10 ms·

Not very surprising. He had already been arrested, back in 2002, for selling illegal stuff on eBay. He was somewhat of an attacker of Bitcoin, promoting his "bc

by afc 2y ago

Not very surprising. He had already been arrested, back in 2002, for selling illegal stuff on eBay. He was somewhat of an attacker of Bitcoin, promoting his "bcash" fork.

suck-my-spez 2y ago
[flagged]
YugyDugan 2y ago
[dead]
- repomies69 2y ago
  Bitcoin has worked for me all right for 10+ years. What is exactly wrong with it? At times fees have been a bit higher, but overall I would see the protocol as "good enough". For smaller transactions I have been using Lightning Network and it seems to work all right. The fact that Bitcoin hasn't hard forked for whatever reasons is a positive feature, that outweighs the negatives. You can consider for example Ethereum, which has hard forked numerous times and changed the monetary policy as well multiple times. It just feels quite centralized and controlled by Vitalik. Harder to trust that crap.
  - TarasBob 2y ago
    Ethereum is not controlled by Vitalik. Have you actually looked in to how decisions in Ethereum are made?
  - yardstick 2y ago
    > Bitcoin has worked for me all right for 10+ years. What is exactly wrong with it? How much of your Bitcoin usage is associated with crypto investments, vs a replacement for traditional bank transfers and expense payments? I think it has worked well for a lot of people as an investment. Not so much as a replacement to normal money.
    - tromp 2y ago
      Bitcoin was designed as an investment vehicle by its choice of capped supply. Use as a currency would have vastly benefitted from a fixed block subsidy, which also would have avoided much of its current wealth concentration [1]. [1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153 https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
      - sph 2y ago
        Use as currency is possible with Layer 2 systems like Lightning. The issues I believe are both technological, political and philosophical: apart from the ease of use (or lack thereof), people prefer the currency they need to pay taxes with, and will always prefer the depreciating one, until it stops having any useful value. See the arguments put forth by Saifedean Ammous in his book. For me the main ledger is equivalent to inter-bank settlement payments. It is not for people to use directly, it is to settle the large amount between "market makers", so $10+ transaction fees are not a problem when the amounts transferred would be in the millions. These settlements are few and far between, they do not require immediate execution. In Bitcoin parlance, these market makers would be Lightning nodes, which I imagine in the long run would not be operated by your Average Joe.
      - hggh 2y ago
        > Bitcoin was designed as an investment vehicle Please read the whitepaper [0], at least its title [0] https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf
        scotty79 2y ago
        I guess it was lucky that it was designed quite badly for the stated purpose and it was actually designed as investment vessel.
        hggh 2y ago
        Bitcoin (BTC) worked perfectly as currency in the beginning, until Blockstream took over the development team, and they decided to keep the temporary anti-spam 1MB block limit, making 0-confirmation transactions (instant payments) very risky by implementing return-by-fee (which make transactions reversible before getting confirmed), etc.
  - ErikBjare 2y ago
    Vitalik is basically only a thought leader these days, he has taken many steps back (as you can read about on his blog). He doesn't "control" anything. The guiding principle for the monetary policy of Ethereum has not changed: minimum viable issuance. Thanks to the economic efficiency of PoS + fee burn, it enabled what amounts to frontrunning every "halving" and having ~net zero issuance, it's simply good for holders. If Bitcoin had a way to be secure without further issuance (huge can of worms, halvings are slowly ticking time bombs in the long-run, unless fees rise significantly), it'd be good for holders to fork and scrap it too. There'd be no need to pay billions for security through issuance. Calling Ethereum centralized at this point is ridiculous. The fact that core devs from multiple client teams can manage to agree on and implement forks to keep developing the protocol (unlike Bitcoin) is a major accomplishment, not a failure.
  - hggh 2y ago
