Ripple is a centralized payment service with a federal reserve (being OpenCoin Inc). It doesn't matter how they word it - if the federal reserve printed 100 trillion dollars but will only release drops through the economy to further their agenda, it's the same as printing money
In the same sense that federal reserve has already printed an infinite amount of dollars and only release a trillion or so per year OpenCoin has printed 100 billion and only release drops while there's demand. Imagine every Bitcoin wallet must have 1 coin in it for basic functionality, what would that do to the exchange rate  |
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If the 'Bitcoin purchase payment' exchanges coins and ripple-style IOUs, would it also be possible
to hook more than one blockchain into Zero Reserve and exchange between them (i.e. completely trustless)?
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Economists say that in an effective market price of an item is it's future utility times probability of it happen times our time preference. That is if chances of Bitcoin trading for 500K$ in 10 years time are, say, 50% and we value a dollar today twice as much as a dollar in 10 years time, then Bitcoin today should be trading at 125,000$ apiece. Still it's trading thousand times cheaper. Why?
I can see two explanations:
-We estimate chances of Bitcoin's success around 0.1%
Less than 0.1% to go to 500k because it's not 100 vs 500000, there should be some kind of "bulk of the probability distribution". (e.g. when Bitcoin goes to 1k or 10k and struggles against real competition from big tech companies) But who can look at the Btc price chart and say "efficient market" with a straight face? |
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It is foolish to believe their Ripple will help Bitcoin in any way as the much quoted benefits are based on faulty conclusions,
- an automatic distributed currency exchange is complete vaporware. It will require a lot more than technology to work, e.g. like liquidity.
- debt valuation depends on the debtor
If (in the far future) everyone will have an open-sourced Ripple server and XRP valuation has left bubble territory, it's almost an automatic distributed trustless currency exchange and it will help Bitcoin. Almost because you still have to trust a gateway for transactions. |
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In theory (not part of the protocol), the transaction could include requirements for the block header to be included. So for example it could specify that only specific version numbers in the block header are allowed. However, the version number can be faked, it doesn't tell you what the miner is really running.
The simplest solution is probably to just hand-pick who you are submitting your transaction to; if they don't broadcast it, only those who received it can mine it.
Yes, they don't have to broadcast it. But if someone tries a soft fork with nonstandard transactions that can't be mined by anyone, then *other* nodes don't have to broadcast these funny tx's. (effectively, the dev team would decide) |
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i have a question, is it normal for proof of stake coins to outnumber pow coins by a factor of 5 before a coin has even reached 0.001 percent of it's total cap?
If the factor goes up, fewer and fewer miners can be profitable. You would think this must kill the coin long term if it weren't for an example like XRP/ripple. (economically just that concept driven to the extreme, proof of stake blocks or not) |
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Likely, what you have to consider though is in the instance of pot prohibition it doesn't only affect marijuana as a drug but also it's usage as medicine, industrial hemp and using it as a food crop.
A Bitcoin prohibition would have similar deteriorating effects.
I think an outright ban is not very probable, more something like a nasty poison dart. For example, the government could require that all *merchants* process incoming payments only through *licensed facilities* i.e. banks with infrastructure to recognize and block certain blacklisted coins of criminal origin. And use undercover cops to enforce it. Regular persons would then be told by mass media to use the same facilities for storage of their coins and for incoming transactions. This way everyone will be "protected" from "illegal bitcoins". |
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For example, could issue initial coins to holders of savings bonds or stocks or etc, without requiring payment of coins back at savings bond maturity.
This could go horribly right. If the coins in question are valuable due to lack of selling pressure, holders (mostly filthy rich even before that) will lobby for general adoption of it. Dollar will have a hyperinflationary fit (to convince everyone), mining becomes environmental crime #1, borrowing rates for the new 1%-coin will be usurious etc  |
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It is clear that such a thing would be difficult to enforce, and somebody somewhere would still store the blockchain regardless of the potential consequences (a lot of people actually). But it would sure be a pain for anybody with a company to openly use Bitcoin. Think about how pot prohibition works.
Seems to work like this: - X is banned at some point for arbitrary and nonsensical reasons (extra information in the blockchain or not) - Availability or price is not affected by the ban. - Additionally thousand synthetic high powered versions of X are developed and fly under the radar. |
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A decentralized cryptocurrency becoming international standard will indeed be against the interest of the US and some other governments. They'll find some reasons to suppress it's adoption.
