7 ms·

Bitcoin: I am a time-traveler from the future, here to beg you to stop (2013)

112 points by bneiluj 9y ago

bgia 9y ago
Should add (2013) to the title.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  Maybe also (Fiction).
jawns 9y ago
If I were a time-traveler from 2025 to 2013, and things were roughly as described, you can bet I would go straight to Reddit and tell, in lurid detail, the tale of this digital dystopia. Not because I expect it to change the outcome. Time travel doesn't work like that. No, I would do it because I would need to do it -- because in a sense, I had already done it. I would, in all likelihood, already be aware of having done it, because during the time leading up to my temporal voyage, I would have read the words time-traveling me had already written. And I would be very glad to do it, whether or not I had a choice in the matter, because I would already know about the Bitcoin I would receive from amused Redditors for having done it. I might have to return to the dystopian future, but I would return very rich. Probably rich enough to afford adequate security protection and to live out the rest of my days in luxury. It might not be the best outcome for the human race as a whole, but it would be a very good outcome for me.
- kumarvvr 9y ago
  These sort of arguments seem to solidify the notion that time-travel is not possible in the current setup of the universe.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    Time traveling backwards is not possible. Time Traveling forward happens the faster you move. Satellites have to compensate for the fact that time is different the faster you go.
    - cowmoo728 9y ago
      I think it's "time traveling forwards happens slower the faster you move." The easy explanation is that we're traveling in a 4 dimensional space at the speed of light, and any increase in speed in the 3 spatial dimensions must subtract from your speed in the orthogonal time dimension.
      - dvdkhlng 9y ago
        Maybe in an Orthogonal Universe [1,2], but not in ours :) The way you state it, traveler's time would speed up (as the resting frame's time of journey would be decreased). [1] http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html [2] http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/02/Motion.html#LR http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/02/Motion.html#LR
        baldfat 9y ago
        If I jump on a ship and travel near light speed (Not possible yet) and then land on the same spot I would not have spent the same time as those on the earth. Now at a tiny level anyone ever on an airplane also will have spent less time than those who never have flown.
    - kumarvvr 9y ago
      I have always wondered, when satellites have to have their clocks compensated, is it that they are experiencing time differently, but are still in present time? To rephrase it, how does one know they are not in "now" but the past? apart from maybe measuring ages of their counterparts etc.
  - yiyus 9y ago
    Time-travel is absolutely possible, as long as it is always in the forward direction and at a (relatively) constant pace.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Time Travel totally works in forwards. In backwards it's probably more like winding up a tape; you can rewind all you want but the tape contents won't change.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Travel back in time and travel faster than light are logically equivalent, and seem to be utterly impossible in our universe. “c” does seem to be the iron law, the speed of causality, but of course who knows? I don’t see a universe without causality having people in it though!
Nullpointerjack 9y ago
he said 10,000 in 2017 and it is!
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  That's literally the only thing that matches up.
  - flygoswatter 9y ago
    Stop using the word 'literally'. You sound like a kid.
koolba 9y ago
Not the best writing style but still a fun read. Could change a few things to create a big budget Hollywood script out of it: Terminator x Mad Max x Big Short x In Time. I'd probably watch it too.
- b3lvedere 9y ago
  I'd call it 12 million monkeys. :)
alexmorenodev 9y ago
Will bitcoin worths $100.000 on 2019? I mean, seriously.
- tudorconstantin 9y ago
  If it'll have a year like 2017, it will hit $100k mid 2018
- dEnigma 9y ago
  Well, when this was written in 2013, the numbers for 2015 and 2017 probably provoked the same response (haven't read through the Reddit thread to check it). That being said, I'm with you in doubting Bitcoin will ever be worth $100,000.
  - xutopia 9y ago
    I'm expecting a 20k BTC before end of 2018. 100k BTC within 3 years.
  - xtracto 9y ago
    There are two ways to achieve that... either Bitcoin increases value or your "$" decreases value... I mean, 1 Bitcoin equals 10,775,501.53 South Korean Won
    - dEnigma 9y ago
      Sure, but I just don't feel like either of those factors will be strong enough for Bitcoin and the US dollar to reach a 100k$ price.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  That's $100,000 for anybody who's not insane. Seriously, why use the "decimal point" as a digit separator? You might as well start using Roman numbers too!
  - bencoder 9y ago
gondo 9y ago
"I have no way of proving to you" well what about some events from "your past" and our future? like what big will happen in 2018? anyways fun read
- jcranmer 9y ago
  If I suddenly dropped you in Poland on June 11, 1371, how would you go about convincing a reasonably well-informed person that you're from the future?
  - tehwalrus 9y ago
    I wouldn't talk to anyone: they'd die of several diseases from my breath pretty quickly if I understand the epidemiology of it. I wouldn't want to kill people, or get labelled a plague carrier!
  - b3lvedere 9y ago
    I doubt i can ever convince someone from over 600 years ago about anything. Someone who is reasonable well-informed, but living in the year 1371 is still a whole different level of information than someone who is reasonable well-informed today. Lots of concepts have not been discovered/invented and another whole bunch are lost.
  - jerf 9y ago
    This guy claims to be from our culture ~20 years in the future. Your question seems to be something like "Yeah, but what if everything was completely different?" Not terribly relevant in this case since I doubt anybody is even remotely fooled, but more interesting in the Jon Titor case, where I think many people were (albeit with a certain amount of willingness). He kept his predictions close to his chest and tried to play off any inaccuracies as issues with "alternate realities", but if that is true and you're not even in your own past anyhow there really wasn't very much reason not to be far more free with the details of the timeline that we may not even be in.
