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What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

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Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#41

Post by petertodd »

kylebenzle wrote: post #30
petertodd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most interesting Bitcoin meetups I've ever been to was in Nairobi, Kenya, where I met a bunch of farmers who had modern, large scale, industrial operations in Kenya and other african countries. They were using Bitcoin to buy supplies like fertilizer and farm equipment, as well as sell their crops, evading border controls in the process. It was a lot safer and less prone to confiscation than carrying around…

Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now. Lighting is obvious vaporware nonsense that solves only the problem of how to keep Blockstream in control of the GitHub repo they (Adam Back and Greg Maxwell) hijacked years ago.

If you want to try Lightning out - and see for yourself whether or not it is vaporware - the easiest way to do that is to get a mobile Lightning wallet such as Eclair (fairly easy) or BlueWallet (easiest) from your appstore. As I mentioned, ManyVids accepts Lightning payments for a real product, as does https://www.bitrefill.com/ (phone refills, gift cards, etc). For testing with smaller amounts, https://yalls.org/ will let you buy access to blog posts for trivial amounts of money (eg one cent).

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#42

Post by jakupovic »

ChomskyNormal4m wrote: post #39
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

> inflation protection and avoiding capital controls are arguably the most impactful innovation since the internet Inflation protection? Bitcoin lost one third of its value in the past three years. How is that inflation protection? You would have done better to hold most commodities or most currencies in that time period to protect from inflation, other than Bitcoin.

That's only for the People who bought at the top and sold. For the vast majority of people BTC has outperformed any other investment for majority of trading days.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#43

Post by cft »

kylebenzle wrote: post #35
slickrick216 wrote: post #21

The fact that every time a blockchain/crypto thread hits HN and many of the responses are talking about time stamps is in itself a bit of a meme. Seems very reminisce of people in ages gone by talking about what was the point for any advances from trains to telegram to the internet. The answer for what to use it for is to make things trust less and decentralized if you can’t see the advantage or limitless possibiliti…

HN hates Bitcoin. I have never seen such a smart group of idiots in my life.

That's because now HN is mostly FAANG employees. FAANG is naturally opposed to Bitcoin because it's difficult for them to imagine how they would control it. When it rallied to 20000, they only saw it as a threat.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#44

Post by fidelramos »

thebean11 wrote: post #9
egypturnash wrote: post #6

Has anyone actually found a use for cryptocurrency and/or the blockchain yet that is not "burn a shit-ton of power on arguing over units of cryptocurrency are worth anything"?

Transferring money across borders, gambling, buying drugs are the main three that come to mind. edit: missed financial speculation

Censorship-resistant payments. Protection against central banks inflation. Protection against taxation. Carrying undetectable wealth without a weight.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#45

Post by loxs »

> Limited divisibility of coins. Bitcoin has a limit of 21 million bitcoins, but more importantly, it has a limit of about 2^52 satoshis as the atomic unit. If Bitcoin were to really become Earth’s only payment system, this would provide fewer than a million units per human being. This isn’t nearly enough to capture both day-to-day transactions (even rounded to the equivalent of tenths of a dollar) and also large holdings. It would have been quite cheap to expand this with a few dozen extra bits such that divisibility would never be an issue.

This, and also to me the decimal point is clearly in the wrong place. I Have thought about this and I fail to see what was Satoshi thinking.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#46

Post by martinko »

ChomskyNormal4m wrote: post #39
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

> inflation protection and avoiding capital controls are arguably the most impactful innovation since the internet Inflation protection? Bitcoin lost one third of its value in the past three years. How is that inflation protection? You would have done better to hold most commodities or most currencies in that time period to protect from inflation, other than Bitcoin.

Picking arbitrary dates is fun and all, but we are bootstrapping a new financial system. Do you see a way to do that without volatility?

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#47

Post by aazaa »

The title of the article doesn't match the content.

The tile suggests the article will talk about the white paper specifically. It instead talks about what Bitcoin got right/wrong in general.

The white paper says nothing about specific hash functions, signature schemes, scripting systems (not even mentioned at all), currency units, and many other things that ended up being important to Bitcoin.

And one of the things the white paper got wrong was to conflate chain "length" with "strength". The white paper appears to mix the two terms, even though it's clear that chain "length" wouldn't work at all as a security mechanism.

You can see examples right in the abstract:

> The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.

Chain "strength" is the cumulative hash power behind a particular chain, which is not the same as the number of blocks.

The white paper later corrects itself:

> The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#48

Post by pavlov »

kneel wrote: post #37
pavlov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “if you view it as a savings technology then it's the best one that's ever been created” IMO this crown belongs to ETFs. Putting all your eggs in the Bitcoin basket would be an extremely risky strategy. A portfolio of ETFs is a much better place for most people’s savings.

ETFs are still subject to whatever country's tax laws. Imagine putting your retirement into various funds only to have a Brexit type situation destroy your hard earned money. Bitcoin is borderless, permissionless storage of value. Game theory built in (anyone powerful enough to attack the network is better incentivized to participate in it.)

I’m trying to imagine the average Briton putting their savings in Bitcoin. Maybe they buy £50 worth on some local exchange every month. Will the money be there in 30 years?

Seems more likely that they’re going to be wiped out before then by either a fraudulent/bankrupt exchange (if they never moved the funds to a Bitcoin address) or by losing the private key (if they did).

This technology is absolutely not where a Sussex nurse should park their hard-earned pennies at this point.

The same monthly payment into globally diversified ETFs is almost guaranteed to be liquid and in gains in 2050. If it’s not, the global collapse has rendered the Bitcoin thesis untenable too.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#49

Post by NotUsingLinux »

kylebenzle wrote: post #35
slickrick216 wrote: post #21

The fact that every time a blockchain/crypto thread hits HN and many of the responses are talking about time stamps is in itself a bit of a meme. Seems very reminisce of people in ages gone by talking about what was the point for any advances from trains to telegram to the internet. The answer for what to use it for is to make things trust less and decentralized if you can’t see the advantage or limitless possibiliti…

HN hates Bitcoin. I have never seen such a smart group of idiots in my life.

Blub paradox

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#50

Post by martinko »

kylebenzle wrote: post #30
petertodd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most interesting Bitcoin meetups I've ever been to was in Nairobi, Kenya, where I met a bunch of farmers who had modern, large scale, industrial operations in Kenya and other african countries. They were using Bitcoin to buy supplies like fertilizer and farm equipment, as well as sell their crops, evading border controls in the process. It was a lot safer and less prone to confiscation than carrying around…

Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now. Lighting is obvious vaporware nonsense that solves only the problem of how to keep Blockstream in control of the GitHub repo they (Adam Back and Greg Maxwell) hijacked years ago.

> Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now

Really? The market begs to differ.

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