
Zcash begins - carlchenet
https://z.cash/blog/zcash-begins.html
======
Animats
_" This technology can do for cooperation what the Internet did for
communication two decades ago."_

Huh? Why? How? It's an altcoin with more anonymity than Bitcoin. That's nice,
but no big deal.

I went to hear Tromer's talk on the theory behind Zcash at Stanford last
Wednesday.[1] There were a lot of very strong claims and a lot of hand-waving.
I'm not an expert in that area, but the claims were awfully strong and the
presentation didn't back them up sufficiently. Here's his key paper.[2] He
claims, at least, to have developed a new way to generate cryptographically
strong hash functions. See section 1.1 of that paper. That's a hard problem.
Of the existing crypto-grade hash functions, Snefru, MD2 (128-bit), MD4, MD5,
RIPEMD, HAVAL-128, and SHA-0 have all been broken, and SHA-1 is looking weak.
Solving that problem alone would be a noteworthy achievement. So where's
Tromer's proposed hash function, evaluated by the crypto community?

On the financial front, the insiders take a 20% rakeoff of new Zcash coins for
the first four years. That's a huge cut for a financial product. The investors
include Roger Ver, the convicted felon who publicly said Mt. Gox was sound.
What could possibly go wrong?

[1]
[http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/)
[2]
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf)

~~~
patcon
Haven't read it, but since that quote totally rings true to me, I'll step up
to the plate: I think they're trying to channel the idea that blockchains are
to "agreements" what the internet was to "communications", particularly in
terms of democratization.

The internet used to provide low-barrier super-human communication abilities,
but only in very limited contexts -- possibly beside a giant mainframe, and
only able to talk with other giant mainframes. Now that we have instant comms
in our pockets and on our wrists all the time, the effects are pretty
expansive. Blockchains are not yet ubiquitous, but when they are (in every
device and underlying many services we use), every person will have the
infrastructure to create and maintain complex agreements for near-zero costs.
(Financial agreements and otherwise.) This will be pretty transformative.

I assume ZCash is acknowledging that privacy is a critical piece of that
transformation in organizational structure for society. Kinda like how
ubiquitous communications are almost pointless without the possibility of E2E
encryption.

But this is a lot of speculation given that I haven't read the linked article
;)

~~~
wslh
> Blockchains are not yet ubiquitous, but when they are (in every device and
> underlying many services we use), every person will have the infrastructure
> to create and maintain complex agreements for near-zero costs. (Financial
> agreements and otherwise.) This will be pretty transformative.

Sorry, but this is wishful thinking. The simple question about how you can
enforce agreements running in blockchains can't be answered. In the real world
you have the military or police force while in the blockchain itself you are
pretty limited. On the other hand external oracles are the weakest part of the
blockchain system. If they are hacked you hacked the agreements.

I think the blockchain/cryptocurrency/smart-contracts/app-coin scene is really
exciting but the connection with the real world is problematic, more when the
financial institutions are enforcing AML/KYC/etc

~~~
aianus
> The simple question about how you can enforce agreements running in
> blockchains can't be answered.

Check out [https://www.augur.net/](https://www.augur.net/) for an attempt at
answering that question. They crowdsource the outcomes of the various bets
from people holding REP tokens. REP holders have a financial incentive to act
honestly to increase or maintain the value of their REP.

~~~
wslh
I know Augur, but what part of Augur is an attempt to answering my question?

~~~
aianus
They developed a way of enforcing agreements (bets) made on a blockchain
without courts, police, military, or easy-to-hack external oracles.

~~~
wslh
Augur doesn't answer my original concern. If you have a smart contract
between, for example, two companies, that information is private and it
doesn't work like a popular baseball game. If one company doesn't follow the
contract you need to solve the problem in the real world.

