Another important reason I think is that zero fee transactions would make it very easy for someone to clog the mempool by simply generating a huge number of transactions. Having a fees discourages this as every transaction will cost something.

Apart from this, of course the fee-based economy is one thing on everyone's mind. The emission rate has to go to near-zero sometime. At that time, fees is the only reason that miners will include transactions. How this fee economy shapes up could be an area of research by itself.
None of the chains except BTC and ETH hve shown practically what such a situation would be like.

Great topic. It must be such a source of tension for people who have hundreds of BTC and other crypto. So many attack vectors and new are being researched everyday.
Even if you ensure that your air-gapped hardware has no malware , there is the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability! While a software patch suffices for Meltdown, Spectre needs a hardware fix it seems. So Goodbye old processors!!
Looks like the only secure way is to write down private keys and store separate parts of them in fireproof, blast proof steel cube. You could always leave crytpic clues for your grandson/daughter (National Treasure) if you are worried about succession. It is interesting that cryptocurrency wave has provided renewed motivation to academic work on such attacks. Wonder how far along SHA-256 attacks are?

This "black money" issue has been a big talking point in my country for the last 3-4 years. Ill gotten wealth that the politicians and businessmen stack elsewhere, typically in Swiss accounts. For the last few years, there was a lot of public pressure to make the names of individuals with huge swiss accounts public. Lot of political mileage was garnered by the present ruling party promising to release the names once they come to power. Obviously nothing of that sort happened as they too started citing "issues" in making the names public.

The one thing that stands out is that even if there is pressure the elites protect each other. Democracy or no democracy, the rulers will get away with it no matter what. The same money laundering issue is being touted in case of bitcoin. Bitcoin affords anonymity to even the middle classes. This is what they fear. It is okay if the richest 1% stack billions in black money in swiss accounts (which can not be disclosed) but if it's a technology then that becomes a problem for them. It's so exasperating

The bold part is something troublesome though. Government's and Fed's wariness of Bitfinex comes from the fact that they are the Federal Reserve of crypto.. They are printing money out of thin air and keeping the crypto-economy running. Bitfinex is wrong, the other is absolutely right??!

Correct. No celebrations yet but if the matter goes to court and there is a hearing, the govt. will have to clear its stand regarding taxation. RBI as an autonomous body will have to provide better data based judgement than giving out blanket judgments like "Cryptocurrecies raise concerns of consumer protection, market integrity and money laundering, among others".

With the example of other countries willing to accept and consider some form of regulations, the govt. cannot simply choose to ignore and ban. The lobbying is on. Lets see where it takes us.

Glad that we are on the same page on this. I do hope that endlasuresh can prove o_e_l_e_o (dude! such a pain typing your name!!lol) wrong here by being a bit more receptive to my efforts.

This depends on him as an individual. The anonymity afforded by bitcoin ensures that nobody can hold him to his word if he is okay with leaving the aTriz account altogether. I do hope he can make the amends he proposed. Fact is, t there is nothing he'll get out of it considering the vitiated atmosphere.

Is there any precedent to someone losing rep and getting it back after refunding a bunch of people?? I saw a thread once where a previously trusted guy put up a list of people he was refunding one at a time. It was a long list. Maybe some of the old members remember what I am referring to. I am pretty sure he never got the rep back.

ALU said he is out and Lauda has negged him. In terms of action, I don't think there is anything more they can do. It is our naivete if we expect there being any other possible option in this world of anonymity.
As far as the new criteria for projects is concerned, is there is anyone today who can objectively judge an ICO to be an exit scam or not? Apart from getting the funds escrowed beforehand, there is hardly any other judging criteria they can hold ICO devs upto. No individual or company managing ICOs can afford to hold these people to higher standards because then they simply lose business. This is a problem for the whole ecosystem and there is hardly anything ALU can do except putting up a disclaimer.

I see people saying great things about Amazix but they too have no control over whether the intended ICO is a scam or not. Infact, if a manager becomes too trustworthy, you can even find these ICO devs using their name to gain legitimacy. That is a dangerous trend in itself. There are still just two friends you have in the world of ICO investing:

• Do Your Own Research
• Never invest more than you can afford to lose

At such moments, rather than judging people, I like to ask what would I do? For example, I consider myself generally honest but never had to take a call on such a thing. We all are "generally honest" till we get a whiff of power and control. Power corrupts. You find a way to make some quick gains without anybody knowing and maybe take a quick decision. (Like Alia's code vouch, ignoring bitbliss' false representations). You do such things because you are in too deep. I like to draw the parallel to a lot of young Indians who are idealists when they join public services. But slowly the system takes a toll on you. Not everyone is a Vinod Rai (Love his book) and most end up serving the system they dreamed to change.

