A general note on this subject, not aimed at anyone in particular:

The problem—one of the problems with that type of thinking is that it ruins Bitcoin’s fungibility, and thus ruins Bitcoin’s value.

I’m not making an idealistic argument here.  I am making an argument that hits you in the wallet, based on Bitcoin’s fundamentals.

Right now—as Bitcoin is designed—Bitcoin transactions are closer to being absolutely frictionless than any payment technology that ever came before.  Whether the transaction is B2B, B2C, or between private individuals, A gives B a Bitcoin address, B clicks a button, and—that’s it.  Although the process is scary for n00bs who don’t understand the system, it is actually the easiest payment technology ever invented from the dawn of history until 2008.  That is a large and indispensable part of Bitcoin’s value proposition.

When “KYC” gets its hooks deeper into Bitcoin, you wind up with coins being assigned different “risk ratings”.  It is happening already.  And if coins are assigned “risk”, then to receive coins, you are financially coerced to subscribe to the risk ratings system.  (Perhaps in the future also legally coerced—but let’s start with the part that hits you straight in the wallet.)  After all, you don’t want to receive risky coins:  If you receive “risky” coins from A, and then you try to pass them on to B, and B subscribes to the risk ratings system, then B may refuse to accept the coins as payment.

For the value of money, this is a disaster.  If different same-sized pieces of a currency have different values, then it is not a currency at all:  It is a chaotic mess of non-fungible tokens.  (This is what Mike Hearn wanted; and where is he now?)

For electronic payments, the legacy financial system is encrusted with ugly, cumbersome, unreliable, expensive layers of “fraud detection” systems.  These are make-work schemes for the fraud detectors, who charge a hefty fee to scrutinize your counterparties and reduce your “risk”.  Of course, the people who make money by preventing fraud in a fraud-prone system do not want for the fraud problem to be solved:  If fraud disappears, they lose their jobs!  And of course, the shiny new financial system that we know as Bitcoin is being beset by wannabe fraud-detectors who want to make work for themselves in a system that’s designed to be immune to fraud.

Receiving money in Bitcoin is supposed to be zero-risk.  Control of the private keys equals control of the funds.  Your keys, your coins, at least from the perspective of the payment network; and transactions are irrevocable.

The sanctimonious scum who assign “risk” ratings to UTXOs are actively destroying this property, and thus destroying Bitcoin’s long-term value proposition.  (N.b. that this process is inextricably entwined with “KYC” policies.)  They are trying to turn Bitcoin into a new iteration of the legacy financial system, with all the problems and costs of the legacy financial system—and with the world’s most inefficient database, i.e. the Bitcoin blockchain.  That is the worst of all worlds!  It turns Bitcoin’s value into a net negative, lower than zero.

If you want for “number to go up”, then you should care.

That would pretty much mean a total break of SHA-256.  The purpose of a cryptographically secure hash is to make the outputs computationally pseudorandom with respect to the inputs.  You imply some clever way to use a correlation between the inputs and outputs for other types of calculations.  Even MD5 (or even MD2) isn’t that broken.

Furthermore, a Bitcoin mining ASIC can’t even do SHA-256.  It does a particular part of a double-SHA256 calculation, on a very specifically structured piece of data which cannot have any other structure.  Any repurposing of an ASIC must be based on that exact format.

Per the bitcoin.SE quote in my prior post:


The word “midstate” means that the CPU in the machine running the ASIC does the first part of the SHA256 calculation.  Where are the first 28 bytes of the Merkle root?  Already hashed into the midstate, together with the block’s version number and the hash of the previous block.

Substantially all that the ASIC does is to complete the hash that was already started, hash the hash (for double SHA256 as specified by Satoshi and required by consensus), compare the result to the target, and, if it failed, increment the 4-byte nonce so that it can try again.

That is the innermost loop of an optimal implementation of the Bitcoin mining algorithm—the part that must be run most often.  It needs a CPU to feed it newly calculated parameters from grinding extraNonce in the coinbase tx, thus changing the Merkle root (also, potentially increasing the timestamp).  Fortunately, a CPU can keep up with this.  The CPU only needs to feed the ASIC new data after every 4,294,967,296 failed hashes; thus, the ASIC is doing almost all of the computational work, by many orders of magnitude.

