Wonder if I can work a table as "Have your bitcoin questions answered" like I did in San Jose, to help out newbies with how to get into bitcoins, news orgs with answers on bitcoin trends, and veterans on whatever bitcoin topics they wish to debate or learn more about. I'd do it as a volunteer, and it was quite usefull when I did it in San Jose (I'm assuming it was useful, because Julian and I were pretty much busy constantly, with people showing up nonstop for three days straight)

If you look at it that way, increasing premiums on people who live unhealthy lifestyles could be pretty analogous to "beatings." Higher premiums for bad life choises is still a negative reinforcement. Perhaps having everyone start out with high premiums, and reduce their premiums for every good decision they make is a way to change that to a positive reinforcement system, but I'm not sure whether that would be effective.

We really need to get that 'tricorder" tech that's being worked on finished and out for sale. If you haven't heard of it, there are some universities and private groups working on a hardware attachment for spartphones that will be able to test your heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation, and even take blood and other fluid samples to test for many other things, which it will then instantly process and give similar results to what you would get from your annual checkup. The idea is to get these things to places like Africa, where the number of doctors are low, so that nurses and volunteers can quickly test and diagnose people to see if anyone needs to go to an actual doctor, and in developed countries so that people can easily keep track of their health, daily if they wish, to be able to catch any problems like onset of deseases or cancers quickly enough to easily treat them. I can see something like this be implemented with health insurance or medical programs, and possibly give financial or gift rewards for reaching or maintaining certain goals.

Force costs a lot, and we just invented a way to make taking money by force a hell of a lot more difficult. So, hopefully, that power will simply be for sale, if only because they would have an incentive to provide customers with products they wish for, as opposed to products like the Iraq war.

Also, anarchy isn't and won't be a utopia. There will be plenty of people slipping through the cracks and whatnot. The biggest different between that and what we have now is that people would have to make choices for what they want and don't want (a benefit, actually), and be fully responsible for the consequences of their choices, instead of offloading them onto the rest of society (which scares a lot of people right now). And, actually, the internet itself is anarchy. So it will be sort of like that, with a few obnoxious trolls running around, but mostly people being cordial and civil, and making lots of awesome stuff for us to play with.

The options you list are

• Majority decides for minority: Democracy
• Minority decides for majority: Dictatorship

There is a third option, which is each minority decides only for itself (or even each person decides only for themselves), which is anarchy. Bitcoin is basically anarchy, since neither a majority nor a minority can force a small minority to continue to use Bitcoin as is. And that is what my sig essentially points out, that bitcoin (and the entire internet, really) is a state of anarchy, and may influence people to transition into that state of mind simply by the way it works and what it considers as incentives and threats.

The best expert quote I have heard (and I wish I remembered who it was by) is

Bitcoin doesn't work in theory. Only in practice.

That study has very questionable assumptions about associations of addresses. For example, it was rather clear that some of the "wealthy holders" that they listed were actually hot wallet accounts held by major exchanges. Other thing I found sketchy was their assumption that if one address sent money to another, that the two were likely owned by the same person, which is true for change accounts when making transactions, but there is no way to tell whether the change address is the first or the second in the transaction.

Besides the fact that any changes in bitcoin must be approved by near 100% of its users (this includes both miners AND users), otherwise you just end up with a new altcoin and the old bitcoin running side by side, note the text in my signature, which was my thought, put much more eloquantly into words by our forum user NewLiberty


The meaning is that in bitcoin, a 51% mining majority is seen as an attack, unimagitively called "The 51% attack." This is quite literally "democracy, where majority votes, is an attack." This idea may actually influence people's psychology to consider many other majority-rule democracy things as an "attack." Possibly in the same way that peer-to-peer music/movie file downloading has influenced people to believe that breaking copyright isn't actually stealing.

Since you obviously know and understand this a hell of a lot better than me, I sort of understand what you are saying, and defer to your judgement.

Woah, that's new. Source? From what I understood, miners will have to take the fees they are given, and if the fees don't pay their bills, shut down until difficulty decreases to make it worthwhile to mine again.


Sounds like I need to hang on the dev forum more often. I thought Gavin was working on improving security, the merchant protocol, and multi-signature based two-factor authentication. When did this new project come up, and can you describe, or point me, to how he plans to reduce the block size? (I thought it was mostly raw, uncompressible data already). Regarding the 7 per second limit, from what I understand, that is there ONLY to keep hard drive storage requirements in check. Reducing the size of a block by a factor of 10 should allow to increase transaction limit by a factor of 10, too.


