Maybe let's make it a more concrete proposal: fundraising and headhunting for the development of a client with a entirely new codebase.
btcd has already done that. They have a fully clean-slate implementation that was engineered instead of evolved. This isn't really a criticism of the reference implementation - as a prototype of something entirely new it can't really have come into existence any other way. Bits of Proof was another player with their own independent codebase, but apparent they've decided not to be part of the effort to heterogenize the network. What's really needed is an implementation based somewhere that's not the US or Europe, Maybe a Chinese project, or Latin American. |
|
|
|
I want to express my 100% confidence in Mike Hearn who does an excellent job at pushing Bitcoin in the right direction. Even if, or especially if, anyone deserves 100% confidence then expressions like this do more harm than good. Put on your villain hat for a moment and ask yourself who you're going to try to bribe, blackmail, or extort in order to infiltrate and destroy a project. Do you pick the person who everybody is skeptical of and watches closely, or do you try to suborn the person who everybody trusts implicitly? Skeptical scrutiny protects everybody, particularly people who want to do the right thing but may be under pressure to do otherwise. It's easier for honest actors to resist such pressure they can plausibly claim they would be instantly detected and countered if they tried to harm the project. |
|
|
|
But we don't want running Bitcoin or Tor nodes to require expensive sacrifices. We want them to be as cheap and numerous as possible. A lot of the inventive problems with the network right now are due to the anomaly of the block reward being larger than the transaction fee revenue. Subsidies always cause economic distortions, and Bitcoin is no different. In a future where the transaction rate is high and transaction fee are more important than the subsidy in terms of miner revenue then things start to look a lot different in terms of the miner/full node dynamic. Perhaps it's better to get the network to that state first as quickly as possible because that's what needs to happen for long term viability of the currency anyway, and then see what needs to be done. |
|
|
|
https://blog.conformal.com/redecentralization-robust-developer-network/As it was originally proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was conceived of as a peer-to-peer system that was fundamentally decentralized. Many past and current discussions about the future of Bitcoin acknowledge that too much centralization is a threat to the Bitcoin network. To some extent this process of avoiding centralization has been successful, but in several key areas it has not been very successful and it is in need of redecentralization. The most pressing case for redecentralization in Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies more generally) is the current development community:
the number of developers who have experience developing cryptocurrencies is very low, I would estimate there are less than 100 such developers
the majority of the developers are located in the US and other “Western” nations
the developer incentive structure with successful cryptocurrencies creates conflicts of interest
In what follows, I propose solutions to these issues cited above. Since we develop our own full-node Bitcoin implementation, btcd, the criticism of the developer community status quo that follows applies not only to other developers, but also our developers who work on btcd.
|
|
|
|
Tainting BTC in this manner does not require the participation of the Bitcoin developers. Mostly just that they do nothing significant to protect against taint. So many people fail to acknowledge inaction as a viable attack route in their threat models. |
|
|
|
Development at the protocol level...one man got the whole thing off the ground, another should be enough to implement much of the needed changes I guess? Not to say there will be many more.
What is amazing and addictive about Bitcoin and differentiates it from other open source projects is it's incredibly empowering, lots of programming skill/money in the community can be immediately put into good use, I alone will keep enough to pay a programmer for one year. Not all the problems involved can be solved by code. Sometimes you've got to solve problems in meatspace by interacting with people, and a lot of coders got into software for the explicit purpose of not needing to deal with people in meatspace. |
|
|
|
Will we have access to the track if we bring race cars?
Either way im going to try and make it.
No idea, but if you're serious I can try to find out. You'd probably have to set that up with the track directly and pay for a pace car. |
|
|
|
|
Suppose the major US companies which back Bitcoin Foundation receive ultimatums. What could they do?
They could use their influence to completely stall needed development at the protocol level, for example making Bitcoin scalable to greater than trivial transaction rates, especially if they could push other priorities like blacklists and user identification.
This would prevent Bitcoin from getting "out of control" from a regulatory standpoint by forcing users off the blockchain and P2P network itself into the waiting arms of off chain services like Coinbase who are willing to make the user experience good for them while dutifully reporting everything their users do to every applicable government agency who asks for it, and especially being willing to comply with any funds confiscation orders they may receive.
They could even spread FUD around like telling everyone how using transaction rationing to push people off the blockchain and into off-chain services which contain exactly none of the freedoms the blockchain provides is, "keeping bitcoin free", and then laugh manically when people actually fall for it.
