We have Bitcoin, pretty advanced AI, global warming, peak oil, new cold war tensions and renewable energy rapidly growing as costs fall - and more likely - all happening in the next 25 years.

Trying to predict what will occur 25 years out by saying "25 year recession" is laughable.

Sure stocks may move down or up, but the world is going to be very different in 25 years! I don't give a shit about simple mainstream economic numbers.


I could easily imagine that we have a 3rd world war induced by a peak oil crash and global warming starving millions OR that renewables and AI saves "the economy" - but no one can get a job anymore because robots have them all.

For now I hold some Bitcoin, read the news and try to stay ahead of the curve.

Is his encrypted wallet still in his control? The one with what 600.000 btc in it?

Were I him I would serve my sentence, 600.000 BTC is a good paycheck for ~20 years. + You can read and stuff in prison.

Ok F land takes B land, but then what?

1. They can't raise taxes because everyone hates them and are hiding their transactions using Bitcoin.

2. Oppressing peoples is historically insanely expensive, the ONLY "successful" examples I know are
the Romans, Arabs, Mongols and other such empires that brought new organization and tech with them
- not just oppression.

3. Funding a purely defensive military is also way cheaper than actual wars, any small fortifications,
armed militias or one or two deterring weapons like 1 nuke, 1 dirty bomb or 1 bio weapon would drive the
cost/risk of invasion through the roof.

4. They need the local work force of the nation to get the resources - no Americans are willingly gonna dig for coal
in Africas mines! Their ENTIRE modus operandi for achieving this has been putting the country deep in debt and corruption -
which becomes very difficult with a B land based on open voluntary P2P structures and no debt.
Russias method has been convincing them they're Russian.. a method which has its limits.

In any case a decentralized B nation is difficult to control through capturing 2 or 3 central authority buildings.

5. What about REAL war then? Exterminate a people, move your own in and straight up take it all? Very risky in todays world -
everyone and their grandmother has a nuke/bio weapon - and you just became the international bad guy that its okay to bomb/"liberate".
Why do you think Putin cares about the medias perception when he could just roll in? This is why.

Actually gold is quite cumbersome to use in real life.

As much as people here hate fiat, fiat is very likely cheaper to use for society than gold.
If you start to count the gold storage, transportation, splitting, accounting and counterfeiting costs you quickly realize gold probably costs more than the inflation of most stable nations - at least SOME of that inflation money goes to healthcare and such, all gold costs are wasted entirely.

However I believe Bitcoin is the next thing, so not a step back at all.

Well ideally we would want everyone to be rich, but money is just a "meaningless" token system humans use to prioritize what needs doing without central planning.

If everyone switches to Bitcoin the USD would loose all value yes. The value you know within yourself is based on experience; ~0.4$ = 1 apple and so on. If you compare prices of items now and 15 years ago you'll notice your perception of normal has actually changed slowly towards accepting higher prices.

Bitcoin aims to be a better token for prioritizing and hence the world as a whole may make better decisions - leading to increased wealth for all - but at the beginning it is a zero sum game.

I think we need to brace ourselves for Bitcoin being blamed when people loose their pensions. Unfortunately.

Banning Bitcoin won't help us much, but if both USD and Bitcoin are banned and you hold crumbling rubles, which is easier to illegally get? Bitcoin wins hands down.

Point 2: If there is war, cold war or even uncertainty coming that would mean fiat - money based purely on trust in government - would loose to the global, inflation-free and robust nature of Bitcoin.

Might make some of the people who have proclaimed Bitcoin dead the past 2+ months remember why it was invented in the first place.

Seen the second one before, definitely the best (shorter and same points basically).

I disagree with him a little in the first; I don't think Bitcoin will end ALL war. I just think it will be more difficult to start and fund over long time stupid wars.

You might have a few genuine reasons for war left that people would in fact fund even if it cost them.

For instance if I was a Somalian I might indeed choose to fund some newly started government/movement if they could stop the random violence and anarchy.

My own country has a few instances of armed uprisings in the past based entirely on volunteers.

Still that puts a pretty firm limit on the possibilities for war - it would only happen if massive rewards were apparent.

I KNEW Bitcoin was inherently anti-war!

Inflation gives massive rewards to those who oppress others whereas Bitcoin must be earned fairly - going to war means giving your money away for supplies and the destruction you cause makes everything more expensive, with inflation it can pay off, but in a Bitcoin world your enemies and dissidents end up holding all the capital while you have to pay more!

