Thought I'd check how much in donations they've gotten. And I saw this massive 10 Bitcoin donation from back in 2023 (worth $800,000 now...)
From the activity history, neovim last sent bitcoin out of the address in 2019 so it's been max 7 years since they've definitely had access.
Does anyone from the neovim project know about this? Seems like a pretty significant amount of funding to have sitting there. Hope it can come to good use as I use neovim daily.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1Evu6wPrzjsjrNPdCYbHy3HT6ry2EzXFyQ
I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?
We explored using smart contracts to have logic perform the 3/5 consensus rather than a cryptosystem, but that was never rolled out while I was there. Social recovery wallets in general did not take off, which was a big learning moment for me that very few people actually cared about the technology and what they really wanted was an app with as many gambling features as possible that uploaded their keys to google drive.
People who are not HN-profile never care about the technology, and always care about usable, convenient features. The shocker is: most HN-profile people feel the same way.
Also see: https://m.xkcd.com/2501/
ERC7093 has finally added this
The other day a neighbor asked me about AI. I said I wasn’t really up to date with things anymore. They asked: like what things? And then I said: like the Astra model that OpenAI released yesterday, I know nothing about it. And they were like: “bro, yesterday?! And you feel you’re not up to date?! Pfff”
But during the big buzz, the crypto parts were what got those companies any exposure at all.
The difference is that with Shamir you have to reconstruct the private key in one place before you can sign. With threshold signatures multiple servers can collaboratively sign without ever reconstructing the private key in a single place.
For chains like Solana, Aptos, SUI that use ed25519 (schnorr signature), there's a pretty clean solution called FROST.
For Bitcoin and Ethereum/EVMs that use ECDSA it's a bit trickier but there's been a lot of research recently, so there are solutions.
"Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.
This seems orthogonal to the ability to seize assets.
Managing your private keys is cumbersome, error prone, requires some computer literacy, the list goes on.
Tbh I have been kind of impressed by how fast L2 businesses brought back centralisation in every possible way. I guess it's more efficient for them.
In the same way, the internet was supposed to be decentralised, everyone being in charge of their own servers. But in practice nobody has the time to set up their own MX servers.
For most people, cryptocurrency is just another stock market / betting app.
If you believe that, I have some land to sell you
Or rather the majority of actual users. Hard forks occur because people install and use the updated clients. If 90% of the miners decide to mine on the “bad” chain, but 90% of users switch to the “good” one instead, the “good” would likely still win out in terms of market cap and recognition (and the miners would naturally have to follow).
Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth. Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world. Worst thing is that you gain less money on day N+100 vs day N, but it does not mean you lose money or stop gaining it.
So how are you going to build the supermarket?
> Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world.
If it needs to give you more money than just saving the investment (which it should, you need to be rewarded for the risk or you would just save the money), obviously the profit margin has to be higher than it currently is, which would increase prices.
So you'd be working for 0.000000000000000001 coins per day at the amazon warehouse, while Bezos has 500000 coins because he was born with them. There would never be a way for you to get 500000 coins, because there are only 20m coins in existence.
So then you need an investment; you're going to have to return a multiple of the deflation rate since the risk of your supermarket shutting down is probably higher than the currency changing course.
Running a super market involves owning physical goods for some period of time. With deflation, the price you can sell those goods for drops while you are holding them. In fact most economic activity involves paying for inputs (labor, materials, etc) and then later getting paid for your outputs. Deflation directly impacts profitability and can cause losses.
Since deflation causes demand to drop as economic actors wisely choose to start hoarding currency and buying less, this causes a feedback loop where deflation can spiral.
Similarly, inflation causes demand to increase since holding currency is unwise and it is better to spend or invest that currency than hold onto it.
These two patterns mean that the neutral state (no inflation or deflation) is unstable as any deviation above or below starts a feedback loop until things fall apart. This is the boom and bust economic cycle that modern monetary management is supposed to ameliorate.
Given that you want economic growth, the best solution is to try to stabilize around a small fixed amount of inflation. Arguing for the end of inflation is arguing for the end of economic growth.
To put it another way, the model you're presenting reads well in an economics textbook and I'm sure is exactly how we justify our MMT social policy but it doesn't fully account for actual human behavior. I'll buy necessities (house/food/water/electric/communication) even in a deflationary economy.
When was the last time you went to the grocery store and thought "I better buy this milk today because my money will have less spending power tomorrow"?
This is, in part, why there were expeditions to find gold.
The Japanese Lost Decade?
Greece Debt Crisis?
For a decade before Black Thursday,there had been many things that were signs that the economy was having trouble even if the "Roaring Twenties" made it seem like everything was fine.
