Thanks.  Unfortunately, I will need to cut short what I was writing here—if I ever want to post this.  :-)

To answer that, we first must define “success”.  Is economic success the sole criterion?  Although that is important, I think that economic success is necessary but insufficient.

Bitcoin is freedom-money.  It is authentic cypherpunk-money.  It grew organically as a social phenomenon, in historical circumstances that cannot be artifically duplicated.

If Bitcoin were to fail, I think that “the whole cryptospace” would almost inevitably fail in the way that really matters.

I say this when I own altcoins, and I much like some altcoins:  If Bitcoin were to fail, then any independent altcoin would almost inevitably fail economically.  Bitcoin makes the cryptocurrency market.

If Bitcoin were to fail, I predict that the only “altcoins” that could still succeed would be those backed by massive capital from big banks and VCs.  But those are not legitimate “crypto” in the sense of cypherpunk-money.  Those are merely de facto centralized Fintech payment systems that use some cryptography, and that sell themselves under a veneer of fake “decentralization”.  Some are better in this aspect, some are worse—all of them devolve over time in the direction of giving big banks and insider whales the power that Bitcoin takes away from them.  Worst in this aspect is anything POS, a definitional plutocracy.

Thus, although I disagree with the “maximalist” purity-testing that treats people as sinners for (gasp!) touching a forbidden altcoin, I agree with the proposition that “Bitcoin’s failure will be the whole cryptospace’s failure without any other cryptocoin having to find and achieve success.”  Like it or not.  That is the reality.

I love Bitcoin.  I love it as if it were a living creature.  And I recognize on pragmatic grounds that attempting to replace it would be a fool’s errand, likely resulting in a Pyrrhic victory at best.  Accordingly, I am proud when altcoiners call me a “Bitcoin maxi”; and I tend to agree with them about that.  I say that when I own altcoins, I think that defi has great potential (excluding such garbage as Yield Farming, a classic HYIP scam), and I have some history on this forum of defending the good uses of NFTs.  (Not Bored Ape trash.  The basic idea now called “NFTs” is much older, and it has much undiscovered potential for future applications.)  There are multiple reasons why my signature or personal text has said since 2017:  “There is only one Bitcoin.”

Am I a Bitcoin maximalist?


I don’t follow the opinions of these types of pundits, so I can’t comment other than to say that [0] I think that it is very, very unlikely that all fiat currencies will go to zero against Bitcoin in the type of total “hyperbitcoinization” scenario that some Bitcoiners predict; and, [1] whenever fiat currencies crash, as not infrequently occurs, people need an escape hatch—a currency that is not controlled by corrupt governments and corrupt central banks.

Bitcoin was created to be such a thing.  See the headline in the Genesis Block.

---

The Great Collapse

Quote from: NotATether on August 09, 2022, 08:41:14 AM

Quote from: bbc.reporter on August 09, 2022, 12:55:17 AM

I also want to hear your opinion on the comments of people similar to Max Keisler who said in an interview that all fiat will be going to zero against bitcoin. Is this right?

Completely unrealistic in the developed Western world. I know it's fashionable to peddle an impending collapse of economy, but the govts. simply don't allow that to happen.

Governments are not gods.  They cannot magically stop economies from collapsing.  The smaller big question is when the petrodollar scam will collapse.  The bigger big question is whether or not that will be a part of a catastrophic global collapse.

I know it’s fashionable to peddle the “this is fine!” belief that governments can prevent a catastrophic global collapse of civilization; but history shows that civilizations do collapse, inevitably so when they are infected by even the tiniest bit of today’s all-consuming rot.  I have remarked before on this forum that around A.D. 350–400, Romans must have believed that their civilization was invincible.

Only a knowledge of the mere past century, the blink of an historical eye, is needed to know that major economic collapses do happen.  Whereas only myopia, short time horizons, and a lack of historical education could lead anyone to believe that a civilizational collapse can’t happen here and now.

Today’s global economic system is altogether the biggest scam in the history of the world.  Its eventual collapse has been assured since the 1970s, at the latest.  And a technological, industrial civilization cannot reasonably expect to survive a catastrophic economic implosion.  The question is not “if”, but when?  Many commentators discredit themselve by mispredicting the “when?”—a question that no one can reasonably answer.

This does not necessarily mean that when some fiat currencies collapse, Bitcoin will just replace them.  To presume as much is a simplistic leap of logic in attempting to predict the outcomes of a complex scenario.  I think it’s more likely that as long as technical civilization exists, there will be a competition of currencies—and when this rotten civilization finally collapses in total, Bitcoin will not exist, because computers and the Internet will not exist.

N.b. that I have always consistently said this:

Quote from: nullius on October 16, 2020, 10:18:01 PM

I do think that the collapse is nigh inevitable, barring a drastic, radical global change that has negligible chance of actually happening.

[...]

