It's impossible to answer such question.

It depends on which stage it gets outlawed, among many other things. If outlawed now, for example, I think it would bring much more awareness than damage, and maybe it would even raise the value of bitcoins.

And by the way, I don't think it'll be outlawed in every country of the world. As said in another thread, if a few countries allow its use and the technology really manages to do good to these countries' economies, that would push for abolishing prohibition elsewhere.

Wouldn't it be more fair if only those which have donated to the said bounty could vote?
I didn't contribute so I don't feel like I get to say anything.

Actually, stick with your bitcoins. Avoid converting to fiat.

I've translated the subtitles to Brazilian Portuguese. Hope it helps!

http://rapidshare.com/files/455023837/What_is_Bitcoin-ptBR.srt

If this someone keeps suppressing his freedoms by keeping him in captivity he'll probably starve, of course. But if s/he stops being such an asshole criminal and let him interact with decent human beings and nature, he'll probably find a way to improve his life, you bet.

About the video, it proves the point that it's silly to panic about "we only have 60 years left of nuclear fuel! OMG! How will my grandchildren do?!".
Prices will push for better uses of scarce resources, if you just let people free.

You'd better ask those questions in an astrology forum.

That's a question I've been asking. Who pays for this site?
There are no ads, no donation link, nothing. Somebody's contributing out of his own pocket...

I'd say they're a branch of the state. Normally the work "government" is reserved to the executive branch of the state. The central bank, as the supreme court, is independent from government, yet part of the state.

That's pretty much the tl;dr version of my previous post.

Great, now I only need to relearn C++!

Sorry, no patches coming from me... but I'm glad you are open for it.


For the jerk with a botnet to succeed with this he would need to either pay lot of transaction fees to include spam transactions in everybody's else blocks, or make the spam blocks himself.

If he's paying, well, miners are getting properly rewarded, the jerk is not a jerk anymore, he's rather an impulsive consumer of miners services. Miners will probably make him pay whatever they need in order to sustain such irrational demand.
Honestly, I don't see this happening.

Now, for him to make it on his own, he would need an immense amount of computing power. Having more than 50% of the network is already a way more dangerous thing than spamming, so let's assume he's not that strong.
Let's say that he has something like 25% of total power, which is already a lot.
He could act in two ways:

Stupid jerk mode: He fills all his blocks with spam, refusing everybody else's transactions. This is stupid because he'd be wasting money, by refusing to accept the transaction fees from others. I suppose people running botnets are not that stupid, but sill, what could the stupid spammer do?
Let's suppose the network is already running with a block size limit of 110% of the average needed. Now, the jerk occupies 25% of the space with garbage, forcing all transactions to be in the remaining 75%. That should be 82,5% of the needed space, so such space will get filled and the block size limit will increase. But how much should it increase? It would stop increasing as long as the 75% space not occupied by the spammer is 110% of what is needed. If I'm not lost in the numbers already, this super-spammer with limited intellect would make the block size limit around 144% (one third + 10%) of what it would need to be.
Anyway, what I want to say is that is that the relative damage he could cause is proportional and limited to the computing power he has, since as soon as all transactions are fitting in the space the spammer does not control, the bock size limit would stop growing. (I probably made some mistakes in the numbers above, but I hope you get the picture)
Having 25% is already a lot, and the relative damage for this stupid-mode is not that great.

By picking an arbitrary constant too much higher than the actual needs of the network, we'd probably be giving spammers much more space to spam. Actually, right now, with this 500Kb limit, a spammer with all this power could probably do much more relative damage, making the network download much more than it would need to.

Now, assuming that the spammer is not that stupid and he accepts paying transactions into his blocks, that greatly decreases the relative harm. Actually, his blocks would contain around 10% of spam only, the rest would be true transactions. He would barely move the block size limit, even with a great computing power.


I hope you're right on that. Nevertheless, consider what I said above: a high constant gives spammers much more opportunity, and risks not creating a sufficient artificial scarcity to incentive mining and thus weakening the network. And a low constant would require frequent backward incompatible changes.

The same is true for the Supreme Court and yet nobody says it's private.
I agree with hugo, it's misleading to say a central bank is a private institution. It is a state institution.

The block maximum size is not only a "miners problem", it's the whole system, since it's a criterion that says whether a block is valid or not.
And this constant will probably have to change one day, if we want this project to scale. And such change will be backward incompatible. And as always, it's damn difficult to organize a backward incompatible change after your protocol has evolved enough to have multiple clients everywhere.

If this backward incompatible change will have to be done one day, why not make it only once (by setting an automatic adjustment rule), and why not considering making it now, while it's still easy?

It's not related with transaction fees only, it's related to the scalability of the bitcoin network as well.

Justmoon is right, it shouldn't be difficult to implement a sort of white-list discrimination. Actually it could be even easier than what you say, you could just send the transaction to the miners you know and trust, not to the entire network.

But this is quite limiting, and it's not exactly what the OP wanted. He wanted a blacklist - allowing everyone a priori, except a few he doesn't like. That I wouldn't know how to do, probably is not possible as others said.

This problem has been discussed before. I agree it's tricky, and it also worries me a bit. This transaction fee thing does look like a tragedy of the commons.

One solution would be to have a maximum block size limit that automatically adjusts itself. It can be made so that it's always "tight", possibly pushing fees up. There's a thread for this: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1865.0

I do worry not even that would be enough, though. I mean, I can easily imagine a scenario where the greatest majority of transactions (>95%) are not done on the block chain, precisely to avoid fees. Most people would use bank-like services for their transactions. Transactions between different banks could be dealt by them, for example, bank A has an account on bank B and vice-versa, and they transfer to these accounts, avoiding to use the block chain. They would only need a block chain transaction once in a while in order to transfer the balance. This could be done daily or even weekly, depending on the level of trust these institutions have on each other.

Anyway... we're discussing a scenario that will take long years to happen. Impossible to know what will be of bitcoin by then.

Was in an attempt to deal with this issue and also the need to eventually grow the block size limit that I once proposed this.

If, for example, at each difficult factor adjustment, the block size limit also gets adjusted to, say, 110% or 105% of the average size of the last X blocks, we not only allow the network to grow to suit demand, but we also create an artificial scarcity of block space that may drive fees up.

+1

It is actually more dangerous, because physical goods normally are not that anonymous, you have at least a mailing address. And as they are not that liquid either, they're less interesting for thieves.

Paypal doesn't have much protections for sellers. If you sell something for somebody who has stolen somebody else's paypal account, they will reverse the transaction and you'll end up without your money.

@allinvain, take a look at how coinpal is working. You may want to mimic some of his fraud protection techniques.

You'd better do whatever you can to prevent fraudsters. They will try to get your coins. Trading irreversible digital currencies for reversible ones is dangerous.

I don't even know who/what finances this host.

I agree it would be nice to have it on a bitcoin hosting. But that's up to the person paying for it to decide anyway.