As the inventor of a Bitcoin sexual fetish,(*) I must interject:

This story goes better when she is mesmerized by the sight of the UTXO, the immutable mark of the carnal transaction in which she laid herself down as a sacrificial offering to the god of Bitcoin.  She feels that she herself is forever hashed into the blockchain; it arouses her anew, it enthralls her, and she becomes addicted to accumulating bitcoins through ciphersex...

Based on prior research, I observe that printable temporary tattoo paper is readily available, and suitable for QR codes.  “Entrance fee.”

Gives new meaning to the word “HODL”.

(* Deep in my post history are modest hints, partly veiled by smoke and mirrors.  Not giving links, because I’m a tease.)


I could help—for a price.  Though I think it works best in the written word (or in real life), and best appeals to females.  (Women are by far the biggest consumers of written erotica, which is just fine with me!)

Ah, Sway, now you are just being coy.  Admit it:  You are tickled by the idea that, depending on whose opinion you believe, either the forum’s most eloquent sesquipedalian genius or the forum’s most arrogant jerk wanted to send all of his money to you—if but only you could achieve the impossible!  (“Focus on the IF.”)

By the way, I hope you don’t mind if, at this juncture, I kindly request that you apply at least a modicum of correct grammar to your posts.  This is not to be rude, much less to make a grammar flame.  Your posts are actually difficult to read; you would be a more effective communicator, if you at least formed proper sentences and used apostrophes where appropriate.  This isn’t Twitter.  I am trying to help, if only so that I can better understand your financial insights.

For you see, I am all about peace, harmony, and cute kittens.  Really.  Ask anyone here.

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Don’t get me started.

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Personal text:


Thanks; I’m not actually trading.  I am only discussing with SwayStar whether or not she wants to take all of my money and gamble with it.

Damn, V8s, important message posted while I was writing long thing.

The deeper problem is ASICs.  Special-purpose hardware can be controlled on the supply side.  What happens if mining hardware requires a licence to purchase?  What, you think they won’t go that far to prevent terrorist laundering and money financing?

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I am in Bitcoin because it is more or less our last hope.

I intended to write of this recently...  I actually don’t believe in much of the maximalist economic stuff.  Yes, Bitcoin has long-term fundamentals and will increase in value.  No, I don’t buy that it will become a “world reserve currency”; that’s a terribly naïve proposition, whereas it will never be allowed by bankers who can’t control it—bankers who control tens of trillions of dollars in assets, own governments and thus militaries, tanks, ICBMs, and nuclear weapons, start wars at the drop of a hat, topple governments like toys and kill millions of people...  Do you really suppose that their lunch can be eaten by some software on the Internet, which, by the way, they also own and could shut down at any time?

If Bitcoin fails, there is really nothing else to shield us from being crushed into total, inescapable enslavement through the lethal combination of scam fractional-reserve “money”, total financial surveillance, and KYC-everything permission systems.

Bitcoin gives us some freedom of action to strive to obtain more freedom—if we choose to do so.

All other freedoms depend on financial freedom.  For only one example, just try to exercise the freedom of speech if financial censorship and financial surveillance can be used to ensure that you cannot buy even a crust of bread without permission, and you can be physically located at any time.  For only one example.

Jay, let’s take this as scientific gambling:  Pop those numbers into the Kelly criterion!

If I believed that SwayStar could reliably gain 5% on even close to 40/60 odds (acknowledging that that’s just your off-the-cuff example probability, not what she claimed) versus 1% losses, then I would practically beg her to let me send her all of my money right now, on agreement to let her keep half the profit (or hell, even most of it) as a management fee—just keep hitting those trades!  Because I would get rich quick that way.

Really, do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.  Geometric growth (what Kelly addresses) is funny.  “Turn 0.005 BTC into 1 BTC” kind of funny, and more.

Of course, I’m not exactly doing that.  Just call me a skeptic.


Yeah... about that...


If you could be certain of the odds, and if the odds are EV+, Kelly bets that roll profits back into the pot are, of course, mathematically optimal for growth in the sense of “I no longer care what the market does, because my portfolio already went to the moon”.  Confirmed science, lulz.  (Hey, there’s that “IF” again.)


There is certainly a difference between plagiarism and improper attribution.  I could quote some academic integrity discussions on that, but then, you know, I’d need to attribute them, and I am just too lazy for that right now.


UTC is the Internet anonymity time zone.

