Here is CSW's original claim that Bitcoin is Turing complete that took many by surprise including Nick Szabo. They heard it as you did, specifically addressing Bitcoin Script.
He immediately corrects them:
"The difference is that the SCRIPT ITSELF ISN'T, what you can do is..."
So there you go. Clearly not what you're claiming here, and if he said anything similar casually I'm sure this is exactly what he means, as he has stated many times, as the article states, as others have stated, as I understand it, and as can be observed.
You're conflating (intentionally?) Bitcoin the system vs Bitcoin Script. Nobody claims the Script in a vacuum is Turing complete which is important and by design, including the article which clearly says "Each step in running the Turing machine is triggered by a Bitcoin transaction."
Others have explained this too, so forgive me if your account age combined with Greg's precense, your arguments style, and the very peculiar coincidence that your handle matches a known BSV proponent on Reddit who Greg just happened to tag in connection with this post suggest you are being disingenuous.
This is true but the conclusion is over simplified. There is of course no looping constructs in script. This is by design as it guarantees the script can be executed without consuming excessive resources. Of course it can represent a single iteration of a larger program which is the point not being acknowledged.
Interesting this account is 2 hours old and seems to have been created specifically to discredit this post. At the same time, another commenter here nullc is Greg Maxwell of Blockstream fame who has become notorious for this exact behavior. These fresh accounts with long winded explanations of the same opinion tend to appear when Greg is near.
Twetch is an experiment in exactly this. Pay to like, comment, "branch" as they call it (retweet). pow.market is another fascinating experiment using proof of work as the currency that could be integrated into these platforms. ctzn.network is another take but no payments going on there. "Karma as a token" is what I think of based on your description and it's really cool. I think in the next couple of years there will be a lot more experimentation in this area too. It's a perfect storm of censorship, bots, and fake news that are encouraging more experiments now. There are others I'm aware of that are not yet public that I'm most excited about though. It's definitely happening.
I'm here collecting downvotes in exchange for hard truths.
Could have paid to put the data on chain for less than the cost to settle the purchase of this luxurious immutable broken link. BSV is much better low level technology for this kind of thing. Now shower me with your hatred before I give you more sound reasons it is clearly superior.
Even if I did provide you some report showing banks use more than Bitcoin (which is still true for now) it's only a fraction of the big picture. Although banks are a good example of this effect, Bitcoin doesn't JUST improve banking. As this plays out, mining infrastructure provides a shared resource that can be used by MILLIONS of companies, among which are banks who manage massive datacenters requiring humans and their associated energy consumption, the cost for audits, compliance, card readers, and other things that Bitcoin makes effortless. Surely unlocking efficiency offsets power consumption, and at scale the efficiency improvements can be astronomical. An accurate figure on this probably does not even exist, especially considering the lack of imagination with respect to Bitcoin use-cases. Not to mention the biggest energy consumers are also the best in the world at reducing their consumption out of competitive necessity.
I agree. I think makes them more efficient, and less important for some of their common use-cases. All of that mining equipment is infrastructure they don't need.
Funny nobody complains about the energy consumed by actual banks and other services Bitcoin would replace, which is much higher. In those circumstances they can understand it's not a waste at all, but a cost of providing a valuable service.
I don't think POS is an adequate replacement. POW was an intentional design choice because of the highly competitive environment that it creates.
Exactly. Price aside, the growth is insane. Things are being built. Merchants are coming back online. Within a few months the sentiment will start to change for BCH.
> How?
By simply eliminating intermediaries. A middle man always takes a cut somehow. If you can eliminate him, both parties can enjoy better rates. Here are some non vague ways blockchains can help real problems:
- What if a kind of youtube existed where advertisers paid content creators directly instead of youtube taking a large percentage? And it was censorship resistant.
- What if we could build app stores that don't take a 30-50% cut.
- How about an entire p2p marketplace without fees like ebay? openbazaar.org
- What about getting paid for things that are impossible right now because of CC tx fees? This unlocks microtransactions & an entire attention economy (see yours.org, steemit.com, more incoming)
- How about p2p digital rights management to allow artists to keep more of their income? Several in the works.
- How about any service that exists to keep records? I would love to see the day Pacer was replaced by a blockchain.
