I think you might be getting too hung up on words.

Sure, we can't prove that the whole universe isn't deterministic and therefore can't prove that randomness exists at all.  But so what?

When we talk about using randomness the applications we talk about aren't at all troubled by that problem. They usually only care that the random numbers are uniformly distributed and are strongly unpredictable to other people.

It doesn't matter if some hypothetical god could see your dice rolls in advance when you're playing dice against grandma.

It's like complaining someone calls a ball a sphere, even though it can't be because it's made of copper and there is no way to pack the relevant atoms into an an absolutely perfect sphere.

This thread is super-cringe and contributes to Bitcoiners looking like unlovable trolls.

You shouldn't be married to someone who isn't your partner-- if you are, you are selling yourself exceptionally short.  With a partner, you share both the risks and benefits: you expect your spouse to stay with you if things go poorly and you're struggling, so you should also expect to share if things go well.  A good partner aids you in many ways both direct and indirect, so it is hard to determine what a "fair share" would be,  but if 50/50 wouldn't be close enough to fair then it wasn't a partnership.

A partner is someone you can trust to support you even when the world doesn't, in good times or bad. They're someone you can seek advice from on gnarly situations you couldn't share with others. They're insurance against things going poorly and someone you can trust isn't merely with you for your success when things go well.

Maybe places outside of the US have really stupid laws, but in the US at least-- assets that were yours prior to getting married as well as inherhentences are not split in a divorce-- that would be absurd if you could marry a wealthy person then divorce them shortly after and take all their stuff.  A pre-nup should only be needed when their are circumstances like an illiquid business interest that would be damaging to need to divest in the event of an acrimonious divorce. Usually when I hear people online talking about prenups I'm left wondering if they're thirteen years old-- a "mine is mine" prenup wouldn't be enforceable anywhere in the US AFAIK and you wouldn't want one because if one party does make more they'd create a wealth inequality which would undermine any prospect of partnership.

Besides-- look at the volatility in cryptocurrency markets.  Handing over 50% of your gains to someone who shared their life with you is a small loss compared to the Bitcoin price rodeo.  If the separation with someone you loved isn't a much worse concern than the prospect of 'mere' 50% loss in gains, you're over invested and/or misprioritized.

Citation needed.

Altcoins are quick to add marketing features, but over and over again those wizbang features have thoroughly undermined their security usually while providing little to no practical benefit, sometimes while not even providing a clear theoretical benefit.

Superior shouldn't be about how many bullet items you can put on a webpage to fleece suckers with, it should be about keeping your coins secured and easily transacted.

There is an occasional altcoin that has some genuine improvement but it's usually packaged with other marketing features that hurt security or other features or tradeoffs that make it less of a competitor to Bitcoin (premines, worse scalability, centralization, etc.).

If some altcoin did one day supplant Bitcoin it's far from clear that the whole circus wouldn't just stop not long following that... After all, if foocoin can replace bitcoin then won't some barcoin replace foocoin eventually? If so-- why would you want to own foocoin either?

I'd like to get in contact with the person whom I spoke to in mid 2011 on Bitcoin IRC who was using the nick lolwat`.

If you happen to see this message, please shoot me a PM here or an email at gmaxwell@gmail.com. I owe you something.

Your examples use different hashes.

If you are freely setting the hash values and do not know the hash preimage then your "signature" is not an ECDSA signature.

The requirement that the hash input is actually as hash is utterly critical to ECDSA security.

What darosior said, plus it doesn't even fetch or store the block until it has headers that indicate it would be on the most-work chain assuming it at all its ancestors are valid.

This means that you essentially cannot use javascript, ruby, python, or rust. All of them are orgies of dependencies autofetched and updated in a practically unaudited manner.

(Sure, it's technically possible to use these languages without their ecosystem, but it's impractical and moots much of their benefits).

Which developers owned how?

If Bitcoin dies, it'll be because the public was too stupid to handle having a system that doesn't have any higher power taking care of it-- like a child that forgets to feed their pet gerbil.   The fact that so many people fall so easily for that sort of nonsense is probably the biggest danger signal against Bitcoin's future.

Yes, it's possible, but difficult.

And there is so much discussion that without the ability to search text it's impossible to find anything.

But here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140703182335/http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2011/06/11#l1307836061

https://web.archive.org/web/20140703182232/http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2011/06/12

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0023.mediawiki#Block_Proposal

You send the proposal mode and the block encoded in hex, just like it gets sent to submitblock when you have a solution.

The link says nothing about proposal.

Getblocktemplate which is the only interface for mining provides transactions but no coinbase transaction (because it doesn't know where you want to pay the coins).   Where does the coinbase transaction come from? Your pool/mining software has to create it.

How do you know you created it correctly?   You can submit your candidate block back as a proposal, and see if it would accept it.

All that text is from the #bitcoin-dev IRC channel on freenode, which has been the most active discussion venue for Bitcoin development since Satoshi stopped participating (well, now in #bitcoin-core-dev due to other interesting history).

It used to have public logs all over the internet as matter of channel policy: We considered the public logs important for openness and transparency, so while other bitcoin channels forbid public logs and preferred banning over quieting disruptive users,  #bitcoin-dev embraced public logs and strongly preferred quieting to bans.  If not for the public logs I would have consistently pushed that all important discussions get moved to the mailing lists.

Unfortunately all the public logs are offline now and it's not entirely clear to me why. I've found it particularly concerning because the loss of these logs is extraordinarily helpful for people who are dishonestly trying to rewrite the political history of Bitcoin. (e.g. they claim stuff like I only started participating in Bitcoin in 2014 or 2015 or that everyone always agreed that the blocksize limit was temporary and would be completely eliminated-- stuff that the discussion shows isn't just wrong, but is an absurd opposite of the truth).

