There are 2^256 private keys out there: how big is that number?

[ABCbits]

Wait a minute.  For the past three years, nobody noticed that fillippone is a wannabe wallet thief?  This is way beyond Asch.

fillippone will never find anything unless someone tells him about Brainflayer, but that is not the point:  He is audaciously proclaiming wallet-thief intentions that rico666 evasively dissimulated with LBC.  rico666 got tagged for that.  Worse, fillippone claims that this is “legitimate” (!).  And he claims that as a trusted pillar of the community, who should be responsible to the highest standards.  Tagged accordingly.

Doesn't it depend on how you interpret meaning of word "legitimate"? Based on how @fillippone use that word on sentence, i interpret that as Bitcoin ownership based on knowing it's private key.

2. adjective based on known statements or events or conditions
synonyms: logical
                   valid
                   well grounded in logic or truth or having legal force

[1714883267]

1714883267

[1714883267]

1714883267

[1714883267]

1714883267

[1714883267]

1714883267

[1714883267]

1714883267

[aliashraf]

Wait a minute.  For the past three years, nobody noticed that fillippone is a wannabe wallet thief?  This is way beyond Asch.

fillippone will never find anything unless someone tells him about Brainflayer, but that is not the point:  He is audaciously proclaiming wallet-thief intentions that rico666 evasively dissimulated with LBC.  rico666 got tagged for that.  Worse, fillippone claims that this is “legitimate” (!).  And he claims that as a trusted pillar of the community, who should be responsible to the highest standards.  Tagged accordingly.

Doesn't it depend on how you interpret meaning of word "legitimate"? Based on how @fillippone use that word on sentence, i interpret that as Bitcoin ownership based on knowing it's private key.

2. adjective based on known statements or events or conditions
synonyms: logical
                   valid
                   well grounded in logic or truth or having legal force

It is rare that I find myself in total disagreement with you as a wise and well crafted poster in this forum, but sorry, your position looks too cryptographic to me, and yes, it is bad, no matter how many people are bragging with their elementary number theory and cryptography or how trending is zk proof fantasies which are supposed to be the next BIG thing (total madness), bitcoin is not cryptography, believe it or not, it has not been introduced by its inventor as a "cryptocurrency" or any other crypto thing. Average people, fascinated/overwhelmed/mentally-paralyzed by stupid math behind asymmetric cryptographic schemes, which looks like magic to them, mostly forget the fact that it has been around decades before bitcoin, ambitiously and desperately trying to do something about internet money, but it was Satoshi who did it not them, period.

Factually speaking, the elite/gov dominated field of cryptography and its artificial terminology is not hailed in the bitcoin white paper as something of critical or distinguished importance, there was nothing new or disruptive about electronic signatures. The term "crypto" appears just once in the body of the paper, think about it, only one occurence of "crypto"!
 
Don't take these mathemagicians too seriously, they are full of sh*t.  

BTW, Who in the hell made it up in the first place, cryptocurrency?  

[JayJuanGee]

Question:  Do you, babo, believe that if you had a script that could find people’s private keys, it would be quote-unquote “legitimate” to transfer their bitcoins to your wallet?

The general futility of such an exercise is irrelevant:  What matters here is the intent.

See the topic title: the intent is to show how secure Bitcoin is. That's why I Merited the post.
If I had a script to find people's private keys, Bitcoin would be worthless. I'm glad I can just tell people to try and find a funded private key, so they can prove to themselves that it won't work.

Your summary (Loyce) does seem to fall in line with my assessment too - even though I have been a bit technically baffled about what is going on  and the extent to which there might be malicious intentions regarding actually finding security vulnerabilities (and thus funds from wallets with bad security).  

Of course, red tags can be given at the discretion of the sender, and surely if they somewhat justify their red tag with the support of evidence (and even somewhat logical explanations), then the sender of the red tag is less likely to receive counter-balancing or retaliatory red tags from that member or from other forum members - and maybe in this case, nullius is getting too worked up about his own self-righteous attribution of mal-intent to shoot first and ask questions later, when maybe he should have at least allowed some response or be willing to downgrade such red tag to neutral - potentially if warranted.  

Sure each of us likely have some evil within us and even motivated by self-interest, and bitcoin seems to be designed to grow stronger from such motivations of self-interests - even though surely, each of us are free to beat upon others if we believe that they have loosey-goosie morals... and personally, it seems that I spend a lot of time nit-picking members about some of their language in regards to naysaying bitcoin or supporting seemingly scammy projects that are tangential to bitcoin (aka shitcoins or some other questionable projects), even with all of that, I am having difficulties attributing mal-intent to fillippone based on the way that he has so far discussed this topic of showing, finding and/or potentially exploiting security vulnerabilities, if they were to be able to be discovered..... and surely, it could even be possible that he could consider conceding to nullius in some ways (maybe?) if there might have been some ways in which fillippone might conclude that some of his language might have been misunderstood, misleading and/or even describing malintentions that he had not meant to promote.  

To the extent that I even understand the criticisms against fillippone, I am not even conceding that fillippone had gone too far in the whole context of his attempt to present this matter -  so in that regard, I am not sure whether changing language - or even putting in a disclaimer within OP or some subsequent post(s) would be necessary given the context in which it had seemed that fillippone was attempting to bring up this topic in terms of pointing out various existing or possible bitcoin wallet vulnerabilities.  

Of course, another matter is the discouraging of members of posting potentially controversial material by red-trusting them, and I am pretty well aware that fillippone must put quite a bit of efforts into his various posts, and sure sometimes I find that he gets things wrong and there are all kinds of members, including fillippone, in which sometimes I do not agree with what seems to be their intentions, and even with all of that said, I am having troubles appreciating how fillippones actions in this case rise to the level of warranting red trust in the various ways that nullius has attributed such bad intentions to fillippone, even though I do agree that lack of success in breaking into wallets would not necessarily make the aims less morally repugnant in the event that fillippone did have such malintentions... but still it seems to me that nullius is attributing way more malice to fillippones set of actions than they deserve to the extent that malice can be considered a gradient rather than an absolute.

[nullius]

It is bad enough that I needed to point out the nature of the Emperor’s New Clothes.  Worse that others are wasting my time arguing about the obvious.


@fillippone, in addition to being a wannabe wallet thief, you are a coward.  You are obviously quite well aware of this thread.  Hiding behind others, as your friend babo maliciously tries to turn this into an attack on me:  Despicable.  Perhaps because there is nothing you could say here.


@LoyceV (via LoyceMobile) (bottom of page 2), you wholly evaded the substance of the matter.  But the next time that some anonymous “Newbie” account pops up in the development forum to seek help with Brainflayer or a key-cracker, I will be happy to let him know that LoyceV says he’s just showing that Bitcoin is secure.  Do you even realize that you yourself are propounding a popular blackhat argument?

As I remarked in my first post on this thread, this is well beyond Asch.  It is group conformity, plus people reflexively defending someone who is popular.  If the author’s name on OP were not “fillippone”, and if fillippone were not exceptionally popular, then everyone would immediately see that he is a wallet thief (or wants to be ).  Imagine that an anonymous Newbie account very explicitly said that he is trying to get lucky finding and taking other people’s coins, he favourably cited LBC (a wallet-thief project whose author has been red-tagged for years), and he claimed this is “legitimate”.  Classic wallet thief.  Open-and-shut case.

Taking fillippone’s argument in OP to its logical conclusion, there is no such thing as a Bitcoin theft:  If you have the private keys, the money is legitimately yours, period.  Chew on that for a bit.

Whereas a popular and highly-trusted pillar of the community has increased responsibility.  I will not grant fillippone deference for being “fillippone”:  To the contrary, I will hold him to a higher standard than I would apply to some dumb random newbie.


@babo, (page 2 and now page 3) beneath response save to note that your tactic of accusing the accuser shows your own dishonourable character.  Defending expressly stated, openly proclaimed wallet-thief intentions by wild insults and personal attacks on the one who properly pointed out the obvious:  Tagged accordingly.


