Bitcoin Forum

If a coin was going to copy Dash and Zcash's model of having some portion of transaction fees (more generally block reward) paid to a governance board which then distributed the funds, who would you trust to be on this board and what percentage of the board's funds would you want paid to the members of this board for their effort to manage the distribution of the funds?

Bitshares learned that if you let everyone vote, you end up with rigor mortis due to political turf battles, i.e. a power vacuum. So for Steem they did a sneaky stealth "pre"mine to make sure the principals control 80% of the money supply. Essentially they copied Dash which has a sneaky "bug" "pre"mine so that the insiders got a huge portion of the tokens and thus control the money supply and voting (probably via proxies so they can hide their control (https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@thedashguy/warning-why-i-don-t-trust-the-price-of-dash-nor-the-community-be-careful-folks-invest-wisely-diversify#@otoh/re-thedashguy-warning-why-i-don-t-trust-the-price-of-dash-nor-the-community-be-careful-folks-invest-wisely-diversify-20170219t020606751z)).

So in lieu of doing some scam like those, the only way I can see to make a governance work is to permanently install trusted board members and then pre-program in the protocol to dissolve the entire funding source after a set period of time once the initial bootstrap development is completed. Perhaps a 2 - 5 year period. What do you all think?

Feedback please. Ideas?

Those doing governance would need to be very technical so they understand the visionary developers. Yet they need to be solidly grounded. And they need to not have a conflicting agenda.

The first person who came to my mind is @smooth, but he has conflicting vested interests.

P.S. I am not saying it is a good idea to do because it involves centralized trust (and don't we want decentralized and trustless?), but during bootstrap stage possibly it can help to have a funding source. I am starting a discussion if anyone is interested to discuss.

P.S.S. Feel free to discuss legal implications as well if you want. Note that providing the illusion of (i.e. ostensibly hiding the ownership of your masternodes via proxy owners, etc.) decentralized voting that the Steem and Dash scams do, is probably intended to be a way to avoid issues with the law about investment securities.

I'm new, as you know, so take with a grain of salt, as you will.....

1. The top 500 (random number, enter number there that you see fit) miners in the last 30 days or X blocks should be able to vote. Same people are the only ones able to submit ideas to be funded.
2. The percentage of income to the "treasury" would depend on the emission scheme of the coin, but assuming something like bitcoin, 1 percent of the block mining and 1 percent transaction fees should be enough. I think Dash's 10 percent is way too high.
3. No end time on the treasury, ongoing.
4. Unspent treasury is distributed to all miners equally (based on work over the 30 day period or whatever period). If no agreement on spending can be reached then automatically distributed in this fashion.

Their economic incentives don't always align with the best directions for the development of the coin. Also they may be deficient in technical understanding of complex issues.


Problem is it becomes a centralized resource to fight over. It eventually it will be controlled by those at the top of the power-law distribution. So it will be a "the rich collect rents and parasite" formula. So I don't think perpetual is a good idea. The centralized bootstrap should get out of the way and let the ecosystem fund itself decentralized as Satoshi did when he stepped aside.

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How about decentralized voting by the token owners wherein they vote their stake in the treasury separately from the others, i.e. not monolithic appropriation?

I guess you will always have both those problems with any kind of fairish voting system.

Another 2 options:

1 - Allow the development team to (heaven forbid) pre-mine some coins for themselves, they get paid when they make them worth something

2 - A perfectly fair launch with no treasury system and the developers beg for a different currency to fund development (USD, Bitcoin). People have incentive to fund good development as it will increase the value of their holdings. This does obviously means that people that hold the coin but dont help with funding the development get a "free ride".

This is the ultimate problem in crypto.
Remind me of the old days of MemoryCoin before they went on to do Protoshares / Bitshares.
That coin MEM is a worthy mention for this topic.. which i have explained lots before.

I see a centralization problem everywhere.
And if it's an automated / decentralized thing then i guess it's going to suffer like Mr. Moore here said.

Look at Monero and the guy running MEW, hell look at any coins.
They all have a head figure of sorts etc.. which pulls the strings etc.

Every coin is hosted on Github pretty much and who has the Password ?
And who does Github report to ? I know for a fact from Piracy circles they are US Govt compliant 100%.
I believe this forum is also.

Follow the trails and it starts to look ugly.

Decentralized automation of sorts is the answer and if it gives a bad result then oh well.
For example we need a fully autonomous exchange solution.
I can't wrap my head around how hard that would be to make.
Imagine Cryptsy or Poloniex or Bittrex etc all fully 100% decentralized running on it's own basically.
So you could do the exact same thing as you do on them now.. that's a LOT of code !
That was the next step after Bitcoin we never took.

The government.   ;D

Honestly, if there is a "trusted party" to be had, it is the government.  Trump, the United Nations, Putin, the European Union, or some other "trusted entity", no ?

I don't know why one would go through all the crypto hassle to end up with the equivalent of Putin or Trump, with the equivalent of the European Union or the United Nations.  Because that is what will happen if there is "aristocracy", that is to say, "people who are different from others, because they have institutional decision rights which others haven't".

Satoshi knew this and pulled out before people asked him to "rule".

You know, If we picked the right one (Australian, Norwegian, New Zealand, Denmark, Finland) It probably would be about the safest bet. (to handle the distribution of funds, not to run the development team)

I am also coming to the conclusion that is the only way to do it because all other ways appear to be illegal (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.msg17989461#msg17989461). And that was my original plan in 2014, but was told by everyone that premine was horrible. Yet I've come to realize that every project was premined, even Bitcoin and Monero. There was always some limited number of people who were mining with huge resources at the very start when the difficulty was miniscule.

Yep, The issue here, as you obviously know:

- When the coins are still worthless at the start, and you really need money to pay developers, you have none.
- Once its gone, its gone.

I still think, despite the issues, the first idea I posted is the best long-term (Dash style mining percentage, voting system)

If you wanted to you could bake in a percentage reduction over time, ie, 10% (Dash) goes to the treasury initially, reduced over time till you hit .001% after an amount of time (10 years?)
 and then its sits steady there forever.

Votes on treasury spending should be divided between both miners and wallet holders in a balance that you would know better than me.

I am a developer. I eat rice. I live in the Philippines and $300 monthly rent, $256 child support, etc. I have angel investors for my basic needs.

Open source. Anybody can code on it.


Illegal (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.msg17989461#msg17989461).

And its competing for a coming ICO graveyard of bankrupted fools (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1804521.msg17990874#msg17990874).

the best regulation about governance, same youre write is USA
USA with SEC and ETF, but if SEC and ETF is nothing want receive payment from client is investigation, nothing receive bribe money,so transaction fee paid to governance is nothing to work, becuase can indicate coruption

Seigniorage is inevitable when one creates a monetary asset.  It is considered "unfair" and can harm, as such, the monetary belief in the system, but seigniorage will always happen.
With fiat, the seigniorage goes to the government ('s buddies), and people scream "THIEF", but it is just a tax like any other.  With bitcoin, about the smartest anti-seigniorage system was thought of: you BURN it.  Every coin that is created, has WASTED as much value as it was worth (apart from a small and fair "competitive" margin).
But even with bitcoin, there is seigniorage: the first adopters could get their coins at a fraction of the value it has now.  All this "unmerited" value transfer from certain people to other people because of an "unfair advantage" (the monopoly of the state, the knowledge of the devs and their buddies....).

It is inevitable.  The only thing one should obtain, is that this advantage gets "washed out" over time.  Seigniorage is worse with PoS than with PoW for instance, because initial stakes give you the final dominance over the coin distribution.

But why don't you consider a totally different way of distributing your coin ?

Give yourself a fair premine, and make the coin for the rest a *fork of bitcoin*.  So that anyone holding bitcoin at a specific date in the past holds your coins too (and you hold your premine on top of that).  As such, you get immediately a distribution everyone considers now as "fair".  You could even only accept bitcoin that has already moved, say, at least 10 transactions at a day in the past, so that you eliminate Satoshi's stash.  

Bitcoin is a primitive coin, but has one advantage: apart from Satoshi's stash that mostly didn't move, it has a fair distribution that has a certain age.  Why not "fork" off this, and take from bitcoin what it did best, and which can only happen ONCE in history ?

It is unwise to think that any centralized service or website is free from being pawn in the bigger game.
In the end it is government which controls everything. Do you remember when BFL went down?
Theymos was 'asked' by the authorities to share private messages of everyone involved in this case.
He complied to that request. How could he refuse?

Yeah thanks, let's discuss about monetary theory.

The seigniorage is the price we-the-society pay for there being confidence in the currency. For without confidence, money has no value (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1665943.msg16749910#msg16749910). This is a critical point that most people under appreciate, so it is very important that readers click that link and understand more deeply the linked thread in all its detail.

The ability to get a large community to rally around one thing as money, is essential for money can't exist without confidence that it is a liquid and fairly universal unit-of-exchange.

So he who can create that confidence, gets the seigniorage.


When a developer of a project works very hard to create the confidence, he BURNS his labor which is economically analogous to getting paid and buying mining equipment and paying electricity.

The argued benefit of PoW as a distribution mechanism is that is an OBJECTIVE (i.e. trustless) free market competition and it has unbounded, decentralized participation. So it is really the distribution mechanism of PoW that is its genius, not the BURNING.

Now if someone can design another form of distribution which has the same properties, then he will have a valid alternative to PoW. I am working on such an alternative system of trustless, objective, distribution.


Knowledge acquisition and social networking are competitive. At least in our ecosystem unlike in the nation-state model, no one has a monopoly on this competition.


Agreed. An ongoing (i.e. perpetual "tail reward") PoW-like distribution is much better. But I intend to show that PoW isn't the only way, nor even the best way.


I am.


Byteball did this. The problem is that when you give away coins for free to speculators, they are likely to sell them because they didn't decide to BURN anything (e.g. buy or do effort for it) for it, e.g. Auroracoin.

Also your suggestion only targets a very limited audience of Bitcoin holders.


No, you don't because those who obtained coins had nothing invested.

Hmm, I thought I saw you saying the other day that POW is the only viable solution lol...

It better not be a proof of storage after you have just been telling me my idea in that other thread is no good without giving me the answer to make it work! :)

First thing you said Shelby was "getting paid"
That is the issue.. morality & altruism etc.

If we are going to play by this everyone needs to be paid to lift a finger game then it's just going to scale up and escalate higher and higher.

Crypto in general started out as a few guys in a basement and now it's million dollar loans for mining farms
..and multi-million dollar ICO's where the "Dev" (i use that term loosely) is paid millions.
But.. it started out with guys doing coding work for nothing in return.
Aside from having the same equal mining opportunity on launch as all the others.

If they "need" to be paid it's going to snow ball.. it always does.
I don't know who to trust for governance off hand but i would trust the guys with hands out the least LOL
I'd be looking more to people who do things with out asking for anything in return.
That may not be an answer but it should help narrow it down a bit i think.  ;)

Why did you buy Bitcoin then?



The problem you lament exists because the speculators want to compete with each to buy ICOs early because they are all jealous  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1806043.msg18002861#msg18002861)that they didn't buy Bitcoin at $1. There is no solution to that other than to take all their money from them, and give it to scammers. Because that is what happens to jealous fools.

Whereas, telling me not to creating the Bitcoin Killer advance because you don't want me to get paid what I am worth, is nonsensical. If you could somehow stop me, then I would go work on some other project not in crypto and earn the (up to) $350,000 a year I used to earn before.

The problem with seigniorage is not the LOSS by society (your analysis is correct), but rather the *unmerited gain* of those obtaining seigniorage, and hence the economic power the obtain "for nothing".

It is not so much the fact that it costs you something, it is the nasty effect to see the other guy get rich without production of value.

Seigniorage is on the receiving side, not on the paying side.  That a monetary asset network costs value is OK.  But that this value gets in the hands of some is not OK.  If it is destroyed, then that's OK.  This is what is so brilliant about PoW.

There's nothing wrong for them to sell it, on the contrary.  The more a coin gets traded, the less it is concentrated in the hands of a few.  

You don't need people to "invest" in something.  The only thing you need is a large list of non-identical crypto-identity holders, so that the initial distribution is as large as possible.  If it were possible to have, in one way or another, a public key of every person on earth, that would be the most ideal distribution.  But we don't have such lists of which we know that they aren't manipulated.  As such, the bitcoin address list looks like it is one of the best.  There doesn't even need to be a correspondence between the AMOUNT of bitcoin to an address and the newly distributed coin.  You could give a single coin to every existing address.  Most of them are probably dead.  But that doesn't matter.  What is needed, is a large list of public keys, of which the secret keys are in the hands of as many people as possible.

You don't even need to TELL people immediately.  You can have them discover their holdings way later.  The important point is that whatever is used as public key, cannot be manipulated when the knowledge is out.  It has to be a list "of the past".

Those things are not scams.

the problem is that you undersell yourself. You don't believe your ideas are worth it. But they are. It actually doesn't matter whether your ideas ultimately work out. What matters is that we need many people like you to be creative to push to try things.
Let us take care of whether its a "scam"or not.

We are all involved in the experiment, and we can't predict exactly where it is going, so we need people like you with knowledge and ideas to experiment.
I'd happily put money into an ICO of yours.
I have done very well in crypto because I'm not afraid to take risks and to believe.

You have something to contribute. It doesn''t matter whether it is perfect.  Do it.

And remeber , if something is worth doing it's worth doing badly the first time.

1. PoW does not destroy (aka "burn") the economic value. Most of it ends up as cash flow to the utility companies, which means more demand for subsidized large infrastructure power projects, given that utilities are price-controlled and regulated (which means the political corruption of privatizing the profits and charging the costs to the public). There is some portion of the value traipsing into to the environment as "waste" heat (i.e. disordered), but there is friction in any system that interfaces with the tangible world, thus it isn't a unique feature of PoW.

2. The problem is not an incipient gain by a group able to hoist a more efficient monetary system on to society, but rather a gain which doesn't naturally diminish exponentially, because otherwise it sells the future to the past which is a reduction of degrees-of-freedom and incompatible with the Second Law of Thermodynamics trend towards increasing entropy. The fiat masters try to unnaturally maintain the right of gain from seigniorage over the long-term being rewarded for being a top-down Coasian cost on society, which is low entropy and this top-down statis is why nation-states collapse over and over again throughout our human history.


Thus there is nothing wrong with the creator obtaining some exponentially diminishing seigniorage. And PoW's great contribution is in the objectively, competitive distribution which runs on auto-pilot and doesn't require ongoing seigniorage (except as pointed out above the seniorage of the government utilities it furthers and also the fact that economies-of-scale centralize it and create an ongoing seigniorage, which is really, really bad and why Bitcoin is in a scalepocalypse political clusterfuck as the power vacuum must be filled). But PoW doesn't actually destroy the value transferred in the process. Destroying all value will be akin to moving to infinite entropy (disorder) which would mean we could not exist.

Btw, what I am attempting to do is design and launch a variant of the root concepts explored by Satoshi's PoW, which I hope ameliorate the aforementioned power vacuum. However, even I will admit to you that my design can be gamed by whoever can convince society that an objective system is not a priority. But at least my design doesn't require that most people need to stop being apathetic (because they only have to make a decision to employ the objectively provably correct automated client/wallet software). It only requires that society has the correct ideological understanding of objectivity. So we must teach. Or alternatively that only those who do have that understanding stay on the well functioning fork of my design. With Satoshi's PoW, we can all have the correct understanding, but it doesn't help us avoid the fact the economics of PoW are naturally centralizing due to asymmetrically higher profits that accrue to those with more hashrate than others (and other forms of economies-of-scale such as cheaper electricity and the fact that @ArticMine's decentralized space heater concept is provably incorrect as I have exhaustively explained in my unpublished white paper).

Following rant is prompted by the usual argument between @ArticMine and myself flaring up again (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1804521.msg18005032#msg18005032) before I slept (just woke up).

<rant>
Before you read this, please read Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons (https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surgeons-23b0e2cf6d52#.zukx8wrsp) by Nicholas Taleb, the progenitor of antifragility.

