Bitcoin Forum

I'm new to bitcoin, but I notice the discussion on doublespending attacks and I'm a bit disturbed by how quickly people want to create a monitoring panopticon rather than commit to our shared culture and act on a few strategies without prompting thereby creating the mass force necessary to discourage such tricks.

The first line of defense is already in place as bitcoiners responded correctly, with little incentive other than common sense, and broke off from allowing any one pool to have 50%+.

I've seen Anonymous destroy their own operations if they became dangerous. One minute there's a chatroom, the next suddenly flood from many directions. The pranksters grew up.
They rein in the nutters. There's no reason we can't rise to the occasion.

It's very encouraging to see people do what's necessary. But let's have more spontaneous fraud intervention by being educated rather than look at a critical problem and try to wish it away with more systems and tweaks.

Myself, I am prepared to raise hell if people try to even suggest violating the 21 million limit. Make variants. We should be preparing for it and begin dealing with it when it hits 7 million. This will mean a portion of bitcoin will have to be traded for common necessities and services to give us all a benchmark that we can all relate to.

Many have already advocated breaking the 21 million limit and making bitcoin inflate at some "steady" % rate (various figures have been bounced around) but I feel the majority of the people who responded to their suggestion feel that this is a bad idea. I personally do not support it and would never join this alternative block chain no matter what. I do not want a digital equivalent of the same crappy hyper inflationary fiat money system I live under right now!

But the reality is that there isn't much anyone can do to prevent someone from forking bitcoin or from creating their own flavor of the blockchain based on some wild idea that came to them while they were stoned. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But if the current bitcoin system were to gain a certain amount of traction any alternative systems would get largely ignored or would become a highly niche system. This is of course that it will be much easier for people to obtain common necessities and services for bitcoins belonging to the current system. Thus growth of the current system and widespread adoption is paramount!

In what way do you recommend we "deal with" potential forks?

1. Be like demons promoting our view.
2. Aggressively promote the forks where they would be appropriate, thus severing the connection.
3. Get diskcoin, cyclecoin, bandcoin, and servcoin out there so that forks become irrelevant and special purpose variants are more attractive than forking. Let them fork those as much as they like.

For this though, bitcoin needs to become a library with an interface on top. libxcoin?

Well bitcoin is a protocol. Last I checked that's not really the same thing as a library.

I agree one option #1. That is the best way to do this at the moment - to defend the system as it currently is and to properly educate people as to why its advantages far outweigh any possible perceived disadvantages. Many times people want to fork the current system because they do not fully understand economics or that they've been brainwashed by the Keynesian BS passed off as economics in the current educational system.

Option #2 is also good. I see no reason why specialized forks of bitcoin and the main bitcoin cannot co-exist.

3. Do you have some links to threads regarding those *coin variants? I'd like to learn more about them.

To standardize variant creation.


I agree one option #1. That is the best way to do this at the moment - to defend the system as it currently is and to properly educate people as to why its advantages far outweigh any possible perceived disadvantages. Many times people want to fork the current system because they do not fully understand economics or that they've been brainwashed by the Keynesian BS passed off as economics in the current educational system.
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They can't comprehend that a fork is a physical stereotype. A variant would serve them better.


http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7841.0

Coming Monday.

I don't think that a pool making up more than 50% of the network power is necessarily a bad thing. The operator could choose to use that power maliciously, but it would be difficult to hide doing so from the miners. Given that they are in it for the money, they're not going to tolerate any malicious use of their processing power and will switch to another pool. I'd rather have a mining pool control >50% of the network than a single individual or business any day.

Nothing against you as a fellow bitcoiner, but this is the desk jockey podium saint approach to risk management. I'll stick with the guy who doesn't drive the truck perfectly on the edge of the road up the mountain. I understand your argument, but I've seen dumber people run with this sort of ego inflating risk skating attitude at the expense of others in other situations.

It's simply not satisfactory.

The potential threat of loss of credibility isn't holding back politicians.

Yet you use the example of Anonymous turning on itself... how is that different? Same with miners voluntarily leaving the biggest pool before it gets 50%.

Correct. And that's what we need to keep as part of the culture to so Bitcoin will pass some tests it will soon face.

But that's not what I meant. I do apologize it was late. My only concern is that the trigger point be somewhere around 45% ish depending on how quickly it approaches 50%. It's one thing not to be worried, but it's another not to use safety procedures.