@ETFbitcoin, few people have considered the abstract question of Bitcoin ownership in cogent and coherent terms.  I am well on record as characterizing Bitcoin as a bearer asset; please see quotes below (including my disagreement with some Bitcoin Core developers, whom I believe abrogated the concept of Bitcoin as a bearer asset in some development discussions about signmessage).  Insofar as I have seen, I seem to be the only person in the world who has really thought this through.  I should write about that further, if I were not wasting my time pointing out the obvious here.

Consider physical gold coins as an analogy, and take fillippone’s name out of the picture.  Imagine that it were still a popular practice to hide (crypto- < κρυπτός, ‘hidden’) gold coins under one’s mattress.  “Account X” said that he wants to find a way to peek under people’s mattresses, and to discover where they hid their gold coins.  He claimed that if he finds where people hid their gold coins, it is “legitimate” for him to take them.

With physical gold coins, possession rules:  A theft cannot simply be frozen or revoked, like a bank or credit card transaction.  Instead of not your keys, not your coins, the situation is literally not your coins, not your coins.  That is obvious.  However, we would all recognize a theft as a theft.

See also Gregory Maxwell’s condemnation of LBC:

"I started making keys, starting with ones with fewest cuts and systematically working through all possibilities. To learn if these keys matched any that had been used in the past, I tried each one in every door in the neighborhood.  After a bit I found a few valuables. What was I supposed to do, leave them there?"

It profiteth us not to apply a—well, let us say, a “creative” interpretation of the word “legitimate”.  The word descends from L. legitimus, ‘lawful’, < lex, ‘law’; and it has stayed close to its original meaning.  In English, it can mean ‘lawful, legal’, or in a non-legal sense, ‘in accord with principles and customs’, among other senses not relevant here.  It is a cognate with Italian legittimo, which is a synonym in Italian with legale, valido, regolare, permesso, concesso, consentito, accettato, approvato, autorizzato.  Thus, fillippone cannot reasonably claim to have made a mistake of foreign language:  In his own mother tongue, he claimed that for him to take any coins he could hypothetically find is legale, valido, regolare, permesso, concesso, consentito, accettato, approvato, autorizzato—and @babo is backing him up on this!


@aliashraf, partly agreed and partly disagreed.  Technologists do generally have a tendency to think of technologies in isolation, without considering philosophical, legal, and social aspects.  Please see my discussion above and below about Bitcoin’s nature as a bearer instrument.  However, I also disagree with your characterization of Bitcoin and especially, with your deprecation of cryptography.

Aside...

or how trending is zk proof fantasies which are supposed to be the next BIG thing (total madness),

I have known for the past nine years that zero-knowledge proofs will take over the world.  For nine years, I have yearned to get zero-knowledge proofs into Bitcoin.  Satoshi himself knew that zero-knowledge proofs could improve Bitcoin; he simply didn’t know how to imply them here, and the breakthrough cryptographic advances didn’t happen until 2013–2014.  I was an early adopter, and suffered some bleeding-edge problems around 2017–2018; only in 2022, after many further advances, I am ready to declare the technology mature for general adoption and usage.  I have been making many preparations; and some of my forthcoming posts will be exactly on that topic.  That, which is of world-moving importance, is being delayed and having my time stolen away by this, which is a spectacular failure of community responsibility.


@JayJuanGee, although your response is more level-headed than some others here, this is not a case of “shoot first and ask questions later”.  It is an open-and-shut case:  fillippone openly, blatantly proclaimed the intentions of a thief.  This is not even a technical argument, or a n00b “whoopsie”:  It is a matter of basic ethics and honesty of character.

It seems that almost everyone responding on this thread would side with rico666, the author of that LBC project that fillippone praised in OP here:

"I started making keys, starting with ones with fewest cuts and systematically working through all possibilities. To learn if these keys matched any that had been used in the past, I tried each one in every door in the neighborhood.  After a bit I found a few valuables. What was I supposed to do, leave them there?"

Yeah. I had lot's of these discussions. Your comparison doesn't apply - even remotely.

"I started taking walks in the park - systematically taking paths to cover the whole area. From time to time I find some coins. What am I supposed to do, leave them there?"

The doors in the neighborhood have names on them. And yes, even "for finds in the park" rules apply. We adhere to them.