Also, we don't know yet how public blockchains (where Augur runs) work with
State or powerful actor attacks, when the incentives are not purely financial.

~~~
etherael
One way you could solve the problem in the real world is track down the
delinquent counterparty to the contract, drag them into an expensive legal
system, subject them to the costs thereof, levy a penalty on them, hope that
they pay it, in the even that they do not or cannot, seize their assets, in
the event that they have none or you cannot, punish them with prison, in the
event that they resist, kill them.

Sure, that's the traditionally accepted way to go about solving the problem in
the real world. But there are many other ways to solve the same problems that
we're all intimately familiar with by now based around reputation systems.
When it becomes public that a counterparty to a contract has engaged in
delinquency, they suffer a reputational hit. If their reputation has value
(and there is nothing about pseudonymous entities that mean that they cannot
accrue reputational value, rating systems work on darknet markets quite well
and have since their inception), and the amount of damage to their reputation
is higher cost than making good on the contract, then they will make good on
the contract (and even if they can't, you've punished their delinquency by
damaging their reputation, instead of dragging them through an expensive
inefficient corrupt legal system involving violence as the final sanction).

All sharing economy and peer to peer systems that currently exist work on
systems of this kind, and cryptocurrencies to the extent that reputations are
valued and contracts made similarly so, and this will only become more
prevalent as time goes by.

Not everything requires recourse to violence.

~~~
wslh
Reputation doesn't work in problems with a lot of money/power at stake. You
can easily hack the system behaving like a good citizen for a long time until
you consume all your reputation in a big transaction. Not only that,
reputation is a hard problem if you are a newcomer.

~~~
etherael
Nothing works if the payoff for defection outweighs the costs of enforcement,
that's why we have wars, crime, and all of the other things that the old
fashion legal and diplomatic systems of the nations of the world have to deal
with. However, conflicts of this type are rare compared to the very standard
ones that are quite capable of being handled by reputation systems, escrow,
etc. They solve these ordinary problems more efficiently, quickly, and at a
lower cost.

That should be embraced and noted, and where appropriate migrated to, not
pushed aside because there is a rapidly decreasing class of problems not
suited to resolution with this model.

~~~
wslh
Your loan is not paid, how do you enforce the payment? This is the difficult
issue that companies such as BTCJam have.

~~~
etherael
You don't make loans to people unless you have evidence that they can and will
pay it back. BTCJam for example has reputation scores, and people actually say
what they intend to use the money for.

The default rate on BTCJam, which was one of the first loan services is 10%,
this doesn't compare well with mainstream rates however, Bitlendingclub is
supposedly one third of that, which compares favourably to mainstream rates
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCLACBS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCLACBS)

------
mrb
Here is a sweet little block explorer tweeted by Zooko (although it gets the
hash rate value completely wrong and unit wrong too--It's Sol/s not H/s and
it's about 400 Sol/s right now):
[https://explorer.zcha.in/](https://explorer.zcha.in/) Edit: it gets this info
from zcash itself (zcash-cli getmininginfo) which is probably buggy and
doesn't compute the network's speed correctly.

My Equihash PoW solver silentarmy gets 45 Sol/s on an R9 Nano, so there seems
to be only about 10 GPUs mining worldwide, 65 minutes after the launch of
Zcash :)

Edit: oops scratch everything I said. I forgot difficulty 1 was redefined for
the mainnet. In testnet difficulty 1 was defined as:

    
    
      genesis.nBits = 0x200f0f0f;
    

So you needed the 32-byte SHA256 hash to be less than
0x0f0f0f00_00000000_00000000_... But with the mainnet it was redefined as:

    
    
      genesis.nBits = 0x1f07ffff;
    

This value is 0x0007ffff_00000000_00000000_... so only 1 in 8192 random hashes
is less than this. So the network's speed seems to be around 130,000 Sol/s. So
that's already 3-4k GPUs mining. Ouch.

~~~
oh_sigh
Why is 3-4k GPUs mining a bad thing? That seems really good for a brand new
blockchain.

~~~
tromp
Yes, it is surprisingly good. The "Ouch" was meant as "don't hold your breath
waiting to mine your first block".

------
mostly_harmless
> Zcash is a technology, and like any technology it has multiple uses. I
> suspect that many of the best applications of this technology haven't been
> conceived of yet.

> 10% pre-mine to founders

This smells super fishy. Altogether, I've yet to see anything to do with
cryptocurrencies be useful. Nothing but scams, hiding illegal activities, and
hopeless optimism so far.

