
Ten Years of Bitcoin - clarkmoody
https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/posts/ten-years-bitcoin
======
simias
That's good Bitcoin PR but clicking the link I hoped for a more in-depth
analysis of these ten years, the lessons learned and the way forward. This is
mostly fluff.

>These past ten years might be the earliest days of a new golden era of human
flourishing, built upon censorship-resistant, sound money.

Good thing they used "might" otherwise I might have scoffed at this
grandiloquent and unsubstantiated statement.

~~~
clarkmoody
Author here.

Yep, it's definitely a message to Bitcoin insiders, but that's not a bad
thing. Sorry to fail your hopes.

> grandiloquent and unsubstantiated statement

Once you've studied money from a critical angle, you start to see that unsound
money is the root cause of many of the problems with society and government.

The first ten years of Bitcoin (plus history leading to it) and sound vs
unsound money are both huge topics in their own right. Perhaps it would be
useful for me to include a little box at the end of each article with links to
books and lengthy posts about these topics.

~~~
mgraczyk
Interestingly, I meet a lot of traditional banking folks who understand how
Bitcoin works. It's very rare that I meet Bitcoin/blockchain folks who
understand how traditional banking works.

~~~
spiorf
Maybe the information asymmetry is part of the problem itself. Banking system
is centuries upon centuries of arbitraty constructs. It does not make sense
from the ground up.

~~~
mgraczyk
Yes, there are lots of good Bitcoin/blockchain resources online, while the
banking system is more complicated and has fewer easily digestible resources
available.

~~~
CaptainZapp
_while the banking system is more complicated and has fewer easily digestible
resources available_

I'd wager that the literature on banking and finance _far_ outweighs resources
on anything crypto. Specifically compared to papers on crypto coming from a
neutral perspective.

Your statement is just plain wrong.

edit : clarification

~~~
pjc50
Ah, but it's not presented in a droning series of youtube videos that pander
to the viewer's prejudices, so it might as well not exist! /s

------
askmike
The text in the hex data seen in the article (part of the Bitcoin genesis
block) was the headline of The Times to prove the block wasn't generated prior
to the newspaper's date.

Bitmex (one of the largest exchanges at the moment) put an ad on the frontpage
of the newspaper's issue exactly 10 years later as a tribute:
[https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/108059040132345036...](https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1080590401323450368)

EDIT: It seems there is a full page ad that goes with the front page one:
[https://imgur.com/sVBZVfN](https://imgur.com/sVBZVfN)

~~~
HashBasher
How can a newspaper prove that the block wasn't generated prior to the publish
date? If I were to hash the headlines from a 1969 "ON THE MOON!" article,
would it prove that my block is older that the bitcoin's genesis block?

~~~
rtkwe
Including it only proves that it was not generated before a certain date. It
can't prove that it was generated before something also generated after the
headline in question.

You have to predict exactly what the headline is going to be though "On the
Moon" is a fair guess but the chances you would get "Men walk on the moon"
(plus "astronauts land on plain; collect rocks, plant flag" if we're using the
subheadline too) exactly correct to fake it are really low. That's only
possible on a very small number of dates where there's a known huge event
coming up.

------
gooseus
I was expecting/hoping for analysis, but it's more like an anniversary press
release touting a bunch of success without reference and ignoring anything
negative.

> For ten years, the world has known a decentralized source of truth. At all
> prior times in human history, we relied on centralized third parties to
> establish trust.

This is your periodic reminder that >51% of the mining is currently controlled
by 5 large mining companies based out of China[0]. If you think these
companies not entirely beholden to the non-democratic, highly centralized,
Chinese government (or that this is a non-issue) then I'd really like to hear
that argument.

I must admit I was surprised to see that 20.1% of mining is currently
"Unknown", which was not the case last I checked.

[0] [https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools](https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools)

~~~
smokeyj
> or that this is a non-issue

I'd argue non-issue. Attack vectors could be to attempt a double spend (not
worth it) or confirming empty blocks (why?).

------
acdha
This reads like a press release — I thought the puffery would be followed by
something substantive but hit the bottom of the page instead. If you aren’t a
true believer before reading this you wouldn’t leave having learned anything.

------
ForHackernews
There's almost no content in this post. I can't tell if it's intended as some
kind of meta-commentary on bitcoin?

------
acjohnson55
No doubt, this is a rare achievement of technology, community and economics.

At the same time, if everyone abandoned the project today, it's tough to
imagine a measurable impact on the world outside the cryptoscene.

Personally, I feel that everyone has been too obsessed with the desire to
hoard assets to actually build shit that's useful to society. The fact that
this rent-seeking desire is baked into the core of most cryptocurrency schemes
makes me skeptical that the space will amount to much in the near term. I
suspect that when it does, it'll come about in a way that avoids rewarding the
squatters. Certainly nowhere near the ratio of dumb money to strategic
investment we've seen in the past couple years.

------
nikolay
... Ten years of scams and theft and damage to the environment from the abuse
of electricity!

------
fastbeef
I recall mining a Bitcoin back in early 09 or so, staring at it for a few
seconds and then deleting it with a chuckle. Oh well.

~~~
jcousins
If you did mine in 2009 you mined a block yourself, so it would have been
50btc.

~~~
spurgu
And he likely wouldn't have those 50 BTC anymore, might've bought a pizza or
something back when the price hit $0.30.

