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If anyone has ever wondered whether "permissionless innovation" is really so important to the economy, just show them this debacle.
First and foremost is the incredible loss of calendar time.
Second, I wonder how many man hours of time has been wasted filling out paperwork to apply for this.
Third, how much time and taxpayer money is spent reviewing that paperwork and not making a decision?
Will the Mt. Gox creditors see a dime of the money confiscated by the US government because their US accounts were not opened properly? If not, its hard to argue that the purpose of that law is consumer protection...
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they're making a number of faulty assumptions. I think we've been calling this "govcoin" on these forums since at least 2012. They'll release open ledger SHA-256 implementation without block subsidy (money printed by a centralized source -- a special txn signed by a well known private key). Nobody will mine it so the government will pay banks to do so and these banks will lease IBM "cloud" based hardware to mine for massive profits to IBM. As part of the mining contract, banks will allow their mines to blacklist addresses and in an emergency be redirected to a shorter chain so txns can be unwound. Currency may be 51%ed by hackers for the lulz but this is exactly what some planners are actually hoping for because it will require the network to be "temporarily" limited to trusted banking partners and require massive additional spending to build out the "good" miners so that they out hash the "bad". If it doesn't catch on, 10s or 100s of millions will have already been spent (of taxpayer money), people will be distracted from Bitcoin, and CC providers will use its failure to justify the continuation of their own insecure and data-collection-intensive methodologies. Its a win win situation -- the perfect way to continue the current system while co-opting blockchain technology and buzz. |
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now that the concept of the Bitcoin unit being inextricably linked to the blockchain is finally being better understood, the next logical extension of that concept is that sidechains make no sense. for all of the reasons i, and Adrian, have been arguing for months on end late last year.
No, its a well known logic axiom that the positive does not imply the contrapositive. In other words, yes, the blockchain needs the bitcoin token. But that does not imply that Bitcoin needs the blockchain. Ok, ok, Bitcoin obviously needs the Bitcoin Blockchain to exist as it contains the history of the token's value appreciation and forms the foundation of its awesome features. So what we are really asking is "does Bitcoin need to use the blockchain exclusively?" Well can Bitcoins be traded off chain? Of course. Judging by exchange volumes it seems that most transfers (trades) already occur off chain. that's not at all what is happening. BTC deposited on an exchange are parked in an address owned by the exchange. all the trading is just on its own internal DB. when an owner wants to withdraw from the exchange, it simply draws from the pooled address and sends back to the owner's personal address. none of the BTC has EVER left the blockchain. BTC never leaves the blockchain with sidechains either. But the value does. Its kind of like paper gold. The gold never leaves the vault but the value is traded on exchanges. Without dwelling on what the word "trade" means, what I'm trying to say that if someone gives someone else a Casascius coin, trades on an exchange, transfers in a sidechain etc I think that its fair to consider that transfer of value facilitated by the digital token but not using the blockchain. Your opinion of how we should define the words may differ but what I'm talking about in this post is are these kinds of transfer.
A sidechain is just a decentralized way to make off-chain transfers. Judging by what's going on on exchanges, if sidechains work they'll be popular even if their sole use is to decentralize some of the currently-existing centralized solutions (changetip?).
I think that there are very limited uses for a blockchain without an independently valued token (i.e. not a fiat representation token). I have discussed some in this thread. But in the ultimate egg-on-face for all the naysayers, I think we'll discover countless uses for a digital value token (aka bitcoin) and our ability to deploy crypto-currencies into these applications will actually be hindered by the inconvenience of the blockchain. Sidechains (if they end up viable) are an attempt to reduce this inconvenience by opening up development of the blockchain, but keeping the token.
