Market cap or price are more a measure of speculative betting than actual currency usage.  So I wouldn't care too much about market cap.  In fact, the too high market cap of bitcoin damaged it more than anything: institutional finance jumping in, regulators jumping in, ... all this without any increase in usage of bitcoin as intermediate asset or "to buy stuff on the internet".  MOST of bitcoin's market cap is made up by gamblers/speculators/"investors" which have their stuff on exchanges most of the time ; so just having tokens on an exchange's web page without any block chain would be just as good for them.  This has damaged bitcoin more than anything else.

You should separate the OPSEC from the coin protocol, although you should keep it in your mind when designing the protocol.
ZCASH has good ideas, but the way it is put into music is wrong.  What is good in zcash, is that the anonymity set is total.  That's better than in monero, where it is initially only a few, growing over time.  (monero is really not bad, btw).
The problems with ZCASH are:
- the company post premine
- the way the trusted setup is handled
- the fact that transactions are not anonymous by default.

I would suggest to do away with the premine, by not having any genesis block, but by forking off from bitcoin.
I have already done some suggestions for the trusted setup: that's possible if there are potentially many thousands of participants in its setup.
Making anonymous transactions ONLY is a necessity.

Absolutely, ethereum can play the role of a new litecoin.  Actually, that is what it currently mainly is: just another better's token on exchanges.  The "smart contract fuel" thing seems to be a far souvenir of the old days - this was what I was pointing at tongue in cheek.

Ethereum is then as much "smart contract gas" as bitcoin is "currency": not.  Essentially betting tokens on exchanges, and the "crypto tech" behind it doesn't matter much.  In fact, ethereum is somewhat better as currency than bitcoin, because it is faster.  But Litecoin is so too.

Imagine you're a ransomware cracker.  You've sent a ransomware malware to Joe, who was so untidy not to have air-gapped backups, and he paid 10 bitcoin to address A (one of yours).  You did the same with Jack, who sent also 10 bitcoin to address B.  These addresses are known, of course, because Jack and Joe mentioned them when they put up a complaint.

As long as you are the happy owner of A and B, the chain will not teach you much.  The problem is, what are you going to do with A and B ?  You can transfer A to C and B to D.   And then C to E and D to F.  Great.  One can follow that on the chain.

Now, are you going to put F on an exchange ?  Exchanges want to know identities, especially if you want to get fiat.  Whenever a successor (a "colored coin") hits an exchange, it is interesting to find out who owns it, because that person has received coins from someone who has received coins from the cracker, and hence one has a real-world trace.
So it is interesting to go and ask some questions to whomever it was that put F on an exchange.  In this case, questions to the cracker himself.  Of course, that doesn't prove, in itself, that the cracker was the cracker, but at least, that he knows the cracker, or knows someone who knows the cracker.  So it is very easy: the first question is: "sir, from whom did you get the coins in address D ?".  It is going to be difficult to indicate just anybody, because that person will not have done any business with the cracker, or will never have owned those coins.  "an anonymous donation for my contributions on bitcointalk" is probably not going to cut it.  So even after having transacted with oneself many times, the coins remain colored, and will trigger a "real world contact" from the moment they hit an exchange. 

The same is true for any official store accepting bitcoins.  If you've sold shoes to the cracker, you will probably have some trace (say, a post address, an e-mail) of where you sent the shoes.  You will easily show that to law enforcement asking you about how you got those coins if ever YOU got them, and then you went to an exchange.

So it is very difficult for the cracker to get rid of his coins and not induce a real-world contact that may lead to him.

On top of that, it gets more difficult.  Suppose the cracker wants to buy something worth 15 bitcoin.  He will have to COMBINE both outputs, (10 + 10) and get 5 bitcoin in a return address G.  As such, the combination of E and F in a same transaction hints that E and F at that point, are still the cracker's possession (we know that A and B are his possession, and it would be strange that these two tracks get separated, just to be spend together again later...).  And we also know that address G is the cracker's.
 

I agree that if there is a future to free crypto currencies, then they must be multiple.  This is actually killing some (naive) economic ideas behind bitcoin, such as the "sound money doctrine".
Let us agree that when we talk about crypto, we talk about *free* crypto.  Using the *technology* or part of the technology in crypto to implement a kind of fiat, is not what crypto is about, even though it may use PoS, block chains, and several cryptographic ideas that can also be found in bitcoin and altcoins.  It is not because it uses chained blocks with hashes, that it has something to do with free crypto.

