You can enforce a policy like in China, each couple are only allowed to have one child. So that population will start to decrease after some generations

Even so, I think that the advance in technology would still outpace the speed of population decrease, so that even you get less and less human on earth, there is still more and more people become jobless

The problem is rooted from the market based economy: In a market economy, you have to give out something in exchange for something, so called fair trade principle. So when some powerful entity with millions of robots can produce anything you need but demands nothing from you, they can let you starve without feel bad, because you can not provide anything that they need, thus no trade will happen (jobless)

Why there is a such fatal flaw in market based economy? Because it is established in a very old environment where many demand can not be satisfied due to low productivity and low technology level

So how to deal with a society with high productivity and less future demand? The prevail solution is to give welfare to those who can not produce anything useful, keep them a decent level of living: Anyway the society can afford it due to extremely high productivity

But this model is against market based economy, because there is no fair trade in this process, the producers should not give out products for free. So in order to make it happen, the government will pay a fair price to those producers by handling out social security check to jobless people, and these money are either gathered by taxing producers or borrowed from future (inflation taxes everybody)

The question is: Is this way long term sustainable?

I don't know why most people are saying that money is debt, maybe because they have never created money, but only borrowed money

For money creators, money is not debt but asset. I think every bitcoin miner understand that

He has good coverage of a wide variety of aspects of bitcoin, like technology, economy, society, politics, psychology etc...

That's not the case with majority of the people in the community. For example, some of the devs are extremely good at coding, but they lack good understanding of how the society and economy, especially how a monetary system works. Because they are not working in those area, and those jobs like banker or senator typically holds knowledge that you can not get from google or school. When you don't have knowledge in a specific area, you might make wrong decisions due to lack of overview, no matter how good you are at your own expertise. A good example is block size debate, solutions can be technically correct, but economically and politically wrong

Devs can also improve their knowledge in other area, but that will also cost a lot of time. If it takes 10 years for a smart person to become an expert in coding, then it might take 20 years for him to become an expert in economy and finance, simply because the society and economy is not really a science, they are much more difficult to learn and understand, everything in those area are highly political and full of illusions

Take fiat money for example, why people blindly trust those pieces of paper even they knows that central banks print those notes faster than printing books? Andreas just revealed part of the reason: We live in an era where fear has overcome reason. It is difficult to understand fiat money's value without taking enough time to dig into the psychology root of each people's unconscious behavior. However, if you fail to understand how the value of a currency is based on, then your decision might destroy a currency like many currency makers did during past several hundred years

Noiseless cooling 

Their public nodes are listed as:

public.us-west.relay.mattcorallo.com
public.us-east.relay.mattcorallo.com
public.eu.relay.mattcorallo.com
public.{jpy,hk}.relay.mattcorallo.com
public.bjs.relay.mattcorallo.com
public.{sgp,au}.relay.mattcorallo.com

All registered under mattcorallo.com  if your rely on their service, then when this company is down, bitcoin is over

I think it brings more problems than it can solve, due to its complexity. Raised level of complexity will reduce system's robustness and integrity

Suppose that 1000 bitcoins were send to side chain US, and then 1000 USbtc will born. We are talking about a future that each bitcoin worth one million dollars, so USbtc blockchain will have 1 billion dollars worth of coins, enough for a small ecosystem

Then there are several issues:

1. The chain US must be enough secure: You either use other hashing solution to secure the network (and dilute the hash power for bitcoin network at mean time) or merge mine together with bitcoin (risk of double spending attack by other bitcoin hash power)

2. In order to use those USbtc, merchant have to install another client to specifically work with it. There will be other side chains like EUbtc, AUbtc, CNbtc etc...  And since EUbtc is not spendable on USbtc network, vice versa, each merchant/exchange will install and maintain a whole bunch of different clients if they want to do business with its international customers. So unless all the side chains are invisible to end users through a single unique interface, the most likely outcome is that each country use its own side chain due to speed advantage in its domestic network

3. If CNbtc grows a lot and there is a strong demand for CNbtc in china, this will cause its exchange rate to be higher than bitcoins on the main chain. Then there is a motivation to convert main chain bitcoins to CNbtc due to 1:1 peg. There will be arbitraging happening every second on the blockchain to profit from the different exchange rates between different chains, thus the whole bitcoin main chain becomes an exchange platform, dramatically increase its traffic

4. The mainchain is not aware nor responsible for what is happening on the side chain, so if something went wrong on side chain, it might cause the mainchain to fork due to nodes might disagree with the different truth they receive from the same side chain...

In one word, raised level of complexity will bring much more problems that you can never expect

Corallo Relay Network is just a group of private controlled servers on internet backbone, it can not be applied to all of the nodes around the world. If everyone is using Corallo Relay Network to relay 1GB blocks and it is shutdown by the government, bitcoin is dead right away

For any suggestions, first consider a worst case scenario, if that works, then you can make your point. 1GB block in a worst case scenario will definitely separate the network into many forks, each fork will just grow on each USA/EUROPE/CHINA chain and never receive block fast enough from other chains, so the bitcoin is totally broken, no transaction can be confirmed globally

First, you will receive the questionnaire from financial regulators, you must provide the evidence of where did you get your bitcoins

Second, tax offices will remove 30% of that value if you ever want to cash out your coin to fiat money, so called capital gain. It even applies when you directly purchase assets with bitcoin: 30% of the value gain of bitcoin goes to tax office

Third, if many people is trying to cash out bitcoins to that large amount of fiat money, exchange must have that amount of cash, which they typically don't have. So as soon as large amount of cash out happens, it dropped back to $200

So, unless the finance infrastructure for bitcoin is fully mature around the world, a bitcoin worth $1M does not make any sense, because you are still heavily restricted by today's legacy financial and political structure

There are different types of centralization, if you are not careful, you will always end up with one type of centralization. The real question is which type of centralization is most dangerous for bitcoin

An extremely small block will make the blockchain work like Fedwire system: Only coins worth more than 1 million dollars can be transferred in a timely and cheap manner, thus blockchain will only serve the rich and institutions. Although anyone can run a node, they can not afford making transactions on blockchain, they have to rely on payment processors and web wallet providers to do micro transactions

An extremely large block will make the blockchain work like IT admin's club: Only those mainframe server sitting on internet backbone can relay the blocks, all the other nodes have to connect to them in SPV style, no normal people can run a node, they have to rely on those supernodes to do transaction

If any powerful entity want to kill the bitcoin network, they will easily do that through killing those super nodes, but they will achieve almost nothing by killing those web wallet providers and payment processors, because the damage is limited at micro transactions. So the first kind of centralization is less dangerous than the second

Of course these are extreme cases, some where in between we might find a balance point where both centralization do not happen. But from survival point of view, the first is always the safest bet

"The move appears part of the government's recent efforts to curb the potential of capital outflows," said a senior dealer at a major Chinese commercial bank in Shanghai.

"We understand that NRAs are part of the sources of onshore and offshore yuan arbitrage activity, but we have no data for either how much funds these accounts have nor the scale of their arbitrage business."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/11/china-forex-nra-idUSL4N11H37B20150911

It just proved that bigger blocks are even more problematic during such kind of stress: The attacker can still spend 200 BTC and create 10x more traffic with 10x lower fee in each transaction, but the 10x larger mempool and 10x larger block will definitely crash most of the nodes

Anyway, nodes will start to filter the spam transaction by raise the relay fee threshold when they see the mempool is too large, this will drop low-fee transactions. Unless the spam transactions would pay a higher fee than many of the legitimate users, it won't make a sense

The investors are positive because they know that the soul of bitcoin is a consensus. As long as this consensus is intact, any kind of technology difficulties will be sorted out eventually

The stress test is far from hurting the network, the nodes can easily filter the spam transactions, they just let it run for a while to test the robustness of their infrastructure and also observe if a healthy fee market will develope

That invertible bloom look-up table sounds promising, but would take some time to implement, especially need to have a consensus first

Basically it does not worth the effort, you are most likely to be able to pull out 0.005 bitcoin if you are lucky enough to broadcast a transaction with more than 500 inputs of 0.00001 bitcoin and get it confirmed by some of the nodes, that's $1 but will waste you a couple of hours time

Actually I regard this as some kind of bitcoin faucet, not spam. Because you are still possible to construct valid transactions with decent fee, just each transaction is so huge that it stress the network heavily

A normal 1 input transaction is 220 bytes, but a 2000 input transaction will be 400KB, almost fill an average block. I think any transaction that combines more than 10 input should have significantly raised fee to discourage this kind of low value high frequency transaction

This test just showed that the blockchain is not suitable to do low value high frequency transaction, no matter how big the block size is

Not exactly, I think you can pull off maximum 0.005 BTC in one transaction from those free coins, I have managed to do that as a test

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1175321.msg12386783#msg12386783

There are many incentives for home users to run a full node, but of course not everyone

1. By running a full node you can make the sure the network is robust and secure, thus indirectly secure your investment (Suppose you treat bitcoin like gold as long term investment). Unlike gold, which is protected by the law of nature, bitcoin need its user's protection by running full nodes, and anyone who have serious amount of coins will definitely run a full node

2. By running a full node you have a direct insight of what is going on in the network, which is good for following the development in bitcoin

3. By running a full node you have much more control of the transactions (Look at the current coinwallet.eu coin give out scheme, if you don't have full node you can not even receive those 0.5 bitcoins in each private key )

Imagine that a billionaire throwing out $20 notes every second at the top of Empire State Building， it will immediately jam the traffic in whole Manhattan  

But that does not mean that you have to upgrade the road infrastructure of New York city because of this

The stress test will prove that no matter how strong your infrastructure is, there is always a way to create chaos in the network, so the natural solution is to let the fee market develop, thus make the attack more and more expensive and become totally unfeasible

Currently the optimum fee is not automatically calculated for each client, there should be a fee market price feed into major clients

This will increase the amount of core nodes