SC's present its own form of problematic deposit; the spvp. talk about friction; it will be necessary to have at minimum a 2d proof of locktime, probably more. and then in the federated server model according to Adam himself, a necessary bounty to prevent cheating by the centralized owners. i was highly disappointed by this simplistic presentation yesterday which didn't get any traction on Reddit whatsover, btw: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Tc_fhTPqbdlvApnWQWsgzG1U6NwN9lgkQsTdm5O-9iA/edit?pli=1#slide=id.g6eb72e55c_0103it is all pie in the sky and glosses over the potential for losing coins while stuck on the SC in case of an attack. these SC's will be attacked as they will be insecure by virtue of the fact they won't have 100% MM. and there is just no guarantee of one getting his coins back on the MC in that event as their simplistic SC sandbox in the Bitcoin Park diagram is suggesting. those miners who were once MM'ing to protect the SC can turn around and perform a 51% attack on the SC and refuse to mine the "proof of lock" thus disabling a return of those BTC all the while going short on the SC at an exchange. the slideshow presents as if nothing can go wrong. Yes. I'm not so worried about the friction since most people will get their SC coins using a decentralized p2p exchange system with atomic cross chain exchange. This is easy once 2 digital assets are being traded (scBTC and BTC) where one of them was explicitly coded with this kind of transfer in mind. Arbiters will be the only people moving them the slow way. But aspects around prematurely unlocking the SC's backing bitcoin on the BTC blockchain have always been fuzzy. I have essentially trusted the Blockstream guys to deliver (or not) since I'm much too busy to do an in-depth analysis just for my own edification. But given that many months have passed since the white paper, the "or not" option is looking more and more likely. However, as functional pressure builds and altcoins continue to see low valuations, I think people will start seeing the value in "curated transfer" sidechains. A competitor to MaidSafe for example would instantly gain greater credibility (than MaidSafe) if it booted its blockchain with 1000 storecoins by parking 1000 bitcoins with a well known independent auditor. Nobody will ever trust a for profit company to not inflate its token supply. |
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now that the concept of the Bitcoin unit being inextricably linked to the blockchain is finally being better understood, the next logical extension of that concept is that sidechains make no sense. for all of the reasons i, and Adrian, have been arguing for months on end late last year.
No, its a well known logic axiom that the positive does not imply the contrapositive. In other words, yes, the blockchain needs the bitcoin token. But that does not imply that Bitcoin needs the blockchain. Ok, ok, Bitcoin obviously needs the Bitcoin Blockchain to exist as it contains the history of the token's value appreciation and forms the foundation of its awesome features. So what we are really asking is "does Bitcoin need to use the blockchain exclusively?" Well can Bitcoins be traded off chain? Of course. Judging by exchange volumes it seems that most transfers (trades) already occur off chain. A sidechain is just a decentralized way to make off-chain transfers. Judging by what's going on on exchanges, if sidechains work they'll be popular even if their sole use is to decentralize some of the currently-existing centralized solutions (changetip?). I think that there are very limited uses for a blockchain without an independently valued token (i.e. not a fiat representation token). I have discussed some in this thread. But in the ultimate egg-on-face for all the naysayers, I think we'll discover countless uses for a digital value token (aka bitcoin) and our ability to deploy crypto-currencies into these applications will actually be hindered by the inconvenience of the blockchain. Sidechains (if they end up viable) are an attempt to reduce this inconvenience by opening up development of the blockchain, but keeping the token. |
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So nobody treated Buttercoin seriously because of the name
But people sent millions $ and BTC to MagicalTux and his Magic: The Gathering Online .
When I first heard of Mt Gox I didn't know how it got its name, it was merely an unusual name to me. It took months before I heard it stood for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange. Conversely, I immediately thought Buttercoin sounded like a stupid name as soon as I heard it. Mt Gox had a chance to gain business partly because it was only after people got used to trading on it that they realized Mt Gox was an acronym for a stupid name. Well, let's be clear here. Mt Gox was a GREAT name for the original company business model: trading playing cards... and the software would have probably handled all 5 trades per hour just fine too!  |
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Still. Fking. Waiting.
