Regardless of whether Q3 is positive or negative, we will not know whether or not the economy was in recession at the time of these posts.  We will certainly need to know Q4 and may also need to know Q1 before we can be sure.

You are right to notice that "recession" here is simply a function of GDP.  An economy in recession is not necessarily shrinking and an economy which is shrinking is not necessarily in recession.

Indeed, GDP is roughly a measure of current consumable output and not one of overall economic size, health, or strength.  When long-term investments are neglected in favour of immediate luxuries, GDP will increase.  When resources are diverted towards long-term capital investments and away from short-term gratification, GDP will decrease.  Independently of GDP, economic health necessitates that investment and consumption are balanced in accordance with the preferences of the people.

Wow, that sounds like a lot!  How did you generate the 20 words?

I struggle to remember extras like capitals, digits, and symbols.  For security reasons, I avoid them whenever I can.

Roughly yes.  Back-to-back quarters of negative GDP growth define an official "recession".  However, note that in these cases, the recession is deemed to have begun with the first negative quarter.  It's perfectly possible that the US, for example, is already in a recession (we don't yet know Q3 GDP let alone Q4 and Q1) and it will be many months before this uncertainty is resolved.

As Small link mentioned, for split keys multisig is the way to go.  This general idea was discussed years ago and is very well established albeit rarely used.


This is fine but notice that a more efficient arrangement is possible with 2-of-3 multisig.  2-of-3 multisig means that you have 3 pieces, any 2 pieces can unlock, and any number of pieces less than 2 cannot unlock.

For myself, I'd prefer a locktime-based dead man's switch.

Yes, provided your password has sufficient entropy.  The minimum entropy you'll need depends on your situation:

• Can you easily afford to lose your cold storage?
• Do you live among people you trust or do you travel/backpack a lot?

You'll probably want between 40 and 100 bits of entropy.

I strongly advise against thinking up your own password.  Rather than digging through your mind for existing information; generate random information and memorise it.  It's not difficulty to rack up provable entropy this way.  To give you an idea, here are some examples each of which had about about 64-bits of entropy (of course, don't use these precise examples):

A uniformly random 20-digit natural number (about 66.3 bits):
    77167661296005852823
14 uniformly random lower-case letters (about 65.8 bits):
    tefdszwmhuwyso
10 uniformly random letters (upper + lower), numbers, and 33 common symbols (about 64.1 bits):
    EVl2;C?m=[
6 uniformly random words from a list of 2048 simple words with a 2-bit checksum (64 bits, BIP0039):
    scissors artwork burger catch hospital august

I personally prefer the latter for memorability but you may disagree.


A tool which should be used with some care.  Notice for example that the poor password "HelloWorld!!11" scores 100%.

Bear in mind too that these tools are targetting a different use case, one with much weaker security needs.

Still so much of the world loves Sweden and it is often held up as an example to follow.  Apparently, more government is always good.

Totalitarianism is in vogue.

Debt ceiling alarm!  Press "snooze".  Go back to sleep.

The problem I have with the dynamic blocksize proposals is that they are demand-based.  The proposals seem to assume that "real demand" for blockspace will always remain respectfully below what can be handled by a well-decentralised network.

Certainly, all else equal, prediction is inferior to algorithmic measurement.  However, I would much prefer a limit given by a prediction of what will be possible to one given by an algorithmic measurement of what we would like to be possible.

Sad yet inevitable.  As someone that uses cash heavily just for the basic dignity of financial privacy, I'm glad I don't live in Sweden.

If the ticket price is too low then there will be a shortage of seats.  This will cause the event to sell out before everyone that wants a seat can get one.  We'll often see extended queueing for physical tickets or a rush for digital tickets.  This is inefficient distribution.

If the ticket price is too high then we will have a glut.  So few people will want to pay the high price that there will be empty seats.  This is equally inefficient.

Profitable scalping helps to reduce these effects.

I wonder if Back to the Future had a hand in boosting the understandable hype surrounding the Cubs to unnatural levels.


I prefer to see scalpers doing well.  Profitable scalpers only improve the distribution process.

You're welcome.


Transaction validity further highlights the fees issue.  Consider a coinbase transaction with a total output of, say, 25.3 BTC.  To be valid, we need that the total of all the fees of the transactions included in the block is at least 0.3 BTC.  To check this we'd need to check a large number of seemingly unrelated transactions.  Working recursively, we'd soon find ourselves checking transactions from 2010 if not 2009.

Also, you may have noticed that neither shorena nor I have yet used the term "address".  Bitcoin addresses don't really exist at the protocol level and are more of a higher-order convenience.  At any moment in time, an address could be associated with any number of different unspent transaction outputs.  The validity of a transaction which spends the balance of an address relies on the validity of each of these outputs.  The "antiquity" of a heavily used address, as you've described the term, will rise and fall with time as the set of unspent outputs it is associated with changes.

If anything, the "antiquity of an address" should probably correspond to the minimum of the numbers of the blocks in which it appears.

As shorena puts across well and in detail, the question "When were my bitcoins born?" suggests an unfortunately common misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works. *

However, let's put this to one side and try to capture the spirit of your idea.  We'll say that an output y is a parent to an output x if there exists a transaction with y used as an input and x given as an output.  We'll say that an output y is an ancestor of an output x if there exists a chain of parents connecting x to y.  Finally, we'll define the bloodline birthblock of an output x to be the minimum of the heights of all blocks that contain ancestors of x. **

Given these definitions, every output has a well-defined bloodline birthblock and this concept corresponds loosely with "antiquity of my coins".  One could associate this concept with the chunk of bitcoin one imagines is stored in an output.  Following the analogy, Bitcoin transactions aren't so much moving chunks of bitcoin as they are breeding them (corresponding to the second shorena interpretation).

---

* People like to think that chunks of bitcoin have identities independently of transactions and therefore can be tracked as they "move" through the blockchain.  In reality, a chunk of bitcoin is nothing more than a property of some Bitcoin output; an amount.

** For simplicity I have ignored fees, essentially assuming that fees are destroyed and created anew as they are claimed with coinbase transactions (corresponding to the first shorena interpretation).

I consider "open source" to be an essential first step.  A Libreboot X200 from minifree.org would be a good base but you might also browse thinkpenguin.com.

There are no perfect solutions but you can easily put worries about USB firmware nasties to bed.

(emphasis mine)

That's a pretty damned big "unless"...

(emphasis mine)

... and a mind-boggling "if".

Surely this argument claims an even brighter future for 42-coin?  A single unit of this 2-year-old, active altcoin is currently worth about 460 USD, nearly twice as much as a bitcoin!

The bank coins already have mass adoption.

I have wondered about this before but assumed the saracen account was created to aid the migration from Sourceforge to Github by mirroring Satoshi's commits.

Consider for example this Sourceforge commit by s_nakamoto with timestamp 2010-12-12 18:20:36 GMT and this Github one by saracen with timestamp 2010-12-12 18:20 GMT.

This looked like an automated process to me and was enough to quell my curiosity.

Good point.  Whether I go to altcoins or precious metals depends on precisely how Bitcoin dies (a centralised Bitcoin is a dead Bitcoin).  Putting the "how" out of my mind, I currently believe cryptocurrency is an idea worth trying which is why I chose altcoins.

However, when I think about how Bitcoin could come to die in this way, I struggle to imagine a scenario in which the notion of cryptocurrency itself is not fully undermined.

Yes, I'd quit.  In such a scenario, I'd fully expect an altcoin to eventually take Bitcoin's place and I'd start using an assortment of the most likely candidates.