You should run an antivirus program on your computer and see if you have any keyloggers or malware on your computer. You may not be able to get your coins back but the community can benefit from the knowledge.

If the exchanges are so pitiful then there must be a lot of money to be made by starting a superior one. Go ahead. We won't stop you.

But then we have to trust N1, N2, and N3, who would all have to be presumably verified by N4, N5, and N6, and so on. Does this bootstrap in a decentralized manner?

Maybe some day a newbie will post a poorly designed website pretending that he didn't make it and actually expect people to send money to the random address he put on it under the presumption that it would do some vague thing. That would be really nuts.

My only reservation is you would think that if this type of fingerprinting were as accurate as you'd need it to be then it would already be used for tracking, breaking Tor, and the like. Of course there's a difference between an involuntary timing attack and a node specifically trying to prove its validity to you.

After thinking about it more, the passport idea does seem a bit lazy (though still not malicious as many have accused). The risk of all of the hashes being bruteforced is a pretty large downside since those who would need to provide that extra identification most would be running over Tor and likely not keen on taking any chance of having their identity revealed.


This is an interesting idea but I doubt it's so simple in an actual network. Do you know of any academic papers or what not that actually promote this idea? It would also be kind of silly to blacklist a reliable and honest node just because it moved.

http://blog.ethereum.org/?p=39/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm

Your idea is similar to the Slasher algorithm.

It will be the end of the world when somebody with an axe to grind gets their coins stolen from the allegedly perfectly secure Bitcoin network and goes to the media about it.

X is all coins associated with a revealed public key becoming spendable by anybody and impossible to return to their original owners, which would affect primarily early adopters who have never moved their coins and people who reuse addresses.

That depends on how much your electrickity company charges you. They might try to eletrick you into overpaying.

I don't know where you're getting this from. Nobody has suggested enforcing US law in Bitcoin.

Democracy can function but that hardly makes it the best system. Dictatorships can function too. Wikipedia is explicitly not a democracy, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOT. It is most accurately a meritocracy.

The flaws of traditional democracies are immediately obvious. Democracy treats every opinion as being equal, but we know that this doesn't reflect reality. Some opinions are objectively more informed or intelligent than others in that they objectively lead to better results (a higher GDP or longer life expectancy for example) when heeded. Futarchy corrects this imbalance of knowledge by making people financially accountable for whether or not their opinions actually turn out to be correct or not. Futarchy is to democracy as capitalism is to communism. Democracy is a communism of knowledge that promotes the equality of every piece of information in spite of the blatant falseness of this premise.

Keep in mind that this system doesn't entirely disregard opinion. It retains a traditional system of voting for determining what people want. It simply implements a superior form of decision making to find out what we should actually do to then get those things.

Think of it this way. The choice of whether to play hockey, basketball, or baseball is a subjective decision. You cannot objectively say that one game is better than the other, and voting is a fair way to determine the issue. But once you've chosen which game to play, winning becomes a matter of fact and not opinion. One strategy will be objectively superior at winning the game. Similarly, what issues (health, wealth, happiness, a mix of the three, or something else entirely) society chooses to prioritize is a matter of opinion, but what plan will actually get the best results in those areas is a matter of fact. Futarchy does what traditional democracy fails to in separating these functions.

In that sense it's actually more democratic than traditional democracy. People vote for what they want in an abstract sense (like less unemployment) and then the best plan for getting that is formulated automatically for them, eliminating the inevitable fact that in a traditional democracy people rarely get what they want because the details of how to actually implement things are too complex for people to reasonably understand. Can the average citizen really be expected to be an expert on politics, economics, the environment, and everything else they vote on? Futarchy eliminates that requirement while still allowing for everyone's preferences to be considered.

I suggest you read the original paper linked in the original post. It will explain more thoroughly.

Would you rather have Gavin lie to you and tell you that we're living in a libertarian fairy tale where everyone is a rugged individualist committed to the principles of decentralization? I don't think he "argued" anything there. He simply gave a realistic assessment of the situation. The community searched for and successfully found solutions (stealth addresses, coinjoin) in response. It sounds to me like he did his job.

No Bitcoin core developer specifically promoted blacklisting, and the whole idea seems to be mostly dead, especially in light of stealth addresses/coinjoin/zerocoin. You are worried about an issue that never really was one.


There are plenty of free cert providers. But why shouldn't they pay? Identity verification doesn't happen for free and if you can't pay for a cert then how can I possibly trust you to actually deliver a product? If you don't like it then just use the PGP implementation that will assuredly pop up alongside it.


What's wrong with that? Passports are a reasonably scarce resource for your average person, providing good anti-sybil properties, and requiring only zero-knowledge proofs of their possession has little privacy impact. It would hardly be required either. It would simply be a tool for users of a particular Bitcoin implementation to make a more diverse selection of nodes. You wouldn't even have to use it.

You're all hysteria and no imagination.

A single unit of a number associated with a hashed cryptographic key stored in a particular data structure hosted by a particular decentralized network

But that's pretty boring.

If you can do things like prevent Sybil attacks and maintain decentralized legders with common sense then why didn't you invent Bitcoin years ago? Academia created Bitcoin. It would not exist without "cold hearted" logic, mathematics, and cryptography.


Satoshi was able to compete with the existing monetary system purely on the strength of his ideas. If yours are so good then why can't you compete with Bitcoin? If you step back and think about it carefully then you'll probably realize that there's nothing really wrong with Bitcoin and you are incredibly worried about vague probabilities.

Meanwhile thousands of credit card numbers are shown on television every day without incident. Those fiat users are so honest.

That's difficult to estimate. It's not simply a straightforward answer based on the transaction frequency, but also depends on what type of transactions are used, the transaction outputs created (or pruned) by each transaction, and other factors specific to Bitcoin.

I think he means several addresses, which is actually a good idea.

You didn't post this on the "Beginners & Help" subforum so you're already doing it wrong. You're also trying to mine Bitcoin with a conventional computer. This is not likely to even recover the costs of the electricity you're going to spend trying to mine. Your best bet is to mine an altcoin like Litecoin or Dogecoin and trade them for BTC (and do get rid of them as soon as possible).