I can do no better here than to quote the conclusions of indefatigable Glenn Greenwald:

garlonicon, thanks for engaging in the type of discussion that I’d hoped to incite when I made the puzzle:


I am curious.  Would you please point me to the txids?  I have not been running a testnet node (or for personal reasons, much of anything lately).  I’d love to see this.

The thirty-six leading zero bits (nine zero nibbles) denote when I decided to stop grinding.  On my ancient junk-heap hardware, it took me days of almost overheating my computer to get up to 36 zeroes.  However I did it, I could have kept going to grind out more zeroes in the manner of any other POW.  I will not comment on how (or even whether) that relates to the puzzle’s solution; it may lead the way to the solution, or it be a red herring. 😼

Someday, this “mining” of txids may make for an interesting thread in the development forum.  Or here!  I have many related ideas, which may be useful in various ways.

I’m not sure:  Was that the first time anyone had ever done this?  Need to scan the chain for analysis...


When I published the puzzle, I thought that either it would be solved very quickly, or it would never be solved.  It did not seem to get much attention, at first—perhaps due to the low funding amount.  Now that it seems to be getting more attention, I am deeply curious about whether anyone may crack it.  If nobody does, then perhaps I may use a similar method to create and back up my personal wallet—lulz!

Could this be like the Beale ciphers?

I want to give it some time.  Get more people curious.  Difficult puzzles are more fun, but insoluble puzzles not so much—we’ll see.

Thanks for your interest here, and good luck with whatever attempts you may be making.

In memory of Kitty! 😺

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---

I was, for over a year.  I reluctantly “woke” my account on 29 June for the primary purpose of addressing some badness which came to my attention, which I could not in conscience ignore; that is not yet done, alas.  By coincidence, some Lauda-related things arose.  Well, when did I ever miss a chance to talk about Lauda?  LOL.


There was also a rumour that theymos had an intimate relationship with Lauda.  Lauda herself referenced this, in a joking kind of semi-sarcastic way.  (Best link I found on a brief search; I recall some better ones.)  So, take all these things with a grain of salt.


Lauda did seem to be everywhere at once, all the time.  And I have never denied it.  WHY DON’T I DENY IT?  ;-)

Ownership of a topic can indeed be changed.  For example, it has happened to the Wall Observer.  Fun Lauda fact:  In 2017, Lauda was one of the leading candidates to run WO.  In that case, which did make sense for WO,^* the question was put to a vote with a non-secret ballot.  Lauda came in second after infofront, the current WO boss.

^* I do not think a vote would be right here, since (a) it is a decision that should be based on technical competence for the task, and (b) it is Lauda’s thread; Lauda was not the biggest fan of democracy.  WO is a sort of special free-for-all discussion thread with its own local culture, so I guess a poll made more sense there.

My biggest concern is, frankly, that certain parties may try to seize any opportunity to efface or to bury Lauda’s legacy of community contributions here.  Lauda touched many people’s lives here; she had friends and admirers.  But she also had many enemies—some of whom are as underhanded and duplicitous as they are petty and spiteful.

I do NOT want to take over Lauda’s thread.  I speak up here as her friend.  My personal wish would be that the thread should stay exactly as-is, forever and forever—but without being stuck with obsolete information.  That is clearly impossible.  Therefore, I am searching for the least-bad option.

Lauda did a huge service to the community with this thread.  It is one of the most highly-read threads on the entire forum.  She took justifiable pride in it; this thread was dear to her, and it was for her a labour of love.  I want to preserve it for her, in her memory, in any way that I reasonably can.  That may be best achieved by keeping it well-maintained, such that it shall remain the best one-stop source for beginner-level wallet advice—pinned at the top of Beginners & Help.


With this, I emphatically want to agree.

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I see that as akin to rewriting a software project from scratch (LOL).

Lauda’s thread is great.  It just needs updates from time to time—what programmers call “refactoring”.  Those updates require a terrific amount of work; I know that what is seen publicly is only the tip of the iceberg, because I was on contact with Lauda.  However, it only needs to be done occasionally.  I could commit to that.

