LOL.  A half-day after I posted this to the Wall Observer:

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So, did you wind up holding?

(Asking because this user has logged in as recently as last month.  If he won’t answer for reason of privacy, I will understand!)

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It’s the flipside of buying on FOMO when the price is up.  Buy high, sell low!

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^^^ Winner of this thread.

If the market were being manipulated (“if”—#justsaying), I would expect that now would be the time to be pushing it down.  That way, the sheep will fear that Bitcoin is crashing; so they will buy junk at Walmart Amazon instead of buying Bitcoin.  (I mean, the ones who aren’t starving and/or homeless.)

Longtime Bitcoiners see a bargain Bitcoin sale.  But as for others—how many people actually buy the dip?  Instead, they wait and then catch bull run FOMO.  It’s almost as if people want to buy when it’s more expensive—no, it’s exactly like that.  Human psychology.

Although many of these dollars will probably be DuPMed into Bitcoin, more would be, if the money hit last week.  Just saying...

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The Wall Observer is not immune to similar effects.  When the price is jumping upwards, this thread jumps 10+ pages per day.  When the price is flat or in a dip, this place is dead.

I actually use WO activity as a crude proxy for Bitcoin’s current momentum.

I clicked on this thread so that I could post that.  :-)

Absent better evidence, I suspect that dust attacks are probably an urban legend (except in case of high-value targets).  Blockchain spam is a real problem; and it used to be worse when transactions were cheaper.  However, I doubt that blockchain spies are blasting out free money to significant numbers of people.  It just doesn’t make sense.  The cost is high, and the gain for them is low when blockchain privacy is already so bad.

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Yes.  Thank you.

If you want to destroy bitcoins, please use OP_RETURN instead of a burn address!  The use of burn addresses permanently spams the UTXO set, forever imposing a burden on every full node (including pruned nodes!).  It is harmful and irresponsible.  Burn addresses should never be used for any reason.

However, the linked gist is wrong.  Why does it spam the blockchain with 32 bytes of random data in the OP_RETURN?  That smells like cargo-culting from an application that uses a 32-byte push.  An OP_RETURN (0x6a) can be followed by a push of 1–40 bytes.  (I just tried some other opcodes to cut it below a 1-byte push, and Core’s decoderawtransaction barfed.)

OP_RETURN spam is not nearly as bad as UTXO set spam; but putting random data in OP_RETURNs for no reason is spam, and it is bad for Bitcoin.  Don’t do it!  OP_RETURN should only be used for data that you really want to force every non-pruned node in the world to store on disk forever—e.g., for OpenTimestamps, or as seen in the puzzle with magical txid 000000000fdf0c619cd8e0d512c7e2c0da5a5808e60f12f1e0d01522d2986a51.  (I should scan to see if that’s the first cat emoji ever embedded in the blockchain.)

OP_RETURN has another use:  The amount placed in an OP_RETURN output is irrevocably destroyed, thus permanently reducing Bitcoin’s monetary supply.  That is a consensus rule:  The coins no longer exist (unlike coins at burn addresses, which still exist).  The script in the gist isn’t doing that.  It is a completely wrong use of OP_RETURN.  The gist’s author evidently does not know the purpose of OP_RETURN.  The script is not using either of its functions (storing useful data, and/or destroying coins).

If your objective is to donate a spam coin to miners, then... <snip>

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I started here to write a helpful explanation of how better to do this, with a script for getting it done.  I wanted to demonstrate on testnet, and link to that on a testnet explorer.

I have some testnet coins; but I use them for things that I don’t want blockchain analysts to link to nullius.  Of course, that is also a concern on testnet!  And the testnet faucet situation is fouled up.  It seems that due to abuse, testnet faucets are requiring Javascript and CAPTCHAs; and some are blocking Tor.  I rarely do Javascript, and I never do CAPTCHAs nowadays.  I am sure as heck not dealing with that to obtain some worthless test coins so that I can provide free advice on a forum!

If someone would please be so kind as to send testnet dust to tb1qywy48q0yfj8pjffrav39fvwkmm0kpcj6ntmgqw, then I will show how to get rid of it.  N.b. that the same privacy concerns may apply to you.  Transparent blockchains are a problem.  :-(

Thanks.

Just think:  For his $102 investment to make him a billionaire, all that he had to do was to wait for Bitcoin to reach $600k.

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You forgot to subtract his $102 initial investment.  If he had held, then that would now be relatively negligible; but since he didn’t, you must consider that he only profited by $408.

400% ROI is usually considered pretty good.  But if you bought Bitcoin at $0.06, it’s terrible!

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All that being said, I am even worse off:  I didn’t buy Bitcoin at $0.06.  (And I didn’t CPU-mine back in 2009, damn it.)

Neither did most of the folks reading this.

In hindsight, Schoen made a stupid sale.  But he made a smart buy.  Did you?

Food for thought.

What, like HTML or \LaTeX? 

STOP MAKING UP FALSE INFORMATION.  Your etymology is totally wrong:


Via “plagiary”, the word “plagiarism” derives from Latin plagarius < plagium, ‘kidnapping’.

In academic terms, you are full of shit.

Also, this is off-topic in Beginners & Help.  What has it to do with learning about Bitcoin!?

Discussion of the merit system should be banned from Beginners & Help.  The off-topic merit system spam slides down threads about Bitcoin.  Beginners & Help is a forum for helping newbies learn about Bitcoin, NOT a forum for discussing the merit system.

Furthermore, as seen here, such posts are usually just idiotic spam fishing for merits.

I don’t want to feed this retarded thread; but I must point this out:  In 2014, Apple banned Bitcoin from its app store.


A few months later, after a huge backlash from customers, Apple grudgingly allowed Bitcoin apps back into the iOS walled garden that psychotic control-freak Steve Jobs had built.

Said backlash included the public destruction of iPhones:

Nonsense!  The government can spend unlimited amounts without taxation, simply by creating more money.

And that is how hyperinflation happens...

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I think there were many other other reasons why people voted for Trump.  Trump was a moderately corrupt president who, I believe, sincerely wanted to preserve America.  Biden is totally corrupt, and he almost openly wants to wreck America for a globalist-internationalist agenda.


That’s not how it works.  No matter what the rhetoric, these types of tax increases always impose the heaviest burdens on the middle class and the working class.  Unfortunately, the voters who embrace these types of policies are too stupid to foresee the results.


Yes, I think that it is the right move because America is a bad country that should destroy itself ASAP.  The suicide of the American Empire will be a benefit to the whole world.

Americans may disagree.

OP “remotemass” is horribly incorrect.  On a quick skim, I see that only BrewMaster corrected OP’s misinformation.  Does no one else on this thread know how Bitcoin works!?

This is important for users to understand.  Coin control is an important skill for:

• Protecting your privacy.
• Optimizing your transactions to reduce fees.

Yes, you can split and merge coins.  Knowing how that works is basic Bitcoin competence!

Any decent wallet software has an interface to show you the list of coins in your wallet, and to let you manually select coins to build a transaction.

In technical terms, “coins” are also known as UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Outputs).

The key point hereby is the difference between Bitcoin’s UTXO model, and the account model used by Ethereum and some other currencies:


remotemass, stop spreading technical misinformation.  Go to Beginners & Help, learn how Bitcoin works, and don’t try to teach others until you know what you are talking about.  You haven’t learned anything in the past nine years, but it’s not too late to start!

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WRONG.  Each UTXO (“coin”) can be spent only once.  The balance of a UTXO can neither increase nor decrease.  That is why change addresses are used:  If the total amount of all the UTXOs used as inputs in a transaction exceeds the amount that you want to spend, then you need to send change back to yourself as a new UTXO (= a new coin).

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The part that you quoted is totally wrong.  If you seek knowledge, disregard what remotemass said.  Bitcoin addresses do NOT have balances.  Rather, the reverse is the case:  In simple terms, each coin usually contains the address which is allowed to spend it (the address that received the coin).  The coin can only be spent by the holder of the private key for that address.

