I agree. Bitcoin is forking awesome 

I like that these ideas are being entertained and scrutinised. I want to see a distributed block chain but probably don't have the expertise to actually implement what is required. I do hope that someone does pick up some of these ideas for reducing the size on disk and runs with it or fans the spark to an inferno.

My vague idea is that blocks are distributed throughout the clients. No one has all (but you could pull them all if you wanted). There is some replication so a 50GB chain might be 70GB in the cloud. There may also be some overhead of erasure coding taking it up to 100Gb. But that is distributed amongst many, many thousands of clients.

To reconstitute a start point (this master block maybe?). A Client queries some other clients for some random blocks (say genesis, #10 and #100). It makes a hash of them then queries some other clients as to the hash of their genisis, #10 and #100 blocks. If the hashes agree, then the blocks it received are true and can be used to generate your master block. It then repeates the process with #200, #300 and #500, say, and continues to progress towards the master block (whatever that is) but querying clients for blocks they have and comparing hashes with others

Every so often there are checkpoint blocks. These are distributed in places like websites, usenet and other known places and occasionally included when generating a check hash. Once you are up to the latest transactions you then become a provider for others by having some blocks for others to query.

So the idea is that you don't need to keep all the blocks, only the master block (if that's how that part works) and the last N transactions. If a particular block is required to spend or calculate a signature, then it can be requested from the cloud, combined with a couple of other blocks and/or checkpoint blocks, hashed and the hash conformed by a few nodes to verify the block you want is true.

Not sure if that's useful as is, but I think a distributed blockchain s the way forward.

I don't think so. Linux has always been free so you have to ask yourself. All things being equal, why do people pay money for something that they can get for free?

The Linux community didn't capitalise on the abomination of Windows Vista. They didn't capitalise on Windows 8 debacle. Are they going to capitalise on Windows 10? Probably not.

Some in the Linux community ask "When will it be the year of the Linux Desktop". They pine for market dominance for a superior operating system. They definitely have the cheapest. They probably have the best hardware support (it runs on anything). It runs most of the internet, TVs and phones even. Yet they still can't get their parents, siblings and aunties and uncles to use it.

When they understand why, instead of snorting derision. When they pool their expertise instead of feuding between distros. When they make things easy because simple has become cool - that year will be the year of the Linux Desktop.

Sure. Because its not like Linux would track and log every website you visit,  conversion you have or file you have opened,  is it?
Reading Metadata is not like interpreting content as “similar”. Now where have I heard that before? 

The hash is kept in txn_count.

I am making some pretty broad assumptions here though (like there is no check for zero in txn_count) . So please do pick holes or tell me I'm an arse and shut up.

Companies like M$, Google and Apple want you to share everything. They do everything they can to make it easy for your to share everything. Recently, they have taken steps to make it extremely difficult for you to prevent their software from sharing all your stuff. It is a short update away from forcing you to send everything through their servers for scrutiny if you don't share enough willingly.

On the other hand, they want to share nothing. They will take you to court if they catch you sharing their stuff. They force you to accept thousands of words in agreements you cannot understand, written by lawyers who are employed specifically to relieve you of your rights while giving them rights over you. They sell the information they accrue to people who can harass or even imprison you but you cannot know who has it or what it is used for.

Food for thought.

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"Everyone should wear these latest fashion bracelets", they say.
The chain bracelet meme goes viral.
While some are berated for calling them handcuffs.
In the peonage downward spiral.
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Why not use the first byte of the version as a header length indicator to give you up to an additional 95 bytes of extended header for clients that are aware? If the version is FF, then the version is in the extended header and clients should look there for it because it is bigger than 1 byte.-> Fully backwards compatible.

If you need more, just keep leapfrogging adding 255 bytes or less whenever you need a bigger header and always maintaining backwards compatibility.