~~~
olegkikin
I love paying with bitcoin, even when other methods are available. It's just
so easy, and just knowing no stupid bank can stop the payment or freeze your
balance feels like freedom.

If you see "nothing but scams", it only tells me you live in a strange bubble.
There are tons of legitimate businesses that use bitcoin daily. There are some
that use litecoin, and even dogecoin.

~~~
dangerlibrary
As a consumer spending money from a checking account or credit card, the only
reasons a bank would stop a payment or freeze a balance are because they
suspect fraud or illegal activity. In the first case, it's a service they are
providing you - peace of mind as a result of extensive fraud protection
measures. In the second case - then _mostly_harmless_ is correct. If the only
benefit of bitcoin is "no fraud protection and the freedom to use for illegal
transactions" how is _mostly_harmless_ wrong?

~~~
AgentME
I've had a number of transactions blocked because my bank must've suspected
fraud. I can count on zero hands the number of times it wasn't actually a
transaction I wanted to go through. It's pretty awkward when I'm in the
checkout line trying to pay for something or if it means some order gets
delayed. I'm really thankful I have multiple credit cards which don't seem to
all use the same fraud protection algorithms so I usually can just cycle to
the next card, but it makes me a little uncomfortable that my solution is
essentially just trusting the next service doesn't fuck up.

>In the first case, it's a service they are providing you

I like knowing that I have some money that I control myself, not through some
service I have to worry about locking me out at inopportune times, though I
admit it's mostly an ideological position than an economic one.

~~~
waterphone
Same. Every single time my bank has killed my card for "suspected fraudulent
use", it's been legitimate. The one time I was actually hit by a fraudulent
use, they didn't even notice and I had to catch it myself and notify them.
Even normal things like buying gas often get my card shut down and I have to
call them and go through a long verification process to get access to my money
again.

~~~
UweSchmidt
Strange - no one in the game has any interest in you not conducting your
business.

Note that in cryptocurrency, there is no bank to call when your crypto "coins"
are gone. Then it's gone _harder_ than anything else that ever went, ever:

\- you can't explain to your family or friends what happened

\- law enforcement will hardly consider it a crime and in any case can't do
anything about it

\- the community will berate you for not watching out better for yourself and
somehow call your loss "a good thing"

\- if it's anything like Ethereum's DAO hack the fraud will not even be
considered any wrongdoing _at all_

\- everyone in the game has already made their money by pre-mining or getting
in early and nobody has your interest in mind

~~~
jjnoakes
> if it's anything like Ethereum's DAO hack the fraud will not even be
> considered any wrongdoing at all

I would not use the word "fraud" here, regardless of which side of the Eth
fork you sit on.

~~~
UweSchmidt
Heh, yeah? What would you call it?

Either way, this confirms my point - Your cryptomoney is GONE and no one would
even acknowledge ANY wrongdoing whatsoever. Hilariously you losing money is
absolutely part of the pseudo-libertarian crypto worldview and not worrying
anybody. But at the same time crypto currencies should replace real money?

"DAO-Hacker just executed code as intended". "Of course you lose your money if
a) your PC is hacked (easy) b) the wallet software is in beta (always is) c)
your coins are not in a cold wallet (complicated) d) you are using the 3rd
party providers/exchanges (which are hyped by the community) e) your password
is weak etc. etc."

I'm having a laugh but then again I haven't lost any money in this.

~~~
EdHominem
That's no more appropriate for every transaction than TCP is for every packet.

If you want that service, buy it. Transfer your crypto-backed currency with a
"trusted" party who will rollback certain transactions. Do this with a well-
capitalized service in a country you can sue them in.

But as we've seen with Paypal (and now Upwork), etc, that can be just as
disastrous. They're un-sueable because of their size, and have draconian and
arbitrary policies. Many people have had money confiscated or indefinitely
frozen because of this misplaced trust.

------
zby
In other news TumbleBit[1] seems to bring good enough anonymity to bitcoin as
well.

1\.
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf)

~~~
wcummings
And works w/ the Bitcoin protocol as it exists now.

------
jstandard
Genuine, blunt question here, why is this technology important and needed?

