No, "conscious being" and "ethics" is an oxymoron, apart from the natural ethics:
"good" is what is good for me, "bad" is what is bad for me.

2000 years of fake philosophy have tried to define ethics in any other way, but that's the basis of ethics with conscious beings.  All other kinds of ethics are nothing else but social lies, in order to get the gullible act according to my real ethics: my advantage.

There are two kinds of people:
1. egoists who assume being egoists
2. egoists accusing others of being egoists.

Nothing in crypto is a scam, because crypto is based upon trustlessness.  In other words, if you adhere to the fundamental principle of crypto, the idea is that *everyone out there* is trying to rip you off, and that you are supposed to *rip off everyone out there*, but the belief is that the greed of everyone is large enough, and the trust between parties is low enough, *and the protocol is designed such* that there cannot be sufficient collusion for you to be able to collude sufficiently with others to rip off anyone else *by consensus protocol failure* and that no group will emerge that is colluding strong enough to rip you off *by consensus protocol failure*.   However, in order for that to succeed, you are supposed to study the system YOURSELF, because of course, one way to do so is to MAKE YOU BELIEVE that the protocol is designed as such, and the *initial conditions are designed such that* this property holds.

There's no reason to accept the notion of trustlessness on the level of individual actors with a given protocol, that is, to believe that people will try everything to make you believe in a fake consensus, and that this will fail by hypothesis of strong enough protocol, and at the same time NOT accept trustlessness by people defining protocols.

This is a bit like being favourable to strong cryptographic algorithms so that people can always try to crack them, and believe that the algorithms are sufficiently strong that people trying to crack them will not succeed, but at the same time downloading new cryptographic algorithms from "people on the internet" and cry "SCAM!" when they've designed back doors in them.  After all, this is just ANOTHER METHOD of getting at your data.  One is to 'crack an algorithm', the other is 'giving you an algorithm with a back door'.  

So, no, DASH, with its ninjamine is not a scam.  It is not any more a scam, than an attempt at a 51% attack on bitcoin.  This is the fundamental premise of crypto: the others are supposed to try to rip you off.  Whether that is with a 51% attack on bitcoin, or by promoting an alternative of which the protocol and the initial conditions are such that you will be ripped off, is the essence of the game.  In as much as they succeed, they've simply used the trustlessness aspect of crypto.  In as much as a 51% attack on bitcoin succeeds and goes unnoticed, or people don't care, it was the challenge of bitcoin.  In as much as people buy into a ninja-mined half PoS coin with a whole structure to make you believe it enough so that you pump value in it, it is the name of the game in crypto.

It is not a scam.  It is crypto at its best.  Like back doors in "free" cryptographic software offered by "a guy on the internet".  Because the game is trustlessness.

A protocol with large PoS and ninja mining is of course highly centralized in the hands of the ninja miners.  But that is not a secret, and is verifiable on the block chain.  As such, people buying into it are taking their responsibility.  If they "didn't know", then they are stupid, and them being ripped off is well-deserved.  If they knew it, well, they knew what they were doing.

Does that make DASH not useful as a currency ?  I don't know.  The problem with a highly centralized system like this is of course the high potential volatility, and the low effective liquidity.  But this can change, when the centralized owner decides to cash out.  I wouldn't touch the anonymity of DASH with a finger, because probably most master nodes, being centralized, can easily be compromised (by water hosing, bribing, or whatever), even though its technology is way, way better than bitcoin's.  It can also be that DASH's owners care about the system enough to make it function well enough as a currency.  I fail to see its interest over fiat, because if you have to trust some centralized parties, it is probably better to trust a kind of state than a kind of "unknowns on the internet".  But that's a matter of informed choice.

So no, DASH is not a scam.  It can't be, it is crypto.

Every non-fiatised coin (that is, of which the state/central bank/financial authorities) cannot lay their hands, reverse transactions at their will and have a completely detailed overview of who did what when with it, are on the same ground.  So what are you doing in crypto and why aren't you doing it with fiat ?  The only currency that will remain legal ?

