Name ONE system or organization in the world where the leader cannot threaten the subordinates one way or the other.

You could respond with GreenPeace here, but do you really think an entire country could be organized like that? No money just volunteer work?

Bosses threaten to fire you and politicians and generals can throw their subordinates in jail.

So does crack, yet some few manage to get off crack.

History is rife with examples of rare, but amazing leaders: Gandhi, Mandela, Lincoln...

You just have to find a method to select for that kind of leader.

"Magnum opus" is greek and means "great work" often used to refer to someones life work.

I was not referring to a project or thread name, if you found one that is entirely incidental (and a little funny).

My "thing" had a name during my bachelors project, but the final program will be vastly different and does not exist yet. It may get a new name. You can search OrgOs if you want.


A constitution is possible and the idea, but there are limits: You can specify that the program should make a random citizen "the president" every 4 years, but if you specified that "everyone should be equal" or that that "guns should be free" the program would have no way to know if these things were being respected.


My program will not be an AI, but rather a very carefully thought out incentive structure from which order will grow - similar to Bitcoin; nothing in Bitcoin actually specifies that it is money, it just behaves in a way that makes humans behave in a certain way - I will do the same, but with government.


I fundamentally disagree with the anarchists on this forum. I believe in organization and leadership, but it has to be a good organization and a good leader. So far democracy has been the best shitty system of other shitty systems.

I may actually buy like 1000$ of gold and silver for my son, just in case I get hit by a car and Bitcoin is replaced by a new crypto-currency. If you don't want to take risk at all and it won't move for 20 years, gold still makes a little sense to me.

(Maybe it would be 100% BTC if Bitcoin was fully fleshed out and near full adoption.)

PS: Great post BTW.

As I described, not all governments are doing this. The problem is with gold itself. I could buy gold any day and my government would not bother me at all or take a nickle.

You are correct that acquiring gold for savings and selling it again later would be easier if gold was the standard of exchange as even your neighbor would have some - HOWEVER as I outline later in my post it does not make sense for gold to be the standard because it is a hassle to use gold every day.

This is why it costs 3%, I assure you that cost would still be 0-25%-1% or so in the middle ages when metal money was prevalent and there was no government suppression - except you would pay it every time you paid for something - also instead of the acquisition cost being higher your security costs would be higher instead (I wonder what a swordsman would cost or bribing the local chief?).
Transportation costs may also have been vastly higher given you would have no car.

Even if gold was reintroduced we would still need government "Coinage" and banks (for digital payments) to allow easy everyday use. The banks are fiat all over again and the government coins would probably be diluted, as history has shown, which brings you back to just fiat OR miserably carving gold at the cashier.


The simple truth, Occam's razor, is that gold is bad money hence it is not used as money anymore.

If gold is so great, but just held back only by governments then why isn't the national currency of the Cayman islands or Las Vegas?


Until like 2 weeks ago I was kinda a goldbug, but now.. just accept it; "gold sucks" and stop being wrong.

I would look at the amount of currency in circulation. We don't know these numbers exactly for the entire world, but approximations can be made.

The assumption that world GDP = total currency is wrong I think. I'm guessing total currency is higher than what is transacted per year.

You could also make an input box or some radio buttons with suggestions like "Using world GDP"/"Using est. world currency pool"/"avg personal wealth and BTC/person"...


(Nice Lars! Jeg må snart sende min egen update )

So everyone seems to take for granted that gold is superior and people only use fiat because of government suppression.

But it occurred to me that this is blatantly false as someone mentioned "gold has already failed".

What backs up this statement? Well for one not a single country I know of uses gold or other metals for money. Is it really feasible that government suppression would be so powerful? Keep in mind quite a few non-oppressive and very peaceful countries with inflation STILL use fiat.

There is also lots of stories of countries using dollars instead of the sanctioned money.


So I think its safe to say that gold is not out because of suppression when you think about it.


Okay so whats the deal then, fiat clearly degrades at 1-5% (avg: 3%) a year in most countries - yet at some point the whole world decided to boot out the metals. Why?

Well a simple explanation would be that gold is simply worse in a free market.


Which turns out to be true when you run the numbers:
Lets say you are saving 20.000$, a decent chunk of savings for most people, considering how many are in debt instead these days and the poor of the world.

Well you will need to first buy the gold at a loss. You will probably have to drive to pick it up and you need to test it a bit to insure its good.
For this amount you will have to go to maybe two different guys found online to pick it up at least.
I think its safe to say buying and selling the gold will cost you at least 3% each time in transportation, offer-research, time used, risk of fraud and so on.