I want to preface this rant with an acknowledgement that Monero comprises an important body of work that advanced our ecosystem's understanding and technology. However, what I found to be so ironic and what has irked me about Monero's community attitude/ideology since the start was this holier than thou religion that (only Monero's variant of) PoW was the Holy Grail which eliminated the evils of seniorage. They voiced superiority over every other project and economic scheme (although I end up agreeing with them about the centralization flaws in other schemes such as Dash's masternodes). And only their anonymity was worthy. Etc.. As it turns out, no system based on Satoshi's PoW avoids centralization long-term. And even the anonymity of Monero appears to me to be incompatible with reporting taxation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1798356.msg17974824#msg17974824) totals to the authorities, thus afaics (IMO) meaning it can't possibly become mainstream and thus can't become a unit-of-account and thus will always be tied and enslaved to fiat. Monero folks were always telling me I had to work for free and could only get my ROI by having a large amount of capital to invest in XMR (i.e. a big boys club and I ain't in it):


Underlying implication and attitude was that I had better join them or end up being left behind as a failure (and that they had the larger grouping of smart people and so one guy on his own trying initiate something creative couldn't possibly compete). According to their groupthink, they felt smug to belittle anyone who claims there could be opportunity to go create something great and earn more than the most lucrative year of my career thus far ($350K in 2001). Instead they throw some bones out for the little guys in the form of measly donations. Hey if I just wanted a job earning $50 per hour, I could in theory go earn more than that back in Texas. One of the reasons for working every waking moment on this stuff is not just because it is very challenging and interesting work (and also for the social interaction given I am an extrovert), but also because of the potential financial upside given I am at the tail end of my most productive years. People have opportunity costs. My opportunity cost is that I am age ~52 with negative networth, no retirement, and minanarchist meaning I won't accept government handouts, so I can't just work for free for fun. That doesn't mean anybody owes me anything. We only can earn what we are capable of earning. In this ecosystem, the fact is that others can clone your open source work. There are factors to consider...  Any way for the moment I decided I just want to work on it, and not think about my potential ROI. I will not do an ICO. I am funded for some more months on my basic expenses, so I will just enjoy working on it and see if it can be launched. Then the free market can decide. Note I do want to acknowledge that several guys in Monero's community have been very generous to me. I think I've received on the order of ~15 - 20 BTC in total (at an average BTC price < $500 and I spent it on expenses) in total from those in the Monero community over the past 3 years. So perhaps my ranting above is insolent. I am trying to make a point about the evils of groupthink, not a personal admonition of individuals in that community per se.
</rant>

We can't give away for free that which is not free.

When Russia privatized the land after the fall of the Soviet union in Perestroika by giving it away free to people who didn't know how to own/steward/manage private land anymore, the rich bought up all the land, so there was less significant change in the top-down control of the economy than one might have hoped for.

Instead of harvesting high diversity of effort (i.e. true investment) with a viral distribution model, IMO Byteball is creating a low entropy speculation with too much top-down control at the nascent stage where it needs exponential distribution. Thus the probability of failure is much higher, i.e. the antifragility is very low.


You have clearly demonstrated to me by now in our discussions over the past days that you entirely do not understand/appreciate the critical importance of the entropic force and the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes.

Replication is not the same as a diversity of irreversible paths. Replication is low entropy. You have a huge blindspot in this area of conceptualization and it is the source of your incorrect analysis on many issues. Sorry just being frank.


Egalitarianism is the same as infinite entropy (in that everything is equiprobable and simultaneously absolute top-down order) which is the same as non-existence and a static universe.


Nicholas Taleb disagrees (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1739268.msg18010992#msg18010992).

I agree with all of this. And part of my experiment, is explaining what I think about various things such as monetary theory and ICOs, etc..

The incorrect claim of Byteball creating a wide and fair distribution:

https://medium.com/iconominet/iconomi-acquires-9-766-of-byteball-initial-distribution-free-of-charge-cd9c4a5d49ac#.rkuo958we

You are right that the energy markets are not totally free, but in reality, there IS commodity destruction.  It is not as complete as in the case of a totally free and competitive liquid energy and ASIC market, but there is more waste than if you had to print dollar bills.

The real problem of PoW doesn't come from the fact that there are still large margins taken on the commodities that need to be destroyed, but rather that the coin value at the moment of its PoW creation only has a fractional value of its later value.  The value increase of the coin over time is also a form of seigniorage: people get value for just holding coins.  At what point that is seigniorage, and at what point that is "investment", can be discussed.  I consider that it is not an investment as such, because there's no economic value produced by the investment - well, there is the ultra-small economic value produced by the utility of the crypto currency, which is essentially zilch: almost no consumer good, in the end, has seen the daylight that wouldn't have seen the daylight if crypto currencies didn't exist, and consumer goods/services are the bottom line of economic value of course.


There are two remarks on this.  First of all, holding a seigniorage-obtained fraction of a collectible which grows in market cap over time, gives you a proportional growth in seigniorage, without doing anything.  If you possess 5% of bitcoin when its market cap is 1 million dollars because of seigniorage, and bitcoin goes to 1000 billion, your seigniorage has grown proportionally.  So you DO gain continuous seigniorage by just holding the coins.  That is even the case if you wasted 50 000 dollars to obtain them, that is, if you destroyed entirely the initial seigniorage when you created them.  This is the problem with a "sound money" collectible as a monetary asset.  You could formulate it that its seigniorage properties are not invariant over time.  This is a problem in my opinion.

The second is that value that is transferred (the goal of a currency) shouldn't, of course, be destroyed !  It is coins created that should have their value destroyed, apart from a small competitive margin.  The economic value of a crypto currency is ultimately only worth what it allowed to produce in utility for the end consumer, and that is not much.  This economic value can be distributed over the people that made this happen, took the risk and had the vision, like with any investment.  But the problem with a monetary asset is that it doesn't take its *added economic value* as market cap, but *the whole traded value*.  There is no "economic fairness" in this.

If I have, say, a big machine that can labour land, and you want to labour your land, my machine has economic value to you, because you can grow more food on your land with my machine.   Let us say that the gain in food production ends up being 1000 if you use my machine.  You using my machine is hence worth 1000.  But we have to get my machine to your place.  If I have to hire 20 people to carry it to your place, that would cost us 200, which means that only 800 remains.  Now, if Joe has a truck, and he can transport the machine to your place.  He needs to spend a value of 50 on gas, maintenance and so on for his truck.  You can say that in the end, the economic value of him using the truck is 150, because without the truck, we would end up obtaining 800, and with his truck, we end up obtaining 950 of value.

However, his truck did transport my machine, which was worth 1000 in total.  But the truck voyage itself was only worth 150.

With a monetary asset, however, the existence of the monetary asset, which is the "truck for value", brings in some economic value (like the truck did, about 150), but takes on, as a market cap, the FULL value of what is transported.

The confusion with a monetary asset is between the value it *transports* and the value *creation* of the system itself (the competitive advantage the monetary system brings over other ways of transporting value).   My claim is that, at the moment, the competitive advantage of crypto over, say, fiat, in pure end-consumer value creation is minuscule.  This minuscule value is what could be fairly distributed to the "investors" in crypto - like they would if they had invested in any other stock.  But with crypto (like with any other monetary asset), the value of the asset itself is confused with the value it transports.  It is not because I bought something for 10 000 dollars with bitcoin, that the bitcoin system created me an economic value of 10 000 dollars, it only transported it (like the truck) ; as such, it did bring me some small value because otherwise I would have done it with fiat, but this is a very small amount.

However, the holder of "seigniorage bitcoins" takes the full value that is transported as reward, and not just the value creation by the bitcoin monetary system.   This unfair economic advantage makes that one hugely overinvests in this system.  In other words, the seigniorage-by-holding-coins is a huge market failure, that directs tons and tons of resources towards something that has very little economic consumer value.

I have only casually looked at it, but it seems that byteball is not really a FORK of bitcoin at a certain block height, but rather organizes "rounds" where you can obtain coins if you participate.  As such, you are obtaining the same "inside knowledge" unfairness as a ninja mine.  You simply "have to know and be there at the right time".
A genuine fork would allow people to use their (former) bitcoin address signatures *automatically* and at any time to create their byteball coins ; in fact, their coins would be considered existing on the byteball system, in the same way that ETC coins were considered existing on the ETC chain when people had ETH coins before the fork.

Well, I have the impression that you deify the notion of entropy.  For sure it is an important and fascinating concept, and it sneaks into areas of research where one didn't expect it at first sight.  But it isn't a magic word.  Entropy has a very well-defined meaning, and using the word and the notion outside of its well-defined meaning can sometimes be speculative theory, but most of the times, charlatanism.  There's another word like that, "quantum", that is often abused.  It is not always clear in what way the author using that word is simply being casually speculative but has in fact a clear idea in mind, and when he's using the word "magically".   I've seen that you sometimes use the word "entropy" in a context where I cannot link it in a clear way to its definition.  I don't know if, at those moments, you use it with a clear link to its definition, which I fail to understand, or as a "magic word" because you're somehow fascinated by it, without clearly understanding yourself what it could mean in that context, but you "feel in your bones" that it must have something to do with it, but you don't know what.

Entropy is just "lack of knowledge of an event".  The event has a specific state/value/outcome... (will have, had, ...) and you don't know which one it is, but you only know it must be "one of several possibilities".

Entropy is hence a relationship between the entity that can take on the event, and the entity that "ignores".  What is entropy for me, is maybe not entropy for you (and in that case, YOUR entropy for me is at least as big as the entropy I have about the system - which is the essence of the second law).

