4 ms·

Mastering Bitcoin 3rd Edition (2023)

44 points by wslh 2y ago

doublepg23 2y ago
Regardless of your feelings toward BTC I think my favorite thing is it is FOSS first. Change of pace from the opaque system that controls global finance. Even it goes to zero, I think I'll still enjoy playing with it (like I do with other FOSS projects).
- wslh 2y ago
  The great thing about the Bitcoin technology is that is accesible to understand, relatively simple and Satoshi hasn't premined it like others blockchains do: if you were there you could mine like Satoshi with your PC CPU.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - nephronaut 2y ago
    This is surely the strongest point voiced. Most if not all subsequent chains pre-mined a substantial fraction then used proceeds to fundraise some cash and held the rest in reservoir Until they could keep dumping once listed. So any subsequent chain never adhered to the original principles of satoshi. And I have seen some funky shit with CEO’s that have legitimate seeming background but completely abused this. But here is the snag. Most early Pre-listing investors will love it coz they have gotten a golden parachute investment, and will defend the CEO at all cost.
  - Delmololo 2y ago
    It's not simple and normal people struggle hart getting it.
  - tromp 2y ago
    Satoshi still took advantage of the high initial emission rate (half of all bitcoin emitted in its first 4 years) to mine 5% of all bitcoin for himself. Some other blockchains feature a purely even distribution of coins by fixing the block reward, making sure that later generations also get their fair share (in bitcoin each next 20-yr generation gets 32x less).
    - wslh 2y ago
      You should think that Satoshi didn't prevent you to mine, it was just a new project that nobody cared about. If somebody launches a new blockchain today and put it in "Show HN" it is very probable that almost nobody will put their efforts in that project even if it will succeed years later.
- Delmololo 2y ago
  It's actually less transparent as I thought. There was.this article a few days ago how people start to game the system because all transactions land in blocks every 10 minutes. Now if I want to trade, someone can game it and do transactions before mine to make something for them. Same hidden super specialized trading stuff like in normal just because it's open it's still hidden in complexity
  - PretzelPirate 2y ago
    Are you talking about frontrunning? That happens in both blockchain-based trading systems as well as private systems, but on the blockchain it's easy to see that it's happening and what address is doing it (transparency). Anyone can frontrun on the blockchain, so it becomes a much more level playing field. Front running on the blockchain can also be combatted through various approaches like a commit and reveal scheme, but that slows down the market and hasn't been adopted widely
    - Delmololo 2y ago
      The point I made: the shitty in transparent things normal people don't know about are also happening at Bitcoin. Bitcoin didn't solve any of this.
      - PretzelPirate 2y ago
        Frontrunning on the blockchain is transparent. Bitcoin doesn't have exchanges so trading is happening on private exchanges, but other blockchain have decentralized exchanges where frontrunning is obvious and you can often reverse engineer the strategy and sabotage or frontrun the frontrunner. Frontrunning is far more transparent on decentralized exchanges than anywhere else.
- Breza 2y ago
  I would enjoy it more if the price went to zero. Imagine being able to set up miners with a spare Raspberry Pi. It's rubbish as money but fascinating technologically.
Delmololo 2y ago
Bitcoin should not be needed to be mastered but finally shutdown So much stupidity behind it. So much misery. It motivates to convert energy to heat were the local energy price is the lowest while trading globally. It connects two markets which greatly suffer from this and with a medium which is as sacred as water.
- lrvick 2y ago
  It creates incentive to produce cheap energy, and some estimates peg Bitcoin as operating on more than 70% renewables. It also takes power away from governments to continually apply hidden taxes that disproportionately affect the poor: inflation. At the end of the day, yes, BTC is powered by decentralized energy production, but that feels a lot better than the credit/debit+fiat system, powered by centrally controllef violence. The current system is a low bar to upgrade. Come up with a better proof of work than energy. Maybe Chia works. Until then BTC is the best thing we have for the problems it solves.
  - Delmololo 2y ago
    No it doesn't. Stop lying. Whenever energy is cheap and available Bitcoin will just consume it. And we see this. We see were energy gets blindly stolen in China, we see were a old gas power plant gets turned ON again in NY. We see that in Texas they paid the Bitcoin miners money to stop mining when they needed the energy We need taxes. Poor people especially for social services. No one benefits proportional more from taxes than poor. And if a poor person can take advantage of anonymous money, the rich have done it already. Proof of work is shit and Bitcoin doesn't solve a single issue. You still can get robbed of Bitcoin now just much easier than before, it's still not anonymous because of the ledger and the amount of energy and hardware garbage it produces hurts normal people more than it ever helped. We have the perfect system which has more features (a lot more) and has grown to what it is. It's our current proof of stake. Bitcoin doesn't solve inflation/Deflation at all. The new Bitcoin amount which gets added to the system is not controlled which is necessary to have the right amount of money in it to be useful. I can go to a bank and recover my money. I can exchange my money with other countries. We have some type of protection for inflation and Deflation . You really need to learn to understand our current currency system.
lrvick 2y ago
One of the noteworthy things changed in this edition was the removal of instructions to use bx from libbitcoin to generate keys, since it only uses a fixed 32 bits of entropy seeded from system time by design no matter how many bits you request. The bx maintainer Eric Voskull (who added these instructions to the book in the first place) insisted this was not a bug. His side of the story is he crippled entropy intentionally, expecting users would read the related source and doc changes, and instinctively understand this as advice to switch to using dice. This choice has resulted in the loss of millions of dollars in value across many chains. Interpret that as you will. It is possibly the first example of a supply chain attack targeting a book. Details: https://milksad.info https://milksad.info