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Check out RGB/Spectrum.  It’s still in the relatively early stages, but seems to have competent people involved; and IIUC, it’s being backed somehow (?) by Tether people.  (I would guess that somebody is probably sick and tired of running on a network cries out in pain from the load of all the USDT flying around.)

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I think that I already am.  Did you hear?  SwayStar is going to make me rich!

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I did a double-take when I saw Sr. with 500 merits due to slow server update.  Nice move.

Well, I said that I should post here...


Given that the language is fully capable of supporting Layer 2 projects (and IIUC, such projects do exist), the problem there is more that the development and market culture suffers a sort of “everything on-chain!” brain-damage.

Arguably, there may be a place for a blockchain which can execute complex contracts on-chain for use cases in which it is desirable for execution to occur when some parties are offline.  (I am not saying that that’s Ethereum!  I am not saying that “complex” means “Turing-complete”, either, though I take a somewhat nuanced view of that question.)  The problem occurs when that’s the way that everything is done, even when it makes no sense—which is usually.

I think that the vast majority of “defi” use cases can have contracts executed fully off-chain, using the blockchain only as a synchronization and enforcement mechanism.  It would result in much faster, more private, more efficient trades.  Why not do it that way?


Compare and contrast (somewhat different concept, but very close):

http://langsec.org/occupy/


I don’t think that a Turing-complete execution environment is necessarily fatal.  After all, if you use a non-Turing-complete smart-contract language, you are executing it on a Turing-complete computer at some level; and for those willing to put serious CS expertise into writing contracts (i.e., not average Solidity developers!), formal verification has made some great advances in recent years.  Attempts to fix Ethereum’s notoriously weak security, such as KEVM, are interesting in that regard; cf. IELE.

For a new project that is not constrained by backwards compatibility with a blockchain full of shitty code, I would hope that some concise explanations would be provided of how they address these issues.


Thanks.  Will look into this...

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Quick question:  Why not aim for Spectrum/RGB?  That’s a smart-contract platform which will support defi on Bitcoin.  It will use the Simplicity language, which is designed from the ground up for security verification; and Spectrum on Layer 3 (atop Lightning) will have the privacy, speed, and efficiency advantages of off-chain contract execution.

Overall, I would suggest that if you want to gain people’s trust, do fewer manifestos (preaching to the choir here) and more informative explanations about just how this works, what useful properties the system has, and why it should be trusted to not fail catastrophically.

The “EV+” part is arguable. :-)


Sure, I’m interested—if it’s private, secure, and reliable and if 0.7%/year margin interest isn’t too good to be true.

I saw you drop that link a few days ago.  The thread seemed long on hype and short on details of how it actually works; I stopped reading after
ZmnSCPxj’s very thoughtful post, which appears to be unanswered.  (Both ZmnSCPxj and gmaxwell, who +5ed that, know what the fuck they are talking about.)  I was going to ask something along the lines of, why not use or build toward the upcoming Spectrum project (Layer 3 smart-contract platform built on Lightning Network and RGB, with Simplicity as the formally verifiable smart contract language—and the privacy advantages of an off-chain protocol!), but didn’t bother.

I just went through the thread again, and peeked at the Github link (but see as yet no reason to spend time and effort trying to understand their code).

You seem interested in promoting that for some reason.  I would suggest that if you want to gain people’s trust, do fewer manifestos (preaching to the choir here) and more informative explanations about just how this works, what useful properties the system has, and why it should be trusted to not fail catastrophically.  Answering ZmnSCPxj’s post would probably be a good start.  (No, I don’t know him—but I have learned something new from almost every one of his posts that I’ve ever read on bitcoin-dev.)

Edit:  I followed up there.

Personal text checks out:


“Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States!”

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Good one.  Is the second rule, “Don’t brag about how Bitcoin bought you a Lambo”?

An insightful comment from the Reddit thread:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ipy7le/rule_number_one_in_bitcoin/g4qv6wv/

Having always kept my savings in cash before I had Bitcoin, that rings true.  Unfortunately, I think that many people nowadays are sufficiently foolish that they would brag about cash at home.  I have even seen people post photos of their gold and silver holdings on readily identifiable social media accounts, with faces in the picture (!).  Some people just ain’t so bright.

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That’s close to 500M permutations, not 500K.  And any desktop PC made in about the past ten years should be able to crunch through them all very quickly.

The words in a 24-word seed would have 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000 permutations.  You won’t be bruteforcing that with a desktop PC—not even if you leave it running for a few years!

