It's some kind of consensus, maintained by network. You won't reach it physically, that means any kind of physical violence is useless. This is similar to that you can not destroy religion or language by using nuclear weapon, even if you kill everyone that uses them

And this is very important for the value of countries (coins) on this cryptostar, if any government can control a coin, then it will worth no more than the worth of that government

Currently bitcoin can not be regarded as safe on this cryptostar, since a few mining pools control more than 51% of the network hash rate. However, maybe future development will make some coin extremely resistent from external control

This is always a topic that worth debate

In fact, every investment is a ponzi scheme, since you always have to find the next one who accept your payment, if you can not, it basically become worthless. Many such schemes (like pension fund and social security fund) do not collapse, simply because government can force people to buy into such scheme forever

Most of the fiat money is backed by government (once the government is replaced by another government, their fiat money will worth zero over night), but have you seen anyone go to government to exchange anything? None. So, the backing is just something that gives people confidence. It is better to say fiat money is backed by confidence, that it will be accepted by other people in the country that the government rules

And where does the confidence of bitcoin come from?  Suppose that its technology is without flaw, then similarly, the confidence comes from  the acceptance by other people in the world. Although this time, it is not by the people ruled by a certain government, but by the people who have confidence in its value

The core question is, what gives peopel more confidence? A government or knowledge and thinking. So far I could say it is still the government that gives people more confidence, but is that a good thing?

Of course some kind of order will have to be established on that star, but it will be very different from what we are currently seeing on Earth, which is purely based on violence and social engineering

There has been some talk in chinese twitter that BeiJing police could (in theory) order the biggest 3 mining pools to do an reorg to get the stolen coins back. So fragile the bitcoin network currently is

Like buying land in NewYork or very populated capitals, the lands are mostly sold out, the only way to get a piece of land is to first find someone who want to sell because of some situation and then raise the price to defeat other bidders

My point is, unlike NewYork or other big cities, the land on cryptostar is very secure from any kind of violence. Of course those lands are not able to provide some physical usage like on earth, but besides physical usage, human still have lots of other demands, being secure from any kind of violence itself is already a demand, and another demand will be investment return

You can compare this to investment in some developing country, it could be food production or car construction, the final result is that your capital gained

Why did your capital gain? From a micro level, it is because you did some production/service for the people in that country at a low cost and you get very good sale. But from a macro level, your business will be very difficult to generate any return if the money supply in this country did not increase

So, the ultimate reason that your investment generated return is because:
1. You produced something that have a high demand in this country
2. The country have increasing money supply

Now to this cryptostar, it is similar, the star's land have high demand, and increasing money supply from earth. If you could produce land for this star (mining), you will get a good return, or you just simply buy and hold land, because anyway not so many land left for producing

Actually this thought just came over me when I  saw this a few days back:


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/f6a08u/wise_quote_by_wei_dai_bitcoin/

If your space ship could reach that gold asteroid, you might have a claim on its ownership, but soon your government or even another warship might come to you and grab it, there might be a war break out for this little asteroid. This means the ownership of something that is reacheable by physical violence is always uncertain, unless you have the dominant violence

However, for a star that is far away that the physical violence on earth is not able to reach, things become different. And currently cryptocurrency space is getting close to this status. Of course there are still ways to compromise a blockchain, but it is quite difficult, similar to sending a war ship to Mars. And even better, a blockchain, once destroyed, leaves nothing valuable, this greatly discourage any kind of attack

Just an analogy, somebody has already been selling land on Moon for years, but obviously it is less secure and ownership is no guarantee
https://www.lunarland.com/

The cryptocurrency industry can be regarded as a cryptostar in a galaxy far far away. No man on earth could reach this star in his life time, people can only communicate this star through internet

Each cryptocurrency represent a country on this star. Buying cryptocurrency is like buying land of each country

Why would people on earth to buy lands in a star far far away?
1. it is delivered right away and you have full control and ownership once you have the key
2. the star is far away from earth thus secure from earth violence
3. the limited supply ensures its exchange rate will rise against forever-increaseing fiat money supply

The experiment just proves what the experimenter claims, nothing more. This is what I call technology politics, very common in modern physics. Need a better way to convince other people

That's exactly what I see in the laboratory that my friend professor was doing all day, lots of lens and filter and electronic devices, but he still can not make a quantum miner

I have promissed to him that he will make billion dollars by inventing a quantum miner, he only need to work out the theories, I do the physical production, but he obviously have no idea how to even form the concept

This video, togher with hundreds of other quantum computer videos I saw, none of them make sense. They typically show you some numbers, did not tell you how did they get those numbers, and just tell you what does those numbers mean, and then it is done

This is similar to : Look at KPI, data proven that inflation is low, so we need to print more money

He is not able to join our discussion. I grew up in university, I knew many of those professors, their lifetime is dedicated to publishing articles on science and nature and giving lectures, they don't see the bigger picture, they don't have the motivation to dig into something, like making a quantum miner

Similarly, I highly doubt those experiments since no one can prove they are right or wrong, it just as abstract as Quantatative Easing, more politics instead of real truth seeking. And when you see a lot of complex formula, you know that something is used to let other people shut up if they are not good at high level mathematics (which most of the people are), and even they do, they can not really relate those formulas to physical world in a very strict way

For example, have you seen the card dealer analogy in that BBC documentary? I think it is not very convincing. Based on Einsteins glove theory, the content of the two cards are decided before the dealing, and they are always different(entanglement); and based on copenhagen interpretation, the content of the card only appears when you turn them over

The obvious difference in these two theories lies in: In hidden variable theory, the content of two cards are calculatable and predictable, but we don't know how to calculate. While in copenhagen interpretation, the content of two cards is unknown all the time until you turn them over, no way to know in advance

So, based on this difference, you would easily design a test that turn cards at different time, if they are always the same, then hidden variable theory wins, if they are random, copenhagen interpretation wins.