- yiyus 9y ago
  Somebody in the comments asked about the hashes of tomorrow. OP didn't deliver.
eggoa 9y ago
In 2025 the word "mean" no longer means "average", it apparently means "median". Amazing!
- kortex 9y ago
  I mean if "literally" can mean "figuratively", why not?
pmontra 9y ago
Governments can do an awful lot of things to collect taxes. For example a comment [1] to a similar story [2] suggests a benign one, that they "ask you to surrender the public keys that you are getting paid through". How to know there are no undisclosed keys? Much like they get people with untaxed money now: they spend more than they should. Is there anything wrong with this argument? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/comment/c9itn47 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/comment/c9i... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/bitcoins_dystopian_future/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/bitcoins_dy...
fori1to10 9y ago
If I were a time traveler, I would buy bitcoin.
gonational 9y ago
READ CLOSELY: I don't think it's possible to travel to the past, but I've figured out how to travel 1 hour into the future. It works 100% of the time. Here are the instructions: 1. Visit https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://news.ycombinator.com/news
- uptown 9y ago
  I find this works better: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
  - gtt 9y ago
    Actually, I prefer 15 minutes trips, so https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/
misterdata 9y ago
I suggest the next time traveller to prove being from the future by showing us the next 1000+ block hashes for the Bitcoin blockchain then...
- conmarap 9y ago
  Even if they show you, you'll never know until that block is mined. They could, however, show us something that happened today (a scandal or something) with the use of Bitcoin. In other words, bribery of elected officials or something similar. Perhaps related to the relentless attempts to repeal net neutrality? - Or maybe the outcome of a near-future vote in Congress.
SilverSlash 9y ago
So this time John Titor predicted the value of bitcoin. Perhaps we ought to listen to him?
n8n3k 9y ago
"Economic growth today is about -2% per year. Why is this? If you own more than 0.01 Bitcoin, chances are you don't do anything with your money. There is no inflation, and thus no incentive to invest your money." See, if you don't invest your money you simply make everyone elses money more valuable, until someone actually does invest it. You need to stop looking at money and start looking at resources, time, etc.. Those stay the same, no matter how much money is spent. "Just like the medieval ages had no significant economic growth, as wealth was measured in gold, our society has no economic growth either, as people know their 0.01 Bitcoin will be enough to last them a lifetime." You know the Industrial Revolution happened when wealth was measured in gold. Do I really need more excuses to stop reading this bullshit?
Yuioup 9y ago
The whole post is satirical, in case somebody here did not notice that.
- cududa 9y ago
  wait you're telling me op is NOT actually a time traveller?
  - fileeditview 9y ago
    oh he is. just take what he says with a grain of salt..
conmarap 9y ago
Do you all remember when Gold went up to ~$1850 in 2011 (about $2015 in today's money) never to reach those prices again (today's gold spot price is $1294.57)? The price did skyrocket, but what goes up must go down, especially in the financial field. Also, BTC reached the price of about $1150 in November of 2013, and then didn't get to that point until January of 2017 (If I'm reading the data on coinmarketcap correctly). The prices of BTC at the moment were largely driven to this point due to rising political and social upheaval and uncertainty in the market. Bitcoin is currently a bubble that's ready to burst. Also, if you want "privacy" use Monero or Zcash, not Bitcoin.
- panarky 9y ago
  > what goes up must go down Do you all remember 2005 to 2008 when Google stock went from $42 per share to $200 per share? Wonder what it's trading at today.
  - conmarap 9y ago
    Amazon, as well. Generally speaking, strong stocks keep going up. "Strong" in the sense of innovation and profitability. Twitter, on the other hand, is still struggling.
- xtracto 9y ago
  There is a school of though in economics that believes that in the current ~20 years economy, there is a recession every 7 years (roughly 2008, 2001, 1994). This school of thought thinks that a recession right now is due and some people think that it is already cooking. I think the value of cryptos (BTC, BCH, ETH, etc) will be pushed up when these recessions happen. The value of Gold went up in 2011 due to several factors. EU instability because of Greece was part of that. There was also some USA instability that caused some further grow in Gold price (I don't recall precisely which came first, US or Greece issues).
decentralised 9y ago
This is from a time when we thought Bitcoin would be the only cryptocurrency. In the meantime the core devs have spend countless hours on twitter arguing with trolls and there are a dozen or so new blockchains with better features and covering different use cases.
vectorEQ 9y ago
no one cares abouyt the future, why do you think people are inventing more types of money lol
justifier 9y ago
Fake: where's the mention of discovering p=np and all the current assets locked in Bitcoin disappearing in an instant?
james43534 9y ago
original_hash = Hash(hash of tomorrows block) and revel the original_hash to decode the tomorrows hash day after tomorrow. That way you do not disrupt the future and also can verify your authenticity of time travel.
somethingabout 9y ago
The username on Reddit is the name of a famous Canadian murder.
- megamindbrian2 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luka_Magnotta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luka_Magnotta
theklub 9y ago
Anyone else google Luka_Magnotta ?
megamindbrian2 9y ago
I am not buying any bitcoin (or its derivatives) because I want to survive the Rapture.
cmroanirgo 9y ago
Not a real time traveller, of course. He keeps mixing up his tense: "On average, every year so far.." "From now on..." A person from the future would state dates and times categorically, because to them it is history. Fakes are easy to spot.

