I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
schneier.com
schneier.com
So what if 90% of people decide to instead trust a third party with their holdings (like 100% now do with banks)? A portion of Coinbases holdings are even insured[0], gasp. And with regular banks you're paying increasing amounts in "management fees" to maintain this insurance. Cryptocurrencies have proven that you don't have to have traditional layers of trust and that's where I see the technological breakthrough.
Disclaimer: Somewhat neutral about crypto in general.
[0] The USD/EUR holding rather than crypto IIRC
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
The underlying sentiment here, at least for me, is that crypto churns through thesis after thesis, pitching different usecases and value systems and benefits, and all of them fall flat, and the only remaining reason to be in it is idiotic "number go up" economics, hence the "store of value" thesis which describes everything from gold to dollar bills to a ham sandwich, and demands and describes nothing of the technology.
The only benefits thus far that have come to widespread fruition are illicit purchases and speculation.
For it to be broadly accepted, it has to lose the rest.
Anonymity? People are unsurprisingly very in favor of KYC so we can apply anti–money laundering and terrorism laws.
For it to be trusted you have to insure deposits. Those fly-by-night exchanges going poof with everyone's coins aren't what the public are looking for. I have never met a human being who is anti–FDIC (what insures bank deposits in the US up to $250k).
For it to be used as regular currency you have to have price stability. No one wants to go to the grocery store and find out that they lost 10% of their budget on the walk over.
People don't know how to manage private and public keys. Anyone who has built SaaS knows that reset password requests are one of the most common issues users have. Now they're being pitched something that losing a file or losing the password to that file loses all of their money (???) Of course you want a third party!
Immutability? Well that's fine until there are exploits. And then you either have to live with a DAO losing millions of dollars or you have to hard fork. The former is terrible publicity and bad for the people who hold most of the money, while the latter violates the spirit of the whole thing. Guess which wins?
It's all so silly. People are re-inventing the wheel and building something worse.
Have people made a ton of money? Might it still get adoption? Sure. But there's a hell of a lot of problems in the world and a hell of a lot of bright people building bullshit.
Not only that but Bitcoin or whatever shitcoin becomes the next big thing need to scale up the network's ability to handle transactions.
Payment processors like Visa handle something like 400x more transactions per unit time than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin fanboys love to talk about the future where you can buy groceries and order pizza with btc. Do you typically use a bank wire for those transactions?
I don't.
This doesn't scale any further than a website ran by a company providing services. Most eyes are on DeFi which is a world of smart contracts and dapps - which at some point (hopefully, because else there is little point) will run without anyone having any authority to change/stop them.
> For it to be trusted you have to insure deposits. Those fly-by-night exchanges going poof with everyone's coins aren't what the public are looking for. I have never met a human being who is anti–FDIC (what insures bank deposits in the US up to $250k).
It's not about being anti FDIC, it's about forcing all software to be managed by an American company that is registered and managed in a very particular way.
> For it to be used as regular currency you have to have price stability. No one wants to go to the grocery store and find out that they lost 10% of their budget on the walk over.
I think we are at the stage where very few people actually believe everyone is going to stop using any type of fiat and store all their wealth in crypto currency, even for everyday spending. So in that perspective this is like telling people not to buy an iPhone because Apple stock might go down (they are very separate).
> People don't know how to manage private and public keys. Anyone who has built SaaS knows that reset password requests are one of the most common issues users have. Now they're being pitched something that losing a file or losing the password to that file loses all of their money (???) Of course you want a third party!
Yes, not everyone cares about this but some do, that's like saying there is no point in WhatsApp to be e2e encrypted or Signal to exist at all because most people don't care if authorities read their messages.
> Immutability? Well that's fine until there are exploits. And then you either have to live with a DAO losing millions of dollars or you have to hard fork. The former is terrible publicity and bad for the people who hold most of the money, while the latter violates the spirit of the whole thing. Guess which wins?
We are early days for sure, the "ETH hardfork" one in that instance but there are many instances where it didn't.
I think you may be generalizing here.