For another metaphor, this thread is a garden that was tended with great care.  The gardener dropped dead.  Weeds are moving in.  It is unnecessary to get rid of the garden, or to change it around altogether.  It just needs some tending.


I established my reputation in the technical forum, and most of my merit is from the technical forum.  When contemplating what is fundamentally a technical topic, i.e. wallet advice to newbies, my track record should obviously be evaluated from my long record of technical posts, not from Reputation dramas or whatever.

If I were to do such a thing, I may eventually experiment with placing thread’s top posts on Github, accepting issues and PRs, etc.  Eventually.  Maybe.  It would probably make it less of a hassle than how Lauda did it.  But I also would not want to raise a barrier to contributions by those who may not have (or may not want) Github accounts.


Lauda’s thread is pinned for a reason.

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I believe there is no reason for me to answer attempts to inject substance-free ad hominem trollbait from someone with a demonstrated history of trolling, personal harassment, and extremely unprofessional behaviour.

When Lauda was a candidate for “topic starter” of the Wall Observer, r0ach had a fit of nigh apoplexy over the prospect that a (widely-presumed) woman may run WO—LOL.  Undoubtedly, my offer here will draw some irrational reactions, too.

Well, here go the conspiracy theories:


I am sure not—this, I am sure about.  (Unless I am Lauda’s alt, as QS, TS, and others have claimed at various times.  I have never denied it.  Wouldn’t it be lulzy if they were right!)

People who believe that this forum is some be-all, end-all that people can never leave need to gain some perspective on life.  It is an Internet forum.  Why can nobody choose to leave this forum and never, ever return?  Those who believe it is impossible to leave must surely be projecting, in ways that I do not care to speculate about.  (Jay? )  And to interpret her emphatic declaration she left as confirming that she secretly stayed is conspiracy-theory tier pretzel-logic.

For anyone who has a unique personality in both style and substance, restarting with a new account is not a realistic possibility.  Mediocrities who never attain a high profile could easily hide in the crowd; those who are otherwise never can.  The risk of being outed is too high.  In case you have not noticed, this forum is infested with dweebs with no lives, who are obsessed with speculating on the “real” identities of innocent new accounts that obviously aren’t really newbies.  I have been intending to make a general thread on this exact topic, from my concerns as a privacy activist—and from my musing that sadly, I believe it would be infeasible for Satoshi himself to return to his own forum in a different guise.

Furthermore, based on my private conversations with Lauda at the time she left, I am morally certain that she will never return to this forum.  Sufficiently certain that I will immediately issue negative trust feedback and raise a Type-1 flag on any account that claims to be Lauda.

And furthermore, her departure was unsurprising to anyone who knew her as you did not.  I was shocked when it happened, and deeply disturbed by how it happened.  I fear that something may have gone very wrong.  But I had long been expecting her departure—well, I had been expecting some sort of a retirement party, a happy event.  The cat devoted a big chunk of her life to this forum; she did not want to spend the rest of her life on it.  At some point, she would inevitably move on.

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The notion that Lauda may return with a new account is not new.  It was raised almost immediately.  As a final duty to her here, I must firmly squelch it.  Lauda did her best to burn all her bridges here, for the express purpose of preventing any scams that potentially may attempt to exploit her reputation.

Rumours of Lauda sightings would open the way to Faketoshi-style impersonations, which could be highly profitable:  I would trust Lauda with any amount of money, and I am far from the only one!  An impersonator could play off the type of thinking that you are setting up, by “reluctantly” letting himself be “discovered” as Lauda.  It is a usual way for such a scam; recall that from the start, before he switched to demanding that everyone believe him, Craig Wright pretended to be reluctant about “admitting” that he was Satoshi.

Lauda will NOT be returning under a new account.

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That’s a claim far away from your prior post, whereby you said that anyone who disagreed was fooling themselves.

By analogy, I usually write with British spelling.  I am perfectly capable of consciously switching to American spelling—and of mixing the two, not from confusion, but from a desire to cause confusion.  (Satoshi did the same thing, with Brit/Murican spelling; there exist some statistical analyses this.)  I also sometimes purposely switch or mix regional vocabulary (“petrol”/“gas”), idioms, etc.

