Bitcoin Forum

I need to vent and this forum seems like the best place! For the last two days I have been attending/following via Twitter the 14th annual Digital Money Forum in London hosted by my friend, Dave Birch.  Here is the agenda link: http://www.chyp.com/  (click thru to get to agenda) ...or...  http://www.chyp.com/digitalmoney/agenda-2011/

Keep in mind that the speakers and attendees are paid many thousands of dollars/pounds/euros per month to study and implement electronic money concepts for multinational banks, payment associations, and payment companies. For Hushmail, I even presented at the Forum in 2001 regarding web-based digital signature technology but i think it was Digital Identity Forum at the time. And, this is why bitcoin is going to blindside everyone:

1) there is not an awareness of market demand for decentralized p2p digital currency;
2) many 'experts' do not understand the difference between centralized vs. decentralized as it relates to digital cash;
3) many 'experts' do not recognize that bitcoin requires the chain to prevent double-spending;
4) people react with the same antipathy that they have towards gold standard or else, conversely, they fail to understand that bitcoin value doesn't rest upon the intrinsic value economic argument;
5) quasi-competitors, Facebook credits and Linden dollars, etc. as virtual currency, restrict two-way convertibility;
6) generally people dismiss it as a fad and they are not aware of the floating exchange rate;
7) lastly, it was mentioned that they could invite someone from bitcoin to attend the forum next year (I guess that would mean Satoshi if anyone can find him or if he wants to be found, but if I were him, I wouldn't attend -- that's the whole point of distributed p2p value).

You can follow the hashtag #dmf14 on www.twitter.com if you want to view the conference comments. Godspeed.

Do you really expect them to have a positive attitude towards an invention that could potentially seriously compromise their market share of facilitating transactions between people and loose all those fees they collect? I sure hope not.

They're going to fight BitCoins with teeth and nails so the best thing we can do is to just ignore them because they are irrelevant and find other ways of spreading awareness(youtube, facbook, twitter other media).

If there's value to the market to use BitCoins, the market will use BitCoins. The most important thing we can and must do is give the market a chance to learn about it.

p.s.: I only just learned about BitCoins on Saturday and had previously no clue something like this was invented and I think it's the greatest thing I ever learned about in terms of money inventions.

Payment processors can bring value to the bitcoin economy by facilitating ever lower transaction fees, increasing trusts, etc.

It's their loss.

There are some interesting points being made in those tweets.

(1) The claim is made that most of the audience are old men who take notes with pen and paper. The implication is that those people won't be the agents of change.

(2) The claim is made that 30% of the Gross National Product of Kenya is now transacted through the mobile phone system. That's more than I would have expected.

(3) The claim is made that the poorest tenth of the UK population spend more money than each of the next two tenths. The implication is that those who are officially poorest are more likely to be agoristically-inclined.

(4) The claim is made that supermarket chain Tesco's loyalty card data is being used to detect tax evaders. If you spend more at Tesco than you declare to the taxman, expect a visit.

Bitcoin is in some way related to, or relevant to, each of these.

+1

At some point, there will be ...

http://i.min.us/ijh1b0.png (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=https://smsz.net/btcStats/bitcoin.kml)

http://bit.ly/bitcoinnodes

It's an entertaining clash of cultures.  

Bitcoin is a bit like going to a Swiss private bank and being attended by a punk sporting facial tattoos and a ripped anarchy t-shirt.

People who work with money tend to be very conservative, parochial, risk-averse, authoritarian, uptight, narrow-minded, detail-oriented, left brained, and ISTJ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISTJ), because traditionally, those traits were advantageous in this industry.

The Bitcoin ecosystem contradicts pretty much everything they stand for: It's revolutionary, unpredictable, anti-authoritarian, disruptive, concept-oriented, "weird", right-brained, and rather INTP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTP).

It's no surprise these people are not enthusiastic to learn about Bitcoin. There will be a lot of cognitive dissonance once market forces force them to learn about it.

Meh, we use both side of our brain.

I'm an INTP and I think you're right.

I have been talking to "nations" that do see the bitcoin approach as well worth considering. They are nations in a game, so they do not have as much vested interest to worry about as "real" nations, they might even be more open-minded "players", and they are not "nations" that have huge populations of bankers and bureaucrats, so their views are not likely to reflect quite those of current day "real" nations.

Nonetheless they do have some concerns, mostly around the idea that thy would prefer to "own" most of "their" money themselves rather than have it appear in the hands of a population of "miners" that might not be very easy to designate.

