I never said Bitcoin is ideal money, nor stable in value. I said it's supplementary / alternative money and that deflationary criticism makes an erroneous assumption that bitcoin is the only currency available - when clearly it is not (it has to compete with metals, fiat, altcoins, etc).

If you are in a quest to find ideal money, you won't find it anywhere because stable value (in monetary terms) is in itself an "ideal".

I read the thread for 3-4 pages and the last two. Although I'm not 100% sure of the issue, I think it boils down to this:

"Bitcoin is deflationary, deflationary currencies don't work as ideal money, therefore we need to fix bitcoin economics to make it so" - or something to that effect. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

This is not the first time that I've heard the deflationary argument, however it is a problematic argument because it makes one basic assumption: That bitcoin is the only currency in the economy.

The deflationary argument flaw is based on an assumption: That Bitcoin must somehow play the role of the primary currency of entire states/economies and that these will be destroyed by its deflationary nature. However Bitcoin is not an exclusive currency that will dominate state economies. It's a supplementary currency that will co-exist with fiat, gold, silver, altcoins, etc. Thus countries will always be repaying their ever-inflating debts, by printing more fiat, paying govt wages and pensions through freshly printed money, etc etc. They will also be adjusting the money supply according to growth. But if you want an alternative to fiat, you can buy gold, silver, bitcoins, altcoins, etc.

The problem stated would be significant if we had a global body trying to enforce a deflationary global currency on the entire world, while also eliminating the use of alternative currencies by force. If this scenario plays out, it will be probably be with an inflationary, not a deflationary currency. Whatever the case, there is no problem to solve as far as Bitcoin is concerned: Its role is not to replace the entire global money supply, nor will governments ever adopt it as they would instantly go bankrupt by converting their debt to a currency they cannot issue.

This is precisely why non-exporting countries which have adopted the Euro, suffer. By converting their debt to a currency they can't issue, they have become insolvent to repay their debt with own means. This has in turn converted what was easily managed as an internal debt, to an impossible to handle external debt (debt refinancing, by necessity, has to come from abroad - since the country can't issue money).

BUMP

I doubt he's going broke anytime soon. If I were the NSA, he would be among the primary actors (along with other vocal proponents) I would pay handsomely to damage bitcoin by forking it - and proving that Bitcoin is unreliable as money, as investment - as anything.

Nobody can fork gold and make your gold coins and coin bars worthless. If bad actors manage this in Bitcoin then that'll be pretty ugly for Bitcoin and I think Satoshi will indeed materialize his warning[1] of coming back and declaring it a failure, due to getting beaten from a social engineering attack vector.

I think this vector needs to be closed down with an automated algorithmic increase of some sort that will eliminate disagreements that can be used for social-engineering a fork.

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010238.html

I think there is a whale group which is periodically pumping various coins and a lot of money flowed to Monero and DASH. I have the sense that the coins they are using can't really be cashed out... they could be half a million btcs or more, stolen at some point in time, and the hackers are simply having fun with them pumping alts.

Anonymous coins were always going to take, at least 1% of BTC marketcap (I've said that in early '14 when darkcoin and anoncoin were at 2-3mn marketcap combined), which gave the anon market explosive growth potential that wasn't even worth the "fights" between drk/monero/other coins... there was enough "food" for everybody 

I tried to compile this but failed due to non avx2 use, so it did compile some of the files... so I run cuckoo28:

perf stat -d -d -d ./cuckoo28

Looking for 42-cycle on cuckoo28("",0) with 50% edges, 7 trims, 1 threads
Using 16MB edge and 32MB node memory, 1-way siphash, and 4-byte counters
initial load 3200%
round  1 partition loads U0 2022% V0  947%
round  2 partition loads U0  560% V0  373%
round  3 partition loads U0  267% V0  201%
round  4 partition loads U0  157% V0  126%
round  5 partition loads U0  103% V0   86%
round  6 partition loads U0   73% V0   63%
round  7 partition loads U0   55% V0   48%
nonce 0: 7 trims completed  final load 48%
   4-cycle found at 0:67%
0 total solutions

 Performance counter stats for './cuckoo28':

