Just curious, because I've been getting a lot more questions about the resident size of the blockchain.

That wasn't complacency, that was willful restraint. 

Peer pressure, whatever you call it, is not coercion.  Coercion is the use of force, as in enforcement of monetary laws.  The general opinion of a (largely) anonymous forum, whether or not you agree with that "groupthink" (it's called Bitcointalk, after all.  There's obviously a bias.), is not force.  All they can do is ignore your commentary.  Which happens to be what most of us do to you, Question.


That's the great innovation of bitcoin, as mass adoption of bitcoin would make government control of commerce much more difficult than it already is.  That is no small thing.


Oh, I know that.  A great many of those same people consider me a heretic as well.

The truth here scares me.

Plagiarism is an impossibility in a libertarian worldview.  It might be polite to cite this paper, but it's not a crime to fail to do so.

AnonyMint, you are a strange jumble of correct and false.  I wonder how both Austrian and Keynesian economic theories can co-exist in your head without your head exploding from the cognative dissonance.

I didn't say that I don't take any part of it literally. 


Since that is an impossibility without coercion, the rest is irrelevent.  Bitcoin cannot be the mark; and as I already mentioned, I don't even condsider "the mark" to be an actual prophesy, so the interpretation regarding control of commerce (which was very relevent to the Roman Empire during the first century A.D.) is not relevent to Bitcoin, the United Nations, or the United States Federal Reserve.  It's Daniel that predicts the (repeated) rise of Israel as a nation with actual borders, and Enoch perhaps as well (in the prophesy of the ages of humanity).  I don't consider actual prophesy to be at all common, and it should be suspect (even th ebible itself says this) but I don't consider prophesy to be impossible either.  Of course, those same prophesies (both in Daniel and Enoch) arent' very useful except in hindsight, as the only thing that they are really good for is establishing the (divine?) creditials of the author to a distant generation.

Bitcoin: What's in your wallet.dat?

I'm certain it's not Gavin.  I was here when they were both still active, and the possibility that the were the same individual was brought up and investigated then, but they had notablely differnet English writing styles, and differnet coding styles.  While such a thing can be faked to a degree with concious effort, it's provablely true that Gavin was quite busy doing other things in life while Satoshi was busy building Bitcoin early.


Which government?

I know I really shouldn't be doing this, but....

http://iang.org/papers/fc7.html

I wonder if anyone has bothered to ask Ian Grigg if he is, or has knowledge of, Satoshi Nakamoto.  It seems obvious to me that Satoshi must have read his works, at a minimum.

The mark is an involuntary system.  Bitcoin is, by it's nature, entirely voluntary and without coercion.  Bitcoin isn't the mark.

That's assuming that I beleive that Revelations should be taken literally.  I do not.  I'm a gnostic christian, not a literalist.  Revelations is better understood if it's read as an allegory for personal death in the context of the early church experiencing a very real persecution from government, written in a kind of jargon 'code' that wouldn't imply to those same government agents that the author was actually discussing current or near term events.  The 'mark' or 'number of the beast' (666) happens to match the written character consents of the full name of the Roman emperor of the time, and that was a trick of identification that would have been somewhat familiar to Christian Jews at the time.  In short, I don't agree that Revelations was actually prophetic, but was a mass communications tool that was deliberately disguised to appear prophetic.  I would consider the (Expanded) Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch to be the most prophetic of the books of the Bible, and I don't consider the Bible to be complete without the Apocrypha taken into consideration, dispite their dubious authorship and difficult read.  Nor do I consider all the books of the canon to be of equal value, as I think that each should be considered individually.  This is what makes me 'gnostic' (in search of the knowledge), and means that I don't believe in the Doctrine of Divine Preservation.  To me, each book, it's authorship, history and translatoins stand alone.

Fallout 4: The Second Coming...

"I come not with peace, but with the sword..."

Neither was I, but your (apparent) belief that reproducible laws of nature are immutible and/or that our understanding of said laws of nature are sufficiently complete simply supports my point.  You have faith that your worldview is correct.  You have to, for if you did not, the cognative dissonance you would regularly encounter will either require you to alter your worldview till the stress of such cognative dissonance is below your cronic threshhold; or simply drive you to madness.

From the article...


I think that, overall, it's an excellent assessment of near term investment risks.

Wow, this is really well done.  Thanks for the link.  I've not read it all, obviously; but from what I've read thus far, it appears to be very well researched and a balanced assessment of Bitcoin as a financial investment asset.  Whoever wrote it groks Bitcoin on a deep level in the Economic sense.

Believe what you wish.

We can all use whatever unit we desire.  There will never be a group, nor top-down, decision to either switch or not switch currency units.

You have a faith based worldview as well, you just don't think you do.  While I would agree that Mt Everest is a real mountain that can be measured, can you personally perform that act, or do you need to trust the claim of someone else?  What first hand evidence do you possess that the proto-planet Pluto exists?  That Nelson Mandela (who died today) was more than a fictional character, or that James Bond was not?  That Americans have ever visited the Moon?

The truth is, you don't.  You could have the ability to prove to yourself that some of these things are truth, but no single person could prove that all of them are truth.  You live as a lifeform for which a faith-based worldview is a physical and psycological requirement for any kind of sane or rational interaction with the rest of humanity.  You must put your faith in someone.  In whom, or what, you choose to believe in says as much about you as what, or whom, you choose to deny.

If that were true, why did he spend so much money and time trying to cure his cancer; rather than willing it out of existance?

I'm not proposing any such thing.  History is funny that way.

The 6000 years of a "gold standard" is funny history.  Gold is a deflationary currency unit; as it's availability during any given age is limited to that which has been mined out of the ground, but by comparison to population growth across recorded human history, gold is an increasingly scarce commodity.  At some point in human history, we moved from zero jobs to non-zero jobs.  Since this occured well before the rise of inflationary fiat currencies, then the obvious answer must be that the deflationary nature of currencies, at a minimum, does not prevent jobs from being created.  The realtively short history of infaltionary currencies asl tells us that the infaltionary nature of said currencies, at a minimum, doesn't prevent existing jobs from destruction either.

Perhaps, then, the evidence suggesting a relationship between the inflationary/deflationary nature of the common currency and that of the net creation/destruction of jobs is weak.