Okay not that bad, since you have value dense gold and not THAT much to store you now get a small safe at 200$ - quite cheap, yet that works out to another 1% cost. You skimp on alarms and other stuff.

So now you're set to go, after just a little more than 2 years you start to save money on inflation.


So on a 10 year basis it does okay - but if that is your time frame why not invest in something more productive like stocks, bonds etc., buy a car with better mileage, insulate your house? I mean gold will NEVER pay your day to day bills, gold does not climb in real value - its not a real investment!

This is supposed to be superior money and all that jazz right and this is a buffer savings so lets look at that instead. So lets say you loose your job and have to live off your savings a while after 2 years, now you pay that 3% again on at least some of your savings amount and you haven't made anything yet!

Keep in mind that you skimped on security and you safe is so small anyone could kinda just grab it and run so on a 10 year time frame what is the risk of burglary - 1% again in a nice neighborhood (that's an avg, could be 100% for YOU)?

So gold is a bad investment and bad as a buffer savings. Even during hyperinflation or the zombie apocalypse a few cigarettes will do you just as well or better.


So now the final one: Is gold good as MONEY and for EXCHANGE?
Not really: Imagine your local supermarket taking gold; total widespread acceptance. You stand there with your groceries and you have to lob like 3 grams off your "shopping nugget" and you brought your own weight to not get cheated...
I mean just play that out in your head and its obvious its a little funny.
Just to start with its a hassle to you AND the supermarket who will need more cashiers to deal with the slower transactions. They will also have a headache doing accounting with grams of gold and silver and all with different grades of purity.
They will have to move a lot of gold around the country every day from all their stores in trucks... its horrible.

But then you say "Realpra, that's not what the goldbugs mean! They mean a gold-BACKED currency you dunce, it can be digital and all!". Well then that is fiat. Fiat is kinda always backed by something (I have yet to hear of actual government "IOUs") but they always print more.
It is still fiat if its backed by gold and you hold the paper - that's how fiat started!

So clearly "barter < shells < gold/silver < fiat < crypto-currency" and NOT "shells < fiat < gold < crypto-currency". (turns out that is the historical order too!)

So what is gold good for? Well basing huge banks off of, backing fiat currencies or clearing rare debts between countries or other huge entities - which is exactly what we see today albeit not even that much (American Chinese debt is denoted in dollars for instance).


I will follow my own realization and prioritize gold/silver savings much less.
(I still need a safe for my paper wallets though...)

EDIT:
SHIT! I forgot my punch-line: "Notice how the gold cost works out to about the same as the cost of inflation for most fiat? Not coincidence! That is free market competition at work between gold and fiat!"

ta-ta-ta-daaaa...... 

I saw the potential application of the "POW BlockChain solution" a while back as my bachelors project was a computer controlled organizational system which could use the method to make the system robust.

My system will also use Bitcoin for its currency as its the ONLY currency in the world that can be used by an autonomous AI or Robot (this realization was why I got into Bitcoin again after first dismissing it as flawed - which it still is by the way, I'm counting on selling early and buying into BTC 2.0 or Bitcoin evolving).

I will add all my own previous work to this and my solution to actually giving the P2P political system real power and thus organizational power.


I will return to this "Magnum Opus" of mine within 6 months I think. Presently I am missing just one component.

Actually I have sent money to the Philippines and the total price for converting from fiat to BTC and back to PHP is about the same or lower than the price Western Union charges.

HOWEVER: No offense, but these over-seas-workers aren't tech savy enough to use BTC. You guys ever been to the Philippines? Organization and education is.. lacking.

Here is my advise:
Keep an eye on the issues with BlockChain bloat/ 1mb limits and how it is/is not fixed.
Also keep an eye on how often clients are updated and how blindly people install the new updates.

You see lasting trouble there getting out of BTC may be a really good idea. Otherwise hold "forever".

As for day trading:
I'm not doing it, but it seems the best indicator is the press, how much, how positive etc.. Sell when its high, buy when its low.

You can't predict markets short term, its gambling.

Even if you are 100% correct in your logic, short-term it is so random that it will not help you.
You can "cheat" by trading faster (with robo-trading, which can also fail when unexpected events occur) or spend resources gathering information about where the market is headed (which you can't do short-term unless you are MtGox).

Even IF you correctly called both peak and bottom you have to remember that volume at those points is likely to be very low ie. not many sold at 50 or bought at 260 so you might not have been able to do that trade even WITH perfect information. (+MtGox was down some of the time)

(If you search me on the forum you might see that I predicted a bubble/crash in early 2013 back in Nov/Dec last YEAR and I still didn't try to trade this because in 2 years BTC will be higher than 260$ ea. and I didn't know the exact top/bottom.
Why trade for a few hundred bucks, risking thousands, when holding may make me a freaking millionaire in a few years time?
Start of April I guessed 60$/225$, but I also guessed wrong before that, who will bet 1000-10.000$ on a random guess they made?)