I ask this as someone who is intrigued by cryptocurrency, but never felt a
pressing need to be able to transact 100% anonymously.

~~~
0xCMP
In a world of bitcoin any address could be anyone, but as addresses are shared
(or posted on someones public website) knowledge is revealed about who they
are. You can, thanks to how bitcoin works, track all the transactions they do
and who they send it to. You may know somehow who the other side of the
transactions are (or find out in the future, since the blockchain is forever).

This isn't how cash works, which is the real "money" in our system. At some
point (even if on credit) cash is transferred for stuff. I don't want people
to know which places I have a news subscription for. I don't want them to know
who I donate to just from the blockchain. I have a choice to want them to know
that. This is a practical problem because that means either I need to use
shady services to hide these facts for normal purposes. That, or never use
them except in a few cases where I don't care people know (but I also might
regret that).

I think from a practical perspective, this makes bitcoin really hard to use.
How do you make transactions that aren't easily traced to you by literally
anyone? Answer: it's hard and possibly won't work completely.

~~~
jstandard
> "I don't want them to know who I donate to"

This part seems to be the major problem zcash solves from what I can tell.
Delivering on the promise of true anonymity which Bitcoin currently lacks. I
see the appeal to current Bitcoin users, but outside of that group, can't see
the appeal in a broad "general consumer" sense.

zcash seems like a company addressing a small problem (true anonymity) in the
broader context of issues cryptocurrency faces (ubiquity, liquidity, ease of
transacting, fraud prevention). Creating an entirely new currency which has to
retread the efforts of building out the ecosystem to support that currency is
a huge mountain to climb.

~~~
OrpheanBeholder
According to Matthew Green, they tried for years to get this (or one of the
earlier versions) into Bitcoin and Bitcoin weren't having it. Their options
were to make an entirely new coin, with the problems you point out, or to let
the crypto they had developed die.

~~~
petertodd
That's simply not true. I was actually hired as a consultant by Green, and he
did hardly anything with that contract. I know of no proposal actually made to
any Bitcoin devs for inclusion, and in any case, it took a long time to
improve the tech to the point where resource requirements were low enough for
either Zerocoin or Zerocash to be viable in any currency.

~~~
OrpheanBeholder
I went and dug up where I had read Green talk about this and it turns out it
was in a conversation with you.

It seems you and him disagree, he says ZCash couldn't/wouldn't have happened
in Bitcoin and you say it could.

Is your blog post about this still coming?

[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78153309118155571...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/781533091181555712)
[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78154154453702656...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/781541544537026560)
[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78154374789720064...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/781543747897200640)
[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78153489377171865...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/781534893771718657)
[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78154782708016742...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/781547827080167424)

~~~
petertodd
> I went and dug up where I had read Green talk about this and it turns out it
> was in a conversation with you.

Ha!

> It seems you and him disagree, he says ZCash couldn't/wouldn't have happened
> in Bitcoin and you say it could.

Yeah, I'm just surprised he feels so strongly about that, given how little I
remember him actually doing along those lines. Like I said, I actually was
hired by him on a monthly retainer to do consulting... and he did almost
nothing at all with that contract. :(

> Is your blog post about this still coming?

Yes, although holy fuck I have a lot on the todo list. :( I also need to
writeup my part of the trusted setup ceremony too.

And a blog post on that isn't paid work, so doesn't get as high priority as
paying rent. :)

------
marklawrutgers
Is this the one that forked off BitCoin due to differences centered around how
it didn't make its investors/founders enough money?

From the last thread they pointed out: "Zcash's monetary base will be the same
as Bitcoin's — 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC, or ⓩ) will be mined over
time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash
Company — founders, investors, employees, and advisors. We call this the
“Founders Reward”."

It's nice to have a currency with more security and privacy features in mind
but I would be extremely wary of compromises like this for that achievement.

~~~
wmf
Yeah, I hate those compromises like capturing a fraction of the value you
create and using it to pay your developers.

