What's the alternative? Every user being publicly known? Records about each user being kept by a trusted third party?

All of this only puts holders in harm's way while not preventing cryptocurrency-thieves from doing their thing. Quite the opposite. It would merely make staking out potential targets easier, while cryptocurrency-thieves will likely just find other ways to stay anonymous.

You can't fight anonymity, so use it to your advantage.

PoC exploits should always be taken seriously, despite being PoC only. Apart from that I fully agree with you. The PoC in question doesn't even affect hardware wallets to begin with. It just shows that if you have full access to an unsecured hardware device and its software you can do amazing things with it.

As an attack it is thwarted by applying best practices in terms of security. Which is why these best practices exist to begin with.



Or, you know... buying a hardware wallet.

It's just semantics, but isn't any impact that Bitcoin has by extension attributable to the internet as well? After all the internet is what is enabling Bitcoin in the first place. Did anyone ever say that email will become bigger than the internet? Or that the world wide web will become bigger than the internet?

Maybe he meant to say that Bitcoin will become bigger than the world wide web. That would still be a contentious statement, but at least it would make sense. Saying that Bitcoin will become bigger than the internet, however, is a meaningless statement that only makes for a nice headline and nothing more.

Not quite, Bitcoin has neither accounts nor balances

It's just transactions all the way down...


It's important to remember that Satoshi's work didn't happen in a vacuum. Most of the concepts had been around for quite a while. However Satoshi was the one to finally piece everything together in a way that would give birth to a whole new asset class.

For anyone interested, I can't recommend this article enough:
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/12/223058-bitcoins-academic-pedigree/fulltext

The profitability of Bitcoin mining won't change, the network's hashrate will. The hashrate (or rather: the resources spent on Bitcoin mining) will depend on the total amount of transaction fees spent. The transaction fees will depend on the amount of people using Bitcoin.



Oh yeah, and that too.

Well, you could make a Bitcoin hardfork that uses the same metrics as Litecoin (ie. same PoW algo, block reward, block interval, etc...)

However such a coin would be neither Bitcoin nor Litecoin -- it would just be a Bitcoin hardfork using the same metrics as Litecoin.

Either way, not sure how much Litecoin's codebase has diverged from Bitcoin's ever since the code got forked -- after a lot has happened since then -- but it's likely still one of the technologically closer alts (apart from more recent hardforks, of course).

That those third party resellers can not be trusted is exactly the point that bitmover is making though.

If you refer to SatoshiLabs and Ledger themselves -- SatoshiLabs never increased the Trezor price, except for priority shipping. Ledger did increase their price, but not even close to doubling it.

Keep in mind that both those companies are rather small operations, so production bottlenecks are indeed a thing and not just a way to artificially manipulate supply and demand.



Doesn't matter. Hardware wallets are built to work securely even on compromised computer systems, regardless of whether it's been compromised by malware or out-of-the-box. That applies to both the computer's software and hardware.



Light-based quantum encrypted transmission channels have existed for a long time and have been cracked as far back as 2010:
https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100829/full/news.2010.436.html

I'm not sure how this relates to the current discussion though.

wut



You pretty much answered your own question, but anyways. It is worth noting that limited supply does not apply to PoW coins only, and that there are PoW coins that do not limit their supply.


That being said: One effect of the halvings that often gets ignored, yet in my opinion is worth a mention, is that it ultimately keeps Bitcoin's power usage in check. Assuming Bitcoin's price finds a stable level, each halving will see miners drop off the network and power usage reduced as a new profitability equilibrium is found.

Another thing I find interesting about Bitcoin's halving is the 4 year cycle of sudden decreases instead of a more gradual schedule. My pet theory is that this 4 year cycle coincides with the public's attention span, causing upward price pressure and therefore media interest whenever the general public was just to forget about Bitcoin.

That's the thing though. Most of the questions that get asked over and over again are already covered in stickies -- or countless other threads on the same topic. So if something like a newbie jail actually encourages people to use the search function or google first, that's a plus in my book.

That's the important bit

Not getting your system compromised is one of the reason you air gap them in the first place. The other thing is that this also means that hardware wallets are not affected by this attack, so hooray for hardware wallets!



Trezor bugs are usually fixed swiftly, but some guys even found ways to extract private keys from Bitcoiners a while ago, albeit with special tools:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/man-robbed-at-gunpoint-for-1100-worth-of-bitcoins-in-brooklyn
https://cointelegraph.com/news/russia-blogger-who-boasted-about-crypto-wealth-beaten-and-robbed-for-425k
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/910958/Bitcoin-ripple-ethereum-UK-robbery-cryptocurrency-armed-thugs-oxfordshire-news-latest

Physical access is not just a technological problem, unfortunately.



I like your style

I concur. There's already posting restrictions for new accounts in place. While we may argue about whether these restrictions are tight enough, completely preventing new accounts from being able to open a new thread sounds like a bad idea to me; as it would very likely also shut out new members that are genuinely interested in the matter. For an interested newbie crypto can be already intimidating enough, pre-emptively shutting them out completely would make matters only worse. After all we also want the community to grow.

I remember when I started out in 2013 newbies where only restricted to certain sections -- is this still the case? It seemed to work rather well back then.

Pretty much the whole industry does.

Just look at IBM, Microsoft, JP Morgan... sometimes I wonder if these companies themselves are aware of the bullshit they're selling or whethere they're too blinded by the cargo cult called "blockchain, the technology". I mean supposedly there must be enough smart people working at these companies for them to realize that it's not the right tool for the job... right? Right? When the European Central Bank did their research on using a blockchain for international remittance they at least had the integrity to admit: Nope, that's not gonna work for us. Alas, using existing public infrastructure -- ie. decentralized blockchains -- is apparently not as profitable as trying to force your own proprietary standards.

Aw well. Enough of a rant. This too, shall pass.

Thanks, I'll check it out.



The Pareto principle appears to be inescapable, that's true. Still it's vital for the likes of Bitcoin that the top players keep each other in check. Otherwise we're just back to traditional banking but with extra steps. Even if sub-optimal, there's still a difference between having 4-5 dominating mining operations vs a mining duopoly / monopoly.



Following the chain with the largest accumulated work is a feature, that's true. The possibility of a single entity controlling the network with majority hashpower (ie. > 50%) however, is not. Just because the former leads to the latter doesn't mean it's a desired effect. It's a weakness of PoW that has been accepted for lack of a better alternative.

Regardless of code being law and everything working as intended, a cryptocurrency that can not be accepted for fear of history being rewritten by a third party is a useless cryptocurrency.

I remember the concept of periodically switching PoW algorithms being discussed before, but I'm not sure if that discussion ever came to any meaningful conclusion. Are there any alts that have been attempting this approach?




There are also effectively 2 GPU and maybe 3-4 major CPU manufacturers. Lack of competition seems to be just a small part of the equation, with the main problem being that mining hardware manufacturers have a strong incentive to produce mining hardware for themselves rather than their customers.




SHA256 has nothing to do with curves, it's Bitcoin's private / public key algorithm -- ECDSA -- that is endangered. Which is unfortunately much worse. However it can luckily be mitigated by avoiding address re-use until a new private / public key algorithm has been deployed.




He kinda did though:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306




A blockchain rewrite caused by dominant hashing power is not a feature though. It's a weakness that is kept at bay by game theoretical incentives, ie. the assumption that no rational actor would waste that much money on an attack of questionable merit. Rewriting transactions is exactly what Bitcoin's consensus algorithm is trying to prevent.




I think that's the heart of the issue -- Bitcoin's growth has turned mining into an industrial endeavour where economics of scale is key and money available to be put into R&D is plenty.

Simply changing Bitcoin's PoW algo won't keep ASICs at bay forever, but would come with a lot of challenges -- both technologically and community-wise. Not only evaluating and selecting a new PoW algo will be challenging -- even how the selection for a new PoW algo takes place would likely result in a lot of drama and hidden agendas. Some parties may secretly benefit from one algo over another.

In other words, I too think that the downsides of changing Bitcoin's PoW algo would outweight its benefits -- for now. As much as I'd love to see a time of hobbyist GPU / CPU Bitcoin mining again, I'm afraid this train has left for good.

kuhotina just went ahead and copy / pasted the following posts, straight from the original post of each respective thread:


original:



copy:




original:



copy:

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not recommending Blockchain.info to anyone.

I'm just saying that Blockchain.info is probably still a better choice over keeping money on Coinbase or any other exchange. Much like I'd prefer getting beaten to death with sticks over stoning. Then again stones don't have splinters.



Of course. However in terms of keeping your private keys safe on an online device, both are equally fit -- or unfit -- to do so.

Granted, this has more to do with online devices being generally unsafe than with Electrum's or Bitcoin Core's code quality and design philosophy.



Excellent point. In general I'd still argue that your average grandma's windows laptop has more malware on it than your average grandma's smartphone, but this does indeed only hold true until the next major OS vulnerability has been found.


TL;DR: Just get a Trezor or Ledger.



Ledger's list is longer, but here's the list of coins supported by Trezor:
https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-faq/overview.html#which-coins-are-currently-supported

If you define terms loosely enough you can define anything as anything. Sometimes it can indeed highlight interesting parallels or open up new perspectives.

Sometimes, however, it leads to conclusions such as this:


Which is unfortunately a false conclusion, caused by interpreting words that have concrete meanings in a vague way.

It's an interesting way to look at it, but Lightning Network's transaction fees have little to do with PoS. LN nodes merely route transactions. They neither verify them, nor do they have to reach consensus on the state of the network which is one of the core aims of PoW and PoS schemes.

At any account, Lightning Network is not a sidechain. It's a construct of smart contracts keeping track of BTC, not alt coins or pegged tokens. So at least looking at Lightning Network there's nothing that would hint at Bitcoin heading towards PoS sidechains for scalability. It is worth noting that Bitcoin's scalability issue is not a question of PoW vs PoS, but rather a question of keeping the data that is publicly stored in its blockchain at a minimum to allow for future sustainability in terms of decentralization.

Atomic cross-chain swaps may enable something similar to what you envision, but will likely not serve as a scaling solution. Still, it might be an topic that you could be interested in.

If you're holding a significant amount of crypto, get a hardware wallet such as a Trezor or Ledger. It's worth the peace of mind if you have a few bucks to spare. Make sure to buy them directly from the vendor and not some third party reseller.

Otherwise, go with Electrum. If you happen to have some old PC or laptop around, wipe it, give it a fresh OS install and use it to hold your wallet. Only use it for transactions. That's not as secure as a hardware or paper wallet, but still safer than using your everyday computer.

I would avoid online wallets where possible. If you absolutely insist on using an online wallet, choose Blockchain.info over Coinbase. If I recall correctly with Blockchain.info you at least have control over your private keys, which is not the case with Coinbase.

Either way, don't forget to back up your wallet.



When used with an internet connected device, Electrum and Bitcoin Core are about equally secure (or rather: insecure), so the amount doesn't really matter. You can use Electrum as an offline wallet on an airgapped device though, so if set up correctly Electrum can be vastly more secure than Bitcoin Core.



To add to that: Up-to-date non-rooted Android and iOS devices are supposedly less prone to malware than Windows or MacOS. So a mobile wallet might be an option as well, but a mobile phone is tentatively easier to steal or lose than a desktop PC or laptop.