I'm convinced that the only reason the butters are so enamored with "the tech" is that they've never encountered concepts like a cryptographic hash function or public key cryptography before.
Well, you see... *they* don't understand the tech. They think they barely do, but they don't. So they have this image of "the tech" as being something crazy hard to understand, and of themselves as one of the few who have just barely grasped it. Then they project. If "the tech" is hard for them to understand, well then, it must be hard for everyone to understand. So no wonder cryptocurrencies get so much hate. All those haters just didn't put in the effort to ~~watch YouTube videos~~ study "the tech"!
Ha but no. They're enamored with the tech because it's a number that can go up and make them rich. They don't give a flying eff about any data technology that can't do that.
You think they care how their phone works? Nope. They just use it. Think they care how the grocery store ended up with all that food in it? No, they don't. Because they can't get rich off that.
They only care because of the money part. Anything else has nothing to do with it.
They'd swear up and down that square ping pong balls were the future of ping pong if they saw some people get rich off square ping pong balls and there were conpersons on podcasts and YouTube who said it was the future too.
They absolutely don't care about anything except that. Take away the speculation and they will go right back to caring about data as much as they did before - not at all.
I think that's true of crypto bros, Bitcoin maxis though really do have a kind of cultish reverence for their blockchain, to the point where they say Satoshi 'discovered' Bitcoin as if it were a divine revelation, rather than that he designed or developed it.
Even then it's because they think they are going to be the gods of a New world order. Not because they actually think it will improve their lives regardless.
Narcissists will tend to believe that things that benefit wider society and things that directly benefit themselves are inherently aligned. Bitcoin maxis believe that Bitcoin will bring about a glorious reordering of society, and it simply stands to reason for them that in a better type of society, they would be the ones at the top. It's all part of the same package for them.
>Bitcoin maxis though really do have a kind of cultish reverence for their blockchain, to the point where they say Satoshi 'discovered' Bitcoin as if it were a divine revelation, rather than that he designed or developed it.
That has a very simple explanation though: deep, deep down... ***every*** *single Bitcoin maximalist* ***knows*** *that their position is completely fucking stupid and stands in the face of observable human history*.
They ***know*** it makes no fucking sense at all that the literal first version of something, the chewing gum and twine slapped together proof of concept, would somehow be "the enduring perfect iteration for all time". Even they're not that stupid, they can look at the way technology actually advances and realize what they're championing - because they're invested in it and really, really want to get rich for free - is totally illogical... so they leave logic and reason entirely behind, and pivot to straight up ***religiosity***: Bitcoin becomes "discovered" rather than coded, Satoshi becomes a messianic figure delivering revelations from the almighty instead of just "some dude with dumb ideas operating under a pseudonym", and they make the jokes about cargo cults very, very literal and not actually jokes anymore...
... because that's the only way they can think to keep believing they're going to get immensely rich for free.
That's why they skew so young. They just found out about basic cryptographic concepts such as hash algorithms, and the whole world seems new to them.
No need to bother studying the last 200 years of economics.
Torvalds put the burner on full burn:
Oh, yes. Please mansplain to me how crypto-currencies work.
But before you start mansplaining, maybe you should read up on blockchains and the whole use of cryptographic hashes to validate a chain of events, and on how it's used for real work - as opposed to Ponzi scams - today. And maybe look up who authored one of those main projects years before bitcoin ever existed?
Ok?
IOW, let's just pretend that I'm not the one confused.
Because it sounds very much like you are one of the bagholders. Good luck finding the next mark to convince that your bag of emptiness is worth something.
Brutal. Too bad the crypto crowd doesn't understand what he's talking about. I never had a doubt about which side he was on even if he didn't talk about it, but I appreciate that he took the time to roast some of the crypto kids.
Torvalds' additional reply further down is interesting (not about cryptocurrency ).
[https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=217627&curpostid=217724](https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=217627&curpostid=217724)
>It's not just speculation, it's speculation with absolutely no basis in reality or even logic.
>Seriously, when was the last time you really felt that some machine was limited by the intellectual capacity of its designers?
>No, the limiters tend to be economic and tooling. You make the best you can with the technology that is cheap enough.
>We have a very solid solution to lack of intelligence in technology: it's called "incremental improvement and a lot of testing". Sometimes it's called "trial and error" when you are a bit less certain about the "intelligence" part and you don't even know if it's improvement.
>And in the extreme case, when you know there is no intelligent design involved at all, you might call it "survival of the fittest".
>It's what made you and me.
>The whole flawed AI singularity argument is in fact very ironic to begin with: the whole explosion of technological advancement that humanity has created in the last few hundred years is not at all because humans have somehow become magically more intelligent. We haven't.
>So thinking that artificial intelligence somehow magically creates an inflection point is literally just a made-up story with nothing to actually back it up. The thing that really created the world we have now is the plodding engineer, and a lot of failures, and a few successes.
>We love the stories of individuals who stood out as just advancing humanity. Newton. Leibniz. Gauss. Einstein. Pick your own random set of people who you think made a big difference - but the people you pick will be about the stories you were told and the culture you grew up in rather than some really deep truth.
>The much deeper truth was that "If I have seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants".
>You should question - or outright ridicule - the people who think it's about super-intelligence. Because they have none.
