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Good write up, and thanks for including us (even though I don't align with some of you points :) ).

One thing I would just like point out is that eMunie isn't really Vapourware.  Anyone is free to join the forum and request access to the regular beta tests where they can test drive the client and see subsequent progress.

Great article ... i agree with all of these ....

I am monitoring this thread.  
  
I would like to see discussion here limited to specific implementations of a currency and not the currency itself.  
  
For example, if coin x has stolen a lot of its code and the devs have constantly lied, let's not focus on that.  The currency can be relaunched under better circumstances if the technology does what it needs to do.

I'm not hearing anything to argue with LOL
and this deserves a bump.. I want to keep an eye on this topic, thanks for posting Roach

You make some good points about PoS, but NXT has functionality that BitShares doesn't.  I've used NXT, it was easy, and it looks like eBay or something.  Something that people can use.  

With BitShares, I've tried multiple times to use it.  I can't get it to work.  

In order to register an account, you have to send some BitShares.  I bought some on an exchange, but I couldn't send those until I registered an account.  But I couldn't register an account until I could send some. 

There's an option to get your registration fee from a faucet, but there was no faucet there the times I tried.  

I talked to one of the main devs, and his final advice was to wait until a faucet was up again.  In other words, "BitShares is unable to accept new users at this time". 

I gave it more effort than 99.99% of people would have bothered to do, and I never got it to work.  

state of cryptos is everything mentioned in the OP post is following the same route ie over-complicating whats technically needed.

small side note;

how is this;

"D)  The only known altcoin to have github activity or ownership by Bitcoin core devs themselves."

re monero even remotely true.

For the most part, they don't either.

It's a lot of limping to the market with this week's frankenstein.

Kind of embarrassing at this point, how market demographics show over and over again these dumb idiots would drop their life savings to the new 'gold of the week'. Really?

It's easier than letting people who can't afford them, take loans against their 401k's.

systematized zombie theft, in the name of security and fear.

I bet tla's love it, being a problem that's also a solution to itself.

horizontal value-scaling doesn't provide any value added to anything.

Anyways, glad to see a compendium of everything that's already been said on a board for which there's nothing much left to say.

Wladimir

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/329

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/issues/389


Gmaxwell

https://i.imgur.com/HxG4bRf.jpg

I guess you could go out on a limb and say there probably was some coordination between BTC and LTC devs in the past, but they seemed to have distanced themselves from it for a long time now.  There's not really any evidence of them currently running any LTC nodes or holding anything in LTC wallets.

I could argue this point all day, but it'd be a waste of both our times, and send the thread a tad off track. litecoin is one example., but we'll agree to disagree (save me dragging out a ton of evidence this time in the morning).


but to a more ontopic important point.

I've travelled in the background on so so many 'breakthrough' alt to bitcoin communities, and one thing they all have in common. all doing the exact same thing as many others, yet in their own community thinking what they are doing is so out side the box and original.

its almost scary the same stuff being repeated by all.

especially when a ton of this 'original' stuff was floating around even before bitcoin.

Great read. Watching thread for any new posts. Good luck and keep this thread alive please!  ;D

I must say that this is for the most part a very balanced assessment. I do have some comments:

1) Bitcoin. The most fundamental problem I see here is how can it scale, and at the same time keep miner incentives after the emission runs out? I do not see a solution here that does not involve constant forking, centralized  control etc. This only leaves Dogecoin and Monero as viable POW alternatives because of the small but non zero tail emissions.

2) Monero (Cryptonote). The one fundamental problem here is bloat / blockchain size. Pruning will not solve it in any significant fashion since it is a linear saving in space vs exponential growth. What does have a very significant chance of solving this problem is a continuation of Moore's, (processing), Kryder's (storage) and Nielsen's (bandwith) laws. This is comparable to someone betting on credit cards in 1951 when Diner's Club was launched. Credit cards also could not scale with the technology of the time (tabulating machines and punch cards). By this token Bitcoin would be Diner's Club, Monero has a chance at American Express or even possibly Master Card or Visa. Dogecoin also has a chance here to compete here as an open ledger if it steps up to the plate and fixes it blocksize limit issue. I do not see governments censoring centralized mining as an issue in Monero because with Monero it is an all or nothing proposition, since a miner would not know what transactions to censor. In any event regulators are focusing on service providers (way easier to regulate) than miners. The environmental issue can be mitigated to a large degree by using the "waste" heat for space heating since the heat  only has value when compared to the electricity consumed, if the mining is performed in a in a distributed fashion.

Note: As a baby boomer, I have actually worked with punch cards and have also sent a telegram, so that does give me a strong bias towards the continuation of  Moore's,  Kryder's  and Nielsen's  laws. that a much younger person would not have.

3) POS, 4) DPOS. The biggest weakness  I see here is borrowed stake. This is where those controlling the coins do not have exposure to the coins. For example: Borrowing, derivatives and hedging. We must keep in mind is that at a very fundamental this is what nearly brought down the fiat monetary system in 2008. The same problem only worse is also present in any DPOS system. In addition in DPOS the delegates would likely be subject to government regulation under existing laws unlike the miners above.

5) eMunie. I agree with the OP here. It is extremely complex. If it works it could be a player. Otherwise no. At this point I simply prefer KISS.

My bet at this point is for the most part Monero with a significant Canadian Dollar (cash) position as a hedge.

some say the blockchain tech is more important/bigger then bitcoin itself.

however i think the whole blockchain and like ideas as the biggest thing holding alt to fiat p2p currencies back.

also almost all this crypto community is about is ROI, making a currency that increases in value so all the early adapters (ie us), get the spoils.

like i've always said, whats the point of making an alternative to the greedy banker controlled fiat if we ourselves become the new breed of greedy bankers  ???

you got to look more at what the mass' need. not what gets a few nerdy underground users off.

Id like to make some comments about the general theme that eMunie is complex.  In actual fact, the core fundamentals, algorithms and protocols are quite simple.

I guess it manifests an assumption of complexity simply because it has the potential to be all encompassing.  Almost every single component of the platform is a stark departure from current technology and not only is there a steep learning curve to understand it, it can also be difficult to detach from the "Bitcoin" way of thinking.

After working on this for 2 years now, I find myself in the same position, but in reverse.  Detaching from the "eMunie" way of thinking when participating in discussions about Bitcoin and others can be an issue.  I find myself slipping up sometimes and misunderstanding, even though I spent 12 months, full time, experimenting and taking Bitcoin apart to understand it prior to starting eMunie.

Hopefully over the coming months, with more comprehensive information this illusion of extreme complexity can be relieved some.

"All that is required?" You act like this is no big deal. It is a big deal, and it is quite likely it doesn't exist. "Even if it is less secure" does not work, by the way. You would have to qualify that with it only being slightly less secure. and then further qualify in what ways it is less secure ("secure" is not really a one-dimensional scale)


PoW mining facilities don't have to be large. Outlawing big mining facilities would likely be the best thing that could happen, because that would shatter them into a million smaller pieces that could not be effectively regulated. Subtle pressure is perhaps more problematic. See below. Governments are not (always) dumb though; maybe this is why no one is really pushing banning.


First mover advantage is overrated anyway. Historically only a few first movers actually ended up dominating. How do you make a law out of something that requires cherry picked exceptions to support? Seems like bullshit to me.


If that's true then we are home free when it comes to mining because countless people grow weed and these busts are routine enough to be part of the landscape, with no real effect on the ultimate market situation. PoW with 1/10 the number of mining facilities as there are grows would be very secure, very decentralized, and highly resistant to being undermined by regulation (unlike Bitcoin now run by a few big farms and pools). But see above of course. If governments don't ban and start busting people then this doesn't happen.


No, it really is "he doesn't understand how it works", or he does (or more likely people who work for him do) but he actively wants to undermine  it. "The blockchain" is nonsense without a native currency. Even PoS requires the ability to issue native tokens in order to incentivize people to do it (and even then in current PoS systems, many don't even bother). Hash chains (which is what you are left with if you remove the native issuance) are nothing new and not particularly interesting.

The bigger question behind all this in my mind is whether crypto actually solves any useful problem that anyone cares about. Outside of gold bugs and some anti-Fed zealots no one really cares about "fixed supply" and all that stuff. The existing banking system works pretty well for swipe-your-card-and-pump-gas. Likewise for e-commerce. With Paypal, Swipe, etc. even ordinary people can do convenient payments via the existing banking systems. Where is the compelling use case for crypto coins? I'm not sure it exists (outside of a complete collapse 10x worse than 2007 that makes people demand something radically different).

Overall a good balanced post and a refreshing change from the usual pure-hype/FUD dichotomy with little actual thought.

^this x 1000

so much of crypto i could describe as solutions looking for a problem.

My thoughts on eMunie is that when I see a technical paper that explains how it works, then I will spend the time to evaluate it.

If all I see is the benefits then I am not interested. I know that most sales persons are taught to sell benefits rather than features becasue it actually works with many people. I just happen not to be one of those persons, so I simply dismiss it as complex.

That's irrelevant. In analyzing an entire system it can be, and usually is, the interactions that are highly complex and critically important, not the components. That includes interactions with the outside world.

Very simple. Show me a poor, homeless person, that accepts credit or debit cards. In person cash works but over the Internet, across international borders? Crypto currencies solve this very simple problem.

Edit: Allmost all electronic payments systems are primarially designed to transfer wealth from the middle class or wealthy individuals to large corporations and governments. They fail badly when the payer is poor. As for when the recipient is poor they fail completly.

That sounds like a small market to me.

Sure, algorithmic complexity is irrelevant, ok then  ::)

You don't need to know all the high level interactions to achieve an understand how something works.  

Relativity theory can be digested by anyone of sound mind, and they can form an understanding of it at a good enough level to visualize what is taking place.  

Getting into the detail is a different matter, but that is not what I was trying to say.

sorry how many poor homeless people use a crypto  ???

over the internet, banktransfers, paypal, credit card, all work just fine, and most people have no problems here.

I was also going to answer the unbanked.  No need to be homeless. In many countries bank accounts are rare. In some countries where bank accounts are more common, fees are very high and there are lots of restrictions on international transfers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
M-Pesa is huge, but run by the phone company and with much higher fees than bitcoin. There is demand for crypto!

Higher fees are kind of a weak argument. Bitcoin doesn't have a compelling model to scale up without enormous costs or becoming centralized (or both). So it can't really deliver low fees on a large scale either, or at least we can't say it can with high confidence. Now maybe it can with things like the lightning network, sidechains, or even long-term continuation of Moore's Law, but there is no real consensus to pursue any of those paths, so what we have now is an unclear future (in part because no one really knows if any of them will work).

M-Pesa is actualy an exception but only works in Kenya. On a bus between Kenya and Tanzania it fails. There is a different incompatible M-Pesa in Tanzania. The market is huge as most of the world's population is poor. Fees are critical here. If it costs $12 for someone in Canada to pay $70 to someone is Kenya that is fail. I witnessed this at the local post office. Crypto can solve this problem.

Market size is the product of the number of potential customers times the average demand for the product from each of those customers. Poor customers have small average demand per customer by definition. So is the market really huge? I don't know.

Let's say it is though. How can crypto really focus on serving that market then? It seems quite different from where the focus is now.

I was referring to the validity of coins as a store of value, not a chain without native currency.


Of course, decentralized exchanges.  Also, for example, the ability for software or game devs to do things like self publish their own software on a platform like Bitshares 2.0 (possibly emunie as well - if Emunie works) instead of having to use Steam or GOG.  Since the platforms have a native currency, plus USD pegged assets, they're already their own payment processors.  You have the ability to integrate that 2.0 platform front end to navigate to and purchase the files on the provider's back end.

An example I posted in another thread of a simple way to do this:

1)  First, add a simple to use, peer to peer, off-chain, encrypted messenger that doesn't utilize 3rd party servers, with a non-bloated interface, something resembling Aim Lite to your 2.0 crypto client.

2)  Next, expand on this messenger functionality by allowing users to set file permissions for people on your list, using both global variables for any contact, and also allowing to set more fine control per individual, giving directory access to each other.  This would basically be a way more cut down and less bloated version of the program DC++, which is open source file sharing software, so might be able to have some donor code for this use.  You're adding file sharing capability to your client for both personal use between friends and vendor use.

3)  Since you now have a monetary system, a dollar peg, and a file sharing system with granular control over users and permissions, you now have the backbone for users to open their own stores like GOG.com and Steam, or just individual game studios or software developers themselves operating them.  Your 2.0 platform would just be the front end, while a business would have to integrate their back end into it.  You of course have all the technical difficulties of monolithic vs compartmentalized approach, but I'm sure it could be sorted out somehow.  The messenger friend list is just a database entry on their back end, for all intents and purposes, so a game company could just auto accept new user invites, auto share demo folders with them, then have a trigger to increase folder permissions when a purchase is made to be able to forever download the game.  This could be done as easily as browsing a folder directory, then when you click it, it comes up with a message saying it requires 20 BitUSD or Emunie for access to this folder, or proprietary store interface menus could be launched within the program or built in browser as well.

Yes, all of this stuff is being done off-chain with the exception of the payment processing, but who cares?  You're building off chain functionality into your clients in order to facilitate on-chain commerce.

What is the counterexample?

Here is a very small example of this market. http://www.irinnews.org/report/88397/haiti-us-remittances-keep-the-homeland-afloat (http://www.irinnews.org/report/88397/haiti-us-remittances-keep-the-homeland-afloat). The thing about the poor is that there are many of them, so even if they each only send and receive a little it adds up fast. I picked Haiti because it is one of the poorest countries in the world. There are many more.

How crypto can help?

1) Build the payment infrastructure that allows for person to person international payments, with no middlemen.
2) Do not worry about "bloat"
3) Let Moore's, Kryder's and Nielsen's laws do the rest.

Will it work? There is a good chance that it will; however there are no guarantees.

Poor people and remittance is huge IF the fees are seen as significantly lower and ease of use is there.

But homeless people using bitcoin?    Really.

How many homeless have you actually intereacted with? Some are just down on their luck, but most are mentally disabled, drug addicts, or both. They use barter economy and don't have the ability to store long fancy passcodes or keep data. Sure some might have a smart phone but shit gets lost and stolen way to fast.


Bitcoin had a utility when people thought it was anonymous and they could get prohibited items, such as drugs with mail order. Silk road busts crushed this notion. This has left altcoin speculating as the main use for btc. And altcoin speculating is in the toilet.

Crypto needs a pissed off gov person to come on the news and say, those damned kids are using [insert name here] crypto to buy drugs and theres nothing we can do about it

 i replied earlier, but yeah litecoin for 1.

$WBB is on the way to something great

Homeless using Bitcoin. http://www.wired.com/2013/12/bitcoin-homeless-redux/ (http://www.wired.com/2013/12/bitcoin-homeless-redux/).

Edit 1: Now if they are addicted probably not. The idea of say a heroin addict paying for his next fix online and then waiting two weeks in withdrawal for the drug to arrive by mail does not make much sense to me.
Edit 2: I have worked with homeless people. I have also observed a person spend $50 to make a $20 payment online. Poverty ain’t cheap when it comes to online payments.

The offchain apps are def the value add to any core api because it brings in real world usage.. I did about 11 plugins to shopping carts for bitshares and this is the kind of thing that makes a core protocol take off.. When you have the ability to make things better for consumer and vendor at no extra complication. Because the pegs you now don't have to change existing web architecture to start understanding other new currencies people haven't hewrd of. To achieve network affect you leverage today's architecutre and make it better instead of the other way around. Once network is achieved people can learn about the native currency and start using that.

kinda lost when people quote banking fees, transfer, payment fees etc

because it rarely cost me anything to transfer between countries or make any online payments or purchase (i work in china often live in austalia, and have travelled internationally alot)....I've always had zero bank fees here in australia, just have to research and shop around. china have more trouble banking across the regions (kinda a strange system) then using its banking os.


most expensive payment system i've experienced is bitcoin oddly enough.

I'm not disputing since I don't know. Can you point to specific github activity on the litecoin repo by Bitcoin core devs themselves?

Hmm. Isn't that the opposite of what Buffet was saying? I'm not sure since I don't know the context but "the blockchain not the currency" is something that is claimed a lot by various commentators.



I don't see it. Using regular dollars seems fine for that. It certainly hasn't hampered Steam or thousands of games published on Steam, Xbox, mobile.

Where is the compelling value here?

And what good are decentralized exchanges if the things you are exchanging have no real use? It seems like a dog chasing its tail to me.

A stock exchange which clears trades trustlessly without frontrunning and hfts is a compelling case for a dex usecase. The assets that people care about have on/off ramps which instantly create value in those assets proportionate to the level of service those ramps can provide.

This is not an uncommon experience for many people. Same here. Why would I use Bitcoin for a domestic payment when I can get 1-2% cash back by using a credit card? The reality is that more often than not those who are involved with crypto - currency as: developers, investors / speculators, miners, investors or employees of crypto currency businesses etc., are not the primary market for the use of crypto currency as a payment method. The same online payment that "costs" me -1%, with a credit card can cost someone else 100% or more in fees.

Better clearing, yes I agree with that. It is a niche application that won't ever matter to people outside the industry, but nevertheless it is a significant opportunity. As for decentralized exchanges, I'm not so sure they don't increase opportunities for front running by being slow. When you talk about HFTs those are situations where speed of light delays matter. People have tried to build non-real-time liquidity pools before and it hasn't really caught on. So we'll see, but I'm not convinced it is compelling.

Even so that's largely inside baseball for traders (whether professional or otherwise) and wouldn't be of much interest to the Average Joe or Jane by any means. What ArticMine is talking about seems closer, potentially.

but you see thats the point, i do have a need for a p2p currency (and within my needs is a huge market) yet that need todate is not being served.

you're expressing as if the only need for cryptocurrency is humanitarian type issues, does anyone in development really care what tribes in africa do, or feeding the homeless?  not saying it from a heartles point of view, many would help were they can, but seriously its certainly not the driving force behind the tech.

certainly way better ways to help the underdeveloped world then token efforts with cryptos.

Right, they'd need infrastructure to handle that as well. How many of them share a phone, or smartphone, if you're lucky enough to locate one? Those things are increasingly designed to be used by about one person. Not a community centered around crypto banking.

Then they'd need a functional network on which to support a crypto banking infrastructure with mostly full coverage across the geographic area, and a non-subsidized way to pay for that.

Then they'd need so much more.

There's so much that you'd basically just have to hand to them freely that you'd basically save more money by tossing out the crypto and giving the homeless a home.

It's just too costly for the third world. First world doesn't have much left to give with all these trillions of dollars of debt and inflating population growth through social programs these days.

These people don't need crypto.

They need railways. They need roads. They need water. They need livestock. They need farmland.

Alternatively, after more than 6000 years of history has shown, perhaps the extent of the third world is exactly where it's at right now, and they instead need nothing.

It is not just about charity. I am talking about transactions, including for profit commerce, anywhere in the world where:

1) At least one of the participants has an income below the US poverty line. 11,770 USD for single person or 24,250 USD for a family of four. http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines (http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines)
2) It is not an in person transaction. (Cash is very much still king for in person transactions involving poor people)

I am not saying this is the only market but rather that this is a huge if not the largest market for p2p crypto currency.

Edit: In many underdeveloped parts of the world this is the vast majority of the population and many people whose income is below the US thresholds would not even be considered "poor" by local standards.

my point was more they need less stealing of their resources by the developed nations, and less war.

at the end of the day tis all about resources rather then fiat.

anyway to get back on topic.

i say my needs are not being meet in crypto. other more traditional means serve me better then anything thats come out of this community (and i'm definitely not alone, as anyone whos tried to use cryptos as a currency would see).

so what is needed in a p2p currency?

Out of curiosity. What needs are not being met?

lol where to begin.

a usable, simple, widely accepted p2p currency, involving no money changes (ie fee free), with no centralised control, that retains a stable price.

What you're asking requires the involvement of millions of people.  That can't be designed into a currency.

Only governments can force millions of people to use a certain currency, so it makes no sense for you to expect it to happen without centralized control. 

Moving money takes work, so fees will always exist.  As long as there is more than one currency in the world, there will always be "money changes".

disagree completely. very simplistic way of looking at things that there are already existing solutions too.

Well that seems easy, then.  Is that what you want from a currency?  Just whatever you say, with no explanation required?

You say you want "a usable, simple, widely accepted p2p currency, involving no money changes (ie fee free), with no centralised control, that retains a stable price".

As you know, it doesn't exist.  As most people know, it's impossible for that to exist immediately.  It takes time, and Bitcoin is headed there.  

But you can't expect everything overnight.  Even American Express doesn't fit your requirements as a payment processor.  No fiat money is decentralized, and each fiat currency is mainly accepted in only one region.  So even when governments force people to use a currency, it still doesn't "meet your needs".

Maybe, like a woman making excuses for sleeping with other men besides her husband, saying "my needs aren't being met" is just an excuse that doesn't mean anything.  It's just some vague way of rejecting any responsibility for your own life by implying that it's someone else's responsibility to meet your needs.  

The things you say you want in a currency:
 - usable
 - simple
 - widely accepted
 - p2p
 - no money changes/fee free
 - no centralized control
 - stable price  

So before Bitcoin, how many of those needs were met with any currency?
And how many of those things does Bitcoin already do?

 - Bitcoin is usable.  

 - Bitcoin is relatively simple, especially compared to "go create your own new decentralized p2p currency, something which has never existed before".  Bitcoin solved that problem.

 - Bitcoin is widely accepted in global terms, moreso than any currency other than maybe the U.S. Dollar.  But even U.S. Dollars don't work in vending machines in most countries.  I can't use dollars, or my credit or debit cards, to buy anything from England online.  My banks don't allow it.  But I can use Bitcoin, so Bitcoin is more widely accepted in that case. 

 - p2p...yes, crypto is really neglecting your personal needs.  When will anyone in crypto develop a p2p currency?  This guy has NEEDS!  

 - No money changes - again, you're asking for one worldwide currency.  All other currencies would have to be outlawed in order to get rid of "money changes".  That requires centralized control.  A lot of closet authoritarians whine about the rules, but they only whine to get the rules changed by the existing authorities.  In other words, they love authority and depend upon it.  They might have a little riot sometimes, but the only thing that really appeases them is for Big Daddy Government to pay them some attention.

 - Fee Free - Can you give us an example of such a currency?  Of course you can't.  Today marks the 20th birthday of eBay;  compare those fees to Bitcoin.  For 20 years, millions of people have been buying online.  Their best option has been 3% fees and waiting 3 days to get their money.  Until Bitcoin.

 - Stable Price - the British Pound is the world's oldest currency, and it's not stable.  But then, Bitcoin is the world's newest currency and is already worth 150 times more than the British Pound.  But Bitcoin has already been out for like 6 years, isn't that enough time already?  We should probably give up, it's a lost cause if it can only be worth 150 times more in 6 years.  30 years ago the Pound was worth $2.40, and now it's worth $1.50.  

 - No centralized control...So you want a new currency that no one has ever used before, that isn't controlled or maintained by anyone, and you want EVERYONE to accept it, FOR FREE, and give up all their life's savings in exchange for this new money, AND you want it to be totally simple and easy to use, like no big deal right?  You just put an app on your phone, click it, and all your life's savings is gone and now you have phone money!  Simple!  But you want all of that to happen without anyone being in charge of it, and you want it NOW.

Seriously, isn't Bitcoin already more than you could ever expect to happen?  Even if you say it doesn't fit your requirements, it fits them better than anything else does.  So you have to choose which items on your list are more important;  a newer crypto might have some features you like, but it won't be more widely accepted or more stable than Bitcoin.    

The point is that you already have currency that meets your needs, or you wouldn't be able to buy anything and you would starve to death.  The real question is whether Bitcoin is an improvement over the currency you were previously using.  It's one thing to say "This is the best option in the world, and eventually it can be made even better".  But what you're saying is more like "The best thing in the world isn't good enough for me, I wish someone would make it perfect."

runpaint, i appreciate such a comprehensive reply, i actually do  :)

but we are on completely different pages and i could spend months explaining it to you.

do i think bitcoin is the best option for now, that could evolve into what i need?

i wish it was true but no. i've not been happy with bitcoin from day one, and to misuse someone elses words, i think bitcoins been a distraction.

i think there was more potential before bitcoin and bitcoins been a huge step backwards.

i've been around alt to fiat long before bitcoin existed.

everything i've said todate isn't that hard to solve, you just have to get away from the bitcoin thinking you know.

just one example.

yes i agree to send currency costs, infrastructure needs to be built, bitcoin's solution was the blockchain and mining, and this has a cost to it, and if its ever to become mainstream these cost will increase.

but why not just piggy back on infrastructure that already exists?

Is that possible?  The existing infrastructure is owned by governments and banks and corporations.  Even if we could copy the infrastructure and use it for a new currency, it would have to be centralized because that's how it's designed.

Or if we wanted to make a new currency and plug it in to the existing system, it would have to use the existing units.  To send money using a checking account number or credit card number would require converting into the local fiat currency. 

Before Bitcoin existed, I was invited to a small conference for a currency called "Trade Dollars" (also known as "barter bucks") from a company called TradeBank.  In essence, it worked the same as regular debit card money, except it was only accepted at a few places and there was a 10% fee.  Because they copied the existing model of infrastructure, but on a much smaller scale, they got all the drawbacks of our financial system with none of the benefits. 

The only advantage was that other local users would be forced to buy from you, since they had nowhere else to spend Trade Dollars;  that advantage was cancelled out by the fact that you yourself had nowhere to spend the Trade Dollars you accepted.  I went to the conference because one of my customers wanted to sign me up, and I indulged him to keep a good relationship with his account.  But I didn't go so far as to join, since it was such a stupid idea that it was almost a scam. 

Their entire appeal was based on the idea that "when you barter, you're getting everything for half price".  It was aimed at small businesses, and the angle was "you only pay wholesale prices for your inventory, but you're trading it for full retail price".  You see, if you sell a $100 item at your store, but you only pay $50 for it wholesale, you can barter it for a $100 item from someone else's store.  That's what they call 50% off.  I explained to my customer that U.S. dollars work the exact same way, without the 10% fee.  He said, "But with Trade Dollars I'm getting 50% off." 

I actually drew him a chart: 
You pay $50-->trade it for 100 Trade Dollars-->spend 90 Trade Dollars.
Next column:
You pay $50-->sell it for $100-->spend $100. 

He still wasn't convinced, because they had sold him the idea that he was getting everything half price with "the barter system". 

So it was a fiat altcoin - just like fiat, with a few arbitrary adjustments, and without the advantage of widespread acceptance.  There is no reason to use Trade Dollars when you could use Dollars instead.  Bagholders tried to hype it and get new users, but they had no selling points to offer. 

But Bitcoin uses a different system.  It does not bring with it all the drawbacks of our financial system.  So there are reasons to use Bitcoin instead of Dollars.

And that is why crypto altcoins are different from fiat altcoins like Trade Dollars.  If an altcoin is based on Bitcoin, it has all the features of Bitcoin plus or minus the arbitrary adjustments unique to the altcoin.  It's just like Bitcoin, but without the advantage of widespread acceptance.  If you add widespread acceptance, then it might be just as good as Bitcoin, and better than fiat for some purposes.  In London, you can pay your rent with RE/MAX realtors using Litecoin or Dogecoin.  For that purpose, Litecoin and Dogecoin work just as well as Bitcoin.

Paid is paid, whether you use Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Paypal, wire transfer, money order, or traveler's cheque.  People choose to use different methods even though they all do the same thing.  If a retailer has the ability to accept one type of credit card, it's a small matter to accept another new card which uses the same system.  If a retailer accepts personal checks, the check can come from any bank out of thousands of banks. 

And now we have Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, NXT, and any other altcoin you want to use.  I'm personally involved with Fractalcoin, Keycoin, Lyrabar, and Unitus, and people have asked me why I care about "shitcoins".  What's good about them, they ask.  The easy answer is "everything that's good about Bitcoin".  They all do the same thing, and there's plenty of room for all of them just like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.  Once a retailer adds the ability to accept Bitcoin, it's a small matter to accept any other cryptocoin. 

Now, if you think DPoS is the future, then there's plenty of room for that too.  You'll probably be able to spend it the same places you can spend Bitcoin.  A debit card and a credit card do diffferent things - one uses money you have, the other puts you into debt.  But they function exactly the same for the purpose of buying something.  The cashier doesn't care if you have the money or if you're going into debt, as long as the receipt is paid.  It will be the same with Bitcoin-type transactions.  When you buy groceries, it won't matter that Bitcoin "doesn't do anything" or "wastes electricity", while your other payment method can be used for smart contracts or uses DPoS.  They're all cryptocurrencies, and they're all together within a new category of money. 

But if you have a new currency that is based on the old fiat infrastructure, then why would you use it instead of fiat?   

I saw a guy in the exchange trollbox yesterday that said he left money in BitUSD (the Bitshares dollar peg) for something like 6 months, came back and it was still there, same dollar value as before.  The market pegs for a stable currency seem to already work.  I believe Nubits also has a dollar peg, but I don't think it's as good a mechanism.  There are many ways to do it from price feeds, to market maker, etc.


I don't think this statement is correct.  If systems such as Bitshares DPoS and Emunie (like I said, if Emunie actually works), gain the same widespread adoption as Bitcoin, Bitcoin will be dead pretty fast since it handles 0.00007% the transaction volume and 0.00167% the speed with probably more expensive transactions on top of that after the miner subsidy lowers.

This is probably why if you go in Poloniex trollbox right now and see six lines of text in a row, five of them say they're long Bitshares, and the sixth will be something like "Where did the Ethereum volume go???"

Volume on BTS just went to the moon equaling Ethereum, but it's still trading in a small range, meaning someone is accumulating and not trying to maniacally push it up.  Seems like Ethereum people are diversifying.

https://i.imgur.com/dNq0NcY.jpg

A quote from a different thread:


He must not read Zerohedge.  CNYK, the company with 1 employee, 0 revenue, 0 assets, and no product made it to a five billion dollar market cap.  We probably haven't even seen a real crypto bubble yet.  The thing about the so called 2.0 platforms is, they have the advantage of being more than currency, being able to run decentralized exchanges, derivative products, USD pegs, store integration and payment processing, etc, so they can kind of blend in with normal items traded on Wall Street.  Meaning even if Bitcoin died for some reason, and people suddenly don't trust cryptocurrency, some platforms like Ethereum and Bitshares would still exist.  With the asterisk *if Ethereum develops into a platform with a valid consensus mechanism to support it and economic activity since I don't know what it's supposed to be now.

Question for the OP? It's interesting that you haven't mentioned NXT at all. I mean, you did write about POS, but you mentioned Vanilla coin and nothing about the most developed platform and coin with the most features.

Did you do this on purpose since you believe that NXT has no future at all or did you just put all POS coins in the same basket, Vanilla, NXT, etc..

Thanks!

It was actually referring to vanilla proof of stake, as in standard, and not Vanillacoin.  For all intents and purposes, both coins use this mechanism, just with NXT attempting some proprietary bandaids on top of it.

NXT is for kids while xmr bts and emunie are for grown ups...

That's why Crypti is built with DPoS as well, and all decentralized applications will run in their own DPoS sidechains as well.  :o 8)

Did someone mention being out on a limb?

Far from a technical person I've allowed my understanding of the cryptosphere osmosify within my mind over the year or so since discovering it's existence.

This thread is definitely one of the better one's I've been able to absorb with a modicum of clarity. When BTC et al becomes the simple mechanism of commerce for the everyday user without the corrupt machinations of current systems, then we will begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel toward a more egalitarian future for all who live on this planet.

As always there will be those who are more equal than others through circumstance, talent, hard work and luck.


There is a caveat however that I would like to point toward. We can do everything there is to be done to bring this world to a more sane plane and it may come to pass that that equilibrium may hold for a millennium or two, or three. But there is always the possibility that future generations will become bored with that status quo and thus chaos will have it's turn at the wheel again.


