What city do you live in? Most places have someone willing to trade for a commission, although it's not always cheaper than MtGox.
Southern Maine, about an hour north of Boston. I doubt I'd be able to meet anyone w/o spending $ on gas. Well, of course not. But's that's true for anything, isn't it? Transaction costs show up in every form of transaction, and transportation is one of those hidden ways. It's one reason that Wal-Mart supercenters do so well even though the farmers' market has better pricing on produce, one stop shopping also means less fuel consumption. You could add a get together on your next planned trip to Boston. Check out their local makerspace in Boston, IIRC they do have bitcoiners there. They might even have some makers who live closer to yourself. |
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So, if the exchanges are issuing their own cryptocurrencies backed with bakcoin, how does that make them any different than a central bank?
Huh? Exchanges have nothing to do with issuing crypto-currencies any more than they currently do for Bitcoin. That's the job of designers and communities which interact with the designers (voluntarily in my idealized conception of things.) Wouldn't that then make the designers the new central bankers? No more an no less than Satoshi, Gavin, and co are with Bitcoin. Bullshit. Neither Gavin nor Satoshi have it in their power to create bitcoins at will against the consent of the current community, which neither could ever hope to garner. While any version of linden dollars or WoW gold, whether officially backed with something else or not, can be created in mass by whomever has direct root access to the server that manages that currency. In this respect (among many others) Satoshi/Gavin/et-al have set a very workable example for the relationship between the 'designers' and the 'user community'. For this reason it is most likely that it would serve as the model for other such efforts. Or at least efforts which are likely to go anywhere. It's not a question of example. They literally cannot do what a central banker could do. Not sure where you got the idea that there is anything particularly different in my conception of the various exchange currencies (or even 'bakcoin', for that matter) compared to Bitcoin.
I didn't, but you're views one how a bakcoin supported cryptocurrency should work is inmaterial, what matters in that regard is the views & moral fortitude of the developers of said backed currency. So it's reasonable for me to assume the lowest common denominator. And if you intended to have multiple altcoins that were very similar to bitcoin, why not use bitcoin? If it;s too big to be a peer, why would being a peer in a smaller pond be more secure than being an end user in the bitocoin ocean? |
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What city do you live in? Most places have someone willing to trade for a commission, although it's not always cheaper than MtGox.
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hi guys, followed bitcoin for over a year, now hopping on the train...  I'm from Switzerland btw. Cool, I collect fiat currencies. I don't have any Swiss Francs yet. Got any to offer, mailled to America? |
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So, if the exchanges are issuing their own cryptocurrencies backed with bakcoin, how does that make them any different than a central bank?
Huh? Exchanges have nothing to do with issuing crypto-currencies any more than they currently do for Bitcoin. That's the job of designers and communities which interact with the designers (voluntarily in my idealized conception of things.) Wouldn't that then make the designers the new central bankers? No more an no less than Satoshi, Gavin, and co are with Bitcoin. Bullshit. Neither Gavin nor Satoshi have it in their power to create bitcoins at will against the consent of the current community, which neither could ever hope to garner. While any version of linden dollars or WoW gold, whether officially backed with something else or not, can be created in mass by whomever has direct root access to the server that manages that currency. To each his own. Honestly I hope you do get your altcoin going, because I truely believe that every one of us are here for a purpose; and if you can't be an example you might as well be a warning.
Don't hold your breath. I've a very short attention span and would need to significantly develop certain skills which I lack. Sure seems that you've already spent a great deal of time just on the website. Couple of afternoons + a few minutes to register the domain. Most of the work was done in the shower. Whatever that means, I most certainly do not want further details. Really my main goal with 'bakcoin.org' is to help break out a few folks who might have fallen into the old tunnel vision trap and get them to consider the possibility of a wider perspective. I'd be content to achieve simply that, but would be generally proud of doing something more so who knows what the future holds.