(N.b. that there is a slight flaw in what I said above:  Words in a seed phrase can repeat.  That will be relatively rare.  When your seed phrase has exactly n unique words, then the number of permutations will be n!.)


Say what!?  (Why do people suppose that the word “blockchain” magically solves all problems?)

Ah, the joys of leverage.  So it seems that my inference was wrong.

Now, what really makes me curious is this:  Suppose that the price of X is a random walk.  I am not saying so about BTC, or any other existing asset:  I am contemplating a hypothetical asset X.

A random walk without drift is pretty much the canonical example of a (non-)trend that can’t be exploited:  It presents a straight gamble.  But it seems to me that if you can wager both ways at once as you describe—betting one way with your money, and betting the other way on leverage with other people’s money—then that would be ideal for exploiting a random walk.

Waving my hands a bit here (what type of random walk, etc.), say you somehow arrange it so that you have exactly 50% odds of hitting your stoploss before your profit take, 50% vice versa:  You thus have a 50% chance of losing 1%, and a 50% chance of gaining 5%.  It is EV+ gambling on 50/50 odds.

It seems that I must have made a mistake here (and if I didn’t, I had better get a margin account—which would mean “defi”, because I don’t do KYC, and I don’t know of any centralized exchanges that offer no-KYC margin accounts—sorry, Jay).  What gives?

Well, this is interesting:  What, exactly, is the difference between selling BTC that you own, and selling BTC that you borrowed on margin—other than the latter costing interest money (and having unbounded potential loss—but I note you said you set a stop-limit on the upside)?

I don’t see how that would protect you from an unexpected pump in the market, any differently than a stop-limit buy order on the upside.

(Of course, counting in Bitcoin and not dollars is good.  Who the hell wants Fed toilet paper?)

It’s funny:  Before I saw the below, I was just thinking to write a Development & Technology post about BIP 39 flaws, especially the stupid cargo-cult crypto use of PBKDF2 and the ill-designed “passphrase” feature.  I should probably do it sometime.

(To be clear:  The use of seed phrases is good, very good.  The standard just has some points that are ill-advised, which you can safely ignore.)


I recommend against this.  It is security theatre that simply increases your chance of losing your coins (if you forget your passphrase), without adding any significant security.


That is an unrealistic expectation.

If your seed phrase is compromised, how likely do you really think it is that you will discover that before your coins are gone?

How much time do you expect a passphrase to buy you?  I mean, in quantitative terms based on real data about how fast password crackers can crack a weak passphrase stretched with a piddling 2048 iterations of PBKDF2 security theatre.

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The security of your seed phrase rests on keeping the seed phrase secret.  Generate the seed phrase using a cryptographically secure source of randomness (CSPRNG), and set it in your mind that your coins are gone if that gets compromised.

Unless you have considerable security expertise for evaluating the benefit of what you are doing according to a sound security model, pinning your hopes on the passphrase only gives you a false sense of security—especially when you start with the low standard, “even a relatively weak passphrase”!  Whereas you already have a strong “passphrase”:  It is the seed phrase itself.

If you were capable of reliably memorizing a cryptographically secure passphrase for the long term (which you are not—and I’m not, either!), then you could simply memorize the seed phrase (don’t try this unless you want to lose your coins).  The whole purpose of engraving your seed phrase in metal is to make sure that you don’t lose pseudorandom information which is strong in the first instance.


“Plausible deniability” is a concept that needs to die.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-January/015547.html

Quote from: nullius

[...]

I rather suspect the concept of “plausible deniability” of having been invented by a detective or agent provocateur.  There are few concepts more useful for helping suspects shoot themselves in the foot, or frankly, for entrapping people.

[...]

If you are publicly known to be deepy involved in Bitcoin, then nobody will believe that your one-and-only wallet contains only 0.01 BTC.  That’s not even “plausible”.  But if you have overall privacy practices which leave nobody knowing or suspecting that you have any Bitcoin at all, then there is nothing to “deny”; and should a Trezor with (supposedly) 0.01 BTC be found in your possession, that’s much better than “plausible”.  It’s completely unremarkable.

Whereas if you are known or believed to own large amounts of BTC, a realistic bad guy’s response to your “decoy” wallet could be, “I don’t believe you; and it costs me nothing to keep beating you with rubber hose until you tell me the *real* password.”

