[HN Gopher] Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from we...
___________________________________________________________________
Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after
threats from CSW
Author : wildrice
Score : 253 points
Date : 2021-01-21 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bitcoin.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bitcoin.org)
| avmich wrote:
| > This surrender will no doubt be weaponized to make new false
| claims, like that the Bitcoin Core developers "know" CSW to be
| Satoshi Nakamoto and this is why they acted in this way.
|
| It's like "Bank of America paid 10 millions to the claimant -
| WITHOUT ADMITTING GUILT - ..." There is specific phrase for that,
| so - why not insist that the removal was "without admitting the
| guy is Satoshi"? And reinstall the paper?
| superpanic wrote:
| Would be interesting to run linguistic analysis on written text
| by CSW and Satoshi.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744
|
| Reason number #420 why you should institute 24 hour rules on your
| repos (and not abuse lock functions.)
| randomopining wrote:
| Bitcoin slow descent to zero? Or buying opportunity before the
| next moonshot?
| whoisjohnkid wrote:
| no way to tell for sure, but the stock to flow model has been
| pretty accurate over the years and it projects around $90k+ by
| year end ... institutions like PayPal are buying directly from
| miners, others are applying with SEC to buy BTC for their funds
| ... price looks shaky, but the big players seem confident in
| the fundamentals
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| lawn wrote:
| As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this,
| the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it
| runs counter to the argument of Bitcoin being "digital gold" and
| should just be a settlement layer.
|
| So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.
| eecks wrote:
| Why are you posting this as 'fact'? You do not know this, do
| you?
| uncletammy wrote:
| They removed the whitepaper about as fast as they removed Gavin
| Andresen's commit access once they found justification.
|
| There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs
| but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.
| midmagico wrote:
| I'm the reason why Core removed Gavin's commit access, as I
| pointed out that he doesn't use it, he was bamboozled by
| Craig, and in fact Gavin himself agreed that it should've
| been done long before just as a security measure.
|
| The FUD on here is always surprising voluminous.
| elliekelly wrote:
| BitCoin's short history seems to have quite a lot of drama.
| Every once in a while I pop in to get an idea of what's
| happening in the world of BitCoin but it's not something I
| really pay much attention to so I've definitely missed out on
| quite a lot of "big" news stories.
|
| If anyone knows of good books or podcasts about the history
| of BitCoin and the various characters/motivations involved I
| would be most interested in recommendations. Especially from
| the governance or legal perspective.
| toomim wrote:
| You'll get a history from the Bitcoin Cash perspective
| here: https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/js6jft/frequent
| ly_aske...
| heidar wrote:
| Not a podcast or a book but the Cryptopia documentary gives
| a pretty good overview of what has been happening in the
| cryptocurrency space in the past few years.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core
| was a very insidious group of people that seized control of
| Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin
| subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most
| reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd
| notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that
| is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic
| cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was
| purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay
| for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely
| speculative thing.
|
| The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold:
|
| (1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a
| stable point to base its value around. For example, the value
| would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring
| (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which
| would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people
| are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to
| speculate.
|
| (2) Bitcoin, like any asset, _is_ a store of value, but its
| ability to store value is the same whether it 's worth $.0001
| per coin or $40,000 per coin.
|
| So they basically turned it into a purely speculative
| instrument.
|
| ---
|
| The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment
| for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but
| didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community
| where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a
| stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a
| cryptocurrency to failure.
|
| Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company
| are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and
| elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around
| exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and
| what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship /
| suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as
| the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the
| decentralization of the bitcoin network.
|
| ---
|
| Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public
| blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to
| a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly
| viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge
| believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending
| money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you
| have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size
| limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.
| rlt wrote:
| I'm not ideological about this, but I don't understand how
| it's not obvious to anyone technical that Bitcoin can't
| simply keep increasing block size to meet global/mainstream
| demand for payments without eventually sacrificing
| decentralization, which is the only characteristic of
| Bitcoin that makes it valuable.
|
| Sure, doubling the block size a few times would likely be
| fine, so Bitcoin may be overly conservative right now, but
| I firmly believe any long term solution will require some
| form of "layer 2" for payments.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Please specify what you mean by "decentralization". If
| you want I can explain the classic (fallacious) bitcoin
| core argument here, which is in essence: some poor person
| in the 3rd world needs to be able to fit the whole
| blockchain on their raspberry pi.
|
| EDIT: Meeting ended early, so I'll just take this on now.
| First things first:
|
| > Sure, doubling the block size a few times would likely
| be fine, so Bitcoin may be overly conservative right now,
| but I firmly believe any long term solution will require
| some form of "layer 2" for payments.
|
| So, just to point out the absurdity here explicitly, you
| are worried that Bitcoin's "decentralization" will be
| harmed by block size increases eventually, to which your
| solution is to force a layer 2 payment solution which
| essentially will force transactions to route through
| centralized middlemen, rather than the transaction
| publishing to the blockchain, which is literally the
| thing that gives bitcoin its value. You don't see
| something weird about that reasoning?
|
| Additionally, the "you can do a few doublings but
| eventually you run out of space" is a misunderstanding of
| how exponential growth works. The capacity to store data
| has increased exponentially over time, there's no reason
| to think it won't continue down that path. (I'd really
| like to avoid going down the "moore's law will end"
| rabbithole if we can)
|
| Oh, and for good measure this goes into the Bitcoin Core
| dogma that what keeps the Bitcoin network
| secure/decentralized is the number of "full nodes" (nodes
| that have a full copy of the blockchain but do NOT mine),
| whereas the real security of the network comes from the
| miners, and it is the capitalist market mechanism of
| competition for hashpower that gives Bitcoin its
| resilience to double-spends.
|
| Finally, the whole justification for the hurt
| "decentralization" is as I said above: the argument that
| everyone needs to be able to have their own copy of the
| blockchain. Firstly this ignores that most users use thin
| wallets and have no need of the whole blockchain; this
| does insert some trust at a point in the chain but it is
| a tradeoff most users are more than happy to make for
| their use-cases. That being said, like I said above,
| there's no reason to think that one can't keep a whole
| copy of the blockchain. Indeed the Bitcoin Core argument
| is just that it's prohibitively expensive, not even that
| it's impossible, although they define prohibitively
| expensive from the arbitrary threshold of a random 3rd
| world person living in poverty.
|
| It's doubly ironic because the literal result of refusing
| to increase the blocksize - which, not that it matters
| but Satoshi was never against a blocksize increase;
| indeed he assumed it would happen - is skyrocketing
| transaction fees, so that same third world person Bitcoin
| Core _pretends_ to be so concerned about now has to pay
| $80 to buy their $1 worth of rice. Oops.
|
| Now the argument comes in: "no they don't need to pay
| $80, because they'll use the lightning network and thus
| never need to push to the blockchain!" Which I already
| addressed above but just to recap, now you've introduced
| a system of centralized middlemen, AND the very design of
| the lightning network means that (a) you have to make at
| least one transaction to seed your "store credit" (and
| even a single $80 transaction is unaffordable for our
| hypothetical third world person), and (b) they are
| required to pay in advance which again puts unrealistic
| financial stress on them. (For those who aren't familiar
| with the lightning network, the idea is basically that
| rather than making bitcoin transactions like normal, I
| send $20 to a middleman who now gives me $20 of credit
| and now I can "send" money via an elaborate form of IOUs
| that never end up on the blockchain, until some point in
| the future where you resolve onto the chain. It's an
| optimization strategy that destroys all of the utility of
| Bitcoin in a misguided attempt to "preserve its
| decentralization".) If I'm failing to be articulate here
| it's because the whole concept is so mindblowingly absurd
| that I don't even know how to properly explain how
| ridiculous the whole thing is, and is a large part of why
| I assume that anyone who advocates for it has just
| literally never used Bitcoin except to speculate
| rlt wrote:
| A Raspberry Pi is extreme, but again, I'm not talking
| about a few block size doublings. "Visa scale" is on the
| order of 1000x Bitcoin's current capacity.
|
| The other argument I'm familiar with is longer block
| propagation times lead to more orphan blocks, which is a
| centralization pressure.
|
| EDIT: responding to your edits:
|
| > layer 2 payment solution which essentially will force
| transactions to route through centralized middlemen
|
| 1. Layer 2 solutions aren't necessarily centralized
|
| 2. Even if they are all centralized I don't believe it's
| worth sacrificing decentralization in the base layer to
| support small payments
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| By "small payments" do you mean less than $1000?
|
| A payment system's fees need to be 1-2% at most to match
| credit cards. I remember fees going as high as $80 for a
| transaction back in the day, so that means you could only
| reasonably use bitcoin for a minimum of $1000-$10,0000
| when fees were the worst. But in reality, Bitcoin can be
| .000001% (I put a random number of zeroes don't take it
| literally).
|
| Additionally you're trying to "protect the blockchain" by
| having people never able to use it. Surely you see the
| absurdity.
|
| If Bitcoin ever hit Visa scale, there'd be no problem
| with only well-capitalized miners maintaining a full
| chain. It's really not an issue, but frankly you should
| cross that bridge when we get to it anyway. In actuality
| Bitcoin was hard limited at 3-7 transactions/sec for no
| reason whatsoever.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| That's not core's argument. Core's argument is that the
| more centralized mining and validation becomes, the
| easier it can be shut down by govt decree, or to regulate
| away privacy protections.
|
| Keeping it spread out across millions of individual home
| computers, laptops, and mobile devices is the strongest,
| and perhaps only defense of that.
|
| If you want to argue, at least argue the real issue, not
| some strawman.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Not quite. Their argument is based around running "full
| nodes", which is made-up term for a non-mining node that
| stores a full copy of the blockchain. (There's nothing
| wrong with having the whole chain, but the fallacy here
| is that "full nodes" don't protect the network, it is
| miners that secure the network and it is miners who
| decide what transactions to uptake)
|
| It's all moot though, because introducing sidechains and
| the lightning network destroys the value of Bitcoin in a
| perverted attempt to save it from a non-existent problem.
|
| > Keeping it spread out across millions of individual
| home computers, laptops, and mobile devices is the
| strongest, and perhaps only defense of that.
|
| No, because Bitcoin was built to be resilient to Sybil
| attacks, that's why it's proof-of-work and not proof-of-
| stake. So it doesn't matter if a million people in Africa
| have the whole blockchain on their raspberry pis or
| laptop or whatever, because all I need is one ASIC mega-
| farm in Antarctica and I can double spend attack the
| network into oblivion.
|
| It's hashpower that protects and secures the network,
| nothing else. This is one point that the fraud CSW
| actually got right.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I think you may have missed the whole S2X vs UASF battle.
| There are multiple important reasons for non-mining full
| nodes to be validating the whole chain and not just their
| own transactions.
|
| Having many independent observers seeing the entire chain
| and detecting problems or attacks against it, facilitates
| coming to consensus out-of-band about what's happening
| and what to do about it. It's the ultimate check-and-
| balance.
| insertnickname wrote:
| Who's running a full node on their phone?
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| And more importantly, what utility does that have for the
| network?
|
| The whole idea in their heads is that nodes will
| "validate" transactions. Which doesn't make any sense
| because it's the person engaging in a transaction (on
| either end) that cares about the state of the blockchain,
| not some random neutral third party. Your full node can
| detect an invalid transaction all day but without a way
| to tell the guy who's about to treat that invalid
| transaction as valid, the utility isn't there.
|
| No, the real threat to the Bitcoin network is and has
| always been that a hostile actor would get 51% hashpower
| (or almost 50% but not quite and roll the dice until they
| won a few blocks in a row) and issue double-spend
| attacks.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| No one in Bitcoin, that part is an aspiration not a
| reality.
|
| But fwiw the technology does exist now to do that, just
| in another protocol:
|
| https://minaprotocol.com/
| dane-pgp wrote:
| It's true that long term adoption will likely require
| "layer 2" solutions, but it's the worst form of
| "premature optimisation" to deliberately limit "layer 1"
| and force users into a single "official" proposed
| solution.
|
| A better approach would have been to let the block size
| scale in line with average connection speeds and storage
| capacities (per dollar), and let multiple competing
| groups implement different "layer 2" approaches that
| users can opt in to.
| tromp wrote:
| Without a backlog of high fee paying transactions,
| Bitcoin mining becomes unstable in the long term when
| block subsidy dwindles to insignificance, as discussed at
| [1].
|
| [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| This issue resolves itself. Miners will refuse to uptake
| transactions into blocks that pay insufficient fees.
| There's no need to arbitrarily force $80+ transaction
| fees.
|
| As a review for anyone reading, miners are compensated
| via the block reward - a direct grant of Bitcoin to the
| miner - as well as transaction fees for any transactions
| they decide to include in their block. (The person who
| mines the block gets to unilaterally decide which
| transactions go in the block; functionally this means
| they just sort in descending order of $/kb and include as
| many as they can)
| Paul-E wrote:
| The paper that relies on turns out to have some
| inaccurate assumptions. The paper assumes that miners can
| flip their hardware on/off at essentially instantaneous
| intervals. The assume this to argue that miners will
| strategically turn their hardware off when the expected
| value of mining a block drops below the cost of power.
|
| It turns out that many of the big miners have long term
| contracts with power companies to consumer power; they
| wouldn't save money by turning their hardware off for
| short periods of time. Power companies like this
| arrangement because it lets them predict demand better,
| and miners like it because they get "bulk rates" on
| electricity for being predictable in their consumption.
| The arrangement falls apart when miners turn their
| hardware on and off.
| gruez wrote:
| >But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer
| in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to
|
| There was a talk[1] a few years ago that basically argued
| that this property only really holds if you look at
| individual transactions in isolation. It basically boils
| down to: if you make one transaction to a darknet market,
| it's impossible to know whether you were actually sending
| to a darknet market, or whether that was just a decoy
| transaction. However, if you make repeated transactions to
| a darknet market, the chances that all of your transactions
| had a darknet market decoy approaches zero, and you'll be
| considered suspicious. At that point the police can get a
| warrant to search your house, or put surveillance on you so
| they can catch you slipping up irl.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s3EbSKDA3o core
| argument starts at around 10 minutes.
| tromp wrote:
| That is a weakness of decoy based systems. This chart [1]
| shows how various blockchain designs offer different
| tradeoffs in privacy leaks versus scalability.
|
| [1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive
| evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were
| connected to other "theys" involved. I'm not saying there
| isn't a group that is in tighter control of the codebase,
| but given the code they produce is independent of the
| actual data (the blockchain) I'm ok with that as long as
| others audit their work and then talk about it publicly
| (which _they_ do): https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/statu
| s/135185541410371584.... Keep in mind that some developers
| who disagreed with other developers ends up creating a
| fork.
|
| Bitcoin's "fiat" value is pretty much a
| speculative/opinionated/consensus of belief thing, by
| nature. This is really no different than the fed saying
| these 100,000 things are worth this much in dollars. It's
| an opinion based in observation, but still an opinion,
| albeit a collective one.
|
| The value of the Bitcoin network itself to provide a wide
| range of authentication and payment integrations is quite
| high and a technology potential for changing markets. That
| is only valuable if it is found long term to be a secure
| store of integer values.
| dylkil wrote:
| >Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive
| evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were
| connected to other "theys" involved.
|
| This [1] is a good recap of what happened
|
| [1]https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-
| debate-a-ti...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I wonder if this is because BTC's use as currency has
| definitively failed, and is now being used as an elaborate
| ponzi scheme to extract money from investors.
| dylkil wrote:
| The failure to raise the block size limit is the very
| reason bitcoin has failed as a currency. The main people
| against against raising the block size limit were
| blockstream and bitcoin core devs. A competing client to
| Bitcoin core which supported a block size increase was
| Bitcoin XT. At one stage it had 50% of the market share,
| until nodes running XT started getting DDoS'd. Then the
| censorship began, any posts about bitcoin XT and block
| size limit increase were banned from bitcointalk and
| r/bitcoin. [1]
|
| [1] https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-
| debate-a-ti...
| CraigRood wrote:
| Block size argument has absolutely no relation to Bitcoin
| failing as a currency. Block size is some weird inside
| baseball argument that has little real world validity.
| Truth is, Bitcoin was never in a position to even fail,
| because it never succeeded in being a currency. Bitcoin
| only really got any attention because of Silkroad.
| Without the darkweb market place Bitcoin would be a fun
| little internet toy.
|
| You can see this reasoning today in chains like Bitcoin
| Cash, these are cheaper, these do have larger blocks, but
| they have nowhere near the amount of currency
| transactions to legitimately call it a currency. These
| chains don't even pull in any extra load when Bitcoin
| fees start to creep up.
|
| XT is not really worth talking about. It ended up being a
| failed power grab. BIP101 failed because both sides
| failed to work together, instead one side got upset and
| created a hard fork at the next opportunity. Then
| attempted to call themselves Bitcoin, knowing full well
| they didn't have the hash rate and subsequent proof of
| work.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > Bitcoin only really got any attention because of
| Silkroad
|
| You just refuted your own argument. Bitcoin got attention
| because of its utility as a currency, in this case for
| illicit drug purchases. Now as soon as I have to pay an
| $80 fee, it ceases to be useful as a currency (except
| ironically for illegal drugs, if you had no other option
| - which is not the case btw because you can just use
| monero or bitcoin cash - some users would still pay a 50%
| fee to get their illegal drugs)
|
| > but they have nowhere near the amount of currency
| transactions to legitimately call it a currency
|
| What the hell is your definition of currency? A currency
| is whatever people use as a currency, and by that
| definition BCH or what have you is absolutely a currency.
| And fortunately you can send a transaction on-chain for 1
| satoshi per byte, instead of having to use a stupid side
| chain / lightning network pseudo-solution
|
| > instead one side got upset and created a hard fork at
| the next opportunity. Then attempted to call themselves
| Bitcoin, knowing full well they didn't have the hash rate
| and subsequent proof of work.
|
| This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works.
| Within a protocol, the "real" chain is the longest chain.
| But when a hard fork occurs it splits into two different
| universes, where BCH people don't recognize BTC as valid
| and vice versa.
|
| Frankly the software ignorance of so many shows when they
| discuss this topic of forking. It's worth nothing that
| the "soft fork" vs "hard fork" distinction, while
| somewhat real, is part of the whole Bitcoin Core
| propaganda belief system; they believe that there must be
| some arbitrary "legitimacy" to a hard fork (where
| legitimacy is defined as who can shout the loudest after
| having conveniently censored all the sane people out of
| the room).
| grubles wrote:
| Gavin admitted he should have been removed because he stopped
| contributing. Why has HN comment quality fallen so low...
| ogogmad wrote:
| Hi Grubles!
|
| Question: How do you think people will use BTC in the
| future? Do you think people will ever be able to buy coffee
| with it?
| [deleted]
| garmaine wrote:
| No, because people don't use highly volatile speculative
| assets for everyday transactions.
|
| But I know you're referring to the transaction fees, and
| it would only be fair to point out that the cost of a
| lightning transaction is a few cents.
| lawn wrote:
| And it is only fair to point out that to use lightning
| you first need an on-chain transaction to enter it, and
| then you need to have another one in reserve so you don't
| lose your money. And then you need another one if you
| want to top it up with more money. And if the node you
| connect to goes down or you can't find a route you need
| to open a new channel...
|
| Or you use a functional cryptocurrency that don't have
| these ridiculous limitations.
| uncletammy wrote:
| > Gavin admitted he should have been removed because he
| stopped contributing
|
| Citation desperately needed. Here's a contribution from
| literally the day before he had his commit access stolen.
|
| https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/006cdf64dc932
|
| Even if he did say that, it's irrelevant to this
| discussion. Him "no longer contributing" was not the reason
| his commit access was revoked. It was revoked as a power
| grab because he wanted to and had the power to increase the
| block size. Nothing more.
| grubles wrote:
| His access was revoked because having unused keys to the
| Bitcoin code is an attack vector.
|
| Citation here BTW:
| https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1247592193319198720
| dylkil wrote:
| Peter Todd said it was because he thought he was hacked
| [1]. Then two days later he posts a blog about wanting to
| submit a pull request for bigger blocks[2]. Interesting
| timing.
|
| [1]https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/727078284345917441
|
| [2]http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-
| blocks
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core
| devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab
| power.
|
| This is a non-idiomatic usage of this expression, unless
| you're saying that power grabbing is good?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I feel that /r/btc lunacy has made it's way to HN
| smelter wrote:
| Excellent, yet another stream of text that must occupy my
| information grapevine to define a virtual value system
| utilized by people who are not creative enough to park their
| economic gains as deployed assets.
