9 ms·

What’s Behind the Naming of TBD54566975?

82 points by alexrustic 4y ago

charcircuit 4y ago
I'm surprised the idea of it being a timestamp came up before it being ASCII characters.
- bagels 4y ago
  68EK?
- AdamH12113 4y ago
  To save someone else the trouble: With hex codes, 54 56 69 75 would be TViu. With decimal codes, it would be 68EK. The sequence isn't valid octal.
lwf 4y ago
> Translated to a human-readable timestamp, 54566975 becomes: > > Friday, September 24, 1971 06:29:35 GMT No, that's PDT :) $ TZ=UTC date --date=@54566975 Fri 24 Sep 13:29:35 UTC 1971
- davidcollantes 4y ago
  That's correct. Chris has it wrong in that blog entry.
lifthrasiir 4y ago
The Nixon--Burns conversation in question: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearchers/find/tapes/finding_aids/tapesubjectlogs/oval578.pdf#page=16 https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearch... It only says "10:29 am" though. I have no idea how the second was determined.
a1371 4y ago
I was curious when I read the name in that Tweet too. It's cryptic marketing for crypto people, so, well done. Decentralized trust is an interesting concept because at least we know that so far trustless systems have been extremely bottlenecked and inefficient. Still, I'll hold judgement until there is a repo I can fork. If it's anywhere close to NFTs that's a no for me. High likelihood since it's coming from the same crowd.
AdamH12113 4y ago
Short version: Square (now known as Block) has a brand called TBD54566975, which has developed a protocol for "liquidity and asset exchange" called tbDEX. The number 54566975 is a Unix timestamp equivalent to Friday, September 24, 1971 10:29:35, which was the end of a meeting between US President Richard Nixon and Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns where they effectively decided to take the US dollar off of the gold standard. This ended the Bretton Woods system[1] where various Western countries pegged their currencies to the US dollar, replacing it with a system of free-floating exchange rates. (The actual history is of course somewhat more complicated.) Goldbugs and (apparently now) a lot of crypto enthusiasts consider this to be some kind of mortal sin against the concept of money, and have been telling each other that the dollar is going to collapse any year now every since. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
- jandrese 4y ago
  Now that is some laser targeted marketing. A Venn diagram of Gold Standard Libertarians and Crypto Nerds has a whole lot of overlap. Which isn't really a surprise since both offer the chance to horde a resource with limited supply in order to passively gain wealth.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    There's this link to an interview with Yanis Varoufakis a few days ago, he mentions the "primitive thinking" of the "Gold standard!" folks https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/23/discussing-crypto-the-left-technofeudalism-with-evgeny-morozov-crypto-syllabus-long-interview/ https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/23/discussing-crypto-... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133393
    - luciusdomitius 4y ago
      If Varoufakis is such a financial genius (with his eccentricity he is either that or a complete retard), then why is the country whose finances he managed the laughing stock of Europe? And why did it become like this on his watch? Disclaimer: I don't think it was all his mistakes that caused it, but his immense stupidity definitely did more harm than help. Anyway, commodity-backed money are back for a good month and they seem to be doing quite well so far. BTW with commodity-backed money you have direct mapping between wealth and environmental impact, thus eliminating the need of carbon-credits, right-to-repair regulations and a million other things.
coolhoody 4y ago
Someone register it before Musk buys HK. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TBD54566975 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TBD54566975
- TBD54566975 4y ago
  Where do I cash in? And when will Musk buy Hong Kong?
  - smilespray 4y ago
    On 1 July 1997, after the Great Clock Reset
nasmorn 4y ago
It is time to stop making fun of Elons children
School-Cotton 4y ago
To save a click for anyone who doesn’t care about blockchain gibberish: don’t bother clicking.
sydthrowaway 4y ago
When will people shut the fuck up about crypto already?
- ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
  What I don’t understand is what happens when someone can crack wallets and just start transferring money anywhere they want? Why is this something that can’t happen?
  - sph 4y ago
    Literal cracking of that kind of encryption is still some time away, people are already losing their crypto money through theft and lacks of backups anyway.
  - mr_mitm 4y ago
    You'd need to break ECDSA, which is assumed to be hard, and not without reason. Basically the entirety of online privacy is built on this or similar assumptions.
  - edf13 4y ago
    Same reason people aren't cracking other encrypted data, hacking banks, breaking TLS etc. It uses strong encryption (Not all the same encryption, but strong all the same).
  - shakow 4y ago
    > Why is this something that can’t happen? Because if you crack wallets, you are either (i) cracking it through social means, i.e. stealing login/password, and it's nothing extraordinary; or (ii) you just broke EC crypto, and the world has a much worse problem at hand than you stealing something-coins.
    - smcl 4y ago
      I thought there was an other scenario which is biting people more commonly: (iii) smart contracts that are clumsily or maliciously constructed to either transfer assets out of a "wallet" or lock them up for eternity
throwaway4good 4y ago
While you can construct a crypto currency with finite supply, you can construct an infinite number of crypto currencies. For crypto to act as gold; everyone has to agree on elevating a single one (Bitcoin variation BTC) to this special status and have everything else evolve around it. While BTC holders has incentive to encourage this, it is not obvious that everyone else has.
buro9 4y ago
Keybase had an implementation of the identity piece down. At least, it appears more similar than dissimilar.
- FullyFunctional 4y ago
  Has. I use Keybase Chat all through the day, every day. All my most important contacts are on it and I obviously really love it.
colesantiago 4y ago
While this name is very clever and cute, crypto including Bitcoin is still all a giant ponzi scheme scam. [0] [0] https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...
- smokey_circles 4y ago
  That is the dumbest argument I've heard about ponzi schemes to date. If you don't know something, just ask questions. That author is retarded. Bitcoin has no central authority. It's just utilitarian. Crypto needs regulation where it overlaps with fiat. We should start doing that instead of having these stupid debates. None of these have anything to do with ponzi schemes, which is the act of using new investor money to payout old investors. People buy and sell crypto like anything else. It's not legal tender (at least not everywhere or even anywhere that counts) but if you wanna call bitcoin a ponzi scheme then so is every fiat currency and the entire stock market. The difference between the stock market and crypto is regulation at the fiat overlap. So can we do that instead of giving air to these completely brain dead "decentralised technology nobody controls is clearly a scam to enrich early adopters, like the whole stock market except not like the whole stock market because economics is actually beyond me" style arguments, please and thank you
- mypastself 4y ago
  Did I miss the part where the author lays out their argument within the article (rather than some podcast that’s referred to)? The closest I can find is the diagram with two nodes and an arrow connecting them. The first node represents users involved in transactions, the other is miners. The arrow presumably represents fees. That looks like any other payment processor. Just like another label commonly used in similar discussions, cult, Ponzi scheme has a very specific meaning. There are other more reasonable ways to criticize cryptocurrency, but I guess these two sound scarier and more definitive, even if they’re inaccurate.
ffhhj 4y ago
In Kubrick's movie The Shining there is a gold room that seems based on this gold standard adoption, there is a very interesting analysis [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoWZEwedPkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoWZEwedPkc
andreisbc 4y ago
And the whole point of this post is just marketing