That is the simple explanation—perhaps oversimplified.  The way that it actually works, each UTXO contains a spend script.  To spend the coin, information must be provided that makes the script evaluate to a true value (nonzero item on top of the stack).  The most common types of script simply require a digital signature from a public key which, when hashed, matches the hash contained within the script.  In the user interface, that hash is expressed as an address.  The blockchain does not contain any addresses; an address only is a UI feature.

Would someone who is sufficiently retarded to use Twitter please go necro-bump this thread, or however it works there?

It seems that this thread hasn’t gotten any love since the start of the bear market in January of 2018.

N.b. that if he had held, he would have reached 1,000,000x gains at $60,000.  (100,000,000% ROI at $60,000.06.)  But the bubble has burst, and now he would be down to about 909,000x gains.  Bitcoin is dead, etc., etc.

https://twitter.com/GregSchoen/status/70261648811761665

We all (except Jay) know that π is an irrational sonofabitch; but is he normal?  



Yes, I just implied that 0 = -1.  Well, that’s not as bad as looking for the last digit of π.

Edit 2021-03-19 (original)

It has come to my attention that some people are confused by the below.

I am vaguely aware that there is a blockchain company named Paxos, founded in 2012.  I guess that it is probably named after Lamport’s Paxos protocol, which was named that in 1990 (paper published in 1998).  In the below post, I was referring to the work of Lamport, et al.

Not many forum users have the computer science or distributed systems expertise to understand what I said; and I don’t want inadvertently to mislead people.  My point was that before Satoshi, fault-tolerant distributed consensus in a trusted environment already had better solutions.  Satoshi invented something new:  Distributed consensus in an untrusted, anonymous, permissionless environment.  Whence mining.  Otherwise, mining is just a Rube Goldberg scheme to do orders of magnitude slower what Paxos already did almost two decades before Satoshi.

</edit>

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Sure.  And I’m Satoshi Nakamoto.


You have clearly demonstrated to the contrary.  Your posts essentially amount to a grab bag of common newbie misconceptions.

My kindliest suggestion to you:  Go to Beginners & Help, and start learning.  If you make an effort to ask smart questions and you are lucky, then someone with expertise may have the patience to explain to you the basic concept of Byzantine fault tolerance, the respective rôles of miners and non-mining validating nodes, and other key points that you have shown you do not understand.  If you are very lucky, then an expert in distributed systems architecture may explain to you in detail why Satoshi didn’t just use Paxos.

(If the nodes that create the ledger can be trusted to order transactions, then I myself could easily design a Paxos-style consensus protocol with results authenticated by digital signatures.  It would use no proof-of-work—no hashrate at all!  Zero electricity spent grinding hashes!  It would be orders of magnitude more efficient than your Rube Goldberg scheme; and if the transaction-ordering nodes can really be trusted, then it would be just as secure.  Whereas if they can’t be trusted, then your scheme is totally insecure.  My design would be fault tolerant, but not Byzantine fault tolerant; of course, since you lack knowledge of this subject domain, what I just said may as well have been in Greek.  “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ...”)

If you want for me to tutor you, my current consulting rate for educating arrogant dolts is 0.00875 BTC/hour.  To be clear, that is a discount quote and a time-limited offer.

HTH, HAND.

You folks are scaring me.


1 BTC = 1 BTC.  Ah, what a relief.

(The dollar got a bump up to 1720 sats; but the bubble can’t hold.  Yawn.)

How much do I need to pay to keep twit-@jack’s tweets off of my computer? 

This is one of the dumbest ideas that I have heard in—well, in about the past week or so.  The world is just full of stupid ideas.

This Bitcoin thing.  You do not know how it works.

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Stupid ideas should get short shrift.  And your idea is not only stupid:  It is also actively harmful in a way indistinguishable from malice.  You should be treated accordingly.

Whereas your attitude stinks:  You make grandiose pronouncements from abject ignorance, you have no idea what you are talking about, and you expect for people to listen to you.  Fuck off.

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A reply to DannyHamilton:


So, he wants to build a permissioned signet.  Obviously, this solves none of the problems that the Nakamoto consensus was designed to solve, while still having all the inefficiencies of the blockchain.  It is the worst of all worlds.

