9 ms·

The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)

108 points by lawrenceyan 1y ago

oliveranderson 1y ago
[dead]
anupj 1y ago
The 184 billion BTC overflow bug is a reminder that even “immutable” code is only as trustworthy as its review process. The real miracle isn’t that a bug happened, but that Satoshi patched it in hours and the network agreed to roll back. Decentralization is great, but consensus is everything
- vbezhenar 1y ago
  As long as there's singular entity which leads the changes to the protocol, there's no decentralization.
  - exe34 1y ago
    Leading doesn't mean coercion. Leadership in decentralization implies consent.
    - LegionMammal978 1y ago
      Comsent by whom? In most "decentralized governance" projects I've heard about, all you need is for the holders of 51% of the tokens to agree, and the holders of the other 49% have no recourse but to leave.
      - fouc 1y ago
        with bitcoin isn't it more about 51% of the compute rather than 51% of the token?
        LegionMammal978 1y ago
        Yes, but I was talking about "decentralized leadership" in all the projects following Bitcoin, which often use 51% of stake instead of 51% of mining capacity, under the social theory that the biggest stakeholders will be the most invested in the outcome of the project.
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Those with at least 51% of the sustained hash power can already redefine “Bitcoin” to be whatever they want… At any time whatsoever? (assuming they stay cohesive enough as a bloc) So this seems like a pointless distinction.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        Retric 1y ago
        51% hashing power doesn’t prevent forks. Including forks to 51% of the token systems. That’s the thing people thing of crypto coins as math, but they’re still a social construct.
        olalonde 1y ago
        That statement is a bit misleading. The damage an attacker can do through a 51% attack is much more limited than that. It allows an attacker to censor transactions or perform double spends, but it does not allow them to "redefine Bitcoin" (e.g. change consensus rules, arbitrarily reassign coins, etc.).
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Why can’t such a bloc for example rename Bitcoin to Buttcoin?
        olalonde 1y ago
        Anyone can do that, it doesn't require 51% of the hash power. And it's already been done hundreds, if not thousands, of times (the more technical term for them is "shitcoin").
  - hyghjiyhu 1y ago
    Your critique is valid but outdated. This happened way back in 2010. Satoshi disappeared a long time ago now. There are still influential people, but none with the authority of Satoshi himself.
    - joshstrange 1y ago
      See also, the DAO hack.
      - jowea 1y ago
        Yeah that's a great example. I think sometimes people take "code is law" too seriously, when it is clear to me the code is just a deterministic way to form a consensus that works 99% of the time and the other 1% you get forking.
      - whatsupdog 1y ago
        What Ethereum did after DAO was way more sinister. At least with the Bitcoin "roll-back" there were no transactions reversed. The miners just got together and started mining from a previous point in the Blockchain, and eventually the new chain had more work done and was validly accepted by even outdated nodes. Ethereum just went ahead and added this to their protocol: "ummm this transaction stands reversed, you don't need to verify signature for this particular transaction". This blot will stay in the protocol for ever.
    - wslh 1y ago
      Bitcoin (et al) is/are not fully decentralized in the sense that a core development team actively maintains and proposes changes, even minimal ones. While it's true that major updates require broad consensus and may be rejected by nodes if controversial, we should acknowledge that certain points of centralization exist, particularly around development and decision making. These often overlooked aspects now carry more financial consequences, especially as Bitcoin becomes more intertwined with regulated financial instruments and political power. For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling again the OP_CAT opcode [1]. [1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat
  - FabHK 1y ago
    Indeed. Permissionless blockchain is much less of a technological innovation, but more of a governance innovation, specifically an accountability sink, where instead of a named entity (corporation, institution, person) being in charge, you have this amorphous blob in charge that does come together if its interests are affected (this 184 bn Bitcoin bug, the DAO hack, etc.), but otherwise even in the presence of heinous crimes shrugs and says: "who, me? what can I do?" I don't understand why that's so attractive to so many participants - possibly because the enormous negative externalities of such a thing more often than not don't fall on themselves, but other, more vulnerable people. (Not always though: when 200 Bitcoin were stolen from ultra-libertarian Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, he came crying for help from the bad bad centralized FBI rather quickly...)
  - Salgat 1y ago
    BTC has occasionally obtained community driven patches by distributed consensus rather than a centralized approach (as recently as 2021 with the Taproot soft fork). When Quantum Computing finally becomes a threat to BTC, there will almost certainly be a distributed consensus to update the protocol again. Now what happened with Ethereum could be argued as not so decentralized since the organization (Ethereum Foundation) has extremely strong political influence over the corporations that support it.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - clysm 1y ago
      I really hate the “someone will certainly solve this problem!” mentality. You can’t just magically update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography. That not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
      - yieldcrv 1y ago
        You… can. Once people catch wind of bitcoin being moved from secure places, nodes will cease processing transactions, quantum capable thieves will be frozen Network will upgrade if it hasnt already, nodes will only process transactions on the network with the most other nodes They might even resume from a few block back. No different than branching from an old commit If this doesnt match your philosophy of legitimacy, you can try continuing in the orphanage chain and get other nodes to join you. May the longest chain win! This has all been theorized before and has subsequently happened before and the resolution has given confidence to attract more capital.
        clysm 1y ago
        And what happens to all those cold wallets where people can recover the secret key or forge signatures for it? They money is just gone, either by thieves or the network disallowing them to be spent.
      - 1y ago
- nivertech 1y ago
  It’s based on a social consensus only, the rest (Nakamoto Consensus, PoW, longest chain, difficulty adjustment, block halving, artificial limited supply, decentralization, censorship-resistant P2P network, open source, etc.) is a combination of a Rube Goldberg machine & crypto bros LARPing.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    I halfway disagree: There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants can be trusted (including the fact that the Bitcoin paper uses game theory to give evidence why malicious entities attempting to create another fork will by the mere design of the algorithms have a hard time). What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. By the design of the protocol and its data structures, there do exist boundaries concerning possible "social interpretations" of this consensus, but a lot of aspects are up to different interpretations.
    - bravesoul2 1y ago
      Bitcoin is the OG Birkin Handbag. Valuable for the story. People compete to own a bit of it for that. You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! But no story, no value.
      - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
        > You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! That is what I wrote: > What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. In your private Bitcoin clone, such a consensus has a "socially much more boring" interpretation.
        bravesoul2 1y ago
        I'm not disagreeing though. Just adding.
- pards 1y ago
  Just like the Ethereum fork in 2016 [0]. Before then, the battle cries of the crypto advocates were: - Blockchains are immutable! - The code is the law! ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Powers gonna power
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. Not everybody agreed - and so the Ethereum Classic blockchain was created, causing all the problems that go hand in hand with having different, forked blockchains: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    That's probably more important than worrying about bugs in the code. There will be bugs, the concern is what are the rules for rectifying the damage done by those bugs. Plus, where do I go to appeal if I disagree with the decision?
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > ignored the hypocrisy You don't need to exaggerate so strongly.
  - splix 1y ago
    That's different because in Bitcoin's case there was a clear violation of the specification, of how it supposed to work. So the bug was fixed to make the software working as it intended to be. If there were two node implementations then one would just stop to work until fixed. In Ethereum's case there were no violation of any specification. In fact there were no bug in the blockchain itself. Just someone took founder's money, they didn't like it and so they decided to get them back. And note that after that, there were bugs in the nodes code that were breaking the spec (which you should compare to the bitcoin's bug), but because of multiple node implementations only some of the nodes stopped and so we don't care about those issues.
- londons_explore 1y ago
  > and the network agreed to roll back Is there a tiny community of a couple of nodes running the original network?
zaphirplane 1y ago
At today’s price that’s … like … err more zeros than I’ve got fingers
- FatalLogic 1y ago
  I think it's US$21.7 trillion? That's now about 15% of the total global money supply. So, it's good that the transaction was undone, or 15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker. (To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin)
  - willis936 1y ago
    (And maybe that wouldn't have been so bad)
    - FatalLogic 1y ago
      Thanks, for adding the joke that I thought was too boring and obvious to say
  - pickledoyster 1y ago
    >15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker why? It's not like btc has anywhere near the trade volume for 15% of global money supply.
    - FatalLogic 1y ago
      >(To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin) Yes, Bitcoin does not have sufficient trade volume, and it was a joke anyway. Bitcoin would probably not have survived even one more month in 2010, if there were 184 billion new "fake" bitcoins added in the mix. Even ignoring all the problems about the Bitcoin software being proven to be seriously broken, those 184 billion extra bitcoins meant that every other Bitcoin was suddenly worth about $0.0000000000000001