Even a slow ASIC chip nowadays can run through the whole nonce space a number of times per second (and a pro-grade ASIC miner unit contains a bunch of these chips).  For comparison, each core of my very slow, Satoshi-era CPU would take almost an hour and a half to run through the whole nonce space.  My CPU could keep up with feeding an ASIC chip—easily so.

It is all done this way for reason of efficiency.  The ASIC can do that innermost loop orders of magnitude faster than any CPU or GPU, at much lower electrical power cost.  Everything except for the innermost loop is stripped out.  The innermost loop is directly programmed into the silicon; it cannot be changed.

An ASIC that did generalized SHA256 hashing would be more complex.  That means more circuitry, more transistors—more power use.  Mining is a hot competition with thin margins, at best.  Ask any miner if he wants an ASIC that is even a few percent less efficient, and see what answer you get!  It’s like asking a Formula One race-car driver if he wants an air conditioner, an in-dash CD changer, and some handy cup holders in his car.

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N.b., this means that miners are deeply invested in Bitcoin.  Their hardware is absolutely useless for anything except for the exact inner loop of the Bitcoin mining algorithm.

A hostile miner can try to attack Bitcoin with a contentious hardfork.  That has been tried by Jihan Wu, and others.  It does not seem to work out very well for them!

A hostile miner with an unlimited external budget could attack Bitcoin outright.  (E.g., a hypothetical government agency attack.)  But that means destroying the value of the hardware that is needed for the attack.

Miners and mining pool operators can censor transactions.  That is being done; and I consider it to be a significant threat.  Countermeasures include Stratum v2, Payjoin, and CoinSwap.  Miners should have a strong incentive to adopt Stratum v2, because it has technical improvements that miners need (e.g., protection against hashrate theft attacks).

But overall, a typical business-minded miner who acts only in his own selfish financial interest must protect Bitcoin.  If Bitcoin loses value, he loses financially—and if Bitcoin fails, then all of his fancy ASIC hardware is absolutely worthless garbage because it can’t be repurposed.  Miners are financially locked into Bitcoin.

Much though I myself wish that mining could still be done on commodity hardware, let’s not lose sight of the fact that ASICs also have a benefit to Bitcoin.  Glass half full/glass half empty, etc.

Yes.


Yes.


NaN.  The Bitcoin network cannot calculate the digits of π.  Not at all.  Not even one digit.  That is the meaning of “ASIC”.  Furthermore, as I mentioned briefly, the algorithms used to set these pi calculation records are I/O-limited, not CPU-limited.

Edit:  From shahzadafzal’s reference:


I was referring to Chudnovsky’s Formula when I mentioned I/O.  Look at the disk specs there.  What ASIC farm has that kind of fast persistent storage?  And look at the RAM!  LOL.

Edit again:  See also:  http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/faq.html#why_desktops

Next question is, “Why not use this as an ASIC-resistant PoW algorithm?”

Answer:  How do you verify it?  PoW must be slow to calculate, and very fast to verify.  Bitcoin’s PoW makes it hard to produce a block.  Verifying that a block hash meets the PoW difficulty level takes only a double-SHA256, some bit-twiddling, and an integer comparison.  (Then, of course, you need to verify the rest of the block per all consensus rules, and build a Merkle tree of transactions in the block matching the block header’s Merkle root.)

I like.

It is also the only triple-digit number with all repeating digits, and no leading zeroes.  I mean—in binary.  See above.


Myself, I do pride, wrath, and lust just fine without money.

Bitcoin is an antidote to gluttony, per The Bitcoin Diet™.  Also an antidote to sloth, if it motivates you to strive for more bitcoins.

Envy is for those who didn’t buy Bitcoin dirt-cheap at only ... $0.01 $0.10 $1 $10 $100 $1,000 $10,000 ...

Greed is good for those who did, if it keeps them holding.  Is saving not prudent?  And is prudence not a virtue?

Anyway, why would you want to spend at only $100k?  Get greedier.  I have my sights set on >$1m (in terms of the dollar’s current value!).  If necessary, I am willing to wait a few more years for that.  At that point, I will not “sell” for dollars; but I may spend a bit more than I do now.

Damn.  You liberals managed to steal the 2020 U.S. election with massive ballot fraud, and you’ve still got TDS!

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“VB”?  The initials of Vitalik Buterin!