Of course, the end of this story is transaction censorship—which the Nakamoto consensus was designed to prevent.  Central bank miners could all agree to blacklist UTXOs and refuse to accept transactions that they deemed undesirable.  Hmmm, maybe OP is not a n00b—maybe he is an alt of Mike Hearn...  /s

It is fortunate, Danny, that as you and I know, OP has no plan for forcing nodes to accept his special signet blocks and/or prevent nodes from accepting Bitcoin blocks.  What’s his plan for that?  Require a licence to run a node?  LOL.  Either his central bank miner blocks will not violate consensus (perhaps hacking the signature into coinbase), and nodes will treat them just like any other blocks—or the blocks will violate consensus, and nodes will route them >/dev/null.

Such an abysmal display of technological incompetence would be pitiable, if it were not so ugly and presented with such brash conceit.

Let’s see what other n00b errors he commits:


The belief that hashpower drives Bitcoin’s value, rather than vice versa as is actually the case.


Total incomprehension of why the mining process exists—again.


More of the same total incomprehension.  Of course, if there is a way to set a limit on hashpower, there is no reason to use proof-of-work at all.


Zero understanding of the rôle of miners.  (Nodes validate and secure the blockchain.  Miners provide BFT consensus for transaction ordering.)

Eh, enough waste of time with this nonsense.

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I am surprised that nobody corrected this promptly.  “HODL” (often stylized “HoDL”) is NOT an acronym.  It does not mean “Hold On for Dear Life” (which would be “HOFDL”—duh).  It is a misspelling that originated with someone who got drunk after Bitcoin’s price crashed in 2013.  It simply means, “hold” (in contradistinction to “sell” or “dump”).

No, I didn’t read the thread.  Not interested.  I am only interested in DuPMing dollars!!!!  USD, EUR, and similar shitcoins are losing value—cash out into real money while you still can!

That’s true, and it’s an interesting observation; but how does hashing help?  Some handwavy scheme to produce pseudorandom numbers faster than your CPU can process them?  ;-)

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GPUs can’t be used to mine Bitcoin.  It’s so infeasible that discussion of GPU mining is banned from the Bitcoin mining forum, per the stickied rules thread there:


I have seen some colourable claims that high-end FPGAs can still meaningfully mine Bitcoin.  I do not know whether or not that is true; either way, that would be ridiculously expensive compared to buying an ASIC.


It is indeed astounding.  And that is what secures the network against double-spends!  To do a so-called “51% attack”, you need to do more computation than everybody else combined (so that you are doing more than half the total, and everybody else is doing less than half).  (N.b. that even a 51% attacker can only double-spend, and censor transactions.  Even a 51% attacker cannot spend arbitrary coins owned by other people, or otherwise violate consensus rules.)


I should note, GPUs are not necessarily faster than CPUs.  They are faster than CPUs for very specific types of operations:  Roughly speaking, tight loops that can be run in parallel.  The core speed of a typical GPU is actually slower than that of a typical high-end CPU!  But GPUs do a whole bunch of the same thing at once more slowly, instead of doing one thing at a time more quickly.  (That’s the most nontechnical way that I can explain it.)

I am not very much familiar with pi algorithms.  I don’t know how well they parallelize.  I do know that they typically require huge amounts of fast storage, as I have repeatedly mentioned.  If the algorithm can’t be parallelized, then a CPU will be faster than a GPU.  If it’s I/O bound, then the question is irrelevant because your processor wastes time waiting for your storage media.  Same as for memory bandwidth (another big issue in high-performance computing).

GPUs beat CPUs at Bitcoin mining because Bitcoin mining is what’s called “embarrassingly parallel”:  The algorithm is so easy to parallelize that it’s almost as if it was designed for that.  Games use GPUs because many different graphics rendering algorithms (especially 3D) are embarrassingly parallel.  AI also does a huge amount of parallel stuff.  Anything single-threaded will run much faster on a CPU.  That is essentially why we have CPUs, and don’t just redesign GPUs to run all of our programs.  Most types of general-purpose computing run best on a CPU; a few types of computing run much, much better on a GPU.  Different tools for different jobs.


Not sure what you mean.  I think that your terminology is off.

Anyway, however many digits you mean:  How do you intend to store all of these digits?  Really, really biiiiig disks?