82 points by alexrustic 4y ago

charcircuit 4y ago

I'm surprised the idea of it being a timestamp came up before it being ASCII characters.

bagels 4y ago
68EK?
AdamH12113 4y ago
To save someone else the trouble: With hex codes, 54 56 69 75 would be TViu. With decimal codes, it would be 68EK. The sequence isn't valid octal.

lwf 4y ago

> Translated to a human-readable timestamp, 54566975 becomes: > > Friday, September 24, 1971 06:29:35 GMT No, that's PDT :) $ TZ=UTC date --date=@54566975 Fri 24 Sep 13:29:35 UTC 1971

davidcollantes 4y ago
That's correct. Chris has it wrong in that blog entry.

lifthrasiir 4y ago

The Nixon--Burns conversation in question: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearchers/find/tapes/finding_aids/tapesubjectlogs/oval578.pdf#page=16 https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearch... It only says "10:29 am" though. I have no idea how the second was determined.

a1371 4y ago

I was curious when I read the name in that Tweet too. It's cryptic marketing for crypto people, so, well done. Decentralized trust is an interesting concept because at least we know that so far trustless systems have been extremely bottlenecked and inefficient. Still, I'll hold judgement until there is a repo I can fork. If it's anywhere close to NFTs that's a no for me. High likelihood since it's coming from the same crowd.

AdamH12113 4y ago

Short version: Square (now known as Block) has a brand called TBD54566975, which has developed a protocol for "liquidity and asset exchange" called tbDEX. The number 54566975 is a Unix timestamp equivalent to Friday, September 24, 1971 10:29:35, which was the end of a meeting between US President Richard Nixon and Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns where they effectively decided to take the US dollar off of the gold standard. This ended the Bretton Woods system[1] where various Western countries pegged their currencies to the US dollar, replacing it with a system of free-floating exchange rates. (The actual history is of course somewhat more complicated.) Goldbugs and (apparently now) a lot of crypto enthusiasts consider this to be some kind of mortal sin against the concept of money, and have been telling each other that the dollar is going to collapse any year now every since. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