Since I write with British spelling, it is logical to assume that I am British or Commonwealth, and to refer to me as such—yes?

Although English lacks the grammatical nuances of the Croatian language, I am sure that I could consistently make myself seem either masculine or feminine in any language that I know.  I am sure, at least, that Lauda was smart enough to pull off such a thing if he/she so desired.

You call him a “he”.  I call her a “she”.  No problem.  Neither of us knows.  I have also seen theories that the correct answer is “they”, i.e., a group operating the Lauda account.  I think that is very unlikely; but I don’t know for certain about that, either.

😺


Clarification:  I didn’t say that it could be solved with Bitcoin Core.  In the context of discussing hardware requirements, I said that it can be solved with any computer that could run Bitcoin Core.  It my way of saying that you don’t need fancy, expensive hardware for this.  I love how Core has kept it possible to Be Your Own Bank on inexpensive devices.  Poor people are welcome to try this.  You can solve it just as well on a Raspberry Pi as on a many-core Xeon.  Bitcoin is for everyone!

People with GPU-farms can grind on it however they want, as much as they want.  It will not help.  Finesse, not force will solve this.  The key is cryptographically as “strong” as any Bitcoin key—but I leaked information about how to reconstruct it.  Security through obscurity:  Can you find the clues hidden in plain sight?  Even if you can find them, can you guess my thought process for putting it all together?

Reconstructing the key will require at least intermediate-level Bitcoin knowledge—not real wizardry, but definitely not newbie-level.  If I created a txid that starts with 36 zero-bits, I obviously wrote some custom code for this.  (Call that “Proof of Something-More-Than-Meets-The-Eye”.)  Retrieving the money would be easier, but at least a modicum of skill and effort will be needed.


I will not give an further hints. 😼


That part, in itself, is entirely correct.


I have no intention to “upgrade” this puzzle, but I am excited by some of the possibilities offered by Taproot for other purposes.

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With apologies to Quickseller, who is a gentleman.  Sorry, it is just too funny here.

LOL, at least I admit that I don’t know.  You are so sure.  I am sure that you know less than I do—and I don’t know.

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Indeed, we can only speculate.  I decline to say my own theories, for I have no wish to sow rumours.  In private, she refused to tell me why.


It is a mundane theory, boring, unlikely to excite the imagination—and maybe wise and insightful.  I hope it is the case.  In the past, she said some things to me which would seem consistent with that (and she repeatedly urged me to leave the forum myself), but her final post seemed to imply otherwise.  Who knows.


That is fair of you.  Many people who got the red cat-scratch only bear a grudge about it, regardless of how much it was deserved.  I see that she neutralized yours in May 2020, about five months before she left.


Now, that is an interesting subject of speculation!  There has been endless talk about it; sometimes, there have even been whole threads devoted to that question.  It is probably the most productive use that the Reputation board has ever had.

She (he? whatever) caused this confusion for privacy, not for jollies.  She once pointed out to me that male/female is a significant bit of personally identifying information.  He was a privacy fanatic.  Concealing that one bit of information theoretically doubled her anonymity set—although the effect in practice would be disproportionate, given the disproportionate distribution between men and women in these types of venues.  Partitioning and intersection attacks to attempt deanonymizing the cat cannot exclude known males, and cannot exclude known females.

It is not unprecedented to incite such confusion for unusual reasons.  For instance, I know of a psychiatrist-blogger who subtly switched back and forth between apparently-male and apparently-female, without ever explicitly claiming either.  He did this to make his readers’ assumptions a part of whatever message he was presenting—and sometimes, to show them how wrong their assumptions can be.  As a professional psychiatrist, he pulled this off most excellently.  But he was not a privacy expert; in his case, he was eventually doxed as a man.

Earlier in this thread, I quoted a post in which Lauda presented a female image and spoke of her “husband”, in a context where I think that she was probably joking; see also my take on it.  Other forum members have dug up posts where Lauda seemed to indicate or imply being a man.  I think it’s likely that the apparent contradictions were not unintentional.