IMO the largest issue was that American farm sector was teetering on the edge because of the dramatic drop in crop prices. This deflation screwed over farmers who mechanized with lots of debt, which because of said deflation, became impossible to pay off.
The fed also implemented rate hikes to curb speculation right before 1929 which froze up credit contributing to deflation
The problem of the Great Depression was NOT the stock market crash, it arguably wasn't even the real start, just the most "spectacular" one. The problem was that with the entire economy deflating, it caused a massive downward spiral that the Fed did not really have the tools to fix, because of Gold Standard and lack of legal authorization.
This was why the Govt went to extreme lengths to try and figure out how to raise prices, which is why you get programs to pay farmers to NOT grow food, and mass killings of pigs and cows and other farm animals, even as the farmers who raised those lifestock went hungry.
So no, speculation was not the problem, it just sparked the key issue of the fact that the economy was deflation uncontrolled, but was just hidden.
The idea that you can put away an amount of money under your bed that buys 1,000 loaves of bread or one GPU, leave it there for decades, and then have it buy exactly the same number of loaves of bread or GPUs is a fantasy. You can hold onto the shiny rock but you cannot stop the world rotating around you and changing all its relative prices.
> For most of human history the money was stable
Achieved by a combination of restrictions on trade, price stability laws, occasional crippling shortages, and quietly shaving bits off old coins. A much poorer world.
The ratio of one ounce of gold to one productive beef cow has held for a hundred years, and plausibly for around 5,000 years.
A single ounce of gold could purchase a quality tunic, sandals, and belt in Ancient Rome and still buys a fine tailored suit in the modern era.
https://findbullionprices.com/blog/gold-purchasing-power-wha...
(Rome definitely had inflation crises!)
>For most of human history the money was stable.
Absolutely ridiculous. People have been counterfeiting and debasing money for as long as there has been money.
"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.
> For most of human history the money was stable.
[citation needed]
The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.
Indeed. Credit is money; ultimately anyone can expand the money supply with an IOU.
My thought on this would be a dynamicaly stable currency. estimate debt and transaction activity, and the more debt and more liquid activity there is, the more deflationary currency should be. the less debt there is, and the less of a percentage of the money is actually in-use, the more inflationary the currency should be. this, though, is fairly off-the-cuff.
The right maount of money is the amount of money we as normal humans need to work with (buying and selling stuff).
Inflation and deflation are results of too much money or too little money in comparision to the production capability of a society.
If i save today for my retirement and money gets less valuable when i'm retired, i have to give more 'saved' capacity back to get the real capacity (people taking care of me) and if i have more value, the others have to do more for me.
Controlling this is 'work' from experts and is not solved by bitcoin btw.
Even your straw man 20th century cut off is hilarious where you just kind of forget about 1873? Or maybe that decade is your shining example of the benefits of deflation. So much joy and global prosperity the peasants just forgot how to eat. Its cool, Bismarks destruction of the bimetallic system really helped usher in that age of stabikity from the international gold standards.
..balance in all things. Neither being completely stingy, individually, nor being excessively spendy will benefit us, individually or collectively. ..but there are times for either.
I wonder if there's a way to quantify that and put a variable on the conditions, and have an inflationary/deflationary currencynthat is dynamically stable depending on conditions.
..i mean, individually, most people will eventually spend, if they have much saved and it benefits them to do so. but occasionally, we do need a kick in the pants. whenever the economynis in gridlock, that's the time for inflation. ..but when people are spending excessively, it's a time for deflation, which discourages taking on debt, and pushes the economy towards real wealth. rewarding long-term thinkers is valuable, and has a very broad effect on society.
A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.
Wildly inaccurate, thanks to forgery and coin shaving - sometimes even governments officially reduced the silver or gold content to make more money out of their coin reserves. Even when proto-banks began issuing letters of credit, the quasi-fiat letters were subject to loss of confidence.
However, the availability and quasi-fungibility of other silver/gold currencies meant that if you didn't trust Edward's penny, you could use a Dutch penning instead. That provided an alternate path to dampen inflation, as long as the dominant currency was coinage.
But it was equally hard to buy a pig or a new suit with silver pennies by the 20th century. Bank notes, even when theoretically backed by exchange for their value in precious metals (the Gold Standard), were even easier to forge, and suffered from "loss of faith" inflation (runs on banks meaning they couldn't practically be exchanged for 14 pounds of silver pennies).
See the so called 'Long Depression' in the 19th century. Which was only a depression of the price level, everything else did well.
For a more sectoral example, see how computer hardware used to get cheaper and cheaper all the time, but total spending on hardware went up.
How does that work? When inflation goes to 18%, borrowing rates go to 23%.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
(At the moment, there's a smallest fraction you can send on the network, but they can change that.)
