It truly is a wonderful paper. Lots of information in it.
You don't need that much background knowledge to understand it, but it can take a few reads to wrap your mind around it.
I would suggest also taking a look at the annotated version of the whitepaper on Fermat's Library:
I wrote some of the annotations and tried as much as possible to make it so that this annotated version would provide a motivated reader with all the resources needed to truly understand the bitcoin protocol.
I don't think the NSA is/was the threat. If there is ever a singularity moment and an AI comes to emerge, it'll need funds to build it's power. What better way than finding the identity of Satoshi and getting his private keys?
Yeah, the whitepaper is very approachable. It's amazing how simple it is.
Along similar lines (complex topics explained beautifully and simply by their creators), I recommend Relativity: The Special and General Theory[1] by the man himself. It's a great explanation of relativity without the need to have a strong math background. He explains it in the form of thought experiments, as only he could do. "What if you were in a cage in space with a rope tied to the top and it was being pulled upward by a giant at a constant acceleration (simulating gravity)? How would you perceive the world?" (Spoiler: This is gravity.) "What if you were on a spinning disk and had a ruler and tried to calculate pi?" "What if you were on a train moving really fast and two lightning bolts struck at the same time?"
> "What if you were on a train moving really fast and two lightning bolts struck at the same time?"
I read one of Albert Einstein's popular science on the same topic and folded when a completely paradox statement was justified by saying, welp you'll surely agree on this.
Relativity is hugely useful for scientists and make predicted with extreme accuracy.
So it's a theory, but one could say that it is much more useful than Bitcoin.
Btw, Bitcoin also works based on mathematical theories. If someone were to prove P = NP, Bitcoin doesn't work any more, because I can now steal all your money.
The current belief is P != NP, that's why people trust bitcoin, and crypto in general. But it's still a theory.
When I first started learning about Bitcoin, I automatically assumed that the whitepaper would be filled with all kinds of fluff like most other research papers, so I never read it.
Instead I tried to learn from all the "Learn Bitcoin in 10 minutes", "Build your own Blockchain in 200 lines", and all that stuff, all of which are nothing more than a shallow scraping the surface type of pop-sci content.
The problem with these Medium articles and "intro to Bitcoin" posts is that they're trying too hard to abstract out something that's already simple, that the abstraction itself is much more complex than what it actually is. Not to mention the fact that after reading all that stuff, all you come away with is some abstraction, not the actual Bitcoin.
Anyway, so I thought why not just take a look at the whitepaper. And I was blown away. I've never seen a "research paper" with so little fluff. The whitepaper helped me understand Bitcoin much better than all the weird analogy intro blog posts that litter the web.
I recommend anyone to just start from the whitepaper.
I think I see where you're coming from here. When I see something typeset with Latex/in the Computer Modern font...the quick assumption I make is that I'm not going to understand a single word of it.
That is my default assumption too, that I will not get what they are saying.
OT: This paper is produced using a wordprocessor; my PDF reader says it is produced by OpenOffice.org 2.4. The word spacing and justification of paragraphs makes me think that this is not LaTeX, nevertheless it looks professional. Tex experts have also come to this conclusion [1]. But is it the original PDF or someone's version/copy of it?
It's the original. Satoshi used Computer Modern for the headers, which is kind of strange. I guess they wanted to give it the TeX vibe, but didn't want to use LaTeX for some reason.
If anyone wants to collaborate on a TeX version, let me know!
There are two sides to that issue. On the one hand, the point of publishing research is to make knowledge available to humanity, so if you are having trouble understanding even the basic premise of a research paper (what problem it is addressing, etc.) then the authors are failing to achieve that goal. On the other hand, if every published paper was written to be accessible for non-experts in the field, papers would become longer and longer over time as lines of research progressed.
Unfortunately there is no reward for researchers taking the time to write tutorial and survey papers that give more readable explanations of particular lines of work.
Should there be? Seems pointless to target every paper for entry level understanding, paper length would grow exponentially and it would quickly become unreadable.
Kind of like LISP. When I read McCarthy's original papers, it had that same feeling of simplicity, and you could easily see how it mapped directly to the hardware. Original papers are often the best. Chuck Moores book on FORTH was finally released as a PDF, but he wrote it in the early 1970's. Amazing. I knew FORTH was linked to LISP, and the link is explained in there.
Of course he did. Smart contracts had been floating around for a while. And that's why he included all those operators in the Bitcoin scripting language which then had to be disabled early on because their security & resource consumption were totally unpredictable.
> The phrase "smart contracts" was coined by Nick Szabo in 1996, and reworked over several years. Szabo's first publication, "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Free Markets" was published in Extropy #16,[3] and then later reworked as "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks."[4]
I doubt it: he explicitly denied it in a blog post, and it's not clear how good he is at programming and system design (for all that he's obviously smart). More speculatively, I kind of doubt his personality as shown by his writing is that compatible with maintaining Nakamoto's personality as shown by theirs.
Also, your prior shouldn't be too high: although Szabo is well-known from his writings now, they didn't come out of nowhere. He previously worked for Agorics, Inc., which was founded to develop these ideas: https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.htm... which I think of as more fundamental than Szabo's smart-contracts paper. (Admittedly I never finished slogging through that one.) If you think of smart contracts as emerging from nowhere then it probably seems more likely for Nick Szabo to be the lone genius behind it all.
That is the beauty of it. It is only eight pages long, but fundamentally changes the concept of money.
The only thing that people should recognize is that it doesn't really try to explain the game theory behind it. It is a technical paper. When it all sinks in, it becomes clear that it is pure genius, but that certainly took me a while to grasp.
Yes, that's why it highly irritates me when people repeat the Tulip bulb analogy. Bitcoin may be in a bubble, and it scares me. But it amazes me how little people think, before that kind of pattern matching.
I read the paper about 2 years back, after reading Nathaniel Popper's book 'Digital Gold...' which presents the history of cypherpunks, leading upto Satoshi's white paper. The book was enjoyable to read. And the paper's brilliance was stunning.
That said, when I think of it deeply, it does seem to me similar to pyramid schemes. The early adopters have a unfair advantage.
Also, its better that an alternative to proof-of-work is found. Although the argument is support of that, is that, it perhaps takes more energy to sustain the present financial system, the base of which Bitcoin intends to replace.
So I find myself in a curious position of being in the Blockchain camp, and unwillingly though. Which is because people who typically are in that camp, say the tech is good, but Bitcoin is not. But I believe Bitcoin by itself is a fantastic and disruptive thing. Without that app there is no platform (blockchain) evolution.
But of course Bitcoin has flaws, and we could be in a big bubble. But no half baked Tulip bulbs analogy please+.
Another flaw which I find with Bitcoin is the ownership is very fragile, compared to real world ownership. In these days of phone cameras, all it takes is an accidental photo of my secret 12 words, for my satoshis to get compromised. Or there is no alternative, if I lose my private key. Real world banks have ample ways of addressing the identity and tend to offer more robust possession safety.
+ - I have not seen that analogy on HN, thankfully, but its there every where. Yesterday, I saw a respected VC making it on LinkedIn.
That's absolutely true but consider this: early adopters always have an advantage, in fact just being born earlier than someone else gives you an advantage. Family wealth, real estate ownership, rent seeking, tenure and so on are all linked because of this.
Furthermore, I've tried to pay lots of people in bitcoin over the last couple of years, and often the response is "fake money? no thanks, I want real money please".
Largely from the same people who complain most loudly about inequality. You can lead the horse to water, but you can't make it drink...
Always is a big word. So you are saying people living today have a disadvantage against people from 200 years ago? I mean I get where you are coming from... less competition and more room left to explore but there is also less knowledge to start from and less people to cooperate with. The advantage depends not on time but on how resources, in particular knowledge, is distributed in a society - bitcoin makes a design decision which undouly favors early over late adopters but it wouldn‘t necessarily need to.
> bitcoin makes a design decision which undouly favors early over late adopters but it wouldn‘t necessarily need to.
Explain please how it would be possible to create something like bitcoin which does not in some way or other favor early adopters over later ones, I really can't see it so this is a genuine question. Not 'pre-mining' is roughly equal to simply not adopting it at all. I see it analogous to a founder not believing in their product to the point that they will not use it. Of course 'Satoshi' could have not pre-mined as much but who is to say whether those coins are even accessible today?
And anybody that joined in later than that already lost that early adopters advantage compared to those that joined earlier.
Which probably means that (wild hyperbolic assumption following) if you haven't done anything with it so far you'd look at me and my miserly number of coins as an 'early adopter' whereas I was - and still am - pretty skeptical about bitcoins long term viability.
Sorry for the late reply, I am not a regular poster so I forgot about the comment :(
I didn‘t say that there wouldn‘t be any favoring towards early adopters... a „better system“ will by definition always favor early adopters at least through efficiency gains accrued through the usage of the system over users who have not yet adopted. BUT bitcoin is crazy in terms of „value“ increase that is not related to any real gains in practice. People buy tokens because people invest money to find tokens because people buy tokens. And because everyone seems to be „making money“ from that things just continue... It‘s like with the rat who can control its own cocain supply...
So what I meant to say is - this specific system design is madness!
DLT in general is very interesting and I am playing around with some ideas regarding currency pegged tokens that increase in value if empirically verifiable achievments/improvements have been made. The goal is to create common-interest communities that are rewarded for realizing real-life impacts. So even people not participating profit. People who join in profit a little more. The goal is to have sustainable growth and predictable prices.
That's a talk about brainwallets, which is something else. Brainwallets are generally chosen by humans; you can't rigorously prove how much entropy they have, and in practice it's usually much less than people realize.
With a proper 12-word phrase, each is randomly chosen from a list of 2048 words for 11 bits of entropy per word. That's 132 bits of entropy, which is not crackable. (With a 24-word phrase you subtract 8 bits for a checksum; I'm not sure about the 12-word format, but 124 bits of entropy isn't crackable either.)
"That is the beauty of it. It is only eight pages long, but fundamentally changes the concept of money."
Not really; it only serves to validate the beliefs of people who already agreed with the basic premise that money is something that can exist without central authority. That view was already common long before the Bitcoin paper. Plenty of libertarians believe that money is an emergent phenomenon of free markets, something which arises on its own as the market converges on a common currency as its medium of exchange.
On the other hand, if you are aligned with the mainstream of economics, the entire premise of the paper is easily dismissed. In that view, money can never be separated from banks, the paper is basically nonsense.
How does that prove money is an emergent phenomenon of markets? In fact, that article suggests exactly what the historical evidence suggests: markets cannot really exist without money. Societies without money tend to only engage in trade with strangers, rather than having markets:
It can't prove it any better than than anything else can bridge the is-ought gap. I agree that markets can't exist without money, but I think historical evidence suggests that they will create money in order to exist. Almost every society in human history has developed a monetary system; either one based around a commodity as simple as camels, bullion or sea shells, or backed by fiat.
> "Money is an emergent phenomenon of markets, and it has nothing to do with libertarians."
let me fix that for you: "Money is an emergent phenomenon of markets, markets are a fundamental feature of libertarianism, therefore money has everything to do with libertarianism."
Markets are ~10,000+ years older than libertarians. Some early examples had people swapping from banditry to trade depending on how well armed the people they encountered where. No outside forces nessisarily, but no rule of law either.