2 months have gone by now, and still all you trolls have is talk? No coins left to dump, just talk?
LET'S SEE THIS SUPPOSED EPIC DUMP YOU TROLLS KEEP BLATHERING ON ABOUT.
PUT UP, OR FKN SHUT UP.
Just when I start thinking it can't get any worse, it just goes ahead and does! Why did I let you guys talk me into holding?! Bitcoin has been a disaster for me. Buy Bitcoin they said. We'll all be farting through silk in a year they said...  Can't believe this, down another hundred bucks? Bitcoin's like the worst thing that happened to me. Ever  Are you spending coin and rebuying, or supporting BTC in some other way? Or did you just figure on riding other people's wave to riches? If the latter, you deserve your losses. |
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And how do you propose the greeks are going to get bitcoin? Buy it with what, exactly? Are you going to loan them some? Because that worked out real well for the Germans... Get real man, if you are going to troll, do so with a sense of humour and irony. This is simply not trying hard enough. You Greek, by any chance? Its the irony of Bitcoin; once you realize you need it, you can't get any because nobody wants what you have to trade (your hyper-fiat) |
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Fiatcoin is nearly here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/12/us-bitcoin-ibm-idUSKBN0M82KB20150312\ Unlike bitcoin, where the network is decentralized and there is no overseer, the proposed digital currency system would be controlled by central banks, the source said.
"These coins will be part of the money supply," the source said. "It's the same money, just not a dollar bill with a serial number on it, but a token that sits on this blockchain." Nice. Now they won't even have to turn on the printing presses. Just type in a big number and hit enter. I'm assuming this means we then get accurate insight into exactly what the money supply is. No more shadowstats! No more government handwaving about inflation! Not such a bad thing? Just a guess but fiatcoin's blockchain will probably be private, all clients essentially just client/server so money supply is obfuscated. Likely devices won't hold their private keys, or there will be a master private key that can spend from all accounts. No other way for the government to freeze accounts, implement asset forfeiture, etc. |
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So what triggers spending those reserves? It must be something... that is the point of a reserve. That is when high inflation hits.
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Bitcoin is literally at a fork. One path leads to super-gold, the other leads to yet another forgettable/replaceable retail token.
Why "forgettable/replaceable retail token"? You could just as easily have said "spendable super gold". I think that the promise of Bitcoin is, at its core, disintermediation (transfer to anyone, anywhere, nearly instantly). This is where it gains its intrinsic value which then supports the value holders put on it by holding. But if it costs too much for individuals to make transactions, then txns must be posted through intermediaries who as Circle/Coinbase have shown are susceptible to all the problems with today's banking system. "Welcome the new boss same as the old boss". Sidechains could solve some of that problem which is why it is interesting to consider them alongside the block size; I suppose we could have sidechains for daily spending and Bitcoin could be essentially be your super-gold "savings account". A carefully designed sidechain would still achieve disintermediation. But money flow between sidechains and Bitcoin will not be quick so it would not be and ideal situation, and is still not achieveable with 1MB block sizes. So I think we should accept Gavin's scalability plan, and guess what? its not set in stone. If it scales faster than the available hardware, we can always change it. Really, the crux of the argument for me is this: The worst case with the scalability plan is that individuals can't in practice be full nodes, but can STILL hold BTC in local wallets and spend them. The worst case without scalability is that individuals must trust intermediaries to hold their BTC because a single txn is so expensive it must be aggregated -- i.e. the same banking system we have today. (none of the awesome functionality like multi-sig "custodial" accounts can be used (on a per customer basis); they all require a transaction to unlock the funds which would be too expensive to do per customer) [/quote We need to get this right the first time. One does not simply "always change it." Otherwise hard forks would be called 'easy forks.'  No. This is software. Its harder to change from a social perspective than a technical one. If its becoming obvious that nobody can keep up with the blocks it will get changed and changed quickly.
When TOR and other slow/hardened connections are excluded by GavinBlocks, users must then trust their ISP/.gov/etc. to not snoop on or throttle/banhammer their nodes. This creates intolerable intermediaries at the network layer, which destroys the basis for BTC's antifragility and thus its unique/intrinsic store-of-value function.
Come on man. Think about the problem instead of arguing your position. First of all, you can receive txns and blocks over the open net and still send your private txn via TOR. Secondly, if Bitcoin is so successful that it "wants" to fill a 20MB block but only has 1MB (demand 20x higher than supply), it will cost so much to send a txn you won't be topping up your SR account with bitcoin anyway. Third, it probably makes sense to in general transition that kind of use to an altcoin with true anonymity anyway.
We can't ignore the trade off between retail suitability and super-gold fitness. Trade-offs, like diminishing marginal returns, are economic law.
Some of us simply won't be able to afford Bitcoin when it assumes its rightful position as Gold 2.0. Let's accept that and move on, instead of rejiggering everything just to appease us pikers at great risk to the whales who do the heavy lifting to keep BTC viable and growing. If you can't afford regular gold now, what makes you think you have the right to expect affordable SuperGold?
This is just dumb. I can always buy some fraction of super-gold. This equalizer, this lack of differentiation between haves and have-nots is what makes Bitcoin awesome. Many of us will actively resist network degradation and less super-gold fitness in exchange for more retail noise accommodation and uncertainty about the impact of exponential blocksize growth. It's not just the initial 20MB Gavinblocks, it's the >>20MB Gigablocks that kick in relatively soon which concern those of us who care about the weakest links in the system's chain. Individuals making low value tx don't have to trust Paymium or other off-chain intermediaries so long as plenty of capacity exists in 2nd tier altcoins' blockchains. Litecoin, for example, is secured by more than enough ASICs and GPUs to be perfectly acceptable for small and medium size daily retail consumer BS. Let's also note that blockchain technology, by enabling unprecedented transparency and real time auditing, allows us to keep our off-chain overlords on a short leash. As Davout put it so succinctly: The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".
This is sig-worthy quote really gets to the crux of the 'retail token vs super-gold' fissure, and makes clear why the FUD of Fundamentalist Monopolists ("Thou shall have no other coins before Holy BTC, lest you be cast into the off-chain lake of fiat") is unfounded. But they don't get to benefit from it. Because they can't use it without an intermediary (with small blocks). So that intermediary goes fractional. But with a large block size your home wallet might not be able to grab the whole blockchain (verify incoming $). But it could still hold your coins and submit transactions. Remember the blocks won't be filled. And if they DO get filled its a great problem for us holders to have. It means Bitcoin is 20x or 1000x more popular than it is today. The fastest way to kill this coin is to create artificial transaction scarcity. That's just inviting an altcoin to come relieve the pressure. Seriously, sometimes I wonder whether you people want Bitcoin to succeed. Are you a miner or altcoin holder? |
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I don't sell (much) at the tops. I don't want to be known as the guy who bilked lots of suckers out of $ if Bitcoin fails. I want to be known as a guy who identified BTC's potential as a force for positive social change through economics early and invested accordingly.
I don't see how selling at the tops is immoral. If anything it is praiseworthy, since selling at the top and buying at the bottom will smoothen out BTC's price, resulting in lower volatility and greater usability for commerce, store-of-value etc. . Selling at the top gives you the ammo needed to buy at the bottom. By buying at the bottom you are showing your faith in the continued existence of bitcoin, and stop a feedback loop of declining prices leading to less interest and a smaller network. Yes, like most real world activities the situation is not morally clear cut. And I do sell some at the tops and certainly have bought on the way down. Perhaps you are right, the real evil is the hype cycle that gets the suckers to invest. Ofc without the hype cycle there would not be enough media coverage to pull in everyone else. I cannot see any noteworthy economic disadvantages with sidechains.
