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Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

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Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#71

Post by chill1 »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #19
arcticbull wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

BIP39 mnemonics ("seeds") were not around in the early days. Bitcoin core software generated random private keys that were completely unrelated to one another. So it was necessary to backup the wallet file each time that new keys were created. Most users would generate hundreds (or thousands) of keys at a time, to reduce the frequency of backups.

Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#72

Post by sneak »

Note that the canonical Bitcoin whitepaper url (which appears on tshirts and stickers and the like) is still just fine:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

That URL's been up since the beginning, and AFAIK isn't going anywhere.

I didn't even know bitcoincore.org was a thing until today.

Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#73

Post by dieortin »

suikadayo wrote: post #30
jerry1979 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As transactions grow in BCH, wouldn't it need larger and larger blocks? I think larger and larger blocks would centralize the nodes. Edit : Also, I don't think the Lightning Network behaves likes the credit card networks. What do you mean when you say that?

It would need larger blocks, but it was the general understanding within the community before the fork that with Moore's Law, hard disk capacity would increase and price would go down in the future, so it really isn't a big deal, and not enough to cause "centralization of nodes" like some people argue. Also, my understanding is that Lightning Network is semi-custodial, so it's probably more similar to banks than cred…

What do you mean by “semi-custodial”? You’re not giving anyone the keys to your address. It’s nothing like a bank.

Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#75

Post by __blockcipher__ »

uncletammy wrote: post #62
lawn wrote: post #13

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.

They removed the whitepaper about as fast as they removed Gavin Andresen's commit access once they found justification. 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.

From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core was a very insidious group of people that seized control of Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely speculative thing.

The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold:

(1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a stable point to base its value around. For example, the value would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to speculate.

(2) Bitcoin, like any asset, is a store of value, but its ability to store value is the same whether it's worth $.0001 per coin or $40,000 per coin.

So they basically turned it into a purely speculative instrument.

---

The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a cryptocurrency to failure.

Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship / suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the decentralization of the bitcoin network.

---

Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.

Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#76

Post by Scoundreller »

sedeki wrote: post #66
tylersmith wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not a hardcore bitcoiner, but the price would fall quickly if these few controlling nodes would do something malicious. Which is against their own interest.

Probably. But a core aspect of decentralization is that you shouldn’t need to trust a few others at all.

Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#78

Post by __blockcipher__ »

toolz wrote: post #46
mdoms wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only need to read the first couple of sentences of the whitepaper to understand that it was primarily designed as a digital currency with a focus on spending/transacting.

Are those two concepts mutually exclusive? A liquid currency that holds value in unstable economies would seem to serve both the purpose of being spendable as well as a stable investment like gold. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it means to be "gold like" though.

They're not mutually exclusive, and that's always been the point made by those like me who supported a blocksize increase and were on the BCH side of things.

Those on the Bitcoin Core side of things believe that they are mutually exclusive, and that you can either be a gold-like store of value (that is to say, absolutely fucking useless) or a peer-to-peer electronic cash, but not both.

To me it's so obvious that the value of something as a currency is what makes it equally a good store of value.

Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#79

Post by 1996 »

f430 wrote: post #61
hanniabu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that sub is completely delusional

A buttcoiner always sees another buttcoiner. edit: wow, didn't know so many people were against r/buttcoin its sad to see HN descend into this sort of madness.

Even if I'm generally pro-crypto and against HN negative stance on crypto, I upvoted you (and will vouch for your comments if needed) because buttcoin is an interesting community: they are educated on crypto, and their negative arguments are more than simple rebuttals. I spend some serious time there - it's a great source of news, a bit like HN

Now to the moon with lambos! /s

Re: Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

#80

Post by __blockcipher__ »

lawn wrote: post #57
toolz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those two concepts mutually exclusive? A liquid currency that holds value in unstable economies would seem to serve both the purpose of being spendable as well as a stable investment like gold. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it means to be "gold like" though.

No they aren't mutually exclusive. In fact sound money should be both a good store of value and a medium of exchange (in other words work well for payments). The problem is that Bitcoin's high fees has made it unsuitable for regular payments, so proponents only have the store of value explanation left.

Exactly this. To me it was proof that 99% of the Bitcoin community (such as the Bitcoin subreddit which had an absurd amount of influence, thus why taking it over and censoring discussion was so effective) didn't care about Bitcoin as a currency and had never once used it as a currency. They just bought it on Coinbase and never even transferred to their own wallet.

Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.

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