Wisdom Engine

Source: blog + substack (v3 unified) — 42,162 records total.

- Innovation Ecosystem Theory: This theory posits that a firm’s innovation capacity is influenced by its connections within a larger ecosystem of stakeholders, including other businesses, government, and industry associations (Arenal et al., 2020; Asplund et al., 2021; Dodgson et al., 2013; Nylund et al., 2021). While this theory does not have a single specific creator, numerous scholars have developed and elaborated the idea in innovation studies over many years. It suggests that a firm’s innovation ability is shaped by its connections to a broader network or “ecosystem” of other firms, institutions, and stakeholders. In today’s interconnected global economy, this theory highlights the importance of strategic partnerships, collaborations, and industry alliances in driving innovation - Organizational Culture Theory: This perspective suggests that organizational culture factors like psychological safety, collectivism, and power distance can significantly impact innovation performance. Psychological safety and collectivism generally positively impact innovation, while high power distance (a hierarchical culture) can have a negative effect (Kwantes & Boglarsky, 2007; Lee et al., 2019; Schneider et al., 2013). Likewise, this theory is the product of contributions from many scholars over time. It posits that the culture of an organization – its shared beliefs, values, and practices – can significantly impact the organization’s ability to innovate. In the modern business context, companies increasingly focus on fostering cultures that encourage creativity, risk-taking, and collaboration as critical drivers of innovation. - Open Innovation Theory: This theory, proposed by Henry Chesbrough, suggests that companies can and should use internal and external theories and paths to market as they seek to advance their technology (de Jong et al., 2010; van de Vrande et al., 2010). Henry Chesbrough (2003) challenges the traditional notion of innovation being driven solely by internal R&D, instead suggesting that businesses should leverage internal and external ideas and pathways to advance their technology. Today, many companies use this approach, partnering with external researchers, customers, or even competitors to drive innovation. - Diffusion of Innovations Theory: This theory, developed by Everett Rogers, describes how, over time, an idea or product gains momentum and diffuses (or spreads) through a particular population or social system (Rogers, 2010). Everett Rogers developed a theory to explain how innovations spread through populations over time. Businesses today use this theory to guide their marketing and adoption strategies, helping ensure that their creations reach as wide an audience as possible. - Disruptive Innovation Theory: Proposed by Clayton Christensen, this theory suggests that a smaller company with fewer resources can successfully challenge established incumbent businesses by targeting segments of the market that have been neglected by the incumbents, typically because it is not profitable at the time (Christensen et al., 2006; Liversidge, 2015; Si & Chen, 2020). Clayton Christensen (2004) introduced a theory to describe how smaller, less-resourced companies can challenge established businesses by targeting neglected market segments. Today, this theory can be seen in many industries where start-ups have disrupted incumbents, such as Uber in transportation and Airbnb in hospitality. - Resource-Based View (RBV): This theory posits that the competitive advantage of a firm lies primarily in the concentration of a bundle of valuable resources at the firm’s disposal (Barney & Arikan, 2005; Mele & Della Corte, 2013). Jay Barney and Birger Wernerfelt (Lazonick, 2002) posit that competitive advantage lies primarily in applying a bundle of valuable resources at a firm’s disposal. In today’s business, companies are more focused than ever on leveraging their unique resources and capabilities, whether proprietary technology, talented employees, or powerful brand identities, to innovate and achieve competitive advantage.

- A temporal relationship where the cause always precedes the outcome. If there is some factor that is believed to cause an event, then it must always necessarily precede the event. The first criteria is the most critical and essential of all of Hill’s criteria. If the first criteria is not true, then we have a correlation alone and no causal effect. - Next, we need to consider the strength of the relationship. It is a statistical measure of the strength where the factors are highly related. We can look at the Pearson number for correlation as a means of testing the value. - Next, there is an effect-response relationship. It is a measure of input. As we increase the amount of one factor, the other must also increase. For instance, if we put more time into training people in security awareness, then naturally, for it to be causal in the relationship we would have to have improved security. The improvement is not required to be linear, and we may find that each incremental expense returns less, but it must return something more than it would’ve if it wasn’t there. - The fourth relationship is consistency. The results need to be replicable and repeatable. They should apply in different population groups and samples. - Next, we look at plausibility. The association that we are purporting exists needs to be supported by a valid theoretical basis. There needs to be some phenomena that can act in a manner that causes the result or event. - The sixth criteria is that we consider alternative explanations. Many so-called scientists fail here. They merely assume a relationship matches with their understanding. It may be true that we can dismiss many arguments out of hand as they have already been investigated and shown to be false, but it does not mean that we do not consider alternative explanations. We must always consider multiple hypotheses prior to making any conclusion about a causal relationship between events we seek to explain and investigate. - Experimental evidence is also important. Even though we cannot expect to completely re-create an event, we should be able to implement an appropriate experimental regime that supports our causal argument. - Next, there is a requirement that the causal effect is specific. It is one of the weaker criteria, and we can demonstrate causal effects without it. The absence of specificity does not negate a causal relationship, but the existence of specificity between associations does add additional support to the existence of a causal relationship. Here it is important to always examine specific causal relationships within a larger systemic environment. - Lastly, we have coherence. Ideally, any association we are purporting exists should fit within the body of existing theory and knowledge. There are ways, of course, to introduce new theory, and Thomas Kuhn referred to the changes to the accepted theoretical basis of science as a “paradigm shift.” To reject the existing theoretical basis of science, we need to have particularly good and strong proof and evidence supporting our new claim of causality.

- Note that the linked article includes the original quote still online saying that there were 144 blocks on a daily basis. It is best practice to ensure that you have capacity to handle multiple times the levels of data that is to be received at any time, because you can never predict whether data bursts will happen. Consequently, at the time, to replicate Visa would have required 2GB to 3GB blocks. Today, the same would require 5GB to 6GB blocks with the changes in the protocol. Integrating other payment forms such as MasterCard would require 8GB to 10GB blocks. - Note that 2 HD movies account for seven to nine gigabytes of information. - This does not mean that a developer group can centrally manage and control changes. Rather, it means nobody, including a plurality of developers, can make changes without the system being centralised. The only way Bitcoin or any blockchain functions as a decentralised entity or exchange or process or anything is one where the protocol is set and never to change again. Once it cannot change, once there are no changes ever made to the protocol (note it is not the same as the software), then the system can be called decentralised. If, at any time, developers can propose and make changes, the system is centralised by definition. - Note that the acceptance and the voting is purely carried out by nodes which are defined in section 5 of the white paper and commonly called miners or mining pools. There is no methodology for any system to vote in Bitcoin, or any other blockchain network based on a proof-of-work system, other than through the creation of blocks. Consequently, the only systems in Bitcoin that can enforce rules are nodes, and such nodes are miners. Any system that is not mining in creating blocks is not voting or having any impact on the nature of the system or enforcing rules. Importantly, any needed rules and incentives can be enforced, which means law and court orders were always a part of the protocol. The methodologies for doing so may vary, but it is premised on the fact that only a few large commercial systems will exist. As in the image, we can see it already today. Despite the false narratives and misleading information, and for that matter downright fraudulent representation, promoted by criminal groups, in relation to how Bitcoin would work with thousands of nodes, Bitcoin is a system that, at scale, is designed purposefully to allow interaction through law enforcement. Even systems copying Bitcoin, such as the BTC system, are subject to it in the same way.

