evilspammer
I don't think it's recovered from the silk road and alphabay era?
A more modern alternative is https://www.privacytools.io/ but I haven't checked it in a while and can't vouch for the current contents.
AI has a hype cycle and young people are seeing their first one before the next AI winter
I think if even 1 developer has a court order for them to push to master, it will happen whether anyone wants it to, since GitHub is already known to mindlessly abide by government requests. (see popcorntime dmca)
The people who merge or pull the code have the ultimate decision. But it's a problem. Who is accepting the code and who isn't? The developer can be disallowed from contributing to the code if this change isn't accepted. (Explicitly not "compelled speech" to "not say" something - this would be a gagball.) So the next patch comes. The question of who is forking and is who isn't raises from 50%/50% to 25%/75% until the numerator approaches zero. For the sake of networking the question isn't "whether I want to accept this patch" but "whether I think most people will accept this patch."
So the miners have a endless chain of developers who are asking for this patch or no more patches. For the miners to have leverage with developers they need to be able to take over the code themselves. The next set of developers will have this issue, ad infinitum, unless the cycle is broken somehow.
IMO the solution has to involve zero knowledge proofs which is the closest we can get to preventing rubber-hose legal attacks. Since XMR probably won't gain the traction to become a competitor to BTC, BTC will probably have to integrate it or continue to suffer from problems like this.
edited to add addendum:
The incoming/departing core developers & the open source nature of the BTC codebase also presents an issue. Unless the miners are reviewing each pull indiscriminately, they are trusting the code developers to have merged PRs that they want. How does an open source contribution, blessed by a core developer, become trustless? Anonymity is necessary to prevent core developers from being compelled, but names are necessary for trust of core developers.
Further, if the author intends, they can take their digital and make a vinyl; or record to vinyl, distribute as digital. (caveat: potentially having a double-lossy situation) Once you have a lossless digital you can publish it over two cans and string if you want. So it is quite literally a superset of analog media.
Since we don't have chips that detect one's heart's intentions yet, the best we can do is treat bots and user agents the same, and address the problem of malicious activity in other ways. This can be rate limiting, paying per request (i.e. hashcash) or other mechanisms I don't have top of mind. But bot=deny and user=allow is not what Cloudflare does or seeks to do.
> This is obviously not true, has never been true, and I have no trouble predicting that it will never be true.
IANAL, especially considering the number of jurisdictions involved.
It seems totally possible to me that a BTC developer could be rubber-hose compelled by the legal system to publish a patch, just as they might compel a bank to refund someone's stolen funds. Governments sometimes protect from "compelled speech." But what if the speech is publishing "from=acct1 to=acct2 value=100" to a blockchain? How is that different from a banker being compelled to click a button in their own UI, thats value is the same thing?
Secondly, you are right that people would probably fork and not update if the developers became compromised... then the new developers would have the same thing happen to them and become compromised. As long as the developers aren't anonymous they will be a SPOF. (This is why my initial comment said KYC killed bitcoin - its entire premise fails when it is nonymous.)
Finally, cryptocurrencies as a whole are just BTC, ETH, and a bunch of nothing. Repeated forks of BTC because of legal drama, departing/jailed developers, will rapidly move the BTC forks into the nothing category. Without consensus on a path forward (to fork or not to fork) both sides of the network are diminished. It isn't even clear if Wright's goal is to get 4b, or just to destroy BTC far enough to collect the ashes.
I saw someone comment above that one of the keys in question signed a message saying that they were not Wright, which is a good example for that particular key.
My comment you replied to specifically mentioned a scenario where the key owner did not defend themself. So we are talking about different scenarios.
In any case, I wasn't lying when I posted what I referred to as my thoughts, & certainly do know what I'm talking about. Thanks for the correction.
- Chrome obscuring the full URL in the address bar, which makes people use Google Search as if it were the address bar.
- Gmail being so popular that people assume `@gmail.com` is a suffix for all email addresses. You might tell a cashier your email address to sign up for discounts. When you say `[email protected]` they might end up typing `[email protected]` (this is, of course, an example.)
- Web search as a generic trademark "Google it" which most people now take for granted.
When people don't type in URLs but instead "google" everything by query, it's no surprise people conflate these different systems. My point in essence is that people who confuse Google/Web/Internet are just laypeople, not ignorami; they've been subject to a deliberate campaign by Google to make them think that.
Technically true, but he's looking for $4 b-b-billion.
Some thoughts about this that interest me:
- Things like the Bitcoin Cash fork & DAO fork arguably set the precedent that the developers control the funds. They never should have done that because now anybody can argue "you did it for them, why not me?" And this time it's being argued in the legal domain instead of just on heated GitHub comments. Judges aren't known for understanding the details of blockchains and can probably swing either way on this, especially if you jurisdiction shop.
- The "assets you don't own" part. He can't prove he had the keys, or lost the keys. But he just needs to present a compelling argument, not have an argument beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fact that the real Satoshi is unlikely to appear to defend themself makes it easier for Wright to argue Wright had the keys at some point, even if he wasn't the first or last owner.
- Combining these points: If you have established you will change the blockchain through a compelling argument; and if _nobody_ presents the keys; but if you have the best compelling argument _without_ the keys, then the coins probably belong to you.
- The big problems that lead to this situation were opening the Pandora's box of blockchain forks; & the tying of physical identities to wallets through KYC (which was the death of BTC.)
When mass produced media first became possible, people probably said you could only listen to live music and the experience of not being in a venue was lost. Then everybody who grew up with a gramophone, modern turntables, Sony Walkman, etc, think the version they grew up with is the best because of nostalgia.
> People keep talking about quality to praise digital media. But most people saying this listen to music through crappy bluetooth speakers nowadays. There is a very small amount of users still using decent hi-fi equipment.
Lossless digital recordings are the _closest_ way to listening to the originally produced audio authentically. (It still will have artifacts from the equipment itself - the media is the message after all) You can use crappy equipment to listen to any audio, but digital is closest to ideal.
The code fragments are hashed and the hash is used to refer to the code fragment. So instead of writing this code with explicit names:
let functionA = (x) => x;
let functionB = (y) => functionA(y) + 1;
To name the functions, you can assign the hashes human-readable labels.
let functionA = (x) => 3bebbe46355493ecc5f6b6c9bb7e9db7;
let functionB = (y) => 51e272dc500e6a58889dde88ec1057fd;
The difference is that the entire tree of functions is hashed. If `functionB` refers to `functionA` and `functionA` is updated to have different behavior, things can break. But if `functionB` calls `3bebbe46355493ecc5f6b6c9bb7e9db7` rather than `functionA` then you know that `3bebbe46355493ecc5f6b6c9bb7e9db7` will always be `(x) => x` and it won't change out from under you.
Hope this made sense, it was eliJS rather than eli5.
Which is good. That's a desirable property. The distinction isn't available without also allowing fingerprinting. Something like cost-based attestation where humans and bots are treated equally is ideal.
> And before somebody makes the argument of "but that's centralised, big brother, blah blah whatever bullshit", let me remind you that every payment you make goes through either Mastercard or Visa.
That's an even bigger problem!