While I admire their enthusiasm, I can't help but feel like "replace" is too strong a word.  It carries connotations of a sudden, or even drastic, change.  I see it as more of the beginnings of a shift in power.  A gradual transition to people having greater self-determination over their wealth.

It's difficult, at least in our lifetimes, to envision a world that has absolutely no debt-based lending and no custodial money services.  Some people are naturally going to be hesitant to let go of those ideas.  And, in fairness, a small amount of good can come from them on occasion.  We clearly have a problem in the world with the impact and consequences of how these ideas are currently being utilised and the power it gives to a small number of people.  There is abuse on a massive scale and we obviously need to rethink it.  But moving to the extreme opposite and eliminating these concepts entirely would likely only create new problems.  As with all things, there needs to be a balance.  

The rational approach is to start with less reliance on debt-based lending and fewer custodian services.  Take it steadily.  It's not an 'all-or-nothing' affair.  Traditional Finance may be flawed, but it's not quite practical for the world to go 'cold turkey' and stop right away.  Change made in haste often leads to regret.

But yes, Bitcoin will unquestionably result in greater freedom.  It already does.  We just have to ensure we use our newfound freedom more responsibly than the financial institutions we deplore.

So the question then becomes:

Is your issue truly with ASICs?  Or with Bitmain?

My stance remains that it's far more practical and safe to encourage a larger number of companies to get involved in the production of ASICs, rather than trying to stuff the genie back in the lamp, burying it and then hoping that the clear and obvious financial incentive to let it back out again is never discovered.

Competition works best when there isn't the potential for one competitor to obtain a major advantage over the others.  This is why you raise the bar and not just politely ask the competitors to perform to a lower level than they're capable of.  Sooner or later, their desire to win will override your desire to lower the bar.  If multiple manufacturers can make ASICs, no one company has a major advantage over the others.  But if you make a supposedly ASIC-resistant algo, you open the potential to one company "cracking" it (it's not really a crack, though) before the others do.  And the companies with the most disposable income will have the best chance of gaining the advantage.  That's a weaker system than the one we currently have and I will continue to argue against it.

I mean, you've seen movies, right?  That overused trope where the good guy and the bad guy agree to settle their differences with a fair fist fight, but then when the bad guy is losing, they pull out a knife/gun/whatever?  You can't trust hardware manufacturers to agree to a fair fight.  It won't work.  They want to win and I sincerely doubt they'll lose any sleep if they don't conform to your noble ideals.  

Mining is an arms race.  It was an arms race long before ASICs.  It'll continue to be an arms race if someone comes up with something better than ASICs.  But at no point will it be ever be safe to believe that everyone will lay down their arms and go back to a fist fight.

It should come as no surprise that you've been excluded from my trust list for some time already.  I also have a mental list for the top 3 trolls on the entire forum that you feature fairly prominently on.

There's clearly a "Show ratings" link to see untrusted feedback.  There's no need for anyone to add you to their trust list in order to see the (totally inane) feedback you've left other forum users.  This sounds like an attempt to manipulate inexperienced users into adding you to their trust list.

That's pretty much the best we can hope for with this.  With the exception of sig campigns, I haven't had any financial interactions to base my trust on.  I've never done any trades with other forum members or bought/sold any items in the marketplace.  That means I'm mostly limited to trusting users who appear to demonstrate sound judgement and who aren't embroiled in any scandals.  

It's never going to be a perfect system, but the more people use it, the better it will become.

And how do ASICs break the cryptographic hash function?  The idea of mining is to solve the nonce.  Finding a way to do it as efficiently as possible is not breaking any cryptographic element.



So ASICs are bad but GPU mining is okay?  It's nice to see where we draw the arbitrary lines.  The centralising element doesn't come from the hardware used, but from the quantity of units one person can utilise.  If I mine on my home CPU, while some billionaire has 50 warehouses dotted around the globe with 10000 CPUs mining away, it's literally no different in terms of centralisation.



It would be a bigger failure if we switched the algorithm to one that could allow that to happen in future.  Attempting to restrict ASICs and someone managing to do it anyway is the only way this scenario could occur now.  For me, personally, your ideology isn't worth the potential cost to the network.  Others may feel differently.

For an algorithm to be "cracked", we'd first have to agree that designing hardware to perform a task more efficiently is effectively breaking some sort of implied lock.  I'm still yet to be convinced there's a lock to break, let alone that ASICs are somehow breaking them.  It's unlikely we're ever going to see eye-to-eye on this.

Perhaps if an algorithm was specifically designed with ASIC resistance in mind, then you could make that claim.  But that doesn't apply here.

Mine was already customised, but seems I had a greater number of users excluded from my trust list than I had included.  I think it must be that psychological factor where negative impressions tend to be more memorable than positive ones.  All updated now.

This.  How does this "Genesis project" actually make a difference if you're just repeating the same concept other advocacy groups have taken previously, but with the addition of some vaguely upbeat branding about how yours is supposedly better?  Nothing I've read here so far sounds like a new idea.



I still think we need to tread carefully with this supposed "takeover" narrative.  It's all just some different ideas that didn't make the cut.  The moment you call it a takeover, you are implying there is someone to take over from.  

