Bitcoin Forum

The whole mining thing is the most elaborate and wasteful means of trickling out a new block every ten minutes or so that the human mind could devise, so far anyway  :D
As you rightly point out, the exchanges thwart the concept of decentralization.

So, there's two requirements for Bitcoin 2.0, or the replacement for Bitcoin 1.0
1. Eliminate wasteful mining driven by computing capacity.
2. Decentralize the currency exchange function.

#1 is easy, #2 not so...

Oh, RLY? #1 is not easy. There must be proof of work to ensure the validity of blockchain.

If you don't have mining, you have no way to protect against double-spend attacks, etc.  People could change the blockchain at will.  All of that "wasteful" mining ensures that no single person can change the blockchain record.

Good thinking inside the Bitcoin Box there. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like cryptography.

Why not a capacity-based mining metric as used in the distributed project software BOINC? "Earnings" are based on your percentage of commitment of a benchmarked resource as well as total capacity contributed. If capacity is really not needed in the aggregate, you could level the playing field between the cell phone processor used at 99% and the energy-wasting dedicated red hot pig breath generator running at 99% or for that matter dial in any skewing of reward you might want to achieve.

The whole weird hack of the difficulty level makes it clear whats really going on. Set it to minimum and rework the mining block creation rate meter, which could be amenable to something as simple as a consensus-based peer to peer counter.

Right now the mining hack is a lovely illustration of the fallacy of composition. The more it's done the less is the return to each participant for their investment. At the other end, where everyone recognizes pointlessly compute-intensive mining just costs everyone more individually so that no one should do it, bitcoins aren't created. It's a truly ludicrous situation.

LOLNO

a BOINC-like system would require a central authority to verify the work, defeating the whole point of decentralization.

Why is that? Please elaborate. Peers benchmarking each other could do the verification. Once again, you are only telling us how Bitcoin works, it seems you are having trouble thinking outside that tiny little Bitcoin Box. ROTFLMFAO, what's the weather like in 2008?

I am having trouble figuring out how such a system would work successfully.  It seems like you are describing Bitcoin when you say "'Earnings' are based on your percentage of commitment of a benchmarked resource as well as total capacity contributed".  And then you say that you will even the playing field between a cell phone and a power generator.  How, exactly, would that be achieved?  Give the technical details!  Most "evening the playing field" ideas are shot down pretty quickly by people who figure out how to circumvent such measures.  The best you could do is to limit the computations to something that only CPU's can calculate, not GPUs, but that's not going to save much power.

And what about security?  If it only takes a few cell phones to do the calculations, what would stop someone with malicious intentions from calculating and broadcasting their own blockchain?  By default, the Bitcoin client accepts whichever chain is the longest as the "correct" blockchain.  If you used a similar scheme, but limited the processing power behind the protection of said blockchain, it wouldn't be long before you'd start seeing 51% double-spend attacks on it.

By default, the Bitcoin client accepts whichever chain is the longest as the "correct" blockchain.

No shit? To borrow a phrase from the mayor of Chicago, that's fucking retarded. Are you suggesting that this preposterous business of spinning wheels at ever increasing rates is necessary to maintain the security of the blockchain? If so, failure is inevitable. So many flaws, thanks for pointing this one out.

Give the technical details.
The means of benchmarking GPUs, FPGAs, or whatever are too obvious to waste space on, in fact the more heterogeneous the platforms, the better for having them cross-check each other. Besides, existence proofs are always compelling, witness the BOINC project does this for CPUs and GPUs as well and it is not centralized other than as a matter of recordkeeping convenience. Of course, the BOINC project generates work of tangible value, whereas bitcoin asks for unbounded resources just to barely keep itself going, so there's a shared interest in central recording in BOINC.

It's been said before, but Nakamoto was very prudent not to burn his real identity on a 1.0 prototype. He's obviously much more clever than the folks who have internalized his work as gospel, a silly thing to do with a wholly synthetic mathematical game.

Ok, bright and enlightened one, what is your solution?  I see nothing wrong with accepting the longest blockchain as the correct one.  I can think of no other way to successfully implement a decentralized account ledger.  You seem to be so ready to criticize Bitcoin's methods without offering up any solutions of your own.  Once you can solve all the problems that Bitcoin solves, people might start taking you seriously.

What kind of jargon are you spouting off about here?  Way to completely generalize when I say "give details".   ::)

Again, if you have a better system than Bitcoin, by all means, spill out the DETAILS.  Just saying "it'll use BOINC" isn't enough.  How would you create a public ledger that is unchangeable, yet decentralized?

Too funny! Ok, sonny, I won't trot out the string of degrees I have in mathematics, economics, and law. I won't cite my 30 years of experience in the financial services industry with 20 of that on Wall Street. I won't even discuss my role as one of the earliest implementors of the RSA cryptosystem in that industry. All that was a long time ago, I would pay people to do that stuff for me now had I not done so well as to be out of it completely. None of that is relevant in a world born yesterday.

In any case, the only practical value I see in bitcoin is as a transactional system.

I am sufficiently experienced to recognize that in the worst case a black box behavioral emulation of bitcoin as a transactional system could be built, perhaps out of as little as hamster wheels and rubber bands, perhaps more. Decentralized distributed data models are very common, there are many solutions to maintaining coherency in them. So on and so on. Yawn, been there, done that.

A really good way to not get sucked into the paradigms of a given tool set is to start with requirements. Rather than retype the work of others, I would suggest you take at look, FOR EXAMPLE ( just like BOINC is an EXAMPLE, you dingbat ) at this refined set of proposed requirements posted elsewhere on this forum:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54222.msg647423#msg647423

You shouldn't be surprised that the adults in the room are not taking bitcoin as seriously as it takes itself, many of them have seen a lot more than you have. Did I mention I knew some of the implementors of Flooz?  :D

Ok, so you have credentials and experience.  I applaud you.

Now with all of those degrees and years of experience, why have you STILL not come up with an answer to the question I continually present to you?  You criticize Bitcoin for its wastefulness of resources, but what sort of security would you put in place of raw hashing power?

Again:  How would you create a public ledger that is unchangeable, yet decentralized?

Makes no sense, BOINC is very centralized, it must rely on a central system to feed it with Work Unit to crunch.

That's only because BOINC does interesting and useful computing work from many fields, hence it's actually connected to reality and not a self contained game simulation featuring performance of the same simple operation over and over like the computing done in bitcoin. Spin those wheels, little hamster, spin!  ;)

Flip Tulipcoin, I understand exactly what you're suggesting. Thus, here's a much more specific question: how would you combat the potential for a sybil attack, without the assumption that every client must be connected to the network at all times?

1)  Who maintains the blockchain based on cryptography?  If it is decentralized, what criteria would clients use to determine whether the blockchain is legitimate or not?  Obviously, anyone could create their own blockchain, then broadcast it in an attempt to "rewrite" history.  If the amount of computational power it takes to write a blockchain is artificially limited, then it can easily be overwritten by anyone with computing power greater than the artificial limit.
2)  The computing power is necessary to prevent someone from having an equal or greater amount of computing power.
3)  Inferior people?  If you really are as old as you say you are, learn some respect.  It makes you look pretty childish when you throw out insults like that.

Who sets the capacity limit? Who make a cellphone and quad 6990 rig "level".  How do they do that?  

Now rethink this theory uses decentralized network.


Now you are just talking in circles.  Neither extreme has to exist.  Enough people mine so the network is strong enough.  If more people mine profitability declines and some people drop out restoring equilibrium.  If less people mine then profitability goes up and thus more people mine restoring equilibrium.  As economic activity of the network rises scarcity drives up the price of BTC in fiat terms increasing the revenue to the miners thus encouraging more mining and stronger network.

When medicine advances enough, maybe we'll finally make a currency that fuels itself on our Oxytocin production :D

WELL NO SHIT? bitcoin is all about transactions
so it's ok to think centralized, but it's not ok to think decentralized? weren't you the one asking people to think outside the ox?  ::)
bionic "credits" are more for show than anything else. even then, it relies on a central server to keep tally.
I would like to see references to that.

inb4 you ragequit because you think it's not worth your precious time. when really, you're just afraid of losing.

How close a sibling are we talking about? Would a sibling attacker have, say, private keys known only to it's sibling? I don't mean to be circular, but how a node's "identity" is defined would be some persistent property of the node when disconnected from the network and verifiable by other nodes during the time the first node is connected. Other nodes must a recollection of the identity, such as a public key, to validate a signature exchange. Consensus of all participants validating each other on an ongoing basis with changing keys would probably be a part of it, as it would make flooding the network with confederates who would validate an attacker ineffective.

Handling failure of consensus is an implementation issue I would have to break down to use cases. If there's an overarching simple answer, I'm not seeing it.

The property of identity itself need only persist between connections, not forever. Although I dislike the SecureID system for various reasons, their implementation of object authentication requires that an object's identity be "freshened" by occasional connection to the network, it is not a static property. Now if only their token database wasn't centralized maybe they wouldn't have gotten hacked so easily this past year.

so what's preventing me from creating a ton of sock puppet nodes, waiting a few moths, and launch a double spend attempt?

btw, it's sybil, not sibling ;)
also looks like you missed a verb here:
???

Nice job beating up your straw man little girl, isn't it time for you to go jerk off in its ass? Maybe you can get enough bitcoins to buy a RealDoll someday, keep dreaming.

So instead of a proof of work it is proof of identity ... in an anonymous network.   Which is easier to implement millions of fake identities or millions of megahashes?  The network would require consensus (as in 100% agreement) or majority (51%)?  Consensus in a distributed network where anyone can join?  LOLZ.  How would you deal w/ entities who made identities simply to break consensus (voting "false" on every transaction).  On the other hand 51% bad identities (even if all from a single entity) would control the network.


Calling that a copout is the understatement of the year.  I thought it would be trivial.  

So in summary:
"Bitcoin is wasteful, and here are much better ways to do it.  I haven't got the implementation down because there is no simple answer but Bitcoin is wasteful because there are much better ways to do it."

that seems something a mature person with "degrees in mathematics, economics, and law" and "30 years of experience in the financial services industry with 20 of that on Wall Street" would say  ::)

oh, i'm still waiting for proof of those degrees that you have.

Well, clearly then, the return to mining is an economic inefficiency that should tend to zero over the long term, that it does seems to be the consensus. Besides, the mining capacity arms race results in equilibrium being a moving target. I seriously doubt most miners who make a hardware investment for that purpose at this point in time will ever reach break even before something better to do comes along.

  Mining may be a losing proposition for those who's costs are higher than average but that is no different than any other industry.  There is no consensus that mining will trend to zero over the long run.  Mining will always be profitable for those who costs are lower than the network average.


Then wouldn't the prudent decision be to .... NOT make a hardware investment at this time at least not until ... something better comes along.  The network likely is overcapacity at this point but that is no different than the auto industry being over capacity in 2008.    Lower profitability will push out the least marginal miners.  In time FPGA will make almost all GPU miners too marginal to continue mining just as GPU did to CPU miners.  

well hold on there. what happened to the previous arguments that you presented? they were all soundly defeated, and you just move on?

seems like a serious case of
https://i.imgur.com/fzpiT.jpg

If you can't come up with something better, shut up, and come up with something better, instead of moaning and complaining on a internet forum.

oh, did i mention i was the president of the universe? oh, and no need to ask for proof, it's not like you provided any either ;)

So, first off:I looked at this proposal, and it's still missing the secret sauce. It has the idea of using "trustworthiness" on the network to determine nodes' weights in getting to sign off on a transaction having occurred or not occurred, but doesn't explain how "trustworthiness" is determined.

Now, certainly, if there was some way to establish such a thing, algorithmically, in a way that prevents both sockpuppet shenanigans and the long (but big) con, then you'd be done! You wouldn't need proof-of-work anymore! The problem would be solved!

But... that's a hard problem. That's one of the fundamental hard problems in this field, from what I understand. I've not yet heard of any algorithm to do it. And the proposal given doesn't say one word as to how it would be accomplished.



So let's put that aside for the moment. Let's take a step back and look at the requirements for a currency. To me, they seem to be:

• Multiple accounts, each with a persisted balance that cannot change except in atomic transfers
• The ability for the holder of an account, and only the holder of that account, to atomically transfer funds to another account
• Privacy of the account balance with respect to any individual account holder. (Possibly. Not sure if you care about this, although many folks around here do.)

Are there any proposals that address these requirements, of which you're aware? I should note that since reliance on a "trusted authority" would allow such a party to violate invariant 2, the solution cannot rely on one.

Notre Dame. University of Chicago. John Marshall Law School. Please hold your breath while waiting, I'll surely hurry back with more. BTW, I reserve the right to say whatever I like to a retarded child such as yourself. Sorry, you gave yourself away immediately.

Boring, boring. It's evident bitcoin comes with blinders. Time for a snack...

that's not proof.
you get bored rather fast :P had too much sugar? it's only 86 seconds.
https://i.imgur.com/r3onb.png

Somehow, I knew it would come to this.   ::)  He blames Bitcoin for having an inefficient solution, but comes up against a brick wall when trying to explain his own "solution".

Not true.  Mining won't tend to zero over the long term.  Mining will always be present, as long as Bitcoins continue to hold value, as mining generates Bitcoins for the miners.

Yes, the equilibrium is a moving target.  Same as the equilibrium in any industry.  Every miner must make a calculated decision whether to invest in more hardware (or sell off their current hardware) based on future projections of profit and risk.  Same as profit/risk analysis in any industry.  Your point?

I said "the return to mining".

Your analogy fails in that Bitcoin mining isn't an industry, it's a game that serves only the claustrophobic world of bitcoin, which is itself a game. Bitcoin mining produces nothing and would not be missed if it disappeared tomorrow. Seriously.

no one is forcing you to use it.

You came on so strong to start with, now you just sound like a little pussy with hurt feelings. Did you stick out your tongue when you typed that? If you did, what were you hoping to find with it?

i could say the same for you. let's see the arguments you abandoned so far:


let's not forget the fact that since page 2, all you have been doing is criticizing the system without providing a real solution. complaints are everywhere, solutions are not.

oh, it's not a strawman if it's a position explicitly stated by you. ::)

edit:
moar arguments

mega tunnel vision (https://i.imgur.com/fzpiT.jpg) much?

Back from dinner. Obviously you have been having fun playing with yourself while I was away. Sorry to see you couldn't keep up with the finer points, it makes you such a cranky child. BTW, is English not your first language? Is it perhaps a language without Latin or Greek roots?

I did get some good ideas from Qoheleth, enough to warrant further research and consideration. OTOH you may go back to pulling your pud, little girl, you are the most useless fuck I've talked to all day. Seriously.

Last thought for the evening, I tried to look up the SIC ( Standard Industrial Classification ) for bitcoin mining, it's not there. Too bad the codes are 4 digit decimal, "1D10T" would provide an easily remembered designation  ;D

Qoheleth, thanks again for the thoughtful input.

If you're looking for a serious response here, I'd argue it'd go under either 7379 (Computer Related Services, Not Elsewhere Classified) or 6099 (Functions Related to Depository Banking, Not Elsewhere Classified (which includes wire clearinghouses and EFT networks)).

But I suspect this is intended as a sarcastic jab, in which case I'd note that lack of an OSHA classification doesn't stop pyramid schemes from being a major industry either. Also that your habit of making such asides might be contributing to peoples' tendency to construe you as a deliberate troublemaker instead of actually taking you seriously ;)

Glad to help.

If you have time, I think this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53804.0) has some interesting ideas for an alternative vote-vetting system, although it's far from a complete proposal as yet (most notably, there are some significant bootstrap problems that need to be addressed).

The return to mining?  You would think that someone with so many prestigious degrees would use proper terminology.  How about, "the return on mining", "the return on investment of mining", or "the profitability of mining" will tend to zero over the long term.  "The return to mining" does not mean what you were trying to say, hence my confusion.

Even then, I do not believe it to be true.  Anyone with their head on straight will only make investments when the projected return on investment (inclusive of risk) is above the real cost or opportunity cost of those funds.  In the case of a real cost, the projected return would have to exceed the cost of financing - say, 5-6% for someone with good credit on a small loan.  In the case of an opportunity cost, the projected return would have to exceed the return of other potential investments - say, 4-5% on a (virtually) risk-free CD.

So no, I do not agree that returns will tend towards zero over the long term.  Returns will tend towards the cost of funds.  No one is going to invest in hardware when the return is less than they would receive if they just threw the money into a bank CD.

My analogy doesn't fail at all.  No, Bitcoin is not an industry, but analogies don't require the items being discussed to be of the same type - analogies only require similarities to be present.  And the unspoken rules of investment for any given industry apply just as much to investments made towards Bitcoin mining.

Maybe you should have studied more while acquiring your dozens of degrees.  Then you would know what an analogy is.  ;)

Oh, and you still haven't shown me how you would solve any of the problems that Bitcoin solves with regards to a decentralized currency.  So far, your "solution" has fallen flat on its face.  It doesn't work.  Come up with something that works, THEN come back and tell us all how Bitcoin is wrong.

I got what I wanted, it's not about you, junior. It's been easy enough to sort out the people around here who actually know something about anything from the hopeless fanboys using bitcoin to fulfill a desperate emotional need to be part of something they perceive as successful. If they are teenagers that's to be expected, but there's clearly a lot of arrested development running around here that just never grew up or had any success.

I finally did get some useful information that I think will help my clients to avoid making imprudent choices with respect to Bitcoin World 1.0, and I gained a better understanding of how it has painted itself into a corner in which it will remain until it passes out of general interest completely or becomes something other than a second rate collection of clones of traditional institutions. It was interesting while it lasted, too bad currency exchange and speculation resulted in it becoming a de facto centralized system of the type some would tell me it was meant to replace.

It's really unfortunate that no one competent and willing to take ownership of the design decisions is around. That alone is enough to set expectations very low. There's an "enterprise software" company, Computer Associates, that would be an ideal final resting place for bitcoin if there ever turns out to be any real money in it. CA is known as the mausoleum of software, it creates nothing but instead acquires the work of others who by and large disconnect from their work after selling it. The result is that the software is never enhanced, it's only maintained enough to keep it salable by people who only ever work around the edges of it. Bitcoin already seems to be frozen in amber, so there wouldn't even be an uncomfortable transition to the realization that everybody's favorite cryptocurrency is in an evolutionary cul de sac.

BTW, your comment on the economics of mining presumes rational behavior, and yet economic behavior and choices are full of examples that are famously irrational, enough so to merit a Nobel Prize for work done in this area. Here's a Sunday magazine section light read on the subject, there's tons more where this comes from if you are interested.

harvardmagazine.com/2006/03/the-marketplace-of-perce.html

Oh, and regarding "the unspoken rules of investment". Are they part of another magical cult? Is that why they are unspoken?

Once again, another post full of fancy words that say nothing.  You still haven't explained how your superior version of a virtual, decentralized currency would work.  I'm disappointed - I expected more for someone who came barging on to this forum blurting out about how awful Bitcoin is.

Yes, my comment on the economics of mining presumes rational behavior.  What do you base your own forecasts and predictions on - irrational behavior?  LOL.   ::)  No, real-world people won't always act rationally, but there are usually plenty of rational people around to correct for the irrational ones.  Especially within a project with as many participants as Bitcoin has.  And it would be downright foolish to base a business analysis like this on irrational behavior.

Folks, please avoid using ad hominem attacks while you are on the Newbie forum.

Tell me, what industries exist that don't depend on game theory in any way? Your small little business could go away tomorrow and the masses wouldn't miss it either. What point are you trying to make there? However, just like how you would be missed by your customers (at least I'd hope that they'd miss you...), the Bitcoin community would be lost without the miners. You see, it is a common misconception that the miners don't do anything. That isn't true. The service that miners provide is securing our transactions into the blockchain. Without that, there is nothing stopping someone from spending the same Bitcoin outputs to multiple people.

Currently bitcoin is a toy, and will most likely remain one until more amusing toys come along to replace it. It is at a best a 1.0 effort that while internally consistent in its logic, didn't anticipate that opportunists would centralize its use and made no provision to prevent it from being turned into just another piece of script ( say that slowly and clearly ). I suppose you could say it is successful as a simulation game within its own limited definition.

The absence of public ownership for bitcoin's design is probably the best indication that its creator recognizes its limitations. If he doesn't at this point in time, one would sincerely hope he hooks up with some management who could make better use of his talents than he can working by himself. It's a shame that he evidently developed bitcoin to this point without partners or peers to give him reality checks along the way.

Your viewpoint that criticism that causes you cognitive dissonance must also come with something that relieves it or otherwise the critic is a bad actor is one of the most childish things about you. You see, your favorite toy can suck out loud and no one who says so is obligated to spare your feelings about it. Wearing your intellectual immaturity on your sleeve is merely your emotional deficiency, which I suspect is mostly a result of your inexperience and lack of education.

Sorry, no one has to fix bitcoin in order to point out areas where it could use improvement. It's funny that this even needs to be said but appropriate given your born-yesterday-and-likes-it-that-way attitude.

It's obvious you spent a lot of time thinking about behavioral economics before you LOL'd it. If you could ever get your head out of your own ass long enough to catch up with the rest of the world, you would already know how very simple-minded, quaint and parochial your insistence on rationalism is, that sort of thinking was already well on its way to becoming passé before you were born.

By the way, what are you a sargeant of? I was a captain by the time I left the U.S. military, the early 1970s was a nasty time to think about making a career of it, I'm very glad I didn't, notwithstanding it helped me grow up a lot in a hurry. Clearly you could benefit from challenging yourself by getting out of your comfort zone, not that I would suggest the military as a first choice.

I see my initial comment ended up starting a whole thread. I would have never imagined lol.

Here's some food for thought to those that view the mining process as wasteful and not Eco-friendly. Bitcoin mining is how Bitcoins are minted. When a country mints their physical coins and paper money they are wasting far more than what bitcoin mining does. If you're not familiar, go look up how gold mining is done. Then tell me what is more wasteful. Seems a lot more Eco-friendly using up electricity than mining for gold or other precious metals.

It is good engineering practice to seek energy efficiency. It's not just good, it's expected, it's not optional any more. It's hard to believe that an open-ended energy requirement was anticipated in the design of bitcoin. There may have been some rationale about increasing powerful and efficient computing meeting needs in the future, but that doesn't count for much. If I had a bitcoin for every "it's gonna be great!" thing that was just around the corner and then never came to pass, I would have quite a pile of game tokens, I could use them to buy one of them there jet packs everyone uses to commute these days  ;)

Since the bitcoin system was orphaned by its designer and there doesn't seem to be anyone else up to taking architectural ownership, there's no reason to believe that the core of it will evolve. Consequently, the best case expectation is that progress will replace bitcoin with something that addresses its shortcomings, both technical  ( for one, it's an energy pig ) and behavioral ( de facto centralization of its operations in currency exchanges and other institutions cloned from the bad world some would tell you that bitcoin will replace ).

Other than that,  I agree with you, raping children is not nearly as bad as raping and killing them, which is why a comparative advantage case is often hard to win  ;D

The efficiency of Bitcoin mining hardware has already increased by three orders of magnitudes (in terms of MH/W).  

Athlon 64 ~=- 0.02 MH/W   
AMD 5000 or 6000 series GPU ~= 2 MH/W    (peak 3MH/W w/ tweaking & undervolting)
45nm FPGA custom miner ~= 20   MH/W

The desire for more efficiency (and thus higher profitability) will continue to drive efficiency gains.  There is no open ended energy requirement.  The annual revenue from mining puts a limit on the expenditures for the network.  If anything as time goes on the move towards FPGA (higher capital costs and lower energy cost) which further limit the energy cost to maintain the network.  Personally I think the network is overbuilt by a factor of 2x to 3x but as mining becomes a lower margin operation I expect some marginal miners to continue to idle.


Then propose one.  The problem is non-trvial.  How do you acheive consensus in an anonymous network?

The proof of work is the method Bitcoin uses.  If you believe there is a superior method THEN SHOW IT.

You just went on a rant.
Bitcoin is inefficient BLAH BLAH BLAH
There is a better way BLAH BLAH BLAH
I can't tell you what it is but Bitcoin sucks.
If that is the extent of your contribution then the logout button is over there.

Bitcoin is inefficient compared to a centralized network.  Satoshi even discuss that inefficiency in his paper.  There may be alternatives but YOU haven't proposed one.  The cost of the Bitcoin network (both hardware and energy) deters an attacker.  A security guard at a bank which doesn't get robbed is equally inefficient.  It is one component of the costs in that system (physical money).  There may be other ways to deter an attack with lower cost but so far you haven't shown one. 

Were bitcoin to grow into anything of consequence, scalability would still be a factor. Viewed in this light you are correct, it is most likely a non-issue.

You started out in this thread stating that Bitcoin was wasteful, and that there were better ways to go about securely recording transactions through p2p.  Now, it seems you have redacted that statement (or at least refuse to support the latter half of it with anything of substance), and have simply reverted to attacking Bitcoin.  Which is fine.  I just don't want someone going around stating that Bitcoin is inefficient, and there is a better way, when so far, there is NOT a better way.  If someone comes up with a better method of securing a transaction log than what is present in Bitcoin, then I'm all ears.  But I was (rightfully) skeptical when you came in here as a know-it-all who claimed to have a solution much better that what Bitcoin accomplishes.

I was attacking you only because you made claims that you couldn't support (and I knew you wouldn't be able to).  Now that it is obvious to both of us that you no longer wish to make such claims, I rest my case.

Also, regarding the "architectural ownership" of Bitcoin - it's an open-source project.  There are several developers working on maintaining and updating the Bitcoin client.  Gavin is one of them, Philip is another.  Sorry, you are wrong that no one has taken ownership of the project.

Wow, I guess you really showed me, monkeyboy. Obviously you are enjoying being a winner somewhere in your own mind, aren't you?

I *proposed* a portion of a solution based on work from another project. With one exception, it was very clear that not one person posting in reply was motivated to go research that project. You aren't all ears little girl, you are all mouth, and such a funny little monkey at that, one for whom everything is black and white and must be settled right now before you pee yourself in mortal angst  ;D

Doing source code maintenance is a long, long, long, long, long way from architectural ownership for the design of bitcoin. Source code maintenance is the stuff I've outsourced offshore many times while keeping the proprietary value of the creative engineering and design work close at hand. Of course you need not hear of firsthand experience in either of these areas since you already know everything about them anyway, don't you?

Nothing is settled here, nothing is closed, it doesn't have to be nor will it be any time soon. When this bitcoin thing blows over as it almost certainly will like so many other half-baked internet phenomena before it, use it as a learning experience.

I rather do enjoy proving people wrong, yes.

You didn't propose a solution based off of some other work.  You linked to a thread where someone had proposed a solution (and a failed one at that).  If you want to use someone else's proposal as your own - fine, but just say it up front.  And again, that "solution" in the thread you linked to - it doesn't work.

The guys maintaining the source code are also the ones continuing to engineer new facets of the software.  They are one and the same in this project.  Many suggestions are made by the community and by the developers themselves, and some of them are chosen to be implemented.  To say that Bitcoin cannot evolve from its current state is to be blatantly ignorant of the current development process.

Bzzzt! Wrong again. Sorry you couldn't keep up with the adults. The project I referred to was the BOINC project, clearly anything that isn't spoon fed to you is automatically above your reading comprehension level. There was an extra-credit question had you answered correctly, so you are now 0 for 2. With regard to the Greencoin posting, that the distinction between work in the requirements phase and a "failure" is lost on you just tells everyone you wouldn't recognize either one even if one came up and bit you on the ass. Keep pretending, it's fun to watch, kind of cute actually.

Thanks for once again confirming you have no knowledge of the software development process, firsthand or otherwise. Actually if the developers are any good at all they could get a real job doing it and one would hope they do. This is probably the most common reason for open-source projects being abandoned, near the top of the list along with simple application obsolescence and the developers finding something more interesting to do. Go wander around SourceForge a bit, it's a great place full of nifty stuff and home to some favorites of mine, but the ratio of dead projects to live ones there must be at least 4 to 1.

If we could find someone with sufficient background in cryptography, it might be interesting to open a discussion of work towards Bitcoin 2.0, although I of course would rather like the name TulipCoin, it captures the current reality of Bitcoin so well. I would look for someone who could show some relevant exposure from a related bachelor's degree or higher, say in math, computer science, or quantitative methods in economics. Yammering teenage monkeyboys may come back later after they grow up.

How did you ever get so simple minded, are you an American 12 year old on Ritalin? If either of my kids were as witless at that age as you are so proud to be, I would have had an obligation to society to either get them fixed or put them down for good. However if you are much older than 12, it raises the question of who gets you ready to be picked up by the short bus each morning. If you weren't already Sargeant Micropenis, we could call you Special Ed.

You may stand at ease, Sargeant Micropenis. Resume being ridiculous at will, we know you can't help yourself  ;D

what a nice, convincing, and well thought out argument.  ::)
and why do you always have to resort to name-calling? (you know... "girl", "junior", "kid") definitely sounds like something a well educated person would say.

I'm beginning to think you're a huge troll.

Once anyone provides an argument to the contrary, you immediately:

• insult the person with names such as "kid", "cranky child", and "little girl"
• ignore the argument and change the topic
• provide a meaningless post detailing a totally unrelated theory and your personal life as a supposedly successful businessman

since i'm such a nice person, i'll even quote all of your posts (interesting parts bolded!)
wow, tons of educated comments there. that must be what they taught you in your 3+ universities, right? not to mention that you get bored in less than 1.5 minutes. i'm beginning to wonder how you even got your high school diploma.

by the way, i'm still waiting on those transcripts, or at least pictures of the diplomas. just in case you went on google and copy pasted a few university names.

bonus round:
let's see if i can guess his response! (assuming he's not too butthurt to reply) :D

• UR A HUGE FAGGOT AUTISTIC JEW KID ON AMPHETAMINES, I'M NOT GOING TO WASTE MY PRECIOUS TIME ON SCUMBAGS LIKE YOU, I'M IGNORING U
• blablabla strawman blablabla red herring blablablabla game theory blabllabla ad homiem
• bitcoin is a flawed sytem from the start. a better way would be to use microfluxations within the economist's pens to generate a quantum singularity that would be protected from change due to game theory blablablblabla i have no actual design, but that's only because my time is so precious bla blablabla...
• JOKES ON YOU, I'M A TROLL. THAT MEANS I WIN!!1!1111

Anger is a sign of weakness

Holy crap dude, I'm done talking to you.  It's obvious you have some sort of emotional problem...  I don't think I've ever seen so much name-calling and insulting in the same post anywhere.

5BTC up for grabs:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55318.0

Wow. Guess this is what I get for not reading the thread fully... why did I take this guy seriously at all?