rufusroflpunch

He was more or less doing that already anyway. He could at least have used an even moderate amount of modern Bitcoin opsec.

I am sure you’re right. But you could just send the funds to a new address in the new wallet. He could have done that at any point in the last 5+ years.

This is baffling. It would be remarkably easy to memorize 12 words, then keep no active wallet anywhere. When you want to send coins, start up a desktop wallet, enter the 12 words, send some Bitcoin, then delete the wallet.

Same here. I presume that one day I will have to write something using a GAT, and then the understanding will click with me, even if I don't speak the terminology.

Owning and holding Bitcoin is not a scam. That's about it.

Layoffs were always coming, whether Musk bought it or not.

> ruined the network

Pretty sure it’s doing just fine.

Maybe I am reaching here, but by “ruining the network” I assume you mean that you are blaming him Adam for the small blockers winning, in which case the network is better off for it.

Kind of a ridiculous comparison. If you absolutely must compare this to school shootings, compare it this way:

Should a national government mandate only one method of security that every school must implement, or allow states/provinces/districts to experiment with what works for them? Even if the national government improves security in the short term, there is a strong possibility that the bureaucracy of national government's slowness to adapt will cause security to be worse in the long term.

Bitcoin is more comparable to FedWire which has very similar throughput. In a Bitcoin world, it would just be the base layer.

An endless parade of articles attacking Bitcoin mining have been flooding in since since Ethereum switched consensus mechanisms. Almost enough to make one a conspiracy theorist.

I'm just getting old, I do not understand VTubers or the appeal.

This is not a correct analysis. Firstly, Bitcoin is far more price sensitive to electricity than almost any other industry. Remaining profitable requires very low electricity costs, and are usually not competing in the same price bracket as other uses of electricity. Bitcoin mining is most prevalent in places where the energy is already wasted (thus very low price at market). Because Bitcoin miners can act as a buyer of last resort, it actually incentivizes energy development, not only for Bitcoin, but for every use.

Also, Bitcoin miners aren't destined to grow infinitely, consuming all spare electricity. There will be an equilibrium point where Bitcoin mining computers can only get so efficient and so fast.

I think it's worth pointing out to people that the developers really have nothing to do with it. If the developers all decided to more Bitcoin Core to proof of stake, the node runners would just switch clients.

Proof of work is core to the ethos of Bitcoin.

What he's comparing to Bitcoin is not EVERY SINGLE USE of the USD, but the actual USD network (the Fed and it's member banks) and it's security component (the US military, which is the ultimate enforcer of dollar hegemony).

This is comparable to the Bitcoin nodes and the miners.

This is your daily reminder that computers, including Bitcoin miners, do not generate emissions, they only use electricity, and do not care where that electricity comes from any more than any other industry.

Now that Ethereum has moved to proof of stake, the part of the crypto industry that is in bed with ESG-friendly VCs and regulators has really turned on Bitcoin, as was always expected. There's an almost constant barrage of these articles now.

Some people really do want to live in a world the state gets to decide to what uses of electricity are allowed and which are not, but I am not one of those people.

> I know Kentuckians aren’t the smartest

This is more offensive than the obvious joke you're responding to. Unless you're participating in jokeception.

I'm a proud Kentuckian, and I thought it was amusing.

Russia doesn't really stand to gain here. Ukraine and the United States stand to gain the most by removing the option for Europe to capitulate to Russia this winter.

Ukraine isn't on the Baltic Sea, but do they need to be? Honestly, I don't know the resources that would be required to accomplish this. Would some special forces with diving equipment and a fishing boat be enough?

> No it doesn't. It has one purpose, and one purpose only: to secure the network against double-spending attacks by making it infeasible to reverse transactions.

I won’t argue with you on this point. A better way to phrase it might be to say “POW has many features or implications for Bitcoin…”

> There are PoW cryptocurrencies like Monero, Litecoin, and many others that have community-driven development and institute a less dangerous emission schedule than Bitcoin.

Disagree that it is dangerous. We don’t have enough information about the future to determine that. It is just as likely that fee markets will be enough, thus implementing some kind of “perpetual emission” would only damage the value of the network.

Nobody will know the answer until it happens.

I consider Bitcoin’s use only as money to be a good thing for Bitcoin. It has no competing uses, thus has ultimate comparative advantage as money. The best monies throughout history had no competing consumption uses.

This is a rambling article, but the core premise that Bitcoin is leaky because it has an energy INPUT is a weird one. The argument that other tokens being fully closed loops that don’t leak value is certainly a take…

Proof of work plays many roles in the Bitcoin. One role it plays is that it ties a digital token to a real world, scarce, valuable resource. The only thing a digital token can be tied to: computation, or energy. Closed loop staking tokens have no tie. It is a formless, virtual, free floating concept. Not to mention that they are all highly centralized, so they don’t even have confidence in their monetary policy to fall back on.

With Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, etc, your value is in the hands of where the developers choose to take the protocols. They can and have changed their monetary policies, and they will again.

This person’s real concern appears to be “number go up”. It seems to have infected their thinking. They see a system that decided to engineer for NGU instead of stability and confidence, and thinks that’s “not leaky”. It is extremely short sighted.

In the stormy world of crypto, Bitcoin is the port.

I love the Critical Drinker and I also loved this movie. I am not a fan of Indian movies usually, but this one was so good that it is really almost mythical in the way can tell a universal story.

I read the WH report and my impression, despite the one line everyone is citing, is that Washington is slowly working its way to justifying acceptance of proof of work, despite whatever reservations they have, because its would be almost impossible, practically or politically, to ban it.

No. The average person (or even crypto user) doesn’t know anything about the difference between consensus algorithms and that is certainly not stopping growth.

Also Bitcoin will 100% not remove proof of work ever. The overwhelming majority of node operators would not agree to that, ever. It goes against the ethos of Bitcoin. Proof of work is part of the social contract, right up there with 21 million hard cap and users running their own nodes.

There is no way Bitcoin has only 11k nodes. There are currently 17k public Lightning nodes, so there must be at least that many full nodes, and certainly many many more.

You're right, their pricing says $1 per 80 searches, sorry. I still think that sounds like a lot. I'm wonder that their infrastructure looks like that making 80 searches costs a dollar. If there is one thing that I would think would be extremely cheap for a search engine, it would be conducting a search.

First I am hearing of Kagi. I'm impressed with what I am reading though. The company seems very transparent about their business model, which is refreshing.

Reading their pricing page, it says it costs them about one dollar for a single search query. Holy moly, that seems wildly expensive. I would really be interested in knowing why a single search query is so pricey.

> If something sounds too good to be true, then it isn't.

This one threw me for a loop, at first. Wouldn’t one normally say “then it is” instead of “then it isn’t”?

If you are accepting that the network can hard fork to change the hash algorithm, then why not accept that they can do a soft fork to blacklist UTXOs or any one of who-knows-how many possible defenses? Changing the hashing algorithm is a nuclear option and probably not necessary in the astronomically unlikely event that someone managed to get 51% of hash rate for any amount of time.

edit: Blacklisting UTXOs is entirely possible as I mentioned, and as I said, it should be achievable by soft fork. This would be the proof of work equivalent of slashing. I have a hard time believing Vitalik doesn’t know this. Is he being dishonest? I don’t know.

There are beliefs that as Bitcoin continues to accrue value and users, the fees will be enough to sustain the network. I understand many are skeptical in this regard and the only thing that will them right or wrong is time.