If you believe in Bitcoin for good reasons then buy in again immediately and don't trade/worry for some years, things take time.
If in doubt leave some in Bitcoin and invest in other things with your other money.
If you don't believe in Bitcoin for good reasons then sell/stay out and invest in something else.

Ok I got it now:

Satoshi already used the hash trees to prove that if you have the block you actually have the block.

You can make various hashes and chains of the root, but it would tell you nothing new.

SO the solution is for the S-nodes to demand parts of the merkle tree. Before they receive this they will not accept the block. If another block comes along and the old ones data is difficult to get, they may switch to the new block.
Further if the S-nodes cannot get a demanded part of the merkle tree after ~10 min. of successfully polling peers (but with no data returned) they will file a report.
If other S-nodes receive 2+ of these reports they will add the merkle branch in question to their own must-have-list. If they also fail after 7 min. they will also sent a report (not before).

The merkle data received will be random:
1. If it concerns the S-nodes W. addrs. the node will save the data and re-transmit it to its same group peers.
2. If it does not concern the W. addrs it will be sent to any relevant group peers the S-node may have and will then be deleted after 6 blocks.

The S-nodes will simply want to see IF they can get this data to verify the entire block is available to the network if polled for.

Each S-node would accept only a certain maximum number of such reports and would ignore further reports.

The S-nodes will thus have 2 types of reports:
1. Double-spend report (DSR)
2. Incomplete block report (IBR)

DSRs can be instantly proven to be true so using the functionality maliciously on the entire network would be impossible. You could DDOS or falsely report to individual clients you connected to, but no one else would care.

The IBRs would behave similarly if the data was in fact available it would be sent around the network. Only if the attacked clients could NOT find the data, they would repeat the reports.
You could again attack individual clients, but if they do not repeat the report it dies there, the longer chain wins and whether they were blocked or not for a while the attacked clients go to the newer chain.

IBRs would further be ignored until the newest block header was 10 min. old.

You could overload this reporting system with fake reports so that one real report got ignored, however this would require you to be connected to 51% of the network and you would still then have to deal with any running full clients.

No my reporting algorithm will solve that last part.


I don't think meta data will be necessary. As long as they have the full history of the addr. spend they are verifying and have proven that the network has the entire block all should work.

I determine who should own what with S-node groups divided by redeem script hashes:
If the redeem script hash could be 0-100 then group "0-25" would handle a well defined set of address histories.

As for verifying block-availability I described above how this can be done simply. For that it does not matter who downloads what part, just that somebody reports it if they CANNOT download a part.

Yes:
1. The spender creates a new TX that spends an output script "A" (could be an address, an IP or a multisig, we don't care)
2. Miner includes it.
3. Miner gets lucky and broadcasts entire block to the network.
4. S-node gets parts of the block that has W. addrs.
5. If the output has already been spent this S-node will know because it has been tracking exactly that scripts/addresses entire history.
6. S-node reports double spend of A and the block is rejected.

Well if we have S-node group A and B a miner or a pool of miners would then send TX data concerning A script hashes to group A and TX data concerning B script hashes to group B.

A nodes would connect only to either A or A+B nodes and so on.

If an input is a double-spend it would get reported by the S-nodes watching that redeem script.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but basically a miner could send an incomplete block out and the S-nodes would be clueless if they only watch by scripts... yes?

So basically they need to REQUIRE full branches somehow.

Well its easy to do it, but it would cause a lot of wasteful data transmission... let me think about this. It is trivial to do it (just send the whole block :-| ) but I want to make it fast.

This was how I originally split up the work and I still use this method for sending data.

However the address/script hashes must be used to split the work. The reason for this was raised earlier in the thread: If you have half the block history, but incomplete history for each address/script hash you cannot validate new transactions!

This is because the data inside a block is randomly arranged, the same address may be on the right main branch in one block and the left in another so simply looking at say the right main branch of each new block would make the S-node unintelligent.

I mention this in the first post as a new communication protocol allowing for getting branches/segments rather than blocks.

No it should not:
All S-nodes have the blockchain header hashes and all reports must include the minified branch, header and TX data of the TX that already spent the funds and made the new TX invalid.

Such reports can be instantly checked, rejected and ignored, you can't make a fake TX and link it to the block header of an existing block (or ALL of Bitcoin would be broken).

The only assumption is that out of thousands of nodes some are honest and will relay all necessary information, however the other 999 can be malicious without really slowing down or messing with the honest S-nodes.