Nooooooo!  Saylor is dogwhistling a pump for ETH!  Bitcoin is dead.  SELL!!!!!!!

Here I thought that he was only a domestic terrorist.  :-(


👌  ←  There, did I get it right?

This is funny to me, because I’m not even white.  I just think that white people are collectively committing suicide, because even the ones who aren’t brain-damaged ultrawoke liberals are usually moral cowards.  The latter don’t have the balls to stand up to the former.  —Well, I guess this means I must be guilty of “multiracial whiteness”.  LOL.  👌

Free speech.  Use it, or lose it.

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OK, you beat me to it.  I take too long to assemble posts.

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Oh, you poor victim!  Just full of victimhood, you are.

You have perfected the anti-art of liberalism.

I have been intending to open a new topic about my patent-pending invention of The Bitcoin Diet™:  Bitcoin’s deflationary nature helps disgusting fat “people” to spend less on food, so that they can slim down.

In the Bitstamp dataset that I have handy, the very first transaction from 13 September 2011 was a 1.0 BTC purchase for $5.80.  A Big Mac costs somewhere around $5.80, if I understand correctly (though I don’t really know; I don’t eat that stuff).  Therefore, if you are a fat slob who stuffed his face with a Big Mac 9½ years ago instead of buying Bitcoin, that Big Mac cost you the current equivalent of $60k!

Seriously.  Stop eating.  Start saving!  Slim down by stacking the sats.

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Will make a real thread about this... sometime.

Why waste time searching post history, when the lusername says it all?

Other than amusement, of course.

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fscking dollar bull.  The dollar is up to 1671 sats, struggling to stay over the psychological 1666 sat threshold.  It won’t stay up.  DuPM!!!11 your dollars!

New poll:  How many dollars will 0.001 BTC be worth in March of 2022?

(Yes, the txid is real.  Try it on any explorer.)

Done:  A puzzle tx worth 0.001 BTC.  Solve it if you can!

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eddie wins this thread.

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Kitty had nine lives.  I was already working that into the puzzle before this thread was started.  Indeed, that is the part which took so long!  Proof of 2³⁶ work, all done on my poor old CPU:

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I know that if I were a woman, I would consider either pretending to be a man on this forum, or leaving my identity wholly ambiguous; and I myself am sufficiently careful to alter my linguistic usage in every detail, in any language.

I wouldn’t want fat and thirsty nerds hitting on me—and I wouldn’t want for braindead feminists as Timelord to pretend to speak for me, based on their narrow stereotypes of how all women must think.


“Lauda” is an actual given name—a feminine name, derived from Latin.  You may confirm this in any competent reference on onomastics.  It means “praise”; and it is etymologically related to a number of English words, such as “laudatory”.

In Latin, first-declension feminine nouns end in an -a, in the nominative case.  However, to my understanding, the name “Lauda” is actually descended from the Latin third-declension feminine noun laus, ‘praise, merit, high reputation’, whence also the Latin verb laudo, ‘to praise’; “lauda” is not itself a Latin noun.  “Lauda” is an archaic Italian feminine noun, meaning ‘praise’.

Note that the earliest archives of LaudaM’s profile page state a “gender” of “male”.  I have various theories about that, such as (0) it is well-known that women on tech forums often masquerade as male, to avoid unwanted sexual attention; and (1) other theories I don’t want to state because it is just pointless speculation.  None of this is inconsistent with the Croatian posts to which you refer (a point previously raised by marlboroza in English Reputation).

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The Cult of Lauda has been officially dissolved, by order of its Grand Prophet, i.e. me.

As a cult sacrifice in memory of Lauda, I have irrevocably destroyed one satoshi.  To keep the UTXO set tidy, I used OP_RETURN with a 1 sat value and a message to be seen by all auditors of Bitcoin’s monetary supply.  The transaction is also a puzzle, with a prize of 0.001 BTC at the address bc1qt2mdkehmphggajer3ur3g8l754scj4fdrmw3rn.


One zero nibble for each of Kitty’s nine lives!



About the puzzle:  Remember when Bitcoin was fun?  It still is!

Although the creation of this tx took my Satoshi-era CPU way too long grinding, the puzzle does not require any heavy-duty compute power to solve.  Because I am poor, and I have no GPUs (or even adequate CPUs), I would not want to create a puzzle that gives an edge to those who have better hardware.  Bitcoin is for everybody.  Core keeps it so that you can run a full node on an inexpensive SOC board.  I have made it so that the puzzle can be solved with any computer that could run Bitcoin Core.  Yes, you could solve this on a Raspberry Pi.  GPUs will not help you.


