Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's almost certainly a 100x engineer.
Has he saved 100x lives with FSD?
100x means he produces 100x you (or 100x the average engineer).
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
131–140 of 293 posts
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Above is proof that the original bitcoin protocol can scale, and recently testnet can do 90k tps. What you think of certain people doesn't change the fact.
Its centralized and run by the people around this fraud. It doesn't matter if the tech is good since no one will use it for anything beside speculation or abuse it as storage which just wont be sustainable in the long run with no limits in place.
The protocol remains the original and it scales significantly. I'd focus on protocol not people. If people changed the protocol then it's no longer bitcoin.
Twetch.app has more than 50k users. It's also a genuine use case. So is etched.page or the other above-mentioned services.
How can you abuse storage if there is a 0.5 satoshis/byte fee to write data on chain currently? Miners are for-profit entities and will always charge for storage.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taproot decreases the size of multisig and other complex transactions significantly, in the happy path of a cooperative signature. It also enables Schnorr, which produces smaller signatures than ECDSA. It also contains features to further improve the efficiency of Lightning, which is a shockingly effective scaling mechanism.
Lightning doesn't work because it either leads to a chaos of routing that doesn't scale or it ends up centralized and you lose the point of bitcoin in the first step. And don't bother coming up with hand wavy explanations of how it could work, some day . People have been talking about Lightning for years, literally billions of dollars have been poured into the "tech", the fact that even bitcoin enthusiasts barely eve…
lightning works, at least you are having fun tho
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#134I'm amazed that he has time for this kind of hobby work.
I know right? I had to do a double take when I saw the link, and then had to click it to confirm it was that Karpathy
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It launched, is usable in most wallets, and is starting to get adoption. It's going to be a key piece of the recently passed legislation in El Salvador which makes Bitcoin legal tender.
I am puzzled by one thorn it is intended to solve. In the case of merchant/customer interactions, the LN channel blocks customer funds from their balance, but they will never receive money from the merchant. So that balance will be sent to the merchant, payment by payment. Not only does that block funds for the customer (which wants to reduce those, to avoid blocking too much, but that reduces the number of payments…
It’s an ongoing problem for sure, but the simple answer is users maintaining multiple well connected channels.
It’s very common on lightning to pay liquidity providers to balance your channels to you. Lightning Labs has a service called loop where you can pay them an onchain transaction and it will make a lightning network payment to your channel for that amount, thus giving you more spend liquidity. Loop is sweet cause it does this in a non custodial way, look into it.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#136"...Bitcoin is a living, breathing, developing code base that is moving forward with new features to continue to scale..." There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years.
What happened to the lightning network? (Serious question, I am out of the loop.)
its maturing, works pretty well already, but surely patience helps with emergent tech
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can think of the Bitcoin block chain as the state of a globally-accessible machine. The state is updated through the publication of valid blocks, each of which builds on a previous block. A block is composed of transactions, each of which incrementally advances the machine's state. Each transaction contains a small program "script" that defines the conditions for the state transition it causes. There's this persi…
Bitcoin's script language is very restricted, claiming that Bitcoin has been doing "smart contracts" is disingenuous to me. I wouldn't call a bitcoin script as "smart". Ethereum was born because of this
Script is restricted, but it permits everything outlined by Nick Szabo's definition. As Wikipedia notes:
> Smart contracts were first proposed in the early 1990s by Nick Szabo, who coined the term, using it to refer to "a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract
We don't get to decide what smart contracts are. Nick Szabo decided long ago.
Marketing vs reality has been a big problem in this space.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#138In Step 1, he explains how to create a cryptographic identity- the private public key pair. I came across an argument that a number cannot be property or owned because you can't legally own a number. If this is true then you can't own UTXOs associated with a private key or a cryptographic identity. I do think that bitcoin is fundamentally too complicated to understand, mathematically, for most people- myself included…
You don't own the number that is your private key, just as you don't own the number that is your bank account PIN or balance. What you own is space on the blockchain.
And just as you don't need to tour the mint to have confidence in the dollar, or implement Diffie-Hellman to have confidence in your TLS connection to Amazon, you don't need to understand elliptic curve cryptography to have faith in Bitcoin.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I count myself very fortunate that I find the word "work" very confusing.
I know what you mean but I still think that there’s a number you can give. Like this counts as work. What does your average daily schedule look like?
I'm interested in this too Karpathy, would love to know. Not sure why you're being down voted Adam.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a closed, centralized implementation that doesn't accept third party nodes. The use of bitcoin is pure marketing, it's just MySQL with extra steps.
This is interesting. Obviously, I heard about the whole "El Salvador something something Bitcoin" deal, but am completely unaware of the actual situation. Can somebody point me in the direction of some nice writeup explaining these details? I can only vaguely imagine how one can take Bitcoin and make it essentially an extension of SWIFT, and struggle to clearly visualize what the implications of this are.
From Strike CEO Jack Maller [1]:
Let’s walk through a user story. I want to send $1,000 to a friend of mine in El Salvador:
* When I initiate the $1,000 payment, Strike debits my existing USD balance.
* Strike then automatically converts my $1,000 to bitcoins ready for use in its infrastructure using its real-time automated risk management and trading infrastructure.
* Strike then moves the bitcoins across the Gulf of Mexico where it arrives in our Central American infrastructure in less than a second and for no cost.
* Strike then takes the bitcoins and automatically converts them back into USDT (synthetic digital dollar known as Tether) using its real-time automated risk management and trading infrastructure.
* Strike then credits the existing user with the USDT to their Strike account.
[1] https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-global-2392b90...