- What if a kind of reddit could exist without centrally moderated channels and armies of fake users?
- What if p2p rented data storage could be a fraction of the price of dropbox without selling your data?
- What if you could rent computing power in a p2p fashion?
- What if network/VPN rules could be tokenized in the hardware and network access could be metered and charged per minute in crypto?
- What if you could receive payroll as a minute by minute stream?
- What if the lottery was provably fair and 1000 times less of a ripoff?
- What if we could replace obviously flawed political polling with prediction markets?
I could write this list all day. Not vague handwaving, all of these things are being worked on or already exist.
If you think the desire for sound money is weird you'll never understand why we need bitcoin. The hard core gold bugs in the Libertarian forums circa 2008 STILL don't trust bitcoin because they can't hold it in their hand. You think these are the folks that invented it? They're typically not computer savvy in the least and would rather invest in canned food with a 90 year shelf life. In that diverse group there were a small subset of cryptography nerds who had worked on several digital money theories and iterations before actually inventing bitcoin. Those people knew a lot about finance, economics, politics, etc. People like to flatten groups into one personality and call them weird or fringe to auto-win an argument when the reality is a bit more complicated than that. I'll remind you that the early days of the internet attracted some weird characters too. Doesn't mean they were wrong to be excited, and it doesn't mean the people who actually invented it wore spiked collars and combat boots either.
This one makes me a little sad. I was very into bitcoin and blockchain ideas early on and the ICO fever has poisoned the well a bit. The money is attracting the types you're describing but IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy. It seems obvious to me that the intersection of these things informed bitcoin's core design concepts. Some people think the system we have now is deeply flawed and needs a redesign, others don't. Those who don't might find it hard to see the utility in bitcoin.
The best practices I'm talking about are built into the client software and a user doesn't need to know about them (new address per transaction already happens in most wallets). Again, totally not claiming linking ids isn't a problem, its just being touted as an impassable blockchain problem which is the basis of this discussion. The problem exists because governments are forcing all onramps to link IDS, not because of an inherent flaw of the system. Even with that 'flaw' other proposals/experiments already exist and work really well, and will probably be integrated directly into bitcoin in the future. An equifax-like service could exist that establishes credibility based on holdings or the public history of an address you control, not necessarily an identified individual. There are some clear benefits to that, one being your identifying information is not put at risk.
There are actually lots functional proof of stake coins like byteball and NEM for example (but I share your skepticism about long term viability of proof of stake BECAUSE it doesn't cost anything). I think the energy "waste" isn't waste because it serves a purpose. For someone to forge a transaction they would need to control a huge amount of hash power which would cost a fortune. On the other hand, there's always ideas like gridcoin that use that hash power to do scientific computations at the same time (best of both worlds?).
While this is correct, for that to be true a person would need to be using the same wallet address for every transaction which is contrary to default wallet behavior / best practices. I think people conflate the side effect of KYC regulation (mass identity linking) with an inherent weakness of blockchains when it's not. I can buy BTC directly from a person to a new wallet address and it is pseudonymous at that moment. My point is the blockchain doesn't provide or remove anonymity, its just a medium that does not require identity. Meanwhile, every bank transaction you make is recorded with your ID and its all sitting in a handfull of databases waiting to be hacked like equifax was. If used the way they were intended the anonymity could be miles ahead of where we are now (just ask the ransomware bitcoin hackers).
Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc.
If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train.
- low tx rate? not for long
- high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake).
- high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. not everyone needs to run a full node (but anyone can).
- no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow. openbazaar does this very nicely
If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes.
A blockchain is like a big spreadsheet. It's not going to be anonymous if you start typing identifying information into it, but it certainly gives you the option of being anonymous if you care to do so.
In contrast, you cant make a bank transaction without linking your identity. This is what people are talking about when they say blockchains give anonymity.
He immediately corrects them:
"The difference is that the SCRIPT ITSELF ISN'T, what you can do is..."
So there you go. Clearly not what you're claiming here, and if he said anything similar casually I'm sure this is exactly what he means, as he has stated many times, as the article states, as others have stated, as I understand it, and as can be observed.
https://youtu.be/LdvQTwjVmrE?t=1083
I'm glad to hear you never post under other accounts.