- Archive Nodes: Archive nodes are computers or devices that maintain a complete copy of the entire blockchain. These nodes do not validate and verify transactions and blocks. While these have been falsely referred to as a “Full node”, the only activity these engage in is storing and propagating a limited subset of the transaction history. In the Bitcoin network, archive nodes are promoted as maintaining the integrity of the blockchain and participating in the consensus mechanism. However, the only nodes that validate and verify transactions are those defined within section 5 of the White Paper, also called mining nodes. - Mining Nodes: Mining nodes are the only system that could be correctly called a full node as these engage in the mining process, where they compete to solve computationally-intensive puzzles to add new blocks to the blockchain. Mining nodes validate transactions and create new blocks containing validated transactions. They contribute computational power to the network and are responsible for securing and extending the blockchain. - Lightweight (SPV) Nodes: Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) nodes, also known as lightweight nodes, do not store the entire blockchain but rely on full nodes for transaction verification. These nodes maintain a limited set of data, typically storing only the block headers, and use Merkle proofs to verify the inclusion of transactions within specific blocks. SPV nodes provide a lighter-weight option for users who don’t require entire transaction history. - Network Connectivity: This operational definition refers to the ability of a node to connect and communicate with other nodes in the network. Nodes must establish and maintain network connections to exchange information, propagate transactions and blocks, and participate in the consensus process. Network connectivity can be measured by the number of links a node has or the quality of its connections. - Consensus Participation: This definition encompasses the active involvement of nodes in the consensus mechanism of the blockchain network. In the Bitcoin network, nodes participate in the consensus process by following the proof-of-work algorithm, contributing computational power to mine new blocks, and validating transactions. The level of participation can be assessed based on the computational resources dedicated to mining or the frequency of validation and propagation of transactions. - Node Diversity: It refers to the variety of node types and their distribution within the network. This operational definition considers the presence of full nodes, mining nodes, SPV nodes, and other specialized nodes. Node diversity can influence the decentralization and resilience of the network, as different types of nodes contribute unique functionalities and help maintain a distributed ecosystem.

- Transaction Throughput: This refers to the number of transactions the blockchain network processes within a given time frame. It is essential to define the specific unit of time (e.g., transactions per second, transactions per minute) to measure the scalability of the network accurately. - Confirmation Time: It represents the time a transaction takes to be confirmed and added to the blockchain. This definition should include whether it refers to the time taken for a transaction to be included in a block or the time for a certain number of blocks to be added on top of the block containing the transaction. - Block Size: It defines the maximum allowable size of a block in the blockchain. This can be measured in terms of bytes or other relevant units. The block size plays a crucial role in determining the scalability of the network since it affects the number of transactions that can be included in each block. - Network Latency: This refers to the time delay experienced in propagating information across the blockchain network. Network latency can impact the overall performance and scalability of the network; thus, it should be defined and measured consistently. - Node Count: It represents the total number of active nodes participating in the blockchain network. The number of nodes can significantly affect the network’s scalability, and defining the exact criteria for determining active nodes is essential. - Consensus Mechanism: It refers to the specific algorithm or protocol used by the blockchain network to achieve consensus among nodes. The consensus mechanism can impact scalability, and its operational definition should include details about the specific algorithm used and any associated parameters. - Computational Power: It defines the processing capabilities of individual nodes in the blockchain network. Computational power can influence the speed at which transactions are validated and added to the blockchain. Therefore, the operational definition should include the specific metric used to measure computational power, such as the hash rate or processing speed. - Scalability Metric: This encompasses the specific metric or criteria used to evaluate the scalability of the blockchain network. It could be transaction throughput, confirmation time, or any other measurable factor determining the network’s ability to handle increased transaction volume.

- Alice sends a transaction where the nLockTime value is set to a date in the future. We can start with anything, but by default we would start at a sequence number of 0. - The miners will not recognise this transaction to be valid, and thus, it is not “final”. The network of miners will not include it in a block before it is final, and that will only occur when the nLockTime value has been reached. - As the transaction cannot be included in a block until the time specified in the nLockTime is reached, there is a final state that both parties have agreed to and also the ability to send updated transactions. If there is a 2-of-3 address, the parties can use an escrow (such as a licenced shared registry) to ensure that a transaction that has been agreed is final. If not, we can also have the parties negotiate and allow a means to “pull out” of the negotiation at any time before the nLockTime deadline. - Using this method, and prior to when the set nLockTime is reached, the users can replace the transaction with a higher-version transaction. A higher sequence number is a newer version that replaces the ones before. That is, the network will accept the highest sequence number for transactions once the nLockTime has been reached, rejecting all others with a lower value. - The negotiations can also be finalised. If a party sets the sequence number to UINT_MAX, the transaction is considered as being finalised by the miners. No replacement can occur. When the sequence equals UINT_MAX, miners will no longer accept a replacement transaction even where the nLockTime value remains in the future. - If you ever want to lock the transaction permanently, you can set the sequence number to UINT_MAX. Then the transaction is considered to be final, even if the time represented in nLockTime remains in the future.

- Shipper: Information about the party or company that is shipping the goods. - Consignee: Information about the party or company that is receiving the goods. - Carrier: Information about the shipping carrier or transportation company responsible for transporting the goods. - Notify Party: Optional field to specify a third party to be notified about the arrival or status of the goods. - Port of Loading: The name of the port where the goods are loaded onto the vessel. - Port of Discharge: The name of the port where the goods will be unloaded from the vessel. - Vessel/Voyage: Details about the vessel name and voyage number identify the specific vessel and voyage on which the goods will be transported. - Bill of Lading Number: A unique identifier assigned to the Bill of Lading for reference and tracking purposes. - Description of Goods: A detailed description of the goods being shipped, including the type of goods, quantity, weight, packaging, and any special instructions or handling requirements. - Marks and Numbers: Unique markings or labels on the packaging or containers used to identify and track the goods. - Gross Weight/Net Weight: The total weight of the goods, including the weight of packaging (gross weight) and the weight of the goods alone (net weight). - Measurement: The dimensions or size of the shipment, including length, width, and height. - Freight Charges: Information about the freight charges associated with the shipment, including the currency and payment terms. - Incoterms: The International Commercial Terms (Incoterms) that specify the rights and responsibilities of the buyer and seller regarding the shipment and delivery of the goods. - Date of Shipment: The date when the goods are loaded onto the vessel. - Signature: Signatures of the authorized representatives from the shipper, carrier, and consignee, acknowledging their agreement to the terms and conditions of the Bill of Lading.

