[HN Gopher] The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)
Author : lawrenceyan
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-07-11 04:51 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (decrypt.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (decrypt.co)
| anupj wrote:
| The 184 billion BTC overflow bug is a reminder that even
| "immutable" code is only as trustworthy as its review process.
| The real miracle isn't that a bug happened, but that Satoshi
| patched it in hours and the network agreed to roll back.
| Decentralization is great, but consensus is everything
| vbezhenar wrote:
| As long as there's singular entity which leads the changes to
| the protocol, there's no decentralization.
| exe34 wrote:
| Leading doesn't mean coercion. Leadership in decentralization
| implies consent.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Comsent by whom? In most "decentralized governance"
| projects I've heard about, all you need is for the holders
| of 51% of the tokens to agree, and the holders of the other
| 49% have no recourse but to leave.
| fouc wrote:
| with bitcoin isn't it more about 51% of the compute
| rather than 51% of the token?
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Yes, but I was talking about "decentralized leadership"
| in all the projects following Bitcoin, which often use
| 51% of stake instead of 51% of mining capacity, under the
| social theory that the biggest stakeholders will be the
| most invested in the outcome of the project.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Those with at least 51% of the sustained hash power can
| already redefine "Bitcoin" to be whatever they want... At
| any time whatsoever? (assuming they stay cohesive enough
| as a bloc)
|
| So this seems like a pointless distinction.
| Retric wrote:
| 51% hashing power doesn't prevent forks. Including forks
| to 51% of the token systems.
|
| That's the thing people thing of crypto coins as math,
| but they're still a social construct.
| olalonde wrote:
| That statement is a bit misleading. The damage an
| attacker can do through a 51% attack is much more limited
| than that. It allows an attacker to censor transactions
| or perform double spends, but it does not allow them to
| "redefine Bitcoin" (e.g. change consensus rules,
| arbitrarily reassign coins, etc.).
| Geee wrote:
| No, that's completely different thing. Mining power only
| "decides" about the blocks in the blockchain. 51% is only
| relevant in the context of taking over the blockchain by
| 51% attack.
|
| Software versions and updates require social / economic
| consensus and have nothing to do with mining power.
| Bitcoin is open-source protocol / software and everyone
| can use whichever version they like. But there's also
| economic incentives to use the most used version and to
| make sure that it will keep being the most used version,
| i.e. forks are bad and should be avoided, therefore it's
| in everyone's interest to reach consensus.
| daveguy wrote:
| So there are two different places that a coup against
| bitcoin could occur? Processing and Software.
|
| With something like 45% of processing controlled by
| entities in Iran, China, and Russia, it seems like an
| absolute fools game to put any significant wealth in
| Bitcoin. All it would take is a significantly effective
| worm to destroy bitcoin. But hypers gonna hype.
|
| You couldn't pay me to hold a Bitcoin.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| It's the same as any currency. If the place you want to
| spend it only accepts currency y then you must trade for
| currency y to spend money there.
|
| Since Bitcoin is software anyone can fork it and create a
| currency y with the same ledger up to the fork but few
| people do because convincing other people to trade for it
| without a very strong argument is hard.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| What do you think "Iran" can do if they controlled 51% of
| processing power?
| daveguy wrote:
| Double spend any bitcoins in their possession?
|
| Or just announce and prove that they are doing it,
| thereby causing a run on bitcoin and all the other
| bozobucks.
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| Your critique is valid but outdated. This happened way back
| in 2010. Satoshi disappeared a long time ago now.
|
| There are still influential people, but none with the
| authority of Satoshi himself.
| joshstrange wrote:
| See also, the DAO hack.
| jowea wrote:
| Yeah that's a great example. I think sometimes people
| take "code is law" too seriously, when it is clear to me
| the code is just a deterministic way to form a consensus
| that works 99% of the time and the other 1% you get
| forking.