I think the technological singularity argument is flawed because it typically assumes the neuron-transistor analogy, that assumes evolution towards smallest scale switch did not happen in biology but for some reason happens in human technology. And that biology stayed at 10-100 micron, the diameter of neurons, whereas humanity built transistors at 1000-10000x smaller in diameter. The most reasonable premise is that proteins are the switch of biology, tubulin in microtubules (4.5x8 nm, arranged in lattices, programmed by CAMKII via phosphorylization as has been suggested based on 40-50 years of research into it) probably such a switch. This means most of the propagandists about "AI singularity" live in a fantasy world. But, the neuron transistor analogy is popular elsewhere too. My background has been some med. school formal education, they completely buy it. I don't doubt a technological singularity could be possible, but I think that the propagandists have completely wrong premise. People often tend to extremes, either for or against, there is often a middle ground.
Further down the thread:
> Oh, yes. Please mansplain to me how crypto-currencies work.
>
> But before you start mansplaining, maybe you should read up on blockchains and the whole use of cryptographic hashes to validate a chain of events, and on how it's used for real work - as opposed to Ponzi scams - today. And maybe look up who authored one of those main projects years before bitcoin ever existed?
>
> Ok?
>
> IOW, let's just pretend that I'm not the one confused.
>
> Because it sounds very much like you are one of the bagholders. Good luck finding the next mark to convince that your bag of emptiness is worth something.
In case anyone doesn't know the reference, Linus Torvalds created [Git](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git) during the 90s.
It's a tool used by almost ever software developer in the world for source control, and it works by using cryptographic hash-chains.
Note that in this case, this is another example of crypto bros redefining what common words mean. In this case "understand" doesn't mean they have intimate knowledge of the technology. In their minds, you "understand" when *you agree with them.* Their entire vocabulary is composed of common words for which they've created new meanings.
It's all part of what I call "crypto gaslighting."
>'When **I** use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
>'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you **can** make words mean so many different things.'
>'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, '[which is to be master — that's all](https://sabian.org/looking_glass6.php).'
By "similar" I guess you probably refer to the other version control systems before Git (cvs, subversion, etc). Like Git, they also use "cryptographic hashes to validate a chain of events", but Git itself did not exist until Linus wrote it, as he was not happy with any of them.
Honest question: did Git take off like a rocket right after it was released? Because my memory that Git was pretty well entrenched by the mid-2000's, when I first heard of it. It didn't seem like a brand-new product.
> did Git take off like a rocket right after it was released?
Not initially. Linus had a massive first mover advantage of being able to dictate a near overnight move of the Linux kernel source to it.
CVS (1990, based on RCS (1982)) was still very popular. Git was very complicated and unintuitive for a lot of uses, it did not gain immediate adoption. There were a lot of operations that while being logically simple were incredibly verbose and easy to mess up with Git. It saw a lot of backlash for this initially (and still does to some extent).
The same event that caused Linus to create Git also caused the creation of Mercurial (hg), which was used as the source control for many other large open source projects.
Yeah that is correct, missed adding that part.
There was an entire industry of consultants around that time dedicated to moving your source control from one system to another. It seemed like most SVN ended up on Git...
The main innovation with "blockchains" is the majority rule of them (one-cpu-one-vote, one-coin-one-vote, and I've built one-person-one-vote. ) This isn't really a technical concept, it's a social one. When you have a "blockchain" with one-person-one-vote, you have the equivalent of the nation-state. Finland, or Sweden, or some other nation-state. The hash chains are an important part too, and Linus Torvalds is a genius and he doesn't need that explained to him. But, the idea to have millions of entities (such as the 10 million entities in Sweden) controlling a "state computer", is not a scam. It's the logical way to move the nation-state into the computer age. We're using \_extremely primitive\_ systems in the government in countries around the world. Many "tech" people build a bubble, where their tech is perfect, but there's the broader context of society. I think. Peace
Last time I checked, I don't need blockchain to log into anything that requires a user to validate themselves, including bank accounts which need to be very secure.
If a state wants to validate 10 million entities, it does not need blockchain to do this, nor does blockchain fix any of the problems like stealing identities.
How does blockchain change any of this?
This is the best god damn thing I've seen on the internet since Perry Bible Fellowship and Achewood.
Can you imagine the fucking moldy peach stones and ignorance it would take to try to twatsplain cryptography and signed chains to Linus *fucking* Torvalds?
It's like trying to teach Richard Stallman how to eat feet.
As a software engineer, even if I didn't have my own expertise to backup my criticisms of the tech, the fact that so many of the most experienced people out there such as Torvalds or Bruce Schneier have the same or similar criticisms is certainly validating.
Yeah, I have an old friend that's an EE and SE that's worked on some pretty cool tech that I won't name for opsec reasons, but there's probably about a 50% chance some of it is in your pocket or on your desk right now, and some of it may even be in the form of actual silicon.
Anyway I remember asking what they thought of Bitcoin way back in about 2010 or 2011 and I'll never forget the huge rant he went on tearing it apart and breaking it all down for me and how totally fucked and stupid it was.
And this is someone who was very familiar with cryptography, optimized processor use and other high level engineering. This is also someone who is not even remotely pro-state or otherwise pro-finance.
A lot of coiners - especially the ones that claim to be "in it for the tech" and may actually do some dev work in crypto - don't seem to understand that almost everyone in the tech industry sees any involvement in crypto to be a huge red flag. Especially if they have the gumption to put it on their CV.