To produce randomness that no one owns is therefore a foundational act, and the instruments assemble naturally to perform it. The simplest construction is a commit-and-reveal among many parties: each commits to a private random value, all reveal, and the values are combined, so that the result is unbiased provided even one participant was honest, since no one could see the others’ contributions before fixing his own [14]. The more sophisticated constructions close the one loophole this leaves — the dishonest party who, seeing the others’ reveals, simply refuses to open his own commitment and so aborts a draw he dislikes. Here the verifiable delay function of Boneh, Bonneau, Bünz, and Fisch supplies the remedy [20]: a computation that demonstrably requires a long sequence of steps to evaluate, yet whose result anyone can verify quickly, and whose output is unique. Feed the combined contributions into such a function and the result cannot be predicted by anyone until the unavoidable delay has elapsed — by which time the moment for manipulation has passed — and cannot afterwards be disputed, since the output is fixed and the proof is public. The authors themselves enumerate the uses: public randomness beacons, the election of leaders in consensus protocols, and more [20]. A lottery built this way is provably fair in a sense no licensed operator can match, for its honesty is not certified by an inspector but guaranteed by construction; a random audit selected this way cannot be steered toward or away from any particular target; a leader chosen this way owes his selection to no faction. The marked deck has been replaced by a shuffle that every player performs together and none can rig, and the result belongs to no one, which is the only honest form of belonging that chance permits.

The first and most important is that collusion is mitigated, not solved, and the boundary must not be blurred, for there are two quite different things that go by the name of collusion and the cryptography reaches only one of them. There is collusion within the protocol — the pooling of keys, the joint reconstruction of a secret that no single colluder could open alone — and against this the constructions are built to be resistant: the broadcast schemes secure against coalitions of the excluded, and the poker protocols designed, from early on, expressly to minimize the effect of player coalitions even where such coalitions could not be wholly abolished [15, 4]. And there is collusion outside the protocol — the player who simply tells a confederate, by a telephone in the next room or a mouth at the next chair, what he has honestly and legitimately seen with his own eyes. Against this second kind no mathematics avails, and none ever will, for the protocol cannot reach beyond the screen into the room where two people have agreed to share what each is entitled to know. Two persons in one room, or many accounts driven by a single ring, defeat the most perfect concealment by the oldest method in the world, which is to share what one has fairly seen. Traitor tracing catches the leakage and redistribution of keys and decoders; it does not catch the whispered word, and any honest account of these games must say so plainly, and design its incentives, its table structures, and its economic consequences around the collusion that no cipher will ever prevent. The confederate is older than cryptography, and will outlive it.

Any end-user transaction exchange in Bitcoin can be served by a destination wallet directly using a P2P exchange where a template is swapped and signed or sent to a known (even offline) address by sending directly to a node. A source wallet is the system that supplies access to the keys and systems where the initiation of an exchange (both lawful and illicit) is presented or created[[5]](#_ftn1). There are two significant differences involving the source wallet and the destination wallet when viewed under a regulatory framework. Firstly, the destination wallet serving ordinary end users is most unlikely to have any direct association with or precise information concerning the primary malfeasor, unless the wallet is involved with illegal activity (such as the Silk Road wallets), in which case it provides law enforcement with a source of all illegal transactions that can be traced. Any logs or materials that may be maintained are unlikely to hold the level of detail necessary to prove malfeasance from a merchant wallet that has recieved bitcoin that may have come from a “tainted” source. A source wallet conversely is likely to maintain logs and track access to the content that it maintains. It is necessary to weigh any process of assessing how “fair” it would be to “hold responsible” the merchant wallet for the misconduct of its clients or other parties and also in determining how successfully a wallet-service provider could serve as a regulator in controlling misconduct against a variety of factors. In many cases, the merchant wallet may be located in a jurisdiction without reciprocal regulations, thus preventing prosecution. Next, the merchant wallet may itself be a victim of illicit activity.

On receipt of funds the wallet immediately decomposes the amount into many outputs so that no single output exceeds the configured ceiling Vmax⁡V_{\max} (expressed in satoshis, enforced in code—not as a mathematical formula). It does not hold a lump sum in one place and it does not create a large target for later convenience. For each output it derives a brand-new keypair and creates brand-new secrets that will be demanded at spend time by the locking program. In the minimal profile there is one 32-byte secret ss; in the stronger profile there is also a second secret tt of policy-defined length. These secrets may be drawn from a cryptographically secure generator, or deterministically derived from a master key with a unique per-output nonce using HMAC-SHA-256 so that a restore can reproduce them exactly. The wallet immediately computes the required commitments—at minimum SHA-256(s), and, in the hardened templates, additional checks on the same s (such as HASH160(s) and RIPEMD-160(s)), or a second commitment SHA-256(t) together with a structural binding like SHA-256(s‖t). If the chosen template includes a small arithmetic latch, the wallet also selects two small positive integers n₁ and n₂, records their product P, and later enforces OP_MUL equals P in the locking program. With those constants in hand, the wallet assembles the scriptPubKey for the output: either a key-hidden, multi-hash script that proves the public-key hash first and then demands the exact secret(s) before it will validate a signature, or a dual-secret script that commits to s and t and binds their concatenation, again before any signature check is considered. Every output receives its own independent key, secrets, and commitments; nothing is ever reused.

A zero-knowledge proof allows one to demonstrate a fact about private data without disclosing the data — to prove that one’s balance exceeds a threshold without revealing the balance, that a figure falls within a permitted range without revealing the figure, that a set of accounts reconciles without exposing the transactions within it [15]. Secret sharing and secure computation allow several parties to pool sensitive records and learn only an agreed result — an aggregate, a statistic, a yes-or-no — while each party’s contribution remains its own, so that data may be made useful without being made naked [13, 16, 17]. From these follows a form of audit that the older world could not imagine: a ledger that is confidential and auditable at once, whose entries are concealed from the idle and the hostile yet provable to the entitled, where the question “do the books balance, and was each entry properly authorised?” can be answered with certainty by a proof rather than by the surrender of the books. The intermediary who once had to be trusted with everything in order to verify anything is dissolved into a protocol that verifies without possessing. This is the application that touches the individual most nearly, for it restores to him the thing the information age quietly took: the standing to be the sole owner of facts about himself, disclosing them by his own judgment and on his own terms, neither forced into exhibition nor condemned to silence. A man’s data, like a man’s hand of cards, should be his to conceal and his to prove — and never the dealer’s to read.

- Type of Goods: Specify the nature or type of goods being shipped, such as electronics, textiles, machinery, perishable goods, hazardous materials, etc. This information helps in determining appropriate handling and storage requirements. - Quantity: Indicate the quantity of goods being shipped. This could include the number of units, packages, pallets, or containers. - Weight: Provide the weight of the goods, which may include gross weight (total weight of the goods and packaging) and net weight (weight of the goods without packaging). It helps in determining transportation costs and ensuring compliance with weight restrictions. - Packaging: Describe the packaging used to contain the goods, such as cartons, drums, crates, or pallets. Mention any special packaging instructions if required. - Dimensions: If applicable, include the shipment’s measurements, such as length, width, and height. This information assists in space allocation and determining compatibility with transport equipment. - Marks and Numbers: Specify any unique marks, numbers, or labels associated with the packaging or containers. These markings identify and track the goods throughout the supply chain. In our example, we will gradually integrate them to allow for a global tracking system that traces logistics goods. But, this is only the first post. - Special Instructions: If there are any specific handling instructions or requirements for the goods, such as temperature control, ventilation, stacking limitations, or fragile handling, they should be mentioned clearly. - Harmonized System (HS) Codes: Include the appropriate HS codes that classify the goods based on internationally recognized coding systems. HS codes facilitate customs clearance and ensure accurate categorization of goods for regulatory and statistical purposes.