However I expect that adding more decimal places will actually happen, but adding extra bitcoins won't.
Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.
But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack
Suppose I make a paper wallet on an offline PC, write down the address and discard both keys. If I now send some BTC to this address, how does the client figure out the public key?
part of me feels like this is most likely a defunct wallet and nobody involved with the project has the keys anymore
They would have to either pay the tax on gains or write off losses.
So assuming they are the holders of the bitcoin as well, there would be no tax liability.
Edit: it seems perfectly acceptable and ideal even for society to say there is a cost to wealth. As others have mentioned Neovim is in the US is likely mostly tax exempt so this hypothetical doesn't even apply to them.
I much prefer land value taxes (and similar taxes on non capital wealth like jewellery) and leisure taxes (ideally taxing people for every hour they don't work). Of course these are difficult to administer in practice, but British business rates and US overtime tax discounts effectively approximate this.
I think something more like "investment income should be taxed at a higher rate than income earned through labor," accomplishes similar goals but is more intuitive and less problematic.
It's much, much worse to tax wealth.
It seems quite a bad idea from a practical point of view.
Not so much because it's socialist but it leads to all sorts of extra paperwork for no good reason. Like say you buy some utility company share for your retirement in 20 years and it fluctuates. Do you want to be valuing it and paying tax and then claiming it back when it goes down every year for 20 years or just declare the gain at the end?
I'm a little tired of billionaires 'buy, borrow, dying' to get around the paltry taxes they're currently subject to. We need a harder tax to dodge.
Include deaths due to poverty and lack of affordable healthcare under capitalism, overworking and dangerous working conditions, and all wars and counter-insurgency waged on alternative economic systems globally.
A lot of the language, for example "interest" comes from cattle culture. If you think about it, a cow produces other cows, so it bears interest. You can eat the cow (consume capital) or let the cow produce a stream of milk. Ownership of cows gave you great power.
So asking "the number of people killed by capitalism" is like asking "how many people were killed by everything that's not communism", which is pretty inane, since the point of communism is that it is an ideology, and mass killing for an ideology (that's not religion) is a part of the modern world, not the traditional world of cows and capital. The first ideological genocide was the slaughter of the Vendee peasants by the French revolutionaries, but it was merely the first of many times that urban ideologues slaughtered rural farmers.
[0] https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-tells-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
[3] https://historyincharts.com/chinese-death-totals-great-leap-...
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-34667551
They all turned into paranoid dictators who did everything they could to stay in power, except for Mao who got lied to by other party leaders and regretted it in his final years. None of them represent what socialism really is. Tankies who worship them are a small minority.
Similar to Swordfish? :)
If they haven't accidentally done this, they've definitely got some balls
It's very reminiscent of stocks that rocket 500% in a year, while almost nothing in the underlying company changed.
A couple other examples: https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2019-02-07-bitcoin-inefficie..., https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2024-11-20-nobel-prize-winni.... This bothers me, you can't respond to a genuine critique with "but look how much money I've made!"
Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.
Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.
It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.
Let's assume bitcoin has a tiny but positive probability of running the world economy in, say, 50 years. Ie bitcoin is a lottery ticket.
The fair value for a lottery ticket is some positive number. In 99.99..% of cases, the ticket will expire worthless. (In 0.00..1% of cases it will be worth quadrillions.)
The fair value of a lottery ticket is not a bubble, even if most lottery tickets expire worthless.
---
Now, of course, it's still possible to overpay for lottery tickets. Eg if you buy an actual lottery ticket in retail, the whole transaction usually loses you at least 50 cents on the dollar for lottery taxes alone.
But that's a separate issue.
Lottery tickets were only an example.
All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.
but i think the primary point of the comment was to highlight the "Bitcoin has been declared dead 478 times" part
The first quote i got was "Bitcoin is evil" and then the subtitle "bitcoin worth now 10000%"
Bitcoin is still evil and it has very much to do with the value of bitcoin.
This page is ignorant and shit :(
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
For most of the people you mention, a fiduciary cryptocurrency like these 'stable coins' is the better product.
(If you don't trust the value of the USD, and thus don't want a stable coin linked to that, you could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.)
Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!
USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).
There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.
But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.
Has been proofen often enough.
State actors can just hurt your famiily. State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
That actor has to know that you have something to be touched for in the first place. Which is not the case if you buy crypto without KYC unlike with the classical brokerage, for example.
> State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
Is paranoid and not serious. Yes, they can do a lot in theory, but on practice even basic level opsec avoids it.
In reality if somebody from the state is already after you explicitly for real, you are going to die or be in prison. I can't really argue with that. Most people are not under active confrontation with the governments, but under passive snooping and pity everyday legal risks that make their lifes miserable.
In most cases they don't send hitmen neither for "foreign agents" labeled people from Russia, nor for sanctioned Russians outside from the US, for example. My point is about people who are not active fugitives, but, you know, want to keep their stuff with them without risking neither their country bank freeze, nor western-based financial infra freeze because they hold the wrong passport.
Chinese firewall is real.
Putting fear into people with propaganda is real.
And yes i find my shadow bitcoin infrastructure not paranoid at all. It would be the first thing a state actor would do after closing everything through their state firewalls.
Like Joni says, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone."
Also the transaction cost. Is it any better?
Its about 2 cents for a coffee(10k sats ~= 7.6 usd), or 0.2%.
Versus 1.5-3.5% that visa typically charges.
Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.
Neovim first.
I've never "purchased" Bitcoin or any cryptocurrencies ever because it is not money or legal tender and never will.
Your 'point't doesn't make any sense at all?
But as long as others giving you real money for this garbage, it would be better to use it for a project like neovim :)
Yeah no.
You know what happened in el salvador? A Lot of people got their initial crypto stolen.
And you know what real people do? They use euros and dollars as hard cash. Like i have seen in Iran.
That's true for bitcoin, but not for cryptocurrencies in general. Especially those that moved to proof-of-stake.
Ah yes let’s ignore the tons of energy being used in giant data centers run by visa and Mastercard to operate the payment cards used by billions of people around the world.
“Yeah no.”
You know what happened in USA? A lot of people got their cash stolen.
Your arguments are as coherent as the dissonant “Yeah no.”
Bitcoin uses a massive amount of energy and has neither the transaction amount, nor the transaction speed and a LOT of features missing which visa/mastercard and a normal bank provide.
Losing your key to a wallet? BTC gone
Fraud? Yeah and now what?
Seller or buyer protection? hahaha no
Lets not compare apples with stones okay?
Seller and buyer protection don’t exist with cash either my dude.
If you’re going to compare apples and stones at least do it honestly.
Each payment option has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it’s fantastic that we have the freedom to choose from a variety of products and services to use.
I hated it when PayPal froze my funds and wished there was an option where a middleman couldn’t decide who I am allowed to pay. Then Bitcoin came along. For me, Bitcoin works great. For you, your method of choice works great and I’m happy for you.
Yes seller and buyer protection exists with cash. I pay regularly with cash in a ot of shops.
I wouldn't mind bitcoin if it would actually do the things and has any features besides gambling. And if it wouldn't add additional strain on our planet and the future of humanity.
What do you do with bitcoin? Be honest. Gambling? Do you really have most of your assets (if you have any relevant ones) in bitcoin? Yes? No fiat besides daily use?
Did you get 'rich' from the money shifting from someone else to you?
However the value is as much as people agree to value it and for a typical person both have little utility. Maybe BTC has even more utility because it facilitates remote transfers of value very easily.
So as long as the network exists there is intristic value in BTC. I believe more than one can say about gold.
Still, a good portfolio will contain both gold (in small coins likely as a kind of "war hedge") and BTC as a kind of hyperinflation hedge.
Not really. Try using gold in retail.
[0] https://www.goldback.com/
My bank already allows me to keep my bank account money in stocks and sells units whenever I spend. (We have no capital gains tax here, so this is less insane than it sounds.)
Your gold might give you food, your btc is rotting on some hard disk on a computer you can't / wont use.
BTC as a hyperinflation hedge? We have seen already what happens to btc when money gets tide: BTC drops.
We don't know where the Bitcoin has come from, so it needs to go through extensive anti money laundering checks.
Save the hassle of all of that taxes, accountancy and just send everything to a dead wallet.
Nah, you would have a lot more to pay in taxes.
Might as well send it to a dead wallet, it's not real money anyway in many countries as legal tender.
How about they use the bitcoin to donate?
Behind the US Dollar is a whole country and a lot more countries if not the whole world.
Behind Bitcoin are random investors, random people.
Bitcoin is also rarly traded directly it uses fiat for most. So Bitcoin is even dependend on this proof-of-stake system.
Bitcoin is a proof-of-work system dependend on the best proof-of-stake system we have.
You just have to be able to sell it for money.
Not sure how this applies to donations though, and of course this will almost certainly be changed in the future, .nl is leading the way in taxing _unrealised_ gains; we are sure to follow!
Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
> Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
Well that's really funny. Because the 7 years are about tax liabilities not the speed of bitcoin transactions.
So maybe you made a statement about crypto advocates here...
And the tax liability sister comments all disagree with each other
Notably, the parent commenter hasn’t replied at all yet