Based on my legal studies at the University of Wikipedia, I think Chainanalysis is violating the CFAA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Criminal_offenses_under_the_ActConnection slots made available by full nodes are offered to peers who will participate in the relaying of transactions, I doubt the people who run full nodes authorize use of their limited connection slots for the purposes other than participating in the Bitcoin protocol. |
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verbal diarrhea The mistake that you, and quite a few other people, are making is that what makes money security has something to do with transactions. It doesn't. Monetary security is about maintaining the quantity. When you own some bitcoins, you know precisely what fraction of the bitcoin ledger belongs to you, and that's why Bitcoin is value. What you do or do not spend it on is immaterial. The best money is the one that provides the most quantity security and is used by the most people. There is no reason whatsoever to prefer any money except the best money, which is why the market will eventually converge to a single money. |
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If the marginal cost of adding a transaction is zero If I had a flying unicorn, I'd be king of the world. |
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It sure is easy to argue against half a sentence, that's not really interesting for anyone but you though.
It's not half a sentence - it's the premise of a syllogism. Refuting premises to falsify a syllogism isn't a matter of being interesting or not interesting - it's about being logically correct or not. This is the difference between reasoning and sophism. |
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If the marginal inclusion cost is zero It isn't, and will never be. |
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The trend seems to be tapering off, but it's still alive. Meanwhile Ethereum seems to be taking a "money doesn't matter"/"blockchains are a friggin' database technology" stance even after their huge crowdsale. Of course he'd act that way. When he wanted the investor money, he had to build expectations of returns. Now that he has the money, he wants to lower expectations of returns to preemptively shrink the size of the angry mob before it forms. |
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Well, any business that has sufficiently low costs to be able to turn this amount into a positive profit. The only way to make the scenario you described possible is if a business has - not just low costs - but zero costs. |
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I really hope this is the last gasp of the appcoin model: http://blog.factom.org/post/113341070224/coinapult-factom-announce-collaborationFactom has selected Coinapult to be one of its partners on its asset allocation model. More details will be announced in the coming weeks, along with a breakdown of the best practices Factom will employ in its software sale. Since Coinapult can offer a wide variety of exchange integration and over the counter trading this shields the value the Factom Foundation collects from price swings associated in the market and preserves the value contributed by Factoid purchasers. Because both the marks investors and the regulators are now so skeptical of appcoin IPOs, they now have to pretend it's a "software sale" to have any credibility at all. |
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Do you agree with the argument that, with IBLT deployed, there is no rational reason for a miner to limit the size of blocks it is willing to mine ?
(In other words, if blocks do not risk getting orphaned because of their big size, it is economically profitable for a miner to include all the transactions that bear a >0 fee, no matter how small the fee is). This is incorrect. Specifically? Not going to transcribe my blog into this forum, but Ill give you a hint. How many businesses in the world function by accepting any amount a customer is willing to pay, as long as that amount isn't zero? |
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Do you agree with the argument that, with IBLT deployed, there is no rational reason for a miner to limit the size of blocks it is willing to mine ?
(In other words, if blocks do not risk getting orphaned because of their big size, it is economically profitable for a miner to include all the transactions that bear a >0 fee, no matter how small the fee is). This is incorrect. |
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Would it matter if the Federal Reserve issued their own cryptocurrency?
It would since most people are sheep and they would follow whatever is "official". Thing is, it can backfire and maybe all they do is drawn more attention to Bitcoin. Those people are already using Dollars. What really changes if the Fed slaps some cryptographic lipstick on that pig? |
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If the protocol was changed to require a valid UTXO set hash for a block to be considered valid, and if enough entities kept enough history to catch any cheating before its too late it should probably work.
Tricky part is finding the right values of "enough."
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Recording all transactions that have happened is done because that's the easiest way to generate the proof, not because storing that kind of history is the purpose of Bitcoin.
Well said. embedding the hash of UTXO in the block headers and retaining only the last few hundred blocks is being experimented with as a client option. The real trick will be figuring out a secure way of letting the entire network do it. I don't think committed UTXO sets by themselves are sufficient. |
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Competing blockchains are not "fragmented." They are linked through exchanges, and soon by SuperNet/Blocknet type interconnections.
Your illustration is extremely simplistic. I think you know enough economics to realize that. I wonder what that last section at the end of my most recent blog post means... |
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Would it matter if the Federal Reserve issued their own cryptocurrency?
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if you fail to see the fundamental difference between those stacks and the already primitive flash drive on my newish machine, i fail to see the interest hanging out here has for you.
There's also the issue that what the blockchain records is not records of transactions, but rather proofs of ledger integrity. The blockchain is a statement that, "no matter how many lattes were purchased or Satoshi Dice bets were placed, the number of bitcoins available for spending, is and always has been, exactly correct" Recording all transactions that have happened is done because that's the easiest way to generate the proof, not because storing that kind of history is the purpose of Bitcoin. |
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can you imagine the feeling of empowerment felt when walking into these hallowed halls? (Cincinnati Public Library 1874 from Classic Pics) That reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with an uncle who was a fan of the Highlander series. He was gushing about how great it would be to posses the accumulated knowledge of many centuries of human civilization, and then I asked how much of the memories about what happened 5000 years ago was actually useful as opposed to be merely interesting to people who like that kind of thing. |
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Does it make a difference security-wise to wait for this^^^ to become the norm before increasing the limit? I don't think it's possible to give a reasonable answer to that question yet. Before I can talk to you about how transaction rate does and does not affect security, we both need a common understanding about what Bitcoin security means the what, why, and, how of the factors that affect it. I've noticed that common understanding does not exist in the Bitcoin community in general. I've also noticed that there's no single I reference I can point to which establishes it. So I guess I have to write that too. |
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I think we've been back and forth on this before. I contend that a service like Coinbase, while obviously not a theoretically ideal user-onboarding platform due to centralization of coins, is inevitable, and also a positive for the ecosystem at this point in time. Part of the necessity for bitcoin to become a powerful asset is user education. If Coinbase makes it easier for people to enter the ecosystem, thus triggering a desire to learn more, then that's a good thing. Hopefully people will in fact learn enough to move most of their coins to cold storage, or a user-controls-2-keys vault solution (like Coinbase msig vault or BitGo's wallet), etc...
If users are simply never going to learn, Coinbase (and/or Circle) will neither help nor hurt. I lean towards it helping, though, as it does make it a lot easier for new casual users to obtain bitcoin. And some of them will likely become serious/knowledgeable users where they would've just ignored bitcoin without the easy initial channel.
Maybe that's too optimistic a viewpoint, but I don't see a realistic alternative.
I would classify Coinbase as building dual-use technology that can be employed as useful Bitcoin infrastructure, as well as weapons to attack Bitcoin. Certainly they are using a substantial amount of funding to reduce the privacy of all Bitcoin users. (As a matter of fact, they explicitly declined to participate in the Open Bitcoin Privacy Project's wallet survey). They are opening up liquidity pathways between central bank currencies, and at the same time are building the tools to tightly control who is allowed to use those pathways. There are other startups which focus entirely on blockchain privacy destruction without providing any compensating benefit to Bitcoin users. Those startups are even worse than Coinbase. Mostly I'd just like to see the enthusiasm tempered with a bit of appropriate skepticism. Not everybody who pretends to be a friend actually is one. |
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you weaseled out of it If we're going to turn this into a mudslinging fight, there's a goldmine of character references, as well as case studies in "weaseling out" available in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167215.0Just note that while it doesn't bother me to play your argument-by-insult throwing game, I only do so on a time-available basis when there's not something more important to work on. |
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