So do you disagree with the statement made by GiGi?🤝
Discussion
i think Gigi would understand what i am talking about, i just have done a lot of general study of distributed systems outside of the context of bitcoin, mainly network transports and messaging/control systems.
my disagreement mainly relates to the fact that bitcoin's clock is lenient, because it can't be strict with the unreliability and latency of the internet.
the chain of custody along UTXO in-and-outpoints and the chain itself are both pure causality consensus. the security comes from them, not the clock. the clock governs the creation of new coins.
this is also why it's a 10 minute block time target btw. the minimum propagation time on the internet for a block is about 12 seconds, but reorgs can happen and it can take time for those to become high confidence. a lot of altcoins use even down to 15 seconds (ethereum's PoW consensus was this fast) but this doesn't allow for avoiding a lot of chain splits. 10 minutes helps ensure bitcoin's miners are always targeting the main chain and avoiding growing side chains.
i understand the bitcoin protocol and consensus so well i could probably write it from scratch without using any existing code aside from crypto/network libraries, and the spec of the block format and tx payload merkle tree.
i used to want to do that, but it would take me like 6 months lol. not interesting enough. for now, anyway. maybe some day i will do it for funsies.
Mate! You have a wealth of knowledge..
If you could get consensus to change something in BTC - what would it be? Everything you’ve said makes sense for someone who is very non technical… interesting stuff though!
i would deprecate segwit, by only allowing old segwit and legacy addresses to spend into taproot
this would also end the witness discount spam, eventually, because you wouldn't be able to go back the other way
that's about it. i'd rather nothing else was changed. i consider segwit to be a mistake and back in 2017 that was my opinion also. taproot signatures solve the signature malleability problem.
my solution doesn't take a consensus, either, just a gradual adoption of this policy by node developers to make it a default. can't wipe out old addresses from ever being able to spend but eventually every coin that was ever gonna move, would move.
schnorr signatures solve the malleability problem, they lower the block space requirement for multisig transactions, and they make lightning transactions indistinguishable from a payment from two addresses.
they could have done this in the blocksize wars, but the bastards managed to wheedle in what is essentially a block size increase, and, ironically, can't be used for actual transactions, only spammy data.
the reason why it isn't already happening though, is there is a lot of people tied up with legacy wallet software especially exchanges and this doesn't benefit them in any way. it also doesn't benefit miners, it's purely a user benefit.
this is also why so many switched to knots, which is basically a bitcoin core fork, with some sane default policies, because core devs decided to fuck around with dropping a non-consensus policy that previously more or less limited extra data in transactions to 80 bytes. it is expensive data compared to per byte cost of witness data, so they rationalised "why not drop that since no spammer will use it" but that's kinda not going with the vibe of the thing.
it would have a longer term security benefit by enabling the maintenance of a large number of nodes, however. but this is far future and speculative.
after all mentioned - are we more or less safe from BTC failing from a purely technical point of view?
absolutely, zero chance for at least 5 years and 10% chance in the next 5 after that, that somehow they manage to actually crack a few hash reversals on SHA256 or for that matter reverse public keys (which is already mitigated by not reusing addresses).
i personally think that Grok was being kind to the quantum doomsayers, i personally don't think that there will be an economical to run quantum computer even remotely near able to crack the cryptography before 2040.
i think they are going to figure out there is a flaw in their physics theory about the quantum states, and turn out that the algorithms that supposedly would exploit this property are not actually possible, and probably won't be possible any time sooner than there is enough computing to brute force these hashes and signatures/pubkeys anyway, by which time everything will be long ago upgraded to 512 bits or more.
as for the actual protocol and game theory level of it, it's proven itself for 16 years and if breaking the cryptography is the only viable path, i'd say that only a massive solar flare or alien invasion would break bitcoin.
so stack sats stay humble and learn and educate as much as possible? Thanks for all the information today!
it should get you on the right track i think. don't trust, verify. i may have muddled something up. i don't do teaching as a profession, but what i explained is my understanding of the design of bitcoin, coming from years of exploring the subject of distributed systems and economics.
there is a lot of nonsense around, so i hope i gave you some tools to recognise it.
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They have assumed Superpostion is continuous across the quantum timestep. If you can’t observe Planck Time, you can’t assume continuous Superpostion.
Schrödinger’s UTXO is utter nonsense when you Bitcoin measures the quantum of time (blocks) and we can audit the entire ledger at each timestep.
yeah, i consider it to be impossible also. mainstream physics is still holding to dark matter bullshit and ignoring the mounting evidence of electromagnetic forces being the source, also.
i think there is some crazy stuff going on in physics but they sure as fuck are off the reservation, and the red flag for me is how much they hype it in the media, and idiots like shitcoiners thinking that "quantum resistant" cryptography makes a shitcoin better. i tend to assume that if stupid people believe something, it's wrong.
a method that might actually work, is if you figure out gravity and put a computer in an extreme high gravity environment so its clock is ticking thousands of times faster. then you can shorten the bruteforce process. but that's about it. but i think that making gravity near zero would be far more interesting and productive.
Bitcoin defines literal quantum computation based on the original meaning of “quantum”, not the narrative spewed by media. Sunken cost fallacy is deep.
If you can’t understand what it means to compute a quantum (of time), how can physicists understand what they are observing and its true nature.
Bitcoin fractally added to the unified field theory, we are literally watching energy flow inward into time with every block mined. I just don’t think physicists understand the Kelvin must be absolutely scarce for a quantum to retain meaning. Absolute scarcity is a precondition for any existence mathematically; not this infinity narrative.
Bitcoin shows both transformation and registration of the quantum.