Given the choice between:

a) running code that someone paid people to make so that it would benefit institutions and speculators, which would almost certainly end up as a walled garden early-Netscape type monstrosity

and

b) running code that people made of their own volition because they cared passionately enough about what they believed in, whilst also following underlying principles that espouse the notions of permissionless freedom, open source and transparency

I know which project I'll be following.  Have fun with your institutioncoin.  Feel free to come back when you get the point of crypto.

Cool story bro.

If you weren't willing to spend the time, you wouldn't be putting so much effort into creating all these topics to spout a load of meaningless waffle because you don't understand that the fiat price isn't the important part.  The market chooses the direction.  If the market decides it wants wants your "framework for structural multilayered financial system with regulated organic entities" word soup, it'll almost certainly find a way to obtain it.  Otherwise it'll ignore it like it does all the other myriad ideas that get buried without notice or attention because no one cared.  Blame whoever you want and make all the doomsday prognostications you like.  Doesn't make a difference.  You're just another person who thinks their idea is great, but has no way of making it happen other than shouting loudly and flailing your arms about in a desperate bid for attention.

What, exactly, do you think they should be developing?  It would probably help if you were a little clearer on that.  How is it the fault of Bitcoin developers that altcoins aren't getting the attention you feel they deserve?  What are you even talking about?

Sounds like you have it all backwards.  Contrary to popular belief, what's best for crypto is not necessarily what's best for the speculators and the institutions.  Go invest in PayPal and Ripple if you want the kind of "development" you're talking about.  Anyone who actually understands why crypto is important will know that you're barking up the wrong tree with this. 

Not everything has to be built into the base protocol to be utilised by Bitcoin.  Things like smart contracts can be built on top.  

Also, arguably, Hashed TimeLock Contracts, or HTLC, are a basic form of Smart Contract and are currently implemented in Bitcoin, so the subject may well be considered on-topic for this board.

Missing the point as usual, but okay.  What I'm saying is that while it's fairly safe to make the assumption that, because bad things were happening in that period, it could easily be the motivation behind Bitcoin's creation, it's still not quite definitive proof.  I know a lack of empirical evidence has never been a problem for you before, because we all know how much you love to tell fantastical stories, but some of us prefer facts over speculation.  And there are many facts we're likely never going to possess. 

Or is this the part where you tell us that you met Satoshi in person and they told you exactly what their motivations were?  Definitely sounds like the kind of thing you'd say.

True enough about the genesis block, but I'll have to stay on the fence with this one.  Clearly some of the work was already done before that particular headline was written.  As theymos alluded to, Satoshi was working on the idea in 2007 (i.e. before it actually became the 2008 crisis).  If the text embedded in that first block had contained a headline from 2007, then we could definitely point to that beyond all doubt as the true source of inspiration.  But it didn't.  It appears as though Satoshi deliberately launched the network upon reading that article, so it does support the notion that the financial crisis was undeniably a factor in their motivations.  But we can't know for certain if the article was merely something that reinforced Satoshi's general outlook on the problems with modern economic practices, or if it was specifically the global financial crisis that prompted their decision to create Bitcoin. 

It may have been that Satoshi was sufficiently economically astute to see the shit en route to the fan before it actually hit.  Or it may have been that Satoshi thought the banking system had some flaws in general and referenced that article in a "see, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about" kind of way.  I'd like to believe it was the former, but sadly, we may never find out for sure.

It's a little more nuanced than that.  Blockchains and smart contracts have potential to disrupt the Notary business in particular, but that's generally just a small portion of the "lawyer" repertoire.  There are many functions which lawyers perform that are less simple to reproduce in code.  

Try landing yourself in court and see how far a smart contract gets you in terms of legal representation, for one fairly obvious example.  

I've yet to hear complaints from those who have used it that the experience was like dealing with banks. 
I've yet to hear complaints from those who have used it that it is a utopian fantasy.
I've yet to hear complaints from those who have used it that their consensus was bypassed.
I've yet to hear complaints from those who have used it that it is a separate network that supports more than once blockchain.

All that repeated propaganda material is coming from you.

But as long as we agree on the part where people should try using Lightning before forming their own conclusions, rather than simply take your word or mine for it, then that's okay.  However, much like Bitcoin itself, it's only responsible to point out that Lightning is still not at the stage where it is ready for mainstream adoption.  It may be best for most users to wait a while before taking the plunge.  It's also important for users to learn about the differences between sending transactions via LN compared to the standard way of transacting before getting involved.  The security model is different.  Lightning is still beta software.  Users should experiment with only small amounts of BTC, or other compatible cryptocurrency, until LN is more mature.

But they arguably did quite a bit of damage to the space as well.  There were several controversies and scandals that definitely had an impact on public perception.  Such abuses occur when people are placed in positions of influence or authority, so the key to successful advocacy and funding would be to find a decentralised way to do it.  It's not nearly as simple as your proposal suggests.



Votes can be bought.  Members can be bribed.  Committees can be corrupted.  We've seen enough projects like this to know they often don't end well.

---

And how much of a bounty are you willing to pay to implement your various "improvements", Mr Double Standards?  All you do is complain that devs aren't making what you want them to make, as if they somehow owe it to you to build your vision for you.  Take your own advice, stump up the BTC and offer to pay someone if you can't or won't code it yourself.  

But for anyone who is prepared to learn, they'll save some money by cutting out the middleman.  I see why you feel the need to defend your business model, but at the end of the day, there is a cost for utilising your service.  You have to maintain a profit margin and that profit comes directly from your customers paying you to do something they could be doing themselves.