Indeed, although a single block chain is distributed, and has no single "node of failure", it has a "single network of failure" and can easily be attacked by TPTB.  However, if there is a continuous creation and continuous forking of coins, then this brings us to an even more distributed system which is much, much harder to break.  However, you cannot afford "long term digital gold" on such a living, warping, muting ecosystem of interacting crypto.  It can only serve short-term store of value.

An economic consequence of an ecosystem of forking and creating coins, is that there's not much left of the "sound money doctrine" ; and actually, this is normal, because the sound money doctrine contains a fundamental flawed hypothesis: namely that it is the UNIQUE and UNIVERSAL currency.  The sound money doctrine could apply to a central bank with its imposed fiat (but then it is radically opposing the hidden and announced purposes of central banks).  But the sound money doctrine has no leg to stand on when new currencies are continuously created and taking variable market share in the "currency market".  Each individual currency can be in "finite supply", if the supply of the NUMBER of different currencies is elastic, or the FORKING of currencies is elastic, then there's nothing left of that initial economic goal.

So I think that the future of free crypto is an ecosystem of continuously creating new coins and forks of coins.

Very good summary 

This is a bit like saying "why should it be computer and network based ? Who is innovating this aspect ?".

There must be some public knowledge of spending, to avoid double spends.  The point is that digital data can be copied and transmitted as many times as you want, and in order for you do accept a digital coin against value, you don't want the owner of it to be able to spend it 5000 times to 5000 different people.  Now, the ONLY way to know that a coin one is giving to you has not been spend, is to be able to verify in one way or another whether it has been spend already or not, and the only way to do so, is to have a common database of "spent coins".  Also, you want to verify that when the spending is done to you, that the previous owner has "put his proof of spending" in that common database.

This common database has not to take on the form of a block chain, but it is close.  Because if it doesn't, you "had to be on the network when the spending was broadcast".  And the previous spending might be 7 years ago.  If you weren't on the network 7 years ago to capture the spending proof, you may not see that the coin he's giving you, has already been spend, unless that spending proof is locked up in an immutable database: a block chain.
Because it would be too easy not to broadcast your spending on the whole network, or to have it erased from the database at some point where people "pump the database from".

So the only way to have this kind of certainty that a coin has NOT been spend, must be a secured, immutable database, which comes close to a block chain, isn't it ?

That said, you don't truly need a block chain at this point.  You need a block chain because there's another necessity: the necessity to prove that new coins have been created in limited amounts, according to the rules of the protocol.

As a centralized entity, I could emit a certain number of distinct coins, namely, my digital signature of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, .... N (N coins).  These N files are then the "coins" and I have all the seigniorage.  The "coins" become appended with all transactions, and only their successive spending has to be public.  You would only need a distributed immutable database of spending proofs that way, and not a genuine block chain.
But if coin creation is part of the distributed system, there's no other way but to record the unique creations once and for all, and you end up with a block chain.

So yes, at the basis of any distributed monetary system will be a block chain.

I can see this picture, but I honestly fail to see the use.  It is as if one is asking the question "what can we do for crypto", and not "what can crypto do for us ?".  Crypto is a tool to obtain something, and my point is and remains that its only use is to obtain freedom that has been taken away.  Crypto is NOT practical, crypto is not environment friendly or computing friendly.  To go through all that hassle, you must obtain something that you couldn't get otherwise, and all the hassle of crypto comes from the implementation of trustlessness, which is of course a concept related to freedom.  Without freedom, trustlessness doesn't mean anything, because you are forced to trust the one that takes your freedom away, the centralized authority.  And if you have true freedom, you cannot be supposed to trust a privileged elite, so the system has to be egalitarian (in rights - no "masternodes") and hence cannot be trusted otherwise than by  cryptographic proof.

So in either case, whether you are WILLING to give up your freedom for that centralized authority, or because you've GIVEN UP and consider that it is simply too strong, and you are AFRAID of it, all the hassle of crypto is useless.

This is why a "regulated crypto" (like bitcoin is becoming) is an oxymoron.  If it is regulated, there are much much simpler ways to do the same thing.

So the question now is: do we NEED a digital gold that is not a currency ?  What can we do with it that we can't do with gold ?  The biggest problem with a store of value on the long term is that states want to take it away.  When you see how states are chasing people that have "hidden bank accounts", you see what I mean.  In as much as bitcoin would obtain an extremely high market cap, for sure the chain will be analysed, will be taxed, and most of bitcoin will end up in a digital Fort Knox.  So if you're trying to hide long term digital gold from the states, on the transparent bitcoin chain, that's a risky thing to do.  And if you are playing it according to the rules, why would you use bitcoin in the first place ?

There are very many reasons not to trust bitcoin as a store of value in the long term.  I would say that the main reason is that sooner or later, bitcoin will start to fork.  In fact, I'm amazed it hasn't forked yet.  Ethereum showed the way.  If I were to make an altcoin, honestly, I wouldn't start a new chain with a genesis block, but I would fork off bitcoin.
Each time you fork a coin, you split (unevenly of course) the market cap.
Another reason is that such a purely speculative asset is highly volatile.  Gold is a different beast, because it has 5000 years of history as a value keeper.  But apart from gold, an asset that has no "stickiness of prices" and is pure speculative belief, is highly volatile.

So again, I don't see the use case of crypto, like bitcoin, if it is "storage of digital gold" on a transparent block chain in agreement with the laws of the day.  I think that holding gold (paper or physical), or holding a diversified set of shares, is the classical, and still much better way which will be preferred by the vast majority of law-abiding and less law-abiding wealthy people.

The real use of crypto is as a currency, to do those economic interactions that are hampered by law and state in one way or another.   In other words, as a short-term store of value between two trades.  There, and in my opinion ONLY there, crypto has its place.  The hassle is worth it, because it is simply not possible to do without, because the laws are forbidding you, stealing you, or making life impossible to do so, and hence it is impossible or highly risky to use classical means of payment which leak information to the state.  But crypto is a pain to use, compared to VISA.  So it has to be worth it and has to offer sufficient protection against being traced.

I don't see any other use of crypto, honestly.  If it is not to free trade, and if it is to do, with more troubles, what you can already do, I fail to see the point of it.

It is very easy to set up a state crypto, that undoes everything that crypto stands for.  You can, like ZCASH, have a trusted setup, where the state has the golden key.  You can also have a state golden "mining" key: instead of PoW or PoS, you have PoK : proof of key, to mint blocks.  So only the state can mint blocks cryptographically.  You can have a fee system that is nothing else but a kind of VAT: a percentage of every transaction goes to the state.  The state can make as much money as it desires.  The state could have a view key that can reveal the full transaction history, which is hidden for all others.   It would be true crypto, and I would totally fail to see its point: it is even worse than the banking system concerning Big Brother stuff.  So I fail to see the joy that would come with this "adoption of crypto".

I think this is somewhat unfair to Apple.  After all, the *ONLY* reason why Apple is pickish about these things is because they feel the heat from the Biggest of all Brothers on this planet: the totalitarian united states of america federal government.   Otherwise they wouldn't bother.
That said, Apple doesn't come and raid your house if you install something on a computer.  The only thing they do is to sell products that can only use their store, and to decide themselves what they want to put in their store or not.  That is their good right.   The problem with Apple stuff is not that Apple can decide what they put in their own store (nothing sounds more normal than that).  The problem is that i-things only work with Apple store stuff.  It is a closed system.

If you buy an intel computer, you can put linux on it, and you're free.  But even windows allows you to install just any software you like.  Android too.  So if you intend to use your device the way YOU intend to use it, and not the way Apple is telling you to use it, you shouldn't buy Apple stuff.  On the other hand, if you want to stick to the Apple experience as Apple decides it, then by all means, buy i-stuff.  This is why I said that probably, most Apple customers are not interested in crypto.  If you're interested in crypto, you're not going to lock yourself up in a closed system.

It is true that even android devices are more tied to Google, than intel machines are linked to, say, microsoft, because most android devices are so different.  There's no non-tweaked standard install of an Android derivative that just works on most devices, like gnu/linux runs "out of the box" on most different intel machines.
But at least, with some work, you can get a version of, say, Cyanogenmod on your android device, and you're free.

There's a difference.  A crazy bank doing essentially a ponzi, and then going on its face, I think that is not only normal, I find it normal that its gambling customers lose their money.  They were in for the 7%, they played, and they got burned.  Fair game.  It is even unfair to the taxpayer, that he has to cough up part of the gamblers' losses of those bank customers through state warranties.

However, in Cyprus there was simply a haircut *by the state* on ALL bank accounts.  That's (usual, but in this case excessive) state theft. 

