61–70 of 287 posts
As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this, the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it runs counter to the argument of Bitcoin being "digital gold" and should just be a settlement layer. So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.
There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.
This is so bizarre. For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years). Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud: - The real Sa…
The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison. > He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’…
That conjecture makes a huge amount of sense based on circumstantial factors but most importantly, business purpose. The gentleman you identified was (when BTC was released) running an international unconventional business with money-logistics issues. As we see now, BTC's primary use case is facilitating international financial logistics for criminal transactions-- the use case for BTC always stayed close to home! Assuming the conjecture is correct BTC performs exactly the real-world role it was designed to perform.
As for the paper, let me get this straight-- the group that publishes the software that establishes what BTC is now has taken the position that whoever Satoshi is or was can claim copyright and take down core BTC IP no matter how licensed?! Yeah, that can't be very reassuring to a multi-million dollar industry based on IP collected and distributed by Bitcoin Core, i.e., the entire bitcoin ecosystem.
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Unless satoshi lost his keys lol like virtually everyone else of that cohort.
You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key? You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.
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Is he being released? I thought he received a 25 year sentence in 2012?
Paul actively cooperates with the US justice and secret services. It is likely that his sentence will eventually be reduced.
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The whitepaper didn’t expect/predict most hashing power being controlled by very few actors. Edit: I’d say the whitepaper did expect this and basically said it could be a problem: From the abstract: > As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attacker.
That's a fundamental security assumption made by Nakamoto consensus. It's like assuming the discrete log problem is hard. If/when the assumption doesn't hold the security is gone.
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Craig produced a proof on a computer he himself provided. Wouldn't have been hard to alter it to say whatever he wanted to.
Indeed. I think Craig is a fraud. I'm just dumbfounded why Gavin --a person I admire from intial days and who is probably person n.2 after satoshi in terms of bitcoin actual initial lines of code written -- was so easily fooled.
This is so bizarre. For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years). Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud: - The real Sa…
> The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massiv…
Regardless, intelligence community subpoint aside, I think the fact that third-party criminals would want to kidnap him and force the transfer of his bitcoin mega-fortune is very plausible, even if you don't see governments as a possible threat vector.
I do agree in general that maintaining pseudonomynity helped keep the focus on the project and not the person(s). But I think it's undeniable that being publicly known as a figure with billions of dollars of value stored in their brain puts a target on one's head. And it puts a target in a way that being a normal fiat billionaire does not, because you can't just wire a billion dollars to another country without having the transfer stopped, whereas with bitcoin once they force him to transfer Bitcoin (if he caved to torture etc) it's irreversible.
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> Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be born directly by parties to the transaction and will have to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly. This is something I don’t see talked about much, but the asymptotic state of Bitcoin when mining fees are zero is interesting to think about. It’s not obvious to me that the economic incentives against running a 51% attack will exist in the “terminal…
Would the economic incentives not remain unchanged as a function of unit price of BTC? It feels like in the terminal state there’s going to be a high stakes game of chicken between attackers and holders to see who’s willing to pay more for control of the whole network. This is likely exacerbated by a move to layer 2 networks to avoid the 7tx bottleneck isn’t it? I’m not sure personally this is just something I’ve bee…
Especially if, as you point out, layer 2 networks become a more desirable place to do transactions.
Basically, it seems like the terminal state of this is a gigantic freeloader problem where everyone wants the network to be secure but nobody is incentivized to do it.
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The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison. > He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’…
>The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison. That conjecture makes a huge amount of sense based on circumstantial factors but most importantly, business purpose. The gentleman you identified was (when BTC was released) running an international unconventional business with money-logistics issues. As we see now, BTC's primary use case is facilitating international financial logistics for…
Le Roux genuinely impresses me haha. He's a real-life Bond villain - even his Wikipedia article is riveting [2].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...