3 ms·

> But he was wrong about that. The way it bootstrapped was a guy buying a couple of pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins and people taking that leap of faith that it coul

> But he was wrong about that. The way it bootstrapped was a guy buying a couple of pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins and people taking that leap of faith that it could actually be successful and might be worth a dollar or two at some point in the future No, it was bootstrapped by ransomware companies encrypting your data in order to demand a ransom paid only in Bitcoin. This is how literally all money starts - not as a facilitator of existing economic transactions but as a conduit for imposing coercive taxation. e.g. the US Dollar is money because the US government demands you pay taxes in that currency. The first historical examples of money were invading tyrants and conquerors paying their soldiers in coins they could mint and demanding payment of taxes in the same money. Since the people being subjugated didn't have the coins they needed to pay, they had to sell their useful goods and services to soldiers in exchange for worthless discs of metal that indicated that they had sufficiently funded their oppressor's further military expansion. Ok, sure, that's a nice history fact, but how does that relate to cybercrime? Ransomware vendors can't print Bitcoin! They can, in the same way everyone else does: mining it. Except because we're already breaking into other people's computers to encrypt files, we can also just mine the Bitcoin on their computers that they will later have to buy to pay us. A huge amount of cybercrime is just mining Bitcoin, because you can then sell that Bitcoin - which is free to you - to your victims in exchange for useful goods and services[0]. What Satoshi didn't know is is not would it bootstrap, but how. Money bootstraps not by being more private, more inflation-resistant, or just by being better money, but by the use of coercive force[1]. Bitcoin is objectively worse money than US dollars - there's expensive transaction fees, high confirmation times, price volatility, etc. People use it anyway because they have to - otherwise, the person who broke into their servers is going to either delete or leak all their valuable business data. [0] Ok, yes, US Dollars. [1] This implies the only acceptable economy under the NAP[2] is a barter economy, because barter and payments-in-kind is what people choose to use in contexts where there is no coercion. [2] "Non-aggression principle", a thing right-libertarians like to talk about as if it's so self-evident we don't even need to talk about it.

midmagico 3y ago
The first payments in bitcoin were not the pizzas. Malmi sold bitcoins for money prior to that. The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all. It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent. Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible. Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress. There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  >Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible. Why not? If I have enough access to machine in order to get an (asymmetric) encryption key off of a server, encrypt all your files with it, and delete the originals, why can't I also warm the CPU for the few days it takes for my victim to buy Bitcoin? It doesn't matter if the returns are awful because the hardware I'm mining on was stolen (thus free). >It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent. Malmi, the "Bitcoin pizza guy", Satoshi, and everyone else in the legit side of Bitcoin are not the targets of my original post and I don't believe they had any illegal motivations. They just had the wrong priors, and accidentally built something that's enormously useful for criminals looking to build a parallel state. > The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. The use of the word "entirely" is dangerous to you. Because the mere existence of a ransomware program demanding Bitcoin - and there are a lot of them - lets me be cheeky and refute your argument. If you want to argue that there are substantial non-coercive uses of Bitcoin, sure. I don't believe they're big enough to sustain Bitcoin's current or prior valuations. > If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; Having to buy Bitcoin to pay ransom puts upward pressure on Bitcoin prices. It's not a drain on adoption, it's a booster of it, because a LOT of organizations get hacked and have to use Bitcoin to pay ransoms.

midmagico 3y ago

The first payments in bitcoin were not the pizzas. Malmi sold bitcoins for money prior to that. The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all. It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent. Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible. Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress. There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.

kmeisthax 3y ago
>Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible. Why not? If I have enough access to machine in order to get an (asymmetric) encryption key off of a server, encrypt all your files with it, and delete the originals, why can't I also warm the CPU for the few days it takes for my victim to buy Bitcoin? It doesn't matter if the returns are awful because the hardware I'm mining on was stolen (thus free). >It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent. Malmi, the "Bitcoin pizza guy", Satoshi, and everyone else in the legit side of Bitcoin are not the targets of my original post and I don't believe they had any illegal motivations. They just had the wrong priors, and accidentally built something that's enormously useful for criminals looking to build a parallel state. > The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. The use of the word "entirely" is dangerous to you. Because the mere existence of a ransomware program demanding Bitcoin - and there are a lot of them - lets me be cheeky and refute your argument. If you want to argue that there are substantial non-coercive uses of Bitcoin, sure. I don't believe they're big enough to sustain Bitcoin's current or prior valuations. > If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; Having to buy Bitcoin to pay ransom puts upward pressure on Bitcoin prices. It's not a drain on adoption, it's a booster of it, because a LOT of organizations get hacked and have to use Bitcoin to pay ransoms.