> For it to be trusted you have to insure deposits. Those fly-by-night exchanges
You seem to mean "cryptocurrencies" when you say "it", yet you address only the case of exchanges. What about money that's not parked at an exchange?
I'd agree with the "something worse" claim if you explained the trust aspect completely, and addressed the division of power, but as it is, I can only agree to some points.
such an uneducated take. there is no fiat currency that lasted a hundred years without massive loss in value, or completely disappearing altogether.
The other day I wanted to invest in a token. So I transferred ETH out of Coinbase to MetaMask wallet, then traded my ETH for the token.
Each transaction took about 30sec and cost ~$25. That sounds like a lot!
Until you realize ETH has been around only 8 years and the transaction is entirely irreversible by an enterprising (invasive? dictatorial?) third party.
To me it’s entirely insane that I can almost instantly transfer dollars across the world (galaxy?) for so little AND the protocol delivers incredible flexibility through smart contracts.
IMO the future is bright.
Are you aware of the history of Ethereum?
I guess I didn’t think of that bc I don’t consider myself important enough to be overruled by so many people.
Possibly the good thing about the ecosystem is anyone can make a protocol or form the existing open source ones and then users and miners can vote with their feet.
It’s funny you make this comment specifically about ETH since it literally exists today as a result of a hard fork that reversed transactions in 2016.
Meanwhile, bitcoin reversed 53 blocks in the 2010 "inflation bug" incident.
I would rather let businesses decide whether to choose payment options that allow chargebacks or not, and then customers can choose which businesses to support. The method of payment becomes one factor in shopping decisions. Businesses that eliminate chargeback risk are ultimately more competitive and can pass savings onto consumers. The whole chargeback thing is a ridiculous byproduct of our antiquated payment rails.
There are plenty of fly-by-night operations that will smash and grab as many transactions as they can and not care about their reputations because they'll just set up under another alias.
Further, if your account/wallet gets compromised there is also no irreversibility. Whereas with the 'regular' banking system transactions can usually get reversed.
From a company's point of view almost every individual consumer looks like a potential fly-by-nighter, so companies are forced to accept that risk, and we all share the costs of that. It could be useful to offer an alternative to this paradigm.
You're telling people to "just" be rational. Or to not be susceptible to slick marketing gimmicks, or to not be bamboozled by a fast-talking salesman.
Insurance and dispute resolution are separate jobs from the job of the money itself.
But if you layer those on top of the money does not the whole stack loose the purported benefits of crypto-currency? What I mean is if you have intermediaries to handle Insurance and dispute resolution (which are needed since people want that) do you still get any anonymization or irreversibility benefits from crypto-currency?
What's the point of crypto-currency if we need to add layers on top of it that remove all the benefits?
No.
I don't even know where to begin with unpacking all the invalid assumptions you just made.
The job of the money is just to be a counting system. It's just a variable that holds a value. What you do with that value is whatever you want.
You want to make some transaction be tentative and have recourse and strings? You can arrange for that an infinite number of ways besides processing through Visa in exactly the same way Visa does it this moment.
And of course you don't always want recourse. Eventually you want a transaction to be done and irrevokable.
(The person who bought the business, and knew all the details as we provided all the exact numbers from our e-commerce system and bank, actually burnt out and killed the business at great loss to himself when he saw how many people are actually down right thieves)
Crypto is slower, more expensive, and less safe. True, it's only eight years old, but the important thing is it's much worse than current solutions - at least on the dimensions that I think most people care about. Plus, it's not like online credit cards are that much older.
to be fair, in your case there was also certainly a transaction fee, paid for you by your merchant (and probably rolled up into the price of the product)
I recently made a donation from a new bank account that took ~20-30 hours to finish processing. Meanwhile Monero trasactions have the 10-15 blocks needed for irreversibility mined in ~20-30 minutes, and the first block in ~2.
Most crypto currency seem proud even that they can only deflate … which is the worst thing for a currency since it will just result in hoarding and ever decreasing economic activity (AKA deflationary spiral) - at the end of the day, economic activity is what we want, it’s what put food on supermarket shelves, we can’t eat money.
If you get this wrong, you have price instability.
