3 ms·

Summary for other people who might not know what this is: Nicholas Weaver, Lecturer at UC Berkeley after 9 years of research in cryptocurrency, lectures on Cry

Summary for other people who might not know what this is: Nicholas Weaver, Lecturer at UC Berkeley after 9 years of research in cryptocurrency, lectures on Cryptocurrency as part of CS161: Computer Security. He explains the history of the data structures, some implementation choices, then a bunch of obvious lies from Bitcoin hucksters debunked, security problems, more history/lies debunked, the fraud and bs, computational power, power consumption, blah blah, everything is there in one hour. I think it could be a good thing to send to people so that they either come out of it knowing bitcoin is braindead or have to admit they're not capable of understanding it because they don't have the basic computer science knowledge :P

mw888 4y ago
There’s a reason HN largely misses the innovation behind crypto, and it’s fairly simple. Bitcoin is not a technical innovation; Bitcoin’s value does not come from being an interesting data structure. Bitcoins value and genius is almost entirely economic in nature and hand waiving the (very simple) cryptography and computer science involved to analyze the economics is where the sophistication and avenue for critiques would come in. Technical knowledge gives you a menial job of auditing when it comes to Bitcoin. If you don’t have the economic sophistication and approach when discussing Bitcoin it only proves you are ignorant to what’s relevant.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I can see that you didn't watch the video. More than half of it was about economics. No, the reason HN thinks shitcoins are a pyramid scheme is because it's trivially obvious that they are and people here aren't braindead. "economic sophistication" This is just a baseless ad hominem and you have no knowledge about anyone's economic knowledge. A bit hypocritical to complain about alleged hand-waving with hand-waving, no?
  - mw888 4y ago

mw888 4y ago

There’s a reason HN largely misses the innovation behind crypto, and it’s fairly simple. Bitcoin is not a technical innovation; Bitcoin’s value does not come from being an interesting data structure. Bitcoins value and genius is almost entirely economic in nature and hand waiving the (very simple) cryptography and computer science involved to analyze the economics is where the sophistication and avenue for critiques would come in. Technical knowledge gives you a menial job of auditing when it comes to Bitcoin. If you don’t have the economic sophistication and approach when discussing Bitcoin it only proves you are ignorant to what’s relevant.

guerrilla 4y ago
I can see that you didn't watch the video. More than half of it was about economics. No, the reason HN thinks shitcoins are a pyramid scheme is because it's trivially obvious that they are and people here aren't braindead. "economic sophistication" This is just a baseless ad hominem and you have no knowledge about anyone's economic knowledge. A bit hypocritical to complain about alleged hand-waving with hand-waving, no?
- mw888 4y ago