This is COMPLETELY irrelevant for the point that I'm trying to make. Now please, answer the question.

The truth is i know a lot more about bitcoin than i do peercoin. So im really moving out of my comfort zone here. I'm really not sure if a hybrid model is more secure. It is my understanding that POW was used to get a reasonably homogeneous and fair initial distribution of currency and that the ultimate goal for peercoin is to eventually phase out POW entirely. Peercoin sort of relies on the idea that anyone who controls a large stake will have more to lose from a doublespend than to gain since the doublespend would reduce the value of his stake and anyone who controls a small stake will not be able to produce more than a single block at a time. Still I see some problems with this idea. What if the owner used his stake to buy a put option right after the doublespend? what if he is even more heavily invested in an alternative currency that would absorb a large portion of the capital exodus from peercoin? what if he can liquidate his stake before news spreads of the doublespend? If however peercoins security model is fundamentally sound than you should be able to get pretty fast and secure confirmations.


there would be no way to determine whether two block authors were actually the same person.


i have been thinking about this a lot and i do think i have solved the problem of waiting for secure confirmations but its rather complicated to explain here. I made a thread about it but there were some problems in my initial outline. problems that i now think i have solved. maybe ill go back and try to update this thread to reflect that fact.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=343923.0

Ok so the extent to which peercoin still uses proof of work is the extent to which this will still be a problem. I really think sonny king should have put the phasing out of the proof of work on a hard timeline but hindsight and what not.

Ok so yea there are other problems with orphan blocks. So the bottleneck in how many transactions we can put in a block is not the block size being stored on peoples hard drives (as is the common misconception) it's how many transactions a miner can download. If we have regular orphan blocks, lets say 2/3 of all blocks a miner downloads are orphan blocks than the network can only reliably record 1/3 as many transactions as if the miner were downloading 0 orphan blocks since 2/3 of everything he downloaded is just garbage.

If you have TOO many orphan blocks than that can turn into a calamity. No miner can reasonably be expected to check all of the chains floating around so some totally honest miners would end up mining on a chain that isnt the longest because they simply hadnt checked all of the chains and hadnt located the one thats actually the longest. You could end up with a situation where honest nodes were doing the exact same thing that everyone fears dishonest nodes may do, saving up a secret chain and publishing it later. This would make confirmations unreliable, potentially even MANY confirmations could be unreliable, you could have 60 confirmations on 1 minute blocks and suddenly your client finds an even longer chain that that which was incubating hidden on some dank dark corner of the network.

Ok so about that post. Let me use an example. Imagine that we have A who is a single person and B who is a group of 10 people. Lets say they have the same hashing power. Lets say that it takes 10 seconds to propagate a block across the whole network. Lets say the block time is 20 seconds. Lets say that a is an attacker who wants to save up his own chain and publish it later inorder to double spend. A starts mining, in 20 seconds he produces his first block, 20 seconds from then he produces his second block ect... after 10 minutes he has produced 30 blocks. Now lets compare the group of 10. Group B are all honest. after 20 seconds the first block is created by B_1. B_1 publishes his block and after 10 seconds the rest of group b has the new block. They all start mining on it, after 20 seconds one of them finds the next block and he publishes it, after 10 seconds the rest of the group gets it and they start mining on it. ect... So we see that after 10 minutes group B has produced only 20 blocks. Even though group b has the exact same amount of hashing power as A they just cant compete. You can keep pushing this further. Imagine if it took 10 seconds to propagate a block across the network and the block time was 10 seconds. In this network if you had one dishonest miner with 1GH/s and 1 million honest actors with 0.75Gh/s each, his 1GH/s could over power all 1 million of them.

its true that state contract enforcement is available to large corporations and the clinically insane. its true that apple was built upon a foundation of such contract enforcement. i agree with all of this but i dont think its relevant to the question, and the underlying principal that I'm trying to hit at here.

I'm asking something very specific. Suppose you personally contract with apple. The contract stipulates that if you send apple X number of dollars, they promise to send you an iphone in return. Further suppose that you and apple both recieve a letter from the government stating that they refuse to enforce this particular contract. Do you think it is likely that apple would violate this contract?

hey hilariousandco did you see my post where i asked how much he would have to pay you inorder for you to accept him continuing to do this? if not than please go read it and get back to me.

I think it is very wise to snip and deal with one point at a time. No apology necissary.

So your position is that, in our imaginary case with apple, if the courts did not enforce your contract with apple than apple would take your money and not send the phone? let me just make sure i have that 100% right before i proceed.

I think the problem with this idea is that OP has a conscience otherwise he would have surely done this already.

Ok so think about it this way. If it takes a few seconds to propagate a new block across the network, having a strong Internet connection may give you say a 2 second advantage. With 10 minute blocks you wouldn't think this matters but actually it does matter quite a bit. Profit is made on the margins, someones profit margin may be less than a percent. 2 seconds represents about 0.0016% of 10 minutes, meaning you get ~ a 1/10th of 1% advantage for having that faster internet connection. This could represent a 10% increase in profit. This is a very big incentive for miners to find ways to get stronger faster internet connections.

This same principal could be pushed further. Imagine if miners in one major city somewhere could purchase their own land lines and build a physical network. Or even further, what if they pool their resources to buy a facility and keep all of their mining equipment in the same large room. This is exactly the sort of centralization bitcoin is designed to avoid.

the faster the block time the more advantage you get for centralizing because think about it this way. If you have 1 minute block times a 2 second advantage nets a 3.3% increase efficiency. thats HUGE incentive to centralize if your profit margin is 1% to begin with.

anyway i know this isnt the best explanation i just hope it gives you a basic idea of the problem.

*edit* with all of that being said i do think satoshi should have chosen faster block times, 10 minutes is too long but he was just trying to play it really safe, i understand that.

everyone    some people look at anarchy as the lack of nations, i prefer to look at it as having 7billion of them.

this isnt accidentally bumping the salt with your elbow at the dinner table. you dont just accidentally take control of a drone and accidentally fly it 100 miles and accidentally pressed the fire button to accidentally shoot a missile and then say "oops, sorry about that but shit happens".

1) Do you really think that its the state that enforces contracts? if you really truly believe this than im sorry to say that you have been living under a rock my friend. In order to get a contract enforced by the state you have to be willing to give up 10+ years of your life and about $300,000, hardly ANYONE does that. Maybe walmart inc. can do something like that but certainly not ordinary people like you and I.

In reality contracts are enforced by reputation. Suppose you make a contract with apple stipulating that if you send them money in exchange they will send you a phone. Even without courts, laws, laywers, and enforcement do you really think apple would risk damaging their reputation over a couple of hundred dollars?

2) Refusing to allow the insurance company to have a quick check of these things for themselves would be just as damning to your reputation.

3) Ok so a few points here. Assuming society generally disproves of these things, assuring these sorts of people would damage the reputation of an assurance company pretty severely, meaning that it would be more than a few extra dollars to convince them to dismiss this sort of behavior.

However with that being said some people are lunatics, thats just the reality of the situation. There is probably someone out there who would pay the premium. To stop those who are very committed and would be willing to pay the exorbitant rates you have insurance. Assurance is the first layer, it is important because it makes the next layer, insurance, cheap. Assurance takes care of all of the marginal cases, making insurance cheap because it only has to deal with the statistical outliers. If you dont like people genitally mutilating their kids (funny how you keep going on at length about female genital mutilation when circumcision is so much more common, but i digress) than buy an insurance policy. 1 million dollars to be payed out to you if anyone can find proof that someone mutilated their kid in your geographical region. This gives the right incentive structure to actually get the problem solved, police dont give a shit about preventing crime, the higher the crime rate the higher their budget.

The next point is that what you are claiming here, this fatal flaw of anarchy, is exactly how the state works. Do you think the poor get the same "justice" in government courts that the rich get? Do you think statist legal systems dont give privileges to certain people? Do you think bankers, politicians, judges and the all around extremely wealthy are subject to the same laws ordinary people are in any country? OF COURSE the right to commit crimes is a privilege that can be purchased for the right price, thats how it is in all systems, thats just life.

Finally no one is going to claim that anarchy would be utopia. No one is claiming that it would solve every problem. Of course under any system bad things would sometimes still happen to good people. Only that it would be better than what we have now. Only that it would be better than the state which locks people in dungeons to be sexually tortured for years on end for having an innocuous bit of vegetation in their pocket. Better than a system where >90% of convicted criminals never see the inside of a court room because they are faced with the prospect of either "confessing" and going to prison for a year, or taking it to court and spending 3 years in prison just waiting for the proceedings to begin. Better than a system where a president has direct access to a fleet of killer robots and claims the authority to kill anyone he wants anywhere in the world with out due process. Insert your own egregious violation of human rights here, there are plenty to chose from.

indentured servitude imo

This liberals are charitable thing is a myth. I suppose it probably comes from this fact that liberals are more inclined to advocate the use violence and threats of violence in order to compulsorily redistributing peoples property, but that is the furthest thing from charity. Conservatives for example donate, on average, a significantly higher proportion of their income to charity than liberals do.

simple answer:

0 confirmation transactions are safer than you think, its still way harder than chargeback on a credit card

starbucks has cameras, if you steal from them than they call the police

Well there is no low cost provider of a solution to this problem. Him not smoking weed anymore would probably greatly inconvenience him, and you spending the money to make your house airtight would be very expensive. You are imposing a cost on him by smelling and being bothered, he is imposing a cost on you by making a smell that bothers you. Almost everyone in the world smells and gets bothered by fowl smells but not everyone makes fowl smells (atleast on that level). So it would appear to me that the onus is on him to rectify the situation.

Let me ask you this. Suppose i had the power to make the fowl smell go away or to give you an infinite amount of money. Suppose i offered you 1 dollar and the smell would stay, or 0 dollars and the smell would go away. Surely you would chose the latter. suppose it was 2 dollars and the smell would stay vs 0 dollars and the smell would go, still you would chose the latter right? Imagine that i kept increasing the amount of dollars, 2, 3, 4 ect... Where would be the tipping point? At how many dollars would you chose to keep both the money and the fowl smell over no money and no smell?

*edit* lets assume its a monthly payoff

Hawker:

Ok so i think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what we advocate. Which is totally ok because there is wide disagreement even amongst ourselves. Mostly anarchists want humans to be as free as possible and we recognize that its not possible to perfectly predict exactly what sorts of systems will manifest in the absence of a state to serve the functions the state serves now. So as an analogy, if this was the year 1800 and i was advocating the abolition of slavery, and you said "but with out slaves how will cotton be picked" it would have been quite a long shot for me to have correctly predicted that the answer would have been the tractor. With that being said i would be happy to give it a shot.

So basically this is how i imagine that it would work: Before engaging in commerce with someone you would want to be able to feel sure that they were not going to cheat you. Recognizing this fact you would realize that, when engaging in commerce, other people would be thinking the exact same thing about you. So what you would do in order to give yourself a competitive advantage in the marketplace is buy insurance against yourself, that way you could show people that you were transacting with that you had insured them against yourself, this is called assurance. If you were well behaved than this assurance would be cheap, if engaged in behavior that would indicate to the insurance company that you were more of a risk than your rate would go up. Things like being cruel to animals would be a huge red flag and would definitely cause your rates to skyrocket. This is a mechanism of internalizing the costs of antisocial behavior, same as the idealized vision of what law is or ought to be in a statist society.

So having assurance would quickly become the societal norm and rather than checking someones reputation yourself, you would just learn the reputation of various assurance providers and do a quick check to make sure that the person you were transaction with was assured by a reputable assurance agency.

This takes care of everything except people with EXTREMELY high time preference and people who are totally out of their minds. For those sorts of people you would just have to take the risk of being attacked by one of them, buy insurance, or keep a fire arm with you at all times. Your choice.

All are welcome

I'm an anarchist and a conspiracy theorist who loves and owns bitcoin so Its definitely true that some of are those things.

I like the fact that its such a libertarian community without actually being "libertarianforum.org". Also some of the people here are crazy smart. Also my main interests are economics, philosophy and technology so there are a lot of people here who share those interests.

in coupon lingo its called "overage" with most stores you just have to use your overage on products from the store but walmart is one of the rare exceptions that will actually let you walk out of the store with cash from the drawer its fun especually seeing the reactions from the employees. sometimes they do this face but usually its this one