Sure markets may be older than libertarians, but even though libertarians didn't exist to enunciate libertarian theory back then, the fundamental libertarian phenomenon of non-aggression and voluntary exchange as you mention was indeed present.
But most non-libertarians believe in non-aggression and voluntary exchange too. They just argue that some taxes aren't aggression and some exchanges aren't really voluntary.
Markets are a reflection of human action. Political science is concerned with quantifying and influencing human action, thus markets are a fundamental feature of all political schools of thought.
No need to be so dismissive. The abstract term "decentralized" hides a lot of the complexity in Bitcoin. It is also programmable money, irreversible money, geographically unbound money, fast money, and transparent money.
> On the other hand, if you are aligned with the mainstream of economics, the entire premise of the paper is easily dismissed. In that view, money can never be separated from banks, the paper is basically nonsense.
So, did banks invent gold? Or did gold give rise to banks?
How can banks even exist in the first place unless we already have a common medium of exchange (gold), which can deposited into said banks?
Actually, the first banks, along with the first money and the first markets, developed from the palace economies of early city states. Originally the proto-bank maintained records of what each person had deposited with the temple, what had been given to various people, and what was available to give. Those ledgers recorded each type of deposit (wheat, cloth, olives, etc.) with a different unit; the innovation that gave rise to money was the transition to a single unit of account.
That’s really interesting! Were these banks private enterprises? I assume people voluntarily deposited commodities in exchange for a common medium of exchange.
The problem arises when depositors can’t redeem their medium of exchange for the commodities they originally deposited, or something of equivalent value.
By the way, I’m convinced Bitcoin will not function without credit instruments, just like was the case with gold. I’d argue there’s a huge difference between redeemable and irredeemable credit instruments, though. The latter being an artifact of government regulation.
Sort of; at that time it the boundaries were less clearly defined between what was governmental and what was private. The basic economic structure was for a large temple to store the various goods people produced, and to give the goods out to people as necessary. For example, a farmer would deposit grain, and the grain would be redistributed throughout the city-state; the farmer would receive other things from the temple, like clothes and tools. The record-keeping served two purposes: to keep track of what was available for distribution, and to keep track of who was contributing what. This was the "palace economy:"
The bible makes reference to such a system in the story of Joseph (which is ancient enough that palace economies still existed when the story was first written), who was the administrator of such a system in Egypt:
"I assume people voluntarily deposited commodities in exchange for a common medium of exchange."
Not originally and not universally. It was more like a system of 100% taxation in some of the early palace economies, where everyone deposited everything they produced with the temple, and then received things as they were needed. You were basically not allowed to live in the city without contributing something (he who does not work shall not eat), though a person could always work for the temple itself e.g. as a sacred prostitute. Of course the specific laws and economic organization varied from city to city, and plenty of people lived far outside the cities and had their own ways to manage goods; the specific details varied with different places and periods of time.
What you received for your deposit was often just an update to the temple's ledgers clearing a debt you owed the temple (i.e. indicating you paid your taxes; often referred to as "offerings" in the biblical legal code) and possibly offset future taxes. If you were unable to make good on that obligation, your land could be seized and you could become a slave until the king declared a general amnesty (not uncommon in the ancient world; the biblical legal code requires slaves to be given amnesty after 7 years of service, and a similar amnesty provision is in the code of Hammurabi). The story of Joseph also indicates that this exact scenario had played out under Joseph's administration in Egypt: the farmers were forced to turn their lands over to the government during a famine (I am not suggesting that the bible is historical; rather, in ancient Israel at the time that story was written, people were familiar with the situation).
As the economies became better developed and the scale increased, money (i.e. a single unit of account that serves as a common medium of exchange) and markets (i.e. trade between inhabitants of the same city) began to replace the temple economy system, at which point private banking enterprises became more clearly defined. For example:
if I'd be willing to pay 6-20 bucks for a simple transaction with a volatile currency and wanted to live with the threat of having my account hacked and no insurance whatsoever, sure
PS. Every standard sized bitcoin transaction bar the past three days (and those will too), that people paid over 5c for has been committed to the blockchain.
That's not my money because I do not own any US Dollars, and more importantly I don't really see why a graph showing me the money supply is supposed to convince me to buy Bitcoin
I have a bitcoin debit card. I use it to pay all of these things. Your argument is akin to a person in the US saying that a person from Europe using their visa card, isn't using real money, because you don't control it.
> I have a bitcoin debit card. I use it to pay all of these things. Your argument is akin to a person in the US saying that a person from Europe using their visa card, isn't using real money, because you don't control it.
If the person from Europe comes to US, goes to McDonald's, buys a meal whose price is denominated in USD with his European credit card and tells me he made the purchase with Euro, I would consider that a false statement. To me, he made the purchase in USD, his credit card company just will make the FX conversion for him and accept EUR from him when he pays his credit card bill.
What is a Bitcoin debit card? What payment system does that card actually use?
Converting BTC to fiat currency on the spot is not really the same thing as using Bitcoin to pay your bills, any more than selling some shares of stock and using the money to buy a house is the same thing as buying a house using shares of stock.
Neither are you paying with USD even if your debit card directly debits your USD account. It's a proxy for paying with USD, just like a bitcoin debit account is a proxy for paying with bitcoin. That the conversion and account adjust ment happen in one currency or another does not mean that currency is directly involved, it is merely a convenient stand-in for the number reflecting your balance, an attribute of it.
People think that banks hold their money: they don't. The bank simply owes you your money but they don't hold it for you. What you get in return for your money is a statement from the bank what debt they owe you and a device to convert that debt into goods whenever you feel like it. That device is not the same as the underlying money, it is merely a proxy for your debt.
Which you'd find out about in a hurry if your bank ever went under and your card stopped to work.
Are there standard mag stripe/chip cards that draw from a BTC account and exchange into fiat at the time of purchase of a good?
All the cards I've seen when I looked into it a bit ago converted into fiat at the time of charging the card with BTC (ie, you send BTC, that got converted into fiat immediately (at pretty mediocre rates), and then you could use that fiat to purchase stuff or withdraw cash (at pretty mediocre rates, again)).
Maybe I'm not clear on how a btc debit works but that seems foolish. Maybe a few years ago when it could actually function as a medium of exchange. Now the transaction fees are exorbitant.
All the remarks about the skyrocketing fees can be cut short by pointing out that Bitcoin Cash (which is much closer to the Bitcoin described in the white paper than Bitcoin Segwit [BTC]) doesn't have this problem. Just like Satoshi Nakamoto said that the block size limit could be raised once blocks started to get full, the developers of the Bitcoin Cash software also say the current max. block size of 8 MB can be raised if the blocks get full.
> I'm not clear on how a btc debit works but that seems foolish.
Not sure there's any response possible for that one. "I don't know how it works, but I think it's dumb."
> Now the transaction fees are exorbitant.
Every standard sized bitcoin transaction bar the past three days (and those will too), that people paid over 5c for has been committed to the blockchain.
Either pay a ridiculous fee or wait a ridiculous amount of time for confirmation?
Replace by fee is a thing, as long as the tx is unconfirmed it could be replaced. You're effectively saying the wait time is now 3 days unless you want to pay a fee of several dollars. So that rules out most transactions.
How do you pay for anything given those restrictions?
You can't explain how your bitcoin debit is usable without paying a high fee or waiting a long time, so I don't know how bitcoin works? I hardly think that's fair. Your responses are practically non-sequiturs.
Lightning network hasn't been rolled out yet. It has nothing to do with our conversation.
What it did, was it made it possible to create a decentralized store of value without the need of a central authority. And that has definitely made people question their understanding of what money even is.
Not really. Anyone who is confident in the mainstream view of money, which requires the existence of a bank or government of some kind, would quickly dismiss Bitcoin. If I cannot pay my taxes or mortgage with it, why should I accept it?
(And of course, if I can pay my taxes and mortgage, how can anyone claim to have removed the central authority from money? Just like the gold standard, nothing would prevent a government from changing its mind about whether or not to accept Bitcoin for tax payments.)
Like I said, if you already believe that money can exist without a central authority, Bitcoin simply serves as validation. Otherwise it does not really change anything, because if you accept mainstream views of money, then the premise of Bitcoin makes no sense at all.
You think Bitcoin is a decentralized store of value? Tell that to all those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding, which is being resolved by paying for the lost BTC according to the price in Yen at the time Mtgox declared bankruptcy which is a tiny fraction of the current prices. When push comes to shove the "value" being stored is measured in fiat currency, with all its associated central authorities.
> You think Bitcoin is a decentralized store of value? Tell that to all those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding
That is a gross misrepresentation and a misunderstanding of the point of a decentralized store of value. "All those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding" were not using a decentralized store of value. They were using a centralized broker that handled things for them. If they kept their own private keys and managed their coins directly, in a decentralized way, they would be still whole today.
The context: MtGox is currently going through a bankruptcy proceeding in Japan. The complaint right now is that the creditors i.e. people who had accounts with positive BTC balances when MtGox declared bankruptcy will be repaid in JPY, according to the price of their BTC balance when MtGox declared bankruptcy in 2014. Since then, the value of BTC has obviously increased quite a lot, so much so that MtGox can actually use its remaining BTC assets to repay those creditors, leaving plenty of BTC to pay the shareholders.
In other words, even if you think Bitcoin acts as a "store of value," that still does not make it "money" according to the law. You can have 1BTC or 100BTC, but the law is only concerned with the monetary (i.e. fiat currency) value at some particular time (not necessarily right now).
Gold and silver were a decentralized store of value from about 600BC till 1935AD, so ~2500 years. FDR and Congress made owning gold illegal in 1934 and then the dollar went off the gold standard in 1971. Previous fiat currencies have usually not lasted more that a few generations before they blow up. Now is about the right time for that to happen.
Reading history is fun and can help one understand the present. I'd highly recommend it. "Debt: The first 5000 years" is a great book and a good start at trying to understand what money is/has been.
> it made it possible to create a decentralized store of value without the need of a central authority
In itself, that always existed: it's called gold and gems. It's the most primitive store of value ever- modern economies were born when we went past it.
Yes, bitcoin is better than gold in that it's virtual and can be transferred over the internet.
But that doesn't change the fact that it's a store of value like gold is, and not a currency.
> Name-calling cryptocurrencies "primitive"
I called gold primitive as a currency. And made an argument for bitcoin (specifically) being similar to gold.
Edit: btw, gold 500 years ago had the same exact property of bitcoin today: it was immediately transferable to anybody you were in contact with and could buy goods from. That didn't make it better.
Oh sure, US was just demonstrative: I think commodity is the right mindset, both as a user and as a community. Banning it's not going to happen, taxing it will be tricky, and it may be premature to rework anybody's tax system just for BTC.
Pretty sure paper says it is a p2p cash system. The goal wasn't a store of value that was a natural side effect of the limited supply and the utility of the network effect from being a means of transacting.
If there is something Satoshi Nakamoto didn't seem to understand, is money. He designed a system that, being capped to a max amount of units, is intrinsically deflationary, and thus cannot serve as money. You don't transact with something that was worth x last year and 2x this year (not to mention 10k last week and 17k this week), it's just dumb.
> intrinsically deflationary, and thus cannot serve as money.
It is hard getting out of the inflationary currency mind-set, I recognize that.