Some longtime forum regulars are almost sure that he was a man.  I think that she was probably a woman.  I pestered her endlessly about this question; all that she would tell me was, “I’m a cat.”  Flip a coin, pick a pronoun, and stick to it.  Whatever the correct guess may have been, she/he was never offended by wrong guesses.

A Laudatory Philosophy of Life in Cypherspace


LOL, “In my dreams.”  So:  Like one knows a disembodied spirit.  Although I not infrequently flirted with her, or tried to, I still do not even know if she was a “she”.  (Yes, that question still drives me crazy.)

For a rough analogy—to be applied mutatis mutandis, and not overextended:

Gold is a tangible thing of value.  Gold is the canonical embodiment of tangible money.  It has been so for millennia.  So always shall it be.

Bitcoin is intangible, disembodied value communicated in cypherspace.  You can’t see it.  You can’t touch it.  You can’t hold it in your hands.

People will always have bodies and real-world relationships, like gold will always be valuable.

A cypherpunk Bitcoiner should understand the pure meeting of minds—encrypted communication between spirits known only by their nyms and public keys.  Those who would assume that such a thing cannot be valuable will also be unable fully to understand why Bitcoin is valuable.  And to be sure, most forum relationships are like shitcoins:  Easy come, easy go—shallow; ultimately meaningless—try to enjoy them while they last, if you bother with them at all.

I think it is no accident that I met Lauda on the Bitcoin Forum.  She was a Bitcoiner.  Her mindset was Bitcoin.  Her quintessential Bitcoinism reflected in her personal interactions.  Observe that Bitcoin is reliable and incorruptible; but it demands responsibility, it has strict rules, and it is extremely harsh if you mess up!

A very few people had the vision to mine Bitcoin in 2009, and hold it to this day.  I didn’t, but I saw Lauda for what she was.  Accordingly, I valued her without regard for the fact that I could never meet her; and losing her hit me as hard as losing someone IRL ever could.

I know that she touched many people’s lives here.  She was one of the most active community contributors, briefly on staff—no doubt, she must have had numerous other forum contacts that I never knew about because they are none of my business.  Some will forget that, like they would sell BTC to “cash out” and “take profit” in central bank fiat shitcoins.  Some never will.

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Not even for 21 million BTC.  I know you jest kindly here; but it is a serious principle to me.  I have known, and sometimes been betrayed by the types of people who would sell out all their family and friends—oftentimes, for shockingly small amounts of money.


Well, perhaps I should take up mining?

Although nothing is perfect, mining is the fairest way yet invented to distribute newly-issued coins.  Miners face stiff competition, and they need to sell on thin profit margins to cover their high costs.  It is not a “rich get richer” system.

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To this day, I have never admitted or denied the allegations that I am Lauda’s sockpuppet.  That was a popular refrain in some quarters, in 2018 and in early 2020.  No comment.  My refusal to answer such questions is a personal policy, which I have rarely ever broken for any reason whatsoever.

Hey, this looks like an interesting discussion:


Just bear in mind that if the colonies that became the United States had instead remained under Crown authority, all subsequent history would have differed.  Most obviously, the American Empire could not have replaced the British Empire in the middle of the Twentieth Century.  Perhaps even more importantly, in my studied and unhumble opinion, the cultural disease which has destroyed England was incubated in the plutocratic American mercantile classes, the bankers, traders, and stock-jobbers, who had culturally metastasized from the same cancer that gave rise to the Cromwellian and subsequent revolutions in England.  In America, the cancer grew out of control; it eventually metastasized back to England, and ultimately, to the Continent.

I will leave it at that, lest anyone suspect that I may be an ultraconservative, aristocratic British Monarchist moonlighting as a rag-tag anarchist.

Lest any liberals try to strawman me as dogwhistling:  By “cancer”, I hereby refer to the breed of Gentiles who fit negative Jewish stereotypes worse than the Jews ever have, while Jews get all the blame.  The old-money American financial and later, industrial “robber baron” classes who defined America on the world stage were mostly not Jewish, in and of themselves.  They were predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestants.  They were running America with an iron fist, back at a time when Jews were more or less unwelcome in their social clubs.