- Nodes are miners, these are commercial entities that compete. - The aim is to remove all limits to scale as soon as possible. Then, and only then, to lock the base protocol and stop any arbitrary change. - SPV is safe and is all a user needs. - Layer 2 is IN SCRIPT. - Malleability is not a flaw. - All systems are based on risk. There is no form of absolute security, and miners must weigh costs as do consumers. - Bitcoin is pure capitalism. - Distributed and decentralised means that there are 3 or more miners with no group holding more than 50% control. - Bitcoin is all about economic incentives. - The system works as it is designed to allow miners to compete profitably. - You do not need to try and fix Bitcoin, it works, and it does not need to be perfect, it is competition that drives advancement. - Developers work for corporations to build software. - Privacy and confidentiality matter— these are distinct from anonymity (which is not a function of cash). - LAW is law, code is at best a form of evidence. - Patents are a means to encourage development. - Companies help to protect rights and allow us freedom from government and tyranny. - Only one coin can exist at scale. - There is no such thing as “permission-less” tokens or equity offerings. - ICOs are a scam. FULL STOP - A digital IPO, tokenised shares, equity, bonds, etc are NOT ICOs

There is one result in the same paper that appears to cut the other way, and honesty requires meeting it rather than omitting it. Their Theorem 7 shows that the delay cost required to raise a target revenue grows as Θ(K / log K), so that “a lower value of K allows raising any level of revenue at a lower delay cost to users” (ibid., p. 3034) — smaller blocks are actually better at extracting a given dollar of revenue from congestion, which sounds like a design lever that could be pulled to rescue the fee market. But note what the theorem actually establishes. It says congestion rent is an inefficient tax base at every block size, and grows more inefficient as capacity expands. That is an argument against funding security from congestion at all, not a recipe for doing it well. And the authors’ own prescription is not a fixed cap that could be tuned; it is elastic capacity — a protocol that adjusts the block rate, μ = λ / (Kρ*), to hold congestion and revenue stable as demand varies. They describe BTC’s fixed K and μ, the very parameters that produce the seven-transaction ceiling, as explicitly “undesirable” (ibid., p. 3031). The design the peer-reviewed theory recommends against, on efficiency grounds, is precisely the fixed-capacity design that BTC’s proponents defend as sacrosanct. The fee-market rescue is not merely unlikely to work. The canonical model of the fee market says the mechanism is built the wrong way for the job.

In the instance that a merchant wallet supplies both the host that contains content and also the access to that material, it is likely to be able to more effectively monitor and control the activity of its users than a provider would that provides only access to the material. A user wallet cannot readily remove itself from the authority of the regulatory regime in whose jurisdiction the users are situated. To do so would result in also removing its ability to serve those end-users. A merchant wallet and the content it hosts, if desiring to make possible prohibited conduct, can move itself to an alternate jurisdiction that does not disallow the illicit conduct. For instance, a merchant wallet that wishes to implement access to Internet gambling can locate itself in a jurisdiction where these activities[[6]](#_ftn2) are legal and thus legitimised. This in effect places these organisations beyond the jurisdiction and capability of the majority international legal edicts and the related enforcement capabilities[[7]](#_ftn3). The user wallet and system, though, are not beyond this reach. A user wallet that is accessed and/or located in London with local clients that allows its clients to connect after exchanging payment to a child pornography site in Nigeria links to the user in London and can be used to trace this activity. The miner is unable to determine this level of transaction use, whereas a wallet provider and others could limit such access, as can intermediary ISPs who provide the conduit.

- Identity Verification: The first step is establishing a verified identity for the individual or entity claiming digital asset ownership. This process would involve traditional means of identity verification, such as government-issued identification documents, biometric data, or other trusted methods. - Root Key Generation: Once the identity is verified, a root key is generated for that identity. This root key serves as the foundation for establishing ownership of digital assets. - Asset Registration: The asset is registered within the cryptographic framework to link a specific digital asset to the verified identity. This registration process includes creating a unique identifier for the asset and associating it with the verified identity’s root key. - Digital Signature: When transferring ownership or asserting control over the digital asset, the verified identity signs a message or transaction using their root key. This creates a digital signature that anyone can verify using the corresponding public key associated with the root key. - Verification and Validation: To validate the cryptographic proof of ownership, anyone can verify the digital signature using the public key associated with the root key. By confirming that the signature matches the registered asset and the verified identity, the ownership claim can be upheld. - Trust and Certification Authorities: While Bitcoin distributes trust, trusted entities can act as certification authorities (CAs) within the framework to establish trust in the system. CAs would verify identities and issue root keys, ensuring the cryptographic proof of ownership aligns with traditional legal definitions.

The primitive was named and first formally studied three decades ago, and it answers a question that is exactly the question games pose [1]. The question is this: how may one transmit information so that precisely a chosen subset of the recipients can read it, and no one outside the subset can, even should every excluded party pool its keys in collusion? The early constructions were combinatorial and the schemes have grown vastly more efficient since, to the point where one can broadcast to any chosen subset of a vast population with ciphertexts and keys of constant or near-constant size, fully resistant to collusion by any number of the excluded [4]. Mapped onto a game, the correspondence is immediate and exact. The hidden state of the game is not held by an operator and parcelled out; it is distributed already enciphered, so that each fragment of secret knowledge can be opened only by exactly those players the rules entitle to it — your hand readable by you alone, the face-down communal card by no one until the protocol opens it to all at once, the contents of a region by those whose pieces can see it. The subset who may read is chosen by the rules, enforced by the mathematics, and verified by the participants; there is no observer in the middle who could peek, because there is no decipherable plaintext in the middle at all.

- Formally define a contract in a manner that can be formally interpreted and implemented by a machine, as well as converted into natural language; - Publish a contract to an audience where the details of the contract can be restricted to authorised entities only, but the knowledge of the existence of the contract is publicly available information. In other words, it can be public knowledge that there is a contract between A and B that anyone can verify, but anything other than its existence is restricted to authorised parties (normally A and B only).i.e. encrypted data on the DHTs (e.g. contract definitions etc.) - Provide a mechanism that allows contracts to be time-bound (i.e. they expire after a certain time or on a given date); condition bound (i.e. they expire once the deliverable specified within the contract has been fulfilled) or open-ended (i.e. they continue to roll on with a notice period to terminate them). - Provide a mechanism to serve notice to terminate that contract in a public fashion. e.g. Using nLockTime + CLTV in a spend transaction to ‘enact’ the expiration. - Provide a mechanism to structure a hierarchy of sub-contracts in a deterministic manner to allow control over different aspects of the contract to be partitioned. For example, on a technology programme, the requirements phase may have a different set of control triggers than the development phase. i.e. chain of hash-linked DHTs.

