Tweet

Bram Cohen

27 May, 14 tweets, 2 min read

And now I present what passes for intellectual commentary about coin issuance (thread) medium.com/@nic__carter/i…

The message is 'Premines are unethical. I have this great idea that you can give yourself a leg up on mining by keeping the PoW algorithm secret beforehand and making your own ASICs in advance'

Because laundering the money at great expense totally changes everything. This being twitter I should clarify that that was sarcasm. It just wastes a bunch of money and makes a burning need to dump to recoup some of that investment

Grin, which more or less followed this plan to much VC excitement is presented as a great example. And what happened? They dumped! Who could have imagined?

Of course the moral crypto VCs took from this was that 'professor coins' are bad, not that, ya know, trying to exit day 1 tanks the price

At Chia we did a straightforward honest pre-farm and made very sure in advance that noone - most definitely including founders, developers, and investors - has the ability to dump. And we got called unethical for standing by that principle.

These same yabos are now claiming that Chia is 'wasting' the hard drives which are being used to farm. Listen ya numnutzes: Somewhere between 10-20 exbibytes is all the storage on all the sales inventory in the world \

once the netspace exceeds that it will by the pigeonhole principle be validating my thesis that it's mostly overprovisioned/otherwise decommissioned storage which is being used

Chia netspace is now over 12 exbibytes and going up by about 1 exbibyte per day. It will be well over 20 in a month.

And all those HDs being dedicated exclusively to farm are have had minimal wear. They can still be sold used.

But still the apologists for Bitcoin waste will continue to dunk on Chia claiming that it's the thing which is really wasteful. Clean coal. Toxic sludge is good for you. We have always been at war with East Asia.

At some point a thing becomes more a cult than an actual project. If everybody insists that something is perfect and not improvable then it will never be improved.

Meanwhile I continue to improve Chia and now that consensus is out there's a focus on higher layers because, oh yeah, we have a much improved version of that too

Good luck worshiping what you imagine Satoshi was going after guys. See if you ever figure out what he was trying to get at with 'one CPU one vote'

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More from @bramcohen

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

16 May

For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is getting repeated as the fashionable fud. This is odd, because for the most part it's just plain wrong (thread)

If you plot with a plain old HD or an enterprise-class SSD then your drive will survive no problem. Plotting on hard drives, including the one which you'll probably leave your plot on, works fine. It's a bit slower and requires more head room, but works fine.

We've gone to great pains and put a lot of technical wizardry into getting plotting even on HDs to work completely acceptably. The amount of head room it needs isn't much more than one plot, and the time it takes isn't much more than double.

Read 10 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

6 May

Launch estimate update for chia pooling protocol: Currently the 17th of this month for both plot to pool and a pool prototype being out

This is a bit of a bump out of the plot to pool and a pulling in of the release of a full prototype because the work was more front loaded than I thought at first

How long it will take for there to be high quality pools once our prototype is out I don't know. Plotting to pool protocol will work then and switching is easy though.

Read 8 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

26 Mar

There are a few a vaccines out now, so what's the difference between them? Possibly more how they're used than what they are (thread) statnews.com/2021/02/02/com…

Pfizer and Moderna have similar efficacy. One has a second shot after 21 days and the other after 28 days. Can you take the second shot for either in a broad range of time or mix and match for similar efficacy? Probably yes, but we don't know.

Moderna uses 100 micrograms. Pfizer uses 30 micrograms and has fewer side effects. Could you use 30 of Moderna and have it be cheaper with less side effects? Probably yes, but we don't know.

Read 8 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

17 Mar

Some thoughts on RandomX. The audits are more useful than the docs on this one (thread) github.com/tevador/Random…

Oddly the pop writeups babble on about virtual machines and such instead of straightforwardly saying it's based off Argon2. That's something which one should be proud of instead of obfuscating.

From the audits it's clear it went about how you'd expect. Some people with more CPU than cryptography experience took Argon2d and applied mixing functions which are reasonably spread out across the functionality on a standard CPU

Read 13 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

3 Mar

Came across some discussion the other day of academics talking about how hyperinflation killed Mojo Nation. Don't have a good link (maybe it was Ian Goldberg) but will reflect on Mojo Nation a bit (thread)

Mojo Nation was a glorious failure. It went down in flames, but directly lead to BitTorrent and Bitcoin. There are few failures anywhere near that successful.

I can confirm that hyperinflation did in fact happen in it, although I haven't thought about it much, and hadn't realized that that had been studied and the learnings incorporated into later projects, most notably of course Bitcoin.

Read 10 tweets

Bram Cohen

@bramcohen

3 Mar

It's a bit emotional for me to talk about this, but I will say that Len posted pseudonymously on the cypherpunks list constantly, including at least one fleshed-out and long-lived handle, and even I didn't know what it was leung-btc.medium.com/len-sassaman-a…

Also I have a vague memory - mostly because Len told me about it and I wasn't paying close attention - that there was a nym called Product Cipher which pseudonymously posted the first ring signatures implementation to cypherpunks and then disappeared.

The implication with that one seemed to be that it was Hal or Len or some combination of the two, very unsure though, and don't know if it got clarified later.

Read 4 tweets

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