Money should be the most boring part of the economy. It's just the medium. This is what crypto gets wrong. In crypto, the money is the entire economy.
Preventing that type of manipulation might actually be the motivation for Bitcoin's creation. Satoshi embedded the text "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" into the first coinbase in the blockchain¹. Inflation is a tax on savings that similarly benefits the money manipulators at the expense of common people with less control of the currency.
There's an entire country that uses crypto as legal tender. I could stop there, but there's more.
Fees are lower than credit cards charge, there are businesses saving money by utilizing crypto.
Sending money overseas is cheaper and more accessible with crypto.
The list goes on. I'm not sure how you've arrived at your position, but it is not an educated position.
Not in any of the countries that have implemented PayID. (Most of Europe, Aus/NZ, and South America, with the US finally beginning to get on board this year).
It's a case of sending to a mobile phone, with instant-3days timeline, with a cost in 20-50c range for anything less than $10k.
and payID holds first time transactions for 24 hours...this isn't even marginally reasonable for many use-cases
crypto wins there - payID sounds like it's been something that should've existed decades ago, but crypto has solved this problem and done a better job
and yes it absolutely is more accessible - everywhere except maybe countries that make buying crypto illegal
to receive crypto you don't even need KYC actually, just to on-ramp from fiat...and if you mine crypto you don't even need KYC - so again there is no category in which crypto loses and categories where crypto clearly wins
No on-ramp, because payID works for any fiat account that can be linked to Mastercard or Visa sounds more accessible to me.
No specific KYC as its backed by existing banking infrastructure.
I do not see how crypto possibly wins this one.
I was under the impression you had to download the blockchain for e.g. bitcoin before you could engage in transactions. Which is something like 350 GB at this point. And then do some processing that takes a while.
Surely this takes a lot more than two minutes.
If you didn't do that, do you really have a crypto wallet?
So to answer your question, yes I actually own the wallet and no it didn't take more than a minute at most for many different coins
So I'm not sure about that "full control" thing.
It's not terribly different than if you were to encrypt some file and put it out on the cloud and delete it locally - as long as you have access to the cloud, you are the only one who can make sense of that file with your decryption key.
The distributed network of the blockchain is what ensures you'll have access to a node because most crypto coins have very distributed nodes.
https://cryptoservices.github.io/blockchain/consensus/2019/0...
And I believe I've read that, when you aren't running a full node, you have to just assume the longest chain is the right one. I mean, all that data is the chain, right? If you don't process it, you have to assume other nodes are trustworthy.
What you are saying about complete control sounds to me like if I said I have complete control over my bank account, in the sense nobody can guess my password, but maybe the bank is fake and I'm not even trying to check.
80% of the world is not more accessible when the alternative is practically 100% of the world.
also there's no on or off ramp for crypto when you can use it as currency, which is the direction the world is headed.
edit: I'm googling and apparently payID isn't even international. This isn't really even a comparison. I don't know why you believe otherwise.
Any in-network payID transaction is 0-fees. Whilst lightning does occasionally have negative fees, the fluctuation of Bitcoin means that the fees aren't cheaper in the end.
> 80% of the world is not more accessible when the alternative is practically 100% of the world.
Anywhere with a relationship with Mastercard or Visa is more accessible to most people _today_. Because they absolutely would have to generate or convert fiat to end up with Bitcoin, but have to do absolutely nothing to make use of payID.
You can come back and use that argument if Bitcoin turns around and becomes the defacto currency, but otherwise it falls short. Most people today, have to do nothing to use payID. They have to do something, to use Bitcoin.
> edit: I'm googling and apparently payID isn't even international. This isn't really even a comparison. I don't know why you believe otherwise.
Because it's a set of banking protocols that are international. [0][1][2][3][4][5]
[0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...
[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...
[2] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/08/31/fednow-the-federa...
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-13/new-payments-platform...
[4] https://rg.ru/2019/01/28/v-rossii-zapustili-sistemu-bystryh-...
That's news to me. Is this true for any of the major coins or just for some obscure one?
El Salvador is a case in point of why crypto is a terrible currency. The first day that they went live, Bitcoin dropped 10%.
