Now this thread is cooking. Keep it coming ya'll
Agreed. Waxwing is describing an ideal high-level solution. |
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http://bitnodes.io/It appears that china has more nodes then any other country. 51% attack possible if they get more than half of the nodes? It's not nodes which matter. Its hashing power (averaged out over a few days). However, China has been leading the way with ASIC development, which gives them a good chunk of the hashing power too. Hopefully this is temporary as BFL and others finally get into the market. Great site for providing a measure of decentralization, which is sorely needed for the block size debate. |
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Great artwork goodlord666. Just wanted to share this image which Small Biz Trends probably ray-traced in-house. I think the mirror effect in a stack of coins is amazing.  |
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You just need to consider the FinCen and SEC guidance people like John Corzine and Angelo Mozilo have treated with as much disregard as a parking ticket with the wrong licence plate written on it.
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Thanks for the deeper insight!
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Royal Bank of Canada = Bankster-Complex scum |
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I'm not sure how you could say it's more accurate.
In more words: Kinlo's block origin is more accurate than blockchain.info about the pool percentages for block hashing, because block origin uses their published results whereas blockchain.info collates based upon who propagated each block to them. |
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One possible solution is to only extend trust to people who you know,
If there's one thing I've learned as I've gone through life, it's that you can't trust at least 80% of the people you know. And that includes the ones you think you can. This has been my reservation with trust systems all along. Money destroys friendships and money destroys family relationships. Society seems to work better when individuals have the option to keep their financial affairs separate from their personal life. |
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scalability discussion
Mike: Will bitcoin look like visa card in use
J.R.: yes
Discussion continuing, live blog over. I need some coffee.
CE.What was the consensus from the scalability discussion? (Also, need to change title: protocol) |
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Solex, that's a great signature.
"Got a new wallet? Here's a test address to practice sending to: 18acC6avzFy495oQWbRtr2Z7hirYW4u8DD"
Do you get many takers?
ha, thanks. 4 donations in 4 months, but each time getting smaller.... will be a long while to get to 1 BTC at this rate tho. Don't forget you can check any address this way: https://blockchain.info/address/18acC6avzFy495oQWbRtr2Z7hirYW4u8DD |
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This "Get-out-of-Gox" yankee-rally won't last long  [emphasis added by Pzi4nk] Is this a baseball thing? It's more of an idiot thing. A few vocal people who trade with 'pocket change' amounts of money can't make a withdrawal for 25 cents any more and this is creating a big problem for them. They think it's causing a 'bank run' on MtGox - it's hilarious. Dwolla = Dust transactions. Indeed. The theory is that dwolla users (which is USA customers only) are converting their fiat on gox into btc in order to shift it elsewhere, hence artificially driving up the price, towing bitstamp and other markets upward. However, major dollar buyers would use wire transfers and remain unaffected, so probably the theory is lame, and BTC was headed up anyway, |
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The cool thing about this conference is that I got to chat with Brian Armstrong before he went on to Free Talk Live, and I learned why they had so many problems with low daily limits on the number of BTC they could sell. It was because of limitations placed on them by their bank, not anything inherent to their processes or backend capability. Apparently the bank has removed this limit as a result of their success in raising $5 million in additional capital.
Once awareness of this increased capability spreads, I expect it to have the same effect on the price in the medium term that their initial unveiling of ACH purchases had back at the end of January.
Great inside info JR. Interesting. |
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How is this explained... syn999 before account "hack": well, hes a scammer on the list and you should be alert first place
"hacker" message: Guys I won the giveaway! In that I ACTUALLY received the 10 BTC from anyroll.  He contacted me this morning on a noob account and told me I was the winner, he said admin banned him from posting and updating giveaway thread. I also thought he was a hacker when I recieved the spam but now I believe hes a standup guy. I just dont think a hacker would ever pay out the 10 BTC. I contacted admin about this, we will see what happens. From an anyroll post: Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is, he's an amazing mathematician, and truly a visionary.
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I certainly think the nuance here is far more easily explained as a tension between two completely legitimate engineering objectives which we— as a community— have to carefully compromise over, rather than just some right vs wrong binary question of "is a bigger blocksize bad".