It could be worse, too.  In a kidnapping scenario, the bad guys could say, “I don’t believe you.  Hey, I also read Trezor’s website about ‘plausible deniability’.  Now, I will maim your kid for life just to test whether you told me the *real* password.  And if you still don’t tell me the real password after you see that little Johnny can no longer walk, then I will kill him.”

The worst part is that you have no means of proving that you really *did* give the real password.  Indeed, it can be proved if you’re lying by finding a password which reveals a hidden wallet—but *you* have no means of affirmatively proving that you are telling the truth!  If the bad guys overestimated your riches (or if they’re in a bad mood), then little Johnny is dead either way.

In a legalistic scenario, if “authorities” believe you have 1000 BTC and you only reveal a password for 0.01 BTC, the likely response will not be to let you go.  Rather, “You will now sit in jail until you tell the *real* password.”  And again:  You have no means of proving that you did give the real password!

“Plausible deniability” schemes can backfire quite badly.

[...]

That was in reply to this:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-January/015529.html

Quote from: Peter Todd

Quote from: RHavar

I think you're under-appreciating how useful the "plausible deniability". Someone I know was (solo) traveling to the United States when a border agent asked her to unlocked her phone; thumbed through her apps, ended up finding tinder and went through all her recent conversations to make sure she wasn't involved in any "pay for sex things".

In the same light, I travel frequently and constantly have my trezor on me. If I am asked to unlock it, I will have no problems doing so (as refusal will no doubt lead to deportation) and showing my personal wallet (which sadly hasn't had much use since fees became ridiculous).

Trezor's "plausible deniability" scheme could very well result in you going to jail for lying to border security, because it's so easy for them to simply brute force alternate passwords based on your seeds. With that, they have proof that you lied to customs, a serious offense.

I would strongly advise you not to use it in that situation.

Real life is not like the movies.

You never want “plausible deniability”.  What you want is to be above suspicion.  For example, nobody who knows me “IRL” would ever suspect that I have secret bitcoins.  Neither cops nor robbers will even think of it.  I don’t need to construct the types of cocked-up stories that investigators enjoy tearing apart, or make decoy wallets.  I don’t need to deny anything, “plausibly” (“Focus on the IF!”) or otherwise:  Nobody will even ask.

O(n!) for the order.  If you totally lose the order, then it depends on how many of those precious washers there are to permute.

12! is only 479,001,600, easy for a computer to bruteforce search.  24! is an awful lot bigger, and would require over 2⁷⁹ work to bruteforce—say goodbye to your coins, unless you have a vast amount of supercomputing resources.  For BIP 39 (not Electrum), the checksum bits can help to optimize the work that you do when searching; but you will still need to do the search.

(For comparison, the ordering of a deck of cards has 52! permutations, about 2²²⁵.)

If you lose only a part of the order—say, if just a few washers fall off the end and scatter across the floor—then recovery will accordingly be easier.


Each washer that you totally lose means 2048 trial-and-error attempts to replace it, if you still know the ordering of all washers (including the blank spots).  That’s exponential, to the power of the number of lost washers.

Losing one is easy to fix!

If you lose up to 3–4 washers, it should be feasible to recover your coins with a home PC and much patience.  If you lose 5–6, recovery will be awfully expensive; it may still be worthwhile for a whale wallet.  If you lose 7, I would guess that the NSA’s supercomputers could still recover your coins—maybe.  If you lose 12, recovery will be far beyond the combined capability of all computers on earth; that is why 12 words is the minimum seed length.

I myself use 24-word seeds, for to protect even against superintelligent space aliens with star-sized computers and a few billion years of spare time.  But note that Bitcoin’s public-key security level is the same level as that of a 12-word seed, i.e. 128 bits.  (Bitcoin uses 256-bit elliptic curve keys, but brute force is not the best known way to attack that class of cryptography; this is many orders of magnitude faster.)

If you lose the ordering and lose some washers, then—eh, good luck, LOL!

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I don’t think that obfuscation is in any way useful to protect you there.  Indeed, it is more likely to frustrate you—after you forget how you obfuscated.  Just rely on keeping the whole thing secret, which it needs to be anyway.

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Just seeing this for the first time.  Damn, I like it.  Though you probably want to research the properties of your washer material carefully, if you want for it to be fire-resistant, etc.  Compare Jameson Lopp’s trials of various seed-storage products.

Most importantly, this requires no Bitcoin-specific hardware purchases that are usually infeasible to make anonymously.  Inexpensive materials available at any hardware store, and maybe even already on-hand in your garage—excellent!

