jbreher,

Unfortunately CoinJoin is jammable otherwise we could get on chain anonymity without a fork of Bitcoin's protocol. Btw, I (AnonyMint) was the first person to point out to gmaxell (in the CoinJoin thread) that his ideas to prevent jamming were not sound and that no ideas could possibly be. DarkCoin reiterated this by trading jammability for giving up the identities to the masternodes (which can be Sybil attacked). DarkWallet has not solved the jammability and will thus fail.

Also I don't know how you can pay-per-packet in real-time (i.e. 0 delay) for the Tor redesign I proposed with a 10 minute block confirmation delay. Well actually I do know how (one of my secrets) but 10 minutes is still too extreme (I can't yet describe problems but I anticipate complications the longer the delay). 1 minute may be fine.

Also let's not forget UDP and FTP came before adoption of TCP/IP and HTTP respectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol#Differences_from_HTTP

Exactly there is a valid duality to consider. I did a mea culpa on that.

I would phrase that not as "bring in more regulation" (government will attempt to avoid regulating something they can't although they fail to recognize in many cases, because it draws attention to their impotence), but rather that Bitcoin can gain more mainstream adoption in at least one sense, i.e. through government compliant providers such as Paypal.

I don't know if I agree if Bitcoin can get more adoption overall versus a hypothetical altcoin. The most decentralized coin will win that race of scaling. Bitcoin has a lead and it is compatible with the government approved world.

Experimentation can potentially answer that question.

I guess in your perfect politically correct nirvana over there in Europe, conflation of debate-in-search-of-truth with personal-insult is common category error. I certainly wouldn't be politically correct over there. I am reminded of where Armstrong says in his Forecaster documentary movie at a dinner table, that Americans are super polite now (because of fear of the 98% conviction rate and prosecution of almost any action as a crime).

If your reaction is because I have been harsh on you, I don't think I was intentionally harsh rather just forceful on the facts, but if I was it was because of your condescending and smug attitude towards me in the prior thread. My assumption is you took my forceful arguments personally and decided you needed to make an example of me. I think it is sometimes unavoidable in passioned debate.

P.S. I didn't realize you had quoted him cross thread until I had already submitted my reply.

I know you are referring to efficiency of capital not being misallocated, i.e. the efficiency gained from decentralization.

Therefor I assert if Bitcoin falls to government regulation as I allege will likely happen, it is no longer as efficient as the decentralization ideal.

Thus I assert a regulation resistant altcoin can in reality end up more efficient than Bitcoin in terms of decentralized allocation of capital and resources in an economy.

If you were referring to other measures of efficiency, such as transaction speed. An altcoin could possibly improve upon Bitcoin.

No. Not exclusively. Just whether you would jump with any significant portion of your interest, effort, and money, i.e. more than an insignificant smidgen. Assume any quality of implementation required by you.

I've seen this advocated as a positive for Bitcoin many times. So my rebuttal is not targeted at you personally, but at the concept which you've ostensibly learned from others.

This assumes crypto-currency will be the only currency or the public can force all government transactions on to the block chain, which I assert is irrational and delusional to the extreme.

If ever you had only one way to transact, we'd be slaves in a 666 system (don't tell me that with decentralization we'd be free of the Law of Collective Political Economics, impossible...don't abuse yourself with notions of eliminating nature and achieving perfect nirvana).

We can't even force the government to reveal all information about the NSA, so we surely can't force them to be open when they have other options for transacting, kickbacks, and other ways of gaming the system.

Also we already know about the government transactions in sufficient detail to know about the corruption, but we still can't vote them out of office. We the People lack the power in democracy is because of the Law of Collective Political Economics.

The way crypto-currency will reform government is "voting by feet". When people have a way to walk away from the government edicts, e.g. confiscate and redistribute (ahem tax and spend), the government becomes impotent or at least the people have a finer grained veto on socialism because each person can make his or her financial weight counted in terms of what they agree to and not.

In other words, tax should never be mandatory and should always be by consent of the governed[1].

And this is why anonymity is so important so we can force the government to accept that we are each individually sovereign and must be respected as such, as opposed the current situation where we are owned by our government and enslaved as such. This is not black and white demarcation line, but a slider of comparative power. We individuals always need to be improving our decentralization technology.

Collective sovereignty is an oxymoron, because of the Law of Collective Political Economics.

If you can appreciate the above point and my point about why the collectivized majority is always wrong, then you will understand how I define an anarchist. It doesn't mean chaos, it means maximizing mutual respect and degrees-of-freedom.

