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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.

"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"

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.

Sarkozy served prison time for allegedly taking money from Gaddafi to fund his reelection campaign, a man he was at the forefront of the effort to depose; this sort of thing is outlandish and hard to draw conclusions from. But if true, these are not the actions of a man who believes in the long-term stability of his country.

Similarly, the Le Pen clan do not believe they can turn around France’s coming Brazilification either. So, in a rather less naked and commercial way than the Trump family, they are going through the pockets of _Marianne_ as she sleeps on the driverless metro; the political conflict, at least within the Assemblée nationale, is over who will benefit from the legacy wealth and influence of a great country. France makes rockets, handbags and helicopters; she provides a far better quality of life for her inhabitants than Britain, and at least in large pockets will continue to do so indefinitely.

https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/france-our-prettier-neighbour-278

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.

...

This imagining is another important good bestowed by historical reading, for it dispels the illusion that H.G. Wells called the "governess view" of history: They (the bad people) are doing this terrible thing to Us (the good people).

The fallacy in it is to suppose that any large group acts as with one mind, clear in purpose and aware of consequences. Such a projection of the single ego upon whole masses is a form of provincialism that is encountered in most political discussions and certainly in all social prejudices: "If the President would only act ... if those people would only see reason...." A reader of history is cured of this simple-mindedness by developing a new sense—the historical sense—of how mankind in the mass behaves, neither free nor fatally pushed, and in its clearest actions mysterious even to itself.

...

'The Point and Pleasure of Reading History' Jacques Barzun

"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

If you rank programming languages by usage outside of devs, the top languages all have a table-ish metaphor (SQL, Excel, R, Matlab).

The languages devs use are largely Algol derived. Algol is a language that was used to express algorithms, which were largely abstractions over Turing machines, which are based around an infinite 1D tape of memory. This model of 1D memory was built into early computers, and early operating systems and early languages. We call it "mechanical sympathy".

Meanwhile, other languages at the same time were invented that weren't tied so closely to the machine, but were more for the purpose of doing science and math. They didn't care as much about this 1D view of the world. Early languages like Fortran and Matlab had notions of 2D data matrices because math and science had notions of 2D data matrices. Languages like C were happy to support these things by using an array of pointers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052064