Viewing profile — antiscam

Thanks. Good perspective. (I also get the reference in your username, btw. I don't know if it's obscure or not, but I don't see it often.)

I'm making no such assumptions; I don't think I'm making the argument you think I'm making. As for "money has already exchanged hands," that can be true of any Ponzi scheme as well…

It's a kind of distributed Ponzi scheme that lacks the ordinary intent and centralized accounting associated with them. It's different from startup in that a startup's shares incre…

I'm not "bitter" at Satoshi Nakamoto, or really at anyone. I'm trying to do what I can, as I have from the beginning, to prevent people from falling for a scam. I'm not alone in do…

I honestly don't see why. Most of the people involved in the major Bitcoin businesses, or in promoting Bitcoin publicly, are reprobates. Have you spent any time reading bitcointalk…

As you'll see from my comment history, I was playing with significant money in Bitcoin early on. I have at least paper gains that are quite satisfying. Nothing I'm saying is person…

Hal is one of the only class acts publicly associated with Bitcoin.

True, if by "break" you mean "break by brute force" (and of course with current, non-quantum computing technologies).

On "little practical use," I mean today. Why does anyone buy a bitcoin today? The only reasons that I can see are (1) ideology, (2) illegal activities (including the circumvention …

Or the seventeen others founded on the same technology. It's important to distinguish the Bitcoin software from the particular block chain in whose private keys naive people are no…

Well, rather than armchair psychology, you could consider the points I made themselves. Do you think there is a good reason for the world to transfer massive wealth to those who cu…

I'll give it a go. The early distribution of bitcoins seems to have been enough to motivate lots of relatively early adopters to promote it aggressively, maybe out of ideology or m…

Oh, I don't mean to suggest that at all. I'm just trying to suggest that an offer from Google doesn't, to me, at present imply that the offeree has any special merit. Google is cas…

It wouldn't be right to assume that because Google has many smart people, everything they do as a result is smart. Google is hardly an innovative company anymore. In fact, they see…

It's a huge myth that Bitcoin is beyond the reach of governments. There are three reasons for this. First, Bitcoin isn't actually decentralized. It's not a true open-source communi…

Bitcoin's not at all resilient in the face of an attack by a government. You're right about limiting damage from a 50% attack, however. Of course, you could agree in advance on an …

I think you've misunderstood his focus. He's describing the network protocol, not the overall "Bitcoin system" that's sometimes called the "Bitcoin protocol." He explicitly points …

Those are the most superficial points of the post; everything else he says is spot on, particularly the disconnect between the claim the the protocol is easy to update and the near…

I haven't seen a good argument for why the blocks need to be prevented from being found in advance or why the proof-of-work has to depend on the contents of a particular new block …

I think you may have missed the point of the comment to which you were replying. What's the humor of the comic, in your view? I can't discern it myself. It does seem to need a punc…

This is a bit of a digression, but it's something important that needs to be said. Most of the Bitcoin fanatics are drawn to Bitcoin in part because of a bizarrely deep anger at th…

The statistics here seem more important than the individual cases. Not everyone who talks up penny stocks is long them either, but most of the people sending spam promoting various…

And with a check or an American-style ACH payment (or British-style BACS payment), nothing at all. And both ACH and BACS provide many more services and essentially no practical dow…