Now, what can we ignore ?  Almost anything, which is exactly why this notion is so all-pervading.  "physical entropy" is our ignorance of the exact micro state of a physical system, that still satisfies a given "macro state".

If I have a cup of hot water, I know its macro state: it is "hot water".  However, I don't know where what water molecule is, exactly, on a microscopic scale.  This ignorance is the entropy that how water has.  Note that it is dependent on what I consider as micro state.  I also don't know the nuclear state of hot water, but usually I don't care, so I don't take this into account in its physical entropy.  When I have to do nuclear stuff with water, suddenly water has much more entropy, than when I will be doing chemistry with it.   The heat that I can get out of water by using nuclear fusion is not accounted for by the usual values of entropy one gives to hot water, because most of the time, we don't consider that kind of outcomes.

In the same way as I can ignore physical micro states, I can ignore other things, like memory states of a computer, the actual state of a finite-state machine.  Take a whole network as a big finite state machine, then my ignorance of the exact state of this network can be measured in entropy units.
I can ignore "complex outcomes", like throwing a dice.  I know that if you throw a dice (or if you threw one yesterday, but didn't tell me the outcome), that it must be one of 6 outcomes, but I don't know which one.  Entropy.

In very much most cases, the entropy of the ignorance of a physical state is MUCH, MUCH larger than anything "computer-related".  There's more entropy in my hot cup of water than in the whole internet.

But, and this is important, we now come to the complementary notion: information.  Information is what sets off entropy (and is hence the same kind of quantity).  I need to receive information in order to diminish my entropy about something.  If you tell me that the dice thrown gave a 4, then my entropy about that dice is now entirely lifted, by an equal amount of information I received.

But information has another aspect.  It has the aspect of "what I care about".  Information has also to do with what one calls "macro states".  If I have hot water, the physical entropy of that is huge, but I don't care.  I only need the macro state to make coffee.  So my "entropy about the macro state" is essentially 0, because I KNOW the macro state.  I don't need the micro state if I want to make coffee.

So the fact that when I pour a cup of hot water over my instant coffee, and that I'm "Handling huge amounts of entropy", doesn't matter for what I'm doing.

I've seen you fall into this trap several times, like with the "entropy of the network with latencies calculating the digits of Pi".  I don't care, because the macro state I'm only interested in, is the value of the digits of pi, and the "microstates of the network" don't matter.  They are the equivalent of the hot cup of water, and its microstates.  I don't have to know them to make coffee.


Chaotic irreversibility is nothing else but the amplification of a specific micro state to a macro state.  The ignorance of the micro state then results in the ignorance of the macro state.
There are usually two opposing dynamics: one is chaotic dynamics which "brings micro states to the macro level", and the other is "statistical averaging" over large populations, which turns "individual macro states" into "system micro states".

The first one makes that one can "lose information", the second makes that "this information doesn't really matter".

If I use hot water, and I pour it to make coffee, I not only have the physical entropy of the hot water, I also have the chaotic dynamics of the turbulence in the water flow.  And all of this doesn't, in the end, matter, and I end up having a cup of coffee.

However, in as much as the turbulence is too turbulent, say, I can burn myself, I have to go to the hospital, and this implies a change in my life path that was difficult to foresee.  However, on the level of humanity, on average, 0.001% of people making coffee burn themselves, so this becomes again a kind of macro state.

So one cannot just be "amazed at the amount of entropy in a system".  There's more entropy in your cup of hot water than there is in the whole internet.  It doesn't always matter.

This has nothing to do with "egalitarianism".   I don't want everybody to "have equal income" or some silliness of that kind.  But if a monetary asset is to be introduced as something new, there is absolutely no reason why it should go into the hands of some more than in the hands of others, because any difference on that level is seigniorage, and gives value "against no economic production" to some over others.

Of course, an initially equal distribution of a monetary asset will not stay that way, but that doesn't matter.  At least, there has not been someone having had seigniorage from it.  Nobody has won anything by such an initial distribution, and that is how it should be.  That you can gain value by trading the asset against economic production, and accumulate wealth that way, is OK: you obtained it by providing value.  But you should not have gotten "value for nothing" which is exactly what seigniorage is about (and what most of crypto speculation is about).

And this is one of the cases where the word "entropy" doesn't have its place, honestly.  We're talking about how a token system that serves to transport value should "start out".  There's no reason why some should have more tokens *against no value* than others.  The only thing that makes sense in a monetary asset is the *transport* of value.  But the *creation of tokens* means that this is a non-equilibrated "transport", which is contradictory to the idea of the system that value only goes in closed circles through the system.  The best way to do this is by an as uniform as possible initial distribution, so that the "value out of thin air" is equal for everybody, and hence doesn't represent, in the end, any value.  From that point on, the tokens can transport value in closed circles.
This has nothing to do with "ignoring outcomes" or "ignoring states" and hence, has nothing to do with "entropy".

There is a distinction though.
Take the launch of MAX Coin for example.
It was screamed LOUDLY that it was coming.. and in turn we all piled onto it.
We all had the same advantage to have mining hardware ready to go on launch.
Is it a premine if another guy has more money to buy more mining PC's for the planned launch ?
Saying Bitcoin etc was premined is to me insanity.
I get what your driving at but i am not buying it.

What you are missing is the fact there was no better way to do it.
And the massive intense super ultra mega world changing revolution of the ICO
..is a step in reverse.

NOT INNOVATION.

The retarded logic is that if a mined coin *can* be exploited by a whale on launch then we must abandon the entire concept of mining a coin at launch all together.
If that does not sound retarded to you guys then i bet you are an ICO supporter  :D

And lets not forget that Bitcoin was not premined with cash in hand BEFORE the product was released.
The first block reward of value was mined AFTER the coin was launched and the person rewarded was paid so for doing a task.. making the system work / securing the block chain.

I can see some of you really do enjoy the little game of verbal gymnastics  :D

I already said who can be trusted.. it's obvious.
And it is not the people holding their hand out for something that will come *later.
Some of you are fucked in the head bad enough that you really do not comprehend others will do something for nothing.

I just finished installing Visual Studio and fixed an error on an Android / Windows program posted on XDA.
The dev left long ago when interest and money / donations dried up i guess..
No one is going to be giving me fuck all for my time & effort.. i did it because i felt like it.

This bullshit has turned into a cesspool of greed and entitlement.. aka: the ICO.
If you do not have the means to launch a coin then leave it someone who can.
ICO shitheads will never get 1 single cent from me.
I do not support Crypto-Pan Handling fer ROI'z.
I support Crypto Currency's (not crypto-schemes for profit)
Either you make it and post it or fuck off ..pretty simple.

I am not purchasing *convincing varied levels of idealism tokens for trading LOL

---

EDIT:

By the way i donated a while back Bitcoin to an XDA dev too.. panhandling ?
Nope.. he created it FIRST ..then i paid him Bitcoin.
See how that works guys ?

Okay so you've concurred that Byteball's distribution is flawed.


Then you'd be back to giving things (e.g. de-nationalized land in Russia, tokens in our case) away free to people who weren't motivated to invest and work for them. And the dumping of them to whales as a result and thus not a wide distribution. Besides the Bitcoin distribution is tiny as it is.

It is difficult for me the fathom how you can be so myopic.

Incredible value has already been created by the degrees-of-freedom of being able to move funds globally without permission. (I had already mentioned my personal examples to you in another thread, yet you cling your myopic viewpoint, so can see Monero and anonymity as the only feature of interest)

Bitcoin's daily volume is only $0.2 billion compared to $6000 billion for the SWIFT (https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/china/china-cips-v-western-swift-system/) transfer system, i.e. 1/30,000th. Imagine if its volume was 100X higher what the effects would be.

And the final chapter of what blockchains are going to enable has not been written yet. Stay tuned...

(You are such a pessimist. I would not want to live in Europe, it's so gloomy. My Belgian friend says he hates going back there to see all the long frowning faces)

No.


But Bitcoin didn't have everyone trying to pile in to mine it. It only had Satoshi who was seriously mining it. Because only he knew the masterplan and its importance. So when a developer takes a premine, he is essentially doing the same as Satoshi.

I understand you are making the distinction that anyone could have mined Bitcoin at the start. And with a premine no one could. But I can retort you on that. Anyone at the start of premine could have created their own altcoin instead. And they could fork it and mine it.

Gotcha.  ;)


Wanna bet?


I didn't propose an ICO. Please don't conflate.


But it doesn't logically follow that everyone MUST also work for free ALWAYS.


So make a blockchain by yourself then from scratch. Launch it. Etc..

The amount of work you are doing for that toy hobby doesn't compare.

The HODLer has an opportunity cost which is not free. The external economy didn't just cease to exist while he was HODLing.