    > I have been using Lightning Network and it seems to work all right That won't last. As stated in the Lightning Network whitepaper [0], it will need much bigger blocks (it mentions up to 133MB) to scale. [0] https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
    - npoc 2y ago
      Nah, channel factories solve that problem. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67158/what-are-channel-factories-and-how-do-they-work https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67158/what-are-c...
      - hggh 2y ago
        A new layer between the layer 1 and layer 2, sure...
        npoc 2y ago
        Why don't you think it's possible?
        hggh 2y ago
        It is possible, but absurd. Why more layers if layer 1 works fine just increasing the maximum block size? Bitcoin Cash did it and works flawlessly. Just try it.
        npoc 2y ago
        It's called the blockchain trilemma. Bitcoin cash pays the price through centralisation. It can still only manage 100 transactions/second so certainly isn't flawless. Far better to make the base layer slow but very robust, and then add layers to scale.
        hggh 2y ago
  - lawn 2y ago
    > At times fees have been a bit higher Fees at $50 per traction is "a bit" higher to you?
- awrence 2y ago
  Given the monetary policy Satoshi chose and the headline he picked to include in the genesis block, I really don't think you can infer what he himself thought bitcoin was meant to become, even if he referred to it as cash originally. Beyond that I don't see how it matters what something was designed to do or what early adopters personally used it for or thought it was meant to be used for. The only relevance for a technology is what it's actually adopted for over time and the total addressable market cap for a store of value being 100x + of that of a medium of exchange, it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to by far as reflected amongst other things by the relative prices between current btc and bch...
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Satoshi wrote extensively about what he imagined Bitcoin could become, including in emails to me that I later published. Certainly, what was done to the original Bitcoin completely voided Satoshi's goals and offers an abject lesson in the difficulty of keeping institutions on-track over time. Note that the same tactics that were used to wreck Bitcoin are now being deployed against Nix, as the open source community has struggled to learn the right lessons from Bitcoin. > it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to The market certainly didn't converge to that outcome. It was the result of relentless political scheming and psychological manipulation of a small number of people, combined with criminal tactics like DDoS attacks. The winners of that fight have then tried to retcon what happened as some sort of natural or obvious outcome, but then why did it require so much viciousness and illegal behaviour? The market value of all cryptocurrencies seems to move in tandem, or at least did many years ago when I last cared about this topic. It reflects nothing more than the general hype and brand awareness around Bitcoin and crypto. Certainly a "store of value" that can't directly be used to purchase things is worthless, as any government that wishes to void that store of value and force users back into their own currencies can do so overnight by simple legal fiat.
    - nullc 2y ago
      > including in emails to me that I later published Without headers.
lawn 2y ago
Roger has consistently been promoting the same ideals from the beginning. BCH was also never "his" fork, it was just the fork he started to support. "bash" is a slur to attack the BCH fork, same as the character assassination that Roger has been subjected to. Finally, he sold firecrackers on eBay.
hggh 2y ago
For reference, that "illegal stuff" were just fireworks (too powerful, I guess) [0]. Those "attacks" are fully explained in his recent book "Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC" [1]. He didn't fork Bitcoin, he just proposed its name: Bitcoin Cash [2], which is not "bcash" [2][3]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ver [1] https://www.hijackingbitcoin.com/ https://www.hijackingbitcoin.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash [3] https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bitcoin-cash-bcash-this-will-be-shocking-to-new-readers-956558da12fb https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...

