Bitcoin Forum

I thought I'd let everyone know about a project of mine that I've been thinking of doing for awhile now, but is finally actually happening. While much has been written about the blocksize issue on these forums, very little of the discussion has been presented in a nice, accessible way, like the we-use-coins 'What is Bitcoin?' video. So I wrote up a preliminary script, tested it out on some friends of mine ranging from non-Bitcoin users to fairly serious investors and tweaked it until it worked. I then got in touch with stonecanoe (http://stonecanoe.ca) (run by former classmates of mine) and we should have a roughly 2.5 minute animated video done in time for the conference. I'm pretty happy with the cut-down script (https://s3.amazonaws.com/peter.todd/btc-blksize-script-v2.pdf) and we're working on nailing down the storyboard in another day or so, followed by about two weeks of production if everything goes well. I'm also working on material for a website to go with it, and in the process learning how little I know about web design.

Why am I doing this? It's simple: right now Bitcoin is democratic. The blocksize simply won't change unless we all agree to change it. On the other hand, if you can't run a full validating node, you aren't participating in that democracy, so once the limit is lifted there is no going back. Beyond some niche troll-infested forums like reddit and this one the issue just isn't getting the mindshare it deserves. It's telling that the Silk Road forums, which have about as much volume that Bitcointalk, don't have a single mention of the issue, yet a centralized Bitcoin and the regulation that follows is a direct threat to the anonymity Silk Road users depend on.

Beyond that Bitcoin is far more important than just some internet payment system. Sure, calling it one is a nice safe thing to tell authorities, especially when you remind them that every transaction is public and easily traceable, but what is truly unique about Bitcoin is that it's the first currency with democratic decision making baked directly in the technology behind it. Everyone with a full validating node is a part of that democratic process.

I don't want to see that democracy sacrificed just so people can buy songs and make penny bets over the internet.

Neither do the concerned investors who have given me the first $3k worth of donations to cover the cost of the video. Right now I'm on the hook for the rest of the $7k cost, (after taxes) but if you want to help out my donation address is in my sig. Having said that the project is going ahead regardless; the long-term viability of Bitcoin is something I truly believe in.

Also, I'd like to say thank you to TripleMining (https://www.triplemining.com/) for being the first (http://blockchain.info/tx/4cd4be0510f9824a23d98ee891880ce862dc98280a871606bd54f7129a876c76) pool to put the /1MB/ string in their coinbase showing their support for the blocksize limit. I talked to the owner about the limit a few days ago about how it protects mining pools and miners by ensuring that the mining reward can go to the hashing power rather than overhead.

I'll also point out that there is a pull request (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2577) from Gavin that will essentially ban microtransactions outputs less than 54.3uBTC in value; there is a consensus among the core developers that the Bitcoin blockchain can-not support microtransactions.

There's no such consensus, actually.

Changed post to say 'core developers'

I'll let readers who are familiar with the work I've done decide whether your edit changes anything.

Regardless, I'm not sure what putting markers into coinbases is supposed to achieve. When the block size limit changes, miners who believe in 1mb sized blocks can just not create blocks that are larger. If most miners agree then transaction fees (and/or delays) will go up a lot and demand will be suppressed accordingly. If you're trying to build a voting framework, then it already exists.

Peter, I appreciate your tenacity as causes need someone to champion them. However, I think you are overly concerned on this. You've been on this forum a while so you should know I take the grassroots, decentralized position. I even threatened to work as hard to undo the support I may have drummed up for Bitcoin as I did fostering it when I thought Bitcoin Foundation might gain uncontrolled centralized power.

I was glad I could back away from such a position. This was when I realized there could in fact be a check on future power because free markets work as good strict regulators. All that was needed was a viable market outlet valve for the market to express dissatisfaction with how things developed regarding Bitcoin Foundation and Bitcoin in general. Alternative coins had already shown up on the scene (by the wisdom of the market), though none had any real traction except Litecoin which was near $0.04.

I wrote a post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115303.0) explaining why I now felt Bitcoin Foundation proposed no threat to the idea of Bitcoin, as long as viable alternatives existed in the market, and that I would work to further establish alt-coins like Litecoin in the market for that reason.

At the time I believed there were many benefits to such a set up and the block size issue which developed later is a perfect example. While I actually share your concern for infinite block sizes I can rest easy knowing that even if a path taken by Satoshi's Bitcoin is ever unworkable there now exists viable alternatives (Litecoin is now at ~$4) which can do things differently yet still serve the crypto-community. Make sense?

Don't get all butthurt about it - heck on IRC the other day I was saying if you could make an argument to add anyone to the core developer list on bitcoin.org it would be you.

I have to specify who exactly I'm saying has consensus somehow.


I could bother replying to this, but my time would be better spent elsewhere on a website or similar resource with such replies to that and similar falsehoods in one place.

Proof of work crypto-currencies have a startup problem: when they're small they are trivial to attack.

I suspect we have one shot at making a strong decentralized crypto-currency; future currencies will simply be killed at birth . Bitcoin and Litecoin are the only viable options right now, but the latter's scalability problems are four times worse, and it just doesn't have the level of support that Bitcoin does.

In any case the solution to the problem of making small payments viable for a decentralized crypto-currency, off-chain transaction systems, will create technologies that can be used with any crypto-currency. For that matter, part of making off-chain tx systems viable and secure will include security improvements that are applicable to on-chain transactions too.

I would greatly prefer to see Bitcoin be the solution which functions as a 'reserve currency' of sorts for the abundance of solutions which are likely to evolve going forward.  It is most critical to me that whatever system takes on this role can be as widely dispersed and diffuse as possible in terms of operational infrastructure.  That is a huge part of what gives a solution it's backing strength in my opinion, and to me this translated directly into a small block size.

If Bitcoin could just take on a 'reserve' role directly, the development phase of crypto-currency-land would be much simplified and it would be more likely that it will provide a robust and simple environment for the masses should more mainstream financial institutions crumble.

Seems like all hope may not yet be lost for Bitcoin to fill this role.  I've made a small contribution and will be interested to watch this effort proceed.

THERE IS NO BLOCKSIZE PROBLEM.

the only reason free transactions are taking forever to confirm is because satoshi dice (and other on-the-chain gambling services) are spamming the blockchain with useless transactions.

^ If bitcoin ever becomes a major global currency, then there will be 10,000X as many transactions being created as SD is creating now. SD is providing stress-testing for the network, and showing that unless the block size limit is lifted, there will be a problem.

My reaction:  stop spreading FUD.

"small mining pools will go out of business" -- give me a break! My back-of-the-envelope calculations say that anybody willing to spend a few hundred dollars a year on a dedicated server with a high-bandwidth connection can support a MUCH, MUCH larger block size.

The block size will be raised. Your video will just make a lot of people worried about nothing, in exactly the same way Luke-Jr's BIP17 proposal last year (and his hyperbolic rhetoric about BIP16) did nothing but cause a tempest in a teapot.

interesting view

Please note that 51% attacks don't destroy cryptocurrencies, because they are simply agreements between a number of people. If a large enough number of people supported a certain cryptocurrency, even while starting up, it could gain traction even with external forces engineering hash power attacks until no longer effective. Granted, this isn't an ideal or smooth progression of a crypto coin starting up, but it is possible.


Don't forget about Novacoin, which has the most traction of an alt-coin next to Litecoin (now ~$3.90), which I believe is because it's a combination proof of work and proof of stake coin, which of course dramatically reduces the chance of successful 51% attack.


Why would you think Litecoin's scalability is four times worse? Aside from a few changes it's the exact same thing as Bitcoin. It actually has more scalability than Bitcoin right now because blocks occur 4 times faster, meaning the number of transactions waiting in between blocks don't build up as large. With Bitcoin the limit is 1MB worth of data every 10 minutes; with Litecoin it's 1MB worth  every 2.5 minutes. I think you have it backwards. However, I believe it's a good idea (though not crucial) to raise Litecoin's block size too, to say 10-15 MB, while allowing Bitcoin to be uncapped. That way we can see, and the market appreciate, which works best in practice.

As for level of support I think you're underestimating it. Remember Litcoin comes into circulation 4 times faster than Bitcoin. That means a $4 price point for Litecoin is the same valuation as Bitcoin not at $4, but at about $16. That's a lot of people holding litecoins and growing every day. Also remember support levels can change. When I wrote the post I linked above there were many skeptics in that thread, and what could I say? Litecoin was at $0.04 after all.


I agree.



I believe here you're talking about chaum banks, which I still haven't fully considered. However, while we share strong believe and support in off-chain tx solutions I believe many ways for that to develop exist.

it's not a stress test, it's a DDOS attack. stress tests are temporary and done with permission. satoshi dice transaction spam last forever on the network (uneconomical satoshi outputs). bitcoin was never meant to be a micro transaction currency, stop pulling numbers out of your ass.

Peter: Interesting! I wish you had told me about this project earlier. You have my support:


It is so important that you are taking this message to the people. Bitcoin is much bigger than this little forum.

Mike: Don't troll the forums with stuff you know isn't true. 1MB blocks still have to be processed by all miners regardless of what they think the blocksize should be.

Gavin: Your few hundred dollars a year means you will not be mining anonymously. That is unacceptable. I think you spend too much time thinking about the needs of the big businesses that pay your salary. It is telling how they businesses transacting Bitcoin out in the open as a payment system.

Why you put so much focus as Bitcoin the payment system puzzles me. It's a unscalable one where you have to wait long times to get your payment, you have to jump through hoops getting your money in and out, and every transaction is public. The claimed advantages of low transaction fees and zero fraud for the merchant are both things that non-bitcoin solutions can easily replicate. For instance MintChip gives you both. For Bitcoin to tie it's future to such applications is simply foolishness that will end sadly the moment non-anonymous systems pull the rug out of it by changing the way they treat their customers. You know that PayPal could change it's one-sided policies overnight with the new "PayPal No Refunds" service offering low-fees and no refunds.

On the other hand Bitcoin is a inflation proof and censorship proof store of value. The people in Cyprus, Russia and China, don't care about SatoshiDice, they care about their savings being secure from confiscation. Part of that security is anonymity of the kind that off-chain transaction systems can provide. But they can't provide that if Bitcoin is controlled.

Actually, to reply to another message of Mike Hearns, talking about how he expects regulatory efforts to focus on mining hardware that is EXACTLY the issue. Regulation WILL come to Bitcoin mining and the first step of that will be to regulate mining pools. Forcing pools to operate out of data centers with easily found high bandwidth connections will make those regulations possible.

Anyway I suspect there is a lot more Bitcoin activity going on that doesn't give a damn about Bitcoin as a payment system. Peter mentioned Silk Road which is brilliant I think. It is an off-chain transaction system already. As a serious Bitcoin investor I also care about the store of value, not stupid micropayments, and I know my partners feels the same way. We also know that Bitcoin's value has very little to do with being a payment system because any efficient payment system will hold Bitcoins for the minimum possible time which means payments don't actually drive much demand for Bitcoins. Investors on the other hand do.

Hilarious. I love that you're donating with an off-chain tx system. But for the sake of transparency, I will say that was a 1BTC donation.

I know and understand nothing of the technical stuff you guys are talking about. I will say this though...

Complaining about the micro-transactions of some gambling site, or saying it's not what bitcoin was designed for, is meaningless unless you have an effective and practical plan to put a stop to such activities.

If there is no such plan proposed then you (we) need to presume such things will continue and work around them.

There are very real concepts being discussed here.  I find this a disapointing reaction from a person in your position.


Commercial broadband providers are monitoring and manipulating users traffic.  This is not some 'moon landing' consipricy theory.  It's happening now.

The importance of a monetary system is about 1000 times more important than keeping people from watching movies for free.  To think that the same legal structures, hardware infrastructure, marketing, and etc used for 'six strikes' will not be turned against decentralized crypto-currencies is wishful thinking.

To think that commercial infrastructure providers are going to be immune from similar pressures to attack their customers, even if you think that it is a good idea to force the Bitcoin infrastructure into this space, strikes me as utterly absurd.

If you are not actively thinking about these things, I have to say that you are simply not very well equiped to be planning the roadmap for a robust solution in light of various potential threats which are very probable.  I'm honestly not trying to be a dick; this is simply as close to a statement of fact as any of my ravings on this forum have been.

The BCF and you have my support in having a desire to integrate with state law at this time.  I don't see most laws and regulations as being without reasonable rational even if the implementation is cumbersome.  At this time.  The question is what if the laws change to 'no Bitcoin period'.  Is your answer going to the 'well, that is that.'?  This question is, in fact, not hyperbole.  A followup question is whether there would be any alternative which had been considered?


The BIP17/16 thing was most memorable to me in that a single pool operator made the decision about timing if nothing else.  It was an excellent study in centralization.

I do labor under the assumption that 'The block size will be raised.'  just as I assume the worst about other threats to my interests or things that I care about.  It would be silly not to, and further, not to take pro-active steps to mitigate the damages.  I own 'bitcoin-legacy.org' and will gladly offer it to any person or group who demonstrates the right combination of technical and ethical proficiency to make use of it should that it be required.

Indeed. Gavin's original blog post on the subject a month or two ago is similarly embarrassing. But after all, Bitcoin is our currency, not his. If he wants to embarrass himself and the foundation let him.


Absolutely. I do support the foundation and have donated funds to it and the development team but we can't just put our heads in the sand and hope for the best. In addition something people should realize in the wake of the StrongCoin debacle is how anonymity is a form of security. If what wallet software and who has what coins is not known, it is much harder to be attacked.

People often don't appreciate how your privacy is directly threatened by large transaction volumes. A SPV client, like your Android wallet, has to tell the nodes it communicates with about what Bitcoin addresses it is interested in so that only transactions relevant to it are forwarded. Now there is a mechanism where that knowledge is obscured, sort of like saying "Only tell me about addresses beginning with 1Ac4" but as transaction volumes go up the specificity of that filter has to increase so that your little Android phone is not flooded. The next step for any authoritarians is to setup a bunch of nodes to track who owns what coins.

blockchain.info already has that infrastructure.

The block size problem is just one of a number of problems that are coming bitcoins way. The biggest problem however is not block chain or any external government or regulation, as actually both the problems could be solved rather easily. It is the bitcoin foundation itself.

First of all, and this may seem like a rather extreme opinion, but I think that Gavin Andresen is a liability to bitcoin. If you read in the tehnical forum, you can see MANY complaints about him, his communication, the way he acts and deals with the community. You will notice a general dissatisfaction about Gavin Andresen that has been present for a while. Considering he is currently in full time employment effectively by bitcoin itself, and therefore really has no excuse, this is rather worrying. Is my opinion that his involvement as lead developer with the bitcoin project, effectively CEO of bitcoin, is going to cost investors a lot in the future. For this reason amongst others, I have sold many of my coins already for alternative currencies so I don't not have to worry about the things he and the rest of the bitcoin cartel have in store in the coming months.

All I can really add here, as i am not a member of the cartel and just look at things from the point of view of an outside investor: if you believe in the concept of crypto currencies that bitcoin has successfully communicated, but do not want to have to worry about the bitcoin foundation or 'satoshi', this mysterious guy who holds nearly 10% of the coins outstanding, and you do not want to continue to prop up the bank accounts of such individuals as Gavin Andresen and the bitcoin cartel, there is an alternative currency Litecoin that is actually technically better than bitcoin and avoids all of these problems.

The day the bitcoin foundation opened was the day that bitcoin died. I strongly advise anyone holding bitcoin to sell now and buy lite coin so they do not have to worry about this bunch of idiots. I also believe more people will be doing this in the coming months, as the incompetence of this bitcoin foundation makes itself clear, which makes this a pretty good time to be buying.

Ad hominem

Don't be foolish. If Bitcoin is decentralized and democratic as it needs to be Gavin and the foundation pose little threat to Bitcoin regardless of their actions.

I disagree with Gavin on the blocksize issue and I think the foundation should be making off-chain transactions a priority. But Bitcoin needs people working full-time doing the grunt work of testing and feature development and Gavin *has* done a good job of that. Bitcoin also needs people working on legal issues and advocacy and again the foundation is beginning to provide that. That is exactly why I've donated to the foundation before and if they changed their priorities I would do so in the future.

The foundation does not control Bitcoin. They are a resource and YOU choose to run the software they help develop.

I think he is a huge asset. Complaints against him are inevitable, no matter how he conducts himself, given the size of the bitcoin community and the differing opinions among its members.


This not the place to pump your bitcoin copycat. It's clear what your motive is now.

I'd rather the most successful bitcoin-based cryptocurrency reward early adopters like Satoshi who actually developed the technology and supported it while it was still unproven, and not early adopters of copycat networks who want to profit off of all the work put into creating bitcoin technology, without rewarding those who put in that work.

You give all bitcoin-based cryptocurrency a bad name with your spammy sniping.

you have absolutely no evidence of this.

given my recent experience with one of the other core devs over on github, i have to say that my support for Gavin as lead dev has been reinforced many times over.

i too would like to see Bitcoin become a reserve currency and a store of wealth but i don't necessarily see increasing the block size to be a mutually exclusive event.  certainly i plan on holding multiple copies of the blockchain as it increases in size.  as for it increasing the target on my forehead, i'll have to defer to the experts on that one.  but the increased velocity of Bitcoin as a currency certainly will increase it's value even if a merchant chooses to hold it only briefly.  the mere fact that those coins will be circulating at a much faster rate will increase demand for their use and consequently their value. 

seems to me Mike has a point that miners could always choose to put a cap on their block sizes if they want.  i say open up the limit and let it evolve.  more users also means more difficult to shut down.

The things which concern me most are deep packet inspection and targeted blocking.  These have been toyed with off and on in the US, and are under active use in other countries.  I have zero confidence that one 'cyber-attack' would not sway a majority of people to support whatever means are necessary to stop 'al-quida' or whoever the baddies are advertised to be.  Especially if the filtering left their porn and media theft habits available.  Nor do I believe that it would be technically unfeasible to filter with enough effectiveness to throw a wrench into the workings of many systems including Bitcoin.

If the infrastructure required to operate Bitcoin needs to be of commercial grade to be effective, I believe that the task of disrupting it would be even more simple.  Again, that would just require a law, and a law would just require an emergency.  Such an emergency does not even have to be a 'false flag' for those who are not prone to conspiracy theories.

You might argue that Bitcoin is global and can survive be packing up and moving to a 'free' country.  I say that very few countries are not going to feel some threat to their own financial infrastructure posed by a robust Bitcoin and it may be hard to find a welcome home.  The countries which are not set up to quash 'threats' such as Bitcoin and are not under pretty strong influence of a powerful external political body are rare...and I believe that you've find a dearth of datacenter and backbone fiber within their jurisdictions.

You might argue that people will switch en-mas to using cryptography and other forms of cloaking.  I will say that it will hasten the requirement for traffic which is not auditable by authorities to be blocked.

You might say that it will damage legitimate uses, industry, etc.  I will say you've got 90 days to re-compile or use the solution provided by a certified vendor.  Nobody is going to hunt down illegal crypto users...just flip a switch and start blocking traffic.  That is kind of a checkmate unless I want to make the argument that I don't trust the government, and that's going to be a loser in certain very possible environments.