This thread is worth a pin...please continue to osmosify my mind.


~may all hatred cease and let there be peace~  

please explain

If someone read the original post, followed the conclusion, and went to market with that information, you would currently be up 40% profit in a time span of 24 hours:

https://i.imgur.com/gXx1fDE.png

yes, but again your not even on the same page, and to put you where i'm at would be too long a journey with zero point.

however earlier you eluded to bitcoin evolving into what i (and others) need, personally i can't see this happening as bitcoins been going more in the opposite direction, however i don't discount an offshoot of bitcoin evolving so.

if they' done the same 12 months ago they'd be down 90%  :o

24hrs in any market (unless you're daytrading and your op post certainly was not daytrading advice), has little relevance.

Hold your horses my man! 8 months ago BTS was at 0.00009, then started falling as a rock. Trust me, I held over 100,000 BTS, but then they started falling as a rock from the sky.

Also, this little recovery smells just like a little pump and dump scheme, since I cant find any reason, any news, why the BTS are rising at the moment!


.

2.0 will be out before oct 21.  They will announce a 1 month testing period before the "pitchfork."  Feature set and browser based wallet look pretty nice...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1171829.0

True, and it's good that you're able to admit it.

saves us both alot of meaningless effort ;)

You don't reach what is now double the volume of Ethereum without fundamentals

https://i.imgur.com/aElNt3p.png

Ethereum itself has only been on the market for a relatively short time. Coins get hot, then they're not (and maybe someday hot again). That's how this game works.

Take a look after 6-12 months over the course of the entire period and see if the picture is the same. It may be, it may not be, but I agree that 24 hours is almost entirely meaningless.

I would check back in 3 month. And see where price is

The question here is how do we find the ways crypto can truly help the everyday user, that have not been done yet, and find a way to make them happen.

How do we make a crypto that has a real selling point, that is compelling enough to move the prospective user?

What do people need? What non-crypto platforms are successful now? How can they be improved, joined, and made more useful than they are now, then incorporated into a decentralized crypto?

What brand new ways of doing things can we offer?

Id say blockchain turing completeness combined with a new structured programming design can be powerful for software in general.

i think many of the older 2013 and prior coins have evolved and improved to be of great value/usefulness then the 2.0 original coin types.

In order to reach Joe Public it has to be convenient, and easy enough that someone with a 5 grade education will be able to understand how to use it.
It must be decentralized, in other words a P2P network system.
It must be mobile/portable such as a debit/credit card size preferably or a small screen flip phone.
The network application must be fast as in less than 20 seconds to get a send/receive confirmation back to Joe.

Given these above I am not sure how your going to be able to scale any blockchain to an international Paypal level, let alone to the VISA level.
An example that I have in mind is the SMS text messaging that is used worldwide on 3G flip phones, and I am not talking about any smart phones.
If the SMS texting network could be some how used to send and receive crypto-currency that would be a boon to the crypto environment.

Someone linked this in an XMR thread, probably bullish for crypto in general as people try to avoid more inflationary government "coins":

http://yournewswire.com/denmark-becomes-first-country-to-ban-cash/

Situation for Monero looking kind of blah at the moment, but as everybody knows, someone like Rptiela can just double it's price at any time:


In other news, Bitshares still rising with volume increasing way beyond Ethereum on Poloniex, and any second Kelsey will probably attempt to hand you a brochure for Litecoin for some unknown reason.

Re to the OP:


Bitshares will have privacy with Bitshares 2.0 (can be enabled or disabled within the wallet) too https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=17687.30 (see the whole thread).

Ethereum's proposal for POS is casper. See https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-friendly-ghost/
Review by D. Larimer http://bytemaster.github.io/2015/08/08/Review-of-Casper-Ethereums-proposed-Proof-of-Stake-Algorithm/

Bitassets are backed by Bitshares not by themselves. And Bitshares (BTS) have value apart from being a collateral for Bitassets. BTS is the core asset of a platform that supports many use cases besides Bitassets.

I added the anonymity features link to original post.  As for Ethereum, it doesn't seem like anything is really set in stone for it, so not really worth commenting yet as in saying, so and so will work or won't work in the long term.

Good call! I actually bought 10'000 of 'em before BTS started rolling, at 1466 satoshis. The funny thing is, I bought 'em simply because I had the BTC to spare and I thought it was finally time I refilled my bucket. (I had ~10000 earlier, which I bought at twice the price, but I sold 'em at a loss - ~2500 sats - to switch to something else.)

So there you go: a real-world, real-life case of someone who bought at the bottom. The funny thing is, I had no idea it would take off! I wanted a small stake anyway, the price looked right, and I had some spare BTC at the time I bought. That was all.

I hope everyone remembers this little anecdote when some self-adverted hotshot brags, " I bought ---- at the bottom!" Just because someone did, doesn't mean he did so because of his timing acumen.  


EDIT: Shortly after making this post, I heard an "imaginary winner" echoing in my head: "Kid, why not just say you bought at the bottom and show 'em the screenshot? What, are you afraid that someone's going to pounce on you if you're not naked-in-the-street candid? Are you looking to burnish up your loser cred? Geez, do yourself a favour and learn how people tick!"

Sometimes it helps to ask yourself about the other side, I suppose...

Oh, I'm sure we all know the reason. ;)

I'm sure people have made money on Litecoin in the past by knowing that it usually benefits from a delayed bump after BTC, but there's probably too many other big or bigger players in the room now for those benefits to continue in a significant way.  It's overall less risky and more profitable to find whatever you think has the best fundamentals and stick with that, rather than trying to utilize some kind of symbiotic relationship with another coin.

If a PoW coin really did go all the way and take up one fourth the world's entire power supply or whatever it is people speculate, there's only going to be one of them, there's not going to be others, so it's kind of an irrational strategy from many angles where past performance obviously does not dictate future performance.  I do not see that scenario playing out for either BTC or LTC though.

As for BTC living or dying and it's effect on other currency, as I said in the thread below:

Bitshares always assumed that the value of BTS doesnt come from being money itself or "digital gold"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT9ICMfUDjk

http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/DAC/Distributed_Autonomous_Company

If your consensus mechanism is relatively bulletproof, which I believe DPoS now is considering you can specify how many delegates you require for a transaction instead of just 51, then the native currency is obviously going to have large value by default.

I haven't watched all of them, but the best Larimer video is probably the 4 minute one below.  It's like watching a recreation of NASA worker from the 70's, complete with identical outfit and all.  Try not to drool at the screen too much, Kelsey:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBlAVeVFWFM

I didn't understand you argument there. Can you expand?

I predict the 70's style will be a big advantage to make this go viral on social media at some point ("crazy scientist created Bitcoin successor").

Most people make the argument that a block chain is useless without a native currency, as Smooth has already done so in this thread.  Bitshares has/is a native currency, so it's not a drawback.

I skimmed the thread but didn't find the argument. Can you point me to it or rephrase it?

He was talking about something kind of off-topic because everything listed in the original post has/is it's own native currency:

Somewhat, except to the extent that some of the use cases of the coins listed there seem to revolve primarily around off-chain assets. A blockchain that relies on that for most of its value is probably doomed. Merely "having" a native currency isn't enough if the native currency is only of incidental significance.

I don't know to what extent this applies to the coins listed in the OP. It seems some of that will have to play out in the market and while we might have opinions on how that will occur, most (if not all) of those opinions will probably be wrong.

which coin uses offchain assets?

Nxt as presently used would be one example (included within OP under PoS). As I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong), most of the value is presently accounted for via the asset exchange (as opposed to the the native currency being a store of value or used transactionally)

Bitshares and Ethereum are both "platforms" to some extent, which means whether they are relying on offchain assets for most of their value is more of a practical question that will have to play out over time.

These assets on NXT dec. exchange are traded on chain...

Yes I understand that. What I mean is that the value is off-chain. If you have some venture that issues shares on Nxt, you can move those shares to another platform without any effect on the underlying venture.

In order for a chain to have value it has to be the chain itself that is valued, not claims on external assets that happen (today) to be traded on that chain. At least to a large extent; being used as a platform does give the chain itself some value, but it is a tiny fraction of the asset value.

Really? PLEASE EXPOUND WITH LINKS AND VERIFIABLE FACTS OF THIS CLAIM.

What large PoW mining facilities for Monero exist?

As far as I know there are very little if none that are "large".

Botnets are not large mining facilities that can be shut down easily.

No Cryptonight ASICs on the horizon (not that there couldn't be one made) currently.

Not sure how much more efficient a Cryptonight ASIC would be over a GPU or CPU.

Indeed they are pretty much the opposite of something that is going to be successfully shut down or even regulated by the government any time in the foreseeable future. If anything that is a lot more like the pot grows mentioned in the OP, which to me seems like close to a best case for decentralized PoW mining. (I'm not sure whether that is better or worse than end users just running a mining client like Bittorrent, but it seems close.)

Perhaps the price is "blah". But it is important to remember the fundamentals of what is going on here.

I've been guilty of looking at the price of X-coin (any coin, take your pick) and purely judging based on that in the past.

What is very interesting to me are the technological, financial, social, legal, macro-economical, and possibly political implications that are at hand when you have digital currencies that are trailblazing and going into uncharted waters.

This time in history of crypto reminds me of the slow market during 2012.

The pot example/analogy gave me a little chuckle.

But more seriously, I see the same as well. What would be the best case for decentralized PoW mining if the playing field as far as mining is concerned is more "level" or "fair" when comparing CPU vs GPU vs ASICs?

Wasn't there some talk some months back about smart mining integration into the client? That did interest me as it would give the end user the ability to mine XMR in the background with their unused CPU cycles at a much more fair rate than CPU vs GPU in many other coins.

It would be awesome if the decentralized structure of BTC or LTC would be constrained to that level playing field I mentioned earlier.

I was there when LTC had cpu mining. That was an interesting time as I got to get a glimpse first hand how it was to mine with CPUs as opposed to using my gigantic bitcoin mining rigs at the time.

Is there any site or application that is tracking the current number of monero nodes (full nodes) that are on the network?

Yes that is still planned, probably in the next full release after the one that is coming up now.


This site (link below) tries to track them but has issues with part-time nodes, and the site itself seems to be down right now. The best estimate seems to be 50-100 full time, several hundred part-time but up regularly. I'm sure there are more that are very part time, brought online only when people want to transact or check balances.

Hopefully that number will increase significantly in the future with smart mining (it is intended to minimize its resource footprint to encourage, or at least not discourage, people to leave it running in the background like a Bittorrent client) and some other things that are in the works.

http://cucjrcntebdskoljhpxj4xc3bmietslv7nfg5uy7itgrbgppcb6q.b32.i2p.us

You mean the MPAs that are on bitdhares relying on pricefeeds derive their value in external entities outside the chain meaning the system by in large which uses it is useless if those external entities become useless or are regulated for use in the system?

But you do have UIAs which aren't based on feeds and ethereum ? There are no oracles in that one or price feeds gas is a market for fees how is that offchain? I don't see how either are relying on offchain for "most of their  value"

As far as I understood.. Fiat pegs are generally used to achieve network affect and thereafter if these cryptos become usable by avg joe then there is a push towards pegging to other cryptos instesd and perhaps by then there will be atomic transactions implemented anyway so only real thing you would peg to is gold or something a prediction market may need.

Space heating. It could also include heating such things as swimming pools, greenhouses, even domestic hot water. Pot is not a good example since it is typically done in a clandestine manner and the need is more for light rather than heat alone. In a jurisdiction where it is legal a greenhouse full of pot could work. The reason space heating works is because the heat only has more value than the electricity consumed becasue it is cheap to distribute electricity but next to impossible to distribute heat.

No, I wasn't referring to pegged assets, but to external assets (i.e. claims on some external entity, such as a business, development project, service, etc.). Pegged assets are a different question which has its own set of issues, but not the same ones necessarily.

so travelling around some communities its interesting to see various alts evolve, problem i see is most are evolving the exact same way.

like all the 2013 coins that went POS to stay relevant  ::)

anyone care to state some old alts of bitcoin/litecoin, that have gone their own path and done something unique, or solved an issue you yourself had with bitcoin?

Yes we were using coloured coins to do services in syscoin and now are going turing complete to do the same services and more. We are issuing a new token on ethereum for this like augur... Also it's possible to be turing complete on Bitcoin clone via AT which will open many doors and I will probably make this happen soon.
Syscoin is scrypt merge mined pow.

Currently main target is a decentralized marketplace as we have become experts in that. Once turing complete we can do many other things.

The biggest issue that I have had with Bitcoin going back to 2011 / 2012 is the 1 MB fixed blocksize limit and the lack of an adaptive blocksize limit. I have recently come to the conclusion that this is closely related to securing the coin after the emission runs out; namely with just transaction fees. The latter very likely needs a tail emission.

So what POW coins have addressed this issue:

Full Solution:
1) Adaptive blocksize limits and tail emission Monero (XMR)

Only partial solution:
1) Tail emission only with no adaptive blocksize limits: Dogecoin (DOGE)
2) Adaptive blocksize limits only with no tail emission: Bytecoin (BCN). Bytecoin has a serious  premine / ninjamine issue but one can consider Dashcoin (DSH) which is a clone of Bytecoin without the premine / ninjamine. Most other cryptonote coins have adaptive limits with no tail emission (except Monero, above, which is a full solution).

Edit 1: Dashcoin is not to be confused with DASH (Formally known as Darkcoin, which has inherited both problems from Litecoin)
Edit 2: I found out about Monero back in 2014 because I was researching the fixed blocksize issue in Bitcoin. Only after I was satisfied that Monero did not have the fixed blocksize issue did I start to even consider Monero.

tried monero again this morning after previous fails.

i'm lost on it, is it command line?

Mostly yes, but there are some third party GUI wrappers. Unfortunately the developer of one of the most popular, MoneroX, (who was 17 years old) has moved on to other things, and it is suffering from lack of upgrades.

There is also MyMonero.com which is web wallet that doesn't store your spend key (so neither the site nor someone who accessed its database could steal your coins). There is a similar site (uses some of the same code) called monerowallet.com which does store your spend key but encrypted by a client-side password (similar to blockchain.info). The latter also has a mobile app version.

from my perspective its alot harder to use (and a hassle to start using) then even bitcoin, which itself is too hard for mass adoption.

Absolutely. I don't think anyone claims that Monero is a mass-market ready.

so then now tis all premine? (not that most aren't in the same boat).

Premine doesn't mean what you think it means.

EDIT: But if in your mind not "mass-market ready" constitutes a premine then I wouldn't say that most aren't in the same boat, rather all are.

How can it be with all the "shilling" and "spamming"? One cannot have it both ways.  

in the context of this forum verses the large pop you wish it to be adopted tis premined.

agreed and its something i've argued against about bitcoin itself and especially for the longest time. i doubt anything from this community would be accepted by the mass' on this alone.

hardly makes any of them an alternative to the bankers controlled fiat, this crypto community is just trying to become the new bankers.

You think penny stocks are premined? Do you think big caps are premined around big news releases? You think fed mins cause the entire market to be premined?

The insiders know information others don't leaving others having to buy later at higher rates.. Similarly those that do their research and even those on the inside of Bitcoin get in early while everyone else buys at higher rates.. How is it different than any other market.?

Part of the reward calculation is the risk.. It's so high that people will understand that there was a chance that they wouldn't get their money back (if your an avg joe you think Bitcoin is Ponzi) thus if you end up buying higher it's because of the premium on the instrument because the fact that it's a real recognized trading instrument and it's priced in as such.

Just the way all markets work.
Maybe this will sync in: you buy a property that needs tlc.. It's not priced in as such because the seller didn't know the labour required and discounted the buyer per negotiations.. Now the buyer renovates and sells for a profit..

Howver imagine the person buying from the renovating seller... Would he have liked to buy it cheaper and fix himself? Would the buyer really care that he has had to pay a premium after the tlc and paid market rate for home? Not so much because there was time and risk involved in doing the renovation.

Onto your second assumption.. Is the home now any worse than most other homes out there at sold rate? No.
Is the fact that your using a crypto over fiat still relevant in context of debt implosion and central bank Ponzi schemes of inflation control? Yes it is.

