midmagico

pfft, real neutral pov there

Most of the article is technically ill-informed; unfortunately, much of the logic, while sound if it were based on factual reality, fails in that sense.

The gaslighting in this case is therefore inverted.

lol ArtForz was an engineer who single-handedly designed from scratch low-run book printing machines, built his house with CHP that he designed and created himself, created his own pick-n-place machines from parts he had laying around, reversed a hidden opcode in the AMD GPUs of the time, designed at the gate-level his own FPGA, manually soldered his own sASIC, and printed his own MOSIS chips. He was the smartest person in the room. By far. Many of the very early non-get-rich-quick people that didn't think anything would happen for decades but were interested in Bitcoin, were in fact the applied-science smartest people in the room. The people generally who thought it was digital tulips even a few years later were also people who thought they were the smartest people in the room, but were actually nowhere close.

Others who were very early (source: I was there and interacted with them) were extremely wealthy investment bankers with a track history of being able to make money, some kinds of cryptographers (Hal, Adam, etc) and others who were ultra-competent, often inventors of new technique in their own right.

It's a well-studied but unfortunately not particularly well-known result that the people most interested in Bitcoin are at the two ends of the expertise spectrum—highly highly financially competent, and financially incompetent people.

You will never hear from most of the highly-competent people because they also recognize that being noisy about owning Bitcoin draws a giant target on their backs. E.g. try and find ArtForz now.

I would offer that the late and very great James Randi's often-repeated comments on ultra high-skilled people being some of the easiest to trick are probably illustrative, and my personal opinion at the moment is that many of these people have been tricked long ago into thinking that Bitcoin is something bad.

I'm not gmax, mike, which you definitely knew on IRC when you offered to help me deal with criminal harassment on IRC by handing me +o status in the channels where they were harassing people in your name.

(edit) I'm also not answering gmax; I'm answering you, with concrete specifics and an actual example, to inform you about the utility of DKIM even if Satoshi's email provider didn't use them, which you clearly didn't already know.

man that guy is an idiot

lol, no.

The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :)

They don't have to! (re: txid 5d80a29be1609db91658b401f85921a86ab4755969729b65257651bb9fd2c10d)

The massive amount of additional logic and thought about Satoshi from OG'ers (e.g. |}ruid etc) that have come out in response to this terrible effort, IMO is partly the purpose of the doco.

Most people have no way to more-deeply authenticate those emails because you didn't provide headers. Many people, myself included, would love some way to better-rule-out whether parts of the messages had been elided, for example. A DKIM signature would have been a perfect integrity check of the message. It's just good protocol.

As a result of timestamping emails with their DKIM into Bitcoin, now even rotated, broken, or released keys can be used to partially authenticate e.g. Google messages. You can see this for example in this project here:

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

And in particular, here:

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/pull/5

So you see, even historical DKIM signatures can act as strong authentication.

Complete nonsense, lol.

This is all pretty much boring, tired lies that altcoin profiteers like to trot out apparently assuming nobody is still around who is interested in contradicting them.

The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down.

His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions.

There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..

Maybe in the 1990s. Now, try getting it running even on a network edge platform like those from Netgate. NetBSD's hardware support is singularly unstable and unusable.

Most new platforms port to Linux, commit drivers to the Linux kernel, and ignore the other platforms. The other platforms don't really seem to bother anymore, unfortunately. Things have bit-rotted to such an extent that FS will destroy large amounts of data and.. nobody seems to notice. Kernel panic reports are ignored. Debuggers fail to set functional breakpoints on native hardware. CPU quirks that need workaround to prevent panics are never committed.

Meanwhile, developing this kind of expertise is about as far from the minds of younger experimenters and hackers now as baking cakes and permaculture gardening were from the 00s hardware hackers decades ago. Not only is it far from the minds of younger experimenters, but even attempting to develop it hits a hard wall of hardcore, draconian behavioural purists, secops fashionistas who deride essentially any burgeoning attempts at writing drivers, and language revolutionaries who rage extensively at people for writing any new code in any language but their own favourite.

The situation is pretty harsh and it's likely not going to get any better anytime soon.

FreeBSD can't really be said to support native-hardware PPC. Also don't forget riscv. Which it also doesn't really support in native hardware.