by afc 2y ago

Not very surprising. He had already been arrested, back in 2002, for selling illegal stuff on eBay. He was somewhat of an attacker of Bitcoin, promoting his "bcash" fork.

suck-my-spez 2y ago

[flagged]

YugyDugan 2y ago

[dead]

repomies69 2y ago
Bitcoin has worked for me all right for 10+ years. What is exactly wrong with it? At times fees have been a bit higher, but overall I would see the protocol as "good enough". For smaller transactions I have been using Lightning Network and it seems to work all right. The fact that Bitcoin hasn't hard forked for whatever reasons is a positive feature, that outweighs the negatives. You can consider for example Ethereum, which has hard forked numerous times and changed the monetary policy as well multiple times. It just feels quite centralized and controlled by Vitalik. Harder to trust that crap.
- TarasBob 2y ago
  Ethereum is not controlled by Vitalik. Have you actually looked in to how decisions in Ethereum are made?
- yardstick 2y ago
  > Bitcoin has worked for me all right for 10+ years. What is exactly wrong with it? How much of your Bitcoin usage is associated with crypto investments, vs a replacement for traditional bank transfers and expense payments? I think it has worked well for a lot of people as an investment. Not so much as a replacement to normal money.
  - tromp 2y ago
    Bitcoin was designed as an investment vehicle by its choice of capped supply. Use as a currency would have vastly benefitted from a fixed block subsidy, which also would have avoided much of its current wealth concentration [1]. [1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153 https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
    - sph 2y ago
      Use as currency is possible with Layer 2 systems like Lightning. The issues I believe are both technological, political and philosophical: apart from the ease of use (or lack thereof), people prefer the currency they need to pay taxes with, and will always prefer the depreciating one, until it stops having any useful value. See the arguments put forth by Saifedean Ammous in his book. For me the main ledger is equivalent to inter-bank settlement payments. It is not for people to use directly, it is to settle the large amount between "market makers", so $10+ transaction fees are not a problem when the amounts transferred would be in the millions. These settlements are few and far between, they do not require immediate execution. In Bitcoin parlance, these market makers would be Lightning nodes, which I imagine in the long run would not be operated by your Average Joe.
    - hggh 2y ago
      > Bitcoin was designed as an investment vehicle Please read the whitepaper [0], at least its title [0] https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf
      - scotty79 2y ago
        I guess it was lucky that it was designed quite badly for the stated purpose and it was actually designed as investment vessel.
        hggh 2y ago
        Bitcoin (BTC) worked perfectly as currency in the beginning, until Blockstream took over the development team, and they decided to keep the temporary anti-spam 1MB block limit, making 0-confirmation transactions (instant payments) very risky by implementing return-by-fee (which make transactions reversible before getting confirmed), etc.
- ErikBjare 2y ago
  Vitalik is basically only a thought leader these days, he has taken many steps back (as you can read about on his blog). He doesn't "control" anything. The guiding principle for the monetary policy of Ethereum has not changed: minimum viable issuance. Thanks to the economic efficiency of PoS + fee burn, it enabled what amounts to frontrunning every "halving" and having ~net zero issuance, it's simply good for holders. If Bitcoin had a way to be secure without further issuance (huge can of worms, halvings are slowly ticking time bombs in the long-run, unless fees rise significantly), it'd be good for holders to fork and scrap it too. There'd be no need to pay billions for security through issuance. Calling Ethereum centralized at this point is ridiculous. The fact that core devs from multiple client teams can manage to agree on and implement forks to keep developing the protocol (unlike Bitcoin) is a major accomplishment, not a failure.
- hggh 2y ago
  > I have been using Lightning Network and it seems to work all right That won't last. As stated in the Lightning Network whitepaper [0], it will need much bigger blocks (it mentions up to 133MB) to scale. [0] https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
  - npoc 2y ago
    Nah, channel factories solve that problem. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67158/what-are-channel-factories-and-how-do-they-work https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67158/what-are-c...
    - hggh 2y ago
      A new layer between the layer 1 and layer 2, sure...
      - npoc 2y ago
        Why don't you think it's possible?
        hggh 2y ago
        It is possible, but absurd. Why more layers if layer 1 works fine just increasing the maximum block size? Bitcoin Cash did it and works flawlessly. Just try it.
        npoc 2y ago
        It's called the blockchain trilemma. Bitcoin cash pays the price through centralisation. It can still only manage 100 transactions/second so certainly isn't flawless. Far better to make the base layer slow but very robust, and then add layers to scale.
        hggh 2y ago
- lawn 2y ago
  > At times fees have been a bit higher Fees at $50 per traction is "a bit" higher to you?
awrence 2y ago
Given the monetary policy Satoshi chose and the headline he picked to include in the genesis block, I really don't think you can infer what he himself thought bitcoin was meant to become, even if he referred to it as cash originally. Beyond that I don't see how it matters what something was designed to do or what early adopters personally used it for or thought it was meant to be used for. The only relevance for a technology is what it's actually adopted for over time and the total addressable market cap for a store of value being 100x + of that of a medium of exchange, it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to by far as reflected amongst other things by the relative prices between current btc and bch...
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Satoshi wrote extensively about what he imagined Bitcoin could become, including in emails to me that I later published. Certainly, what was done to the original Bitcoin completely voided Satoshi's goals and offers an abject lesson in the difficulty of keeping institutions on-track over time. Note that the same tactics that were used to wreck Bitcoin are now being deployed against Nix, as the open source community has struggled to learn the right lessons from Bitcoin. > it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to The market certainly didn't converge to that outcome. It was the result of relentless political scheming and psychological manipulation of a small number of people, combined with criminal tactics like DDoS attacks. The winners of that fight have then tried to retcon what happened as some sort of natural or obvious outcome, but then why did it require so much viciousness and illegal behaviour? The market value of all cryptocurrencies seems to move in tandem, or at least did many years ago when I last cared about this topic. It reflects nothing more than the general hype and brand awareness around Bitcoin and crypto. Certainly a "store of value" that can't directly be used to purchase things is worthless, as any government that wishes to void that store of value and force users back into their own currencies can do so overnight by simple legal fiat.
  - nullc 2y ago
    > including in emails to me that I later published Without headers.

lawn 2y ago

Roger has consistently been promoting the same ideals from the beginning. BCH was also never "his" fork, it was just the fork he started to support. "bash" is a slur to attack the BCH fork, same as the character assassination that Roger has been subjected to. Finally, he sold firecrackers on eBay.

hggh 2y ago

For reference, that "illegal stuff" were just fireworks (too powerful, I guess) [0]. Those "attacks" are fully explained in his recent book "Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC" [1]. He didn't fork Bitcoin, he just proposed its name: Bitcoin Cash [2], which is not "bcash" [2][3]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ver [1] https://www.hijackingbitcoin.com/ https://www.hijackingbitcoin.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash [3] https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bitcoin-cash-bcash-this-will-be-shocking-to-new-readers-956558da12fb https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...