The Euro is a very special construction.  The Euro is the first and probably only "private money" that is common fiat to several states.  It is the first time that a state doesn't control its fiat, but a private entity does.
The Euro was invented by European federalists, in their wild dreams to make a United States of Europe, with grave neglecting of the communities and different nations (people) that they were putting artificially together in one big state power house.  They tried to shove the European Union of Socialist Soviet Republics through the throats of the different people, with the collaboration of their states, but it failed.   As such we are in this funny experiment, where states have given up their monetary prerogatives to a weird club of bankers in Frankfurt.
On the other hand, this has decoupled the Euro from the standard frauds that states usually do with their own money, and for the first time in history, states are kept to do vaguely correct bookkeeping of their revenues and expenses, without cheating too much. They aren't used to that, and this is why almost no European state gets its finances in order.  They never did, but could print money in the old days.  Now they have to borrow money from the bankers of Frankfurt.   

... and then it has lost its purpose, and you better use fiat.  Much easier, less hassle, less mining.

That is as much a contradiction as "I have no problem with gangsters, as long as they are honest people".  In fact, it is the SAME contradiction.


So you can continue to do that, and provide those services, without a government, right ?

Why would you need compulsory service, if everybody wants it ?  The very same people that provide "state services" can do this just as well in an associative way if the people profiting from it would pay the contributions to that association in the same way they pay taxes.


Why not contribute voluntary to an association or company that provides exactly the same service (you want) ? 

When you need bread, you are happy that state bakeries provide it to you and took your tax money to pay for it, right ?  Ah, no, that works on the basis of free agreements.  Funny, why can those other things not run on free agreements ?

There is a great reading:

https://www.princeton.edu/~kiyotaki/papers/Evilistherootofallmoney.pdf

You can start with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_Primer

There is a lot of information in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb

and in its sequel: Dark Sun.

These are historical works, but they contain all the necessary *scientific and technological principles* to build a nuclear weapon, if you complete that with normal engineering competence.  That doesn't mean that you have a *manual* to give to a technician to build a bomb, but all the scientific principles are there.

All the physical data you need can be found on: http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/

This is all the science you need to go of.  The difficulty in making a nuclear weapon doesn't reside in knowing or not knowing the science and technology.  It resides in the capital investment needed, and the visibility of your endeavour.  And you will still need to "tune" practical stuff.  For beginners, I would suggest a U-235 bomb.  That's what the US started with on Hiroshima too.  The plutonium bombs are harder to trigger (all the science is there, but to get the trigger right is tricky, and a matter of classical fireworks).

The reason why people don't make nuclear bombs in their basement is simply that it takes a huge capital investment, and that it will be noticed and that you will get a few classical bombs on your practice area before you really get off.  Not that its science would be hidden.


Economically, that only makes sense if one can use state privileges.  If you cannot use state privileges, the most efficient technology will also be the most profitable.
However, the point is that many embryonic technologies LOOK simple and efficient at naive first sight.  The fact that it isn't done in reality then gives rise to conspiracy theories.  But the real truth is that the technology is MUCH HARDER to put in practice than at first sight.


Do you mean "controlling you" or do you mean "spying on you" ?  Controlling can be fought by learning, informing, and practising logic and science to a limited extend.  The spying can be rendered difficult or useless.  I run things like trackmenot, that do hundreds of random and bogus internet searches.  I'm working on a project to send noise over the internet.  You remember the Danish reaction to the Nazi chasing the Jews there ?  Everybody put up a yellow David star.  


This is nothing but the quirks of the fiat system.  It is a fascinating engine.  Luxembourg is one of the richest countries in the world, btw.  These "debts" don't mean anything.  If anything, a national debt only means how much money the country as put in circulation.  That is the initial meaning of state debt.  It has not the meaning of an actual debt.  This is a very, very deep misunderstanding, because of the very strange nature of the fiat system.  A very high debt only indicates that your country has managed to rip off the rest of the world a lot.  Something to be proud of

That's simply optics.  You can do that too, with good optics and a drone
I think it is not the normal print, but the head lines - but of course you can just get any resolution, by increasing the size of the aperture.  That's the whole art of making big telescopes.


Frankly, no.  Some *technologies* may have been retarded somewhat before going public.  Scientific knowledge, no.  Hell, the biggest scientific secret ever, the nuclear bomb, was out even before the war was totally over.  We even know the next biggest secret: the thermonuclear explosion.

Scientific discoveries are like zero-day exploits.  You can find them, and keep them  for yourself.  But if you use them, some will find out about it, and in any case, if you could discover them, then there is a finite probability (growing in time) that others will find it too.

Even better: science works best when it is in the open and communicated publicly.  Every "totally secret science project" has had problems of not sufficient peer review, and going off the cliffs.  The bigger the community, the more open the communication, and the larger the network, the better it works.

