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Forum reactions to Satoshi's Bitcoin paper
- tamimio 3y agoInteresting, I didn’t see this but I heard about bitcoin in 2009, and bought my bitcoins in 2010 and 2011 just for the fun of it, worth every bit as I still hold them.
- jjackson5324 3y agoDo you view it as a security hazard to talk about this publicly (or tied to your username)? I presume that bitcoin is now worth millions of dollars (at the very least)?
- tamimio 3y agoThat’s a valid point, but I wouldn’t call it a hazard since not much information is available (as your second question implies). It’s similar to seeing someone with a luxury car on the road, except that one is physically accessible and the other is not.
- dotBen 3y agoNo because whether he owns a bitcoin at $30 or at $30k a bitcoin is a bitcoin and at this point every wallet is indexed, tracked and any wallet with significant value (regardless of cost basis) is being mined for potential vulnerabilities.
- ziddoap 3y ago>at this point every wallet is indexed, tracked and any wallet with significant value (regardless of cost basis) is being mined for potential vulnerabilities. The point being made is that once a wallet is connected to a real identity (as opposed to just knowing that wallet X has Y amount of BTC), the attack surface for that wallet is increased by magnitudes and entire vectors of attack are opened up (e.g. phishing).
- Uptrenda 3y agokinda true. A lot of users were targeted by outing themselves as having crypto wealth.
- thom 3y agoThere are, I would guess, hundreds of people on HN who are millionaires and happily lead public lives without fear of being hit by $5 wrenches until they give up their passwords.
- epolanski 3y agoI know a guy who stopped saying how many Bitcoins he had after he mined few thousands (by then Bitcoin was skyrocketing to single digit dollar values!) I know he kept mining for years. I know for a fact he only sold 2 of those since then. Now here's the interesting fact: he wasn't early into Bitcoin because of the technology, but because he was a full blown lunatic crypto anarchist. The guy literally works at some low paying job and has a normal life and lives dreaming about a world where Bitcoin's a common way to trade goods. Seriously, he's easily worth hundreds of millions since years and he lives like a normal dude and spends his time just blogging and being a bitcoin evangelist.
- ziddoap 3y ago>Seriously, he's easily worth hundreds of millions since years and he lives like a normal dude and spends his time just blogging and being a bitcoin evangelist. Maybe I'm just reading it this way, but it seems like you are implying that this is a negative and I'm really not sure why a millionaire living like a normal dude could possibly be considered negative.
- EternalUsenet 3y ago[flagged]
- mingw__ 3y agowhat a weird demand to make
- kobalsky 3y agoto be fair, the comment they were responding to is just some weird flex without substance, fishing for attention. a good thing about being a bitcoin millionaire is that you can prove it while remaining anonymous, in like three clicks
- pests 3y agoWho cares?
- EternalUsenet 3y agoI do, because people online tend to flex about things that seem like really tall tales. Someone who held on this long is exceptionally rare in the first place, and I like when someone makes a claim, they back it up with evidence.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoEven if they were lying and have now been outed as lying, who cares? I could see a point if they somehow used this claim to enrich themselves at the cost of others but I don't anything of the sort happening here. The only enrichment is the internet points they can get from a popular comment.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SirLJ 3y agoI heard about it when it was about $30 and it looked expensive to me back then and even if I bought some, I wold have sold them long time ago at 2,3,5x as I much prefer the stock market (and even real estate) for investing...
- dvirsky 3y agoSame here, I actually started to buy some at $30 for the heck of it, but the process to buy then was so involved that I gave up and wanted to get back to it later, and never did.
- tamimio 3y agoI held on to them for so long because my old laptop’s motherboard died and I had the wallet there. I forgot about them till around 2014, when I looked for them and surprisingly managed to extract them from the hard disk as everything was dead in that laptop not just the motherboard. Then I secured them and forgot about them again until Covid time, when they skyrocketed in value. So I don’t deserve all the credit for holding them, but rather my poor laptop and memory.
- jbverschoor 3y agoInaction regularly is the best move
- lifestyleguru 3y agoBuying bitcoin in 2010 absolutely wasn't inaction, it was a painful process. The problem is identifying when not to do anything. Tell me one thing to do once in 2024 and then forget about it until 2038. Subscription to an AI service? Nah...
- xanderlewis 3y agoI bought £5 worth in 2017 or so and (after remembering I even had them) sold for ~£20 a few years later. 4x! Yay! …shame I didn’t invest my entire life’s savings.
