What is this 0MQ? I haven't really been following crypto for quite a few months now.

I think its entirely reasonable to put on that hat. After all satoshi left because gavin began rubbing elbows with an alphabet and gavin is leading the charge on this. If gavin is well intentioned, than its unfortunate that he does not understand that there is something so much bigger at stake here than the block size. I find it hard to belive that he cant see that so that's another reason why im inclined to entertain if not outright support your metallic hat.

That's my thinking. I really hope xt fails. They tried to get consensus and they failed, due to resistance from some really smart people (adam back ie). Now they are trying to coupe de ta? They are beginning to appear fanatical.

sorry for offtopic but does anyone know gmaxwells position on the fork? which tine(?) will he be taking?

Am I correct in assuming that the reason the trezor is so derpy these days when it used to be fast as lighting is the result of patching some power analysis attack vectors?

A bit of a break out after a long flat consolidation period looks pretty bullish to me.

I acquired my original bitcoin position (ages ago) by selling silver (i miss bitmit). I would be happy to do the same thing for monero if there is any interest.

Brain wallets are fine. All you have to do is make it a combination of randomly generated string that's short enough to be memorized, a more traditional pass-phrase (your mothers maiden name + your fathers birthday + your favorite candy, or how ever normal people make passwords), and then something public domain tacked on the end to add some entropy almost for free. Ezpz and no "brainflayer" is going to ever crack that.

It would really really help our cause if the dev team would "officialize" one of the third party gui clients, even if just temporarily until the dev team produces its own gui client, and put it on the front page in the "Where can I download Monero" section. Just label one command line interface and the other gui. Please devs.

All you have to do in order to prevent it from dying is bid on it. If a sufficient number of people bid a sufficient amount for it at a reasonable price than it will stay alive indefinitely.

Thanks. I'll check it out. Though I'm wary when the corporate media attempts portray anarchists. Would be very interesting if they treated us fairly for once.

well that's a novel "attack vector"

Yes of course. Its not as if I haven't thought through all of this myself already. But there are reasons why I said what i said after the bolded part.

The most important thing to understand is that "can it be hacked?" is the wrong question. The important question is how costly will hacking it be and how great will the benefits be. (or for the more economically minded among you, technically the question is closer to, when the market reacts to hackers by lowering the amount of money people are willing to accept on one of these chips to the point where the marginal hacker finds it no longer worth his time, will that amount be too low for this technology to be sufficiently useful).

You are not going to be using this thing to buy a car or a house. Transactions like that will be done on the blockchain. You will be using it to buy a soda or a tank of gas or a game from the steam store. Sure there is a risk that some kid will dig into it with a microscope. Of course. But we have a perfect analog for this already with blockchains exactly the way they work now. People will accept 0 confirmation transactions on small purchases even though they could be reversed by a dedicated attacker. So what? Is the solution to force someone who is buying a soda to wait for 3 confirmations? As a market actor you just weigh the risks against the benefits and you decide for yourself what is your preferred trade off. If you are risk averse you have a lower threshold for amounts that you are willing to accept off chain, for the sorts of people you are willing to accept certain types of transactions from, and how often you settle up on the blockchain.

Understand what we are talking about here. Understand the promise. Understand what is at stake. What we are talking about here is a measure of unlinkability for all crypto users, instantaneous transactions, offline transactions, free transactions, the massive reduction of blockchain bloat, and the solution to the scalability problem. These things collectively, in their totality, ARE HUGE! When you dismiss it out of hand its tantamount to saying this medicine that will save my life tastes bad and gives me a tummy ache, so forget it.

This "solution" to doublespending could never be a replacement to satoshi's solution. It could never act as an alternative to blockchains. But it definitely can act as an amazing complement by leverage up satoshi's amazing invention to help make up for some of the shortcomings of this type of doublespend "solution". Togather, and only togather, they could make something beautiful.

Of course all of this this depends on how difficult it is to hack. If its too easy or too expensive to stay ahead of the curve in the arms race than it will be a footnote in history. If not it could take crypto to who new places. Only time will tell that but the chance that it will work is exciting as hell.

*edit* and i should add. this is the first time in my life that i have ever been excited about a closed source project. (excluding things like video games). So I definitely feel your concern. Its not as if im some closed source fan boy.

So I don't know if you guys have seen the news about this proposal called "offcoin" http://www.coindesk.com/netopia-internet-free-bitcoin-transactions/ but it looks really cool and really exciting. It's rare that I will forgive a project for being closed source, but this one has to be closed source by it's nature, and still can be sufficiently trustworthy even considering.

Anyway one beautiful thing about it is that it will have a really significant positive externality on the privacy of everyone including people who never even use the product. Essentially it will make it so that there is no way for a third party observing the blockchain to know if the person who is in control of an address when it receives funds is the same person who is in control of it when funds are sent from that address. In essence it will give bitcoin an, admittedly imperfect, measure of unlinkability or at least link plausible deniability (though i think it would definitively go beyond plausible deniability).

So the point of all of this is not to say "sell all moneros bitcoin going to be anonymous soon". Clearly this is at best a partial solution. But if monero were to leverage up this technology it would make our privacy features only that much more robust. We could pay the same as we are paying now for privacy and get even more of it, or we could pay less for the same amount.

Since the code is closed source it will have to be entirely rewritten, so that's a bummer. But one nice thing is that none of the things that make monero different from bitcoin make implementing this idea within monero one iota more difficult than implementing it with bitcoin.

Some stuff worth thinking and talking about I think.

Bitcoin - a trojan horse with monero inside

Just let it past the gates and see what happens.

if you guys do this just act under the assumption that he is trying to steal your money. if you just do lots of small trades and never keep very much in the way of funds on the exchange at any given time it could still prove to be a useful service even if he were a scammer.

I've gotten #2 before but never yet #1. Did you have allies or did you manage that solo?

lightning network looks promising