You are lucky, this night the pool found something again. The funds are still on the address. What would be your take on this now?

It's a rhetoric question, I do not really need your input. As promised I slept over our - for me yesterdays - "conversation". I guess I'll leave the lawyers in their box this time. Instead, when we meet at the next Bitcoin event we'll both be attending, I'll approach you and we'll handle our arguments like real men. Promise.


Rico

Whereas even rico666 does not go so far as fillippone:  rico666 expressly claimed that he does not intend to take away people’s money, whereas fillippone claimed that it would be “legitimate” to steal people’s money for himself (!).  If rico666 was widely tagged as a wallet thief (and he used to have a lot more tags for this than I see now), this is indeed an open-and-shut case.  It is ridiculous that anyone is even arguing with me.

As I have repeatedly mentioned, everything that fillippone claimed in OP was “legitimate” applies equally to malicious use of Brainflayer (which works!), or to “key-cracking” tools (which don’t work, but I am speaking to the principle of the matter).


Nullius on Bitcoin as a Bearer Asset

Following is a brief abstract of my prior statement on Bitcoin’s nature as a bearer instrument.  I think that with physical bearer instruments, it would be too obvious to state that a bearer instrument can be stolen.

• Nullius. “Stake addresses, signmessage, ownership, and control.” Bitcoin Forum post. 2020-01-19.
  
  

  I respectfully disagree with sipa, luke-jr, and others so stating (and I should probably say so on that issue).  I argue strictly that control of the private keys equals title to the Bitcoin, period; and it is dangerous to blur a rule logically inherent in the nature decentralized, trustless, permissionless cryptographic money.
  
  If you are a custodial exchange, etc., then you may be holding title to that Bitcoin as a nominee, or (quite arguably) a bailee, or some other legal concept which may be logical to apply.  However, account-holders at custodial exchanges are not the titular owners of any Bitcoin at all, in my opinion.  If you don’t have the private keys, then it is not your Bitcoin:  It is somebody else’s Bitcoin; and that somebody else, the titular owner of the Bitcoin, has contractually agreed to let you excercise beneficial ownership of some sort.
  
  So many ills of this world result when ownership is divorced from control.  (Aside, don’t get me started on how the separation of ownership, control, and responsibility is a major factor in the widespread corruption of modern corporations.)  Don’t do that with Bitcoin.
  
  In my analysis, ownership is fully congruent with the use of digital signatures to control money in a decentralized, trustless, permissionless system; and legal agreements outside the four corners of Bitcoin script are properly compartmented where they belong, in the realm of legal contracts and the legal enforcement thereof.
  
  (N.b. that the same argument applies to theft:  A thief who uses wrongful means to obtain title is still holding titular ownership, and will continue to do so unless recovery is effectuated by avoiding the improperly obtained title.  By analogy, consider a criminal who uses forgery, coercion, or fraud in the factum to wrongfully obtain a deed to lands—although that deed would probably be adjudged absolutely void, not merely voidable, whereas a Bitcoin transaction is only absolutely void if a blockchain reorg retroactively invalidates it.)
  

• Nullius. “[WO] Bitcoin is a bearer asset!” Bitcoin Forum post. 2020-11-17.
  
  

  Bitcoin is a bearer asset.  It is a bearer asset by the nature of its design.  [...]
  
  All “KYC/AML” nonsense, including the tracking of the source and destination of funds, attempts to change Bitcoin from a bearer asset into an identity-based asset.
  
  The only way to achieve that is to universally enforce “KYC” via miner blacklisting and transaction censorship, and to make some way to rollback transactions (in the manner of an “irregular state change”) which, to my knowledge, has not been seriously proposed for Bitcoin.
  

• Nullius. “Judge concurs with nullius: Keys = titular ownership (vs. beneficial ownership)”. Bitcoin Forum post. 2020-11-25.
  
  

  I take the position that Bitcoin is a bearer asset.  [...]
  
  Bearer assets such as cash, gold bullion, or old-fashioned bearer bonds can be held in trust for the benefit (“beneficial ownership”) of another.  This neither changes the nature of the bearer asset, nor absolves the trustee of legally enforceable fiduciary duties to the beneficiary.  Much as I can tell from the above snippet, the judge in this case seems to have imposed a constructive trust on the coins.
  
  The word “beneficial” is key here!  A beneficial owner is not necessarily the titular owner.  [...]
  
  Much though I am sympathetic to this statement in principle, there will always be tension between the desires of those who would govern, and the practical limitations on their power.  Bitcoin directly exploits this tension.  In an era when governments and their owners, the banks have been attempting to replace all bearer assets with identity-based assets, Bitcoin’s nature as a bearer asset pushes us back toward the wiser, freer era of bullion, cash notes, and bearer bonds—with the added benefit that Bitcoin can be transferred around the world with the press of a button.
  
  For better or for worse, courts will attempt to adjudicate disputes over the allegedly proper ownership of bearer assets.  As you say, it comes down to a question of enforceability.
  
  Possession is nine-tenths of the law.  Always has been, always will be!  Possession of the keys equals possession of the coins.  Bearer asset.
  

N.b. that “nine-tenths” is not “ten-tenths”, and that should not be read out of context.  If possession equalled ownership in all aspects, then the whole concept of theft would not exist:  It would be impossible to steal anything, because anything that you possess is legitimately yours.

That is a classic “law of the jungle” argument.  The “law of the jungle” is what fillippone explicitly proclaimed in OP here:  Find money, take it, it is “legitimately” yours.

As a Nietzschean amoralist, I am well aware that all morality is subjective; and I can philosophically contemplate the “law of the jungle” argument, or (mutatis mutandis) various justifications of a Thieves’ Code, without jerking my knee or overly exciting my glands.  However, thievery is incompatible with me and with any society in which I wish to partake.  Accordingly, my morality brands thieves as thieves and criminals; and on the Bitcoin Forum, I tag them accordingly.

Edit:  Reviewing the above quotes, I realize that fillippone’s statements in OP are logically equivalent to extending the “not your keys, not your coins” rule to mean that a centralized exchange has a right to exit-scam users, simply by walking off with the coins.  I don’t think that that’s what any reasonable person means by “not your keys, not your coins”.

[...] you are actually owner of the private keys, so you are legitimate owner of such balance, and nothing prevents you from transferring to your own wallet.

(End of edit.)

The above responses are compressed and not so neatly formatted as usual; for this is suddenly becoming an absurd waste of my time, and a distraction from important tasks.  I should start hourly billing of anyone who expects for me to explain the obvious yet again.

[odolvlobo]

...
@fillippone, in addition to being a wannabe wallet thief, you are a coward.  
...

@nullius, how about starting a thread in Scam Accusations instead of hijacking this thread?

[babo]

@babo, (page 2 and now page 3) beneath response save to note that your tactic of accusing the accuser shows your own dishonourable character.  Defending expressly stated, openly proclaimed wallet-thief intentions by wild insults and personal attacks on the one who properly pointed out the obvious:  Tagged accordingly.

dear child, you are sick
how much are the trusts of a person who randomly throws them around
without any motivation

do not worry, I will act accordingly and not only will I tag you, I will open a flag, because a toxic person like you damages the community

[nullius]

...
@fillippone, in addition to being a wannabe wallet thief, you are a coward.  
...

@nullius, how about starting a thread in Scam Accusations instead of hijacking this thread?

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.

Nobody who has even the slightest knowledge of cryptography will ever attempt to guess a Bitcoin private key that way.

For an P2PKH or P2WPKH address where the public key has not been revealed, the search space is 2¹⁶⁰; and there are approximately slightly fewer than 2⁹⁶ valid keys per address.

If the public key is known, it has a notional 2¹²⁸ security level.

• Bitcoin’s Public-Key Security Level

An attacker would not try to guess the key by bruteforce.  Rather than bruteforce, an attacker would use something like this free, open-source program:

• Pollard's kangaroo ECDLP solver, by Jean_Luc

And even if someone wanted to try bruteforce for some ridiculous unreason, there are about 2²⁵⁶ - 2^128.3457 valid private keys, not exactly 2²⁵⁶ keys.  That is a negligible difference; but if one wishes to count keys, count the keys properly!