> Sending money overseas is cheaper
Right now it's about $2.50 per transaction which is not the cheapest option. Earlier this year we saw transactions fees for BTC hit like $60. Add to that the risk of it dropping 10% in a not-uncommon event…that's not good.
Let's talk about businesses.
First, cost. Let's say you have Stripe's base fee: 30¢ per transaction + 2.9%. For that $2.50 transaction to be cheaper, your purchase would have to be over $75. Is that typical for most businesses? No. And again, that $2.50 is what it is now. It could be $3 in a minute or $20 tomorrow. No one knows.
You think small business owners want that kind of uncertainty? Taking a (???) cut from every monthly SaaS charge does not make sense—not to mention that as you scale Stripe will negotiate prices downwards while BTC will not.
Let's turn to scalability.
BTC clocks in at seven transactions per second. Seven. Transactions can take 10 minutes or longer to process. Imagine a supermarket checkout line where each person blocks for 10 minutes. Or a gas station, subway, restaurant, corner store, coffee shop, or anything else.
Note that I said widespread uses. I am aware that some places are experimenting with bitcoin. I am also aware that crypto has shown to be woefully inadequate for all but a few narrow use-cases.
As for bitcoins value, in 12 years it is valued high enough to be in the top 10 market cap stocks.
It took apple 71 years to hit 1T market cap - it took bitcoin 12 years.
And the likes of HSBC launder money with impunity. (BUT BUT KYC/AML!)
But hey, let's continue trusting self interested people who don't care about you to "do the right thing" and protect your funds.
Do you even know that FATF is the main organization that goes around imposing KYC/AML?
And they are a non-governmental body, no oversight - don't answer to anybody.
They are literally Luca Brasi and you don't even know who the Don Corleones behind the curtain are.
And the hard forks did happen. And they definitely undermined the whole model of what the coins actually should do.
The positive point, though, is that with crypto, the self-hosted side and the managed side can work together seamlessly, so everyone can choose their approach.
you have met one now. I am anti-FDIC, and really anti-banking in general, as well as anti-KYC laws, and anti-anti money laundering laws...
I am very surprised that people are "very in favor" of KYC laws, which if true highlights the ignorance the people have about how these laws are used by government to abuse normal people. Take a gander over to the Institute for Justice who has any number of cases linked to these and other similar laws.
The big bad "terrorism" has replaced the 70's and 80's big bad of "Drug King Pins" to justify all manner of abuse by government to go over small businesses, and ordinary people all in the name of stopping some <<insert your bogey man here>>
>>For it to be used as regular currency you have to have price stability. No one wants to go to the grocery store and find out that they lost 10% of their budget on the walk over.
Maybe not on the walk over, and bitcoin is not really that unstable either. This idea that fiat money, and the USD in particular is stable is really laughable. This year especially where I have seen my average weekly grocery bill increase by about 20%, and I am buying the same things in the same QTY...
But I forgot the Fed says this is not the inflation I am looking for and just hand-waves it away... so it is all good. No issues at all with Fiat money....
That's true until KYC starts being use for "social credit" purposes.
Yes, money-laundering and terrorism are important but human nature being what it is, govts can't resist the temptation. In fact, one might reasonably argue that temptation is the point for folks who get into govt.
See also child-porn and drugs.
This is the first time I'm actually going to favorite a comment on HN.
Best-written crypto critic I've ever read
[0] www.fool.com/amp/investing/2021/06/18/the-man-who-lost-265-million/
Their support is email-only and has a backlog of months. Try taking a look at /r/coinbase for examples.
There are some very good reasons to put your crypto somewhere you control. I am in the process of moving everything I had off of Coinbase after they silently disabled my send/sell ability, but not purchase/receive, without ever providing a reason. Others were not so lucky as I was for them to reply to my support ticket after only 6 weeks of this status. None of their FAQs or support emails acknowledged the exact problem correctly or plausibly answered any of my questions as to why.
Genuinely: lol, what? How many exchange exit scams have we seen over the past few years? The idea that crypto institutions are "transparent" and trustworthy makes absolutely no sense. If there's any institution that should have no public trust, it should be crypto exchanges.