This study focuses on the analysis of the social interactions between Alice and Bob, their anonymous alias is used here to protect their real identity. The aim is to analyse the interactions between Alice and Bob in the context of their social interaction networks and friendship networks. We introduce the concept of a social interaction network for an individual person, which is social network of everyone whom the selected person talks to. For example, the social interaction network for Alice will include everyone she talks to online. Since Alice interacts with everyone in her social network, therefore the number of edges she contributes to the network is equal the number of friends she has. A reasonable simplification, therefore, is to omit Alice from the network to make network visualization clearer. She is also omitted from the statistical network analysis to make the statistical results consistent with the visualization. We have also created a social network for Bob using the method described above. From visual inspection of the network and the interactions data, we realise that there could be multiple usernames which are similar, and these may represent multiple identities used by same person. Also, users with many friends tend send messages to many people without receiving a reply. This motivates us to improve the original network by consolidating multiple user names, and to remove interactions which only occur in one direction.

- Data Structures: In data structures like linked lists, trees, or graphs, a node represents an individual element or unit of data within the structure. Each node typically contains a value or data payload and one or more references or pointers to other nodes in the structure. Nodes are interconnected to form the underlying structure, enabling efficient data storage and manipulation. - Networks: In networking, a node refers to any device or entity that can send, receive, or forward data over a network. This can include computers, servers, routers, switches, or any other network-enabled device. Each node in a network has a unique address or identifier and plays a role in the transmission and routing of data packets within the network. - Graph Theory: In graph theory, a node (also called a vertex) represents a discrete object or entity within a graph. A graph consists of a set of nodes and edges that connect pairs of nodes. Nodes can represent various entities, such as individuals, cities, or web pages, while edges denote relationships or connections between the nodes. - Distributed Systems: In distributed systems, a node refers to a computing device or server that participates in a distributed network or system. Each node typically has its processing capabilities, storage, and communication capabilities. Nodes collaborate and communicate with each other to perform tasks, share data, and provide services in a decentralized manner.

On settlement specifically, the mechanism the survey describes is probabilistic, not final. Disagreement about the state of the ledger — a fork — is, in the authors’ account, an expected occurrence (Halaburda et al., 2022), and a token’s value in a given block, the survey notes, depends crucially on whether that block is recognized by other users once a fork is resolved (Halaburda et al., 2022). A payment recorded in a block that is later orphaned did not, in the end, happen. The survey documents that this is not hypothetical — it points to the hard fork of 1 August 2017 as a live instance of consensus splitting over the rules — and it catalogues, following the security literature it surveys, that an attacker with sufficient mining power can prevent transactions from confirming and can double-spend, even while noting the offsetting fact that an attacker cannot alter others’ transactions without their keys. The relevant conclusion for the present argument is narrow and firm: token settlement is a probability that rises toward one as confirmations accumulate, subject to reorganization and to fork, and it is never the categorical extinguishment of prior claims that the law grants to cash. On the axis, this is not the finality endpoint. It is somewhere short of it, and the distance is the reorganization risk the survey describes.

In that regard, the term “currency” may have different usages in relation to money. In the sense in which I have just used it, the term is a synonym for the medium of exchange itself, namely, coins and bank notes circulating in a particular polity. In another possible usage, the term refers to a characteristic feature of the proprietary regime that applies to money. That is to say, the full force of the general rule on derivate transfers of title does not apply to title to money, in that title to money is exempt from the maxim nemo dat quod non habet. In that regard, currency refers to the negotiability of money, such that, as a general rule, the right to money is inseparable from the possession of it. Where coins or bank notes are delivered in payment of a debt or for the provision of goods or services, it is not incumbent upon the recipient of the coins or bank notes to enquire into the title of the payer. Not only possession of, but also property in, coins and bank notes passes by mere delivery, irrespective of the title of the payer (see Miller v Race (1758) 1 Burrow 452 and David Fox, Property Rights in Money (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008) at 265–6 and the authorities there cited).

Bitcoin was designed with the combination of simplified payment verification (SPV)—for users—and the ability to act as a node—to earn money, to be paid. Bitcoin, at its base level, is hierarchical. Nodes compete to create blocks of validated transactions. In their blocks, they seek to include as many transactions as possible. Also, in 2008, I said that Bitcoin could already scale to the level of Visa back in the same year. With, on average, 144 blocks a day and 100 GB of transactions, the mean size of a transaction block in 2008 would have been 695 MB. Next, the distribution of transactions will not be even. The distribution of transactions in the Visa network follows a Pareto distribution. As a result, we can calculate that it will be necessary for nodes to be able to handle blocks of up to 11 GB in size. A node would have to handle the most significant possible block size that comes in any particular period of time. It is in the node’s interest to do so, because the larger blocks will carry more fees. The node that collects the block with the most fees earns the largest profit. The hierarchical distribution of nodes was the design of Bitcoin when I created it. The hierarchical structure, which I demonstrated, remains the formation even now.

Bitcoin has an issuer. In January 2009, as director of companies I created in multiple jurisdictions, I issued 21 million bitcoin, where each individual bitcoin is an indivisible set of 100 million tokens. To distribute the tokens (and note the word distribute as it is on the original, unilateral contractual offer [13], presented to nodes that act as agents to my network), I set up a contractual arrangement where nodes (which many people call miners today) act within a set of common rules that I defined. If you don’t like the rules, you are free to create a new cryptocurrency as such involved with Litecoin and Ethereum and others have done. If you negotiate with me, arrangements can be made allowing the continuance of selected copies of my network, with a set of restrictions. In other words, I am willing to license [14] the Bitcoin database. I will do so on my terms. While the terms are rather generous right now, I would prefer others as I have been talked into doing something far more generous than I would desire. I would prefer to take things through court, because I will win as those who are currently challenging me do not know what is about to happen. It is time you learn who created Bitcoin, and it is me.

Gill, Stinner and Tyrell give the argument its formal statement in Energy Economics, and they give it a name: the productivity trap. In an ordinary digital technology, efficiency gains decouple output from resource use — you get the same computation for less power, and total power can fall even as output rises. In proof-of-work this cannot happen, because “the computational output — hashes — has no intrinsic productive value. It functions solely as a cost signal that sustains decentralized consensus” (Gill et al., 2026, p. 1). The hashes are not the output; the cost of the hashes is the output. Their first main result follows directly and is counterintuitive on its face: an increase in the supply of cheap surplus energy raises both total energy demand and the number of active mining rigs, because miners respond to the cheaper input by substituting into it, lowering their average unit cost, and deploying more machines in equilibrium until margins are competed away again — “such resource expansion does not enhance network security, which depends solely on cost levels” (ibid., p. 2). Efficiency does not reduce the burn; it enlarges the fleet. Their second result is that abundant surplus energy reduces emissions but increases e-waste, and identifies equilibria in which the net externality actually worsens as the “green” energy arrives.

It is worth making the tightness concrete, because “exactly k + 1” is the kind of phrase that slides past the eye. Take k = 1, the smallest interesting case. A single certified block in a target’s anticone leaves the target certifiable: one can write down a valid 1-cluster containing both. Add a second certified block to that anticone, incomparable to the first, and the target is finished — any set containing all three now has a block with two others in its anticone, one too many. The jump from certifiable to vetoed happens at the addition of a single block, and it happens at every value of k: the k-th block still leaves the door open, the (k + 1)-th closes it. There is no gradual erosion, no margin to tune, no safety factor to add. The mechanism is a cliff, and the attacker knows exactly where the edge is, because the edge is written into the definition of what the honest protocol will certify. A defender who raises k to make the cliff more expensive to reach simultaneously widens the anticone the honest set will tolerate — which is to say, weakens the very detection the condition was imposed to perform. The parameter is loaded against its own purpose from both directions at once.

Three further nChain filings document the surrounding machinery by which fixed on-chain units are made to carry off-chain function. Accessing an Internet of Things device using blockchain metadata (Vincent & Wright, 2025) specifies a method in which access to a resource is controlled by a tokenised output — a “coloured” unit of value carried within a transaction — such that spending the token grants access and a subsequent transaction detokenises it to revoke access. Here a fixed unit of bitcoin is overloaded to carry a transferable, revocable right, with the right itself moving through ordinary transaction mechanics. Computer implemented system and method for storing data on a blockchain (Wright et al., 2022) specifies the Metanet structure, in which transaction outputs carry content and a flag linking related fragments, demonstrating that the fixed transaction grammar carries arbitrary structured data alongside value. Communication protocol using blockchain transactions (Mackay et al., 2022) specifies a method by which network-access certificates are issued and verified through blockchain transactions, again repurposing the fixed transaction model as a carrier for off-chain function. A fifth filing, Systems and methods for efficient and secure processing, accessing and transmission of data via a blockchain network (Wright et al., 2025), specifies improved methods for processing and retrieving data anchored to a blockchain with enhanced access control.

The aim of all such changes and the fraudulent airdrop is very simple: it’s an attempt to make a system that acts outside of law, allows terrorist funding, and helps many other scams and frauds. That’s it. And the thing is, it’s very very simple to stop. People are going to wake up one day and not find that the value of their BTC investment is diminishing, but that it is zero. When such types of crime coins end, they don’t end slowly — they end in an instant. One moment you will be looking at US$8000 per coin, the next global trading will be suspended. More importantly, miners who seek to violate such orders will find themselves incarcerated, and they will find their equipment seized. They will be allowed to stop mining BTC and continue mining other coins. They will then simply move from scams such as BTC onto Bitcoin and recover some of the losses. It is, of course, why the scam-coin (BTC) developers at Core seek to try to manipulate the system and remove miners — they want to make it harder to stop, but the problem is: Bitcoin is resilient to what they intend to do. The crime-coin attack is one of the things I spent years working on stopping.

In August 2017, BIP141 (Segregated Witness) was activated on the BTC chain through a soft-fork mechanism in which non-upgrading nodes’ inaction constituted acceptance. The competing proposal — increasing the block size limit, which would have addressed congestion in a different direction — required a hard fork, and was abandoned in November 2017 after the SegWit2x compromise was withdrawn. The framing choice was decisive: soft-fork SegWit shipped without requiring active community consent; hard-fork capacity expansion required active consent it could not muster against an entrenched reference-implementation incumbent. BIP141’s author and several other BTC Core developers were on Blockstream’s payroll. Blockstream’s commercial products — the Liquid sidechain, Core Lightning, mining services, and hardware wallets — were structurally complementary to a Bitcoin in which on-chain capacity was constrained and value migrated to second-layer constructions. Pre-SegWit transaction fees were on the order of USD 0.20 to 0.50; following activation and continued capacity constraint, fees spiked above USD 20, with the December 2017 median briefly exceeding USD 30. The Lightning Network, which depended on SegWit’s transaction-malleability fix, launched on mainnet five months later. Those rejecting the change maintained the original design as Bitcoin Cash, with Bitcoin SV subsequently diverging from BCH in November 2018; in each case, it was the party that altered the protocol that constituted the fork.

I cannot make you think, but I can ask you to. When such flimflam men tell you they have knowledge of the system and know which way prices will go, ask yourself why they are not making lots of money but, instead, are working to promote flimflam. If their system is so good, why are they giving away everything they could earn so that you can invest your money into the sudden wealth that they have altruistically walked away from? It does not matter whether you like me, it does not matter whether you think I am honest or dishonest or anything else; I’m not trying to sell you anything. I am simply trying to get you to think. I know it is a hard task for some people. I am not promising fast-earned wealth; I am simply telling you that such people have no idea outside the Ponzi they are creating to take your money. I know it seems strange in a world of people seeking to grab everything you own, but think for a moment: would it not be better to investigate the so-called Internet promotions that promise prices will go up a million times, rather than simply listening to people who are half the time close to being broke themselves?

On BSV, the principal commercial mining nodes publish documented public APIs for direct transaction submission. TAAL and GorillaPool—the operators that account for substantially the entire active commercial miner set on the network—both run mAPI and the successor ARC interface. The BSV Association’s design description of ARC characterises it as engineered to connect to every mining node on the network, with each ARC instance peering directly with the active commercial mining infrastructure rather than relying on the legacy gossip path.15 GorillaPool’s mAPI endpoint accepts transactions without requiring an API key for ordinary submission and explicitly advertises direct routing to the miner nodes at the centre of the mining network.16 TAAL’s ARC implementation is similarly publicly available, with API documentation supplied through the miner’s developer console.17 The ARC architecture was designed precisely to expose every commercial mining node through a standard, horizontally scalable, public interface; direct submission to the active hash rate is, on the network where the architecture has been adopted, the documented default of its commercial operators, not an exotic exception. The empirical proposition that any user can address any miner on BSV is therefore not a theoretical claim awaiting test. It is the design intent of the deployed infrastructure, satisfied at or near full coverage of the active hash rate.

A taxonomy of eight major public blockchains — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, BNB Chain, Uniswap, MakerDAO, and Tezos — identifies six structural governance mechanisms, each observable, each documented in primary sources. Developer commit access concentrates the authority to merge protocol changes in a handful of maintainers; BTC Core has approximately five persons with merge rights. Foundation and corporate control concentrates funding and roadmap authority in legal entities; the Ethereum Foundation held a treasury of approximately USD 1.6 billion in early 2024. Validator and miner concentration places block production in the hands of small cartels; in BTC, five mining pools produce roughly 75 per cent of hashrate, and in Ethereum proof-of-stake, three staking providers control roughly a third of staked ETH. Sponsor and investor capture aligns developer work with the commercial interests of funding entities; Blockstream has raised approximately USD 728 million since 2014, with several BTC Core developers on its payroll. Fork-type authority allows the reference-implementation controller to determine whether a change requires a hard fork (inaction = rejection, costly coordination) or a soft fork (inaction = acceptance); the asymmetry was decisive in the SegWit episode. Token-weighted governance makes protocol changes a function of token holdings; concentrated holders such as a16z Crypto have been decisive in Uniswap votes.

Bob can quickly check the validity of any coin that Alice is using to pay him. He can check whether it’s in the UTXO set as an unspent transaction, and he can quickly validate the input location in the blockchain as Alice has handed him the path. The deeper the coin is, the more the proof of work is that is needed to change the path and hence the more secure it is for Bob to accept it. If Alice simply spends her pay and receives coins after being validated for an hour or so, it is still very secure. Bob does not need to download the entire blockchain. Even if he ran his own node, it would gain him nothing. Only miners change the blockchain. As Bob has received Alice’s input coin, he can check that it is valid and that she has correctly formulated the output coin to Bob, which is all he needs to validate the payment itself. Next, if Alice hands the Merkle path associated with her coin to Bob, she can now be assured that Bob can quickly validate it by hashing the input transaction and checking its location on the hash headers, by validating the Merkle path she has given him.