I've been working on unifying logs from a number of people to recover a complete set (any given person has holes in their logs because of periods where they were offline...).

No, not correct. It just skips POW and tests everything else-- what did you read that made you think it wouldn't test the coinbase transaction?

Current Bitcoind doesn't support handing out block templates without segwit txn. If you tell getblocktemplate that you don't support segwit, it just throws an error.

You could patch it to not do this and instead just give you empty blocks, and it would work fine (which, incidentally, I answered in the original thread) and your blocks would be accepted.  But you could also patch NoMP to support segwit-- there are guides online to doing so-- and it would probably take similar amounts of effort (and would be less work to maintain because presumably nomp either doesn't change or will accept the patch).

Also, right now 1.5% of mining income is fees-- soon to become 3% plus. During high congestion periods it can be much more, we've seen as much as 50% income from fees. You'll lose this income if you're not mining transactions.

Jackg's advice to test with testnet is good advice too. You can also hand a block back to bitcoind and ask if-- ignoring the POW-- it would accept it as valid. See the "proposal" option to getblocktemplate.

The linkage between generics and most forms of dysfunctional behaviour are very weak to statistically insignificant-- human genetics is already well optimized by evolution to produce consistently good outcomes. Worse, some of the strongest genetic connections that exist appear to be for traits that also produce HIGH ability in some people-- greater intelligence, creativity, etc. So if you were to try to breed out the dysfunctional people, you might also breed out the most capable.

Sometimes seemingly bad traits are preserved by evolution because they confer advantages in some situations, with some upbringings, by chance, or in combination with other genetic traits.

Plus what we consider 'dysfunction' is highly dependant on social context.  Galileo Galilei was considered a bad guy and a trouble maker by the powers that be in his time.

And every one of us has had ancestors who were lesser than ourselves.

Besides, human beings don't deserve to die just because they're losers even if you could somehow objectively determine that they were.

Basically there were a lot of Bitcoin donations-- thousands of Bitcoin-- sent to the EFF and then they decided they didn't want them, and they handed them over to Gavin.

I think it's really good to learn about history from primary material like these logs-- it wipes away a lot of the bullshit hero worship and false certainty, like the idea that great leaders usually have any freeking clue what they're doing, that shows up in more derivative historical work.  But it has limitations: you're stuck with the misconceptions that existed at the time

My recollection is that their reasoning was more complicated than "tax reasons"-- essentially they were concerned that if they accepted Bitcoin they'd have a conflict of interest that might impede their ability to defend Bitcoin in the courts.  E.g. if any use of Bitcoin was criminal then the EFF might have been a defendant in anti-bitcoin litigation.  My understanding is that they were also getting flak from some of their donors for 'endorsing a scam'.

Here is EFF's blog post https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/eff-and-bitcoin ... it seems to backup my recollection.

Maybe one could, but why would it?  If it did, wouldn't it get replaced?  If it will get replaced too why value it in the first place?

Most altcoins are hobbled by their creators motivations to line their pockets.   E.g. Ethereum premined 72 million tokens.

Most altcoins that don't have extremely scammy origins you hardly hear about because they don't have fat pocket books to buy placement on exchanges/website listings/conferences.

To differentiate themselves from Bitcoin altcoins make various design departures, some might be useful-- but if they're really that useful, Bitcoin will likely adopt them, so they need design departures that Bitcoin would never adopt and those tend to be ones that make the economics suck or which severely hobble decentralization at least in the long run.

It already does and has since day one. They got hobbed a bit by Satoshi due to security vulnerabilities in them but I'm confident that they'll be restored to full power eventually as people learn more about what form that would best take.  Lightning is powered by Bitcoin's smart contracting abilities.

One thing about going over these old logs which I didn't recall was the claim "bitcoinj might end", which I don't have more more context for, or at least don't remember the context for. Clearly Mike Hearn was pretty cross about the illegal activities discussion.


I believe BCT has an order of magnitude more active posters and posts than the Bitcoin subreddit or any other single bitcoin-related venue. It's not hyper-engineered to capture and spoon-feed a massive passive reader base like reddit or twitter.


Hm? The design is more or less that of most other SMF style forums, it's not uncommon.

I don't see any technobabble here!

We're going a bit offtopic here, but I'll answer..


The thread is full of technical details-- so perhaps not the best summary to link from here.

You know how real property can have deed restrictions?  -- contract terms that run with the land and impose restrictions on future owners?

In theory the same could be done with Bitcoin. Where instead of just having keys and timelocks a coin could constrain have restrictions that it required you to preserve when the coin was moved.  But don't worry, you couldn't accidentally accept one of these encumbered bitcoins, your wallet wouldn't recognize them unless specifically programmed to.

Currently the state of script is hobbled enough that no one knows how to do it at the moment, but it's pretty likely that it will become possible again eventually.  There are really powerful and good uses for such tools, but there are also profoundly stupid ones.

So, for example (in theory) I could take a bitcoin and encumber it so that that particular coin could only ever be sent between me and you,  no other key could ever control it.  You and I could send it back and forth forever, if we wanted... but it would effectively be out of circulation. ... even though it was circulating.  It would effectively no longer be a Bitcoin any more, but some kind of "me and you" token.

In theory, with sufficiently advanced technology,  no one except the people involved with a coin could tell that it was encumbered either.

So it's possible that some day there may be circulating bitcoins that aren't really bitcoins anymore and only their owners know it.