> it's just dumb.
It's great. The money put on my debit card card a few months ago means that the beers I buy today are 1/3 of the price of what they were relative to the time the money was put on the card. And you know what's better than beer? Good beer on special.
You do know that trend isn’t sustainable, right? Bitcoin evangelists in 2017 seem to love talking about the rate of increase in price as if increasing in value by 300% every couple of months is a built-in feature.
I expect bitcoin to stabilize at an ever appreciating value in line with existing inflation. And not government CPI, with their hedonic quality adjustments either, actual inflation. But I don't see getting to that point for a long long time.
Why would you expect bitcoin to stabilize? I see no mechanism that would do that. Gold has had thousands of years of use as money-like instrument, and only periods of relative (nominal) stability during the last century or so have been when there have been organizations (central banks) to keep that stable.
Yes, cryptocurrency prices will stabilize when they displace all fiat currencies ;) Because, until they do, they'll be too damn attractive for speculative investors to resist. That was part of the original plan, as I recall from discussion in various cryptoanarchist forums.
In that case I assume you never brought a computer from 2000-2010, when you could wait a year or so to get twice the computation for the same price?
For that matter, would you even buy beer now, when you could instead invest the money risk-free in US govt. bonds so you could buy more beer in future?
I did, but during the years I certainly delayed the purchase of many technological goods because I assumed that waiting for their price to decrease or their performances to improve was a wise thing to do. Didn't you? Imagine how companies loved that, and imagine extending it to just everything, from food to housing.
However, with technological items there was always another side: the new ones were so much better than our current ones, ours were actually getting old faster, and we were driven to buy. The same won't happen with the other goods on the market.
The interest of gov bonds or of any other financial instrument afaik represents (and is proportional to) a risk of not getting repaid.
>I did, but during the years I certainly delayed the purchase of many technological goods because I assumed that waiting for their price to decrease or their performances to improve was a wise thing to do. Didn't you?
But you still purchased it eventually. In that sense a deflationary currency might change the balance of consumer spending vs saving in favour of more saving, but that doesn't mean a continuous downwards spiral in spending, it could just be a new equilibrium.
>Imagine how companies loved that, and imagine extending it to just everything, from food to housing.
Personally I'd absolutely love if house prices halved every year, as at the rate they're currently increasing it'll be a long time before I could afford even a tiny apartment anywhere near where I work.
>However, with technological items there was always another side: the new ones were so much better than our current ones, ours were actually getting old faster, and we were driven to buy. The same won't happen with the other goods on the market.
Would it be bad thing if it did happen to other goods on the market? If e.g. a 2005 car was better than a 2000 car to the same degree that a 2005 computer was better than a 2000 computer.
>The interest of gov bonds or of any other financial instrument afaik represents (and is proportional to) a risk of not getting repaid.
I was referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-free_interest_rate : "In practice, to infer the risk-free interest rate in a particular situation, a risk-free bond is usually chosen—that is, one issued by a government or agency whose risks of default are so low as to be negligible."
For the reasons I explained, and that apply only to a small subset of goods.
> Would it be bad thing if it did happen to other goods on the market?
That is definitely not decided by the currency.
> risks of default are so low as to be negligible
Those have also negligible interest rates, that is, ones that only repay you of the inconvenience of not spending your money now. You know, there's also a non negligible risk that you'll die before you get your money back.
He (and all the rest of them) dont understand the modern economy. It's like banging your head against a wall.
You explain the importance of monetary policy, why the gold standard is problematic, why this means Bitcoin will not replace modern currencies, yet they don't really hear. They just don't like "The System" and want to subvert it.
Bitcoin is great, but it will not change 'the system'. It is a novel and ingenious asset, nothing more.
This has been said many, many times, but I will say it again: the criticism of Bitcoin being deflationary would be valid only if Bitcoin was to replace the entire financial system. But it's perfectly fine for it to be deflationary if it's replacing only parts of the system.
Can you give any other data-point that shows the dangers of deflation that didn't happen during during a world war and wasn't actually caused by fractional reserve banking and government interference?
Gold has existed for thousands of years, surely this commonly accepted idea is based on more than one or two heavily flawed data-points.
Or perhaps it is you that is wrong, and all the illusions you cling to amount to nothing more than the indignant declarations from seventeenth century clergy of the intolerable social consequences if it were to be widely accepted that god may not exist.
Things do not endure merely because some social engineer has a tortured explanation for them he trots out at every opportunity to justify the construct.
I’m not sure why you are being down voted. What you are illustrating is the time value of money, a real economic concept. A deflationary currency like bitcoin encourages non productive hoarding at the expense of investment and commerce. It makes a great store of value, but a terrible medium of exchange. And when we say “currency” we are usually talking about the medium of exchange purpose of money...
That is the effect of our current financial system, where the use of debt to bid up the price of fixed assets has been labeled 'commerce' and 'investment'. The only effect of which has been the punishment of savers.
It also disincentivises investment, resulting in an economy less productive than it could be, and with built-in bias and stratifying wealth transfer, not unlike the system of bankers it seeks to replace.
Edit: do we know if economies really behave like this under these conditions? Are we really using a scientific approach on this? Or are we holding these models as divine truth?
It’s a bit like asking if the Church-Turing thesis is true or not, and if we’re really using a scientific approach to answering that question. On the one hand.. I’m writing this on a computer, dude! There is a pragmatic sense in which the Church-Turing thesis is “scientifically true” in the amount of progress that has been made in the domain of computer science which it invented, which does follow a scientific process. It allows us to make accurate predictions and test them. But it is embarrassing to say the thesis itself is just that, an axiomatic assumption. (There are some pretender proofs out there, but not consensus that they are correct.)
The relationship between productivity plus inflation (both measurable) and economic growth is similar. It’s the bedrock of modern macroeconomic theory, which has largely been successful in both explaining and predicting the effect macro policy has on economic growth. The history of North American and Western European economies after going off the gold standard, and asian and Eastern Europe economies more recently all show these same correlations. Outside of external influence, economies which stray outside of the ideal parameters end up either stagnating (lack of investment) or experience dramatic boom-bust cycles (excessive poor investments). I’m on mobile but there’s a fair number of reports by Fed and other central banks justifying their choice of interest rate based on historical examples, and with the purpose of achieving certain productivity (capital investment) and price inflation (money supply). You could also pick up just about any macroeconomics textbook and chase the footnotes and references or spend some time on Google scholar.
> The history of North American and Western European economies after going off the gold standard, and asian and Eastern Europe economies more recently all show these same correlations.
So what you're saying is that it's all based on one data point, the second world-war. Gold existed for thousands of years, why is this incredibly bizarre period of history used as a proof of anything about the gold-standard?
Even worse, the gold standard wouldn't have collapsed if it weren't for the widespread use of fractional reserves banking, along with many government policies at the time that significantly worsened the situation.
The 40's, 50's and 60's were a period of unprecedented growth for the US, which was on the gold standard during that whole period, but no one tries to claim that the gold standard was responsible for that.
Surely, if 1000 people own 40% of a currency which had evangelical aims to service 7.5 billion people, then it is impossible to call it decentralised... Add this to the obvious fact that the vast majority of new bitcoins mined are from china, which due to the scale of processing power now has a monopoly due to capital barriers. The conclusion is... great experiment, but as in all deliberate implementations of social ,political, or economic theory. The real world is a very different beast to one man's view from a desk. I feel sorry for any new uneducated investors getting in now. This has become nothing more than a pyramid scheme that adds no value whatsoever to the world. Not cryptocurrency as an idea, but bitcoin's current iteration and implementation.
> Surely, if 1000 people own 40% of a currency which had evangelical aims to service 7.5 billion people, then it is impossible to call it decentralised...
Decentralized can have many meanings. What is important is that you can transact with anyone without a third party having any say. For that 99% of all coins could be in the hands of a single person as long as there would be enough left for others to use.
> Add this to the obvious fact that the vast majority of new bitcoins mined are from china, which due to the scale of processing power now has a monopoly due to capital barriers
As long as they do not collude to destroy or disrupt the network it has no relevance at all.
> This has become nothing more than a pyramid scheme that adds no value whatsoever to the world. Not cryptocurrency as an idea, but bitcoin's current iteration and implementation.
As Bitcoin is practically useless due to high fees and congestion, I agree. But not because the reasons you gave.
> Decentralized can have many meanings. What is important is that you can transact with anyone without a third party having any say.
I understand the premise of decentralised transactions, it's just that if the value of the currency can be manipulated by small group, it is not removing the need for trust, just shifting it...
> As long as they do not collude to destroy or disrupt the network it has no relevance at all.
I thought the point of decentralisation was to remove the need to trust others...
> As Bitcoin is practically useless due to high fees and congestion, I agree. But not because the reasons you gave.
AGREE! 7tps vs Visas 4,000tps with a peak capacity of 56,000 tps...
> it's just that if the value of the currency can be manipulated by small group, it is not removing the need for trust, just shifting it...
I think there's different aspects to "manipulated".
Large holders or exchanges can always manipulate the price, this is true for cryptocurrencies, the stock market and other things as well. Cryptocurrencies is however much less mature and more easily manipulated, but I foresee it to stabilize in the years to come.
If we're thinking of the miners to manipulate the coin I think the real genius of Bitcoin is they are heavily incentivized not to. All miners are heavily invested in Bitcoin's success so it's in their best interest not to destroy Bitcoin's value.
> I thought the point of decentralisation was to remove the need to trust others...
To be clear: what miners can do if they collude is try to revert transactions or block new transactions. If this happens it would be obvious and Bitcoin's value would be severely damaged.
There is trust yes, but it's more trust in the incentives behind Bitcoin than to specific miners themselves.
> As Bitcoin is practically useless due to high fees and congestion
I disagree here. Gold is very expensive to get into and out of on a percentage basis, also requires careful storage, and is more difficult to exchange (manual pickup/delivery or insured registered mail). And yet it is worth eight trillion dollars.
In addition, believing that Bitcoin is dead for transactional uses because of temporary issues may be a mistake. It is simply software after all, and there are now hundreds of billions of reasons for the developers and users to get it right. My thought is that the alt-coins are simply testing “improvements” to the core technology, and if any updates are sufficiently proven and begin to threaten Bitcoin they will simply be stolen by Bitcoin’s users and eventually co-opt the alt-coin’s value due to Metcalfe’s law.
Yes okay. I can add that Bitcoin is practically useless because you can get the exact same service using other coins like Bitcoin Cash.
The problem is uncertainty if your transaction goes through, because it's practically impossible to predict if the fee you just paid will be enough, and that Bitcoin cannot support more users.
Gold does not have these issues. Gold also has other usage but what is the use of Bitcoin if you cannot move it?
> In addition, believing that Bitcoin is dead for transactional uses because of temporary issues may be a mistake.
Agree. I should say that Bitcoin is practically useless right now when the fees and confirmation times are skyrocketing.
It's not hard to titrate your fee to your desired confirmation speed. Just look at the mempool, sorted by fee and age of transaction: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
If everyone else does the same you're out of luck. Your best bet is to pay a lot more and hope you pay more than the others.
This is because you're not only competeing against the transactions in the mempool but also against future transactions which may enter after you make your transcation and before more blocks are found.