This—n.b. the date before Covid, when exuberant faith in ever-increasing prosperity was more fashionable:

Quote from: nullius on February 08, 2018, 11:54:02 PM

[...]

By comparison, Roman society was a zombified rotting corpse for four or five centuries before the civil machine built by long-gone forebears ran out of momentum.  I can see how greater technology could have accelerated the ultimate downfall in various ways.

What’s left is to secure yourself, take care of your own, live by honour alone whereas law is meaningless, keep busy with something productive, and try to have some fun.

[...]

Quote from: Vod on February 08, 2018, 11:53:07 AM

I believe nullius has a more optimistic view of the future than I do. 

“Optimism is cowardice.” — Spengler (writing most of a hundred years ago)

Indeed, you have long been one of the most consistent and well-spoken advocates on this forum for the principle of privacy.

My argument was directed not at you personally, but at some widespread and pernicious wrong thinking that I know you have so oft opposed.  It is too bad that many people just don’t or won’t get it.  In the big picture, since last week, I have been discovering and rediscovering just how broken everything is—the subject of a new project which forced me temporarily to set aside something I’ve been working on for zero-knowledge proof privacy.


That is an interesting point.  I didn’t think of it that way.


The evidence indicates as much.  Indeed, if privacy and fungibility are considered valuable, it looks to me like nopara73 and Wasabi are doing something tantamount to an exit scam:  They build up a good reputation, and they are now using it to slip in support for Mike Hearn’s old agenda.

This is one of the oldest debates in Bitcoin.  Most newer users do not realize it.  I will soon place it in its proper context.

This is a thread for the purpose of name-dropping, salted with arse-kissing.  FYI, it is one of the reasons why people in VIP positions are sometimes reluctant to interact with people.  Take it as advice; more is below.

Sometimes, I wonder if theymos ever uses an alt account to engage with the forum as an ordinary user.  The problem is, of course, that he could not risk engaging in discussions very deeply, lest style and substance may reveal his identity.

An even bigger problem is nonpublic contacts.  If anyone in a high-profile position engages in casual PM or e-mail correspondence with someone relatively unknown, it runs the risk that some loser will go around gratuitously bragging, “Oh, I was just chatting with X,” as if suddenly they are pals.  Unless you really are close to someone, it is inappropriate—and you will never be close to someone famous (let alone famous yourself), unless you have sound judgment about such matters of social appropriateness, and moreover, privacy.  It is why I try to avoid even mentioning such things unless there is a reason to do so—even in one instance when the other party took the initiative of reaching out to me, then quoted my reply on Twitter (with my permission).  Well, that is obviously not private; but I will not pretend that I’m best buddies with X just because X took an interest in something I wrote, and we had some interesting chit-chat about a topic of mutual interest.

For referring to public discussions, context is important.  To illustrate by way of example:  If, in Lauda’s final thread, there were occasion to recount the origin of Lauda’s final avatar, it would be relevant to retrace the history of how I made a satirical thread in Lauda’s defence, and theymos was so amused that that inspired a little piece of his April Fools’ joke that year, and my satire became a kind of a meme for Lauda in some of her later posts, and she used a clip of a William Blake painting that I had made for that thread as her final avatar.  But it would be gauche to make a merit-seeking Meta thread about the times that OH MY GAWD, SO-AND-SO REPLIED TO ME (and that makes me so “important”) with a list of my past interactions with theymos, forum staff, Bitcoin Core developers, etc., etc.  As if that validated my existence.

Ucy, try flipping the question around:  How important are you to yourself?  People who are worth talking to, usually know it—so it feels natural and normal to talk to someone famous.

---

Who is Chris Pratt?  (Seriously, I have never heard of him/her/it.)


So, why are you here?  If you are not connecting with anyone, and if you think your posts are of such ephemeral, negligible significance to everybody else, is there any purpose?

In some of my past disappearances, when it seemed I may not return, people have sometimes created threads asking what happened to me.  Without any intention to deprecate the VIPs, it frankly touched me much more on a personal level to find that relatively unknown people had been wondering about my fate than to have perfectly normal interactions with famous folks.

---

The Bitcoin Forum is not Bitcoin.  The forum is obviously centralized; and the central authority on this forum does matter.  Nonetheless, in a different way, this evokes an important point:

Quote from: marcotheminer on August 04, 2022, 09:20:56 PM

Isn't it like Bitcoin, where no one person even 'matters' (as long as there is 1+ person.. I suppose)?

One of my favourite quotes:  “Bitcoin’s greatest vulnerability was and always is that it can’t be any stronger than the people who use it.  It’s possible for the public to be just too dumb for Bitcoin.” — nullc on Redit (2021-12-30).  The context:  A proposition that if, hypothetically, CSW were really Satoshi, then it wouldn’t matter, because no one person matters to Bitcoin.

