ClaytonB
Member
- Joined
- Oct 30, 2011
- Messages
- 10,245
I was going to post this clip in the other thread but when I got into it, Poole starts spewing so much FUD disinfo that I see being repeated on this forum and elsewhere, that it needs to be addressed:
No central bank is interested in Bitcoin, any more than they're interested in gold. No central bank wants to try to "buy up" a network consisting mainly of sweaty, mangy neckbeards running racks and racks of miners in remote warehouses with access to cheap electricity. Poole implies that all they have to do is "buy up 51%" (of miners, I guess?) to "take over" and that's just not true at all, that's not how Bitcoin works and that's not how a theoretical 51% attack would work.
"What if Bitcoin is the global currency?" Then, I'm just back at Square-A. I already receive my paycheck in the real global currency, called the US Dollar.
"AI computer systmes will figure out what your address is in seconds." I guess the only way to find out is to bring it on beyotch. "And there's nothing you can do to stop them." Since when is Poole an expert in AI and blockchains? He watched a wallet tutorial and now he's the expert on all things digital?
His given reasons for this amazing leap of brilliance is "private investigators exist" and "if a human being can do that, imagine what a computer can do." Well, last I checked, computers can do zero private investigation. This whole AI paper-tiger is already a worn-out trope. We've been subjected to the "Fear the Machines!" predictive-programming since HAL-9000 famously said, "I can't do that Dave."
"The Bitcoin ledger is publicly trackable." Sure, the individual transactions, and their amounts, are visible. It is possible to reconstruct a lot of private information from that record in some cases. However, if you take appropriate steps to shield your identity on the blockchain, no magical AI machine is going to be able to figure out which Bitcoin addresses, if any, are yours. In addition, as far as privacy of the small transactions which will give away the most information about you, that will be going over the Lightning Network which, unlike the blockchain, is opaque in the same kind of way that HTTPS web browsing is opaque. Nobody is going to be buying coffee with an on-chain transaction. So, even if you knew what Bitcoin addresses are mine, that wouldn't help you in tracking my daily activity, since that would be going over the LN and you simply have no way to even intercept that network activity, let alone track it, data-mine it, etc.
"The FBI was able to ... track Monero payments." OK? If you make yourself a direct target of an agency with nation-state resources, they're going to know how many times a day you wipe your ass, if they want to. There's literally no information about your person which they will not be able to surveil because the technological capabilities of modern surveillance are effectively unlimited, and if you bring enough heat down on your head because of your criminal activities, any amount of those technological capabilities will be deployed on you. My favorite Snowden disclosure is the Tailored Access Operations catalog and two of my favorite devices in that catalog is are little cylindrical devices that clip on a standard display cable and keyboard cable. They can be concealed to look like an ordinary "choke" (an inductor used on many cables to prevent current surges). These devices are completely passive, meaning, they have no onboard power source. Rather, the NSA can park a creepy white van somewhere nearby and use a directed antenna to send an RF power pulse to the device. The device receives this power on its antenna, like an RFID tag, and uses that power to measure the signals on the cable, and then send a tiny RF pulse back to the creepy white van. All of this happens in a matter of nanoseconds, so the pulses are sent in a high frequency stream, and sent back. The return pulses contain the signals that tell your computer display what to display and, if they put a device on the keyboard, what you're typing. It's so small that anybody with a desktop computer could be 100% compromised with nothing more than a simple lock-pick operation to enter and bug the targeted computer, and quietly exit. Nobody can ever be completely immune to this kind of an attack. So if you piss off the right people, nothing in heaven or earth is going to protect your Bitcoin wallet.
But none of that has anything to do with saying that Bitcoin is "akshually" the global currency that the WEF types want. Good lord, who comes up with this controlled opposition narrative?! This stuff is obviously retarded to anyone with the most basic functional understanding of the Bitcoin network. If you understand how Bitcoin works, and you have valid concerns, by all means, state your concerns. But this nonsense is only believable by people who do not understand how Bitcoin works.
"With the 51% attack, you can effectively do anything you want" This is FALSE INFORMATION.
"If you go too hard, it will split the blockchain in half." Forks and the 51% attack are unrelated. A 51% attack applies to some specific set of transactions and would be a "one-shot" attack. If I control 51% of the nodes, I can make an attack against you that will cause you to believe that I have transferred Bitcoins to you when I have not or, at least, I can persuade the network to believe my story over yours, in effect (due to the structure of proof-of-work). But once this happens, the gig is up. What will happen is that you will complain "Hey, I just got ripped off and these guys stole my payment despite me receiving confirmations that it was valid." This is why mid-size Bitcoin transactions (say, buying a Ferrari) should wait until at least 6 confs (one hour), and very large transactions may need to wait longer. Once it is realized that 51% of nodes have been corrupted, there would likely be a fork away from those nodes by honest nodes, but nobody is going to keep doing business with them as though nothing happened. Nor can the corrupt 51% prevent the remaining honest 49% from forking away. There's no way to "force" anybody to use a version of the blockchain they have rejected as dishonest, and there's no way to pass off a dishonest blockchain as genuine. A single honest node suffices to determine that the corrupt blockchain is corrupt.