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Final edit:  Thinking over those numbers, and the BIP 39 use of a bit of PBKDF2, I am slightly revising down my estimates of how many lost washers you can recover.  I am accustomed to thinking pessimistically from a defender’s perspective, and thus making somewhat liberal assumptions about what a cracker can do.  Whereas I don’t want to dose people with hopium about how many lost seed words they can get back, realistically.  Let’s put it this way:  I would not be surprised if somebody can crack 4 words on high-end home PC hardware in a semi-reasonable time; but if you rely on doing that, you may be in for a lot of pain!

I think I’m not alone in rooting for anyone who shorts in this market to get fucked.


Is proudhon actually unaware that maximum potential profits from a short are limited?  I confirmed by mathematics that the difference between a positive integer < 10⁹ and zero is finite and < 10⁹.

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(Edit—I also realize what ought to be obvious:  Anyone shorting Bitcoin is not holding any.  Because being long and short in the same asset would be insane.  If you’re long and you expect a drop, you sell:  You don’t borrow more of the asset to sell it.  (Edit again:  Though if one were to start applying “proudhon maths” consistently, maybe going simultaneously long and short in the same asset would be a hedge.))


Go, Bitcoin, go!

And here I thought that your secret agenda was to induce Woers subconsciously to fantasize about what if someone who is a stellar genius compared to proudhon were female.

I am not swayed by this conspiracy.


But... but... your GIF violates social distancing rules!  That’s just cruel.

If there existed such a thing as a complete predictive method for financial markets (a.k.a. a “crystal ball”), and if you possessed it, then you would be using it to gain unbounded wealth—and you would not be posting about it on an Internet forum.

That sounds obvious.  But it bears noting, whereas too many people forget it—especially on the Internet...

(Other stuff to reply to, but no time.  Cheers & thanks for the reply.)

Seriously?  That is just way too pretty to fit my mental image of proudhon.

Ah, so your thesis is that shitcoin miners will dump their profits into Bitcoin.  Makes sense.  The way I read your prior post (and I read it twice), it came off as implying that the Bitcoin price should rise to equalize profitability over the higher cost of mining Bitcoin, or something of that nature.  Thanks for explaining.


I don’t think that’s a proudhonism.  Most shitcoins should and will go to zero.  Ether probably won’t go to zero anytime soon, but it is way overvalued; and in terms of fundamentals, the ETH2 vapour clusterfork will continue to provide merry entertainment whilst other projects with better technology rise to eat their lunch.  (I’m not even stating that from a Bitcoin-maximal perspective:  If you want a blockchain that does what Ethereum does, but does it without so much failure and frustration, then you should be looking elsewhere...)  So, long-term prospects there are indeed quite bad; and in the shorter term, why wouldn’t dumping by miners help push down the ETH price?  I have seen that happen with others.

Meanwhile, enjoy your ethereally “mined” bitcoins!

You misunderstood me.  I added back in brackets an important phrase that you snipped.

Crypto is bigger than Bitcoin, because crypto is bigger than cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is only one application of crypto:  The usage of crypto to create a new form of money.  Usually, if I want to refer to cryptocurrency, I simply talk about Bitcoin.

Similarly, I hate it when people conflate the Internet with the Web.  The Internet is much more than the Web.  The Web is only one application of the Internet, just as Bitcoin is only one application of crypto—and of the Internet, too.

The Internet includes the Bitcoin network.  Well, imagine if people started calling Bitcoin “net”, and then expanded that to start calling any networked monetary application “net”—and then, took to assuming that the word “net” means the latest hyped-up shitcoin scam.  So as for “crypto”.


It’s not a “pre-Bitcoin usage”; the usage is current.  We all use crypto daily in a many ways that have nothing to do with money.

See that padlock in your web browser?  That means crypto.  The point is not pedantic:  It’s a familiar current usage to anyone who is accustomed to discussing, say, the merits of modern crypto in TLS 1.3 AEAD ciphersuites.  Things have much improved since the bad old days of “export crypto”.

See also all the Crypto Wars 3.0 stuff in the United States, with ongoing attempts to ban or seriously restrict crypto so as to protect the poor, innocent sheep from terrorist molesters and child financiers, etc., etc.—who will undoubtedly stop Doing Bad Things and cease to exist, if but only the government will be wise enough to keep uncompromised crypto out of the hands of Obedient Citizens who are are actually worried about what the law says.