Sitting still in your chair is not free and has a (n opportunity) cost.


This is not quite right or not the complete story. Society needs both savings and consumption. The money supply can growth faster than GDP, but any way the Quantity Theory of Money is not accurate because the value of money is complex and intertwined with confidence and derivatives.

It is quite complex, because even for example we may need that effect you lament to counteract the extreme level of money supply growth in the early distribution phase and also to encourage early adopters to invest in the ecosystem and not just dump their tokens for fiat (for the more liquid unit-of-account and unit-of-exchange).

then please do, if this is your opinion then honestly the development of a 'bitcoin killer' isn't for you.

lost on most the crypto crowd is the entire point behind the development of a true p2p currency. its not about developing another payment system, seriously the world doesn't need a new visa or paypal etc etc etc  ::)

yes bitcoin was essentially premined and one of the many reasons i think its more a distraction then the future of p2p currency. the only good thing todate to come out of cryptocurrency is the idea.

whats the point of being an alternative to the greedy bankers system if we ourselves become the greedy bankers  ???

The greedy bankers system we have today concentrates more and more power to the greedy bankers. Ie, because they have money, they can get more money, because they are in charge of the interest rates etc they can affect the economy.

In a cryptocurrency greedy banker scenario as the banker "consumes" his wealth (stake in the crypto currency) he becomes less relevent because as a percentage his share is going down.

eg: I realease a coin and pre-mine 50% of the coins. People start buying the other 50% and put the price up, so I decide i'm going to dump 50% of my holdings, I make some nice alternate currency (ie, USD) and feel very happy, fat and greedy, but, now I only own 25% of the currency. Thats not really how it goes in the current system of greedy bankers, where they get rich, spend it, the print some more and give it to themselves.

Also, provided I am the only one with access to my wallet or something in a de-centralized sytem, if something happens to me (eat too much cake and have a heart attack and die) then thats it, the coin continues without me, no more greedy banker.

If something happens to the current centralized greedy banker the vice greedy banker becomes the cheif greedy banker and it continues.

Communists have never been wrong.

The entropy (a measure of possible surprise) of the Internet includes not just the hardware and software but all the biology of the humans interacting on it, which is not just a product of their DNA. There is a lot more water out there interacting with the Internet than in your cup of water.


At the infinite asymptotic limit of all possible trials (or otherwise stated that on a long enough time window in the past and future of the path dependencies of irreversible thermodynamic processes), you will be exposed to all possible surprise due to the microstates (and their Butterfly effect interaction with the environment) unless you can replicate those trials in an isolated system (which you can't in a real world). You implicitly presume that thermodynamics processes are reversible (i.e. able to be isolated to known initial conditions), but they are only reversible in a general relativistic framework, wherein the reversal is a simultaneous occupation of more than one inertial frame (which is impossible due to the quantified speed-of-light). You build artificial, impossible conditions around which you base your analysis, i.e. I am pouring this cup of coffee without any entropy in the initial conditions of the experiment (i.e. a totally isolated system).

You don't live in a vacuum!

And that is the essence of the error you keep repeating and why you still are incorrect about our past discussion about human vs. machine intelligence.


Due to microstates interacting with the environment as you pour, aka the Butterfly Effect, you don't know if the next time you were going to pour a cup of coffee, you instead have an entirely different outcome than had you not poured the coffee (and due to the microstates in some cases, not just due to the macrostate of pouring). That is why it is myopic to say the microstates in the water are irrelevant.


You think seem to think statistical averaging loses microstate information relative to the totality of every possible inertial frame and that is your huge blind spot in our debate on machine intelligence. From the perspective of any particular snapshot of the macrostate, you might conclude that the information was lost, but this would be myopic. No one person is omniscient and has perfect information, but this doesn't mean the information was destroyed as the process of evolving to the dynamic, continuous, living system of microstates that exist at any point in time is irreversible (i.e. not bijective to the past). Meaning that  inertial frames lose their ability to know the totality of the universe (i.e. they become unknowing of the totality so in this sense they've lost access to all information) but the total entropy of all inertial frames hasn't disappeared. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy does not decrease on the whole universe, but can only decrease in some systems as it increases in others.

You are conflating the perception of information by any finite perspective (i.e. any partial order) with the entropy of the unbounded universe. The perception of a total order can't exist (because it would require an unquantifiable speed-of-light and the past and future would collapse into indistriguishable), but the (Butterfly) effects of the total entropy exist via unbounded space-time.

tis nothing to do with political ideology in facts its the lack there of.

This is where you are simply wrong concerning the concept of entropy, and where you deify it.
I think that as long as you haven't cleared that up, you will use the concept in a "magical" way and be misled by otherwise correct claims about it, like the second law of thermodynamics.

It is this kind of erroneous handling of the concept that also leads creationists to claim that evolution is not possible because of the second law of thermodynamics, for instance.   This is because they use the notion of entropy outside of its established, well-defined domain, but hope to use results that are only valid from within that well-established domain.

No offence, you are a brilliant guy, but don't fall in the trap of using precise mathematical/physical notions outside of their domain of definition in a hand-waving way, and hope that their rigorous properties from within the well-defined logical system still mean something.

@AusKipper refuted your logic.

That is not a rebuttal.

You don't seem to comprehend that you can't just grab an initial condition out-of-your-ass (as if you weren't a product of the continuous living human network and the environment) and declare that your inertial frame's entropy is only dependent only on your perceived macrostates at that instant in time. That is fundamentally incorrect. Sorry. You may not realize it, but your paradigmatic conceptualization implies the assumption of the reversibility of thermodynamic processes, which is of course impossible.

You'd like a top-down model of the universe to be true, but sorry mate, the microstates are just as intertwined also.

Please talk to someone like Roger Penrose or Nicholas Taleb.

I added to my prior post to aid your understanding:


Existence is a very complex, unbounded system. We don't just pop into existence out of nothing with only a finite entropy from our history contributing to our initial conditions. The history of the universe is also unbounded, as is the future. Those who try to compute the start of the universe give me a good laugh. Such computations are only bounded by our (humanity's ability to share a common) partial order of perceptions.

P.S. The entropic force is not a deification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity#Erik_Verlinde.27s_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_force#Gravity

I resent the slander. Please make cogent arguments if you have any.

I'm very much aware of Penrose's work, and he's right about almost everything.  But this has not much to do with what I'm trying to make you see.  You are confusing the "entropy of the universe" (which is an ill-defined concept) with the entropy of a sub-system in relation to an "observer", which is entirely well-defined, and to which almost all of what is scientifically claimed about entropy, is about.  
This entropy is defined as a function of the possible cases that the observer needs/wants to consider, and hence limited to the sub-system under study.

The (quantum) entanglement you are talking about is in fact exactly the generator of entropy in a system state: it is the fact of limiting one's attention to a sub-system, while this subsystem entangles with the rest of the universe, that changes the quantum state of the subsystem from a pure state into a mixed state, and while the entropy of a pure state (which implies it is also a *known* state) is zero, a mixed state has a (well-defined) entropy.

I don't know how much you're acquainted with this, I can hardly write out a three-year course on quantum physics and statistical physics here, but essentially:

If you have a sub-system A that is a priori isolated from the environment B ("the rest of the universe"), and you happen to know the exact quantum state of A, then the whole universe is in a special product state |a> |b> ; where |a> is the quantum state of A.  The entropy of A as such, with respect to you, is zero, because you know its micro state perfectly, it is |a>.

Once A interacts unavoidably with the rest of the universe, A gets entangled with it, and there's no specific quantum state of A any more.  However, you can still limit your attention to system A.
The quantum state of the whole universe is now a sum of |a1>|b1> + |a2>|b2> + .... |an> |bn> where we have been running over all possible micro states of A: there are n of them.
The quantum description of just system A now reduces to a density operator, which takes on the form:

| a1 > < a1 | (<b1 | b1>) + |a2 > < a2 | (<b2|b2>) + ... |an > <an | (<bn | bn > ).

Here, ( <bi | bi > ) are positive real numbers, the norms of the quantum states of "the rest of the universe" that are entangled with our system's quantum state ai.  There are only n such states of the universe that MATTER even though there are infinitely more of course, but they are not solicited by the entanglement with our system.

As such, our density operator consists of n quantum states, with statistical weights given by ( <bi | bi> ).  In the worst case, these weights are all equal, which means that our density operator corresponds to "total ignorance of the micro state of A".  Usually, we take extra conditions on the interaction with the rest of the universe, like "energy conserving" or "thermal equilibrium".  This changes the values of ( <bi | bi >), and leads to things like micro-canonical ensemble, canonical ensemble and so on.