No, most people are buying crypto because number goes up. It's pure gambling, nothing else.
It's almost like using git, a decentralized version control system, through GitHub.
On the coin side, though, decentralization is the main selling point. When you manage your coins via regulated exchange your really don't have much more than stocks with some added payment functionality. The threat scenario is completely different.
[0] Technically, your code could still be stolen from GitHub, but it won't be a total loss like coins would be.
Crypto is no different to regular currencies in this regard. There's nothing stopping you from physically withdrawing all of your cash and stuffing it under your mattress.
If you're concerned about the government devaluing your cash through dodgy bailouts of financial institutions, you can even convert a significant percentage of it to precious metals that you bury in your garden.
The reality, though, is that people generally take the convenient option when presented with it.
People tried that in the US once.. The government passed a law that made owning said metals illegal...
Which was in effect from 1933 to 1974...
>Which was in effect from 1933 to 1974...
And now it's almost 50 years later. Why is that relevant now?
Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and you can bet if people started divesting from the USD into gold and silver, gold and silver would be quickly made illegal to own
I'll bet you an ounce of gold that doesn't happen while I'm still alive. As such, I don't care.
Since you're neutral to crypto, no, this is not weird. There is an overwhelming chance you use a trusted intermediary for your personal finance, so accepting that for crypto is an ideologically consistent position for you to take.
The issue is that it's a bit two faced for the crypto crowd, who for years have been saying "be your own bank" and hyping crypto's ability to destroy traditional banks and financial institutions. That's why those of us who are negative on crypto (like me) will regularly point out how crypto has basically started recreating a parallel financial structure to traditional finance, only worse.
The major paradox here is that Coinbase, a company that has banked its success on crypto for the masses, derives most of its marketcap through listing on the NYSE. Go figure...
"Not your keys, not your coin" is trite, but true. I was an ardent, outspoken critic of Coinbase for a long time.
I was also wrong. Coinbase didn't lose the crypto. I don't know how they managed not to, but it was an excellent reminder that the most successful startups in history often seem like terrible ideas at the start. I'm weirdly proud of them, because I understand how difficult of an achievement that was to pull off at scale.
Just remember that the losers like me are forgotten in the sands of history. For every winner, there were dozens of horror stories you never hear about. Keep control over the assets that matter to you.
Are you sure about that? Crypto forums are littered with posts of people having lost their coins due to some stupid mistake, be it a harddrive crash, a malformed transaction, a scam or even an actual hacker. Now, I'm not saying banks are perfect, but you at least have some hope to get your money back. With crypto, it's quite easy to loose it in the void.
And if your money is in an insured, legal exchange, managed by someone else, you're using a fancy stock brokerage with some extra payment options. It's cool, yes, but not a paradigm shift.
Maybe don't skim the article?
Because that is literally what it is about: trust. You claim to blindly trust a single point of failure. But traditional banks aren't the same: there are multiple levels of recourse and regulation.
Although I think we do need trimmed down easy to use personal/home mailservers/dnsservers -- which are easy to deploy and configure and totally inappropriate for running a Fortune 500 company -- and those need to be incorporated into consumer electronic boxes (similar to a home NAS) to make them easy to deploy to dramatically drop the barrier to ditching gmail.
I've also never had an issue with sender reputation -- but I have an .org domain and its run DKIM+SPF for years so the last time I got forged bounce spam must have been a decade or more ago. Sender reputation is probably a bit overblown and possibly even a bit of a lie by google to keep you locked into gmail. If you are in a TLD that people have to trust and have a domain which is secured, then your e-mails will go through, even if your mail volume is low.
Spam filtering is a bit annoying though, DNS blackhole lists tend to shitcan quite a bit of necessary e-mail that some neckbeard has gotten themselves in a twist over.
can not "you" verify said "correctness"?
-j
RIP Hal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=628344.msg48198887#m...
"I contend that James Simons put the team together that made up Satoshi Nakamoto and that Nick Szabo was the main public-facing voice behind the nym."
