randomhodler84

It’s not an anonymous account, I believe it is Senator Cynthia Lummis (team?) soliciting opinions via GitHub PR. It’s a pity more people are not taking the experiment seriously.

If this was true, in it was easier to steal or extort; the miners would be stealing or extorting. Such is the nature of the Bitcoin game.

I don’t know if we have a way or model of calculating it accurately yet. It exists.

Better to spill the electrons of the enemy than their blood. We can only hope that future warfare is computational, rather than kinetic.

Not quite :-) I believe it is part of the equation. I don’t think it is the nature that work occurred applies value — rather the demand for something that someone has sacrificed something for exists — in art, generally a work that has sacrificed time to create something aesthetic has a demand that provides its value. It’s value is subjective to the buyer, however the astute buyer is more likely to buy the 1000 hour work over the mass produced out of nothing thing.

Do you think 20 years from now people will be using (some variant of) BitTorrent protocol, invented in 2001 for peer to peer file exchange? I do.

AES, the criminal math. Every day countless innocent bytes are diffused and confused JUST because someone might be watching. Where will the madness end!

That we had to fight for them be created. Eternal hash war. We didn’t wave a pen or type a keystroke to magic them into existence.

Litecoin also has some privacy features now too — MWEB (mimblewimble extension blocks) that aggregates all MW tx into a single blob, and hides the amounts transacted. Check it out if you haven’t seen it, it would be good for the network to expand the volume of the anonymity set.

Sure but why would anyone want Jed’s PoS token in the first place? They just printed it and gave it away to people on Facebook when launched. Like all PoS tokens, they have no value and cannot really be used as a universal medium of exchange between fiat; they are best to be used as the antispam and fee mechanism, to conserve and meter precious eternally recorded storage.

My fav scam is TCP/IP. I can’t believe they made every computer on earth speak it and in general accept traffic from anyone else on the planet! Without permission! Haha it’ll never work.

Reality is people will learn NYKNYC eventually. It’s a multi year journey for some. We had the largest outflow of BTC for exchanges ever last week. Ledger hit new sales records for sale of hardware wallets. People are getting it.

I will not accept that people consider it a PITA. I will teach them, personally if I have to. I have onboarded many.

Agree about understanding the threat — but I really don’t think I am avoiding the threat model here.

I’ve been philosophizing on the nature of Bitcoin for a long time. You haven’t given me an attack that would defeat this system yet. If you have a valid attack, I would encourage you to circulate it where technical folks can deal with it.

All you are doing is throwing your opinion that it is useless, the state will defeat it, etc. I mean cool, but coiners will not agree with you. There are many others here that have told you their experiences, threat models and uses.

“Wow, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are getting a lot of withdrawals lately!”

POWERFUL TECHNOLOGY!

Multisig constructions were created for the torture case. There are unfortunately cases where this has proven true.

I know your opinion re usefulness, noted. It contrasts greatly with my experiences.

Some of us dream up ways to keep the State out, you keep dreaming up ways the State will defeat it. It is a cat and mouse game for all eternity. I am confident we will survive.

Could sure, but that’s not how ransomware typically works. Typically, it is a non interactive process that is enabled by automated application of strong encryption delivered via a binary payload. It is encryption that puts the user in danger of malicious intent not the payment rails. Before Bitcoin, LR ukash and shady payment card processors handled this. Cryptocurrency is just a better rail, so good guys and bad guys use it.

Is your problem with the network enabling crime? (Internet?)

Agreed. Crime is not a good thing, and please do not thing I am trying to endorse it. I just know that it exists and will use whatever resources it has access to. I philosophically disagree with denying ourselves something because someone somewhere can do crime.

Now, encryption and by extension cryptocurrency, this is truly revolutionary. They can shoot me in the head, but they cannot read my data, access my devices, or take the money. All that remains is silicon and metal. I like the idea that when I die, everything I have written privately, and every sat I have earned will rest forever, unreachably.

It’s far closer to the truth than you are willing to admit.

Ransomware is primarily enabled by encrypting your files. How they take payment is irrelevant. No encryption (eg: a universe where AES, RSA, ECEIS is broken), no ransomware.

My position is the fallout of ransomware is enabled by people failing to take backups.

Yeah, sorry, I lost it all in a tragic boating incident.

Ironically the zksnark paper had a glaring, crypto system breaking error and the implementers of zcash went out of their way to hide the parameters until sapling, where they could correct the problem.

That being said, zcash is a quite useful construction.

David, I am highly concerned about fairly new and poorly understood zkproof systems vs transparent blockchains for long term storage. Monero, Grin, Zcash; have all had their issues.

What would be required in your mind for you to trust Mina to accurately and retrievably store your life savings?

They will take my intels amd and rpis from my cold dead hands!

There are trade offs. I am acutely aware of them. In other conversations I will freely explain.

I also know history, probably better than most on this board. This conversation is about trying to find the crux of your disbelief.

The thing is, you and Bruce are not being original in your arguments. Some of the things you have said are absolutely undeniable the truth. I am saying it doesn’t matter. Nothing you have proposed is existential for an internet protocol, you are throwing gotchas that we mostly disregarded years ago. Sometimes, In practise, worse is better.

Fair enough, I also like the doge community. It’s hyper positive. I’m happy to spend doge on beer and stack sats for the apocalypse.

“Oh so that’s ok then!”. You are feeding into my point.

I get what you are trying to say, but I counter it by saying the same amount of Bitcoin sats are associated with the same address it was sent to. No haircuts, no confiscation.

Check history. I think you will find folks that bought BTC to avoid a Cyrus haircut are quite happy today. Nb: I was only tangentially referring to Cyprus. I am from another place.

Yes, and I tell people not to store on exchanges, take custody of their coin. There is no bank in Bitcoin!

Agree, there is risk for the 5 minutes it takes to transfer the coins out. If you are on boarding from fiat, there is a degree of trust to extend to the exchange. But this is not Bitcoin, it is a centralized exchange. There are other ways to buy and trade coin too. Earning is best.

I knew not to leave coins with MtGox. I knew not to leave them with Cryptsy. This is a lesson I learned from banks.

Can you elaborate how a bad actor, any bad actor, can confiscate, steal, reorder or devalue a UTXO recorded on an immutable blockchain for all eternity?

The problem is where does one determine the point of tyranny? You will find that even the most apparently benign governments can turn given the political will of elected tyrants.

I’d say a government that outlaws abortion is a tyrannical overlord with no legitimacy. And yet here we are.

Indeed!

We should also ban crime too, that will surely stop it. Why not get rid of general purpose computation and global communication networks while we are torching our technological footprint.

I mean no offense to you personally, it’s just one of my quests in life to dispel misunderstandings of this revolutionary technology.

It’s easy to find flaws in any tech. It’s how we adapt that is important.