In the worst case, we don't know which of the n micro states our system is in (due to entanglement with the rest of the universe), and then its entropy is log_2 (n) in bits, or 1/K_b ln(n) in thermodynamic units.

From an information perspective, if a system can be in N possible states, its entropy is (at most) log_2 (N).

Now, let us compare.  A cup of hot water, at 80 centigrade, 100 grams, say, will contain MORE than the entropy increase from freezing to 80 degrees, right ?

Now, the heat delivered to 100 grams of water to go from 0 to 80 centigrade is 418.6 J/K x 80 = 33488 J.
This heat is transferred at a temperature of less than 80 centigrade, so less than 360 K.   As such, the entropy *increase* is at least 93J/K.

Now, this corresponds to a number of states N equal to e^(6.739 10^24), or to a number of bits equal to 9.7 x 10^24.

Note that I didn't even consider the entropy of icy water, which is not zero.

So my cup of hot water has already an entropy of 10^25 bits.  No computing system on earth masters a memory capacity (*) of 10^25 bits, not even the whole internet.

(*) I take memory capacity as "state space" proxy.

I can tell you there was no bug, this was done intentionally, if this was a bug, they should have relaunch the code and the mining process.



I think the main thing is having people who have the interest of the project at heart above their selfish interest. I think this is what makes Bitcoin a success, I have heard some arguement that Satoshi is better at economic than coding that is why he left the project to others and this type of succession has continued. Another thing is the separation of power between developers and the miners, though their interest need to aligned to move the project forward.

Most people in crypto now are in it for money, it is only Satoshi that is in this because he has the vision, but most people will ask what about the 1 million Bitcoin stash but who has any proof that he has been spending it. Today you see developers investing in another projects hedging their profit

Auskipper's point had little to do with what i was referring to by greedy bankers.

 ??? i think you really misunderstand what i meant by crypto's greedy bankers. your example is comparing apples with oranges; ie comparing fiat bankers with the premine scam coin pump and dumpers (which are far removed from the new breed of greedy bankers forming in crypto).

I made a point which preceded your posts:


Any premine becomes an ever diminishing portion of the total supply if the emission of new money supply is perpetual. Whereas the greedy banksters and their fiat system continues to extract seigniorage ongoing and doesn't diminish. Any blockchain which continues to extract tokens to pay to the developers is akin to a greedy banksters, fiat system. They may employ a democratic governance to obscure the fact that they are really in control of voting to pay themselves from the blockchain. Notice I have not named the blockchains which do this, but you can figure it out.

Edit: more about this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1803001.msg18042263#msg18042263).

For example, to say I am in it only for the money and not for my vision is going to be mistake on your part.

Creators never do something only for the money. If I mostly wanted money, I would have manipulated with reputation and launched a snazzy ICO already.

In my case, I am doing it for: a) expression of my creativity, b) love of the process and challenge of creating (i.e. not boring), and c) because I want to have an impact. Yes I do need money, but I choose my work based on those a - c as my overriding priorities. I trust society to reward money (capital) to those who prove they allocate capital resources efficiently.

We don't know how much Satoshi was paid by someone (Hint: Rothschilds). The odds that Satoshi was one person are very slim (one person doesn't produce what he with the organization and foresight he had and disappear without a trace ... only covert agencies or their equivalents can do that).

That is what I've been trying to tell you. (not ill-defined, rather unbounded)


And provable to no other observer.

https://bitcointalk.org/Themes/custom1/images/post/lamp.gif for you?


As if memory capacity is the entropy of the Internet (and which memory specifically?). Since when was the Internet an isolated system and not entangled with the user's lives? Someone posts something to Facebook shares with a friend who is talking about and hours later posts something back to the Internet. The offline surprises are not included in the entropy of the Internet? How did you decide where to draw this arbitrary border around what is the Internet? Can you define this border unambiguously (be careful!)?

It really is ill-defined, and in as much as you'd like to estimate it, you'll probably end up with 0.  Yes, zero.  Like the total energy content of the universe is also most probably zero, in as much as that even could have a meaning.

Most people talking about the "entropy of the universe" talk about the "entropy of the REST OF THE UNIVERSE with respect to an observer inside that universe".  But there's a subtle difference between what one would call the entropy of the universe (with respect to an "outside observer" ??? hence ill defined) and the "entropy of the rest of the universe".



That really doesn't matter.  My cup of hot water is also entangled with the rest of the universe, but that doesn't increase its entropy with respect to me.
The "states of the internet" is the number of different states the internet can be in, and that is limited to the technical capacity of that system.  If we limit ourselves to the *digital states* (and not to, say, the heat in a micro processor - like I'm not taking into account the nuclear states when accounting for the entropy of my cup of coffee) of the devices that make up the internet: the nodes, the network devices and so on, their digital state is entirely determined by all bi-stable digital components, essentially memory bits (and a few register bits in processor units and FPGA).  If you know every single state of every single bi-stable circuitry of every device that makes up the internet, then you know the entire state of the internet.   That's equivalent to me knowing the quantum state of the entire set of molecules making up my hot cup of water: i'd know the microstate of my hot water.  The IGNORANCE of that microstate is what makes up the entropy I have about that cup of hot water, and the IGNORANCE I have of the state of every bistable state of every component of the internet is what makes up the entropy I have about the internet.

My rather secure guess is that the internet doesn't have 10^25 bistable circuits.  It would mean about 10 billion devices with each a Petabit memory state.  We aren't there yet (in a few years we will maybe).


No, of course not, not any more than the swimming of a whale, which is entangled with every molecule in my cup of hot water for historical reasons, increases the entropy of my cup of coffee.  Because that's exactly what entropy is about: my ignorance of *just the cup of water*, and NOT its environment.  

The posts only contain at most the amount of bits that are needed to download the page (in compressed format).  And they were already taken into account by counting the empty bits on the page's server's hard disks.  So someone posting some stuff on the internet doesn't really increase its entropy.  A technician adding a few more disk units in a data center, does.


Ah, if you call "the internet" all of physical spacetime between here and Andromeda, of course we're talking about different stuff.  I'm talking about all the data that is available to be transferred and stored by all nodes with an internet connection.
Now, of course, you can say, there are sensors connected to the internet, so they bring in an "unbounded amount of entropy".  No, not really.  When that camera takes a picture, say, of 8MB, then these 8 MB are available and are entropy to you if you didn't know the picture.  But if at the next instant, the camera takes a new picture, the previous one is gone.  There's still 8 MB of entropy because of that camera.  If the previous picture wasn't STORED, and made available for download, the new pictures don't add entropy.  If you are looking at each picture, you get 8 MB of information THROUGH the internet.  But each time that picture gets refreshed, and not stored (nor on the camera side, nor at a cache site, nor at your side) on an internet-connected device, the internet's entropy doesn't increase.  In fact, when the camera takes the picture, its entropy rises (for you) with 8 MB.  When you look at it, you receive 8 MB of information, and hence the internet's entropy LOWERS with 8 MB wrt you.  When the camera takes a new picture you haven't seen yet, the internet's entropy rises again with 8 MB.  When you look at it, it lowers again with 8 MB.  Etc.

This is like a telephone wire.  The (digital) state of the wire is 1 bit at a time.  Whole conversations can go through a telephone wire.  But the state of the wire is at most 1 bit.  When you haven't received the bit yet, it has 1 bit of entropy.  When you read it out, it has 0 bit of entropy, until the transmitter puts another bit on it. Etc...

The internet, as defined by all the devices connected to it and their digital states, has less entropy than my cup of hot water.

A sensor, looking at the entire universe, has only the entropy of the data it has at a certain point in time, while you didn't look at it.  From the moment you know the data, its entropy falls back to zero, until the next (unknown) data are taken.

You ignored the most damning point.

Are you chasing your tail yet?

Ok, if you really want to get into this: physics is a relationship between an observer and "the rest of the universe".  That "rest of the universe" contains entities which the first observer might identify as observers (I will call them "secondary observers"), and in order for his physics to be consistent, whatever the first observer observes from those secondary observers, must be coherent with what the first observer observes, and what he would observe if he were in the place of those secondary observers.   In other words, the only consistency must come from what the first observer observes "directly" and what he observes when observing those secondary observers.   This is the "consistent history" view of physics.  At no point, an observer "needs to prove" anything to a secondary observer.  He simply needs a consistent view between his "direct observations of nature" and his "observations of other observer entities".

The idea that there is a single objective reality out there goes out of the window with that view, but for an observer, the consistent view of his observations of nature, and his observation of secondary observers, is what comes closest to his best guess of what his objective reality might look like.

