I bought some fractional bitcoin today from my local gunshop's ATM. Feels good.

I remember holding fiat at Mt Gox waiting for $45-50, then prices reversed at $66. I bought back in the rally. Ugh.

I understand your argument, as I maintain a logistical, e.g. S-curve model, of bitcoin price data presuming that the price is correlated with the population of adopting bitcoin speculators. I use $1 million for the arbitrary, guessed-at maximum price. Likewise I hand-fit the logistic function in November 2013, and will re-fit the function sometime next year given more data.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArD8rjI3DD1WdFIzNDFMeEhVSzhwcEVXZDVzdVpGU2c

Ahh ... but where are the network effects in religion with respect to Pascal's Wager? Do more believers make a certain God more likely to exist?

Unlike religions which for the most part have immutable doctrine, Bitcoin is defined by software which can be changed a large consensus of its community. I am hoping my altcoin under development has such an effect on Bitcoin, by demonstrating that certain alternative technology is better.

Here is the log chart of adjusted number of bitcoin transactions as calculated by Blockchain.info. Note that the most recent value is above any previous except for a few weeks at the bubble peak in 2013. Bitcoin transactions are growing in number and bodes well for the potential growth of bitcoin prices.

Not God Exists, but rather Your God Exists. Cuts the odds a bit, and introduces the dilemma of choosing the right religion/faction for those who Believe.

Here is the one-week resolution chart from Bitstamp. On it I have drawn two trendlines suggesting a damped oscillation pattern that might breakout mid October. The green candle I was watching a couple of weeks ago, turned out not to be a hammer on any of the high volume exchanges that Bitcoin Wisdom charts.

Litecoin prices are still well constrained by the bubble collapse resistance trendline. This is the one-week resolution chart from BTC-e vs the dollar. If the price pattern over the last four weeks is a damped oscillation, then prices should converge near the present level of $4.7. At that level, prices reach the trendline again in the second week of October.

Here is the most recent 7-day moving average chart of adjusted number of bitcoin transactions from Blockchain.info. Note that the dip in late August has reversed back towards upward growth. I am closely watching to see if the number can exceed the previous peak near 75,000 per day. Currently the smoothed value is 67,330 per day.

This diagram supersedes the one posted earlier. Note that I do not plan to fork any existing proof-of-work coins, rather I am demonstrating an alternative approach that I hope will one day be adopted by Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Namecoin ect. developers.

TexaiCoin is designed to run within a Docker container on the Linux operating system. If you want to run this but have only Windows or a Mac, then the VirtualBox software environment can be installed to allow Linux to run on your computer.

TexaiCoin

After completing the minimal required changes to my fork of the Bitcoin Core code for creating new blocks with trivial effort, I have been reflecting on how best to demonstrate the technology. Today I am re-branding this thread accordingly as TexaiCoin.


I would like to demonstrate TexaiCoin at the Hashers United Conference in early October. It will not then have all the features needed for a public release but I can say that when released, TexaiCoin will have the same parameters as Bitcoin and will launch with a genesis block and no premine. This coin is to be marketed as a cryptocurrency especially suited for microtransactions and immediate acknowledgement that the accepted transactions will appear in the next block.

Because the USA has relatively good compliance with income tax payments, we have a rather progressive tax structure in which half of taxpayers pay little or no federal tax but a small proportion of high income companies and individuals pay the majority of federal revenue. Many US states follow the federal lead with regard to state income taxes. Interestingly, Florida and Texas do not have state income taxes and rely on other taxes for revenue.

All in all, I consider the US tax system to be comparatively progressive in structure, e.g. soak the rich, yet perhaps less tax as a percentage of national income vs. say some European countries which soak the middle class through VAT. In the USA, the rich are fighting back politically, as a recent court decision permits corporations to contribute funds to political campaigns as if they were individuals, enabling the so called 1% to punch well above their weight so to speak when it comes to electing low-tax officials.

Also value added taxes are popular in Europe which exaggerates the price differences at retail vs the USA.

Here is a one-week resolution chart of Peercoin from BTC-e. Note that proof-of-stake coins are not necessarily immune from the bubble collapse. PPC has fallen 14x from its peak. I believe that economic transaction volume is a key support of bitcoin prices vs some altcoins which have been held mostly for speculation.