If really *no-one* uses it, it is useless.  But if only the people you want to trade with use it, that's good enough I'd say.  

The thing that is missing for the moment, are anonymous distributed crypto exchanges.  Once they are around, the user base of a specific coin doesn't matter any more.  You can use any other crypto as a "back bone" to hop between cryptos and the liquidity of every crypto becomes essentially the reach of all of them.  Bitcoin could very well be the reserve currency for such kind of exchanges.

At that point, even a small coin that allows you to do what you want to, is good enough, because you're not limited to its user base.
And you can keep under the radar.

It also solves the issue of block chain bloat.  Not all transactions have to happen on the same, big block chain.  Many small coins with different block chains can handle much more transactions, than one big one.  And you really get to "distributed" that way.  No incentive to centralize, because you'd have many, many independent coins, many, many independent distributed exchanges (probably "coins" themselves) and a fully scalable distributed network that way.

If you believe that one day we will be free of material needs and will not be prone to violence, then I think the guy smoking heavily is on the other side of the line

I still need a house, I still need food, I still need a lot of material stuff, and I can still be beaten up, tortured, and killed.  I don't think that this kind of thing will disappear in any near future, on the contrary.

This has nothing to do with "egalitarianism".   I don't want everybody to "have equal income" or some silliness of that kind.  But if a monetary asset is to be introduced as something new, there is absolutely no reason why it should go into the hands of some more than in the hands of others, because any difference on that level is seigniorage, and gives value "against no economic production" to some over others.

Of course, an initially equal distribution of a monetary asset will not stay that way, but that doesn't matter.  At least, there has not been someone having had seigniorage from it.  Nobody has won anything by such an initial distribution, and that is how it should be.  That you can gain value by trading the asset against economic production, and accumulate wealth that way, is OK: you obtained it by providing value.  But you should not have gotten "value for nothing" which is exactly what seigniorage is about (and what most of crypto speculation is about).

And this is one of the cases where the word "entropy" doesn't have its place, honestly.  We're talking about how a token system that serves to transport value should "start out".  There's no reason why some should have more tokens *against no value* than others.  The only thing that makes sense in a monetary asset is the *transport* of value.  But the *creation of tokens* means that this is a non-equilibrated "transport", which is contradictory to the idea of the system that value only goes in closed circles through the system.  The best way to do this is by an as uniform as possible initial distribution, so that the "value out of thin air" is equal for everybody, and hence doesn't represent, in the end, any value.  From that point on, the tokens can transport value in closed circles.
This has nothing to do with "ignoring outcomes" or "ignoring states" and hence, has nothing to do with "entropy".

Well, I have the impression that you deify the notion of entropy.  For sure it is an important and fascinating concept, and it sneaks into areas of research where one didn't expect it at first sight.  But it isn't a magic word.  Entropy has a very well-defined meaning, and using the word and the notion outside of its well-defined meaning can sometimes be speculative theory, but most of the times, charlatanism.  There's another word like that, "quantum", that is often abused.  It is not always clear in what way the author using that word is simply being casually speculative but has in fact a clear idea in mind, and when he's using the word "magically".   I've seen that you sometimes use the word "entropy" in a context where I cannot link it in a clear way to its definition.  I don't know if, at those moments, you use it with a clear link to its definition, which I fail to understand, or as a "magic word" because you're somehow fascinated by it, without clearly understanding yourself what it could mean in that context, but you "feel in your bones" that it must have something to do with it, but you don't know what.

Entropy is just "lack of knowledge of an event".  The event has a specific state/value/outcome... (will have, had, ...) and you don't know which one it is, but you only know it must be "one of several possibilities".

Entropy is hence a relationship between the entity that can take on the event, and the entity that "ignores".  What is entropy for me, is maybe not entropy for you (and in that case, YOUR entropy for me is at least as big as the entropy I have about the system - which is the essence of the second law).

