The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 43 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hearn: Reaching Bitcoin capacity limits will kick users out of the system
“At worst, things break quite badly, but even at best, even if things don't break, some users won't be able to use Bitcoin, right? They will be kicked out of the system, effectively. There won't be enough capacity to handle them.”
Felten: Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap is changeable by community consensus
“Right now the monetary policy is grow asymptotically to twenty-one million Bitcoins, but that could change by consensus of the community. That twenty-one million limit is not inherent mathematically. It's just a number that is hardwired into the currently used…”
Choi: Hamas stopped accepting Bitcoin donations because the blockchain is traceable
“And, you know, even Hamas, like, I think in like, 20, 22, 23 announced that they were no longer gonna be accepting Bitcoin because it was too traceable.”
Horowitz: Bitcoin reached a $1 trillion market cap without a corporate structure
“Bitcoin started in 2008 and it's, you know, a piece of software and there's probably four engineers working on it at this point and there's no company and it's worth a trillion dollars.”
Back: Lightning Network could scale Bitcoin capacity up to 10,000x
“There's also right now quite active work on this sort of Bitcoin enhancement called lightning, which is a best described as a kind of right caching layer for Bitcoin, which might scale Bitcoin by a factor of a thousand or 10,000.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin-native applications will create multi-billion dollar companies
“So, these are very small today, but I think in the future some of these will end up being many multi-billion dollar companies and systems.”
Dixon: Sub-second transaction finality is impossible in proof-of-work systems
“You just simply can't have, ah, like sub-second transaction finality in a proof of work system. Like, so Bitcoin, like you really need to wait, you know, each block is 10 minutes, and it has to do with the coordination among the network, and the network propag…”
Weisman: CFTC ruled Bitcoin is a commodity under its jurisdiction
“And it's been, one of their rulings said that Bitcoin is a commodity, so it falls under their jurisdiction.”
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum enables features simply not possible on Bitcoin
“So you can build all sorts of more advanced features in Ethereum that are simply not possible with Bitcoin.”
Boneh: Functional quantum computers would break modern internet cryptography and Bitcoin
“All the world of crypto that we use on the internet today, and for Bitcoin as well, ah, would be well, would be broken if someone was able to build a quantum computer.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin GitHub repositories outpace traditional payment systems like PayPal
“There's about 6000 total to date, which is outpacing the number of GitHub repositories for other common payment systems like PayPal.”
Hearn: Bitcoin will hit its 1MB block size limit next year
“And we're now at more like half of that block size, and it, you know, as traffic is growing, it looks like we might start hitting that limit sometime next year.”
Popper: Bitcoin is not ready to serve as a mainstream currency
“It's pretty clear that at this point, Bitcoin is not ready for prime time in that way. There are sort of basic problems with the protocol, with the number of transactions that can go through the system, and significant improvements that need to be made before …”
Goldman Sachs estimated Bitcoin could save consumers $200 billion
“For example, even as like 12 months ago, even 18 months ago, people were calling Bitcoin an imaginary currency for crazy people on the internet. And now Goldman Sachs is saying it can save people two hundred billion dollars.”
Robert Mueller traced Bitcoin payments to Russian GRU operatives
“In fact, even special counsel Robert Mueller traced Bitcoin payments to Russian GRU operatives in the election interference case.”
Katie Haun argues Bitcoin price volatility is lessening over time
“I think now what we're seeing is the price is, the volatility is lessening, and I grant you, there's still a lot of volatility.”
Haun: Darknet share of Bitcoin transactions dropped from 30% to 1%
“At its peak in 2012, 30% of bitcoin transaction volume, 30%, was associated with dark net markets. Marketplaces like Silk Road or Alpha Bay. And we typically, of course, associate dark net markets with criminal activity. But by 2018, that number is down to one…”
Horowitz: Bitcoin uniquely commits to a hard-coded 21 million token supply cap
“That's the strong commitment that Bitcoin makes that other blockchains don't make as strongly, which is twenty one million. That's it. You know, Ethereum's not making that claim.”
Narula: Bitcoin was the first intermediary-free digital payment system
“It took me a little while to realize this, but this was actually the first time that this had ever happened. This was the first time we could make online digital payments without a bank or another financial institution in the middle.”
Narula: Bitcoin's seven TPS throughput limit is an easily modified parameter
“Bitcoin doing seven transactions per second is a choice based on two numbers in the code. One could change these two numbers very easily.”
Tomaino: Hundreds of millions are spent externally securing Bitcoin
“So, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent external to the network of Bitcoin just to secure the network.”