"Quantum computing could crack private keys." If so, then say goodbye to your regular bank account because the same quantum hackers that can hack your Bitcoin wallet can hack your HTTPS connection to your bank. Government/military/satellite/inter-bank communications... they all fall to quantum computing which, by all appearances, has gone into a winter. So, another boogie-man bites the dust.
"They can control the exchanges. They can ban your address." Yes, it is well-understood that the fiat-money onramps and offramps are controlled by the fiat central bankers. Surprise! But the crypto freeway itself is wide open and there's nothing that the State can really do about how you buy and sell. In El Salvador, today, yes you can absolutely buy meat in a supermarket with Bitcoin. You can buy gas. You can pay rent. You can perform all the ordinary activities that you would perform with a fiat money, using Bitcoin.
In summary:
- If you don't understand Bitcoin, please beware of just repeating "skeptical" talking points, even if you heard them from a "trustworthy source", like a super-PI with magical PI powers to locate any person on the planet by the timing of their tweets.
- Also, if you don't understand Bitcoin, you shouldn't buy it. Do not invest in assets for which you do not at least have an operational understanding. If you're investing in oil but you don't know the first thing about the oil market, expect to lose your shirt.
- If you do understand enough about Bitcoin to recognize all of the BS that Poole was spewing in this video, that still doesn't mean you have to use it or approve of it.
- Please never put all your eggs in one basket. A balanced SHTF preparation plan would include some Funny Reserve Notes (just in case they're still useful for something other than toilet paper, post-collapse), some silver coins and, if you are comfortable with how to use crypto, some Bitcoin. If you're putting your entire faith in just one solution, you could end up in a world of hurt if other systems collapse. Stay flexible and think about all the possibilities, not just the one or two apocalypse scenarios that really scare you the most. For all you know, they'll never happen.
- Finally, and this should go without saying, don't use crypto for criminal purposes. If you're committing crimes that would get the attention of agencies with nation-state resources, there is no amount of whiz-bang techno-magic that will save you. A lot of these myths about how Bitcoin is "fully public", "trackable", "AI can crack your identity in seconds", and so on, has started because people were using Bitcoin for a criminal purpose, got busted by the authorities and had their crypto seized, and were told a bunch of myths by the cops when they asked, "How did you catch me?!" The cops never fail to use that opportunity to pump up every imaginable myth about their supposedly godlike powers. But the way to avoid this entire scenario is don't use crypto to commit crimes. There, problem solved...
No central bank is interested in Bitcoin, any more than they're interested in gold. No central bank wants to try to "buy up" a network consisting mainly of sweaty, mangy neckbeards running racks and racks of miners in remote warehouses with access to cheap electricity. Poole implies that all they have to do is "buy up 51%" (of miners, I guess?) to "take over" and that's just not true at all, that's not how Bitcoin works and that's not how a theoretical 51% attack would work.
"What if Bitcoin is the global currency?" Then, I'm just back at Square-A. I already receive my paycheck in the real global currency, called the US Dollar.
"AI computer systmes will figure out what your address is in seconds." I guess the only way to find out is to bring it on beyotch. "And there's nothing you can do to stop them." Since when is Poole an expert in AI and blockchains? He watched a wallet tutorial and now he's the expert on all things digital?
His given reasons for this amazing leap of brilliance is "private investigators exist" and "if a human being can do that, imagine what a computer can do." Well, last I checked, computers can do zero private investigation. This whole AI paper-tiger is already a worn-out trope. We've been subjected to the "Fear the Machines!" predictive-programming since HAL-9000 famously said, "I can't do that Dave."
"The Bitcoin ledger is publicly trackable." Sure, the individual transactions, and their amounts, are visible. It is possible to reconstruct a lot of private information from that record in some cases. However, if you take appropriate steps to shield your identity on the blockchain, no magical AI machine is going to be able to figure out which Bitcoin addresses, if any, are yours. In addition, as far as privacy of the small transactions which will give away the most information about you, that will be going over the Lightning Network which, unlike the blockchain, is opaque in the same kind of way that HTTPS web browsing is opaque. Nobody is going to be buying coffee with an on-chain transaction. So, even if you knew what Bitcoin addresses are mine, that wouldn't help you in tracking my daily activity, since that would be going over the LN and you simply have no way to even intercept that network activity, let alone track it, data-mine it, etc.