Lots of non-obvious ways these companies can compromise Bitcoin.
|
|
|
|
Regulating crypto-currencies will work as well as regulating drugs, alcohol, and file sharing. Total Fail.
Freedom is Truth. Truth always wins out in the end. It may take awhile, but it wins. I agree with this in the long term. In the short term, watch your back because while the long term plays out it's highly likely that more than one Bitcoin startup is going to stick a knife in it. |
|
|
|
"They will eventually be made as a payment system to follow the same standards as the other payment systems and that will be probably be the end of them," he said. The game plan is to do to Bitcoin what they did to PayPal. This is not at all surprising coming from him. What will probably be to many, but what shouldn't be, is how many people in the Bitcoin community will be willing to help them try to destroy Bitcoin in return for a financial benefit. Keep an eye on those VC-funded Bitcoin startups especially. |
|
|
|
there will be tech which allows to overcome fundamental weakness in PoW. Forgive me for being skeptical about claims of Bitcoin's PoW having fatal weaknesses. Bitcoin could have been invented in 1988 instead of 2008, except that everybody who understood cryptography well enough considered the economic properties Bitcoin possesses to be fatally flawed and so never even tried. Incidentally, Bitcoin's reliance on economic theories that so many people consider to be a flawed are exactly what enabled it to succeed where ever prior attempt failed.. I wish everybody involved with altcoins who do not understand this dynamic the best of luck, since they'll need it. |
|
|
|
Oh, its inevitable...the technology exists. The bitcoin centric mindset is pretty short sighted. If people feel, in any given community, for the rest of time, like they are not being served by bitcoin, they can have their own currency at basically the push of a button. They will exist and be traded. They may ever be bigger than BTC, but they're obviously going to exist...I know this because I would make one for just my family, inside my home...
I think it's ridiculous to assume otherwise. Cities will adopt local ones...there will be crytocurrencies circulating in high schools. Poor countries and impoverished slums will rock their own coins.
I remember a time when there was no global Internet. Every city had their own little BBS, with a handful of national ones. Each was its own walled garden with little-to-no communication between them. Then flat rate ISPs showed up and wiped all competition off the map*. Do you think Compuserve and GEnie and AOL really wanted to have their business model steamrollered like that? Too bad - the network effect was too powerful for them. The advantages of a single currency are too overwhelming for alternatives to become anything more than hobbyist toys that never amount to more than a rounding error. Maybe it won't be Bitcoin that becomes that single currency, but anything that aims to overthrow it has a high barrier to overcome. * For that matter, when was the last time anyone used IPX/SPX? How many people even remember it other than that weird network protocol that you sometimes had to use for Starcraft 1 LAN parties? |
|
|
|
Now we've got a Twitter account, with some information about the speakers and sponsors: https://twitter.com/TexasBitcoinIt's hard to keep the website up to date with the speed with all the new developments but here's a preview of some of them that will be formally announced soon: A distributed applications hackathon featuring over $1 million worth of prizes and contracts from the sponsoring organizations. A Bitcoin-only concert after the conference. |
|
|
|
My anti-asic comments apply more to cryptocurrency as a technology going forward. For bitcoin you can't look back. We'll see if there is any future in non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies... I know all the VCs and traders want that kind of a world, but they might not get what they want. |
|
|
|
I know. It's not like I'm gonna burn my asic miner. My points are more for the purpose of future slant we can place on our thinking. I mean look at my mug. I loooovvveee ICs. I just think they need to phased out of open-stuff, or made open somehow. Not sure how the latter would work though. ASICs are a very competitive space right now. Anything that uses extra power and does not increase the hash rate puts an ASIC at a severe disadvantage compared to its competitors. For the specific case of hashing I'm not sure how much of a threat really exists. Now if specialized hardware is ever used to select transactions and construct blocks, that's something I'd be more concerned about. |
|
|
|
Your movements around your house. How often your body is within 7 feet of the machine. The number of steps you take each day. How often you use a microwave.
Again, an easier question may be what can't they do. It's a black box man. ICs are not getting less capable.
I have designed an insanely sensitive (and expensive) burglar alarm in my lab before by accident. You'd be surprised. Oh, you assuming that home mining is still going to be a thing for much longer. Yeah, in that case I can see why you'd be as concerned. The amount of mischief they are capable of in a data center environment is not zero, but not quite so personally intrusive. |
|
|
|
Not even necessarily attack the network, but to get data - that's such an obvious move... What kind of sensitive data could such a company grab from a device that's designed to process the data in a public transaction ledger, that generally receives said data from a public mining pool anyone can join? |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