You might argue that it has not happened yet and we won the strong crypto battle of two decades ago and SOPA recently so we're all good.  I will argue that it was a close call in both cases, the adversaries learned lessons for their next attacks and learned that it is possible to make some pretty good lemonade out of the lemons that we delivered in those to instances.  In short, "it ain't over yet."

Or you might just be a pimple-face Internet tough guy who will state the acronym 'tor' to solve any problem.  If so, you are likely to end up being an Internet tough guy with a dead internet connection.  Good luck using Bitcoin in that state.

---

Now I do believe that there will be plenty of technically inclined people will be able to move with relative freedom through almost any conceivable network environment.  How much 'guts' they will need is the main question.  My whole thing about the block size comes down the difficulties of moving through a hostile environment while trying to pack a big load of data.

It is important to note that I'm not talking about today's legal and cultural environment.  Obviously Bitcoin can scale hugely under the environment we enjoy today.  I'm looking down the road and asking 'then what' under certain changes which are, I am pretty certain, distinct possibilities.  If the Bitcoin Foundation is doing such forward threat analysis, they are doing a damn bad job of communicating it, and if they are not, they are negligent in my opinion.

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It just hit me that it is the case that many animals when they wish to quit a fight will lay prostrate and 'expose their jugular'.  This is an indication to the winner that the loser no longer poses a threat.  In short, it is the ultimate demonstration of good will.  I wonder if the Bitcoin Foundation is, in an effort to demonstrate goodwill to the authorities, putting themselves (and us) into such a position (by laying defenseless against certain forms of attack.)  If so, I think this is a totally wrong strategy.  I think that Bitcoin should maintain a cordial relationship with the authorities and make good faith efforts to comply with reasonable requests, but should (and could) operate from a position of power.  Centralization and reliance on corporate controlled systems is a position of extreme weakness whereas full and credible p2p is an expression of extreme strength and possibly enough to actually win the war which seems likely to at some point be fought.

One thing that video script is missing is a simulation of how high transaction fees would go if you had your way. Without that it's a bit meaningless, because people can't imagine which of the current uses of bitcoin will still work and which ones will have to disappear or move to something else, like a payment processor that they'd have to trust.

You're going to have to pay quite a bit just to beat out Satoshi Dice, because those guys are making out like bandits doing what they're doing, and sometimes they're taking seriously high-value bets.

What are we going to be paying in your world to get into the world highest-value 7 transactions? $1 per transaction? $10 per transaction? $100 per transaction?

money and politics

inseparable after all  ::)

And I'll say (again) that it is possible to 'have a p2p connection' in hostile environments which can pass small amounts of data, but will not live long or work well on large amounts.

Once Bitcoin make the jump to a bandwidth intensive solution it is unlikely to be able to go back, and that leaves it at significantly higher risk of a successful state directed attack.

I am only saying that attacks of this nature might be 'triggered' in that if Bitcoin is weak in this areas and can heavily damaged or killed.  If so, that could become the preferred attack channel as Bitcoin becomes increasingly threatening to existing power structures.

The flip-side is that if an attack using network analysis and filtering technology is unlikely to kill Bitcoin, or is likely to make it stronger, or is likely to cause excessive co-lateral damage, that will probably not be the attack vector of choice.

You seem to be saying that it is somehow invalid to consider problems which have not yet occurred.  That strategy is unlikely to result in a robust system.  This is not specific to Bitcoin but applies to almost any endeavor.

I do not understand the "anonymity" objection to raising the block size.

"Trust a 3rd party" is a perfectly valid solution for doing low-value transactions, but it's not a solution for keeping anonymity?

I think retep's objection is the short-sighted one.  In the long-term, hardware capacity will vastly outstrip transaction growth.  In roughly a decade, storing and forwarding every transaction in the world will be trivial.  In 1995, it seemed impossible to stream and store 1000's of high-def movies.  Now it is done on cheap commodity hardware.

There is no reason whatsoever to keep the block size under 1mb.  There may be a reason to limit it somewhere, and it may not be easy to come up with a good scheme to limit it, but seems to me a permanent 1mb limit is "right out".

tv, this is a judgment call on your part.  there is no data to support it either way.

i could just as easily say that if and when blocks have grown to the size you're talking about, that would mean actors like Paypal, Visa, and MC would have climbed onboard Bitcoin making it politically impossible for any gov't to attack it.

Yes, it is somewhat theoretical.  I have, however, dabbled with techniques of covert messaging over the years for the fun of it and am probably a bit more aware than most of the technical difficulties of cloaking data channels.  (DPI's Achillies heal is that it is processor intensive, and just as a hashing function acts like a valve using this principle, it is possible to make life hard on the analysis part of a DPI system.)

I do not think it is at all improbably to imagine a world where the Internet is much more controlled than it is (or appears) at this time.  It's not likely in the plan of those in power in the US, for example, to end up being "Mubarak'd".

I think it is a false hope to trust that the strength of Bitcoin will be promoted by adoption by Visa, PayPal, etc.  Firstly because it is unlikely.  Secondly because even if this were the case it would mean that they are extracting sufficient value out of the system.  That means value from the pockets of the users.  In that case there would likely be nothing worth trying to protect.

well then the other way to look at it is that if the masses are the ones driving up the blocksize bandwidth, then there will be just too many of us for TPTB to do anything about it from a political standpoint.  i'm not saying you're wrong, scrutiny of my bandwidth usage is the last thing i want, but what we're talking about here is a theoretical situation which is mostly unpredictable.

tv,

this is what i think needs to be supported, not squelched:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/29/chris-dixon-plans-on-investing-in-more-bitcoin-startups-says-more-entrepreneurs-are-getting-involved/

""I think for a lot of people in tech, finance has been this very frustrating area," says Dixon. "We see what happens on Wall Street, it's very corrupt, and it's so highly regulated that, when you do try to start a company, you run into all these regulations. [Bitcoin is] this release for the pent-up frustration. Finally something is happening in finance tech....[We spent] years in the desert there."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-dixon-why-silicon-valley-is-obsessed-with-the-bitcoin-2013-4#ixzz2RsTBynQW

if Silicon Valley takes Bitcoin by the horns and rides this wave, it won't matter what the gov't thinks.

Firstly, I agree.  Facilitating the inclusion of people with financial power to get some skin in the game is a powerful tool.

I dis-agree that this is the be-all-end-all solution to thwart against state sponsored attack.  Relatedly, people with financial power have their own struggles going on between themselves and Bitcoin's future could become one of the weapons they use against one another.

