Tela Network

Provision is a bitcoin wallet based on three concepts: - all secure operations performed on an air-gapped machine - all products transported by USB drive to an online machine - guaranteed to have no entropy re-use An air-gapped machine, or a machine that has never been connected to the internet, reduces the attack surface of the environment used to operate safely with bitcoin. No secrets are ever placed on the USB drive, leaving everything secure on the offline machine. Creating your own entropy, e.g. via rolling a die, is the most secure guarantee for cryptographic operations available. Provision also enables secure message encryption and signing using the same underlying software as Bitcoin. Written in pure Python with no third-party dependencies. Code available upon request. https://github.com/corporation-dev/readme

The first wave of Bitcoin Banks have started to emerge in the form of Bitcoin Treasury companies such as Metaplanet, Twenty One, and MicroStrategy. They are all trying to do one thing: acquire as much BTC as possible and use it to generate returns in whatever way possible for their shareholders. In short: they are attempting to bridge the gap between the old Fiat system and the new digital asset system by treating Bitcoin as a stock, not as gold. I don't have a concrete idea of how Bitcoin can be used in finance but I do know that using it to create returns as if it were a stock is unlikely to work in the long term. I believe that a good use of time is to research and experiment with how a group of individuals can come together a collectively grow a stockpile of bitcoin. Step two would then be how to financialise that or issue a token on top of the Bitcoin whoch could be used everyday in a small geographical area.

I think the primary inspiration for Bitcoin was Adam Back's Hashcash, not Wei Dai's b-money. 1) Satoshi's email to Wei Dai indicates that he had not previously read the b-money post: "I was very interested to read your b-money page. ... Adam Back (hashcash.org) noticed the similarities and pointed me to your site." 2) The Bitcoin whitepaper cites b-money only as support: "transactions must be publicly announced [1]" 3) The Bitcoin whitepaper cites Hashcash by name: "a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash" 4) The format and style of the Bitcoin whitepaper closely matches the Hashcash paper. In contrast, the b-money post is plaintext. http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf NB: The Hashcash paper cites b-money. 5) Satoshi's first post cites Hashcash by name: "New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work." https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html

"I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper. I think I will be able to release the code sooner than I could write a detailed spec." - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014832.html My impression of Satoshi's work is that he felt his way intuitively to the object / pattern / ruleset / system that is Bitcoin "through his hands", by working on the code, molding it like a potter molds clay. This quote from one of his posts confirms my impression. I'd say that this is a point in favor of Aristotle over Plato. Plato emphasized forms, theory, the abstract - Aristotle, his student, believed that what emerged from practice, the concrete, was more reliable... There wasn't a rational path to Bitcoin - it wasn't something that you could reason your way to from earlier theories. This is more like Schrödinger's equation - out from the unconscious.

"The credential that establishes someone as real is the ability to supply CPU power." - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014860.html He is referring to identity within the Bitcoin mining system. It occurs to me that: In the political world, the credential that establishes someone as real is the ability to supply violence. This violence may be direct or delegated, wide or limited, open or hidden, embraced or disavowed, demanded or inspired, but it must. be. present. In the same way that Bitcoin mining ignores all identities other than those that supply CPU power, politics ignores all identities other than those that supply physical force. On top of Bitcoin mining, we can build addresses, transactions, identities, property rights, immutable publishing, and secure communication. On top of violence, we can build towns, cities, temples, polities, law courts, houses, families, and futures. But: Without a foundation, nothing can stand.

Bitcoin is the first modern monetary system that is outside of the political control of any state. In the pre-modern era (earlier than the French Revolution), gold (and to some extent silver) was above the state. If the state issued too much currency, its value would visibly decrease relative to gold. However, tech advancement caused gold to become too difficult to protect on a small scale. Gold centralized into a few major locations inside states. It became impossible for an individual to escape the effect of money printing. Inflation is effectively another tax. (It also destroys the measuring stick that we use for value, and therefore for business.) For most young people, a house is out of reach. This was one of the only remaining ways to escape (somewhat, and badly) the debasement of inflation. For the next 15-30 years, despite the scams / fear / uncertainty / doubt, I think that Bitcoin will remain the most achievable method available to a young person to save for the future.

http://edgecase.net/articles/bitcoin_transaction_test_set_2 This article contains 16 Bitcoin transactions, with 1-3 inputs and 1-3 outputs. All transactions are onchain - and thereby confirmed to be completely valid (there is no higher level of validation). You can take each txid and look it up in a block explorer. Private keys are included. All addresses are Pay-To-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH). I published it on 2020-12-19. A Bitcoin transaction is a complicated object. Getting one of its aspects wrong can produce a transaction that looks plausible but is invalid, or worse, valid in a way the developer did not intend. The value of a test set like this is that it gives a developer something fixed and confirmed-true to compare against. You can run your code against known cases and check whether it produces the expected transaction IDs, signatures, serialized bytes, or decoded fields.

is that digital money requires credible history. Satoshi found that: - the central problem of digital money is the double-spending attack - the central requirement for a solution is a trustworthy source of transaction ordering - a timestamp server From these two aspects flow these points in the Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf - "a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server" - "computational proof of the chronological order of transactions" - "The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes." - "We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures." - "The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions." - "To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, we will need to use a proof-of-work system" - "Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." - "Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one"

Borges: What's your opinion, StJohn? StJohn Piano: If quantum computing can crack public keys, that means all modern banking systems have a really bad time. People always do the "quantum computing will be the end of Bitcoin" interpretative dance, but seem incapable of making the mental connection to the existing banking system, which also runs on cryptography. Some version of this story has been published regularly since Bitcoin began. A lot of it is clickbait: combine "quantum" and "Bitcoin" for maximum effect, with a side order of "haha Bitcoin is going to break you guys". There's definitely a scenario where quantum computing becomes a problem for Bitcoin. But focusing on Bitcoin here is remarkably shortsighted, because that scenario would be a nuclear wasteland for the rest of the financial and digital infrastructure as well.

" > You have an outline > and proposal for such a design, which is a big step > forward, but the devil is in the little details. I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon. I sent you the main files. (available by request at the moment, full release soon) " - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014863.html Date: Mon Nov 17 12:24:43 EST 2008 A year and half earlier would be: May 17 2007 So he was inspired to begin working on Bitcoin on or before that date. Often it's said that Satoshi was inspired by the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing bailouts (which he cites in the genesis block), but this claimed start date is much earlier. He was probably inspired by the initial subprime mortgage crisis, which began in February 2007. (The US housing bubble popped in mid-2006.)

Friday, August 22, 2008 4:38 PM 1) Satoshi Nakamoto to Wei Dai "I was very interested to read your b-money page. I'm getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system." 2013-04-18 2) Adam Back posted to the BitcoinTalk forums a self-introduction mentioning that "I believe it was me who got Wei Dai's b-money reference added to Satoshi's bitcoin paper when he emailed me about hashcash back in 2008" "the actual bitcoin mining is basically my hashcash invention..." 3) bitcoin.org was registered on 2008-08-18. 4) b-money: http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt 5) b-money was announced on the cypherpunks mailing list in 1998. https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/11/msg00941.html 6) Adam Back's commentary on b-money: https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/12/msg00203.html Source: Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails https://gwern.net/doc/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto