I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto • Hacker News Board

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#161

Post by throw0101a » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

herendin2 wrote: post #120

throw0101a wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have every incentive possible to treat their customers right, and issue refunds on valid issues. There are plenty of fly-by-night operations that will smash and grab as many transactions as they can and not care about their reputations because they'll just set up under another alias. Further, if your account/wallet gets compromised there is also no irreversibility. Whereas with the 'regular' banking system tra…

So, just don't do business with those obvious fly-by-night companies who have no established reputation or brand? From a company's point of view almost every individual consumer looks like a potential fly-by-nighter, so companies are forced to accept that risk, and we all share the costs of that. It could be useful to offer an alternative to this paradigm.

> So, just don't do business with those obvious fly-by-night companies who have no established reputation or brand?

You're telling people to "just" be rational. Or to not be susceptible to slick marketing gimmicks, or to not be bamboozled by a fast-talking salesman.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#162

Post by syshum » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

nobody9999 wrote: post #92

syshum wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> you can even convert a significant percentage of it to precious metals that you bury in your garden. People tried that in the US once.. The government passed a law that made owning said metals illegal... Which was in effect from 1933 to 1974...

>People tried that in the US once.. The government passed a law that made owning said metals illegal... >Which was in effect from 1933 to 1974... And now it's almost 50 years later. Why is that relevant now?

Because history repeats itself? Why is this even a question?

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and you can bet if people started divesting from the USD into gold and silver, gold and silver would be quickly made illegal to own

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#163

Post by native_samples » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #50

> For the record, I am not Satoshi Nakamoto. I suppose I could have invented the bitcoin protocols... That's not a given. Nick Szabo provides a good explanation [1] of the state of things when Bitcoin was invented, and why very few people were capable of it then: "The overlap between cryptographic experts and libertarians who might sympathize with such a "gold bug" idea is already rather small, since most cryptograph…

That's a poor explanation mostly because Satoshi was not a cryptographic expert, at least not at the start. For example he insisted early on that you can't use elliptic curve cryptography for encrypting messages (wrong), he stated that he had to research ECC because there was very little information out there about it back then, and so on. More importantly all actual cryptographers were trying to build e-cash systems out of novel mathematical constructs. Bitcoin ignored all of that. It just uses SHA2 and digital signatures. Cryptographically it's as plain vanilla as it comes, and lots of developers understand hash functions and signatures. There's no actual expertise required to use them.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#164

Post by acjohnson55 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

bouncycastle wrote: post #117

300bps wrote: post #51

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 was pretty surprised to learn this several months ago, given how much people still cite the Ethereum fork as a putative smoking gun.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#165

Post by toolz » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

tyre wrote: post #123

toolz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's an entire country that uses crypto as legal tender. 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-uncomm…

This is incredibly uneducated. If I were to talk about fiat with this level of ignorance I would say things like "transferring money takes weeks!" in reference to ACH. Any cursory google search will show you that you are wrong about fees, max tx per second and tx time to finality.

As for bitcoins value, in 12 years it is valued high enough to be in the top 10 market cap stocks.

It took apple 71 years to hit 1T market cap - it took bitcoin 12 years.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#166

Post by twelve40 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #64

Dwolb wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

Isn't that really bad though? I paid for a VPS with my credit card recently. The transaction appeared to complete instantly. No 25 dollar transaction fee, no multiple hops through different software interfaces, just click and done. If it turned out the VPS company was a scam, I could've made a single phone call and reversed the charge saving my money. Crypto is slower, more expensive, and less safe. True, it's only e…

> No 25 dollar transaction fee

to be fair, in your case there was also certainly a transaction fee, paid for you by your merchant (and probably rolled up into the price of the product)

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#167

Post by wolf550e » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

john_alan wrote: post #146

tptacek wrote: post #95

Earlier 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.)

> The NIST P-curves aren't backdoored How can you assert this? Can you explain the coefficient choices?

The argument is basically this: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/12917/24949

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#168

Post by trixie_ » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

tyre wrote: post #14

spurgu wrote: 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…

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…

The benefit of crypto is being able to move large amounts of money around quickly and easily. As well as protection of what you’re holding being diluted by central bank. Does it replace fiat currency? No, and it shouldn’t. Diversify.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#169

Post by toolz » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #140

easrng wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can locate, download, install, and set up a crypto wallet and be ready to accept payments in under 2 minutes. (I just did.) Setting up a bank account is far more involved.

>You can locate, download, install, and set up a crypto wallet I was under the impression you had to download the blockchain for e.g. bitcoin before you could engage in transactions. Which is something like 350 GB at this point. And then do some processing that takes a while. Surely this takes a lot more than two minutes. If you didn't do that, do you really have a crypto wallet?

you don't have to be a synced, full node to have a wallet that you alone have full control over

So to answer your question, yes I actually own the wallet and no it didn't take more than a minute at most for many different coins

Re: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

#170

Post by Valakas_ » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

worrycue wrote: post #61

tyre wrote: 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…

For the economy to be stimulated through increase of supply, everyone has to lose some purchasing power. Is that a good trade-off? I don't know.