There are obviously also various other types of Americans, from Jeffersonian idealists to Texan—well, nowadays, to Texan Bitcoiners.  I refer to the politically dominant Americans who, like it or not, defined America’s place in history.

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Indeed, it is.  As power has centralized into government entities that cannot be opposed by old-fashioned means of revolution, the dynamics of asymmetric warfare have also changed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_warfare

I began here to write something further.  Although it was nothing illegal—to the contrary, more like “the first principles of how to overthrow the system and burn it to the ground by legal, nonviolent means”—I decided that discretion is the better part of valour, at this particular moment.

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On a more jovial note, this post’s subject does not refer to any of the persons who are quoted above.

Thank you for remembering Lauda.  Her legend will live forever.

I had hoped to make some sort of a meaningful speech here.  Right now, rather, I will just remind everyone of the Lauda memorial crypto-puzzle to claim 0.002 BTC.

I am thrilled that whilst I slept, on 2022-04-30, someone doubled the prize money from the 0.001 BTC that I had put into that address on 2021-03-14.  It means more to me than I can say.  I think that Lauda would have been touched.

How can the puzzle be too difficult?  Or perhaps, is it infeasible to break?  I myself could reproduce the private key from scratch, using only the information that is publicly available on the blockchain.  It is, in essence, a Nullian Brainwallet.  To claim the money, simply think like me!  :-)

Lauda was unique.  Noble, harsh but caring, and totally incorruptible.  She had a fun side.  I created the puzzle because I wanted to do something here that I think she would have appreciated, for the enjoyment of everyone who misses her.  I know that she touched many people here.

She was to me only a faceless, voiceless ghost—a disembodied soul in cypherspace—the bare essence of a person, devoid of all else.  Nonetheless, she was one of the most significant people to me in the course of my life; could a unique soul not be so?  Indeed, could a unique soul be not so?  She left an indelible mark on me.  It is my privilege to have known her.  I would not trade that experience for any money in the world.

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Edit:  Classy—not.  Although I have some reasonable doubt about busy moderators who sometimes miss the context of a post, I am morally appalled at whatever hateful wretch reported the bump.  Are we forbidden from having good and constructive things in the perpetual dumpster-fire known as “Reputation”?  Is it only permitted to attack people ad hominem, and never to celebrate the memories of famous forum members who gave so much to the community?  It is lucky that I sent icopress a merit, before I spent some time solemnly contemplating and writing a reply; sometimes, I do the merit-sending after I am done replying.

If there is a serious chance that the maintainership of this thread may be changed, I offer to take it up.

Pros:

• I have the general expertise to evaluate and collate information about Bitcoin wallets.
• In the technical forum, I have long demonstrated an ability to organize technical information into a focused, coherent presentation.
• I would have an exceedingly strong personal motive to uphold Lauda’s exacting standards for accuracy and professionalism, in her memory.  I don’t want to make my personal mark, show off, or strut my ego here; I do that elsewhere!  At this point, whatever Lauda did to make this thread such a legendary success, I would just want to keep it going the way she always did, insofar as reasonable and practicable.  I don’t feel like it’s my thread; if it ever were really to become my thread, it would need to evolve that way organically in the course of time.
• I have a strong general desire that Bitcoin newbies should be guided to secure storage for their coins, and away from so-called “privacy” wallets that suddenly embraced blockchain analysis and transaction censorship.

Cons:

• In terms of direct experience, I lack much breadth of knowledge about the ever-changing plethora of available Bitcoin wallets.  I don’t see that as an obstacle:  This thread is mainly about collating and organizing information from the community, as Lauda did.  To be upfront, I simply note my own limitations here.
• I frankly need the hassle like I need a hole in my head.  Maintaining this thread is a chore and a time sink.  It does not require frequent updates—but each update is a task with a public result that is only the tip of the iceberg.  I have some idea of what Lauda personally invested in this, behind the scenes—oh, most people have no idea what went into this!  I offer only because I understand both how important this thread is to the community, and how important it was to Lauda.  I mention how much of a hassle it is, because I don’t want for anyone to assume that I make this offer lightly.
• Per the below, I doubt the whole idea of changing maintainership.