"The FBI was able to ... track Monero payments." OK? If you make yourself a direct target of an agency with nation-state resources, they're going to know how many times a day you wipe your ass, if they want to. There's literally no information about your person which they will not be able to surveil because the technological capabilities of modern surveillance are effectively unlimited, and if you bring enough heat down on your head because of your criminal activities, any amount of those technological capabilities will be deployed on you. My favorite Snowden disclosure is the Tailored Access Operations catalog and two of my favorite devices in that catalog is are little cylindrical devices that clip on a standard display cable and keyboard cable. They can be concealed to look like an ordinary "choke" (an inductor used on many cables to prevent current surges). These devices are completely passive, meaning, they have no onboard power source. Rather, the NSA can park a creepy white van somewhere nearby and use a directed antenna to send an RF power pulse to the device. The device receives this power on its antenna, like an RFID tag, and uses that power to measure the signals on the cable, and then send a tiny RF pulse back to the creepy white van. All of this happens in a matter of nanoseconds, so the pulses are sent in a high frequency stream, and sent back. The return pulses contain the signals that tell your computer display what to display and, if they put a device on the keyboard, what you're typing. It's so small that anybody with a desktop computer could be 100% compromised with nothing more than a simple lock-pick operation to enter and bug the targeted computer, and quietly exit. Nobody can ever be completely immune to this kind of an attack. So if you piss off the right people, nothing in heaven or earth is going to protect your Bitcoin wallet.
But none of that has anything to do with saying that Bitcoin is "akshually" the global currency that the WEF types want. Good lord, who comes up with this controlled opposition narrative?! This stuff is obviously retarded to anyone with the most basic functional understanding of the Bitcoin network. If you understand how Bitcoin works, and you have valid concerns, by all means, state your concerns. But this nonsense is only believable by people who do not understand how Bitcoin works.
"With the 51% attack, you can effectively do anything you want" This is FALSE INFORMATION.
"If you go too hard, it will split the blockchain in half." Forks and the 51% attack are unrelated. A 51% attack applies to some specific set of transactions and would be a "one-shot" attack. If I control 51% of the nodes, I can make an attack against you that will cause you to believe that I have transferred Bitcoins to you when I have not or, at least, I can persuade the network to believe my story over yours, in effect (due to the structure of proof-of-work). But once this happens, the gig is up. What will happen is that you will complain "Hey, I just got ripped off and these guys stole my payment despite me receiving confirmations that it was valid." This is why mid-size Bitcoin transactions (say, buying a Ferrari) should wait until at least 6 confs (one hour), and very large transactions may need to wait longer. Once it is realized that 51% of nodes have been corrupted, there would likely be a fork away from those nodes by honest nodes, but nobody is going to keep doing business with them as though nothing happened. Nor can the corrupt 51% prevent the remaining honest 49% from forking away. There's no way to "force" anybody to use a version of the blockchain they have rejected as dishonest, and there's no way to pass off a dishonest blockchain as genuine. A single honest node suffices to determine that the corrupt blockchain is corrupt.
"Quantum computing could crack private keys." If so, then say goodbye to your regular bank account because the same quantum hackers that can hack your Bitcoin wallet can hack your HTTPS connection to your bank. Government/military/satellite/inter-bank communications... they all fall to quantum computing which, by all appearances, has gone into a winter. So, another boogie-man bites the dust.
"They can control the exchanges. They can ban your address." Yes, it is well-understood that the fiat-money onramps and offramps are controlled by the fiat central bankers. Surprise! But the crypto freeway itself is wide open and there's nothing that the State can really do about how you buy and sell. In El Salvador, today, yes you can absolutely buy meat in a supermarket with Bitcoin. You can buy gas. You can pay rent. You can perform all the ordinary activities that you would perform with a fiat money, using Bitcoin.
In summary:
- If you don't understand Bitcoin, please beware of just repeating "skeptical" talking points, even if you heard them from a "trustworthy source", like a super-PI with magical PI powers to locate any person on the planet by the timing of their tweets.
- Also, if you don't understand Bitcoin, you shouldn't buy it. Do not invest in assets for which you do not at least have an operational understanding. If you're investing in oil but you don't know the first thing about the oil market, expect to lose your shirt.
- If you do understand enough about Bitcoin to recognize all of the BS that Poole was spewing in this video, that still doesn't mean you have to use it or approve of it.
- Please never put all your eggs in one basket. A balanced SHTF preparation plan would include some Funny Reserve Notes (just in case they're still useful for something other than toilet paper, post-collapse), some silver coins and, if you are comfortable with how to use crypto, some Bitcoin. If you're putting your entire faith in just one solution, you could end up in a world of hurt if other systems collapse. Stay flexible and think about all the possibilities, not just the one or two apocalypse scenarios that really scare you the most. For all you know, they'll never happen.
- Finally, and this should go without saying, don't use crypto for criminal purposes. If you're committing crimes that would get the attention of agencies with nation-state resources, there is no amount of whiz-bang techno-magic that will save you. A lot of these myths about how Bitcoin is "fully public", "trackable", "AI can crack your identity in seconds", and so on, has started because people were using Bitcoin for a criminal purpose, got busted by the authorities and had their crypto seized, and were told a bunch of myths by the cops when they asked, "How did you catch me?!" The cops never fail to use that opportunity to pump up every imaginable myth about their supposedly godlike powers. But the way to avoid this entire scenario is don't use crypto to commit crimes. There, problem solved...
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