It will be interesting to see if the US tech industry survives, or if this is the beginning of the end.

There's some pretty strong poison in that well, and surely we've only seen the tip of the iceberg so far.

Quite the contrary - everybody understands the effects of deflation on a social economy.

The "social" economy is the poison for which deflation is the cure.

We need most of the planet's double-sha256 capability devoted to Bitcoin mining instead of doing something else.

As long as that condition holds, the actual hash rate isn't very important.

There's a lot more to security than just hash rate.

I think there's a large amount of cargo culting going on regarding the hash rate rather than useful analysis of threat models, attacker capabilities, and exactly what proof of work accomplishes.

I see a potential market for actual (not soft) hardware again.

Why do you think this is a problem, or more specifically, why do think there is no cost to larger blocks in the system I proposed (did you read it?)

If nodes are charging for bandwidth, and those transactions are in the mempool of most of the network, then the people who created the transactions already paid for them to be distributed.

If some miner with 5% of the hash rate includes all transactions in the mempool regardless of fee, then it just means that paying no fee means the transaction takes 3 hours to get confirmed. Anyone who wants a confirmation faster than that will pay a higher fee.

If miners are independently collecting transactions which are not broadcast to the network ahead of time, then they lose O(1) propagation speed. Their block will be more expensive to propagate in terms of direct cost and orphan risk.

A good VPN is about 5 euros/month.

Take the $29 discount, route 100% of your traffic through a VPN, and you still come out ahead.

The consensus process will be users of the network upgrading their software to versions that support version 4 blocks, and miners producing those blocks.

The blockchain will record the point at which a consensus has been reached.

Money doesn't work that way.

Its a meme, not a misspelling.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stahp

Complaining makes you look 'net illiterate.

I can tell that you didn't read my proposal that I've posted several times, because the answer is embarrassingly obvious.

Suppose every node prunes a 99% of the blockchain, and keeps a random 1% of the blocks.

A new node bootstraps by contacting 100 random nodes.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million appcoin pumpers cried out in terror and were suddenly bankrupt.

I would ask if you'd change your mind if the math showed you to be wrong, but we already know the answer to that, don't we?

Szabo read Nash, and Krawisz read Szabo.

I can read Krawisz and then avoid reinventing all the wheels so that I have time to focus on the few wheels I do want to reinvent.

I've spent a fair amount of time studying the nature of money.

From 2008 until 2012, I spent most of my time on a different forum where the topics under discussion were macroeconomics, money, and the operation of the financial system. During my time there I came very close to independently deriving the concept of money as delayed reciprocal altruism.

As far as "ideal money" goes, Krawisz nailed it.

The only thing I'd add to what he wrote is that where the crypto-goldbugs think they have an example of something being a store of value without being a medium of exchange, what they are actually observing is the effects of subsidies on central banks.

I was talking about payment channels between nodes so they can negotiate peering agreements, not for replacing regular user transactions.

For one thing, if he has an incentive to lie it would be in the opposite direction. Favourable scaling characteristics for the main chain weakens the scalability argument for sidechains.

Also, it makes intuitive sense.

Suppose you're a node with 8 peers. Each of your peers has 8 peers, until one of them adds two more.

To what extent has the fact that one of your peers added more peers of their own increased your costs?

I'm not sure what you mean by "turn".

Check my post history - I've been in favor of scaling Bitcoin to high transaction rates since at least 2012.

This equation is inherently misleading.

There are at least three ways to talk about scaling Bitcoin: scaling the number of nodes, scaling the number of transactions, scaling the number of users. Each one needs to be considered separately, or at least independently acknowledged.

That equation deals with the number of nodes and the number of transactions.

"Decentralization" isn't a well-defined term, but here it's something proportional to the number of nodes.

That sounds scary, but it really isn't because no single entity is responsible for paying the entire network's cost by themselves.

What happens to that equation when you consider the per-node network cost?


Data size is proportional to the transaction rate, therefore the cost of operating the node is proportional to the transaction rate. According to gmaxwell, the quadratic component to scaling the number of nodes can be made small enough to ignore with good network design, so I'll take him at his word.

Clearly the only threat to decentralization is the lack of price discovery for transaction relaying. If users paid for this service, then nodes would have revenue proportional to the transaction rate, therefore their revenue would increase at the same rate as their costs. Problem solved.

Fix the lack of price discovery in the P2P network, and the network will do an embarrassingly good job of solving its own scaling problems without tending toward centralization.

As hinted above, that assumption has been incorrect the entire time. I'll prove that more thoroughly shortly.

The only thing that would make your service better than LocalBitcoins is if you had more active traders using your site than theirs. (yes, this means you have a hard problem to solve)