Oleg Andreev
Month
Introductory posts
Bitcoin non-technical FAQ. When I learned about Bitcoin for the first time, I immediately started digging articles, forums and wiki pages for answers to many of my questions. While doing that, I compiled a list of answers which turned out to be quite valuable. Bitcoin Magazine publishes it in every printed issue for over a year now. This is a good place to start learning about Bitcoin.
See also my Bitcoin glossary — the most complete reference of Bitcoin-related terms and abbreviations.
Bitcoin is like… Understand Bitcoin by comparing it to paper cash, banks, gold, Git and Bittorrent.
Original vision of Bitcoin: what Bitcoin is, what it is not and why is that so.
Satoshi on Bitcoin design. “The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.”
Journalist’s guide to describe Bitcoin and not look like an idiot. Must-read for anyone confronted with a task of describing Bitcoin to people in a few sentences.
How to keep your bitcoins safe. Slightly outdated, but still valuable overview of security options and precautions.
Finally, my only advice about Bitcoin to newcomers.
Economics of Bitcoin
Bitcoin and Gold. How Bitcoin relates to gold and why only one will survive.
The universe wants one money. Money is a standard that everyone wants to share with the whole world. Various intermediaries and restrictions make people use local currencies while everyone would be better off with one most universally accepted token.
There is only one blockchain and it’s called Bitcoin. Informal proof of how alternative blockchains are not viable in the long term.
Real crypto-anarchy without anonymity. How crypto-anarchy can happen worldwide without everyone remaining actually anonymous.
Money and Security. Money is a measure of personal security against risks created by nature, people and institutions.
You can own Bitcoin, you can’t own your dollars. What does it mean to “own” your money.
Bitcoin is not compatible with the State. Bitcoin and State do not go together at all. Neither logically, nor economically. Choose one.
Arguments for Litecoin are fraudulent. While Litecoin itself is just as good as Bitcoin, most prominent arguments about its superiority are plain wrong.
Economics of block size limit and part two. People worry about block size limit: should it remain as it is, or be raised? How much? We do not answer these questions, but we show what will happen, regardless of our opinions on this matter.
Last, but not least, three important notes on “deflation” and “circulation”:
1) Murray Rothbard on circulation of money
2) A thought experiment on deflationary spiral
3) Transactional Currency and Store of Value
Technical articles
Blind ECDSA signatures for Bitcoin. The ultimate solution to secure and private Bitcoin storage. Use many semi-trusted friends to sign your transactions, but keep information about your funds completely private.
Idea of a useful altcoin. How to make an altcoin based on existing Bitcoin blockchain, inherit the entire userbase and stay compatible with their wallets.
Complimentary reading: soft-fork way to fix transaction malleability.
Contracts without trust or third parties. How to make Ebay without Ebay, where two persons can secure promises to each other by committing to a single bilateral insurance deposit (that can be unlocked only simultaneously by both parties when agreement is reached).
How to launder Bitcoins perfectly. A theoretically perfect way to mix Bitcoin in a way that does not leave any “suspicious” transactions on the blockchain or a server.
The Ultimate Wallet. My personal checklist for every Bitcoin wallet to be considered safe and secure (such wallet does not exist yet).
По-русски: http://bitnovosti.com/2014/06/01/dengi-i-bezopasnost/
When comparing Bitcoin to traditional financial tech, people always notice that Bitcoin makes them think about security way more than they have to think about their cash or bank account. They feel that in the established system the security is “being taken care of”, while Bitcoin makes you worry about weird things like private keys or malware on your phone. For a normal person it seems like a downgrade; only rare crazy libertarians ignore all these difficulties because Bitcoin cannot me manipulated by “the powers that be”.
What many people, even bitcoiners, do not realize, is the fundamental relation of money to personal security. Not just how to store your savings or pay online safely, but in a big way: what money is and how it protects your health, wealth and sanity.
In a safe, certain world, where lightnings do not strike you in the head, crop is not destroyed by dry weather, computers do not have bugs and where people understand each other perfectly and always keep their promises, we do not need worthless tokens called “money”. We can simply agree on how we allocate our food, shelter, personal time and labor and from time to time adjust to new desires or conditions. I can go every day to the baker and take one bread, then go to my work and do something useful for someone else. Everyone gets what they could agree to and there is no shortage of anything. (And if there is, people help each other promptly and efficiently.)
But the world is far from being safe and certain. It is dynamic and unpredictable. And it is populated with people, who are even less predictable and many of them are greedy, selfish and untrustworthy. They have always been and probably always will be. In this world your bakery may disappear tomorrow, or your job may become irrelevant, or your house can catch on fire, or your friend may not hold his promise or someone may not lend you a hand when you are in trouble.
To address these issues, people invented money. As Richard Dawkins once said, “money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism”.
Money is a virtual token that holds a speculative value. It can be a rock, a coin, a piece of paper, a promise from a bank, or a cryptographically signed abstraction. What matters is that it is rare enough, so if it is demanded, it can only be collected and transferred, but cannot be easily produced. If it can be produced to satisfy increasing demand, like bread, then it would only be good for direct consumption and be worthless as a collectible. Hence, it won’t be a token holding speculative value.
How does money help us? Money is a sort of a social agreement: when enough people value the token and ready to accept it in exchange for their services, then money becomes a measure of your personal security. When you can work, you can earn money and save it for later. When you cannot work, if you saved some money, you can buy yourself some food. If some accident happens, savings will save you: buy you a medical help, new clothes, shelter, MacBook Pro 15" to replace a broken one etc.
