> When Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin Whitepaper he defined it as a peer to peer electronic cash system.
How do we know Satoshi is a he?
The Decentralized Future
41–50 of 144 posts
Re: The Decentralized Future
#42"nobody can destroy or seize your coins"
"keeping your investment safe is not simple"
Hmm...
Re: The Decentralized Future
#43> When Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin Whitepaper he defined it as a peer to peer electronic cash system. How do we know Satoshi is a he ?
Of course we don't know for sure whether Satoshi is really a man, a woman, or a group of people. But for ease of conversation, people use the gender and number of the pseudonym (masculine, singular).
Re: The Decentralized Future
#44The nature of single things is decentralized. Therefore every new era starts with decentralization. The internet started off quite decentralized, for instance. But do we really have a new era here? I'm not sure if with 32 years of age I'm already too old to recognize the New and grog it. I don't feel it. I feel there's a lot of buzz around blockchain, sure. But it looks like it would be all. Bitcoin is just as centra…
I think the best way to think about this to think about the tcp/ip protocol. It's a standard protocol but it's decentralized still to this day.
Blockchain takes it further and conceptually adds history to the TCP/IP protocol. This has extreme value as it allow data to behave like physical properties.
Re: The Decentralized Future
#45"nobody can destroy or seize your coins" "keeping your investment safe is not simple" Hmm...
I think this means:
- nobody can destroy or seize your coins unless they have your private keys
- keeping your private keys safe is not simple
Re: The Decentralized Future
#46I’ve reacently read the Burnskie book about crypto assets in the hope that I might come away more enlightened about the market and how to assess it. The opposite was the case. After reading the book and looking into it more, it’s very hard to see these things as assets at the moment, or to see much utility in the technology. Don’t get me wrong, there certainly is some and it is certainly ‘cool’, but right now blockha…
The problem is not because cryptoassets are bad, it's because you read an investment book instead of technology book. (I read the cryptoassets book too and I think it's a great book, it's just that it's not a book to solve the specific problem you're talking about) I can confirm from my own experience that reading pop-sci books about blockchains--although they sound really cool and do provide motivation to look furth…
> When you do so, you'll get the "enlightment" you were looking for.
Which is what? That the blockchain is a solution in search of a problem? There is very, very little reason to use a cumbersome data structure when better ones exist (eg: just a regular database, or something like git). Worse, the only way the blockchain gets all it's supposed valuable attributes is when you provide a financial incentive to mine. Aka -- bolt a "currency" on top of it and then go market it to tons of rubes so you can convert all of the generated tokens into cold, hard fiat to pay your bills. Without the "currency", who will pay miners to trustlessly verify all the transactions? The parties running the service? If so... since you seem to trust all them to pay the bills.... why not just use a database instead and save some substantial fiat?
The whole bitcoin/blockchain "movement" is just pure hype. It's people at the top of the pyramid hyping a worthless technology in order to cash out their tokens before the whole thing collapses in on itself...
Re: The Decentralized Future
#47"nobody can destroy or seize your coins" "keeping your investment safe is not simple" Hmm...
One of the great ironies of Bitcoin is that it was marketed as "the internet of money".... except one of the best way to secure it is to avoid exposing it to the internet and by printing its keys out on sheets of paper.
Re: The Decentralized Future
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bitcoin is just as centralized as banks are, for instance. That's a rather odd statement. Can you justify that?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitco... A handful of actors with a controlling stake isn't exactly the same thing as "centralized" but it's close.
Not really. They're pretty different things.
Re: The Decentralized Future
#49Happy to answer any follow-up questions here
Thanks for this writeup! You've done a great job at organizing many of the points that were discussed in this Bitcoin thread[1] from last month. I'll be using this as a starting point for discussion with friends that are interested in cryptocurrency.
Re: The Decentralized Future
#50Source 5 is a broken link. It should be:
https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-bitcoin-consensus-yes-i...