The whole point of all these discussions is to come up with spontaneous/natural/market-based ways to finance the work that is done for the blockchain, and not just arbitrarly pick some magic numbers or formulas and impose them via the protocol.

The inflation rate is necessarily an "arbitrary formula". Satoshi was wise to put an asymptotic cap on it.

If you use an arbitrary number/formula, there's just no way of knowing if this number really reflects the amount of security the network needs. It's likely to be higher (but it can also be lower), meaning that the resources being spent on such security would be better spent elsewhere (or are not enough). It's the knowledge problem Hayek talks about. You'd have to be omniscient to know what's the optimal formula, and it would need to change constantly.

Finally, inflation is even worse than just an arbitrary transaction fee, as you don't put the load on those who create the load. You force every holder to pay, regardless of how many UTXO they're creating.

Oh sorry, I misread what you wrote. You were talking about an increase in circulation of a particular kind of bill. I thought you were referring to an amount.

I think I was sleeping while all this happened.

Could somebody please explain me one thing.... The whole point of this "version 2 blocks" was just to include the height in the coinbase? I mean... can't the height just be calculated? Couldn't local databases add the height on their data, in an extra field of some kind? Need it be on the protocol?

I fail to see why going through all this hassle just to add the block height to coinbase...

Centralized pool operators. Unfortunately that's not new. They've been attacked by these botnet operators for a while. The botnets attack pools in which they're not mining in order to increase the revenues of the pools they're mining in (and thus, their revenues). Some pool operators are already using high-bandwidth ISPs specialized in DDoS protection.

Let's hope ASICs makes mining no longer interesting for botnet operators, and perhaps then they'll leave pools alone.

DDoS is an arm wrestling. The one with more bandwidth wins. If the botnet operator is aiming at a single bitcoiner, then this bitcoiner is likely in trouble. But the entire network? His botnet would need more bandwidth than the bandwidth of the entire network combined. Quite unlikely.

Or do you mean DoS through the Bitcoin protocol itself, like trying to flood fake transactions and such? Bitcoin peers have a series of protections against that. The attacker would have to spend a fortune in transaction fees.

Are you sure you meant 1K? That should be a rounding error...

Precisely!
I also live in France and that's the feeling I get. Many colleagues of mine (computer people, you know, those who live in the Internetz...) weren't even aware of what's going on. I'm the one who brings the subject up most frequently. People here don't seem to be worried at all.
It seems many French citizens believe that France is somehow immune to all these Euro-zone turmoils ("Quand même, on est en France!"). I think they should review their beliefs for their own sake...

The banks should definitely fail. What I'm repeatedly describing here is how a bank failure should proceed.


Where do you think such money would come from? The tooth fairy?
These state-backed insurances rely on the barrel of a gun (as everything else backed by states). Why should Cypriot (or worse, EU) tax-victims be forced to finance the risk-taking of those who invested in these banks going down? Only those who took the risk should lose. People who had no relation with the failing banks should not be stolen.

Again, read this (as apparently you did not): http://detlevschlichter.com/2013/03/cyprus-and-the-reality-of-banking-deposit-haircuts-are-both-inevitable-and-the-right-thing-to-do/


WTF!? I don't want to bail out any bank. And how the hell did you conclude I'm nationalist??
Seriously, would you mind at least reading what I write before blasting such ridiculous accusations?


The fact that so many outrageous injustices are practiced in US is not an excuse to practice them anywhere else.


WTFx2? Do you even... I mean...

And you dare link me to word definitions... 


The recession is inevitable. It's the inexorable consequence of an artificial creation of credit through inflation. The best (less worse) way of dealing with it is letting bad investments die, let companies fail, the quickest possible. The worst way of dealing with it is by pushing the problem further with the creation of more money/credit, or by increasing government spending


That'd be great.

Sigh... Have you read the text I linked to above? Here, I link it again: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/03/peter-schiff-on-cyprus.html
Also, read this: http://detlevschlichter.com/2013/03/cyprus-and-the-reality-of-banking-deposit-haircuts-are-both-inevitable-and-the-right-thing-to-do/
And then, read my previous posts on this thread.

And stop saying BS, please. These banks are going down, some people are going to lose money. Better it be those who invested in said banks than tax-victims who had nothing to do with the problem. Even worse would be forcing all EUR holders to pay.
Of course, for the 100th time, the bank shareholders should lose all, they should not be saved at the expense of their clients. And ideally those who made riskier investments should be cut before those who simply held checking accounts. And every creditor or client of the bank that loses something should receive a proportional share of the bank's assets in return.

Why not?

Well, translating is less important for now. Bitcoins is still not that user friendly. People that can't read English would likely have a hard time learning enough about Bitcoin.

And plus, you can't translate memes.

I was thinking of the following: the ad starts with the geek meme "Government steals bank deposits... Bitcoin User Not Affected". Then, the One Does Not Simply Confiscate Bitcoins meme. Both narrated in English. Then, if the user keeps watching, we concatenate the we use coins video - this one could come with subtitles.

How much do ads cost on Youtube?

Maybe we could pledge to add this 4s video as an ad targeting Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Ireland.
Actually, we could put 2 memes, the one of the irritating geek, then this one One Does Not Simply...

What do you think?

It would be particularly interesting if you can pay incrementally (the more you pay, more views you get, but you can start small).

hehe, I thought that too.

Congratulations Bitpay. You've just raised the bar significantly.

As many others here, I'm very uneasy with the possibility of Bitcoin losing fungibility.

But anyway, this is undeniable:

It's perfectly possible to implement such thing. It's actually possible to implement much nastier things (think of a government-mandated whitelist). Mike Hearn has a point when he says that, in the event of a government trying to impose its regulation, the usage of a totally voluntary and decentralized system like this is preferable. But, should we be "compromising in advance"? Wouldn't that be "negotiating against ourselves"?

Governments can do much worse than killing Bitcoin fungibility. The problem, as always, are governments themselves, not this voluntary system Mike is proposing.

Perhaps we should focus on implementing p2p, anonymous mixing services. Such mixing systems would be essential to keep the "market-based checks-and-balances" Mike describes in OP, if such system ever comes to existence.

How do you know this? Do they publish these numbers somewhere?

Are you really arguing that it would be better to push the problem further into the future with inflation??

EU created this mess years ago, precisely due to creating too many "accounting entries in their computers" to buy debt bonds from many of its sub-governments. This crisis is the natural consequence.

Of course that it would be fairer to take all assets from banksters, but inflating the problem into the future is definitely worse than what's being done.

WTF... I mean, I know Brazilian authoritarian capital controls render arbitrage difficult... but that much!?

Literally, I'd say. I mean, if it's really true that the Russian mob has stashes of money on Cypriot banks..... I don't think it's a safe thing to take 40% of their money like this.

Their bottle appears in the beginning (it's their bottle isn't it?) and the name "Neft" is written on one of the airplanes of the hangar.
Plus, this: