Ten Years of Bitcoin
bitcoin.clarkmoody.com
bitcoin.clarkmoody.com
>These past ten years might be the earliest days of a new golden era of human flourishing, built upon censorship-resistant, sound money.
Good thing they used "might" otherwise I might have scoffed at this grandiloquent and unsubstantiated statement.
Yep, it's definitely a message to Bitcoin insiders, but that's not a bad thing. Sorry to fail your hopes.
> grandiloquent and unsubstantiated statement
Once you've studied money from a critical angle, you start to see that unsound money is the root cause of many of the problems with society and government.
The first ten years of Bitcoin (plus history leading to it) and sound vs unsound money are both huge topics in their own right. Perhaps it would be useful for me to include a little box at the end of each article with links to books and lengthy posts about these topics.
That also describes the English language, and yet here we are, still using it.
In general, something that's lasted centuries is more likely to last centuries more, than something that's only lasted one decade.
I'd wager that the literature on banking and finance far outweighs resources on anything crypto. Specifically compared to papers on crypto coming from a neutral perspective.
Your statement is just plain wrong.
edit : clarification
This is a real "if you have a golden hammer everything looks like a nail" philosophy.
Adding more noise to the echo chamber certainly isn't a good thing. I'd be much more interested to hear about the problems surrounding the technology and how you envision them being solved. Most mining is centralized, no one actually uses it as currency, the entire thing is one big speculator market, etc.
Fiat money can be created or destroyed at any time, so it is the most unsound money. As purchasing power rises (falls), the central bank can create (destroy) money at will to counteract the trend.
Gold exploration increases as the price rises, causing the supply to grow to meet this demand. Yet it is hard to mine gold, and its scarcity means that the increase of supply relative to the existing stock is small (roughly 2% / yr). Thus it is more sound than other metals, which are easier to mine. It is also much more sound than fiat money.
Bitcoin's monetary base increases algorithmically, so there is no supply response to increased demand. On top of that, the monetary inflation rate tends toward zero over time. The supply will reach a maximum and stop increasing. This level of soundness is greater than that of gold in the long run.
A great scholarly treatment of money is The Ethics of Money Production[1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6520108-the-ethics-of-mo...
Bitmex (one of the largest exchanges at the moment) put an ad on the frontpage of the newspaper's issue exactly 10 years later as a tribute: https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/108059040132345036...
EDIT: It seems there is a full page ad that goes with the front page one: https://imgur.com/sVBZVfN
The newspaper could go back and change the title in their archives. Single point of failure. Tsk tsk. Should have picked a newspaper that stores their archives in an immutable blockchain.
You have to predict exactly what the headline is going to be though "On the Moon" is a fair guess but the chances you would get "Men walk on the moon" (plus "astronauts land on plain; collect rocks, plant flag" if we're using the subheadline too) exactly correct to fake it are really low. That's only possible on a very small number of dates where there's a known huge event coming up.
That would only prove your block is NOT from before 1969. The date of the article in question is 03/Jan/2009. Which is around the time of the block itself (thus proving the block wasn't generated before 2009).
> For ten years, the world has known a decentralized source of truth. At all prior times in human history, we relied on centralized third parties to establish trust.
This is your periodic reminder that >51% of the mining is currently controlled by 5 large mining companies based out of China[0]. If you think these companies not entirely beholden to the non-democratic, highly centralized, Chinese government (or that this is a non-issue) then I'd really like to hear that argument.
I must admit I was surprised to see that 20.1% of mining is currently "Unknown", which was not the case last I checked.
I'd argue non-issue. Attack vectors could be to attempt a double spend (not worth it) or confirming empty blocks (why?).
So its good people are chomping at the Chinese mining pools
At the same time, if everyone abandoned the project today, it's tough to imagine a measurable impact on the world outside the cryptoscene.
Personally, I feel that everyone has been too obsessed with the desire to hoard assets to actually build shit that's useful to society. The fact that this rent-seeking desire is baked into the core of most cryptocurrency schemes makes me skeptical that the space will amount to much in the near term. I suspect that when it does, it'll come about in a way that avoids rewarding the squatters. Certainly nowhere near the ratio of dumb money to strategic investment we've seen in the past couple years.