Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

karpathy.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 293 posts

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#141

Post by SnowProblem »

Taek wrote: post #90
andai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the lightning network? (Serious question, I am out of the loop.)

Lightning network more or less failed to live up to the hype. Problems like routing complexity, liquidity, and a lack of on-chain space to open and close channels have delayed/limited its impact.

To expand on this, to receive money over Lightning, you need someone else to lock up their bitcoins for you. This is called inbound liquidity, and the problem of users getting inbound liquidity is no joke. Lightning Labs recently launched Lightning Pool to help with this, but fees range from 5% to 25%. Uncompetitive. If you think about it too, it makes sense, because anyone locking up their bitcoins for others should expect a several % return, or else they would loan it out at similar rates. Current Lightning wallets are basically giving their users inbound liquidity for free using VC funds, but is this honestly sustainable? There are other problems with Lightning, like the requirement to be online to receive payments, watchtowers, UX complexity of channels. Some of these are solvable through centralization. But that is why you'll hear people say Lightning recreate the banking model, because realistically that looks like the only way it could work. Oddly, this was all pointed out by many people over the years, but Lightning seems to get endless forgiveness in its inability to deliver, because it is BTC's only hope to maintain the peer-to-peer cash narrative.

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#142

Post by prox »

nednar wrote: post #101
simias wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, the "pyramid scheme" + "technobabble" is not totally worthless, if it enables the investment of "literally billions of dollars" in otherwise totally unproven technology paths, doesn't it? Finally there is one area where people are really investing money into computer science! A cause to celebrate in my book.

cough dotcom bubble.

Seriously, investing money in a bubble is nothing to celebrate. That’s why it is called a bubble. It pops and many people loose their money.

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#143

Post by noxer »

doomroot wrote: post #129
lawn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Segwit was also supposed to scale Bitcoin, and it turns out it was a massively inefficient solution, which took years to even reach it's lackluster potential. Taproot will in practice have an even smaller impact, as it only affects special transactions that normal people won't use. So yeah, it's not zero progress, but it's certainly not much.

Segwit itself provided an effective 2x increase in onchain transaction capacity and it fixed transaction malleability which was necessary for lightning network. Lightning network has 50,000+ open channels where payments can be routed without going onchain. Given the lightning network’s strict requirements to keep a node online & responsive, less you lose all your funds, I think that’s extremely impressive and shows a…

Bitcoins scaling problem was solved by removing PoW/PoS and by removing the incentive structure (block rewards). As soon as this is gone there was no reason anymore why it would not scale like similar systems. Its basically limited only by how fast data can propagate trough the network.

PoW/PoS was replaced by FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) Its not a coin its technology used by several systems and based on BFT (which is way older than bitcoin and bitcoin actually is based on BFT as well although maybe unintentional).

FBA just adds the federated part so a decentral system can be build. While bitcoin instead used a work-reward lottery system (PoW) to decide who can write the next block rather than finding a block everyone agrees on. Its really not that hard to figure out which of these solutions probably works better and scales somewhat like a distributes system is expected to scale.

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#144

Post by runbathtime »

modeless wrote: post #138
runbathtime wrote: post #130

In 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.

A bank account balance is representative value of dollars that bank owes you. If someone tries to steal it by pretending to be you even if they just steal your PIN, they are committing fraud.

If someone steals a private key by committing another crime like stealing a laptop, that is a crime because you own the laptop. If they learn of your private key without committing a crime, that is not theft.

You don't own 'space on the blockchain.' I have no idea what that even means.

You do need to understand elliptic curve cryptography to have confidence (not faith) in bitcoin because you make the transactions in bitcoin. You are responsible, not some third party. People understand the dollar because it is physical and you can get them on demand and they originally got their value from Gold, not some abstraction like proof of spent energy one time awhile back.

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#145

Post by Shosty123 »

coding123 wrote: post #126
wyager wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years. Lol, literally this week: https://taproot.watch/

Bitcoin doesn't scale. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Just watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDKntG4F0hg So in about 5 years pretend everyone in the United States melts a wrench like that... Then a month later they do that twice, a month later they do it three times. Hey, at least it will be fun.

Why does every discussion about Bitcoin's environmental impact reduce to "it uses a lot of electricity therefore it should be stopped".

We're not going to shut down entire sectors of the economy because of their environmental impact. People are going to innovate and invest in alternative sources of energy because it is becoming profitable to do so. The solution is hardly ever "just stop doing it", it's "how can we do this better".

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#146

Post by wtsnz »

noxer wrote: post #61

"...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.

There was a demo of node software that is capable of 50,000 transactions per second just a few weeks ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3As9-9uSXs

(Yes this is on the Bitcoin SV implementation of the Bitcoin protocol - where they're using the original protocol that Satoshi envisioned)

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#148

Post by grokstar »

karpathy wrote: post #54
21eleven wrote: post #17

Looks like the exercise left to the reader has been completed: https://www.blockchain.com/btc-testnet/tx/182bf9202649ded3a6...

the plot thickens :) https://twitter.com/YuleHou/status/1407395412575592453

The thickening intensifies :) https://twitter.com/grokology/status/1407433078914437120

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#149

Post by xwolfi »

thesausageking wrote: post #80
andai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the lightning network? (Serious question, I am out of the loop.)

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.

El Salvador, the military dictatorship that managed to make western dreamer hype it like a shitcoin...

Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python

#150

Post by wtsnz »

SnowProblem wrote: post #118
noxer wrote: post #61

"...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.

So-called heretics have been scaling Bitcoin in spite of BTC's braindead decisions. Last week, 50K TPS were demonstrated publicly on Bitcoin SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3As9-9uSXs . More privately.

This.
Post reply on HN