I am more sure now than ever it can be done and my explanation at least has grown more specific, shorter and hopefully more bullet proof.

Done.


Anyway everyone, I am bumping this thread as my offered reward has now grown considerably in dollar value AND I have greatly updated and modified my original post. + with us hitting the 1 mb limit and Bitcoin growing like crazy this stuff is more relevant than ever. The average fee is no longer 2 cents but 14 cents after less than one year of the creation of this thread.

I am good for the money too as I am all in BTC at the moment and hold a decent amount - and of course I am not retracting my offer.

I also included the solution to connection hi-jacking arrived at at page 3 of the thread. I have also dealt with concerns as to the too many peers overloading routers by simplifying the protocol/understanding stuff AND more importantly my originally incorrect assumption that the Bitcoin network uses addresses (it uses a complex-ish script system).

I hope my explanation is a lot more clear now that I better understand how the S-nodes should divide themselves and work.


Bitcoin is backed by nothing - it has value because it is useful... so gentlemen, what happens if it is not as useful as it could be? Pledge a few microBTC along with me, you will not miss them when your BTC are worth 3 million $ each!

My grandmother just wrote me that she heard about Bitcoin on the Danish public radio.

I'm guessing the P2 or P4 channels.

That's all I know, but their programs can probably be found at www.dr.dk as podcasts.

Fimp might know more..

People keep blaming the EU for the Cypress mess, but without the EU these banks would have no money and NO ONE would get ANYTHING back.

Now there may be flaws with fiat, but this isn't one of them. You put money in a defunct business you loose, you think anyone will help you if you loose money in a BTC bank? Nope, same exact thing.

The guy with the Hitler Merkel should have a picture of her as freaking Jesus.


You pay a bank to keep your money safe and to handle your money, its your own problem what happens if you do no research.

Would infinite bailouts really be better than free markets being free to remove bad banks and punish their ignorant clients?


The EU kinda made the right call here I have to say.

What they should do next is create their own bank that does nothing other than store, send and receive digital euros with 0 leveraging.


I would still believe more in Bitcoin of course, but I think everyone has this Cyprus thing backwards.

That is all.

I must disagree from what I read in the thread linked below your post it sounds like a lightweight client scheme. The full clients would still need the full chain so as the real Bitcoin network is concerned nothing is solved.

A coinbase ledger block however is simple, easy, secure and puts a finite limit to the blockchain size. As long as the limit is finite it doesn't really matter if you need one or two gigs extra compared to other esoteric solutions with mining and 2nd meta trees.

Actually I would say yes it can:
While its happening a reorganization of global markets and finance might seem slow happening over say 5 years, but in historical sense this would be faster than the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise and fall of Hitler and his 4th reich and the fall of the roman empire - all events usually considered dramatic and fast relative to their scale.

DeathAndTaxes is exactly right about the issues Bitcoin has, issues I feel are being ignored during this rally-frenzy, but given 5 years the major stuff could be resolved and MtGox could upgrade their servers in a matter of months - if they suddenly had that many more customers they would also have the money for it.

If I was the Argentine government or a major bank I would be scared shitless by exactly this meltdown scenario.

Someone also suggested a ledger solution where transactions older than say 5 years would be removed and added to a ledger.

So say you have 1BTC going from A-->B-->C-->D-->E-->F where A is older than 5 years.

A yearly ledger would simply state that B had 1 BTC and remove A and all older roots as well.

The "ledger-block" would become part of the protocol and part of the chain as the first "link". It would simply behave much like a coinbase transaction.


If someone didn't trust this security level they could simply stay with the old client as there would be no protocol breach here. Ledger clients would simply be unresponsive when polled for blocks older than 5 years.
They could also move their funds every 4 years to be sure, but even if they didn't it would still be there even after 100 years.


This would definitely be a nice easy first step for Bitcoin scalability with distributed/swarm/collaborative nodes coming next.

4 is the correct option because your con list is flawed:

1. In the case of a very large block being artificially being created to destroy Bitcoin most of the network would simply automatically end up rejecting it because by the time they downloaded it there would be a longer chain/fork without that block.

2. In the case of increasing block sizes squeezing out smaller nodes the solution is to create "swarm clients" that do collaborative validation.
This would allow the network to scale to any size for "infinite" time when combined with the "ledger solution".
(This is not up to choice or opinion, Bitcoin presently does not scale and if you don't fix this some other crypto currency will. Forum searching both quotation marked concepts should be easy enough)


The vision of Bitcoin believers is to take over the world, you won't do that with a 1mb block limit, its pathetic.