Quote from: nullc (2021-12-30 01:57:28)

Quote from: AmbitiousPhilosopher (2021-12-30 01:17:57)

I think most people wouldn't give a hoot

I'm confident you're wrong. Too many people are hidebound authoritarians and simply can't wrap their head around a system that doesn't have a central authority.

The history of the public's interaction with Bitcoin has been a comedy of errors with people (press, organizations, etc) incorrectly fixating on one person or element of the system as being in charge of it... only to end up mired in confusion, oscillating between options, because they can't wrap their head around a named 'system' that has no central authority... even though there are plenty of other things in our lives that don't (e.g. the English language, to give an example we're all familiar with).

Bitcoin's greatest vulnerability was and always is that it can't be any stronger than the people who use it. It's possible for the public to be just too dumb for Bitcoin. I'm generally pretty positive about the world's ability on that front, but in a hypothetical dystopia where it turned out that somehow an incompetent narcissist conman created Bitcoin, one fixated on destroying its properties, confiscating coins for personal gain, and destroying its decentralization? ... in that world Bitcoin would be well outside of my personal risk tolerance. Wright would be way too much of a headwind.

This is even more true today because BSV exists so we don't have to speculate what a Bitcoin of the Craig believers looks like. It isn't pretty.

Although I disagree with him about some details, I agree with Cøbra’s proposition that Bitcoin is hyperpolitical money.  And in politics, these things matter:  Charismatic leaders, founders, VIPs—authority figures.  Bitcoin’s distributed database consensus is decentralized; its development consensus is largely decentralized, because the Bitcoin Core developers think in terms of decentralization; but its broader wetware-layer social consensus never can be.  And an ideal that contradicts human nature is worth no more than an idea that contradicts the laws of physics or of mathematics.

New policy:  I present myself as a fearsome “Bitcoin maxi” to altcoiners, and I chat about my favourite altcoins to Bitcoiners.  Thus, I can discover who my true friends are.  This optimizes for the human element.  So does intransigent opposition to scams.

I have been intending to write an essay with my own take on Bitcoin maximalism, but I am not sure if this forum is the right place to publish it.

---

That’s backwards.  All of the scams that you list made hardfork changes, while most of them accept post-Satoshi softfork changes such as P2SH (activated 2012-04-01).  Only Bitcoin has retained the status quo, with only backwards compatible changes since (IIRC) BIP 50/Bitcoin v0.8.1 (?) in 2013.  AFAIK, the only forkscam that even claims to be “exactly how Satoshi made it” is BSV—the perpetrator of which demands that Bitcoin make hardfork changes to seize coins.  I think that shows the nature of Faketoshi’s nonsense about Bitcoin being allegedly “carved in stone”:  He is upset that Bitcoin’s blockchain is actually carved in stone, never mind the consensus rules.

(I need not reach the rest of this discussion.)

Hot on the heels of one of the shocking sudden demolition of one of the most promising post-quantum key agreement algorithms...

• Popular news article:  2022-08-02:  “Post-quantum encryption contender is taken out by single-core PC and 1 hour”.  Ars Technica.
• Cryptographic research paper:  Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru.  “An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH (preliminary version).”  2022-07-30: received; 2022-08-05: last of 2 revisions.  https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/975

...we find this:


BERNSTEIN v. NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY (1:22-cv-02319)
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872195/bernstein-v-national-institute-of-standards-and-technology/

DJB’s blog summarizes the history of NSA sabotage of cryptographic standards.  He describes the atrocious state of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process.  He concludes:


Good luck to Professor Bernstein here.

When I saw the topic title, I expected something like this:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/17779


Definitional malware.


Definitional malware.

As the self-appointed high priest of the god of Bitcoin, I must object:  Bitcult.Faith


Why not?  Are you aware of the wealth that churches have, and of the investments they make in other asset classes?

The pretense here that money has nothing to do with religion has encouraged me to update my cult’s tithing address.  For too long have I lived as if under genuine vows of poverty!  Hark, a vision:  The god of Bitcoin wants me to have some more of those bitcoins.  To fulfill this divine commandment, you must tithe only 10% of your income.

Money is, after all, one of the major purposes of religion.  Religion is the best business on Earth!  Perhaps I have sinned as a businessman, by never having sufficient greed.  But I do understand religion.  How should I best please divinity in a religion about money?  Should I preach about money, but not practice it?  Forsooth, an it be so, the god of Bitcoin may condemn me as a hypocrite!

I said it in 2017:

---

Good idea.

For the record, I drafted the above about a 10% tithe on 2 August, when I updated my cult’s page—before you wrote this.  10% is a traditional tithe.

I think that is overly melodramatic.  “Powerful”?  “Waves”, as opposed to ripples in a frog-pond?  All this DT, rank, and merit stuff has the grandiose false importance of a schoolyard popularity contest between children.  Poor children:  Anyone who has significant BTC would be unlikely to care about these cliques.  Nothing against the poor, per se—I myself am poor; I guess that some poor people can somehow keep a proper perspective on how much supercilious forum-politicking is driven by remarkably petty levels of greed.  But imagine, Eddie:  Would anyone with 1000 BTC be deeply entangled in forum-DT factionalism?  More importantly:  In even so short a time as twenty years, will anyone care?