The funny thing is that a lot of the "gold" people are investing in doesn't exist, its just paper, so actually prices should go UP as investors realize there is less of it.

However it goes DOWN because the "gold" price is set by the paper instruments - which are now loosing trust.

The real gold you ask? No one cares; because of the digital age and tungsten fillings gold has become cumbersome and difficult to use. EVEN if the world ended you would probably be better off trading cigarettes than gold/silver.

I used to like gold and silver coins, but every time I analyze it rationally it does not make much sense.

I actually try my best at work.. I DID sign a contract you know.

That sounds like a separate security issue.

No one can tamper with a signed TX once its done (transaction malleability does not and cannot change outputs only tx hash/id).

I will just weigh in on this as someone who has worked with Bitcoin merkle trees in practice:

1. The limit could be infinite and we would be fine. Hence I support any proposal to increase block size as much as possible.
2. That said a slow ~40% growth rate gives us time to improve the clients to scale nicely. Again I give full support to this.
3. The things that makes this possible is swarm nodes and aggressive merkle tree pruning.

There are two hard forks needed in Bitcoin this is the first. The next will be more decimals. Nothing else I know about is needed.
(Made sure of that before I jumped the wagon you know )

Scaling details:
Swarm nodes:
Put/implemented as SIMPLY as possible (can also be trustless, decentralized and peer to peer) -> Two people run a "half" node each and simply tell each whether their half of the block was valid, boom 2X network capacity.
(Rinse and repeat/complicate as needed )

Aggressive merkle tree pruning:
1. Spent/provably unspendable TXs are pruned.
2. Dust size and rarely/never used unspent TXs can ALSO be pruned by miners -> The owner, should he exist, will just later have to provide the merkle branch leading to the header chain and other TX data at spend time. (Self storage of TX data, not just keys basically)
A miner who does not know about a TX will have to either A not include it in his blocks or B Get the information from someone else.

Security:
Complex issue, but it will be okay. (In another thread I have described how Bitcoin clients can delay miner blocks from miners that NEVER include their valid TXs for instance.)

In general ->
Bitcoin is consensus based, if the issue is serious enough it will be solved. A Bitcoin software "crash" will never happen because all issues will be solved.
In 2010 anyone could spend anyone elses Bitcoin... you probably didn't even know about that right? What happened? -> Nothing; solved and "forgotten".

I am a programmer and I have worked for a professional software company for almost two years. This company is the best in the world in its field.

If you think untested/partially tested code never happens in production I'm guessing you can't have much software experience.

Its undesireable, calling it evil is crazy talk.

Forget my idea. I think you don't understand Bitcoins P2P protocol. No offense, but the worst thing some new node type can do is get itself ignored/kicked off.

I would love to test my idea and develop it, but unfortunately I don't have those resources so I have put up a bounty for a simple fix and described it.

Yes that would be possible, but they would HAVE to be trusted ids if they wanted more than 50% control - trust which they would loose it again if they started misusing said trust by severely pissing off users enough to get kicked off the trust lists.

So trust me there is a point and that is to put Bitcoin in the hands of the USERS.

This is basically exactly the barrel you are looking down RIGHT now.

1. Pools and their operators are mostly known and a handful controls everything.
2. Government finds them and takes over (or evil pool does).
3. Now only government approved transactions occur, NO transactions occur or chargebacks could become standard.

Once an attack occurs and no solution is in place, multiple solutions will take place, but too slowly and too many and Bitcoin is fragmented to death.
It would not survive this, even if patched later.

People would switch to the first coin with a solution which would likely be an altcoin or an alt of Bitcoin.

... or we could just boot up my client idea.

I have later stated and in my edit of the first post that you could sign the transactions minus the coinbase only. Thus you are NOT signing the "block" but contents.

I have been in too many forum debates to put up with someone who wants me to be wrong no matter what - even when solutions are obvious.
So I will focus on technicals from here on and not entirely opinion based argumentation.

This is not entirely correct. No one gives a damn about miners. It is the users and acceptors of Bitcoin that give it value and if 90% of them use a client that protects them against selfish and centralized miners then that IS Bitcoin.

But yes the usually well-connected miners would not notice this new type of node for a long time.

This is wrong.
The hardfork punish mode for 100% untrusted blocks could be disabled in the beginning. Then the clients would only delay the normal blocks. It would be no different than someone closing their normal fullnode and opening it the next day.