|
| One BTC is currently a post-tax yearly salary, a third of a
| tractor, at least one Bridgeport CNC lathe, 12 metric tons of
| cold rolled 304 stainless coil, or two springtime paid
| internships for folks out of high school (including their
| brand new Lincoln welders).
|
| When the price goes up, it means even more people do not know
| what to do with resources available to them.
|
| Kilowatt hour upon kilowatt hour that must be sequestered
| only because someone desired to "invest".
|
| A modern metric to measure mediocrity, stagnation, and
| indecision (a hockey stick graph).
| smelter wrote:
| Downvoted without a counter. Point proven.
|
| To be fair, I have only listed available assets - not a
| plan. This is the source of the 7 furrowed brows.
|
| World of Warcraft "gold" is worth more than the Venezuelan
| Bolivar.
| hanniabu wrote:
| No, that sub is completely delusional
| f430 wrote:
| A buttcoiner always sees another buttcoiner.
|
| edit: wow, didn't know so many people were against
| r/buttcoin its sad to see HN descend into this sort of
| madness.
| 1996 wrote:
| Even if I'm generally pro-crypto and against HN negative
| stance on crypto, I upvoted you (and will vouch for your
| comments if needed) because buttcoin is an interesting
| community: they are educated on crypto, and their
| negative arguments are more than simple rebuttals. I
| spend some serious time there - it's a great source of
| news, a bit like HN
|
| Now to the moon with lambos! /s
| f430 wrote:
| Sir, I tip my fedora in your general direction.
|
| It seems there are quite a bit of mEth heads here as
| well.
|
| /u/jstolfi has many disciples
| hanniabu wrote:
| I don't think the 2 are mutually exclusive.
| baby wrote:
| Source?
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| The whitepaper is _why_ I view bitcoin's value proposition as a
| gold-like store of value. Can you say more about why you think
| the whitepaper discourages that view?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The whitepaper didn't expect/predict most hashing power being
| controlled by very few actors.
|
| Edit: I'd say the whitepaper _did_ expect this and basically
| said it could be a problem:
|
| From the abstract:
|
| > As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes
| that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll
| generate the longest chain and outpace attacker.
| tylersmith wrote:
| That's a fundamental security assumption made by Nakamoto
| consensus. It's like assuming the discrete log problem is
| hard. If/when the assumption doesn't hold the security is
| gone.
| sedeki wrote:
| I am not a hardcore bitcoiner, but the price would fall
| quickly if these few controlling nodes would do something
| malicious. Which is against their own interest.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Probably. But a core aspect of decentralization is that
| you shouldn't need to trust a few others at all.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Who cares about technicalities, the point was to let
| people hold the system in their own hands.
| codehalo wrote:
| I think it's more like limits: Trust minimization, not
| trust elimination.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That's a better way of putting it. It's a good argument
| for ASIC resistance and CPU dependence because it's a lot
| harder to control General-Purpose CPU supply than ASIC
| supply.
|
| Meanwhile my regular joe laptop can earn double its
| electricity cost in Monero (before it thermally locks
| up).
| 153791098c wrote:
| Satoshi did predict just that, even before he launched the
| network (in 2008). "At first, most users
| would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a
| certain point, it would be left more and more to
| specialists with server farms of specialized hardware." -
| 2008. "At equilibrium size, many nodes will be
| server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the
| rest of the farm over a LAN." - 2010. "The design
| supports letting users just be users. The more burden it
| is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few
| nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client
| nodes that only do transactions and don't generate." -
| 2010.
| [deleted]
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Satoshi couldn't have thought of a solution of the scaling
| issues, just like Mark Zuckerberg didn't design Facebook for
| billions of people originally. From the paper it's clear that
| he would have liked if all people could have access to P2P
| layer, but it's just technically impossible.
| toomim wrote:
| That's not entirely accurate. His solution was to increase
| the block limit [1], and use faster computers [2]. Note
| that Bitcoin Cash is currently implementing this, and
| succeeding at scaling to 1,100 tx/sec on testnet. (Bitcoin
| Core supports 3 to 7 tx/sec.)
|
| [1] "It can be phased in, like:
|
| if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit
|
| It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it
| reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older
| versions that don't have it are already obsolete. When
| we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to
| old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade."
|
| ~ Satoshi Nakamoto, on bitcointalk.org, October 04, 2010,
| 07:48:40 PM
|
| [2] "Hi Mike,
|
| I'm glad to answer any questions you have. If I get time, I
| ought to write a FAQ to supplement the paper. There is only
| one global chain.
|
| The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15
| million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can
| already scale much larger than that with existing hardware
| for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale
| ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it
| would cope with extreme size. By Moore's Law, we can expect
| hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100
| times faster in 10. Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption
| rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the
| number of transactions.
|
| I don't anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon,
| but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is
| possible to run a node that only processes transactions
| that include a transaction fee. The owner of the node would
| decide the minimum fee they'll accept. Right now, such a
| node would get nothing, because nobody includes a fee, but
| if enough nodes did that, then users would get faster
| acceptance if they include a fee, or slower if they don't.
| The fee the market would settle on should be minimal. If a
| node requires a higher fee, that node would be passing up
| all transactions with lower fees. It could do more volume
| and probably make more money by processing as many paying
| transactions as it can. The transition is not controlled by
| some human in charge of the system though, just individuals
| reacting on their own to market forces.
|
| Eventually, most nodes may be run by specialists with
| multiple GPU cards. For now, it's nice that anyone with a
| PC can play without worrying about what video card they
| have, and hopefully it'll stay that way for a while. More
| computers are shipping with fairly decent GPUs these days,
| so maybe later we'll transition to that."
|
| ~ Satoshi Nakamoto in correspondence with Mike Hearn
| gruez wrote:
| >That's not entirely accurate. His solution was to
| increase the block limit [1], and use faster computers
| [2].
|
| This doesn't address the storage requirement problem. 15M
| transactions per day * 250 bytes per transaction = 1.369
| TB per year. After a year most home users wouldn't be
| able to run a full node without shelling out for extra
| hardware. After 10 years you'll need to spend hundreds on
| hard drives just to get started. Sure, it's still
| decentralized in the sense that you can still run a node,
| but it'd be closer to usenet (users connecting to
| independent server farms) than what we have now.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Yes, and we're already seeing exactly what happens with
| bigger blocks from Ethereum. The entire thing is being
| run on Consensys's centralized Infura servers on AWS.
| It's not even decentralized.
|
| This is an unavoidable physical constraint given
| Bitcoin's architecture. You can either prioritize
| decentralization (and with it, censorship resistance), or
| you can prioritize TPS or in Ethereum's case heavy-weigh
| smart contracts (at the cost of decentralization).
| xiphias2 wrote:
| While I agree with you on everything, and I'm all in on
| BTC as a store of value, I love some of the contracts
| that are built on top of Ethereum. Uniswap is an example
| system that should be implemented in Bitcoin as well over
| time, as it brings transparency to trading and asset
| ownership. It doesn't need turing completeness (so gas is
| not required), though as it needs state management, I
| think it's important to be able to account for the cost
| of UTXO created.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Everyone having a copy of the whole blockchain is not
| needed. What you need is sufficiently distributed
| hashpower that no actor can perform a 51% attack. That's
| all.
|
| Small-time users can use thin wallets; mega-power users
| can download the whole blockchain and spend whatever (in
| perspective, not super significant) amount of money they
| need for sufficient storage. Users in between can carry a
| reduced form of the blockchain that doesn't care so much
| about a full transaction log but accurately describes the
| state of every wallet's balance (thereby functioning the
| same from a "verify that they're not bullshitting me"
| perspective).
| xiphias2 wrote:
| You just described a way to decrease the security of
| Bitcoin. Users already decided collectively that no
| amount of security should be exchanged for other features
| inside Bitcoin. Even taproot, which is a relatively small
| change takes years to get to a point that it's accepted.
|
| It's like Kosher food: if a small percentage of people
| want food to be kosher, it's often easer to make all food
| Kosher.
|
| As Michael Saylor says, Bitcoin is good enough to store
| hundreds of trillions of dollars. Just don't f*ck it up.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > After 10 years you'll need to spend hundreds on hard
| drives just to get started.
|
| Do you think that 10 years from now, a 15 TB hard drive
| will cost at least $200?
| gruez wrote:
| Maybe? Hard drive growth speeds have slowed down in the
| past decade or so. While there's no doubt that storage
| capacity growth will outpace transaction volume growth,
| and that _eventually_ it would be feasible for a typical
| home user to run their full node (at visa 's TPS). It
| remains to be seen whether that's 10 years away or 50+
| years away.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It's interesting, so he didn't see the limits of the
| system. Scaling tx/s is easy, scaling it without
| increasing block verification time and cost is what's
| impossible.
|
| So Bitcoin is not exactly what Satoshi planned, but for
| me it changed my life completely.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Satoshi did actually see those limits and discussed them
| in the early days on Metzdowd and Bitcointalk.org. But he
| covered his bases and allowed for both big data centers
| and/or layer 2 architectures to solve that problem. I'm
| don't recall if he expressed a strong preference for one
| over the other, though.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Could you please point to me where Satoshi discussed
| using "layer 2 architectures" to handle the scaling
| problem? To my knowledge he always talked about scaling
| from the perspective of every transaction being published
| to the blockchain, because that's how the whole system
| works.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > It's interesting, so he didn't see the limits of the
| system. Scaling tx/s is easy, scaling it without
| increasing block verification time and cost is what's
| impossible.
|
| Nonsense, he absolutely thought about scaling and in his
| head it was quite simple...because it was. You just need
| blocks big enough to allow the transaction throughput the
| world requires, but they need to be a finite size. That's
| all.
|
| Not sure what you mean about "block verification time"
| having a scaling problem. It really doesn't.
| mdoms wrote:
| You only need to read the first couple of sentences of the
| whitepaper to understand that it was primarily designed as a
| digital currency with a focus on spending/transacting.
| grubles wrote:
| "In this sense, it's more typical of a precious metal.
| Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same,
| the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the
| number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has
| the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users
| increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users
| to take advantage of the increasing value."
|
| - Satoshi
|
| https://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:95
| 6...
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Misleading. He's talking about Bitcoin being an
| (ultimately) deflationary currency. Not any "it's a store
| of value but not peer to peer electronic cash" fallacious
| arguments.
| toolz wrote:
| Are those two concepts mutually exclusive? A liquid
| currency that holds value in unstable economies would seem
| to serve both the purpose of being spendable as well as a
| stable investment like gold. Maybe I'm misunderstanding
| what it means to be "gold like" though.
| spijdar wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd use as strong language as "mutually
| exclusive", but to the point: when was the last time you
| used gold to buy your lunch? Get groceries? Pay for an
| Uber? Tip someone?
|
| I'm sure someone out there insists gold is a perfectly
| legitimate currency for day to day life, and it's not
| 100% incorrect. But gold is very inconvenient to attempt
| to use for quick transactions. You would typically
| exchange gold for some other currency to do day to day
| spending. The same is basically true of bitcoin now as
| well, which was (arguably) not the original intent at
| all.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| They're not mutually exclusive, and that's always been
| the point made by those like me who supported a blocksize
| increase and were on the BCH side of things.
|
| Those on the Bitcoin Core side of things believe that
| they are mutually exclusive, and that you can either be a
| gold-like store of value (that is to say, absolutely
| fucking useless) or a peer-to-peer electronic cash, but
| not both.
|
| To me it's so obvious that the value of something as a
| currency is what makes it equally a good store of value.
| lawn wrote:
| No they aren't mutually exclusive. In fact sound money
| should be both a good store of value and a medium of
| exchange (in other words work well for payments).
|
| The problem is that Bitcoin's high fees has made it
| unsuitable for regular payments, so proponents only have
| the store of value explanation left.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Exactly this. To me it was proof that 99% of the Bitcoin
| community (such as the Bitcoin subreddit which had an
| absurd amount of influence, thus why taking it over and
| censoring discussion was so effective) didn't care about
| Bitcoin as a currency and _had never once used it as a
| currency_. They just bought it on Coinbase and never even
| transferred to their own wallet.
|
| Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using
| the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on
| a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided
| that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the
| arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow
| antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using
| the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on
| a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided
| that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the
| arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow
| antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.
|
| Big blocks would have never solved this issue, and you're
| still free to use Bcash, but you won't as no one does...
| because that wasn't the issue.
|
| Second layer solutions are the crux of that story, and
| people who didn't or wouldn't understand that were vocal
| non-tech people (like Roger Ver) who don't understand
| basic network protocol topology and why things need to
| run on secondary, tertiary etc... layers on Bitcoin (the
| Network) that uses bitcoin (the token) to validate your
| $20 tx on the blockchain, which by the way if you paid
| $60 for goes to show you never understood Bitcoin the
| network.
|
| No one would sacrifice that much to miners instead of
| just opting for fiat at that point unless there was an
| absolute imperative need to do so, which at $20 is
| clearly not the case. I should know I did it.
|
| I've been in this for a long time and the only time tx
| fees were above $20 was when the Bcash fork happened and
| Ver/Jihan spammed the network. I paid $25 tx fee on
| behalf of a new customer (merchant I just on-boarded)
| that was panicking because they didn't understand mining
| fee priority (I did explain it to them) and thought they
| lost they money, when in reality the 5 sat/byte tx
| cleared in a weeks time and I just recovered my funds
| then.
|
| I discussed it and felt absolved of responsibility but
| rather than lose a potential client I just begrudgingly
| paid the mining fee, to Antminer/Jihan no less, which
| added insult to injury.
|
| This is far from ideal, and I have a stuck tx as we speak
| (2sat/byte were clearing without a problem until then)
| for a over a week now, but it just goes to show that
| these new billionaire class investors (Saylor) don't
| understand this tech at all and that they need to use
| their new found fortune to help flesh out LN to get it to
| function to its full potential without all this mempool
| bloat they've help create.
|
| Mainchian is doing EXACTLY what we would think would
| happen under these conditions even after Segwit, its
| purposely this way as this is the trade off for security,
| which makes it less than ideal as a settlement network
| for small, low cost, individual transactions.
|
| That's what LN is for and I wish these instituinal
| investment firms would understand that, to date only Jack
| Dorsey (an actual technologist/developer) has funded
| Lightening labs, while the Winklevoss, Saylors of the
| World just keep trying to compete for more headline
| grabbing media attention and ignoring this vital issue as
| they do not understand or care to take the time to learn
| this very obvious fact.
|
| As for me, I want them to keep doing this as it gives me
| a better buy-in position so I'm all for it.
| toolz wrote:
| I think there are tradeoffs available there since it's
| mostly tx count and not currency value beings moved that
| dictates network fees. Potentially gift cards backed by
| BTC solve the issue of both slow TXs and expensive TXs.
|
| I'm sure there are better solutions, but that's one that
| comes to mind.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| A good argument can be made that money should not be a
| long-term store of value, and should only store value
| long enough to be useful as a medium of exchange. The
| idea is that it is better to lend your money than to
| store it, and that the best way for people to "store
| value" is to be invested in economically productive
| activities.
| lawn wrote:
| You're right!
|
| The key point, no matter which theory you subscribe to,
| is that medium of exchange is the most important
| property.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Not to mention, "safe storage" of that currency for
| spending. It was literally an escape from traditional
| banking that was born out of the 2008 financial crisis
| where wallstreet caused billions in losses.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I am the only one who thinks Craig Wright is the writer of the
| Bitcoin whitepaper and the original developer? I understand why
| it is controversial and doesn't fit the bitcoin myth. And I don't
| find him particular symphatic.
|
| But he convinced Gavin Andresen and in general has the background
| of someone who could build this and do the writing that followed
| on various mailing lists and discussion forums.
| garmaine wrote:
| Yes. There is strait up clear evidence of his fraud.
|
| The tricks he used to convince Gavin were revealed later and
| shown to be fraud--he used slight of hand to reuse a historical
| block chain signature rather than produce one.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Revealed how? By Gavin Andressen or Craig Wright?
| garmaine wrote:
| By CW. He later did a blog post showing the same "proof"
| that he had done in person with Gavin.
| chabes wrote:
| There's a simple way to verify his claim, yet he has yet to do
| so. Why, if he could, would he not?
|
| And why would the opinion of a single person (Gavin, or anyone)
| be relevant to wether or not Craig's claim is factual?
| jonathanaird wrote:
| He's stated his reasoning many, many times. Legally speaking,
| keys do not prove identity. They prove access to keys which
| can be stolen. He's making an intentional point to prove it
| in a court of law as a part of his bigger point that Bitcoin
| exists within existing legal frameworks and was not created
| to evade the law. Quite the opposite, it was created as a
| system to provide immutable evidentiary trails.
| smitj wrote:
| Craig worded this nicely 2 weeks ago here
| https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=2133
| throwaway4good wrote:
| And if you read the whitepaper it is pretty obvious that the
| author did not intent bitcoin to be a "digital gold" secondary
| settlement layer. And the low transaction fee "BSV" version is
| a lot closer to the original idea than the current "BTC"
| version.
| joseluis wrote:
| you're not alone. it's pretty obvious when you care enough to
| listen to him directly talking about bitcoin, economy, law,
| history... There's a lot of quality interdisciplinary
| information coming from him, that makes infinite more sense
| than anything anybody else says about bitcoin. you just have to
| understand his aspergers manierisms, but for me it's clear he's
| the real deal, despite all the vicious fud coming from
| interested parties.
|
| It's a shame that even in HN people aren't immune to the
| shallow crypto propaganda...
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Yeah, only a few years late. Seems like a pretty fraudulent
| claim.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Craig Wright has done enough to hurt Bitcoin over the years that
| I effectively think of him as a canary: the fact that he is still
| walking around is evidence that there are no darkweb
| assassination markets that are not just scams or honeypots.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It just goes to show that effective assassination markets need
| to be centralized and corporate, not distributed and anonymous.
| ruined wrote:
| Unfortunately the operating space is monopolized in every
| jurisdiction with strong barriers against new entrants.
| Regulatory capture is so thorough at this point it will
| probably take an unforeseen externality to generate any
| disruption.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| This is so bizarre.
|
| For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly
| claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof
| as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify
| having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full
| details here, it's been years).
|
| Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to
| trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud:
|
| - The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is
| essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and
| is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of
| intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more
| run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer
| his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity
| publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.
|
| - If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it
| in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their
| wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs).
| Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to
| giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic
| primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system
| that found the right balance of technology and economic
| incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous
| lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely
| released) whitepaper pulled from websites.
|
| - The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the
| whitepaper down is lunacy.
|
| Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the
| great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH.
| Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise
| for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a
| currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the
| blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global
| transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the
| $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are
| related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin
| itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as
| much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also
| necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC
| side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an
| idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems
| like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole
| credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain,
| which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the
| value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least
| at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was
| unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin
| which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a
| total joke.
|
| Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a
| charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a
| fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work
| model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful
| system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms
| to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-
| spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312
| arcticbull wrote:
| The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in
| federal prison.
|
| > He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's
| proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-
| inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that
| incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the
| network (resistance to double-spend, etc).
|
| Well that's obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you
| can't pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play
| multiplayer excel.
| drtillberg wrote:
| >The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in
| federal prison.
|
| That conjecture makes a huge amount of sense based on
| circumstantial factors but most importantly, business
| purpose. The gentleman you identified was (when BTC was
| released) running an international unconventional business
| with money-logistics issues. As we see now, BTC's primary use
| case is facilitating international financial logistics for
| criminal transactions-- the use case for BTC always stayed
| close to home! Assuming the conjecture is correct BTC
| performs exactly the real-world role it was designed to
| perform.
|
| As for the paper, let me get this straight-- the group that
| publishes the software that establishes what BTC _is_ now has
| taken the position that whoever Satoshi is or was can claim
| copyright and take down core BTC IP no matter how licensed?!
| Yeah, that can 't be very reassuring to a multi-million
| dollar industry based on IP collected and distributed by
| Bitcoin Core, i.e., the entire bitcoin ecosystem.
| arcticbull wrote:
| To be fair, we don't really know it was Paul "Solotshi"
| Calder Le Roux, but there is a ton of circumstantial
| evidence - not least the nickname on his Congolese
| diplomatic passport. I really liked the Wired write-up by
| an author who's been following Le Roux's, uh, career, for
| many years. [1] It's fair to say his authorship of E4M (the
| precursor to TrueCrypt) gave him the crypto chops.
|
| Le Roux genuinely impresses me haha. He's a real-life Bond
| villain - even his Wikipedia article is riveting [2].
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-
| this-inte...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux
| yao420 wrote:
| Not a chance, all the evidence for theory that is very weak
| and circumstantial.
| Stevvo wrote:
| I'd say claiming Satoshi is Paul Le Roux is obviously and
| trivially wrong when there is much more evidence pointing at
| Nick Szabo.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > Well that's obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you
| can't pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play
| multiplayer excel.
|
| It's horribly wasteful now. As the block reward decays it may
| transition to being less wasteful; it depends on how high
| transaction fees rise. Last time I tried to work it out the
| total electrical+transaction fee cost of bitcoin compared to
| spend volume (not including obvious change to self) was at
| about 1%. Almost comparable to current credit/debit network
| overhead, probably a lot more expensive than interbank
| transfer.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Currently about $80 of electricity and goes into each
| transaction, which is socialized across all holders as
| inflation. It's this incentive which keeps miners mining.
| Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be
| born directly by parties to the transaction and will have
| to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly.
| paulgb wrote:
| > Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be
| born directly by parties to the transaction and will have
| to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly.
|
| This is something I don't see talked about much, but the
| asymptotic state of Bitcoin when mining fees are zero is
| interesting to think about. It's not obvious to me that
| the economic incentives against running a 51% attack will
| exist in the "terminal" stage of Bitcoin in the way that
| they do in the "inflationary" (positive mining reward)
| stage.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Would the economic incentives not remain unchanged as a
| function of unit price of BTC? It feels like in the
| terminal state there's going to be a high stakes game of
| chicken between attackers and holders to see who's
| willing to pay more for control of the whole network.
| This is likely exacerbated by a move to layer 2 networks
| to avoid the 7tx bottleneck isn't it? I'm not sure
| personally this is just something I've been noodling on.
| paulgb wrote:
| Yes, I agree that the incentives to run a 51% attack are
| purely a function of the market value, but I mean that
| without the incentive to mine in excess of what
| transaction costs would pay for being socialized by the
| whole community, it seems unlikely that transaction fees
| will be enough to secure the network from a bad actor.
|
| Especially if, as you point out, layer 2 networks become
| a more desirable place to do transactions.
|
| Basically, it seems like the terminal state of this is a
| gigantic freeloader problem where everyone wants the
| network to be secure but nobody is incentivized to do it.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > Basically, it seems like the terminal state of this is
| a gigantic freeloader problem where everyone wants the
| network to be secure but nobody is incentivized to do it.
|
| It'll be in the interest of exchanges and payment
| processors to prevent double-spend at least, and they
| have an incentive for the blockchain to be trustworthy
| vs. running their own attacks and could adjust their own
| fees to maintain >51% control of miners across the lot of
| them.
|
| There's also a fallback recovery mechanism; for any
| attacker willing to invest $X in a 51% attack the
| remaining users only have to invest an additional $X*.04
| to regain 51% control and make a hard fork that most
| miners would switch to. My guess is that faced with
| evidence of a double-spend most miners would switch to
| the hard fork to avoid losing the block rewards the
| attacker's chain stole from them. This relies on rapid
| detection of the attack and availability of a hard-fork
| client.
| alwillis wrote:
| A nice collection of articles regarding bitcoin's energy
| usage. Spoiler: it's quite different than the narrative
| that's out there: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/tags/energy-
| consumption
| arcticbull wrote:
| The only spoiler is that a pro Bitcoin source is going to
| extreme levels of mental gymnastics to justify the
| unjustifiable use of an entire countries worth to
| electricity to write 7 entries per second into the worlds
| slowest and least efficient database.
| krupan wrote:
| Bitcoin would be an utter failure if it sacrificed
| security in order to gain speed and efficiency.
|
| And make sure to compare how much energy (including the
| entire military, police forces, FBI, etc.) is used to
| secure US dollars.
| qwytw wrote:
| There were 285,418 bitcoin transactions* in the last 24
| hours, bitcoin energy consumption is estimated to be
| around 76.87 terawatt hours per year, which is 0.210603
| twh per day.
|
| So 0.210603 / 285,418 = 0.000000737874765 which is
| 737.874765 kWh per transaction. Assuming a price of $0.10
| and an average 475g CO2 emitted per kWh, the real cost of
| a single transaction is $73 and 350kg of CO2. But I
| suppose that's a price worth paying...
|
| *according to https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Bitcoin mining uses hydroelectricity, that doesn't emit
| CO2.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Yeah, no, it simply does not. Citation needed.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > So 0.210603 / 285,418 = 0.000000737874765 which is
| 737.874765 kWh per transaction. Assuming a price of $0.10
| and an average 475g CO2 emitted per kWh, the real cost of
| a single transaction is $73 and 350kg of CO2. But I
| suppose that's a price worth paying...
|
| From the same site, mean transaction value is 2.67 BTC
| ($86,672 USD), so about .1% transaction fee.
| https://www.blockchain.com/charts/cost-per-transaction-
| perce... computes it at closer to 1%. My guess for the
| difference is comparing total volume vs. approximate real
| value transfer (subtracting the change going back to the
| same address).
|
| Comparable to the cost of the card networks but an order
| of magnitude more expensive than ACH transfers and maybe
| double the cost of wire transfers.
|
| EDIT: I'm assuming that the profit margin is scarce on
| average so most miner fees go directly to
| hardware+electricity. Given the volatile price in USD I
| don't know a better assumption to make.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > And make sure to compare how much energy (including the
| entire military, police forces, FBI, etc.) is used to
| secure US dollars.
|
| Those aren't to secure the US dollar, those are to secure
| the US. Switching to Bitcoin would not change the
| expenditure in those areas one iota. Not. One. Iota.
|
| If anything the US dollar is freeloading on the
| expenditure there.
|
| However, setting that aside, it's pretty trivial to
| disprove your argument. If you linearly scaled the energy
| usage of Bitcoin to the number of transactions per second
| currently handled by _just_ Visa alone, Bitcoin would
| require more energy than the entire world generates a few
| times over, and generate more e-waste than the entire
| world generates today. 7 transactions per second is
| enough for a decently flea market or a Costco, not a
| global economy.
|
| > Bitcoin would be an utter failure if it sacrificed
| security in order to gain speed and efficiency.
|
| Which is why it shouldn't exist. We can do better. We
| _are_ doing better already.
| ogogmad wrote:
| BCH eventually got forked into Craig Wright's and Calvin Ayre's
| "Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV)", which has a block size in the
| gigabytes, and which according to them carries the torch for
| Satoshi's original vision for Bitcoin.
|
| Craig Wright is the chief scientist for BSV.
|
| I personally think there's sufficient evidence to conclude
| Craig Wright isn't competent enough to have created BTC:
| https://craigwright.online/
| eecks wrote:
| I don't think he is Satoshi but what evidence is in your
| comment?
| ogogmad wrote:
| Follow the link.
| buzzert wrote:
| > The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is
| essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity,
| and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of
| intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your
| more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to
| transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his
| identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on
| his back.
|
| This would be the Hollywood interpretation of his motivation to
| remain anonymous. Personally, I think it's because he really
| wanted the work to speak for itself, and not have the entire
| project tied to one particular individual with thousands of
| newspapers trying to figure out what motivated him.
|
| Remember The Social Network movie? When they tried to make it
| look like Facebook was created just so Zuckerberg could get
| back at his ex-girlfriend? It's stuff like that he was trying
| to avoid.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| It's not a hollywood interpretation at all, Satoshi created
| something that was an existential threat (at least long-term,
| in terms of the doors it opened) to fiat currencies /
| fractional reserve banking more broadly. It's not farfetched
| to see that certain government organizations would want to
| disrupt that, or at a minimum gain control over the founder
| to be able to direct things how they please.
|
| Regardless, intelligence community subpoint aside, I think
| the fact that third-party criminals would want to kidnap him
| and force the transfer of his bitcoin mega-fortune is very
| plausible, even if you don't see governments as a possible
| threat vector.
|
| I do agree in general that maintaining pseudonomynity helped
| keep the focus on the project and not the person(s). But I
| think it's undeniable that being publicly known as a figure
| with billions of dollars of value stored in their brain puts
| a target on one's head. And it puts a target in a way that
| being a normal fiat billionaire does not, because you can't
| just wire a billion dollars to another country without having
| the transfer stopped, whereas with bitcoin once they force
| him to transfer Bitcoin (if he caved to torture etc) it's
| irreversible.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > It's not a hollywood interpretation at all, Satoshi
| created something that was an existential threat (at least
| long-term, in terms of the doors it opened) to fiat
| currencies / fractional reserve banking more broadly.
|
| At its most charitable, the underlying economic theory
| you're supposing is out of mainstream. To the extent that
| it's a Gold Standard version 2.0, though, it should be
| pointed out that the kind of mainstream economists who
| actually run economic policy would usually view it as a
| specifically _discredited_ theory: 100% of all gold-
| standard currencies have failed and been replaced with non-
| gold-standard.
|
| In any case, though, the notion that someone with an
| alternative economic theory is so threatening to your
| profession that you need to send Deep State Operatives(tm)
| to shut everything down is Hollywood fantasy at best and
| Qanon idiocy at worst.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| If you can't see why Bitcoin is a threat to the status
| quo such that it could theoretically justify "Deep State
| Operatives" trying to either outright stop it by
| murdering the founder or compromise and neuter it by
| taking over the project, I don't know what to tell you.
|
| I'm not saying anything about how likely it is or isn't,
| just that it's a theoretical possibility that someone in
| Satoshi's position would be considering.
|
| And I find your dismissive references to absurdities like
| Q-Anon to be wholly inappropriate and a cheap shot.
| Capira wrote:
| > failed to provide cryptographic proof as such
|
| That is not entirely correct. Wright provided a forged
| cryptographic proof to Gavin Andresen and tricked him into
| accepting.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > forged
|
| So in other words he failed to provide proof
| ogogmad wrote:
| It's worse than just failing.
| Capira wrote:
| Exactly. By trying to fake a proof Wright increased the
| odds that he is not Satoshi.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| As transactions grow in BCH, wouldn't it need larger and larger
| blocks? I think larger and larger blocks would centralize the
| nodes.
|
| _Edit_ : Also, I don't think the Lightning Network behaves
| likes the credit card networks. What do you mean when you say
| that?
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Please specify what you mean by "the nodes". As I've
| discussed in other comments, the whole "full node" concept is
| basically made up and absurd; the security and therefore
| decentralization of the network is provided by miners. The
| network is only truly "centralized" if a faction gains a
| sufficiently large portion of the hashpower to perform a 51%
| attack.
| suikadayo wrote:
| It would need larger blocks, but it was the general
| understanding within the community before the fork that with
| Moore's Law, hard disk capacity would increase and price
| would go down in the future, so it really isn't a big deal,
| and not enough to cause "centralization of nodes" like some
| people argue.
|
| Also, my understanding is that Lightning Network is semi-
| custodial, so it's probably more similar to banks than credit
| cards. I'm unsure why modern bitcoiners are adamant about
| "not your keys, not your coins", but are ok with semi-
| custodial solutions.
| dieortin wrote:
| What do you mean by "semi-custodial"? You're not giving
| anyone the keys to your address. It's nothing like a bank.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Yeah, not sure where they got that.
|
| The problem with the LN is that it's like a gift card (I
| said credit cards before but gift cards is a better
| analogy). I need to send $X on-chain to establish my
| "store credit" so that we can transact off-chain for
| future transactions, before eventually resolving on-chain
| at some point in the future.
|
| Imagine network address translation but stupider by
| orders of magnitude :P
| betterunix2 wrote:
| The real Satoshi is probably dead. Who just disappears, without
| any warning, without saying goodbye, when their project is just
| beginning to take off? What sort of a person never gets
| involved again, even just to comment, when the project attracts
| the interest of heads of state? Death or severe incapacitation
| (stroke, coma, etc.) is the simplest explanation that fits all
| the things we know about this person. He probably used FDE and
| his family probably did not know his passphrase or what he was
| working on, so nobody even knew to announce what happened.
|
| People die all the time -- car accidents, heart attacks,
| strokes, drug overdoses, etc. Usually you never hear about
| them. Satoshi was almost certainly not a well-known
| cryptographer or even someone with significant involvement in
| the cryptography research community or any related community
| (the whitepaper screams "enthusiast"), so his death would have
| likely gone unnoticed.
|
| (Besides being a simple explanation of the evidence, this is
| also falsifiable -- all Satoshi has to do is spend some of his
| BTC or sign a message or otherwise unambiguously reappear and
| we will know I am wrong about this.)
| tehjoker wrote:
| TF even if he is Satoshi, scientific papers belong in the public
| domain.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| What makes it qualify as a scientific paper?
|
| It has only 8 references, less than papers published around the
| same time
|
| It was self-published, not subject to peer review
|
| It has no proofs
|
| It has errors:
| https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf...
| tehjoker wrote:
| The content is scientific in nature and it spawned an entire
| field of research. The quality of the paper is of course
| debatable as are the ideas contained within.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Haha this whole exchange is such a good metaphor for
| classic academic gatekeeping. Satoshi gave birth to an idea
| that spawned an entire new type of financial system, with
| revolutionary implications for the world, and the GP is
| spending his time arguing that it didn't go through peer
| review and wasn't published by a real journal and therefore
| it's not real science :P
| tehjoker wrote:
| This kind of thing drives me crazy. Peer review is very
| valuable, but it was basically instituted to make sure
| government science grants were not being wasted. It also
| has a function of keeping crackpots out of the public
| information stream and increasing paper quality. However,
| Newton (and "Satoshi", though not at the same level as
| Newton by a long shot) didn't use such mechanisms but
| their ideas were eventually accepted (in some fashion)
| through wide ranging debate.
| aftbit wrote:
| If Craig Wright was Satoshi, he would be able to sign a statement
| proving that with the keys from the genesis block. Otherwise,
| he's just an obvious fraud.
| sktrdie wrote:
| A while ago he (this Craig Wright fraud) actually sat with one
| of the first people behind bitcoin development Gavin Andresen.
| Gavin was the main developer in the beginning chatting with
| satoshi in the forum. There was a video of Gavin saying that
| Craig proved to him that he was satoshi. But later seemed to
| have been part of some kind of social engineering - wasn't
| totally clear how he proved he could sign the keys.
|
| Regardless the guys's behavior doesn't at all match Satoshi's
| behavior from the initial days in the forum (before he
| disappeared that is).
|
| edit: video of Gavin saying Wright is satoshi
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNZyRMG2CjA
| ddtaylor wrote:
| AFAIK this is probably the same trick he attempted to use
| where he took a signature from the blockchain and used it.
| The signature would be of a hash of a transaction, but it
| would appear as a "valid" signature from that wallet public
| key.
| lawn wrote:
| Craig produced a proof on a computer he himself provided.
| Wouldn't have been hard to alter it to say whatever he wanted
| to.
| sktrdie wrote:
| Indeed. I think Craig is a fraud. I'm just dumbfounded why
| Gavin --a person I admire from intial days and who is
| probably person n.2 after satoshi in terms of bitcoin
| actual initial lines of code written -- was so easily
| fooled.
| lawn wrote:
| Yeah it's hard to understand. Gavin's good nature of
| assuming good intentions from anyone is sure to play a
| big role.
|
| Also worth to remember that anyone can get bamboozled,
| even if you're highly intelligent and knowledgeable in a
| certain area. Just look at how many cult followers there
| are in the world.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| It is easy to understand. Gavin wanted to say what he
| said. It does not mean that he thinks this is true. He
| just wanted those words to be out of his mouth. Now how
| to interpret this fact is another question. May be he
| wanted to distract public focus from another person. May
| be he was paid to say so. May be he was bored and did it
| for lolz.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Just because people demonstrate remarkable skill or
| intelligence does not make them immune to the same
| cognitive biases shared by every human being on the
| planet. We are all susceptible to being fooled, and a lot
| more easily than we probably like to imagine.
| 153791098c wrote:
| He probably wasn't fooled, or actually, he got screwed by
| both sides. He knew CSW wasn't satoshi, also he knew adam
| back was satoshi but couldn't tell anyone because of the
| NDA he signed (adam had long been compromised at that
| point). I think he felt the only way to save the project
| was to point to someone else being satoshi that did
| believe in the original bitcoin = p2p cash narrative, but
| that obviously backfired. Craig also did a complete 180
| on his 'beliefs' and made everything he touched
| proprietary, patented and anti-freedom and privacy. Hard
| to believe that happened without any external influences
| as well.
|
| The history of bitcoin is a very interesting one. The
| video series of unmasking satoshi nakamoto from barely
| sociable is a great first step into the rabbit hole. But
| i'm warning you, the deeper you go the weirder it
| becomes.
| zadler wrote:
| What are some good subsequent steps after the barely
| sociable vid?
| 153791098c wrote:
| The e-mails between Peter Todd John Dillon and the
| connection with Greg Maxwell and the FBI. There is a
| pastebin out there from 2013 which is mind blowing. (see
| https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=335658.0)
|
| But looking into what happened in 2015 with the
| introduction of blockstream, the core devs and the small
| block campaign. The massive censorship on all major
| bitcoin discussion platforms. introduction of RBF. the
| rise of Bitcoin XT and later classic and unlimited. The
| major signalling for Bitcoin Unlimited by businesses and
| miners and its subsequent DDOS attack. The segwit
| proposal with the subsequent Segwit2X proposal. The NY
| and Hongkong agreements. The BCH fork (and subsequent SV
| fork if you're interested in that side). The activation
| of Segwit and the UASF and anti S2X campaign. The
| complete narrative change shifting to digital gold, SoV
| and scrubbing anything related to the title of the
| whitepaper (p2p electronic cash). and so much more
| interesting stuff, much of the info can be found on
| reddit's /r/btc that has been scrubbed from other parts
| of the internet. warning: many info you will find on the
| subject will be biased one way or another so try to get
| info on these topics from different sources and make up
| your own mind.
| gruez wrote:
| >also he knew adam back was satoshi but couldn't tell
| anyone because of the NDA he signed (adam had long been
| compromised at that point).
|
| uhh what?
| 153791098c wrote:
| After you watch the socialy bareable video it would
| probably make more sense. Makes it pretty clear that adam
| is satoshi (i would say with a 99% certainty). Adam says
| completely different things about bitcoin today than
| satoshi did all those years ago. It's not definite that
| he was compromised but him taking back control over the
| project with blockstream and the direction he steered it
| in makes it pretty clear to me.
|
| On Gavin, that's also explained pretty well in the video,
| also this reddit quote from gavin says more than enough
| for me (this was under a post named "How Craig Wright
| probably tricked Gavin Andresen"): "I won't violate
| people's privacy or repeat things told to me under non-
| disclosure agreements, so I'm stuck-- I'm not going to
| say anything more, except I suspect someday the full
| story will come out (and it'll be made into a movie).
|
| Of course, everything I was told could be a lie, and even
| professional magicians can be fooled sometimes (ever seen
| Penn & Teller's Fool Us show ?)."
| lawn wrote:
| Adam Back? The guy who said we should use "tabs" instead
| of Bitcoin while we waited for Lightning Network to be
| finished?
|
| I'm not kidding, here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com
| /watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be...
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Adam Back? The guy who said we should use "tabs"
| instead of Bitcoin while we waited for Lightning Network
| to be finished?
|
| While I don't claim to know that Back was involved in the
| creation of Bitcoin, it's also really hard for me to
| understand why many people think Satoshi was just one
| person after all this time.
|
| If anything Hal makes more sense and has way more
| circumstantial evidence if it was just a single person,
| but even then I don't think it matters much who was/were
| the thing we refer to as Satoshi Nakamoto and is actually
| a cool part of the mythology we've created over the
| years.
|
| It's like something you'd expect from a Neal Stephenson
| or Daniel Suarez Book.
|
| Because in the end, they don't matter anymore; it's gone
| so far from the original codebase that its entirely
| academic and quite honestly incredibly uninteresting in
| comparison to everything else that has been accomplished
| in this community. Though I argue much more could dhave
| been done if we didn't have to be derailed by this kind
| FakeToshi BS drama we so all too often in Bitcoin.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| And yet you can explain Adam Back/Bitcoin
| Core/Blockstream's actions much more simply as them being
| insidious actors that wanted to take over the Bitcoin
| project in order to promulgate propaganda supporting
| ridiculously high transaction fees so that they could
| establish a for-profit company to extract the delta
| between how high the fees are and how low they need to be
| for bitcoin to actually be usable.
|
| Sending a message from Satoshi's e-mail is very obviously
| not proof of identity. Satoshi needs to move coins or
| sign a message. That's the only acceptable proof.
|
| You claim Adam Back is compromised because the things he
| writes and does are so contrary to Satoshi and what he
| believed in that it's the only explanation that would
| make a universe where Back is Satoshi make sense. I much
| prefer to believe (with better evidence, btw) that Back
| is just not Satoshi. Boom, no logical contradictions to
| resolve.
| 153791098c wrote:
| The connection with the very niche bmoney, the
| conspicuous absence of adam the years before and after
| bitcoin's release, his move to a tax haven, his creation
| of hashcash which is very similar to bitcoin, his deep
| knowledge of bitcoin's source code without having ever
| contributed to it with his bitcointalk posts, his writing
| style, and not many other people that would be able to
| pull it off...
|
| Also even if he didn't create it, why did he never
| contribute to or interacted with the project? Why did he
| create a company that would make something he always
| wanted to create unusable? He even put this on his
| wikipedia page in 2007: "He has an interest in privacy
| technology, electronic cash (of the payer and payee
| anonymous type)..." and yet he is completely absent from
| bitcoin from 2009-2013 and sets up a company the
| completely defies everything that he wanted to create for
| years? It's completely illogical.
|
| I know most of these arguments are from the video but
| come on. He is the perfect candidate. And i think you
| will not get much better evidence when someone doesn't
| want to be publicly known to be satoshi. But sure there
| is no 100% conclusive proof so believe whatever you want.
| _jal wrote:
| It is usually easier to con smart people. Or in the
| alternative, being a bit thick can provide protection
| against fast talk.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Also book smart vs street smart. Gavin is book smart, but
| not street smart. Street smart people don't get taken by
| conmen with flawed cons.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Maybe because he didn't expect anybody to do a lot of
| work to convince him of a basically worthless fact.
|
| How long have you spent verifying your own computing
| platform? However it is, it is never impossible that
| somebody can corrupt it and fool you about something.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > he didn't expect anybody to do a lot of work to
| convince him of a basically worthless fact.
|
| Being Satoshi seems like the exact opposite of a
| basically worthless fact.
|
| Gavin was just being gullible. Being a good early
| developer on an important project isn't mutually
| exclusive with being gullible to social engineering.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What does he lose if he guesses wrong?
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > What does he lose if he guesses wrong?
|
| Total credibility loss in the BTC community.
|
| I could some how look past his indiscretions: calling
| himself 'chief Scientist' of an open source project,
| gate-keeping antics for pull requests, attempted forks
| with Hearn et al, his involvement with the foundation...
| He was still critical to the project for many years and
| not beyond redemption as open source project typically
| fork into other things for experimentation purposes that
| grow the project in the long term--Linux distros being a
| prime example.
|
| But when he went public that he bought faketoshi's
| narrative it was clear he was beyond help, and that his
| meeting at the NSA was more than what any of us ever
| assumed and he was so compromised that nothing could help
| that anymore.
|
| I hope he is mentally well, and I'm sure he has enough
| money to do what ever he wants in Life if he just kept a
| fraction of his coins, but other than I never want to see
| or hear from Gavin ever again.
| brohee wrote:
| Reputation obviously... He'll forever be "the guy who
| believed Craig"
| arcticbull wrote:
| Unless satoshi lost his keys lol like virtually everyone else
| of that cohort.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and
| maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while
| communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private
| key?
|
| You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have
| billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't
| think that's a realistic possibility.
| f430 wrote:
| Or perhaps being incarcerated for 25 years shortly after
| releasing bitcoin
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Of course.
|
| I know a lot of security phds who fall for phishing emails.
| The hugely likely outcome of btc was that it would end up
| worthless. "Oh crap, those keys were stored on that disk"
| after dropping it on the floor or having a laptop stolen is
| an entirely reasonable situation.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Maybe his house burned down and he had failed to keep
| offsite backups. Maybe he never made backups in the first
| place and his hard drive failed. People make all kinds of
| mistakes, sometimes very costly mistakes.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| And plus, who knew it would grow so big when things were
| just getting started? For all we know it was used as a
| test of the program rather than a real account.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Satoshi, Hal Finney, etc were very aware that it at least
| theoretically could become the world's primary
| transaction system. Indeed it was that insight that
| motivated Satoshi to make Bitcoin in the first place.
| adventured wrote:
| > People make all kinds of mistakes, sometimes very
| costly mistakes.
|
| For example, pizza-Bitcoin guy. The stories always talk
| about how he traded 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas.
| That's only a small part of the story, what actually
| happened is drastically worse. He sold several times that
| many Bitcoins in other low-value transactions at the same
| time (some straight up for cash) and did the pizza trade
| more than once.
|
| Pizza guy likely traded a minimum of 50,000 Bitcoins for
| less than a few hundred dollars of value. That's $1.6
| billion presently at 50k.
| chill1 wrote:
| > You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin,
| and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while
| communicating in public forums etc, would forget his
| private key?
|
| > You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have
| billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't
| think that's a realistic possibility.
|
| BIP39 mnemonics ("seeds") were not around in the early
| days. Bitcoin core software generated random private keys
| that were completely unrelated to one another. So it was
| necessary to backup the wallet file each time that new keys
| were created. Most users would generate hundreds (or
| thousands) of keys at a time, to reduce the frequency of
| backups.
| eecks wrote:
| So how could you use these private keys now? Considering
| they're not seeds.
|
| EDIT: downvoted for asking a question
| bayesianbot wrote:
| I can still import a wallet from at least 2012 and move
| the coins using the official client just like it was
| created yesterday.
|
| edit: and obviously you can't remember that but if you
| encrypt your wallet you can save it to long term storages
| like Dropbox / differrent servers / medias / etc, what
| Satoshi would most likely be doing
| CydeWeys wrote:
| They're still supported by most if not all wallets.
| chill1 wrote:
| Any one of those individual private keys could be
| imported into another wallet software application (e.g
| Electrum). Then the funds can be swept to a newer wallet
| that has a seed backup.
|
| Private keys are just numbers. That has not changed since
| the beginning.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| I see. Very interesting! I wasn't involved that early so
| wasn't aware :)
|
| Anyway, my general point stands, just s/remember a
| seed/store an encrypted file
|
| Personally I think Satoshi is either dead or never going
| to move his bitcoin.
| Bellamy wrote:
| Satoshi was a mathematical and programming genius who did
| not take backups. LOL.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Sure why not! It was utterly worthless at the time (and
| today in my opinion) and we know plenty of people who lost
| multi tens of thousands of bitcoins.
|
| All it takes is spilling some coffee on your laptop.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Everything you say is true*, but there's plenty of other
| evidence that Craig Wright is a fraud, independent of
| whether he's in possession of Satoshi's private keys:
| https://craigwright.online/
|
| * - Except where you point out that it's your opinion
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| > Sure why not!
|
| For multiple reasons
|
| > It was utterly worthless at the time
|
| If you read what Satoshi wrote, he didn't think it would
| be worthless in the future at all.
|
| > (and today in my opinion)
|
| Your opinion is contradicted by reality
|
| > we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of
| thousands of bitcoins.
|
| They weren't the creators
| [deleted]
| skywhopper wrote:
| Of course this is easily possible.
| Thorentis wrote:
| If CSW was genuinely Satoshi, he would be humble and genuine
| enough to admit he simply lost the keys. He would also
| acknowledge that there is no way for him to prove he is
| Satoshi, but that that is his own fault for losing the keys.
| Instead, he is engaged in childish lawsuits and actual fraud
| (his PhD, the backdated keys). Not the moves of somebody like
| Satoshi.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| If the paper was signed with that key, then the signature must
| be FIPS compliant to be legally significant, but the paper is
| not signed.
| skywhopper wrote:
| That wouldn't really mean anything. If he is Satoshi, he may
| have lost the keys. If he has the keys, that doesn't mean he is
| Satoshi, it only proves that he has the keys.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Anyone who has the keys is Satoshi, for all intents and
| purposes. The problem is no-one has the keys (at least
| publicly).
|
| Satoshi has never revealed themselves. That's because they're
| either smart enough not to, or they're dead.
| wildrice wrote:
| "Yesterday both Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org received
| allegations of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper
| by lawyers representing Craig Steven Wright. In this letter, they
| claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name,
| and ownership of bitcoin.org. They also claim he is Satoshi
| Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and the original
| owner of bitcoin.org. Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were both
| asked to take down the whitepaper."
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the
| paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org.
|
| Isn't that basically asking for a lawsuit in the format of
| "Prove that you are Satoshi or be charged with perjury" ? Why
| is CSW still able to play these tricks?
| mathiasrw wrote:
| Yes it is. He is wanting to get into a situation where he can
| provide proof in a legal setting so that any outcome can be
| used in other legal battles.
| garmaine wrote:
| Because the cost of the lawsuit would still be carried by
| these open source volunteers.
| yawniek wrote:
| wouldn't he need to pay taxes?
| csense wrote:
| Someone should host the whitepaper on IPFS.
| Sargos wrote:
| Many people thought the same thing. Here it is:
| https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/13523156821934366...
|
| https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ will always work to view
| the Bitcoin whitepaper from any browser.
| https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ is completely decentralized but
| you need an IPFS enabled web browser to view. (FYI you can add
| .link to any .eth website to view it through an IPFS gateway)
| mathiasrw wrote:
| You can get it directly from data stored in the BSV blockchain:
|
| https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c6...
| lawn wrote:
| They have. It's also hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain and it's
| forks and there are torrents of it of course.
|
| Here's how to decode it from the blockchain:
| https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the...
| [deleted]
| Nursie wrote:
| Isn't this guy literally billions in the hole to the estate of
| someone he claims was his partner in creating BTC, and who is co-
| owner of the Satoshi hoard of coins which haven't moved (ever)?
| Did that court case ever finish or is he still using every trick
| in the book to draw it out?
|
| (Kleiman v. Wright, that's what I'm thinking of) (Looks like it
| got kicked back to June this year due to covid)
| phkahler wrote:
| >> the Satoshi hoard of coins which haven't moved (ever)
|
| What type of math problem has to be cracked to claim that
| stash?
| jandrese wrote:
| Basically you have to crack hard crypto. With key lengths
| long enough and no mathematical weaknesses discovered in the
| algorithm it could easily take until the heat death of the
| universe.
| b3n wrote:
| Can't quantum computers theoretically break elliptic curve
| cryptography? I suspect we'll get there a bit before the
| heat death of the universe.
| tromp wrote:
| The famous ECDLP or Elliptic Curve Discrete Log Problem, upon
| which a large part of Bitcoin's security rests.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-
| curve_cryptography#Ra...
| hanniabu wrote:
| Yes, that fraud
| vmception wrote:
| Yes, he failed to produce any keys, the courier with the keys
| never materialized, the judge has not thrown Craig Wright in
| jail for contempt of court nor has be been charged with
| perjury. The judge seems to be mildly entertained by this and
| views Craig Wright as mentally ill, but won't have him
| committed. It is all sad and strange. There are a lot of
| guardrails against using the system this way, but they aren't
| being used.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| As near as I can tell they're letting Craig Wright cosplay
| being Satoshi because it's another useful way of inhibiting
| Bitcoin's adoption and annoying the real Satoshi, wherever he
| is out there.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Why do you believe this judge is part of an over-arching
| conspiracy of powerful but mute people who are attempting
| to inhibit the adoption of bitcoin through cosplay?
|
| Why wouldn't those super-intelligent, powerful people do
| something about the actual Chicago based exchange that
| already trades Bitcoins?
| vmception wrote:
| There's nothing to suggest this one judge is part of any
| plan. This is just a judge playing "choose your own
| adventure" with live characters arguing over something he
| doesn't care about while providing some form of escapism.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| It would be an entirely different judge in a different case
| that would have to have him committed, not a judge in a
| lawsuit in which he's a party, no?
| tedivm wrote:
| In the US it's not easy to commit people- you generally
| need to prove that they are a danger to themselves or
| others. Judges just can't randomly commit people against
| their will, especially if it has nothing to do with the
| case in front of them. They can hold people in contempt,
| but that's a whole different thing.
| Loughla wrote:
| It's not easy to get someone committed long term, in my
| experience, but startlingly easy to get someone
| forcefully admitted against their will for a 'short-term'
| stay, that may (does) turn into longer term care.
|
| You need three things: 1. a person who is naturally
| combative, 2. a wellness check performed by the police,
| and 3. an underfunded mental health facility.
|
| The police show up and the person gets combative,
| naturally. The police then swear the person is a danger
| to themselves and/or others. The person is committed,
| short-term, for evaluation. During this evaluation
| process, the person refuses to follow prescribed
| treatments; in an underfunded facility this treatment is
| generally accompanied by powerful psychoactive drugs,
| that most people, especially naturally difficult people,
| will refuse. Then comes long-term care.
|
| Now, I know it's not the context of a judge ordering it,
| but it really isn't that difficult to do.
|
| Source: you wouldn't believe the things I have seen in my
| career in higher education. Some people and especially
| controlling families are truly, absolutely, evil.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Also, needs to be a person who does not have family with
| the monetary and system-navigating resources to try to
| keep them from getting committed. Poor and/or alone, not
| able to appear and speak like a "respectable
| professional", you're fucked.
|
| Or in your example if you have family that _wants_ you to
| be committed _and_ has money and the ability to appear
| and speak professionally and navigate beurocracies, oh
| yeah you 're never coming back.
| vmception wrote:
| He should either be thrown in prison for contempt of court
| until the keys are revealed.
|
| Charged with perjury when he tells the truth to get out of
| court-jail.
|
| Or committed to an institution because he is mentally unfit
| and that it would be unconscionable for him to face penal
| consequences for his delusions.
|
| None of this is happening and the judge is clearly
| entertained.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Is pathological lying (narcism, borderline personality,
| whatever) a mental illness that requires being committed? He
| should be prevented from hurting other people for sure. And
| who knows... with his personality he may thrive in jail.
| pvarangot wrote:
| If you are lying "to yourself", as in, really believing
| your lies, it may be because you are showing you are
| delusional. Of course that delusion has to be really
| dangerous for you or others.
| Thorentis wrote:
| He seems like somebody who is very concerned with taking credit
| for things. And not just in a "hey, I made that!" kind of way,
| but in a "I will sue people who say I didn't make it. " [0] kind
| of way.
|
| This alone is enough for me dismiss his claims. Satoshi clearly
| intentionally wanted to remain unknown. It might be a real name,
| but it likely isn't. There was plenty of opportunity to reveal
| himself. Now that BTC is suddenly valuable and Blockchain has
| taken off, it is inevitable that there will be opportunists who
| want to personally gain from it. CSW is just one of many.
|
| Not to mention that CSW has made other false claims, such as
| claiming to hold a PhD when he actually doesn't [1]. There is a
| lawsuit where his name is titled as "Dr.". Again, alarm bells
| should be going off for anybody that sees that.
|
| And of course, there is a very simple way to prove he is Satoshi,
| which is to prove he holds the private key for a known Satoshi
| public key. But he can't do that, and almost certainly forged
| multiple keys he claims are Satoshi's [2].
|
| [0] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bitcoin-craig-
| wright-...
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/mashable/status/675193059408265216?s=20
|
| [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-
| are...
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| A real Satoshi could have lost his key, like many people lost
| their Bitcoin wallets. A fake Satoshi could possess the keys,
| by stealing or by receiving them in gift etc.
| louloulou wrote:
| Also here are a bunch of signed messages calling him a fraud
| using the keys to addresses HE CLAIMED TO OWN IN COURT -_-
|
| https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Is it even legal to claim copyright on a pseudonymously published
| work?
| SilasX wrote:
| I'm more worried about whether a pseudonym can (with legal
| credibility) place their work under an MIT or other Free
| license.
| Vespasian wrote:
| I don't see a reason why not. If it's an original
| copyrightable work one would assume that the author can grant
| rights to others or the public.
|
| IANAL and the legal system is sometimes strange, but there is
| no obligation to register yourself as a copyright holder.
| detaro wrote:
| Sure, just because you used a pseudonym you don't lose the
| rights associated with being the author. Getting people and the
| legal system to believe you that you are the author is your
| problem though.
| upofadown wrote:
| >Furthermore, Satoshi Nakamoto has a known PGP public key,
| therefore it is cryptographically possible for someone to verify
| themselves to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
|
| I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't
| exist 50 years ago. They are a completely new discovery. The long
| term implications are not yet clear.
|
| They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink
| signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely
| anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time.
| This is a great example of that.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they
| didn't exist 50 years ago.
|
| Very new, I think you could even say almost all of computer
| science pre-dates them.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink
| signatures they are named after in that they can give an
| entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period
| of time.
|
| The fundamental difference is the medium not the properties.
| People can sign papers with false signatures and be erroneously
| identified as the actual party. That is why there are notaries,
| to authenticate the identity of the signer, subject to trust in
| third party documentation.
|
| For example, people steal houses by signing false quit-claim
| deeds. Signatures on paper do not have any positives properties
| over cryptographic signatures.
| scarmig wrote:
| There is this constant thread of seediness to the point of
| absurdity running through Bitcoin that makes it look like a joke
| that everyone is in on except the suckers buying into it. Which
| makes it hilarious for an observer... though I guess I don't get
| to laugh all the way to the bank, which is a fitting punchline.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money
| laundering. Were there seriously billions of dollars worth of
| gullible people buying ICOs and every random alt coin a few
| years ago?
|
| On Reddit, there are tons of spammers selling "copy trading"
| services. Are there actually customers for that?
| [deleted]
| Stevvo wrote:
| In the ICO boom, I worked on many of their products.
|
| For the most part, everyone from the CTO to contractors like
| myself knew the business plan was terrible and the founders
| were as deluded as the investors. We were just trying to
| extract as much money as possible from these companies before
| they went under.
|
| It worked. I was earning anywhere from $400 to $5000 an hour.
| gruez wrote:
| >I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money
| laundering
|
| Because the best way to clean your dirty money is to sell
| tokens (which are "totally not securities") and get
| investigated by the SEC.
| notretarded wrote:
| Yes
| f430 wrote:
| I would be worried too if Paul Le Roux was getting released from
| federal penitentiary.
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| Is he being released? I thought he received a 25 year sentence
| in 2012?
| hummel wrote:
| Paul actively cooperates with the US justice and secret
| services. It is likely that his sentence will eventually be
| reduced.
| f430 wrote:
| I've read somewhere that he is being released in 2025 but
| can't be sure.
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| The BOP website lists his release date as 1/14/2034 with
| his status as "NOT IN BOP CUSTODY".
| f430 wrote:
| what does that mean tho? BOP?
|
| Is he out on bail???
| fogof wrote:
| BOP is the federal bureau of prisons.
| https://www.bop.gov/
| waterfowl wrote:
| The federal inmate locator lists him as not in BOP Custody.
| Did he get extradited somewhere? House arrest for covid?
| sneak wrote:
| Note that the canonical Bitcoin whitepaper url (which appears on
| tshirts and stickers and the like) is still just fine:
|
| https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
|
| That URL's been up since the beginning, and AFAIK isn't going
| anywhere.
|
| I didn't even know bitcoincore.org was a thing until today.
| smitj wrote:
| Craig discussing the very website 2 weeks ago
| https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=4328
| Bellamy wrote:
| Why would "real" Satoshi first add the paper and now want to take
| it away?
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be great if Satoshi's true identity was left
| ambiguous...because Satoshi forgot their password and couldn't
| log in again to prove it.
| UShouldBWorking wrote:
| This is just more of the same Blockstream (Adam Back) trying to
| rewrite history.
|
| Back's Blockstream hijacked the GitHub repo years ago and ever
| since has been working hard to buy up influence and control the
| narrative about Bitcoin.
|
| They artificially limited the block size which caused an increase
| in fees, trying to push users to their second layer solutions.
| fogof wrote:
| I always thought bitcoin core and bitcoin.org were run by the
| same people. Who controls bitcoin.org?
| StreamBright wrote:
| And the bitcoin circus continues with the most bizarre turn of
| events.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Huh? You can't claim authorship of anonymous publication. Neither
| the author, nor anybody else, it's the whole point, anonymous
| once anonymous forever.
| FabHK wrote:
| That is not only false in this case, but also in general. As
| another refutation, consider _A Warning_ , by Anonymous,
| subsequently revealed to be Department of Homeland Security
| official Miles Taylor.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| You can personally believe such revelations, but they aren't
| binding.
| bidirectional wrote:
| There are multiple ways one could prove themselves to be
| Satoshi. He has known public keys, bitcoin wallets, email
| accounts etc.
| aeturnum wrote:
| As they point out, the paper is not anonymous. It is
| pseudonymous. "Satoshi" is a person or persons whose
| communications are validated through a public key (Qanon folks
| take note). Anyone claiming to be Satoshi can simply sign
| something with the associated private key and prove they were
| involved with the identity.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| What is the reason to believe that the key belongs to
| Satoshi? Did he post a proof?
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I think Craig is a pawn who's handler's goal is to reveal
| Satoshi's true identity.
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