But but... initial 0%? It's as soft as can be. As long as it doesn't budge from 0%, it's still good ol'bitcoin.

I haven't considered this. It seems a bit far fetched, but not totally out of this world.

Yes, a quantum computing breakout (unlikely for several years to come) would destroy Bitcoin as we know it. Having the necessary machinery for PoW in place could be a safety exit. Just insert Cuckoo Cycle into an "other hashing algos" slot.

That's a good point that I haven't considered fully. Guess I need to read up a bit more.

Buterin would do better to first make sure transactions are irreversible.

Especially if the game is about keeping open competition.

I do care, if they can charge whatever they want for their shovels, to the point of suppressing shoveling when they don't want it to happen.

Monopoly is never good, except for the monopolist. Don't jbreher yourself into a corner.

We're in the same position. Mining has become a hardcore game for big players. It's financially risky and you are subjected to the whims and abuses of people like Jihan. Not to mention the policies of governments. They can't stop bitcoin, but they can stop miners fairly easily, giving the minimum mining farm size of today.

That's another reason why I would love some real decentralization by soft PoW modulation.

A kind of distributed checkpointing? That would be nice, I agree.

However, Bittorrent as a protocol has a lot of back-and-forth chatter, more so if it's trackerless and decentralized (DHT). That's why it just won't play nice with mesh networks like TOR. I don't know anything about the technicals of checkpointing, though. There might be some alternative solutions, but their efficiency needs to be accurately evaluated.

PoS - Those who can prove ownership of coin get more votes.

Short: An established miner has (or can quickly have) lots of coin lying around, so he can steer the voting result more easily than a few hodlers with the same total stake (read: stash).

Longer: Giving each satoshi the same voting weight is a hard problem, possibly unsolvable. What is needed is a hypothetical system of incentives that makes GPU- and CPU- miner owned satoshis as heavy as ASIC-miner owned ones. Is such a system practical to implement? Does it ever exist? I doubt it. That's why PoS is dangerous.

Also, if I'm allowed to dream wildly on future Bitcoin technology development, I would love some kind of blockchain checkpointing to be implemented. This allows ultra-light nodes to have no trust (or very little) when first syncing.

I'd posted my reply about PoW change before reading the posts by Icygreen, flipperish, flynn and others.

I, too, would like the full nodes to have a say in the relative distribution of hash functions, but full nodes are too easy to sybyl attack. PoS vote is also dangerous, because established miners have huge availability they could employ to crush GPU- or CPU- friendly functions. That's why we will eventually need to figure out more game theory to have a stable solution.

My opinion is that preparing for a soft PoW change would be a good thing. Keywords: preparing and soft.

A monopoly on mining is an evil thing. It keeps decentralization from really taking place. However, changing PoW drastically without a grace period would only alienate the "good" miners - probably ruin them, and piss them off enough to turn them (rightfully) bad.

One way could be to have a PoW that alternates between a few different hash functions - some of which hard to implement on ASICs, probably because of insane RAM requirements although there are alternatives. The alternance should be based on past history; the percentage of SHA-256 blocks could be dynamic, so "good" miners are incentivized to keep their percentage high by maintaining good demeanor. Or there could be a multiple PoW in each block, so that both a SHA-256 proof and some other proof(s) are necessary for validation. Each PoW function should maintain a different difficulty scale, and the difficulties could be combined into some overall metric. Such a system would be highly tweakable, and adapt dynamically.

(EDIT - about "softness". The initial conditions could be 100% ASIC-based, 0% others, as it is now. Then in times of mempool storms, or fork FUD, or whatever, the "others" might be gently pushed up until the situation gets back to normal.)

Any working solution should be designed with game theory in mind, not only the obvious complexity theory. A long check on testnet would be necessary, to figure out at least the complexity part, if not the game theory part.

(Inb4 - Bitcoin is a scam designed to centralize because no digital money can ever blah blah the Joos blah blah gold and silver.)

I quite agree with your idea of things, bitserve.


... and, as someone also said, from a statistical point of view, such a woman wouldn't be too interested into having a relationship with someone with about as much money as her. Hypergamy and things.

Sorry I've been away and couldn't congratulate you. Smile, my friend, smile! They say 50 is the new 40, so life is just about to begin again!

And bitcoin will rise, as she always does.

The number and variety of ways you have to express this single concept is mind-boggling (and quite entertaining). One more reason to stick to this thread for me 

A humble suggestion from a serene, non-sad, not-yet-retired straightie.

Just live on your scrawny, meager, pathetic already-cashed-out stash for a year or so. A couple maybe, if it is not that paltry. Try not to think of that ball-munching drunken badger too much (ok, admittedly not that easy if you keep on hanging out here with us spooks).

After a year of pitiful poverty, I bet you'll see things in a different light. Who knows, the smelly critter might sober up, even. Of course, you still have to suffer being temporarily poor  

And mind your balls, get them out of the corn and into more deserving ginger places. Or wherever you like, as long as you keep them safe from erosion.

I'd assumed the temp ban was from the whole bitcointalk.org site. I was guessing, might be wrong.

Must have been a different thread with stricter rules.

Not a slip, but a step back into the right direction. But still only 1 digit. Keep working at it!  

I have to agree with this reading of things. Torque might be a master of paranoid thinking and a conspiracy nut, but more often than not subsequent events agree with his (broad stroked, not numerically pinpointed) predictions.

Why
U
Yoda
Like
Talk?

I was expressing sarcastic discontent with all the racial/save the earth/left/right irrelevant talk, just trying to steer discussion into honey badger related territory.  

Nice to see you're (still, always) on it!

I almost ran out. I kept placing buy orders hoping/thinking "it can't possibly go much lower than this". So I accumulated quite a bit (well, everything is relative) barely shy of selling grandma to buy moar.

Good for you. I wasn't as forward-looking (or well funded?) as you, but I managed to do fairly well.


The NUMBERS, JayJuanGee, the NUMBERS! Don't you know we all read your posts just for the juicy probabilities with 4 significant digits after the decimal point??  

If only that reckless badger would stop drinking and driving... eh Hairy guy?

Yes jbreher, that's you. I didn't mention your name explicitly to avoid a tide of ad-hominem noise, but it seems you don't care that much.

I'll read more carefully, too. I just gave a glance to the top posts. But more importantly, I'd like to listen to the talk on video. It seems rich with technical details, but I really can't stand lengthy videos. I much prefer the organized written form for complex content.