112 points by bneiluj 9y ago

bgia 9y ago

Should add (2013) to the title.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
Maybe also (Fiction).

jawns 9y ago

If I were a time-traveler from 2025 to 2013, and things were roughly as described, you can bet I would go straight to Reddit and tell, in lurid detail, the tale of this digital dystopia. Not because I expect it to change the outcome. Time travel doesn't work like that. No, I would do it because I would need to do it -- because in a sense, I had already done it. I would, in all likelihood, already be aware of having done it, because during the time leading up to my temporal voyage, I would have read the words time-traveling me had already written. And I would be very glad to do it, whether or not I had a choice in the matter, because I would already know about the Bitcoin I would receive from amused Redditors for having done it. I might have to return to the dystopian future, but I would return very rich. Probably rich enough to afford adequate security protection and to live out the rest of my days in luxury. It might not be the best outcome for the human race as a whole, but it would be a very good outcome for me.

kumarvvr 9y ago
These sort of arguments seem to solidify the notion that time-travel is not possible in the current setup of the universe.
- baldfat 9y ago
  Time traveling backwards is not possible. Time Traveling forward happens the faster you move. Satellites have to compensate for the fact that time is different the faster you go.
  - cowmoo728 9y ago
    I think it's "time traveling forwards happens slower the faster you move." The easy explanation is that we're traveling in a 4 dimensional space at the speed of light, and any increase in speed in the 3 spatial dimensions must subtract from your speed in the orthogonal time dimension.
    - dvdkhlng 9y ago
      Maybe in an Orthogonal Universe [1,2], but not in ours :) The way you state it, traveler's time would speed up (as the resting frame's time of journey would be decreased). [1] http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html [2] http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/02/Motion.html#LR http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/02/Motion.html#LR
      - baldfat 9y ago
        If I jump on a ship and travel near light speed (Not possible yet) and then land on the same spot I would not have spent the same time as those on the earth. Now at a tiny level anyone ever on an airplane also will have spent less time than those who never have flown.
  - kumarvvr 9y ago
    I have always wondered, when satellites have to have their clocks compensated, is it that they are experiencing time differently, but are still in present time? To rephrase it, how does one know they are not in "now" but the past? apart from maybe measuring ages of their counterparts etc.
- yiyus 9y ago
  Time-travel is absolutely possible, as long as it is always in the forward direction and at a (relatively) constant pace.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- zaarn 9y ago
  Time Travel totally works in forwards. In backwards it's probably more like winding up a tape; you can rewind all you want but the tape contents won't change.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Travel back in time and travel faster than light are logically equivalent, and seem to be utterly impossible in our universe. “c” does seem to be the iron law, the speed of causality, but of course who knows? I don’t see a universe without causality having people in it though!

Nullpointerjack 9y ago

he said 10,000 in 2017 and it is!

dingo_bat 9y ago
That's literally the only thing that matches up.
- flygoswatter 9y ago
  Stop using the word 'literally'. You sound like a kid.

koolba 9y ago

Not the best writing style but still a fun read. Could change a few things to create a big budget Hollywood script out of it: Terminator x Mad Max x Big Short x In Time. I'd probably watch it too.

b3lvedere 9y ago
I'd call it 12 million monkeys. :)

alexmorenodev 9y ago

Will bitcoin worths $100.000 on 2019? I mean, seriously.

tudorconstantin 9y ago
If it'll have a year like 2017, it will hit $100k mid 2018
dEnigma 9y ago
Well, when this was written in 2013, the numbers for 2015 and 2017 probably provoked the same response (haven't read through the Reddit thread to check it). That being said, I'm with you in doubting Bitcoin will ever be worth $100,000.
- xutopia 9y ago
  I'm expecting a 20k BTC before end of 2018. 100k BTC within 3 years.
- xtracto 9y ago
  There are two ways to achieve that... either Bitcoin increases value or your "$" decreases value... I mean, 1 Bitcoin equals 10,775,501.53 South Korean Won
  - dEnigma 9y ago
    Sure, but I just don't feel like either of those factors will be strong enough for Bitcoin and the US dollar to reach a 100k$ price.
dingo_bat 9y ago
That's $100,000 for anybody who's not insane. Seriously, why use the "decimal point" as a digit separator? You might as well start using Roman numbers too!
- bencoder 9y ago

gondo 9y ago

"I have no way of proving to you" well what about some events from "your past" and our future? like what big will happen in 2018? anyways fun read

jcranmer 9y ago
If I suddenly dropped you in Poland on June 11, 1371, how would you go about convincing a reasonably well-informed person that you're from the future?
- tehwalrus 9y ago
  I wouldn't talk to anyone: they'd die of several diseases from my breath pretty quickly if I understand the epidemiology of it. I wouldn't want to kill people, or get labelled a plague carrier!
- b3lvedere 9y ago
  I doubt i can ever convince someone from over 600 years ago about anything. Someone who is reasonable well-informed, but living in the year 1371 is still a whole different level of information than someone who is reasonable well-informed today. Lots of concepts have not been discovered/invented and another whole bunch are lost.
- jerf 9y ago
  This guy claims to be from our culture ~20 years in the future. Your question seems to be something like "Yeah, but what if everything was completely different?" Not terribly relevant in this case since I doubt anybody is even remotely fooled, but more interesting in the Jon Titor case, where I think many people were (albeit with a certain amount of willingness). He kept his predictions close to his chest and tried to play off any inaccuracies as issues with "alternate realities", but if that is true and you're not even in your own past anyhow there really wasn't very much reason not to be far more free with the details of the timeline that we may not even be in.
yiyus 9y ago
Somebody in the comments asked about the hashes of tomorrow. OP didn't deliver.

eggoa 9y ago

In 2025 the word "mean" no longer means "average", it apparently means "median". Amazing!

kortex 9y ago
I mean if "literally" can mean "figuratively", why not?

pmontra 9y ago

Governments can do an awful lot of things to collect taxes. For example a comment [1] to a similar story [2] suggests a benign one, that they "ask you to surrender the public keys that you are getting paid through". How to know there are no undisclosed keys? Much like they get people with untaxed money now: they spend more than they should. Is there anything wrong with this argument? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/comment/c9itn47 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/comment/c9i... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/bitcoins_dystopian_future/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cos8x/bitcoins_dy...

fori1to10 9y ago

If I were a time traveler, I would buy bitcoin.

