Hacker News: nadahalli

New comment by nadahalli in "Willow, Our Quantum Chip"

nadahalli — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 21:30:48 +0000

[pedantic hat on] Bitcoin doesn't use encryption.

You mean digital signatures - and yes, we use signatures everywhere in public key cryptography.

New comment by nadahalli in "Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn"

nadahalli — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:50:24 +0000

You will like this 2020 classic piece by the folks at Paradigm: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

New comment by nadahalli in "Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC"

nadahalli — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:44:01 +0000

The hashing part is kind of orthogonal. The real negative outcome of quantum computers getting reliable and powerful would be that ECDSA would be broken (using Shor's algorithm variants). This would make every coin stealable by anyone with access to such a computer. Some coins would be easier to steal than others (P2PK would be the easiest - and all of Satoshi's coins are P2PK). The Bitcoin network would keep working, but coin-ownership would be meaningless.

New comment by nadahalli in "In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism"

nadahalli — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 11:06:42 +0000

I started reading the article assuming it was an April fool's joke. After a bit into it, I thought it was not a joke. When the self-deprecation began, I was again convinced it was a joke - but at the end of the article, I think this is not a joke. It's a rather good take on why Bitcoin maximalism is what it is.

Some degree of ETH-maximalism will be required in the future given the sheer number of pretender L-1 blockchains snapping at ETH's heels. Writing about BTC-maximalism sets the foundation for that culture.

New comment by nadahalli in "Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021"

nadahalli — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 19:54:47 +0000

That's the entire point. Bitcoin has just one use case, and it's very inefficient design is tailor-made for that one use case.

Alt-coins have use cases that can all be solved by AWS. The inefficient design is er....inefficient for those applications.

New comment by nadahalli in "Is Web3 anything?"

nadahalli — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 22:24:11 +0000

Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments are one approach. Encoding everything that you might want to buy as an input to a ZKP system is a stretch, obviously. But at least, that's the spirit of this philosophy.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

New comment by nadahalli in "100 years of whatever this will be"

nadahalli — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 11:35:17 +0000

I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.

New comment by nadahalli in "An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities"

nadahalli — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 08:36:42 +0000

As for "Crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and friends" - you have to ask yourself why they don't work at scale. That's the key insight of Bitcoin. You need to have a system-native incentive for the nodes to do their thing, and this system-native thing (BTC the currency, in Bitcoin's case), should have outside value. Many wiser people have said this (not on HackerNews maybe), that money is the only use case for a blockchain.

New comment by nadahalli in "Bitcoin is a Ponzi"

nadahalli — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 09:10:34 +0000

> If we could magically make 100x the gold, that would be great! Current gold investors would be sad but it would be a win for the world.

I am not sure about that. If there were a magical new way of creating gold to inflate its supply, it would not be good for the world.

New comment by nadahalli in "Dutch entrepreneurs avoiding negative interest by opening multiple bank accounts"

nadahalli — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:31:41 +0000

You are on the wrong forum my friend.

Austrians and the HN community talk past each other because it's not easy to get the latter (which I am a part of) to see that their large salaries in FAANG companies are partly due to the Fed largesse.

New comment by nadahalli in "$600M taken in largest DeFi hack to date"

nadahalli — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 12:16:28 +0000

SlowMist has a non-humorous writeup. https://slowmist.medium.com/the-root-cause-of-poly-network-b...

I am still waiting for Rekt to cover this one.

Stacker News: HN like site where upvotes require 1 satoshi

nadahalli — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 06:48:31 +0000

Article URL: https://stacker.news/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27744959

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nadahalli in "The collapse of the IRON stable coin"

nadahalli — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 07:56:41 +0000

Most smart contracts on Ethereum, or other blockchains are only immutable in their marketing material, but not in practice. Either they use an obvious PIMPL/Proxy contract (OpenZeppelin, a popular smart contract library suite has proxy contract that many others use: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/upgrades-plugins/1.x/proxies), or they have other subtler hooks that can be used to change what ABI/function calls to the smart contract does. These hooks are only usable by privileged actors (surprise surprise).

Smart contracts being immutable is a joke, almost. And more importantly, even if they were immutable, proving that formally for a Turing complete language is impossible.

Bitcoin smartly avoided this by making its smart contracts dumber.

New comment by nadahalli in "The collapse of the IRON stable coin"

nadahalli — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 07:49:56 +0000

That'd be quite expensive. And as you manipulate prices across blocks, arbitrageurs would arb it back to "market price". Uniswap V3 allows for a 3rd party smart contract to ask its Uniswap V3 Oracle to employ a 9 day moving average price - which is of course, not very useful as a "spot price", but is super hard to manipulate.

New comment by nadahalli in "It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency"

nadahalli — Sun, 30 May 2021 23:40:19 +0000

Many European countries also charge negative interest rates. In Switzerland, where I live, bank balances above CHF 100K gets a flat -0.75% interest rate.

Just saying.

New comment by nadahalli in "Bitcoin is not a Battery – it is a Sink"

nadahalli — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 18:44:58 +0000

I am curious why the author thinks that security is not a commodity.

New comment by nadahalli in "Bitcoin Is Time"

nadahalli — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 21:33:14 +0000

That primitive has not been invented (maybe yet). Till then, we have Bitcoin.

New comment by nadahalli in "Bitcoin Is Time"

nadahalli — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 21:30:37 +0000

For those who already know about Bitcoin's timestamping really well, it's worth reading about the time-warp attack. David Harding wrote a great answer about it on StackExchange ages ago: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75831/what-is-ti...

New comment by nadahalli in "Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto"

nadahalli — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 13:44:12 +0000

This is deflation, and turns out everyone hates deflation. Just to be clear, I am with you here.

New comment by nadahalli in "S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021"

nadahalli — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 10:43:22 +0000

That's true. It's a verifiable "burn of electricity". The only upside to the burning is the verifiability. If there was some other way to generate this verifiable scarcity of something that we all agree on (electricity is kind of universal, that way), that would be better - obviously.