But if they do, it's even more against their interest. As long as Bitcoin is treated as some weird foreign currency, governments can control all merchants and exchanges but if Bitcoin is only used in black market/"System D" part of the world economy there will be no taxes at all, and no control. Governments aren't rational, of course. |
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Source for v0.8.3.7: https://github.com/wiggi/fairbrix-0.8-coincontrolThere are 2 new debug window functions, svscanblocks and svdebugblock, to measure total in- and outflow for addresses that start with a given vanitygen string. testing: block 168266, 70 Fbx sent to fXgaga4p31vZvizUP6Y6coDAe6su8JMiph block 168271, 80 Fbx sent to fXgagaVmUAcfpptmEHhH64v5j6fbuxvXwd, change from 1st tx is one of the inputs block 168279, 200 Fbx sent to fXgaga4p31vZvizUP6Y6coDAe6su8JMiph block 168282, 300 Fbx sent to fXgagaVmUAcfpptmEHhH64v5j6fbuxvXwd block 168344, 115 Fbx sent to some address, the 70 Fbx from 1st tx is one of the inputs svscanblocks 168265 168345 Xgaga {
"total balance change" : 580.00000000
}It backtraces tx's like the Bitcoin v0.7.2 Coin Control traceback function that was kicked out in 0.8, but only 1 deep to find the correct input(s), and without using the database. (txindex=1 is required) Why? Currently nodes can't access real world facts in any reliable way, thats why "Bitcoin mining difficulty contract" is used as example in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260898.msg2926734#msg2926734I want a PoS based voting system for this... |
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When you do drugs people tend to build a tolerance... eventually you can't even feel the effects of the drug any longer so people up the dosage to feel the effects of the drugs again... this is how most people become addicts and such.
With moderate doses tolerance doesn't build up to the point of "can't feel it anymore". (e.g. lots of people get by on their constant daily allowance of methylphenidate) |
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So total network power consumption is at least (1.42E-9 J/hash)*(262E12 hash/s)=372040 J/s = 372 kW. Like I said, this is the most efficient scenario, with little room to improve with new mining hardware in the future. A year ago it was far, far worse.
Power "consumption" is a feature, not an inefficiency. It allows to exchange electricity into coins. One way only, but try this with Visa and dollars The only inefficiency that matters is (average transaction fee / average transaction volume). |
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And how/where can you see the current ripple price?
In ripple, if you choose Bitstamp (rvYAfWj5gh67oV6fW32ZzP3Aw4Eubs59B) as issuer for BTC/XRP and USD/XRP. My guess is Ripple/Bitcoin won't go back anywhere near 5000 unless ripple becomes much more awesome. |
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2. Bitcoin being defined as "currency" by a Federal Judge is actually bad as it opens Bitcoin up to a whole host of US laws designed to prevent people from creating their own currency. Can you say "Liberty Dollar".
THIS should be the concern. Bitcoin being a currency means now the entire banking infra can enforce laws and policies on bitcoin. Welcome to fees, regulation, and loss of freedom. You can't expect authorities to say "ok it's not money so we don't get power and fees" but in this case it's correct, Bitcoin is used to buy things (->money, like gold coins in the past) and pirateat40 sold... basically junk bonds (->securities) |
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To this, I have to add the following observations...
- Block-time targets of less than 1 minute are not good for the network. They do not propagate fast enough, leading to many avoidable and undesired forks/orphans. This is partly due to the nature of mining, which anyone can find 10 or more blocks within the first-find, well before the first block has traversed the net. Each new block is a new lotto-ticket
I think this is a problem with the qt client's network code. It doesn't give block chain related traffic high enough priority, i.e you send a transaction around the world and through Tor and it takes 1 second to arrive, then you solo mine a block and it gets orphaned half a minute later. Perhaps the nodes could be made to ping each other every 10 seconds to make sure they are "awake" and at same block height, and give the user some feedback. Currently an "established connection" means very little. |
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I don't believe it's possible to write an algorithm that a machine can't do but a human can. Is there any evidence to the contrary?
Hmm... something like a SP scenario in Battle for Wesnoth where the player is outnumbered 3:1 and under time pressure/strict turn limit would qualify imo, if the (super smart botnet) machine doesn't know what the (dumb computer) enemy will do next turn. I.e. synchronize it with the block chain. 1 game turn per block (30 seconds or so), RNG is re-seeded with each block hash, this way the game is deterministic, but only in hindsight. To get any reward, you would need to solve a block, then post a "special" transaction (containing keystrokes/player actions and a 1use privkey to prove the original block was yours) no later than N blocks after that (N = turn limit) If a machine can really be made to do this the game in question will get a whole lot better. And we have an "AI-coin". Win-Win |
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I doubt botnet resistance is possible, unless you make it such that normal people can't take part with their PC. You want broader participation for a coin to have better chance of success.
The 1% are only 1%, that is not broad. Appeal to the starving, the children, the outcaste, make it unappealing to the rich, the well fed, the well-to-do at first, so that its appeal to them ends up coming from how many millions of people they can sell their howerver they got rich well fed etc to by adopting this currency that all those potential customers, who are currently ignored due to having no money, can become customers by means of once they have been given money by this method of giving money only to those who so desperately need it that they are willing to sit down 16 hours a day doing Turing Tests, or whatever... -MarkM- Just 5 or 10 minutes human input when a block is found. For example, the block hash could be used as RNG seed for something like 1 small level of a very complex roguelike game. Keystrokes to solve it are recorded and saved in the block chain as additional PoW. Hard for computers, incomprehensible for 99% of all people (mechanical turk resistant), and takes only a millisecond or so to check validity. But I guess it would be difficult to implement in a way to make savescumming+bruteforcing inefficient for bot(net)s and to require some human attention without making grueling working hours the best strategie. |
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Once Litecoin is added to Gox the spread will be in cents.
Or Litecoin will also be more expensive on Gox than everywhere else. |
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