From one perspective— bitcoin as an unstoppable, unregulatable, absolutely trustworthy egold— practically any block size is bad... smaller is pretty much always better. People are already using SPV wallets in large numbers because of the current cost of validating the chain, people are choosing centeralized pools over P2pool because of the cost of dealing with the chain. There is no doubt in my mind that this is already hurting the decentralization of the system to an unacceptable degree: Kidnapping _two_ people is enough to do enormous chain rewrites right now.
And at the same time— from another perspective— Bitcoin as practical unit for common every days payment cheaply available to as many people as possible— practically any block size restriction is bad. It's also completely clear to me that transaction costs— even insubstantial ones— have already turned some people off from using Bitcoin. A tiny 0.0005 bitcent fee is _infinitely_ worse than zero by some metrics. If we can first just accept that each of these views are valid conclusions from different objectives for the system... then after that we can have a polite discussion about where on the compromise spectrum the system will delivers the best value to the most people.
I hear you, and agree completely. There are different visions for Bitcoin, some people are happy with a niche off-grid currency/payments system, some (more?) people are keen to see Bitcoin achieve greater goals, a global system which makes existing fiat currencies and card companies all but obsolete. Leaving those visions aside however there is indeed a middle ground on the block size issue between no-change and infinite blocks. I have always considered an algorithmic increase keeping ahead of demand as the conservative option. An interesting question that this begs is how do we measure the decentralization impact. Right now the best I have is basically a "gmaxwell-test"— what is my personal willingness to run a node given a certian set of requirements. Given that I'm an exceptional sample in many regards— including having hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of storage— at home, if some scale level would dissuade me it's probably a problem.
Anecdotal evidence like this is helpful, but surely we can do better. This is the nub of the argument about Peter's video. He makes no attempt whatsoever to provide a numerical measurement of decentralization before and after 1MB average block sizes occur. Perhaps nodes should be able to issue query responses which contain information about their transaction handling capacity. So what is the point of having decentralized validation system if a user has to choose between 5 centralized solutions to make a transaction?
In Peter's vision of the future those centralized solutions will all be Fidelity-bonded (Chaum-trusted) banks. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146307.0While I think the idea of them is very good, they must take market share of transactions on their own merits, not because Bitcoin is deliberately crippled. |
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All that said, I do cringe just a little at the over-simplification of the video... and worry a bit that in a couple years it will be clear that 2mb or 10mb or whatever is totally safe relative to all concerns—
gmaxwell, it is always a relief to read your level-headed analysis of a problem after a serious amount of arm-waving and hyperbole. The video is completely dishonest from the point where data-centers is mentioned. It makes the false case that up to 1MB blocks allow for decentralization and anything larger needs PayPal-like server farms for each node. It may be that the network would hum along fine with 2MB or 5MB blocks right now. We just don't know. If Peter Todd had run NASA's Apollo space program no astronauts would ever have landed on the moon because they would still be doing Earth orbit missions, tinkering with the technology. What is desperately needed is software that scans the Bitcoin network and provides metrics of exactly how much decentralization exists (by what ever measurement is sensible, such as propagating node-hours up-time) and plot this against average block size. Blocks are now about 0.18 MB each, so there is still time to gather stats and project how much fall-off (if any) occurs at values above 1. |
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It is tax evasion which is morally wrong and illegal. Cash is just as much a vehicle for this as Bitcoin.
Apologies, I meant tax evasion and I'm in complete agreement with you on this. Bitcoin could be a huge vehicle for the democratisation of money with a more voluntary tax system - although I'm not sure how well that would work in practise. If I put my idealist hat on then my hope is to see governments reduced to about 30% the size they are, which is reasonable considering they have expanded so much in recent decades, Also, that they are funded via sales tax (VAT/GST) only, paid by merchants. Property and vehicle taxes are still viable in a Bitcoin economy. Income tax can be zero :-) |
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 Anyway you draw it, we seem to be out of the short term downtrend. I was a short term bear until today's mini rally. I dumped at 110 only to sit idly watching the ticker as it went down to 103 thinking sub 100... Bought back in at a loss at 118, we've been stable way too long and have broken through all the bearish trendlines. I really see no reason not to be long right now. I called a uptrend to 130/140 area just before the Dwollar story broke. I think that this is still going to happen soon. |
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