Now, what can we ignore ?  Almost anything, which is exactly why this notion is so all-pervading.  "physical entropy" is our ignorance of the exact micro state of a physical system, that still satisfies a given "macro state".

If I have a cup of hot water, I know its macro state: it is "hot water".  However, I don't know where what water molecule is, exactly, on a microscopic scale.  This ignorance is the entropy that how water has.  Note that it is dependent on what I consider as micro state.  I also don't know the nuclear state of hot water, but usually I don't care, so I don't take this into account in its physical entropy.  When I have to do nuclear stuff with water, suddenly water has much more entropy, than when I will be doing chemistry with it.   The heat that I can get out of water by using nuclear fusion is not accounted for by the usual values of entropy one gives to hot water, because most of the time, we don't consider that kind of outcomes.

In the same way as I can ignore physical micro states, I can ignore other things, like memory states of a computer, the actual state of a finite-state machine.  Take a whole network as a big finite state machine, then my ignorance of the exact state of this network can be measured in entropy units.
I can ignore "complex outcomes", like throwing a dice.  I know that if you throw a dice (or if you threw one yesterday, but didn't tell me the outcome), that it must be one of 6 outcomes, but I don't know which one.  Entropy.

In very much most cases, the entropy of the ignorance of a physical state is MUCH, MUCH larger than anything "computer-related".  There's more entropy in my hot cup of water than in the whole internet.

But, and this is important, we now come to the complementary notion: information.  Information is what sets off entropy (and is hence the same kind of quantity).  I need to receive information in order to diminish my entropy about something.  If you tell me that the dice thrown gave a 4, then my entropy about that dice is now entirely lifted, by an equal amount of information I received.

But information has another aspect.  It has the aspect of "what I care about".  Information has also to do with what one calls "macro states".  If I have hot water, the physical entropy of that is huge, but I don't care.  I only need the macro state to make coffee.  So my "entropy about the macro state" is essentially 0, because I KNOW the macro state.  I don't need the micro state if I want to make coffee.

So the fact that when I pour a cup of hot water over my instant coffee, and that I'm "Handling huge amounts of entropy", doesn't matter for what I'm doing.

I've seen you fall into this trap several times, like with the "entropy of the network with latencies calculating the digits of Pi".  I don't care, because the macro state I'm only interested in, is the value of the digits of pi, and the "microstates of the network" don't matter.  They are the equivalent of the hot cup of water, and its microstates.  I don't have to know them to make coffee.


Chaotic irreversibility is nothing else but the amplification of a specific micro state to a macro state.  The ignorance of the micro state then results in the ignorance of the macro state.
There are usually two opposing dynamics: one is chaotic dynamics which "brings micro states to the macro level", and the other is "statistical averaging" over large populations, which turns "individual macro states" into "system micro states".

The first one makes that one can "lose information", the second makes that "this information doesn't really matter".

If I use hot water, and I pour it to make coffee, I not only have the physical entropy of the hot water, I also have the chaotic dynamics of the turbulence in the water flow.  And all of this doesn't, in the end, matter, and I end up having a cup of coffee.

However, in as much as the turbulence is too turbulent, say, I can burn myself, I have to go to the hospital, and this implies a change in my life path that was difficult to foresee.  However, on the level of humanity, on average, 0.001% of people making coffee burn themselves, so this becomes again a kind of macro state.

So one cannot just be "amazed at the amount of entropy in a system".  There's more entropy in your cup of hot water than there is in the whole internet.  It doesn't always matter.

I have only casually looked at it, but it seems that byteball is not really a FORK of bitcoin at a certain block height, but rather organizes "rounds" where you can obtain coins if you participate.  As such, you are obtaining the same "inside knowledge" unfairness as a ninja mine.  You simply "have to know and be there at the right time".
A genuine fork would allow people to use their (former) bitcoin address signatures *automatically* and at any time to create their byteball coins ; in fact, their coins would be considered existing on the byteball system, in the same way that ETC coins were considered existing on the ETC chain when people had ETH coins before the fork.

