You don't seem to quite get it.
From who do you suppose you will "download" the entire block chain initially.? So we have people who want a service and they aren't sure how they are going to get it. What a tough problem. If only there was this technology that could help people cooperate to get what they want more effectively than direct barter. Something that people could exchange but not consume directly, in order to help them keep track of whose turn it is to consume the products and services being produced. Wouldn't that be a great invention? You know what would be even better? What if anyone who wanted to provide a service was free to do so, and the people who wanted to consume the service were free to choose any provider which which they could come to a mutual agreement, or no provider at all? I wonder how good of a job such a mechanism might do at making sure that the number of suppliers was sufficient to meet the demand for the service? Could that improved barter trading thing maybe play role? Perhaps there's some kind of signal that might be passed through it that could be useful. It feels like we're so close to having all the technology we need to solve problems of how people are going to be able to get what they want via mutual trade. Perhaps in some far off future utopia a more advanced civilization just might finally crack this Enigma. |
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Yes, that's fine provided there are nodes in the network that can serve you the blocks you haven't verified yourself. A brand new node of course needs to verify every transaction in every block all the way back to the genesis block (to keep the current level of security). I'd like to think it's within the realm of possibility to create a ZKP that a given set of headers is only composed of the hashes of valid Bitcoin transactions. If such a proof existed, it would be safe for the entire network to discard the old history. |
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1) Does the NSA have any interest in breaking bitcoin?
Of course.
2) Do they have the means? Do they have any influence over the cryptography?
Yes. Sha is their creation and they made special adaptations to it for reasons that are secret.
3) Has the NSA ever engaged in a similar type of deception, i.e., promoting weak cryptographics so they could seem to be breaking codes, doing their jobs, expertly?
They have. They are not so much 'code breakers' as 'con men employing code breakers who are willing to work for con men'.
That still doesn't prove that NSA has intentionally made SHA insecure. It gives them a motive, but there's no evidence. Your fallacy is in where the burden of proof lies. Is it better to trust the good intentions of the nsa, or to use a clean algorithm so there is no need to trust them? Do they have such a sparkling history that it is wise to trust them? What would happen if, just once, the NSA was asleep at the wheel and allowed a major cryptographic tool like SHA-2 get approved without an exploitable back door, and to make things worse some status quo-threatening distributed currency started using it. How might they recover from this blunder? One way would be to spread FUD about SHA-2 to convince everyone to switch to a new algorithm their deep cover agents had prepared just for this event. But on the other hand, if SHA-2 was broken and they wanted to keep the truth from getting out, they'd propose a story just like what I wrote above. Unless that's just what they want you to think. Maybe this loop of infinite recursion of motives but no proof is not the way to go. Instead, look at this another way. There is an enormous financial incentive to being able to break double SHA-256. The the most obvious incentive belongs to the ASIC manufacturers, who are devoting a lot of time to building machines that try to break double SHA-256 as rapidly and efficiently as possible. None of them have found a substantial shortcut yet, despite years of working on it. If the NSA did have a secret method, then every single person in the organization who knew about it would have a huge incentive to profit from it personally. Could all of them resist the temptation? I think the hash rate will tell us if/when SHA-256 is broken, because we'll see a sudden increase that's not explainable any other way. Unless or until that happens, SHA-256 is probably safe. |
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By "prune syncing" I meant reduce the amount of bandwidth needed for syncing so that it doesn't grow arbitrarily with the length of the chain. That doesn't exist currently. I think that a yet-to-be-invented zero knowledge proof could probably achieve this eventually. |
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If 50%+ of miners decide to do something, and they have the programming ability, they can make bitcoin into whatever they want.
They can certainly try, but miners are at the whim of market forces (just like the rest of the world). Everyone holding bitcoins before the miners "do something" can sell these new "whatever the miners want" forked coins and buy actual bitcoins with the proceeds. The smart kids will mine the valuable coin while the we-are-trying-to-push-rules-on-you crowd will be stuck with a bunch of worthless tokens. Miners only make money because people value the properties of the current block chain and are willing to exchange other things of value for the bitcoins which exist because of that block chain. I keep hearing long-time bitcoiners talking about the power miners have when it's obvious that the economic majority has all the power. If no one will trade other objects of value for whatever it is the miners are selling, I can promise you that the miners won't be selling it for long. Miners have no power. TLDR: No. |
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I don't believe that would be the same if you include the $ value of all the assets listed on the platform. The nxt token is not the most important aspect of the system, it is simply a mechanism of which to pay for access to features on the system. You are looking at the wrong metrics. Getting into to nxt doesn't necxasarily mean to buy the Nxt token. In fact many are unable to hang in to the token as they find better uses for them, which is part of the reason the price is lower.
