Clippy noticed that Bitcoin seems to make it easier for software agents to earn money, convince humans to do jobs for them, and optimize the universe in a paper-clip friendly direction.
If Clippy is right, is it a problem?
Singularity Institute visiting fellow Thomas McCabe is running GetBitcoin, a notable money handling service.
Does he have any insights to share?
Gwern wrote an article arguing that Bitcoin is an ugly protocol: Bitcoin is Worse is Better
What does gwern think today?
How should one extend or rework the protocol to make Bitcoin, or a successor more appealing?
Wei Dai is quoted in the original whitepaper. He writes:
If you read the Wikipedia article, you should know that I didn't create Bitcoin but only described a similar idea more than a decade ago. And my understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, didn't even read my article before reinventing the idea himself. He learned about it afterward and credited me in his paper. So my connection with the project is quite limited.
What does he think of of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general? (Still mining?)
Scott Aaronson recently published a technical paper on quantum money, u...
Gwern wrote an article arguing that Bitcoin is an ugly protocol : Bitcoin is Worse is Better. What does gwern think today?
I actually finished that a month or two ago, so it reflects my current sentiments. No events have substantially changed my opinion, and some reinforce them - for example, I thought it was very stupid for anyone to engage in finalization on Silk Road (releasing your money from escrow to the vendor before receiving anything), and indeed, a big vendor recently scammed buyers out of something like a hundred thousand plus dollars worth of bitcoins by requiring finalization and then absconding.
Needless to say, this is what Wei Dai / Satoshi Nakamoto would say if they were the same person.
Needless to say, this is what Will_Newsome / Satoshi Nakamoto would say if they were the same person.
(Sorry. Played Resistance for the first time yesterday evening.)
I still use it for some things, but there's not really a whole lot to discuss; the price is stable, Silk Road is still running, people are still taking it for donations. Infrastructure isn't always exciting.
On a related note, has anyone else in the Less Wrong community looked into RipplePay? It's a system that, instead of being based on a finite currency, is based on distributed transferable IOUs.
Paper fiat money can be interpreted as an IOU from the government, transferable, and valid for use on your taxes. Ripple payments are private IOUs, valid for canceling debts with the issuer. To make a ripple payment to someone who trusts you, you simply issue them an IOU (assuming you haven't maxed out your credit with them...). To make a ripple payment to someone who doesn't trust you, the system finds a route along which IOUs can be exchanged (eg Alice gives one of her IOUs to Bob, who gives one of his to Carol, and then Carol gives whatever it was that Alice bought to Alice).
My biggest critique is that there isn't a distributed protocol, and the only implementation currently relies on a single central server. That, combined with the bootstrap problem, makes it unusable in practice. (BitCoin has a similar bootstrap problem, but less of a critical mass problem, since you don't have to find a route among people who both trust each other and use BitCoin.)
Comments or critiques, on either the theory or practicality?
The concept of RipplePay seems to require people accepting significant default risk from many people, for no compensation. The size of the risk accepted and the carrying capacity of the network are proportional, such that making it useful requires making the default risks large. The proponents suggest setting up lines of credit with your friends, but this seems like courting disaster; not only would I be risking both money and friendships, I'd have to pay for expensive due diligence, I'd have to occasionally offend people by signaling mistrust, and I'd be setting things up so that if I did go bankrupt (perhaps because I lent too much money to someone who defaulted), my social network would transform into angry creditors.
In exchange for all this risk, I gain nothing: I'm still using an inflating currency, I can't move large balances quickly or secretly, and I gain a constant chore of settling books with people. And after all that, I still need a traditional bank for value storage (since RipplePay is only attempting to solve the transfer). No thanks. RipplePay will never be anything more than a novelty used for tiny dollar amounts.
I was wondering about this only the other day. If you're wondering "what became of BitCoin after the price peaked last year", here's the price chart (log scale - see tick boxes to change)
This story came up on Hacker News recently (article in question): a company is creating chips that apparently can do 1 terahash/s, and currently pricing them for around $30K.
As this comment points out, the total combined hash rate of the entire bitcoin network is about 12 TH/s (source). So buying just one of these chips gives you >7% of the current total hashing power. In theory this is about 21 BTC (or 130+ USD) per hour, which means you break even after 230 hours, or fewer than 10 days!
Last year, MBlume suggested:
Someone should really write a prediction market using bitcoins -- it would be simpler for US-based users to participate.
This now exists at BetsOfBitcoin. I signed up one exactly one month ago.
So far, I've won 13 out of 13 bets. Mostly small bets and low yields, but winning is fun.
Bitcoin's primary function in my life is to provide a constant temptation to say 'screw this nonsense' and earn significant sums of money very quickly, though bitcoin-enabled anonymous crime.
Thinking about Bitcoin always makes me think whether it could be profitable to invent a new "Bitcoin 2.0" -- officially it would provide some improvements over the old protocol, but of course the real reason would be to have all those new free coins just for yourself.
In case of success, this has a potential to bring a lot of money. Therefore some money could be spent now, for example to weekly spam Slashdot with articles about the advantages of "Bitcoin 2.0".
If there is a good chance of a successful takeover, this is what rationalists s...
Bitcoin's mining system seems odd.
There's a reason we don't make coins out of precious metals. Mining them is a waste of resources. Mining bitcoins has the same problem. If they're worried about people not liking them because of the profit they'd get, can't they just donate the money to charity or something?
Some things I would like to know:
Clippy noticed that bitcoin could make it easier for software agents to earn money, convice meatspace agents to do jobs for them, and optimize the universe in a paper-clip friendly direction.
If Clippy is right, is this a problem?
Singularity Institute visiting fellow Thomas McCabe is running GetBitcoin, a notable money handling service.
Does he have any insights to share?
Gwern wrote an article arguing that Bitcoin is an ugly protocol : Bitcoin is Worse is Better
What does gwern think today? Could one extend or rework th...
Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Monthly threads popped up around the same time a pricing bubble brought mainstream attention last year. When the bubble popped, and price continued to deflate, discussion on this site stopped entirely. Was there a change of sign in the social status of the topic, is the topic fully explored, or has there simply happened nothing of interest over the last year?
If you are not familiar with Bitcoin, here is one intro I happen to like.
Kaj Sotala lists a number of previous threads on the topic:
Less Wrong seems like a good place to discuss recent developments, if one does not want to suffer the inanity of the officially unofficial forum. If you are not longer interested in Bitcoin, perhaps send your remaining balance to the Singularity Institute?