Nick: [what was your bitcoin aha moment?]

George: I had just written "Knowledge and Power" about information theory and I figured that Shannons information theory was [the?] perfect instrument for creating a network that could efficiently transmit bits and bytes. However to have a civilization you need more than just bits and bytes. You need contracts, you need transactions, you need provable facts, you need titles, you need notarization, you need identities. You need all these other factors that really can't be accomodated very well on the internet. So you have to have banks and all these other outside channel to conduct transactions. You have this comedy of bogus contracts you're supposed to sign. I mean the internet is full of junk. And it pretends that a lot of the stuff is free, which is not. So it's a lie. It's full of lies. It's a hussle. A lot of the characterisitcs of the internet are the result of having a pure Shannon information without higher...

Nick: what is shannon information?

George: Shannon identifies information exclusively by its surprisal: unexpected bits. That's how you measure information and bandwidth across the net. And Shannon is a genius. He created the perfect theory for the network layer. And you need more than 3 layers in the network. You got to have a whole apparatus on the network in order to conduct provable transactions.

Nick: so how does Bitcoin...

George: Bitcoin is a breakthrough in information theory that allows without reference to trusted third parties (people outside the internet) provable transactions. Timestamped transactions that can't be changed.

Nick: So Bitcoin is the currency the internet deserves.

George: It's the currency the internet deserves and needs

Nick: let's talk about: how is bitcoin deflationary. Because if you were lucky enough to buy bitcoin a few years ago you're wealthy now. Especiall if you take out of the internet...

Georg: Satoshi's worth a billion bucks, baby! [chuckles]

Nick: when do we get to the point where Bitcoin is no longer a speculative currency?

George: You know the speculation is a big debate over what proportion of the worlds transactions Bitcoin will finally accomodate. Bitcoin is currently undergoing a market process. But when it reaches its full maturity with 21 million coins, which is the asymtotic cap which is imposed through the algorithm itself. This means that it will tend to be deflationary.

Nick: Because there'll be more goods chasing after the same...

George: That's right. But this is life. Really the other way I came to this insight is of the "zero marginal cost society", if you heard about that... that capitalist economics doesn't work any more because we live in a world of abundance. But money can't be abundant in the same way that goods and services are. Money has to be the foundation to prioritize and evaluate. So the question is: what is scarce when everything else becomes abundant? And what is scarce when everything else is abundant is ultimately the rediual resource, which is time.

Nick: we're going from Bitcoin to time, what, how does that...

George: because the production of bitcoin is rigorously regulated by the passage of time and the pursuit of irreversability. Satoshi, all through his original paper, talks about irreversible currency. That's the big goal. And the only thing in this universe that's irreversible in this sense is time.

Nick: in a kind-of "Milton Friedman wet dream" you would have a government or a robot kicking out a certain amount of predetermined expansion of money on a regular basis no matter what.

George: an assumption of inflation. Miltion Friedman was the greates figure in libertarian economics and I don't deny it for a minute. But he did make a major error. MV = PT, that's his great formulat. The money supply times velocity equals output. But what we've learned overwhelmingly in recent years is: velocity is not a constant. Milton Friedman thought the money supply controlled. And because he thought the money supply controlled he though you had to have some centralized control of money and that the central body that controlled the emission of money should be regulated [and] accomodate economic growth.

Nick: And he was wrong in thinking that you'd need growth of the money supply in order to have economic growth?

George: Yes. And that money rules rather than velocity. He thought velocity was a constant and the money supply could be regulated by the government to actually favor outcomes. And I think that velocity rules and veolocity means we can rule. That Bitcoin as a currency on the internet, peer to peer, managed by the participants in it is the perfect libertarian solution to the money enigma.

Nick: How do you tell the kind-of backward-looking reactionaries who are like "it's all about gold, it's all about silver, it's all about paper currency".. should they just give up?

Gilder: Gold is still important. Gold and Bitcoin share these fundamental roots in time. They aren't chiefly governed by the capital function. Capital changes and is volatile and is not a stable source of measurement. It's time that is the source of measurement and both gold and bitcoin share this feature.

Look here's the problem im comfronting when I talk about Bitcoin to people:

1) They do not want to spend FIAT on it to access it. The see this as a waste of time, and they actually lose money due fee's.
2) They don't understand how something has volatile can be used as a currency.
3) People tend to hold BTC and use it as a store of value like Gold. They feel paying with BTC is as dumb as paying with a piece of Gold because anything you can buy with BTC, is available easier with cash/transaction.
4) They feel they are just serving the lucky early adopters while they get shit nothing.
5) The ATM machines are shit as demonstrated by the Tested video

How does that get solved so we can reach mass adoption? Unless legitimate jobs where you get paid good amounts of BTC arise, I dont see any other way to get legit amounts of BTC beyond risking FIAT into it in the first place. But of course, im not sure if people is going to want risking getting paid in BTC.