Lastly I wish to make it clear that I see the entire crypto-currency world as being a cat which has escaped the bag at this point.  There WILL be a healthy exchange currency solution, and probably many of them.  There also WILL be a functional 'reserve' currency as well.  These functions have many areas where their functions and logical focuses diverge, and some of them are mutually exclusive.

The only real question is how Bitcoin proper will wind it's way through the landscape which is yet to be explored.

Just some raw calculations for distant future:
script (https://s3.amazonaws.com/peter.todd/btc-blksize-script-v2.pdf):
I can't see much difference for small mining pools between 1MB block with avg tx fee of $10 and 100MB block with avg tx fee $.1. Avg block revenue would be $42,000 in both cases. So even tiny mining pool that mines 1 block/day (0.3%) would make $150,000 a year with 1% fee. Full, reliable 100Mb/s connection (not shared with anyone) as of 2012 cost~ $30,000/year in Sao Paulo and 10 times less in New York/London - source (http://www.dslprime.com/dslprime/42-d/4830-internet-transit-costs-down-50-in-last-year). And the cost of 4TB/year is meaningless. Finally the revenue would be > 80% as opposed to ~99% for 1MB. And this is worst case scenario, since the pool can easily share 1Gb with 1000 other consumers and pay ~1% of the price (normally 1Gb is shared with 10,000 broadband connections)

Off chains tx are fine as long as people would like to pay less fee than $.1. Otherwise miner would want to claim the fee, as shown in the above scenario.

I believe the consensus may be reached and something between 1MB and unlimited size will be finally accepted.

In this case 'do nothing' is the solution which, to me, makes the most sense.

The most rosy scenarios for scaling via block size increase get us up to 'as big as Visa' range.  I've argued for a long time that that is simply not enough to run a fair fraction of street-level transactions of the world on, and the cost of doing this is reducing the number of potential 'peers' down to a low number of well connected and well capitalized entities.  Even then it likely fails at some point anyway and we are back to the same problem but with a much less desirable Bitcoin solution.

An alternate solution is to embrace multi-tiered and loosely coupled set of solutions and attempt to retain Bitcoin as the top-most tier in the hierarchy.  Bitcoin could perform that role adequately with the configuration we have today and would allow a multitude of highly dispersed transfer nodes to exist in support of Bitcoin proper.  And to my main points of this thread, there is a high likelihood that they could communicate with one another efficiently even under significant attacks by network carriers.  Such a solution would be difficult to stamp out...and thus something which I and others could have a lot of confidence in.

i think we should design any future redundancy models after an industry that has done this before and has proven adept at disaster and attack modeling:  the military industrial complex.  

there must be readily available plans as to node density and capacity per square mile/kilometer that they put forth back in the 70's or even earlier required to withstand a nuclear attack.  any anticipated gov't interference in Bitcoin could be designed after this model in an effort to anticipate maximum damage and institute proper controls and response.

David Perry gave a good podcast talk the other night where he likened the crypto behind Bitcoin as military grade compared to even the stuff we see with RSA symmetrical encryption used by banks.  i'd never really thought about it that way before but from what i can tell after studying ECDSA public key cryptography, it sounds like he is correct.  

we should design any future blocksize expansion and calculate its effects with the goal of maintaining full nodes at a similar density to what maintains the structure of the internet in the US from a military defense perspective.

that should do it.

I'd say that the military industrial complex is most proficient at sucking taxpayers dry, and that the likelihood that the US could have defended it's geographical borders with 1/100th the cost is very high.

But there are certainly lessons to be taken away from strategic (and tactical) military planers, many of the pre-dating modern US military doctrine.  Chief among these are the notion that it is rare to ever need to fight a war that one is prepared for and capable of winning.

while true, if considering weaponry, manpower, homeland security yadayadayada, i'm only talking about from the perspective of maintaining military grade communications via node density of the Internet.  and as you know, it wasn't just the war guys who helped design it, the academic community had an equal role.

you know what they say; the best defense is a good offense.

This is assuming what, today's hardware? 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png

The blockchain is growing at what pace now, about 10 gigs a year?  Commodity hard drive capacities are growing at 100 times that pace.  The blockchain cannot possibly catch up.  Storage is a made-up concern, as far as I can tell.

Network bandwidth is growing too, although probably not as fast.  So this is still a realistic concern.  Still, unless bitcoin explodes into prominence in the next few years, there seems little chance that it will surpass commodity hardware, especially if some block size limit is kept in place (can still be >1mb).  That limit only needs to be kept such that commodity hardware can handle it.
It will not be long before every transaction on the face of the earth can be very cheaply transmitted and stored.  I don't see the point in artificial scarcity of blockchain space.  The only reason to constrain it is to avoid overloading commodity hardware. 


And who is going to provide these solutions?  If the answer is not "bitcoin", then you've lost me.  Why would you want to create a half-assed solution and then stop and wait for someone else to finish it?

Not many people are bringing up hard drive space because it is not an issue.  Access to the data on the media is a somewhat different story.  In any event, I've outlined my rational on this thread and it has little to do with anything you commented about.


A better question is "who's not?"  Everybody and their brother is coming up with an 'alternate crypto-currency' solution and a lot of them have some fascenating concepts.

Ultimately I expect to use a variety of currencies to which happen to best fill niches I need, or promote causes I believe in.  I don't expect that it will be much trouble to exchange between them.

As an overall store of wealth I'll probably use some combination of gold and the most robust and static crypto-currency solution which exists.  Likely there will be a strong correlation between robustness and simplicity for a successful reserve currency.  I may dip into it yearly so the usability requirements I have of it are highly secondary.

Network bandwidth is currently growing about 20% per year, or roughly doubling every four years.

Satoshi's original code had a 32MB block size limit, which he dropped to 1MB as part of a bunch of band-aid fixes to make denial-of-service attacks harder.

RE: density of full nodes:  In my opinion, if it is affordable to run a full node (less than, say, $100 per month in server costs-- that is a trivial monthly cost for most businesses and some individuals) then we'll continue to see tens of thousands of full nodes.

Median cost of a dedicated server with lots of bandwidth, disk and CPU is under $100/month these days (http://www.hostmonk.com/analytics), which would support a block size at least ten times the current maximum.

And all of THAT is before even starting to think about possible optimizations (e.g. figure out how to mitigate the "insert malicious data" problem-- maybe Peter Todd's security bonds would be helpful-- and a shared DHT storing all valid transactions combined with bloom filters on connections could make it cheap for any one machine to be a fully validating node).

Please, don't listen to all of the FUD being thrown around about raising the block size even before there is any solid proposal for what should be done.

this would be great but i also think that going forward we should develop a way to measure the square mile or square kilometer density of full node operation and perhaps compare it to how the military has structured the internet to withstand an attack from their perspective.  especially since that data should be relatively available.

i guess i should rephrase that.

instead of assuming that tens of thousands of full nodes would result from keeping server costs below $100, we could measure the outcome of a specified block size increase by determining full node density on a per sq mile or per sq kilometer basis and attempt to model that density after a militarized internet.

i think it should be done on a geographical basis like that as opposed to just # of full nodes in the US b/c i assume ISP's are geographically distributed; something like (and i don't know this for a fact) Verizon having a stronger presence in the Northeast vs Cox Southwest vs Comcast Midwest.  i'm totally making that up but if i'm right, the point being that some ISP's might be more susceptible to being influenced to shut down Bitcoin nodes than others.

I'm amazed this still comes up. The idea that Bitcoin can survive in a country where the state wants to wipe it out is naive and attempting to actually design a system with that constraint is a poor use of time.

I suspect at some point China will forcibly demonstrate this fact. After all Tor is already banned there and VPNs are regularly disrupted. So, ban port 8333, block websites of exchanges and web wallets, forbid banks from wiring to the primary exchanges, announce that anyone who advertises acceptance of non-licensed currencies will be jailed. Done. All of those things are easily within the abilities of the Chinese government and some of them are quite easily done by other governments too (there's already a large financial sanctions infrastructure in place in the west).

You can't have a currency which people are afraid to advertise acceptance of because the utility of a currency is the square of its participants. An outlaw currency isn't even useful to outlaws.

If you want to build a currency that can operate in a world where accepting it leads to immediate punishment then go right ahead and try, but it won't be easy and block sizes are the very least of the problems you'll have to solve.

Ask Gregory Maxwell about his excellent solution to the malicious data problem. Sadly it can't stop timestamping, penny bets, tips and many other abusive uses though.

As for fidelity bonds they're only useful if the bad behavior being punished can be evaluated in an automated fashion.


You probably missed the many discussions we've had about having transactions provide proof that their transaction inputs exist in the UTXO set so validating nodes don't have to store any blockchain data at all. (albeit with the serious risks that UTXO proof implementations have for many other reasons) But that just makes the bandwidth problem even worse, and it's anonymous censorship resistant bandwidth that is the limiting factor for scalability.

Block size will be raised when it's economically profitable. And at some point it will be for almost everyone.

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/49174658108/economically-limited-resource

I don't think that it would be technically unfeasible to devise such a solution, nor do I believe that it is as trivial as you make it sound for a society to stamp out things that the leadership does not like.  If so, there would not be such a thing as 'contraband', and it is absurd to turn a blind eye to the existence of such things or to their value (which happens to often rise dramatically due to artificially straining the supply/demand curve.)

I don't know how prevalent CP is and I imagine that the problem is blown out of proportion for political reasons, but I am sure that it does exist.  This in spite of nearly universal negativity on the part of almost every society and strong support for enforcement it has not been stamped out.

In contrast to CP, efforts to interfere with a distributed crypto-currency would probably be seen for what they are by large segments of the population;  self-serving and unfair policies designed under a crony regime to benefit their well connected friends.  In short they are likely to receive much less public support and subject a much broader segment of the population to abuse.  This will impose some limit on the level of punishment that a state can impose on those caught participating in the economy.  Of course that will vary from state to state, but we are talking about a global phenomenon here.

I am speaking about a 'reserve' currency role.  Arguments about the ability of the state to interfere with Skittle purchases are in a different category.  Those are not the kinds of transactions inherent in a 'reserve' role, but I do not believe that value in a 'reserve' capacity is negated because an item has no realistic 'exchange' function.  Certainly it is not what we see in precious metals.

I do suspect that you are right that Bitcoin will simply not be the solution which ends up being a trusted reserve currency.  This is not because it is could not be.  Indeed, one has to work at it to make it NOT fall into this role.  It is more that much of the development team simply sees no value or role for such a solution and if anything seems to consider it an undesirable thing and something to be actively avoided.

Look around you and ask yourself how many people share your vision of bitcoin. I'm afraid not many. Most share Satoshi's vision.  And that's probably not because it's better, but it was first one and everyone get used to it. High fees, limited to the rich currency is just not what we believe bitcoin is. It's not what we love. It's you who want to change that vision. The blocksize limit was probably reduced to 1MB as a temporary solution for attacks. And once the problem is fixed, it should be raised back. Simply because, this is what bitcoin is.

Hah!  I'm neither unused to nor uncomfortable with being in a minority.

Neither is this the first time I've seen people adopt a counter-intuitive action of Satoshi as evidence to support their own side of an argument.  For my part I simply do not know why the guy set the block size as he did.  He certainly knew it was going to be a significant issue in the trajectory of the solution yet neglected to outline his rational in the commit log or even mention it.  He could have simply been running late for a date for all I know.

One thing is for sure, however, and that is that hardware has not changed significantly since Satoshi felt the need to protect the system in this way, though software has undergone some optimizations.  Even with these though they seem somewhat strained to keep up in spite of our barely touching the economic balances imposed by the current, and (purportedly) temporary 1MB quick-fix.

I don't expect things to go 'my way' here.  They should not both because my efforts have been minimal compared to those of others, and because I very well could be wrong about a lot of things.  I don't think it hurts to provide a different point of view however as it is clearly the case that people tend to get tunnel vision.

So answer this for us: Do you believe Bitcoin users will be able to run a mining pool anonymously? Is that even important to you?


Yeah, all those possible optimizations have been debated to death here, and Peter and Greg seem to do an excellent job finding all the ways they don't even begin to work in the face of attack.

DHT's? Seriously? You're just spewing out techno-babble frankly for how little thought you put into that.


Peter: You should write up a quick one and put it here.


You really do live in a sheltered world. Black market currency use exists all over the world in lots of countries with capital controls. I personally know people from places under those constraints, and non-state-approved currencies do just fine even though you have to transact them physically, putting yourself at risk.

Sometimes I think when you see the challenge of regulation all you want to do is sidle up to the state and say "Please Please! Bitcoin transactions aren't anonymous! We can make blacklists! You can regulate me!"

I don't even want to think about what you'd do if you were working on the Tor project...

Good point. I'll have one on the website, and I'll post one here soon too.


stonecanoe sent me their preliminary story boards (https://s3.amazonaws.com/peter.todd/BitCoin_Story_Boards_V1_Apr_30.zip). We discussed a whole bunch of changes to them, so what's actually in there isn't what's final, but that's the gist of it. We also made a bunch of tweaks to the script to emphasize the anonymity and resistance to regulation the blocksize provides rather than just the cost of running a mining pool - thanks everyone for your feedback!

An idea hit me this afternoon spurred in part, I'm sure, from discussions on this thread.

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=192273.0

~jdillion:  You and I seem to be in a a similar predicament and of a similar mindset so you might be interested in the thought.

Great thread, thanks posters :)  For further sake of transparency, might I enquire the nature of this off-chain tx?  My guess is that this is an encrypted bitcoin private key.  In which case, it's not really secured to a keypair that only you retep control, until you put an additional tx in the chain moving that coin to the address that only you control.  In which case, it's not really "off chain" is it.  Or perhaps in that message is jdillon also claiming to destroy all records of this privkey, and you retep trust jdillon to do so?  Or are you using some third party scheme like what gavin proposed ages ago but still nobody has implemented publicly? 

Thanks thanks --       

EasyWallet URL.

A video about this might not be a bad idea, but there's no need to stick to 1 MB forever. Even if you want every Bitcoin user on a desktop computer to run a full node, optimizations and hardware improvements will eventually allow the max block size to be increased. I also don't like the word "democracy". Bitcoin isn't a democracy, or at least it's very different from most other things that are called democracies.

We discussed how to approach communicating the 1MB limit for quite awhile before we decided on the approach that we did. There isn't anyone reasonable in this discussion that thinks the limit is set in stone forever, however it will be years before it's safe to raise it, if ever. Network bandwidth is something limited not by technology, but by what regulatory environment you live in. It has everything to do with what your local telecom monopolies and governments think the internet should be used for than it does how many transistors can fit on a piece of silicon. Anonymous network bandwidth is especially fragile: look at how Japan's national police force has been talking about forcing ISPs to block Tor and proxies and even making using them illegal. EDIT: apparently this is incorrect (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189792.msg2035030#msg2035030) The decision that it's safe to raise the 1MB limit won't be one made on technical grounds and it can't be made safely until we better understand how governments perceive Bitcoin.

With that in mind simplifying the message to talk about the 1MB limit directly, rather than talking about it as some wishy-washy "small blocks" message seemed like the right approach. By the time the limit can be raised safely many years will have passed, plenty of time for people to understand the nuances involved.


As for calling Bitcoin a democracy again I and the rest of my team decided it was quite reasonable to talk about it that way. The mining process is a strange type of vote, but in the grand scheme of things it's still a vote. For instance P2SH was implemented by miners voting that they would ban transactions that didn't follow the P2SH rules.

The Bitcoin blockchain rules are essentially our Constitution. They can be changed, but it takes a supermajority agreement to do so. 51% of miners need to agree to do so, and a reasonably large fraction of economic activity needs to follow.

You have to remember that a lot less than a majority of economic activity needs to follow because a blockchain without majority support from miners the blockchain is not secure. Specifically, note how with just over 2/3rds miner support the remaining 1/3rd of miners can be attacked by those supporting the new rules. That 1/3rd can't outvote the new blockchain, and at the same time they themselves can be outvoted, IE 51% attacked, making the blockchain with less miner support insecure and worthless regardless of what the economic majority wants.

It doesn't particularly support or refute retep's main point but I don't want to miss a chance to correct this zombie fact, since the English-language press never bother correcting stories that turn out to be wrong:

It's almost definitely not true that the Japanese police have been talking about forcing ISPs to block Tor, or about making it illegal.

The police proposal seems to have been to (voluntarily) educate site operators so that they know how to block people from posting on forums and through email forms from the IPs of known Tor exit nodes. This may still turn out to be quite oppressive, depending on the tone of voice with which they said "voluntarily" and "educate", but it's an attack on websites, not on the network.

Unfortunately this got reported here rather vaguely (" The panel specifically recommends that communications be blocked when there is access from IP addresses publicly listed as those allocated to the third in a chain of computers that are used by Tor."), without saying who was blocking what communications or how.
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130418p2a00m0na013000c.html

This then seems to have got picked up by non-Japanese media who filled in the missing details using the traditional, time-honoured journalistic technique of pulling things out of their arses and assumed it must mean they'd get ISPs to block Tor connections by some (mercifully non-existent) method.

Good to hear! Corrected


Don't think Tor is totally unblockable. The Chinese government has had a lot of success discouraging Tor and proxies in general, especially for the purpose of Bitcoin, by simply slowing down any encrypted traffic. Bitcoin is especially vulnerable to such techniques because miners need a lot of bandwidth to quickly get blocks when they are created, or their orphan rate will be too high to be profitable compared to miners who do have government support and have access to faster communications.

The flaw in this plan - even if you grant all the assumptions along the way that get to miners operating anonymously being practical now, seriously useful against the easiest government attacks on the network and impractical with bigger blocks - is that the way governments perceive Bitcoin is not static.

The reason why even an oppressive government like China tolerates the internet at all, despite being unable to censor it properly, is because it provides big economic and social benefits to everybody, and not just dissidents. If it was a little niche tool used by dissidents and people who didn't trust the government they'd just shut the whole thing down.

The way you safeguard the ability to make censorship-resistant transactions is by growing Bitcoin as big as possible, as fast as possible. In the US context you want every company that owns a congressman or a senator calling them up instructing them to make sure nobody makes it hard to trade dollars for bitcoins, and every charity that mobilizes a large number of voters from the NRA to the Rotary Club terrified of losing their Bitcoin donation stream. And you need all those activities happening right on the blockchain, rather than through a bunch of PayPal-like intermediaries, because otherwise it becomes too easy to peel off the intermediaries from the underlying technology and make them use something less censorship-resistant.

Bitcoin is heading in the right direction to do all that, but if you cripple the network at 7 transactions per second and blow transaction fees up to $1 or $10 or $100 you stop all that progress and make it far, far easier to interfere with. (*)

(*) IMHO it's more likely that at that point most people just give up on Bitcoin and sod off to some alt-coin leaving the people expecting it to be their store of value holding a cryptographic collector's item, but let's assume for the sake of argument that they don't.

Right, but you then mess with things that are of a lot of economic value. That wouldn't fly in Japan, and it probably won't work in China forever.

That ties into the point in my next post, which is that the way to stop hostile government action against Bitcoin is to take the world's payment systems hostage, so that nobody can shoot Bitcoin without risking hitting something they care about.

China has effectively muzzled the internet, and they've been extremely smart about doing it. Saying dissident things is not illegal in China, however organizing in groups to do so is.

China muzzles the internet by allowing some dissidence, but making doing so inconvenient at every step, and clamping down on groups as they pop up. Sadly it's a very effective approach.


Intermediaries can be anonymous, and even better than that, there are ways to use cryptography and incentives that let you trust anonymous intermediaries, just like Bitcoin let you trust an anonymous group of miners.


I wrote elsewhere (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195711.msg2034938#msg2034938) how the smartest thing governments can do to stop Bitcoin is attack Bitcoin as a payment system by providing secure, zero-fee, no chargeback fraud alternatives. Even better is if these alternatives are mostly anonymous, or claim to be. I suspect the Canadian Mint is attempting to do exactly that with their MintChip project, although it's also quite possible it's just an attempt at ensuring the mint has a future in a cashless society.

What Bitcoin has to offer is deflation, decentralization and anonymity. If we screw up decentralization, Bitcoin will be no different from any other payment network.

A world where some communications get disrupted is completely different from a world where they are all stopped. The fact that people in authoritarian regimes are able to use the internet makes a huge difference to the level of freedom in those countries. Seriously, this is a huge win. It is not a trivial thing. And it happened because the internet is designed so that the same network that carries dissident content also carries economically important content, and pictures of people's cats.


Build us a practical payment system that does actually does that and we can talk about crippling the one we have. Right now the places where we have to depend on intermediaries are causing the Bitcoin community all kinds of headaches.


Really, there's no comparison between what you can do with Bitcoin can and any system that you could get implemented in an actual country. MintChip seems to be going nowhere, and the people behind that don't dare suggest that it's for anything except small (<$10) transactions. There's a reason why this still hasn't been done.  Nobody wants to take responsibility for a new system without buyer protection. Nobody wants to take responsibility for a new system that lets you launder money or buy drugs. Or a new system where you can lose your private key and you can't get your money back.

If the governments of the world were run by some kind of incredibly cunning strategic mastermind then you might be onto something, but it's not. It's run by a bunch of politicians who respond to incentives, which is why back in the real world we're still stuck with sodding PayPal.

PS. If the governments of the world were run by the strategic masterminds you imagine, they'd have no trouble taking over the Bitcoin mining business by setting up their own mining business, running at a small loss and crowding everyone else out. Hell, with cheap access to capital and economies of scale they'd probably be able to run it at a profit.

Right idea, but note that crypto-currency regulation itself is pretty fungible.

The same effect can be had more quickly and safely by actively embracing off-chain transactions and alternate crypto-currencies.  In fact, a lot of organizations may be more quick to jump on the band-wagon if they had a crypto-currency of their own.

I worry that no crypto-currency will be able to be a truly competitive player while trying to fit the 'jack of all trades' roll.  That is to say,

 - A solution with faster confirmations may eat Bitcoin's lunch for much real-world activity.

 - Bitcoin has already effectively given up on 'micro-transactions'.

 - Bitcoin is developing complex transactions suitable for contracts, but at the expense of significant internal complexity, and with complexity comes risk.

 - As a 'digital gold', I personally and I think a lot of other people are not going to be satisfied if the blockchain and mining becomes ever more consolidated to large players who must rely on commercial infrastructure.

I see few disadvantages and a lot to win by letting go the 'one world currency' fantasy that a lot of people seem to have for Bitcoin.  It makes me think back to the old tale about "the fisherman's wife."

This is a serious question.  I'm sure you'll answer it.  But I hope you really take a minute to think about it as well.

Since you've basically admitted, over and over again, that you have no interest at this point besides that of making the price of your Bitcoins go up in the short term (presumably so that you can cash out before the value implodes), why should anyone care about your opinion on this?

These are just some choice quotes, for the record.  I am actually kind of impressed at your ability to appeal to "democracy" while defending the oligopoly of miners and shadowy investors currently directing development of the de facto Bitcoin client.  Kudos for that, I guess.

But, I'm not really buying any of this.

I mean, you don't seem like an idiot.  So, I'm assuming you understand that, if Bitcoin is used as an actual currency, governments will respond poorly to it.  I also assume you understand that bandwidth is not really limited by telephone companies, and that users who demand more bandwidth will have it provided, one way or another.

Maybe I'm wrong, but are you really advocating hobbling Bitcoin so that we can all ask permission from governments and telephone companies whether we can actually continue to use it, just so that we can preserve some arbitrary standard of Bitcoin "democracy" that includes people with computers and broadband internet connections?

I don't really think you expect us to do that.  So, then, can you tell us what exactly you and your "team" are working on, and what "investors" are supporting you, that would justify you spending $10,000 to make a video about limiting the Bitcoin block size?

Fair question.  I've pondered it myself somewhat over th years.  In case anyone cares, here is probably a fairly accurate set of reasons for my duality on this topic.

I did not realize that it was going to be such a challenge to increase the block size.  So I went through a phase of giving up on Bitcoin for a while.  When it hit me that there was a chance to have something end up which I consider possibly workable it sort of put me back into the modestly hopeful camp.

I'm also human and would not mind making a buck on Bitcoin no matter where it eventually ends up.  Since I am confident that crypto-currency land will produce something which is a boon to humanity it is not completely the end of the world if it does not happen to be Bitcoin.  Getting rich has always been a factor in my opinions about things.  Sometimes more and sometimes less.

As I've said before, the whole ecosystem would be all around less messy and easier on 'the masses' if Bitcoin itself moved directly into the role of a top-dog reserve currency.  But I've little doubt that something will.  Or I should say, will complement gold on the virtual side of our world.

I do often play 'devils advocate' as a mechanism to explore and explain concepts.  Since I simultaneously hold several different view on this topic it is easy enough for me to do.

Lately I am becoming more excited about the potential for my 'paracoin' idea to solve the problem on a flexible schedule driven by events in Bitcoin-proper-land.  It would:

 - allow me and others who hold BTC a degree of protection,
 - give a flexible 'semi-live' environment to work on challenging problems
 - result in a blockchain free of 4+ years of cruft
 - may actually work!

I've toned it down on 'paracoin' a bit lately out of deference to those who are trying to influence Bitcoin itself evolve in a healthy direction.

$7,000, the other $3,000 is going towards blow and hookers. (we're not filming that)

As for the team: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z09bNgSeMI <- I'm the handsome one.


Seriously, you think the tens of millions of Mt. Gox trade volume every day goes to buying socks?