Basically they are not keen to "back" some random miner's currency rather than "their own" currency, especially if the miner might not even be one of their citizens. Heck the miner might even be a person in a nation one is not eager to help in any way.

Some of the "nations" that have been looking into this though are determined to give it a try. They like the distributed network as a way that many nations can participate in each using each currency, and they plan to have only "nations" and "banks" do any mining until a few years down the line, maybe even after the full quota of coins have been mined.

Each nation is committing to trade at par some huge number of coins with each other nation that is part of the pact, but as a direct central bank to central bank exchange rate not a commitment to exchange at par with any tom dick or harry who happens to be a citizen of a participating "nation".

For reasons that actually derive from conditions on "the mythical planet known as Earth", the Hacker "nation", which supposedly used actual bitcoins as its currency, is not participating in the exchange at par agreement nor in the buy so much of each other's currency agreement. That mostly comes down to the fact that no-one who might be construed as a representative of the Hacker "nation" has indicated any desire or intent to put such large numbers of coins into this "experiment". So although initially the possibly many new block-chanin based currencies will start of at par, they might all as a group be far from at par with actual bitcoins.

Hopefully this will be an interesting experiment. I am setting up IRC bots right now to provide a simple interface with just very basic command such as balance, address, send and exchange.

-MarkM-

markm I wish your post made sense to me but I have no fking clue what you're on about.

I gave up trying to understand him long time ago.

I think that ISTJ fits to me perfectly and I still (at least partially) understand the Bitcoin :).

I think he's been shopping at Silk Road.  ;D

As an INTJ/P (50% P, 50% J), I endorse this thread.

As an ENTP, I'm going to help get Bitcoin out to everyone else :)

Myers-Briggs tests are crap, very similar to horoscopes.

+1

i'd like to come out with a 4 char selfevaluation as well but too many cream+kahlua+vodka's to judge my sobber part properly

really? I found the description of INTP to fit me with incredible precision, after being classified as such. And it's obvious to me that INTP would love something like bitcoin.

It's really just a way of classifying personality types. Some may fit these classifications rather strongly and some may not be so polarized in all of the four dimensions.

There was a good Skeptoid podcast about it (http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221).

Our brains are really good at pattern-matching, and are really good at fooling us into seeing patters where none exist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw

this experiment sums it all up.

I doubt that sounds very appealing to them. Bitcoin is like a disruptive technology as explained in "The Innovator's Dilemma".  I'm pretty sure the big players in a bitcoin monetary system are not going to be related to the traditional players.  The traditional players are just too hooked on high margins to adapt.

Also, I have to wonder how many non-technical people just will not be able to accept that bitcoin could work at all.  If you don't understand the cryptography then you have to take it on faith that the system could work as designed.  It's easy for them to brand bitcoin advocates as kooks (see "Time Cube").

For me Myers-Briggs is a personality description system with 4 bits of precision.  Not a heck of a lot but it's more useful than, say, geek/nongeek which has 1 bit.  If horoscopes let you pick which one you were, then they would be similarly useful (and would actually probably coalesce instead of remaining purposefully as vague as possible)

Eh? The Time Cube guy IS very obviously a kook. (Aside: If you need a good laugh, this radio show interviewed him (http://www.freetalklive.com/guests/gene_ray) - TWICE - pretending to play along with him. He's absolutely nuts.)

Attempting to brand someone as a kook only works if there's something kooky going on. Bitcoin is exactly what it claims to be. One might find a security hole in it, but that's about all you can credibly do to discredit it.

The masses wont use bitcoin till famous people mention it.

WINNING !!!

And by famous it can be any kind of famous really! For instance I sent an email to a youtube starcraft 2 caster who has 400k subscribers and accepts paypal for donations.. Imagine if we could find a few of these famous youtubers to start accepting BTC and maybe even make a video about it, especially the more technical and geeky ones, we could spread the word very fast.

Considering that I'm a strong INTP also, I accept your conclusions as correct, intuitively.

People need to classify themselves. Human nature I guess, as is pattern matching and seeing faces in clouds.

For the layman, I submit that bitcoin sounds no less kooky than Time Cube (okay, maybe a little less kooky, at least the website styling doesn't burn your eyes and people write in grammatical sentences).

My point is that the average person doesn't understand science and much of what they believe is based on faith.  In fact, that's really true for anyone, scientifically inclined or not.  I didn't prove to myself all that I believe, I have sources I trust. Witness the continuing popularity of pseudoscience in popular media (astrology, natural healing, etc).  People don't always believe the best sources, they have their own personal trust "network".