By coincidence, the dread “nullius woke up” moment came near the beginning of activity period 1369, and was not intended to last beyond the end of it.  I need to attend some old business, conscionably to address some wrongdoings in my awareness, and belatedly to answer some PMs—none of which is yet done, for I am busy with other matters.  That’s it.  If I were somehow to be assigned to maintain this thread, it would be an ongoing commitment that I take with appropriate gravity.

Hereby, I do not yet express any opinion about what I think should be done with this thread; I need to think about that.  I only address the potential case of a change of maintainership.  I note that in several different subforums, there are stickies that don’t seem much maintained.  Needless to say, however, I understand the importance of accurate and up-to-date information for newbie wallet advice.  I jumped in here because I noticed people talking about this; my own opinion is quite ambivalent here.  If I arrive at an opinion that maintainership should stay as-is (one way or another), and I have not yet consummated any definite commitment, then I reserve the right to retract or modify the foregoing.

Considering that U.S. big business interests banned President Trump, I think you must mean that there’s a danger that a left-wing dictator may be illegitimately installed as U.S. “president”.


Oh, wait.  That’s what already happened.  And the new Uncle Joe even rolled 25,000 troops in the U.S. capitol, for no reason except an intimidating show of force backed by mass-media brainwashing hype.  So much for your “military coup”.


Indeed, the word “socialist” is too nebulous for my liking.  It can mean any number of things, including some with which I would agree.  For example, I think that trust-busters should smash Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other big business interests to smithereens; does that make me a “socialist”?  The word could even be stretched to apply to almost every form of government in history.  Absolute monarchy is more or less “socialist”!  Aristocracy is very socialist, if you think about it.  Therefore, I think that I should stick to calling out Commies.

Username and avatar check out.

That type of an “argument” can be made in either direction.  If I see one more whiner flipping out about NFTs as if it will make your digital fluids impure to touch any value-bearing instrument other than Bitcoin...  Moreover, in the context of an innocuous techno-gadget that you’re free not to buy, it looks very much like a retreat to a last-resort argument of, “I just don’t like it, so I want to shoot the people who do.”  I find that unpersuasive, especially since keyboard-warriors cannot actually shoot me.

McCarthy was right, you historically ignorant boob.  Though I guess you don’t know that if your sources of education are Hollywood, the mass media, the public schools, the the Communist Encyclopaedia to which you link-drop in lieu of a rational argument.

Much though he has been maligned and smeared (and as incompetently as he fouled up parts of the handling of his own investigation—which is how he got knocked down), McCarthy was right, and more right than he knew.  There was significant high-level Communist infiltration of the United States Federal government^*—so much, and at such a high level, that a mere Senator was in way over his head.

Stop traducing one of the only good Senators that the United States has had within the past century.

* At this juncture, I am often bemused by some Internet idiot conflating Senator McCarthy’s investigation of infiltration of the USG with the House Unamerican Activities Committee’s investigation of Hollywood.  Those Hollywood Commies have really done a bang-up job miseducating the public.

Do you have a citation for that?  I have not seen such a thing, although I admit I that have not followed LN development closely as I should; I have been more checking into it from time to time, waiting for a few particular parts of it to mature.

By the way, what use cases would you like to see?  If we get to the point of high-value transactions and upper-layer settlements on the blockchain, small-value transactions off-chain, and RGB/Spectrum doing smart contracts, tokens, NFTs, DEXes, etc., then what more is needed?  I am sincerely curious.  On this point, off the top of my head, all that can I think of are some smart contract edge cases where the contract code must be available for execution without parties being online; that’s not a case for bigger blocks, but rather, for one of the upstart competitors to ETH2.