No.

this logic would apply to literally every facet of human existence if it were true; your argument has devolved into "people would make more money if they were engaged in criminality and didn't get caught, therefore everyone eventually devolves into a criminal."

the papers studying the amount of black market activity in Bitcoin have consistently shown Bitcoin to be cleaner than the economies in virtually every country on the planet, except for the occasional ultra-clean tiny european state.

literally every bitcoiner since the first roll-out of the Silk Road and the resulting senatorial attacks on them, have been ultra-interested in exactly how much of their hobby is black market and how much is criminality. literally every single one of them is heavily invested in knowing more about the nature and extent of bitcoin criminality. to say that it didn't occur to them that self-interested criminals are operating in BitcoinLand is .. stupid.

You are inflating the amounts considerably (and unverifiably with bald assertions) and then generalizing the rest of the industry based on anecdotal individual reports.

The amount of bad participation is negligible compared to the whole; the benefits are well-catalogued in places where it works under a legal regime. Your commentary about the attempt to destabilize the world economy has no legs and no justification aside from bald assertions, and in any event is directly contradictory to literally every academic estimation of the size of Bitcoin's black market going back to literally its first participant, being Silk Road v1, which even at the very beginning of Bitcoin represented only a tiny, tiny fraction of the otherwise legitimate economy.

Your assertion about the nature of miner profitability even internal to the assertion itself is a completely contradictory lie, since it can only be true if both miners are somehow ultra-profitable due to theft, but also not profitable at all and is thus a lie.

The mining conglomerates and larger operators and their profit in your assertions are clownish strawmen that have nothing to do with reality, and you are ignoring high-quality analyses of majority hashrate, their location, their energy use and source of energy, and ignoring the fact that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide find positive value in Bitcoin's existence, and smacks of an oppressive first-world privileged hypocrisy and failure in value judgement.

This is .. pretty much just a total whole-fabric lie.

The first payments in bitcoin were not the pizzas. Malmi sold bitcoins for money prior to that.

The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all.

It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent.

Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible.

Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress.

There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.

Current libbitcoin-explorer instructions telling users to use the seed command to generate private keys.

.. and receive bitcoin at them.

Wow brutal.

And yet r/btc are or were all or almostly entirely paid employees of Roger Ver and Reddit didn't seem to care at all.

It is a lie, since Bitcoin Cash never moved funds that weren't signed by their owners. You're going to have to prove that, now, or admit you overspoke.

The direct counter-evidence against Craig's claimed key ownership are the facts that many of his claimed addresses signed that he was a fraud, that Wizsec showed that the 1feex address was actually stolen MtGox funds (and nothing to with Craig at all,) the court records of Klein v. Wright showing he completely made up the list of claimed addresses by instructing Shadders (a shoddy programmer from nChain) to construct the list entirely algorithmically from broken precepts.

So no, it wasn't just "one" key. It was dozens.

(Lots of addresses that Craig claimed were his, signing that Wright is a fraud): https://craigwright.lol/

(An outline of why the 1feex are entirely NOT Wright's Bitcoins): https://blog.wizsec.jp/2018/02/kleiman-v-craig-wright-bitcoi... https://blog.wizsec.jp/2020/06/mtgox-march-2011-theft.html

(An ultra-early miner, maybe the second miner, signing his own early blocks proving they aren't Craig's, either): https://twitter.com/druidian/status/1447833107143483393

You are doing a slippery thing here by claiming that your directly-falsifiable statement about Bitcoin Cash being a "precedent" where "developers control the funds"—while now in the above statement claiming that this was actually in regards to Satoshi likely not stepping up to defend his own key ownership—is somehow related.

You clearly don't know what you're talking about, or else you could show me even a single instance where Bitcoin Cash moved funds absent its owner's key signature—which is entirely what this entire thing is about, namely a court case where Wright is suing to attempt to force a backdoor into Bitcoin which would move funds specifically to his possession without a key owner's signature (or a coinbase pay.)

Finally: reasons why you don't have any idea what you're talking about, itemized:

1) You didn't know that Bitcoin Cash never moved funds without a coinbase payout or a key owner's signature but asserted it did.

2) You didn't know about the direct evidence of Craig's claimed keys being owned by other people.

3) You don't know how hard forks work because you think that hard forks can happen gradually and that pressure from minor buy-in can push it to adoption.

Aside from the DAO (which is irrelevant because Ethereum is a scam) you haven't had a very good batting average in general, and for Bitcoin, it's atrocious.

I think if even 1 developer has a court order for them to push to master, it will happen whether anyone wants it to, since GitHub is already known to mindlessly abide by government requests. (see popcorntime dmca)

No, it will not happen since a majority of the devs are US-based and developers in the US can't be compelled to produce speech in the USA. Neither will it matter even if someone with push commits pushes a theft-branch to the github repository, since nobody would run it.