      79535.505140      task-clock (msec)         #    0.998 CPUs utilized          
             1,567      context-switches          #    0.020 K/sec                  
                 2      cpu-migrations            #    0.000 K/sec                  
             5,366      page-faults               #    0.067 K/sec                  
   146,892,319,199      cycles                    #    1.847 GHz                      (6.66%)
   104,304,503,009      instructions              #    0.71  insn per cycle          (13.35%)
     4,551,218,923      branches                  #   57.222 M/sec                    (13.35%)
       348,290,653      branch-misses             #    7.65% of all branches          (6.67%)
    16,992,792,470      L1-dcache-loads           #  213.650 M/sec                    (6.68%)
     1,043,305,676      L1-dcache-load-misses     #    6.14% of all L1-dcache hits    (6.67%)
     1,034,482,209      LLC-loads                 #   13.007 M/sec                    (6.67%)
       698,460,299      LLC-load-misses           #    0.95% of all LL-cache hits     (6.67%)
   145,872,608,950      L1-icache-loads           # 1834.056 M/sec                    (6.67%)
        11,774,481      L1-icache-load-misses                                         (6.66%)
    16,954,141,954      dTLB-loads                #  213.164 M/sec                    (6.67%)
       384,883,546      dTLB-load-misses          #    2.27% of all dTLB cache hits   (6.67%)
   104,269,293,009      iTLB-loads                # 1310.978 M/sec                    (13.34%)
            17,157      iTLB-load-misses          #    0.00% of all iTLB cache hits   (13.34%)
         9,380,542      L1-dcache-prefetches      #    0.118 M/sec                    (6.67%)
   <not supported>      L1-dcache-prefetch-misses                                  

      79.674461632 seconds time elapsed


(that's on a q8200 running @ 1.86 GHz). Ins/cycle are seemingly quite low - which is normal-ish for ram tasks, but still).

Further perf stats indicate a lot of overhead here (the cmpxchg stalls the jump?): http://imgur.com/a/zwEmP
(data obtained by running perf top while ./cuckoo28 was running).

Given that this was on a single thread, couldn't this be done with plain unlocked moves? Also, in multithreaded applications, would it be possible to gamble faster unlocked moves trading data accuracy in order to produce a faster version with possible data corruption?

Just some thoughts...

Fixed it

Ok then, you have nothing to worry in terms of CPU though. Your issue is network transfer rate - it's too low. You need ~35 seconds to download a block and verification would only last half a second or less.

30kb/sec = the bottleneck is on the network (transfer rate, not pings). Your other components should be good for handling at least 1mb+ / sec. Try it with an ethernet cable if possible.

It could but it won't

You only need to know the "trend": Has the establishment / authorities, ever done anything to pump BTC? No. They have done exactly the opposite (hammering BTC with "negative news"). And BTC rises despite these.

Linux has zram (real-time RAM compression/decompression). It can help in scenarios with ram constraints. Essentially you are trading processing power (that you may have in excess), with RAM (that you lack).

There is also zswap where you trade processing power for reduced I/O operations while swapping to a medium, by compressing the swap data.

If one has something like raspberry, and its cpu is good (I have no idea whether it is or not), but lacks RAM, then they can trade the cpu power with compressed ram + compressed swap, and make the impossible => possible.

Another tradeoff that you may face, is in the selection of medium space. A minimum of 256gb (blockchain currently at >110gb which means the 128gb will be full very soon) seems inevitable, but even that can drop if you compress the partition and trade CPU time in realtime compression/decompression with storage space. A compressed partition might reduce space requirements for the blockchain by 20-30%, postponing a 256gb medium purchase - for when their prices drop. If you use a HDD, space is not such a problem but for cards, flash storage etc, it is.

All the systems that act as intermediaries to people actually owning their bitcoins, are quite vulnerable from state intervention. I think China is big because people used exchanges as they would a broker account. Few moved their coins to their wallets - if they ever had one (aside from the exchange interface they used). So this made exchanges vulnerable. An ETF could present a similar situation / danger, although it could make it easier for people to buy.


I don't really think BTC has the dynamic to reduce metal demand, as its marketcap is way too small. Even at 10x current price it's too small... Gold production (only mines / no recycled) requires more than 120 billion $$$ per year to absorb while bitcoin production (~650k coins) only takes 0.7bn usd. It's a drop in the ocean in comparison (all BTCs mined per year can be bought with the money needed for ~2 days worth of global gold mining). And we are not even counting silver, palladium, platinum, etc.

The fluctuations on metal price and metal production put a much bigger strain on buyers capacity (=wallet) to absorb production. A "small" increase of annual production in the range of 100 extra tons, can require a further 4bn USD in cash to buy that. Or a price spike of 50$, can make the annual production require 5+ bn USD extra cash. If you combine events like +200 tons output and +100$ in price within a year (both quite possible scenarios from year-to-year), you are suddenly dealing with increased cash requirements of an extra 20bn to buy the annual gold mine production - which is an amount that ...eclipses the BTC marketcap. And it's just a "small" fluctuation, in the market dynamics (supply/price), of just one metal.

These type of markets and their dynamics make BTC look pretty damn small to have any serious impact on their demand. Which is good for ...upward potential.

I think the chances are actually closer to 2-5% than "<25%" of the market analysts etc etc.

The establishment / authorities / countries, have traditionally never done anything to pump BTC and that's not going to change now. But they have hammered it down hundreds of times.