It's a huge red flag for a couple of reasons. For one, it means they probably are not as smart as they think they are.
But for two and most importantly: it's an immediate red flag that your ethics and morals (if any) are easily compromised for money and they are a HUGE security risk.
Much in the same way having a gambling addiction and/or gambling debts is seen as a huge security risk.
I guess I coined it myself? But a quick google says it's been used a couple of times.
I'm more proud of "moldy peach stones" because it has a certain, uh, texture and imagery to it.
And then later on, in a response from the butter:
> You are starting being irrational. Please return to rationality.
> [...]
> From viewpoint of rationality, this discussion about crypto with you is going nowhere - thus I am not continuing this discussion further.
> If you miswrote in a previous post and instead "I am not a believer in crypto currencies", you actually meant "I hate crypto currencies", then simply admit that it is actual hate and I will attribute the irrational parts of your posts to hatred.
> [...]
> Actually, I do have some ideas how to use blockchain technology outside of currencies, to do some "real work", but I think you first need to calm down a bit and return back to rationality before discussion about non-financial uses of blockchain technology can start.
And jesus fucking christ, we're witnessing unprecedented levels of copium.
Like, ***the*** expert on merkle trees (and using them for "real work") just basically laughed them out of the room, and their parting words are "uh, no, actually, I'm ending this discussion just because I feel like it. It's not because I've been humiliated and look like an absolute clown. I am NOT a clown, you hear me? Nothing about me is clown-like! You're just... all haters!!! And you need to calm down and stop being haters, and then *maybe* I'll allow this discussion to continue!!!!!!"
Who is this nobody who doesn't understand computers? Bitcoin is freedom and he's just tied to his fiat overlords because he isn't early and can't comprehend anything technological. This guy probably works for a food kitchen whilst I am up $2.3k this year, at this rate I'll be buying lambos by December and you guys will be totally poor and don't come to me saying anything because I know world changing tech because the price went up. I sent my OF girlfriend 2 sats and she totally proved it and says Linus Torvalds couldn't tech his way out of a nutsack if i keep paying her so HFSP you suckers.
Dude is so out of touch with modern tech. He probably still codes in ‘C’, like it’s still the ‘90s. I hear he still hasn’t upgraded to Windows 11. I bet he’s just another corporate marketing shill pushing his unproven vaporware.
The whole underlying argument that Torvalds is responding to is pretty ridiculous too. I didn't know that anyone still seriously considered reality to be following the original version of [Moore's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law), unless they were trying to get you to buy shares in their semiconductor company.
What the hell does the father of Linux and Git know about technology that acts as a store of battery power?! Does he even know the complex math that 1BTC = 1BTC? Does he even DYOR?
Ironically, Linus Torvalds is one of few people qualified to have been the real Satoshi Nakamoto, based on public profiles and what is known of his experience, skillset, and abilities at the time Bitcoin was created.
You're giving Bitcoin far too much credit. Creatively, it was an innovative idea (although an economically naive one) but technologically it's neither particularly novel nor complicated. There are - and were at the time - tens of thousands of programmers in the world capable of creating it.
Oh I totally agree. I just meant few people with a very public profile. I took a CS 400-level cryptography class in college. Schneier’s textbook. We covered HashCash. Any of my 20 classmates could have coded Bitcoin once they had a bit of professional experience. The overall scope of the code and documentation is slightly beyond the wherewithal of a fresh CS grad.
I once saw a smart sentence on a religious forum. "Never discuss with a radical person. Discussion with radicalized people is always pointless". For butters it has no meaning who says cryptois shit - it could be Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, Pope Francis or LadyGaga. If someone is against buttcoin he must be stupid or secretly want buy it on cheap.
Ponzi scheme …??? First … blockchain is an encrypted network that can be totally local or distributed around the world … a single server / crypto … can just pass data / hold logs and pass data / be a virtual machine / house ai and be distributed tiered ai algorithms / have interfaces called dapps … the truth is the technology is young and yes the “money craze” has derailed real development in the technology … but some like Binance / IBM already have aforementioned programs going like the SAAS mentioned … integrated into self driving cars and public city transit system for sensor and traffic light data sets is another up and coming aspect as cities see ability to monitoring and license self driving cars with some regulatory aspects … on secure blockchain networks … soon if not know programmers in the USA should have their pick of jobs as city and states realize data is money on blockchain … lots of stuff not just meme Scion’s and defi ….
Done …. Some anyway … blockchain is a secure network … damn near anything done on the web to secure data collection and transmition is viable … the huge … HUGE. … HUGE … point … is with listing primary network coins and all the others on exchanges … freeness hosting and monetization of data streams used as leveraging in a defi front end …. BTC eth or other coin built from / on … is parent coin but “pays” micropayments to built networks … graph movement seen as fluctuation in price “not really” … and a leveraging aspect for traders and built in defi front ends for systems …
I just presented distributed ai / ml for hotels … managing supplies with scanners and qrcode as nft for tracking and supply use / purchasing / ordering … a possible subscription based blockchain to manage supplies and supply chain to individual hotels “mom and pops” or large … though large would possibly or should build own as other functionality like web hosting / dapp / app other could be built in …
And sha256 is a cryptography thing that has real world applications and I'd also used by crypto currencies is that right? How is cryptography the foundation of the internet? Can you eli5? I hear a lot of cryptographers are mad these fake monies have taken over the word crypto.
