Having miners on Elizium or some other node doesn't change the fact that my 120GHs makes me a small fry that won't get any reward anymore on p2pool.

And I'm telling you that you are wrong about this.

During the time that you have a share active, you will be getting more per block than you "should", which will balance out the times when you don't have a share active (when you will be getting less than you "should").

In the long run, (fraction of time with share active)*(reward per block) will equal out to (reward per block)*((my hash rate)/(pool hash rate)

You don't think the the banks or government can manipulate the markets? Outlawing, extreme taxing, using the media as a tool for propaganda, etc. are just a few ways.

If Bitcoin is supposed to be money, why is one worth $700? Or anything at all?

If I bought BTC1000 for $1000 a couple of years ago I didn't do much to justify having $700,000, or the ability to suddenly buy a house and fancy car. Excuse me if I don't see much 'value' in what I did. The problem is our notion of what is valuable. Hard work or even smart work isn't valuable-- getting as much as possible for as little as possible is what passes as valuable nowadays and is precisely what gives value to Bitcoin.

There was a goal of social justice, just not for everyone-- you know, not having banks or governments controlling and taking our money-- remember that? By saying there wasn't means you are admitting that Bitcoin is nothing more than speculative greed driven 'value' quite literally based on nothing. What other usefulness does it have over classic 'money'?

And because you mentioned all the other altcoins-- wouldn't they make Bitcoin 'tech' seem redundant (if that were another aspect of its 'value')?

I've been around for months and I saw those good weeks too.  The point being that at the current structure of share difficulty for p2pool shares, I'll never see those days again.  It won't even out.  Its callously preventing actual work below 100GH from achieving any semblance of reward. This could be solved if the 24 hour share limit was raised to 48 or even 72 hours before demoting miners to 0 payout level.

But you can't have it both ways. There is nothing I did that made me potentially deserve anything when I bought a bitcoin. I simply exchanged one method of storing value for another. Sure, bitcoin has some usefulness as a tool for barter, but why would we attribute a value to it, when bitcoins being traded for bitcoins is pointless. If there is only a finite amount of value just as there is a finite amount of resources and people, then where is that value coming from? 

If the banks had to buy them from people, you think they would buy them at whatever the speculative (out of thin air) value is? They would run it to the ground before they would 'buy' a single coin, and at that point it would be usless. The government and/or media can destroy Bitcoin at any time. They've never redistributed their wealth and they're not going to start now because of cryptos-- nothing will force them into that situation, they are the ones in charge and there is no way in hell they will allow competition-- for them, everything is at stake.

This is why I mentioned Bitcoins simply disappearing. My question is a hypothetical/philosophical one.

Most people with some ideals see Bitcoin as a way for the banks/govt to stay out of our pockets-- to not allow them to take more than they already have-- this is seen as unjust. Bitcoin is seen as revolutionary by these people because of its ability to accomplish this. I happen to think that these same people acquiring so much of something for pretty much next to nothing, is also inherently unfair to those that don't, and won't do anything to redistribute the wealth from the ultra rich to the ultra poor. It is a potential revolution for the 'haves' in denial but not for the 'have nots'. They will not actually be taking anything from the super rich, and the wealth (because of the very nature of 'wealth') has to come from somewhere or be in relation to something else. That relation will only cause the poor to become poorer because they didn't gain anything of value, even if they didn't actually 'lose' anything.

Ok, Insolvent is the wrong word unless the debts owed are to me

But, yes it USED to even out.... or actually it used to pay more than the Centralized PPLNS pools, but not anymore.  Even with 7 shares found for my p2pool node over the last week, I only had 2 days where blocks paid out at a miniscule amount, and this was during a very lucky few days in terms of Blocks found.

So no, it no longer evens out compared to what I earn at BTC Guild on PPLNS now, because actual work effort towards finding a Block is paid out no matter how small the effort.  I have essentially "useless" work effort over the last week on P2pool that didn't pay out at all.  I'm also not some noob who just started on P2Pool.  I optimized the hell out of my bitcoind and p2pool settings, was almost always above 110% efficiency and I used to see plenty of shares for the past few months.  But the last month has been horrible even with a stint of good luck in finding blocks for the pool.  With the difficulty per share set so high, and the timeframe threshold to earn a piece in the pie, I would now need much higher than my current 20Ghs to get anything.  That is troubling if we're trying to have a peer-to-peer supported pool if its setting the lower bar at 100GH and the "little guys" like me don't even get crumbs.  

...and over half the Bitcoins that will ever exist are already in the hands of such a small amount of people (let's say 1 million?), what would be the repercussions?

As it stands today, a huge chunk of people are left out.

Those who:

- don't have any money to 'invest'
- are without a computer or internet connection
- don't know about Bitcoin
- can, but are unwilling to buy into Bitcoin for any given reason
- are incarcerated, sick, comatose, etc.

The rich can still buy, so they'll never be out of the loop. Besides, they hold value elsewhere which they can always sell for whatever the currency will be.

Forgetting the madness of speculative greed, and just concentrating on those who believe that Bitcoin can one day be the reserve world currency/money-- do you believe that such a disproportion in future wealth is something that's going to be good for humanity?

I always thought that one of the ideas behind Bitcoin would be to somehow 'stick it' to the rich/banks/governments. However, if the best case scenario (or one of them) becomes a reality, the thought of the future disparity makes my stomach turn. As it stands, 1/7000th of the world population already owns 50-60% of the total sum of the future 'money', and most of them are hording.

The possibility of this outcome alone makes Bitcoin the ultimate divider of people and predestines it for failure. The failure can, and most likely will, see it become what it once was-- a niche for a specific type of transaction or completely disappearing, or it will be a failure of humanity on an epic scale.