zahlman 1y ago
I'm disappointed that the article doesn't point out that this is really a nice, round, negative 10 BTC if you work out the overflow (in satoshis). > The rapid implementation of the patch was vital in keeping Bitcoin a viable cryptocurrency. 184 billion Bitcoin would have devalued the currency completely, leaving it at the mercy of the person holding the newly-minted Bitcoin. It would have become worthless, sure, but I imagine that other people would have also just gone around creating additional batches of 184 billion BTC and driving the project into the ground, rather than letting one person walk off with effectively the entire thing.
- skizm 1y ago
  Could all the large centralized mining pools (ghash and the like) plus exchanges like coinbase and binance blacklist or burn the 184B BTC? Didn't ethereum do something similar to revere a $600M "hack" a while ago?
  - pyman 1y ago
    Is this info correct? - 2.4 million bitcoins are lost forever. Their owners, for one reason or another, can't access their wallets. No insurance, no guarantees, nothing. - 1.1 million are owned by a mysterious person who sits at the top of the pyramid. - 2.3 million belong to investors and speculators, who make money by pumping and dumping. - 1 million are owned by banks, the same institutions the mysterious man said his system would replace. - 1.6 million are held by whales: billionaires, money launderers, narcos, weapons dealers, and so on. - 1.4 million are still left to be mined, but only a handful of rich people with servers worth millions can actually mine them. - The rest are owned by individuals who see it as a long term investment. - It's a digital currency most people don't use to buy or sell anything. The only ones making transactions are banks, investors, and the rich. - And if you own even a tiny bit of bitcoin, and read something like this, you go ballistic and end up siding with the banks, investors, and the rich to keep the system going. I can't think of a worse system to fight inequality. The banks won.
    - zahlman 1y ago
486sx33 1y ago
[dead]
pimlottc 1y ago
I’m surprised they don’t spend more time taking about the “soft fork” that voided the coins. For all the talk about the immutability of bitcoin transactions, it’s worth mentioning that things were once a lot more fluid.
- kragen 1y ago
  I think orphaned blocks still happen regularly? Although blockchain.com's graph drops to 0 in August 02017, I think that might just be a bug in their metrics collection.
mNovak 1y ago
>> That Satoshi himself intervened, and did so so quickly, showed that Bitcoin was not as easily hackable as some might have assumed I don't know if this is the central takeaway I get from this. Moreso it shows Bitcoin dodged a bullet, in that there was still a central figure or group with enough clout to roll back and fork the chain.
- npoc 1y ago
  Even if it was caught by the bullet, the weakness would then have been fixed and the network eventually grown again in its new robust form. The people that knew this would have bought more bitcoin in the price crash and ultimately be heavily rewarded for keeping faith in the system. You can't hold down superior money.
osigurdson 1y ago
>> It took just five hours before a “soft fork” was rolled out This is the dumb part about today's crypto imo. It is just a type of consensus among humans. People like to say its "all math" or some fundamental property of nature but that isn't true at all. It is a constant in a text file + people agreeing on its value. I.e. if a sufficient number of people agree that "we're bumping it up to 1 billion now", that is how many there would be. The argument really is how much better is this mechanism than other stores of value? Fiat currency is also a number where some people are given a magic wand to make more of it up on the spot. Gold is something that you either store in your house and hope that it is real or have someone else store it for you (or pretend to store it). Real estate is fine until the city / government decides that you don't own the title anymore. Basically it is a comparison of one absurd mechanism vs other absurd ones but perhaps Bitcoin is less absurd in the final analysis.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  It’s a dumb PvP game that you can try to beat! But so is everyone else! Now nation states are competing against each other and the private sector! Bitcoin is a mind virus that’s working. It co-opts human minds and synthetics to support itself. If you understood that perspective, you would have contributed to its growth earlier, others get it later.
- 0x445442 1y ago
  I've been asking for quite some time what the fundamental difference is between BTC and BCH that would warrant such a price difference. I've not heard an answer that has satisfied me yet.
- wagwang 1y ago
  Some arbitraries are better than other arbitraries. For bitcoin, you'd need 50% of supply to arbitrarily make decisions which is a pretty high threshold, and for all its faults, there hasn't been any egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20 yrs.
  - HaZeust 1y ago
    >"egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20 yrs." What?? Are we just going to forget about BTC, BCH and BSV? Same thing happened with Ethereum too - with Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Bigengytfan 1y ago
Coding has nothing to do with bitcoin