When the war against govt is won.. People will realize power of crypto over fiat.. Until then it won't be fully priced in.
Risk: govt doesn't get beat.. Doesn't reset.. Status quo.. Fist replacement Crypto project dies
Reward: chsnce to profit at any point the current government control is still in effect

There are other projects that target different markets.. But that is general essence. Imo with bitshares going after nasdaq it may help with markets and save people money and allow for true price discovery.. It doesn't need govt defeat to price in its true potential of that usecase .. It just needs recognition and acceptance by the exchanges that it is the way to go fwd.

seriously we are talking currency, and many of us would like a p2p currency to evolve as an alternative to the fiat corporate systems....hmm...you see thats kinda the whole point.

yeah i know most here, lost track long ago and it became more about ROI, making the next paypal visa, with us guys the new wealthy elite  ::)

i know its too much to ask of people here to think outside the whole fiat mindset, but if you don't there is no point to this whole community; unless its just another get rich quick scheme.

Again it's just how markets work., you don't seem to understand... Plz reread

I tried to be as non-bias as possible in this thread and mentioned the pros and cons of monero, but reaching the half way mining point without a real wallet is a major problem.  People like Fluffypony seem to brush it off as a minor problem...because there's always CLI.  Now we're seeing this problem manifest in the real world in the form of potential users that were turned away due to it - the Australians don't like coins without wallet effect.

This in turn means you're relying on a small amount of CLI whales (Rptiela) instead of mass adoption to push the thing forward, which is an insider's market.  If you have Rptiela on speed dial, this could be a good mid term investment, if not, then it's like going to the dog track.  I'm not going to pretend that most coins don't rely on whale support (ie: market makers), but in this situation, you're probably investing more in the market maker than you are the coin.

As I also mentioned, I don't see a viable end game for PoW for all the reasons stated in the original post.  Some people are going to disagree, but in all cases I think it will prove to be a highly inflexible system, resistant to change, that doesn't scale, with not enough out of the box functionality, no consensus to change it, not enough decentralization, etc etc etc.  If someone were to invent "Martian Consensus Algorithm from space", that provides all benefits and no cons over PoW, you would probably never get consensus to implement it in the real Bitcoin either.

PoW's implementation in Bitcoin was also obviously just proof of concept since it doesn't take things into account like energy price not being a constant.  When something like 2/3rds the cost of producing a coin is electricity now, and this ratio only increasing by the day, the fundamentals people rely on for decentralization just do not function.  People then try to exchange those fundamentals for entirely new fundamentals saying everyone on earth will mine with water heaters.  The mining with water heater solution probably doesn't even work since the profit per unit would be low.  People would leave them on zombie auto pilot for certain pools, and decentralization with pool mining requires a very dynamic, pool hopping userbase.

Since Satoshi seemed to overlook a lot of things like the effect of ASIC, I highly doubt he planned that far in advance for scenarios like the one above.  At that point, if Bitcoin with PoW functioned, it would entirely be by accident and not by design.  It's very important to get as much out of the box functionality as possible, with as little uncertainty as possible, the basic definition of engineering.  This is how I came to the conclusion in the summary section of the original post for what has fundamentals and what doesn't.

We should be grateful to bitcoin for starting the whole crypto currency alt coins are the next generation  because they can correct what went wrong with bitcoin for example this whole fuss about the block limit

This seems like itself an insider's analysis. In actual end user terms, Mymonero.com (and I assume monerowallet.com although I haven't tried it) is about as easy to use you could hope for, including good support for most if not all mobile platforms, and is reasonably safe. The only gripe I have with it really, usability-wise, is that it doesn't support scanning QR codes (possibly the monerowallet.com app does), which would be needed for point-of-sale or easy in-person p2p use, neither of which really exists at all.

So you have a narrow range of probably a few hundred, possibly a few thousand, altcoin speculators on this forum, who can't handle command line and don't accept a web wallet. But those outside of that in both directions -- serious miners/investors/early-adopter types on one end, who are happy with CLI, and "mass market" on the other, who are happy with a web wallet -- are fairly well served. Unless you are looking to encourage and then trade on pumps in this silly altcoin-of-the-day game, there is really no particular reason to care about that group.

The richest people around are the 50-90 year old guys that can barely work a VCR.  I would say, no, the serious investor is not served by the CLI.  Even if they, or one of their henchman can, they'll be put off thinking it's a duct taped together operation.  I mean, look at people like Ron Paul, he's pretty damn good at economics, but by his own admission can't figure out how Bitcoin works and would probably have trouble using a Monero CLI.  At that point you have an Austrian proof, Austrian currency.

Investors meaning those who would invest in cryptos at all.

Bitcoin has a GUI, and had one since 2009. So you just disproved the connection between GUIs and any relevance to the outside world.

Ron Paul, if he could figure out cryptos, could certainly use MyMonero. His technical experts would probably do key management, secret sharing for cold storage, etc. using command line tools the way early Bitcoin investors did, and probably some still do.

The GUI argument is a red herring. The other arguments about lack of mass market appeal are not, but they apply equally to cryptos that do have GUIs.

The non techy investor would probably prefer the more polished project because theyd know it takes proper software development from management down and years to achieve. Cli is just the first step (the data layer) which will serve the next layer to complete the polish. Once you get past that youd look for support and how easy you can find it or lack thereof. Put those 2 things together and you achieve network effect if there is a market for that tech.

I keep reading your positive assertions and I keep wondering whether I'm missing a trick, yet every time I follow up it seems I get a different experience to you.

Is it possible that you are underestimating others’ expectations?

Case in point - the Mymonero web site fails to canonically identify the entity making the privacy statements, rendering them worthless. That's an obvious, no-brainer FAIL --- and worse, whoever’s responsible for the site is apparently either careless or ignorant of that fact which, for me, has to call their competence into question.

Given the cryptocurrency context and all that this implies, it’s a triple word score fail in my book and changes my perception of the service from an untrusted one to an untrustworthy one.

Cheers

Graham

on the topic of the state of cryptos, i'm in the process of going around the many exchanges consolidating where i've odds and ends of coins, converting them into the few coins i like.

what i notice, damn there's such a stack of pointless coins, so much dilution, you see it on coinmarketcap etc but you don't really notice until you go from exchange to exchange trading, how utterly pointless and counterproductive most of it is.

i know many go free market, competition is good, let the market decide etc etc etc. but no, such dilution is not helpful. you have ton of good honest hard working positive people, but spread thin through so many communities.

i'm not saying there can't be multiple coins, but the scene would be so much better off, and healthier liquidity, if the pack was thinned alot.

Although this may be true, it's something that we can't do anything about. It's natural.

I believe the members of these communities will consolidate into one, or a few coins, when worthy ones appear.

When a platform comes that answers that elusive question of "why crypto" to the general public, we will be off and running. Until then, we will only be a bunch of small communities and individuals trading amongst ourselves for the most part.

I also agree that the goal so far seems to be trying to become the new bankers.

Until there is a shift in motivation, and strategy, we will continue in this holding pattern.

you must be aware of the prices of coins its good to have just 2 to 3 types of coin and none of them its much alt coin like LTC or doge and even soo those ones are becouse of stairs factors into dollar of its price you need to be aware that BTC its the price that regulates its importancy you say BTC walking dead i say its never the second coin to have will be like this 7 years the first top of top of all crypto not the alt cryptos not even 42 coin

You just described Linux distributions.

The real problem IMHO is people keep jumping into every new coin as if they're somehow special. There's a vast underestimation of how much effort is poured into Bitcoin Core, and seemingly the belief that it was easy for Bitcoin to get this far and/or its devs are lazy and not pushing the coin forward. The result is you get badly considered one-trick-pony coins that launch and hit the difficulty curve like it's a mountain, but that's going to happen anyway, the problem is people keep buying them too.

Meanwhile, even Bitcoin has huge potential room for improvement, that gets ignored. Lets deploy payment protocol on more systems, formalise payment protocol over NFC, improve bitcoinj or any of the other libraries to let developers get involved, integrate hardware wallets with open source shopping sites, etc. etc. etc.

however the problem is many of us who've been around awhile have watched bitcoin grow, yet head down the regulated, centralised, corporate path......defeating much of the whole point of a p2p currency.

i know people will reply thats likely inevitable with any successful currency, however i think if you setup a truly decentralised p2p currency its possible to avoid.

Full decentralisation of control imposes a harsh and demanding regime on the participants. To be fair to ourselves, this group configuration of untrusted peers and pseudonymous entities is a brand new ball game and punts us far beyond the scope of even the more radical modernistic organisational models in trying to build a set of solid working practices adequate for such a challenge.

My research indicates that even these modern organisational models remain irretrievably mired in the existing centrally-controlled hierarchy (the main thread of thinking even uses the term “healthy hierarchy”).

As an example, Zappos’ switch to the watered-down Holacracy wasn’t seen as a good move by Forbes columnist Steve Denning in his piece Making Sense Of Zappos And Holacracy (http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-sense-of-zappos-and-holacracy/).

By contrast to peer-to-peer, Holacracy’s near-obsessive attention to prescriptive procedural detail just looks Byzantine --- and we’ve beaten them before, in one of the early rounds, IIRC.


Cheers

Graham

if you're thinking in terms of p2p ledgers, yes, but nothing crypto wise you've seen todate has been decentralised, that's just a buzz word here. a truly properly setup dencentralised p2p currency would be indifferent to 'untrusted peers and pseudonymous entities'.

This is 100% the wrong approach to it. It doesn't matter who "they" are, nor whether "they" promise to protect your privacy. Privacy statements are a sham. Ever hear of Ashley Madison?

MyMonero usage is pseudononymous. There is no registration. They don't know who you are, and if you access the site using private methods, they don't even know your IP address. You can create as many accounts as you want, and furthermore you can take your key and use it elsewhere (using p2p software or another service that operated the same way if there were one) without their permission.

Finally, they can't even see where you send coins, because stealth addresses are done in the client (browser). By the time a transaction is sent back to the MyMonero server for relay to the coin network, it is already opaque. Web wallet is a bit of a misnomer. In many ways MyMonero operates more as a standalone wallet in-browser.

Thanks for the response and for confirming my conjecture.

Cheers

Graham

State of Crypto v0.02 changelog
-------------------------------
Added to Bitcoin section:

I)  Many claim Bitcoin has a "monopoly" over crypto.  I would argue this monopoly was broken in December 2013, when Dogecoin broke 200,000 transactions per day, three times Bitcoin's 65,000 on-chain daily transaction volume (although Bitcoin is now leading again).  You could argue on-chain vs off-chain obscures the data, making it not show the full picture.  I would argue the on-chain metric is an important number to maintain, this is why scalability is important, otherwise the system can quickly devolve into a fraudulent, fractional reserve system if everything is done off-chain.

J)  The altcoin market cap appears to be increasing relative to Bitcoin market cap.  Just as we saw a transaction volume divergence in the two sectors before, I believe the price divergence will continue until an alt or two rival or beat Bitcoin market cap.  Ironically, Bitcoin would need enormous changes to reach huge market caps, but the higher cap it goes to, the more resistant to change it becomes.  This is why out of the box functionality and scaling is important.

K)  Financial instability is likely to accelerate in the next 1-3 years.  This could cause a huge crypto bubble overnight that helps both Bitcoin and alts.  Since Bitcoin has little hope of scaling well in the foreseeable future to meet those demands, most likely everything would be done off-chain.  Alts capable of high volume on-chain transactions and possibly coins with anonymity features would be the big winners here.  As mentioned further down, anonymity without scaling may be useless though.

This is at best a short term trend since ETH (though this doesn't mean this trend won't continue). The altcoin market cap share declined a lot from 2013 to early 2015, from at least 10% if not more, to around 5% pre-ETH. I don't know the number now (and one must be careful in assessing the market cap of tokens such as Ripple which have limited float relative to total supply and are subject to large changes as float number is adjusted).

I agree with your other points somewhat, although I don't entirely agree that number of transactions is so important independent of the value of those transactions.

The thread's opening post is reasonable but I didn't have time to check all the detailed points for absolute correctness. You will need to add my Delegated Transaction Consensus algorithm once it is published.


The first few seconds of this interview with bytemaster (Daniel Larimer) explains they hide both the values and whom you are sending to (i.e. the payee):

https://beyondbitcoin.org/bitshares-dev-hangout-bytemaster-stealth-confidential-transactions/

In other words in the terminology of the Cryptonote white paper, they have unlinkability but not untraceability.

He admits this at 13:45 mins point and (in his non-analytical summary) he highly understates the block chain analysis that can be done with traceability because they have not hidden the payer. For another thing he completely discounts the possibility that the adversary is gaining access to some of the hidden values because the payer and payee both know the transferred value, which then rapidly breaks down his other assumptions. The merging of balancing he is suggesting at 21:00 will break untraceability.

They accomplished the easy part. It is combining that with untraceability that seemed nearly impossible to achieve without Zerocash's flaws. But finally after many days of brain stumping I did figure out how to do it.

Well I have them beat. In July I wrote a white paper where I can hide the values, the payee, and the payer. Thus I also have untraceability. And I don't have any of the setup issues that plague Zerocash! I invented the holy grail of on chain anonymity.

My white paper is entitled Zero Knowledge Transactions.

P.S. About the 9 min point, bytemaster is explaining that payees can't anonymously scan for their Stealth (unlinkable) transactions, which means they even break the unlinkability. Very sloppy. Yes he is correct that it breaks scalability which is one of Monero's issues. I have solved this issue also!

State of Crypto v0.03 changelog
-------------------------------
*edit - Removed the additions since it added too much fluff to main post.

r0ach - have you covered the differing security models of POS and POW?

A good discussion has been taking place recently: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1171311.0

I tried to stuff everything about general PoW under the Bitcoin section in main post, then did pros and cons of standard PoS vs DPoS below it.  Will add Vitalik's PoS implementation to compare if he ever finalizes one since it's all theoretical vaporware at this point...

Delegated is not the same as decentralized.

Sounds like your system has more of a centralized approach.

Should be interesting to see how you solve the "trust less" aspect as well as the centralization problem.


Word choice problems?

del·e·gate
verb
past tense: delegated; past participle: delegated
ˈdeləˌɡāt/
entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself.
"he delegates routine tasks"
synonyms:   assign, entrust, pass on, hand on/over, turn over, devolve, depute, transfer
"she must delegate routine tasks"
send or authorize (someone) to do something as a representative.
"Edward was delegated to meet new arrivals"
synonyms:   authorize, commission, depute, appoint, nominate, mandate, empower, charge, choose, designate, elect
"I don't recall which personnel were delegated to carry out the inspections"

 And that is accomplished (thinning out) by voting with your wallet.

It is why I don't invest in many of the alt coins.

Nor is it necessarily an antithetical concept. Delegated can be decentralized and effectively as trustless as Satoshi's design is (with some differing assumptions that have differing tradeoffs).

No one said that it was antithetical. The point is they are not the same.

Delegated....



Either it is actually delegated or you had poor word choice in describing your system.

Question: Is your system trustless?

Satoshi created Bitcoin as a proof of concept and didn't actually engineer any of the end game variables in his system.  The result did not lead to decentralization.  If it wasn't proof of concept, it would have been engineered a specific way from start to finish, but it wasn't, there's far too many loose ends and unaccounted variables.  It's unknown if he was even adamant on forcing the system to run on PoW forever.  He seems like a relatively smart person, so I kind of doubt he would purposely engineer a system to consume something like one fourth the world's power if it became world reserve currency on purpose.  At that point, it would be the equivalent of designing the system to create nanorobots that turn every atom on the planet into paperclips.

I've seen Gavin quotes talking about porting Bitcoin to some form of PoS system in the future (not standard Sunny King PoS), so other people seem to agree on that point, that everything is entirely open ended, it's all proof of concept, and nothing is set in stone.  Decentralized is an ambigious term that means nothing.  Even Kelsey, "the Litecoin troll", acknowledged this.

