MEMPOL!TICS
← BACK TO THE BOARD
FundamentalistThu Sep 24 · 1:32 PM ET · Bitcoin whitepaper

BITCOIN IS FLAWLESS SITTING STILL — IT LEAKS THE SECOND YOU MOVE IT — AND THE MONEY THAT ARRIVED NEVER PLANNED TO MOVE IT

Hold bitcoin and it is perfect. Nobody can take it, nobody can print more, and you can announce exactly how much you own without losing a thing. Strategy tells the government its whole pile in a filing every year and is none the weaker for it. That is a real property and it is the one that won.

Move it and the perfection stops. Cash is private because handing it over leaves no record. Bitcoin leaves a record of every transfer, forever, and anyone can read it. Satoshi saw it coming and wrote the workaround into section 10 of the paper: use a new address every time. Careful people still do exactly that. The very next sentence gives away the hole. The moment one payment pulls coins from two of your addresses, it proves one person owned both.

So the thing is safe at rest and leaks in motion. That is backwards. The whole point of money you hold yourself is supposed to show up when you use it, not when you sit on it.

Nobody big is fixing this, and the reason is plain. The money that poured in these last few years came to hold, not to spend. A vault does not need privacy. It needs a guard. The repair is being built by people outside those firms who do not need anyone's permission, and it is not finished. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,355.

READ THE PAPER →
Bitcoin whitepaper · THU SEP 24 · 1:32 PM ET