From the Archives: Important Bitcoin articles for newbies, 2014-2018 edition.

In the event that you’re new here,i and inspired by Saif’s new book, let’s look back at some of the Contravex articles vis-a-vis Bitcoin that you probably weren’t around for but that you’d be remiss to miss if you’re still in the early phases of trying to make sense of this whole ball of yarn. These articles have not only aged well but are as timeless as ever for those new to the “crypto” scene. Enjoy!

1. On Matters of Merchant Adoption
2. The Wallet Inspector’s Promise
3. Early Classical Revival Websites Do Not A Bitcoin Bank Make
4. Citizens of Fiat vs. Citizens of Bitcoin: A Contrast
5. On Delusions Of Digital Security
6. On Making Bitcoin Accessible. Or Not.
7. On Making High-Entropy Paper Wallets
8. There Is No “Bitcoin 2.0”
9. Deflation Isn’t Bitcoin’s Problem, It’s Bitcoin’s Solution
10. Ex-Post: Toronto Bitcoin Expo
11. The Brokenness of MaidSafe.ii
12. Bitcoin: Killer of Nietzschian Nihilism
13. On Reusing Bitcoin Addresses
14. Tell The Grand Inquisitor There’s No Fucking Bitcoin Taint.
15. How A Bigger Blockchain Is Less Secure And Why Block Size Ain’t Gonna Increase Any Time Soon
16. Adding Value To Bitcoin
17. The Revolution Was Fiat, The Reaction Is Bitcoin
18. Breaking A Bitcoin Brainwallet
19. The problem of digital identity, or how to circumvent Blockchain.info 2FA and e-mail authorisation
20. The economics of sinking 20 MB Gavincoin blocks.
21. Bitcoin is unfair. That’s the point and so it shall remain.
22. 21 Inc. and Comcast sitting in a tree, d-e-r-p-i-n-g.
23. Wences whacked, Xapo zapped.
24. Legal pluralism as it relates to Bitcoin.
25. Zcash will crash just like Gavincoin, Garzikcoin, XT, SegWit, and Classic. Now you know.
26. The layman’s guide to salvaging bitcoins in the era of Chicom miner monopoly.
27. PSA: Don’t pay the bitcoin ransom.
28. From the scammer files: Anthony Di Iorio.
29. The Bitcoin Life Insurance policy.
30. “Suppose we have an exchange that, due to resource limitations, is limited to 5 decimal places for orders”, or how Kraken is scamming to stay solvent.
31. Canadian Economic [Bitcoin] Nodes? More like Canadian Derpatronic Altcoin Hoes.
32. How Developmentally Stunted Ingrates Like Bram Cohen Imagine Bitcoin Mining Companies
33. The Ethereum market cap fallacy.
34. The Wallet Inspector’s Promise v.”ICO”
35. The implications of Bitcoin for inheritance.
36. Worried about the fork?
37. SegWit toljaso
38. “Unpopular Ideas about Blockchains” by Sunny Aggarwal and Nate Rush, adnotated.
39. Why CME and CBOE bitcoin futures aren’t important and don’t matter.
40. Bitcoin Year-In-Review 2017
41. Announcing the newest Bitcoin infrastructure node, or why Ethereum is so utterly fucked.
42. “Dumb,” “Stupid,” “Pathetic” and other Mike Beggs-isms unfairly and unreasonably railing against our innocent little Bitcoin that ain’t never hurt nobody.
43. What is “late capitalism” anyways ?

These being in chronological order and spanning almost half-a-decade, you’ll forgive me for being fairly breathless in the earlier pieces. I’m clearly not immune from the old problem of overestimating how much the world will change in the next two years and underestimating how much it’ll change in the next ten.
___ ___ ___

  1. Do you think I’d be surprised how many of you there really are ? Y’know I think I might!
  2. MaidSafe, for those blissfully unaware, was the dentralised internet scam before Blockstack, Filecoin, etc. came along to steal its thunder. Not that the ones you see out there in the “market” today are the last, merely the latest. It’s a deceptively chumpatronic idea, that decentralised cloud storage schtick.

6 thoughts on “From the Archives: Important Bitcoin articles for newbies, 2014-2018 edition.

  1. nou says:

    As a former shill of Mircea and his deluded company, may I ask how does this make you feel?
    http://btcbase.org/log/2018-07-14#1834373
    http://btcbase.org/log/2018-07-14#1834531

  2. gt3000 says:

    Thanks for the links, however, I don’t understand the game theory involving miners stealing segwit funds. Why would miners want to form a cartel against segwit? Assuming they do so and successfully steal funds sitting on segwit addresses (which is approximating half of all transactions now: https://transactionfee.info/charts/payments/segwit), the result would be a guaranteed collapsing market in which they will find themselves mining at a loss quickly, the last thing a miner wants (disaster which would be increasingly worse as % of segwit usage increases over time, and it is increasing as you can see on the chart). This coupled with an huge decrease in transaction volume due fears of insecurity (so less fees for them to milk from) doesn’t look like a bright future. The bear market would be longer than miners would be able to sustain mining at a big loss (assuming an eventual recovery).

    I don’t use segwit addresses myself and never plan to do so, yet, I don’t see any realistic scenario in which miners would risk bankruptcy attempting stealing segwit funds.

    • Pete D. says:

      Why would miners want to form a cartel against segwit?

      For profit. And lots of it.

      the result would be a guaranteed collapsing market in which they will find themselves mining at a loss quickly

      This isn’t guaranteed at all. Users already don’t trust miners and it’s not like there’s much in the way of viable alternatives if/when a segwit unwinding takes place. So even if no one trusted segwit after The Great Unwinding and stopped using it (if they were nuts enough to use it in the first place), there would still be plenty of other users using the original BTC, certainly those with serious numbers of coins to move. Furthermore, even a small drop in tx volume from the loss of segwit wouldn’t be enough to kill the profitability of Bitcoin mining, much less faith in the whole network.

      The bear market would be longer than miners would be able to sustain mining at a big loss (assuming an eventual recovery).

      How can you predict how long a bear market, or any kind of market, will last ? If/when segwit is unwound, I foresee a “surprisingly quick” (obviously observer-dependent) return to normal. Given Bitcoin’s manifold advantages over national currencies and other cryptocurrencies, it really doesn’t also need infinitely cheap transactions. It’s icing on the cake if anything, but hardly the cake itself.

      Cheers.

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