I am here because of ideals that I have put before profit for years, to my own detriment—a habit that I have been trying to change, thus far without success.
I am here because after long study and excogitation, I concluded that Bitcoin offers some slender hope of solving dire economic, social, and political problems for which I know of no other solution. When I behave as an economically irrational actor, it is only because I rationally value
that over the size of my own wallet.
I am not here for evangelical sermons about “faith”. Frankly, it is not something with which I want to associate myself. Not at all. Not when it is serious.
I also observe that religions are poor financial investments—except for their promoters, who get rich off of them. For comparison, last I heard, it cost about $300k in total to “go clear” in Scientology.
That said, I doubt that
Mircea Popescu ever got rich—his wild claims to the contrary notwithstanding. For the newbies: That was the last time I saw someone try to build a serious Bitcoin cult. In the Bitcoin microcosm, MP got some traction and some followers around 2013–2017, or thereabouts. What disturbs me is to see
this one published in Bitcoin Magazine.
This is not a criticism of Bitcoin. (Protip: Bitcoin does not consist of the opinions of a few mad hatters in WO.)
This is me making a clear public statement of my position—to preserve my own reputation, in case this particular discussion is ever found and linked to any of my other pseudonyms. I do not wish to be associated with “Bitcoin is a religion” stuff—not when it’s not fun-and-funny!—not when it is so deadly serious that
believers lash out at me for criticizing it. I do not wish to make myself look like a lunatic.
The Internet never forgets.
Who tested it? Where is the version that crashed. The version that people played with for a few months before they found the flaw.
You must be new to Bitcoin. Eventually, you will learn the Bitcoin lore.
The early versions of Bitcoin were riddled with flaws.
It took years to refine Bitcoin into what it is now.If you want one specific flaw, try this: >184 billion BTC were created out of thin air on August 15, 2010. It took more than “a few months” to shake that out: Someone exploited it 1 year, 7 months after the Bitcoin software was first published. It was a very basic integer overflow bug, nothing special.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incidentOK, how about a crash? On March 12, 2013, Bitcoin suffered an accidental hardfork that qualifies as a crash of the whole network, IMO.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawikiAs of 2022, IMO, the underlying cause of that crash has
still not been fixed:
The consensus code is married to specific versions of database libraries, to avoid breaking like that again. I call that a workaround, not a proper fix. There are various proposals and research projects that could properly fix the problem—maybe someday.
Transaction malleability was a severe design flaw. I have mentioned it several times. Although it cannot be exploited alone, it was leveraged in practice to build exploits stealing money from poorly-designed, insecure services; early Bitcoin was chock full of idiots who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, such as the idiot who ran Mt. Gox. Worse: Transaction malleability completely prevents the secure construction of whole classes of systems that can be built on top of Bitcoin, including but not limited to the Lightning Network.
Segwit fixed transaction malleability, for Segwit transactions only; it can’t be fixed altogether without a hardfork. One of the major reasons for my wrath at Bcashers was that they wanted for Bitcoin to be stuck with this design-level security flaw.
Overall, indeed, I draw a bright line at Segwit:
Segwit activation was when Bitcoin matured. Before Segwit, Bitcoin was high-risk experimental software—sort of like much of defi today. After Segwit, Bitcoin became world-class, institutional-grade serious financial software. Although the maturation of Bitcoin was much fuzzier and more prolonged, I focus on Segwit because it was a
huge improvement—much moreso even than most Bitcoiners realize (or will acknowledge).
I am a bit nonplussed at some people’s criticism of Saylor for having dismissed Bitcoin in 2013. Whatever his reasons may have been, I myself admit that Bitcoin had credibility problems before the Segwit activation in 2017; and it was not unreasonable for Saylor to wait until 2020 before jumping in with large amounts of money. In 2013, it wasn’t wrong to decline the risk—just as in 2009, 2013, or 2016, it also wasn’t wrong for some early adopters with high risk tolerance to take risks on an experimental-quality financial network.
Satoshi advanced the state of the art: He solved in theory and in practice a seemingly impossible problem, the prevention of double-spends without a central authority. But it was Core that made the system production-quality. I would not entrust billions of dollars worth of value to Satoshi’s original code (LOL).
Moreover, in my extremely not-humble opinion, the greatest single practical contribution by Bitcoin to
security as a process was
Gitian (now deprecated). That started in 2011, after Satoshi disappeared. It was a practical answer to
“Reflections on trusting trust” (Thompson, 1984). Bitcoin developers were some of the pioneers here; nowadays,
Reproducible Builds are an industry best practice for secure open-source software.
OK.... What the fuck?
Satoshi Nakamoto wrote production software that has stood up to 13 years of the most difficult pressure a production distributed database could possibly...
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