Trying to claim a system like DPoS isn't decentralized and saying PoW Bitcoin is, is the biggest red herring in the room.  It's trading one set of pros and cons for another, then you weigh what you gained and what you lost and find the winner.  If Bitcoin's current implementation with PoW was buzz word "decentralized", then it would have never hit 50% or more hash rate at Ghash, and Peter Todd wouldn't have sold half his Bitcoin when it happened:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_sold_50_of_my_bitcoins_ghashio/

If Bitcoin PoW was "decentralized", then China wouldn't currently control Bitcoin with an iron grip, having 70% of the hash rate in one country, mostly run by 3 pools.  Anything you can count on one hand doesn't exactly sound "decentralized" to me.  There's no such thing as decentralized, everything is just pros and cons.  Satoshi is an excellent cryptographer, mediocre engineer, and great bullshit artist.

Guns and bullets are not the same, but they don't preclude working together. If your point is that delegation does not necessarily imply decentralization, then so what. Satoshi's white paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System doesn't have the word decentralized in the name. The title of my white paper emphasizes the key feature of the design. That omission of word in the title doesn't insinuate that it isn't decentralized nor trustless.

Come on I don't want to get into silly tit'for'tat noise.


Very well stated. Thanks. I am not too clear yet on the DPoS design and its tradeoffs. I will look into it.

True. He clearly left an unfinished development for reasons unknown.


That's clearly not the case since the block rewards go to zero and the bigger question is whether there would even be enough PoW, not whether there would be too much.

The concern over PoW going gray goo over all the world's power is based on the bizarre premise of moonstruck fanatics that it becomes the world reserve currency tomorrow, despite not even being able to figure out how to scale above 5-7 tps. After a few more block halvings this would not be the case at all.

Here's a chart showing energy use assuming 1 BTC = $100 000. World electricity production is in the neighborhood of 2 TW, so anything after the first few eras is not particularly problematic.

Did you even look up the word delegated?

It does require trust in order to delegate. Not sure how you have a delegated transaction consensus without trust.

Otherwise, why delegate in the first place?

Or is that just a word you use to put there not actually wanting to have it carry its meaning behind it?

Not trying to get into a silly argument.

You called your system "delegated" yet there it is trustless. As far as I am aware in order to delegate you need to have a central point to delegate from and trust those who you are delegating to.

Otherwise why call it delegated? Poor word choice perhaps?

What do you think pool mining is?  

First we have litecoin trolls, now semantic trolls.

Excuse me. Please leave the name calling at the door. I'm not a troll.

I am a genuinely interested user here asking legitimate questions.


To answer you,

Pool mining is built upon the protocol not making it the same as the underlying system.

My point being that bitcoin could survive without pool mining. Pool mining is not a requirement for bitcoin to be useful.

Once again please leave the name calling at the door as I am honestly genuinely interested.

Just because I ask questions does not automatically make me a troll.

DPoS is not decentralized.  Here is why:

This is why being able to objectively filter 25 - 33% selfish mining attacks and 51% attacks is so critical. Satoshi's design can not do it. Mine can.

With that key improvement, then one can change the way mining is done so that those who are sending transactions are doing the mining, but they don't care about their profitability so then you drastically reduce the electricity used, yet simultaneously make it uneconomic to run an ASIC farm. And pools become irrelevant because no one is mining for profit, rather because they must mine to send a transaction.

So then you have the unbounded entropy of proof-of-work that insures its model of security and game theory, without any of the drawbacks.

TADA.  ;D

It's hard to take your post seriously when your entire account is devoted to shilling for NXT and fanatical stalking of Bitshares devs.  Anyone that read the original post can tell that instead of improving upon PoW, standard proof of stake brings in so many new problems and dead ends, you would probably be better off using Bitcoin, fiat notes, or bartering with random objects from your house instead.  If you're going to claim DPoS can't work while shilling for NXT, you're at least obligated to explain how the mess of a system known as standard proof of stake outlined in the original post is supposed to function on a globale scale.  I just don't see it working at all.

Having said that, most people know that Bitshares is going to have elements of the Roman senate, maybe people will even stab or murder each other eventually.  It will be great for Coindesk news.  It's also going to have elements of corporate fascism, as corporate entites attempt to gain control of a disproportionate number of nodes.  If the ownership of publicly operated delegates seems fishy to you, you can simply stop using the system.  If they're operating nodes on the system, they probably have assets on the system, and will most likely be hurting themselves doing this.  

This is like if you see two Bitcoin PoW pools in China that combine to make up 70% of the hash rate but are owned by the same guy or brothers, you might stop using BTC.  The Satoshi system is obviously not sybil resistant in this case.  The incentives to not do this are basically the same in both systems, but it can still happen.   There will always be politics you can't escape from in the real world that you have to audit yourself.

The purpose of DPoS is kind of to engineer the way these systems play out from start to finish in a defined manner where the likelihood of things like sybil are minimized, or force them to be visible for you to audit.  If you're uncomfortable with the delegate ownership or coin ownership, you should simply not use the platform.  It's no different than manually measuring the different real world metrics of Bitcoin like hash rate to see if it's distributed.  Also like having to manually audit standard proof of stake wealth to figure out if one guy owns 90% of coins, except he could have them in separate accounts, so it's not even possible to do.  Woops, sybil attacked again on 3 different consensus mechanisms.  At least on both DPoS and PoW you had a chance of manually auditing it yourself to find out and prevent it.

Let's take this to the real end game though.  What happens if Bitcoin becomes the world reserve currency?  Do you really believe each nation that already has treaties with each other is going to sit there blowing megatons of coal, hashing away for no reason with basically the only benefit being the preventionion of keynesianism?  At this point, they would all just integrate into a delegate system like DPoS organically.  Things like DPoS are designed to go global, the others are not.

PoW is dead on so many levels it's not even funny, unless you see cryptocurrency always maintaining a tiny market cap and powering things like the Silk Road.  Standard proof of stake is far more sketchy than DPoS, so this leaves you with very limited currently existing options.

My white paper will be the first to show the above are false assumptions.

I am telling you I am going to shock the world.

I don't do small things. I rock the Titanic.

Call this hype without details. Fine. But I can't let you write fallacious statements without pointing them out.

http://cryptorials.io/glossary/delegated-proof-of-stake/
https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-consensus/

Well, well now I see I have the only consensus design that is not a PoS (Piece of Shit), Satoshi's design included.

I take the best from Satoshi and fix it all the way it should have been.

'Nuff said. I need to implement, so I can publish. Sooner the better.

I am so sleepy, been here discussing for entire afternoon and night and now it is 11am again. Zzzzzz....

You also can't (at the moment) prove them to be false.

We are still waiting.  ::)

One thing that stands out is your ego.

Honestly I am giving you my observation. You remind me of RealSolid (dev of solid coin) back in the day.

He would talk so highly of himself and amounted to nothing.

Perhaps instead of building yourself up, be humble and release your project when it is done and stop with the unnecessary ego pumping.

Lol at DE the NXt troll trying so very hard yet failing lol

Leave it alone decentralized exchange troll nxt marketcap is now falling lower because market is beginning to see thru bs like you.

So what has exactly happened to the Bitshares price? I thought the Bitshares will be at the moon surely at this moment, at least the OP made it sound like that. He was very confident about it nevertheless.

I got into the Bitshares at 1800 satoshis, just after a launch. Rode up with them all the way to 9000 satoshis and sold everything between 5000-6000 when they started falling as a rock from 9000. I lived through the whole PTS - BTSX merger. There hasn't be a working wallet for over a year for this coin. And the new BTS wallet (not BTSX) is late about 9 months.

To sum up, for someone to come and to claim how BTS is going to the moon and has bigger volume than Ethereum, the OP is at least to say very cocky!

The post isn't about Bitshares, it's about currently existing consensus mechanisms and their long term viability.  Neither PoW or PoS have a viable end game, so you can either walk away from crypto completely, or:

A)  Go with the only existing option which actually does have a viable end game, even when scaled to global reserve currency - DPoS

B)  Hope that Vitalik, Fuserleer, or Anonymint will some day release something better, but the consensus mechanism of all three projects is currently vaporware

I would honestly make the argument that whether by coincidence, or by design, DPoS actually functions better when scaled to world reserve currency than as a small market cap coin.  What other consensus mechanism has characteristics like that?  Each nation state easily integrates into it's delegate system, making it hard to question it's validity or sybil actors at that point.  Even the global equities exchange would run on the same platform at the same time.

I think it's possible Vitalik, Fuserleer, or Anonymint may invent a system that appeals more to the anti-govt anarchist than Bitcoin or Bitshares does at some point in the future, but I don't think any of their systems will scale to global reserve currency as efficiently, or while running global distributed exchanges on top of the same platform.

Before Anonymint responds, anything not on an exchange is vaporware.

sorry i'm missing how DPoS is a viable option (apart from being a passing buzz word)  ???

i think the flaw is endemic to any ledger type option and thus that is what should be changed (which would solve a hell of alot of other issues too like, privacy, centralisation etc).

You didn't read anything in the thread and decided to troll us with Litecoin...which is functionally identical to Bitcoin...

In other news, coindesk just made a good article saying what I said a month ago:

http://www.coindesk.com/why-bitcoin-creates-a-voluntary-tax-system/

I will accelerate. Multiple Sclerosis has gone into remission apparently.

I will sign off for now and be back online with some code.

State of Crypto v0.04 changelog
-------------------------------
Added to DPoS section:

I)  A common complaint of DPoS is that it can't be decentralized because it has the word "delegated" in the title, yet anyone mining with a pool in PoW is doing the exact same thing.  Satoshi made the claim of one CPU, one vote, yet you are delegating your vote to the pool owner in PoW.  Some argue you are not delegating in PoW because you can solo mine.  While this statement would be technically correct, the miniscule portion of the Bitcoin userbase able to do so makes it functionally infeasible.  It's only a question of what percent of the hash rate is being delegated.


Additional
---------
I will continue to refine the original post trying to remove ambiguous statements, fluff parts, etc.

I disagree with this analysis. In analyzing incentives it is often important to have an option to do something even if that option in rarely exercised in practice. For one thing, it puts a cap on the degree of abuse that can be performed by those who can be opted out. Now you can vote out particular delegates in DPoS but you can't opt out of the delegate system, you can only do a "meet the new boss same as the old boss" switch. If the abuses are inherent in the power structure, then replacing Boss Alice with Boss Bob will not fix them.

However, in Bitcoin if the pool system were to be became sufficiently abusive (but it likely won't by the argument in the third sentence of the previous paragraph), miners really could just opt out entirely and solo mine. It would have a cost, but the cost is bounded and even measurable.

This is another epic logic fail.

You love to argue ad nauseum points that are not viable.

Fact is that mining will become ever more centralized in Satoshi's design because of the economies-of-scale of ASICs and electrical power. I believe there was maybe even a research paper that proved something along these lines?

The fundamental problem is the mining is done for profit. For as long as that is the case, ASIC farms (or Larry Summers' 21 Inc. economies-of-scale) and subsidized, industrial/government/utility scale electricity will rule.

Also due to bandwidth issues and that every full mining node has to validate every transaction, scaling transaction volume will force centralization.

These are precisely some of the core issues my Delegated Transaction Consensus design is attempting to fix.

Also your argument about sacrificing cost is nonsense, because the low cost leader will take hash rate from the others over time by reinvesting higher rates of return.


Edit: Smooth has a valid point if no entity (or collusion of entities) has 51% of the hash rate because then someone could sacrifice mining losses in return for censorship resistant way to post transactions to the block chain. So in that sense, my word "nonsense" is incorrect and I apologize. But the huge glaring flaw is that once the State can regulate 51% of the mining power (which is destined to be centralized), then Smooth's caveat no longer applies. And this is my overriding concern, so that is why I often downplay this caveat that smooth points out.

Edit#2: however if hashrate is very large then smooth's caveat is really pointless because who has enough hash rate to push their transaction onto to the block chain without a pool. And again Satoshi's design doesn't enforce that pools must allow getblocktemplate. If your hashrate is not too small, you can just mine on any pool that offers getblocktemplate and wait a long time until you win a block solution to insert your transaction, or just mine a long time solo. Many could potentially join together to pool their resources to mine at a loss to have ready access to censorship resistance, but unless you are using P2Pool (which can be attacked with share withholding attacks) then the State might target your pool server (but again I think it is easier for them to just target 51% of the hash rate for regulation requiring all transactions to carry KYC, since you might place your server behind an anonymity network although this will be very difficult to do in Satoshi's design because of the bandwidth requirements). And now you start to get some inkling of why my consensus network design overhaul is so important.

I'm not aware of such a paper.


Maybe correct, but depends on assumptions about future costs and technology which are hard to make soundly with certainty. Bandwidth, etc. may become too cheap to matter. The new iPhone has 300 megabit (peak; ideal) wireless capability. Comcast is promising to upgrade their entire network to 1-10 gigabit within three years without needing fibre to the home.

In any case, that's not the same delegation argument r0ach was making. Pool mining and centralized mining is not the same thing.


Great. Go finish it.

smooth please see the edit on my prior post. I was rushing when I wrote that because my gf was giving me "3rd call" on "come eat breakfast".

I realized you have a valid point in the non-51% attack case. Again please bear in mind that I am most concerned about the case where the G7 can regulate 51% of the large centralized mining corporations, such as 21 Inc. which is coming up fast.

By pointing them out using a fallacious statement yourself.  The irony. Maybe if you spent less time beating your dog we'd get more sense from you.

You know I am all for not conflating separate concerns, so I concede.

But again the 51% attack (if you believe it is realistic the G7 or G20 and other government unions can regulate that much mining) renders the distinction almost entirely effectively invalid.

But I will repeat the point I've made to you this year (recently) that as you raise the bandwidth requirements, you reduce the diversity of ways that mining can be connected to the network which thus increases the State's ability to regulate you (i.e. effectively centralize mining w.r.t. to censorship resistance and KYC) and also decrease network fault tolerance issues such as network slowdowns w.r.t. to orphan rate which then impacts double spends, etc.. You can't win the argument that big O (or theta O) scaled higher bandwidth requirements beats a design with lower big O bandwidth requirements scaling, all other factors being equal. I know you did not argue higher bandwidth is superior rather you seem to be arguing it might be a mitigated issue. And I am arguing that the failure potentials are significant and that we need to improve on all aspects to maximize probability of retaining some attributes of resilience such as censorship resistance.

Also there is the issue of network fragmentation, which none of the consensus network designs deal with at all. They just collapse into chaos of double-spending.

Also on that chart you posted upthread about electric consumption and hashrate declining over time due to block reward halving, that excludes the expectation that transaction rates and fees will be increasing and assuming the market is competitive then hashrate should be higher than it would be due to value of block rewards alone.

r0ach's overall point is we are headed for centralized mining any way.

On that thesis he is correct, unless someone presents a superior consensus network design.

The future will be bitcoin with merged mined coins. Merge mined chains are secure and cheap to run. They also enable much more txs. It's really a riddle to me how people haven't begun to support merged mining more as it solves a lot of the issues mentioned in OP

I did not make a 'fallacious' statement. There is a difference between a 'claim' and a 'fallacious' statement. Perhaps you could use the adjective 'vacuous' instead to qualify my statement.

I would argue that inferior logic and vocabulary skills is an indicator of which of us is likely to be correct on the final resolution of my 'claim'.

With an N delegate dpos you have option to vote out for anyone else based on the demand for N delegates if power structure is corrupt then because the barrier of entry is so little then anyome outside of that structure can get voted im (democratic and viable once a smooth distribution of tokens over many years of accumilation amd distribution cycles). As its smoothed out more it becomes harder and harder to have a corrupt power structure retaining control.

Afaik, merged mining doesn't change anything about the centralization of mining. It enables mining multiple chains, but that doesn't mean the miners are any more decentralized. Am I missing something about merged mining?

Just like when I delegate the transfer of my internet packets to my ISP and all the router hops along the way, thus my participation in the internet is no longer decentralized.  ::)

That is the fabulous logic of Smoothie which he tried to ram down our throat 5 or more times (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1175752.msg12386678#msg12386678).

As I tried to explain to that young punk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1049048.msg12387338#msg12387338) several times, if the routers are fungible, replaceable, and can't be monopolized, then the packets find their way to the destination, without need to trust or centralize. Delegation should not be conflated with centralization, nor trust. We told him this 5 or more times, yet he still insisted.

And he claims to be a software developer. I wouldn't let him any where near my code.

I have explained my point in much greater detail here as a separate topic in the main Bitcoin general forum:

The Bitcoin consensus mechanism is incorrectly labeled Proof of Work

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1176835.0

Voting systems are a winner take all paradigm, because they create of power vacuum of who can do the most corruption can offer the greatest spoils to the victors. So the power structures will align towards who can game the system to extract the most value for those who join the corruption. Votes are bought by sharing the spoils.

Vitalik Buterin explained this as an undersupplied public good:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity/


The problem was explained by Mancur Olsen in his Logic of Collective Action.

Eric Raymond, the 150 - 160 IQ genius progenitor of the term "open source", wrote an essay about this Some Iron Laws of Political Economics (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984).

This logic is flawed because it assumes you would have 51% of the voting power shared by multiple random but coordinated sources by the entity. The key is to understand that it just takes one leak to ruin the whole corruption while it takes massive coordination to try to game.. I guess if there is enough incentive people can keep quite but if tokens are distributed smoothly then chances of this are low.

Logically because it just takes one leak and therefor replacement within a few hours vs coordination whoch mY take weeks or years then System tends towards rewarding honest delegates

sidhujag, could you please make your elucidation more well defined and clear. I can't understand what the heck you are describing.

Specifically refute the undersupplied public good, as I quoted it.

Come on smooth. You've been a serious programmer long enough to observe that demand for bandwidth and CPU fills up any new supply. If the new standard for bandwidth is 1000X greater, then users will be doing 1000X more microtransactions.

And you've been a serious programmer long enough to become very acquainted with the very important factor that big O algorithmic complexity drives your big wins in terms of performance and other attributes that hinge on it.

These are the sort of intuitive priorities that are just no brainer to any senior level programmer.

I disagree that eMunie's is "vapourware".

1. It is function in the client now
2. Anyone can test the client out
3. The database of the client can be queried for the consensus components.
4. More documentation going up this coming week
5. Finally, I can provide source code relating to the consensus should anyone be willing to be legally bound not to leak it.

That to me isn't "vapourware".

i've certainly read this thread, how about less arrogance more input, i mean you spin the same shit ad nauseam, but you're not really saying anything.

stop baffling on about me being troll here with litecoin, hell i attack and troll litecoin more then most coins, there's no sentimental attachment to litecoin or any coin here.

i've said many a times the only thing good to come out of crypto so far is the idea.

yes its self evident that litecoin todate is the best we've got, and if you asked my why, and to my reply you wouldn't listen just troll me saying i'm a litecoin troll.

Well I guess I must agree. Thanks for making that point.

Edit: let me add that for as long as the individual miners can't decide what they put in the block for their mining shares, then my statement that the entropy of proof-of-work is unbounded needs to be corrected to bounded, which is the same as for proof-of-stake.

Just some short little morsels of non-expertise I (as Anonymint) wrote some year(s) ago. Oh never mind me, I am just a grandstanding idiot whose only value in life is self-aggrandizing ego who craves attention and am otherwise a useless blob of flesh unlike the others here who are so productive.

Without getting into a semantics argument, let's just say for the purposes of this thread, the term vaporware applies to anything not being traded on exchanges or being actively, natively accepted in commerce.  Emunie can't be evaluated until released into the wild because of Realsolid's half correct, half i-don't-know analysis below:

[20:57] <@Realsolid> no one is going to understand emunie to ever work on it besides the dev
[20:57] <@Realsolid> bitcoin struggled and it was much simpler
[20:57] <@Realsolid> bitcoin , for what it needs to do, is a rube goldberg machine
[20:57] <@Realsolid> emunie is like rube goldberg to the square
[20:58] <@Realsolid> it means it will be vulnerable, overly complex systems always are, bitcoin was very vulnerable early on
[20:58] <@Realsolid> im one of the best coders in the world and even i sometimes make mistakes, even when developing ultra efficient killing machines
[20:58] <@Realsolid> let alone a rube goldberg ^ 2
[21:01] <@Realsolid> im one of the best coding, best debugging, best looking motherfuckers you ever seen

Blockchain 3.0
I don't know if anyone has finalized the metrics concerning what "Blockchain 3.0" is yet, but this guy's post + my response to it cover pretty much what it will be and what metrics are important for running such a thing:

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,18434.0.html

Things like Bitcoin and PoW are so dead in the water it's not even funny to me.  Whatever dream system you're trying to build, Anonymint, I don't think you're designing it around the necessity of having to run a fast global dex + all these auxiliary features on top of it.


In other news:
For Kelsey, in honor of Litecoin making an appearance on "Buttcoin":

https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3kr27t/litebutters_cant_figure_out_why_the_rats_are/

Your statement is correct depending on the context, as is mine.

Most people however that read vaporware will consider the position of "it doesn't exist", as opposed to the truth in this case of "it isn't ready for general release"


Another egomanic, whose comments I'm not going to acknowledge.

There is a saying "The loudest in the room is the weakest" and its never more true than it is when applied to loud developers (of which there is no shortage around here)

I thought it was hilarious because he is right in saying all cryptocurrencies are basically Rube Goldberg machines.

Oh in fact my proposed design is expected to scale to a 100 million transactions per second easily. Even Bitshares doesn't scale to 100s of DEX running simultaneously. Again you are going to want to know the details, and again my answer will be wait until I finish the implementation, then I will release all the details and code into the open source.

I am specifically targeting to have the best real-time transaction architecture among other improvements.

Okay that is enough about my vaporware. You raised the issue otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it.

Let's instead focus on the linked post you quoted.

An example of a private chain is a decentralized forum or ebay market place. It may or may not be private, but at least we can say it is orthogonal to the currency block chain.

One issue is who pays for and provides the resources of mining and storage of the decentralized chain. You've got to have an open market for that otherwise network effects don't scale. You don't see TCP/IP run by a corporation that issues shares.

Bitshares can't possibly succeed. Sorry I hope you don't get angry at me, but I am telling you frankly that in my opinion Daniel's weakness has always been that he doesn't understand scaling, end-to-end principle, and other scaling principles and economics. He is a talented coder I guess. And apparently several talented coders in his community. I wish him the best.

What kind of network size do you require to achieve 100M TX/s?

1000 - 10,000

Node specification?

You're talking about each node processing between 10,000-100,000 transactions per second if the network is perfectly partitioned in some manner, and these partitions are 100% independent of each other....which I find hard to believe if I'm honest.

For that one I will believe it when I see it.  For a different topic, Smooth and I were talking about decentralized exchanges and I brought up that HFT (high frequency trading) is a form of PoW itself in practice that demonstrates the end game for Bitcoin PoW.  You're fighting over a finite resource (skimming profits) where even the speed of light matters.  Parties are expending resources to position themselves to capture this supply, and eventually it's a winner take all monopoly or something extremely close to it...

Smooth argued that an equities DEX would be useless because you would get front run by the HFT.  The Bitshares 2.0 dex will probably have 3 second blocks at launch, which will lower down to 1 second without a hard fork.  At 1 second blocks you can't trade as fast as the HFT systems, but I would argue there's a large chance the decentralized exchange would gain more credibility over the HFT systems over time, and the HFT might just be left with two bots trading against each other on a system nobody uses.

If the transaction rate can scale up sufficiently the HFT would be eaten by transaction fees before they could consume the entire network bandwidth. Also HFT operates on the principle of having the closest connection to the trading exchange, thus I assume they will run their own node in my system and scale up to what ever they need using as many servers as they need.

I envision millisecond confirmation speed.

What about network latency?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_%28engineering%29#Packet-switched_networks

What if nodes are at opposite ends of the network and cant be located close to each other?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

What is the actual envisioned confirmation speed of a regular transaction operating in normal network domains?

If you mine your own transactions, this is irrelevant.

Where did he say that?

Meh...there is too much vague detail spread too thin and I don't have the time to go chasing it around.

I'm going to just wait until he finally decides to let the details out.

He didn't - but this is one way you can achieve that... actually pretty much the only way.

When I said ms, I mean fraction of a second, not double digit ms. I assume network latency will improve over time. Also some nodes may be very well connected, since we were talking about HFT here.

Also I made the point that indeed HFT traders could make their own node and thus no external network latency.

I would prefer if you all think it is bullshit for now. That would be better actually.

Ooh, right yeah.  That opens a major can of worms though....

Yup.

Worm A) difficulty
Worm B) block reward
Worm C) sybil attack

D) Satoshi probably spent numerous hours trying this already, otherwise he wouldn't have used PoW in a more obscure manner creating the "Rube Goldberg" machine that Realsolid implies

Well remember I wrote I think it is better for now if you think I am full of bullshit.

So I am purposefully not attempting to refute you.

Just remember it is not over until the Fat Lady sings.

Seems I have some coding to do.

Of these only D) is a reasonably good argument.  Or to put it another way, if something new relies on old components and has not previously been developed, then it must be innovative (which implies a degree of conceptual if not implementation-level complexity, or more precisely non-obviousness).

Therefore you can conclude:

1. There is something Rube Goldberg-ish about TPTB's scheme that Satoshi didn't consider or perhaps considered but chose another also Rube Goldberg-ish path. (I don't think this is necessarily bad, although I do think that Bitcoin is about the limit of complexity that might be viable right now)

2. There is a serious flaw in TPTB's scheme that he hasn't identified

1. Yes. But I think the tradeoffs are superior. And so far it doesn't look any worse than heuristics I heard Maxwell talk about are in Bitcoin for defending against Sybil attacks on the P2P network.

2. That is of course a strong possibility, especially when there is only one dev working on it with no peer review. Problem is that I think I lose more time to verbiage than it is worth to team up. Better to produce a basic product, then ask for team work. At least that is what I am thinking today given my M.S. isn't bothering me.

Okay i am really going to try to sign out. I have people watching these forums and they will alert me if there is any thing really egregious that needs my response.

Good luck to everyone in their coding as well.

A) is relevant because if you have fixed difficulty designed to target home computers, home computer will be able to send transactions, but server farms will have a controlling advantage which leads directly on to...

B) block reward with home computer difficulty and no adjustment (difficulty adjustment would render home computers unable to send transactions) would mean the coin supply would suffer out of control inflation in a short period which leads directly on to...

C) sybil attack - mining your own transactions is great until some huge player starts executing double spends with his massive server farm by chucking a bunch of CPUs at a POW designed for home computers

A, B, and C are not good arguments because he hasn't disclosed enough about the structure of his scheme to determine if they are even relevant, or if so how. You could propose a guess about his scheme is structured and then consider those items, but that's pretty silly.

A, B and C are the consequences of mining your own transactions. I'm not talking about his scheme, because I don't know it.

You don't know how his chain is structured (is it even a chain of blocks or is it something else?) nor how difficulty is calculated or used (or even if such a thing is done or if there is another approach). "Sybil attacks" is certainly a valid point but you haven't connected the dots nor can you since you don't know what sort of voting scheme is employed. The point being you are (implicitly) assuming something very much like the structure of Bitcoin and then analyzing it on those terms. That's not a good approach.

I repeat: I am not talking about his approach.

This was a distant consensus design of my own in which I considered a system which would stay 100% decentralised POW.

I saw your idea of a proof of burn coin.  Seems hard to get those right since you have to account for runaway inflation/deflation.  I remember there was this previous proof of burn coin called "Slimcoin" where you burned coins to mine.  Even though it was already unprofitable to burn coins to mine, since there were already so many in the system burning, people kept just dumping more and more in continuously.  I wouldn't be surprised if half the entire money supply was burned.

Does that matter?

Once an equilibrium is reached, the money supply is what it is, and people using it as money don't really care.

Unless there is something unstable about it that would cause these sorts of "burn storm" events to occur repeatedly. It wasn't clear to me if you were suggesting that happened in your post.

When phsycology gets involved price can do irrational things to people like sellimg at a major loss in panic and in this scheme end up burning 99% of the coins which you cannot get back.

It's much like a federated pegged asset which is based on market demands to control price according an external target. We know what it should be, but in a panic it may break. Actually vbuterin wrote about that how black swans would break a peg indefinitely based on game theory if it didn't place limits on selling. That's why in bitshares you can't short below 10% or above 10% of the price feed. Anyways who knows if it limits the long term swan from happening, perhaps pushes time further in achieving a better solution down the road before a peg breaks and all hope is lost in a project. I'm not sure how the pegs work in ether but if they don't have rules in place like bts they will break sooner than ones that do.

Even burning 99% of the coins, I can't see how that is a problem. The remaining 1% become a lot more valuable and then people won't be willing to burn them. (This assumes of course that the system has some actual utility at all.) Some equilibrium must be reached.

But like I said earlier, I don't rule out that some ongoing instability may exist including psychology or something else. I don't know anything about the structure of that proposed system so I can't even begin to guess.

Coins lost per year due to strong encryption, which is estimated to be up to 5% in bitcoin?  Then an incorrectly tuned proof of burn coin on top of that and suddenly you're getting world class interest rates that make Gresham's law turn it into the horder coin that nobody will actually spend.

Oh, that was a different idea completely :) I am still working on that one - when I feel it is ready, I'll post it on this forum for scrutiny.

I hadn't heard of slimcoin, thanks, I'll take a look at their whitepaper.

PoS is the future

POS is the past

DPoS is the future.  Here's my DPoS proposal if it's required to scale past 101 delegates for increased redundancy:

A super delegate system - Re-inventing the Roman Republic

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,18457.0.html

the most sensible thing to be stated in this thread is that BTC is a rube goldberg machine. bitcoin and everything todate related is simply an overkill in complication for a p2p currency.

the blockchain idea leads to too much complications trying to plug its obvious flaws, leading to the biggest flaw of them all complication itself.


as i say its a currency not a mission to mars.

and the extant financial technology isn't a rube goldberg machine?

I mean, I'll give yah that, they are both rube goldberg machines - the difference is that with bitcoin everyone knows how it works (well, one can know how it works). The extant financial system..... not so much.

and, IMO, currency is much much more complicated than a mission to mars. That's merely getting from point A to point B. Currency is a monstrous technology in comparison - a device we use to store value, transfer time, exchange intangibles. We will, someday, get to mars. But we won't get there without currency providing a means to allow civilization to network.

I agree with this, too.

Instead of using our brainpower to find a way to answer the question, "why crypto" to Joe Blow, we are making it harder for him to understand everyday.

Or let's spend our energy figuring out how to market a crypto, which seems to be a lot harder then we ever expected.

 
  
http://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238 (http://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238)  

https://i.imgur.com/UqwiBE9.jpg 
 
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Revised-Edition/dp/006124189X (http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Revised-Edition/dp/006124189X) 
 
https://i.imgur.com/3tKgXC9.jpg

yes but your comparing apples and oranges here on so many fronts, where to begin;

1) average joe's use fiat (without fully understanding it) because they have to, no one has to use bitcoin.

2) average joe's whether (unfounded or not) trust gov backed fiat (partly also because they have too), bitcoin your trusting yourself (well and also an anon dev with a billion $ stash), too trust bitcoin you kinda have to understand it, to trust fiat you can do it blindly (and again really have no choice).

And yet bitcoin still remains the most simple consensus design of all of them. This gives you some idea just what a hard problem distributed, trustless consensus is.

And why Ethereum is in such huge trouble that nobody seems to acknowledge.  It took Satoshi a long time to create the consensus mechanics of Bitcoin, now you have Vitalik trying to create one on the fly after the coin was already released.  They can't copy standard proof of stake due to all of it's negatives.  He's either going to have to beat Satoshi, copy DPoS, or a far more experimental method that might end in critical failure like a DAG chain.

As for Anonymint's coin, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's relying on people not being able to create an ASIC with more than 200% efficiency of a CPU or the entire model fails?  So even if this coin is theoretically perfect, nobody will even know if it's valuable or not until it's been on the market for several years, reach 100 million in market cap, then attract ASIC vendors to attempt to full scale commercialize the coin?

