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Joined October 2023
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Antoine Poinsot (@darosior), one of BIP-54's authors, reproduced our worst seam with Bitcoin Core itself, running BIP-54's time warp check over the whole chain.
Block 203,616, October 2012: stamped 18 min 47 s earlier than the block before it. Same answer, to the second.
New rabbit hole: The Time Warp.
Bitcoin sets its own difficulty from timestamps that miners write themselves. One line in Satoshi's 2009 code leaves a seam a miner with most of the hash rate could use to drive difficulty to the minimum. Nobody has used it on Bitcoin, and it has been open since 2011.
learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…
His post, with the patch if you want to run it yourself: delvingbitcoin.org/t/great-c…
Bitcoin has no clock. Miners write the time into each block themselves.
One line in Satoshi’s 2009 code lets a miner with most of the hash rate lie about it and cut the difficulty window after window. With all of it: the minimum in about 39 days.
The whole story, from the 2011 altcoin it broke to the one-rule fix (BIP-54) still waiting to activate: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…
We checked all 483 real retargets against block headers. Anyone can repeat it: chainquery.com/rpc/getblockh…
New rabbit hole: The Time Warp.
Bitcoin sets its own difficulty from timestamps that miners write themselves. One line in Satoshi's 2009 code leaves a seam a miner with most of the hash rate could use to drive difficulty to the minimum. Nobody has used it on Bitcoin, and it has been open since 2011.
learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…
Checked it against daily closes. True, so far:
2011: -92.7%
2013-15: -84.5%
2017-18: -83.8%
2021-22: -76.7%
2025-26: -53.1%, still open
Odd detail: -53.1% is exactly how deep the summer 2021 dip went, and that one hit a new high three months later.
Every fall, the “it’s over” calls that came with it, and how long each climb back took: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…
Today, moving coins to a fresh address is the best quantum defense you have.
After a quantum computer shows up, moving them is the risk. Spending puts your public key in the mempool until the next block, and Google’s March paper put cracking one key at about 9 minutes.
How many coins already have their key showing, updated weekly: chainquery.com/reports/quant…
Why a panicked mass migration would be the worst response: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…
One row missing:
2008: no price. No coins, no blocks, no network. Just a nine-page PDF Satoshi emailed to a cryptography mailing list at 2:10pm Eastern, 18 years ago today.
The genesis block was still two months away.
Bitcoin turns 18 today. Satoshi sent out the whitepaper on Halloween, 2008.
Fitting, because it’s been buried at least 477 times since. Every tombstone in this video is a real obituary, dropped in the year it ran.
Watch where they pile up. Hint: not at the bottoms.
Who wrote them, which ones had a date on them, and how they scored: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…
The count stops in April 2024 because the list’s keeper, 99Bitcoins, stopped adding to it. The critics didn’t stop.
Per Binance: the laptop let the attacker into a service container that could submit withdrawals. No sign of a leaked private key so far, and it “was not a single one-click action.”
Issuers froze $2.7B of stablecoins. Nobody can freeze the 18,270 BTC the attacker still holds.
Binance says it will cover all $6.3B of yesterday’s hack from its own funds. Good for its customers.
Not every custodian could. Here are the ones that couldn’t.
Binance paused withdrawals after the hack. Coins on your own keys don’t have a pause button.
Each one, what went wrong, and what to actually do about it: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…
“Put a fork in it. It’s done.”
@PeterSchiff, March 2020. Bitcoin was $7,896.
He’s been writing bitcoin’s obituary for 13 years, so we put all 11 of his dated calls on one chart.
Bitcoin is still here. The awkward part: his last two calls are holding up.
Every quote, date and price with sources, plus Buffett, Dimon, Krugman and all 477 bitcoin obituaries: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…