Based upon what I've seen thus far, i would have to say that I'm of the opinion that you have failed in this endeavor. Time will tell. Actually it probably won't. What I allude to is probably not the kind of thing which will have an obvious outward facing marker. I don't even know what that means. |
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Why is it full client or bust?
To answer your bolded question: "Because we can." Prove it. Not necessary. Among the things that Bitcoin has done for the world, and for which I have the utmost respect, is exactly this. You're going to have to prove that you can do it without supernodes, because bitcoin certainly hasn't displayed that capacity. Again, full nodes are supernodes; so I want to know how you can create a cryptocurrency to compete with bitcoin without full nodes and without further centrallization. I say it's not possible, and want you to prove your statement that you can. As long as my i386 router can be a full peer in the p2p network, I don't give a damn what it is called. Bitcoin in it's present form supports a surprising number of enthusisest in our community just fine and still has significant room to grow in it's present 'undeveloped' form. If the flexibility existed to do some non-trivial tweaks to the protocol that could likely add significantly to it's life expectancy. As I've already mentioned, such flexibility not only exists, it was part of the original protocol from the beginning, those 'tweeks' are just not part of the running code at this time. My solution to the problem is simply to break the economies into parts which fit what the users might find comfortable, and I contend that these can be of sufficient size to meet most of an individuals needs.
That sounds fine, but you don't offer a how. While it is kinda cool to have my Skittles purchase live alongside someone's goat cheese sale in Mongolia, there is no compelling advantage, and almost no plausible advantage, to me as a user. If it means pushing the monetary solution into what I and at least some others consider to be risky contortions, the choice for me is a clear one. Given that choices exist of course.
What stops any major vendor from using bitcoin as a backing for a store currency? After all, that's exactly what gift cards & store credit are, store currencies that are fixed to & backed by the US $. WalMart could do this with bitcoin tomorow, permitting bitcoin users to submit bitcoins into a website for store credit onto a gift card thus bundling as many transactions that the user desires to use that card for into the single bitcoin transaction that placed the credit onto the card. This solves teh problem with regard to scalibility, locality, transaction fees & clearing delays with bitcoin proper; at the expense of a 'local' centralization in the sense that one must trust walmart to ack honorableley with as much value as one is willing to trust them with, yet this method doesn't require some new & untested (much less undeveloped) proposal. I did document an expectation that a large contingent of Bitcoin community would resist with vigor and for a variety of reasons.
For a varity of valid reasons, I should add. Not simply FUD. |
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Why is it full client or bust?
To answer your bolded question: "Because we can." Prove it. Not necessary. Among the things that Bitcoin has done for the world, and for which I have the utmost respect, is exactly this. You're going to have to prove that you can do it without supernodes, because bitcoin certainly hasn't displayed that capacity. Again, full nodes are supernodes; so I want to know how you can create a cryptocurrency to compete with bitcoin without full nodes and without further centrallization. I say it's not possible, and want you to prove your statement that you can. |
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So, if the exchanges are issuing their own cryptocurrencies backed with bakcoin, how does that make them any different than a central bank?
Huh? Exchanges have nothing to do with issuing crypto-currencies any more than they currently do for Bitcoin. That's the job of designers and communities which interact with the designers (voluntarily in my idealized conception of things.) Wouldn't that then make the designers the new central bankers?
To each his own. Honestly I hope you do get your altcoin going, because I truely believe that every one of us are here for a purpose; and if you can't be an example you might as well be a warning.
Don't hold your breath. I've a very short attention span and would need to significantly develop certain skills which I lack. Sure seems that you've already spent a great deal of time just on the website. Really my main goal with 'bakcoin.org' is to help break out a few folks who might have fallen into the old tunnel vision trap and get them to consider the possibility of a wider perspective. I'd be content to achieve simply that, but would be generally proud of doing something more so who knows what the future holds.
Based upon what I've seen thus far, i would have to say that I'm of the opinion that you have failed in this endeavor. |
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...big snip...
Well, my 4 year old android cell phone has more processing power than the most powerful Cray available 30 years ago. That said, why does Joe Sick Pack need to run a full client(supernode) himself? Why can't he hire a service to act in his behalf? Or if he doesn't want to trust some corporation to track his balances (such as BitcoinSpinner) what stops him from joining or starting a co-op to do that for him? Why is it full client or bust?
To answer your bolded question: "Because we can." Prove it. |
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or are you trying to move the trust onto the exchanges that would be using bakcoin to start their own smaller cryptocurrencies?
The bold part is as close as one can come to encapsulating the very core goal of the project. The 'exchanges' part are not really a factor, and not of much interest to me personally. The free market will work things out in this respect. Hopefully most people who are particularly interested in exchanges would not find bakcoin very appealing and would mainly ignore it. So, if the exchanges are issuing their own cryptocurrencies backed with bakcoin, how does that make them any different than a central bank?
My document currently does not expand on the concept that all of the 'sponsored exchange currencies' may gain some significant advantages by sharing the workload or supporting bakcoin. For instance, they can use it as a free-form notepad (of modest size) and everyone will be securing everyone else's notes. So, there may be other advantages that gold or seashells don't really provide.
I see a number of reasons that I wouldn't trust it for anything, based on just your implied design. If I, as an end user wouldn't trust it as a medium of exchange, why would I trust an exchange that used it as a backing for their own vanity cryptocurrency? In turn, why should the exchanges trust it, or each other? Trust in just about anything has a significant 'monkey see, monkey do' component. That's why Au which is actually quite useless is highly sought after. (Parenthetically, I contend that the very simple nature of a chunk of gold has more than a little to do with it's reliability and thus the trust that it can muster. This gets back to my 'simpler is better' philosophy.) While gold has been largely useless for any other reason than money or to make pretty things for women for most of the 6000 years it's been in use, this is no longer true. It's not used in industry not because it doesn't have real uses for it's unique physical characteristics, but because it's monetary value prices it outside of those uses. It's actually more abundent in our modern world than silver, because silver has significant industrial uses that largely cannot be substituted for less than the market value of the silver. If the monetary value of gold were to ever crash completely, gold would hit the open market for a great many products.
Trust can evaporate very quickly if people get burnt by trusting something, or see other monkeys getting burnt. Indeed, my trust in many of the efforts to centralize control of masses of BTC value is quite low due to a fairly impressive legacy of fail here.
Those were all failures of centralization, not of bitcoin. Those would tend to limit the trend towards centralization, begetting more paranoid users like yourself who seek other solutions. This is a feature, not a bug. Similarly, I have more than a small amount of suspicion of those who make a profit by snatching fractions of BTC as they pass through time and space. That renders the Bitcoin solution close to par with existing fiat solutions at a functional level and from the standpoint of the user (me.)
You're going to have to explain that one. Because user can choose to offer a transaction fee means that bitcoin is no differant than fiat systems? Really? You do know that you don't actually have to pay those fees, right? Yes, I considered jumping on-board and gearing up to run transfer nodes in a datacenter for fun and profit. I still might, but the reality is that it is not my thing and I believe I would feel better about applying any effort I might put into crypto-currencies in a different direction.
To each his own. Honestly I hope you do get your altcoin going, because I truely believe that every one of us are here for a purpose; and if you can't be an example you might as well be a warning. |
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You pretty much described how coin mixers work in your OP.
Agreed. OP, please see The Bitcoin Fog. summaryThe bitcoin network might be anonymous in terms of single-handedly revealing your ip address, but the transaction history is recorded in the block chain and is publically available, which makes your anonymity very vulnerable. Once the interested parties, be it authorities or just interested researchers ( http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html) have acquired any one of your addresses or transactions, they could easily track your money around the network. While that looks like an awesome hidden service, how is the ownership of the site you linked to protected? If the autorities can figure out who set up that site, and there is no reason to assume that they cannot, finding the hidden server simply involves some baseball bat interrogation. |
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...