I can think of a big one. You cannot use Proof of Work on a sidechain. Therefore you accept security and/or counterparty risk. It will up to the sidechain user to determine how much risk to accept. ... and for those people who think that a sidechain might somehow "take over" from Bitcoin, this additional risk is a big reason why one won't. It isn't the 20MB block size that scares me, it is the automatic doubling every two years until we reach 20GB blocks. This scares the crap out of me because if a problem turns up we need a fork to pause the scaling. I'm starting to wonder if forks are really that big a deal. I think that its fascinating. A fork is like quantum mechanics applied to the real world. In other words both possibilities exist simultaneously until an event (everybody selling one fork and buying the other) collapses the probability wave. Bitcoin has all the properties of a super money that gold can only aspire to be. That has to be on your radar.
Bitcoin is literally at a fork. One path leads to super-gold, the other leads to yet another forgettable/replaceable retail token. Why "forgettable/replaceable retail token"? You could just as easily have said "spendable super gold". I think that the promise of Bitcoin is, at its core, disintermediation (transfer to anyone, anywhere, nearly instantly). This is where it gains its intrinsic value which then supports the value holders put on it by holding. But if it costs too much for individuals to make transactions, then txns must be posted through intermediaries who as Circle/Coinbase have shown are susceptible to all the problems with today's banking system. "Welcome the new boss same as the old boss". Sidechains could solve some of that problem which is why it is interesting to consider them alongside the block size; I suppose we could have sidechains for daily spending and Bitcoin could be essentially be your super-gold "savings account". A carefully designed sidechain would still achieve disintermediation. But money flow between sidechains and Bitcoin will not be quick so it would not be and ideal situation, and is still not achieveable with 1MB block sizes. So I think we should accept Gavin's scalability plan, and guess what? its not set in stone. If it scales faster than the available hardware, we can always change it. Really, the crux of the argument for me is this: The worst case with the scalability plan is that individuals can't in practice be full nodes, but can STILL hold BTC in local wallets and spend them. The worst case without scalability is that individuals must trust intermediaries to hold their BTC because a single txn is so expensive it must be aggregated -- i.e. the same banking system we have today. (none of the awesome functionality like multi-sig "custodial" accounts can be used (on a per customer basis); they all require a transaction to unlock the funds which would be too expensive to do per customer) |
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The trend seems to be tapering off, but it's still alive. Meanwhile Ethereum seems to be taking a "money doesn't matter"/"blockchains are a friggin' database technology" stance even after their huge crowdsale. Of course he'd act that way. When he wanted the investor money, he had to build expectations of returns. Now that he has the money, he wants to lower expectations of returns to preemptively shrink the size of the angry mob before it forms. Biggest legal (but unmoral) con in Bitcoin Land to date. I will make something (or maybe not) and sell coins for BTC. And database tech rocks - 19 year old kid might be able to code but has a long way to go to understand how the real world works. Actually, Vitalik is smarter than all of you. All he has to do to make huge returns for Ethereum is go to the beach and do nothing with the 20k or so coins he's holding and watch them appreciate. No, it did not take a genius to realize that a natural extension of Bitcoin is to make it Turing complete. In fact, as soon as an engineer sees any language his next question is "how powerful is it?" In fact, Satoshi's restraint is interesting in that context, especially his restraint on allowing the definition of other currencies. I wonder if he felt that that feature would attract the eye of too many three letter agencies... Its not intelligence but morality that restrains many of us. I don't sell (much) at the tops. I don't want to be known as the guy who bilked lots of suckers out of $ if Bitcoin fails. I want to be known as a guy who identified BTC's potential as a force for positive social change through economics early and invested accordingly. I think he probably left it out due to complexity of thoroughly testing and left it up to the world to figure out.. If it has value do you think bitcoin can fork to introduce turing complete script ops? Right and also to emphasize the rarity of btc. And so the system doesn't smell too strongly of a method to issue unregulated securities. But the real problem is not turning complete but getting data to run the program on. Or more accurately getting trust free consensus on input data. If you use an oracle to supply the data that oracle might as well just execute the algorithm. Data like the cost of btc in usd or who won the superbowl. I know how to do the former but not the latter. |
