On Reddit, there are tons of spammers selling "copy trading" services. Are there actually customers for that?
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.
Because the best way to clean your dirty money is to sell tokens (which are "totally not securities") and get investigated by the SEC.
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.
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.
And why would the opinion of a single person (Gavin, or anyone) be relevant to wether or not Craig’s claim is factual?
It's a shame that even in HN people aren't immune to the shallow crypto propaganda...
Is he out on bail???
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...
https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/
Edit: Explanation/thoughts from Wladimir regarding the removal & future of Bitcoin Core - https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html
Given the evidence, I'm convinced he's one of them.
(Kleiman v. Wright, that's what I'm thinking of) (Looks like it got kicked back to June this year due to covid)
It's not the job of courts to force people into the care of the a mental institution. The government must petition the court for permission to do that and show that the person is a danger to themselves or others [1]. Sometimes a court will recommend mental hospital rather than prison for a convicted criminal. This Craig Wright person doesn't seem to be using violence on himself or others and hasn't been accused of a crime. Therefore the system will not force him into a mental institution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman–Petris–Short_Act
What type of math problem has to be cracked to claim that stash?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#Ra...
So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.
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
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
Very new, I think you could even say almost all of computer science pre-dates them.
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
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...
Here's how to decode it from the blockchain: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the...
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)
https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c6...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo
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?
IANAL and the legal system is sometimes strange, but there is no obligation to register yourself as a copyright holder.
Surprised no-one has put a hit on him yet.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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.
This is a non-idiomatic usage of this expression, unless you're saying that power grabbing is good?
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.
The FUD on here is always surprising voluminous.
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).
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.
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.
Satoshi has never revealed themselves. That's because they're either smart enough not to, or they're dead.
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/
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.)
That is not entirely correct. Wright provided a forged cryptographic proof to Gavin Andresen and tricked him into accepting.
So in other words he failed to provide proof
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.
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.
Edit: Also, I don't think the Lightning Network behaves likes the credit card networks. What do you mean when you say that?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't those super-intelligent, powerful people do something about the actual Chicago based exchange that already trades Bitcoins?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The students who have the hardest time with this sort of controlling family are the ones who have family that are wealthy and well-connected. That's not saying there aren't low-income folks with these problems; they just don't know how to navigate the systems.
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...
“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.Meanwhile my regular joe laptop can earn double its electricity cost in Monero (before it thermally locks up).
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™ to shut everything down is Hollywood fantasy at best and Qanon idiocy at worst.
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.
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
- Satoshi
https://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:956...
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure there are better solutions, but that's one that comes to mind.
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.
[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
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.
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).
Do you think that 10 years from now, a 15 TB hard drive will cost at least $200?
So Bitcoin is not exactly what Satoshi planned, but for me it changed my life completely.
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.
[1]https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/727078284345917441
[2]http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks
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.
Citation here BTW: https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1247592193319198720
Yes I agree this was the public justification for it. That being said, I'm certain they wouldn't have acted in the same way if it had been Luke jr or Greg Maxwell. They pulled his access because he wanted bigger blocks and he was ruining the official narrative.
I believe your citation but the point still stands.
And for future reference, a citation isn't generally accepted when it's just a screenshot you posted in a tweet you once made where the screenshot reveals a comment to a random reddit post with no visible url in it.
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?
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.
Or you use a functional cryptocurrency that don't have these ridiculous limitations.
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.
Mainchain (layer 1) 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.
PS: Keep downvoting, but a 2.58 tx fee cleared in less than an hour with 5+ confirmations, thus proving my point. I think we're far from the bloat we saw back then proving Segwit worked as expected and block sizes weren't a viable option nor tenable a solution to our problem, which I sincerely remains one of LN progress .
The key point, no matter which theory you subscribe to, is that medium of exchange is the most important property.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And make sure to compare how much energy (including the entire military, police forces, FBI, etc.) is used to secure US dollars.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
This [1] is a good recap of what happened
[1]https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...
[1] https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...
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.
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.
But I'm not comfortable with their marketing it as a "world computer" among other things, implying it's more production-ready and robust than it really is.
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).
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.
> 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.
EDIT: downvoted for asking a question
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
Private keys are just numbers. That has not changed since the beginning.
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.
All it takes is spilling some coffee on your laptop.
* - Except where you point out that it's your opinion
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 ?)."
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.
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.
I'm not kidding, here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be...
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.
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.
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.
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.
But fwiw the technology does exist now to do that, just in another protocol:
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/
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.
The $73 is not strictly related to the transfers fees but rather to how much it costs to mine a single bitcoin. If the total numbers of transactions were to decrease by 99% the energy cost per transaction would be $7300 but that wouldn't mean that transfers fees would increase that much or at all (if I understand how btc transfers work correctly it should decrease since there would be less people bidding) as long mining bitcoin remains profitable.
If currently 900 coins are generated per day, the cost to generate 1 bitcoin (234003kWh at $0.1 per kWh and using the yearly energy consumption value) is $23,400 in addition to that miners also received 150 coins from transaction fees in the last 24 hours. So if 150 dropped to ~0 the number of miners should only decrease by 14% to maintain the same profit margins.
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.
The only example I know is Iceland, but according to https://cbeci.org/mining_map it's not even in the top 10. Over 85% of all bitcoins are mined in these countries:
- 65% is mined in China with 721.2 g/kWh
- 7.2% in US: 417.305 g/kWh
- 6.9% in Russia: 517 g/kWh
- 6.17% in Kazakhstan (couldn't fine specific figure but around 80% produced power comes from Coal plants so gCO2/kWh must be very high)
The only country in the list which close to 0g/kWh is Norway at 0.48%.
Unless we're only talking about Iceland or similar countries, which are not connected to any continental grid and have a surplus of cheap/free energy they have no where to put, increased demand for electricity will lead to increased production. This demand might be fulfilled by building new powerplants using renewable sources (since currently that's cheaper than fossil or nuclear. However as long as these new sources are connected to a grid which still has non-renewable power plants mining bitcoin will produce as much CO2 as using a washing machine, smelting aluminum or driving a tesla per kWh.
Now if (assuming everything else stays constant) for some reason all bitcoin mining stopped the decrease in demand would lead to decrease in production from more expensive (possibly due to regulatory overhead and/or subsidies to renewables) more fossil-fuel based energy sources
Can you gave any examples on where this is happening?