As I have mentioned before, Lauda repeatedly urged me to quit the forum altogether.  She regarded me as an underachiever, and she was deeply critical of me for this:  “Stop wasting time.”  After the time she spent striving with single-minded devotion to try to help foster a healthy community here, she herself was increasingly frustrated and pessimistic for the reasons inferred by Agbe’s analysis.  Any positive change was blocked by what she privately called “the enablers”:  Not the obvious scammers and trolls—not the unpopular people—but the game-players, the manipulative influence peddlers, their backroom politics, their public currying of favour.

Wherever she is now, I hope that she moved onto more productive endeavours.  And I hope that no ill fate befell her, as seems to be implied by OP here.  And I also hope that—well, let’s put it this way:  I have spent the past few years being haunted by the thought that she may have done a real “Goodbye, world!” over that plagiarism thing, which I myself considered worse than that admittedly ill-advised sting operation.  I have graphically hinted at this before.  I don’t think that’s likely—but I don’t think it’s terribly unlikely, either.  I forgave her over that because, among many other reasons, she immediately owned up to it; and instead of lashing out at the anonymous account that correctly accused her, she thanked it.  I hope that she forgave herself.  All I know is that she was very upset—not merely embarrassed at being caught, but sincerely angry at herself; her activity soon dropped off to its lowest-ever levels, and then she abruptly burnt her identity, cut her contacts, and disappeared.  There was always a lot going on with her; it was probably something else.  Probably a coincidence.

With due apologies for being so morose, Eddie—Black Sabbath, and all.  In a few days, I will return to only my normal level of pessimism.


I do dream of what could have been...


Anyway, I am surprised that The Pharmacist brought up that sting operation in response to jamyr.  At the time, jamyr commented on the thread where the sting operation blew up:


So...


(Corrected because Quickseller made peace with Lauda.  So now, only trolls/scammers care about it.)


TMAN was together with Lauda in the same controversy.  I don’t think he would mind my pointing that out, since he was always one of her strongest defenders about that (and otherwise).

---

Posted while I was looking for an appropriate nonexistent-kitty pic I will edit into the above [edit: together with some self-correction of sloppy statements/AI memory bitflips “foibles of human memory” in the draft I wasn’t done with]; with quoting changed to avoid top-posting:


Why should he name names?  It is well-known.  The matter was sufficiently well-settled that the target of the sting blanked his own post about it, to avoid being a drama-magnet.

Lauda was fired from her forum staff position over this—a big blow to her, only two months after she came in second in an unofficial election for the community to suggest a new Global Moderator.  She suffered years of trolling over it.  Over five years later, almost two years after she disappeared, there is no need to rehash the matter.  I am surprised that The Pharmacist brought it up.

Although the circumstances and particulars were very different, in the abstract, that “sting operation” reminds me of something that I once read in a political memoir.  The author was offered a $5,000 bribe in a political type of context—a large sum of money, at the time; this was before the dollar’s implosion in the late twentieth century.  There was a hint that the offer was negotiable; and he had heard that others had received bribes of $50,000 to $75,000 for the same corrupt action.  As he related in his memoir, he was tempted simply to see how high the person offering the bribe would go—not from any temptation to take the money, but from a desire to quantify the corruption.  He thought to play along a bit, in the manner of a sting operation.  Then, he realized that this could backfire very badly; so, he gave it a flat no.

PrimeNumber7’s earlier reply to me had some prior context; it would be known to those who have read the thread, and related discussions in 2020.  I have been actively protective of Lauda’s privacy since she disappeared in 2020, and I repeatedly spoke about that within the first 14 pages of this thread.  I infer from PN7’s prior post that he remembers all of these discussions.

---

Why the sudden display of concern?  Despite your prior DT interactions with Lauda, you first showed up in this thread on 3 August 2022, on page 14; and you very evidently had not read any of the thread.  It is inappropriate for you to be second-guessing Lauda’s friend and throwing negativity onto something joyful, from a professed concern for Lauda’s name and memory.

Lauda generally liked what I did for her.  I think that’s patently obvious—as was her general desire to be remembered by things I did for her.  I usually didn’t ask her beforehand when I easily could have, and she was always delighted.  Your above-quoted question is also directly answered by a prior post on this thread, which has been linked from my unpaid signature for the past month; it is quoted above, with some other relevant prior posts.

