And yet, as you point out, the important fact is not what is important for some of us, but what most of us are willing to pay for.  What you may want, or I, is irrelevant.


Go for it.  Make our own alt-coin if you have the skills.  I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it, personally.


Neither of us will likely  live to see the endgame.  Again, that's not even going to happen for another 115+ years.

A parachute type sea anchor?


Really?  We're not talking about a car ferry, so it's really a water taxi that can seat roughly 30 people and their carry-on gear.  A vessel that large and faster than that is old hat.  Most large cities wrapped around a bay have one or more of these in their harbor already.

It's closer to giving your kids a dollar, and telling them to pick out their own candy at the store.  If you've ever seen a six year old deliberate over the selection for an hour, clutching that dollar in his hand, you've just seen the principles of Praxeology in play.  Particularly "opprotunity cost calculation".  Giving kids candy is a real 'tragedy of the commons'.

Those who need to understand will learn.  It's a fairly easy concept that free transactions can take a long time, so if you need speedy, pay the fee.


Probably; unless the confirm times average over a week, which they eventually will.  Again, there are other ways to pay miners for support off network.  On network is retail.  Free transactions must be possible for off network solutions to develop.


Most, maybe.  Until they learn that Litecoin permits free transactions.


How much?  Can your quantify it, or you just guessing?  Obviously, that was retorical, I know your honest answer.  You must make many assumptions about how much network "health" (a very subjective metric to start with) would be lost, and how mch is enough.  These things are unknowable.  Let the market decide.

The individuals don't need to be well informed for the 'market' as a whole to be well informed.  Look at intrade.com. 

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

― Friedrich von Hayek

Okay.

That's the idea.  The market finds a balance.  There is no other way.

The first mover advantage & Bitcoin's much greater network effect.  On many technical points, AOL was a better network than the Internet at large.  The Internet improved.  AOL is not dead though, still used by old people running modems.

A light client has to trust other nodes to not collude to tell it lies, but doesn't have to trust a single node; it can request reports from several random nodes and compare notes.  If node A says XXX = 5 BTC and node B says XXX = 10 BTC, ask nodes C, D, E & F to see what they say (by default, the bitcoin client talks to at least 8 randomly chosen peers).  If all of the others agree with A, node B is lying to you, and you can safely ignore it forever.

As for bootstrapping a fresh full node, a full blockchain isn't actually required.  The reference client is built with both a zero trust methodology and a high degree of paranoia, both great places to start for such a project.  However, a full node can be altered to start it's own bootstrapping from 1) an internally hardwired & pre-pruned copy of the blockchain, which it trusts automaticly because it's part of it's own code, 2) from the most recent 'checkpoint' encoded into it's own code (search for the term on the forum) in much the same way that the genesis block is encoded into the clients' codebase now, or both.  It's neither necessary, nor particularly helpful, if every new client has to start from the genesis block; eventually clients that start with an internally checkpointed block number from within the past year or so will be much more common.  A client that uses both methods can entirely skip years of pruned transactions and hashwork, and still mine against the resulting pruned blockchain.

Yes, if so desired.  Note, however, that these are not changes that cannot be replicated in Bitcoin itself.  The faster block interval is unlikely to change, but the hashing algo is deliberately modular in Bitcoin.  There is nothing magical about SHA-256.


Indeed.  You do realize that Firefox is a direct code successor to Netscape Navigator, right?  Netscape (the company) did not cease to exist because they failed to compete with IE, they ceased to exist because they were legally destroyed by M$.

In the same way that Firefox is an open source version of Navigator and has successfully incorporated features into the codebase that Windows IE pioneered, there is no innovation that any alt-coin can make that Bitcoin can't just steal, if such an innovation proves to be desired by the public.



Again, evolution.  I have no doubt at all that bitcoin will be something quite different, but it will still be bitcoin.  Keep on mining your litecoins, though.  Bitcoin still needs it's evolutionary failures.  Keep in mind that this is a bitcoin discussion forum; if bitcoin didn't have something to gain from the alt-coin section, would it be here?

Bitcoin has the first mover advantage, and by a long margin.  The only way any alt-coin ever "makes it" is 1) if it serves a niche market Bitcoin was not optimized for (i.e. Namecoin) or 2) manages to make a huge leap in some technical or economic fashion which cannot be replicated in Bitcoin itself (almost impossible) or 3) Bitcoin turns out to have some fatal bug in the protocol itself.

Which of these scenarios is most likely?

Why so many alt-coins?

Evolution, of course.  Those are the dead-end muations.

While I don't think that Bitcoin is ever going to exclusively exist as money, and that some form of fiat currency will continue to exist pretty much everywhere on Earth; I do think that Bitcoin (or it's successor) has the potential to become the world's next global reserve currency.  I can't envision a future wherein international trade is likely to return to any kind of gold standard; too many problems with letters-of-credit and such that Bitcoin solves natively.  In two generations, banknotes with the promise of "backing" by Bitcoin reserves will be common enough as well.  The age of paper fiat currencies is fading away, but it will take many generations before fiat is no longer dominate.

