What’s Behind the Naming of TBD54566975? | Hacker News Reader

What’s Behind the Naming of TBD54566975?

blog.concannon.tech

82 pointsalexrustic59 comments

Short version: Square (now known as Block) has a brand called TBD54566975, which has developed a protocol for "liquidity and asset exchange" called tbDEX. The number 54566975 is a Unix timestamp equivalent to Friday, September 24, 1971 10:29:35, which was the end of a meeting between US President Richard Nixon and Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns where they effectively decided to take the US dollar off of the gold standard. This ended the Bretton Woods system[1] where various Western countries pegged their currencies to the US dollar, replacing it with a system of free-floating exchange rates. (The actual history is of course somewhat more complicated.) Goldbugs and (apparently now) a lot of crypto enthusiasts consider this to be some kind of mortal sin against the concept of money, and have been telling each other that the dollar is going to collapse any year now every since.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

Reminder that owning gold before that time was illegal in the USA. So it's not like gold was a free market under US executive order 6102.

Nixon largely was just admitting the truth, that gold / dollar was no longer connected. By removing the dollar/gold peg, US citizens were allowed to own gold again.

Goldbugs we're literally illegal before that so it seems really odd to demonize that point in history. The true evil to the history of gold was Roosevelt order 6102, if you really wanted to be historical about it.

Also, from [1] since I'm fin-blind:

A gold bug is someone who expounds the virtues of gold as an investment, and who thinks its price will perpetually increase.

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goldbug.asp

That doesn't sound right:

1) Obviously the price of gold will perpetually increase - there is an official policy of low single digit annual inflation. The price of everything is expected to perpetually increase unless it an obsolete good. It isn't like gold bugs are even a little unusual in observing this.

2) I thought the point of gold bugs generally to spruik gold as a speculative gamble on the theory it will go up like crazy.

Note that as an investment gold does pretty well, it usually posts "real" price gains YoY. Or, for people who believe more in reality, the rock stays about the same and official inflation stats undercall asset price inflation every year like clockwork. Gold bugs are the ones who think that is unreasonably poor performance.

Wikipedia[1] has a fuller set of definitions:

* An investor or speculator who is very bullish in buying the commodity gold, or similarly themed financial products such as junior mining companies, gold certificates, bullion ETFs, and other derivative instruments related to precious metals.

* A person who opposes or criticizes the use of fiat currency and supports a return to the use of the gold standard or some other currency system based on the value of gold and other hard assets.

* Someone who considers one commodity, usually gold, "the appropriate measure of wealth, regardless of the quantity of other goods and services that it can buy".

* A person, often with views summarized above, that subscribes to conspiracy theories relating to gold and silver, frequently including but not limited to, alleged manipulation of the price of precious metals and the supposed disappearance of gold held by the United States Government at Fort Knox. The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) is a small but prominent promoter of such conspiracy theories within the gold bug community. However, such persons are widely dismissed as cranks and their beliefs as fringe by reputable economists, business leaders and government officials.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_bug#Various_themes_on_the...

> Goldbugs and (apparently now) a lot of crypto enthusiasts

I'd put these in the same category. The hype around Bitcoin in the early 2010s was very much focused on it being "digital gold".

I was trying to be as charitable as possible, since "goldbug" is basically equivalent to "crank". I suspect there is a lot of overlap, though.

Maybe to some people? I was messing with it then and the hype felt more like "ssh for money."

Yeah back then people still thought it could be used as an actual currency. It wasn’t until the seven transactions/second came to the foreground that people started talking about digital gold.

> and have been telling each other that the dollar is going to collapse any year now every since.

The point of pegging a currency to something tangible, like gold, is to increase confidence in the currency. When the currency is pegged, it's much harder to just print money whenever the government wants to. Thus, pegged currencies are safe to do business in because they just won't evaporate overnight.

Remember: Currencies come and go, so the dollars, Euro, Yen, ect, will eventually be replaced by something else. Given the US Dollar's status as a reserve currency, it probably won't just "collapse any year now".

