I wrote that too before: it became a pyramid investment scheme and a tool for crime. 

Both developments were bad for mankind, and it is hard to tell which one will be more harmful in the end.  But the first one also ruined the technical experiment: it attracted a horde of scammers and unsavory characters, encouraged hoarding, created volatility that all but destroyed its usefulness as currency, made mining into a fabulously lucrative industrial activity that was inevitably centralized, gave birth to Blockstream and their plan to sacrifice bitcoin's original goal to the spurious goal of inflating the price, and more...

Oops, thanks for reminding me.  The Toomims tasked me with doing something momentous that will be the headline of /The Times/ on the launch date.  Maybe start a war, find Elvis, or commandeer a UFO to abduct the Pope from a nudist beach and demand ransom in bitcoin.

Only that it will not be a Genesis block, of course, but a Nativity block.

As I wrote, it is not that Satoshi's words and ideas are "sacred", but they help understand why bitcoin is the way it is -- and see more clearly the features that may render it unsuitable for specific uses. 

And, as I may have written many times, I could have loved bitcoin as it was in 2009: an experiment on a new kind of payment system, run by an open set of uncoordinated anonymous volunteers, stabilized by its incentives, etc..  But I cannot like the monster into which it has mutated. 

I could like it again if it somehow returned to the original plan -- with 10 times as many users perhaps than it had in mid-2010, and with the price 10 times higher, at about 0.50 USD/BTC;  bit without speculative trading, and without for-profit mining...

Actually:

• The blockchain that you should trust is the valid blockhain that you can get that has the most proof of work.
• A blockchain is valid if and only if the software you are running says that it is valid.
• "The bitcoin blockchain" is the blockchain that you call "the bitcoin blockchain".

The question "in a persistent fork of the blockchain, which branch will be the real bitcoin?" is basically a religious question.  You should think about it as you would think of "in a schism of my Church, which side will be the True Church?".

Is a car a good way to cross the Atlantic?  By plugging some holes and attaching some empty tanks at the bottom, a car may perhaps be made to float well enough to do it.  But it will never be as good for that task as a boat.  The reason is that, when the car was designed, every detail was chosen with one purpose in mind: travel on roads.  If the purpose had been to travel across the ocean, almost every detail would have been different -- as one can see by comparing the car to any boat.

The point is: to tell whether some artifact is a good choice for some purpose, it is worth checking what purpose it was designed for.  Sometimes a thing developed for one goal turns out to be very good, or even optimal, for some other goal; but those occasions are very rare.  Almost always, changing the purpose requires a complete redesign, starting from a blank page.

Bitcoin was not created to replace commercial banking or credit cards: it says that on the very first paragraph of the whitepaper.  It was not created to replace central banking either.  Nor to be a store of value, a high-value settlement system, a micropayment system, a lucrative investment, a tool for illegal trade, etc.. In fact, its goal was not even to create a new currency. 

As it says everywhere on the paper, starting with the title, Satoshi s goal was to create


The bitcoin protocol is the best solution that Satoshi found to accomplish that goal.  All its parts were chosen with that goal in mind.  If the goal had been something else, the design would have been different.  Or he may not have bothered to create it at all: since there were already pretty good solutions for those other goals, but not for that particular one.

The new currency was created only because Satoshi (and everybody else) did not know how to achieve that goal with existing currencies. 

Understanding the original goal helps one see that bitcoin is actually terribly inadequate for most of the other purposes.  In particular: 

Bitcoin is not a viable replacement for commercial banking, because it is too expensive, slow, unsafe, complicated -- and lacks many features that bank customers want, like ability to reverse payments, customer assistance, credit, deposit insurance, etc..

And its capacity is too limited: it is OK for the few legal payments where a trusted intermediary is not available or really undesirable -- which a normal person may need a couple times per year, maybe.  It is totally insufficient for millions of people using it for all their payments (or, worse, for micropayments).  Perhaps that much volume could be handled by off-chain solutions or some "overlay network" -- but then there is no reason to use bitcoin: banks and credit cards are already great "off-chain" solutions.

If Bitcoin cannot replace commercial banking, much less all payments with national currencies, then it cannot replace central banking either.

