Although I will say this much - good luck trying to explain the "trust" concepts to the ordinary user. Its difficult enough trying to explain Bitcoin to people.
Actually, trust is very simple, everyone has to deal with it when using a bank or a Bitcoin exchange. What's revolutionary in Ripple is that it makes the trust explicit, by separating riskless exchange of IOUs from risk bearing issuing and redemption of those IOUs for fiat currency, and handing end users control over how much risk they are willing to accept. It's enormously empowering. |
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IIRC early versions of the scripting engine also gave access to the height of the blockchain. Theoretically you could do very interesting things if the script had access to the data in the blockchain, or at least to all ancestor transactions. Not all of these things would be good, taint-based policies come to mind as a bad example.
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Litecoin, and other scrypt based cryptos, think that stopping ASIC miners joining the network will protect the value of the currency for miners. This idea is flawed.
Not only that, the goal is illegitimate. BTC does not exist to serve the goals of miners. One potentially good reason to switch to scrypt, or better yet, to switch to a mix of scrypt and SHA-256 as proposed by Adam Back, is to make sure that decision making power isn't concentrated too much. It's too early to tell whether it will be necessary, but it's good to be prepared. |
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The other day I read about OTR, Off-the-Record Messaging, which seems superior to Bitmessage in some ways, but can probably be usefully combined with it. There's a comparison chart on the Bitmessage wiki, but it leaves out the strengths of OTR (perfect forward secrecy and deniability), unjustly making it look inferior. Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGPWikipedia describes OTR as follows: Off-the-Record Messaging, commonly referred to as OTR, is a cryptographic protocol that provides strong encryption for instant messaging conversations. OTR uses a combination of the AES symmetric-key algorithm, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange, and the SHA-1 hash function. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides perfect forward secrecy and malleable encryption.
The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniability for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with other cryptography tools that produce output which can be later used as a verifiable record of the communication event and the identities of the participants. In most cases, people using such cryptography software are not aware of this and might be better served by OTR tools instead. The initial introductory paper was named "Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP". |
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The disabled opcodes could become more useful if they had more data to work with than the signature script. Not something that should happen any time soon, but thinking about it now can't hurt.
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One consideration that I don't recall reading about before just occurred to me: in addition to having separate difficulties for the two hashing functions, we could also have different reward schedules. Depending on how you do it, this could either increase or decrease the potential controversy over a change in the rules, and help avoid a fork, which would be bad for everybody. If the scrypt-based hash didn't get any reward, it might not alienate the ASIC miners, while it would still give those running scrypt a say in the construction of the blockchain. To do this, you might want to adjust the difficulty so that blocks are created twice as fast to keep the BTC generation on the same schedule.
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I can envision a ADSL box establishing a micropayment channel with a laptop passing by to share the wifi bandwidth for a while.
It would only take a virtual network operator to develop and distribute the ADSL box, turning this protocol into a growth opportunity for the traditionally slow moving fixed line telcos.
This more or less already exists for meshnet. You also need an anonymisation network to deal with liability issues. |
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And as the price drops nobody who isn't an idiot will consider holding coins as an investment
Not true, it will only dissuade those who were looking for a quick buck. If you believe BTC will be very valuable ten years from now, or at least has a decent chance of being very valuable, then lower prices may in fact lead you to spend more fiat money on buying BTC than you might otherwise have. |
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angry gpu miner confirmed.
Heheh. |
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How is that a pseudo-floor? The causality appears to run in the wrong direction for that.
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If I understood it correctly there is intention to do a split so two alghorithms are used at once at rate of 50:50? It might not be that bad idea, right?
It sounds like a good idea to me, though it is too early to tell whether it will be necessary. Right now it's probably not a viable option, because most Bitcoin users would prefer not to have a fork and because the fact that it isn't self-evidently necessary would likely cause a fork. |
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As I read through the whole thread - would not the solution to this problem be if we changed the alghorithm behind Bitcoin so those ASIC can't mine it and everyone had to downgrade to the CPU or at best GPU level?
See this thread: defending ahead the p2p nature of bitcoin - blending hashcash & scryptThere's no need to push out the ASICs, just to make sure Bitcoin stays distributed, instead of serving the interests of a small group. The existence of ASICs isn't inherently bad, they can prevent other forms of misbehaviour, such as a voting-based Bitcoin that imposes taxes. |
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The obvious downside is how to fairly distribute the currency.
It isn't obvious that mining is a fair way to do it, or that fairness is even a problem. You can't continue to sell something for more than it's worth. |
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The whole system was designed as an extension of Bitcoin, and there was a proof of concept implementation when they published their paper a while ago.
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The same happened to me a couple of weeks ago. It took several emails and several days for this to get resolved. It was very disappointing then and it is also disappointing to see they still haven't got their act together.
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Has Satoshi been banned?? !!
Heheh, no, he just wanted to remain anonymous, therefore he probably used Tor. But since I think he is the one who first registered the bitcoin.org address, I don't understand how he could not have left a trace in the DNS records of the registrar. |
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When it is open, then I'll look at it. Until then, I'm too ignorant to trust it because it is closed.
Fine, I'm not saying you should use it. If you distrust it, don't use it. But there must be more to it because you are actively campaigning against it and spreading FUD. |
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What an ignorant statement. Ripple is (or will be) great for trading between fiat and crypto, which is precisely what we need right now. Other alternatives are being worked on (Open Transactions) and they are great too. Don't confuse XRP the currency with Ripple the distributed exchange or Ripple the fiat IOU payment system.
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I think selling internet access through private wireless access points using Bitcoin micro-payment channels, as discussed by Mike in a recent talk, is a great application. A couple of days ago there was an announcement that Fon would accept Bitcoin, but that has now disappeared again. It also has overlap with Meshnet and Hocnet. Once you have a sizeable number of smartphone users with an app for this installed, and a sizeable number of homes with compatible wireless access points, additional privacy features such as those needed for Hocnet and Meshnet could be added. But getting the money to flow is probably the top priority.
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