This kind of consistent history approach (first formulated if I remember correctly by Gell Mann in the 1960ies) explains very easily a lot of quantum "paradoxes", like the EPR "paradox", and also explains apparent paradoxes like Maxwell's demon.

In as much as those "secondary observers" are actual observers of their own, what is needed for everything to be consistent is that they too, in THEIR view of reality, see the first observer as consistent with that.

The simplest solution to this is that all observers observe the same objective reality, which is a classical viewpoint, but difficult to reconcile with quantum mechanics.  But it is not the only solution to this, and "consistent histories" is another, much more complicated, but quantum mechanically compatible, view of things.  If you want to stick to the classical "objective world" view, you have to introduce many strange things in order to explain quantum mechanical effects, such as "spooky action at a distance", "non-causal effects going back in time" and other weird things, while consistent histories don't need all that stuff.

In the same vein, entropy is a relationship between an observer and a system: it is his ignorance about the system's micro state.  In as much as another observer DOES know this micro state (like Maxswell's demon), then that system has no entropy wrt to that secondary observer, but that secondary observer now has entropy wrt to the primary one.

However, in most all cases, "human observers" don't know microstates and hence, they all agree more or less on the physical entropy of most objects, give or take a few bytes.

A secret key has no entropy with respect to its owner, and has (hopefully) full entropy wrt to an attacker.  Maxwell's demon is like the guy with his secret key: he known the micro state of the gas ; but as such, the demon has as much entropy wrt us, than the gas itself.

Do ALL humans communicate ALL of their detailed existence to ALL humans? How could they even communicate this without an instantaneous speed-of-light? The state of everyone's perspective would always be on a lag at best, thus not ALL including the instantaneous present (otherwise stated as "the present never exists" because its always gone instantly before we can perceive/decohere it as mutual information).

In other words, is it plausible that everyone on earth could know (or at least received communication about) everything about everyone on earth.

Obviously it is a rhetorical question and it is intended to point to an inconsistency in your holistic conceptualization (although of course many of the points you've made are correct).

The following may be interesting:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=690

Wouldn't the ICO buyers just be another form of centralization?  What about the people who want to participate in the voting because they like and idea? Because they didn't participate in the ICO for whatever reason, but own tokens, they don't get to vote? Unless these tokens are specific tokens identifiable as ICO tokens?

I guess now that I think about it a bit more, having everyone vote would almost lead to an issue similar to Bitcoin's current issue, no?

Afaics, your conceptualization mistakes aliasing error as reality.

You take the point sample in spacetime of pouring a cup of coffee and presume that the microstates are ignored by yourself because they don't impact your perception of any event or state which is perceivable by you. But you are not factoring in the future of the Butterfly effect of those microstates' entanglement with the environment and the changes to the future you will perceive in the future based on the microstates in the cup of coffee you are pouring at the moment in time.

Thus your entire conceptualization collapses.  ;) :-*

Quantum mechanics models the microstates superimposed, because otherwise measuring the position at any point sample in time is aliasing error (a random result). Analogously we must model the entropy as superimposed into the future in our macro perspective. Your conceptualization of entropy as relative to an observer ignores the fact that the entire future is entangled with the entire past. Our perception of reality (decoherence) is but an aliasing error illusion. Information (order) is our mutual synchronization of a specific instance of illusion.

I hope you realize I'm stating that the objective reality is an unbounded superimposition of multiverses. Our perception of our universe is but an aliasing error illusion. And even humans don't share one consistent illusion (c.f. my prior post). The entropy of the universe is unbounded. Entropy w.r.t. to an observer is an ill-defined concept.

(P.S. I am still having significant issues with cognitive energy and its root concomitant gut/liver health. I am not able to explore this space we are discussing with the assimilation vigor that I feel I had been accustomed to. So do please understand if the limits of my current health prevent me from continuing the discussion or making the level of insights and explanations that I might be capable of at some other time.)

No, of course not, and that is not necessary.

In order for a perception to be consistent, only those things that are *observed* from the secondary observer need to be consistent.  The rest doesn't matter.  If I can't observe it, ever, I don't care, it doesn't exist in a certain way.

Take the following case:

There is me, Joe, and a light bulb (in my reality).

I see the lightbulb glowing green.  (direct observation).
I see Joe saying "the light is green" (my observation of Joe)

This is a consistent world view, a consistent history of observations.

Nothing stops one, however, from considering now Joe's point of view (in Joe's reality).

Joe sees the lightbulb glowing red (direct observation)
Joe sees me saying "the light is red" (Joe's observation of me)

This is (another) consistent world view, a(nother) consistent history of observations.

In the consistent history view of things, both are not in contradiction.  My observing a green light, and observing Joe say "green light" is not in contradiction with Joe observing a red light and observing me say "red light".  Joe, as primary observer, simply has a different consistent history than me.

What would be inconsistent, is that I see a green light, and I see Joe saying "red light".  Or Joe seeing a red light, and seeing me say "green light".

Joe only exists for me to the extend that I can observe him, and that I can observe other things that might observe Joe and so on.  If all these observations are consistent, then that's my consistent view of reality.  Which may be entirely different for another primary observer, but to which I have no access.

You are losing me here.  I can read that 10 times, and still not know what it might mean.  I try to wrap my mind around what you mean with "microstates superinposed".  If the system is isolated and in a pure state, it is of course in one single state (which may be a superposition of "base states" in which I like to express this state, but it is still just one single quantum state).  If the system is entangled (which it most certainly is) with the rest of the universe, it is entangled, which means exactly what I wrote earlier: several individual quantum states of the cup are, well, entangled, with states of the environment.  And that is exactly the entropy we are talking about: the number of those states that is involved.  If there were only state, the entropy would be 0, and if there are many, the logarithm of 2 of that number of states is the entropy of my cup (I'm assuming uniform distribution, which is not necessarily true, but which would diminish the entropy if not uniform).

There's no such thing as "cumulative entropy over time".  I think that is the error you are making, by thinking that the entropy is about the *entire history - and future* of a system.  No, entropy is the ignorance of the *current state*, not about its entire past and future.  That doesn't make sense, because if that were the case, entropy wouldn't be a time-dependent concept, and the second law could not even be formulated !

It is as if you were saying that the "velocity of an object is the whole of movement that an object did and will do in the future" or something.  But if that is the case, you couldn't talk about the acceleration (the *change* in velocity) and not write down Newton's second law !  Velocity is instantaneous, now, and doesn't care about the state of motion yesterday or tomorrow.  If it did, velocity would be an a-temporal notion, and you couldn't ask how velocity changes over time.

In the same way, entropy is an "instantaneous" notion, because the second law of thermodynamics tells us how entropy needs to CHANGE over time.  If all our past and future ignorance were already included, the entropy tomorrow would be the same one as today, as all ignorance would already been included, as well today as tomorrow.

I think you are confusing the notion of entropy itself, with the notion of dynamics.  If I know the dynamics of an isolated system perfectly well (which is very rare), then there's a kind of Liouville's theorem that tells me that my knowledge of the microstate (even if imperfect) is conserved.  When I know something about the microstate today, that knowledge is still pertinent tomorrow, and my entropy about that micro state didn't grow.
If however, my knowledge of the dynamics of the system is not perfectly accurate, OR the system interacts with the environment (of which, by definition, I don't consider the dynamics), then my knowledge of the microstate today will probably get lost gradually over time: my entropy of the system grows, until it reaches its full value of my total ignorance of it, given by one or another canonical statistical ensemble, constrained only by a few macroscopic parameters.

This "loss of knowledge over time" is intimately related to the second law.  It is always related to "the environment" of which the unknown microstate is much more entropy-rich than my system, and is an infinite source (for all practical purposes) of ignorance (= entropy).

This is also why the notion of "entropy of the universe" is problematic.  The universe cannot be entirely observed from the outside, and cannot connect to "its environment" ; as such, this notion breaks down.

@dinofelis, due to my ongoing medication for TB, I don't have the cognitive energy to (assimilate all the information I need to) finish our discussion/debate right now. Maybe soon...

And I apologize that I don't explain the part that wasn't clear, but I'd rather not encourage the discussion to continue until I am back up to full brain power.

In the meantime, some tidbits:



Kurzweil's Singularity (nonsense!) also has an energy efficiency deficiency compared to humans:



I've been trying to make the point to you that raw processing speed isn't a sufficient condition to be indicative of superiority. Such a conclusion is very simpleton.

"neurons" aren't, of course, "processors" in the machine paradigm, but are run-time objects (computer science objects).  In a run-time environment, objects are just as varied as biological neuron types.  The variety of "neurons" in a biological brain corresponds, if you want to, to the class structure of the running software in the object oriented paradigm.   