Bitcoin is not a viable a longterm store of value, because it has no mechanism to stabilize its value.  (Even if it were truly scarce -- which it isn't -- there are plenty of things that are just as scarce but totally worthless.)

For its stated goal, it did not need such mechanism. All it needed was that the value would remain almost stable over a few days, between earning some coins and spending them in another payment. And its very use as a currency would endow it with some value, that would vary only slowly because usage would vary only slowly.

(Satoshi at one point refers to an hypothetical increase in usage of 20% per year as "crazy".  If it had increased at that "crazy" rate, and bitcoin had not been turned into a pyramid investment schema, the price today should be less than 0.50 USD/BTC.)


The most hilarious thing in the "bitcoin space" may be the belief that Satoshi was a libertarian and wanted to destroy banks, based entirely on that single headline in the genesis block. 

But the headline had a specific technical purpose, namely to prove that he had not been doing any pre-mining.  That purpose required it to be a headline of a major paper published on that same day.  So, which is less likely: that he patiently delayed the launch of bitcoin until a vaguely relevant headline came up; or that he rushed to launch the system when he saw that vaguely relevant headline on his newspaper? 

Or perhaps he just picked up the newspaper that he had on his desk, and typed in its main headline?


Let me say only that I am neither Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto nor Craig Steven Wright. 

From his LinkedIn profile: "senior software engineer and tech lead at Google, where I worked for about 7.5 years on Maps/Earth, Gmail anti spam, signup abuse and login security"

From Gavin's profile: "Software Engineer - Silicon Graphics (SGI) 1988 – 1996 (8 years)"

By a strange coincidence, Gavin and Mike seem to be the only core devs with significant *professional*  software development experience...


Why do you think that there was any particular interest for R3 to do so?

There is some poetic justice in the price tanking because of Mike's rage-quit and the block size war.  There would have been no war and no rage-quit, if some segment of the community had not sided with Blockstream out of stupid greed -- because they imagined that Blockstream's plan would make the price of bitcoin go up, even though it meant giving up the very goal that motivated Satoshi to create it,and the only thing that justifies its existence.

Thanks!  So that last email is not relevant to the discussion of the other two.

No, nothing formally published yet.  

I only started to write a tech report on how a mining cartel with majority hashpower can force a change in the protocol, such as postponing the next halving, in spite of opposition by the "economic majority" -- by sabotaging the old chain while mining the new one.  But, after countless forum discussions, that attack is now well known, and I haven't got enough motivation to finish it.⁽¹⁾

Other than that, the closest to a technical article I wrote is this post about bitcoin price bubbles.<sup>(2)

(1)</sup> Critics have two arguments to dismiss it.  First, they claim that any such attempt would cause a drop in the price that would negate the cartel's expected payoff. Second, they say that developers could change the PoW algorithm so as to render ASICs useless, and all users would shun the CartelCoin and use only the DevCoin.  I don't accept either argument, but since they depend on predicting the behavior of people, we have no way of proving our positions...

⁽²⁾ That sum-of-bubbles model is less satisfactory after the Dec/2014 crash, unfortunately.  The most prominent "bubbles" became almost rectangular pulses: a sudden rise, a plateau, then a sudden drop.  In 2015 the price became even more irregular: there were three apparent bubbles (in February, June, and September) but their shapes were more complicated than the model that worked before 2014...

Oops, thanks for reminding me.  I must watch out and avoid that old habit, before someone figures out my true identity.


Well, it is a matter of feeling; but I find the tone of that letter very unlike that of previous writings.  Too dramatic, almost hysterical.  But very much like the tone of Adam and other ardent small-blockians.  The personal and nominal attack against Gavin, in particular, was very strange for Satoshi, but very much like Adam's tone at the time.


The hacker who got hold of Satoshi's email account may have been a smallblockian or Blockstream sympathizer, or may have offered his services to them. (How else would he profit from that "asset"?) 

Satoshi is either dead, or is much more worried about hiding his identity than about the fate of bitcoin (which he apparently abandoned in 2010). 

That, by the way, is another reason why I assumed that the letter was fake when it came out:  if he did not care to intervene in all the previous critical events, why would he come in just to take a side (the wrong one!) in a relatively minor technical dispute?