You are right that the energy markets are not totally free, but in reality, there IS commodity destruction.  It is not as complete as in the case of a totally free and competitive liquid energy and ASIC market, but there is more waste than if you had to print dollar bills.

The real problem of PoW doesn't come from the fact that there are still large margins taken on the commodities that need to be destroyed, but rather that the coin value at the moment of its PoW creation only has a fractional value of its later value.  The value increase of the coin over time is also a form of seigniorage: people get value for just holding coins.  At what point that is seigniorage, and at what point that is "investment", can be discussed.  I consider that it is not an investment as such, because there's no economic value produced by the investment - well, there is the ultra-small economic value produced by the utility of the crypto currency, which is essentially zilch: almost no consumer good, in the end, has seen the daylight that wouldn't have seen the daylight if crypto currencies didn't exist, and consumer goods/services are the bottom line of economic value of course.


There are two remarks on this.  First of all, holding a seigniorage-obtained fraction of a collectible which grows in market cap over time, gives you a proportional growth in seigniorage, without doing anything.  If you possess 5% of bitcoin when its market cap is 1 million dollars because of seigniorage, and bitcoin goes to 1000 billion, your seigniorage has grown proportionally.  So you DO gain continuous seigniorage by just holding the coins.  That is even the case if you wasted 50 000 dollars to obtain them, that is, if you destroyed entirely the initial seigniorage when you created them.  This is the problem with a "sound money" collectible as a monetary asset.  You could formulate it that its seigniorage properties are not invariant over time.  This is a problem in my opinion.

The second is that value that is transferred (the goal of a currency) shouldn't, of course, be destroyed !  It is coins created that should have their value destroyed, apart from a small competitive margin.  The economic value of a crypto currency is ultimately only worth what it allowed to produce in utility for the end consumer, and that is not much.  This economic value can be distributed over the people that made this happen, took the risk and had the vision, like with any investment.  But the problem with a monetary asset is that it doesn't take its *added economic value* as market cap, but *the whole traded value*.  There is no "economic fairness" in this.

If I have, say, a big machine that can labour land, and you want to labour your land, my machine has economic value to you, because you can grow more food on your land with my machine.   Let us say that the gain in food production ends up being 1000 if you use my machine.  You using my machine is hence worth 1000.  But we have to get my machine to your place.  If I have to hire 20 people to carry it to your place, that would cost us 200, which means that only 800 remains.  Now, if Joe has a truck, and he can transport the machine to your place.  He needs to spend a value of 50 on gas, maintenance and so on for his truck.  You can say that in the end, the economic value of him using the truck is 150, because without the truck, we would end up obtaining 800, and with his truck, we end up obtaining 950 of value.

However, his truck did transport my machine, which was worth 1000 in total.  But the truck voyage itself was only worth 150.

With a monetary asset, however, the existence of the monetary asset, which is the "truck for value", brings in some economic value (like the truck did, about 150), but takes on, as a market cap, the FULL value of what is transported.

The confusion with a monetary asset is between the value it *transports* and the value *creation* of the system itself (the competitive advantage the monetary system brings over other ways of transporting value).   My claim is that, at the moment, the competitive advantage of crypto over, say, fiat, in pure end-consumer value creation is minuscule.  This minuscule value is what could be fairly distributed to the "investors" in crypto - like they would if they had invested in any other stock.  But with crypto (like with any other monetary asset), the value of the asset itself is confused with the value it transports.  It is not because I bought something for 10 000 dollars with bitcoin, that the bitcoin system created me an economic value of 10 000 dollars, it only transported it (like the truck) ; as such, it did bring me some small value because otherwise I would have done it with fiat, but this is a very small amount.