EDIT: On page #3 you refer to the 'monolithic' nature of bitcoin. I don't think that word means what you think that it means.
I remember struggling with a word to use there. What I meant to indicate is, among other things, that as currently implemented there is one and only one block chain for Bitcoin. There is only one truth, however that truth is presently replicated in 10K+ places. But for the sake of argument, let's consider this...
While it is conducive to significant pruning and optimization, all of the load of the entire economy must, by necessity, pass through this artifact.
Not, in fact, correct. The 'light' clients that I have been referring to are also mentioned in Satoshi's white paper. Presently the network sends the entire block as a whole digital artifact, but that isn't necessary. The protocol permits a block header, merkle tree, and transactions to be transmitted as indepedent digital artifacts. This small change in the network implimentation of the protocol would go a long way towards reducing redundency and reducing bandwidth. It would also permit a light client to request only the headers, merkle tree & only the transactions that contain addresses that concern itself. Furthermore, full nodes on the edge of the network (think middle Africa) can receive the blocks in a digital stream instead of participating in the full netowrk. There are several different modals permitted by the protocol than jsut what is presently dominate. The network is the way it is right now because that core backbone netowrk is required, but it doesn't need to remain the only way to get the blocks. EDIT2: What is your understanding of what a 'supernode' would look like in a future with bitcoin exceeding the transaction rates of Visa? And under what conditions could the successful growth of bitcoin to that transaction level directly lead to it's failure?
As I've heard it described, a load balancer would accept transactions and distribute them to processing cores to perform the workload which would otherwise swamp one core. IIRC, that is fairly well described in the 'scaling' article. That was also a deliberately extreme example of a workable solution. The more likley result would be a high end rack mount server with a gigibit service & a cryptographic hardware co-porocessing unit to off-load the burdens of transaction verifications. This only applies to nodes that would be taking the full traffic of the bitcoin netowrk in a future that puts bitcoin as larger than the economy of the US, which woudl be comparable to drinking from a firehose. This kind of node verifies everything that passes through it's control before being forwarded to it's many peers. It's not necessary for every node to verify the validity of a transaction before forwarding it, by default a lightweight client couldn't verify anything. All nodes do that now because all full clients are supernodes. Again, there is nothing that says you can't continue to do so till the end of time, but it's not necessary for anyone besides miners or the truly paranoid. There is no particular rocket science behind such an architecture. As long as the workload is not terribly sequence sensitive it's a fairly simple solution. And the nature of the algorithms employed by most load balancers allow them to work at close to wire speed of most media. They can even do packet analysis, filtering, and modification (over and above what their job requires) at near wire speed. Even properly designed deep packet operations can be amazingly efficient (which goes some distance toward explaining why I fear actively hostile infrastructure providers.)
There are several big problems here from my point of view:
1) Moore's Law notwithstanding, it will be a fair bit of time before such technology is within reasonable grasp of Joe Sixpack, and longer yet before he's running such a setup in his garage.
Well, my 4 year old android cell phone has more processing power than the most powerful Cray available 30 years ago. That said, why does Joe Sick Pack need to run a full client(supernode) himself? Why can't he hire a service to act in his behalf? Or if he doesn't want to trust some corporation to track his balances (such as BitcoinSpinner) what stops him from joining or starting a co-op to do that for him? Why is it full client or bust?
2) If/when the transaction load swamps what can reasonable be expected on readily available media (say 10G at this point) it'll be back to the drawing board. Probably before that since the blockchain itself would be at some risk if it were maintained exclusively in something like memcached.
Why? Why would that be 'back to the drawing board'? I don't think that we will ever get there because of the incentives involved with transaction fees, but what if we did? Full time pruning of teh blockchain puts a high end limit to just how large the blockchain can become without each and every new transaction resulting in the pruning of some previous transaction. So far, it's impossible for any transaction on the main network with less than a single Satoshi, and likewise impossible for the transaction fee to be less than a single Satoshi. Overlay netowrks are destined to take much of this traffic burden off the main netowrk in an effort to avoid transaction fees and bundle mutiple transactions into a single send-to-many transaction to settle up at the end of the business day. |
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More and more people complaining about a blockchain size, load ave, etc. That's in the here and now with Bitcoin being .0001% the size that it could be called upon to be. Or less.
Which is the driving force for 1) development and adoption of light & blockchainless clients 2) Stratum and other similar overlay networks such as is used by blockchainless clients (BitcoinSpinner) 3) full implimentation of Satoshi's protocol, in particular the parts that support independent light clients without an overlay network. Beyond that: More people showing concern about a 'network backbone' (I included.)
I've brought up those concerns years ago myself, long before the bitcoin wiki existed, much less had a 'scalability' section. You're far from the first to bring these issues up. Don't get me wrong, the practical scalability of the network is a real issue, and just saying "the market will find a way" isn't really good enough, but there are very smart people that have and are working on those issues.
Theories about 'supernodes' with datacenter class network connectivity with hundreds of cores and load balances distributing the workload to them. And even that only handles what I would consider relatively modest Bitcoin utilization in a more global view. Beyond that I've not heard of anyone having any ideas.
Really? Never heard of any alternative ideas? I've personally mentioned Stratum three times in this thread just this week. I also mentioned BitcoinSpinner & similar clients in this thread; which despite your views actually is the market responding to your issue of scalability. You might not like the idea of some guy running such a server to aid blockchainless clients because you consider it centralization, but have you ever considered running your own Stratum server? Do I need to add a link so that you can find it? That actually defys one of the root conditions for an ideal money, namely that it doesn't require special conditions to keep it from rotting, slipping away or killing it's owner. Otherwise wheat, mercury or plutonium would have made fine commodity monies alongside gold & silver.
Bakcoin is not at all 'ideal money'. It's totally shitty money, and I tried to make that clear. The reason for this is that 'good' money attracts 'poor' owners. At least in terms of meeting the stated goals of the project. Wow. Gresham's law in inverse. I don't know how to respond to that. I'm not even sure that I should other than 'corrolation is not causation'. It's arguably a mistake to label 'bakcoin' as a form of money...and certainly a mistake to think of it as one in any normal conception of the word. And how would non-money work as a reserve currency? Anything cold serve as a 'reserve currency' that met the demands of those using it. That's true enough, taken alone. usually such need-meeting things have a set of common characteristics that lead most people to collectively refer to such things as "money". So deliberately creating a currency that is the reverse of good money seems like a poor design decision. In this case I think that the most critical aspect would be that people trust it. A good part of my design philosophy here is to reduce the reason for people _not_ to trust it and/or trust it more than other things as a basis for notation.
So that I am clear on this, are you trying to move the trust metric away from the unit of currency? Bitcoin tries to eleminate the need for trusted intermediaries and onto the collective protocol & network; are you trying to create a currency that no one trusts for anything or are you trying to move the trust onto the exchanges that would be using bakcoin to start their own smaller cryptocurrencies?
My document currently does not expand on the concept that all of the 'sponsored exchange currencies' may gain some significant advantages by sharing the workload or supporting bakcoin. For instance, they can use it as a free-form notepad (of modest size) and everyone will be securing everyone else's notes. So, there may be other advantages that gold or seashells don't really provide.
I see a number of reasons that I wouldn't trust it for anything, based on just your implied design. If I, as an end user wouldn't trust it as a medium of exchange, why would I trust an exchange that used it as a backing for their own vanity cryptocurrency? In turn, why should the exchanges trust it, or each other? |
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As for the 'deflation' complaint, the whole idea revolves around ratios so absolute values are not even a concern. The 'deflation' is utilized to facilitate a predictable (and long) lifespan is all.