For many people, they will believe bitcoin works only when told so by someone they trust. Telling them to read the design paper will get you nowhere.  I'm pretty sure this will happen naturally, it will just take some time.

Unfortunately its still not proofed if it works (NP=P) . So even the technical people cant be really sure :D

Conversation I had tonight:


People who know me aren't shocked that I'm working on something wild and crazy, and by saying up front "this is a wild and crazy idea that may or may not work" I think they're more likely to really think about whether or not bitcoin makes sense.

I received a phone call the other day. It was someones mother looking to buy bitcoins. Her son told her she needed to own some.

True story.  :)

True, modern cryptography and hashing functions could have systemic issues such as a low-cost NP->P algorithm etc.  But Bitcoin itself is properly hedged against this since much bigger and more powerful systems/organisations would have to deal with this problem before Bitcoin would.  Also, in all likelihood if there were a weakness in these systems it wouldn't come about all of a sudden--rather there would gradually be results in academia, then applications of those results, then more results, etc.  So there would be time to adapt.

Don't get too frustrated...these aren't the people you need to convince anyway.

Actually, it's enough that one large investor or veeeeeeeeery famous person starts using it.

What is happening now is that everybody who is watching bitcoin is waiting for the first big fish to take the risk. If the big, "alpha-male" fish takes the bait, the herd will follow. After that it will be a massive, unstoppable snowball effect (and bitcoin may rise 10-fold or 100-fold in few days after they announce that they jump on BTC bandwagon).

I believe there's a name for that phenomenon in psychlogy/sociology, i just can't find it now.

This effect doesn't work on us, free thinkers/libertarians/minarchists, because we are natural black sheeps, outsiders. We don't follow the herd usually. That's why we are early adopters, because we 1) actually think where we are going 2) look the other way than the herd looks, so we notice weird/unexpected/unusual things before everyone else.

----
I imagine that if GoldMan Sachs or Santander adopted Bitcoin, everyone would follow. But of course they won't.

The "Big Fish" follow the "little fish", if enough little fish gather, the big fish will come out of necessity to eat.

Hahahahaha i didn't think of it this way.
Well, it's probably true.

If a 'big fish' like you describe were to jump into bitcoin, such as Warren Buffet (unlikely), they would be wise to not announce that fact until well after they have accumulated as much as they intended to.  Considering that much of the reason that such 'little fish' follow 'big fish' is that they are perceived to be wise in matters of money, I would be shocked to find out that any such 'big fish' openly advocating for Bitcoin before they were well entrenched.

I like to imagine that we're in a beginning of a exponential take-off.

Heck, the hashing rate of the network is doubling 27 days for the past 15 months.

You are correct, however even without announcing the rumours would spread like wildfire.
So the effect would be essentially almost the same, except delayed by few days.

Don't under-estimate the propensity of geeks to throw hardware, sweat and reputation at wild and woolly ideas and 1 in a 10,000 bets ... it happens in college bars every weekend night.


+1, classic.

This quote needs to go into a cartoon or similar ... a "not your grand-daddy's money" kind of meme (quite powerful seeing as grand-daddy's money has failed)

lol--good one!

hehe, can you explain it a bit, please? :)

I don't pretend to know what is going on in markm's head, however, it did get me thinking about something that may or may not be related to his post.

Imagine you had several companies working on massively multiplayer games that wanted to have the in-game currency convertible between them but they don't fully trust each other not to create lots of extra in-game money.  They could use bit coin but then they have to spend their own money buying enough bitcoins to get this going.  Or, they could start a new block chain, maybe with new rules like the first block generates 5 million coins which gets divided among the companies, subsequent blocks generate just a few coins.  If these games become popular, they could start allowing out-of-game transactions and leverage their version of bitcoin into a real online currency, to the detriment of holders of coin in the current block chain.

You could also see a case where banks decide bitcoin is a good reserve currency, but instead of using the current block chain they start their own, again, providing initial capital (and an advantage) to the banks by having early blocks generate large numbers of coins (this is possible because the number of coins generated per block is just an agreement enforced by code, they control the code and the block chain so they make whatever rules they want).  They may even allow payment processors to join and generate blocks (after paying a yearly fee of course).  Again, this leaves holders of current block chain coins out of the loop.