BTC is rising by itself, slowly but surely, *despite* the fact that it faces government and regulatory resistance. And it will continue to do so - even when the ETF is denied (which I consider almost certain).

Difficulty History

Date   Difficulty   Change   Hash Rate
Feb 18 2017   440,779,902,287   4.41%   3,155,225,442 GH/s
Feb 04 2017   422,170,566,884   7.43%   3,022,014,630 GH/s
Jan 22 2017   392,963,262,344   16.64%   2,812,940,600 GH/s
Jan 10 2017   336,899,932,796   6.05%   2,411,623,656 GH/s
Dec 28 2016   317,688,400,354   2.43%   2,274,102,150 GH/s
Dec 15 2016   310,153,855,703   8.16%   2,220,167,778 GH/s
Dec 02 2016   286,765,766,821   1.76%   2,052,749,317 GH/s
Nov 18 2016   281,800,917,193   10.68%   2,017,209,539 GH/s
Nov 05 2016   254,620,187,304   0.40%   1,822,642,296 GH/s

It's intentionally simple to illustrate the point.


You have to remember that high capacity (and consequent low fees) bring with them uses that are not necessarily economic in nature. For example, using the bitcoin blockchain as a distributed storage file, for storing all kind of irrelevant things - in a sense we are talking about txs with 0$ transfer of value. If someone wants to use the blockchain to store gigabytes per day in bullshit, paying peanuts, they can. And you can't stop them.


Yes it can, but with decentralization cost and users relying on third parties.

Plus real usage is not even 1/10th of that, which means 9+/10ths of the blockchain would be occupied with crap. Why would anyone impose 700gb of crap on everyone else? It's insane.


By its users and its properties to be able to move around non-trivial amounts of money with very small fees.

The benefit of bitcoin widens the larger the amount of money being transferred is. If you want to transfer 10cents and have to pay 20 cents fee, that's not effective. If you want to transfer 100$ or 10k$ and have to pay 20 cents fee (saving you 3$ or 300$ from, say, a paypal) that's far better.

This is not something theoretical btw. You go over at apmex, for example: http://www.apmex.com/product/102251/2017-1-oz-gold-american-eagle-bu?toppicks1

And see:

Quantity   Check/Wire   CC/PayPal

1 - 9            $1,310.69   $1,365.30

+55$ for doing the exact same purchase through CC/Paypal...


I think the use cases are determined based on a profitability equation. Our threshold might be around 5-10$ right now, meaning that if you want to transact more than that, it's probably more profitable going through BTC, than through other electronic payment means. If paypal requires users to pay, say, 3-4% in fees + 0.35$, then a 10$ transfer would cost around 0.65-0.75$.

Are there use cases for moving around more than 5-10$ and saving money in the process, while also enjoying the benefit of knowing that no one will freeze your account, demonetize your currency, reverse your txs, etc etc? The answer is a qualified yes.



Keep in mind that in the same discussion, the previous message of satoshi, says:


...which indicates he wanted blocksize increases on a need-to basis. Which is what I'd expect from a rational man who has glimpsed the problem of giving away too much space for abuse and seeks a solution. The automated proposal of his next message cannot evaluate needs. Humans can (subjectively). And that's where friction comes in.

Network 1: Tx capacity 100tx/sec, does 1$ per tx = 8.6mn usd per day in trade volume
Network 2: Tx capacity 5tx/sec, does 1000$ per tx = 432mn usd per day in trade volume

Just the fee savings that Network 2 can have, compared to, say, Paypal or Western Union fees, exceed Network 1 entire trade volume.

Obviously the value of network 2 would be much higher.

As issues arise (sybil attack vector), solutions are created (invested mixing nodes, collateral etc). And then the concept can evolve to include more than that - like masternodes doing more stuff, like instant X, etc etc. And in a year or two, they might do even more when new functionalities are envisioned and implemented. That's how things get done.

If Greece goes bankrupt, it's doubtful that Greeks will be buying BTCs. They'll have more pressing issues to solve. The real motivator to buy BTCs will be mainly from European buyers, using Bitcoin as a store of value, due to euro collapsing in case of a GRexit. But I think the Greek government will simply do whatever it's told - as it has in the last 7 years. I mean the government even threw out a referendum that said people desired no bailout / memorandum-deal and went for the memorandum deal.

As for the ETF, most BTC investors by now have zero expectations about it. Why? Because the western authorities, western governments, western press etc, have never done anything serious to pump up the price of BTC (except indirectly - like banning cash, creating Cyprus-like situations etc). This is unlikely to change - although there may be a few rare exceptions to the rule.

The ETF would have way more chances if it applied simultaneously in multiple countries... US, UK, investor-friendly countries in SE Asia, etc.