Now, please feel free to take a shot at solving this jolly good puzzle.  I know that you had positive interactions with Lauda; and the puzzle is a fine way to scam you into reading her final thread.  Furthermore, although I know that it may take awhile to solve this one, or it may even remain unsolved indefinitely, I am waxing a bit impatient.  I have been contemplating another puzzle, with some enigmatic ideas that I didn’t use for this one; but I am reluctant to detract from the existing puzzle by adding new puzzles, while this one remains unsolved.  So, please solve it if you can! 😼


P.S., please stop top-posting.  Thanks.

WTF, are people actually defending brainwallets in the development forum?  Did I wander into the newbie forum by mistake?

Fact:  Brainwallets were popularized by a wallet thief, who created the brainwallet-dot-org site to trick people into creating insecure wallets for him to crack.


NotATether, you basically just don’t know what you are talking about here.  The handwavy scheme that you vaguely describe is not what most people call a “brainwallet”, although it is insecure “squish” (to adapt and extend a term from John Denker).  It is in poor taste for you to suggest that you would charge money to create it, when you are wasting my time; I should send you a bill if I need to explain this to you.  Tip address is in my signature.


And you?  You are not a developer.  Your technical skills are nil.  In my experience, you find it too troublesome to verify a PGP signature.  Your disreputable Reputation troll playpen is over this way: → suchmoon demonstrates exemplary professionalism.

---

I strongly disagree with that statement; but I want to assure you that this forum is day by day ever less representative of Bitcoin.

In particular, the “people” who are rationalizing wallet-thievery on grounds of if you find some keys, the money is “legitimately” yours! would be drop-kicked from any Bitcoin Core developer discussion.  Bitcoin Core developers are professionals.  They have a high standard of ethics.  They take seriously their mission to maintain the most secure financial network in the world.

I notice that other than a few exceptions (such as those who are forum staff, and a few others), many Core developers’ forum accounts have been inactive or rarely active for years—and some of the newer leading Core developers do not even seem to have accounts on this forum, insofar as I can ascertain.  That saddens me, for this is Satoshi’s forum; and some excellent-quality technical discussion still happens here.  But seeing these types of discussions amateur-hour dumpster fires, I am not surprised.

If you want to see what Bitcoin development is like, and the character of the people who are building Bitcoin, go lurk in the places where development happens nowadays.

I may reply another time to some of the other things you said; but it is diverging quite far from the topic here.  It converges with some of the things I would otherwise be writing about, if my time were not being wasted here.  Please feel free to watch for my posts elsewhere, if you are curious.

Meanwhile, I cannot help but be amused at the caliber of minds going bonkers here, and evidently projecting their own psychological problems onto me:


Archive: https://archive.ph/H7aww#selection-5304.0-5315.37

---

It is the only appropriate thing in your post—just not the way that you intended.

To be clear:  I did not send the funds on 2022-04-30 and 2022-07-10.  I have no idea who did.  Lauda had many friends and admirers.  Despite my wish to keep the puzzle puzzling, I do not wish inadvertently to be credited for money that anonymous others contributed to the prize!

I created the puzzle, and I initially funded it with 0.001 BTC on 2021-03-14.

I think it’s remarkable that the first new addition of money came when I was “asleep”—just over a year after I had last posted on this forum.  Of course, others remember Kitty—but I was pleasantly surprised that someone remembered my Kitty-puzzle. 😺

---

Thank you for respecting Lauda’s privacy.


However she learned, she learned well.  A few days ago, I took a walk down memory lane with some of her posts from 2017.  I had seen many of her posts at the time, while lurking; at the time, I was impressed.  Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I am amazed at how accurately she predicted events in a complex system that involved both human decisions, and technology.

Bitcoin is apolitical money, as to external politics—but internally, it is also highly politicized money (and I must credit Cøbra for having pointed out this latter part, somewhere that I didn’t see at the time).  Unlike many other realms of politics, Bitcoin politics often hinge directly on technical factors.  Being technically correct means winning.

I think that one of the reasons why Lauda had such certitude about being on the winning side was that she understood Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism better than Jihan did.  Better than I did, too.  Until I saw the theories put to the test, I myself had some doubts about how the Bitcoin network would behave in various adversarial scenarios.  Lauda was highly confident about this—and she was right.

Besides that, she seemed rarely to engage in deeply technical discussions; but sometimes, she popped up with something like this:

Re: Bitcoin Block confirmations, Why do they lag at times?

Meow.

---

Yes, indeed.

With the glorious context restored to the internal quotation:

Alert:  Newbie obsessed with ranking up.  Paid signature campaigns, watch out!


My age is none of your business; but your proposition seems unlikely temporally impossible.  I learned crypto from PGP, AC2, and Cypherpunks—viz., within the decade when the Web was created.  You are just a n00b reaching for canned insults.  Do you even have a PGP key?


You can allege whatever you want.  Here, you are just a shitcoiner who spent years “disliking” Bitcoin for the exact reason why it exists:  It is permissionless.

Greed eventually got the better of you, and some patent jealously of all the people who bought BTC at orders of magnitude lower prices; thus, you now strut as if you are some kind of an expert.  Someone needs to pop the bubble of your empty conceits.