As I noted in one of my earlier posts, Bitcoin transaction demand is high enough that I don’t even think that a blocksize increase would meaningfully increase capacity.  And it only grows!  How do you propose that, say, twice a very low TPS would make any difference, when we need orders of magnitude higher TPS to cover all of the small-value tx use cases with mass adoption?  Bigger blocks wouldn’t get us to 10k TPS and up, unless you think that running a node should require a supercomputer hooked straight into an Internet backbone link.  (Or unless you want to make more radical changes to Bitcoin’s architecture, other than increasing the blocksize.)

My argument here is with the particular type of Bitcoiner who behaves as if people and markets will do whatever Bitcoin wants.  That’s not how it works—all bluster to the contrary notwithstanding.  Obviously, most Bitcoiners outside of a few forums and social media venues do not think this way.

Bitcoin got big because it does what people want.  It fulfills a real need.  It is what the market wants.

Bitcoiners need to acknowledge use cases which are not addressed by what Bitcoin is today.  Many top-flight Bitcoin/LN developers do just that; and they rarely waste time posting on forums, because they are too busy creating solutions for tomorrow.

I observe that no altcoin today adequately fulfills the “cup of coffee purchase” use case.  Some of them have inexpensive, fast transactions—but security that would be a catastrophe, if they saw mass adoption.  Some of them have inexpensive, fast, secure transactions—with awful privacy.  Many of them have inexpensive transactions that would become expensive, if their blocks were not almost empty as they are now.  Etc...

The best should dominate.  Bitcoin dominates because it is the best.  Let’s keep it that way.  Sometimes, to that end, we must examine what could and should be done better.

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The L1/L2 distinction is not only a Bitcoin thing; it addresses problems which are fundamental to blockchain architectures.  As the market matures, developers and users will come better to recognize which transactions belong on a blockchain, and which don’t.  A beneficial side effect of Bitcoin’s scaling debates is that Bitcoin is years ahead of any altcoin in L2 developments.  (Notwithstanding how Ethereum has been spinning its wheels with L2 talk; it has much worse scaling problems than Bitcoin, and thus far much less to show in terms of solutions.)

Are you really just totally unaware of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)?  

That border cannot be crossed in either direction.  Or do you really suppose that South Koreans will sneak through a heavily guarded area covered with land mines and electric fences to get some bitcoins?

Please tell me that you’re American.  I don’t want to believe that anyone else is so totally ignorant of the world.

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Google’s source:  https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/bitcoin-kimchi-premium-south-korea-crypto-crackdown-exchanges-shut-regulation-2021-4-1030351638
Just to make sure:  https://archive.is/CmxaD
https://web.archive.org/web/20210427222022/https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/bitcoin-kimchi-premium-south-korea-crypto-crackdown-exchanges-shut-regulation-2021-4-1030351638

The article does not give much information.  Just fluff.  If there is anything significant going on here, I think that much of the impact would hinge on what they mean by “anti-money laundering strategies”.  (Strategies to launder anti-money?  I just put my positrons and anti-protons in my washing machine.)

The link is 404.

Somehow says “status: 404”, then redirects (?); see metadata banner at top here:  https://archive.is/B0CHW  (Took forever to load with its zillions of ad tracker embeds.)


Archives checked after it failed to load normally.

No, in his case he was mimicking me as a sort of a “no u” argument.  I am surprised that he didn’t blow me a raspberry.

But thanks for the general reminder that there are a few things on my “to do” checklist which have slipped for the past few weeks, given the relative place in my life’s priorities of dealing with forum idiocy.

Deflection.  I will ask outright:  In your prior reply to me, what did you mean by this?

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So do I.  So why are you wasting my time?


You argue like a Commie.  Instead of admitting that you had a ridiculous and disproportional reaction in attacking my post, which was not even hostile toward you, you try to ridicule me and yet also somehow act as if I have aggrieved you.  Waaah, you’re so oppressed!

I can have some patience toward this level of crap from SwayStar123—not from you.  At least she comports herself with more basic dignity than you do, even if she is totally wrong about absolutely everything.

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P.S., inb4 you try to strawman me into rolling’s position:  I would make you both very unhappy.  You seem unable even to follow the various different threads of discussion, the way you went full retard over my off-hand remark about socialists in an unrelated context.  Work on your reading comprehension, and also your attention span.