Technical information must be accurate.  The good cause of teaching the public about Bitcoin’s security is not helped by misleading explanations and misinformation.

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!? 😾


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

@babo, (page 2 and now page 3) beneath response save to note that your tactic of accusing the accuser shows your own dishonourable character.  Defending expressly stated, openly proclaimed wallet-thief intentions by wild insults and personal attacks on the one who properly pointed out the obvious:  Tagged accordingly.

dear child, you are sick
how much are the trusts of a person who randomly throws them around
without any motivation

do not worry, I will act accordingly and not only will I tag you, I will open a flag, because a toxic person like you damages the community

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.

[babo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_box


still continue in your meaningless actions (for a 2019 posts.... really)
no one forbids you
but when you throw a stone into a pond, it causes changes

honestly if I have to live in a context where any bona fide action has to be blamed by black hats (you don't even know what black hats are apparently, because you are ignorant) then we should live in a constant "witch hunt" tension

do you want this climate in the forum? I do not

I did not expect such behavior from you, for months you have been throwing random red tags, history says so

you are so nervous that you have tagged me for no reason and then as a hypocrite you accuse me of giving red trust at random


bravo!

https://archive.ph/96yDW






another symptom that you are sick
Giving merits to a banned account is not normal

you still have time to take the pills




https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=159476;page=trusted&dt
the funny thing is that you gave red to fillippone but not to the creator of the site
that says a lot about your bad faith about it




we discover nullius have many alt account for trolling
and for this reason
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5293050.msg60517506#msg60517506
he lost death_wish account

oh, if we dig MORE we found MORE shit..
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5293050.0



I dedicate myself above all to the local board Italy
I don't normally visit the international sections

but it was lucky for me that you tagged me, @nullius
thank you

it's a good opportunity to clean up

[aliashraf]

@aliashraf, partly agreed and partly disagreed.  Technologists do generally have a tendency to think of technologies in isolation, without considering philosophical, legal, and social aspects.  Please see my discussion above and below about Bitcoin’s nature as a bearer instrument.  However, I also disagree with your characterization of Bitcoin and especially, with your deprecation of cryptography.

Aside...

or how trending is zk proof fantasies which are supposed to be the next BIG thing (total madness),

I have known for the past nine years that zero-knowledge proofs will take over the world.  For nine years, I have yearned to get zero-knowledge proofs into Bitcoin. Satoshi himself knew that zero-knowledge proofs could improve Bitcoin; he simply didn’t know how to imply them here, and the breakthrough cryptographic advances didn’t happen until 2013–2014.  I was an early adopter, and suffered some bleeding-edge problems around 2017–2018; only in 2022, after many further advances, I am ready to declare the technology mature for general adoption and usage.  I have been making many preparations; and some of my forthcoming posts will be exactly on that topic.  That, which is of world-moving importance, is being delayed and having my time stolen away by this, which is a spectacular failure of community responsibility.

Your, bitcoin as a bearer asset, is a plausible legal doctrine; I've frequently used an argument like this to refute both sides in 2016 debate about Craig Wright claims, when it was considered that ownership status of keys for (presumed) Satoshi wallets would be a strong enough evidence to prove or reject his claim, I pointed out that the keys would have nothing to do with identity, the latter being a more sophisticated social problem.

That said,
I need to reiterate my deep concerns about cryptography reign in bitcoin: This wallet theft attempts claiming legitimacy is just a stupid boldness, and you have spotted it just because it is bold, but cryptocult and its reign in bitcoin has more sneaky consequences which are poisoning everything, distracting everyone, including you bro, I'm sorry.

I need to stress more and more, that bitcoin is not crypto it is against crypto! It is anti-crypto! It is live because crypto was not able to go live, it tried for decades but failed to go live.  Am I clear enough? NO? Let's check the same post you quoted from Satoshi:

This is a very interesting topic.  If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible^*.

Originally, a coin can be just a chain of signatures.  With a timestamp service, the old ones could be dropped eventually before there's too much backtrace fan-out, or coins could be kept individually or in denominations.  It's the need to check for the absence of double-spends that requires global knowledge of all transactions.