(Next step:  Correcting, or at least ridiculing your habitual failures of grammar and diction.  Wherefore is there such a nexus between shitcoinery and illiteracy?)


Go ahead and petition the CEO of Bitcoin to ban me.

Well, besides the small fact that you evaded the major substance of my post to reply to the three sentences at the top, you have no idea what you are talking about.  You are obviously just regurgitating whatever swill you drank down on “crypto Twitter”, on Youtube, or on some shitcoin shill site.  That is “research”, to your type.

Given my familiarity with the development process, I feel like I am entering some bizarre alternate reality whenever I see altcoiners pretend that Bitcoin doesn’t have the most active development of any coin.  It is a meme on so-called “crypto Twitter” and amongst “Youtube influencers”.  No exaggeration:  I have seen proponents of an altcoin based on a codefork of Bitcoin Core v0.11.2 claim that Bitcoin is way behind.  (Bitcoin Core is on v23.0, soon v24; due to a renumbering, the v0.11.2 was equivalent to v11.2.)

How can this urban myth persist?  One reason is that Ethereum and its competitors have a “move fast and break things” kind of attitude, whereas Bitcoin Core deliberately has a cautious, conservative development process.  Their goal is not to chase fads, or to be first to ship glitzy features:  Bitcoin’s goal is to be absolutely the most secure, most reliable financial network.  Thus although Bitcoin Core development is so active that it’s difficult to keep up with it, most of the activity is beneath the surface where tweety-types and idiotic “influencers” never see it.

Since you are the type to learn best from videos, I suggest watching what Gloria Zhao says about security:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te-2ke6g3lU

With that being said, I do need to give credit where due.  For all its many faults, Ethereum has been good at three things.  I may cover those in another post sometime.  It is not worthwhile here—especially not whereby the proper topic is that with its switch to POS, ETH is turning itself into an illegal unregistered security.

Now, lest my crypto-anarchist friends suppose that I have suddenly turned legalist, I should add what I recently remarked in another thread:


You see, Mr. “EarnOnVictor”, you want to do something that is illegal in most jurisdictions:  Trade an unregistered security, i.e. a near-future POS version of ETH.  Whether or not it is wise or good, as a practical matter, Ethereum has no hope of getting away with it.

I do not have the foolish attitude of some Bitcoiners who believe that governments cannot shut Bitcoin down.  However, Bitcoin is incomparably more difficult to stop.  Regulators and politicians are not always so stupid as clueless Internet commentators presume; and I don’t doubt that some of the smarter ones take the cost of enforcement into consideration when they decide on their approach.  With Bitcoin, thus far, it seems they want to regulate with a relatively light touch.  I think that the cost of enforcement, combined with Bitcoin’s essential merit, constitute the major factors in the developing difference of regulators’ treatment of Bitcoin versus shitcoins.

I note that the Ethereum Foundation being in Swiss jurisdiction is meaningless, when the U.S. could throw the whole Ethereum ecosystem into turmoil simply by shutting down ConsenSys.  Whereas Bitcoin does not even have a centralized foundation, let alone any centralized critical infrastructure run by companies amenable to enforcement actions.  Bitcoin’s past experiment with a centralized foundation taught it lessons that Ethereum never learned; and it doesn’t really have any critical centralized infrastructure at all.

Yes, indeed.  I have seen the same argument raised elsewhere.  Sometimes, unfortunately, it is raised by people who are unaware that there is no reliable way to measure the number of “lost coins”—or even to estimate that, beyond a very vague guess.  Thank you for noting that.  People who keep their coins in deep cold storage for years do not deserve to have their coins presumed lost.

I think that your line of reasoning is obviously correct.  However, it suffers a problem that most supply-side arguments ignore:  Market demand, which is volatile, is oftentimes more important than supply.

Usually, practical dominance of demand-side economics in Bitcoin overwhelm supply-side considerations.  Before the first halving, Bitcoin’s supply-inflation rate was absurdly high!  Between the first and second halvings, supply-side inflation was still extremely high.  But demand grew so fast that the BTC price went from zero to $12.25 by the first halving, and from there to $652.14 by the second halving.  (Source of price quotes.)  As such, Bitcoin has behaved as economically deflationary (price deflation, for things priced in BTC) even when its supply was wildly inflating.

The inverse also applies:  When demand falls, supply-side considerations cannot create value out of thin air.  Many altcoins suffer this problem:  They cargo cult Bitcoin’s supply limitations, or even burn large portions of their supplies^* to try to pump the price; then, they wonder why they fail economically.  Simple:  Nobody wants the coins.

(^* N.b. that the linked essay essentially admits in other words that many tokens have what are, indeed, the key attributes of a security—and that ETH will have those attributes after it switches to POS.  Uh...  Whoops!)

