nadahalli

A fresh printable worksheet of maths and computational-thinking puzzles for kids. Every question, every answer, and every wrong answer is computed by a program, not written by an AI. The generators and solvers are "correct by construction." The levels are decided by how deep the solver has to go, and a few other static constants per generator.

[pedantic hat on] Bitcoin doesn't use encryption.

You mean digital signatures - and yes, we use signatures everywhere in public key cryptography.

You will like this 2020 classic piece by the folks at Paradigm: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

The hashing part is kind of orthogonal. The real negative outcome of quantum computers getting reliable and powerful would be that ECDSA would be broken (using Shor's algorithm variants). This would make every coin stealable by anyone with access to such a computer. Some coins would be easier to steal than others (P2PK would be the easiest - and all of Satoshi's coins are P2PK). The Bitcoin network would keep working, but coin-ownership would be meaningless.

I started reading the article assuming it was an April fool's joke. After a bit into it, I thought it was not a joke. When the self-deprecation began, I was again convinced it was a joke - but at the end of the article, I think this is not a joke. It's a rather good take on why Bitcoin maximalism is what it is.

Some degree of ETH-maximalism will be required in the future given the sheer number of pretender L-1 blockchains snapping at ETH's heels. Writing about BTC-maximalism sets the foundation for that culture.

That's the entire point. Bitcoin has just one use case, and it's very inefficient design is tailor-made for that one use case.

Alt-coins have use cases that can all be solved by AWS. The inefficient design is er....inefficient for those applications.

Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments are one approach. Encoding everything that you might want to buy as an input to a ZKP system is a stretch, obviously. But at least, that's the spirit of this philosophy.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.

As for "Crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and friends" - you have to ask yourself why they don't work at scale. That's the key insight of Bitcoin. You need to have a system-native incentive for the nodes to do their thing, and this system-native thing (BTC the currency, in Bitcoin's case), should have outside value. Many wiser people have said this (not on HackerNews maybe), that money is the only use case for a blockchain.

> If we could magically make 100x the gold, that would be great! Current gold investors would be sad but it would be a win for the world.

I am not sure about that. If there were a magical new way of creating gold to inflate its supply, it would not be good for the world.

You are on the wrong forum my friend.

Austrians and the HN community talk past each other because it's not easy to get the latter (which I am a part of) to see that their large salaries in FAANG companies are partly due to the Fed largesse.

SlowMist has a non-humorous writeup. https://slowmist.medium.com/the-root-cause-of-poly-network-b...

I am still waiting for Rekt to cover this one.

Most smart contracts on Ethereum, or other blockchains are only immutable in their marketing material, but not in practice. Either they use an obvious PIMPL/Proxy contract (OpenZeppelin, a popular smart contract library suite has proxy contract that many others use: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/upgrades-plugins/1.x/proxies), or they have other subtler hooks that can be used to change what ABI/function calls to the smart contract does. These hooks are only usable by privileged actors (surprise surprise).

Smart contracts being immutable is a joke, almost. And more importantly, even if they were immutable, proving that formally for a Turing complete language is impossible.

Bitcoin smartly avoided this by making its smart contracts dumber.

That'd be quite expensive. And as you manipulate prices across blocks, arbitrageurs would arb it back to "market price". Uniswap V3 allows for a 3rd party smart contract to ask its Uniswap V3 Oracle to employ a 9 day moving average price - which is of course, not very useful as a "spot price", but is super hard to manipulate.

Many European countries also charge negative interest rates. In Switzerland, where I live, bank balances above CHF 100K gets a flat -0.75% interest rate.

Just saying.

I am curious why the author thinks that security is not a commodity.

That primitive has not been invented (maybe yet). Till then, we have Bitcoin.

For those who already know about Bitcoin's timestamping really well, it's worth reading about the time-warp attack. David Harding wrote a great answer about it on StackExchange ages ago: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75831/what-is-ti...

This is deflation, and turns out everyone hates deflation. Just to be clear, I am with you here.

That's true. It's a verifiable "burn of electricity". The only upside to the burning is the verifiability. If there was some other way to generate this verifiable scarcity of something that we all agree on (electricity is kind of universal, that way), that would be better - obviously.

There's your argument for Bitcoin. It cannot be planted by anyone, like tulips. Its supply cannot be increased arbitrarily. Tulips, in fact, could be a bit more complicated. Bitcoin is quite simple that way. Spent electricity is stored and traded - and is a good yardstick to measure other things, etc. etc.

Just as an aside, you cannot build the Bitcoin blockchain overnight as well - because of proof of work and network effects of bitcoin full nodes. That gives it "value". It's function is to serve as that - a store of value.

Merkle trees are everywhere in Bitcoin (full node or otherwise).

The block header has the merkle root of all transactions that are a part of that block. The witness merkle root is stored in the coinbase transaction (if the miner is segwit enabled).

And proof of work is done for the block header, which includes all these merkle roots.

I am from Bangalore, and in 2012, I tried an experiment in an auto-rickshaw (tuk-tuk). I offered to pay the driver double the meter price if he didn't honk even once during an upcoming 1 hour-ish ride.

The driver thought I was nuts to offer him this obviously easy money, and accepted it. I told him up front that the first honk, and the extra money was off the table. He said - ok - and we started the ride. The first few kilometers were pleasant, and the driver was cool with it - but as we entered the business district with more traffic, he became more and more frustrated and started to hum and sing to take it out a bit. Then, he kind of started "barking" (for the lack of a better word) at other drivers who irritated him. He then resorted to outright shouting at the drivers. Eventually, something snapped and he honked once. I told him the deal was off, and the rest of my trip was a veritable honk-hell.

I have always believed the stress ball theory after this one-off experiment.

There is some discussion on their forum on how to set the appropriate difficulty for the genesis block, and how to estimate the number of miners that will be around at the beginning. Good reading: https://www.grin-forum.org/t/genesis-block-message/250

It's possible that I want my passwords (of other sites) synced on all instances of Chrome across my devices, but I don't want Google to know these passwords (obviously). They have an "encrypt-passwords" feature for that.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139

Perhaps you have never visited passwords.google.com :-)

Not you. But (someone connected to)+ you.

The only reason I am on Facebook and also not use AdBlock on Google Search is, I am in the internet business. And if you are in the internet-business, you do have to be a part of the system: all in.

I do not want to mull over a social media monetizing idea and wonder if Facebook has already figured it out. I just need to be there and know it myself.

Sad reason, but that's the way it is.

It's not quite bogus, but it's very close.

http://pratyaya.nationalinterest.in/2013/06/05/the-bogus-cla...

I have been waiting for MANY years for them to do something about this. At least after the XKCD strip came out. http://xkcd.com/977/