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Adam Back discovers hashcash was a mistake
0 sats \ 2 comments \ @LibreHans 18h bitcoin
In a somewhat surprising development, the inventor of hashcash, and proof of work, Adam Back, realizes inventing it was a mistake.
In https://x.com/adam3us/status/1967175343200256446 he says that knots users want a walled garden, and that that's not cypherpunk. He invented hashcash to combat spam on remailers, because at one point in history he understood that cypherpunk infrastructure needs to be protected against spam.
Now he's peddling paper bitcoin and treasury companies, and thinks that fighting spam on cypherpunk infrastructure is bad.
I posted a screenshot here https://open.substack.com/pub/librehans/p/adam-back-figures-out-hashcash-was (hope the link is ok)
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55 sats \ 0 replies \ @standardcrypto 15h
no, the tweet doesn't say this.
cypherpunk isn't pro spam. the argument is over how to limit spam.
hashcash was one way.
Bitcoin (normal core Bitcoin defaults) is a better way. Impose costs on spammers so they can't dominate use of the system.
Knots argues core doesn't go far enough, not that core doesn't limit spam.
You only get spam now because Bitcoin is underutilized because of ETFs and whatnot. My feeling is this will get fixed organically just with the passage of time, more users will utilize Bitcoin and the spammers will mostly get priced out.
But I suppose a 'non filters" way to fight spam would be a soft fork to idk maybe 50 bytes instead of a thousand, forcing regular users to outbid spam. But no one wants to do this.
But it is more cypherpunk ethos than filters.
Filters is whack a mole. You want to fix the problem at the source, by metering utilization.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nitter 18h
https://xcancel.com/adam3us/status/1967175343200256446
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