Two days in a row I see this Karpathy name on the front page of HN on two totally unrelated subjects. It almost feels like this is simulated world and something is wrong.
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
231–240 of 293 posts
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
It seemed like an answer at first, but actually this answers absolutely nothing and I'm not even sure how it's related to the topic being discussed:
* This guy starts talking about sending USD, but ends up talking about receiving USDT. USD != USDT. And while there are problems with sending USD across the border, there're absolutely no problem with sending USDT. And there's absolutely no problem buying USDT wherever you are. (But, what's important, there might be problems actually converting your USDT into USD.)
* Since we end up buying USDT with USD, the word "Bitcoin" in the middle of the story seems redundant and actually confusing.
* There's nothing about Lightning here. I mean, you can talk about how you use Lightning to transfer BTC inside Strike as much as you want, but if BTC is irrelevant to the user story, so is Lightning.
* I'm not sure how Strike and this user story are relevant at all. It started out about El Salvador accepting BTC as a legal tender, and how using it in actual transactions w/o lightning is problematic due to low TPS. How sending USD to El Salvador is relevant here at all?
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#233"NIST publishes recommendations on which ones to use, but people prefer to use other curves (like secp256k1) that are less likely to have backdoors built into them" Does this make any sense? How is a curve going to have backdoors on it? Or he means a specific implementation? Or is this a joke? I'm confused
There's been a history of mathematical information used in cryptography produced by the NSA, for which it's later revealed, they had pre-developed an attack. Example: the s-boxes of DES.
Except NSA strengthened DES against this not-yet-known-to-the-public attack (differential cryptanalysis).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA's...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis#His...
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
There is no bitcoin needed for this at all its does not even move on the chain for the transfer. Both sides are Strike entities all this does is use bitcoin as a bridge for USD to USD which is completely pointless as both sides are USD. You could just buy USDT (or another stabelcoin) and send it there. Its a different story if there is actually a switch in currency needed. There is this famous and from bitcoin people…
Please somebody explain why it's downvoted. Ignoring digression about XRP, this is exactly what I read from the parent comment. Judging by the user-story above, all this talk about how BTC is being "sent" (which, as we all know, is a small lie on it's own, since unlike fiat, BTC is never really being sent anywhere) seems just to distract us from the fact that we just end up buying USDT for USD. No BTC involvement required.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#235Two days in a row I see this Karpathy name on the front page of HN on two totally unrelated subjects. It almost feels like this is simulated world and something is wrong.
He's seni-famous even before working at Tesla
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
All progress was 'wasteful' at some point, but all 'progress' is wasteful. And yes, bitcoin is 'progress'. I suppose Bitcoin is better than gold. Unfortunately, for BTC, we already have much more advanced financial technology.
Permissioned legacy technology is not advanced. The stronger, harder money wins. Good luck with your guess.
I am specifically thinking of fiat money, based on burrowing and fractional reserve banking. This has addressed many historical problems with fixed money/value supply that Bitcoin would have if it ever caught on.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#237Bitcoin is surprisingly easy, I'm currently working on a similar thing, but in Pharo/Smalltalk (I took it up as a project to learn Pharo). It's been pretty nice so far.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#238I wonder how strong would Elliptic Curve Cryptography be compared to other methods if there is a major breakthrough in quantum computing.
I wish this were talked about more. Quantum computing is the biggest long-term threat to crypto imo. What's the plan once elliptic curve cryptography can be broken? There will be a point in time where there are just a few quantum computers that can break everything before the general public has access to quantum computing. Can crypto work in that scenario? Normal computers wouldn't be able to work with the beastly al…
We already have a solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_signature) but there’s no reason to deploy it yet since it reduces scalability.
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#239Andrej is an excellent teacher. I got into ML because of his blogs and Stanford's CS231n course (which he also started).
Re: A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Except this bubble is a bit more insidious because you have actors like Tether that are most likely creating a lot of artificial liquidity/demand. If there is a sudden loss of faith and enough actors start rushing for the exits, it will look something more like a musical game of chairs of who is left holding the bag of worthless Mickey Mouse dollars, by my estimation.