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Adam Back Profile picture
@adam3us
Aug 24, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
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Cypherpunks were always more interested in censor resistant global payment, than new gold store of value. Latter was just a means of deployment, attractive for being permissionless "no banking interface". /1
New gold, as hedge against geo-political uncertainty, and inflation, turned out to be an adoption driver also as the S-curve of both married use cases of uncensorable payment and store of value go through adoption waves. People come to appreciate Bitcoin via different routes, /2
New gold makes Bitcoin itself an investment class. Uncensorable payment without SoV is harder to invest in - you'd have to invest in startups monetizing uncensorable permissionless payments. New gold appeals to gold bugs, investors & exposes a wider range of people to Bitcoin. /3
So clearly Bitcoin with geopolitically neutral free market money, new gold, both store of value and censor resistant payment, is more valuable and useful than payment alone (say denominated in Fiat for example, as digicash was envisaged). /4
Geopolitically neutral free market money is a force multiplying major addition, and gold is not good for payment as it can't be used electronically in bearer form, and even in person assay is not as simple as a Bitcoin smart phone wallet, paired to the users own assay fullnode /5

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More from @adam3us

Adam Back Profile picture
Apr 8
i'm not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.
@JohnCarreyrou in his NYT research finds like @AaronvanW in his "genesis block" book, many interesting bitcoin analogs in early attempts to create a decentralized ecash, in effect prototype ideas trying to figure out a bitcoin-like thing, including p2p, BGP, proof of work.
@JohnCarreyrou @AaronvanW for his quote "I’m not saying I’m good with words but I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually" the broader context was my observation that because I was talkative on the list, and known to have an active interest in ecash, there's some confirmation bias in finding my
Read 8 tweets
Adam Back Profile picture
Apr 4
quantum hypers don't have to agree with quantum realists on timeline, as there is strong value in providing a step-up sequence of PQ readiness for bitcoin users, so they have a long migration time. it also makes it more plausible to deprecate unmigrated ECDSA/schnorr signatures.
and even quantum researchers (who are not themselves hypers) don't understand bitcoin architectural and design details. for example the @googlequantumai paper confuses taproot/schnorr - it's explicitly designed in 2018/19 to be quantum ready with the tapleaf plug in PQ schemes,
@GoogleQuantumAI and tapleaf commitment scheme was later formally proven PQ secure by @real_or_random. and the google paper also flags short-range vs long-range attacks as a weak point which is incorrect: schnorr was designed with the short vs long range equivalence mindset, hence unhashed key.
Read 8 tweets
Adam Back Profile picture
Nov 6, 2025
bitcoin is bearer censorship-resistant money. no one likes spam, nor wants to see illegal content. however there are inherent fundamentals all internet protocols and programming languages are governed by.
bitcoin is decentralized, ungovernable by design: each person can run what software and policy they want, other than for nakamoto consensus rules where proof of work verified blockchain means people who want to mutually transact must enforce the same rules.
network protocol and programming language fundamentals mean you can not realistically prevent arbitrary data (spam) hidden in various fields, keys, hashes, language constructs, even client-side validated data only visible to clients, private keys, encrypted data, steganography.
Read 8 tweets
Adam Back Profile picture
Oct 7, 2025
@NickSzabo4 @adamamcbride @LukeDashjr @tmornini @gofreesamourai Even if it was p2p file sharing, or free-net, eternity usenet (I implemented 1997), usenet (also flood fill for 45 years now), that ship has been around for decades. Usenet topically is flood fill, and was used (abused?) for distributing porn, DVD movie rips in uuencoded parts
@NickSzabo4 @adamamcbride @LukeDashjr @tmornini @gofreesamourai You have to imagine someone posted things illegal in various countries over the 45 years. What would usenet node operators do? Probably nothing as common carriers, they're not moderating or even reading all the flame wars and thousands of groups, alt.binaries etc.
@NickSzabo4 @adamamcbride @LukeDashjr @tmornini @gofreesamourai And Bitcoin is about bearer bearer money, not about file sharing at all,
any image content is unwanted spam hiding inside smart contract interpreter bytecode, stack push op-codes or any of an infinite variety of ways to hide and stuff data into an interpreter bytecode.
Read 19 tweets
Adam Back Profile picture
Sep 5, 2025
Bitcoin is owned by humanity, the protocol developers are stewards, and need consensus from users to change it materially. bitcoin is about money, spam has no place in the timechain. what defaults the bitcoin core project puts in the reference client matter in this.
in may there were 88mil JPEGs in the chain, now 4 months later, there are 105mil JPEGS, a 20% increase. in may 7000btc fees had been paid, at $100k btc that's $700m or an average of $8 per JPEG. they are primarily in taproot inscriptions. (@BitMEXResearch data)
@BitMEXResearch protocol rules are enforced by economic nodes, miners are just service providers; miners cannot change protocol rules. (everyone learned that counter-intuitive fact during the block-size wars). proof of work, hashrate and bitcoin price come from the real world. there are signals
Read 18 tweets
Adam Back Profile picture
Jun 3, 2025
FIPS 205: SLH-DSA. best PQ secure signature candidate for the moment IMO. signature size a bit big, but if we want to stop premature quantum FUD, make a new address format with a Schnorr taproot, and a SLH-DSA tapleaf. QED. future work: signature aggregate SLH_DSA using STARKs.
you can migrate to a new address format, at your leisure during the following years or decades, that can be spent using Schnorr, and without today paying the space and fee cost of SLH-DSA signatures. but you are ready if/when cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist.
I like SLH-DSA as it is using SPHINCS+ which is itself an improved Winternitz signature (1982) improving Lamport signature dating back to 1979, and using simple robust hardness assumptions. most of the other NIST candidate signatures are using novel untested hardness assumptions.
Read 4 tweets

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