Pertaining to the discussion CoinCube and I were having upthread about the entropic direction of crypto currencies and the trend towards world government control: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4089aj/im_working_on_a_project_called_bitcoin_classic_to/cz0mda4https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4089aj/im_working_on_a_project_called_bitcoin_classic_to/cz0vnccMankind's goal is the Second Law of Thermo, i.e. trend to maximum entropy. Thus killing all but Bill Gates or uniformly distributing anything, is an anti-pattern. Welcome to my world of knowledge professor Stolfi. Also, while isolated physical systems tend to evolve in the direction of maximum internal entropy, that does not mean maximum homogeneity or maximum randomness. For example, if one places a cold metal ball in a hot solution of a suitable salt, the system will evolve to a state where some of the salt has crystallized out from the "random" solution as crystal -- a state which has lower total entropy than the starting state, in spite of being more heterogeneous and including a highly ordered phase. Indeed localized systems can be extract energy from the environment to maintain Coasian barriers to the universe trend. But this energy can't be maintained for ever, just as our sun won't burn forever. To argue against our theory for crypto currencies one would need to show what is the external energy source which preventing the rise in entropy. Seems to me the powers-that-be have run financial malfeasance at a much higher clip than increases from cheap energy and technology and thus will have difficulty preventing a lurch towards greater entropy via greater human participation in the global economic village. I agree with you that without considering the relationships of local systems, the notion of a universe trend is of such reduced significance so as to be nonsense. I think the theory about more participation of humans is based less on a universal trend for all of outer space and instead we are referring to the universal trend here on earth, since the external energy inputs to earth is I think limited to the sun. The earth has in theory collected energy from the sun for eons (since many orders-of-magnitude greater than the epoch of human civilization), so earth has a stored internal energy source which far exceeds the current effect of the environment of outer space. Thus earth should be trending to maximum entropy as it is effectively an isolated system. Would you please elaborate? Are you claiming the earth is receiving all its energy from the sun or it has its own energy store? Which flow of energy is currently greater, that coming from earth's internal store or the external flows? From where do you claim earth attained its internal store of energy? I am claiming the internal store of energy on earth dwarfs the external flows. If you disagree, please document your claim, because I am unaware of that. The following resource states the net external flows is 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Energy_budgetThe key point is the relative flows. Perhaps you didn't realize that was my point. Afaics, earth is much more dependent on its internal energy flows and than external flows, that it is for anything on the scale of 1000 years, a closed system entropically barring any major abberations such as asteriod hit. I have found the following which says you are incorrect (and they precisely make the same point I was making about relative flows): https://www.quora.com/Heat-energy-flows-from-Sun-to-Earth-How-does-the-entropy-of-the-Earth-Sun-system-increase-during-this-process/answer/Robert-ReilandThere are some who argue that the absorption of light from the sun by the Earth reduces entropy. This isn't correct, but for the sake of argument, assume it is. This hypothetical entropy reduction is much smaller that the entropy increase from photons produced to radiate from the Earth. Thus, no matter how you look at the sun, the Earth, the two together or the entire solar system, entropy is increasing. A scientist will check his theory against reality. Anyone who argues the entropy of life here on earth has been decreasing over the epochs seems to be out-of-touch with any sense of reality. The encephalization quotient of the human brain is order-of-magnitude greater (measure of the relative efficiency of energy dissipation to entropy) than primative creatures. And man's civilizations are orderS-of-magnitude higher in Kolmogorov complexity than anything in the primordial earth.
The specification of the state of the system, includes specifying all of its dynamic processes. Obviously there is no way to specify the state of a dynamic system without a dynamic model, for the same reason there is no present because it is gone before you can think about it. You constructed a strawman around your own narrow and incorrect interpretation of what CoinCube could have meant. You've just contradicted yourself. First you state that static numbers can't capture entropy because randomness is relative and thus entropy must be described dynamically and holistically, then you state the human brain can be reduced to some static number of atoms (which doesn't factor in the higher-level entropic model of life that CoinCube is explaining).
You are highly confused.
I am attacking everything you've been incorrectly indoctrinated with.
The problem you have is that you want to argue for relativity where it supports your argument, while not realizing you are contradicting yourself by doing so. Bottom line is that entropy is always relative to the context in which it is considered. Even work on chaos theory has shown that, i.e. what appears to be entirely random from one model has a strange attactor order from another model perspective.