108 points by lawrenceyan 1y ago

[dead]

The 184 billion BTC overflow bug is a reminder that even “immutable” code is only as trustworthy as its review process. The real miracle isn’t that a bug happened, but that Satoshi patched it in hours and the network agreed to roll back. Decentralization is great, but consensus is everything

vbezhenar 1y ago
As long as there's singular entity which leads the changes to the protocol, there's no decentralization.
- exe34 1y ago
  Leading doesn't mean coercion. Leadership in decentralization implies consent.
  - LegionMammal978 1y ago
    Comsent by whom? In most "decentralized governance" projects I've heard about, all you need is for the holders of 51% of the tokens to agree, and the holders of the other 49% have no recourse but to leave.
    - fouc 1y ago
      with bitcoin isn't it more about 51% of the compute rather than 51% of the token?
      - LegionMammal978 1y ago
        Yes, but I was talking about "decentralized leadership" in all the projects following Bitcoin, which often use 51% of stake instead of 51% of mining capacity, under the social theory that the biggest stakeholders will be the most invested in the outcome of the project.
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Those with at least 51% of the sustained hash power can already redefine “Bitcoin” to be whatever they want… At any time whatsoever? (assuming they stay cohesive enough as a bloc) So this seems like a pointless distinction.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        Retric 1y ago
        51% hashing power doesn’t prevent forks. Including forks to 51% of the token systems. That’s the thing people thing of crypto coins as math, but they’re still a social construct.
        olalonde 1y ago
        That statement is a bit misleading. The damage an attacker can do through a 51% attack is much more limited than that. It allows an attacker to censor transactions or perform double spends, but it does not allow them to "redefine Bitcoin" (e.g. change consensus rules, arbitrarily reassign coins, etc.).
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Why can’t such a bloc for example rename Bitcoin to Buttcoin?
        olalonde 1y ago
        Anyone can do that, it doesn't require 51% of the hash power. And it's already been done hundreds, if not thousands, of times (the more technical term for them is "shitcoin").
- hyghjiyhu 1y ago
  Your critique is valid but outdated. This happened way back in 2010. Satoshi disappeared a long time ago now. There are still influential people, but none with the authority of Satoshi himself.
  - joshstrange 1y ago
    See also, the DAO hack.
    - jowea 1y ago
      Yeah that's a great example. I think sometimes people take "code is law" too seriously, when it is clear to me the code is just a deterministic way to form a consensus that works 99% of the time and the other 1% you get forking.
    - whatsupdog 1y ago
      What Ethereum did after DAO was way more sinister. At least with the Bitcoin "roll-back" there were no transactions reversed. The miners just got together and started mining from a previous point in the Blockchain, and eventually the new chain had more work done and was validly accepted by even outdated nodes. Ethereum just went ahead and added this to their protocol: "ummm this transaction stands reversed, you don't need to verify signature for this particular transaction". This blot will stay in the protocol for ever.
  - wslh 1y ago
    Bitcoin (et al) is/are not fully decentralized in the sense that a core development team actively maintains and proposes changes, even minimal ones. While it's true that major updates require broad consensus and may be rejected by nodes if controversial, we should acknowledge that certain points of centralization exist, particularly around development and decision making. These often overlooked aspects now carry more financial consequences, especially as Bitcoin becomes more intertwined with regulated financial instruments and political power. For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling again the OP_CAT opcode [1]. [1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat
- FabHK 1y ago
  Indeed. Permissionless blockchain is much less of a technological innovation, but more of a governance innovation, specifically an accountability sink, where instead of a named entity (corporation, institution, person) being in charge, you have this amorphous blob in charge that does come together if its interests are affected (this 184 bn Bitcoin bug, the DAO hack, etc.), but otherwise even in the presence of heinous crimes shrugs and says: "who, me? what can I do?" I don't understand why that's so attractive to so many participants - possibly because the enormous negative externalities of such a thing more often than not don't fall on themselves, but other, more vulnerable people. (Not always though: when 200 Bitcoin were stolen from ultra-libertarian Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, he came crying for help from the bad bad centralized FBI rather quickly...)
- Salgat 1y ago
  BTC has occasionally obtained community driven patches by distributed consensus rather than a centralized approach (as recently as 2021 with the Taproot soft fork). When Quantum Computing finally becomes a threat to BTC, there will almost certainly be a distributed consensus to update the protocol again. Now what happened with Ethereum could be argued as not so decentralized since the organization (Ethereum Foundation) has extremely strong political influence over the corporations that support it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - clysm 1y ago
    I really hate the “someone will certainly solve this problem!” mentality. You can’t just magically update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography. That not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
    - yieldcrv 1y ago
      You… can. Once people catch wind of bitcoin being moved from secure places, nodes will cease processing transactions, quantum capable thieves will be frozen Network will upgrade if it hasnt already, nodes will only process transactions on the network with the most other nodes They might even resume from a few block back. No different than branching from an old commit If this doesnt match your philosophy of legitimacy, you can try continuing in the orphanage chain and get other nodes to join you. May the longest chain win! This has all been theorized before and has subsequently happened before and the resolution has given confidence to attract more capital.
      - clysm 1y ago
        And what happens to all those cold wallets where people can recover the secret key or forge signatures for it? They money is just gone, either by thieves or the network disallowing them to be spent.
    - 1y ago
nivertech 1y ago
It’s based on a social consensus only, the rest (Nakamoto Consensus, PoW, longest chain, difficulty adjustment, block halving, artificial limited supply, decentralization, censorship-resistant P2P network, open source, etc.) is a combination of a Rube Goldberg machine & crypto bros LARPing.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  I halfway disagree: There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants can be trusted (including the fact that the Bitcoin paper uses game theory to give evidence why malicious entities attempting to create another fork will by the mere design of the algorithms have a hard time). What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. By the design of the protocol and its data structures, there do exist boundaries concerning possible "social interpretations" of this consensus, but a lot of aspects are up to different interpretations.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Bitcoin is the OG Birkin Handbag. Valuable for the story. People compete to own a bit of it for that. You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! But no story, no value.
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! That is what I wrote: > What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. In your private Bitcoin clone, such a consensus has a "socially much more boring" interpretation.
      - bravesoul2 1y ago
        I'm not disagreeing though. Just adding.
pards 1y ago
Just like the Ethereum fork in 2016 [0]. Before then, the battle cries of the crypto advocates were: - Blockchains are immutable! - The code is the law! ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Powers gonna power
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. Not everybody agreed - and so the Ethereum Classic blockchain was created, causing all the problems that go hand in hand with having different, forked blockchains: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
- mrweasel 1y ago
  That's probably more important than worrying about bugs in the code. There will be bugs, the concern is what are the rules for rectifying the damage done by those bugs. Plus, where do I go to appeal if I disagree with the decision?
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  > ignored the hypocrisy You don't need to exaggerate so strongly.
- splix 1y ago
  That's different because in Bitcoin's case there was a clear violation of the specification, of how it supposed to work. So the bug was fixed to make the software working as it intended to be. If there were two node implementations then one would just stop to work until fixed. In Ethereum's case there were no violation of any specification. In fact there were no bug in the blockchain itself. Just someone took founder's money, they didn't like it and so they decided to get them back. And note that after that, there were bugs in the nodes code that were breaking the spec (which you should compare to the bitcoin's bug), but because of multiple node implementations only some of the nodes stopped and so we don't care about those issues.
londons_explore 1y ago
> and the network agreed to roll back Is there a tiny community of a couple of nodes running the original network?