Bobby was very enthusiastic about his product, which is a good thing whenever you’re developing something, but it’s also important to understand the system and the market you’re developing for. In the 1990s, a company called Mondex released a form of cryptocurrency based on prepaid smart cards. Unlike the Ballet system Bobby has released, the Mondex system was quite secure. It allowed amounts to be transferred on and off the card, and protected keys very well. Having analysed both physical and IT security systems for several decades, I can estimate the cost of counterfeiting and of taking a key and reapplying the protective coating. The cost at bulk would be between two and four US dollars for each card. As such, cards could be issued where the private keys have been extracted. It would allow an attacker to sell the card knowing that at a future time, they would be able to recoup any “investment” where on average each card they give out returns more than four dollars. But, the cost of the card makes it infeasible that it will be used for anything under $20. More importantly, it results in the user having to entrust the company developing the product with never saving the keys.

I want to state the strongest version of the opposing case, because it exists and deserves an answer. The case is that a fixed base cannot correct its own errors — that if the original design contains a genuine flaw, immutability entrenches the flaw permanently, and the cost of that entrenchment may exceed all the rent-seeking losses avoided. This is a serious argument and it is not obviously wrong. My answer is twofold. First, it proves too much: the same reasoning would justify a mutable Internet Protocol, and the alternative history in which IP was continuously revised is not one in which we got a better internet — it is one in which we got a slower one with more gatekeepers. Second, it misidentifies where flaws are best repaired. A base-layer flaw that can be worked around at the edges should be worked around at the edges, because that solution is voluntary, competitive, and reversible, whereas a base-layer amendment is compulsory, monopolistic, and permanent. The bar for touching the base should be set at the level of flaws that cannot be addressed any other way — and once you set the bar there honestly, you discover that almost nothing clears it.

The public-ruling database of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has the anonymised version of my claim. In looking at it, the tax office quickly realised how easy it would be to abuse the GST system if GST was applied to Bitcoin. Which was of course the point I was trying to make. Unfortunately at the time, I was a rather brash individual, and rather than allowing my lawyers to deal with the matter correctly, I pulled such a little stunt to force their hand. It did. It was very quickly considered and rejected out of hand. The invoice leading to a debt was reversed, and had to be re-entered without GST. So effectively, I bought and sold bitcoin to myself over the border, and the result was that the Australian government rejected imposing GST on Bitcoin. In 2013, we had been discussing the same matter in roundtables and at conferences. I’d met with commissioners and the deputies, and we had been getting nowhere. It was actually looking as if they would impose GST. Rather than spending years trying to focus an effort, I chose the quickest and nastiest way of making them see just how foolish such a thing would be.

The question is, what is gained — at least in the misguided belief of the developers seeking to introduce Schnorr? The belief is that, in not allowing Alice to definitively know who she is dealing with, the parties will be able to have a level of plausible deniability under the law. In theory, such developers believe that they can circumvent the legal process, and create a coin that will work on a dark web allowing drug sales in the manner that Silk Road promised. It, again, is utter bull. It’s the same fallacy that misguided attempts to lose records such as the Lightning Network keep proposing. Such developers and associated fools fail to understand that legislation such as the FinCEN (BSA) Bank Secrecy Act requires that records are maintained and that the mere act of deleting them is enough to make their system illegal. More importantly, it does not deliver plausible deniability. The exchanges between parties can be captured allowing evidential proof and the association of individuals with multiple transactions. And the fact that you are part of a signature whilst not allowing legality for non-persons to sign and be bound conversely delivers evidence when used in criminal trials.

As explained in the paragraph, Bitcoin is not itself about “one-CPU-one-vote”. Bitcoin and proof-of-work are not about ‘one-person-one-vote’. In fact, no blockchain is about democratic voting. Information can be securely recorded on the blockchain, which is not the same as saying that nodes vote democratically. The voting by nodes is a form of plutocracy. What keeps the system honest is that there are only two choices: follow the rules or become an attacker. Voting by wealthy individuals or corporations only would be problematic if it were not for the fact that Bitcoin publishes all the evidence associated with an attack for use by any individual. As a result, if a system attacks the network, the operator forfeits the capital they have invested in their nodes. So, the idea is not to allow any level of voting on the protocol. Nodes act to confirm and enforce the original protocol. Some people will tell you otherwise; they seek to change the scenario, because they can gain power and wealth in doing so. In understanding that Bitcoin does not allow such a change, and that they are trying to replace Bitcoin with something else, you can start to see their tactics.

The verifiable-accounting-chain repository builds this on three pillars. First, a public-key-infrastructure root and a general-ledger key hierarchy: a single certified root key anchors the entity’s whole accounting structure, with a deterministic sub-key for every ledger node and field. “Deterministic derivation” means the keys are generated by a fixed mathematical rule from the root, and — crucially — the rule works such that the public side can be derived to match the private side without exposing the private keys. Second, an ECDH-linked, spend-linked, signed transaction chain: each accounting transaction actually spends the previous one and carries a signature from a key derived from its predecessor and the root, so that reordering, inserting, or dropping any transaction breaks the cryptographic links and is detected. (ECDH — Elliptic-Curve Diffie–Hellman — is the standard method by which two parties’ keys combine to derive a shared secret; here it is used to derive the linking keys.) Third, per-field selective disclosure over the field tree, exactly as in Layer B. On top of those pillars the system is mapped — every field has a ledger path — triple-entry, and tax-linked, so that a tax position recomputes from its mapped fields rather than being asserted.

Abstract. I set out what a ledger actually provides — total order, timestamp bound, tamper-evidence, and verification without trusting the recorder — and what it provably does not: truth, semantics, computation, privacy for low-entropy preimages, deletion, or availability of the data behind a hash. I then give the three-tier architecture: a ledger carrying only commitment hashes and Merkle roots, a content-addressed off-chain store carrying the artefacts themselves in hash-linked version chains, and an overlay layer that recomputes, checks, scores, and publishes attestations which are themselves committed. One rule assigns every artefact: commit whatever’s meaning depends on when it was fixed; version whatever is bulk and immutable; compute in the overlay whatever is a judgement. I apply this to all ten open areas and report where the fit is strong, where the ledger only records, and where it does nothing — interpretability gets no help, and efficiency gets a bill. I work the throughput arithmetic showing why a Merkle root per session, not a transaction per claim, is the correct granularity, and why low unit cost and unbounded capacity nonetheless remain the enabling condition. I close with the conflict between immutability and erasure obligations, and the bounded answer available.

Bitcoin is a critical system, and it is a security platform. When software is created that needs to be resilient to attacks, it also needs to be widely tested and verified. Whilst some people can do static testing and black-box testing and conduct tests based on reverse-engineering the code, none of them are ever as effective as a complete walk-through using the open protocol. At the same time, Bitcoin is a protocol. To be utilised, it needs to be treated like TCP/IP for the internet. In other words, it needs to be publicly available. When I created Bitcoin, I had no idea that it would be worth so much money now. In addition, I constructed it in such a way that allowed no direct method for me to exploit the amount I owned without actively mining to regain the bitcoin I had created. Under the terms of the rules and the associated contracts with the node operators and the people using the system, I was bound to distribute all of the bitcoin I had issued. The amounts that I was allowed to distribute at any time were all preset, and there was no money for me to make.

