Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you realize ETH has been around only 8 years and the transaction is entirely irreversible It’s funny you make this comment specifically about ETH since it literally exists today as a result of a hard fork that reversed transactions in 2016. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ethereum-classic.asp
The fork did not reverse the transactions. Instead, it made new transactions. Meanwhile, bitcoin reversed 53 blocks in the 2010 "inflation bug" incident.
I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
121–130 of 185 posts
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#122I thought this youtuber makes a good argument Satoshi is Adam Back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g
Saw it a while back it’s pretty compelling that it is Adam
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the whole thing with crypto. The only benefits thus far that have come to widespread fruition are illicit purchases and speculation. For it to be broadly accepted, it has to lose the rest. Anonymity? People are unsurprisingly very in favor of KYC so we can apply anti–money laundering and terrorism laws. For it to be trusted you have to insure deposits. Those fly-by-night exchanges going poof with everyone's c…
well over 90% of illicit purchases are done in fiat and you've really not been paying attention if you think those are the only benefits of crypto. There's an entire country that uses crypto as legal tender. I could stop there, but there's more. Fees are lower than credit cards charge, there are businesses saving money by utilizing crypto. Sending money overseas is cheaper and more accessible with crypto. The list go…
El Salvador is a case in point of why crypto is a terrible currency. The first day that they went live, Bitcoin dropped 10%.
> Sending money overseas is cheaper
Right now it's about $2.50 per transaction which is not the cheapest option. Earlier this year we saw transactions fees for BTC hit like $60. Add to that the risk of it dropping 10% in a not-uncommon event…that's not good.
Let's talk about businesses.
First, cost. Let's say you have Stripe's base fee: 30¢ per transaction + 2.9%. For that $2.50 transaction to be cheaper, your purchase would have to be over $75. Is that typical for most businesses? No. And again, that $2.50 is what it is now. It could be $3 in a minute or $20 tomorrow. No one knows.
You think small business owners want that kind of uncertainty? Taking a (???) cut from every monthly SaaS charge does not make sense—not to mention that as you scale Stripe will negotiate prices downwards while BTC will not.
Let's turn to scalability.
BTC clocks in at seven transactions per second. Seven. Transactions can take 10 minutes or longer to process. Imagine a supermarket checkout line where each person blocks for 10 minutes. Or a gas station, subway, restaurant, corner store, coffee shop, or anything else.
Note that I said widespread uses. I am aware that some places are experimenting with bitcoin. I am also aware that crypto has shown to be woefully inadequate for all but a few narrow use-cases.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno I’m an over-halfway believer in crypto. The other day I wanted to invest in a token. So I transferred ETH out of Coinbase to MetaMask wallet, then traded my ETH for the token. Each transaction took about 30sec and cost ~$25. That sounds like a lot! Until you realize ETH has been around only 8 years and the transaction is entirely irreversible by an enterprising (invasive? dictatorial?) third party. To me it’s…
My memory is fuzzy and I'm having a hard time finding details, but didn't Eth actually go through a hard fork to reverse a theft or bug in a smart contract or something?
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fixed supply that always grows in value doesn't encourage investment, just "hodl". And I ain't an economist, but hoarding wealth for the sake of hoarding wealth isn't good for society. If you have to invent another coin to encourage investment/spending rather than hoarding...well why not use that coin. I'm not entirely anti-crypto, I think Monero is neat.
I've always seen this as a weird argument. Most people live paycheck to paycheck and don't have the option to hold even if they wanted to. And those that have extra income will invest it in whatever gains them interest, with the explicit intent of not spending those funds in the short term. I don't see why crypto's deflationary properties would play any practical role at all. Well except that you could actually just…
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#126Of course he isn’t Satoshi. Satoshi isn’t a big mystery, but the person(s) deserves the anonymity they can maintain. Bitcoin is the one true thing that has not been corrupted in this world, despite the decade of FUD thrown at it. Bruce however has shown my esteem for him was misplaced, worse by linking to WIRED, which long ago became an ideological propaganda site with no interest in advanced technology. Bitcoiners w…
A fixed supply that always grows in value doesn't encourage investment, just "hodl". And I ain't an economist, but hoarding wealth for the sake of hoarding wealth isn't good for society. If you have to invent another coin to encourage investment/spending rather than hoarding...well why not use that coin. I'm not entirely anti-crypto, I think Monero is neat.
You said you aren’t an economist, but you have been taught what you know about economics by communists.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#127Of course he isn’t Satoshi. Satoshi isn’t a big mystery, but the person(s) deserves the anonymity they can maintain. Bitcoin is the one true thing that has not been corrupted in this world, despite the decade of FUD thrown at it. Bruce however has shown my esteem for him was misplaced, worse by linking to WIRED, which long ago became an ideological propaganda site with no interest in advanced technology. Bitcoiners w…
Bruce linked to his own opinion piece in Wired.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite: he doesn't trust the constants . That's a big difference. He believes based on reading secret Snowden papers that the NSA has manipulated them via relationships with the industry. There are other curves that are NOT from NIST, like C25519, that are popular. In fact, the twisted edwards curve computation variant is also growing, which isn't the "traditional" (does that even make sense?) elliptic curve. Now…
My feeling is that I could back up both of these statements; the one you made, but also the one I made. He was saying these things before Snowden. And: again, just look at what he's published. He's not Satoshi. (The NIST P-curves aren't backdoored.)
Unfortunately, we have no way to validate that the NSA did not grind the "seed" used to generate their parameters to search for curves which were strong or weak against some publicly unknown property which is only found in candidate curves at a one in a billion level.
This is a weakness in the methodology used to pick the parameters, somewhat lovingly mocked by the BADA55 curves: https://bada55.cr.yp.to/vr.html
It's not unreasonable for people to be concerned about this. Injecting intentional weaknesses into cryptosystems used by others was a fundamental objective for the NSA, which drove programs as significant as the CIA literally purchasing the at-the-time world largest manufacturer of encipher machines in order to ensure that it continued ship NSA designed intentionally weakened systems for decades ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-... ). That was, of course, somewhat before the establishment of the relevant ECC standards-- but the cloud of operational secrecy prevents us from knowing that much about what NSA has been up to more recently.
The curve used in Bitcoin though isn't a NIST curve, and its generation procedure is about as close as you can get to rigid parameters without having rigid parameters as an explicit design goal.
a=0 (required for the endomorphism), field is 3 mod 4 for fast sqrt, increment field from 2^256-2^32-1024 (fast limb structure) until you find a prime field with a non-trivial cube root of unity (required for endomorphism) and until you can obtain a curve with prime order, set B to the lowest value that does. The result of that procedure is secp256k1. (you can actually drop some of the requirements above and still get the same parameters too, but I am pretty confident that this was their search criteria) -- so no high entropy "random" inputs.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#129** IRS noises intensifying **
LOL my wife has this past year started keeping bees “keeping” they aren’t kept you are just lucky they like to live in boxes you provide… anyway this resonates with me because if you do things that alarm a few of them (thousand) they gradually alert the rest … that can really make you reconsider any action you take after that point
Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
My feeling is that I could back up both of these statements; the one you made, but also the one I made. He was saying these things before Snowden. And: again, just look at what he's published. He's not Satoshi. (The NIST P-curves aren't backdoored.)
> I could back up both of these statements; That's what I did, Bernstein could be compromised. > He's not Satoshi. I sat on a panel with him at an Arm conference, he's a great guy and easy to talk to and doesn't write anything like Satoshi: but I could care less if he is Satoshi. FWIW, I, too, think crypto currency is a huge scam.