“Crypto” means more than money!

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If I wanted to be pedantic, I would delve into the senses of the word “crypto” that are unrelated to cryptography.

True, yes—but oh, it’s much worse than that.

I use strong crypto to secure my e-mail, to protect my Internet usage against spies, to authenticate my identity, and to prevent potential thieves from reading the hard disk of my laptop.

I remember the First Crypto Wars of the 90s.

I love crypto.  I have been using crypto since long before Bitcoin ever existed; indeed, it was my longtime interest in crypto that got me interested in Bitcoin, not vice versa.  Crypto is much bigger than Bitcoin:  Bitcoin is only one of the most interesting applications of crypto, the fulfillment of the dreams of those who remember the Digicash meltdown and all the cypherpunks talk about the future of money based on strong cryptography.

It grates on my sanity to see shitcoin scammers demanding KYC for airdrop ICO free ponies get rich quick crypto crypto buzzword FREE ponies hype crypto , please Sir I crypto bounties , all in the name of “crypto” , t̵̗̮̭͇̲̓͆̚h̸̢̛͎̜̥̺̊́̆̅̕͠e̸̡̻̺̣̯͉̹̽ ̵̟̙̥̦̦̍̾̂̑h̴̖̥̝̬̞̖̭͒͝i̷̡̦̓̎̑d̸̡̡̮͖͍̗͇̎̉͑̽̾͠d̵̢͇̾̍̒e̴͎̖̥̖̔̀͗̕͜͜n̶̦͚͎̝̓̽͂͂́̋͌ ̸̨̝̹̘̆͠ģ̴̲̜͚̭̐̈́̀͌̄͜o̷̫̙͒̀͂͜͜ͅḑ̸̱̹̘̤̬̅̊̌̈́͒͛͘s̶̢̫͇̒̑ ̴̨̻̬̼̱̝͔̾͊̉̍̍̅̇W̸̮͒̅̿̅̊̃̐͜E̴̤͍̼̅̓͑̀̔̃͘E̵̟̎P̴̗̦͑̆̉ ̴̣̼̎͗̎͆a̵̝̒̑̃̔͊ṥ̷̳̑̉̑ ̵͖͕͓͕͐͌͜͝a̵̼̰͖̗̒͛l̵̘̦̫̰͖͙̋l̵͇̗̩̘̫̓͌̿ ̵̩̲͕̼̅̔̓̍̈́͜c̷̠̻̫̣̽̇͘r̴̬̩̔̈́̋̆y̵̨̧͔̪̪̪̘̌ṕ̶̩̆̂t̸̡̻͐ő̸̞̲͘͘-̴̯̩͔̬̠̦̙̆̀̂̕g̸̡̞̩͎͛̈́͜ò̵̠̞͗̅̀̀̆o̷̗͈̥͈̬͕̒̂d̵̖͙̣͋͗̾n̵̢̡͙͑͋͊̉́e̶̼̪͊̍̄̓s̸̨̗͓̻̈̍̈́̈́͊̚͘s̴̡̗̞̮̬̱͌̆ ̸̲̫̝̿̒̏̎į̸̱̜̹͎̩̋͋̇͜s̶̹͙̺̘̓̎̒͌̆ͅ ̸̱̰̃̕͝D̵̫͓͑E̶͖͓͌̈́̓F̷̟̭̖̬̼͖͉̾̃̄̈̋I̵̺̩̥̦͖̫̓̆̈̚L̶̼̟̭̫͚͚͆ͅĚ̴̡͈̼͍͙̞̆̏̊Ḋ̸͔͉̿̕ ̶̥͙̬̣͇̰͈̂,̷̠̲̰̣̦̯͓̿͝ ̴͙̋̆H̴̰͙̲̫͒̀Ȩ̵̗͓̩̘̦̘̀̌͑̃L̷͉̍͋̕P̷̢̪̠͆̀̚ ̴͉̭͉̻̬͉͐͝Ḿ̷̬̼͓͐̿́E̶͖̓̀̉̌͝ ̸͔̥̓̓̀̊̍͊̄W̵̜̘̻̋̓ͅẸ̴̢͍̘̖̐̌̒͘ ̶̛̲̗̭̙͖̏̈́̈́̌̂̕A̷̢̗̼̍̍͘̚Ŕ̶̯̺̠̋̈̐̊͜Ē̶͎̈́̿̊ ̶̛̰̮̦̥̤̇͒̀̒͆A̵̢̨̤̗̭̙͒̉͘͘C̶̢͈̠͂̄̀C̶̘̺̖̻̭͚̝̓̋̌̿̚U̶̡̡͉̥͈̬͇͌̈̓̀R̸̲̳̣̲̲̳̟̎͆͛S̷̩̟̹͆́͑͋͐̚̕Ė̸̦͙̝̓̒̏͘͘͝D̸̳̺̺̞̝͌̂̾͂͂ ̵̮̩͙̲̘̞̅Ń̴̤O̷̘̥͋̊̀̚T̵̹̫̙̯̤̓ ̴͉͙̪͎͎̦̑̈́̂̄͝B̸̗͍͓̑̍̾͐͝Y̷̨͈̫͋̓͋̀̂̑ ̶͇̐͐̀̊D̶̙̗̝͖̬̖͗̃̈́̀Ĕ̵̢̥̯̜̠̱͓̀̑̿́V̴̰͙̜̺̖̮͕́́͂̽Ĭ̶̪͙͖̼̜̑̒̽L̷̝͐Š̴̺ ̴̡̨̫͎̍͗̈̆̚͜͝B̵̼͎̅̇̓͒̀̉ͅÛ̵̠̾̿̔͒͑͊T̴͇͍̰̍͂͒̍͌͜͜͝ ̸͎͙͕̮͆̏̉̈́̊̅͜B̴̢̻͎͍̥̯̳̆̃̋̀̚Y̷̛̲̖͓̖͚͈̹͋͒ ̶̧̼̟̹͍̉̈́̐͐̒̿ͅP̵̯͋͛È̴̫̗͇̫̤T̷̢̨̬̞͌͑́̚T̵͙̲̤̮̅̋͑Y̶̧̫̙̠͈̓̈͝ ̵̧̠͈̿̋S̵̠͌̑̂̌͘T̷̰͍̲̋̅͂͛Ư̶̧̯̘̠͖̠̏̏P̶̡̨̦̣̭͚̪͐̌I̴̡̞̥͇̘̓́̅Ḑ̴͖̠͕̟̞̤͒̈́Ȉ̸̬̭̻͈͑T̷̲̘͉̘̰̅Y̶̢̢͈̝̹̙̠͒͌ ̷̨̨̝̩̝̑̀͘Ṫ̶͈̣̭̗̙͛Ḩ̸̠͈̫̘̝̉̌Ā̵̩͕͑̀̓͝T̷̮̒̿̌̉́̾̒ ̸̰̪͙͉̠͗̀̒̕C̴̙̲̀̇̿̑͘̕O̶͔͉̝̜̹̻͌̍̐͗Ñ̶̡̗̘̼̎̀̐̐͘͝Ş̷̯̺̇͛U̴̹̰̺̹̅̈͋̆͂͘M̸̭͚̺̆̽̏͑́̀͝E̸͍̫̫̻̯̾̏́͊ͅͅS̴̨̺̹̮̺̹̯͑̿̈́̈ ̴͎͎̯̂Ḁ̶̗͆̿̊̒̑ͅL̵̡̞̫̲̪̺͋̈́̊L̷̞̞̮̍́̆̑͒ ̴̳̟͎̼̖́̓̈́̍̈I̴̝̲̐Ṇ̶̢̨͎͈̞̠̐͐͐̓̀̚ ̶̨̜̮̖̗͝Í̸̭̺̈́̇͌͐̚͝T̵̟̗͔͋̈͊͊̈́͋͝S̵̛͎͙̻̖̞̿̀͑̾̍͜ ̴̧̣̲͉͚̈̾͆́̾͝͠P̵̥͓̹̫̳̙̲̀̈́̅̓̃̄̕Ä̵̖̥̃̄T̵͕̭̠̲̓̅̽̍H̵̘̩͑̒͒

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Confirmed etymologically correct pun.  (Crypto means ‘hidden’.)

I don’t think that this is relevant to Bitcoin’s market prospects.

The notion that Bitcoin is given its value by mining cost, or “backed by electricity”, etc. is a pernicious myth that needs to die.  It is the organic rise of Bitcoin’s value (based on supply and demand) that drives mining cost (and thus, Byzantine security) by increasing hashrate competition.  Not vice versa.

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lolz, confirmed maths?  ;-)

Take those statistics out to eight decimal places if you want real science.

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(Moved, to keep replies in order.)