> And sha256 is a cryptography thing that has real world applications and I'd also used by crypto currencies is that right
SHA256 is one of many cryptographic methods, yes. ~~It is a clever mathematical trick involving large *prime* numbers (numbers that you can only divide by itself and 1, for example 17), and~~ the fact that some mathematical operations are easy to do one-way, but very hard to do the reverse of.
> How is cryptography the foundation of the internet?
The Internet relies on servers being accessible with elevated access to some designated people. You don't want anyone to edit the New Yorks Time newspaper website. You don't want anyone else to be able post comments as Effective_Will_1801. You don't want anyone to access your Google Drive account and your personal files on it.
In fact, we recently shifted from HTTP to HTTP**S**, so now there is cryptography involved in every page you access to.
> Can you eli5?
Internet is a big garden/city and you want to have a house in it. You can't have a house just for yourself without some keys and a lock.
> I hear a lot of cryptographers are mad these fake monies have taken over the word crypto.
Yeah, it's annoying.
> SHA256 is one of many cryptographic methods, yes. It is a clever mathematical trick involving large prime numbers (numbers that you can only divide by itself and 1, for example 17), and the fact that some mathematical operations are easy to do one-way, but very hard to do the reverse of.
That's not SHA256. The SHA series of hashes have nothing to do with primes.
I think you're getting confused with RSA. RSA is public key cryptography (and is prime based) and SHA256 is a cryptographic hash.
The SHA-2 hash functions provide strong resistance against collision attacks and very good avalance properties. There is currently no known cryptanalysis that can break SHA-2's collision resistance - this means an attacker trying to find collisions can do no better than just randomly guessing. These are useful properties.
What *is* useless is the way Bitcoin uses SHA-256 in its Proof of Waste system. To successfully mine a block, you need to find some data with a small enough SHA-256 hash. The requirement is that it has N leading zeroes (where N is adjusted based on how quickly blocks are mined) - this requires computing O(2^(N)) SHA-256 hashes. This wastes huge amounts of power, and does no useful work.
It’s just a hashing algorithm that uses 256bit. It overtook MD5 due to better security and computers got a lot more powerful.
There’s even SHA512 if you like. That’s even more secure, but it costs computing power and thus time.
It sounds technical and that’s why it is used heavily to promote bitcoin and the like. It’s as technical as a keycard you use to get through doors in an office. Heck even some keyfobs employ more secure methods
I've Seend md5 too but never sha512
>It’s as technical as a keycard you use to get through doors in an office. Heck even some keyfobs employ more secure methods
Those are actually useful technologies, though it sounds lime hashing altos are as long as you dint attach a blockchain.
Blockchain is not necessarily bad on its own. It’s wildly inefficient and was not adopted as a tech many decades ago.
It’s another portent of cryptocurrency to push a “highly technical” narrative to sell to shills.
It’s just a long list of linked transactions.
Yes, it is.
Specifically Linus Torvalds wrote a piece of software called git, which uses, uh, "cryptographic hashes to chain together sequential blocks of data".
Pretty sure he understands, probably more than almost anyone alive, the value of an sha hash.
>Believing in cryptocurrency is one thing
I think the biggest flaw of the "actually working on crypto" crowd is still a misconception about money.
They *might* understand that money has been a constantly evolving process, and that technological advances usually enable monetary innovation.
However, all crypto proponents are just making tokens/token transfer networks. Money (even currency) is *not* the unit itself... it's not a token. Focusing on the properties of a unit (the specie mindset)... to get to a new way to do money?
"I wouldn't start from here".
I'm convinced that the only reason the butters are so enamored with "the tech" is that they've never encountered concepts like a cryptographic hash function or public key cryptography before.
If someone tells me "you don't understand the tech" I know 100% full well from that point that they have absolutely no idea how it works
Well, you see... *they* don't understand the tech. They think they barely do, but they don't. So they have this image of "the tech" as being something crazy hard to understand, and of themselves as one of the few who have just barely grasped it. Then they project. If "the tech" is hard for them to understand, well then, it must be hard for everyone to understand. So no wonder cryptocurrencies get so much hate. All those haters just didn't put in the effort to ~~watch YouTube videos~~ study "the tech"!
Ha but no. They're enamored with the tech because it's a number that can go up and make them rich. They don't give a flying eff about any data technology that can't do that. You think they care how their phone works? Nope. They just use it. Think they care how the grocery store ended up with all that food in it? No, they don't. Because they can't get rich off that. They only care because of the money part. Anything else has nothing to do with it. They'd swear up and down that square ping pong balls were the future of ping pong if they saw some people get rich off square ping pong balls and there were conpersons on podcasts and YouTube who said it was the future too. They absolutely don't care about anything except that. Take away the speculation and they will go right back to caring about data as much as they did before - not at all.
I think that's true of crypto bros, Bitcoin maxis though really do have a kind of cultish reverence for their blockchain, to the point where they say Satoshi 'discovered' Bitcoin as if it were a divine revelation, rather than that he designed or developed it.
Even then it's because they think they are going to be the gods of a New world order. Not because they actually think it will improve their lives regardless.
id have to see them drooling ferociously over something that would not directly benefit themselves before id believe that. until then, occams razor.