So our first order of business here, is to determine whether the earth is essentially a closed system given that the flows of energy here on earth dwarfs the external flows.. EDIT: I messaged the professor and told him I need to put this discussion on hold, because I am too overloaded. I suggested we will start by agreeing on what is entropy from first principles. I told him I was ashamed that my posts were so incoherent and disorganized, and that I am too overloaded at the moment.
Update: Well Life and Intelligence and Human societies run contrary to thermodynamics... ...But begetting information is not easy. Our universe struggles to do so. Our ability to beget information, and to produce the items, infrastructures, and institutions we associate with prosperity, requires us to battle the steady march toward disorder that characterizes our universe and which troubled Boltzmann. To battle disorder and allow information to grow, our universe has a few tricks up its sleeve. These tricks involve out-of-equilibrium systems, the accumulation of information in solids, and the ability of matter to compute. Together these three mechanisms contribute to the growth of information in small islands or pockets where information can grow and hide, like the pocket we call our planet.
So it is the accumulation of information and of our ability to process information that define an arrow of growth encompassing the physical, the biological, the social, and the economic, and which extends from the origin of the universe to our modern economy. It is the growth of information that unifies the emergence of life with the growth of economies, and the emergence of complexity with the origins of wealth...
This is the essence of the debate I was having with professor JorgeStolfi (which I had to put on temporary hold bcz I am so busy on my software project, I had PM'ed him saying I was sleepless, incoherent, ill, and regretted opening the debate when I wasn't capable). The key is to understand that when a human creates order, he destroys some Coasian barrier to knowledge and via the social network increases the degrees-of-freedom in society thus leading to higher entropy. I alluded to these processes in the ~2010/11 essay I wrote which is linked in the OP of this thread, and also the Information is Alive! essay I wrote in 2012. This is why I am now hyper focused on social networking and crypto currency, no longer anonymity. Anonymity fosters barriers thus decreasing entropy. |
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China can SPV mine, which they do already, but it is risky and puts them at a further disadvantage.
Why? They can control the pool abroad. A pool abroad is a loser. It just adds latency. That doesn't add any latency that they wouldn't have already with small blocks. The Chinese are lying about their motivation. The Chinese are extremely devious/clever about political leverage, and they hide it well. |
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China can SPV mine, which they do already, but it is risky and puts them at a further disadvantage.
Why? They can control the pool abroad. Secondarily, it means that more translationtransaction fees would flow to miners outside China. That's not a big factor now, but will become significant after the halving in a few months.
Bingo! |
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I don't understand. Let's say Chinese adopt software that SUPPORTS large blocks, but configure it in a way where it mines zero-tx blocks on purpose, or very high fee txs that are top-priority for the senders, something like <50kb in txs per block. How will others "drive them out"? With what mechanism?
Because all full node miners have to verify all transactions and all blocks. But they could relocate their pools offshore (if they aren't already), so that only hash that needs to be computed is propagating across the Great (Internet) Wall of China. So this shows the Chinese miners have another motivation for wanting small block sizes. (They are lying about bandwidth being the problem) I think it is because they want to force transaction fees higher to maintain the block reward on the next block halving. Chinese are notoriously selfish and short-sighted (which is perhaps why they require a totalitarian govt to discipline them). For example, here in the Philippines they have the reputation of being misers and counting every penny and even firing a good employee if 1 penny is missing (or charging normal losses in a business to the employees, e.g. customer complains the food was incorrect and so the food has to be discard and redone). |
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Maybe. Or maybe they are just doing it because it suits their economic interests to keep blocks small, as TPTB said. I consider that quite plausible, I'm surprised you don't.
We are being raped by the Chinese because we are too stupid to design and adopt a better block chain consensus design: The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs: Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?
Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.
There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.) We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges. Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges. There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there. Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized. So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors.
@TPTB you can't really have it both ways. Either the miners hold the upper hand or the developers do. I think it is a former, and given that you don't need overwhelming consensus, there is no 'design by consensus'.
Now if Bitcoin actually worked in a more fully decentralized manner then miners would not hold the upper and and then you might get something closer to design by consensus.
EDIT: What satoshi was shooting for by his own words was neither changes at the whim of a mining cabal nor by an overwhelming consensus of developers, it was "set in stone". It wasn't even close to achieved.
Yes we must redesign the block chain protocol so that the miners are the payers and so they don't have any centralized control. On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin: The problem is that the cost [ of validating a transaction ] grows like N^2 for N inputs.
By the way, there is no excuse for the cost to be quadratic. That is one of the many crocks in the BitcoinCore implementation, that will take more crocks to work around. Like the Segregated Witnesses proposal, malleability and its partial patches, blockchain voting to increase the limit, etc.. There you have another possible failure mode for Bitcoin: runaway code crockification (RCC). As the code gets more complicated and ugly, fewer competent people will be willing to work on it. Their place will be taken by incompetent pople, who will add even more crocks -- and so on until the code will fail and there will be no one capable of fixing it in time. Just a possibility; but after seeing the malleability problems, the Fork of July fiasco, the "fee merket" plans and the RBF hack, the Seg Wit proposal -- I fear that the RCC may be already underway... |
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The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs: Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?
Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.
There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.) We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges. Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges. There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there. Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized. So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors. On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin: The problem is that the cost [ of validating a transaction ] grows like N^2 for N inputs.
By the way, there is no excuse for the cost to be quadratic. That is one of the many crocks in the BitcoinCore implementation, that will take more crocks to work around. Like the Segregated Witnesses proposal, malleability and its partial patches, blockchain voting to increase the limit, etc.. There you have another possible failure mode for Bitcoin: runaway code crockification (RCC). As the code gets more complicated and ugly, fewer competent people will be willing to work on it. Their place will be taken by incompetent pople, who will add even more crocks -- and so on until the code will fail and there will be no one capable of fixing it in time. Just a possibility; but after seeing the malleability problems, the Fork of July fiasco, the "fee merket" plans and the RBF hack, the Seg Wit proposal -- I fear that the RCC may be already underway... If we understand the reasoning that led to certain details of the design (like the 1 MB limit and the abrupt halvings of the reward) we have a better chance of predicting what would happen if we changed them.
Those who want to reform bitcoin so that it replaces VISA or ACH should put bitcoin aside and start the design such a system from scratch, choosing at each step the gears and rivets that are better suited to those goals. But, first, they should justify why the world needs a better option for those goals and why they think that they can design one.
(That said: in fact, I believe that, as a software engineer, Satoshi, was much better than Gavin and Mike, who are much better than all the Blockstream developers -- who are totally incompetent and irresponsible in that regard.)
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The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs: Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?
Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.
There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.) We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges. Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges. There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there. Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized. So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors. On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin: The problem is that the cost [ of validating a transaction ] grows like N^2 for N inputs.
By the way, there is no excuse for the cost to be quadratic. That is one of the many crocks in the BitcoinCore implementation, that will take more crocks to work around. Like the Segregated Witnesses proposal, malleability and its partial patches, blockchain voting to increase the limit, etc.. There you have another possible failure mode for Bitcoin: runaway code crockification (RCC). As the code gets more complicated and ugly, fewer competent people will be willing to work on it. Their place will be taken by incompetent pople, who will add even more crocks -- and so on until the code will fail and there will be no one capable of fixing it in time. Just a possibility; but after seeing the malleability problems, the Fork of July fiasco, the "fee merket" plans and the RBF hack, the Seg Wit proposal -- I fear that the RCC may be already underway... If we understand the reasoning that led to certain details of the design (like the 1 MB limit and the abrupt halvings of the reward) we have a better chance of predicting what would happen if we changed them.
Those who want to reform bitcoin so that it replaces VISA or ACH should put bitcoin aside and start the design such a system from scratch, choosing at each step the gears and rivets that are better suited to those goals. But, first, they should justify why the world needs a better option for those goals and why they think that they can design one.
(That said: in fact, I believe that, as a software engineer, Satoshi, was much better than Gavin and Mike, who are much better than all the Blockstream developers -- who are totally incompetent and irresponsible in that regard.)
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The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs: Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?
Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.
There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.) We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges. Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges. There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there. Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized. So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors. On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin: The problem is that the cost [ of validating a transaction ] grows like N^2 for N inputs.
By the way, there is no excuse for the cost to be quadratic. That is one of the many crocks in the BitcoinCore implementation, that will take more crocks to work around. Like the Segregated Witnesses proposal, malleability and its partial patches, blockchain voting to increase the limit, etc.. There you have another possible failure mode for Bitcoin: runaway code crockification (RCC). As the code gets more complicated and ugly, fewer competent people will be willing to work on it. Their place will be taken by incompetent pople, who will add even more crocks -- and so on until the code will fail and there will be no one capable of fixing it in time. Just a possibility; but after seeing the malleability problems, the Fork of July fiasco, the "fee merket" plans and the RBF hack, the Seg Wit proposal -- I fear that the RCC may be already underway... If we understand the reasoning that led to certain details of the design (like the 1 MB limit and the abrupt halvings of the reward) we have a better chance of predicting what would happen if we changed them.
Those who want to reform bitcoin so that it replaces VISA or ACH should put bitcoin aside and start the design such a system from scratch, choosing at each step the gears and rivets that are better suited to those goals. But, first, they should justify why the world needs a better option for those goals and why they think that they can design one.
(That said: in fact, I believe that, as a software engineer, Satoshi, was much better than Gavin and Mike, who are much better than all the Blockstream developers -- who are totally incompetent and irresponsible in that regard.)
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Bottom line is any global constant in the protocol is not decentralization. Period. End of story.
If a coin has active development and the protocol is not finalized 100% and set in stone for eternity, there will always be developer-related centralization. And btc is still ver 0.something, so, it's a work in progress. In a sense, the more development a coin will have the more centralized it will be. The less development it has, the more decentralized it can become but it will also be less and less relevant if it becomes a dinosaur. It seems development and centralization may have an inversely proportional relationship. Bitcoin's design is no where on the tract to removing the block size constant. And it was released ~6 years ago. A truly centralized protocol would already be on that tract in its whitepapers and be trying to finalize its protocol within a couple of years of being popular and stress tested. This is one of the reasons I am trying to design a consensus protocol that is orthogonal to the data that is being put on the block chain. So the consensus protocol can hopefully be solidified sooner (but this is not an easy technological feat). Decentralized consensus for a chronological ledger is a hard problem. Afaics, anonymity is an even harder problem. Edit: design by consensus is often rigor mortis. Satoshi achieved the key design epiphanies BEFORE bringing on all the devs to do the refinement work. |
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Bottom line is any global constant in the protocol is not decentralization. Period. End of story.
The protocol must be able to function in a free market dynamic.
All the arguments about consensus is moving forward from 1MB slowly are irrelevant, because if constants are not decided by the protocol, then the protocol is by definition under a 51% attack always.
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And so the n00bs moved their delusion over to Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5Hi, I am AnonyMint. The drama queen allegation is a perception that is mostly irrelevant. Everyone on BCT who posts significantly is a drama queen bcz crypto is dramatic. Your labeling me a drama queen makes you a drama queen, lol. On to the substantive issue... The OP didn't quote my clarifying statement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13575212#msg13575212"The link I provided to you for Ethereum explains that afaik they never solved the primary economic issue facing scaling programmable block chains, which is that every full node has to verify the block chain, thus every full node has to run the programmable script. But the problem is who to pay the gas (ether) to so that all full nodes are paid for verification? This has DDoS implications as well. In short, they never solved the core economic problem and thus Ethereum is just a fucking toy that can't actually work." A probabilistic argument that says miners who win block rewards get paid fees and it will balance out, is dumb as shit. Just think it out. Unless hashrate is uniformly distributed amongst miners, then some miners get paid less for doing the same verification work. It is also DDoS amplication attack vector. Also there are variants of attacks, and Vitalik was incorrect to argue that the attacks are unlikely due to cost, because the attacker can profit from shorting the coin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=448923.msg4995521#msg4995521Come on n00bs, you don't have a clue. Give up. You need an expert. Respect when one is trying to help you understand. Stop labeling him a drama queen. That is B-lister attitude. I think when people try to be perfectly politically correct, they become so anal that they enter another form of insanity. I didn't think you were being a dick. I just chalk it up to the nature of life. It is no big deal, that is why I put "lol".
Well it is mostly getting exhausted because it is very difficult to write so much and repeat oneself so many times. And also I am not really in a position in life where I can just sit back and relax. I have serious problems in my life and I am under a lot of stress. So I am stressed about consuming so much time writing (instead of for example coding). I also run into the problem that when I am less forceful, then the discussions get overrun with noise by emboldened n00bs. I don't know what the correct balance should be. As I said, it is just life. I laugh it away. No worries mate. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0rgdvYou entirely miss the point. The cost of verification in Bitcoin is rather small because the transaction rate is so low, and the block rewards are so high. So the inequality I explained my other post above, isn't such a big deal. But eventually this same issue could plague Bitcoin as well.