That's the most accurate part of the article.

It's too late to regulate.  The Bitcoin network is too big to suppress, the protocol is regulation resistant by design, and a large portion of the userbase would actively resist attempts by any government to annex bitcoin.

The only bitcoin users who are going to submit to regulations are the corporations that labor under such regimes already.  The common user will actively evade regulations whenever possible.  The common man already does so whenever he can using cash and barter transactions.  Have you ever heard of anyone paying taxes on a yard sale?  And the taxman hates the farmers' markets.  Bitcoin makes such evasions commonplace, almost trivial in nature.  Evasion of regulations and taxes within the bitcoin userbase will be more common than not.

I'd say that one half to one full percent of the purchase price would be about right.  That's about what the credit card companies charge to deal with fraud, and I wouldn't expect that zero-conf frauds would amount to greater rates of fraud.  Start at one percent, and see how profitable you are.  If it's profitable enough, some competitor will come along and force you to lower your rates.  If it's not profitable, you'll stop doing it too.

In truth, there are several ways to solve this problem.  I expect that most will be tried in some form or another, and the best solutions will come to dominate, and most clients will evolve to be able to use those methods.

Blueseed will be no worse, nor better, protected from unidentifiable attacks than any other naval vessel in international waters.  Admirality law applies in this context, and firing upon any ship flying a legally recognizable flag is an act of war.  That doesn't mean that it can't happen, but there are a number of less risky methods of undermining the Blueseed project than attacking the ship itself.  With the right kind of insurance coverage, sinking the ship won't even end the project.  Just make sure that the underwriting company is a major US corporation, so any losses that Blueseed takes can be translated directly into tax losses for the US tax base.

Bitcoin generation does not end in 2040

There IS a minimum transaction fee, it's just optional for the miners to accept or not.  Some will certainly not accept free transactions eventually, others will accept free transactions that are paid off network.  The on-network transaction fees are the "retail" method of paying for the network.  There are a number of likely off-network methods of paying for miners to run the network.  This is not a tragedy of the commons scenario.  Free transactions should always be possible, let the market decide if they are viable, not the code.

Not easy.  Let me se you try it.


It's fine for a great many things.  A movie streamed over the Internet, for example, because it can be cut off if a double spend is detected.  Game or digital content licences (on Steam or iTunes for example) can be reversed.  Online services (monthly access, or even daily access) can be reversed.  All of this with a simple transaction, not using blockchain enforcable contracts.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts

Using contracts, particularly example #7, opens up some rather creative solutions beyond the simple transaction.  The "loyalty card" system can be implimented within an android phone, without a actual card, and the balance revoked at will, so one could use it as a running balance for a vending machine at work as easily as one could use it at av ending machine that they never expect to visit again.  One could use #7 to pay for gasoline at the pump, again without a 10 minute wait.  Even the most basic contract is significantly more difficult to "double spend", and may actually be mathmatically impossible under certain conditions.

Or simply pay an access fee to be a first tier peer to one or many of the largest mining pools.  If you think about it, BTC Guild could crediblely charge a small monthly fee for peers to be added to the top of their peer list, garranteed to have the highest connectivity (wherein free peers might be throttled, or not even able to connect continuously).  Logically, the major mining pools already have direct peer connections to each other, so a direct peer connection to any of the top five would only be a single hop connection to the lot.  Such a direct connection would be of value to any retailers that accepted zero confirm transactions, which would likely be the norm for meatspace retailers like Wal-Mart should they ever start accepting Bitcoin directly.

I've been thinking of an idea, but I lack the skills to follow through, so I'm going to lay it out here and let anyone who wishes take it up.

I would like to have an android client that can connect to any given electrum server, but also via TOR.  I'd also like the client to have the ability to create transactions offline using confirmed transactions for which it is already aware, and connect to other clients like itself via a shared wifi hotspot like a piratebox. (http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox_DIY)  In this fashion, the android client can develop a set of transactions in optimal amounts that would allow it to create several transactions without the need to reuse it's own change inputs for a time wherever the transacting parties have a piratebox (or any other accesspoint) with or without a live connection to an electrum server and whenever trust isn't an issue.  The use case here is like the cash you carry in your wallet.  There is only so much there, and it doesn't require live internet to work.

Not a centralized service so much as a combined contract mining agency & insurance agency.  You pay a small monthly fee, and it becomes the insurance agency's problem that your vending machines don't get double spent against.  Your machines connect to the agency's servers, which then make every effort to get those transactions out to the largest of the mining pools as fast as possible, in order to limit the risk of being the loser in a double spend.  Agencies also might trade lists of addresses that have been known to attempt a double spend, and therefore flag those addresses should they pop up in their customers' machines.  There are many ways to undermine the likelyhood of success of a double spend attempt.