Here is an illustration of how a server in the Texai network will be configured with Docker containers that provide isolation between cryptocoin daemons, e.g. bitcoind, and the Texai software agents that control them ...

Here is an organization chart design for the nodes within a particular server in the Texai cognitive architecture. Each node contains roles, which are the software agents that collectively perform the node's mission. Roles, in turn, have skills which are Java objects that provide perception and action behavior. Arrows depict the asynchronous task message passing from superior to subordinate roles. Likewise, perceptions, e.g status reports flow upwards from subordinate to superior.

Each node has the following essential roles ...

• GovernanceRole
• HeartbeatRole
• NodeLifeCycleRole
• NodeLoggerRole

The TopFriendshipNode is the topmost node in this hierarchical control network. It's mission is governance, moreover ensuring that the system is friendly.

The NetworkConfigurationNode contains the NetworkConfigurationRole which performs the node's mission of scheduling the nomadic software agents such as the MintRole.

The NetworkOperationsNode contains the NetworkConfigurationRole which performs the node's mission of network operations management. It contains the BootstrapRole which has the skills to on-board a new server into the Texai network. It contains the RecoveryManagementRole which supervises recovery from a fault. It contains the SoftwareProvisioningManagementRole which supervises software provisioning, e.g. version upgrades.

Cryptocoin operation nodes may contain the following roles ...

• CoinSeedRole - Uses the Texai encrypted torrent library to seed new servers with the cryptocoin's blockchain
• BlockchainArchiveRole - replicates the canonical blockchain with new blocks created by the nomadic mint agent
• MintRole - The nomadic cryptocoin minting agent
• RewardAllocationRole - The nomadic cryptocoin block reward allocation agent
• FinancialAccountingAndControlRole - The nomadic agent which balances the blockchain against processed transactions, and provides traffic statistics to network operations
• PrimaryAuditRole - the nomadic agent which has primary responsibility for verifying the behavior of the MintRole and RewardAllocationRole
• SecondaryAuditRole - has secondary audit responsibility
• SoftwareProvisioningRole - performs software provisioning for a particular cryptocoin's Docker container
• RecoveryRole - has the responsibility for a particular cryptocoin's recovery from a fault
• CoinPortalRole - has the responsibility of public communication with a cyptocoin's native protocol to client wallets and transaction processors.
  

The TorRelayNode contains the TorRelayRole which has the simple skill of running a Tor relay instance that encrypts and obfuscates network traffic for those cryptocoin clients that wish additional anonymity by using Tor.

I completed modest modifications to Bitcoin Core that allow the mining of a new block with no effort. The source code branch is named no-pow-mods on my fork of the bitcoin repository at GitHub. My code is here.

The new bitcoin configuration option is added to .bitcoin/bitcoin.conf, where the parameter is the height of the blockchain at the moment of the fork...


The command on Linux to create a new block and then return is ...


And here is the block reward added to my test wallet ...



Next step is to write a simple Java software agent to send the generate command to the running bitcoin-qt instance every 10 minutes.

I claim my cooperative system is trustless in the sense that the source code is open source for inspection, and what few human agents, e.g. developers, network managers, etc., are subject to at least dual control.

The self-signed root X.509 certificate is public except for the private key. Even if the root private key were made public after the issuance of a fixed number of intermediate certificates, I do not see the vulnerability. TLS/SSL traffic is encoded by the end-user (software agent,  not bitcoin user) certificates. Outbound messages from a node are digitally signed using the assigned certificates held by software agent roles hosted by that node.

The chain of trust flows from the root certificate through the intermediate certificate to the end user certificate. The validating endpoint has its own copy of the root certificate which it obtained upon being on-boarded into the network. Sybil attacks, I believe, cannot be accomplished, because both endpoints know each other's certificates in a system in which persistent network connections are managed by distributed, redundant network operation centers.

Not to quibble, but in my two decades of enterprise billing and payment system experience, I found that reasonable data security practices prevented loss of customer funds. I believe a public trial of cooperative Bitcoin will demonstrate its resistance to hacking - or not.