I have seen people fall in real life before so I don't hold my hopes too high. Also, like i said, given an option of never having to come back and just leaving everything behind, what would any normal man do? I think if there is an alt account he can jump to, he already has done that.

Also, please stop posting like this you guys. Otherwise, you'll soon be unable to earn any merit and rank up with such patterns of posting for the sake of completing post counts.

You will then be crying like the countless other about the merit system. Here is some advice you should take. Your language skills seem good enough but you are in the danger of falling into the other kind of trap that makes it evident that you are account farmers trying to milk bounty/ signature campaigns.

Just some advice. Your choice to take it or ignore. Peace out.

LOL..What the f*** man?? Are you like a real person or a bot or are just using google translate??!! Whatever it is, you clearly need some holding hands here.. The post is not a topic about someone fretting about his personal "debt". It's the Goddamn World debt of the governments we are talking about

But great advice mate. Maybe all the state heads should learn to play a musical instrument. I would love to see Donald Trump giving short one hour lesson to his friend Narendra Modi or even Kim. Ohh wait. They are already having some music and dance classes with each other..LOL

According to this news story at INC42 website, a PIL has been accepted by Delhi High Court.  It has issued a notice to following bodies:

1. Reserve Bank of India (RBI),
2. The Union of India through Secretary, Ministry of Finance and
3. GST Council

A hearing has been scheduled for May 24.

The main points in the petition are:

• The responsibility to recognize a trade as a service and define justified taxation falls on the GST Council. It has failed to introduced any appropriate regulations with respect to cryptocurrencies in the Goods and Services Tax law.
• RBI is dealing with cryptocurrency in an unprofessional manner. It doesn't even define ‘cryptocurrency’  properly and vaguely stated that 
  
  Quote
  “Virtual Currencies (VCs), also variously referred to as crypto currencies and crypto assets, raise concerns of consumer protection, market integrity and money laundering, among others".
  This is a arbitrary statement without any though behind it and has been rightly questioned.
• They have quoted Article 14 and Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution of India. These imply that every person has the right to equality before law and all citizens have the right “to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business.” Clearly, such an arbitrary decision goes against these principles.

Now that the matter is in front of court, hopefully we'll see some rational arguments from the regulatory side rather than stupid blanket bans and demonization.
It looks like the people at Kali Digital here are the ones who filed this petition. More power to them. Show them some love.

What do you mean by saying that the real truth is that "I was about to leave forum but TMAN said bitcoin price will increase so I stayed"? How is bitcoin price increase related to you staying at the forum.
Negative trust doesn't have an expiration but it can be removed by those who have tagged you. It depends on the individual's judgement who gave it to you.

People who tend to support QS are told they are QS alts. It is one of those standing jokes like "Lauda did something, open a thread". His saying so doesn't make The Pharmacist a liar. It's your opinion of him which you are free to have and you can even give him a feedback for that.

My reason for supporting Lauda and the other members who went after the spammers is not because of the signature campaign. Signature campaigns are a way to earn BTC for those who give their time to the forum. There is still an ongoing debate about how it is proving to be bad for the forum.

Regarding that link, this guy was running an HYIP(he says he dint know) which is not allowed as per their terms and conditions. Why they'd with hold his funds is up to coinpayments. They are based out of Canada and only the involved parties can give clarity on it.
Although, in any such case where you have an unregistered company running from a third world country using a payment gateway like coinpayments, running what they deem as HYIP, they may have to freeze the funds to ensure they can repay any of the people defrauded.
You see the reviews and you can see that some people are complaining about the merchants too. So the merchant getting his funds frozen is one resort for coinpayments.

By the way, quit saying things like "your Lauda" and people wouldn't judge you so strongly like here:

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Guilty by association. All the other people appearing on that spreadsheet got negged too. The question you should ask yourself is what have you done after that negative trust to show that you are a trustworthy and contributing member of the forum?? You've been carrying around the baton of vengeance in all these threads that pop up against the person who negged you.

What exactly are you asking? What i was saying is that the barrage of accusations made taking a decision on aTriz tricky and delayed. People had been screaming "scam, scam" for so long that when an actual wrongdoing on aTriz's part came to fore, people were unwilling to act hastily. Ultimately he got negged. you must have heard the story about the shepherd boy who cried wolf.

You don't have to show me anything. I have read the aTriz thread.