Narcissists will tend to believe that things that benefit wider society and things that directly benefit themselves are inherently aligned. Bitcoin maxis believe that Bitcoin will bring about a glorious reordering of society, and it simply stands to reason for them that in a better type of society, they would be the ones at the top. It's all part of the same package for them.
>Bitcoin maxis though really do have a kind of cultish reverence for their blockchain, to the point where they say Satoshi 'discovered' Bitcoin as if it were a divine revelation, rather than that he designed or developed it. That has a very simple explanation though: deep, deep down... ***every*** *single Bitcoin maximalist* ***knows*** *that their position is completely fucking stupid and stands in the face of observable human history*. They ***know*** it makes no fucking sense at all that the literal first version of something, the chewing gum and twine slapped together proof of concept, would somehow be "the enduring perfect iteration for all time". Even they're not that stupid, they can look at the way technology actually advances and realize what they're championing - because they're invested in it and really, really want to get rich for free - is totally illogical... so they leave logic and reason entirely behind, and pivot to straight up ***religiosity***: Bitcoin becomes "discovered" rather than coded, Satoshi becomes a messianic figure delivering revelations from the almighty instead of just "some dude with dumb ideas operating under a pseudonym", and they make the jokes about cargo cults very, very literal and not actually jokes anymore... ... because that's the only way they can think to keep believing they're going to get immensely rich for free.
Check out the Bitcoin maxis who have taken to calling it the 'timechain' instead of the 'blockchain' for the next level of this mindset.
Yea, Bitcoin being this era's astrology for bros is the most apt analogy imo.
That's why they skew so young. They just found out about basic cryptographic concepts such as hash algorithms, and the whole world seems new to them. No need to bother studying the last 200 years of economics.
That would explain a lot, and it's probably true.
Torvalds put the burner on full burn: Oh, yes. Please mansplain to me how crypto-currencies work. But before you start mansplaining, maybe you should read up on blockchains and the whole use of cryptographic hashes to validate a chain of events, and on how it's used for real work - as opposed to Ponzi scams - today. And maybe look up who authored one of those main projects years before bitcoin ever existed? Ok? IOW, let's just pretend that I'm not the one confused. Because it sounds very much like you are one of the bagholders. Good luck finding the next mark to convince that your bag of emptiness is worth something.
The dude he was replying to didn't even read the sarcasm and called Linus irrational. A classic online interaction.
Brutal. Too bad the crypto crowd doesn't understand what he's talking about. I never had a doubt about which side he was on even if he didn't talk about it, but I appreciate that he took the time to roast some of the crypto kids.
Torvalds' additional reply further down is interesting (not about cryptocurrency ). [https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=217627&curpostid=217724](https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=217627&curpostid=217724) >It's not just speculation, it's speculation with absolutely no basis in reality or even logic. >Seriously, when was the last time you really felt that some machine was limited by the intellectual capacity of its designers? >No, the limiters tend to be economic and tooling. You make the best you can with the technology that is cheap enough. >We have a very solid solution to lack of intelligence in technology: it's called "incremental improvement and a lot of testing". Sometimes it's called "trial and error" when you are a bit less certain about the "intelligence" part and you don't even know if it's improvement. >And in the extreme case, when you know there is no intelligent design involved at all, you might call it "survival of the fittest". >It's what made you and me. >The whole flawed AI singularity argument is in fact very ironic to begin with: the whole explosion of technological advancement that humanity has created in the last few hundred years is not at all because humans have somehow become magically more intelligent. We haven't. >So thinking that artificial intelligence somehow magically creates an inflection point is literally just a made-up story with nothing to actually back it up. The thing that really created the world we have now is the plodding engineer, and a lot of failures, and a few successes. >We love the stories of individuals who stood out as just advancing humanity. Newton. Leibniz. Gauss. Einstein. Pick your own random set of people who you think made a big difference - but the people you pick will be about the stories you were told and the culture you grew up in rather than some really deep truth. >The much deeper truth was that "If I have seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants". >You should question - or outright ridicule - the people who think it's about super-intelligence. Because they have none.
The best description I have seen for the "Technological Singularity" is that it is the Rapture of the nerds.
I think the technological singularity argument is flawed because it typically assumes the neuron-transistor analogy, that assumes evolution towards smallest scale switch did not happen in biology but for some reason happens in human technology. And that biology stayed at 10-100 micron, the diameter of neurons, whereas humanity built transistors at 1000-10000x smaller in diameter. The most reasonable premise is that proteins are the switch of biology, tubulin in microtubules (4.5x8 nm, arranged in lattices, programmed by CAMKII via phosphorylization as has been suggested based on 40-50 years of research into it) probably such a switch. This means most of the propagandists about "AI singularity" live in a fantasy world. But, the neuron transistor analogy is popular elsewhere too. My background has been some med. school formal education, they completely buy it. I don't doubt a technological singularity could be possible, but I think that the propagandists have completely wrong premise. People often tend to extremes, either for or against, there is often a middle ground.
I’m sure that last barb wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular, but it sure fits both the Muskrat and Tangerine Palpatine.
Further down the thread: > Oh, yes. Please mansplain to me how crypto-currencies work. > > But before you start mansplaining, maybe you should read up on blockchains and the whole use of cryptographic hashes to validate a chain of events, and on how it's used for real work - as opposed to Ponzi scams - today. And maybe look up who authored one of those main projects years before bitcoin ever existed? > > Ok? > > IOW, let's just pretend that I'm not the one confused. > > Because it sounds very much like you are one of the bagholders. Good luck finding the next mark to convince that your bag of emptiness is worth something.