So no, there are no scientific discoveries that will be kept secret for a very long time.  First of all because it is very hard to do secret scientific discoveries without a large network of peers guiding and helping ; and second, because if you can do it, someone else can do it too.


But the minority knowing, is still very vast and growing.


You can be controlled.  The question is whether you have the possibility to free yourself from it, or not.  That's freedom.  But of course, trying to control others is not only freedom, it is the fundamental nature of human beings.  So it is normal that it is attempted.  The question is simply whether in principle you can have the means to resist or not.

But it already happened in 2015.  The two FBI cops that thought to get away themselves with some Silk Road stash, got exactly nailed that way.  I provided a link.

You should read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by David Graeber, to explain how much states have always be involved with money, contrary to appearances, and most economic teachings.

Money has been much much more a state affair than one may think.  Even gold and silver.

I'm not talking about other stores of value, but *currency*.

In England, you don't go to jail because you do not live according to some or other religion, and the prime minister doesn't derive its power from religion.  Religion is not a pillar of power in England.  It is in several African and middle east barbarian countries, still.  But 1000 years ago, religion-based state power was general.  Now it is reduced to some barbaric regions.


You're not obliged to use facebook.  I don't.  I don't use any centralized social medium, apart from forums, where I discuss the subjects of the forums, but do not involve my personal aspects.  But it are exactly these things which will end up getting decentralized.  It will take time.  And like the barbarian countries basing their power still on religion, of course centralized spying social media will continue to exist, BUT THEY WILL NOT BE COMPULSORY.  That's the whole point.  With freedom comes the freedom to give your freedom up, of course.


I'm a scientist.  I can tell you, because solving these problems is harder than some charlatans may let you think.  Cars don't run on water.  That's not a big oil conspiracy, it is because it doesn't work.  There are a lot of diseases that can be cured, and still many more that can only be cured by killing the patient.  Believe me, science is about the most robust distributed system that has ever been built.  Of course it is also full of fraud, deception, scam and everything, but IN THE END, the scientific method prevails.  Of course, states can push scientific development in one direction or another by financing, but they cannot invent bogus science, or stop scientific truth from being revealed in the end.  They can eventually hold back something temporarily, but because of its distributed nature, science cannot be locked up in any cage.



When you start saying that "people should this or that", cold statist shivering runs across my spine...

A soft fork has the "advantage" that it is compulsory if you have a majority of miners with you, no matter what your users think.
In other words, with a soft fork, if you have 51% of the miners with you, you can shove it down the throats of the whole community.
A hard fork only needs ONE miner to disagree, and the other chain lives on.  Next, the users will determine the relative market caps, and in the end, the mining that depends on the market cap (the block reward and the difficulty determine the profitability).

But I don't see how bitcoin could avoid hard forking.  If I were to invent an altcoin, I would design it as a fork from bitcoin, to solve the issue of initial distribution, to have directly a large user base (all bitcoin holders get "free money" and become directly coin holders) and to have a serious kicking off its trading.

It is very strange that most alts start new chains with a new genesis block, instead of using the bitcoin chain as point of departure.

I didn't say that science killed religion.  Science killed STATE religion (not entirely, there is still a part of the world living in that barbarian state, and this is where we get a lot of troubles from but they have a lot of oil), as its pillar of power. 


We are removing, one by  one, the pillars of this.  Science has taken away one pillar.  It could not be killed because it was a distributed system.  I think the internet has taken away another pillar (the monopoly of mass communication).  Crypto is yet another pillar being sawn away.

I do not see a future "French revolution" but rather a dissolving of the privileges of state.

We are in a better shape than in the time of Galileo, concerning freedoms.  We have won freedom of thought (science).  We have won freedom of expression.  We have won freedom of publication (the internet!).  We still do not have economic freedom.  This is what crypto is fighting.  It will be a tough one.  With it, we may even obtain one day, democracy (that is, in as much law exists, it is voted by people, and not imposed by politicians).  If you thought we had democracy because we are obliged to give a mandate to an elective aristocracy, you're wrong of course.  We live in an elective aristocracy (as compared to the old hereditary aristocracy).


I think you are missing the point: these conferences are not needed or advantageous for the crypto, but for the devs.  People always seek their proper profit, and then represent it as "for the general good".  Devs need these things to exist.  So they happen.  Generals need wars to exist, so they happen.  The responsibility of the propagandist of the moment is to sell it as "for the general good", but it usually isn't.  If someone talks about "the general good" you know that there is some scamming going on.  If someone tells you he wants to take advantage, there's a chance he's being honest.