However, the holder of "seigniorage bitcoins" takes the full value that is transported as reward, and not just the value creation by the bitcoin monetary system.   This unfair economic advantage makes that one hugely overinvests in this system.  In other words, the seigniorage-by-holding-coins is a huge market failure, that directs tons and tons of resources towards something that has very little economic consumer value.

It is essentially impossible to "measure genius".  IQ tests were developed as a medical tool to diagnose mental deficiency in children.  It is entirely abused "on the other side of the scale".

Hahaha   The problem with that statement is that you get an unsolvable game-theoretic recursion.

If, to be *recognized* as a successful surgeon, you have to look like a lumberjack, then the smoothest of actors will of course adapt to this perception, and most scammer-fake-surgeon charlatans will look like lumberjacks, to adhere to the image that the best surgeons "don't look like a surgeon".  It is then the good surgeon that doesn't need publicity as "good surgeon looking like a lumberjack" that will dress nicely because he has the money and doesn't need to play his "lumberjack" role to get to a job, because he's good enough to do without image building (like argued in the blog article).
However, once that's the case again, most actors-charlatans will again look like fancy dressed people, because they don't want to look like the charlatan-lumberjack fake surgeons.  And so on.

There's a world where this "lumber jack attitude" is in fact often the case: computer science and physics.  The smooth guy in a fancy suit is never going to get hired, because the image of the brilliant computer scientist or physicist is the dirty porky fat guy in front of his terminal, slurping coca cola and eating pizzas while looking at his code / data / calculations.  But this is now so much part of the image of a good physicist or computer scientist, that if you go for a job interview, you better DON'T dress fancy.

So a physicist that can "afford" to dress nicely, must be one hell of a physicist,  because he doesn't need his "porky fat man image building".

etc...

 

As if ZCASH was the first coin trying to implement anonymity...

This is indeed the problem: that even with the best of intentions, a centralized power structure always diverges into a self-destructive system.  I'm actually horrified by the systematics of that dynamics, and I already said that the US constitution was built by people who god damn knew this, and tried to build all possible safeguards against this divergence into it, but the US government has become one of the most destructive power houses on earth.

That said, there IS the consensus problem in every collectivity, and Sun Tsu already realized the power and efficiency of hierarchy.  This is why very often, hierarchical systems out-compete distributed systems AT FIRST ; but later on, they diverge into self-destructive empires, almost inevitably. 

No, the first question is: why would you support any project in the first place ?
What is your drive ?  What do you gain from it (not necessarily monetary-wise) ?
Is there a project that "brings the world closer to your ideal", and do you think it is going to happen ?

Why support crypto in the first place and not deal with centrally authorized/controlled/governed/regulated tokens ?

There's nothing wrong for them to sell it, on the contrary.  The more a coin gets traded, the less it is concentrated in the hands of a few.  

You don't need people to "invest" in something.  The only thing you need is a large list of non-identical crypto-identity holders, so that the initial distribution is as large as possible.  If it were possible to have, in one way or another, a public key of every person on earth, that would be the most ideal distribution.  But we don't have such lists of which we know that they aren't manipulated.  As such, the bitcoin address list looks like it is one of the best.  There doesn't even need to be a correspondence between the AMOUNT of bitcoin to an address and the newly distributed coin.  You could give a single coin to every existing address.  Most of them are probably dead.  But that doesn't matter.  What is needed, is a large list of public keys, of which the secret keys are in the hands of as many people as possible.

You don't even need to TELL people immediately.  You can have them discover their holdings way later.  The important point is that whatever is used as public key, cannot be manipulated when the knowledge is out.  It has to be a list "of the past".

The problem with seigniorage is not the LOSS by society (your analysis is correct), but rather the *unmerited gain* of those obtaining seigniorage, and hence the economic power the obtain "for nothing".

It is not so much the fact that it costs you something, it is the nasty effect to see the other guy get rich without production of value.