The question of Bitcoin’s practical utility as an inflation hedge is a question of demand growth being greater than or equal to supply growth.  It is very far from market saturation, so I think it is an excellent long-term hedge against inflation.  Betting against BTC now is essentially a prediction that its market is already at or near saturation.  It seems like a very poor bet to me!  And I think that by the time its market approaches anywhere near saturation, BTC supply inflation will be negligible—effectually negative, for the reason that you explain.

Its volatility can compromise its short- to medium-term qualities in this regard; I think that’s what people are complaining about.  People who bought in December 2017, or anytime from December 2020 – early June 2022, who needed to spend money in mid-June through late July, were definitely at a loss—even nominally, never mind inflation.  There is no such thing as a store of value with zero risk of any kind, so I think the solution there is better strategies for handling volatility and risks.  It is very rare for BTC long-term holders to take a loss on long-held coins!

All that being said, I must emphasize:  The titular reason for this thread was a question of whether Bitcoin was intended to be an inflation hedge.  It was.  That is implicit in its design; and Satoshi himself also said as much explicitly.


Probably because with some exceptions, many of the people posting there are just sigspamming.

Poor Mr. Gantslir.  He shall suffer the slings and arrows of “crypto Twitter” tweeting furiously at him, when the SEC runs through shitcoinland like a bull in a china shop.  It shall hurt Mr. Gonslear terribly, because... um... I dunno.

The funny thing is that decentralization matters.  And one of the only coins (arguably, the only coin) that is sufficiently decentralized to have some chance of resisting regulatory interference is—Bitcoin, the one coin that Mr. Ginslar affirmatively said is not within his agency’s jurisdiction.  Amazing how that works.

I will illustrate with only one example of what I mean.  Beneath is marketing veneer of fake “decentralization”, the whole Ethereum ecosystem has a practical dependency on a single U.S.-based company:  ConsenSys, the owners of Infura and of the vertically integrated Metamask wallet.  If Infura were to go down, it would cause ecosystem-wide disruption in Ethereum that could not be caused in Bitcoin by eliminating any single party, or even any small group of parties.

Another funny thing:  After my prior post here, I posted in an Ethereum thread a substantive argument that POS ETH will be deemed an illegal unregistered security.  I quoted from a law professor, who reached the same conclusion that I have been saying about that for awhile.  The topic starter, who has an admitted history of having “disliked” Bitcoin, insulted me while dodging the substance of I said about the issue of POS tokens being illegal securities offerings. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Poor Mr. Genßler, needing to deal with that.

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I think that the essential nature of democracy is to fool people into believing that they do something useful, while they uselessly dissipate their energies.  It is probably the most effective strategy that has ever been invented for a régime to prevent a revolution.

An online petition is only an extreme version of that; for unlike participation in the official democratic process, it does not even theoretically have any authority.  For organizing impactful action, I think that blogging and tweeting should have more practical effect—i.e., usually-negligible (rarely-high) instead of always-none; and that does not pacify people by fooling them with a mirage that they are directly making some sort of an actual change.

Cringe.  Conflating signatures (authentication) with encryption (confidentiality) is such a basic error that I am not sure if you may be trolling me Slashdot-style, making a ridiculous statement to attempt wasting my time with a long, detailed correction.

Unfortunately, clueless newbies who may somehow imagine that multisignature could “encrypt” (!) seed phrase words (!!) are the same clueless newbies who would attempt naïvely, linearly dividing up the words of a seed phrase—as you originally suggested, and you continue suggesting.  Suffice it to say:  You are unqualified to give security advice.  Stop giving bad security advice.


Quoted for the lulz.


I added highlighting to the internal quote above, for a reason.  The problem that you state is well-known and completely obvious.  The solution is that “M/N” thing:  Any M signatures out of a set of size N can authorize a spend.  Say, a 3-of-5 signature, or a 7-of-11 signature.  IIRC, some high-value escrow deals on this forum have used something like 2-of-3 or 3-of-4 multisignature with multiple high-trust escrow agents.

(2-of-3 multisignature also allows coöperative close of an escrow deal:  If Alice and Bob both acknowledge that the deal is properly completed, they send the money as agreed.  In case of a dispute, the escrow agent—effectually here, an arbiter—can sign together with Alice to send the money to Alice, or sign together with Bob to send the money to Bob.)

For dividing up secrets, a very different approach than multisignature, Secret Sharing also does M/N.  But it has many sharp edges, footguns, and bad implementations.  I disagree with gmaxwell’s categorical condemnation of Secret Sharing; but as things stand with implementations, I will not recommend it to anyone who is not a security expert with an appropriate use case.  Just use multisignature instead.

I miss Kitty. 😿

Fearless and fearsome.  Straight shooter.  Never bent, evaded, or dissimulated to play forum politics.  Ferocious defender of Bitcoin.

