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Comment by thedaveoflife | Hacker News Reader

I am not so sure that "transaction security auditing" would be accurate though. That makes it sound like this company is doing something altruistic. The truth is that this facility was created for one simple reason: to earn Bitcoin.

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If I go out and hire (say) tptacek (and the rest of Matasano) to perform a software security audit, aren't they're doing it to earn dollars? When a corporate board hires external financial auditor to look over their records, same thing. I don't see where your inference of altruism comes in.

The difference is that you are exchanging money for a service between two willing parties. Bitcoin miners don't take anyone else's money in exchange for verifying transactions.

"Bitcoin miners don't take anyone else's money in exchange for verifying transactions."

Yes they do. Your whole point, I thought, was that they're being paid to do it. They presently take a small fraction of value from every bitcoin. They also receive any transaction fees offered by any of the transactions they are processing, but in practice those are presently (almost?) always zero.

The difference is that tptacek won't claim that he's doing it because he cares about your software; he will say he's doing it to earn money. He will definitely try to do it well to maintain his opinion of a professional, but he won't be pretending he does something altruistic.

I'm not saying doing things for money is inherently bad. I'm just saying, let's call things what they are.

I still don't see where the claim of altruism comes in. We're labelling things for their effects. Matasano secures your software in exchange for dollars. I'm currently making software respond quickly to network events in exchange for dollars. The sandwich vendor makes me a sandwich in exchange for dollars. Calling us all "dollar miners", simply because we're doing it mostly for the dollars, is not really "calling things what they are" - it's a horrendously lossy focus on one particular aspect of "what they are".

I think I got the wrong sentiment from baddox's post and have been arguing against the "claim of altruism" that wasn't really made by anyone. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244741.

It was thedaveoflife who made explicit his understanding that a label of "transaction security auditing" implied altruism. He's not really answered queries as to how that's the case.

I would say it was created for the simple reason of maintaining the security of the blockchain. That's the fundamental idea of Bitcoin: the blockchain is protected in a decntralized manner due to proof of work. The reward is added to incentivize people to help maintain the security of the blockchain.

So in other words, they're doing it for the reward, with a side effect of maintaining security of the blockchain. I doubt that they're doing it for an idea.

But why is that contradictory, or a problem at all? When I buy a sandwich, I do so primarily because I want the sandwich, but the reason the vendor makes and sells sandwiches isn't to satisfy me, but to make money. Both of us are "selfish" in a sense, but it's not contradictory and not a bad thing.

Or more directly, when I am dealing with dollars and I hire an auditor to look over my financial records, they're doing it primarily to make money.

Sure, but the difference is well pointed out by @thedaveoflife. The sandwitch vendor doesn't care about me being not hungry, and they would gladly switch to selling toilet paper to me if it was more profitable to them. Likewise, the miners don't give a damn about blockchain security. They have this black box - put electicity in, get money out. They don't care about what's going on inside. If the black box produced sandwitches, or widgets, or just spun and made sounds that make some millionaire happy, it would make no difference to them, as long as when the electricity flows in, the money comes out.

It's the difference between terminal and instrumental values. It's one of the reason why some people are bewildered by what Tesla or SpaceX is doing - because they're missing the point that for Elon rockets and electric cars are terminal values and the money is just instrumental, while most of the companies we interact with have this the other way around.

But that doesn't change the fact that sandwich makers are making sandwiches and bitcoin miners are securing the block chain. Sandwich makers aren't dollar miners.

I still don't see why this is a problem. Even if all the miners don't actually care that they're securing the blockchain, the blockchain still gets secured (assuming there's not a design flaw in Bitcoin, but that's a separate issue).

I believe I understood your comment [0] as saying more-less "bitcoin miners work to maintain blockchain security; monetary reward is just thrown in to sweeten the pot", which would not be true because the miners only care about that monetary reward. After re-reading the entire thread I now think you just wanted to say something like "miners get paid to keep the blockchain working, the same way e.g. plumbers get paid to keep the plumbing working", which would be something I of course agree with. Therefore, I apologize for arguing against a point you didn't make in the first place.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8243425

It's debatable whether all Bitcoin miners are doing it for the reward, or whether some are doing it for an idea.

On the one hand, I think I'm doing it to help the network, but on the other hand I kept the pitiful few coins I've got thereby, and didn't give them away. Why do I keep Bitcoins? Not as an investment, surely; I think of Bitcoin as more of another currency that I keep some money in all the time, like £ or €, so I can buy stuff when I'm there. But my little Bitcoin mining operation is being run for the purpose of "transaction security auditing" [thanks, qnr!] for the same reason I run a tor exit node: because I want to encourage such things to exist.

A fair point, but also misleading. That's like saying a HFT trader is hoping to provide market liquidity... Really they're trying to make money. The market liquidity (or in this case blockchain verification) is an indirect benefit.

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