spiorf

If i carry a pocket knife, would you call me stabber? "anonymous monetary transfer of arbitrary size/value" is the knife, money laundering is the stabbing.

I can even apply gravity laws here: what goes up must come down. Except when in orbit...

2 of 3 multisig. Now the thief has to compromise two sites, at the same time.

Or password protect the seed.

Or both.

The irony is strong here. You need walled gardena because walled gardena protect people from dangerous software. Posted as a comment in a news about dangerous software found in a walled garden.

This is starting to look like the bitcoin obituaries situation.

So you have a guy with a proven track record of companies that manage to make products that 15 years ago were thought to be impossible to make, that is personally invested in those companies, that does so with a clear intention of bringing some much needed revolutions in the whole transport and rocket industry, and he should be fired...

Besides, shareholders bought shares of a company whose stated purpose is "to accelerate the advent of sustainable mobility", not "maximize profit for shareholders".

Being your own bank comes with some responsibility.

Gold can be stolen, gold can be lost. You can hide your gold in the woods, and forget the location.

Also paper money can rot and can burn.

If i memorize my bitcoin seed, my brain is in fact my bank, and if I trust some external entity more than my own brain, bitcoin is not for me.

Are you questioning AI BIG DATA CLOUD BLOCKCHAIN???

Yes, but the hashing of the merkle tree to obtain the merkle root takes like 10^4 hashes for 10^3 transactions. Compared with 2^80 that is about the number of hash operations needed to find a POW block header, it it trascurable.

Lightning network allows trustless instant and low fee payments. It is at the embrional stage yet, and the whole structure has yet to be defined, but the point to point protocol for trustless off-chain instant transactions is ready.

But there is no known function that has these properties and is useful in real world.

At least until/if Ligtning networks is proved to work.

Think about the energy expended to take that gold out of earth. And to make the chemicals for extractions....

I repeat, you got it very wrong.

Transaction number is not correlated with mining energy expenditure.

Mining is used to secure the ledger in a way that the same amount of energy is needed to alter it.

The block hash begins with a number of zeros.

Try for yourself how many tries it takes to find a string that hashes to a hash beginning with 3 zeros.

Bitcoin block hashes begin with 13 or 14 zeros IIRC. This means that you need to try trillions of combinations again if you want to alter a block. And then you must keep finding other hashes with enough zeros fast enough to outcompete the whole network.

But the cost of hashing is the same, with 1, 10 or 1000 transactions in a block. And the block time is on average fixed at 10 minutes.

You don't hash transactions directly, you hash a block header that keeps only the merkle root hash of the transactions. The merkle root is fixed size.

The problem with POS is that you do not have a mathematical guarantee of immutability. It costs nothing to try to stake on different blocks, and every counter-measure relies on the fact that the network is not partitioned.

This would be fatal in case of a remote crash vulnerability, because an attacker could partition the network at will.

Or a nation/state could cut internet access.

Without real world energy, you lose byzantine fault tolerance.

The energy expended is the security of the currency.

If a transaction is confirmed by 1 TWh of proof of work, that much energy is required to alter it, meanwhile the bitcoin network has expended even more energy.

It is still young, and the exponential growth in energy consumption is going to stop as an equilibrium is reached.

This is very wrong. It does not work that way at all.

Volume or value of transactions has nothing to do with the energy expended.

The energy is needed to calculate a mathematic proof that makes sure your transaction cannot be reversed or tampered with.

This mathematic proof on average is calculated every 10 minutes, with no correlation to the number of transactions.

You make a transaction, and if the bitcoin network has expended 1TWh after you sent it, at least 2TWh are needed to reverse that transaction (and/or any other transaction). You can see how over time it becomes impossible, even with unlimited money, to reverse one.

The energy expended is a guarantee of security and immutability.

The fact that real world energy is expended is the thermodynamic guarantee of the irreversibility of a transaction.

If you have access to the VISA database, and change something, you cannot have the cryptographic proof that it has not been tampered with. At the very best, you trust a VISA root key.

With Bitcoin you trust math and physics, telling that if the whole network has expended 1TWh after my transaction, at least twice that energy will be necessary to reverse it, and the only data i need to prove that, is the blockchain.

It's nice and simple, but why no https? right now anybody on the same network could modify the code in transit to make it send the private keys somewhere.

And i would make the online page a demo, with a mandatory "download and run this offline", maybe with an advice to check signatures.

Online web wallet like this are too dangerous to use for non trivial amounts of cryptocurrency. Especially with the influx of newbies for the recent spike in btc price.

You can't have a bluetooth serial adapter on the iphone, because it only supports a few bluetooth profiles. This cuts a lot of complexity.

> Starts sounding like a government that enforces contracts, so that's not entirely new :)

The difference is that you can cryptographically verify the correctness of the enforced contract. You don't "Trust", you "Trust, but verify".