The Bitcoin Community is a Sybil Attack On Bitcoin

Bitcoin as a Wrapper of Hash Cash as a Solution to the Network Problem Sybil Attack

Consider the concept of a Sybil attack:

A Sybil attack is a type of attack on a computer network service in which an attacker subverts the service's reputation system by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.[1]

Satoshi is said to have defended Bitcoin computationally from Sybil attack by creating a 1 vote 1 CPU system wrapping a concept called Hash Cash by Adam Back:

Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks. Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back[1] and described more formally in Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure"

On Bitcoin’s Defense Versus a Socially Lead Sybil Attack

While the internet creates incredible usefulness by transforming many objects into useful digital renditions (such as mail that can be sent instantly) it also allows for a near costless creation of identities. Hashcash turns the cost of verifying these identities into a cost of creation charged to the creator.

However socially, online at least, the landscape is such that protecting against Sybil attack is nearly impossible especially since the attacker's personalities, if undiscovered, at the very least appear to act as one army-the unsuspecting general public isn’t even induced to coalesce even if they could.

Satoshi’s only real game theoretical defense to this possibly could be to create Bitcoin in its best form he could conceive and make it as unchangeable as possible.

On The Game Theoretical Solution of Using Evolvability to Solve the Problem of Social Sybil Attack

We argue that only a Sybil attacker would argue that Satoshi didn’t intend Bitcoin to be secure against a social Sybil attack. And the technical details of Bitcoin can’t and don’t protect it from such an attack vector. We argue it must be that if Bitcoin was to be secure it must be secured from being evolved.

We argue Satoshi understood this:

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime. Because of that, I wanted to design it to support every possible transaction type I could think of.

On the Non-Existent Distance Complexity Between Thermodynamically Inconsistent Bitcoin Proposals and Arguments

Bitcoin, like anything, must adhere to the limits of thermodynamics. The question is where to set the limits. In Money, blockchains, and social scalability Nick Szabo argues that where Satoshi set them is the brilliance of the system and the crux of its security and ability to trade computational efficiency for social scalability:

The secret to Bitcoin’s success is certainly not its computational efficiency or its scalability in the consumption of resources. Specialized Bitcoin hardware is designed by highly paid experts to perform only one particular function – to repetitively solve a very specific and intentionally very expensive kind of computational puzzle. That puzzle is called a proof-of-work, because the sole output of the computation is just a proof that the computer did a costly computation. Bitcoin’s puzzle-solving hardware probably consumes in total over 500 megawatts of electricity. And that is not the only feature of Bitcoin that strikes an engineer or businessman who is focused on minimizing resource costs as highly quixotic. Rather than reduce its protocol messages to be as few as possible, each Bitcoin-running computer sprays the Internet with a redundantly large number of “inventory vector” packets to make very sure that all messages get accurately through to as many other Bitcoin computers as possible. As a result, the Bitcoin blockchain cannot process as many transactions per second as a traditional payment network such as PayPal or Visa. Bitcoin offends the sensibilities of resource-conscious and performance-measure-maximizing engineers and businessmen alike.

Instead, the secret to Bitcoin’s success is that its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability.

We present Szabo’s argument, and allege it to be concordant to ours, that Bitcoin’s great value proposition for the world lies not at all in evolving it to be a money by the definition of the properties of idealness that arguments such as the libertarian, the austrian, the Saifedeanian systems etc. would purport.

Thus we see all attempts to render the thermodynamic setup of Bitcoin’s design as part of a greater Sybil attack on its ability to capacitize and secure the wealth of the global economy (thus allowing the major currencies to float under their own respective moral and sovereign order) and all attempts to render and explain it as money that replaces those currencies as attempts to break its thermodynamic limitations.

On the Nature of a Social Sybil Attack

The simple defense to a social Sybil attack is to assume that all of the loud meming voices and memes are products of and themselves Sybil attacks. Thus all of the main narratives and heroes are understood to be a part of the attack on Bitcoin’s thermodynamic setup.

Bitcoin isn’t perfect, however, to design it to be a preconceived notion of money, is to not consider its thermodynamics limitations to which the acceptance of was the basis of its Genesis and the basis of its capacitance. Thus to pitch it and describe to people as such, as a preconceived notion of money is also to be equally as careless.

On Memeing to Meatspace as a Counter to the Problem of Social Sybil Attack

As an analogue to Satosh’s 1 CPU 1 vote solution we should consider ‘usefulness’ in regard to ‘that which memes’ as being that which memes to those in MEATSPACE (ie the real world to real humans). This addresses the problem of Sybil attack which only makes it SEEM as though an idea is useful.

Ideas that meme in meatspace are useful even though they don’t appear to be. Ideas that meme on the internet are probably not useful but rather are constructed to appear as though they are.

Szabo teaches this, we re-vist it.