- ninepoints 3y agoAll the criticisms of Bitcoin scalability are completely warranted and have played out.
- yuvadam 3y agoWhat exactly has played out?
- Marazan 3y agoMassive transaction fees, slow transactions.
- codetrotter 3y agoI usually pay about the equivalent of a few dollars to send Bitcoin transactions. This system works cross borders, any time of day all days of the year. Bitcoin may not be useful for everyone, but it is available for everyone in a way that traditional banks are not. And this is a far greater strength than a lot of people realize.
- epolanski 3y agoBank transfers are free in my country even cross country. So cost is more convenient for normal bank accounts. Yes, speed is a factor if there's a weekend in the middle, but this is a non issue. I literally never ever had a need to pay someone or send someone money they needed in the very moment as I was sending it. It's really a non-issue. Another few bonuses for bank transfers: - are reversible in many cases - you can't lose any money if you misdigit a single character or send the money to the wrong account you have still time to revert or contact your bank and sort it out - they are simple to use. You can go in person and tell the cashier of the operation. You can use your application or website - as with your bank account is tied to your person, not to whoever holds some cryptographic key. Nobody can really point a gun at me and tell me I ahve to give him what I have in my bank, we all know it doesn't work. But a secret key to a wallet? Good luck holding it. - if I die my family will get the money. This is much more complex to handle with Bitcoin if not borderline impossible. Whoever holds his password can do what he wants with that.
- Dunedan 3y agoI find it pretty incredible how critical the responses regarding the technical feasibility were and how Satoshi Nakamoto had thought of every one of them already when writing the whitepaper, as it's visible from his answers.
- lanternfish 3y agoIt's also interesting that even though this is the case, many of the critiques have borne out anyway
- EA-3167 3y agoTurns out the promise of lots and lots of money can numb a person's good sense, even if they really should know better.
- Ferret7446 3y agoIt's also interesting that Bitcoin still works despite said critiques. It still allows people to transfer funds digitally in a censorship resistant way. The only "failing" is that Bitcoin is not a stable long term investment (which wasn't its design goal to begin with).
- lanternfish 3y agoIt's also failing as a mechanism for efficient p2p small value transactions - as a currency. Consider, from the white paper (with regards to mediated digital transfers): ` The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services. ` Nobody is doing 'small casual transactions' with Bitcoin, which was evidently one of the goals.
- broth 3y ago> Nobody is doing 'small casual transactions' with Bitcoin, which was evidently one of the goals. That is not true and can be easily proven looking at the transactions on the blockchain. However, layer 2 solutions like Lightning are good for small value transactions since fees are low and fast.
- paulgb 3y ago> The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms to generating bitcoins instead. It's fun to see that the “Bitcoin will fix everything” genre started with Satoshi himself!
- xeonmc 3y ago> The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms to generating bitcoins instead. Indeed zombie farms had been diverted to generating coins, but in some sense it achieved the opposite of the former objective.
- ants_everywhere 3y agoThis is pretty funny to me. The forum users immediately point out problems that have in retrospect have kept Bitcoin from becoming mainstream, and which always struck me as notable flaws of the design. But what's interesting is that Satoshi doesn't seem to understand what the problem is. For example, he invokes the "long tail theory" without having any specific probability distribution to work with. And he essentially states there will be a specialist financial sector required to handle the payment transactions: > At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. but doesn't seem to appreciate the extent to which this re-centralizes the network. So it kind of starts off like a peer to peer network, but according to Satoshi even in the early days, the premise that Bitcoins have any value is based in the fact that the peer to peer network converges to a more traditional centralized network.
- Uptrenda 3y agoLooks more like you're reading your own negative opinion of cryptocurrencies into their answer. The discussion that satoshi had on the mailing lists concerned how consensus would work with people asking questions about that. It wasn't about anything you just listed.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoIn the decent chance situation that satoshi was close to death(now well dead) he may have not cared that much about minor criticisms such as adoptability. He was inventing a cryptosystem first and a pragmatic economic thing second(or third, or more). He does not strike me as a person who thinks that much about money, more about his upcoming death and what legacy he wants to leave.
