A 51% miner could have 100% of the generated blocks and 100% of block rewards.  So yes a 51% miner effectively has 100%.  Every block produced by the 49% would be orphaned out (eventually).

1) The US regulated utilities tend to be more expensive than independent power producers where wholesale power is trading on open market, and don't get me started on how worthless US mail service is despite their monopoly.


2)  None of that applies to this scenario.  A monopoly isn't necessary for MintChip, or Bitcoin to (co)exist and it certainly isn't a natural monopoly.

3) From your own quote "the least of these evils is private unregulated monopoly"  and "that such action by government should not consist of forbidding competition by law"

Examples?  I can't think of many govt regulated monopolies which are efficient.  Why would they want to?

This has nothing to do with bureaucracies.  Many private entities sink ships also.

OP it is simply expensive to strip, cut, and melt ships.  Far cheaper to just sink it.  They also becomes artificial reefs so that becomes a plus given the rate we are destroying natural reefs.

Kinda the same question of "why do people throw away metal, paper, glass & plastics only to have to mine new resources out of the earth each year"?

Regarding #3 when has a monopolistic entity ever offered low/no fees?

It isn't a problem, it will never be a problem.  The entire global economy could function on 1 BTC.

Confiscating property is theft.  You don't own anything on Blizzard's servers.  Those conditions are made perfectly clear.  Anything you do on their servers remains their property.  If you don't agree then you can choose to not use Blizzard's products.


But it wasn't designed to work that way.  Bitcoin was designed to be IRREVERSIBLE.  This isn't a minor protocol technicality it is a cornerstone of the entire social contract between participants.  Bitcoin tx can never be reversed.

If bitcoind and p2pool are not on the same machine.

what makes you think that?

Wait a $100 registration fee?  Really?

It doesn't matter how easy it is to avoid theft, taking/confiscating property without due process is theft.

You have no RIGHT to the property of others.  Period.  If someone makes a deterministic wallet based on a passphrase and then say gets sent to prison for 30 years you should have a right to their personal property because they didn't use it?

Confiscation of property without due process is theft.  I don't care if it is 1 year or 10,000 years.   Worse it is theft that isn't necessary.  Users should have confidence that coins they acquire are theirs and theirs alone without exception.

FPGA are really your only option.

Still energy costs still matters so you may want to look into buying shares in an FPGA mining company which has lower energy costs than you do.  Over time FPGA will displace GPU.  When that happens FPGA in low energy environments will be more efficient than FPGA in high energy environments.

Still my guess is that is a couple years away so the competitiveness risk is minimal for FPGA if you feel the need to own your own hardware.

I got cheap electricity and I feel the competitive pressure of rising difficulty, looming block cuts, and more FPGA being sold.  Running GPU (3-4 MH/W) on $0.25 is just economic suicide.  You likely don't want to even look at BFL singles (10MH/W) and instead want to look towards Spartan-6 based boards (20MH/W) or wait for next gen 28nm boards (~40MH/W). 

Entire world economy could function using a handful of Bitcoins. 

There aren't 21M coins.  There are  21 quadrillion finite units (each worth 1E-8 BTC)  that's 2,100,000,000,000,000.

Total global money supply is ~$60T.  If entire world used Bitcoin as a one world currency then each satoshi would be worth ~3 cents.  Under any more realistic scenario a satoshi is worth a tiny fraction of a penny.  Even a 99% loss of coins would make a Satoshi sub 1 cent.

If due to deflation 1 satoshi ever became larger than the min unit necessary for commerce (for many countries that is ~$0.10 or $0.05) the number of sub units could be increased.  i.e. instead of min unit of 1E-8 it would be min unit = 1E-9 or 1E-12.

There is absolutely no reason to seize coins which haven't been used in a "while".  It is theft.  Pure and simple and worse it isn't even necessary.

No and his math isn't even close to reality.  Given he hasn't answered any questions on what he calculated for standard deviation or shown any work I don't know how he "calculated" that.  He also seems to think that mining is a normal distribution which it isn't.

Since p2pool started the expected # of blocks found would be 305.

95% of the time after 305 expected blocks we should have found at least 267 and no more than 344.  As you can see that is a pretty large variance, +/- ~40 blocks.  

The 95% confidence interval is 305 blocks +/- 40.  To convert that to luck you could say the pool should be within 88% to 112% of expected return 95% of the time.  We are at 91% cumulative lifetime luck but still in the range expected.

Just to show how wrong the numbers provided were for us to have a 95% confidence interval of <2 luck% (~99% to ~101% luck) would require an expected # of blocks to be ~50,000 blocks. 

Yeah it is called astroturfing.  The good news is most astroturf attempts fail when the money stops.  Everyone has a budget ... well I am not sure that applies to central banks given they can just print more money.

The issue would be invalid nodes will build a block with the bad tx.  It will be orphaned and the invalid nodes will see the same bad tx as a pending tx and perpetually make new bad blocks with the same bad tx.  Any out of date bitcoind will see these bad blocks as good and having the highest height and try to build off it.  

New nodes will see the bad block as invalid and build off the prior block thus never get invalidated when the bad chain becomes orphaned.

I am not saying that mystery IS using an outdated bitcoind but outdated nodes will perpetually try to include the bad tx in the next block.

The 35 orphaned blocks are not a long 35 block chain they are a large number of 1,2,3 block chains.

That is my understanding also based on the limited information.  My issue would be the track record of "secrets on a chip" is pretty bad.  It really is only a matter of when not if the chip gets hacked.


That is what I am thinking.  Would they just raise fees (to remove the surplus currency from the economy) or would they eventually be forced to lower the exchange rate (i.e. 1 mintchip dollar = 0.97 physical dollars).

Well technicalities or not the point is that when User A is paying user B, user B is relying on the fact that user A "can't" break the chip.  The chip ensures security.  If User A has extracted private keys and can generate thousands or millions of duplicate tx at will there is nothing user B can do to detect that.  To user B chip the tx looks as valid as any other valid tx.  

Absolutely nothing indicates that.  Nowhere in the docs, descriptions, API.  Nowhere.

Tx are person to person.

Receiver chip makes a request. Sender chip uses that to create a credit, sign it, and give it DIRECTLY to the receiver.  Receiver chip updates internal balance and senders chip reduces internal balance.

Please indicate anywhere that indicates tx between users are recorded to a clearinghouse.

But if his bitcoind is out of date he would see the invalid block as valid and continue to build upon that making any block he generates invalid (tx or not).  A block built on an invalid block is by definition invalid.

I am pretty sure it is going to explode ..... sideways.