I'm currently reading "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail", https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/... The author, Ray Dalio, carefully explains the signs of when a currency is going to fail.

Thanks, that's a lot more compact to read

Now that is some laser targeted marketing.

A Venn diagram of Gold Standard Libertarians and Crypto Nerds has a whole lot of overlap. Which isn't really a surprise since both offer the chance to horde a resource with limited supply in order to passively gain wealth.

There's this link to an interview with Yanis Varoufakis a few days ago, he mentions the "primitive thinking" of the "Gold standard!" folks

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/23/discussing-crypto-...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133393

If Varoufakis is such a financial genius (with his eccentricity he is either that or a complete retard), then why is the country whose finances he managed the laughing stock of Europe? And why did it become like this on his watch? Disclaimer: I don't think it was all his mistakes that caused it, but his immense stupidity definitely did more harm than help.

Anyway, commodity-backed money are back for a good month and they seem to be doing quite well so far.

BTW with commodity-backed money you have direct mapping between wealth and environmental impact, thus eliminating the need of carbon-credits, right-to-repair regulations and a million other things.

> but his immense stupidity definitely did more harm than help.

Difficult to say. It is now accepted that the management of the Greece crisis and, in general, the 2008 crisis by the EU was horribly wrong. So much so that it almost destroyed it. The reaction to the COVID crisis in 2020 by the EU was exactly the opposite that in 2008, because of the lessons learnt back then. Those lessons became obvious in part because of the "noise" of people like Varoufakis or Paul Krugman, who explained at the time why the EU strategy was a mistake and what should be done instead. Time proved them mostly right.

Varoufakis' rock star attitude and insistence to stick to economic theory discussions when debating with people who were just trying to cut their own losses, rather than finding what was the correct thing to do for the common good, was probably not a winning strategy. Nevertheless, from the economics point of view (not the realpolitik point of view) it now looks he was right.

Hah, the Greek economy was already in shambles before he and his party came to power. If you read his book "Adults in the Room"[1] about his time as finance minister, he was offering (obviously he'd say so) sane suggestions, but the Troika couldn't accept them because they'd lose face politically. E.g. ge wrote that the Spanish finance minister (from a conservative government) agreed in private that the ideas were good, but if he were to ask his parliament to ratify them (the weird EU policymaking meant every country had to agree to the rescue package, the countries would usually follow Germany's lead), the Spanish socialist party would've said "See, debt forgiveness makes sense!" and would've crucified the conservative party in the then upcoming elections.

The book even had an appendix about why his and his prime minister's threat of Grexit were not bluffs (using game theory), but there was a marathon late-night discussion session between the Greek PM and Merkel, and at the end of it, it was morning, and the PM got beaten to give up Grexit and accept the Troika's destructive policies. And that's the main point, Varoufakis knew austerity wasn't going to help safe the economy, but the Troika forced Greece into those austerity measures to even continue negotiations.

Paul Krugman quoted Matthew Yglesias about how these leftists who got elected in Greece were really serious about fixing their country the way they wanted it, and how Brussels rejected them because they're not part of the clique and don't want to be[2]

> In the era of globalization and EU-ification, I think the leaders of small countries are actually in a somewhat different situation. If you leave office held in high esteem by the Davos set, there are any number of European Commission or IMF or whatnot gigs that you might be eligible for even if you’re absolutely despised by your fellow countrymen. Indeed, in some ways being absolutely despised would be a plus. The ultimate demonstration of solidarity to the “international community” would be to do what the international community wants even in the face of massive resistance from your domestic political constituency.

But I have a feeling you're not here to learn and be changed of your opinion, you already know you're right, correct?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/15/adults-in-room...

[2] https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/greece-the-tie-...

Cryptocurrencies are far from all being in limited supply.

Could you provide some data on those studies?

and have been telling each other that the dollar is going to collapse any year now every since.

Now now, there was that one time in '86, where they thought the dollar would hold up.

I was there, we had tea.

  > Translated to a human-readable timestamp, 54566975 
  becomes:
  > 
  > Friday, September 24, 1971 06:29:35 GMT

No, that's PDT :)

  $ TZ=UTC date --date=@54566975
  Fri 24 Sep 13:29:35 UTC 1971

That's correct. Chris has it wrong in that blog entry.

I was curious when I read the name in that Tweet too. It's cryptic marketing for crypto people, so, well done.

Decentralized trust is an interesting concept because at least we know that so far trustless systems have been extremely bottlenecked and inefficient.

Still, I'll hold judgement until there is a repo I can fork. If it's anywhere close to NFTs that's a no for me. High likelihood since it's coming from the same crowd.

To save a click for anyone who doesn’t care about blockchain gibberish: don’t bother clicking.

While this name is very clever and cute, crypto including Bitcoin is still all a giant ponzi scheme scam. [0]

[0] https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...

Did I miss the part where the author lays out their argument within the article (rather than some podcast that’s referred to)?

The closest I can find is the diagram with two nodes and an arrow connecting them. The first node represents users involved in transactions, the other is miners. The arrow presumably represents fees.

That looks like any other payment processor.

Just like another label commonly used in similar discussions, cult, Ponzi scheme has a very specific meaning. There are other more reasonable ways to criticize cryptocurrency, but I guess these two sound scarier and more definitive, even if they’re inaccurate.

That is the dumbest argument I've heard about ponzi schemes to date. If you don't know something, just ask questions. That author is retarded.

Bitcoin has no central authority. It's just utilitarian. Crypto needs regulation where it overlaps with fiat. We should start doing that instead of having these stupid debates.

None of these have anything to do with ponzi schemes, which is the act of using new investor money to payout old investors.

People buy and sell crypto like anything else. It's not legal tender (at least not everywhere or even anywhere that counts) but if you wanna call bitcoin a ponzi scheme then so is every fiat currency and the entire stock market.

The difference between the stock market and crypto is regulation at the fiat overlap.

So can we do that instead of giving air to these completely brain dead "decentralised technology nobody controls is clearly a scam to enrich early adopters, like the whole stock market except not like the whole stock market because economics is actually beyond me" style arguments, please and thank you

The Nixon--Burns conversation in question: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearch...

It only says "10:29 am" though. I have no idea how the second was determined.

Keybase had an implementation of the identity piece down. At least, it appears more similar than dissimilar.

Has. I use Keybase Chat all through the day, every day. All my most important contacts are on it and I obviously really love it.

In Kubrick's movie The Shining there is a gold room that seems based on this gold standard adoption, there is a very interesting analysis [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoWZEwedPkc

I'm surprised the idea of it being a timestamp came up before it being ASCII characters.

To save someone else the trouble: With hex codes, 54 56 69 75 would be TViu. With decimal codes, it would be 68EK. The sequence isn't valid octal.

68EK?

And the whole point of this post is just marketing

While you can construct a crypto currency with finite supply, you can construct an infinite number of crypto currencies.

For crypto to act as gold; everyone has to agree on elevating a single one (Bitcoin variation BTC) to this special status and have everything else evolve around it.

While BTC holders has incentive to encourage this, it is not obvious that everyone else has.

Someone register it before Musk buys HK.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TBD54566975

Where do I cash in? And when will Musk buy Hong Kong?

On 1 July 1997, after the Great Clock Reset

It is time to stop making fun of Elons children

When will people shut the fuck up about crypto already?

When its adoption in its successful niches and its rejection from its unsuccessful niches is so complete, that it is boring to even mention it.

Pray tell, what are its successful niches? I haven't yet seen any.

There was that Canadian trucker protest where the idea was floated of de-banking them. At that point, a fungible asset worth a few thousand dollars that is a little hard to seize without a court order and serious police involvement would be exactly what they needed.

That was the tipping point that got me in to crypto. It is fit for purpose. I don't want to be debanked suddenly by my political opponents.