The white paper doesn't discuss wealth distribution at all. Bitcoin is a critique of money involving trust in entities not party to a transaction, and not much else. Where this leads us as far as far as wealth distribution goes is potentially interesting, but was never evangelized by the white paper or the community that built it.
The idea that money should be distributed more broadly than 1000 people controlling 40% of it sounds really nice, but it is missing the level of formalism that Bitcoin brings to the question of money.
> Surely, if 1000 people own 40% of a currency which had evangelical aims to service 7.5 billion people, then it is impossible to call it decentralised
Haha. Where do you get that? If a random guy says you so, don't believe in him.
In my view Bitcoin as a very important flaw it's distribution timing it should have been scheduled with a more linear curve and to last at least 100 years so you can achieve a fairer distribution or alternatively to have a small inflation system built in.
cryptocurrency can be used in the background for fiat money settlements, It has made me a better software engineer for sure, secure code will always be in fashion. Also the majority of online gambling which is a billion dollar industry is better suited with cryptocurrency. I don't think it is going away, it could crash 80% and I still wouldnt sell as long as the money remains programmable.
Equally elucidating are the responses on the Cryptography List from other cryptographers[1], plus the responses a few months later when Bitcoin 0.1 was released[2].
You can pretty easily tell which cryptographers read the whitepaper and which ones did not. :)
> I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to start with, so for a little while in the beginning a typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few hours.
If only I had given up “just a few hours” back in 2009...
...and held the coins until today. Or maybe next year it will be worth 10x more.
Put another way, if you had sold your desktop and invested all the proceeds in Amazon stock in 1997, and held that stock until now, you would have a 66000% return; basically you would have become a millionaire by now. Of course you would have had to held those shares through two big market crashes and the recessions that followed.
On the other hand, how could anyone have known that 20 years ago Amazon was going to be the winner? You might have invested all the proceeds in some company that did not survive the dot-com crash. Likewise, in 2009 most people doubted Bitcoin; even today there is plenty of doubt about the long-term prospects. There is no point in kicking yourself over a failure to invest in a big winner, especially when that winner defies all the wisdom on valuations.
Brin and Page themselves tried to sell Google to excite.com for less than $1MM in 1997. Luckily for them they got turned down. Hal Finney stopped mining coins after it started overheating his PC too often. Would he have done this if he believed each 50 coin block would someday be worth over half a million bucks? I think that would justify buying a second desktop or perhaps a better cooling fan.
Nobody knows what the future fortunes of any venture will be, anyone who claims to have known the future success of Bitcoin all along is lying, or they would have sold their blood and worldly possessions to snag as many coins as humanly possible in anticipation.
Thanks for sharing this. Of all the Sathoshi candidates, Hal Finney seems to be the closest (Not my analysis, but I tend to concur). Although he always denied it. When I read this[1] early reply by him, he seems to totally grok it.
I love reading papers that solve fundamental, well-known problems.
They frequently seem so obvious after-the-fact, like "how did we miss this?" Like, here, stated in just a few pages, is an idea that so many smart people have been chasing after for years. And it's presented so well that it seems intuitive, when in reality it was a very difficult challenge.
If anyone is wondering, the answer is that the academics had blinders on in their search for a cryptographic solution to the problem of decentralized transaction ordering, an impossible thing. Satoshi's solution is to accept that impossibility and use economic incentives to achieve eventual consensus instead, and it turns out eventual consensus is good enough.
I doubt that that's the one true answer. If I had been researching the topic at the time, I would have accepted eventual consensus. As somebody who has done research into algorithms, the reason why I would have disregarded Bitcoin's approach is that it's inherently terribly inefficient.
Many cryptographic protocols are much less efficient. I asserted that only as someone who was in that space an personally knows the people who were doing research on this in the 90’s and 00’s. Nearly all effort was focused on finding a solution that had finality of settlement guarantees.
There was also some work on hashcash money, but it made the economically naive and inaccurate assumption that value of the currency must be linked to the cost of production, which is also explicitly not the case in bitcoin.
The document is littered with references to CPUs, including the phrase "one CPU one vote." I think a Bitcoin where CPUs were doing the blockchain processing would be much different that the current one dominated by farms of dedicated hardware. I don't know if it would be better, but I think this is a pretty stark reminder that Bitcoin is not behaving as intended.
This has turned into an interesting question since some coins now are specifically designed to be resistant to ASICs. The downside for those coins is that botnets or general purpose hardware (that can be purchased or rented for an attack and then resold for other uses later) are a serious threat to the network. A potential benefit for Bitcoin is that the network may actually be more secure with custom ASICS because the people investing millions into developing the custom hardware stand to lose everything if they attack or seriously harm the network. That equipment would be useless for any other purpose, and that same dominating hardware makes the Bitcoin network immune to attack from general purpose hardware.
If you need a relatively small handful of people to control the ecosystem to make it secure from large numbers of decentralized users, then what the heck do you need Bitcoin for?
I think that the mistake here is believing that the miners control the network, when most likely the miners simply work for the decentralized network. When the miners become centralized there is little they can do that the users/nodes can’t unwind with a software update, even up to the point of firing those miners completely if necessary (changing the proof of work so that their current hardware is worthless). I think that long-term the incentives are aligned for them to simply do their job.
Satoshi's mining/minting algorithm is manipulative by design.
Less computational energy and the least amount if users produced the most coins (for minimal external capital input).
Satoshi could have used a linear curve anticipating network growth matching minting and computational increase, but instead choose to exploit late adopters.
Early adopters will attempt to psychologically exploit new users by selling their asset for more than the cost of production and acquisition.
This has directly created the situation where utility is not in use but in exploitation of passing the hot potato to greater fools.
Because creating the blockchain hasn't yet been shown to have either advanced the field of the study of economics, or increased our understanding of economics. It is often years later that economists are awarded.
Giving an award for Bitcoin right now would seem more like giving an award to the financial institutions that created securitized loan products before the housing crisis. Right now it seems more like a novelty technology that hasn't yet made itself relevant for long-term innovation except to generate excitement about it.
And you underestimate that you still can't give someone an award who does not exist to receive it.
> And you underestimate that you still can't give someone an award who does not exist to receive it.
Which is what baffles me. I thought we should be honouring ideas and the people who created/discovered them (whether or not they exist to receive the award). It's weird that people get more precedence over ideas. What's worse is that the prize isn't awarded posthumously as well!
It's quite clear that the nomination was rejected on flimsy grounds of not awarding the Prize for "unknown people" because there is no such "precedence".
Not that creating Bitcoin wasn't an achievement, but it built upon heaps of existing systems that explored proof of work, distributed ledgers and so on.
The main innovation was the combination of ledgers with proof of work to prevent Sybil attacks in the face of a system with unidentified participants.
"Look at my great new financial product!" just isn't that interesting from a theoretical perspective, even if it really is cool and innovative. Knowing how to implement an immutable distributed ledger won't help you understand anything about the economy on its own.
This paper packs an enormous idea into a tiny package. It's worth reading - and re-reading.
If you've studied electronic cash systems and/or cryptographic systems before, the paper is quite easy to read. Otherwise it's a challenge. At least that's what I found.
Here's a companion article that fills in some of the blanks.
It seems to me, an understanding of financial systems and macroeconomics is much more useful (or at least as useful) in evaluating a currency than the technology behind it.
There's plenty of people who understand the blockchain quite well who have a pretty ... imaginative understanding of monetary theory.
The way bitcoin was approached seemed to ignore the idea that the boom/bust cycle is mitigated through regulation and control. It isn't eliminated, but instead dampened. While economic miracles and bull runs seem great, if they are followed by devastating crashes, the market instability and "whiplash effect" of this occurring in rapid succession can slow attempts at economic recovery at best, and spark revolutions at worst. Austrian economists love the idea of "letting the chips fall where they may", but that reductive thinking ignores the social and political upheaval that the previous centuries have taught us result from instability.
The financial safeguards that we've been putting in (and unfortunately removing over the past 30-40 years) are there for a reason.
The flip side of this, of course, is that the boom/bust cycle is amplified by fractional reserve banking - banks create and destroy money by changing their lending policies in response to the current global financial situation, and this makes both the booms and the busts bigger. (Apparently, many economists missed this because their model of bank lending is wrong. Some Bank of England staff did a paper on it a while back, if I recall correctly.)
While it sounds plausible on the surface, this is not at all supported empirically. There have never been economies without fractional reserve banking that one could reasonably compare with ours.
There are also plausible-sounding arguments to be made in the opposite direction: Fractional reserve banking allows money to be created and destroyed adaptively to support the economy, which makes the economy run more smoothly overall.
Most of the information you need to understand to invest in Bitcoin (e.g. the distributed boiler room) is not contained in the white paper at all. Now that people are using Bitcoin as digital gold or digital tulips, one could even argue that the white paper is misleading.
Do you know how a fridge works? How about an airplane? How about how to make steel? How to sew a shirt? How to drill and process oil to make gasoline? Every level of the internet stack? How to program hardware drivers? How to farm everything you eat?
"To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash,
transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash." - totally approachable to the layman
I could go on about the summations and other advanced math symbolics in this paper but you seem very out of touch with the knowledge base of most people so I'm not sure it matters.
You don't have to invest in those to use them. You can, for example, use someone else's fridge, without first buying a fridge, and thus learn about the risks and benefits of fridges at no cost to you.
A slightly more apples-to-apples comparison: would it make sense for you to become an early investor in a new futures exchange, claiming it'll do "a new kind of futures trading", without having read any papers or textbooks on futures trading?
There are contexts and limitations. I have no practical use to understand my fridge to such a degree because it will yield me nothing in the future. I just need to keep it plugged in, cool, and not broken. All easy to verify.
I have control of my money and bitcoin is within the realm of learnability, so I'd say it should be required. It is intimate knowledge of a protocol with many working parts that will have a direct effect on your earnings.
The white paper is very approachable, and Bitcoins is a technical marvel. My big problem with Bitcoins has nothing to do with blockchains, trust or even security. All of that looks great. My problem with Bitcoin is simply that it’s a deflationary currency, and can only ever be a deflationary currency.
Prove me wrong by spending, lending or investing your Bitcoins.
The reason being is that the owners of Bitcoin.org are actively trying to rewrite the white paper even against the larger community’s wishes. I believe sometime in the near future the owners will go ahead with their plans anyways as they seem to do that when it comes to other issues too.
SHA-256 could be more broken than SHA-1 and it would still serve perfectly well for mining.
If you don't reuse addresses then even if ECDSA is broken then your coins are still safe. And ECDSA being broken is pretty much the darkest scenario. In which case it can simply be replaced with something else starting at specific block.
> SHA-256 could be more broken than SHA-1 and it would still serve perfectly well for mining.
Sure, but the block header only commits to the double-SHA256 hash tree of transactions. If SHA-2 was broken I could create a single block header that commits to two different valid histories, allowing arbitrary double-spends and irreconcilable divergent views of the network.
Not to mention being able to spend anyone's coins by finding alternate pub keys or hashes that collide with their committed p2pkh or p2sh outputs.
Transactions follow very specific binary format. I don't think it's even plausible that you could find collision within those constraints. Plus, as you said it is double hashed. So then you would have to find collision within small fixed amount 32 bytes. It's just not happening.