Serendipitous

Some people refuse to take responsibility for their impulses, parenting and environment-they never really grew up. They wish for all of us to suffer or be denied access to things because of their failings. It is not only a petty and selfish attitude which goes hand in hand with entitlement, but is the noose by which authoritarians and totalitarians strangle open and free populations.

While true, gold isn't physically moved very often. Instead they allocate it to you and give you a receipt for a particular hunk of metal. Give you unallocated gold which is pretty much a promise to give you gold if you really want it and futures, which is gambling with gold without ever needing it. For all of those, there doesn't have to be any gold at all until someone wants delivery then they go and buy it if they must . Bitcoin certainly could replace those methods of dealing in gold and be far less open to manipulation and general skullduggery as they have been caught doing time and time again. IMO a bitcoin type ledger would be far superior.

I pick neither.

Clients could process transactions instead of miners which fully decentralises the operation of the network. Miners would still do as their name suggests, mine new bitcoins  . A block could essentially be one transaction but a few more might be more efficient. This would mean that the tx/sec is intrinsically linked to the number of nodes rather than hashing power and bandwidth load balanced amongst many clients.

You don't need the entire block chain to process or send/receive bitcoin. You just need traceability of the latest hashes. You could keep the block chain distributed amongst the network clients and reconstitute only those pieces required in a particular client to process transactions. If you were worried, you could audit the entire block chain at regular intervals by pulling every distributed block from the network and running the normal block verify. The block chain is essentially a hash table, it just needs to be distributed (dCache? DFSgc?). Several existing replicating storage systems (such as usenet) could be used to persist reference blocks (like the genisis block) to avoid encirclement of a client by naughty people .

Here's a thread where Satoshi discusses it with the other members.
One point that is made is that hashing power shouldn't be diluted by alt coins. Is that the difference between a side-chain and an alt-coin? Namecoin, for example, is able to discover bitcoins. It just discovers Namecoins more frequently due to lower difficulty.

Is Tor now considered usable with Bitcoin?

I remember there was an issue with being de-anonymised but that was a while ago.

Or they could just put a small mechanical switch in like the dip switches they used to put on the motherboard years ago. Problem solved.

Would this be a good use case for DNS like Namecoin?

I am in favour of the clients doing more of the work but for slightly different reasons, i.e. not energy consumption.

If the clients verified and included transactions instead of miners, then all clients could share in the processing fees and at the same time dilute the 51% attack to all network nodes not just the smaller subset of miners that have specialist hardware. While dedicated mining farms would still get the lions share of fees and still get the mining rewards, everyone would get something for their participation and support of the network while decreasing the possibility for a cartel to capture the network.

Leave the big boys mining and let everyone else handle the day-to-day running of the network.

There are two debates going on here. The technical one with devs and miners about block size which no-one outside of geeksville particularly cares about or even understands and the block chain ledger size non techies are complaining about. The two are related but they are different arguments.

Satoshi predicted the latter debate and seems to have seen it as a participation issue.

Some great advice in that list but I'm wondering about this one.

If he/she is not customer facing; would a self-cert be better? You know that it hasn't been compromised or given to any agencies and you can trust yourself (although my wife might argue differently).

P.S.
I think they also recommend disabling SSL3 now too.

Most sensible comment I've seen for a while.

My vision (however feasible it may be) has these two features:
1. Transactions are processed in clients and not by miners, harnessing the collective processing power of participants to run the network. (the original vision?)
2. The block chain is distributed - by that I mean in pieces distributed amongst the clients and a local "cache" of relevant pieces used by the client for transactions. You could still build a complete history by retrieving all the pieces in the cloud if you wanted, but its not necessary for day to day operation.

These two would make most of the infrastructure problems go away, IMO. Interesting times.

And I find that sad. I believe the debate should be about a way of giving back the ability for any client to add transactions to the block chain, getting rid of blocks altogether (or viewed another way, block size=1 transaction) and load balancing the distribution of blocks. Mining and including transactions in the block chain need to be separate, IMO.