You're thinking, but there is no economic reason for any financial institution (bank or otherwise) to choose bitcoin as a reserve currency and then start another blockchain, for any blockchain requires a great deal of system overhead.  A bank might choose Bitcoin as the backing for a digital or physical currency of their own design and administration, but it would not likely be another blockchain.  If there is a central trusted party (the bank) there are other ways to handle the double-spend problem better than a parallel blockchain.

+1


I use Myers-Briggs not because it measures an objective truth, but simply because so many other people use it and it's a compact way of getting information across.  The 4 dimensions in Myers-Briggs are somewhat arbitrary, but they can be proxies for fundamental personal traits.  eg. "ENFP" gives me a better idea of what a person is like than just "Artsy".

Good point. But (at least at this stage), if P prooves to be equal to NP, we got other troubles on our hands.

Me too.


Hehe, I don't want to see exponential growth on that variable so much. I rather want to see it on mtgox and the amount of stuff being offered for bitcoin.

We don't need miners, we need users/dealers/consumers... the miners will inevitably follow.

If there are more miners, than there are more consumers/users/dealers.

Not directly related, but I actually thought about giving a group of punks on the street a large amount of bitcoin somehow (like give them a private key and the word "bitcoin" on a piece of paper and the words: "this is a lot of money") and then watch what happens... maybe document it somehow. This crowd should really love bitcoin, because when they say "fuck capitalism", they dont necessarily mean money per se. Wonder how long it would take until they have a big party going payed for by bitcoins.

Huh? The consensus seems to be that it would be a great boon. Some physicists go as far and say if P=NP, we would be gods. NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality (http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf).
If P≠NP is a fact of nature, it means, among other things, that quantum computation will not scale.

N=NP is a philosophical problem that dives into the observer's perspective and experience.  Take the ChessMaster vs the Novice.  From the ChessMasters perspective, he can see the checkmate without having to calculate every move. The Novice will have to calculate almost every-move to see the checkmate or the escape. Add a third observer that doesn't know how to play chess, and it becomes very complex.

So you have:

ChessMaster: N=NP
Novice: N≠NP and/or N=NP
Ignorant: N≠NP

Basically, depending on perspective N=NP and/or N≠NP.

Really? I'd rather say he uses heuristics to solve the problem much faster than brute force, but still with exponential complexity.
The heuristics can have polynomial complexity, but they do not solve the problem 100% accurate.

Like the College Dorm Room Scenario  of 400 students applicants, 100 rooms, 2 per room based on dean's pairing rules.

Then it depends on the starting order of the 400 students, as in Chess it depends on the starting order. The ChessMaster's can use heuristics because of the setup of the board (the initial starting position) and the rules.

The starting position and rules determines the best possible moves to make to place the students in their rooms based on the rules that the Dean provides. The verification of the proper placements is easy compared to the possible possibilities. The route taken becomes irrelevant as to the outcome. The efficiency in routes is determined by the experience of the problem solver.

So as to apply it to the Dorm scenario,

A party planner: N=NP (He doesn't need to run through every combination)
A novice: N=NP and/or N≠NP (He may need to check the efficiency and the Rules)
Ignorant: N≠NP (because he doesn't know the rules, he is doomed to fail)

Although the Dorm Scenario is much easier than the CheckMate, You can start from the end and work backwards, where in CheckMate, returning to the starting position from the CheckMate position is more complex (almost infinitely).

I think the initial problem predisposes a possible result. If based on the rules and the result is in question, will it be possible to achieve the outcome. If the result is in question, you are force to run through all possibilities. If however you know there is a result, it is easier for you to accomplish as to where someone that doesn't know.

If there is an Infinite amount of possibilities, there is a result. If there is a finite amount of possibilities, the result is in question.

I like to compare this to the Hash system, there are an ∞ amount of collisions based on any hash. I know there is an achievable result, to reverse the hash. If the Hash was completely random, it would be useless and there could be no achievable result, but leave open the question as to is there a result.

Simply, I can prove Hashes have collisions without showing the path to those collisions. Once the path is learned, the hash is useless.

A bank might not, but a system of banks might.  In the latter case there may not be a trusted third party,  would Wells Fargo trust Wachovia to be in sole control of the money supply?  Extending it to the super-national level would Greece trust Portugal to control the money supply?

I don't really expect banks to suddenly switch over to bitcoin, but you do sometimes read "wouldn't it be great if Amazon, Ebay, and Walmart took bitcoin?"  Well, it would be, but they are so much larger than the current bitcoin economy that they could easily just start their own block chain.