The jump will be big early on. But after a while, those small jumps will be non-noticeable.
50->25 is a lot bigger impact than 1.5->0.8
don't worry about it.
Not if 1.5BTC is worth $100, as it may well be in [how many?] years. |
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IP is essentially the ownership of abstract patterns. To say you own something that exists, only in an abstract sense, is absurd. An Idea is a pattern of thought. How can you own that and how can you restrict someone else's freedom to follow that pattern. The idea that you can own a pattern just because you thought of it is asinine. Did you think of it in an intellectual vacuum? Were you born an a back box and somehow were inspired with this idea? I really don't care about the economic arguments (for or against, but I’m sure the ‘for’ would win).
I want to live in a free society, not just a prosperous one. I’m somebody who picks what is moral, then works out the economics to make it happen.
There is no historical precedent that I know of to justify the case that intellectual property promotes growth. In fact I strongly believe otherwise. |
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Please, memorize: There is no such a thing as intrinsic value.
"Intrinsic value" means something. Otherwise the label would be pointless; a synonym for "nothing". What you may claim is that things have inherent characteristics that make them useful for certain purposes. For example, cotton has inherent characteristics that make it useful for making clothes.
Perhaps this is what is meant by "intrinsic value" |
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Global trade is GOOD. Global government is BAD.
Government should as be decentralized as possible and limited in scope; it certainly shouldn't be involved in ANY economic activity.
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The higher the value of bitcoins the more lucrative generation becomes. It makes sense that the value of bitcoin drives the difficulty.
This will be the case as long as there is a 50BTC reward for generating a block. When it moves to transaction fees, it's a different story.
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How is one going to buy let's say a car underground? Cars have to be registered, etc. Transactions above certain amounts have to be registered, etc. How is Bitcoin or an alternative system going to get around that? For digital goods one could use Bitcoin, but most interesting goods are not digital.
Well, if you want a new Mercedes Benz or something like that, then you will need to buy it in the old economy. However, I could envision a resourceful agorist buying an old clunker with some national currency and restoring it to like new condition and then selling it for Bitcoins. When you register the car, which would already have a title, you would only have to pay taxes on its old, unrestored value. In the future, there will be a greater availability of desktop manufacturing devices and eventually molecular manufacturing machines, so the percentage of the world economy that can be delivered digitally is only going to increase. So commodity markets will be even bigger in the future. Imagine buying exotic matters so that you could print them with your machine. Watch out for copyrights! "You wouldn't copy a car would you?" ;-) |
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Fractional reserve banking mean that the bank have a tendency to collapse. I think we're safer with mtgox type banks where they just keep the balance and earn their fees somewhere.
Think of your deposits as an investment with the understanding that the bank will lend out your (and others) deposits to provide capital for business and pay you interest. Now if there is a bank run (the bank becomes insolvent) that's your problem for making a bad investment. You should have picked a better bank or found another way to invest your savings. The tendency to collapse is there, but this doesn't mean it should be banned; you might as well ban the stock market. This becomes a dangerous scam when you introduce the central bank into the system. Now banks don't have to worry about risk so much, because the central bank can always give them a loan to cover excessive withdrawals (printing money). Now banks can reduce their reserve requirements. Now customers don't need to shop around for a responsible bank; no chance of a run. With a central bank (also, deposit insurance has a similar effect), you've taken the capitalism out of banking; removed the market mechanisms. The end result is a distorted economy which is prone to gross malinvestment, leading to booms and busts and all sorts of economic chaos. Not to mention the theft of inflation, as banks have essentially passed on their risks to the savers. But fractional reserve banking is basically just an agreement between a group of people to pool their savings, earn interest and have the advantage of being able to pull out at any time. I read this article and I will say it tempers my attitude somewhat towards the idea of banks doing this. One of the things sort of not stated is that most current banks assume that you know about fractional reserve currency already and that you have agreed to the system. Perhaps that is the real scam, although if you asked a branch manager or bank executive I'm sure they would explain the system in detail if you were interested. There still is something just a little off, however, in terms of the system actually used within both Europe with the EU, the GBP, and how the Fed deals with dollars.
I had the same reaction, that's why I posted the link. Because the risk of banking has been essentially removed, people have forgotten how the system (FRB) even works and are ignorantly participating in the system. Of course, bitcoin fixes all these problems, which is why I like it so much :-) |
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This has been an entertaining video. I will agree that fractional reserve banking is perhaps one of the greatest frauds ever invented by men and is going to end up causing an eventual disaster when the scheme falls apart. I also agree with the sentiment expressed in the video that it makes no sense at all for the government to be borrowing money from bankers who in turn are borrowing the money from the federal reserve pocketing the difference or better yet "depositing" the interest as reserves and "loaning" more money created out of thin air to the government.