| whatsupdog wrote:
| What Ethereum did after DAO was way more sinister. At
| least with the Bitcoin "roll-back" there were no
| transactions reversed. The miners just got together and
| started mining from a previous point in the Blockchain,
| and eventually the new chain had more work done and was
| validly accepted by even outdated nodes. Ethereum just
| went ahead and added this to their protocol: "ummm this
| transaction stands reversed, you don't need to verify
| signature for this particular transaction". This blot
| will stay in the protocol for ever.
| wslh wrote:
| Bitcoin (et al) is/are not fully decentralized in the sense
| that a core development team actively maintains and
| proposes changes, even minimal ones. While it's true that
| major updates require broad consensus and may be rejected
| by nodes if controversial, we should acknowledge that
| certain points of centralization exist, particularly around
| development and decision making. These often overlooked
| aspects now carry more financial consequences, especially
| as Bitcoin becomes more intertwined with regulated
| financial instruments and political power.
|
| For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully
| depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling
| again the OP_CAT opcode [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat
| 127 wrote:
| Bitcoin can be forked, and in fact has been. You didn't
| mention mining centralization, which is another avenue.
| dennnis wrote:
| One of the biggest points of failure I can see happening
| is self hosted node packaged software services like
| umbrel. Where they are just updating your node for you.
| FabHK wrote:
| Indeed. Permissionless blockchain is much less of a
| technological innovation, but more of a governance
| innovation, specifically an accountability sink, where
| instead of a named entity (corporation, institution, person)
| being in charge, you have this amorphous blob in charge that
| does come together if its interests are affected (this 184 bn
| Bitcoin bug, the DAO hack, etc.), but otherwise even in the
| presence of heinous crimes shrugs and says: "who, me? what
| can I do?"
|
| I don't understand why that's so attractive to so many
| participants - possibly because the enormous negative
| externalities of such a thing more often than not don't fall
| on themselves, but other, more vulnerable people.
|
| (Not always though: when 200 Bitcoin were stolen from ultra-
| libertarian Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, he came crying for
| help from the bad bad centralized FBI rather quickly...)
| Salgat wrote:
| BTC has occasionally obtained community driven patches by
| distributed consensus rather than a centralized approach (as
| recently as 2021 with the Taproot soft fork). When Quantum
| Computing finally becomes a threat to BTC, there will almost
| certainly be a distributed consensus to update the protocol
| again. Now what happened with Ethereum could be argued as not
| so decentralized since the organization (Ethereum Foundation)
| has extremely strong political influence over the
| corporations that support it.
| clysm wrote:
| I really hate the "someone will certainly solve this
| problem!" mentality.
|
| You can't just magically update the protocol to work around
| the ability of someone to break elliptic curve
| cryptography. That not how this works. It's not how any of
| this works.
| greyface- wrote:
| > You can't [...] update the protocol to work around the
| ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography
|
| Have you reviewed any of the proposals to do exactly
| that? https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/quantum-
| resistance/
| alwa wrote:
| Isn't that exactly how it works?
|
| You agree on a post-quantum algorithm...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
|
| Then you update the protocol...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/qth9ii/how_does
| _bi...
|
| Right?
| nivertech wrote:
| It's based on a social consensus only, the rest (Nakamoto
| Consensus, PoW, longest chain, difficulty adjustment, block
| halving, artificial limited supply, decentralization,
| censorship-resistant P2P network, open source, etc.) is a
| combination of a Rube Goldberg machine & crypto bros LARPing.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I halfway disagree:
|
| There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for
| reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants
| can be trusted (including the fact that the Bitcoin paper
| uses game theory to give evidence why malicious entities
| attempting to create another fork will by the mere design of
| the algorithms have a hard time).
|
| What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about
| what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete
| consensus in the blockchain. By the design of the protocol
| and its data structures, there _do_ exist boundaries
| concerning possible "social interpretations" of this
| consensus, but a lot of aspects are up to different
| interpretations.
| nivertech wrote:
| Nakamoto Consensus didn't solved a secure scalable PBFT
| (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) Consensus.
|
| Bitcoin didn't solved a forkability and finality problems.