Benet: Bitcoin mining energy consumption exceeded Slovenia's total power expenditure
“Yeah, last we calculated it was more power expenditure than all of Slovenia and so, I think it's much more now because of the recent spike, a lot of miners came in in the last couple of months, so it's a lot of power,”
Dixon: Ethereum proved multiple scaled blockchain networks can coexist
“One, it showed that you could just simply have another Scaled network, right? I think a lot of people just assumed it was gonna be one network to rule them all, network effects, et cetera. So it showed just like an existence proof that you could do another net…”
Buterin: Bitcoin's Protocol Lacks Native State Persistence Across Transactions
“But with Bitcoin itself, you can't do that because the protocol has a kind of inherent Statelessness to it. Like, you can't remember the notion of, well, this guy already withdrew 500 ETH six hours ago, and another 500 ETH two hours ago, so he can't withdraw a…”
Felten: Bitcoin volatility will decrease as adoption and liquidity grow
“I think the exchange rate of Bitcoin will settle down if it grows. You get more liquidity in the market, and you get more sophisticated economic modeling of what the fair price is. And then I think the volatility goes down somewhat.”
Dixon: Non-speculative Bitcoin payment transaction growth is linear, not exponential
“The best data I've seen is the transaction volume has gone up, the non-speculative, like, the payment transaction volume, it's not exponential, though, it's linear.”
Paul Krugman notes Bitcoin daily transaction volume peaked in early 2018
“As best we can tell, the dollar value of bitcoin transactions peaked at the beginning of this year, and that's actually fallen substantially since then.”
Krugman: Bitcoin consumes real resources like computing power and electricity
“The striking thing about Bitcoin is that it sets up a system in which, ah, first of all, ah, the creation of this currency involves a lot of real resources. We're actually spending a lot of resources now computing power or electricity to generate this, much as…”
Haun: The DOJ asked her to prepare a case against Bitcoin
“And I was a federal prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice at that time. And I was asked to prepare a case against Bitcoin.”
Rampell: Bitcoin transactions are fully traceable on-chain in perpetuity
“Whereas Bitcoin, you can actually track every subsequent transaction from a Bitcoin wallet and when Bitcoin is sent. And it's really remarkable because if I put ten million dollars over here in Bitcoin, I can see where all of those coins end up in perpetuity.”
Rampell: Bitcoin and Ethereum energy use ranks 71st among countries
“So if you were to graph every country on Earth by energy usage, the 71st most energy-using country, so this is ahead of a 120 other ones, Is the two largest blockchain efforts of Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
Rampell: Satoshi Nakamoto holds 1 million Bitcoin worth $6.7B
“He owns about a million Bitcoin at a trading price of about 6700 dollars today is worth about 6.7 billion dollars.”
Bitcoin exchange solvency can be proven without trusted auditors
“The beauty of Bitcoin is that you need no trust in third parties. And this proof of solvency can be done without, ah, any expense, any payments done to a third party.”
Mónica: Glacier Protocol is the gold standard for individual Bitcoin custody
“We became maintainers of the Glacier Protocol, which is the golden standard for individual custody of Bitcoin.”
Tomaino: Ethereum processes 15 TPS, Bitcoin processes 7 TPS
“Ethereum can process roughly 15, Bitcoin roughly seven”
Carlson-Wee: Bitcoin creator holds over $1B in Bitcoin
“I mean, the creator of Bitcoin, whoever he or she or they are, has, you know, over a billion dollars in, in Bitcoin.”
Hearn: Satoshi set Bitcoin's 1MB limit when blocks were under 10KB
“He imposed a maximum one megabyte block size, and as there's one block every 10 minutes on average, that's, you know, you can calculate a maximum transaction rate from that. And at the time he put it in, we were around, you know, less than 10 kilobytes per blo…”
Hearn: Lighthouse pledges stay under user control until target is met
“Lighthouse is a completely peer-to-peer and Decentralized approach. So you can actually pledge money to a project in such a way that it stays under your control until the moment that the project has raised the full amount.”
21,000 Bitcoin disappeared overnight from Silk Road vendor accounts in 2013
“Overnight, 21,000 Bitcoin, worth today about a hundred and fifty million dollars, went missing from Silk Road vendor accounts overnight.”
Chainalysis and Elliptic use machine learning experts to de-anonymize Bitcoin
“There's also services like Chainalysis and Elliptic, whose sole purpose is to de-anonymize networks like Bitcoin. So they have entire teams of machine learning experts to really try to trace some of these coins and what the identity is.”
Linda Xie: Bitcoin and Ethereum are pseudonymous, not anonymous
“There's this misconception that Bitcoin and Ethereum are anonymous. Well, that's actually not true. They're pseudonymous, which means it doesn't use the real identity.”