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What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)
- MrXOR 6y agoBitcoin's white paper turns 12! Dear Satoshi! Thanks for Bitcoin. If you read my comment, please reply me your advice.
- kneel 6y agodrink water
- arkitaip 6y agoInvest in dilithium, shit it going to vanish.
- krapp 6y agoNot for another 1000 years give or take.
- WJW 6y agoWhy would I want to invest in something that will vanish? Maybe this is a bitcoin joke I don't understand yet.
- ficklepickle 6y agoI believe it's a star trek thing. Dilithium crystals are used to power the warp drives IIRC.
- jeofken 6y agoFloss and brush your teeth daily. Kind regards //Satoshi
- pavel_lishin 6y agoGet up and stretch several times a day. If you can, spend some time outside walking around, enjoying fresh air and looking at nature.
- kuroguro 6y agoEarly to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
- taberiand 6y agoBe sure to drink your Ovaltine.
- totemandtoken 6y ago>>Proceeds to read aloud the 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MrXOR 6y ago+1
- egypturnash 6y agoHas anyone actually found a use for cryptocurrency and/or the blockchain yet that is not "burn a shit-ton of power on arguing over units of cryptocurrency are worth anything"?
- yellow_postit 6y agoRediscovering why some financial regulation makes sense come to mind. A petri dish for relearning.
- thebean11 6y agoTransferring money across borders, gambling, buying drugs are the main three that come to mind. edit: missed financial speculation
- dudus 6y agoI was going to say drugs, ransom, money laundering and other illegal activities are the main use cases for crypto
- seibelj 6y agoThey also all happened before crypto. But no one spoke about the evils of fiat currency then.
- raziel2701 6y agoWhat do I, a regular Joe not interested in buying illegal things, gain from using bitcoin? What's the proposition? Where's the value?
- seibelj 6y agoThe US government has an absurd amount of debt but neither major party cares and both have plans to explode it even further. As the global reserve currency the US has the ability to debase the value of it far more than any other country before serious pain occurs. But if you want a hedge against runaway inflation, plus the chance bitcoin replaces or at least eats some of the market share of gold, making bitcoin a small percentage of your retirement portfolio makes sense. It may wind up being an outsized portion of your wealth when you retire.
- slickrick216 6y agoThe fact that every time a blockchain/crypto thread hits HN and many of the responses are talking about time stamps is in itself a bit of a meme. Seems very reminisce of people in ages gone by talking about what was the point for any advances from trains to telegram to the internet. The answer for what to use it for is to make things trust less and decentralized if you can’t see the advantage or limitless possibilities there I don’t know what to say. Smart contracts will change the world without the world even knowing.
- kylebenzle 6y agoHN hates Bitcoin. I have never seen such a smart group of idiots in my life.
- cft 6y agoThat's because now HN is mostly FAANG employees. FAANG is naturally opposed to Bitcoin because it's difficult for them to imagine how they would control it. When it rallied to 20000, they only saw it as a threat.
- NotUsingLinux 6y agoBlub paradox
- seibelj 6y agoFor such a group of “hackers” they have an extreme aversion to hacking on their own alternative financial system. The ethos of the community has been co-opted by conformism.
- wyldfire 6y agoBitcoin is great, but could be improved upon. Some interesting cryptocoins out there. But there's an enormous amount of dead weight P&D tokens and shitcoins that turn a lot of folks off. Plus there were a lot of businesses in the 2010s who decided to make some kind of centralized-bit-distributed-conensus version of some thing like supply chain. It's easy to be cynical with so many of these popping up.
- formalsystem 6y agoIt's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validation.cpp#L1238-L1249 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been printed or how many bars of gold exist. If you view Bitcoin as a payment network like VISA then obviously there are many things the network needs to improve but if you view it as a savings technology then it's the best one that's ever been created. I never understood how "But Can I buy Starbucks with Bitcoin" became a meme, I don't expect to be able to buy Starbucks with Apple stock. Claims that Bitcoin burns useless energy or doesn't have feature X completely miss the point. Avoiding capital controls like in Lebanon, protecting yourself from hyperinflation due to corrupt governments with a printing press like Venezuela are Bitcoin's killer features. It's common to view hyperinflation as something unique to corrupt countries but that's only because CPI is a dishonest way to aggregate inflation data. Inflation is a vector NOT a real number, any asset that people care about has become generally unaffordable i.e: housing, education, healthcare. BS crypto vendors are looking for the next big application of blockchain technology when inflation protection and avoiding capital controls are arguably the most impactful innovation since the internet. Bitcoin and Time are the only 2 scarce assets that exist in this world.
- pavlov 6y ago> “if you view it as a savings technology then it's the best one that's ever been created” IMO this crown belongs to ETFs. Putting all your eggs in the Bitcoin basket would be an extremely risky strategy. A portfolio of ETFs is a much better place for most people’s savings.
- xiphias2 6y agoETFs are all managed by the banking system that I'm happy to be outside of at this point. Thanks, but no thanks to GLD and other scams that ,,may send the value of gold in dollars if it doesn't have enough''
- loxs 6y ago> Limited divisibility of coins. Bitcoin has a limit of 21 million bitcoins, but more importantly, it has a limit of about 2^52 satoshis as the atomic unit. If Bitcoin were to really become Earth’s only payment system, this would provide fewer than a million units per human being. This isn’t nearly enough to capture both day-to-day transactions (even rounded to the equivalent of tenths of a dollar) and also large holdings. It would have been quite cheap to expand this with a few dozen extra bits such that divisibility would never be an issue. This, and also to me the decimal point is clearly in the wrong place. I Have thought about this and I fail to see what was Satoshi thinking.
- aazaa 6y agoThe title of the article doesn't match the content. The tile suggests the article will talk about the white paper specifically. It instead talks about what Bitcoin got right/wrong in general. The white paper says nothing about specific hash functions, signature schemes, scripting systems (not even mentioned at all), currency units, and many other things that ended up being important to Bitcoin. And one of the things the white paper got wrong was to conflate chain "length" with "strength". The white paper appears to mix the two terms, even though it's clear that chain "length" wouldn't work at all as a security mechanism. You can see examples right in the abstract: > The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. Chain "strength" is the cumulative hash power behind a particular chain, which is not the same as the number of blocks. The white paper later corrects itself: > The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.
- petertodd 6y agoRe: "longest chain", the first release of Bitcoin actually used longest chain rather than most work! This was secretly changed by Satoshi very early on, presumably when Satoshi realized that "longest chain" is broken and "most work" is the correct protocol. This would have been a hard-fork if not for the fact that at the time hashpower was so low that difficulty was still at the minimum limit of one, so the two versions did the same thing in practice.
- jamisteven 6y agoI just want to know one thing: What percentage of the world population actually uses Bitcoin?
- Barrin92 6y agoThere's about 300k bitcoin transactions happening per day and apparently a few million active users. So about a very small fraction of a percent probably.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoI believe BitCoin is one of the very few successful crypto protocols that, instead of being developed in the open, pretty much came out fully formed. In addition, it was developed first as a Windows program. This makes the conspiracy part of me, suspect that BitCoin may in fact have been developed by the NSA to enable moving black ops money around more easily. It was released to the public so there would be enough background noise that these transactions would not stand out.
- mrkramer 6y agoWho the hell moves black ops money in open public ledger like bitcoin's blockchain is. It is easier to launder money though banks than bitcoin because bank transactions are not public and hence under less scrutiny. Bitcoin was made by still unknown C++ programmer and computer science enthusiast.
- redis_mlc 6y ago1) The US owns the SWIFT network and monitors transactions globally. 2) During the Falklands War, Argentina was prevented from buying munitions since South American banks were monitored for transactions with Europe. Like any bureaucracy, once they used a bank, they never moved to a new one after a transaction.
- mrkramer 6y agoUS does not own SWIFT, SWIFT is a Belgian company and it is in compliance with Belgian law and with international law through Belgium. Like any other company it must turn in information if requested by court order. For example US was deep into banking system of Middle East countries[1] because they couldn't get all SWIFT transactions they wanted. If you are to blame SWIFT blame Belgium first because they essentially decide what happens with SWIFT at the first place. After 2001 world is not the same, anti-terrorist and anti-laundering laws are pervasive but I suppose for greater good. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/us/shadow-brokers-nsa-hack-middle-east.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/us/shadow-brokers-nsa-hac...
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- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoOne thing he got wrong is that computer power and network speed will scale exponentially to accomodate infinitely large blockchain size. Intel's Q6600 of 2007 is still not too much slower than today's processors.
- possiblelion 6y agoyou could mine 50 btc a night with a q6600 in ~2010
- mudlus 6y agoIt definitely was wrong about being digital cash, but it may provide the basis currency for an economy which has a form of cash. Bitcoin could be your savings account, and then there are a plethora of options for consumers directly using their Bitcoin: stable-coins, lightning network, hell even Bitcoin Cash, that work like checking accounts of functions of apps like CashApp and Venmo.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoA lot of our associates in Russia prefer to use bitcoin over rubles. They say that it's less vulnerable to the Russian government's currency manipulation schemes. Is that really true though?
- redis_mlc 6y agoWell, Russians doing "Internet business" have used products like e-gold for a couple decades, so no big surprise they're happily using bitcoin now. Mainly they need some method to transfer from the West to Russia, and they're sophisticated about managing risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold
- rvr_ 6y agoList of bitcoin uses: - Avoiding bad government - Illegal activities - Ransom payment - Speculation (provides liquidity)