| Blockchain (or more properly hashchain) is a linked list of
| hashpointers, and since anyone can create a hashpointer
| pointing to the head of the hashchain - it means anyone can
| fork it. And indeed Bitcoin was forked multiple times, and
| the solution to forks was almost always either centralized
| and/or social.
|
| IMO PBFT consensus algos have a niche applications anyway,
| and not required for Electronic Cash implementation, only
| for decentralized and/or disintermediated Systems-of-
| Record, but that's a complete opposite of bearer
| instruments like electronic cash.
| guappa wrote:
| > There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for
| reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants
| can be trusted
|
| Yes, they existed a long time ago and aren't wasteful as a
| way to generate "value".
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Yes, they existed a long time ago and aren't wasteful
| as a way to generate "value".
|
| _Can you give me a literature reference for such a
| result, because this claim surprises me._
|
| Of course Merkle trees existed long before - but they are
| just "cryptographically signed data structures", and thus
| don't solve the distributed consensus problem.
|
| Of course eCash existed long before - but it depended on
| some central authority.
|
| Of course distributed consensus algorithms existed long
| before - but they depended on the fact that all
| participants are trustable.
|
| Thus, in my opinion Satoshi Nakamoto indeed made a really
| important scientific contribution for a quite specific
| algorithmic problem.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Of course distributed consensus algorithms existed long
| before - but they depended on the fact that all
| participants are trustable.
|
| No. They depended on the fact that all participants were
| _known_ (in other words, the permissioned setting). Among
| those known ones, some (less than n /3) could go bonkers,
| all the way byzantine, and the honest nodes would still
| be guaranteed to find consensus (with consistency and
| availability).
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Bitcoin is the OG Birkin Handbag. Valuable for the story.
| People compete to own a bit of it for that. You can create
| your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! But no story, no
| value.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of
| it!
|
| That is what I wrote:
|
| > What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects
| about what it "socially" means that there exists this
| concrete consensus in the blockchain.
|
| In your private Bitcoin clone, such a consensus has a
| "socially much more boring" interpretation.
| FabHK wrote:
| > There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for
| reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants
| can be trusted
|
| Not quite. Distributed consensus had been solved in the
| 1980's theoretically and the 1990's practically, even in
| the presence of byzantine nodes. What Nakamoto consensus
| was first in was to extend this to the permissionless
| setting (at enormous expense & inefficiency, and with no
| benefits, in my view; though enabling large scale rule
| breaking or "censorship resistance", which some see as a
| benefit).
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Yes, but no. The Rube Goldberg of PoW isn't just for show,
| it's a protection from Sybil attack (not that it makes the
| economics of it any less of a disaster).
| nivertech wrote:
| You cherry picked one thing from the list, and even there
| made a mistake.
|
| In Bitcoin PoW used as a method for leader election of the
| node composing the list of validated transactions on the
| ledger (aka block), or even an empty list of transactions
| (aka Nakamoto-style Consensus).
|
| But without all the Rube Goldbergian nonsense it's simply
| an illegal/unlicensed lottery where the participants pay
| with electricity for the right to earn records on the
| longest chain (aka UTXO with mining block rewards).
| FabHK wrote:
| > You cherry picked one thing from the list, and even
| there made a mistake.
|
| Not quite. Nakamoto consensus is PoW + LCR, and the PoW
| part is for Sybil resistance, and the LCR part is for
| consensus.
| nivertech wrote:
| he wrote
|
| _> The Rube Goldberg of PoW isn 't just for show, it's a
| protection from Sybil attack_
|
| he cherry picked PoW
|
| no, Nakamoto-style consensus is not the same thing as
| PoW, or even PoW+LCR, not even the same thing as Bitcoin
| consensus.
|
| Nakamoto-style consensus simply means that we're doing a
| leader election, and the leader does the transaction
| validation (aka mining a block in Bitcoin-speak).
|
| The novelty of Nakamoto-style consensus is how we're
| doing this leader election, i.e. using PoW, PoW+LCR, PoS,
| PoET, PoA, Proof-of-X, etc.
| olalonde wrote:
| Seems someone missed the boat...
| nivertech wrote:
| Nocoiners cannot understand Bitcoin?
| olalonde wrote:
| Some do and have reasonable criticism, but you are just
| mixing up concepts and sound pretty bitter - hence my
| assumption.
| nivertech wrote:
| show me at least one so-called "bitter" example from my
| posts
|
| I have been researching crypto for over a decade. And I
| would be glad if I was corrected if I was wrong, instead
| of receiving personal remarks
| olalonde wrote:
| > Show a single so called "bitter" example from my posts
|
| "crypto bros LARPing". "it's simply an illegal/unlicensed
| lottery"
|
| > And I would be happy to be corrected if I made a
| mistake, instead of getting personal remarks.
|
| Sure.
|
| > Nakamoto Consensus didn't solved a secure scalable PBFT
| (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) Consensus.
|
| How could it? PBFT is an algorithm, not a problem to be
| solved. Bitcoin is byzantine fault tolerant though.
|
| > Bitcoin didn't solved a forkability and finality
| problems.
|
| There's no such thing as a "forkability problem" and
| Bitcoin solves finality through PoW.
|
| > And indeed Bitcoin was forked multiple times, and the
| solution to forks was almost always either centralized
| and/or social.
|
| That's wrong. The vast majority of forks are resolved
| algorithmically. There were only 2 or 3 unintentional
| hard forks in the early days that were due to bugs. This
| hasn't happened since 2013.
|
| The only real "social" aspect of Bitcoin is what value
| people decide to assign to the coins.
| nivertech wrote:
| > "crypto bros LARPing"
|
| I was at Bitcoin scene since 2011, I think that I can
| distinguish LARPing from the real thing. It's not me who
| created a dychotomy between fiat and crypto, between
| HODLers/coiners and noicoiners, between Traditional
| Finance and Crypro Finance, between CeFi and DeFi,
| between IPOs and ICOs, etc. Crypto always looked like a
| Pinoccio who want to become a "real boy".
|
| > "it's simply an illegal/unlicensed lottery"
|
| yes, the PoW-based mining is litterally called a puzzle
| solving or a lottery. How do you call a game where
| everyone buys a ticket with electricity, but only one at
| a time wins a block reward?
|
| > How could it? PBFT is an algorithm, not a problem to be
| solved. Bitcoin is byzantine fault tolerant though.
|
| OK, BFT (not PBFT algo) is a class of problems with many
| proposed solutions, but none is good enough if you need
| scalability. Bitcoin is a partital solution under
| multiple constraints, even 1/3 of malicious nodes can
| undermine it. Internet backbone (BGP) should be trusted.
| Governments should allow it. etc.
|
| > There's no such thing as a "forkability problem" and
| Bitcoin solves finality through PoW.
|
| the on-chain Bitcoin transactions are never final.
| Everyone have their own heuristic how many blocks to
| count depending on the amount transacted. Protocol only
| defines how many blocks gamblers (miners) need to wait
| before they can spend their lottery winnings (block
| rewards).
|
| > That's wrong. The vast majority of forks are resolved
| algorithmically. There were only 2 or 3 unintentional
| hard forks in the early days that were due to bugs. This
| hasn't happened since 2013.
|
| There were many more than 2-3 both intentional and bugs,
| but why argue? Even 2-3 hard forks are enough to show
| that it's bad design. Forks should be impossible by
| design.
|
| > The only real "social" aspect of Bitcoin is what value
| people decide to assign to the coins.
|
| IMO there are many more social aspects here beside price
| discovery of UTXO records and social consensus. Bitcoin
| core governance, Mining centralization in China.
| Cypherpunks. LARPing.
| olalonde wrote:
| > Bitcoin is a partial solution under multiple
| constraints, even 1/3 of malicious nodes can undermine
| it. Internet backbone (BGP) should be trusted.
| Governments should allow it. etc.
|
| This is wrong on multiple counts. Bitcoin's security
| model does not assume BGP is trustworthy, nor does it
| rely on government permission. And the claim that 1/3
| malicious nodes can undermine it misapplies BFT theory.
