3 sats \ 0 replies \ @harrigan 27 May \ on: How the Greatest Hacker Manipulated Everyone security
His book, "Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker" is excellent. His story was warped by a movie called Takedown (2000) that was released by Miramax. He wrote the book, in part, to set the record straight. RIP Kevin.
I believe so. He views layering as the best way to scale Bitcoin: higher-level systems that eventually settle to the base layer. He says that users are making "a local and time-limited security compromise" when using such systems, but this is better than making "a system-wide and permanent compromise". Although not mentioned in the book, this would include Lightning and similar systems.
I read The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson some years ago and I found a recommendation online that this book was similar.
The section on prison gang taxation is particularly interesting.
The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System by David Skarbek. It discusses decentralised governance in its purest form!
“They concede that something is flammable, but argue that it will never burn because there will never be a spark.” What a quote from Satoshi.
Sorry, that's from one of his emails with Martii Malmi not Adam Back: https://twitter.com/marttimalmi/status/1760898475980403183
“They concede that something is flammable, but argue that it will never burn because there will never be a spark.” What a quote from Satoshi.
I had a look at their whitepaper. IIUC, Botanix includes a two-way peg to the Bitcoin blockchain (the Spiderchain), a consensus protocol based on proof-of-stake, a blockchain whose native token is synthetic bitcoin, and an EVM virtual machine. The orchestrator nodes run the Spiderchain, the EVM, and a Bitcoin node. They construct blocks and mint and burn synthetic bitcoin. The orchestrator nodes need to provide stake in order to participate. Pegging-in and out involves locking bitcoin into the Spiderchain using a decentralised multi-signature mechanism. At launch, the peg will be centralised but it will be decentralised over time. The proof will be in the pudding: can then pull off that last step?
Long before Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto, there was a game called "Find Satoshi": https://findsatoshi.com/. It provides a photograph of a man and asks you to identify the real-world person. It was solved in 2020.
My TLDR for anyone living under a rock: Lowery considers Bitcoin to be a power-projecting cybersecurity system rather than merely a monetary system. He believes Bitcoin settles disputes in an egalitarian, trustless, permissionless manner by having participants project power in a similar fashion to how deer settle disputes using antlers. Bitcoin maybe be a modern alternative to kinetic warfare. The author predicts that nation states will not just fight over Bitcoin, but they will fight using Bitcoin's proof-of-work function.
Lopp [1] criticises Lowery's thesis primarily for its focus on one aspect of Bitcoin's defence mechanism, the proof-of-work function, when it relies on many others such as independent node operators, the economic majority, open-source developers, and social consensus.
Warner [2] separates the roles of digital signatures and proof-of-work within Bitcoin: digital signatures provide authentication whereas proof-of-work provides arbitration to determine an absolute order of transactions. He indirectly criticises Lowery's thesis dismissing the possiblity of nation states fighting over Bitcoin, or fighting using Bitcoin's proof-of-work function. Instead, he believes Bitcoin must remain a smaller, but significant decentralised alternative to centralised systems.
It is not for everyone, but I really like more-speech (https://github.com/unclebob/more-speech). The intended audience is programmers, especially Clojure programmers. It is fascinating to read through Uncle Bob's Clojure specs for things like Bech32.
Yeah, there are definitely risks here. I think the problem stems more from ETH's dual purpose as a native token and as stake in the consensus mechanism.
Also, does Vitalik try to trigger Bitcoiners by intentionally putting TheDAO fork and the Bitcoin Cash fork in the same basket every chance he gets? TheDAO fork is similar to his BRL story, but the Bitcoin Cash fork was very different.
TBF, the original article (https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/05/21/dont_overload.html) isn't about over-engineering, but about reusing Ethereum's social consensus layer. He argues that reusing Ethereum's cryptoeconomic consensus system (validator staked ETH) is acceptable but reusing Ethereum's social consensus system is not. He's saying that there won't be a repeat of the TheDAO fork in the future, even if systems like Eigenlayer or the L2s mess up. There's plenty to criticise but the linked article does a bad job of stating his argument and linking it to a memecoin.
For me, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork was formative. It showed that there are threats to Bitcoin around every corner, even within the Bitcoin community itself. Since then I find the maximalist viewpoint to be a good default viewpoint when looking at competing projects and ideas.
GENESIS