Tela Network

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.

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

Bozeman, Montana is about as far away from the US urban / coastal cultures as you can get. Nonetheless, urban people displace Bozeman people, not the other way around. I find myself concluding, yet again, that owning a house is no protection against the economic currents of our time. Economic networks are the powerhouse. People hooked into an expanding network simply displace those who are not. So one’s focus must always be one’s network. (Even if you acquire a house, your neighborhood is displaced and restructured, and your kids grow up in the new environment, and themselves are obligated to leave - so you only put off the defeat for one generation.) I think we could think of the phenomenon today as “internal colonization” by different networks. The focus is now Montana instead of the Congo. A model: Networks process transactions. Skills are valuable economically if they allow you to help a network process more transactions.

"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.

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"

Protocol: - Each block creates new coins (the "block reward") in its "coinbase transaction". - The block reward was initially at 50 BTC per block. - Every 210,000 blocks (~4 years), the reward is halved. - This halving produces a geometric series that converges to a maximum of 21 million BTC. Enforcement: - Bitcoin nodes run the protocol code. - The code defines the block reward formula and enforces it. - A miner who tries to claim more than the allowed reward will simply produce an invalid block. - Other nodes reject that block, and the miner gets nothing. Note: - A subgroup of nodes can choose to set a higher limit, producing a hard fork, resulting in a new network, with the same addresses and balances. This has already happened at least twice. However, the original network offers a "harder" asset (due to its lower limit) and over time wins in terms of stored value and market interest. Holders will tend to sell the forked asset.

"Today, if you don’t want to build your own ledger, you do have a few options. For example, there are hosted services like Modern Treasury and ledger-specific databases like TigerBeetle. Both of these are impressive and probably a good fit for many. But by using a ledger outside of the main application database, you lose transactionality and atomicity. Namely, you have to worry about orchestrating two systems that can fail independently. What happens if you write your main data, but the ledger update fails? Or the ledger operation succeeds but your app hits an error and fails to write the surrounding data. Integrating with these often requires two-phase commits and other strategies to ensure they stay in sync. And when they fall out of sync, it can be very hard to debug." https://www.pgrs.net/2025/03/24/pgledger-ledger-implementation-in-postgresql

Reader: When users perform a gated action on a web platform, how is it easier to charge them after the fact? Surely this still requires a ledger. - It's easier because you can treat each gated action as a simple counter increment. At the end of a period (e.g. monthly), you bill for the total. Instead of a financial transaction per action, you have one transaction per period. Over time you may log counter increments in more detail, perhaps approaching ledger-like tracking. But you don't have to start with it. It's also psychologically easier for a user to click now and pay later. This is fine for utilities like hosting: you buy a service, get an invoice later. On current social platforms, posts are free, so no tracking needed, but - endless noise. If you want a real pro-human social platform, this doesn't work. Users and bots can create throwaway accounts, post junk, and never pay. But their content stays on the system and consumes the attention of current and future users.

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 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.

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.