[quote author"people"]consensus falling apart + my idea is evil yada yada unified lists, anonoymity
[/quote]
1. Consensus falling apart: Since my idea would ONLY and I repeat ONLY hardfork in the event of 100 untrusted blocks in a row (if enabled) it would require a significant amount of nodes (>+10%) to ONLY have 1% trust overlap for any consensus issues.
Since "trust" JUST means "anyone who spits out okish blocks" this would be insanely unlikely and the client could warn the user to trust more WELL before that happened.

I want to elaborate on this case: ~90+ blocks from untrusted sources what could that mean? It would literally NEVER happen UNLESS the network was deep in an attack!

2. Evil: My idea follows protocol, are you seriously saying I found a lethal hole in the Bitcoin code?  

3. Unified lists: My solution only requires 1% trust overlap ok?
That means if you trust ANY of the pools you know of today.. you have consensus.. congrats.

4. Anonymity: I have outlined several ways someone could mine anonymously in my system. (using someone elses block content/signature, not using IDs at all and the fact that the trust IDs are pseudonymous just like Bitcoin for Christ sake!)

I'm sorry but saying "I'm wrong because I'm wrong" just doesn't work.
Saying its "not anonymous because its not anonymous" also doesn't work. It is not true.
Etc..
I've been in this kind of forum debate a billion times.


What are YOUR solutions to the 51% attack?
We have a situation where bigger=better/more economic so what exactly stops pools just growing and growing until we have "GovPool" and nothing else?
I'm waiting...
Oh you just have unfounded criticism duly noted, bye bye.

I welcome all the comments and the technical feedback. Its the votes I don't understand who seemingly know some technical detail the rest of us do not.

I suppose I should not put too much weight to random votes on a forum.

If the ID is created by the miner signing the transactions except the coinbase transaction then you could have "Signers" who would only create blocks and sign them.
Then they would publish this block of transactions and the signature.

Then any miner could become "trusted" by just mining these same transactions and including the signature. A single trusted "Signer" would mean that every miner could mine entirely anonymously.

I don't know if you are wrong in your interpretations, but I do not think my system would cause any problems with anonymity of miners. They used reputation IDs on Silk Road and Bitcoin itself is "only" pseudonymous.


But here is the thing: My idea is possible NOW, no changes required. I think we established that much in the thread though I had to change things a little. So if we have a group tomorrow running this kind of "reputation client" and another running the normal clients no one would notice.
There could only be two outcomes:
1. The reputation client works the best during an attack and everyone switches.
2. The normal clients work the best during an attack and everyone switches.

2000$ to whoever codes it. (Contact me for "it" details)

Well an IP is simply a number associated with a certain cable output. If said cable goes to your house.. well of course that IP can be tied to you, its basically an electronic address!

Add to that google, facebook and NSA datamining and I hope its not a surprise to anyone ever.

My system would keep track of pools not nodes. There are about 8000 nodes, but only 20 pools have the vast majority of hashing power.

A cryptographic reputation ID is not the same as knowing who the miner is.

Miners would still be as anonymous as ever in this system.

This wouldn't do anything. The normal network would just continue.

Even if I run a thousand nodes today saying have 1 million the network would ignore me and this is no different.


Ok I'm a little annoyed that no one understands this/have found any flaws in it, yet they are confident to vote it wouldn't work. I think I came to the wrong place with this.

Ok answer this then: Person/address A, B and C have 1 BTC each.

They send this in a merged transaction to X, Y and Z.
You now have only 33% chance to guess who X is. Even if you send your own "tainted" coin to yourself in this merge it can not be proven.

33% won't hold in a court and as said before if everyone uses merging the chaos and anonymity adds up.


Money laundering - take a page from the Skype guys article:
You also use HTTPS when accessing your bank right? So auto merging coins is just an IT privacy protection/security feature!

You would only be doing money laundering if you are cooking your books and actually white washing money from criminal sources/avoiding tax.

Peter Todds comment on one of your linked articles.

Anyway protocol allows various tricks that was my point. Ulbricht was found via his name/gmail not TOR or Bitcoin.

Yes he could.

However the assumption is that if he either
A. Started to do doublespends via chain rollbacks.
B. Started to only allow his own blocks.
It would become obvious that these 10 fake pools were in fact colluding and people would remove them from their trust lists and start to delay them/reject them.
(The clients today already have automatic alarms for 2+ blockchain forks I believe)

In other words one single honest entity could control 100% of the mining power in my system and no one would necessarily know about it.
However as long as no attacks are taking place we don't care.