~~~
vegabook
fraction?? The money supply of the world is about between 30 and 80 trillion
dollars. Let's call it 50 trillion. Let's say crypto gets 10% share over time,
and these guys get 10% of crypto. That's 1% of the money supply. So... 500
billion dollars. 10% for founders = 50 billion dollars. Isn't that just, a
bit, ambitious in your opinion? This fork of bitcoin is worth 5 million
dollars _MAX_ for the founders efforts up to now (it's a fork, remember),
namely 1/1000 of my already conservative scenario. Let's hyperbolically
discount that for the huge risk, and therefore generously multiply my scenario
by 10. We're talking 1% premine fair value, max.

Let's get real here. These guys are fucking opportunists at best, ponzi
median, outright thieves at worst.

~~~
wmf
Good point. Perhaps startup founders should limit their stake to 1% just in
case their company ends up being worth $100B instead of only $1B.

~~~
gpshead
+1 trolling :)

------
pmarreck
As I said here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796310)

I don't see how it's arguable for a _currency_ to have a 10% cut for the
founders. That's too high.

~~~
petertodd
Actually it's a 20% cut for the first few years; the 10% figure is only
relevant if you're talking about the entire theoretical coin supply.

------
sbierwagen
Previous:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790002)

------
wyager
10% premine and run by a private company? No thank you! I don't care what cool
ZKP crypto they use; one of the _critical_ aspects of Bitcoin's success is
that there was no premine (no unfair advantage for the creator) and no company
to go after if someone starts feeling litigious. Bitcoin is a protocol, this
is a product.

~~~
sbierwagen

      one of the critical aspects of Bitcoin's success is that 
      there was no premine
    

Satoshi has about a million bitcoin:
[https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-
deserved-f...](https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-
fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/)

~~~
chabes
Those million bitcoin were all fairly mined, not premined. There is a
difference

~~~
nickpsecurity
Barely. He created them with about no effort at all while other peoples hard
work and real dollars spent would turn it into a fortune later. That counters
wyager's claim a bit where there's definitely an unfair advantage in terms of
financial distributions. Quite like the U.S. system it intends to replace. :)

~~~
wyager
There were a number of people who were mining within the first few days. They
had no idea if it would pay off or not; they put a fair amount of effort into
an extremely high-risk investment. They deserve everything they got out of it.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I'm not arguing they shouldn't get a first-mover benefit. I'm saying it was
designed for that to happen. It's totally rigged so the early players do
almost no work while getting the highest gain. Just like the banking system it
replaces. Just like VC's. It's no different except it's so radical the ROI was
way less guaranteed. More risk.

The wealth distribution of the Bitcoin accounts vs the U.S. dollar is
interesting. Here's a visual one:

[https://www.landmarkcash.com/articles/bitcoin-wealth-
distrib...](https://www.landmarkcash.com/articles/bitcoin-wealth-
distribution.html)

Note: There's also the other problem of hoarding happening a lot since it's a
commodity rather than a currency. I'm not sure if that's changed since I last
looked at it.

------
RRRA
So now someone could / should...

\- fork this

\- remove the 10% economy imbalance

\- remove centralized alerts and anything centralized

\- integrate ethereum & namecoins

\- Get a governance body that would be very neutral and protect principles of
the blockchain (EFF? ...)

And then we could have a normalized, standardized, basis for the rest of
blockchain based protocols...

------
artursapek
You can see the markets reacting here:

[https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/zecbtc/5m](https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/zecbtc/5m)

Pretty crazy, it hit a high price of 3300 BTC! That's $2MM.

------
teekert
I want to buy zcash for 10 euro, then wait until it explodes like bitcoin, how
can I do this? It's not currently traded at Bittrex I see it's there but as
"disabled". When can I buy?

~~~
abrkn
Bitcoin has exploded? That would be the 113th time it has died[1]

[1]
[https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/](https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/)

~~~
narrowrail
It may be a language thing, but I believe teekert meant bitcoin exploded, as
in, took off and was temporarily valued at ~$1,300. So, you mistook the
meaning as the exact opposite of what the author intended (I believe).

Also, the other reply to you mistook you for not understanding that your link
is satire, which I believe you understood.

------
grigio
Why didn't I see the same buzz around Monero?

~~~
OrpheanBeholder
Monero wasn't developed by a group of highly respected cryptographers and the
privacy it offers is plausible deniability not zero knowledge.