True, but that still wouldn't change the fact that the richest Bitcoiners came upon an extreme amount of wealth and others did not. In fact, they came about the coins by attributing a value to them that literally comes from thin air, much in the same way as printed money.

With the share difficulty bouncing between 450000 - 500000 lately, and with the local luck the last few days, I've been having problems getting a share within the 24 hour window needed to keep payouts above 0.  I've got 20+Ghs going and I used to get 0.025 per block a few weeks ago, but now I'm struggling for the past week to get 0.005 per block and it has mostly been 0 even with 7 shares and 120% efficiency during the last week.  So even if luck for Blocks has been great over the last week, the share count has made running my local P2Pool node insolvent.  Anyone else seeing the same?

It's stuff like this more than a pretty interface or easy setup that will push people like me to go back to centralized pools.  So for now, until I can grab more horsepower and try again (I have 100+Ghs Drillbit Bitfury boards waiting for repair), I'm bowing out of P2Pool and going back to BTC Guild.  Love the concept and it was going great for awhile, but it looks like only the big boys can play in the P2Pool anymore.

We heard you already, kuroth. Stop the inane bragging.

Wouldn't the easiest be to use the hash of the file as the private key like a brain wallet and send to the address and empty the address back to another address you control? It's very simple and easily checked by anyone and doesn't leave coins unspendable.

You could even create a text file listing many hashes of files on the computer and prove them all in one transaction just by creating an address from the hash of the text file and bounce the coins to the address and back.

People should realize that in order to sustain this $1k valuation of BTC, you would need 3 to 4 Fools like the OP EVERY SINGLE DAY to buy up the newly mined coins.  But their are NOT that many fools in the world, once miners see their profitability squeezed out by rising difficulty they will HAVE TO SELL COINS DAILY to cover their costs and see a return on their mining equipment.  The market can not remotely absorb that kind of selling pressure, the Entire USD depth on Gox would be consumed in 1 week.

Miners are like you hoarding because they see huge gain on paper, this means that virtually none of the newly mined coins are sold and thus the stock of circulating coins doesn't grow, it actually shrinks as people buy them up.  We have been at under 1 week worth of mined coins available to buy now for some time.  But miners can not hoard coins forever, they have costs which always rise to match their marginal costs.

There are no doubts new industries will appear and new jobs created, but the problem is the number of jobs created is less than destroyed. This trend become very clear now!

- Mr. Nooberg is not a complete noob; he actually realizes the importance of regular wallet backups. However, he figures backing up is only critical after making a change to the wallet, like generating a new address. He doesn't know that if he has done 101 outgoing transactions since his last backup, he now has money in a change address that isn't backed up. If Mr. Nooberg's hard drive failed tomorrow morning, he would be doomed to a life of squalid poverty.

- Mrs. Noobisky wants to prove to her friendly neighbourhood loanshark that she has 100 BTC in her wallet to back up her gambling losses. She sends him her public key (she only has one address in her wallet), assuming that's where her money is kept. She doesn't realize all her money is in some invisible change address. Mr. Loanshark uses a block explorer and discovers that Mrs. Noobisky has 0 BTC in the address she gave him. He feels betrayed, and Mrs. Noobisky is forced to skip town and spend the rest of her life hiding in Tijuana.

True, but this is part of a bigger issue. There are plenty of other mistakes noobs can make because they don't understand how change works. Bitcoin-qt should strive to make the whole issue of change more noob-friendly.

Bitcoins have ZERO established value. You cannot value bitcoins at all.
Whatever you say, is pretty much emotional opinion, unless you can state how bitcoins have a established value and how it would be measured, and WHY?

The purpose bitcoin serves, is also served by other crypto currencies as well. You must remember, money is only a medium of exchange unless it also has intrinsic value like gold.
Gold is valued because of the exactness of it's extraction. Bitcoin started off being extracted for next to nothing and tens of thousands were mined for next to nothing, now they are mined with extreme difficulty and cost, and with much less earned. This is NOTHING like gold, in it's mining features, despite how much Satoshi tried to make it similar.

Without an intrinsic value that can be measured, it still serves purpose and has value, but it's different. It has value in it's ability to serve as a medium of exchange. It's speed, accuracy, inability to chargeback, and anonymity and low transaction fee costs. That is bitcoins value, but it cannot be measured in dollars consistently unless all bitcoins were mined at the same value and cost.

Please say what you think would count as "general" enough and what is "fast" enough, because imo it is already sufficient in both ways.

Here is evidence that it is both reasonably general and reasonably fast:
a) In fact ebfull's implementation is a fully general purpose network simulator, mostly developed before the selfish mining paper was written. He only modified it to illustrate the selfish mining attack after this thread showed up! I unfortunately don't have a link to give you to show the original interface, which illustrates the generality. Maybe eb3full will respond to this thread with one... Additionally, the Selfish Mining simulation interface already supports varying the main parameter (alpha), as well as whether or not network dominance is assumed (essentially gamma=ordinary or gamma=1.0 from the paper), and whether or not the paper's suggested patch is implemented. What more generality is it you are expecting?
b) I just ran an experiment, with 100 nodes, on my browser at 1000x speed (with graphics turned off). Back of envelope, this means I could do 100k blocks in 16 hours. So it would cost roughly about a $160 worth of EC2 nodes to do a hundred sessions out to a thousand blocks. That seems tolerable to me.

I'm annoyed just because I feel like you're trying to avoid honoring your bounty by being vague about the conditions - a simulation can always be "faster" and more "general."

Jabs aside, your post starts off with this:


There is a very subtle but extremely important question here that you may be missing, which I think deserves it's own post, and that is:
Does capital chase production and new knowledge creation? Or does production and new knowledge chase capital? Depending on how that question is answered may make the rest of your post completely irrelevant.