Continuing on my prior post in this thread, I celebrated Bitcoin Independence Day appropriately:

• Quotes of some classic Lauda posts from the Fork Wars.  Post in the Wall Observer, where once upon a time, Lauda came in second in an election for the new “topic starter”.

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Indeed.  Let’s keep a puzzle about the puzzle.  I have been advertising the Lauda memorial puzzle in my signature for almost the past 17 months; and it has been discussed extensively in the past few pages of this thread.  Nonetheless, it seems to be the best-kept secret of this forum!

Like the puzzle itself, all of the information needed to claim the money is hiding in plain sight.  Unlike finding information about the puzzle, recovering the private key requires thinking like nullius.

Dividing up a seed phrase that way is not secure.  Each word of the seed that you leak exponentially decreases security.  An attacker who recovers a large enough proportion of shares, but not the whole thing, will be able to bruteforce the rest of the seed.  Furthermore, there is no way to provide redundancy, or to specify M/N access policies.

A popular approach to try to solve that is Shamir’s Secret Sharing.  In M/N Secret Sharing, an attacker who obtains M-1 shares has no information about the seed.  That has had some horribly buggy implementations, and it has been criticized generally by some experts (notably, Greg Maxwell).  I do NOT recommend using it, unless you know exactly what you are doing; but I disagree with the general criticism.  It needs better implementations, better standards (such as the Satoshi Labs protocol for this), and application to use cases where it makes sense—not ridiculous use cases, where it is too often misapplied.  Reconstruction of the key is potentially a major problem for the use case stated in OP; therefore, it may not make sense at all here, depending on the circumstance.  I note that there exists some enterprise software using SSS to secure the keys for corporate secrets; most Bitcoiners have no idea about that, and it is not a Bitcoin thing.

Multisignature, as I suggested in my prior post, accomplishes the same objective for the use case addressed in OP.  With Taproot, a M/N multisig (and many other access control conditions) can be made indistinguishable on-chain from ordinary spends; this obviates any blockchain privacy and distinguishability concerns, one of my own general objections to multisig.

0. I have no time for this drama.  Why would I want to create a new thread about it?

1. This is not “hijacking”.  Here in the Development & Technical Discussion forum, it is customary to call it out when someone is seeking to steal money while pretending to do otherwise:  Brainwallet promoters, LBC (which fillippone praised in OP here), etc.  The development forum moderators sometimes speak up about that themselves.  As fillippone may not know because he’s not a development-forum regular, there have been massive flamewars here over LBC—sometimes involving one of the moderators; I was tangentially involved with that years ago, via an argument with an LBC shill who also ridiculously claimed that he had found real money by clicking around on one of these “list all bitcoin keys” sites.  (Not keys-dot-lol; a different one.)

By the by, odolvlobo, you have been around for awhile:  What happened to the Bitcoin community whitehats who used to search for keys, for the purpose of securing and returning the money of people with vulnerable wallets?  That is the exact opposite of what fillippone announced in OP he wishes to do.  (That he is laughably incompetent about it is beside the point:  The question here is one of intent.)

But since you want a technical discussion, odolvlobo, I should point out (as I noted earlier) that OP here is inaccurate and misleading in its characterization of Bitcoin’s security.

How I wound up here:  In the Wall Observer, I posted the following.  As you are aware, odolvlobo, I am entirely correct:

[WO] Perennially popular misinformation about Bitcoin keys.

fillippone replied to that (archive) in a manner that seemed to suggest he was arguing with my correct technical information about Bitcoin’s security level, and trying to teach me about the existence of sites that list all Bitcoin keys.  He directed me here.  At first, I just rolled my eyes—well, okay, I have helped to teach plenty of people how this Bitcoin thing actually works.  But then, my jaw hit the floor when I clicked through here and saw that he claimed it would be “legitimate” to take any money he could hypothetically find this way.

He is acting as if money is just floating around in cypherspace, there for the taking if only he can somehow find it—dreaming of anonymously snatching someone’s life savings, without giving a damn if that’s what it is—and nobody pointed this out.  WTF!? 😾

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Archive: https://archive.ph/5yeFn#selection-4285.0-4423.139

That is quite clearly a retaliatory abuse of the trust system.  And unlike tags, which are entirely discretionary and unmoderated, flags have objective criteria that must be met.  For a Type-1 flag, the criterion is that anyone dealing with a user must be “at a high risk of losing money”, according to a determination “based on concrete red flags which any knowledgeable & reasonable forum user should agree with, and it is not based on the user's opinions.”

For the record, to prevent any possible accusation of retaliatory escalation, I was already considering a Type-1 flag on fillippone.  I did not (yet?) raise one, mostly because seriously:  I have no time for this nonsense.  Claiming that it is “legitimate” to take money (hypothetically) found by searching for other people’s private keys is indubitably a “concrete red flag which any knowledgeable & reasonable forum user should agree with”, indicating “a high risk of losing money” in dealing with a person of such character.