statoshi

It's still pretty rare, but as the space goes mainstream I expect the frequency of such attacks to increase.

> It's bad for the environment

Not any more so than other forms of energy consumption. If anything, Bitcoin incentivizes the use of clean renewable energy. https://niccarter.info/topics/

> bad for crime

Hard to even parse what that means given how much crime is committed via dollars. https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-is-not-for-crimin...

> bad for laymen

Meaningless drivel.

> undemocratic (vote with money)

Bitcoin is both undemocratic AND is not a "vote with money" type of system. Governance is unrelated to who holds it. https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/governance.html

> no knobs to adjust monetary/fiscal policy

That's a feature.

> it poses as an alternative to government institutions that serve society with things like roads and health care.

Also a feature. https://www.coincenter.org/a-human-rights-activists-response...

Indeed; I wrote an article last year about time locking. https://blog.keys.casa/bitcoin-multisig-time-locking-challen...

Anything that can be owned can be stolen.

It's a question of how difficult you make to steal and thus how much riskier you make it for someone to attempt an attack.

You sound confused; I'm the author of the article, not the subject.

I wish that were the case.

Unfortunately, while still rare, there are physical attacks perpetrated against bitcoin owners. I've been tracking them for several years. https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks

Nope, but the value of the educational takeaways from the report are not contingent upon me providing evidence of this specific attack. You are welcome to be skeptical.

Our client's privacy is more important than your curiosity; it's as simple as that.

You're free to believe that I (the author) made up this story. I'm not a fiction writer; the Bitcoin security space is exciting enough without needing to waste time making stories up.

I'll note that we have seen several folks report being victims of similar attacks since we published this article.

https://twitter.com/Disruptepreneur/status/14131498654759075...

https://twitter.com/jayzalowitz/status/1413165187205455882

https://twitter.com/e_acorral/status/1413168523250180097

Ha! Another empty prediction that we'll happily call you out on once it expires. Remember when you predicted that Bitcoin would completely cease to exist by the end of 2019? https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1211707215620530176

Indeed; the market has clearly chosen to prefer optimizing for low cost of full system validation (running a full node) over lost cost of transacting (cheap block space.)

False. You're referring to an adversarial situation where your payment channel counterparty tries to close the channel using an old state that gives them more of the money in the channel than they should own. The duration during which you can then post a breach remedy transaction to deprive them of ALL the channel value is configurable when you update the channel state, but the default is 1 week. Eventually the expectation is that you'll even be able to outsource this operation to third parties to monitor the blockchain on your behalf and post the breach remedy transaction if needed.

Nonsense. Multiple teams are developing Lightning Network implementations and anyone who desires to commit capital to operate a Lightning node can do so without asking permission from anyone.

Fraud protection is referring to protection against double spending and protection against chargebacks - it's not the same type of consumer protection that folks are used to with credit cards. However, it's worth noting that this type of consumer protection /is/ possible and can be built on top of the system using reputation and escrow services.

This was a highly contrived test - an interesting point to note is that they don't talk about how long it would take new nodes to perform an initial sync if there were weeks / months / years worth of gigablocks in the chain.

Some people proselytized it, sure. And they're generally the folks who are upset with the current situation and have switched to various altcoins that will suffer from the same scalability issues if they ever become particularly popular.

This is not news; we adjusted the bitcoin.org site to match reality.

The pull request was brigaded by folks from /r/btc who were not interested in positively contributing to the discussion; they just wanted to waste our time rehashing the past 3 years of scaling debate.

I'm the author of the pull request that made this change; feel free to AMA related to it.

Sounds like you're looking at the wrong metrics. Dogecoin had 0 commits to its main repository in 2017. Compare that to 3,277 commits to Bitcoin Core alone. Bitcoin has scaling issues that developers are addressing with second layer networks because tons of people are using Bitcoin. Dogecoin doesn't because it has so few users that the demand for block space is well below the available supply.

To be quite honest, it doesn't matter if folks think that non-mining nodes are unimportant - they can't force folks who /are/ running full validating non-mining nodes into accepting arbitrary rule changes to the protocol. That's what's important.

Our understanding of Bitcoin has progressed by leaps and bounds since the system has been running for 9 years. The whitepaper is not the end-all, be-all of Bitcoin. Even Satoshi did not fully realize what he built. For more details: https://www.coindesk.com/nobody-understands-bitcoin-thats-ok...

False; peers validate and propagate information across the network. You don't have to be creating blocks in order to validate and propagate them.

False. For more details: https://medium.com/@lopp/securing-your-financial-sovereignty...

The linked whitepaper is the original, which is what matters for the purpose of this post.

... of the skeptics when they realize the opportunity they missed.

This is my site; I've probably spent at least 100 hours curating this list over the years :-)

No one can control or take over Bitcoin development. Similarly, there is no official website or subreddit. This system has no authorities.

The argument is that higher cost of node operation is actually what kills the "peer to peer aspect." Trustless second layer networks such as Lightning use "third parties" to route money across the network, but never in a trusted/custodial fashion.

Transaction fees would go down while the cost of operating a fully validating node would go up.