The problem is more immediately egregious in Ethereum, because scripts can consume a lot of resources, unlike verification of Bitcoin transactions which is a constant resource cost per transaction.
Again you n00bs should stop trusting your own analysis, because in my excrutiatingly vast experience of reading n00b posts at BCT, you are nearly always wrong. In Bitcoin I think so, although there was a recent block chain fork because some miners were not doing complete verification, so perhaps the costs of verification are already borderline in Bitcoin and the transaction rate is highly corralled in Bitcoin to a 1MB block size which can't scale world wide. Also $9 - $16 in electricity cost per transaction isn't going to scale. So eventually PoW must be redesigned to lower the cost. (I have designed that solution) And Ethereum MUST allow a much greater use of verification resources, simply because scripts consume more resources than highly optimized code for doing one thing of verifying transactions. Ethereum could place global limits on the amount of gas a script can consume, but this is no longer a fully programmable block chain (no longer Turing complete because it requires unbounded tapes) and it is also not a free market, but rather a hard-coded, centralized decision. Just like Bitcoin's block size constant, this will become a political hellhole. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg13577344#msg13577344"Bottom line is any global constant in the protocol is not decentralization. Period. End of story. The protocol must be able to function in a free market dynamic. All the arguments about consensus is moving forward from 1MB slowly are irrelevant, because if constants are not decided by the protocol, then the protocol is by definition under a 51% attack always." Afaics, none of these directions Ethereum is headed deal with the economic issue I outlined in my first post in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5As for their scalability ideas (which again do not address the economic problem of inequality of gas fees I outlined), they are going down the same throught process that I went through in my analysis of how to scale a consensus system. My thought process is far ahead of theirs, and they will later realize that what they have designed is a total failure. The reason is because the CAP theorem is violated by Proof of Evidence aka Proof of Cheating (which is also one of the reasons why Bitcoin's proposed Segregated Witness will fail). Refer to my decentralization thread in the Altcoin Discussion forum at Bitcointalk for more details of the relevance of the CAP theorem. I am not eager to drill down and convince them of this, because I don't want to give then my design. In short, scalability requires centralization. I ultimately realized it is how the centralization is structured that allows for decentralized control. That was my key epiphany. |
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"Broken" and "Success" are relative terms. Both are broken less than bitcoin and bring attributes to the table that fiat does not. If you have any suggestions that are less broken ... I'm all ears. An absolutist uses words like broken. A realist uses terms like "best alternative". Opening myself up to all available options those are the two answering the big questions. Privacy, programmable blockchain and both more scalable than bitcoin. What alternatives are less broken than these two I mentioned? Don't you understand that "fundamentally broken" means they don't work for the features they claim that are an improvement over Bitcoin. The link I provided to you for Ethereum explains that afaik they never solved the primary economic issue facing scaling programmable block chains, which is that every full node has to verify the block chain, thus every full node has to run the programmable script. But the problem is who to pay the gas (ether) to so that all full nodes are paid for verification? This has DDoS implications as well. In short, they never solved the core economic problem and thus Ethereum is just a fucking toy that can't actually work. And so the n00bs moved their delusion over to Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5Hi, I am AnonyMint. The drama queen allegation is a perception that is mostly irrelevant. Everyone on BCT who posts significantly is a drama queen bcz crypto is dramatic. Your labeling me a drama queen makes you a drama queen, lol. On to the substantive issue... The OP didn't quote my clarifying statement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13575212#msg13575212"The link I provided to you for Ethereum explains that afaik they never solved the primary economic issue facing scaling programmable block chains, which is that every full node has to verify the block chain, thus every full node has to run the programmable script. But the problem is who to pay the gas (ether) to so that all full nodes are paid for verification? This has DDoS implications as well. In short, they never solved the core economic problem and thus Ethereum is just a fucking toy that can't actually work." A probabilistic argument that says miners who win block rewards get paid fees and it will balance out, is dumb as shit. Just think it out. Unless hashrate is uniformly distributed amongst miners, then some miners get paid less for doing the same verification work. It is also DDoS amplication attack vector. Also there are variants of attacks, and Vitalik was incorrect to argue that the attacks are unlikely due to cost, because the attacker can profit from shorting the coin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=448923.msg4995521#msg4995521Come on n00bs, you don't have a clue. Give up. You need an expert. Respect when one is trying to help you understand. Stop labeling him a drama queen. That is B-lister attitude. I think when people try to be perfectly politically correct, they become so anal that they enter another form of insanity. I didn't think you were being a dick. I just chalk it up to the nature of life. It is no big deal, that is why I put "lol".
Well it is mostly getting exhausted because it is very difficult to write so much and repeat oneself so many times. And also I am not really in a position in life where I can just sit back and relax. I have serious problems in my life and I am under a lot of stress. So I am stressed about consuming so much time writing (instead of for example coding). I also run into the problem that when I am less forceful, then the discussions get overrun with noise by emboldened n00bs. I don't know what the correct balance should be. As I said, it is just life. I laugh it away. No worries mate. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0rgdvYou entirely miss the point. The cost of verification in Bitcoin is rather small because the transaction rate is so low, and the block rewards are so high. So the inequality I explained my other post above, isn't such a big deal. But eventually this same issue could plague Bitcoin as well.
The problem is more immediately egregious in Ethereum, because scripts can consume a lot of resources, unlike verification of Bitcoin transactions which is a constant resource cost per transaction.
Again you n00bs should stop trusting your own analysis, because in my excrutiatingly vast experience of reading n00b posts at BCT, you are nearly always wrong. In Bitcoin I think so, although there was a recent block chain fork because some miners were not doing complete verification, so perhaps the costs of verification are already borderline in Bitcoin and the transaction rate is highly corralled in Bitcoin to a 1MB block size which can't scale world wide. Also $9 - $16 in electricity cost per transaction isn't going to scale. So eventually PoW must be redesigned to lower the cost. (I have designed that solution) And Ethereum MUST allow a much greater use of verification resources, simply because scripts consume more resources than highly optimized code for doing one thing of verifying transactions. Ethereum could place global limits on the amount of gas a script can consume, but this is no longer a fully programmable block chain (no longer Turing complete because it requires unbounded tapes) and it is also not a free market, but rather a hard-coded, centralized decision. Just like Bitcoin's block size constant, this will become a political hellhole. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg13577344#msg13577344"Bottom line is any global constant in the protocol is not decentralization. Period. End of story. The protocol must be able to function in a free market dynamic. All the arguments about consensus is moving forward from 1MB slowly are irrelevant, because if constants are not decided by the protocol, then the protocol is by definition under a 51% attack always." Afaics, none of these directions Ethereum is headed deal with the economic issue I outlined in my first post in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5As for their scalability ideas (which again do not address the economic problem of inequality of gas fees I outlined), they are going down the same throught process that I went through in my analysis of how to scale a consensus system. My thought process is far ahead of theirs, and they will later realize that what they have designed is a total failure. The reason is because the CAP theorem is violated by Proof of Evidence aka Proof of Cheating (which is also one of the reasons why Bitcoin's proposed Segregated Witness will fail). Refer to my decentralization thread in the Altcoin Discussion forum at Bitcointalk for more details of the relevance of the CAP theorem. I am not eager to drill down and convince them of this, because I don't want to give then my design. In short, scalability requires centralization. I ultimately realized it is how the centralization is structured that allows for decentralized control. That was my key epiphany.
Also the tragedy of the commons in both systems is largely resolved if you assume that all nodes mine (or this could be read as only miners and economically important users run nodes at all). That was satoshi's original design. It was pool mining that sort of broke it.
You are assuming a more uniform distribution of hash rate (otherwise gas is appropriately unequally yet all full nodes have to do the verification cost). But the problem is that never will be true due to the economics of cost of electricity, as well the variance issue forces pooling even if everyone could have uniformly distributed hashrate. |
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That was a rash statement on my part. Here is a more level-headed statement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13542612#msg13542612Btw, I didn't kill Iota. The fundamentals may (or maybe not and probably not in the short-term). That is not my fault nor decision. I stood ready to adopt their coin and stop my development work if it was sound to my expectations. You mentioned Satoshi's security model in that post. Did you mean that model which is vulnerable to 25% of hashing power with 33% in the best conditions? The difference between 25% and 50% is not really that significant anyway. With 25% you can easily acquire more hash rate to get to 50% or conspire with some other 25% to get to 50%. Satoshi's method only achieves its strong security model with more highly fragmented mining (perhaps with the largest extant mining concentration at 5% or less, to choose a somewhat arbitrarily number), something that hasn't been achieved to date but not everyone rules out that the system could evolve in that manner in the future. (TPTB thinks it is impossible; I and others do not, necessarily.) With numbers like >15% where investments in capacity comparable in magnitude to the amount already invested or small coalitions can easily attack the system, you can really only rely on Satoshi's secondary model, which is sort of proof-of-stakeish and not really very compelling. ^^^ All of which is a weakness of Bitcoin, at least in the eyes of some (informed?) beginners. Until I see BTC issues (including risks related to concentration of mining) relatively resolved in the eyes of experts, I cannot hold more than a fairly small amount in BTC (as an "investment", yes I know that investing (HODLing) BTC is perhaps not that smart). But, there are valid reasons for many of us to HODL BTC. Its use of moving large amounts of wealth in a quiet way to other places (even to other countries) has potentially great value. I wait for a story of some rich Chinese person leaving their country with $1,000,000 or more in BTC...  My view (pure speculation with no evidence) is that Bitcoin's value is constrained by the relatively weak state of its mining infrastructure (and increasing hash rate does little to improve the situation because the main problem is concentration). If somehow we could magically and persistently disperse the mining, the value would increase significantly overnight, even with the current level of adoption (although the increased value would bring more adoption). But as you say it is being used today for some things and is not completely worthless by any means despite being imperfect. Just quite small when measured by finance standards. Note I do think there is a design that is a solution. And I agree value would increase much faster in this new design, because not only confidence, but the miners wouldn't be always dumping coins on the market (which what keeps BTC price low and siphons money away from speculators into the pockets of mining farms which have costs < $50 per BTC). Given Bitcoin has been 51% attacked by Chinese miners now (refusing to allow an increase in the block size), Bitcoin appears to be on its death bed (but may take a while for confidence to collapse due to the ignorance of Bitards). I wouldn't hold it long-term. The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs: Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?
Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.
There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.) We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges. Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges. There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there. Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized. So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors. |
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That was a rash statement on my part. Here is a more level-headed statement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13542612#msg13542612Btw, I didn't kill Iota. The fundamentals may (or maybe not and probably not in the short-term). That is not my fault nor decision. I stood ready to adopt their coin and stop my development work if it was sound to my expectations. You mentioned Satoshi's security model in that post. Did you mean that model which is vulnerable to 25% of hashing power with 33% in the best conditions? The difference between 25% and 50% is not really that significant anyway. With 25% you can easily acquire more hash rate to get to 50% or conspire with some other 25% to get to 50%. Satoshi's method only achieves its strong security model with more highly fragmented mining (perhaps with the largest extant mining concentration at 5% or less, to choose a somewhat arbitrarily number), something that hasn't been achieved to date but not everyone rules out that the system could evolve in that manner in the future. (TPTB thinks it is impossible; I and others do not, necessarily.) With numbers like >15% where investments in capacity comparable in magnitude to the amount already invested or small coalitions can easily attack the system, you can really only rely on Satoshi's secondary model, which is sort of proof-of-stakeish and not really very compelling. ^^^ All of which is a weakness of Bitcoin, at least in the eyes of some (informed?) beginners. Until I see BTC issues (including risks related to concentration of mining) relatively resolved in the eyes of experts, I cannot hold more than a fairly small amount in BTC (as an "investment", yes I know that investing (HODLing) BTC is perhaps not that smart). But, there are valid reasons for many of us to HODL BTC. Its use of moving large amounts of wealth in a quiet way to other places (even to other countries) has potentially great value. I wait for a story of some rich Chinese person leaving their country with $1,000,000 or more in BTC... My view (pure speculation with no evidence) is that Bitcoin's value is constrained by the relatively weak state of its mining infrastructure (and increasing hash rate does little to improve the situation because the main problem is concentration). If somehow we could magically and persistently disperse the mining, the value would increase significantly overnight, even with the current level of adoption (although the increased value would bring more adoption). But as you say it is being used today for some things and is not completely worthless by any means despite being imperfect. Just quite small when measured by finance standards. Note I do think there is a design that is a solution. And I agree value would increase much faster in this new design, because not only confidence, but the miners wouldn't be always dumping coins on the market (which what keeps BTC price low and siphons money away from speculators into the pockets of mining farms which have costs < $50 per BTC). Given Bitcoin has been 51% attacked by Chinese miners now (refusing to allow an increase in the block size), Bitcoin appears to be on its death bed (but may take a while for confidence to collapse due to the ignorance of Bitards). I wouldn't hold it long-term. The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs: Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?
Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.
There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.) We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges. Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges. There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there. Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized. So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors. |
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As a side opinion, i feel the general atmosphere is a bluff before the real bottom/top eg Gold going up, bitcoin going up, S&P falling.
That is nearly always the case when it is not a Waterfall crash but rather just clearing out the incorrect timing speculation. Gold and Bitcoin are not waterfall crashing due to some nosebleed insolvency (as will happen to Europe's banks for example). They are correcting. Note Bitcoin may be on its death bed though given it has now been 51% attacked by Chinese miners. |
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ArticMine PMed me after I wrote that flaming post, and said he would reply after studying my posts. He has not yet replied. Does that mean I am correct and there is no solution for Monero. I think so. It is fundamental. Afaics, you'd have to completely rewrite Moaneuro.  Rewrite Monero, is not necessary at all but some documentation on how the Cryptonote adaptive blocksize limits actually work is needed, especially given the formula in section 6.2.3 of the Cryptonote Whitepaper is wrong. https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf. My response will come in time. Sorry that won't solve the problem, which as smooth pointed out in my vaporcoin thread recently is the generlized ability to move profit to externalities (where I was already mentioning shorting as an attack on PoS coins). Checkmate. |
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Reddit cross post since perhaps not all of you visit there:
Sometimes it can be easy to lose sight of the inevitable: a private and global financial network does already exist.
You're part of it. There is literally no better technology on Earth... So the question is - what level will it need to balloon to in order to function properly? Because the path of least resistance is for it to inflate in value, not for it to stagnate or collapse.
The answer even laymen give me is, "In the trillions."
Ok, well what about $5 trillion? That's a nice reasonable number, right? Then that means we are looking at a reality where every Monero is worth $300,000 each (in today's USD).
Remember: either we continue to use technologically inferior money (unlikely), something drastically better is invented very soon (unlikely), or Cryptonote networks like Monero become titanic financial juggernauts (most likely outcome).
The stock market is down... Bitcoin is down... But our future is still quite rosy. Let's get excited for a great 2016 - possibly the year we broach a new level of mainstream awareness.
Typical overreaching of bagholders as the ship sinks. Delusional nonsense that is ignorant of the technological realities of anonymity. Also it is bordering on insanity in terms of understanding of marketing and market needs for anonymity, even if your technology wasn't mostly inadequate to the point of being nearly entirely useless. |
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ArticMine PMed me after I wrote that flaming post, and said he would reply after studying my posts. He has not yet replied. Does that mean I am correct and there is no solution for Monero. I think so. It is fundamental. Afaics, you'd have to completely rewrite Moaneuro. Rewrite Monero, is not necessary at all but some documentation on how the Cryptonote adaptive blocksize limits actually work is needed, especially given the formula in section 6.2.3 of the Cryptonote Whitepaper is wrong. https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf. My response will come in time. Sorry that won't solve the problem, which as smooth pointed out in my vaporcoin thread recently is the generlized ability to move profit to externalities (where I was already mentioning shorting as an attack on PoS coins). Checkmate.
As you all may know, I now consider this to be useless development. So please do continue! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1211093.msg13514814#msg13514814https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1329136.msg13575205#msg13575205
Reddit cross post since perhaps not all of you visit there:
Sometimes it can be easy to lose sight of the inevitable: a private and global financial network does already exist.
You're part of it. There is literally no better technology on Earth... So the question is - what level will it need to balloon to in order to function properly? Because the path of least resistance is for it to inflate in value, not for it to stagnate or collapse.
The answer even laymen give me is, "In the trillions."
Ok, well what about $5 trillion? That's a nice reasonable number, right? Then that means we are looking at a reality where every Monero is worth $300,000 each (in today's USD).
Remember: either we continue to use technologically inferior money (unlikely), something drastically better is invented very soon (unlikely), or Cryptonote networks like Monero become titanic financial juggernauts (most likely outcome).
The stock market is down... Bitcoin is down... But our future is still quite rosy. Let's get excited for a great 2016 - possibly the year we broach a new level of mainstream awareness.
Typical overreaching of bagholders as the ship sinks. Delusional nonsense that is ignorant of the technological realities of anonymity. Also it is bordering on insanity in terms of understanding of marketing and market needs for anonymity, even if your technology wasn't mostly inadequate to the point of being nearly entirely useless. |
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