| Bitcoin doesn't use a quorum-based consensus like PBFT,
| so thresholds like 1/3 aren't the relevant failure mode.
| Instead, the attack vector is hashrate-based, and even a
| 51% attack doesn't let you rewrite history arbitrarily,
| just temporarily reorder recent blocks.
|
| > The on-chain Bitcoin transactions are never final.
|
| This is misleading. Bitcoin finality is probabilistic,
| like nearly everything in cryptography. It's final in the
| same sense that cryptographic signatures are unforgeable:
| with extremely high probability. The six-confirmation
| rule of thumb reflects the difficulty of deep chain
| reorgs which have never exceeded two blocks in practice
| on Bitcoin mainnet.
|
| > There were many more than 2-3 [hard forks]... even 2-3
| are enough to show it's bad design.
|
| This conflates implementation bugs with protocol design
| flaws. The forks were caused by programming errors, not
| bad design.
|
| > Bitcoin is a lottery.
|
| You could argue that Bitcoin _mining_ is because it 's is
| probabilistic and there's a reward. But unlike a lottery,
| it serves an important role: securing the Bitcoin
| network.
|
| Honestly, your critique reads more like cope than a
| technical argument.
| nivertech wrote:
| 1. 1/3 malicious nodes under some conditions and BGP
|
| This is backed by academic papers. Ask google or GhatGPT.
| You may argue that these papers are wrong or outdated,
| but then you need to tell this to the researchers who
| wrote them, not to me.
|
| 2. finality is binary, probabilistic finality is an
| oxymoron
|
| 3. _> This conflates implementation bugs with protocol
| design flaws._
|
| there is no formal spec for Bitcoin, there is a short
| informal whitepaper and a reference C++ implementation.
| Anyway the paper named _" Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer
| Electronic Cash System"_, and for this specific purpose
| design is flawed, without regards to bugs.
|
| 4. _> Bitcoin is a lottery._
|
| Now you're hallucinating quotes I never wrote.
|
| _> Honestly, your critique reads more like cope than a
| technical argument.*
|
| can you show a specific example of the "cope"?_
| olalonde wrote:
| > can you show a specific example of the "cope"?
|
| Pretty much all your comments here amount to twisting
| definitions, misapplying technical concepts, and
| nitpicking in search of "gotchas." Not to mention all the
| "LARPing" comments. It screams how to cope with having
| missed out, which, to your credit, you more or less
| admitted.
| nivertech wrote:
| Saying everything is X is like saying nothing is X
|
| So, you think that if I had BTC, it would've magically
| changed my views on how Bitcoin consensus works?
|
| BTW: I think Scrum/Agile is also LARPing, do you think if
| I'll get a Scrum Master certification it will change my
| views on Scrum?
| FabHK wrote:
| > Bitcoin finality is probabilistic, like nearly
| everything in cryptography.
|
| Yes, Bitcoin finality is probabilistic, and practically
| good enough after half a day or so (though 20 blocks were
| rolled back on at least 2 occasions).
|
| However, many things in cryptography are not
| probabilistic. And in BFT-type consensus, every block is
| immediately final; the question of finality doesn't even
| arise (which is why the concept only gained prominence
| with Nakamoto consensus).
|
| Regarding forks, there was BCH, BSV, etc. - those were
| not programming errors.
| olalonde wrote:
| > though 20 blocks were rolled back on at least 2
| occasions
|
| Do you mean because of the bugs mentioned earlier or
| during the normal course of operations? Curious to read
| more about that.
|
| > Regarding forks, there was BCH, BSV, etc. - those were
| not programming errors.
|
| That's a different kind of "fork" though and those are
| arguably not Bitcoin. They're basically just competing
| cryptocurrencies that happened to use an existing
| blockchain to get started.
| nivertech wrote:
| > _those are arguably not Bitcoin_
|
| Q.E.D.
|
| You proved it's a social consensus
| olalonde wrote:
| Naming things is, indeed. The protocol is not.
| freejazz wrote:
| Incredibly pedantic, no less when this whole thing
| started with "seems like someone missed the boat"
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That "rube goldberg machine" is what makes social consensus
| possible in a distributed system where everyone is anonymous
| and there's no single centralized authority.
| pards wrote:
| Just like the Ethereum fork in 2016 [0]. Before then, the
| battle cries of the crypto advocates were: -
| Blockchains are immutable! - The code is the law!
|
| ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders'
| money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the
| founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the
| hypocrisy.
|
| Not everybody agreed - and so the Ethereum Classic blockchain
| was created, causing all the problems that go hand in hand
| with having different, forked blockchains:
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Powers gonna power
| mrweasel wrote:
| That's probably more important than worrying about bugs in
| the code. There will be bugs, the concern is what are the
| rules for rectifying the damage done by those bugs. Plus,
| where do I go to appeal if I disagree with the decision?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > ignored the hypocrisy
|
| You don't need to exaggerate so strongly.
| splix wrote:
| That's different because in Bitcoin's case there was a clear
| violation of the specification, of how it supposed to work.
| So the bug was fixed to make the software working as it
| intended to be. If there were two node implementations then
| one would just stop to work until fixed.
|
| In Ethereum's case there were no violation of any
| specification. In fact there were no bug in the blockchain
| itself. Just someone took founder's money, they didn't like
| it and so they decided to get them back. And note that after
| that, there were bugs in the nodes code that were breaking
| the spec (which you should compare to the bitcoin's bug), but
| because of multiple node implementations only some of the
| nodes stopped and so we don't care about those issues.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > and the network agreed to roll back
|
| Is there a tiny community of a couple of nodes running the
| original network?
| zaphirplane wrote:
| At today's price that's ... like ... err more zeros than I've got
| fingers
| FatalLogic wrote:
| I think it's US$21.7 trillion? That's now about 15% of the
| total global money supply.
|
| So, it's good that the transaction was undone, or 15% of our
| planet would now be owned by some hacker.
|
| (To be real: if they had not undone the transaction
| immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed,
| and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin)
| willis936 wrote:
| (And maybe that wouldn't have been so bad)
| pickledoyster wrote:
| >15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker
|
| why? It's not like btc has anywhere near the trade volume for
| 15% of global money supply.
| FatalLogic wrote:
| > _(To be real: if they had not undone the transaction
| immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have
| collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of
| Bitcoin)_
|
| Yes, Bitcoin does not have sufficient trade volume, and it
| was a joke anyway. Bitcoin would probably not have survived
| even one more month in 2010, if there were 184 billion new
| "fake" bitcoins added in the mix.
|
| Even ignoring all the problems about the Bitcoin software
| being proven to be seriously broken, those 184 billion
| extra bitcoins meant that every other Bitcoin was suddenly
| worth about $0.0000000000000001
| pickledoyster wrote:
| apologies, the joke went over my head
| LikesPwsh wrote:
| At a certain scale, face value is meaningless and all that
| matters is liquidity.
|
| $21tn in bitcoin isn't going to get you any more money than
| $1tn would.
| daveguy wrote:
| Yup, good point. Another flaw along with software and
| compute that no one seems to pay attention to. When the
| Bitcoin bubble pops everyone trying to squeeze through a
| few transactions is going to identify the actual worth of
| Bitcoin.
| gsky wrote:
| If code is the law, hackers will rule the world
| anonfordays wrote:
| I've never come across this quote. It is useful, thank you!
| Kinrany wrote:
| The price of Bitcoin would be way different if that much of
| it existed
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Quadrillion, not trillion. ~200 billion * ~100 thousand = ~20
| quadrillion. So, about 15,000% of the global money supply. (I
| had to look it up in case BTC actually lost 99.9% of its
| value and I just missed the news.)
| zahlman wrote:
| I'm disappointed that the article doesn't point out that this is
| really a nice, round, negative 10 BTC if you work out the
| overflow (in satoshis).