Regarding the second one, google bitcoin address collision, it was repeated so many times with great analogies that I'm not going to try to do it here yet another time.
The post I was responding to was the exact hypothetical “if SHA-2 were broken...”
All arguments about collision and preimage resistance are based on the assumption of SHA-2 doing what we think it does. A catastrophic break of SHA-2 would destroy the bitcoin ledger.
I still don’t get how if I start trying a proof of work, and someone faster than me finishes the same proof of Work first, I would never mine a single bitcoin? Is that even the right question?
There's no continuous project you're working on. It's just getting a lot of chances of winning the lottery. If someone finishes before you, you just slightly alter the number you're searching for and continue on. You're also not really working towards the same thing. Your solution probably includes you sending the blockreward to yourself and their solution includes them sending it to themselves too, on top of that you may also choose other secondary transactions. The chosen transactions influence the number you need to find.
It does happen that two blocks are found at nearly the same time, before adjustments can be made. In those cases one of the two ends up getting 'orphaned', it's relatively rare compared to normal blocks though.
More hashpower inceeases the likelihood that your find your block before the other guy, but the PoW is stateless, there's no "progress" made u til you find the solution, it's purely random each time you increment the nonce and try a new hash, thus expected rewards follow a poisson distribution.
> someone faster than me finishes the same proof of Work first, I would never mine a single bitcoin?
That's right.
Now, probabilistically, you'd occasionally get lucky and get the full (big) mining reward, in proportion to your fraction of total hash power.
The alternative is that you join a mining pool, and then receive the same amount (in expectation), minus the pool fee, but with much smaller variance, as the larger pool will much more frequently get lucky and then distribute the reward (minus the pool fee) to the contributors in proportion to their hash power.
But either way, your expected reward will be approximately the same, whether or not you work in a pool (modulo the pool fee), it's just whether you get a large amount very rarely or a small amount very often.
I’d be interested in everyone else’s opinion about the odds that Bitcoin becomes an asset class to rival gold (say at least $2T market cap vs the $8T gold currently is). Right now I’m guessing 20%. Those odds still make the current price a positive expected value (since the 1/5 future has such a handsome payoff), but with a 4/5 chance of failure it wouldn’t be very smart to do this with more than a few percent of net worth. Thoughts?
I view this paper with both love and hate. I think it's technically brilliant and fascinating, and at the same time incredibly naive and will do far more harm than good in this world.
While a trust free payment mechanism sounds wonderful, this implementation cannot succeed in the real world. In my mind proof-of-work is already an ecological disaster. As long as the price of bitcoin goes up, there is an incentive for miners to commit more energy and resources - yet those resources do not increase productivity. Whether there is 1 transaction or 200k, Megawatts are wasted to mine that block. I doubt 99% of people getting into Bitcoin have a remote understanding of how this works. This concerns me far more than the threat of upending governments - my biggest fear is in fact that governments will instead choose to adopt this technology because they would love the ability to track the history of every transaction.
While there are several proposed solutions to many of bitcoins weaknesses, we live in the real world, and the real world goes where the money is. While bitcoin is decentralized in design, in reality, it is controlled by a few mining factions who ultimately control what code enhancements get adopted and how the game is played. Why would they want to increase the block-size, when a smaller block will lead to greater fees? Running a full node is getting expensive, and soon, only the deep pockets will be left to guard.
People will never get bitcoin. It's simply too confusing for the average person. The user experience is a disaster. You're telling me once I buy bitcoin, I'm supposed to transfer it to a hardware wallet? What's a hardware wallet? Wait, so if I accidentally am off by one character in the address I sent money too it's gone forever? There's no one I can call? Bitcoin should never have been any more than just a novelty for the technically inclined, or a technology used for something other than a currency. It's why I can't stand Coinbase - they are lining up the naive (and greedy) masses into the slaughterhouse.
I have non-technical friends who do not understand that their bitcoin is not backed by anything. They do not understand that the money they put in, was immediately taken out by someone else, and that the price of bitcoin is just a funny number. The $XXX billion dollar market cap is fiction. Owning a bitcoin does not give you claim to the output of some productive asset like a stock would. Unfortunately, history tells us we're in the early innings. The real dumb money is just getting in the door. But when the music stops, and the evangelists have squeezed enough out of this lemon, that funny number will go back to zero. And a lot of people who couldn't afford it will get really hurt.
I'm confident that I could be making a killing in bitcoin right now. But it's not about the money for me - my conscience just keeps saying stay away. I really hope either I've completely got it wrong or bitcoin just dies soon.
You managed to cram so much wrong into a post it's unbelievable. Let's start with your 'off by one' address scare tactic. Bitcoin addresses contain a built-in check code, so it's generally not possible to send Bitcoins to a mistyped address.
Ecological concerns? A global, nacent value exchange system uses a little more than the total electricity of holiday lights. In fact many miners use cheap unused energy that would be otherwise costly to build infrastructure to sell normally.
Fair on the first point (thank you, good to learn). Still doesn't make me feel better if I send something to the wrong (yet) valid address that I have no recourse to fix that. Or if I lose my key there is no institution who would be there to help me.
Hydro may be cheap for now, but does that make it okay? If Bitcoin keeps going up, at some point we'll exhaust those more convenient resources. The comparison to holiday lights is misleading because I never said that wasn't bad for the environment either. I'm not sure I can trust a site like icenter.co given it appears pro-bitcoin, but many people are analyzing the environmental impact of bitcoin and it's not negligible and only growing. You're right, it's nascent, and that's the scary part given how inefficient it is.
I stand by too confusing, especially when it comes to financial products. Try to explain proof-of-work to a non-technical person in less than 30 minutes. Explain hard-forks, segwit2, lightning network, double-spend, network attacks, and why the recommendation is to never leave your bitcoin on an exchange.
Our current system of money and banking isn't great, but this is not an improvement.
Edit: Now you've sent me down this other rabbit whole of educating myself on China's Hydro power. China's overbuilding of Dams may be in itself be a big problem (methane release, destruction of biodiversity, 300k deaths). I'd hate for Bitcoins popularity to contribute to the demand side of this equation.
Average person on the street knows almost literally nothing about how money of any kind works. They don’t understand fractional reserve banking, marginal taxation, compound interest, present / future value of money, marginal utility, double entry bookkeeping, annuities, amortization, dividend yields, etc, etc, etc. It’s exactly the same with technology and cars and on and on. Seriously, people do not get it. And yet the systems mostly work. We’re actually pretty good at taking complicated things and making them usable. Do you think people have the foggiest idea what happens under the hood with Apple Pay? There’s no way that the future of mass market cc will look anything like it does now.
From where I stand, there is zero reason that crypto-currency couldn’t be the backbone of all money in a few decades. It’s starting to feel inevitable.
If David Chaum were to release something like bitcoin it would only be after filing a few hundred patents, re-working it every time just before release and making partnerships with every commercial entity under the sun.
It is also important to understand in technical terms what a 'peer' is in bitcoin. A peer is a node, which is a client that validates all transactions and blocks in the blockchain. It is this understanding which forces people to respect the resource requirements of nodes, because any reduction in nodes is a reduction in peers. Any increase in resources requirements must be carefully planned and implemented to ensure the security of the network is maintained.
This is incorrect. The 'peer' in 'peer-to-peer electronic cash' is a reference to a counterparty to a transaction. It's "peer-to-peer" because there is no "trusted third party" (a term used in the white paper) acting as an intermediary.
Satoshi extensively detailed the ability of participants in the Bitcoin network to use light clients, that don't fully validate the blockchain, and predicted that the vast majority of people would use such clients in the future.
The vision of Bitcoin Core that you're promoting totally contradicts the one promulgated in the Bitcoin white paper and further descriptions provided by Satoshi.
The idea of the vast majority of people not being able to hold their own private keys, because transaction fees are so high, contradicts several core features of Bitcoin that are described in the white paper.
No one was discussing the Core implementation of Bitcoin. Why do you bring it up. OP was discussing the engineering trade offs associated with engineering a blockchain.
>The idea if the vast majority of people not unable to hold their own private keys, because transaction fees...
Key custody and transaction fees have nothing to do with each other. I believe you’re referring to UTXO custody, which is influenced by fees. Miners aren’t altruistic, they won’t hash for free. Choose security and fees or no chain-tip extension / double spending is economically feasible.
I bring it up because he's promoting the Bitcoin Core vision for Bitcoin, and I am criticizing that vision. I'm giving a name for the stance that he has for communicative efficiency. How is his vision different than Bitcoin Core's?
>>Key custody and transaction fees have nothing to do with each other.
What are you talking about? They have everything to do with each other. If the average tx fee is $100, you will not be able to have bitcoin sent to your own private key unless you are handling large amounts of value - amounts that are way beyond what the vast majority of the world population deals with.
>>Miners aren’t altruistic, they won’t hash for free.
What does this have to do with having control over your own private key? You're changing the subject instead of addressing the fact that the Bitcoin Core idea of $100 transaction fees means the vast majority of the world population will have to rely on trusted third parties to control the private keys to their wealth, which totally contradicts the purpose of Bitcoin as described in the white paper.
OP was discussing the engineering trade offs associated with engineering a blockchain. Every group engineering a blockchain makes the types of choices he was referring to. To assume he's talking about Bitcoin Core makes you seem like Don Quixote.
>They have everything to do with each other.
You said key custody has to do with fees, which it does not. The fee market does not influence, at all, how hard or easy it is to maintain custody of keys on a blockchain. Again fees do influence the cost of updating the UXTO set. You're confusing the two terms.
>$100 transaction fees means the vast majority of the world population will have to rely on trusted third parties to control the private keys to their wealth
People pay the fees that they are willing to pay. Your position reminds me of the Yogi-ism "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It's Too Crowded". Are you arguing that people are too stupid to know how much fees they're willing to pay? Again, miners will not hash for free. If users want low fees and low security, they got what they wanted by forking off to bcash. People who wanted high security and high fees, they got what they wanted by sticking the legacy consensus rules. What is exactly the problem with this paradigm?
He went out of his way to argue for a particular (and I would argue wrong) interpretation of what 'peer' in 'peer-to-peer electronic cash' means, and his interpretation seems intended to support the 1-MB-digital-gold side of the scaling debate.
I had every right to bring up this debate since his argument very clearly was taking a side in it.
>>You said key custody has to do with fees, which it does not. The fee market does not influence, at all, how hard or easy it is to maintain custody of keys on a blockchain.
I just explained how it does. You didn't address my points. You're denying what common sense says is undeniably true, to promote a vision of Bitcoin where the vast majority of the world don't have private keys to their own Bitcoin wealth, because only a tiny portion of the world population can access the blockchain with any frequency.
>>People pay the fees that they are willing to pay. Your position reminds me of the Yogi-ism "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It's Too Crowded".
That's not even a point. "People pay the fees that they are willing to pay" is tautological. As fees increase, the portion of the population that can afford to access the blockchain shrinks. No amount of spin is going to conceal the fact that a 1-MB block size limit ensures mass adoption of Bitcoin, with Bitcoin remaining an affordable and peer-to-peer electronic cash, is impossible, and furthermore, that it betrays the original vision for Bitcoin as described in the white paper and Satoshi's other writings.
>1-MB block size limit ensures mass adoption of Bitcoin
There is nothing stopping anyone from tweaking consensus rules to their liking. This is what the bcash team did. Sounds like you're mad at people who didn't adopt bcash.