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The trend seems to be tapering off, but it's still alive. Meanwhile Ethereum seems to be taking a "money doesn't matter"/"blockchains are a friggin' database technology" stance even after their huge crowdsale. Of course he'd act that way. When he wanted the investor money, he had to build expectations of returns. Now that he has the money, he wants to lower expectations of returns to preemptively shrink the size of the angry mob before it forms. Biggest legal (but unmoral) con in Bitcoin Land to date. I will make something (or maybe not) and sell coins for BTC. And database tech rocks - 19 year old kid might be able to code but has a long way to go to understand how the real world works. Actually, Vitalik is smarter than all of you. All he has to do to make huge returns for Ethereum is go to the beach and do nothing with the 20k or so coins he's holding and watch them appreciate. No, it did not take a genius to realize that a natural extension of Bitcoin is to make it Turing complete. In fact, as soon as an engineer sees any language his next question is "how powerful is it?" In fact, Satoshi's restraint is interesting in that context, especially his restraint on allowing the definition of other currencies. I wonder if he felt that that feature would attract the eye of too many three letter agencies... Its not intelligence but morality that restrains many of us. I don't sell (much) at the tops. I don't want to be known as the guy who bilked lots of suckers out of $ if Bitcoin fails. I want to be known as a guy who identified BTC's potential as a force for positive social change through economics early and invested accordingly. |
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Maybe they're developing [...] a full-node-ASIC, fit for inclusion in every wifi router (for example)?
That would be extremely cool. But is a dedicated/specially designed chip necessary for such low-intensity computing? I would think that you'd prove the market first in an FPGA with hard processor design first. Performance/battery life would not be as good, but it would be good enough for many products -- certainly good enough for the first gen. |
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Maybe define the interconnectedness of ledgers as the inverse of the cost to move money between them. But this cost function is not just exchange fees. It would ideally take into account the amortized cost to set up and maintain accounts in various exchanges, the time value of the money while it is inaccessible (presumably the inter-ledger exchange takes more time then intra-ledger exchange), and other such externalities. if i'm not mistaken, he's talking about other blockchains, like those of altcoins and sidechains. I think you could generalize to all ledgers including implicit ones like fiat currencies. I have worked out a way of discussing the network effect as it relates to the interaction between Bitcoin, other blockchains, sidechains, various off-chain systems, and fiat currencies, and conversion friction is the centrepiece of that method, and I'm saving it for a future article because nobody seems to read the 4500 word ones. That will be a fascinating article. Since the triple bubble I've thought that BTC and social media would force a rewrite of the intro to economics textbook and I think you're writing a chapter here. |
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Maybe define the interconnectedness of ledgers as the inverse of the cost to move money between them. But this cost function is not just exchange fees. It would ideally take into account the amortized cost to set up and maintain accounts in various exchanges, the time value of the money while it is inaccessible (presumably the inter-ledger exchange takes more time then intra-ledger exchange), and other such externalities. if i'm not mistaken, he's talking about other blockchains, like those of altcoins and sidechains. I think you could generalize to all ledgers including implicit ones like fiat currencies. |
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Not sure any bull thinks that this is the hyperbolic phase... ppl see the 160 low as the capitulation and now we could have up to a year of slowly rising (on average) prices.
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Whelp I'm about to lose a shift load of money when I get margin called on my short. That's what I get for doubting The Bitcoin  Also the reason I only trade with funz money. Now you need to start thinking about what's going to happen when all you "Bitcoin is a long term bull but we are in a bear market" types start to reverse your positions... |
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