If his account was hacked back then, who knows why the hacker posted it.  Maybe he was sorry for the old man.  Presumably he is a bitconer, and thought that the claim was hurting bitcoin.

By the way, there was another message by "Satoshi" recently, denying that he was Craig Wright -- and then adding "We are all Satoshi".  That last part is obviously something that Satoshi would not have written. I can only think that the hacker is aware that everybody is aware that the account has been compromised, and does not care to pretend anymore.

That letter is fake.  It was not know at the time, but Satoshi's mail account has been taken over -- no one knows how or when.  That was proved last September, when "Satoshi" sent a dox extorsion email from that address to some prominent bitcoiner.

Anyway, the phrase "in the face of widespread technical criticism and through the use of populist tactics" is a dead giveaway of its source.  I only cannot guess who wrote it because there are several people at Blockstream, and many more among its supporters, who would have used those words, would not have any scruples in sending a forged message to support their agenda, and are naive enough to think that the trick would work.

The second paragraph, moreover, is totally at odds with the very idea that makes the protocol work.

The most obvious explanation is Mike's ragequit, which got wide exposure in the media (NYT, Motherboard, TechCrunch, Reuters, ...)  It was also commented in Chinese forums.  I can't think of any other suiltable explanation for the sudden drop.

You should have read the contract whitepaper before signing it. 

There was no mention of a block size limit there.  There was no mention of transactions piling up in a queue, fighting with each other through "smart" fee estimation algorithms and RBFs. On the contrary, it was assumed that miners would confirm, into the next block, every transaction that paid a fee sufficient to make that worthwhile.

More importantly, there was no mention of a clique of developers having control of the protocol and deciding what the miners should do.  According to the protocol, the only players that have any power over the system are the miners (which Satoshi called "nodes"), who vote with their hashing power.  And this is not an accident, but an essential feature of the design, that no one knows how to change without breaking it.

Granted, Satoshi did not foresee that 70% of the mining would be concentrated into 4 Chinese companies. Raising the block size limit and letting the miners decide the fees, while conceptually the right thing to do, will not work in that context. However, the concentration of mining, by itself, already means bitcoin is broken. 

Basically, the block size war is like a dispute among pilot and co-pilot about whether the plane that ran out of fuel in mid-Atlantic should be flown normally or upside-down while it falls.

Hey, what is happening?  Back below $380?

I thought that bitcoin was a honey badger in a titanium armor, protected by patahashes of math and a bajillion moogawatts of electric juice. 

But then a single whiny blog post, by a young loner who had already left the stage, brings the price down by 20% in a few hours? 

How is that?

[/troll]

News for you: at this moment, the top 2 Chinese pools, Antpool and F2pool, have 28 + 23 = 51% of the  total hashpower; so all the rest together has only 49%.  With BTCC and BW.com that is 28 + 23 + 16 + 4 = 71% of the total haspower is in China.


That is trivial to program.  However, if you use any rule to select the "right" blockchain other than "the one that has the majority of the hashpower", including blacklisting some miners, you are no longe using the bitcoin protocol.  What you are using is a centralized payment system -- an incredibly stupid and inefficient one.

The Toomim brothers.

Luke-Jr predicts death of bitcoin in 2016

 

(Because he sees that miners will never agree to reducing the block size to 500 kB.)

This seems to be the same idea, but using an "extension record" approach instead of a separate blokchain:

Original comment by /u/seweso on reddit

My understanding of the proposal

Comparison to the hard fork approach

This is what I found; maybe you can follow those leads.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3scvx8/bitcoinxt_logs_from_first_2_days_of_testnet/cwwfho6

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3cgft7/largest_transaction_ever_mined_999657_kb_consumes/csvaqc5

That's a weird site. 

I suppose that calling themselves "The Bitcoin Foundation", even though they are not connected to the better-known Shrem Karpelès & Friends Foundation, is their idea of a joke, or a statement of something.

I can't say much about the code.  I would have to read more, but I cannot find a  more specific statement of their goals. Their mailing list shows some continuing activity, but rather modest, it seems. 


What else can I say? I wish them well.  Cleaning code is always a Good Deed, like collecting trash from beaches or recovering decayed neighborhoods...

Thanks! Happy new year, wisdom and all the best to everybody!