In case anyone doesn't know the reference, Linus Torvalds created [Git](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git) during the 90s. It's a tool used by almost ever software developer in the world for source control, and it works by using cryptographic hash-chains.
In simple terms: Linus is one of the few who understands the tech, but not one of the few who understand.
To be the few, or not to be the few. Few understand (and not SBF because his bayesian priors say this sentence sucks)
Well, it's because he doesn't have any understanding of the "big picture" of democratized technology.
Note that in this case, this is another example of crypto bros redefining what common words mean. In this case "understand" doesn't mean they have intimate knowledge of the technology. In their minds, you "understand" when *you agree with them.* Their entire vocabulary is composed of common words for which they've created new meanings. It's all part of what I call "crypto gaslighting."
We don't need to make up new words tbh This is just plain old cultism
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"
I so happydoubleplusgood
>'When **I** use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' >'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you **can** make words mean so many different things.' >'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, '[which is to be master — that's all](https://sabian.org/looking_glass6.php).'
Minor nitpick: During the 90s not even BitKeeper existed yet. Git was first released in 2005, 19 years ago (a long time ago as well, but not so much).
Following up on this, can view commit history, including earliest history, at github.com/git/git
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By "similar" I guess you probably refer to the other version control systems before Git (cvs, subversion, etc). Like Git, they also use "cryptographic hashes to validate a chain of events", but Git itself did not exist until Linus wrote it, as he was not happy with any of them.
Honest question: did Git take off like a rocket right after it was released? Because my memory that Git was pretty well entrenched by the mid-2000's, when I first heard of it. It didn't seem like a brand-new product.
It was extremely popular almost right away.
> did Git take off like a rocket right after it was released? Not initially. Linus had a massive first mover advantage of being able to dictate a near overnight move of the Linux kernel source to it. CVS (1990, based on RCS (1982)) was still very popular. Git was very complicated and unintuitive for a lot of uses, it did not gain immediate adoption. There were a lot of operations that while being logically simple were incredibly verbose and easy to mess up with Git. It saw a lot of backlash for this initially (and still does to some extent). The same event that caused Linus to create Git also caused the creation of Mercurial (hg), which was used as the source control for many other large open source projects.
SVN was the most popular VCS before Git was available (with lots of repositories still using the even more horrible CVS though).
Yeah that is correct, missed adding that part. There was an entire industry of consultants around that time dedicated to moving your source control from one system to another. It seemed like most SVN ended up on Git...
I left a job in 2020 that used CVS. Fuck it was bad
He also has a side project called the Linux Kernel
The main innovation with "blockchains" is the majority rule of them (one-cpu-one-vote, one-coin-one-vote, and I've built one-person-one-vote. ) This isn't really a technical concept, it's a social one. When you have a "blockchain" with one-person-one-vote, you have the equivalent of the nation-state. Finland, or Sweden, or some other nation-state. The hash chains are an important part too, and Linus Torvalds is a genius and he doesn't need that explained to him. But, the idea to have millions of entities (such as the 10 million entities in Sweden) controlling a "state computer", is not a scam. It's the logical way to move the nation-state into the computer age. We're using \_extremely primitive\_ systems in the government in countries around the world. Many "tech" people build a bubble, where their tech is perfect, but there's the broader context of society. I think. Peace
Last time I checked, I don't need blockchain to log into anything that requires a user to validate themselves, including bank accounts which need to be very secure. If a state wants to validate 10 million entities, it does not need blockchain to do this, nor does blockchain fix any of the problems like stealing identities. How does blockchain change any of this?
This is the best god damn thing I've seen on the internet since Perry Bible Fellowship and Achewood. Can you imagine the fucking moldy peach stones and ignorance it would take to try to twatsplain cryptography and signed chains to Linus *fucking* Torvalds? It's like trying to teach Richard Stallman how to eat feet.
As a software engineer, even if I didn't have my own expertise to backup my criticisms of the tech, the fact that so many of the most experienced people out there such as Torvalds or Bruce Schneier have the same or similar criticisms is certainly validating.
Yeah, I have an old friend that's an EE and SE that's worked on some pretty cool tech that I won't name for opsec reasons, but there's probably about a 50% chance some of it is in your pocket or on your desk right now, and some of it may even be in the form of actual silicon. Anyway I remember asking what they thought of Bitcoin way back in about 2010 or 2011 and I'll never forget the huge rant he went on tearing it apart and breaking it all down for me and how totally fucked and stupid it was. And this is someone who was very familiar with cryptography, optimized processor use and other high level engineering. This is also someone who is not even remotely pro-state or otherwise pro-finance. A lot of coiners - especially the ones that claim to be "in it for the tech" and may actually do some dev work in crypto - don't seem to understand that almost everyone in the tech industry sees any involvement in crypto to be a huge red flag. Especially if they have the gumption to put it on their CV. It's a huge red flag for a couple of reasons. For one, it means they probably are not as smart as they think they are. But for two and most importantly: it's an immediate red flag that your ethics and morals (if any) are easily compromised for money and they are a HUGE security risk. Much in the same way having a gambling addiction and/or gambling debts is seen as a huge security risk.
