So, it's good that the transaction was undone, or 15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker.
(To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin)
why? It's not like btc has anywhere near the trade volume for 15% of global money supply.
Yes, Bitcoin does not have sufficient trade volume, and it was a joke anyway. Bitcoin would probably not have survived even one more month in 2010, if there were 184 billion new "fake" bitcoins added in the mix.
Even ignoring all the problems about the Bitcoin software being proven to be seriously broken, those 184 billion extra bitcoins meant that every other Bitcoin was suddenly worth about $0.0000000000000001
$21tn in bitcoin isn't going to get you any more money than $1tn would.
> The rapid implementation of the patch was vital in keeping Bitcoin a viable cryptocurrency. 184 billion Bitcoin would have devalued the currency completely, leaving it at the mercy of the person holding the newly-minted Bitcoin.
It would have become worthless, sure, but I imagine that other people would have also just gone around creating additional batches of 184 billion BTC and driving the project into the ground, rather than letting one person walk off with effectively the entire thing.
anupj•4h ago
vbezhenar•4h ago
exe34•4h ago
LegionMammal978•2h ago
fouc•2h ago
LegionMammal978•2h ago
MichaelZuo•1h ago
So this seems like a pointless distinction.
Retric•1h ago
That’s the thing people thing of crypto coins as math, but they’re still a social construct.
olalonde•56m ago
Geee•58m ago
Software versions and updates require social / economic consensus and have nothing to do with mining power. Bitcoin is open-source protocol / software and everyone can use whichever version they like. But there's also economic incentives to use the most used version and to make sure that it will keep being the most used version, i.e. forks are bad and should be avoided, therefore it's in everyone's interest to reach consensus.
hyghjiyhu•4h ago
There are still influential people, but none with the authority of Satoshi himself.
joshstrange•3h ago
jowea•2h ago
wslh•2h ago
For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling again the OP_CAT opcode [1].
[1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat
127•1h ago
dennnis•52m ago
nivertech•4h ago
aleph_minus_one•3h ago
There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants can be trusted (including the fact that the Bitcoin paper uses game theory to give evidence why malicious entities attempting to create another fork will by the mere design of the algorithms have a hard time).
What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. By the design of the protocol and its data structures, there do exist boundaries concerning possible "social interpretations" of this consensus, but a lot of aspects are up to different interpretations.
nivertech•3h ago
Bitcoin didn’t solved a forkability and finality problems. Blockchain (or more properly hashchain) is a linked list of hashpointers, and since anyone can create a hashpointer pointing to the head of the hashchain - it means anyone can fork it. And indeed Bitcoin was forked multiple times, and the solution to forks was almost always either centralized and/or social.
IMO PBFT consensus algos have a niche applications anyway, and not required for Electronic Cash implementation, only for decentralized and/or disintermediated Systems-of-Record, but that’s a complete opposite of bearer instruments like electronic cash.
guappa•2h ago
Yes, they existed a long time ago and aren't wasteful as a way to generate "value".
aleph_minus_one•2h ago
Can you give me a literature reference for such a result, because this claim surprises me.
Of course Merkle trees existed long before - but they are just "cryptographically signed data structures", and thus don't solve the distributed consensus problem.
Of course eCash existed long before - but it depended on some central authority.
Of course distributed consensus algorithms existed long before - but they depended on the fact that all participants are trustable.
Thus, in my opinion Satoshi Nakamoto indeed made a really important scientific contribution for a quite specific algorithmic problem.
bravesoul2•2h ago
aleph_minus_one•2h ago
That is what I wrote:
> What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain.
In your private Bitcoin clone, such a consensus has a "socially much more boring" interpretation.
tliltocatl•3h ago
nivertech•3h ago
In Bitcoin PoW used as a method for leader election of the node composing the list of validated transactions on the ledger (aka block), or even an empty list of transactions (aka Nakamoto-style Consensus).
But without all the Rube Goldbergian nonsense it’s simply an illegal/unlicensed lottery where the participants pay with electricity for the right to earn records on the longest chain (aka UTXO with mining block rewards).
olalonde•3h ago
nivertech•2h ago
olalonde•2h ago
nivertech•2h ago
I have been researching crypto for over a decade. And I would be glad if I was corrected if I was wrong, instead of receiving personal remarks
olalonde•2h ago
"crypto bros LARPing". "it’s simply an illegal/unlicensed lottery"
> And I would be happy to be corrected if I made a mistake, instead of getting personal remarks.
Sure.
> Nakamoto Consensus didn’t solved a secure scalable PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) Consensus.
How could it? PBFT is an algorithm, not a problem to be solved. Bitcoin is byzantine fault tolerant though.
> Bitcoin didn’t solved a forkability and finality problems.
There's no such thing as a "forkability problem" and Bitcoin solves finality through PoW.
> And indeed Bitcoin was forked multiple times, and the solution to forks was almost always either centralized and/or social.
That's wrong. The vast majority of forks are resolved algorithmically. There were only 2 or 3 unintentional hard forks in the early days that were due to bugs. This hasn't happened since 2013.
The only real "social" aspect of Bitcoin is what value people decide to assign to the coins.
nivertech•26m ago
I was at Bitcoin scene since 2011, I think that I can distinguish LARPing from the real thing. It's not me who created a dychotomy between fiat and crypto, between HODLers/coiners and noicoiners, between Traditional Finance and Crypro Finance, between CeFi and DeFi, between IPOs and ICOs, etc. Crypto always looked like a Pinoccio who want to become a "real boy".
> "it’s simply an illegal/unlicensed lottery"
yes, the PoW-based mining is litterally called a puzzle solving or a lottery. How do you call a game where everyone buys a ticket with electricity, but only one at a time wins a block reward?
> How could it? PBFT is an algorithm, not a problem to be solved. Bitcoin is byzantine fault tolerant though.
OK, BFT (not PBFT algo) is a class of problems with many proposed solutions, but none is good enough if you need scalability. Bitcoin is a partital solution under multiple constraints, even 1/3 of malicious nodes can undermine it. Internet backbone (BGP) should be trusted. Governments should allow it. etc.
> There's no such thing as a "forkability problem" and Bitcoin solves finality through PoW.
the on-chain Bitcoin transactions are never final. Everyone have their own heuristic how many blocks to count depending on the amount transacted. Protocol only defines how many blocks gamblers (miners) need to wait before they can spend their lottery winnings (block rewards).
> That's wrong. The vast majority of forks are resolved algorithmically. There were only 2 or 3 unintentional hard forks in the early days that were due to bugs. This hasn't happened since 2013.
There were many more than 2-3 both intentional and bugs, but why argue? Even 2-3 hard forks are enough to show that it's bad design. Forks should be impossible by design.
> The only real "social" aspect of Bitcoin is what value people decide to assign to the coins.
IMO there are many more social aspects here beside price discovery of UTXO records and social consensus. Bitcoin core governance, Mining centralization in China. Cypherpunks. LARPing.
pards•4h ago
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
aleph_minus_one•3h ago
Not everybody agreed - and so the Ethereum Classic blockchain was created, causing all the problems that go hand in hand with having different, forked blockchains:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
bravesoul2•2h ago