No, because CLAM used number of outputs, not number of coins (and CLAM used equal weighting across several coins with completely different values, further separating it from any economic reality). That's a rather peculiar quantity without much of a tie to any economically significant value. The stated objective was to distribute the coins in a wide and flat manner. The reality has been somewhat different.

Peter R proposed spin-offs as a bootstrapping mechanism for new coins based on Bitcoin's distribution. I don't remember him proposing it as an upgrade mechanism (although a hypothetical Bitcoin "upgrade" does fit within his model). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563972.0

Unless he proposed something else in addition, which is also possible.

Adam Back already proposed burning coins as an upgrade mechanism, which he called a one-way peg. It was that idea, in fact, which directly led to side chains (i.e. bidirectional burning or two-way peg).

I personally believe that spin-offs are a better model for upgrades than burning but the argument could be made either way (and there may be technical reasons to prefer burning).

Well look as the price drops if people want to play or invest on JD (or if other CLAM services develop) and don't already have CLAMs, then not only will they need to spend less BTC to absorb the dumper's CLAMs, but they will have to buy more CLAMs to do what they wanted to do in the first place (say invest 10 BTC in JD bankroll). I agree an equilibrium will be reached.

I also think there may be more to the dumping than just the digger. Nearly all alts being in the shitter over the past month for example.

Removing claims is certainly arbitrary, no argument there. I question whether doing the same thing by dressing it up in fancy economic terms is really any different.

Also, I don't understand how this addressed what I said above. In my first comment I said you could pull numbers out of the air but there was no reason to think that would actually improve an externality, especially when it doesn't even address the structure of the externality (much less its magnitude).

1. It is still an externality because the suppliers in your model are not the ones incurring the cost.

2. How do you also meet equilibrium between current supply and costs (bandwidth, processing, block space if finite, etc.) and current demand.  The current fee is closer to the this (as opposed to UXTO storage supply). I'm not sure it is possible to do both, but even if you did you still have a problem with #1

I don't think a idea of a time-based-fee is bad but there is a major problem with deciding what it should be. I mean you can just make up any number you want, but if you are going to bless the idea what the economic holy water of eliminating externalities it should bear some relationship to the actual cost and I don't see any way whatsoever to do that. (Otherwise you are just adding an externality, possibly larger than the one you eliminated.) For one thing the actual cost depends on the number of nodes that are storing it.

As far as there being a cost for waiting longer to dig, that already exists. It's called staking and is a very large cost right now. Over time it will get somewhat smaller. A page or two back we roughly estimated it at about 4% per month. I don't know if that is actually very accurate.

Why?

Perhaps it is better to just move on. You know, like a bad relationship.

If you think CLAMs is mortally wounded by this digger (and potentially others like it) then just LET IT DIE.

Have you read Antifragility? Failure of components is absolutely essential to a larger healthy system. Trying to bail out bad ideas with any sort of desperate measures is not helpful, it is harmful. Let the experiment run its course and learn from it.

There are thousands of coins, hundreds of them are somewhat active. I think there are good things about CLAM and I've said so, but if it dies because the distribution turns out to have been fatally bad, then life will go on and, then we all learned something valuable from it. The knowledge of which ideas seemed to be good and which bad will live on.

My argument was I don't know which is more important. As TPTB points out the subsets have different properties and tradeoffs and may serve different markets. Or the answer may be none at all is "more important", if it turns out to be necessary to have all of them

Yeah it seems like this miner only partially works. Someone commented earlier that Wolf plans to work on the Monero version some more so whatever fixes get developed there should port over directly.

The database stuff is probably okay the way it is. There are a few other items needed for the actual Monero 0.9 release (I'm working on one of them). Then we will proceed with merging the database and most of the other new stuff from Monero into AEON.

This remains kind of uncertain overall. I think there are some questions raised in one of shen's papers. By being smarter about how you break up amounts you can achieve quite a bit of hiding and not incur the cost of the range proofs. There are, as you pointed out, certain weaknesses to unlinkability and maybe CT-derived approaches end up being a win overall but it isn't totally clear yet.

As you say there are different markets and for some markets hiding amounts completely may be more important even if there is an overall resource cost. For example, those wanting to hide large transfers (you can't make anything that looks like a large transfer in cryptonote if you don't even have a large amount of coins to begin with, and in a mixed system smaller users won't, so actual very large transfers or at least transfers by users with very large wallets, will tend to stick out).

I think I may be saying the same thing as  Nxtblg (not sure though), but I'd add that when it comes to catching miner dumping you don't really need to be the best bid and being outbid by 1 satoshi is irrelevant. You just need to be somewhere near the top of the buy book. That may still require a bit of active attention though, but not anything like trying to outbid the add-one-sat bots.

Maybe, but attacks on anonymity can be quite subtle, with various combinatorial, timing, and sybil type attacks, so I wouldn't be so confident. If you look at unlinkability, untraceability, and amount hiding as three prongs of resistance to blockchain analysis, then he's entirely missing one prong, which makes his argument quite weak. Blockstream has stated likewise about CT not hiding what they call transaction metadata, only content. Stealth is a nice convenience feature, but largely similar to just having good address reuse practices in Bitcoin (which can also be achieved via payment protocols and HD address chains). To do this well, you really need another piece, at least some sort of good coinjoin/coinshuffle type solution, and that is really hard to do well (potentially impossible) given sybil and timing attacks. At least Dash tries, but Larimer dismisses the problem too easily.

So I'd characterize Larimer's argument as largely wishful thinking and/or hype (i.e. this is what I have therefore this is what is needed, the marketers variation of the arguing from the conclusion fallacy).

But that's an entirely different argument from whether strong privacy/anonymity/fungibility (it is very hard to separate any of these from the others) is more important than scalability (or vice versa). I suppose you could also make that argument that without all of these things you don't really have a very strong solution overall and again are engaging in wishful thinking (which was in many ways the premise of TPTB's original Ion "Bitcoin killer" concept, before he neutered it).

I have no idea what's a gimmick. Maybe you are right. I'm certainly making no attack.

From what I see, someone has something he thinks you might want, and you seem to have something he might want. So there is the potential for a trade.

I fail to see how that wouldn't be more efficient, assuming there is room for a trade there, than a complicated and potentially expensive ordeal involving Kickstarter (who almost certainly takes fees, right?), escrows, etc.

But if it was indeed a gimmick then please disregard.

As I said earlier you can't assume that everything that happens on Polo is one whale digger dumping. There are most certainly other people trading. People who think that it's going to drop (either due to the digger or for whatever other reason, possibly self-fulfilling) will want to get out and drive it down if there aren't a lot of buyers. That may have nothing to do with digging at all. No way to tell.

As much as CLAM supporters might be convinced otherwise, it is not clear that the strategy is a mistake. He may simply believe that CLAM has no future and he just wants to get as much value out as quickly as possible before it fails.

Maybe right, maybe wrong, but you can't take as a given that he's an idiot, his strategy is all wrong, and dumping is all a mistake.

You can't assume that all polo trading volume has anything to do with the whale digger. It certainly does not.

If you two agree, that's a free market. If one of you does not, then the deal doesn't happen (still a free market). There was nothing wrong with him offering it.

Who is to say that "fair value" isn't a trade of a cure for a whitepaper?

Nothing wrong with that if both parties are happy with the deal.