1. He said order of magnitude. In normal English that usually means 10x, though binary order of magnitude -- 2x -- also means something occasionally. I'm not sure what 3x means.

2. I don't think he said the entire model would fail otherwise, so that may be your made up conclusion. I don't really remember though, he may have suggested that.

I don't remember his exact language used to describe what was needed to prevent the system from failing, which is why I said "correct me if I'm wrong".  I thought I remember seeing the 200% specification somewhere.  I doubt it's 1000% (order of magnitude) since this would just give you the same centralized pool structure as Bitcoin now.

It would be absolutely insane for Etherium to actually go through with changing the core consensus mechanism of the chain. Like it or not, there really is no viable alternative to POW at the moment.

edit: only POW provably solves the byzantine generals problem in the face of sybil attack

Unlikely if other aspects of the system are radically different which seems likely from how he described it. You could possibly get some other failure, but it wouldn't likely be the same as Bitcoin at all.

I actually think it is possible that Ethereum will just stick with PoW (or maybe a hybrid PoS+PoW). They've always couched the discussion of PoS in terms of "if it can be made to work". Obviously Vitalik is a fan of PoS and he criticizes PoW based on what he calls its devastating environmental impact but I also think he is at times intellectually honest enough to just admit that it can't be made to work and conclude "we tried our best, but ultimately we decided to stick with PoW."

This would be a bruising political battle given the obvious desire by existing Etherium stakeholders to cut the coin supply from infinite to premine+18 month of mining or whatever, but I don't view it as impossible (nor am I predicting it).

Here it is:

Delegated proof of work, which Bitcoin is, doesn't.  If 70% of the hash rate is in china owned by three pools, you have no way of knowing these pools aren't owned by the same person (sybil).  The only way is to audit them yourself, which is the purpose of the voting mechanism in DPoS, to audit the block validators for sybil.  The only difference is, the audit mechanism is built into the protocol of DPoS and excluded entirely from DPoW (delegated proof of work).

Seriously, read my first and second post in this thread, I'm not bullshitting here, it's painfully obvious this is the case:

The Bitcoin consensus mechanism is incorrectly labeled Proof of Work

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1176835.0

Great thread!

Pretty informative and it reveals a new forward thinking about cryptos and its impact. I really enjoyed your appreciation.

Thank you r0ach & others for comments, this thread is a really good read.

If I understand correctly, in Bitcoin/PoW, any miner can opt for not delegating his hashing power, and yet remain an active participant. I know most people do delegate their hashing power, for various practical and economical reasons, but still, it is not a mandatory position. The miner has full authority over its own hashing/voting power, and unilaterally decides (if he delegates to a pool or not).

Is DPoS comparable, in that the holder/staker has authority over the decision to delegate or not delegate his hashing/voting power, and remains a participant in equal standing regardless of his position towards delegation? I'm definitely not familiar enough with DPoS, would appreciate any pointer to a meaningful intro on the subject.

Hashcash POW is subject to sybil due to ASICs, this is clearly something that satoshi did not foresee, I agree. However, that does not rule out all other types of POW - there exists a near idealised POW in which one CPU really is one vote.

DPOS has no white paper and has not been proven to solve the byzantine problem, much like most other consensus designs.

PoW doesn't require 1C1V. It only requires that (or more precisely requires that no actor have disproportionate voting power) to converge in the manner stated in the paper. Nevertheless it will still eventually converge with weaker assumptions on rate.

Even if you can sybil at the level of miners or pools, you still can't sybil at the level of hashes.

So the pools in China could fork the chain starting 20 or 30 blocks back and double spend. But it would cost them 20-30 blocks worth of hashes to do it. Trying to do this say a year back, while theoretically possible since they have 50+% of the hash rate, would not be feasible. Even if it were, and they did it, they certainly couldn't keep doing that repeatedly because it would cost infinite energy. Eventually they will run out of money and need to let the chain progress forward.

Thus there will still eventually (and remember, even if the ideal 1C1V case PoW doesn't observe a deadline) be an unambiguous longest chain, and therefore a consensus, although it may be a slow and messy one.

By contrast, in PoS with a sufficient portion of old stake, you can create as many versions of the chain as you want without incurring this kind of cost. DPoS doesn't matter here because you can create new chains with different election results, and the proceed as above. (You can infer a cost if you view PoS as a form of PoW where creating chains is the PoW, but this doesn't help the argument.)

The only defense is "everybody knows which is the right chain" which is not a system reaching consensus, it is people forming it.

Yes, assuming the miner has enough hash power to solo mine, and since neither energy price or climate is a constant, is willing to travel anywhere in the universe where it's cheapest from China, to Antarctica, to possibly outer space to remain profitable.  The system is currently designed to create a constantly diminishing working set, and anyone who has ever mined before (me), knows the succesful miners are the people who constantly parlay their profit into the next mining hardware over and over to infinity (designed to force a small number of monopoly players or complete monopoly).

Assuming transaction fees provided the incentive, the end game mining market would eventually become so asinine, people will say, "awesome, I can build an unregulated nuclear power plant in outer space and utilize the 2.7 kelvin temperatures to lower my cooling costs at the same time forming the perfect monopoly". 

Then we can have space colonies whose only purpose is to tend to the mining equipment where 90% of the hash comes from one miner and the other 10% is some guy that sees Bitcoin PoW as a religous movement.

I have a feeling that since delegated proof of work doesn't provide any decentralization benefit over DPoS, PoW will most likely be abandoned before the first Bitcoin space station is constructed.

Well that's a stupid assumption and is the biggest and most challenging to fix design flaw in Bitcoin that I know about.

Space station mining doesn't really make a lot of sense given latency issues. Possibly low earth orbit would work. High earth orbit is probably okay for transactions but not mining. Anything beyond that will probably be separate blockchains. I don't know how Bitcoin maximalists cope with that inevitability.

Dumping heat in space is not easy or cheap either. Space is "cold" but without conduction you are limited to radiative cooling. This is a non-trivial design issue for spacecraft. Under the ocean is likely a better exotic outcome to propose.

The dreamer in me thinks that before either of those exotic scenarios, we'd have free & universal access to electricity, 'cos you know, Sun ... and non-destructive, non-pollutant energy storage methods ...  Anyhow ...

I do agree that PoW has flaws, in my limited understanding of the matter.
My question however, was to how DPoS compares, specifically:

I noticed that the earlier link points to an interesting discussion about DPoS, will read up on it.
Cheers gents!

The pool sybil is due to pool mining, not ASICs. Even before ASICs, there were pools nearing 50% hash rate, outcries, and pools subsequently "shrinking" (though that may have been a sham).

What ASICs do is concentrate mining (at least indirect control over it) in the hands of ASIC developers as a sort of hydraulic empire. That may break down as hashing ASIC technology becomes commoditized, which seems somewhat inevitable.

That's not even very much of a dream. Anyone off grid (or even on-grid when the grid has a surplus) with solar will likely have free electricity some of the time. I'm pretty sure that solar is getting cheaper faster than any other method of energy production, so this may be common soon.

Oh ffs smooth, it doesn't matter if the mining is occurring at the bottom of the ocean or in outer space.  Since energy price and climate aren't a constant, it still creates a constantly diminishing working set or complete monopoly.  This Rube Goldberg machine you've built on the ocean floor is just an additional bonus to the fact that delegated proof of work is providing no benefit to decentralization compared to DPoS in the first place.

Of course it is. As I explained to you, (D)PoS can't form a consensus at all. PoW, whether delegatable or delegated or not, is strictly more powerful. Whether that difference in power is valuable or not is a different question, but you can't correctly argue that the two are equivalent.

Also, as myagui suggested and I clarified (and stated earlier), the "best" place to mine is not unique. There is specialization and different cost functions of scale in different locations and by different operators. Your idea of one miner in the perfect place makes as much sense as the old soviet union which had one enormous pipe factory which was theoretically the most efficient due to central planners' conceptions of economy of scale but in fact turned out to be a disaster because it not only wasn't producing the right pipes but wasn't even the right scale. (A hypothetical statement about the absurdity of unconstrained economies of scale; I don't know that the USSR literally had one pipe factory but I've read real examples of this fallacy actually being put into practice.)

You gave an example of this right in your post (climate). Since weather is not constant, the best place to mine is not constant. Unless you are going to have one miner who moves his gear around chasing the best weather to mine right now, you are going to have multiple miners who operate at different intensities at different times in different places. Likewise cost of electricity, space, construction, maintenance, security, management overhead, bandwidth, etc. There is just an enormous amount of multidimensionality that doesn't resolve to a single point once you get your head out of that asinine one dimensional "lowest energy cost" model.

Hey, all I did was re-use your own example of a giant, underwater Rube Goldberg machine PoW mining away with an unlicensed nuclear reactor.

This thread is going in circles.


anyone willing to think outside the blockchain model for a p2p currency?

Can you be more specific?

All I can recall reading from you is how LTC is the best and how everything in cryptocurrency (including LTC?) is terrible.

What do you think is a good model?

i say litecoin is the best we have, but yeah always looking for better, again i think the whole blockchain idea is a dud (and you guys yourself point out the many flaws).

but i'm very much interested in the dev of a p2p currency, course i have random thoughts and ideas, and hoping others put up ideas to see if something can come out of it.

this section of the forums about alternatives to bitcoin. yet almost no one can get their head outside of the blockchain.

on a seperate note but inline with the thread title.

whats peoples thoughts on this;

http://cryptovoter.com/

you a fan of the DAG thing?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1177633.0

smooth had another link somewherezzzzz....

first i've heard of it, quick read still a bit muddy on it but will look further.

The reason this seems to be true is due to the adjusting difficulty. Difficulty must adjust with increase in mining power, otherwise it becomes easier to sybil attack the network and otherwise the block rate would increase, leading to even more inconsistent confirmation times. The consequence is centralisation, but not as the primary design.

Actually, I say the reverse is true: ASICs represent one CPU, but have disproportionate voting power, that is the essence of sybil.

With 1C1V, pools represent the aggregation of CPUs, which is the very best case you can hope for - linear scale. Of course, they still do represent a different kind of sybil, which is bad in its own right.

No the essence of sybil is that you can make one appear to be many (and get more votes or whatever benefit it is from appearing to be many). You can't do that with ASICs. One is just one.

Everyone is using ASICs now so there isn't really anything disproportionate about it.

An ASIC is one. One chip, custom designed to only do hashes. That's disproportionate power in its essence.

That's silly. It's like saying that everyone has to do hashes with pencil and paper.

The reason ASICs are a problem is that very few people have the ability to develop and manufacture them so it is a cocentration of power. There is not really a sybil attack, since no one is claiming otherwise. We are perfectly well aware there are only a few ASIC developers and there will probably be fewer in a year or two.

State of Crypto v0.05 changelog
-------------------------------
Added to Bitcoin section:

M)  Satoshi didn't solve the Byzantine generals problem:  http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1183043.0

I don't believe this is true for a lot if not all of POS implementations. You can move your coins at will even if you are forging (or whatever it is called in your favorite coin :))
Of course this may not be true for POS-Pools where multiple people throw their funds together allthough there are systems that even cover that use case.

Interesting post.

On the Monero part, you're talking of "CryptoNote" as it was the anon tech, but the tech is Ring Signatures.

Shadow has Ring Signatures too and is based on Bitcoin. So it's not a 'CryptoNote' but share the same mechanism of Anonymity.

Maybe you should look again at that part  :)

I didn't add Shadowcoin for a few reasons:

1)  I forgot it existed

2)  It's a standard proof of stake coin so it already falls under all the pros and cons there

3)  If I added Shadowcoin, I would probably also have to add Darkcoin.  Since Shadowcoin was flash mined, I would end up having to spend hours trying to determine the distribution of Shadowcoin vs Darkcoin vs Monero.  I would end up wasting all my time making the thread on the minor intricacies of the anon sector.  I knew I would be forced to deal with the annoying anon sector eventually, I just didn't feel like doing it yet, so I listed the anon market leader at the time in comparison to everything else.

4)  Most of the threads on the forum for a long time have been about Darkcoin vs Monero vs random anon coin of the week already.

5)  I planned to expand the original post much more, so I will probably get around to it eventually.

That's basically it. Look if you're going to start including coins in the 40+ ranking range you are going to have to include a whole lot of different coins and variations on how they work.

But I guess it is impossible to create a thread like this without having people come and spam their favorite coins to it. One of the SDC guys  (I don't remember if it was ffmad or someone else) created a thread comparing SDC/XMR and a few others. On that thread you have people backing coins even smaller than SDC showing up and spamming on why they should be included too. Just how it is.

Something I need to add to the main post, and I already said this over a year ago but forgot to add it.  I believe since each distributed coin only offers a probabilistic security model, which opens you up to various "long cons" and other black swan events, it's inevitable the market cap will somewhat equalize out in the top 3-5 coins.  The financial industry will hedge between them and there will be no Bitcoin monopoly.  Since PoW coins are expensive to maintain and are also designed to be monopoly players in the market, I don't think they will stay around in the long run.

The financial industry will just not tolerate all their eggs in one basket that can be wiped out by random occurrence.  They can handle losing big with Lehman Brothers crashes and taking a 25% hit or whatever, but nobody is going to go all in on something where they can take a 100% hit.  Assuming Ethereum doesn't turn out to be a giant security blackhole with huge overhead (which I think it will be, so I wouldn't personally recommend it), I could foresee large market caps for Bitshares, Ethereum, something like Emunie (if it actually works), and maybe one more coin that possibly hasn't even been invented yet.  Only coins capable of scaling to huge on-chain transactions would make the list.

Most consensus mechanisms are simply not viable to serve as sole world reserve currency because it's just too risky.  The one exception would be DPoS and having each nation serving as a delegate.  So that's really all there is to it, either a basket of currencies, or huge, non-anonymous entities taking over DPoS and serving as the delegates.

Market caps:
If cryptocurrency takes 1% of m2 (could take a lot more), and market cap is divided somewhat evenly between top 4 coins (which I think it will be), each coin will have a 299 billion cap.

What's shadowcoin ?  ???

You're missing the point completly, what I was saying is: "talk about Ring Signatures". The anon tech is not "CryptoNote".

I don't see why you would need to mention Darshrkoin, it's just a coinjoin thing.

Cryptonote is not just ring signatures.

The transactions themselves in cryptonote also use stealth addressing. Those two portions (stealth adds and ring sigs) are borrowed by SDC. Together they form the solution to privacy and blockchain analysis resistance.

Other parts of cryptonote (in the white paper and code base) include things like smoothly varying block rewards and difficulty adjustment, automatic adjustment of block sizes, and the ASIC-resistant PoW. Those are not borrowed by SDC.

I think we're going to see a much more mixed environment than simply 3-5 top coins. Given the issues surrounding scalability, security and decentralisation vs centralisation, my model of the future of crypto is more like 3-5 different underlying technologies, supporting 100's , possibly 1000's of seperate blockchains, linked together by gateway/exchange systems (like SuperNet or Shapeshift). Think of it like a bunch of grapes, rather than one big apple.
This model aviods the security/control issues of  having 'all the eggs in one basket', doesn't require any single blockchain to scale up to global operations level, and allows a large degree of decentralisation. Given the way society, business and crypto technology are evolving, I see this scenario as the most likely outcome.

That's not DPoS. In DPoS the delegates are elected by stake, not assigned (by whom?) according to lines on a map.

What you are describing is more like the private blockchains being explored by banks, etc.


I'm not sure that huge on-chain transactions will ever make sense when you can fundamentally scale so much more efficiently with something like a lightning network (or maybe EvilDave's model of blockchain specialization), but if it does it will be because the various Moore-style "laws" bail out this worse-is-better approach, and then it will likely work for any of the chains. Obvious obstacles like Bitcoin's fixed block size limit assumed to be fixed in that case of course.

Yes, I'm aware.  What would happen is, nation states would boycott or make it hard for the currency to function via the legal system and claim they want network representation if the currency is to be allowed to function there.  This means voters would either vote out other delegates and vote the country in as one, or raise the delegate cap to include the country in order to raise the market cap which raises the value of their shares.  It's all common sense stuff.