Do you think debanking trucker protesters would not have required a court order backed by police action?

How would you make use of such an asset, if a law or court order had made it illegal for regular financial institutions to transact with you?

BBC says [0] there was no need for court orders, it was to be coordinated through the banks, probably under the banking regulatory framework. "With no need for court orders, banks can freeze personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests." is the sentence I'm looking at.

And I can find someone who is in the banking system, then trade them crypto in exchange for them buying my groceries for me. It'd work as a temporary arrangement while the situation calms down. Even if the exchange rate is bad it is still better than having no liquid assets, I don't want to have to barter with jewellery or something. Crypto is the best option as far as I can tell. If you have a better one do suggest it, but frankly I think Monero is the best option. Better than nothing.

I'm arrogant enough to think I have better political protection than a truck driver, but not arrogant enough to stake a month with no way to pay for food on it.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385

And “Ms Freeland said they were broadening Canada's "Terrorist Financing" rules to cover cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding platforms, as part of the effort.” is also a sentence in that article.

If the emergency powers enable them to freeze your bank assets without a court order surely they also allow them to deprive you of… whatever you think the crypto asset vehicle that would protect you from this outcome is.

The difference between that and a bank account ban is that I don't see a way for them to implement a crypto ban. They may as well legislate that said truckers are elephants - a legally interesting policy but with hard to determine practical implications.

Australia has a soft ban on Monero, it isn't illegal but they've tried to make it difficult to buy using the same regulatory trick of pressuring the trading institutions. I assume because it is useful for trading drugs or something. That has had nearly no impact on my ability to buy some because in the world of crypto the government doesn't have a way of forcing me to deal with entities that follow their KYC laws. At least not without sending police to the door and they don't have the resources to pull that off.

It isn't even clear they have the resources to figure out I bought Monero after buying an interim cryptocurrency. It'd be a massive waste of resources if they did, and it might not be feasible full stop.

At a practical level, if something like that happened in Australia, one of those truckers could come to me and say "hey roenxi, I will give you $300 worth of Monero if you get me $150 worth of groceries". Or someday the reverse - basically barter. It is really, really hard for me to see how a government would prevent that without going seriously totalitarian in a way that the Trudeaus of the world haven't floated as an idea so far. But it is easy for me to see that a cryptocurrency would be a good way to execute that.

It didn't require a court order. Banks did it on "recommendation". This is what ultimately convinced me that we are no better than the Siberian bald dwarf.

Bitcoin: internet-based black markets

NFTs: money laundering, scamming idiots (similar to the fine art world - NFTs make a ton more sense if you view them as an attempt to create "digital fine art" in the same way as Bitcoin is digital gold).

Fine art world is not a scam, but tax-evasion.

For the people with $$$$, it's tax evasion. For people with $ or $$, it's a scam.

It's pretty good for fraud.

As long as our modern economic history is deemed interesting. Almost 400 years later we still talk about Tulip mania. Even if cryptocurrency falls out of favor tomorrow, it will still be an interesting economic event for a long time.

What I don’t understand is what happens when someone can crack wallets and just start transferring money anywhere they want?

Why is this something that can’t happen?

You'd need to break ECDSA, which is assumed to be hard, and not without reason. Basically the entirety of online privacy is built on this or similar assumptions.

Literal cracking of that kind of encryption is still some time away, people are already losing their crypto money through theft and lacks of backups anyway.

> Why is this something that can’t happen?

Because if you crack wallets, you are either (i) cracking it through social means, i.e. stealing login/password, and it's nothing extraordinary; or (ii) you just broke EC crypto, and the world has a much worse problem at hand than you stealing something-coins.

I thought there was an other scenario which is biting people more commonly:

(iii) smart contracts that are clumsily or maliciously constructed to either transfer assets out of a "wallet" or lock them up for eternity

Same reason people aren't cracking other encrypted data, hacking banks, breaking TLS etc. It uses strong encryption (Not all the same encryption, but strong all the same).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com