On Hidden Shallowness of Distance Complexity and the Effects of Observations of Coalitions

If an argument from a Sybil attacker is seen as multiple arguments with distance complexity the Sybil attack would seem like a well supported argument from multiple groups. Here the distance complexity would be forged, like a fake Rai Stone, with some added construction as the complexity icing-on-the-cake so to speak. The complexity in this case simply serves to obfuscate the fact that there is no meaningful distance between the arguments because they originate with only a very small group of persons colluding to Sybil attack the community.

But really, beyond the Sybil attack, such arguments with shallow complexity distance boil down to a coalition of thieves that have no respect for the thermodynamic limitations Nick Szabo and Satoshi each explain, thieves who would themselves steal from each other given any chance to not get caught.

Many such persons, but not so many, are in fact quite bound from being able to collect their bounties they stole because the thermodynamic limits that extend to the transactional limitations of the system preclude them from being able to do anything meaningful with their Bitcoins without at the very least creating an immutable paper trail evidence linking them back to their crimes.

On the Shallow Complexity Between Libertarians and Criminals That Tout Highly Evolved Bitcoin Transactional Capacity

Satoshi wrote as if being not himself a libertarian:

It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I'm better with code than with words though.

And indeed, a libertarian bitcoin faction arose, and later in vocal opposition to attempts to directly increase the blocksize of Bitcoin in order to increase the transaction limits. As increasing the blocksize limit OBVIOUSLY (we see it as obvious as this essay isn’t part of the Sybil attack) breaks the security of the thermodynamic setup of the system the libertarian faction of the opposition argued ‘Bitcoin could be scaled on layers’.

But of course the libertarian voice of Bitcoin, is simply a few early adopters that dramatically don’t want to pay capital gains. They too, have made their bounty, and rational-self interest and linear nature of the utility of money suggests that it is in their greatest desire to want to exchange their volatile asset for one that is socially stabilized.

They of course need the general public to believe otherwise, because then they don’t have the self-fulfilling prophecy argument in which they can pass on their perceived capacitance through.

So the libertarians and the criminals are together part of the Sybil attack that has no concern for Bitcoin’s thermodynamic limitations.

On Saifedeanians As A Sybil Attack and Saifedean’s Lack of Concern for Bitcoin’s Thermodynamic Properties

Bitcoin is not the most saleable good nor should we necessarily expect it to be. Our fiat money is by the very definition of it. In Saifedean’s system this is blasphemy because it exposes his system as being inconsistent. He wraps these things with swear words in his system. This is because he doesn’t get to take unsuspecting people's money if they begin to consider these things.

“The way out of strife…” he will tell you, “is to hate your money, and give it to me, in exchange for my conversion of you to my religion”. All other economic theories he will tell you are blasphemy. Anthropology must be blasphemy then too. As both anthropology and economics explain how his theories are wrong.

Bitcoin as the Global Capacitor That Allows Our Global Currencies to Free Float Morally

In Saifedean’s system the fiat system forever and always is imploding into an infinite death of value and this is why you must give him your terrible fiat. Not in exchange for the good Bitcoin but for the knowledge to understand that your fiat is terrible and not to understand it any other way.

His system precludes bitcoin’s use of a global capacitor as the design principles are wholly different from the base layer perspective (we expect he will argue his system is rather conducive and we will explain here why its not).

None of this matters to Saifedean as long as his audience believes that Bitcoin can replace fiat (and so they should quickly give their fiat to him so he can teach them more about how to do so and think this way).

Saifedean joins the shallow Sybil attack that Bitcoin can be a global capacitor AND a universal money that replaces fiat but through evolution of layers.

Our works explores the value of Bitcoin as a global capacitor understanding that it can’t also serve the role of a universal currency for every person's individual transactions as its thermodynamic limitations don’t allow it to serve as such.

This is something we argue that was understood by Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, et all of those involved in the works cited and surrounding the genesis of Bitcoin and that also that John Nash at least implicitly understood this as we will outline and explain by extending Hal Finney and Nick Szabo’s work via synthesis with John Nash’s work’s Ideal Money.

We wrap Bitcoin in Ideal Money via Szabo, Finney, and Selgin, among others:

jal{nash{szabo{finney{selgin{bitcoin}}}

On the Truth of Truthcoin and the Shallowness of Complexity Distance From the Mt Gox Thieves

Below is a video of an interview with Paul Sztorc where tries to explain how the concept of 'the thermodynamic limitations of Bitcoin being such that it can only be used for capacitance rather than an everyday coffee money' is psychological corruption.