Or more likely they would just throw away DPoS (along with its dangerous and insecure PoS voting) by pushing it aside using the legal system as you describe, and create a nationscoin that does what they want with appropriate fixed membership and weighting of control (unless you think the major world powers are going to agree to give Tuvalu equal representation LOL). You don't need DPoS for that, nor is it desirable in the slightest.

The scenario you described isn't really possible.  They can't create a "nationscoin" because they're all using bogus accounting and none of them could agree on what the ledger is supposed to say.  They all want to print money, and they all want to do things like rig currency so they can increase exports.  They don't really have an interest in being all locked into the same ledger unless something grows so big they can't ignore it anymore, then they have to try and co-opt it.  The free market coin has to come first for the ledger to exist.  The plus side is that even if they do co-opt it, it will most likely get rid of fractional reserve, which is the real root of all problems in the first place.

That may be true but then I find this whole discussion pointlessly stupid since there is no evidence any of these systems are going to grow so big that governments can't ignore it, with the possible exception of Bitcoin. With the #2 cryptocurrency (ignoring ripple for various reasons) at about 3% of Bitcoin's value and the rest far smaller, this whole line of discussion, predicated on something first getting bigger than Bitcoin and then becoming so big that governments are forced to co-opt it, is absurdly speculative.

To me it seems brilliantly clear there is a lot of mental masturbation occurring, motivated by the natural human (or perhaps it is somewhat culturally-specific) tendency to root for an underdog. Plus of course that in this space investing in an underdog has more upside leverage, so greed fuels it too (and I guess trading for a profit is not mental masturbation, so there is that).

It's more like all the back ends of the legacy systems are already considered primitive so when some guy shows up talking about "hey, I got this miracle 5 TPS bitcoin system that might be able to serve a town of 100 people, check it out", nobody really cares.  Once you show up with something that actually compares to what's already running or better, then they start to notice.

We'll see. You have a minimum of 1-2 orders of magnitude of "noticed" before you even catch up with Bitcoin, much less surpass it. (I'm roughly measuring by market cap but I think that correlates reasonable well with notice, although notice is probably even more skewed.)

There is a cognitive illusion when you see lists like

Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin
Litecoin
Ethereum
Bitshares

When in reality it should be like this if drawn to scale

Cryptocurrencies (that actually matter to "the state of crypto")
Bitcoin
Litecoin
Ethereum
Bitshares

I don't really have high hopes for Ethereum (the world's most inefficient botnet).  What's strange is hearing people claim it's not even a currency.  The working unit had to be commoditized to do things like storage spam prevention on a turing platform that isn't even suitable for a currency, so it obviously is.  Information redundancy on a normal chain is also far more useful than computational redundancy that only needs to be done on one CPU for most tasks.  Seems like one of those things that theoretically sounds good but is just a collision of bad ideas in reality.

Was going to wait to add it to the main post in case they find some undiscovered killer app like hooking a 3d printer to each node and creating an army of nano robots.

Like others said, you can discuss all you want about the technical aspects of a new coin, but the main an most important issue remains and it's an old one. To make actual people using it and go full mainstream. Security is even something minor in priority, there is credit card and bank fraud everyday with the actual system.

This is similar to what happened with the PC and MAC if you want. We all know Wozniak and others invented the technology but as amazing as it was, it needed a visionary to bring it to the masses. For that to happen, you need to make deals with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple. People will embrace Bitcoin or whatever cryptocoin they implement, that's it. Or they will create their own, which is most likely and that will be the one.

Bitcoin is like Napster if you want, Apple or a company like that will see the potential when it fits and create iTunes. But that took A LOT of impossible deals with the labels music industry moguls.

Somewhat reasonable analogy but as I recall Napster got literally nowhere where with big companies, and there certainly was not an entire nascent industry of VC-funded companies building around the Naptser ecosystem, whereas Bitcoin at least has some support from large companies (for example you mentioned Microsoft, which accepts Bitcoin (https://commerce.microsoft.com/PaymentHub/Help/Right?helppagename=CSV_BitcoinHowTo.htm)) and many startups are building on Bitcoin, and this can really only be said to a significant extent for Bitcoin specifically (i.e. see above "to scale" list). Whether that is enough to not get replaced by iTunesCoin is hard to say, but the differences with the Napster experience are certainly there.

I understand the comparison is not perfect nor fair. However Napster had the piracy issue, their reputation was tainted. Bitcoin also has this to a much lesser extent, but really the average person doesn't care that it's "anonymous" or decentralized, for god's sake, they use Google and Facebook all the time. It just need to be somewhat secure, cheaper and easy to use. Bitcoin and others already have these features. To me it is inevitable that a major player will come out with it's own coin/currency and the rest are doomed.

It can be sort of a subscription and small limit plan too, kinda like store credit but that can be accepted and used in many places. If you have some extra iCoins, you can pay Spotify with that or renew a Netflix subscription.

Well look I think the existing payment methods are somewhat secure, cheap, and easy to use. Netflix, Spotify, etc. have how many subscribers? Amazon has how many customers? Somehow these people are getting along fine without Bitcoin. They don't miss it at all.

That's not even true for Napster. Napster had far more pull demand from (most) users than Bitcoin/crypto ever has, the latter being more of a solution in search of a problem. Exceptions maybe being things like online gambling (including coin speculation as a sort of gambling game) and online drugs.

There is a context here. When satoshi built and released Bitcoin it was in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and there really was a desire for something better. Outrage over bailouts, Wall Street bonuses, etc. was mainstream. Strong hatred of banks and bankers was common. Even many in the power elite were open to alternatives. There really was a sincere and widely-held feeling that the system was broken. That was nearly a decade ago and much of that is gone. There are some low-level concerns, but the average Joe no longer gives a shit about banking one way or another. Politicians no longer mention it. The problem that Bitcoin was largely intended to solve no longer exists from the perspective of people who would need to adopt it.

If and when the pendulum swings back, then crypto will have a chance to actually do something useful. Until then, Bitcoin is languishing and all the rest have no chance at all, outside of the speculation game.

There will be a turning of the tide as people realize that centralized services are no longer viable because they steal information and sell it or give it up forcefully. The trust in government and other centralized entities will dwindle and be a calling card for decentralized services and applications. I guess its much like the cycle between private and public debt armstrong elludes to but once people are fed up they will switch. The value add of being decentralized will surface only when there is a strong enough market demand such that the average joe sees immediate need to switch over.

People don't know this already about Facebook, Google, banks, NSA, etc.?

I don't believe it. They know but they just don't care. I imagine this is a great disappointment to Snowden. He revealed all sorts of amazing things about the extent of the surveillance, at apparently great personal cost. He probably thought it would be earth shattering. The earth didn't even start to crack. For the most part (other than a few large corporations worried about losing business from other large corporations) people just don't give a shit.

Maybe the tide will turn when they start caring, but what causes that (and when) I don't know.

No because there haven't been many widespread breaches that hit their wallet or head (Ashley Madison's) to really care about on a global basis to affect the market. However I do believe its just another cycle and trust in government and other centralized services has already peaked.. thats just opinion. If one can see that it has peaked and that people are caring more and more and there is an exponential function we are on with regards to trust and privacy with privacy/non-trust being on the hockey stick end of the curve then its smart IMO to be prepared and invested in technologies that specializing in decentralization(trustlessness) and privacy. Perhaps not having trust is a stronger driver because it is affected by more markets but I believe both are parallel drivers bringing us to the same objective in a cryptocurrency.

Whether that currency is adopted is a whole 'nother subject but atleast we know there will be money coming in to the subject of interest because people suddenly have started caring.

Yes I agree and I understand how Bitcoin came to be. Every 10 or 15 years there is an economic crisis of sorts so maybe in the next 5 years if Bitcoin is still alive can take advantage of the next one, that I can see as an option for it to go mainstream. I completely agree that the average joe doesn't care about it when things fine. So in order for Bitcoin to thrive and survive it needs some crisis or change of paradigm in both democracy and capitalism if you ask me. I don't see banks having the same power as once had, they are a dying breed in terms of what they used to be, now there are plenty of other options all over the world. Also I don't buy into the whole "banks are bad", they didn't scammed anyone, it was the people that didn't use common sense and enter a life of debt that was illogical to maintain. I'm not defending bankers because there was clearly some ethical issues behind the bubble but really, if I'm not a criminal, I don't need to make anonymous transactions, and no bank has ever robbed me perse, the risks were there and people took them.

That's why I link Bitcoin future more to digital goods, media, entertainment and maybe small services (sort of how Paypal started with eBay). Not as an actual currency where you can buy an expensive car or ask for a huge loan. It's not really needed for that, it's needed for it's quickness and ease of use in my opinion.

Paypal has quickness and ease of use. Ease of use is probably better than any crypto since you can "send money to an email address". You can also set up recurring payments, which current cryptos also can't do.

For digital goods, small businesses, etc. it serves their needs almost perfectly. The only thing it doesn't have (which most users don't care about, as discussed in the last few posts) is independence from the existing banking system.

IMHO not true
eg european shops which where selling cuban cigars (legally!) have been banned by paypal.

EDIT: http://puffingcigars.com/cigar-news/cuban-related-transactions-banned-by-paypal/5729/ (http://puffingcigars.com/cigar-news/cuban-related-transactions-banned-by-paypal/5729/)

That's the nature of not having "independence from the existing banking system". There is whole layer of compliance, approval and exclusion associated with it (and Paypal is happy to add their own too, but in some cases it may just not be clear from the outside what pressures are placed on them by banks and the government -- see "Operation Chokepoint").

As I said, most users don't care. Paypal is well aware that its restrictions cause it to lose some business but it is small so they don't care either.

Another example that could be potentially be a large market: There has been explicitly-legal online gambling in the US for a few years now and only recently has Paypal quietly started to get back into that market. They've lost some business over the past few years with overly-broad restrictions but it won't matter if that business becomes large now that they are opening up to it.

I think Paypal may be vulnerable in that it isn't effectively marketed as a mobile service though. They or someone else will get that done too. I very much doubt it will be Bitcoin or any other crypto.

Really?

You'd toss out all of a government and military backed currency and an automated ubiquitous electronic payment system and implement an anarchistic unsupported model all over Cuban cigars?

I have to ask you, are you ill? Seriously, are you seeing someone for your condition?

no, i just dont want us-law enforced on european shops

Yes exactly, but Paypal transactions are very expensive in many parts of the world, that it's only problem, plus the need for credit cards to fund it (which is basically the same for buying Bitcoin, which is very difficult if you are not in the US, plenty of people had been scammed. I've used VirWox and while the fees were ridiculous the service was very fast.

Anyway we are both saying the same thing. I guess there's always the chance that one of these alternative coins/startups is bought off and one can make some money, does this ever happened? I have some dollars on GEMZ coins for example, even if they get acquired or their app explodes I don't think I would make any money off it.

That comes with European shops doing business through a US based company.

I know it looks a whole lot like you're a foreign citizen living under USA laws because the computer monitor is in your house on your soil in your country but the reality is those servers you're connecting to are owned and operated by US companies when you connect through PayPal.

If you don't want the US in your living room you're better off just cutting your Ethernet and smashing your wifi for starters.

Better yet, get everyone in your country to use a Chinese alternative. Then you can live under Chinese law.

Look there's no real liberating solution here. You live with the people who have literally tons of guns and who put bread on your table or you don't. Probably why this board has such an infinite underdog infatuation. Everybody sees nothing but infinite upside in having nothing but potential rather than working with what works.

Damn.

Most people into crypto also negates that many of the problems of the current economic system are at the same time very much needed. That's why Bitcoin had plenty of scandals and there are a lot of scam sites, suspicious gambling ones, etc. It's not regulated alright, but that also is a huge problem for people to really adopt it. Also I'm tech savy (graphic designer), I may be not a developer or engineer but buying Bitcoin was extremely frustrating and time consuming to say the least. Who wants to have these problems when there's Paypal and Credit Cards really?

Like smooth said, Snowden uncovered some ugly truths and nobody even recall his name, what he did or who he is but they do know who Bradley Cooper or Kanye West is though. My point is, for 99% of the people would be much more important to use Bitcoin to get the last Kanye West album than to hide from a 1984 Big Brother Government.

I really don't understand what's the big deal about the government having access to my financial records unless I'm a gun dealer (and we don't even know if they do, at least not in my country).

my only argument was that i think crypto has a big advantage over paypal (maybe excpect for us-shops). they can follow their own law and dont have to worry about us-law.

but paypal is everywhere: a shop which doesnt use it has a disadvantage against its competition: which is the real problem.

Good analysis of the potential for upside.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again.... I don't think its a matter of people "not caring", its apathy / defeat / hopelessness. Snowden releases some shit - great. What am I going to do to change things? Go to protests? Write my congressman? Vote?

cryptocurrency is just software you can run. People just don't know the kind of tool that bitcoin is.

Thus, imo, its a lack of knowledge.

People rather are aware of survivalnce. The problem is that they dont see the long term consequences of this. The common attitude is that "i dont have to worry and I have nothing to hide because I dont do anything illegal or fishy". And if try to tell them that they should start caring about their privacy, they immediate assume you have something to hide, that's why you are "not an open book".

i just hope btc comes back into alts.
shit let along hoping btc recovers soon enough!

Succesful market pegged assets will be big in bringing money in.  Most people don't have time to babysit the exchange window all day making sure BTC doesn't go down.

Nubits is run like a ponzi scheme but BitUSD in BTS 2.0 should be good.

Is Anonymint still alive? 

Posting regularly on other threads

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=504237;sa=showPosts

Looks like coding is entirely out of the question

He likes to rename himself once a while. Prob sells his account to put food on the table.

No his old accounts are unused. He says that he just scrambles the passwords and abandons them. To each his own, shrug.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=88197
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=408792
etc. etc.

I think you're about to see the largest margin call in Poloniex history.  

Some guy named Cagara opened a 100btc short on Bitshares around 0.00002700 sometime around Sept 23rd.  He thought the price was going to go down to 0.00002200 but it didn't, the price went to 2450 or so then recovered to 2700 again while his short is still open.  

Now this guy has to buy 100 BTC worth straight off the sell wall or wait for the price to go higher and get margin called.  Depending if he manually covers his short or waits to get margin called, the price is immediately going to go somewhere between 2900-3100 relatively soon.

There's also nobody selling for him to cover his short either because a double sell off wave just happened.  He keeps trying to dump into buy support to stop the rise just digging himself deeper in the hole:

https://i.imgur.com/9Hl6B1c.jpg

relevant how  ???

The politics of crypto are even more interesting than the actual coins sometimes.

trading sub forum at best.

I tried to sell a Kelsey but nobody would buy it !

I agree this is off-topic so create a new thread for it. I am finding this fascinating and would like to see what happens.

How did you get all the details? Can you see other members shorts?

Any estimation on % of losses he might have?

people... please be aware... polo does not show its margin positions. its impossible to tell if this is a margin position or a normal sell.
as bitshares was MUCH higher in the past its very likely this is an old holder cashing out...

can we go back to topic please?

Wow! FYI, the term you're looking for is "short squeeze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_squeeze)".

Made a new thread for it here, will be intersting to see how this turns out because he's currently digging himself a deeper hole:

Overleveraged buffoon creates biggest Mexican standoff in Altcoin history

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1194800.0

It appears we have already reached full blown collusion in Bitcoin.  I suspect this would eventually lead to a US vs China vs Russia vs Europe arrangement:


https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/decentralist-perspective-bitcoin-might-need-small-blocks-1442090446

Funny I didn't notice this.  Bookmarked it for later.  Thanks for the write up, r0achie.  :)

Wildbeastbitcoin $WBB and 1EX.Trade will hopefully bring about some much needed positive change and legitimacy to crypto and alts!  just saying! ;)  8)

Great thread and very nice article.
thank you!
I totally agree with you! I also found a very similar article mentioning another point of view:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/current-state-cryptocurrency/ (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/current-state-cryptocurrency/)

any update

Subtle anti ethereum fud.