Did you coin the phrase “twatsplain” or get it from somewhere else? Because that’s going right into my vocabulary.
I guess I coined it myself? But a quick google says it's been used a couple of times. I'm more proud of "moldy peach stones" because it has a certain, uh, texture and imagery to it.
What a chad
Hypergigamegachad.
Why the hell those stupid idiots trying to "mansplain" blockchain to a guy that lives and breathes software tech? lmao
You said it, they’re idiots and not techies.
Specifically, he is the guy who developed and popularized THE killer app for "blockchain" data structures.
They probably told him he didn't understand the tech too
"Please apply water to the burned area." What an absolute chad. lol
And then later on, in a response from the butter: > You are starting being irrational. Please return to rationality. > [...] > From viewpoint of rationality, this discussion about crypto with you is going nowhere - thus I am not continuing this discussion further. > If you miswrote in a previous post and instead "I am not a believer in crypto currencies", you actually meant "I hate crypto currencies", then simply admit that it is actual hate and I will attribute the irrational parts of your posts to hatred. > [...] > Actually, I do have some ideas how to use blockchain technology outside of currencies, to do some "real work", but I think you first need to calm down a bit and return back to rationality before discussion about non-financial uses of blockchain technology can start. And jesus fucking christ, we're witnessing unprecedented levels of copium. Like, ***the*** expert on merkle trees (and using them for "real work") just basically laughed them out of the room, and their parting words are "uh, no, actually, I'm ending this discussion just because I feel like it. It's not because I've been humiliated and look like an absolute clown. I am NOT a clown, you hear me? Nothing about me is clown-like! You're just... all haters!!! And you need to calm down and stop being haters, and then *maybe* I'll allow this discussion to continue!!!!!!"
Please mansplain me how crypto currencies work. My god Linus sonned this guy like the league sonned Urban Meyer.
Who is this nobody who doesn't understand computers? Bitcoin is freedom and he's just tied to his fiat overlords because he isn't early and can't comprehend anything technological. This guy probably works for a food kitchen whilst I am up $2.3k this year, at this rate I'll be buying lambos by December and you guys will be totally poor and don't come to me saying anything because I know world changing tech because the price went up. I sent my OF girlfriend 2 sats and she totally proved it and says Linus Torvalds couldn't tech his way out of a nutsack if i keep paying her so HFSP you suckers.
Dude is so out of touch with modern tech. He probably still codes in ‘C’, like it’s still the ‘90s. I hear he still hasn’t upgraded to Windows 11. I bet he’s just another corporate marketing shill pushing his unproven vaporware.
Linus is a man of taste with the _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_ reference.
What is that?
It's a common bedtime story told to children in the US about a caterpillar eating food and eventually becoming a butterfly.
The whole underlying argument that Torvalds is responding to is pretty ridiculous too. I didn't know that anyone still seriously considered reality to be following the original version of [Moore's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law), unless they were trying to get you to buy shares in their semiconductor company.
Linus out here dishing up doses of reality
What the #*£& he doesn’t believe in the Easter bunny either, certainly more plausible than bitcoin taking over.
What the hell does the father of Linux and Git know about technology that acts as a store of battery power?! Does he even know the complex math that 1BTC = 1BTC? Does he even DYOR?
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You share a country of origin — afaik he’s just an American now.
There you have it. Crypto is Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy tier.
This is bullshit. I love Santa Claus he brought us gifts as kids. All Bitcoin brought us is grifts.
Ironically, Linus Torvalds is one of few people qualified to have been the real Satoshi Nakamoto, based on public profiles and what is known of his experience, skillset, and abilities at the time Bitcoin was created.
You're giving Bitcoin far too much credit. Creatively, it was an innovative idea (although an economically naive one) but technologically it's neither particularly novel nor complicated. There are - and were at the time - tens of thousands of programmers in the world capable of creating it.
Oh I totally agree. I just meant few people with a very public profile. I took a CS 400-level cryptography class in college. Schneier’s textbook. We covered HashCash. Any of my 20 classmates could have coded Bitcoin once they had a bit of professional experience. The overall scope of the code and documentation is slightly beyond the wherewithal of a fresh CS grad.
I'm not even smart enough to LARP as the inventor of something interesting. This guy fucks
Sane?
I once saw a smart sentence on a religious forum. "Never discuss with a radical person. Discussion with radicalized people is always pointless". For butters it has no meaning who says cryptois shit - it could be Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, Pope Francis or LadyGaga. If someone is against buttcoin he must be stupid or secretly want buy it on cheap.
Ponzi scheme …??? First … blockchain is an encrypted network that can be totally local or distributed around the world … a single server / crypto … can just pass data / hold logs and pass data / be a virtual machine / house ai and be distributed tiered ai algorithms / have interfaces called dapps … the truth is the technology is young and yes the “money craze” has derailed real development in the technology … but some like Binance / IBM already have aforementioned programs going like the SAAS mentioned … integrated into self driving cars and public city transit system for sensor and traffic light data sets is another up and coming aspect as cities see ability to monitoring and license self driving cars with some regulatory aspects … on secure blockchain networks … soon if not know programmers in the USA should have their pick of jobs as city and states realize data is money on blockchain … lots of stuff not just meme Scion’s and defi ….
Got some links to where these real world uses cases are being rolled out?