There is no need to drag everyone in this. aTriz is negged for what he did. Whether an individual (Pharmacist) negs him or not is their own personal perogative. Maybe he knows the guy better. If a friend of mine does something wrong, and I see it as a mistake, it's my choice whether I continue to trust them or not.

What did you mean by that green text? Frankly, stop saying such things and people will be a lot more understanding.
The intention of my post was to show you that you are unnecessarily becoming cannon fodder for the animosity between people who were here much before us. If you like doing that and see it as a contribution/ sacrifice you are willing to make for the forum then, by all means, continue doing that.

So if i click on that link, does it take me tumbling down some exciting rabbit-hole or installs some crazy malware that I would have no idea about??!!

Could you explain in simple words what exactly are you trying to do? What i could understand is you are trying to find high value public keys and then use some 'algorithm' to check them against randomly generated private keys. That sounds evil as shit but still should be worth a lot of academic interest. Like those people who work to attack crypto algorithms all the time.

First, Economies have so many variables ranging from the social, psychological and political that economics cannot really be considered "Science". It is still very much a "Social Science"; a Humanities topic, if you will.
You used the phrase 'econometric tricks'. The same thing as "Financial Engineering". Money is ultimately about power and control. The power to control taxation and interest for governance. What the economists have shrewdly achieved is to paint these "tools" of taxation and interest as some sort of holy grail for constant growth. When constant growth and consumerism shouldn't even be the sole target of societies.


This seems to be coming from the laissez-faire, anti-welfare school. I don't think there is anything wrong with welfare as long as it is not used for political gains. The problem is that this "insane amount of money" has no basis and no accountability.
Imagine a country where all "welfare allocations" were transparent on the blockchain and every single Satoshi spent was accounted for. There won't be an unlimited amount to allocate because, well, you won't have an unlimited reserve currency to fall back on.

Right now, it's fair game for all sort of organisations that take their share of the pie from the debt financed US budget. The money goes in and nothing comes out. That debt-financed money ultimately reaches the top 1% of people via their companies. The burden of debt is borne by the middle classes in the form of higher taxes, higher inflation.
A transparent, decentralized currency is quite a solution for this whole problem. We never hear the media talk about that. The economists are free to wax eloquent about "fiscal policy", "monetary policy", quantitative easing" and what not. Fancy terms to make people realize that it's all too complicated and the trio of Govts, Banks and Businesses is doing a fine job.

Dear Sir,

It has been very hard to follow all the thing you keep saying. I have been following your saga of accusations for sometime now and I must express my awe at your perseverance in trying to bring about the downfall of certain individuals. The one problem is you almost always make references without going into the details and leave these accusations just hanging there like sowing a thought. It's almost like 'The Inception'.

Here for example, you refer to something called a "trust dump" and then ask some very established members to comment on this. Someday. I'll try to figure out what exactly went down with you. I wonder why someone like Vod would leave you negative feedback. I wonder what past sins you have done that have not been pardoned yet.

I wish you spoke with more clarity and proofs than this habit of insinuating things and then just leaving them there. "Go Figure!!". Sorry to say so, but it's a headache to read the drama in your posts. It gets irritating to see you trying to instigate things again certain individuals, again and again and again. I saw you mention somewhere that your business is doing great. Then why do you come back again and again to start the same old tirade??

It is my genuine, humble request to stop it. Please find something better to do with your thoughts and actions. Focusing too much on vengeance from an individual or wishing retribution on them takes a toll on one's soul. It is a very unhealthy thought process. I wish you can come out of the obsession and build something good for yourself. You are an old timer here at the forum. I am sure us newcomers could learn a lot from you, only if you were interested in doing some good. It's always sad to see you wasting so much time and words on this. It is a lost cause. Please find the will to leave this obsession and do something really worth your while.

Be the best, most honest seller maybe. There is enough money, trust and reputation to be earned in honest, non-vengeful work too. I am sure someone with your level of focus and consistency can do it. Stop wasting it on negative things and rise up. Good Luck!!

There there.. Why such gloom?? He is Professor Shiller. He is just preparing the background to start shilling bitcoin..LOL..

And yeah, we do need people to find real use but I don't think enough people are going to get bored. Interest in money or promise of riches doesn't get subdued so easily. Even if the majority loses interest, there'll still be a core group of people who will find the idea of p2p transactions worth exploring. And then there is the technology itself. A lot of Computer majors are going to show continued interest in this for a pretty long while.