And why would you expect that deliberate deflation would contribute to longevity of a cryptocurrency? The basic idea from an engineering point of view is that one starts with a full set of baggage then loses it over time. And why would that be helpful in your view? I see the opposite as an Achilles heal of Bitcoin in some ways. A controlling factor in it's scaling and a regrettable factor dictating it's evolution. Okay, you see it. Help me see what you see. Do you hear voices too? Just because you see it doesn't make it real. Explain. That actually defys one of the root conditions for an ideal money, namely that it doesn't require special conditions to keep it from rotting, slipping away or killing it's owner. Otherwise wheat, mercury or plutonium would have made fine commodity monies alongside gold & silver.
Bakcoin is not at all 'ideal money'. It's totally shitty money, and I tried to make that clear. The reason for this is that 'good' money attracts 'poor' owners. At least in terms of meeting the stated goals of the project. Wow. Gresham's law in inverse. I don't know how to respond to that. I'm not even sure that I should other than 'corrolation is not causation'. It's arguably a mistake to label 'bakcoin' as a form of money...and certainly a mistake to think of it as one in any normal conception of the word. And how would non-money work as a reserve currency? |
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As for the 'deflation' complaint, the whole idea revolves around ratios so absolute values are not even a concern. The 'deflation' is utilized to facilitate a predictable (and long) lifespan is all.
And why would you expect that deliberate deflation would contribute to longevity of a cryptocurrency? The basic idea from an engineering point of view is that one starts with a full set of baggage then loses it over time. And why would that be helpful in your view? That actually defys one of the root conditions for an ideal money, namely that it doesn't require special conditions to keep it from rotting, slipping away or killing it's owner. Otherwise wheat, mercury or plutonium would have made fine commodity monies alongside gold & silver.
Bakcoin is not at all 'ideal money'. It's totally shitty money, and I tried to make that clear. The reason for this is that 'good' money attracts 'poor' owners. At least in terms of meeting the stated goals of the project. Wow. Gresham's law in inverse. I don't know how to respond to that. I'm not even sure that I should other than 'corrolation is not causation'. |
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As for the 'deflation' complaint, the whole idea revolves around ratios so absolute values are not even a concern. The 'deflation' is utilized to facilitate a predictable (and long) lifespan is all.
And why would you expect that deliberate deflation would contribute to longevity of a cryptocurrency? That actually defys one of the root conditions for an ideal money, namely that it doesn't require special conditions to keep it from rotting, slipping away or killing it's owner. Otherwise wheat, mercury or plutonium would have made fine commodity monies alongside gold & silver. |
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A solution which I have put some thought into is to have an extremely stripped-down and lightened up varient of Bitcoin with some extensions which could realistically be expected to live in perpetuity and would serve as a trusted 'reserve currency' upon which shards of various form are built. I started to describe some of my earlier 'thought experiments' as http://bakcoin.org if anyone is interested. The advantage of such a solution is that it could perhaps avoid the need for a 'backbone network' at all. Maybe. I went to bakcoin.org and read your ideas. I hope you're not an econ undergrad, but I suspect that you are. There is nothing like a little knowledge unconnected with experience to beget such a bad idea. But don't feel like I'm belittling your ideas, sometimes us old guys have to eat crow. A deliberately deflationary (and punative) cryptocurrency might have a niche. Go out and make it, and let the free market decide. EDIT: On page #3 you refer to the 'monolithic' nature of bitcoin. I don't think that word means what you think that it means. EDIT2: What is your understanding of what a 'supernode' would look like in a future with bitcoin exceeding the transaction rates of Visa? And under what conditions could the successful growth of bitcoin to that transaction level directly lead to it's failure? |
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This is a good point, and I respect that you have made it. It is actually related to a part of my comment that you snipped out where I called attention to the very different nature of Bitcoin vs. others in terms of 'centralized control'.
Anyone who cares to do something other than wave the pom-poms may notice that I have a great deal of respect for and hopes for Bitcoin even in the 'worst' of circumstances and am certainly not immune to recognizing the strong points which it has.