Unfortunately, once the cards are turned, there is no way to do the test again. So you can not really make an experiment that exploit this obvious difference

However what Bell did is another experiment involving the correlation of different polarization of the lights at different angle. It is very difficult to see the direct relation of his experiment and the above mentioned fundamental differences in hidden variable theory and copenhagen interpretation. Again here politics takes over, complex formulas and experiments seems to be able to shut most of the people's mouth

BTW, I have seen similar kind of goal shifting when I was in university. When the professor could not answer my question in a satisfactional way, they usually say that your way of thinking is too classical, you have not adopted a new mindset of modern physics. But this kind of personal attack does not really help me to get any further. I think the right way is to either admit that there is no sensable explanation on the matter, or explain the thing in a step-by-step, human understandable way. It is worse when you in fact is human but you pretend to be god

Great post!

I used to accept all those things from modern physics programs in university in 1990s. However, after more than 20 years seeing the very slow progress in this area, I start to doubt if those claims are really making a lot of sense, just like segwit: a complex theory that does not deliver on what it promises.

For example wave-particle duality, why particles travel like a wave? I start to lean on the original thought that there must be some medium (Ether), without a medium, things tends to go stright or static, there is no reason they would travle like a wave in vacuum. Wave means there is a force drag the particle back to their balance position once they travel too far away from it. And quantum potential might answer that question but bring other questions

And that spooky action proved by Bell equation, sounds like a magic, but in reality it is a very small difference than classical physics predicted, the difference is so small that you must run the test thousands of times to make sure you see the difference. And that's also why the difference is even less observable once the number of qbuits get large

But still, the fundamental difference between Einstein's glove explanation (Reality were decided before they were observed) and Copenhagen interpretation's spooky action (Your observation change the reality by a small degree) is not answered in a satisfactional way, what is your thought on this?

I just saw this short BBC video during a travel and I think it is quite interesting, but it became unclear when it comes to the test that proves bell equation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k6BuYK_PwQ&t=3s

So, without these fundamental problems cleared, it is difficult to believe any claims on what a QC can do, unless it really did it

Thanks, that's a good explanation, at least it described a possible path toward that

Can you give an example of how to use Shor's algorithm to break ECC? I have a friend that is a professor in QC department in one of the famous Chinese universities, he is unable to answer this question

In fact I have never seen any one that can explain what is a QC and how it actually works, although there are so many material on internet, they all confuse people instead of help them

Schrödinger's cat for example, I think the experiment is designed to show that wave function collapse still happens without observation, since observing cat's status is not directly related to the observing of the particle, which is a prerequisit of wave function collapse in Copenhagen interpretation

I guess nobody currently have an old disk holding WeiDai's B-money which a predecessor of bitcoin, if historically all such projects become useless after a few years, who would expect bitcoin to be any different in 2010. Even in 2011, those coins worth only 100 pizza

BTW, the keys can be stolen, keys prove nothing.

There is always a best way to find out the inventor. If you are Satoshi that invented bitcoin, you must be able to answer many original design related questions such as why OP_CHECKSIG is designed in such a seemingly illogical way. So far only Craig can answer that question, core devs don't understand that, so they invented segwit to replace it

Craig found out later that his invention is hijacked by a group of stupid coders, so he started to apply patents to prevent the same thing happen again

This is a very old concept, the latest development in crypto area has gone far beyond this

Cryptocurrency actually made a virtual world that generates value, and its value can be hundreds of times higher than existing physical world, and the existing law makers in the current physical world can not do anything about it, they must follow the same rules in that network, e.g. no inflation, no tax, etc...

And in future, the participants of this virtual world might not be human, but code controlled AI, which makes it even irrelevant for the current old world regulators, they don't even know what to ban

For example, IRS has started to tax traders for coin2coin trading, but what if those trades are done by smart contract on decentralized exchanges, and the ultimate beneficial owner is just an address controlled by algorithm?

Satoshi is not the God, he can not foresee everything. And the market has put bitcoin to use in mainly cross boarder transactions and store of value, those two usages are not fee sensitive yet

Unless it is totally broken for those two purposes, it still serve those demand and attract more people. Other coins in principle can provide better user experience and low fee, but lack of liquidity and awareness

Based on his deep understanding of some very low level constructions of early bitcoin architecture, I think he is Satoshi. But I guess he lost his keys to most of the early day bitcoins, since those coins worth nothing before 2011. Who would keep a disk full of useless things for 2 years? Anyway, many such projects before bitcoin just came out dead

And there is another fact supporting this view: All those early day coins were mined to different addresses, 50 at a time, they were never consolidated into a large batch, which indicated that they were just left there untouched for some reason. If someone really care about those coins, at least some kind of consolidation or movements of those coins should have happened

I can not believe that there are still people talking about this in 2020, especially after seeing miserable adoption of LN, the same as bitsquare or bisq today. The problem is not the technical part, it is the decision making ability of the dev team, they made one after another wrong decisions

As predicted, segwit and LN has permanantly polluted bitcoin blockchain and there is no way to remove them, raising the block size might get a bit help, but in todays world, 10 minute confirmation is just too slow, many other coins are already in place for the fast confirmation, and with lots of other improvements in both theory and practice, once their marketcap have been pumped above bitcoin, we will see what will happen