This is interesting. I got this old link where Airtel planned to get into insurance and mutual funds. Where did you get the source about selling data to NBFC's for credit scoring. It's quite possible.
It's funny how the poorest have to struggle for loan of a few thousand rupees while the rich get huge loans on the basis of simply their connections. The recent exposes, especially the one with Chanda Kochar are damning and shameful.

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Nice points there. What exactly do you mean by the Point no. 3 there?? If you order something through, say, purse.io, you do need an address. Or are you suggesting this in terms of p2p trades??

The patent application reads:

How is this not a form of surveillance of data? And looks like they have been awarded the patent too...

They are narrowing down the search domain for consumers making crypto payments. This would allow them to make better sense of who is buying what. The kind of thing that amazon already does for their "suggested for you" sections.
The burden to maintain anonymity while making such transactions (by removing any direct references and using VPN for IP) will be on the consumer.

Controlling the monetary system is very much a Bretton-woods invention. World economy had been running through the years when you did not have these 'monetary controls', albeit with crashes and depressions. Crashes still happen today.  The problem is, economists have convinced themselves and the world that this model works the best. Even when there is an alternative emerging for the taking, they are more interested in disparaging it than actually informing the media and public about both sides. It's a battle of perception than a case of one being superior over other.

A capped reserve gives much less wiggle room to central banks(like the Federal Reserve) forcing them, the Politicians and the Investment bankers on their management boards to actually do their job. While with an unlimited reserve, you can always "Quantitatively Ease" your way out of any fuck-up.

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Exactly! This is what we are talking about. Why can't there be a real debate on these topics:

• How much "wiggle room" for monetary control do the central banks, governments and businesses need?
• Why should it at be at expense of middle classes and their lives' savings??
• Why should the rich keep getting richer while the public expenditures on welfare measures for the poorest are forced to cut beyond recognition in the name of austerity measures??

When you create a circle-jerk where businesses, politicians and central banks are only interested in keeping each other protected, you will never have enough 'budget' to help the poor. Demagoguery based democracies like India and USA, with their humongous disparity are a prime example of this phenomena.

Nobody met Satoshi in person after he first declared the whitepaper and started running the network along with the late Hal Finney. There was a time when media tried really hard and a lot of people were called Satoshi Nakamoto at various times.

Some believe it was a group of people or even state actors. Conspiracy theories can also be found regarding it all being a big plan. Whatever it was, it was a gift from the man/ group/ organization to the world. It is one of the awesome things about bitcoin that there is no figurehead but just a legend that lives on!

For an idea of what the man said, this link of quotes from Satoshi with sources is highly recommended.

We all have been hearing about this imminent crisis when people will buy up gold and silver as last-resort assets. This may partially be because the western economies have never looked so battered and in bad shape, since the great depression, in terms of macroeconomic indicators.

A lot of is still sentiment driven. When people lose faith in investments that are considered safe, like bonds, this can result in a sudden crash-like event when all liquidity dries up. If it is really going to be such a time, then why not invest in bitcoin. Although having some Gold and Silver won't hurt. It sounds so ridiculous but are people really going to hoard gold as protection against some sort of economic apocalypse??

If this happens, I am going back to my small home in the mountains, buy a few goats, start farming and wait out the liquidity crunch. With a working internet connection and some BTC, I may as well build up some cheap assets!!

Two important parts of the article:
If governments cannot refinance their debts, the burden eventually falls on public spending. On education, healthcare and infrastructure. This upward spiral of debt and downward spiral of "funds available for the tax-payer" are directly related.

Bitcoin supporters have been saying this for long enough. Creative firefighting measures made possible by an unlimited, inflationary currency will  ultimately, always take their toll on the middle class.
How is this fair?? Why do we keep hearing arguments AGAINST a capped reserve currency with comparisons made to the gold standard and effectively no noise against this tiger of unlimited debt that the governments keep riding at the expense of middle classes. Any economists listening to this?

His point about "Computer Science department not being able to explain it" is probably just harmless jesting or simply an off-handed comment. The kind we have come to accept from the Noble prize fraternity (shameless URL to one of my posts).

As can be seen from his past statement of "It’s such a wonderful story. If it were only true.”, He has used this belittling tone before. I view him calling it a psychological experiment an improvement. Bitcoin must be getting on his nerves because the student community and young people are so fascinated by it.

On his cue, we should expect more statements from the Nobel fraternity (mentioned earlier) in the near future. You cannot just expect them to turn around their views at once. They have to do this gradually. If they turn it around suddenly, they'd look like fools for their earlier statements. This is just them putting the fut through the door to our side..