[pedantic hat on] Bitcoin doesn't use encryption.

You mean digital signatures - and yes, we use signatures everywhere in public key cryptography.

You will like this 2020 classic piece by the folks at Paradigm: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

I have read this and I LOVE it.

The hashing part is kind of orthogonal. The real negative outcome of quantum computers getting reliable and powerful would be that ECDSA would be broken (using Shor's algorithm variants). This would make every coin stealable by anyone with access to such a computer. Some coins would be easier to steal than others (P2PK would be the easiest - and all of Satoshi's coins are P2PK). The Bitcoin network would keep working, but coin-ownership would be meaningless.

I started reading the article assuming it was an April fool's joke. After a bit into it, I thought it was not a joke. When the self-deprecation began, I was again convinced it was a joke - but at the end of the article, I think this is not a joke. It's a rather good take on why Bitcoin maximalism is what it is.

Some degree of ETH-maximalism will be required in the future given the sheer number of pretender L-1 blockchains snapping at ETH's heels. Writing about BTC-maximalism sets the foundation for that culture.

It seems that Vitalik decided to write the best defense he could of Bitcoin and publish it on April 1st. And that's the joke.

That's a very Vitalik thing to do.

For all the heat he gets from Bitcoiners I consider it a net negative that crypto split up into so many different camps.

I wonder how the crypto space would have looked like if the Bitcoin space allowed people like Vitalik to work within it instead of being driven away.

When you see Bitcoin and Dogecoin being staked on ETH contracts and services (now) I feel like we haven't lost!

You're praising bridge contracts just a few days after a bridge contract has been drained by hundreds of millions of dollars? :)

Also, who is "we"? Bitcoiners, Etherians, crypto people in general, or some other crypto group?

Not every L2 is created equal.

"The crypto space"

Meta-irony, I love it

That's the entire point. Bitcoin has just one use case, and it's very inefficient design is tailor-made for that one use case.

Alt-coins have use cases that can all be solved by AWS. The inefficient design is er....inefficient for those applications.

Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments are one approach. Encoding everything that you might want to buy as an input to a ZKP system is a stretch, obviously. But at least, that's the spirit of this philosophy.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.

I usually agree with you, regarding top posts on HN.

Usually I wonder how it is that uninteresting first-order effects dominate.

This is a chance for us all to consider something perhaps more profound.

As for "Crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and friends" - you have to ask yourself why they don't work at scale. That's the key insight of Bitcoin. You need to have a system-native incentive for the nodes to do their thing, and this system-native thing (BTC the currency, in Bitcoin's case), should have outside value. Many wiser people have said this (not on HackerNews maybe), that money is the only use case for a blockchain.

I’m not sure that Bitcoin offers any special insight here.

We use email; it’s very much a crypto-less federated system that works at scale (of, more or less, every Internet user!)

And there are newer examples: while it’s by no means a Twitter, Mastodon (and the broader ActivityPub universe) is already at a healthy scale. I collected these stats three and a half years ago; the ecosystem has grown substantially since then: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/

Mastodon[0] does work at scale.

[0] Or, to be more correct, the ActivityPub ecosystem which is bigger than Mastodon itself.

> If we could magically make 100x the gold, that would be great! Current gold investors would be sad but it would be a win for the world.

I am not sure about that. If there were a magical new way of creating gold to inflate its supply, it would not be good for the world.

I can see why it wouldn't be good for people who are invested in gold, but I don't see why it wouldn't be good for the world.

You are on the wrong forum my friend.

Austrians and the HN community talk past each other because it's not easy to get the latter (which I am a part of) to see that their large salaries in FAANG companies are partly due to the Fed largesse.