Again:
If users want low fees and low security, they got what they wanted by forking off to bcash. People who wanted high security and high fees, they got what they wanted by sticking the legacy consensus rules. What is exactly the problem with this paradigm?
If you don't run your own node, you need to trust a 3rd party to transact with the blockchain, because you require someone elses node in order to record a bitcoin transaction. So you are, by definition, not a peer, because you are not equal to a person who runs a node, because you need to trust a 3rd party.
You trust the hashpower in the aggregate, you do not trust the node that gives you the information. That is because the block solution is independently verifiable by the spv wallet. They can also independently verify that a transaction was indeed in a block. To say they don't verify anything or trust someone is not true. They don't validate the rules, they validate the hashpower. If the hashpower is evil, bitcoin is fucked anyways. If the hashpower is evil your full node can be fooled into accepting a payment for something and reversing it with their superior hashpower. The whitepaper assumes the majority of hashpower is honest for bitcoin to work...
Whitepaper, section 1, end of last paragraph...
"The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes."
If that sentence is broken, like you give as an example that would fool an spv wallet, then by definition bitcoin is not secure.
Are you explaining your definition of a trust requirement in a trustless protocol?
> by definition bitcoin is not secure.
It is not secure if you use your understanding of how bitcoin works. Which, as we've demonstrated with the four failed fork attempts, is not rooted in reality.
I just explained the evidence that this is not how Satoshi defined "trusted third party". He extensively promoted the use of light clients, and didn't find any contradiction between this and peer-to-peer electronic cash. I don't understand why you ignore this point, which I've conveyed to you in our previous discussion as well.
You also continue to sidestep the fact that Bitcoin Core's vision of letting transaction fees rise to astronomical levels with growing usage of the blockchain is going to mean the vast majority of the world population will have to trust other parties to hold their private keys, which is a much greater reliance on trusted third parties than polling random nodes for SPV proofs, as required when running a light client, which still let's the user control their own private key.
There is no such thing as a trustless implementation of a light client. Funnily enough, it was one of the things Satoshi could never get to work.
What do you mean core? Core doesn't run my node. I do. If you can't convince the peers in bitcoin to run your node client, you don't have a solution. I know this, because I do run a node, and I am a peer in peer-to-peer cash. And I, personally, have rejected your scalability plans, because I, personally, being a peer in peer-to-peer cash, have rejected your node client. I was not happy with your security model, and therefore I, with all of the other bitcoin peers, rejected it. Which is why bitcoin remains bitcoin, and failed fork after failed fork attempts remain the failed fork attempts. Because you don't have enough peers willing to follow your consensus change.
Bitcoin nakamoto consensus in action. It is a beautiful thing.
Satoshi never claimed that a "trustless implementation of a light client" is possible. The white paper explains that a light client still has to trust other nodes:
>>As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify
transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency. Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to
run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification.
While you claim that light clients betray the vision of Satoshi, based on totally unsubstantiated claims about what Satoshi meant by a light client, that are contradicted by several pieces of evidence (e.g. Satoshi communicating with Mike Hearn about Hearn's implementation of the SPV light client concept, without once claiming that his implementation fell short of Satoshi's idea of a light client, and while continuing to promote light clients on Bitcoin talk, like in this instance: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/345/), you promote a future where the vast majority of the world have zero control over their own wealth, because they can't economically control their own private keys.
> One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency
This part of the white paper is broken. Satoshi was wrong. Accepting unverifiable "alerts" from network peers as a trigger for doing large amounts of computation is a significant DoS vulnerability.
For this sort of scheme to work you would have a small-to-transmit, easy-to-verify proof of the invalidity of a block. (Called a "fraud proof" among developers who have looked at this.) Bitcoin protocol as specified by Satoshi does not allow for the full range of fraud proofs necessary to support this sort of DoS-resistant lite node implementation.
He didn't give the strategy as a requirement for light wallets to actually work. He gave it as an example of making the security trade off better. Light wallets do work. To fool them you have to have to be able to 51% the network and sybil my node. Not likely, especially if my spv wallet is checking multiple sources, even over https.
No, I have to send a simple forged "alert" packet to cause you to download 1-4MB of block data plus additional dependent spend data of similar size from your peers, and lock up your CPU for an intensive amount of time doing signature verification and hash tree calculations only to find out the alert was incorrect. Meanwhile another spoofed peer sends another alert packet....
You're totally ignoring my arguments. This is pretty much how every discussion with an advocate of 1-MB-block-Bitcoin and $100 transaction fees goes. It's bizarre.
I'm using $ as a unit of account because people have a frame of reference for it. Any real world value can be described as its dollar equivalent, and frequently is for understandability.
> So you are, by definition, not a peer, because you are not equal to a person who runs a node, because you need to trust a 3rd party.
This is incorrect and plain wrong. Trusted party only exists in Ethereum, not in Bitcoin. You are not trusting anyone when you transact in Bitcoin, there is distributed consensus. How is distributed consensus trusting a third party?
This seems incorrect. Isn't a node a process on the network that is mining blocks? It does not seem as if a process that simply reads blocks but does not add any hashrate is participating in the network as I understand it.
That seems inconsistent with the paper. For example, from the conclusion:
[Nodes] vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
I do see the separate section on "Simplified Payment Verification", which does seem distinct from mining. Is that what you are referring to?
It's very possible he never imagined* a non-mining full-node(as opposed to an spv node). Regardless full-nodes do enforce the consensus rules and reject invalid blocks.
* Another phenomenon he didn't imagine was mining pools, which drastically changed the dynamics of mining.
mining pools only group hashpower for the purpose of reducing variance and distributing payment. The mining pool does not dictate what the individual miners in the pool can and cannot do. Individual miners can enter and leave mining pools at will. Mining pools change nothing. Non-mining nodes enforce nothing without proof-of-work.
And yet here we are seeing off four hostile fork attempts in a couple of years (xt/classic/bu/2x). You'd think after four failures in a row, all failing for exactly the same reason, that the people supporting the failures might learn why they fail. But here we are. Explaining why they fail, after they fail, and yet the supporters of the failures are trying to assert that even though they fail, they understand the system. Without even acknowledging that they have failed, let alone why.
non-mining nodes attributed nothing to the failure of those forks. Look, you can stay stupid forever, it's ok, stupid people can still run nodes and use bitcoins.
but but but I thought you said nodes didn't matter? I thought you said miners make all of the decisions, which 97% were signalling 2x at one point, so couldn't they just adopt whatever consensus rules they want?
Or, perhaps, you don't actually know how bitcoin works, and therefore you can't explain how miner 'support' disappeared, as soon as it came time to decide whether they wanted to be bitcoin miners, or become alt-coin miners? You know, given that the nodes police and enforce consensus in bitcoin 'n all. Miners had a choice. Do what you're told, and mine according to node consensus rules, or don't get paid in bitcoin. So they did what they were told.
And here you are, with you still trying to fight a battle you've already lost. Four times. Losing exactly the same way every time. Because even after all of those losses, you still can't figure out why you always lose. Because even after all of those failures, you still don't understand why you lost, because you still don't understand how bitcoin works.
I suppose your full node client software must have pop-up windows when forks happen and you are prompted to click "accept" or "reject"; and when invalid blocks are detected, it prompts you if you would like to "accept", "re-try", or "delete".
You're right, a non-mining node still enforces the consensus rules. A non-mining node will reject any invalid blocks. Even if I controlled 100% of the mining hashrate I could not create a block that did something to violate the consensus rules. For example I couldn't mine a block that resulted in >21MM bitcoins.
You can definitely 'mine' such a block. The problem is getting the rest of the network to accept it. In fact, with Bitcoin Cash you can basically see what happens if blocks are created according to different rules.
However I image if suddenl 100% of the miners decided 42MM bitcoins is better (because 42), something a lot of users would be opposed to (printing money), things would become 'interesting'.
> Isn't a node a process on the network that is mining blocks?
No. It is only the validation that is important, because it is only the validation that ensures that consensus is maintained between nodes, and valid transactions can be included in the blockchain. Nodes even define the algorithm that miners must use in order to produce valid blocks.
There has been a hard education for people over the past year that have carried an incomplete understanding of how bitcoin works, and that has been encouraged by centralized companies that are attempting to wrest control of bitcoin away from its nodes. There have been four wildly unsuccessful hostile fork attempts (XT/Classic/BU/2x), and two in which alt-coins were forked (BCH/BGLD) from bitcoin in order to attempt to convince people to use their alt-coin instead of bitcoin. All of these attempts have been failures, because all of these attempts have not understood how bitcoin works, and the fact that nodes are the peers in bitcoin, and they police and enforce consensus.
I guess I just have never found support for that in the nakamoto paper. You obviously have strong feelings about it, and I'm not trying to provoke an argument. I just still don't understand where in the paper there is any discussion of non-mining nodes. The only place I can find mention of nodes that are not working on constructing new blocks on the network is in Section 8 re: the simplified verification protocol.
I believe the original intention was that all nodes would be mining nodes, and that there would be tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.
I believe in 2008 Satoshi did not understand the full implications of ASICs or economies of scale. (S)he probably didn't even realize that ASICs existed.
Regardless of the whitepaper, in our modern cyberscape the only way to be certain that the original rules (21m coins, can only spend your own money, etc.) are followed is to be confident that a wide and deep pool of users are verifying them. That is strictly at odds with heavy on-chain scaling.
"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. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node."
Satoshi was well aware of specialized hardware. If the majority of the planet were using bitcoin, it would not be necessary for every user to be a node. It would still be plenty "wide and deep" if businesses were running it. The security of SPV is actually quite good.
"I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN."
"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."
Satoshi didn't predict mining pools, but they were fully aware that mining nodes will be in minority. It's mining pools that produce centralization problem, not mining hardware.
Our understanding of Bitcoin has progressed by leaps and bounds since the system has been running for 9 years. The whitepaper is not the end-all, be-all of Bitcoin. Even Satoshi did not fully realize what he built. For more details: https://www.coindesk.com/nobody-understands-bitcoin-thats-ok...
That's because you're right and he's wrong. He's a well known bitcoin core apologist, and is just talking his political position. The original intended system design at scale had no need for non mining nodes.
This revisionism is a long running and well known war, here is the core political bloc in question actually attempting to justify editing the white paper to push their perspective over reality.
For those of us that only follow the latest on bitcoin at a high level, I think it is difficult to determine what are the points of disagreement. When I first read about bitcoin on HN in 2010, and read the whitepaper (and went to their IRC channel), I certainly don't remember thinking that non-mining nodes were that important. However, now I'm not sure, and many people making arguments on all sides seem to have good arguments at various times. I am hoping more people with good knowledge of the issues weigh-in here, rather than the over-politicized subreddits.
The real truth is that both everybody and nobody is in control.
Every participant in the system has a part to play and has a choice, miners choose which chain to mine and in doing so secure that chain from attack and earn a return, people that run nodes pick the nodes to run based on which chain they believe has the most value, or in the case of miners in order to mine the chain they believe has the most value, spv wallet users transact on the chain they value and pay fees to support the upkeep of it, the simple act of conducting trade with a cryptocurrency gives the entire apparatus basic value, so the people that don't give a damn about any given blockchain and just want to use it to move some completely unrelated asset from a to b also still give the system value, and of course the holders and traders of the actual blockchain assets give the system value and play a part in resolving contentious forks, by evaluating what they see as the market value of a given blockchain asset, forked or otherwise, and profiting or losing based on that insight.