I know they are working on two parallel blockchains, one consisting of headers, the other of actual blocks, so a new full node will essentially start working the same way as Multibit, being ready for use within a minute or two once it downloads the headers, and then downloading the rest of the blockchain in the background. Even better, right now you are forced to download and verify blocks sequentially, one by one, but with the new system, you will download the tiny-by-comparisoon headers, verify them, and then download the blocks themselves asynchronously from many sources at the same time like a torrent file, making it download MUCH faster (likely in an hour or two). After that, they will probably focus on pruning, where we only keep records of unspent transactions. My guestimate is that would make the total blockchain only take up maybe 400 megs in size.
In the long term, though, I agree, full nodes will be rare specialty, same as mining. I don't think that will necessarily make bitcoin any less secure, since nodes can still be verified against each other by SPV clients. Are there any issues you are aware of regarding bandwidth and storage with SPV clients? Or any blockchain optimization plans and methods I'm not aware of (haven't listed above)?

Ignoring Mr. Mint's concerns for a bit, I woonder, do you, or others, believe that part of the mining sincentive will also be for wealthy establishments to simply secure their wealth? E.G. if I am rich without Bitcoin, I pay large fees to my bank and security to keep my money, gold, and other wealth safe. If I am rich with bitcoin (or even if I am a wealthy corporation that has a lot of bitcoin) and want to hedge against mining attacks and help maintain the status quo, I pay to run my own mining hardware, even if it is a small portion of the whole network, and even if I have to do it at a loss.

I'm sure we discussed this point two+ years ago, and likely every year this discussion has come up since, but what are people's opinions on this, now that mining has moved from complex GPU rigs, to simple and compact ASIC appliances?

I'm sure we have plenty of Nerdy White Old guys on this forum 

You forgot 3. Condition bitcoiners to ignore such flashcrashes, and just not trade on them.
Note that currencies move on the Forex all the time, too, but most currency users don't give a crap, and such movements (and in the future, bitcoin's flash-crashes) will only be something the active trader minority cares about.

Hmm, I wonder how AnonyMint knows that i did something to confirm such a thing, if he has me on ignore?  



Sure, but to incite you first have to sell. And you'll need to sell/risk increasingly larger amounts to move the market as Bitcoin exchange volume grows. And there are a lot of strong hands waiting to buy who are waiting for such flash crashes, who may buy up quicker than you. Think it through: every time you sell and then buy again, a part of what you sell gets picked up by your competitors, and you don't have enough to buy everything you sold back. If continuously repeated in a competitive market, such action typically ends with you running out of money. You could argue that there are enough weaker hands to initiate a price momentum of continued selloffs once you start the sells, but, as has been pointed out by FenixRD, and with established Bitcoin precedent, each such crash only teaches people that these crashes aren't real, and makes people more resistant to such panics.


What would prevent a competitor from buying coins from you on your own exchange. And if the answer is "the exchange owner trying to flash-crash the market," that action will be quickly found out and complained about loudly, likely causing the exchange to be accused of fraud and lose business. Sure, this rich insider will make a bit more money, but they will lose their echange business, and, since they would likely be publicly known (people tend to not trade through anonymous exchanges), they will become a real life parriah. Oh, also, a drop in the exchange they own not only creates a massive arbitrage opportunity with other exchages, one which trading bits will eat right up, but also makes other exchanges follow down, and allows competitors to buy up cheaper bitcoins on exchanged this wealthy insider doesn't even control.
Really, the only method for such a scheme is to create an exchange that is anonymous, does not allow API's and bit trading, and somehow still convinces enough people to join to make the trading volume actually affect the average global bitcoin price. Not likely.

Yes, but then why can't I match that number in that infinity set with any other number, like 1, in another infinity set?

And a few more:


Seems legit to me. This one was actually introduced to us by that Pathways to Education Canuck with whom I had a very lovely dinner and discussion in Toronto this past weekend.


I'm a bit more ambivalent about this one. Pros/cons/ideas?
EDIT: Actually I'm ok with this one too. Still, feedback would be appreciated.

I'm thinking that maybe Phinneas shouldn't be the only one to vet all of these. I try to a bit, too, but it may be a bit overwhelming for just him. So, if anyone else could take the time to look these over, that would be appreciated.

Open source impplies forked development. (Hint: it doesn't matter if government or a cartel create their own fork, people using bitcoin will continue to use the original bitcoin)


We both know that you know what a ponzi is, and that the definition requires some secretive fraudulent promises of a return on investment. Bitcoin has no secrets, no controling profiting party, and no promises of any returns by anyone in charge (Hint: there isn't even anyone in charge)

I'm not sure that's true. Keep in mind that such penalties aren't limited to "if you're sick, you get no health insurance" or "if you have no health insurance, you are screwed."
If insurance companies could charge you based on your weight, your cholesterol level, and other things that directly affect your health that you have full control over, it would create incentives for people to avoid such things. But at present everyone just pays the same premium, regardless of how healthy they are, because most people are lumped together into employer provided insurance pools.
I don't know if there are actual examples of financial penalties for health. Maybe some states have some laws that make doing something unhealthy more expensive? Maybe you could even extrapolate cigarette tax to heart desease statistics? But I wouldn't be surprised if they were positive.

Can you explain why Bitcoin won''t just implement those scalability designs itself, once they are proven to work?

Yes? Should be two solutions.

Her reply: