Item — HN Reader

Regardless of your feelings toward BTC I think my favorite thing is it is FOSS first. Change of pace from the opaque system that controls global finance.

Even it goes to zero, I think I'll still enjoy playing with it (like I do with other FOSS projects).

3 comments

The great thing about the Bitcoin technology is that is accesible to understand, relatively simple and Satoshi hasn't premined it like others blockchains do: if you were there you could mine like Satoshi with your PC CPU.

This is surely the strongest point voiced. Most if not all subsequent chains pre-mined a substantial fraction then used proceeds to fundraise some cash and held the rest in reservoir Until they could keep dumping once listed. So any subsequent chain never adhered to the original principles of satoshi. And I have seen some funky shit with CEO’s that have legitimate seeming background but completely abused this. But here is the snag. Most early Pre-listing investors will love it coz they have gotten a golden parachute investment, and will defend the CEO at all cost.

Satoshi still took advantage of the high initial emission rate (half of all bitcoin emitted in its first 4 years) to mine 5% of all bitcoin for himself.

Some other blockchains feature a purely even distribution of coins by fixing the block reward, making sure that later generations also get their fair share (in bitcoin each next 20-yr generation gets 32x less).

You should think that Satoshi didn't prevent you to mine, it was just a new project that nobody cared about.

If somebody launches a new blockchain today and put it in "Show HN" it is very probable that almost nobody will put their efforts in that project even if it will succeed years later.

It's not simple and normal people struggle hart getting it.

I would enjoy it more if the price went to zero. Imagine being able to set up miners with a spare Raspberry Pi. It's rubbish as money but fascinating technologically.

It's actually less transparent as I thought.

There was.this article a few days ago how people start to game the system because all transactions land in blocks every 10 minutes.

Now if I want to trade, someone can game it and do transactions before mine to make something for them.

Same hidden super specialized trading stuff like in normal just because it's open it's still hidden in complexity

Are you talking about frontrunning? That happens in both blockchain-based trading systems as well as private systems, but on the blockchain it's easy to see that it's happening and what address is doing it (transparency). Anyone can frontrun on the blockchain, so it becomes a much more level playing field.

Front running on the blockchain can also be combatted through various approaches like a commit and reveal scheme, but that slows down the market and hasn't been adopted widely

The point I made: the shitty in transparent things normal people don't know about are also happening at Bitcoin.

Bitcoin didn't solve any of this.

Frontrunning on the blockchain is transparent. Bitcoin doesn't have exchanges so trading is happening on private exchanges, but other blockchain have decentralized exchanges where frontrunning is obvious and you can often reverse engineer the strategy and sabotage or frontrun the frontrunner.

Frontrunning is far more transparent on decentralized exchanges than anywhere else.