jandrese 4y ago
Now that is some laser targeted marketing. A Venn diagram of Gold Standard Libertarians and Crypto Nerds has a whole lot of overlap. Which isn't really a surprise since both offer the chance to horde a resource with limited supply in order to passively gain wealth.
- netsharc 4y ago
  There's this link to an interview with Yanis Varoufakis a few days ago, he mentions the "primitive thinking" of the "Gold standard!" folks https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/23/discussing-crypto-the-left-technofeudalism-with-evgeny-morozov-crypto-syllabus-long-interview/ https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/23/discussing-crypto-... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133393
  - luciusdomitius 4y ago
    If Varoufakis is such a financial genius (with his eccentricity he is either that or a complete retard), then why is the country whose finances he managed the laughing stock of Europe? And why did it become like this on his watch? Disclaimer: I don't think it was all his mistakes that caused it, but his immense stupidity definitely did more harm than help. Anyway, commodity-backed money are back for a good month and they seem to be doing quite well so far. BTW with commodity-backed money you have direct mapping between wealth and environmental impact, thus eliminating the need of carbon-credits, right-to-repair regulations and a million other things.

coolhoody 4y ago

Someone register it before Musk buys HK. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TBD54566975 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TBD54566975

TBD54566975 4y ago
Where do I cash in? And when will Musk buy Hong Kong?
- smilespray 4y ago
  On 1 July 1997, after the Great Clock Reset

nasmorn 4y ago

It is time to stop making fun of Elons children

School-Cotton 4y ago

To save a click for anyone who doesn’t care about blockchain gibberish: don’t bother clicking.

sydthrowaway 4y ago

When will people shut the fuck up about crypto already?

ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
What I don’t understand is what happens when someone can crack wallets and just start transferring money anywhere they want? Why is this something that can’t happen?
- sph 4y ago
  Literal cracking of that kind of encryption is still some time away, people are already losing their crypto money through theft and lacks of backups anyway.
- mr_mitm 4y ago
  You'd need to break ECDSA, which is assumed to be hard, and not without reason. Basically the entirety of online privacy is built on this or similar assumptions.
- edf13 4y ago
  Same reason people aren't cracking other encrypted data, hacking banks, breaking TLS etc. It uses strong encryption (Not all the same encryption, but strong all the same).
- shakow 4y ago
  > Why is this something that can’t happen? Because if you crack wallets, you are either (i) cracking it through social means, i.e. stealing login/password, and it's nothing extraordinary; or (ii) you just broke EC crypto, and the world has a much worse problem at hand than you stealing something-coins.
  - smcl 4y ago
    I thought there was an other scenario which is biting people more commonly: (iii) smart contracts that are clumsily or maliciously constructed to either transfer assets out of a "wallet" or lock them up for eternity

throwaway4good 4y ago

While you can construct a crypto currency with finite supply, you can construct an infinite number of crypto currencies. For crypto to act as gold; everyone has to agree on elevating a single one (Bitcoin variation BTC) to this special status and have everything else evolve around it. While BTC holders has incentive to encourage this, it is not obvious that everyone else has.

buro9 4y ago

Keybase had an implementation of the identity piece down. At least, it appears more similar than dissimilar.

FullyFunctional 4y ago
Has. I use Keybase Chat all through the day, every day. All my most important contacts are on it and I obviously really love it.

colesantiago 4y ago

While this name is very clever and cute, crypto including Bitcoin is still all a giant ponzi scheme scam. [0] [0] https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...

smokey_circles 4y ago
That is the dumbest argument I've heard about ponzi schemes to date. If you don't know something, just ask questions. That author is retarded. Bitcoin has no central authority. It's just utilitarian. Crypto needs regulation where it overlaps with fiat. We should start doing that instead of having these stupid debates. None of these have anything to do with ponzi schemes, which is the act of using new investor money to payout old investors. People buy and sell crypto like anything else. It's not legal tender (at least not everywhere or even anywhere that counts) but if you wanna call bitcoin a ponzi scheme then so is every fiat currency and the entire stock market. The difference between the stock market and crypto is regulation at the fiat overlap. So can we do that instead of giving air to these completely brain dead "decentralised technology nobody controls is clearly a scam to enrich early adopters, like the whole stock market except not like the whole stock market because economics is actually beyond me" style arguments, please and thank you
mypastself 4y ago
Did I miss the part where the author lays out their argument within the article (rather than some podcast that’s referred to)? The closest I can find is the diagram with two nodes and an arrow connecting them. The first node represents users involved in transactions, the other is miners. The arrow presumably represents fees. That looks like any other payment processor. Just like another label commonly used in similar discussions, cult, Ponzi scheme has a very specific meaning. There are other more reasonable ways to criticize cryptocurrency, but I guess these two sound scarier and more definitive, even if they’re inaccurate.

ffhhj 4y ago

In Kubrick's movie The Shining there is a gold room that seems based on this gold standard adoption, there is a very interesting analysis [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoWZEwedPkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoWZEwedPkc

andreisbc 4y ago

And the whole point of this post is just marketing