Very nice. You pump the nxt token one moment, the when you get called out on it you immediately change stories as if nobody will notice. |
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Is there a reason to expect this error to change over time? Quite possibly, as new wallets come into use that operate in ways different than what Blockchain's heuristics expect. As transactions become more complex in general, the less accurate that estimate becomes. |
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Something I don't think I've explained very well yet is that the payment code proposal provides the missing "from address" that everybody wants, in a way that doesn't compromise privacy. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/From_address |
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hm, that's interesting. So USD tx volume is roughly stable but number of transactions skyrockets. This means the average amount of a tx is going down.
Any rationale for this? Number of transactions is an objective number that's easy to measure. There's more uncertainty about USD volume, since there's no way to be 100% sure which output in a transaction is a spend and which one is change. |
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Effectively LTC has returned to the price where it initially started trading against BTC back in the summer of 2013. |
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I expect that Bitcoin will eventually be upgraded to use ed25519 signatures, putting to rest entirely any controversy associated with secp256k1.
Wouldn't that require a fork? or that can be done easily on the fly on a further upgrade of Bitcoin qt? how does that work. I've heard that it can be done with a soft fork by redefining a currently-unused opcode. |
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I expect that Bitcoin will eventually be upgraded to use ed25519 signatures, putting to rest entirely any controversy associated with secp256k1.
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I hope everybody is getting familiar with the informal economy now, before access to the informal economy becomes a matter of survival: http://www.thefallingdarkness.com/2015/04/22/the-cashless-society-is-going-to-backfire-for-the-establishment/They should also consider what will happen if every single transaction causes you to lose money. If just having money means losing money. This will make it profitable for the black market reach into every facet of the economy. Think prohibition, but applied to buying groceries and paying your rent. Everything that can be done informally, will be. This will in time, pave the way for an economy that is separate from the one we currently operate in. It will create a viable alternative to the system we’ve been forced to endure.
Perhaps, this is difficult for us imagine because we’ve never experienced it. But in most cases the black market always finds a way, because the black market goes by another name: the free market. And the free market can’t be stifled in the long run. It will always produce an alternative to any law or regulation.
Money has become intrinsically connected to everything we want, need, and do, so by removing cash and creative negative interest rates, they’re placing a tax on every day life. And if the black market does what the black market does best, it will create an underground alternative to everything we want and need. And I mean everything.
The same situation occurred in the final days of the Soviet Union. Their dysfunctional system produced one of the most virulent and extensive black markets in history, and one could find just about any product or service there. There’s no reason why it can’t happen here. If they succeed in eliminating cash, their system will fade while the black market thrives. They’re too stupid and hubristic to realize that they’re fueling alternatives to their vision of the world, and sealing their own doom. |
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But there are very few people, none in fact, who have even one percent of the computing power of the NSA. citation needed $8965-million-supercomputing-center/d/d-id/1097313 One percent of $896.5 million is roughly $9 million. They have much more than that. Do you know any people with even $9 million computers loaded with code breaking software? The point is that the person defending the NSA was offering a false gift, a Trojan horse. Is the NSA secretly trying to help the public learn math? No. That is zero percent of their motive, though a few people may learn a little math by trying to break btc. If the NSA devoted all that equipment toward Bitcoin mining, what percent of the network hashrate would they acquire? |
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But there are very few people, none in fact, who have even one percent of the computing power of the NSA. citation needed |
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Let's stay on topic. The need is to prove the negative. You cannot prove the negative outside a bounded context, but you can do so within a bounded context.
Neither Factom nor Colored Coins nor Bitcoin nor any other ledger can change this.
The bounded context can be defined by a colored coin. Only with physical assets, actions can be taken outside colored coins.
The bounded context can be defined by Factom. Only with physical assets, actions can be taken outside of Factom. That is a complicated way of saying that you were conflating two independent issues under the term "negative proof": 1. Can a user trust real-world entities to honour the promises represented by a digital token. 2. Can a user trust that a particular digital token is valid with respect to other digital tokens. The first issue is not a problem that can be solved by software and in that case both Factom and colored coins are on the same solution. Since it's completely outside the scope of the conversation that's not what I was talking about when I said redesign problems to remove the need for negative proofs. The second issue is one that can be solved by creating a system the proves that no conflicting digital tokens exist compared to a particular token of interest, but they can also be solved in much easier ways such as having the holder of the token produce a positive proof of ownership. The second way is easier to implement and more robust, and the former is overly complicated unless the actual goal is to produce straw justifications for an appcoin. |
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Bitcoin has many issues to become so generalized. The very fact that Justus wants BTC to be a store of value while also believing BTC to be a the blockchain data store speaks to the extremism in his view. Congratulations on learning how to use scary words like "extremism". Perhaps someday you can graduate to adjectives and maybe eventually even syllogisms. |
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