Yves smith bitcoins

Satoshi Nakamoto points that no mechanism existed, prior Bitcoins, to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party. The idea of Bitcoin is to define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. For the system to work, we need a way for the payee to know that the previous owners did not sign any earlier transactions.

The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions. To accomplish this without a trusted party, transactions must be publicly announced, and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received. The details of the Bitcoin network very wonkish Felix Salmon writes that for the time being, Bitcoin is in many ways the best and cleanest payments mechanism the world has ever seen.

Nemo has the best understandable description of the technical aspects of the Bitcoin network in a series of posts on his blog Self-evident. He starts by noting that Bitcoin relies on extremely elementary cryptography. Nemo writes that a central ingredient in the system is the use of one-way functions. A one-way function is a function that is easy to compute but hard to invert. The key ingredient is actually a trapdoor one-way function, which is a function that is easy to compute but hard to invert… for everybody except the person who created it.

The idea is that you create your own personal function g x that has a secret called a private key , such that inverting g is easy if and only if you know the secret. You share the function — but not the secret — with the whole world.

So now the whole world can compute the function, but only you can invert it. Nemo gives a simple example illustrating how these functions can be used. Suppose you and I want to bet on a coin toss over the phone. Is it possible for two untrustworthy people, like you and me, to play this game fairly?

By the power of the one-way function, it is! Here is how. First, we agree on a one-way function f. Then I flip a coin. Call that number x. Then, finally, I reveal x. Since you cannot invert f x , you have no idea whether x is even or odd at the time you make your guess. Thus we have flipped a coin over the phone fairly, even if both of us would rather cheat.

Izabella Kaminska writes on her personal blog that miners effectively make money from seigniorage in its very basic form. Nemo explains how mining works. Miners are clients that attempt to create new valid blocks. A block is a record of some or all of the most recent Bitcoin transactions that have not yet been recorded in any prior blocks. They do this by putting some transactions in a candidate block, picking a nonsense word called a nonce, computing the hash of the resulting block, and repeating with different nonces until they find a block whose hash does not exceed a certain threshold called a target.

The current target for the block chain is defined by a calculation, so any two clients looking at the block chain will calculate the same target. This calculation aims to adjust the target such that one block will be mined every ten minutes, no matter how much total computing power is devoted to mining. Then they broadcast that block to the network, thus appending it to the block chain that every client sees.

The Bitcoin software's Prime Directive is: When faced with conflicting versions of the block chain, the one with the greatest total sum of work is the Truth. Compared to the multitudes that own assets today via all the pension funds and mutual funds and the rest, it is a tiny group of people. So, a sharp increase in inequality is an inevitable consequence of bitcoin success. And unlike the richest people of today — the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks, whose wealth comes from creating companies that benefit most of us — the bitcoin aristocrats will get their rank just by buying early.

They will make no contribution to society. When the bitcoin aristocrats start spending their trillions, what does that mean for the rest of us? We do know that such extreme levels of inequality fuel social division and populism. The bitcoin aristocrats will come under increasing threat, and the government will have to respond.

Either way, political and social instabilities get worse. If then the bitcoin investors respond that everybody should buy bitcoin, all that accomplices to bid the price up even more, making existing bitcoin investors even more wealthy. As bitcoin starts displacing fiat money more and more, it will change society in profound ways.

Some will benefit. Those who own assets and services they can sell to the bitcoin aristocrats will prosper. Someone has to build their houses and clean their toilets, educate their children and cook their food. Someone has to defend them from the rest of society. But that is also a small minority.

Those whose material wellbeing depends on fiat will suffer the worst, like pensioners. Because, as bitcoin continues to gain in dominance, the less we want to hold fiat. We will all want to be paid in bitcoin and hold our savings in bitcoin. As in any market, the amount of goods and services that can be acquired by fiat money will inevitably fall, further hurting those whose lives depend on it. But the perverse consequence of this is that as bitcoin continues its ascendance, the less fiat will be worth.

This is why I think coexistence between bitcoin and fiat would be an unstable equilibrium. If bitcoin becomes successful, then we will want to use it more and more. That makes it even more successful so that we disregard fiat even more.

In the end, fiat will be fully displaced, as the success of bitcoin becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy Aizenman , Auer and Claessens There is, however, a contradiction in this scenario. If bitcoin becomes the money we use in our daily lives, it must also become a unit of account. The current volatility of bitcoin precludes it from becoming such a unit of account because which shopkeeper wants to change their prices every time bitcoin goes up or down in value, and who wants high volatility in the purchasing power of their salary or savings?

And that contradiction may be the reason why bitcoin cannot become successful. Success means it is used in transactions, but that requires bitcoin becoming a unit of account, and for that to happen, the purchasing power of a bitcoin must stabilise.

Fortunately, the more successful bitcoin becomes, the more visible the perverse consequences and the internal contradictions become, so that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be discarded long before we get to that point.

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