The overlap of Austro-libertarianism and crypto is not an accident.
Sometimes people use figures which are dramatically higher which come from counting literally every block in the first year which is unspent, not just ones matching that pattern. That is provably a radical overestimate, as it includes blocks mined by varrious known parties. A common characterisic of almost all musing about Satoshi is extensive confirmation bias e.g. "Satoshi was an early Bitcoin user thus any early Bitcoin user is satoshi!".
In any case, regardless of who Satoshi is/was, wouldn't you like to live in the timeline where some early Bitcoin fortune was used to fund turning cryonics into something that works? Hal is cryogenically preserved, so maybe he's not dead-- only resting [1]. :)
I think the idea that someone managed to get cryonic recovery working specifically because they believed doing so would get them access to a Bitcoin fortune would make for an amusing science fiction novel. ... and really, Science Fiction would be an aspirational level of rigor for most speculation about the identity of Bitcoin's creator. Fortunately, Bitcoin was designed so that it hopefully doesn't matter who created it.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2evdr8/hal_finney_...
Now that doesn't mean the NSA hasn't fiddled with C25519, but I'd be surprised if they mind-controlled (or extorted) Bernstein into publishing a compromised curve.
(The NIST P-curves aren't backdoored.)
That's what I did, Bernstein could be compromised.
> He's not Satoshi.
I sat on a panel with him at an Arm conference, he's a great guy and easy to talk to and doesn't write anything like Satoshi: but I could care less if he is Satoshi. FWIW, I, too, think crypto currency is a huge scam.
Unfortunately, we have no way to validate that the NSA did not grind the "seed" used to generate their parameters to search for curves which were strong or weak against some publicly unknown property which is only found in candidate curves at a one in a billion level.
This is a weakness in the methodology used to pick the parameters, somewhat lovingly mocked by the BADA55 curves: https://bada55.cr.yp.to/vr.html
It's not unreasonable for people to be concerned about this. Injecting intentional weaknesses into cryptosystems used by others was a fundamental objective for the NSA, which drove programs as significant as the CIA literally purchasing the at-the-time world largest manufacturer of encipher machines in order to ensure that it continued ship NSA designed intentionally weakened systems for decades ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-... ). That was, of course, somewhat before the establishment of the relevant ECC standards-- but the cloud of operational secrecy prevents us from knowing that much about what NSA has been up to more recently.
The curve used in Bitcoin though isn't a NIST curve, and its generation procedure is about as close as you can get to rigid parameters without having rigid parameters as an explicit design goal.
a=0 (required for the endomorphism), field is 3 mod 4 for fast sqrt, increment field from 2^256-2^32-1024 (fast limb structure) until you find a prime field with a non-trivial cube root of unity (required for endomorphism) and until you can obtain a curve with prime order, set B to the lowest value that does. The result of that procedure is secp256k1. (you can actually drop some of the requirements above and still get the same parameters too, but I am pretty confident that this was their search criteria) -- so no high entropy "random" inputs.
I'd like to think we might be on the same page about Schneier and curves.
Agreed.
As I think we're both agreeing that it's a subject where well informed people could have a reasonable debate and disagreement, if you've got a reasonable link you'd suggest for the perspective you've taken it would be helpful to provide it (I provided the BADA55 curve page for that purpose)! (I could suggest one, but I'd prefer one you like!)
How can you assert this?
Can you explain the coefficient choices?
> Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They're only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don't like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money.
I guess “cryptocurrencies” could be replaced in this paragraph by many other things (past, present and forthcoming) that allow exchange of value and this would ring true to some or many people. The entire article had many great points, but this paragraph sullied it. I have a lot of respect for Bruce Schneier and his work, but I also realize that every human has their own biases and blind spots.
Outside of the exclusions given in the original quote what kinds of things might be examples?
That's not a given. Nick Szabo provides a good explanation [1] of the state of things when Bitcoin was invented, and why very few people were capable of it then:
"The overlap between cryptographic experts and libertarians who might sympathize with such a "gold bug" idea is already rather small, since most cryptographic experts earn their living in academia and share its political biases. Even among this uncommon intersection as stated very few people thought it was a good idea. Even gold bugs didn't care for it because we already have real gold rather than mere bits and we can pay online simply by issuing digital certificates based on real gold stored in real vaults, a la the formerly popular e-gold."
Schneier has the cryptographic knowledge, but I've never gotten the sense he as any deep interest in the nature of money, at least not enough to drive him to put together something like Bitcoin. That drive, that obsession with something, is a prerequisite for making something as unprecented and dissimilar to anything previously existing as Bitcoin.
[1]:https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-...
Nevertheless, he's prominent enough that it makes sense to forcefully deny the rumor, just to make it less likely that he'll be targeted by kidnappers, cranks, etc.
There is other timestamp evidence linking him to the US, but a recent analysis suggests that the totality of the data (including Satoshi's use of British/Commonwealth spelling, vernacular, and date format) indicate he was based in London or the UK.[1]
[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37743.0
[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/new-research-suggests-satoshi-nakam...
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
I dream of a decentralized world currency where you can trace where the money the governments use is going, exactly how much money is being created, and where poor people have a chance to not have their money constantly lose value. This is what got me going the first time I read The Age of Cryptocurrency from Vigna and Casey from the WSJ.
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Cryptocurrency-Blockchain-Challen...
Cryptocurrency might have not been created to make the rich richer, but that sure seems to be the outcome.
Vitalik answers this much more eloquently than I could.
And I would say what is the Gini coefficient for stocks? It isn't great either. Crypto is in its infancy. Bitcoin was created in 2009. What was the Gini coefficient for the first US dollars, the Continentals, in 1775? I'm going to assume most went to those closest to and believing in that new currency.
I make no apologies or excuses for crypto. I fully admit it isn't perfect. But I only state what it could be and dream of the future. That future I dream of is a more equitable society.
Oh man, that is some seriously shaky foundations to rest your argument on. It also only holds for very early day cryptocurrencies; nowadays the main thing that limits your ability to hold a lot of crypto is not interest, but how much disposable income you've got.
Maybe if you intended your cryptocurrency to remain niche this argument might be fine, but if your currency is supposed to replace fiat (as Bitcoin claims) then that argument is pure unadulterated bullshit. All it's saying is that inequality is fine because it's about who cared earlier, please ignore all the people that bought in with USD.
I suspect that Vitalk knows he's playing a rhetorical trick here, he's too smart to not be aware of that.
> The average person with $15 in fiat currency is poor and is missing out on the ability to have a good life. The average person with $15 in cryptocurrency is a dabbler who opened up a wallet once for fun. Inequality in level of interest is a healthy thing; every community has its dabblers and its full-time hardcore fans with no life. So if a cryptocurrency has a very high Gini coefficient, but it turns out that much of this inequality comes from inequality in level of interest, then the number points to a much less scary reality than the headlines imply.
Yeah, except if your currency "wins" and replaces fiat, then that dabbler becomes a new feudal lord, and everyone who didn't have "interest" starves. Not really a comforting argument in that context, is it?
Worse still if that "dabbler" "dabbled" because they had spare cash to spare; e.g. if they were already rich.
> Cryptocurrencies, even those that turn out to be highly plutocratic, will not turn any part of the world into anything close to dystopia A.
I do not trust this argument coming from someone who is in fact a plutocrat of a crypto currency.
Bitcoin is the one true thing that has not been corrupted in this world, despite the decade of FUD thrown at it.
Bruce however has shown my esteem for him was misplaced, worse by linking to WIRED, which long ago became an ideological propaganda site with no interest in advanced technology.
Bitcoiners would love a good anti-bitcoin argument.
It’s a tragedy nobody has any.
If you have to invent another coin to encourage investment/spending rather than hoarding...well why not use that coin.
I'm not entirely anti-crypto, I think Monero is neat.
Edit: But yeah, if only looking at those people who would refrain from investing in stocks and just hold crypto, then yeah, that would leave money out of circulation stimulating the economy. But just overall, for the normal person, it's a moot point.
You said you aren’t an economist, but you have been taught what you know about economics by communists.