The "processor" is the underlying layer: the bio-chemistry of neurons, at least the part of the bio-chemistry that is essential for the data processing (the metabolism biochemistry is not necessary).

But again, the idea is most probably NOT that we implement a bio brain imitation in silicon. 


This is not a problem.  You cannot upscale the human brain to a 1 MW processor.  We would simply catch fire.   You can easily upscale a silicon machine to 1 MW.   And cheap energy is available for machines, much more so than it is available for human brains. 

That's what I try to make as a point: the human brain is a brilliant invention of evolution.  But it is what it is, and can only very slowly evolve.  In as much as it is radically altered artificially, it is btw also not a human any more, but a machine.  By definition, a human will be a thing with a current-human like brain.  It has huge capacity and so on, but only very slowly evolving. 
Technology under Moore's law evolves millions of times faster, and so the hypothesis of a singularity is simply that a faster-growing curve will, at some point in the future, cross an almost constant curve, and that this is inevitable.

The two exceptions are that the point may be further in the future than one thinks, or that the rising curve may flat out (end of Moore's law).  But if not, then their crossing is inevitable.


Again, you're confusing run-time objects and execution layer.  Neurons and their organisation and connection is "run time".  Like objects in a run time environment.  The execution layer is biochemistry of neurons for one, and silicon circuits ("processors", but maybe not von neumann architectures, but rather FPGA like structures, who knows) on the other.
And we don't have to implement brain like run time systems onto silicon, it may take totally different configurations: there's more than one path to intelligence.


You may very well have run time environments with thousands of classes of objects.

I think it is.  Of course, not immediately.  Raw processing speed is a *necessary* condition.  But it will become a sufficient condition because what is possible, will happen in this kind of thing.  Simply because it not happening is a meta-stable situation: if it happens once, that's enough, and will introduce the equivalent of a phase transition.  It is like undercooled water.  It has the potential to freeze, but it simply didn't... yet.  One perturbation that starts nucleating the freezing, and the water undergoes a phase transition.
There is no "stabilizing force" that takes any step towards machine intelligence "back again", on the contrary.  Once machine intelligence can improve itself, there's no stopping to the run-away effect.

What value ?  The actual consumer-happiness value (the ultimate source of all value) by the existence of bitcoin is essentially nothing.  It is that economic creation of value that would not have existed if bitcoin didn't exist.  What is that value ?  What better cars are running because of bitcoin ?  What better food is being eaten because of bitcoin ?  What better education is sold because of bitcoin ?  What markets became more efficient and allocated their resources better than bitcoin ?  I mean, outside of the little crypto world itself ?  Yes, probably a few people are "creating value" by earning salaries when setting up coindesk.com and so on.
But apart from a self-serving little world, what value creation did bitcoin allow that fiat didn't ?
There is, at the moment, only one true application: dark markets.  There is true value creation in dark markets, especially of drugs.  People (consumers) really value drugs a lot.  The value creation for these consumers is huge.  But because of the legal barriers to that value creation, dark markets are risky to do with fiat.  So, yes, value creation happens on dark markets thanks to crypto in general, and bitcoin in particular.

There's another utility, which is related.  Privacy-related services on the internet.  VPN for instance.  This is value creation that is facilitated by the existence of crypto.  

However, on these two aspects, bitcoin is dangerous, because not private enough.  Only crypto with privacy-related features can, in the end, deliver on this.

But how much is this in terms of value creation, as compared to everything done with fiat ?  Crypto has enabled WAY WAY WAY less than 1/30000 of the world's value creation, because essentially all of the market cap of crypto (bitcoin included) is NOT by Fisher's formula for its demand as a use as a currency, but just by greater-fool speculation.  The *REAL* currency market cap of bitcoin is ridiculously small, probably less than 1% of its official market cap.  Remove all hope for "greater fools", let bitcoin's price crash to its level of demand as a currency (its only "value creation enabling" feature) and you end up with the true economic value of bitcoin, which is essentially insignificant.

@dinofelis you are very smart (and probably more knowledgeable than me about many things), but (regarding your prior two replies) you have some huge blind spots. Absolutely huge. I could drive an 18 wheeler through your blindspots and you wouldn't even know it.

Sorry I am not up for the tit-for-tat debate right now (very eager, but I know the limits of my scarce available time+energy and priorities). But we'll engage someday...

Hopefully as my delirium fades, I'll think of a way to elucidate to you more convincingly and concisely. As I said, being re-enabled to assimilate more information will help.

Most probably.  I won't deny this.  I would like to discover them.  However, you might make the mistake to confuse my "utopic view of how the world should be" , my "theory of how the world is" and "what I'm interested in about this world".  These are 3 totally different, and almost unrelated things, and it is true that from one post to another, I jump between these paradigms.

As you wrote somewhere else, you think that I think that we will get rid of government in one generation.  No, I don't think that.  I think it would be a good thing, but it will not happen.  I think government is an unavoidable, but absolute, evil.  However, my idea is that KNOWING that government is fundamentally evil is a good thing.  I think that the best one could do, is make people see that government is the absolute evil.  But this will not work for most, and I know that, because people are gullible - which is exactly the reason why government can exist in the first place.  I'm absolutely convinced, however, that no good can come from any form of government ; that said, there are governments which are less worse than others, in the sense that some forms of government allow people who understand the system, from not being entirely enslaved, crushed and annihilated by it.  I think that that corner is the niche for "distributed/crypto/...".  But by far most gullible people (90% or more of the population) like to be enslaved, are too naive to understand that they are crushed, and cannot be annihilated because there's nothing to annihilate ; and are hence happy collaborators of the government.  They don't need "distributed", or "crypto".  They are all too happy to be part of the system.  They are hierarchical animals, they already started their loss of individuality and are becoming another species, while the 10% or less of us are individuals.  The hierarchical animals are simply another, dominant, species.  So there is simply no hope for individuals to be the dominant species.  We are like the mammals during the Jurassic epoch: the best we can do is live underground, in the shadow of the dinosaurs.  This is where crypto can help.   We want to live as if we were invisible, ignored by the dominant dinosaurs, only come out at night, and hide underground.  It is the only place where individual freedom can hide.  But hey, the mammals survived the mesozoic era !  So, anonymous, discrete, invisible, unknown, "in-existent", the only way to live freely.

In my case, that is sufficient.  My only goal in life, apart from enjoying it, is to understand as much of the world as I can.  This is something that can be achieved in an anonymous, discrete, invisible, and unknown way.  Unfortunately, there are material and other needs that must be filled in, and unfortunately, those expose you to the dangers of recognition, visibility, and hence, all the hatred, theft and violence that goes with the dominant, government-believing species.  Some interaction is difficult to avoid. 

@dinofelis regarding our discussion of the utility of Bitcoin:


The market is telling you that Bitcoin is the reserve currency of the experimentation that will unleash all that utility that crypto-currency and blockchains can do which precious metals never can. Bitcoin is now at parity with gold. The pattern of Android below is what crypto is going to do relative to precious metals:

Hell, how can you write that ?  Arbitrary choice of units, comparing 1/16 000 000 of market cap (a "bitcoin", vs mbitcoin, satoshi...) with one ounce of gold (why not a kg, a tonne, ...), which represents grossly 1/ 10^10 of the total amount of gold.  At this moment, bitcoin is less than 1/1000 of gold, and we're counting all lost coins in.  Probably the true market cap of bitcoin is closer to half of the official 16 million coins.  There's Satoshi's lost stash, there are a lot of lost address keys (especially in the beginning of bitcoin)...

It is amazing that you contradict your own prediction, which was brilliant, now that it is being realized: the scalocalypse.  It is happening right under our nose now.  So this will delegate bitcoin to the status of reserve currency for BIG PLAYERS (which are, most of the time, conservative dudes).


Android has no scaling problem.  I would rather say that in as much as this comparison is valid, you are looking at the evolution of alt coins, which are what android is like: many different flavours of the same idea.

Most above ground gold never trades nor created. All Bitcoin has been traded or created within the past 8 years.

I wrote precious metals, and r0ach has been pitching silver, so compare the volatility of silver to Bitcoin (roughly the same).

https://btcvol.info/
http://teucrium.com/files/pdf/commoditiesinaportfolio.pdf


No contradiction. I never predicted the scalepocalypse would mean anything other than what it means technically and the centralization of mining.

Bitcoin isn't going to the moon and will die and give away to something better just as will happen to Android, but not before move much higher in value.



Exactly. And Bitcoin is the reserve currency of altcoins.

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Excellent post. Plays right into the theme of my Rise of Knowledge, Demise of Finance (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.0) essay.