None of this will be what people expect because people have come to associate bitcoin and the system I developed with something that it is designed not to be. The process we will be engaged in over the next 12 months will be one that radically changes the perceptions of the industry and demonstrates the true power of bitcoin. As part of this, we are working to ensure that the fallout from any interaction in the market involving my family trust’s coins is minimised. We also want to slowly migrate people and node operators (aka miners) into a sustainable model that will take us not only past the next block reward halving in April/May 2020, but far beyond 2020. I do not intend to dump my family’s BTC as some people suspect or want, as this would hurt many people in the industry. Instead, I will work with the family trust to implement plans to slowly move the interests of the trust into a sustainable model that builds the Bitcoin SV environment and ensures that the bitcoin that I originally envisioned more than a decade ago (now known as Bitcoin SV – BSV) continues to grow strongly.

These Maxims are listed in the section of the paper by Saltzer and Schroeder under Design Principles. This section begins by stating: “Whatever the level of functionality provided, the usefulness of a set of protection mechanisms depends upon the ability of a system to prevent security violations. In practice, producing a system at any level of functionality (except level one) that actually does prevent all such unauthorized acts has proved to be extremely difficult. Sophisticated users of most systems are aware of at least one way to crash the system, denying other users authorized access to stored information. Penetration exercises involving a large number of different general-purpose systems all have shown that users can construct programs that can obtain unauthorized access to information stored within. Even in systems designed and implemented with security as an important objective, design and implementation flaws provide paths that circumvent the intended access constraints. Design and construction techniques that systematically exclude flaws are the topic of much research activity, but no complete method applicable to the construction of large general-purpose systems exists yet. This difficulty is related to the negative quality of the requirement to prevent all unauthorized actions”.

5.7 Correctness and termination Feasibility of each step. Assume at step i (0 ≤ i ≤ N−2) that rem satisfies v_min·(N−i) ≤ rem ≤ v_max·(N−i). Then: • Lower bound low = max( v_min, rem − v_max·(N−1−i) ) ensures that after choosing a[i] ≥ low the remaining rem′ = rem − a[i] can still be paid using at most (N−1−i) notes each of size ≤ v_max, because rem′ ≤ rem − (rem − v_max·(N−1−i)) = v_max·(N−1−i). • Upper bound high = min( v_max, rem − v_min·(N−1−i) ) ensures that after choosing a[i] ≤ high the remaining rem′ can still be paid using at least (N−1−i) notes each of size ≥ v_min, because rem′ ≥ rem − (rem − v_min·(N−1−i)) = v_min·(N−1−i). Hence low ≤ a[i] ≤ high implies v_min·(N−1−i) ≤ rem′ ≤ v_max·(N−1−i), maintaining the invariant. The base case at i = 0 holds by the choice of N (N_min ≤ N ≤ N_max). By induction the invariant holds for all i ≤ N−2. Termination occurs after exactly N steps. At i = N−1 we have rem′ = a[N−1] and v_min ≤ a[N−1] ≤ v_max by the invariant, and Σ a[i] = T by construction.

Some people seem to think that I had to come out there when I was exposed and do what the media demanded of me. What you’re going to learn is that you don’t make demands of someone you want something from. You ask politely. You don’t need to like me. But Bitcoin and blockchain are my system. They act within the law, and are bound by it. You’re going to discover that decentralised only works for a blockchain system as a concept where it acts within the law. You’re going to discover that anonymous systems cannot act within Bitcoin. You’re going to discover that Bitcoin allows free speech but not hate crime. You are going to discover that Bitcoin doesn’t allow trolls to continue to operate with impunity. You’re going to discover that people who aid in hacking and compromising systems and people like Greg Maxwell are the opposite of what Bitcoin creates, and you’re going to discover that such people who run the sock puppets and manipulate social media and lie and seek to create systems that undermine law are the antithesis of what Bitcoin was designed to be.

Alice can accept payments without coming under the money-handling provisions as a merchant. She cannot do so if she is an exchange or a seller of cryptocurrency. Consequently, it starts to become very simple to filter out and block illicit uses of cryptocurrency. Small personal payments, say in the order of £200, don’t matter. If Charlie had stolen £1 million worth of cryptocurrency, he could go round in a cycle of stores where he doesn’t spend more than £200 in any one store in any one month with a very low probability of detection — that is, as long as he doesn’t return to a store. If he was to return to a store, there is a possibility he could be caught. So, Charlie would be able to go from store to store looking for non-custodial systems that don’t run on something like Coinbase spending small amounts at each store over a long time period. But if a single one of the stores was integrated with the Suspicious Activity Report system, including if the store had a point of sale system linked to a custodial wallet, Charlie would be reported.

Charles Sturt University incorporates the New South Wales School of Policing Studies. Located in New South Wales, Australia, it is where we train our police force. The attacks against the university and where I was studying had started before I was made public in December 2015. Such a particular hit piece was well-planned. I was simultaneously enrolled in two postgraduate degrees. The university had allowed it, even though it was generally against policy; I was given an exception. All my lecturers knew about it, of course, and I was working there. The scenario did not stop people like those associated with limiting Bitcoin from growing and their teams of sock puppets from sending hundreds of complaints about me to the university. To simplify responding, and to simplify my life at the time, I chose to drop out of one of my master’s courses, just before I would have graduated. I was not happy about doing so, but it was not worth the fight. At the time, I thought that things would just go back to normal, I would just be able to work and study, and people would go away.

Hill’s criteria is the basis of good scientific research where we are seeking to establish a causal relationship amongst social phenomena and in particular ones where we cannot engage in controlled trials. In some instances, it is in fact better than a controlled trial as the process of creating a controlled trial changes the environment and creates a bias in many of the results. Although it is true that this controlled trial has provided the best answer to a problem is not always true that we are investigating the same problem. One example would be looking at studies of irrationality. The University controlled trials testing the reactions of students generally biased the results. In selecting risk trials for instance, we take selective forms of risk that bias the results towards male or female risk takers in the study. Later studies have now shown that these original studies into irrationality have been the result of poor methodology with both women and men exhibiting similar levels of risk. What was demonstrated is that the forms of risk taking differ between men and women but overall the levels of risk a similar.

There are in effect three primary classifications and ways of distinguishing Bitcoin businesses and validators. It is likely that any bitcoin-based transaction will follow through a path of user wallet, backbone providers such as miners, and propagation networks, and arrive at a merchant wallet or PoS (point of Sale) system where both the user wallet and merchant wallets are effectively endpoints. Backbone providers include the class of telecommunication carriers who deal solely with the transmission and routing of transactions across the Bitcoin provider networks and the miners who validate and aggregate transactions into a block. For purposes of liability in the original Bitcoin protocol, backbone providers offer little more than a conduit for contractual loss from other providers that they deal with. Backbone providers are unlikely to have the capabilities or capacity that will allow them to distinguish between data, traffic, or protocol content making the ability to filter illicit activity next to impossible at this level[[4]](#_ftn1). Source and destination wallet providers are in effect similar in many ways. In particular, any endpoint merchant wallets will at some stage act as either and both source or destination transaction providers.