How do we know if "the market" wants it?

You can try, but I don't think you can accurately predict what the "Bitcoin economic majority" is thinking until after the fact (fork). We have lots of people posting that they will do this or do that, but as they say, "Money talks, bullshit walks." The thing about Bitcoin is... you have no idea who the "economic majority" is. They can't even vote until after the fact (fork), so everything up until then is just posturing. Well, I suppose they can vote to walk away today, but anyone with a lick of sense should realize that is a mistake.

I'm wondering if there is any kind of protocol that was ignored by the officer.

I assume the keys were in the car (perhaps it was even running). I'm sure the car is new enough that the woman wouldn't have been able to steal it otherwise.

In a normal situation, I can think of a few reasons why a cop would leave the keys in his car, but I would imagine they all go out the window when you have someone cuffed in the back.

Imagine purchasing electronic gift cards days in advance (waiting for as many confirmations as needed) and then simply using those for your instant purchases.

Imagine paying for things with credit cards (or other forms of credit) and then paying off the monthly balance with bitcoins.

Imagine a merchant asking for some identification along with a no confirmation purchase.

Imagine merchants simply not requiring confirmations for anything less than $100. I'd imagine other kinds of fraud are much easier to accomplish than double spending bitcoins and merchants already deal with those kinds just fine.

There are plenty of ways to bypass the need for confirmations, it just takes a bit of imagination.


Is mainstream use of Bitcoin a goal of yours? Why?


Do you need the benefits of decentralization when paying for your dish subscription? Probably not. Every transaction under the sun doesn't need the censorship-proof capabilities of the block chain. All we need is for those capabilities to exist for the transactions which might be censored. The very fact that a censorship-proof payment option exists will probably cut back on censorship itself (as it's futile).

Bad: Client tells individual which information will be shared with whom.

Good: Individual tells client which information will be shared with whom.

Let's not be intentionally obtuse and conflate the two.

No. I'm wondering how easy it would be to sync a client from scratch (something I find myself doing quite often) over ToR if huge blocks drastically increase the size of the chain. Also, what are the ramifications of mining over ToR, or even low bandwidth connections, if blocks are massive?

Now put on your tinfoil hat and consider the future of internet censorship (a problem which already exists in some locations around the world). Would it be easier to maintain a system that requires more or less information to be shared between peers?

For Bitcoin to truly be different than the status quo, it needs to function in places where getting information may be difficult (for varied reasons). Who cares how well it works in the best of circumstances, we need it to work in the worst circumstances imaginable.

My vision for the future: A worldwide wireless mesh network which is capable of maintaining the Bitcoin network (among other things).

Depends on the OS. It's very easy if you use Windows.

Well, does the solution allow full nodes to function over anonymizing networks like ToR, for example.


People are certainly liberal with the use of the word "censorship" these days. If you want to argue that market forces are censorship, perhaps you should start another thread.


Maybe we are getting to the crux of the divide. Bitcoin is different things for different people. So it's expected that they would argue for changes that enhance a particular property.

I look at it like this. What does Bitcoin allow me to do that nothing else on the planet allows me to do. Those properties are what I consider Bitcoin's real strengths.

As far as I am concerned, there is nothing extreme about a standing backlog of no-fee-paid or extremely-low-fee-paid transactions. That seems pretty normal actually. You get what you pay for. If you want to ride the free roller coaster, you may have to stand in line waiting for your turn.

Greg has always made a lot of sense to me. He seems to understand the inner workings of Bitcoin far better than most.


It's challenging because many of us believe there is no urgency. Instead of some kludgy hack, we would prefer something which promotes both a healthy fee market and decentralization. If I was to err, I would err on the side of decentralization.


Have you taken the time to read some of the other things Heam has said? There are some real gems in there. Here are two of my favorites regarding fees and block size.



So... we will secure the network with "network assurance contracts". We'll does anyone have an example of a functioning "network assurance contract" or should we just go along with Heam and hope for the best? I guess people simply paying fees for their transactions is a ridiculous idea. Let's not K.I.S.S., let's make it far more complicated than it needs to be! Complication certainly helps with decentralization, right?

I think most "bitcoiners" have been spoiled by the early high block subsidy days of free to near free transactions. I know I've sung the praises of low cost transactions in the past. Yet, Bitcoin is censorship-proof money. How much are you willing to pay for that? I'm personally willing to pay upwards of $100 per transaction and wait a week or more for it to clear simply because I know that it can't be stopped by an authority or middleman. Of course, I don't think using censorship-proof money in order to buy my morning coffee is the best tool for the job. It's like using a chainsaw to cut down a dandelion. I'm perfectly happy with centralized solutions for daily spending. What we need is the Bitcoin system to function as censorship-proof money when we actually need censorship-proof money!

A lot of people on this forum act like there are no trade-offs in life. Can we have censorship-proof money that scales like VISA? Probably not. So mainstreamers better be careful what they ask for.

If, in the future, there is a technological way to achieve censorship-proof money that scales like VISA, I'm all for it. I personally don't think that massive blocks are the correct answer at this time. If we need to make slight adjustments to the maximum block size to buy us some time, so be it.

Pool operators are actual miners, along with solo miners and p2pool miners.

The people who sell their hash rate to pool operators are simply hash rate providers.

If you aren't running a node, and you aren't being paid in coin base rewards, you are just a hash rate provider.

Stolfi's story is: A guy who spends an inordinate amount of his free time following those nerds and libertarians around, pointing at them, and shouting, "You're doing it wrong!", while they just look at him and chuckle.


Oh, I doubt it very much.

Send my coins to an address where someone else controls the private keys? No thanks.

How about the website simply sells dust from coin base rewards. Once obtained, people can mix it with their own coins easily enough.

The easiest way to get some dust (off the top of my head) is mine at P2Pool (supporting whichever chain you prefer). The coin base reward is split among the P2Pool miners. Of course, this means you'll have to know how to set up P2Pool mining and have some hardware capable of submitting enough valid shares.

Miners aren't going to mine worthless junk. (Well... not the smart ones.)

The only power and the only votes that count are from those who are willing to exchange other objects of value for bitcoins.

So, can we put this "miners have da power" farce to rest now?

You need an input that is invalid on one of the chains in order to safely spend on the other chain.

This could be a coin base mining reward specific to a chain (or children of it).

Also, you might manage to get a transaction to verify in one chain, then "double spend" (not really since its a different chain) those same coins to a different address on the other chain. Once they are confirmed to different addresses in each chain, they would be separate. This method is more complicated, but may be made easier due to different block sizes (get a low priority transaction confirmed in a large block size chain, then rebroadcast it with a high fee to a miner on a small block size chain). You could keep trying (sending coins to yourself so there is no risk) until you finally manage to get them separated.

I don't know of any other methods.

If you aren't the sole controller of your private keys, you don't have any bitcoins.

If you need to make a trade, deposit, make the trade, then withdraw. Anyone leaving coins on any site for extended periods of time risks losing everything.

Some people need to actually stick their hand into the frying pan to learn the lesson though.

I won't touch XT != don't touch Core

Apparently you aren't listening. It has nothing to do with "doubling bitcoins". It has everything to do with sticking to the reasons we decided to get involved with Bitcoin in the first place.

There are already hundreds of altcoins (most of them failed). The fact that they exist doesn't inflate the total amount of bitcoins and neither will a fork.

After the fork, there will be two separate coins, each with different properties, and they will succeed or fail according to their merits. Both sides may call their coin "Bitcoin", but I have a feeling only one will continue to provide what I like to call "monetary freedom".

The wallet.dat file holds your private keys. If those private keys have bitcoins associated with them and you load the client with access to that wallet.dat, it will show those bitcoins. If you load a fresh wallet.dat or one with no bitcoins associated with the private keys, it will show that you control zero bitcoins.

The block chain may have to be fully synced to see your most recent transactions.

It's pretty straightforward.

If you have a computer that is problematic (hardware or software issues), any number of things could be going wrong.

If you are just swapping wallet.dat files willy nilly without knowing what you are doing, you may run into issues.

Also, I wouldn't store private keys on any computer which is connected to a network.

Yes, you can make a back up of the block chain data and use that copy if you have problems.

I would solve the corruption problems if I were you though.

What if there is no consensus? Does that mean a certain amount of people have to step in line or else? What if there is actual demand from actual users for both sides of a fork? Which group is supposed to give in so that we can achieve consensus?

I have been involved with Bitcoin for a long time now. I would consider myself a huge fan, and even a part time cheerleader. If the project moves in a direction I do not agree with, I have two options. Support a fork, or if I'm so alone in that support that the fork has no legs and fails, stop using Bitcoin altogether.

Which is best for the future of cryptocurrency? Someone moves to a different solution, keeping that solution viable for a possible future where other solutions have failed, or giving up on cryptocurrency entirely and putting my time and money into something I feel more worthwhile?

I support the freedom to choose, even if that means a fork for Bitcoin.

75% means 1 in 4 are dissatisfied with the decision. I'm using Bitcoin because I'm the 1 in 7000 (made up number to make a point) that is dissatisfied with the status quo. Consensus says just use fiat. No thanks.