Short of outright theft of a private key, nobody may compel even the smallest user of a blockchain to perform an action that they do not freely wish to undertake, not all the devs writing node software, shills pushing political agendas, or even miners mining blocks in the chain can change that fundamental aspect of the system that keeps it actually properly decentralised. The only way around this is to drive the vast majority of transactions off chain and force most end users to operate through third party intermediaries that manage their actual potential transactions in the system.
Like exactly what core are doing with the lightning network, for example.
To be quite honest, it doesn't matter if folks think that non-mining nodes are unimportant - they can't force folks who /are/ running full validating non-mining nodes into accepting arbitrary rule changes to the protocol. That's what's important.
Perhaps it should give you pause with that belief structure when you realize the word 'mining' doesn't even exist in the bitcoin whitepaper. It is only the nodes that exist, because it is only the nodes that validate, and everything that didn't have anything to do with validation is rightly considered a secondary concern of the protocol.
So there are nodes, which are peers. And there are people who need nodes for performing bitcoin transactions, and some of those people are miners, and some of them are just making good-ol-fashioned transactions. The correct term is "I am a peer, and I use this node for my transactions, which create blocks". Or "I am a peer, and I use this node for my transactions, which are payments."
Please read section 5 of the whitepaper on bitcoin network. You are not a node in bitcoin if you cannot perform proof-of-work. A non-mining node has no say in bitcoin.
You really should learn how bitcoin works. It will lead to a lot less frustration on your part when reality delivers a different outcome to your understanding.
Oh please. The only thing a non mining full node does is make a choice which network rules you want to follow. They do not define the rules miners use, they do that themselves.
> There have been four wildly unsuccessful hostile fork attempts (XT/Classic/BU/2x)
These were all upgrade attempts that failed to gain miner support. Calling them "hostile forks" is stupid. The only thing hostile with them is the threat they pose to the developers who do not want to scale Bitcoin on-chain, for whatever reason.
> All of these attempts have been failures, because all of these attempts have not understood how bitcoin works, and the fact that nodes are the peers in bitcoin, and they police and enforce consensus.
No. Spinning up mass nodes in a sybil attack has no relevance.
They failed because they failed to gain enough hash power backing their upgrade plan. This is due to politics and economics.
You have had a one year long lesson in your misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. And yet you are here trying to explain how the fork attempts didn't turn out exactly as i say.
> the validation that ensures that consensus is maintained between nodes
That's a terrible misunderstanding. If nodes can reach consensus by simply agreeing on transaction validity, then what purpose do you believe miners serve?
The definition of a node is provided in Section 5 of the white paper mentioned in OP. The logic that explains "why you must mine in order to be a peer" is explained in Section 4.
Non-mining nodes are trivial to Sybil, they are "one-IP-one-vote" per Section 4. Only miners are "one-CPU-one-vote." That is why nonminers (what you call "nodes") are not peers to the system, but rather leeches / relays.
You have had a one year long lesson in your misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. And yet you are here trying to explain how the fork attempts didn't turn out exactly as i say.
this is just idiotic propaganda from Core idiots. Non-mining nodes do nothing. They are like spectators at a football game, they get loug and angry but cannot change the score, only miners can. The only thing a non-mining node can do to reject a block is remove itself from that network. Mining nodes reject blocks by NOT mining on top of it and extend valid chains to be longest and thus orphan invalid blocks.
And yet here we are seeing off four hostile fork attempts in a couple of years (xt/classic/bu/2x). You'd think after four failures in a row, all failing for exactly the same reason, that the people supporting the failures might learn why they fail. But here we are. Explaining why they fail, after they fail, and yet the supporters of the failures are trying to assert that even though they fail, they understand the system. Without even acknowledging that they have failed, let alone why.
Yes, they all failed due to lack of miner support in the form of hashing power. Are you eluding to them failing because non-mining nodes were guarding the entry and exit gates of bitcoin? If that was so, it would be quick, cheap and easy to spin up millions of VM nodes on worldwide servers by bankers and government agencies and just outvote with non-mining nodes. The reality is that bitcoin protocol only recognises mining nodes thru proof-of-work. You are delusional in your understanding of bitcoin networking.
but but but I thought you said nodes didn't matter? I thought you said miners make all of the decisions, which 97% were signalling 2x at one point, so couldn't they just adopt whatever consensus rules they want?
Or, perhaps, you don't actually know how bitcoin works, and therefore you can't explain how miner 'support' disappeared, as soon as it came time to decide whether they wanted to be bitcoin miners, or become alt-coin miners? You know, given that the nodes police and enforce consensus in bitcoin 'n all. Miners had a choice. Do what you're told, and mine according to node consensus rules, or don't get paid in bitcoin. So they did what they were told.
And here you are, with you still trying to fight a battle you've already lost. Four times. Losing exactly the same way every time. Because even after all of those losses, you still can't figure out why you always lose. Because even after all of those failures, you still don't understand why you lost, because you still don't understand how bitcoin works.
the segwit2x contentious fork failed due to an "off-by-one" block height issue in the codebase for miners. Even if all the miners were running it, it would never have activated. Did you even know that?
Also, most of the segwit2x node signalling were indeed done by Amazon AWS instances of non-mining nodes. It was not miner nodes. Did you even know that?
And here you are, with you still trying to fight a battle you've already lost. Four times. Losing exactly the same way every time. Because even after all of those losses, you still can't figure out why you always lose. Because even after all of those failures, you still don't understand why you lost, because you still don't understand how bitcoin works.
> A peer is a node, which is a client that validates all transactions and blocks in the blockchain.
According to the white paper, Section 5, a peer is a miner. That has not changed, regardless of attempts to redefine the paper. To be a peer, you MUST contribute proof of work.
Running a non mining node gives you a copy of the blockchain data that you can trust is valid according to the rules you used to validate it. It does not make you a peer.
He just said nodes validate the information. It just doesn't matter to anyone else other than the node operator and users of that node.
The only occassion the propagation is valid if you're transferring a transaction from another full node to a miner (or helping to do so). As long as there is any path to do so more nodes do not matter.
All miners are already connected together using high speed channels.
Your posts about bitcoin prompted me to deep dive with it. I read the white paper a few times. I setup a node on one of my machines. I wrote some code to fetch a block template from my local nodes RPC service and generate some block generations for mining. I ran some basic cpu mining, etc. I feel like I have a better grasp of it all now. One thing I am struggling with is the incentive for miners once there are no more Coinbase/generation transactions. If the POW is maximally hard (energy intensive) then transaction fees will need to be high for miners to have ROI. If transactions fees are that high, then consumers are going to spend a lot to initiate transactions. This doesn’t seem like a win win to me. How is it going to play out once all coins are mined? Reduce the complexity of POW for post Coinbase txns? The security of the network is still there due to the amount of computation in the block chain up until the mine is dry. What are your thoughts on this?
We’ve already witnessed transaction fees exceed the reward (see block 494045). I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s happened again during the past 3 days when getting into the next block cost 500 sat/byte.
The solution for BTC appears to be off-chain scaling, such as Lightning Network.
The end of mining rewards is beyond our lifetimes, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if there’s a successful hard fork to continue the final 1 Satoshi reward indefinitely.
That's my favorite part of Bitcoin, the fact that it can evolve over time.
If it's found that deflationary really won't work, and it's genuinely hurting the usage and adoption of the currency, and it's in the current users of bitcoin's best interest to do so, it can be turned into an inflationary asset.
Flaws can and are fixed in it, and because those changes can't be pushed through by some appointed authority without overwhelming majority from all involved parties, you don't need to worry about this ability to drastically change being unfairly pushed upon you.
> "How is it going to play out once all coins are mined?"
Difficulty, transaction costs, competition with other coins (and off-chain networks/sidechains), and the market price of bitcoin will all hopefully & probably settle around an equilibrium that is sufficient to incentivize enough miners necessary to maintain the security of the network.
> If the POW is maximally hard (energy intensive) then transaction fees will need to be high for miners to have ROI.
If the transaction fees aren't high enough to support the current level of mining them some (but not all) miners will drop out (and the "difficulty" will adjust to compensate).
The result is transactions will continue to be processed, but the overall security of the network will be lower.
Transaction costs are already a significant portion of mining income. I suspect even by the time of the next halving they will already be a greater proportion of miner income than block rewards.
Lightning transactions will change all of this. By the time we are talking about large lightning transaction commits, we'll be talking about 3rd layer solutions. Bitcoin could be at a reserve currency level, where individual transactions are significant.
take what this user is saying with a huge grain of salt as I see he has an agenda based on his other comments in this thread. Read the e-mails and decide for yourself.
Oh sure, just back your argument with reference to a page that runs the Core Propaganda. Please evaluate the whitepaper, section 5 and really understand how bitcoin functions.
Just because people think and act like something has value doesn’t mean it does. The only things that have value are what the government, financial institutions, university professors, and HN commenters tell you
I cannot help but wonder why there are only 2 comments, is it because there were very few people on HN that time or people didn't take it very seriously
On the face of it, it's a hard thing to take seriously. A currency backed by nothing and based only on the energy expended to generate hashes? We've seen this before, in 1992, as hashcash. It didn't go anywhere then, there was no reason to think Bitcoin would be different.
The discussion was interesting, but not useful. We need plans, and we need them now, while there may still be time to do something about it.
The central question: If the entire resources of all world governments were brought to bear on the task of destroying Bitcoin, what would be the most effective way to do this?
>[Lengthy exposition of vulnerability of a systm to use-of-force
>monopolies ellided.]
>
>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.
Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of
freedom for several years.
Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled
networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be
holding their own.
Ultimately, it may be hopeless to try to solve this. But I can't shake the feeling that we're staring at a 0.1% chance of life as we know it changing forever. We will lose all monetary controls.
Doomsday prophecies have a long and sordid history, but the dinosaurs only had to look up at the sky at the right time to see theirs approaching. And, like the meteor, Bitcoin keeps growing bigger and brighter.
Look at https://i.imgur.com/h0giZzF.jpg We won't be able to deal with cases like the 2008 crash. If the basis of the worlds' wealth becomes crypto, what will we do?
It was now that the frenzy of speculating began to seize upon the nation. Law's bank had
effected so much good, that any promises for the future which he thought proper to make
were readily believed. The Regent every day conferred new privileges upon the fortunate
projector. The bank obtained the monopoly of the sale of tobacco; the sole right of
refinage of gold and silver, and was finally erected into the Royal Bank of France. Amid
the intoxication of success, both Law and the Regent forgot the maxim so loudly
proclaimed by the former, that a banker deserved death who made issues of paper without
the necessary funds to provide for them. As soon as the bank, from a private, became a
public institution, the Regent caused a fabrication of notes to the amount of one thousand
millions of livres. This was the first departure from sound principles, and one for which
Law is not justly blameable. While the affairs of the bank were under his control, the
issues had never exceeded sixty millions. Whether Law opposed the inordinate increase
is not known, but as it took place as soon as the bank was made a royal establishment, it
is but fair to lay the blame of the change of system upon the Regent.