zaphirplane 1y ago

At today’s price that’s … like … err more zeros than I’ve got fingers

FatalLogic 1y ago
I think it's US$21.7 trillion? That's now about 15% of the total global money supply. So, it's good that the transaction was undone, or 15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker. (To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin)
- willis936 1y ago
  (And maybe that wouldn't have been so bad)
  - FatalLogic 1y ago
    Thanks, for adding the joke that I thought was too boring and obvious to say
- pickledoyster 1y ago
  >15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker why? It's not like btc has anywhere near the trade volume for 15% of global money supply.
  - FatalLogic 1y ago
    >(To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin) Yes, Bitcoin does not have sufficient trade volume, and it was a joke anyway. Bitcoin would probably not have survived even one more month in 2010, if there were 184 billion new "fake" bitcoins added in the mix. Even ignoring all the problems about the Bitcoin software being proven to be seriously broken, those 184 billion extra bitcoins meant that every other Bitcoin was suddenly worth about $0.0000000000000001

zahlman 1y ago

I'm disappointed that the article doesn't point out that this is really a nice, round, negative 10 BTC if you work out the overflow (in satoshis). > The rapid implementation of the patch was vital in keeping Bitcoin a viable cryptocurrency. 184 billion Bitcoin would have devalued the currency completely, leaving it at the mercy of the person holding the newly-minted Bitcoin. It would have become worthless, sure, but I imagine that other people would have also just gone around creating additional batches of 184 billion BTC and driving the project into the ground, rather than letting one person walk off with effectively the entire thing.