[1]

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/10/03/obama-holder-destroy-the-constitution/ Quote from: POTUS Barrack Obama The belief that through conscience and free will, each of us has the right to live as we choose.  The belief that power is derived from the consent of the governed, and that laws and institutions should be established to protect that understanding.  And those ideas eventually inspired a band of colonialists across an ocean, and they wrote them into the founding documents that still guide America today, including the simple truth that all men — and women — are created equal. But those ideals have also been tested — here in Europe and around the world.  Those ideals have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.  This alternative vision argues that ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign. http://armstrongeconomics.com/library/books/considerations-on-representative-government-mill/ Quote from: John Stuart Mill Whatever is the strongest power in society will obtain the governing authority; and a change in the political constitution can not be durable unless preceded or accompanied by an altered distribution of power in society itself. A nation, therefore, can not choose its form of government. The mere details, and practical organization, it may choose; but the essence of the whole, the seat of the supreme power, is determined for it by social circumstances.

Agreed, spaghetti rigor mortis can set in if too many (failed and cross-conflicting) experiments are made on the production system.

One of the principles of hackerdom is to scrap-and-rebuild every so often. We can't be doing that in the production system. The production system can only justify incorporating successful experiments that have demonstrably (i.e. proven) unavoidable and critical significance.

Exactly. If.

Have you ever considered that those advances which you speak ("Model T" versus LamborghiniToyota Prius) may come from altcoins with Bitcoin as the reserve currency at the center of the crypto-currency universe?

Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf didn't create the entire web. There were millions of innovators.

As an analogy in the gold mining world or even for Facebook, the smaller mines or startups make the innovations, then they are acquired, e.g. WhatsApp. The humongous returns on investment are made on the earlier stage riskier investments.

Uh oh, I feel gold rush fever may be returning soon again to cryptoland, once we bottom and start the next leg up. I'm sure many of you share the same sentiment.

jyakulis, again mea culpa. You are correct.

This thread is a marketing survey so that before some developer wastes a lot of time implementing, he is already sure there is a market for his effort.

I do think there are some virtues to Bitcoin. For example, if someone does create the killer altcoin, then all those Paypal accounts can get Bitcoin, then trade on a decentralized exchange for that altcoin. Bitcoin has a purpose and probably not only that one. I think of Bitcoin as the reserve currency of crypto. In that capacity, there is nothing wrong with its design. Slower transactions makes it technically less risky. Transparent blockchain makes it amenable to government, Paypal, etc..

Apologies I forget to reiterate the virtues of Bitcoin. Normal myopia of a (high strung, hyper-competitive) developer who is focused on making his own baby (especially when in the mode of defending against criticism). Mea culpa.

That is right you don't get to invent facts. Porn was on the internet in the early 1990s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_pornography#Usenet_Groups

Usenet was already a killer application that couldn't be done in any other way.

Didn't you read DannyHamilton confirmation upthread that none of the innovations I suggested will be coming to Bitcoin any time soon.

Some discussion from this thread ended up in my thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=880088.msg9717627#msg9717627

I was similarly pissed off when I had my own merchant account for my CoolPage.com sales. Nevertheless I had a lot of sales that went through that merchant account successfully.

But he is just making ideological rants, probably for the publicity for his business and to gain the sympathy of the Bitcoin crowd hoping they will treat their wives to Bitcoin expenditures on his site.

The main reason for accepting Bitcoin is it brings awareness of your obscure business, e.g. I discovered namecheap.com because they accept Bitcoin. That works only up to the point that you are the first of say 5 or so in your business category to accept Bitcoin. After that, it doesn't scale any more, because the effect is diluted.

The fact is that this is not a sufficient incentive for most merchants because:

1.	Bitcoin represents only roughly 0.1% (1 in 1000) of the people who have a debit or credit card.
2.	Bitcoin costs much more per transaction in customer support due to the long delays which cause errors, such as double payments, lost payments, etc.. I personally experienced this numerous times using Localbitcoins with Bitpay. It is a fucking horrendously crappy system. I wouldn't dare ask my mother or grandmother to use it. I would be extremely embarrassed to put my name on it as core developer, as I pride myself in high-quality work (must be my German ancestry because I am pedantic about the details when I am not too rushed). And don't tell me it is not the fault of the protocol core developers, they need to take responsibility for the useability of the technology (Edit: see mea culpa downthread).
3.	Customers don't like to pay by Bitcoin when they feel they need the protection of being able to issue a chargeback via their credit card company. Until Bitcoin has some "plug and play" escrow mechanism that is ubiquitously available, then it can't address a big segment of the online sales market (and it certainly can't scale in retail due to the 10 -  30 minute confirmation delay, yeah I know the evil of off chain services providing fast transactions). And once it does have this mechanism available, then it will no longer have the same advantage to merchants that you are claiming. I do understand the virtue that I did some somewhat anonymous transactions with Bitcoin, so it was worth the hassle, but that doesn't scale (how many people are going to jump through those hoops). Note there is another insight here. Micropayments for immediately delivered goods such as pay-per-packet are an ideal fit to the advantage of non-repudiable transactions. Do you see where I am going with this? Who is ignorant here?

Blahblahblah. That is what you all said in 2013 when I was saying Tor was not anonymous. Now it is proven to be not anonymous with recent research claiming 81% of the users can be identified and the recent seizure of 100s of hidden servers. Any more excuses?

Why are humans so unable to project non-linear change? Because it is perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the human race.




That is not an analogy. KYC exists every where already.


Excuses. Critical mass is obtained when most people have heard of a new technology, which was 1997 or 1998 for Yahoo and the internet (which is when I launched Art-O-Matic and CoolPage). At that point, you know the potential the adoption curve. And we reached that in 2013 for Bitcoin (which is when I entered the Bitcoin space). It was plastered on every major news site the entire year. No wonder it went to $1000.


It is only imaginary to those who couldn't for example see in 2013 (and were making the similar accusations as you are now against me) why Tor was not anonymous, but I could.

---

Hahaha, The pot calling the kettle black.

When did you visit a 3rd world country and see that people pay each other for goods and services with cash. They don't need an ATM to get some.

---

And thus are educated enough to have a bank account.

It doesn't make much sense to compare dysfunctional regions of the world to functional ones. How much impact can a dysfunctional economy have relatively speaking?

Africa is different from Asia in that the governments in some cases (e.g. Ethiopia) have restricted access and don't want to promote their countries as open for call centers and freelance online work, i.e. they actively control and restrict the internet. So in this case, yes the people may have difficulty getting a bank account, but this is not the norm for the societies which are prospering and growing at their potential such as the Philippines and much of the rest of the developing world.


How is polygamy working? I ask not to criticize but to ask if it works?

---

MPesa and Hong Kong's Octopus are not decentralized currencies. They are akin to Paypal or the Philippines' GlobeCash or SmartMoney for Globe and Smart network cell phones.


Not much. It is more a novelty. It might work in some yuppie, techie environs as a gimmick, but this isn't a trend that can scale every where.


That is why they never attain 1 million users in 2001 as I did. Which is 10 million users in today's internet.


Myself since 1980, or 1978 if you count when I starting reading books on how to program. So I think I can claim more experience than you.


That was obvious because you are in Europe and he is here in the Philippines where I am. And cbeast, no I never met Art Bell.

Correct and astute. Debt writedowns have to come. But I am just saying you can't write them down without hurting any innocent people, which seemed to be what you were implying originally.

Well managed debt writedowns involve spreading the pain over a decade or more so that the dislocation doesn't plunge society into a Dark Age. Armstrong was interested to help to design such. But instead we have the central banks continuing to increase the debt problem. Thus we are much more likely to get a chaotic dislocation and head into a radically abrupt downspiral.

Global contagion ETA is 2016 according to Armstrong's ECM model.

As I explained in my prior post, all the people of the world are deluded (or at least divided and multifaceted priorities) in ways that hand the power to the powers-that-be. You don't seem to grasp or be aware of the undeniable fact of Iron Law of Collective Political Economics.

Have fun with your ideological idealism, but it has no basis in history or actual outcomes. You pontificate without fact checking.

Thus your opinions are useless ideological ranting. Erect a soap box and blabber to yourself while pedestrians ferry by you unfazed, oh the drool. Meanwhile serious business folks and software developers will remain focused on reality as it actually is.


They can also rule they (mining pools and Bitcoin itself) act as "Money Laundering" vehicles, because one can use cash to buy mining equipment and then convert that into Bitcoins, or buy Bitcoins directly with cash. Thus AML (Anti-Money Laundering) law can be applied. One of the requirements for AML is KYC (Know Your Customer). So this means every user has to be identified.

Can you please stop the bullshit? Do you enjoy deluding yourself?

They would not want to move very fast on regulation, because they want all of you to remain deluded for as long as possible, and so will act only when it is time to take all your wealth (when the shit hits the fan global collapse ensues[1]).

[1]	http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/12/01/the-government-know-sovereign-debt-defaults-are-coming/ http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/12/01/changing-bankruptcy-laws-for-banks/ http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/12/02/can-money-just-be-devalued-creating-deflation-as-a-solution/

Fuck were you born yesterday. Seriously man, have you not observed how KYC is applied every where in the world today, when it wasn't applied before 9/11.


The name has worked perfectly to induce you to sign up a newbie account to hide your original forum identity, so as to reveal the EGO insecurity you have. So who has testicles?


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=880088.msg9715392#msg9715392

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=600436.msg9692846#msg9692846

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=880088.msg9715758#msg9715758


EGO insecurity.

You are apparently technically incapable of perceiving the level of technical acumen on display (not only by me, e.g. I can't take credit for Armstrong's work, smooth's help on understanding ring signatures, and gmaxell's help on understanding Winternitz optimization).


Ignore Armstrong's ECM model's predictions at your peril. See the Mad Max thread in Politics and Society forum for details.

People love to pontificate without fact checking.


And they can't use Bitcoin either, because it has no use case and they can't mine it.

I am talking to the filipinos about it. My neighbor's brother is developing social media apps (Lifebit) and hobnobs with the local government officials and tourism head. My neighbor said he thought about building a mining farm, but really didn't have enough capital to risk, and he says he just doesn't see what he would use Bitcoin for. He and his wife (they have one son) work virtually from home for American companies, his wife doing CSR for swimwear company in Florida and he does foreclosed real estate listings management. They are paid via odesk.com deposit directly to their local bank account (Google "freelance work online"). Any one who has a legitimate need for a local bank account, can get one. My gosh one visit to the bank here and standing in line for an hour for a teller tells me that rapid expansion in the banked is occurring.

Those unwashed who don't have a bank account, don't really need one as they pay for everything by cash.

I am sorry to inform you that any near-term (before 2024 at least) move to a new currency will be driven by westerners, Chinese, and Japanese. We are still guiding the world (at least until China takes over as the new financial center of the world by 2032). The developing world is ... well developing meaning they are learning from and leveraging us.

Note only because home mining in northern cold climates makes the electricity cost free as the waste heat displaces costs to heat the home (an economic advantage over an ASIC farm).


But the merchants have no (non-ideological, delusional crap) incentive to follow your desire. The volatility of Bitcoin is extreme compared to their national currency unit-of-account. Unit-of-account is a critical property of money as a currency, less so as a store-of-value which is why you see Bitcoin as a speculation investment predominantly. Merchants are not investors, they have to mitigate anything which impacts the reliability of their (in many industries very thin, thus fragile) profit margin.


Ah the "change comes from mysterious magic wands" illogic.

Serious software developers don't waste their finite coding years chasing rainbows.


More hyperbole that doesn't address the point that the internet has a laundry list of radically improved human benefits use cases. Bitcoin doesn't. Bitcoin was invented 6 years ago. Bitcoin reached critical mass in 2013 when every person in the world heard of it on mass media. I would say the internet reached critical mass by 1997 or 1998 when Yahoo become a phenomenon. By then there was porn and many other compelling use cases.


Try moving $1 million through the banking system. He wasn't referring to converting your $3000 transaction.

benjamindees,

I proposed only hiding their IP address (so the authorities can't threaten them with regulation), not hiding their reputation (hidden services have a persistent name). Nothing would change in my proposal in terms of the current state of pool distribution.

Pay-per-packet was a key insight. But there are technical details on how to accomplish that which I keep secret for the time being. Also I keep the "everyone can mine out of the box" algorithm secret for the time being.

Any one or group seriously considering and capable of implementing this, you should talk to me. I have already done a lot of the design and some coding work (on the order of 2000 LOC) on those key aspects in the prior paragraph. I shelved my files while I started to work on an Android app (coded in the Scala language which has been interesting, 2000 LOC thus far also).

Danny, and my theory is that is precisely why Bitcoin is scaling at the rate it is.

If this is true (I am not sure), perhaps it is because of:

1.	Starting some new treatments (AHCC, EGCG, L-Lysine, CoQ10, co-enzyme B Healthy VitB complex, carrots, bitter melon to lower blood sugar, no or minimal carbohydrates in any form including sugars from fruits, Vitamin D3 via whole body skin exposure to sun daily and must shower before as D3 is formed at follicles, washes off, requires 24 hours to absorb) for my peripheral neuropathy (likely caused by 2006 HPV infection) which also (in additional to nerve problems at the feet, hands, etc) manifests as headaches and abdominal pain (tumor?) fucking malaise. By "malaise", I mean imagine someone stole 50 of your IQ points. Can't think with that groggy head, chronic fatigue syndrome, welcome to zombie, vegetable-state.
2.	Really wanting to prove to myself I can still code and not talk without a purpose of action. Challenging myself everyday to work on my discipline (gritting my teeth to push myself to exercise to deal with this malaise that seems to cause me to be only capable of talking). "Those who can't build, talk". Grrr. It is humiliating for me to see I have become a wind pipe. Is this what old age will be for me! Hell no I hope not.