Seigniorage is on the receiving side, not on the paying side.  That a monetary asset network costs value is OK.  But that this value gets in the hands of some is not OK.  If it is destroyed, then that's OK.  This is what is so brilliant about PoW.

Well, this is an interesting subject.  Two-wheeled chariots were invented by a "distributed" people, the Andronovo culture in Siberia, about 2000 BC.  One of the oldest roads on earth was build in England at about 3800 BC (the Sweet Track) where it is hard to imagine that it was an empire-induced road building operation.

I agree that city pavements occurred first in Ur, which was already a "state" in Mesopotamia.  But the idea that you need a *violence monopolist* and a *king* in order to build roads and be able to do agriculture, is the misguided kind of social lie that we have been fed with since we were children.  I'm not claiming that you can build a road on your own as an individual.  But you can build roads as a community without the need of a king who needs violence to make people obey his orders.

I agree that the "kings' violence" is a solution to the consensus problem which each community needs to solve before doing something, but I don't think that the price of giving all power to an aristocratic elite is necessary to achieve this, which is the basic tenet of statists.  I also think that if you are dreaming of a "new economy" (the dematerialized economy you're talking about) before hoping that a distributed society like it was before agriculture, is possible again, you will have to wait for eternity.  If you are convinced that one needs a king in order to make food, then we will always need a king (in more modern forms of presidents, parliaments, or whatever aristocratic structure).   Because we will never be free of material needs and always be prone to physical violence.

The idea is maybe not that Monero grows a lot.  It already has a more than large enough market cap to sustain a sensible underground economy.  If it wants to serve the anonymous economy and stay sufficiently under the radar, maybe it shouldn't grow much more.  It can then be used by those (few) people who want to do underground economics, and that's good enough, no ?

And if more demand for anonymous coins is needed, more coins can be invented, so that there is no "runaway" in value, and high concentrations of wealth from this, no ?  The idea is not to have monopolies, is there ?

In my opinion, this is true decentralization: myriads of coins, new ones regularly created, with (slightly) different technologies, different chains etc...  all of them small-scale and not worth being centralized, because the investment is too risky and not worth it.

Amen.  This is why I think that a plot of DASH-days destroyed might help.  Of course, once it is known that this is what is looked at, someone owning most of the market cap can move his old coins to sustain the DASH-days destroyed, but it would show during the pump that it were the same coins going back and forward - if it even are coins on the chain, and not just Poloniex IOU where most of the volume comes from.

Limited supply is a silly concept in an open currency market.  The idea of "limited supply" came from the concept of "sound money".  Sound money theory is based upon a steady-state situation (the money "came from long ago") and has the monopoly of currency.  Essentially, the sound money theory is the theory of gold being the single monetary asset on which every other asset is based.

What the sound money theory is after, is that there cannot be seigniorage, that is the unavoidable value transfer from the economy to the creator of new monetary tokens.  If the supply "has always existed", and cannot increase, there cannot be any seigniorage.  That's the fundamental idea behind sound money.  The other tenet is that with a fixed amount of monetary tokens, it behaves as a perfect collectible, and there will be a fair market of demand for storage of value, correctly filled in by the market cap of the monetary supply (which is fixed).

But this is totally ridiculous with crypto.  First of all, crypto tokens MUST be created because they don't exists "since ever".  So the seigniorage is there.  And second, crypto tokens don't have the monopoly on the money market: there are other crypto tokens, there is fiat, there is gold....
So the hypotheses of sound money doctrine are in any case not respected in the case of crypto.  As such, there's no point in keeping to its conclusions.  There IS seigniorage, there ARE coins created, and there IS a variable market share.  So whether this coin creation will stop "one day" or "at infinity" doesn't matter AT ALL.

In fact, no tail emission gives much more problems of instability and exacerbates the initial unfairness of seigniorage than it solves problems which don't exist.