If the government wants to mine bitcoins they can compete with every other miner on the planet to acquire the 42% of bitcoins that remain to be created. However, like gold, they can't print additional Bitcoins out of thin air.

now this is pretty funny:

I wouldn't underestimate those 60+ grey haired guys. They may indeed understand nothing (or even less than that) about and in technology (and all such), but they know people, their weaknesses and addictions by far better than most of us do, since, otherwise, they wouldn't get where they are in the first place. This means, in its turn, that they have guys at their disposal who are pretty well aware of what's what in networking, internet and crypto (and by far better than most of us do)...

It is a zero sum game,

That is why the "proof" that "a majoritary mining cartel can't change the protocol" is subjective.

I don't know whether the miners will try to delay the halving (or do some other "sacrilege").  But, if they were to try, my estimate is that less than 10% of the bitcoiners would be furiously opposed to the halving delay, the other 90% will not care, and only the 4-5 miners with 60% of the hashpower will be in favor.  Then these miners will do it anyway; and 99.9% of the bitcoiners will accept the change, including most of those who swore that they would abandon bitcoin if that happened. Because their greed will speak louder than their ideology.

Bitcoiners are incredibly easy to fool if they are told what they want to hear.  They believe that adoption is booming, that the exponential price trend is built-in, that Satoshi was an anarcho-libertarian, that governments cannot stop bitcoin, that Greece may adopt it, that the banks are secretly investing in it, that sidechains will solve all problems of the protocol, that Wall Street whales are holding the price down, that China is irrelevant, that Willy created the last bubble...  

If Antonopoulos tells everybody that postponing the halving will not delay the Apotheosis, and Roger Ver posts a video where he promises that it will be the first and last change to the protocol, and Gavin tweets that he supports the change, and Coindesk and Bloomberg and Forbes and the WSJ assert that it will be a positive development for bitcoin, then 90% of the bitcoiners will believe that it is a good thing, and the rest will pretend to believe it in order to preserve the value of their coins.  

Absolutely true. Value is a "nominalization" to borrow a term from NLP: http://youtu.be/1sceRsmT1yc

And, if bitcoin actually dies before that date, this forum will probably be closed; so it would be pointless to enter "$0"

There is no such thing as intrinsic value.

All value is subjective , as beheld in the mind of the observer.

All value is subjegated collectively through the market which reaches a consensus price.

If you do not beleive me ask a monkey what has more value - a warehouse full of gold bullion or a single bannana.

Oh, I already did, here in bitcointalk and on reddit.  The replies were the same: "the majority miners will not do that because it would render the coin valueless" and "if they do that, the faithful would move to an ASIC-incompatible clone".

Sorry, but the first claim is terribly naive wishful thinking (just look at how cartels act in other markets, e.g. international banks), and the second "defense" would be just a ridiculous form of economic suicide by a small set of irreducible ideologues.

Well mocking the US government with alternative methods to sponsor Snowden are just going to provoke a negative backlash.

Sorry, I believe that you failed to understand.  All the ASIC and mining installations will remain perfectly usable with the 25 M chain, and would mine it because there would be no other chain that they can mine.

Ater the "Red Button" solution there will be two fully functional versions of bitcoin, but one will have a 300 PH/s network, the other will have a puny CPU network.  Even "hero miners" with older ASIC miners in the attic will be unable to come to the help of the second one.


Whether the attack succeeds or not, the concentration of hashing power in the "Big Bitcoin" network will be the same as it was before the fork point.  The change to the halving schedule will not affect the possibility of double-spend.  In fact, that possibility already is not negligible now. (Imagine that some hacker steals 500 kBTC from the US or Chinese government, who is determined to get them back.)

The risk of double-spend will be much higher in the "Small Bitcoin" CPU-only network, since an external agent could gain majority mining power with a relatively small investment.

This trolling has gone to a new level

And once you introduce blockchain cryptography, guess what they can do? Have a public ledger of ownership and transfer that cannot be denied because it’s absolutely transparent. It’s absolutely transparent. It is the means through which these individuals can get exactly what Hernando de Soto thinks they best need to bring themselves out of poverty.

It is so much more profound than that, but at its very basis, it has the ability to give these individuals the right of ownership to property. And that has more than anything else, the ability to bring them out of poverty. And I can’t wait. It’ll be adopted elsewhere. I mean, blockchain encryption is such a powerful tool. It’ll be used by banks, it’ll be used by credit card companies, it will become a standard. But what’s more interesting is what it can do to poverty around the world to eliminate poverty.

shows that you are just one of the many cultists like all the other r/bitcoin manchildren.

what did you expect?

How come that you bitcoiners think that in every crypto technology the fucking token is the main point?
XRP is just a token that is not even necessary for the ripple protocol to work (it's an addition as a bridge and as a spam mechanism, but not really necessary), its price could be at a fraction of a penny and nobody would even need to touch it.

The ripple protocol is a very promising technology and still is, same goes with Eris Industries or Ethereum and others.

Stop focusing on the friggin' "coins". It's very probable that they won't even be a part of the future of crypto (where distibuted ledgers/databases are the real useful innovation).