The more money you have, the safer you are. Money is not luxury. Cash flow is: if you earn a lot of money and spend all of it on your lifestyle, it says nothing about your security. Security is only how much savings you have at all times. The more liquid those savings are, the more security you have. If you own an expensive house, good thing for you, but you cannot efficiently trade it for something you will urgently need tomorrow. A briefcase full of american presidents, however, is very liquid and allows you to buy anything very quickly. (However, there’s now a problem with security of the briefcase itself.)
When you think about money as a way to insure yourself against starvation, illness, infections, bad weather, sluggish computers, shitty boss, ugly girlfriends and mob revolutions, you will see which properties of money are most important to you. First of all, the fundamentals should be strong: if demand for money stays the same, its value should stay the same. This means, your money should be sufficiently hard to produce or to counterfeit, so some wise guys do not dilute your personal security without your permission. Secondly, this money should be fairly easy to protect, for the exact same reason. If your security is way too expensive to afford, you are not secure. Wearable beads, shells, paper bills, small gold and silver coins are secure because you can hold them with yourself (a would-be thief would have to risk his ass being kicked if he tries to steal them from you). Finally, the money should be easily and cheaply transferrable. If it is not, then it’s like a house or a painting: a fine collectible, but a shitty insurance against running out of chips while enjoying nachos (https://xkcd.com/140/). That’s all properties that matter. And the history of money shows that humanity was consistently trying to improve on them.
People used local collectibles: beads, shells until they started trading globally. A more universal material then prevailed: precious metals. Then, trade became even more global and transaction costs needed to be lowered. Banking was invented. Trusted third parties enabled instantly transferrable money across the globe, fueling industrial revolution that created an unbelievable wealth on the planet: cars, robots, airplanes and free image hosting for internet memes.
Unfortunately, this all was done at a huge expense: concentrating disproportionate amount of power in the hands of banks and governments resulted in non-stop wars, worldwide economic catastrophes, and nonsensical restrictions on individuals. We have achieved a lot of things in the past few hundred years, but mostly despite of, not thanks to trusted third parties who have the power over our money.
Today, we finally have a technology to solve the problem of trusting monetary authorities that lets us achieve consensus on what money we want: even cheaper to protect, cheaper to transfer and even harder to counterfeit. We all have portable networking computers in our pockets, at all times, so we don’t really need beads, metal coins or paper bills. We can go all digital. And our computers are powerful enough and our mathematicians were smart enough to allow us to implement fancy cryptographical tricks to replace trusted authorities with independent and objective proofs.
The goal of Bitcoin is the same as the goal of money 75000 years ago: to protect the person against systemic risk of his environment. Against natural disasters, against his own faults, and against faults or malice of anyone around him. When you dislike Bitcoin for making you think more about personal security, it is only because you were ignorant to systemic risk and decades of exploitation of that risk. If you take a look at the whole picture, at the core concept of money, at all opportunity cost of trusted third parties, then you will realize that you might be better off if you could wear those digital necklaces of virtual beads yourself instead of you and all your neighbors giving up their security at the discretion of a small group of people who you don’t even know. It does not mean you would have to learn cryptography and math. But it means, that as more people take that path, more entrepreneurs will be there to improve the security and ease-of-use of this new technology. But the first step is to understand the fundamental problem of money and evaluate the old and new solutions with this new understanding in mind.
PS. You should read this masterpiece by Nick Szabo on concepts of “starvation insurance” and origins of money: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html
BitUndo (http://www.bitundo.com) is a service allowing to double-spend your own transactions for a fee. So that you can “undo” your supposedly mistaken transaction. It is of questionable value and works as a direct attack on current practice of accepting 0-confirmation transactions for small purchases.
Right now nodes do not accept double spending transactions, no matter how much they pay in mining fees. This makes simple security promise for 0-conf transactions: the most relayed version is the one that most probably will be included in the block. So merchants can accept such transactions because they know that reversing it would cost much more than 100% of the transaction value.
If enough nodes on the network replace transactions when the mining fee is, say, 10% higher than the previous version (or 10% of the total amount, or whatever), then for the user it is much cheaper to “take money back”. You will send $5 for your coffee and get back $4 with no sweat. Merchant will lose all $5. You can say goodbye to 0-confirmation transactions.
So what do we have:
1) Users get some sort of “undo” function which is nobody was asking for. In my view, if there’s a problem with accidental button clicking in the UI, it’s simpler to fix right there, not by changing the entire network.
2) No one can rely on 0-confirmation transactions anymore. Even today they are not safe, but for small purchases the risks are pretty low, so they work for many people to everyone’s satisfaction. But with network-wide “replace with higher-fee transaction” the risk will go up significantly to make this feature unusable.
However, in the long run, 0-conf transactions won’t be the future of instant micropayments (we’ll have some sort of distributed clearing network instead), so we might not care that much. But the value of “undo” is still very questionable to throw away usefulness of 0-conf transactions today.
Final note: Bitundo can’t be useful when it’s small. It’s either working more than 90% of the time for legitimate “undos” (which makes 0-conf txs useless) or it’s used marginally only by those who wish to rob merchants who accept 0-conf transactions. In which case they still may render 0-conf transactions useless.