gonational 9y ago

READ CLOSELY: I don't think it's possible to travel to the past, but I've figured out how to travel 1 hour into the future. It works 100% of the time. Here are the instructions: 1. Visit https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://news.ycombinator.com/news

uptown 9y ago
I find this works better: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
- gtt 9y ago
  Actually, I prefer 15 minutes trips, so https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/

misterdata 9y ago

I suggest the next time traveller to prove being from the future by showing us the next 1000+ block hashes for the Bitcoin blockchain then...

conmarap 9y ago
Even if they show you, you'll never know until that block is mined. They could, however, show us something that happened today (a scandal or something) with the use of Bitcoin. In other words, bribery of elected officials or something similar. Perhaps related to the relentless attempts to repeal net neutrality? - Or maybe the outcome of a near-future vote in Congress.

SilverSlash 9y ago

So this time John Titor predicted the value of bitcoin. Perhaps we ought to listen to him?

n8n3k 9y ago

"Economic growth today is about -2% per year. Why is this? If you own more than 0.01 Bitcoin, chances are you don't do anything with your money. There is no inflation, and thus no incentive to invest your money." See, if you don't invest your money you simply make everyone elses money more valuable, until someone actually does invest it. You need to stop looking at money and start looking at resources, time, etc.. Those stay the same, no matter how much money is spent. "Just like the medieval ages had no significant economic growth, as wealth was measured in gold, our society has no economic growth either, as people know their 0.01 Bitcoin will be enough to last them a lifetime." You know the Industrial Revolution happened when wealth was measured in gold. Do I really need more excuses to stop reading this bullshit?

Yuioup 9y ago

The whole post is satirical, in case somebody here did not notice that.

cududa 9y ago
wait you're telling me op is NOT actually a time traveller?
- fileeditview 9y ago
  oh he is. just take what he says with a grain of salt..

conmarap 9y ago

Do you all remember when Gold went up to ~$1850 in 2011 (about $2015 in today's money) never to reach those prices again (today's gold spot price is $1294.57)? The price did skyrocket, but what goes up must go down, especially in the financial field. Also, BTC reached the price of about $1150 in November of 2013, and then didn't get to that point until January of 2017 (If I'm reading the data on coinmarketcap correctly). The prices of BTC at the moment were largely driven to this point due to rising political and social upheaval and uncertainty in the market. Bitcoin is currently a bubble that's ready to burst. Also, if you want "privacy" use Monero or Zcash, not Bitcoin.

panarky 9y ago
> what goes up must go down Do you all remember 2005 to 2008 when Google stock went from $42 per share to $200 per share? Wonder what it's trading at today.
- conmarap 9y ago
  Amazon, as well. Generally speaking, strong stocks keep going up. "Strong" in the sense of innovation and profitability. Twitter, on the other hand, is still struggling.
xtracto 9y ago
There is a school of though in economics that believes that in the current ~20 years economy, there is a recession every 7 years (roughly 2008, 2001, 1994). This school of thought thinks that a recession right now is due and some people think that it is already cooking. I think the value of cryptos (BTC, BCH, ETH, etc) will be pushed up when these recessions happen. The value of Gold went up in 2011 due to several factors. EU instability because of Greece was part of that. There was also some USA instability that caused some further grow in Gold price (I don't recall precisely which came first, US or Greece issues).

decentralised 9y ago

This is from a time when we thought Bitcoin would be the only cryptocurrency. In the meantime the core devs have spend countless hours on twitter arguing with trolls and there are a dozen or so new blockchains with better features and covering different use cases.

vectorEQ 9y ago

no one cares abouyt the future, why do you think people are inventing more types of money lol

justifier 9y ago

Fake: where's the mention of discovering p=np and all the current assets locked in Bitcoin disappearing in an instant?

james43534 9y ago

original_hash = Hash(hash of tomorrows block) and revel the original_hash to decode the tomorrows hash day after tomorrow. That way you do not disrupt the future and also can verify your authenticity of time travel.

somethingabout 9y ago

The username on Reddit is the name of a famous Canadian murder.

megamindbrian2 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luka_Magnotta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luka_Magnotta

theklub 9y ago

Anyone else google Luka_Magnotta ?

megamindbrian2 9y ago

I am not buying any bitcoin (or its derivatives) because I want to survive the Rapture.

cmroanirgo 9y ago

Not a real time traveller, of course. He keeps mixing up his tense: "On average, every year so far.." "From now on..." A person from the future would state dates and times categorically, because to them it is history. Fakes are easy to spot.