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Joined October 2023
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His post, with the patch if you want to run it yourself: delvingbitcoin.org/t/great-c…
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…
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…
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.
Small correction that still makes your point: the central bank took Ueno over, and deposit insurance (up to ~$38K) fully covers about 97% of depositors.
What 3 million people lost is access. Locked out of the app, with insured payouts due within 15 days, extendable once.
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…
Every fall, the “it’s over” calls that came with it, and how long each climb back took: 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.
Good outcome for Binance customers. And a useful reminder: the best time to try a withdrawal is while withdrawals work. For a few days last week, they didn’t.
Bitcoin runs on them too. The reward halves every 210,000 blocks, so the supply is 210,000 × 50 × (1 + ½ + ¼ + ...) = 21 million.
Chart idea: supply vs. the calendar. Blocks have averaged about 9.6 minutes since 2009, so the chain runs ~37,000 blocks (about 259 days) ahead of a strict 10-minute clock. The 2024 halving landed in April, not late December. On schedule by height, eight months early by date.
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…
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.
The scale, per yesterday’s snapshot: 7.13M BTC (35.4% of supply) already has its public key on chain. About 5.19M is from address reuse, which owners can still fix by moving. The other 1.93M is exposed by design: Satoshi-era P2PK coins, many with lost keys, and taproot outputs.
The part that surprises people: there are no balances. Your wallet spends whole earlier coins, like bills. Pay 0.3 BTC from a 1 BTC coin and the transaction makes two new coins, 0.3 for them and about 0.7 back to you as change. Whatever’s left over is the fee.
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.
The first reply on the mailing list came two days later, from James A. Donald: “We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.”
Eighteen years in, people are still arguing about that one.
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.