|
| > The rapid implementation of the patch was vital in keeping
| Bitcoin a viable cryptocurrency. 184 billion Bitcoin would have
| devalued the currency completely, leaving it at the mercy of the
| person holding the newly-minted Bitcoin.
|
| It would have become worthless, sure, but I imagine that other
| people would have also just gone around creating additional
| batches of 184 billion BTC and driving the project into the
| ground, rather than letting one person walk off with effectively
| the entire thing.
| skizm wrote:
| Could all the large centralized mining pools (ghash and the
| like) plus exchanges like coinbase and binance blacklist or
| burn the 184B BTC? Didn't ethereum do something similar to
| revere a $600M "hack" a while ago?
| zahlman wrote:
| What they actually did sounds a lot easier to me.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I'm surprised they don't spend more time taking about the "soft
| fork" that voided the coins. For all the talk about the
| immutability of bitcoin transactions, it's worth mentioning that
| things were once a lot more fluid.
| kragen wrote:
| I think orphaned blocks still happen regularly? Although
| blockchain.com's graph drops to 0 in August 02017, I think that
| might just be a bug in their metrics collection.
| mNovak wrote:
| >> That Satoshi himself intervened, and did so so quickly, showed
| that Bitcoin was not as easily hackable as some might have
| assumed
|
| I don't know if this is the central takeaway I get from this.
| Moreso it shows Bitcoin dodged a bullet, in that there was still
| a central figure or group with enough clout to roll back and fork
| the chain.
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> It took just five hours before a "soft fork" was rolled out
|
| This is the dumb part about today's crypto imo. It is just a type
| of consensus among humans. People like to say its "all math" or
| some fundamental property of nature but that isn't true at all.
| It is a constant in a text file + people agreeing on its value.
| I.e. if a sufficient number of people agree that "we're bumping
| it up to 1 billion now", that is how many there would be. The
| argument really is how much better is this mechanism than other
| stores of value? Fiat currency is also a number where some people
| are given a magic wand to make more of it up on the spot. Gold is
| something that you either store in your house and hope that it is
| real or have someone else store it for you (or pretend to store
| it). Real estate is fine until the city / government decides that
| you don't own the title anymore. Basically it is a comparison of
| one absurd mechanism vs other absurd ones but perhaps Bitcoin is
| less absurd in the final analysis.
| wagwang wrote:
| Some arbitraries are better than other arbitraries. For
| bitcoin, you'd need 50% of supply to arbitrarily make decisions
| which is a pretty high threshold, and for all its faults, there
| hasn't been any egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20
| yrs.
| HaZeust wrote:
| >"egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20 yrs."
|
| What?? Are we just going to forget about BTC, BCH and BSV?
| Same thing happened with Ethereum too - with Ethereum (ETH)
| and Ethereum Classic (ETC).
| tripplyons wrote:
| Those are hard forks, which require validators to run
| different code.
| woah wrote:
| That's not how Bitcoin works at all. No amount of the supply
| (or hashpower) can let you make arbitrary decisions.
|
| Having 50+% of the hashpower could let you double spend by
| mining on two forks in parallel, but it will never let you
| change the rules of the protocol, since these are defined on
| clients run by many people.
|
| In fact that is what happened in the article. Someone
| realized there was a problem, got everyone to change their
| clients, and it changed. The first person to notice the bug
| did not need to hold any Bitcoin at all to make this change.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Right but some number of humans can collectively decided to
| change literally anything about Bitcoin. It isn't some
| fundamental constant of nature. The question really is who
| are the humans that could actually decide this, what are
| their incentives, what would make them decide to change it?
| If only you and I are running the original Bitcoin code
| then it isn't really Bitcoin. "Real" Bitcoin is a function
| of human decisions and has fundamentally very little to do
| with the code. Purchasing Bitcoin is simply a decision to
| trust this group of humans.
| tripplyons wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with having 50% of the supply. The
| protection is based on the distribution of hashing power. An
| attacker with 51% of the hashing power can double spend, but
| cannot "arbitrarily make decisions".
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