The challenge is, how do you prove that no other spends exist? ^**It seems a node must know about all transactions to be able to verify that.  If it only knows the hash of the in/outpoints, it can't check the signatures to see if an outpoint has been spent before.  Do you have any ideas on this?

It's hard to think of how to apply zero-knowledge-proofs in this case.

We're trying to prove the absence of something, which seems to require knowing about all and checking that the something isn't included.

^*   If it was possible to prove asset ownership with pure cryptography, Bitcoin would be an irrelevant, too complex system a waste of energy.

^** Remember, it is all about double-spends!

But you read this post, more crypto-friendly  because cryptographers have taken over (without any virtue) by poisoning the literature. It is absolutely paradoxical to stay with bitcoin and to put faith in mathemagical crypto tricks. No crypto-trick will ever touch double-spending.

[NotATether]

Does anyone want to pay me to build a program that takes all the words posted on this page of the thread, generate a brain wallet on each of them, concatenating duplicate words onto themselves as they are encountered, and proceed to demonstrate that even with this creative way of brute forcing address, you won't happen upon anything, zilch, nada?

Just to demonstrate how large all the avenues are (say, 18 million dictionary words squared)? /sarcasm

Or perhaps I can just take all permutations of all words on this page from 1 word to the entire set, and fry all data centers' computing capacity for the next 1000 years?

[suchmoon]

Does anyone want to pay me to build a program that takes all the words posted on this page of the thread, generate a brain wallet on each of them, concatenating duplicate words onto themselves as they are encountered, and proceed to demonstrate that even with this creative way of brute forcing address, you won't happen upon anything, zilch, nada?

Just to demonstrate how large all the avenues are (say, 18 million dictionary words squared)? /sarcasm

Or perhaps I can just take all permutations of all words on this page from 1 word to the entire set, and fry all data centers' computing capacity for the next 1000 years?

Under nooblius doctrine, the fact that you even think of such a horrible crime makes you a thief. Desist at once and report to your local Ministry of Truth office for mandatory brainwashing.

[nullius]

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.

Or, per my aphorism:  So-called “brainwallets” are wallets for the brainless.  I propose renaming to brainlesswallets.

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.

Does anyone want to pay me to build a program that takes all the words posted on this page of the thread, generate a brain wallet on each of them, concatenating duplicate words onto themselves as they are encountered, and proceed to demonstrate that even with this creative way of brute forcing address, you won't happen upon anything, zilch, nada?

Just to demonstrate how large all the avenues are (say, 18 million dictionary words squared)? /sarcasm

Or perhaps I can just take all permutations of all words on this page from 1 word to the entire set, and fry all data centers' computing capacity for the next 1000 years?

Under nooblius doctrine, the fact that you even think of such a horrible crime makes you a thief. Desist at once and report to your local Ministry of Truth office for mandatory brainwashing.

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 need to stress more and more, that bitcoin is not crypto it is against crypto! It is anti-crypto! It is live because crypto was not able to go live, it tried for decades but failed to go live.  Am I clear enough? NO?

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:

Merit summary for fillippone

Sent in the last 120 days

• August 03, 2022, 07:44:17 PM: 40 to LoyceMobile for Re: Reputation: nullius is a cunt ✔
• August 03, 2022, 07:35:25 PM: 50 to BlackHatCoiner for Re: Reputation: nullius is a cunt ✔
• August 03, 2022, 06:22:20 PM: 50 to DireWolfM14 for Re: Reputation: nullius is a cunt ✔
• [...]
• August 03, 2022, 01:15:21 PM: 19 to babo for Re: Reputation: nullius is a cunt ✔
• August 03, 2022, 01:14:25 PM: 50 to Poker Player for Re: Reputation: nullius is a cunt ✔

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

another symptom that you are sick
Giving merits to a banned account is not normal

you still have time to take the pills

[This space is intentionally left NULL.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_box

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

[babo]

take the pills, you need them

[achow101]

This thread seems to have gone horribly off the rails. If you want to have a discussion about particular users, take it to Scam Accusations, Reputation, or Meta. Flame wars are not welcome here.

/Locked