Fair enough. Let's assume for a moment that your not trolling, and that your concerns are valid. Do you have any suggestions for improving the protocol? Boy...not really. My suggestion (which I made earlier) is to try to leverage Bitcoin's success in development of an architecture which really focuses on scalabity (while retaining the 'p2p' nature as at least I classify it.) The key would be that a common vision is shared between the solutions and there is general cooperation. Reading this made me think of this.... http://www.dilbert.com/strips/2012-05-25/This could take the form of simple sharding of a very Bitcoin-like protocol in which the shards are manageable at an entry-level and value is transferred between shards in more of a 'backbone network'. An individual could still do a lot of transactions as today by choosing their shards carefully, particularly if their interaction was with vendors who were 'in' a lot of shards. A solution which I have put some thought into is to have an extremely stripped-down and lightened up varient of Bitcoin with some extensions which could realistically be expected to live in perpetuity and would serve as a trusted 'reserve currency' upon which shards of various form are built. I started to describe some of my earlier 'thought experiments' as http://bakcoin.org if anyone is interested. The advantage of such a solution is that it could perhaps avoid the need for a 'backbone network' at all. Maybe. I say Stratum is a better plan, but whatever. I really wasn't asking for your ideas, only checking to see if you had any. Now take those ideas and fork the bitcoin code. Start your new & imporoved altcoin, and we shall see. If you are right, everyone here, including myself, will eventually be using your altcoin and you will have been the ultimate early adopter. I, for one, don't begrudge Satoshi his early mining gains, nor would I begrudge yours if you turn out to be correct. But I don't thingk that you're correct, so I'll hang out here for a while longer. |
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We don't control that website, and thus don't control that metric. Fudders are gonna fud. It's what they do. Hmm... that website doesn't really seem anti-bitcoin. And if you're gonna write all that code you must be at least a little interested. I was simply thinking someone here might know the owner and ask nicely. :-) I ment that we can't take it down, and detractors are going to find a way to replicate this even if it didn't exist. And the membership of this forum crossed 10K months ago, but there is no chance that the ownership of this forum is going to start counting IP addresses. That wouldn't be any more relevant a metric anyway. Not only do not all members run their own client, much less one full time; there are many more people who use bitcoin who don't have memberships. of course, but one can guess-estimate the number of non-forum members; just like radio stations estimate listeners from request phone calls... and is really the derivative that matters not the value anyway. Again, the growth or decline of the number of listening-but-not-mining clients is irrelevent to the function or resilence of the bitcoin network whether they are on the open Internet or some PVN. Beyond some minimum number required to support the bandwidth of the network as a whole, that is. The very fact that we can't know how many (or where are) all the network's nodes happen to exist is, itself, a contribution to it's resiliance. An attacker can DOS the pools or exchanges, because he can find out it's IP address and a government agent can steal a server because he can find the farm that holds it; but these things cannot stop the bitcoin network for no other reason that you cannot kill what you cannot catch. At worst, these kinds of events simply disrupt the network temporaroly and force more users towards Tor and I2P. I'm not worried about technical disruption of bitcoin but social -- after all there still aren't many merchants accepting it. BTC could just fade away... statistics showing a growing user base would convince merchants to offer it as a payment mechanism. You are right, the inability to fully count/control the members is a great strength which is why I said "approximate numbers". Hard numbers would be great, but if those are not available, it would still be useful to have the same kind of partly-fabricated numbers that businesses have used since the beginning of... well the beginning of VCs probably... to justify their business model. Whatever will be will be. |
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This is a good point, and I respect that you have made it. It is actually related to a part of my comment that you snipped out where I called attention to the very different nature of Bitcoin vs. others in terms of 'centralized control'.
Anyone who cares to do something other than wave the pom-poms may notice that I have a great deal of respect for and hopes for Bitcoin even in the 'worst' of circumstances and am certainly not immune to recognizing the strong points which it has.
Fair enough. Let's assume for a moment that your not trolling, and that your concerns are valid. Do you have any suggestions for improving the protocol? |
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