- epolanski 3y agoI think you have it the other way around. I'm no crypto fan at all, in fact I despise the lunacy and greed in the sector, but I've read about Satoshi to understand that it was crystal clear from day 1 to him that the cryptography or cryptosystem as you call it was just an implementation detail, in fact he was brilliant at understanding that the critical value of Bitcoin was that it was consensus being the key to the entire dynamic. And consensus has a crystal clear incentive into holding bad actors out, because if bad actors can take over a network they de facto sink the value of the network and coins themselves. So even if a government tomorrow could start controlling the network, consensus will simply reject and fork. Albeit I don't like the crypto industry and such, I can't lie that there are many great economical lessons to learn.
- WalterBright 3y agoHas anyone run a stylometric comparison of Satoshi's papers to Hal Finney's?
- akaij 3y agoMany people have, if I remember correctly. The most recent one is at https://blog.lopp.net/hal-finney-was-not-satoshi-nakamoto/ https://blog.lopp.net/hal-finney-was-not-satoshi-nakamoto/
- WalterBright 3y agoThanks for the informative read. It doesn't do a stylometric comparison, but the rest of the evidence is fairly compelling. I didn't much buy the coding style comparison, as I myself often switch around the styles being compared in the article.
- nabakin 3y agoOne of the reasons why I doubt Satoshi is Hal is apparent from these forum posts: if my goal was to stay anonymous, I would not immediately associate my real identity with my anonymous one. Hal is one of the first people to reply to this Bitcoin forum post.
- Uptrenda 3y ago[flagged]
- School-Cotton 3y agoWhat billion dollar industry did it create?
- vlovich123 3y agoI think they’re looking at the total amount of money stored/flowing through crypto (or Bitcoin) by taking the strike price and multiplying it by all the coins on the blockchain. Of course that’s not a great measure of value but it is a measure.
- Uptrenda 3y agoThis kind of response is exactly what I would expect of someone who is totally clueless about the industry. Being completely unaware of what dapps exist, what fintech startups there are, what protocols have been created, the research that has been funded due to blockchain technology, and more. As I said: completely ignorant with all criticism based on the news headlines you've read.
- Apocryphon 3y agoSo does any of that activity actually generate value for regular people or does it just redistribute wealth from investors and speculators
- jjulius 3y agoCare to embody the spirit of what HN tries to put forth by expanding on those points in a constructive, educational manner that may actually help us to better understand, or do you just want to flippantly say that everyone's stupid and you're the only person who gets it?
- vlovich123 3y agoWell, my brother joined a fintech startup in Europe that started with blockchain but pivoted back to boring software building. That particular niche they're in is seeing all the blockchain startups failing because they're not actually solving the use-case. So sure, there's maybe been a lot of research value created in terms of ideas explored and protocols built, but it's not clear any of that actually has practical value outside of building more blockchains. Merkle trees are probably the main cryptocurrency tech I've seen outside of cryptocurrency (& even then in limited use), and that's not even from cryptocurrency but a pretty old data structure concept from 1979. If you're familiar with R&D ideas generated by the blockchain researches that have been applied successfully outside of the blockchain, please enlighten me as I'm eager to fill the gaps in my knowledge and go down a reading rabbit hole. Look, I'm not discounting out of hand that there's maybe been some research and market value created. What I tried to communicate is I'm not convinced it's been a net positive vs all the costs that came with it (investments lost, pollution, opportunity cost lost). That's why I said market value is a measure, but humans in general struggle to figure out holistic ways of computing value, especially when looking at it as a hypothetical opportunity cost vs what else we could be spending our time on. If you're wondering why you got downvoted, I suspect it's because you wrote an emotional response attacking me and calling me ignorant without actually engaging in a thoughtful discussion.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- crawancon 3y agoOne thing this proves at least in my head, is that faketoshi Craig Wright was not present.
- aChattuio 3y agoI would love to know if he regrets it or not. Like the dude who found cfcs
- 1970-01-01 3y agoI know it's wrong to call it a total failure, but can we at least agree that Bitcoin has reverted from changing the world to being an exotic investment thing?
- jagged-chisel 3y agoI initially misread “exotic” as “toxic” and I was in agreement. I still am, but I was.
- fragmede 3y ago(2008)
- dkarras 3y agoThis got me thinking as I do not remember Satoshi having a bitcoin.org domain for the announcement... There must be someone who knows who Satoshi is right? The domain registrar? Or at least they know someone who knows who Satoshi is. Also to whom did Satoshi transfer the domain and when?
- RecycledEle 3y agoWhen I tried Bitcoin (once,) I was bale to double-spend. That was when I decided not to use it.