------
RRRA
Not sure how this affects parameters ceremony compromise or the alert system,
but we can't have an economy with such imbalance from the start:

[https://twitter.com/HeyRhett/status/792332276453416960](https://twitter.com/HeyRhett/status/792332276453416960)

------
swissoak
Seems like a matter of time before someone does the same thing, but without
the bullshit "we keep 10% of everything".

------
vegabook
_》power to uplift millions of people_

Haha. 10% premine to uplift the founders with millions, more like.

------
tuyguntn
Does 1 ZEC worth >1000$[1] in reality?

[1] -
[https://forum.z.cash/t/1-zec-1130-00-usd/4177](https://forum.z.cash/t/1-zec-1130-00-usd/4177)

~~~
Everhusk
Nope, it's worth about $30,000 right now
[https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_zec](https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_zec)

~~~
tuyguntn
feels like bubble

------
tmat
all premiNed coins are a scam..

~~~
kilroy123
It's not pre-minded, but 10% that are mined will go to the company.

~~~
vortico
Wow, that's even worse. The entire reason cryptocurrencies exist is to do away
with a governing party. If what you say is true, Zcash has an administrating
government, while developers of Bitcoin design the algorithm only for the
benefit of the community.

------
erikb
Please use the title to explain what makes ZCash special. Nobody cares about
just another Bitcoin clone, so "Zcash begins" is not enough as a title.

~~~
mrb
With Bitcoin anyone can see for example that
"1F38k5Q3ob4X4rJtmzAER2Y6j94cU8EKW9 sent 0.0115627 BTC to
1NzLNxxU8Vo2urbGdarJjHCpLyv61JuHwD" (see for yourself:
[https://blockchain.info/tx/bf151762857db770a5a714afd974e1f46...](https://blockchain.info/tx/bf151762857db770a5a714afd974e1f46545220cf8bbcf5b7172eba27841e5ab)).
This is not really anonymous because first you see the amount being sent. Then
you may be able to track who owns these addresses, eg. if someone posts his
Bitcoin donation addresses to a website, or if a vendor sells something for a
particular price like 17.958 BTC then you can scan the blockchain and look for
all transactions of 17.958 BTC and you might be able to infer how many
transactions that vendor made even if they used unique addresses for each
sale.

All of this is not great. This is why we say Bitcoin is not anonymous, but
"pseudonymous".

So Zcash fixes this by obfuscating all of this: sender, amount, recipient are
just obfuscated blobs of data. You don't know how much was sent, from who, to
whom, but you cryptographically know the transaction is valid (didn't try to
send more coins than the recipient has, etc). This is verified through fancy
so-called "zero-knowledge proofs". See
[https://blockchainhub.net/blog/infographics/zcash-
explained/](https://blockchainhub.net/blog/infographics/zcash-explained/)

~~~
avar
How is this functionally different from everyone using "mixers" with Bitcoin?

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
Mixers just make graph traversal more expensive. They don't actually hide
amounts.

------
pikachu_is_cool
Is there a fork of this with no premine?

~~~
vortico
I'm interested in this as well. The main fork is so bad, that if a fork
existed, most Zcash users would flock to that.

------
Uptrenda
It looks like the Bitcoin fan boys are already rushing to poison the
proverbial water hole and hijack this discussion. It's always disappointing to
see just how much politics have managed to infect this space. I mean, everyone
knows that with politics a person's preferences end up being based largely on
whether or not they like a given candidate's character (hence the quote
"politics is the mind-killer") ...

But within the cryptocurrency space people are even less rational since after
investing their money they now have a perverse incentive to try discredit any
competition and the effects of their confirmation bias after investing are
truly immense. Bitcoin in that sense, is one of the most toxic communities out
there since its entire community seems to be against any kind of innovation
taking place outside of Bitcoin and are quick to dismiss any such attempts as
"crapcoins."

I wish we could go back to 2011 when people were more opened minded ... It's
honestly gotten to the point where no one can work on anything new in this
space without some shill from Bitcoin trying to cast doubt on their project to
steer people back to it ... So I guess pick your favorite investment and
support your side.

"Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support
all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the
enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing
aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about
evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as
scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue
or Green position on an issue."

Cryptocurrencies are the new mind-killer.

