Punk, do you know how often the cypherpunks archive is updated? I seem to be disconnected from the list; didn't get the last archived email yet, and recent posts aren't showing up. On Aug 4, 2020 2:20 PM, "Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0" <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote:
On Mon, 3 Aug 2020 17:50:28 -0400 Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
No tone cues for sarcasm on the internet.
So to sum up, James is an arch-right-winger trying to pose as some kind of 'libertarian'. He's the typical corporate apologist, pretending in typical randroid fashion that "big business are amerikkkas' most oppresed minority".
Many people seem to believe this.
But NOW he's complaining that his dear 'meritocratic' big businesses are siding with BLM. Which in turn tells you that BLM is just controlled opposition and which makes James' position even more ridiculous.
The businesses are siding with BLM due to the effort of thousands of american activists pressuring people to notice what's up in the flag of violence against blacks, if it matters. It seems something else may have mysteriously helped, too. The position you describe is in line with Trump, who lumps the mainstream with the left. It was a very minority view until he was elected; mostly held by rural demographics near major business enterprises in the areas I'd visited.
I know that all bitcoin transactions are public,
Right. That aids censorship resistance. You can put things on a blockchain that nobody can delete, change, or even hide.
Transactions being public doesn't aid censorship resistance. Rather, it's what makes censorship possible.
Does my next reply respond to this?
You could also use cryptography to make those things private, and mixing layers to increase your anonymity, but that's not what I mean to worry about here.
But that's the thing. The more public information there is, the easier it becomes for censors to decide which transactions to reject.
Not with full nodes: the network is invalid if any information at all is missing. But yes, you need a miner to accept it, and you could be identified, posting it There's a way to push miner acceptance: you can make future transactions require old ones. Like, you can post a special message, and then buy or sell a product in a way that the purchase only goes through if the "special message" is also mined. Once that money is spent for something else, it is required that _all_ preceding transactions go through, for the entire lifetime of the blockchain. Censorship is actually incredibly hard if the protocol is used properly.
and I know that 'miners' get to decide which transactions are included in
the chain.
Partly true. _Any one_ miner can accept a transaction for it to get included in the chain,
yeah, so all miners would have to cooperate to censor a transaction. But such cooperation isn't far fetched. Also, if the majority of miners become censors, then the network would be censored most of the time. You would have to wait for your transaction to be mined by a 'good' miner, but that would take a lot longer.
This is actually already the situation in many cases. I sometimes have to wait for a number of blocks to be mined before my transactions are accepted when I don't use the "special message" trick. This has been getting better for me, interestingly.
I also know that mining isn't too 'distributed'
What's relevent is that it is still distributed enough to defend information in the face of a nation state adversary.
We'll see...
This has already been shown to my satisfaction repeatedly. What would demonstrate it to you?
The 'distributed' reducing problem reflects a situation where the corporate and government spookies attacked the development and mining communities, halting the expected curve of software development as demand increased.
Unless you change the proof of work algorithm,
Right: this was the plan but landed in forks instead of the main chain.
bitcoin mining is going to be centralized because of economic forces. The underlying economic system is pretty centralized and controled by govcorp, so only big mining operations can be 'profitable'.
This is another thing the devs seemed to realize too late that would be changed if there were focused, productive harmony in their community. They made Jim's error of believing money was held by the people, not the leaders, and better capitalism would provide freedom. Instead they produced a mess of cryptoanarchic millionaires which is still quite helpful. Blockchains still show a single programmer can change the whole world, by stepping into the digital cultural spaces that people leave unaddressed, and automating them.
It is an incredibly hard fight for them because cryptocurrencies are incredibly lucrative and widely supported.
and that the supposed creator of bitcoin wasn't bothered by mining being
done in the NSA datacenter.
This would be because the protocol was designed to be robust in the face of arbitrary groups mining. The NSA has to play by the rules of the network, or they are kicked out and ignored automatically.
My comment was somewhat obscure. What I meant is that 'satoshi' wasn't worried about mining being centralized...and wasn't worried about 'scaling' either. Here's the pertinent bit
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/
"as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware"
...you know, like amazon-NSA.
Nice pairing of names. This is just because Satoshi was making the Jim fallacy I mentioned above. It takes a very long time for bitcoins to merge with amazon-nsa. They don't like them: the dollar seems more predictable and familiar, and the dollar makes it much easier for them to keep secrets.
1. Bitcoin is hugely valuable and is designed to rise in value exponentially 2. The design is such that censoring it e.g. by miner collusion also lets people steal money 3. There are more creative thieves than creative censors 4. When the protocol is attacked, it becomes obvious on the network: the whole network is told
the protocol doesn't allow double spending, but it certainly allows 'discrimination'.
I don't know what you mean here. Economic discrimination and miner collusion?
5. So, people are increasingly financially motivated to protect the essentials of the protocol, and many fixes have gone in over the years. If fixes ever stop completely, somebody loses a lot of money and takes action on it.
You need to run a "full node" to participate in the censorship-free network. And due to the harm to the communities the situation does slowly get a little more confusing and a little more delicate.
even if you run a full node and have direct access to the 'true' chain, miners still decide what gets in the blocks.
But see "special message" trick above.
Look at ethereum. The chain was 'forked' and the majority of people went to the chain that had some 'bad' transactions reverted. Same thing could happen to bitcoin.
This required agreement from the entire dev team and is exactly how blockchains die. Note that ethereum is big enough that the original chain is still easy to acquire in its entirety. Bitcoin is much bigger. Disruptive forking has already happened to bitcoin with bch, bsv, etc. It doesn't mean any information is lost, though: each one of those chains has the entire history prior to the fork. All the people who trusted the blockchain to preserve something, in bitcoin and ethereum prior to their unexpected forks, have that trust still honored, without any regard to the content: except for the one person whose permanent impact was hacking the ethereum community itself.
It is still impossible enough to erase things on the Bitcoin blockchain, for now,
True, for now. On the other hand, look at all the cancer that grows around bitcoin like coinbase-mosad-GCHQ-NSA. Bitcoin 'exchanges' are worse than banks.
Economic war is happening. But bitcoin still has friendly communities who will trade with you in person for cash. Most of the exchanges appear run by millionaire cryptoanarchists, learning business and the intense difficulties the situation entails.
that if you could afford it you could broadcast a video of all the world leaders having a naked orgy and it would never go away.
On Mon, Aug 3, 2020, 1:25 PM Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote:
On Mon, 3 Aug 2020 21:12:40 +1000 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
-BLM support from EVERY MAJOR CORPORATION ON THE PLANET
That's your beloved capitalist libertarian heros James. You wouldn't be complaining about the actions of the Capitalist Masters of
the
Universe would you?
K
-
There is proof inside many peoples' electronics. Proof that a marketing group would contract development of a frightening virus. A virus that responds to peoples' keystrokes and browsing habits, and changes what people see on their devices. A virus that alters political behavior en masse, for profit.