The passage is long so we mean to end this essay with it. Notice he wraps Roger Ver’s argument showing there is zero complexity distance between each of their views. The legal metaphor is notable since one’s axioms about money would certainly affect one’s perspective of law and its relationship to the problem of Bitcoin’s optimal design:

there is no way we could possibly understate the amount of just psychological corruption that has happened to people because of the block size War so it's not it's not even anything against the light again I believe in pluralism and I think we should try all these things but what happened was there was a scaling War people said we want large blocks other people said that's a bad idea and then the large black people said well what's what we're going to do instead in the small block people myself included we were like well here's this idea this is lightning Network this is much better because now instead of Global state which is like the utxo said or whatever which is like clearly not going to work very well we have this thing where you prep it and then you have this whole second Network and then there you just you you are responsible for your own little payments and Noble no blockchain um so isn't that great and that's how it started and then what happened was the the large blockers started to critique the lightning Network and many of their critiques were raw or wrong or just nonsensical so they were saying this and that they didn't they clearly didn't know of it everyone was it was the same BS that is happening now with with drive chain basically where I there was a time when you could watch the original uh SF bit devs uh lightning presentation and I would watch I would check in month after month I would check back at it because what I noticed I watched the first time I said oh this only has like 300 views I'm like the 300th person to learn about the lightning Network or the future of Bitcoin the greatest technology like ever invented in the history of mankind up to this point and I'm like okay that's weird I'm like number 300 and then I I would come back because I was like this is a very difficult thing to understand so I was like I have to watch it again and it was like 314. I was like I don't know I was number 14. and then so then I started to turn it into a little project where I was like well I was like why aren't the critics watching this video like why aren't like I was like why doesn't people who hate on lightning Roger or whatever whoever it is oh and whatever take your pick long list of people who could have I was like who like these people are they are they watching it or do they like maybe they downloaded it somewhere and they played it to an auditorium full of people I'm like trying to figure out and month after month year after year would go by and it would took like two years for this thing to get to 400 views or something this was like the only resource other than the white paper which no offense to the people who wrote the lightning white paper I'm sure they did it to put a ton of they poured their hearts all into it I bet uh I found it to be those butterfly diagrams I thought it would have been better if they just weren't in there I couldn't make any sense of it all the naming was horrendous the presentation was good though and but only 400 people on the planet Earth and this is I don't know exactly how YouTube is counting when I watch it like five or six times like is it do I eat those counts I guess my guess is that they must because otherwise how could that dominant Style video gets like a billion right you know so like um well I was like what the heck is going on here and the answer is that no one knew anything about the lightning Network the people for or against yeah no one knew it yeah so today they don't I've been listening to all the lightning podcasts and oh I think they're starting to get it now but the the supposedly very technical people they didn't have any even the the Bitcoin core we just they wouldn't they wouldn't they were not paying very much attention to the lightning protocol and what was supposed to do and so they didn't know the details and there's also these this split like the the attached Raja uh he said some at some point that the other guy Joseph poong was saying that lightning would scale everything would fix the entire world Etc and he was more more like no this can facilitate some transactions like between exchanges and Etc but it will not scale Bitcoin to the entire world but that was the test is that that is that one the the minds of people and everybody thought that and still to this day like he tested Raja will say that um hdlcs that are do not exist they you can send an hdlc on the lightning Network and they they actually do not exist as htosis it's just a fake imagine course 300 right about that he says that should not happen and like apparently it's actually worse if but but the crazy thing is it seems to me that Peter Todd is not aware of that because that happened also a few days ago transactions like oh it's working yeah like how can he not um understand so we can explain this to the audience maybe which is that the reason why there's no htlc below the dust limb the fee dust limit is that the htlc costs a certain amount of bytes to just write into the transaction and it expands the size of the transaction such that at whatever fee rate you were paying before see because it's not fees in Bitcoin are per byte it's Pro as how much ink you use so let's say you have a that's this is how for example people like Roger Veer when they had to combine like 5 000 inputs or something they could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in transaction fees um what but we'll just I'll try to explain this here which is that let's say you planned on spending 50 cents for a 220 byte transaction and at that rate 50 cents per 220 bytes the htlc for you to Route this payment the payment if you were to broadcast this on chain let alone for what would what it would take for you to later redeem it by selecting it as an input and providing the script I'm not sure if this is going to be doing this good job of explaining it but I'm going to try and maybe maybe Steward you can tell me if I this is if this if anyone in the audience is going to get this or whatever the amount of ink needed to write down the htlc will cost more then the whole thing is worth the whole thing is worth the whole thing because the thing is worth five cents but now to broadcast it on L1 is going to cost you 25 more cents the whole point of having the htlc is so you can claim that five cents if someone screws you but there's no reason to ever do that when it would cost 25 cents in ink to write it down and then another another 50 cents in ink to later redeem it it'll cost you more it's like if like it's like going to court and you someone someone hits your bike or dings your car and you're gonna you need to sue them for for fifty dollars but the court taking them to court there's a fee to get into the court that is eight hundred dollars but you can't you can't tell the person well I'm gonna take you to court they know you won't because you hit it on the head man I think you hit it on the head