Rather, it is blockchain art—and it is a puzzle of psychology.  To solve it, you need to think like nullius.  It is essentially a Nullian brainwallet!  Since nobody thinks like nullius, I doubt that the puzzle will ever be solved.  Of course, such statements are oftentimes the last words of lusers with brainwallets—right before they lose their money.  DO NOT USE BRAINWALLETS!  Always use a secure wallet.


All of the information required to reconstruct the private key is published on the blockchain.  In one short paragraph, I could write natural-language instructions for using this information to reconstruct the private key with standard Bitcoin tools and libraries.  By the standards of cryptographers, the process of creating the private key is quite insecure.  However, there is neither any restriction on the keyspace, nor any computationally exploitable bias in its use; thus, the key itself is not susceptible to bruteforce.

It is a trick wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a meow.  For Kitty.  Because I miss Kitty.  😿


If you solve the puzzle, I would appreciate if you would post here with appropriate proofs that you’re the one who got it, and contact me to let me know how you figured it out; but please keep the solution private.  Be cruel.  Leave everyone in suspense.  It is a special way of hiding information in plain sight, for those who love their privacy.  😼

I will give no further hints.  I may give further disinformation to befuddle searchers with false leads.  Lolz.

If the puzzle is unsolved for a very long time, or if this causes idiot-spam on this thread (as I have seen on some other puzzle threads where drooling ignoramuses obsessively search for patterns in random numbers), I reserve the right to end this by sweeping away the prize.  However, I do not want to do that.  The search for the private key controlling this 0.001 BTC is good to keep Lauda’s memory alive.  Naturally, this topic—Lauda’s final thread—is the primary and appropriate venue for discussion of this puzzle.  As much is indicated in the accompanying OP_RETURN.

I wish that I could give more than 0.001 BTC for this, but I cannot afford to.  I expect for that to be worth at least a thousand dollars someday, or perhaps much more!  I hodl my BTC—every sat is precious—dump, dump, DuPM your dollars.

Here’s to you, Kitty!  😺

Happy Pi day!


Bitcoin mining hardware is restricted to a single use.  That is the meaning of “ASIC”:  Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.  A Bitcoin mining ASIC can only perform the inner-loop calculation for mining Bitcoin.  It cannot be repurposed for anything else.


Compare:  https://rya.nc/asic-cracking.html

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Edit:  I forgot to add:  The algorithms usually used to calculate digits of pi are I/O limited, not CPU-limited.  That is one of the reasons why supercomputers are usually not used to calculate digits of pi.  You need big storage on fast SSDs.  Even a pi-digit-specific ASIC would not help you there.

Saylor gets extra awesomeness points for inadvertently trolling the hell out of Wilhelm.  LOL.

What are you, twit-@jack’s woke police searching for the slightest hint of wrongthink?

I heard that white people are allowed to use Bitcoin, too.  They don’t need to ask permission from the Commissar of Private Keys, or genuflect.  Shocking, is it not.

You missed the point.  I am offering a bargain deal to time travellers.

Recently, I was browsing some old threads in which people were expressing a wish for a time machine so that they could get some Bitcoin before it reached hundreds of dollars...  Think about it.

That wasn’t the worst of it.


I recall much more mindrusted talk of that nature.  That is what I found on a 5-second search.

Of course, Bitcoin could go to zero.  If the Internet disappears.  As long as the Internet exists, Bitcoin will exist with some positive value; Satoshi designed it that way, and cypherpunks will assure that the design is used to best advantage.  And if the Internet disappears, it probably means that modern industrial supply chains have collapsed globally.  In that case, you will have difficulty surviving food scarcity, random violence, and the utter unpreparedness of soft, squishy modern man for the hiemal kiss of deadly seasons.  Can you even survive without modern heat?  (Oh, modern man, could you even survive without functional indoor plumbing?)


Bitcoin, go to come hither to nullius!

I am bookmarking this post.

In the future, there will be a market correction.  Bitcoin will crash hard, all the way down to $100k.  The media will scream that Bitcoin is dead.  The mindrusts will be shaken out.  Then, Bitcoin will continue up to $1m.