skizm 1y ago
Could all the large centralized mining pools (ghash and the like) plus exchanges like coinbase and binance blacklist or burn the 184B BTC? Didn't ethereum do something similar to revere a $600M "hack" a while ago?
- pyman 1y ago
  Is this info correct? - 2.4 million bitcoins are lost forever. Their owners, for one reason or another, can't access their wallets. No insurance, no guarantees, nothing. - 1.1 million are owned by a mysterious person who sits at the top of the pyramid. - 2.3 million belong to investors and speculators, who make money by pumping and dumping. - 1 million are owned by banks, the same institutions the mysterious man said his system would replace. - 1.6 million are held by whales: billionaires, money launderers, narcos, weapons dealers, and so on. - 1.4 million are still left to be mined, but only a handful of rich people with servers worth millions can actually mine them. - The rest are owned by individuals who see it as a long term investment. - It's a digital currency most people don't use to buy or sell anything. The only ones making transactions are banks, investors, and the rich. - And if you own even a tiny bit of bitcoin, and read something like this, you go ballistic and end up siding with the banks, investors, and the rich to keep the system going. I can't think of a worse system to fight inequality. The banks won.
  - zahlman 1y ago

486sx33 1y ago

[dead]

pimlottc 1y ago

I’m surprised they don’t spend more time taking about the “soft fork” that voided the coins. For all the talk about the immutability of bitcoin transactions, it’s worth mentioning that things were once a lot more fluid.

kragen 1y ago
I think orphaned blocks still happen regularly? Although blockchain.com's graph drops to 0 in August 02017, I think that might just be a bug in their metrics collection.

mNovak 1y ago

>> That Satoshi himself intervened, and did so so quickly, showed that Bitcoin was not as easily hackable as some might have assumed I don't know if this is the central takeaway I get from this. Moreso it shows Bitcoin dodged a bullet, in that there was still a central figure or group with enough clout to roll back and fork the chain.

npoc 1y ago
Even if it was caught by the bullet, the weakness would then have been fixed and the network eventually grown again in its new robust form. The people that knew this would have bought more bitcoin in the price crash and ultimately be heavily rewarded for keeping faith in the system. You can't hold down superior money.

osigurdson 1y ago

>> It took just five hours before a “soft fork” was rolled out This is the dumb part about today's crypto imo. It is just a type of consensus among humans. People like to say its "all math" or some fundamental property of nature but that isn't true at all. It is a constant in a text file + people agreeing on its value. I.e. if a sufficient number of people agree that "we're bumping it up to 1 billion now", that is how many there would be. The argument really is how much better is this mechanism than other stores of value? Fiat currency is also a number where some people are given a magic wand to make more of it up on the spot. Gold is something that you either store in your house and hope that it is real or have someone else store it for you (or pretend to store it). Real estate is fine until the city / government decides that you don't own the title anymore. Basically it is a comparison of one absurd mechanism vs other absurd ones but perhaps Bitcoin is less absurd in the final analysis.

yieldcrv 1y ago
It’s a dumb PvP game that you can try to beat! But so is everyone else! Now nation states are competing against each other and the private sector! Bitcoin is a mind virus that’s working. It co-opts human minds and synthetics to support itself. If you understood that perspective, you would have contributed to its growth earlier, others get it later.
0x445442 1y ago
I've been asking for quite some time what the fundamental difference is between BTC and BCH that would warrant such a price difference. I've not heard an answer that has satisfied me yet.
wagwang 1y ago
Some arbitraries are better than other arbitraries. For bitcoin, you'd need 50% of supply to arbitrarily make decisions which is a pretty high threshold, and for all its faults, there hasn't been any egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20 yrs.
- HaZeust 1y ago
  >"egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20 yrs." What?? Are we just going to forget about BTC, BCH and BSV? Same thing happened with Ethereum too - with Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Bigengytfan 1y ago

Coding has nothing to do with bitcoin