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I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

schneier.com

151–160 of 185 posts

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#151
post #9

Quickly skimming through the Wired piece, am I weird for not being that uncomfortable with companies like Coinbase managing your crypto? Or Namebase.io managing Handshake domains? Most people don't care about self-hosting/self-managing their stuff and just want something that works and is easy to use. With both of these (Bitcoin & HNS) you can still have 100% control over it if you choose to. So what if 90% of people…

I've run my own e-mail for the past 20 years, including setting up DKIM and all of that. Why do nearly all of you use some corporate service like gmail?

Convenience & (for me personally) superbe sender reputation and spam filtering.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#152

Earlier 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…

It is curious that satoshi chose to use an uncommon, non-NIST curve for bitcoin. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Secp256k1

Satoshi in general appears to have been quite skeptical of the government, so it's not that surprising that they would not have trusted NIST curves.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#153
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, the suggestion that Satoshi's billions are lost forever with Hal's death is perhaps the best way to stop treasure hunters from doing some nasty things to the other potential Satoshi candidates who are still alive.

These "billions" are conjectural based on limited analysis of early minded blocks with no-to-little connection to Satoshi, FWIW. Essentially there are a set of early blocks which have never been spent whos structure indicated non-standard software was used to mine them. People assume Satoshi because that's the exciting thing to assume, and it isn't like anyone else who mined a lot of Bitcoin early on is becoming incr…

Hal Finney invented bitcoin so that there would be incentive for someone to develop the cryonic recovery technology to wake him up. /s

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#154
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They live paycheck to paycheck because the central bank has enslaved them.

I always find this argument extremely weird. The era before the creation of the US Central bank wasn't exactly a worker's paradise, was it? The gilded age was an era so tough for workers that actual gun fights over labor issues were the norm, and the late 19th century saw repeated financial panics every decade or two.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

irreversibility is mostly a negative for anyone who is interested in getting a scam/fraudulent charge taken back. What happens when you purchase an item from some web shop with ETH and it never arrives?

Another way to think about that is like cash. When someone gives you some cash, should they be able to sneak into your sock drawer and take it back? Would you accept payment that came with a remote control held by someone else when you have no such way to recover your goods or services or time? Insurance and dispute resolution are separate jobs from the job of the money itself.

> Insurance and dispute resolution are separate jobs from the job of the money itself.

But if you layer those on top of the money does not the whole stack loose the purported benefits of crypto-currency? What I mean is if you have intermediaries to handle Insurance and dispute resolution (which are needed since people want that) do you still get any anonymization or irreversibility benefits from crypto-currency?

What's the point of crypto-currency if we need to add layers on top of it that remove all the benefits?

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#156
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anonymity? People are unsurprisingly very in favor of KYC so we can apply anti–money laundering and terrorism laws. This doesn't scale any further than a website ran by a company providing services. Most eyes are on DeFi which is a world of smart contracts and dapps - which at some point (hopefully, because else there is little point) will run without anyone having any authority to change/stop them. > For it to be…

Most people aren't anarchists (or even libertarians). A world where anyone (including, say, terrorists or rogue states) can conduct transactions "without anyone having any authority to change/stop them" sounds, to most people, like a very bad thing.

Most people think your comment is unsubstantiated.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#157
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase can disable your withdrawal/sending ability at any time on a whim. Their support is email-only and has a backlog of months. Try taking a look at /r/coinbase for examples. There are some very good reasons to put your crypto somewhere you control. I am in the process of moving everything I had off of Coinbase after they silently disabled my send/sell ability, but not purchase/receive, without ever providing a…

Can you recommend me a good private wallet ? It’s tricky to bring physical wallet in my country

To manage your own coins I'd recommend something like Trezor. The one I bought in 2016 is still supported and getting active updates.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#158
post #19
post #9

Quickly skimming through the Wired piece, am I weird for not being that uncomfortable with companies like Coinbase managing your crypto? Or Namebase.io managing Handshake domains? Most people don't care about self-hosting/self-managing their stuff and just want something that works and is easy to use. With both of these (Bitcoin & HNS) you can still have 100% control over it if you choose to. So what if 90% of people…

People trusted Mt Gox for 4 years and it handled 70% of the world's bitcoin trading until it abruptly shut down and everyone's bitcoin more-or-less disappeared with it.

They were not a publicly traded company though, and/or with clear intent from the beginning to follow rules and regulations.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#159
No shit. Bitcoin is both a technological, economic and a political project. Nobody who understands this would mistake Schneier for a likely candidate to be the creator of Bitcoin.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#160
post #14

Earlier 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…

Another thing I feel would be a flaw is the inability to increase and decrease the money supply - something central banks often do with fiat money to stimulate the economy. Most crypto currency seem proud even that they can only deflate … which is the worst thing for a currency since it will just result in hoarding and ever decreasing economic activity (AKA deflationary spiral) - at the end of the day, economic activ…

The goal is not really to stimulate the economy, but to make sure there is the appropriate amount of money for the amount of economic activity, so that prices are driven by supply and demand of goods and services, but not so much by the constraints of the monetary system, itself.

If you get this wrong, you have price instability.

Money should be the most boring part of the economy. It's just the medium. This is what crypto gets wrong. In crypto, the money is the entire economy.

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