You don't have a right to dictate what abstract representation others choose to use to store their wealth.
What you're promoting is using the power of criminal law to govern the private choices of other individuals.
I'm not even going to address the faulty assumptions that go into your conclusion that voluntary adoption of Bitcoin would be economically harmful and would destroy wealth, because that's a separate issue from the fact that neither you, nor me, nor 51% of the population, have a legitimate right to use force to dictate how others choose to represent wealth and interact economically with each other.
Sometimes, I sincerely wonder if the true point of releasing Bitcoin to the wild anonymously was because the creator had a strong hunch on what would happen and how the example of Bitcoin would in one fell swoop both serve as example of the fallacy of our current currency systems, as well as simultaneously challenge them, and become this kind of black hole you speak of.
Why else would the creator remain anonymous, unless they were truly a good Samaritan or feared for their safety. This feels like an experiment and an example as much as anything.
I suspect there is much more to this story than we know, but who knows, that could just be the conspiracy theorist in me talking!
That is why we need to be talking about this now, not later. Those benefits are all true, and that means BTC might win.
This should terrify you. Think of a world in which you cannot collect taxes, and that not even prison can strip the wealthy of their coins. The wealthy will be able to do whatever they want.
How long until it becomes a crime to speak out against bitcoin? Or if not a crime, so socially backwards that you're looked at with the same contempt that the Chinese general population looks at their political activists? If you dare say this might be a bad approach, and you don't swallow the same madness that has overtaken everyone else, will you be shunned, left behind, or forced into it? The latter is the most worrisome; you won't want to keep your money in fiat, and the last billion people to switch will be subservient to the first ten thousand.
Should I be scared now, posting this here? For trying to say that we should launch a coordinated effort to stop this madness in its infancy? I run a very real risk of this following me around the rest of my life. Communism was once in its infancy too, and those who agitated for it or against it were penalized or rewarded by the waves of chance.
This disease -- the desire to get wealthy -- has been the basis of so much misery, and so much creation. It's as human as laughter. We'll never get rid of the lust for wealth. The only way we can manage it as a species is to control it. And Bitcoin removes this control.
>>This should terrify you. Think of a world in which you cannot collect taxes, and that not even prison can strip the wealthy of their coins. The wealthy will be able to do whatever they want.
The state can exert control over all real estate, and can control the flow of physical goods within its jurisdiction (and into and out of its jurisdiction), whether or not it has control over the flow of money. Taxes will never disappear. They will just decline.
I share Friedman's view that the effect that electronic cash will have, of reducing how much the government taxes, will be beneficial to society:
> How long until it becomes a crime to speak out against bitcoin?
> Should I be scared now, posting this here?
You seem to be the only one who wants to take freedoms away from other people. The bitcoiners don't want to take away YOUR rights. That would go against the entire concept of bitcoin, which is resistance to censorship.
> Think of a world in which you cannot collect taxes
That's the problem. That's exactly what is already happening. The rich already don't pay tax, and neither do the corporations they control. The only thing that is being changed is that the oversight of the masses is now being removed, because banks can no longer be trusted to look after the interests of their clients over the interests of the state.
I suspect the only viable taxes in future will be consumption taxes, property taxes, and estate taxes. If ya wanna eat, ya pay tax. If ya wanna buy something, ya pay tax. If ya wanna live somewhere, ya pay tax. If ya die, your assets are divided, the state collects its portion, and then everyone goes on their merry way again. It's no surprise that these are resisted, because they are the only taxes that are effective against wealthy people.
The loophole that allows the wealthy to avoid paying taxes usually has nothing to do with hiding money though. In the EU there is a lot of talk right now about companies like Apple avoiding taxes, if you buy an iPhone in France pretty much nothing of that sale goes to the French government, but it’s not that they are saying “no we won’t give you money”, it’s that the law allows their company to be setup in a way to avoid paying these taxes in France.
If anything Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are going to allow you to hide and transfer wealth even more. Yes Bitcoin isn’t truly anonymous, but it’s so much different to a traditional bank where you need to prove your identity and they actively report large transactions to the authorities.
And as for the taxes you mentioned, it’s pretty easy to avoid those too. If I live in Russia and I buy an iPhone in Europe I’ll have to pay VAT (consumption tax) of around 20%, but when I go back home, which is outside the EU, (home being where I am a tax resident, not necessarily where I live on a day to day basis) I can claim that 20% back. The same applies for visitors to the US.
I'm pretty bullish on cryptocurrency, but I've actually been nervous for awhile about what you're talking about.
I think that cryptocurrency might be an example of what futurists are always talking about with regard to exponential change. In that regard, it's very much like AI (and maybe CRISPR) and a bunch of other things that we aren't even paying any attention to right now. But almost overnight, these things could basically turn all of civilization upside down, or end it as we know it. I think it unlikely for any one of them, but you only need 1. And while they might be good in themselves, I think it's the shockingly fast shift that may cause issues.
With cryptocurrency, there are a few things that give me pause though.
The first is the question of what makes cryptocurrency fundamentally different in this take-over-the-world scenario from gold? Why hasn't gold or some other precious commodity spiraled up in price to the point where it's the most valuable thing in the universe?
The second is that the USD (and other currencies) isn't going away, because you have to pay your taxes in it. So doesn't that provide an upper bound on the value of Bitcoin? Whether I'm getting paid in dollars or in BTC, the government wants 30% of it in dollars, so that's going to create a demand for dollars that keeps them from going to hyperinflation, right? I'm clearly not a macroeconomist :)
Also, isn't the price somewhat limited by how much wealth there is in the world? Not that it'd be great if BTC was worth a few million, of course, but it couldn't reach billions could it?
What actually worries me more is what happens if Bitcoin goes to $1mm or $10mm. For that to happen, a large portion of the world's wealth would have to have shifted to BTC, and the value of other currencies would drop in that case, right? It just seems very destabilizing in ways that are hard to predict. To go from something being 0% of the world's wealth to 50% or something in a decade with a totally different (and probably even more unequal) distribution of that wealth seems like it would result in a lot of nasty things.
Anyway, enough rambling, maybe cc will be fine, who knows. But I think that there's a good chance that in 100 years (assuming anyone is around to look back), things like 9/11 or Trump or nuclear war with North Korea might just be a relative footnote, and something like AI or cryptocurrency or CRISPR will prove to have been far more important and a huge inflection point in the evolution of humanity.
If you follow the money, Bitcoin does not replace fiat. If I bought $100USD of BTC on coinbase, that $100USD goes to someone else who sold me their BTC. It's still fiat. I'm not confident the governments really mind in that respect because the money is still here.
Where that money goes in the end? Some goes to speculators, and the rest goes to lots of ASICS, graphics cards, electricty bills and food for miners. But none of it is every actually really stored in Bitcoin.
But as Bitcoin becomes more and more valuable, isn’t it actually eroding the value of other currencies? So someone still has your $100 but it’s worth a little less.
> The central question: If the entire resources of all world governments were brought to bear on the task of destroying Bitcoin, what would be the most effective way to do this?
Buy a bunch of hardware to own 51% of the network and make a bunch of illegal transactions which will destroy trust in the system. The US has a federal budget of $3.8 trillion. That's pocket change to them. Or if it's china just force the companies with ASIC's to do it for you: https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-with-51-p...
I think that by the time you could muster the political will to put a large fraction of the budget into countering this threat, it’d be far too late. And I could see other governments not wanting the US to own / destroy the network and countering with their own investments.
Actually, I wonder if in the long run governments will be the miners.
your own example invalidates your argument, we live under the regime of the central banker who prints money with reckless abandon and gives it out to his cronies. How many trillions has the federal reserve created since 2008? You are a misinformed fool.
I was there during the 2008 crash. And I don't mean I remember it; I lived through it. It had devastating effects on the people in my life. One of them lost their business constructing buildings, and would have lost his house if he hadn't been able to get his old job back. And he wouldn't have been able to, had those bankers not injected the money into the system and persuaded the economy to keep turning.
Bitcoin is gearing up to be the biggest financial disaster in all of human history. If it shows signs of winning, people all across the world will rush to transfer all of their currencies to BTC. What kind of upheaval do you think that will cause?
More broadly, when your grand experiment encroaches on our ability to have a solid basis of wealth -- one that has worked for centuries -- what should we do? Are we supposed to sit here and watch you gain power and legitimacy without thinking of ways to stop it, rather than merely profiting off it?
If the BTC bubble pops, it will be a massive relief. But it will only sit dormant, waiting years for speculators to pick it up again and form another bubble that gets the world excited. Someday, that bubble might encompass everyone.
When it emerges that Satoshi has passed his coins to his family, and they become the next world leaders (by power if not by politics), what should we do when we don't agree with their methodologies? When we can't collect taxes? Or divert wealth to social programs like UBI?
sorry but I do not consent for the bankers to control every aspect of my life. you can use your debt notes created at the whims of some evil cabal and I will use a free and open source store of value that anyone can work to create and nobody can censor or steal from me. I gladly pay taxes as should everyone, but I do not agree to have my store of value inflated 3-5% every year like USD fiat.
https://bitcoin.org/en/about-us: "Bitcoin.org was originally registered and owned by Bitcoin's first two developers, Satoshi Nakamoto and Martti Malmi. When Nakamoto left the project, he gave ownership of the domain to additional people, separate from the Bitcoin developers, to spread responsibility and prevent any one person or group from easily gaining control over the Bitcoin project."
Satoshi Nakamoto even disclaimed that bitcoin.com was "unrelated", and that he/she/they registered bitcoin.org as the site they using to publish information.
A single person wasn't behind it - you can look at David Chaum et al's. 1988 "Untraceable Electronic Cash" paper, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor's 1992 paper on proof-of-work, Nick Szabo's bit gold and Wei Dai's B-money from 1998, etc. for work that led up to bitcoin. There is one big innovation in the paper, and that is that proof-of-work on a Merkle tree can be used to solve the double-spending problem. Proof-of-work wasn't new. Merkle trees weren't new (1979). Awareness of the double-spending problem wasn't new (Hal Finney wrote an article on it in 1993, but I doubt that was the first time anyone thought of it). Combining all three is certainly clever and innovative, but it's just one innovation, not years of directed work by a government-funded team.
Bitocin has been in the works since the 80's. There have been many papers trying to get to the point we are at now so you can say that bitcoin is just version 1.0. Other teams and people (cypherpunks) have been working on this for a while.
The most interesting conspiracy in my opinion is that it was created by the US government, to help people in third world countries fight financial censorship.
Tor, for example, was created by the US government to help fight censorship in dictorial countries as well.
Technical ability, motive against USD. Lean more towards Iran than Israel. Who knows! Just a guess. I personally dont think it could have been an individual without help.
It's one logical leap based on well known crypto, algorithms, and cypherpunk literature. Honestly that has more of the hallmarks of a single actor than a state to me. But it's all idle speculation anyway :)
I would suggest also taking a look at the annotated version of the whitepaper on Fermat's Library:
- https://fermatslibrary.com/s/bitcoin
I wrote some of the annotations and tried as much as possible to make it so that this annotated version would provide a motivated reader with all the resources needed to truly understand the bitcoin protocol.
Michael Nielsen's blogpost about Bitcoin (http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a...) is also a great read.