No, zero-confirm transactions should not be considered safe to any degree, because...


... this is ridiculously easy to do.

No, no, and please no. This is not what bitcoin needs. We need trustless exchanges which don't have to be audited because there is no capability to lose client funds.

I laughed and then made a depressing sigh when I heard about Andreas Antonopoulos' "audit" of CoinBase. He basically said "I approve of stucking your money with these folks" -- but you shouldn't have to trust *anybody* with your money. That's the whole point of bitcoin! We have the technology to build trustless exchanges, we just need to focus the resources to do it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zgbza/i_am_building_a_free_and_fair_trustless_exchange/

Your suggestion won't work because there's no way to resolve conflict over which purported branch is valid except by reference to the historical block chain data.

How do you reach "internet-agreement"?

How else would you bring new nodes online?

I said that unearned rent is evil, and I stand by that. You should be able to make money by lending money, for example, but not the excessive interest rates credit card companies require because of a government-enforced monopoly on banking. If the p2p lending market were deregulated then interest rates would be much lower, and there wouldn't be such a massive ongoing transfer of wealth from the indebted poor to these companies. That system is evil.

I'm not sure what "unearned income" means. It sounds like a Marxist concept I do not subscribe to, namely that any income not resulting from actual labor is somehow unearned. I don't think that is true - if I lend out money with some risk, I deserve to be compensated for that risk. (As an aside, with unperishable currency like bitcoin I do pull in an unearned rent here due to the power relationship of having coins, separate from the opportunity cost of lending them out. Fixing this is the reason for demurrage currencies like Freicoin.)

The problem is that in the construction of a free and fair, decentralized, distributed, p2p, merged mined side chain for asset issuance and smart contracts - like Freimarkets - there is no room for the people who created the side chain to profit from its use, short of intentionally limiting the system in such a way as to require use of your pre-mined currency (a la XRP), or mandating some sort of centralized transaction tax, either of which could be just as easily removed with a fork.

With pegging and gateways there is no need for another non-perishable, mined currency, and any sort of usage tax on a p2p network is unfair and users would rightfully revolt against. So your best hope is that the network effect of people using your software will prevent people from switching to an unencumbered fork. But given that you are providing no direct service to the people using your chain (or it wouldn't be p2p), that is the definition of an unearned rent, and something I would find unethical to take part in.

I would encourage anyone that takes issue with the Freicoin Foundation to express your grievances and propose constructive solutions: how should the foundation spend those coins?

We've taken a hardline approach that the foundation will only spend coins in ways which are chosen in a decentralized way by the community (e.g. matching donations to any registered non-profit). If we are unable to distribute coins quickly enough by these mechanisms then they will simply demurrage away and are issued to miners over a longer period of time. We are okay with that, as a fallback plan if community agreement cannot be reached.

There are other decentralized, distributed, p2p mechanisms that we would like to use to handle issuance, such as the republicoin proposal: using proof-of-stake voting to determine how the coins should be spent on an ongoing basis. There are a small number technical issues that need to be worked out, and a lot of infrastructure built before republicoin could be rolled out. We can use some help on this.

Off topic but I'll address it. The foundation funds are only spent through community mechanisms, e.g. matching donations. Neither Jorge nor I have any significant control over the destination of those coins.

Breaking implementations is sortof the definition of a hard-fork...


Anyway, this is already something I'm working on with a few others. The discussion is going on in a mailing list dedicated to these types of programming languages:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.concatenative/3712/match=

Be careful, we don't want to call our potential donors greedy and stupid

Seriously, this should be an educational moment. The only way to make money directly off of a free, p2p, decentralized platform is to leverage the network effect to extract rent from the future economy and pay it back towards early adopters / investors. Unearned rent is evil, and extracting it to provide a return to investors is unethical behavior. We will have no part in that.

We thought this was obvious, but apparently it is not too obvious as other projects have gone on to do just that. In fact they have raised orders of magnitude more than we are humbly asking for, to implement poorly thought out and less capable platforms, in schemes where the anticipated return on investment doesn't make any sense at all. Why? Because any distributed, p2p network platform must be free and fair, or else it will fail. If someone is selling you an investment opportunity in a new open source decentralized platform, you should be very suspicious. Either they are scamming you or they are deluding themselves.

Let's compare the situation with bittorrent, Napster, and other companies of that era. How do you make money off of a free to use, open platform in order to provide a return on investment? You don't, as Napster and others found out. You can try to monetize it by extracting a rent, but then people will fork your code and remove your built-in advantage, or they will release a protocol which is free and fair and can't be competed against (bittorrent). Worse, when you try to make money from the protocol you inevitably introduce some level of centralization which can be exploited by those old industries you are seeking to eliminate. Look to the court cases which did in Napster, for example.

So how do you make money off of a new distributed, decentralized, free and fair p2p platform? You build new services on top of it, and monetize that. Freimarkets adds new capabilities which will be the foundation of hundreds of companies seeking to monetize asset issuance, smart contracts, and distributed exchanges. Many of these companies will go on to become worth hundreds of millions of dollars in separate industries, and the one thing they will have in common is that they will all use the same underlying free and fair, open-access network protocol, just as every bitcoin company today uses the bitcoin network without paying rent to Satoshi.

So here's a suggestion: donate some percentage of what you are willing to invest to the crowdfund address in the OP, then split the rest of your funds across various companies seeking to use the Freimarkets network once it is completed.

Come up with the reasons why it was not negligence and within policy, then threaten to go to the insurance commissioner if they don't come around. Follow through if necessary.

Hang in there. In time things will come together. Stay safe.

You realize (1) it's empty, and (2) it's bitstamp not mtgox?

I wouldn't call the core dev team centralized in any way.

I'm not sure how that logic can possibly generalize.

I'm making enough to live on, barely, and continuing to work because I believe the work I am doing is important. But I get annoyed when I see this persistent, baseless meme that all bitcoin core developers must be posh millionaires just because bitcoin is now seeing some success. Some are well off, but others are not; and not for any reason having to do with being a core developer. We need to find ways for the community and industry to pay these people a living wage so they can devote 100% of their time and energy into improving bitcoin, rather than expecting or demanding that service for free.

That's great. Now how do I pay rent and put food on the table for my family in the mean time? Yes, I have a handful of bitcoins tucked away in a never-spend paper wallet just in case. But sometimes I question the sanity of that as its current value is less than my credit card balance.

How do you expect core developers to actually work on bitcoin today, without being paid enough to live on?

And where did those initial coins come from? Distribution is to the miners not the developers. If only it were that easy. Believe it or not, some of us are living month to month. Free software isn't a very viable business model.

Well, it's not *supposed* to, and Luke-Jr considers it a bug if it does.

Yes, you need an anonymous network. But we have solutions for that...

The case sensitivity of base58 is a hindrance everywhere, not just over the phone. Many people do not distinguish case sensitivity well in hand writing, and some fonts have trouble. Base58 has been a persistent pain point since the creation of bitcoin. Random mixing of upper and lower case doesn't make for very good placeholders, compared with alternatives like regular grouping by space or hyphen.