44 points by wslh 2y ago

Regardless of your feelings toward BTC I think my favorite thing is it is FOSS first. Change of pace from the opaque system that controls global finance. Even it goes to zero, I think I'll still enjoy playing with it (like I do with other FOSS projects).

wslh 2y ago
The great thing about the Bitcoin technology is that is accesible to understand, relatively simple and Satoshi hasn't premined it like others blockchains do: if you were there you could mine like Satoshi with your PC CPU.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nephronaut 2y ago
  This is surely the strongest point voiced. Most if not all subsequent chains pre-mined a substantial fraction then used proceeds to fundraise some cash and held the rest in reservoir Until they could keep dumping once listed. So any subsequent chain never adhered to the original principles of satoshi. And I have seen some funky shit with CEO’s that have legitimate seeming background but completely abused this. But here is the snag. Most early Pre-listing investors will love it coz they have gotten a golden parachute investment, and will defend the CEO at all cost.
- Delmololo 2y ago
  It's not simple and normal people struggle hart getting it.
- tromp 2y ago
  Satoshi still took advantage of the high initial emission rate (half of all bitcoin emitted in its first 4 years) to mine 5% of all bitcoin for himself. Some other blockchains feature a purely even distribution of coins by fixing the block reward, making sure that later generations also get their fair share (in bitcoin each next 20-yr generation gets 32x less).
  - wslh 2y ago
    You should think that Satoshi didn't prevent you to mine, it was just a new project that nobody cared about. If somebody launches a new blockchain today and put it in "Show HN" it is very probable that almost nobody will put their efforts in that project even if it will succeed years later.
Delmololo 2y ago
It's actually less transparent as I thought. There was.this article a few days ago how people start to game the system because all transactions land in blocks every 10 minutes. Now if I want to trade, someone can game it and do transactions before mine to make something for them. Same hidden super specialized trading stuff like in normal just because it's open it's still hidden in complexity
- PretzelPirate 2y ago
  Are you talking about frontrunning? That happens in both blockchain-based trading systems as well as private systems, but on the blockchain it's easy to see that it's happening and what address is doing it (transparency). Anyone can frontrun on the blockchain, so it becomes a much more level playing field. Front running on the blockchain can also be combatted through various approaches like a commit and reveal scheme, but that slows down the market and hasn't been adopted widely
  - Delmololo 2y ago
    The point I made: the shitty in transparent things normal people don't know about are also happening at Bitcoin. Bitcoin didn't solve any of this.
    - PretzelPirate 2y ago
      Frontrunning on the blockchain is transparent. Bitcoin doesn't have exchanges so trading is happening on private exchanges, but other blockchain have decentralized exchanges where frontrunning is obvious and you can often reverse engineer the strategy and sabotage or frontrun the frontrunner. Frontrunning is far more transparent on decentralized exchanges than anywhere else.
Breza 2y ago
I would enjoy it more if the price went to zero. Imagine being able to set up miners with a spare Raspberry Pi. It's rubbish as money but fascinating technologically.

Delmololo 2y ago

Bitcoin should not be needed to be mastered but finally shutdown So much stupidity behind it. So much misery. It motivates to convert energy to heat were the local energy price is the lowest while trading globally. It connects two markets which greatly suffer from this and with a medium which is as sacred as water.

lrvick 2y ago
It creates incentive to produce cheap energy, and some estimates peg Bitcoin as operating on more than 70% renewables. It also takes power away from governments to continually apply hidden taxes that disproportionately affect the poor: inflation. At the end of the day, yes, BTC is powered by decentralized energy production, but that feels a lot better than the credit/debit+fiat system, powered by centrally controllef violence. The current system is a low bar to upgrade. Come up with a better proof of work than energy. Maybe Chia works. Until then BTC is the best thing we have for the problems it solves.
- Delmololo 2y ago
  No it doesn't. Stop lying. Whenever energy is cheap and available Bitcoin will just consume it. And we see this. We see were energy gets blindly stolen in China, we see were a old gas power plant gets turned ON again in NY. We see that in Texas they paid the Bitcoin miners money to stop mining when they needed the energy We need taxes. Poor people especially for social services. No one benefits proportional more from taxes than poor. And if a poor person can take advantage of anonymous money, the rich have done it already. Proof of work is shit and Bitcoin doesn't solve a single issue. You still can get robbed of Bitcoin now just much easier than before, it's still not anonymous because of the ledger and the amount of energy and hardware garbage it produces hurts normal people more than it ever helped. We have the perfect system which has more features (a lot more) and has grown to what it is. It's our current proof of stake. Bitcoin doesn't solve inflation/Deflation at all. The new Bitcoin amount which gets added to the system is not controlled which is necessary to have the right amount of money in it to be useful. I can go to a bank and recover my money. I can exchange my money with other countries. We have some type of protection for inflation and Deflation . You really need to learn to understand our current currency system.

lrvick 2y ago

One of the noteworthy things changed in this edition was the removal of instructions to use bx from libbitcoin to generate keys, since it only uses a fixed 32 bits of entropy seeded from system time by design no matter how many bits you request. The bx maintainer Eric Voskull (who added these instructions to the book in the first place) insisted this was not a bug. His side of the story is he crippled entropy intentionally, expecting users would read the related source and doc changes, and instinctively understand this as advice to switch to using dice. This choice has resulted in the loss of millions of dollars in value across many chains. Interpret that as you will. It is possibly the first example of a supply chain attack targeting a book. Details: https://milksad.info https://milksad.info