The question of who is forking and is who isn't raises from 50%/50% to 25%/75% until the numerator approaches zero. For the sake of networking the question isn't "whether I want to accept this patch" but "whether I think most people will accept this patch."

This is false, no. There are literally tens of thousands nodes worldwide and achieving a worldwide-jurisdiction hostile patch push when compelled speech is illegal in many developed nations would be essentially impossible, and I would be glad to bet you impossible unless Bitcoin were already dead. In any event you're presuming nobody would be able to mount a legal defence in the first place against illegal court orders.

A hardfork change of this nature literally requires global, immediate, coordinated roll-out, or it will simply fail. There's a reason why there have been no contentious hard forks in the entire history of Bitcoin.

For the miners to have leverage with developers they need to be able to take over the code themselves. The next set of developers will have this issue, ad infinitum, unless the cycle is broken somehow.

This is a fantasist scenario, completely at odds with reality. There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars wrapped up in Bitcoin. That block of wealth and capability won't just sit there and be pushed to run something that would literally wipe them all out overnight. It's fantasist nonsense.

The scenario of one bloc or another demanding some change or other is similarly nonsensical due very specifically to the carefully-curated decentralization of Bitcoin and the nature of its consensus—again, the hard forks you are envisioning have a zero chance of being committed as locally-compelled speech, let alone by some legal jurisdiction attempting to compel tens of thousands of people worldwide into running backdoored software which literally none of them would consensually run. Like it's nonsense.

Similarly, miners who produce blocks which reassign any money without cryptographic signatures behind the money will be very simply, producing blocks which are the exact same thing as not producing blocks at all.

At this point, with the newness of your account and your odd half-blind awareness of how Bitcoin works, I'm going to presume you're not actually discussing this in good faith.

No, that's incorrect. There is no fundamental trust; you were describing control in a coercive sense among the developers by directly asserting that developers have specific control over the funds in the system.

This is obviously not true, has never been true, and I have no trouble predicting that it will never be true.

What I took exception to was the fact that you were asserting developers themselves control funds, and that they specifically were trusted parties. Overall, Bitcoin depends on no trusted third parties, since in your example, mining pools with 50% hashrate do not arbitrarily control funds either.

And no, writing software does not imply control over the network, since there were plenty of other node implementations which existed (and exist) and which users choose to run for X or Y reasons. Writing software out of consensus which arbitrarily controls funds, in your assertion and in consistency with your string of logic (context across multiple messages,) "devs writing code" is not what consensus is. Even the github repository where Bitcoin is currently published is not current consensus. Current consensus is the current behaviour of the network right now. That is current consensus.

So, no, you're still wrong.

That is a lie—in terms of funds being controlled specifically absent owner signatures, by the developers, how did even Bitcoin Cash set such a precedent?

In fact, there are specific counter-examples with Jeff Garzik's godmode patches which were so roundly denied and rejected that they were DOA.

Ethereum is irrelevant because of how much total premine it was and how they misrepresented it, and misrepresented the involvement of famous cryptographers like Ralph Merkle.

None of your comments about key ownership have any basis in reality or even logic, because of the direct counter-evidence of key ownership for the keys he is claiming ownership of.

So, you also have no idea what you're talking about.

Pfft. Its existence solely and only persists through the mass of nodes run by people who utilize the network. The only control that developers exert is over their own actions and willingness to write code. The overall community consensus to run that code is cooperative, *not* coercive.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

(edit) And you clearly never read the whitepaper: "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."

^^ Literally trustless right there.

Currently, some people are (IMO deliberately) misreading your research as having immediate live human applications and spreading this news as such, with misleading graphics of human brain scans accompanying their news reports.

Heavily debunked nonsense trope..

https://medium.com/@nic__carter/comments-on-the-white-house-...

It does not have the kind of liquidity, nor anonymity, which could be successfully used at any significant scale whatsoever, and there's no point to it given the USD is a convenient, anonymous, trivially falsifiable source of funds which are fully launderable.

Bitcoin specifically, even at the height of Silk Road, and at Bitcoin's nearly weakest-by-comparison point, has been and is cleaner by proportion when compared with virtually all countries' grey markets in terms of what proportion of its economy is used for crime.

The crime trope is ancient, old, and has been repeatedly debunked. The evidence for its prevalence simply isn't there—because Bitcoin is not anonymous.

Pardon me while I git push -f..