nadahalli

A fresh printable worksheet of maths and computational-thinking puzzles for kids. Every question, every answer, and every wrong answer is computed by a program, not written by an AI. The generators and solvers are "correct by construction." The levels are decided by how deep the solver has to go, and a few other static constants per generator.

[pedantic hat on] Bitcoin doesn't use encryption.

You mean digital signatures - and yes, we use signatures everywhere in public key cryptography.

The hashing part is kind of orthogonal. The real negative outcome of quantum computers getting reliable and powerful would be that ECDSA would be broken (using Shor's algorithm variants). This would make every coin stealable by anyone with access to such a computer. Some coins would be easier to steal than others (P2PK would be the easiest - and all of Satoshi's coins are P2PK). The Bitcoin network would keep working, but coin-ownership would be meaningless.

I started reading the article assuming it was an April fool's joke. After a bit into it, I thought it was not a joke. When the self-deprecation began, I was again convinced it was a joke - but at the end of the article, I think this is not a joke. It's a rather good take on why Bitcoin maximalism is what it is.

Some degree of ETH-maximalism will be required in the future given the sheer number of pretender L-1 blockchains snapping at ETH's heels. Writing about BTC-maximalism sets the foundation for that culture.

That's the entire point. Bitcoin has just one use case, and it's very inefficient design is tailor-made for that one use case.

Alt-coins have use cases that can all be solved by AWS. The inefficient design is er....inefficient for those applications.

I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.

As for "Crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and friends" - you have to ask yourself why they don't work at scale. That's the key insight of Bitcoin. You need to have a system-native incentive for the nodes to do their thing, and this system-native thing (BTC the currency, in Bitcoin's case), should have outside value. Many wiser people have said this (not on HackerNews maybe), that money is the only use case for a blockchain.

> If we could magically make 100x the gold, that would be great! Current gold investors would be sad but it would be a win for the world.

I am not sure about that. If there were a magical new way of creating gold to inflate its supply, it would not be good for the world.

You are on the wrong forum my friend.

Austrians and the HN community talk past each other because it's not easy to get the latter (which I am a part of) to see that their large salaries in FAANG companies are partly due to the Fed largesse.