Amidst the fracas, n00bs will quote you with their wishes that they had a time machine to buy dirt-cheap at only $61k.

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Open offer to readers of the Wall Observer:  I hereby offer to sell my Bitcoin.  All of it.

The price that I offer is 1000 sats per USDT.

This offer is time-limited and non-negotiable.  Escrow will be required, unless the buyer is theymos or a well-known Core developer or [well, there is no replacement for Lauda].  Serious inquiries only!  PM or e-mail me.  Preferably, use PGP.

Of course, it would be stupid to take this offer while you can still get >1600 sats at market.  And of course, I would immediately swap the Tethers back to Bitcoin!  (And then offer you the Bitcoin—until either you run out of Tethers, or this perpetual motion arbitrage feedback loop moves the whole market.)

I make this offer by way of demonstrating a point:  Someday, people will want a time machine so that they can take me up on this.  Nonetheless, the offer is serious:  I always keep my word!

The number will go down.  I think that I will soon revise it to 833 sats per USDT, or maybe 750 sats per USDT, so act fast!

proudhon, savetherainforest, and other dollar bulls are totally brainwashed.  They have a cult-like fanatical belief in the value of fake made-up imaginary money.

The bubble is popping.  For those irrational bulls, this will be a painful experience.  They are the bagholders for a so-called “currency” that is essentially the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.

But they can never say that they weren’t warned to cash out into real money while they still can.

I like it!

Some white background pixels are stuck in the numbers; and doing that type of work on a raster image will not yield optimal results, anyway.  vroom, I infer that you created the original as a PDF.  I suggest a PDF rasterizer that directly outputs PNG with a transparent background.  From the poppler-utils package, pdftocairo with the -transp option will do exactly what you want—at excellent quality.  It’s available on Unix-like platforms; and there are MS Windows builds available somewhere on the net, though I can’t assure their quality.  Of course, there are other tools that will achieve the same goal; I simply find that to be the easiest.

!

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Thanks.  Good finds.  I especially like the usdsat.com site.

Seriously—am I ever not serious?—we need to flip people’s view of value.  When speculators buy bitcoins with the expectation of selling to increase their dollars, Bitcoin is in a fight.  When people simply consider their Bitcoin wallets to be their savings accounts, then Bitcoin will have won.

So as for personal finance.  For businesses, the equivalent is to hold a Bitcoin “treasury reserve”.

In my worldview, my Bitcoin wallet is my money.  I value it at 1 BTC = 1 BTC.  Whatever other currencies I may also have, I mark to market in BTC.  My own idea of my liquid net worth is denominated in bitcoins.  If I make an investment in something other than BTC, I evaluate the returns in BTC.  I invest if and only if I speculate that I will get out more bitcoins than I put in.  From that perspective, USD, EUR, et al. are extremely poor investments!

Whenever I need to buy something priced in stupid fake currencies, I do a conversion to see how many sats I must spend.  I observe that that amount has been falling:  I am experiencing price deflation.  On the flipside, of course, when I make money, I am making less of it:  I must lower my prices, as money becomes more valuable.  This is Bitcoin.


I need better data.  The foregoing table is a draft, based on some numbers that I have handy.  Historical price research will be required to pin down hard numbers for a neat log-scale chart I have in mind.

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As this forum’s best philological pedant and most superlatively evillest curmudgeon, I shall judge your intellect—not vice versa.


Alas, you forgot to mention my incorrect and inconsistent capitalization, my stylistically grotesque abuse of exclamation marks, the ungrammatical phrase “number go down!”, my gauche use of an emoji in the topic title, my misspeling of the word “dump”, and too many other literary sins to list.  (More shameful to me is my past bad habit of splitting infinitives—cringe.)

You are evidently unfamiliar with my post history.  —And with humour.  Anyway, if I wish to affect the tone of a typical Internet p0ast, I am divinely entitled to take whatever licence pleases me.

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Back on topic:


LOL, fake money bubble.  As the USDSAT number fades away, I will be laughing at all the bagholders for that shitcoin.

Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Trading Discussion > Scam Accusations (Moderator: Cyrus) > U.S. Dollar

OP is not totally wrong:  Lauda and theymos are both alts of Tomatocage.  So am I.  So is airfinex.  So are you.  PROOF:  A bear said so; and bears are right.