I think these kind of services could potentially be pretty huge for bitcoin adoption as long as they're safe. Would be cool to send tips to youtubers and twitter users you like etc.

Only now I learn that The Reggie Middleton has joined this board. You are definitely on top of all major techno waves out there.

I admit I haven't tried Ultracoin yet but the question I keep asking myself is how real world assets are tied to the concept of Ultracoin. It's easy to exchange one electronic asset (e.g. a Litecoin) for some other electronic assets (e.g. Mooncoins). Lock the assets up and exchange. No trust needed, its all decentralised.

Now enter a USD / EUR swap. I cannot throw 100 dollars into Ultracoin through my CDROM tray. Even electronic dollars cannot be tied to Ultacoin just like that. The same goes for the Euro part of the swap transaction.

Will Ultracoin just tie these 2 promises together: promises to pay fiat?

Obviously, Ultracoin will not lock in the fiat dollars and euros. Can't be done with centralised systems for fiat currency. Presumably there is and will not be  a 'central' point of trust being Reggie's wife's USD and EUR bank accounts to accommodate this swap.

So what remains: locking in the equivalent of USD and EUR in Bitcoins? Then, parties are just exchanging Bitcoins. And how to deal with Bitcoin variations in price in USD vs EUR
EUR) ?

I have a question concerning advanced settings (use of passphrases).

As far as I see there are two exclusive options:
1) use no passphrases at all.
2) use one or more passphrases.

It would be nice to set up Trezor in a way so that you can have at the same time:
1) one 'account' with no passphrase (for small money).
    This could pop up in the web wallet immediatly without further interaction when you connect the Trezor.
2) one or more (hidden) accounts. These would be visible only if the correct passphrase is
    (optionally) given.

Is this possible ?

when he first announced accepting BTC for gold, i said he probably was already convinced and was trying to accumulate.  i still stand by that.

same link.  Tucker mentions Rogers too.

lol:

Tucker:  What?

Schiff:  See, i told you we could process online tx's immediately and for virtually 0 tx cost!

now THAT is really good news. 

altho quite predictable.  Jim Rogers too.

5. EU are impotents. They absolutely have no independent position which serve their national interest. They serve US. And they will pay for this.

LMAO this putin dude surely knows his stuff:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-08/how-putins-advisor-sees-ukraine-crisis-playing-out

'MURICAAA

To further insulate its economy, Russia should abandon the use of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, according to Glazyev. Russia, which international reserves are the world’s fifth-biggest, needs to diversify its holdings to include China’s yuan, India’s rupee and Brazil’s real.  “If a country aspires to reserve status for its currency, it should behave properly, and that isn’t the case today,” Glazyev said.

OK, im not sure how far in it is but the whole segment is a good listen.

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-134-disruptive-leaps

Gavin has written a brilliant piece describing how Bitcoin can soon scale up to VISA-like size. The writing is on the wall for the legacy systems. The mega-trend remains UP.
https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

1) This is needed to construct the merkle tree. Txs are grouped pairwise to build the nodes of the next level in the tree. The pairs are concatenated for the hashing, so the order is relevant. Currently the order is defined by the list of txs in the published block.

2) Yes, although I think the receiving miner could request missing tx(s).

3) To my understanding this does not need a hardfork, because the blocks are still built by the same rules.



Ah, of course, this makes sense!

Or a 36 seed recovery.

Another possibility would be that a certain TREZOR has hardware specific "random words" in the seed recovery. So even if you recover twice on the same trezor, the attacker wouldn't know what the wrong words were.

WOW!!!!   If the above bolded part is true, then that is NOT good for BTC to have a year without improvement(s) in the realm of ease of use, security, etc... ... Although we may need to flesh out what "etc." is?  number of bitcoin applications?  public awareness of BTC?  liquidity options?  purchase options? ability to avoid fees options?  ease of setting up BTC accounts?   fears about legality of BTC? the press's treatment of BTC? 

I want improvements in the BTC space too.. especially ease of use and security and some of the "etc.," as well.. whatever "etc." is?

@Pelover, well, the seed is entered in a random order. So even if the computer is compromised the attacked still needs to try 24! combinations before cracking your password. So you will have enough time to create a new account as BurtW said.

Since off exchange trade doesn't influence price, I say it's irrelevant except that volumes on our charts are lower.