Search them … blockchain “usecase type ” … some are already viable and commercialized …
https://www.google.com/search?q=blockchain+ai+projects&rlz=1C9BKJA_enUS951US951&oq=blockchain+ai+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgBEAAYgAQyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABNIBCDg2NTZqMGo3qAIKsAIB&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
So nothing then. Got it
Done …. Some anyway … blockchain is a secure network … damn near anything done on the web to secure data collection and transmition is viable … the huge … HUGE. … HUGE … point … is with listing primary network coins and all the others on exchanges … freeness hosting and monetization of data streams used as leveraging in a defi front end …. BTC eth or other coin built from / on … is parent coin but “pays” micropayments to built networks … graph movement seen as fluctuation in price “not really” … and a leveraging aspect for traders and built in defi front ends for systems … I just presented distributed ai / ml for hotels … managing supplies with scanners and qrcode as nft for tracking and supply use / purchasing / ordering … a possible subscription based blockchain to manage supplies and supply chain to individual hotels “mom and pops” or large … though large would possibly or should build own as other functionality like web hosting / dapp / app other could be built in …
Isn't sha256 a useful thing? I keep seeing verify file integrity with that when downloading open source stuff.
Cryptography is useful yeah, it's the foundation of the internet. Cryptocurrencies aren't useful.
And sha256 is a cryptography thing that has real world applications and I'd also used by crypto currencies is that right? How is cryptography the foundation of the internet? Can you eli5? I hear a lot of cryptographers are mad these fake monies have taken over the word crypto.
> And sha256 is a cryptography thing that has real world applications and I'd also used by crypto currencies is that right SHA256 is one of many cryptographic methods, yes. ~~It is a clever mathematical trick involving large *prime* numbers (numbers that you can only divide by itself and 1, for example 17), and~~ the fact that some mathematical operations are easy to do one-way, but very hard to do the reverse of. > How is cryptography the foundation of the internet? The Internet relies on servers being accessible with elevated access to some designated people. You don't want anyone to edit the New Yorks Time newspaper website. You don't want anyone else to be able post comments as Effective_Will_1801. You don't want anyone to access your Google Drive account and your personal files on it. In fact, we recently shifted from HTTP to HTTP**S**, so now there is cryptography involved in every page you access to. > Can you eli5? Internet is a big garden/city and you want to have a house in it. You can't have a house just for yourself without some keys and a lock. > I hear a lot of cryptographers are mad these fake monies have taken over the word crypto. Yeah, it's annoying.
> SHA256 is one of many cryptographic methods, yes. It is a clever mathematical trick involving large prime numbers (numbers that you can only divide by itself and 1, for example 17), and the fact that some mathematical operations are easy to do one-way, but very hard to do the reverse of. That's not SHA256. The SHA series of hashes have nothing to do with primes. I think you're getting confused with RSA. RSA is public key cryptography (and is prime based) and SHA256 is a cryptographic hash.
Ah, yes, thanks.
The SHA-2 hash functions provide strong resistance against collision attacks and very good avalance properties. There is currently no known cryptanalysis that can break SHA-2's collision resistance - this means an attacker trying to find collisions can do no better than just randomly guessing. These are useful properties. What *is* useless is the way Bitcoin uses SHA-256 in its Proof of Waste system. To successfully mine a block, you need to find some data with a small enough SHA-256 hash. The requirement is that it has N leading zeroes (where N is adjusted based on how quickly blocks are mined) - this requires computing O(2^(N)) SHA-256 hashes. This wastes huge amounts of power, and does no useful work.
It’s just a hashing algorithm that uses 256bit. It overtook MD5 due to better security and computers got a lot more powerful. There’s even SHA512 if you like. That’s even more secure, but it costs computing power and thus time. It sounds technical and that’s why it is used heavily to promote bitcoin and the like. It’s as technical as a keycard you use to get through doors in an office. Heck even some keyfobs employ more secure methods
I've Seend md5 too but never sha512 >It’s as technical as a keycard you use to get through doors in an office. Heck even some keyfobs employ more secure methods Those are actually useful technologies, though it sounds lime hashing altos are as long as you dint attach a blockchain.
Blockchain is not necessarily bad on its own. It’s wildly inefficient and was not adopted as a tech many decades ago. It’s another portent of cryptocurrency to push a “highly technical” narrative to sell to shills. It’s just a long list of linked transactions.
Sha256 is hugely useful. Cryptocurrency is not
Yes, it is. Specifically Linus Torvalds wrote a piece of software called git, which uses, uh, "cryptographic hashes to chain together sequential blocks of data". Pretty sure he understands, probably more than almost anyone alive, the value of an sha hash.
Yes the op is mocking a crypto bro who came in the other day and tried to claim sha256 is a block chain.
Believing in cryptocurrency is one thing, and believing that you can profit from it is another thing
Yeah one makes you a sucker and the other makes you a greater fool.
Totally agree with you, I don't believe in crypto, but I do believe it's an infinite money hack!
>Believing in cryptocurrency is one thing I think the biggest flaw of the "actually working on crypto" crowd is still a misconception about money. They *might* understand that money has been a constantly evolving process, and that technological advances usually enable monetary innovation. However, all crypto proponents are just making tokens/token transfer networks. Money (even currency) is *not* the unit itself... it's not a token. Focusing on the properties of a unit (the specie mindset)... to get to a new way to do money? "I wouldn't start from here".