An interesting article I read recently on fractional reserve banking and libertarianism: http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=416I don't think FRB is inherently evil, it's the central banking system and money printing that's the real problem. Without the supply of and value of money (interest rates) being artificially manipulated buy a central authority, FRB is relatively harmless. |
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I heard there is a terrorist organisation printing cash and distributing it widely,allowing people to buy child porn and finance terrorism. I've heard you can send it anonymously in the mail and trade it in person for DRUGS!!! OMG!!! They really should ban cash. Do it for the children nao.
Incorrect analogy. Banknotes are protected by the secret tokens. In the case of mass occurrence of fakes, they will be published and any bank or cashier can verify the authenticity of banknotes. I think he means the central bank :-) |
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This is brilliant!
In the future, when bock sizes are huge, this will save a lot of bandwidth and storage. Only one "server" node needs the blockchain and the fat bandwidth required to receive the flood of transactions. Many clients can then contribute to bitcoin without the need to pay for all that infrastructure multiple times. This means that small players can stay in the market and kind of solves the whole scaling problem. Awesome!
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I suppose you want the system enable you to sign your friends public keys and then store this on the network. Cool idea, but how would you prevent spam?
Do you know about the Freenet Messaging System (FMS)? It's a spam and censorship resistant messaging system that runs on top of Freenet. It uses this trust system with "trust lists", you can trust identities and also trust their "list" on a scale between 0 and 100. Then you set a trust threshold for receiving messages from any given identity, thus preventing spam. It's pretty clever. Perhaps you could steal some ideas form this system.
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The moral of this story is that the non-generating clients operate on the network at the pleasure of the miners. The miners are effectively in control of the "health" of the network and the current block size limits reflect that. So for example block http://blockexplorer.com/b/92037 is about 200455 bytes long and mostly contains spam. Normal blocks max out at 50k. This shows that at least one generator has chosen to waive the current fees scheme. I think that letting miners effectively decide their own fees scheme will be seen to be the least bad option. We came to a similar conclusion in this thread: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1847.0;allMy concern is I don't see any inherent force that will stabilize transaction fees. Generators have the ability to accept any transactions they see fit as well as reject any block that doesn't adhere to their "ethics". The question is; will this game result in an oligopoly of price gouging generators, will it result in a dead market where no one generates or will some competing forces reach a common ground of a fair stable fee structure. I'm not smart enough to figure this out. I wish Satoshi would weigh in on this issue. I suspect he may have already envisioned the outcome. |
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What's the interest on this? is it fixed?
I suggest holding off payment for as long a possible. Inflation will soon eat it away. Thanks Bernanke. ;-)
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This has been happening on and off for a while. Check bitcoinexplorer and it's pretty clear whether it's legit activity or spam.
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I made a web site for this:
bitswap.cz.cc
It's not very popular, but it's free to register and post, so it can't hurt.
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I just feel that any motive other than profit, will not be good enough. I agree that profit is not the ONLY motive for generation as you have pointed out, but other incentives are just too weak and will result in too few generators. The network will be too weak and will surely fail.
Not surely, but maybe. I don't think so because of the preservation motive is nearly as strong as the profit motive, and because there will still be some who can generate at a negligible additional cost, so there is no point at which generation is unprofitable. The confluence of these motivations will ultimately create a self regulating market with a fairly stable difficulty level. The real question then becomes, is that difficulty level secure enough to defend against a brute force attack? That is a question that may never be answerable. I don't disagree that there is a preservation motive to rival the profit motive, but I think that the profit motive is far more prevalent. Only some want to preserve the integrity of the chain, but everyone wants to make profit. As it is, contributing as an honest node is more profitable than attacking the network, but remove the incentive of fees and profit motivated generators become profit motivated attackers. Will the network be strong enough...
No one has commented on my idea of placing a rule on fee distribution on blocks to prevent the acceptance of arbitrarily low fees.
This forces clients to compete with each other for the current block, eliminates the need for a fixed block size (ie. fixes the spam problem) and scales to accommodate any number of transactions. If a spammer sends lots of small-to-zero fee transactions, only some of them, if any, will be accepted, because you can only include max 50% fees which are below the average. To include more smaller fees a generator will have to include more larger fees.
Think about it, clients will compete and a stable market rate for fees will be established. Tiny fees, too far below the market rate will not be accepted soon and fees above the market rate will be guaranteed to be accepted in the current block. It's a simple protocol rule for generators which should be computationally cheap.
I was still considering it, myself. I think that the priority system does much of what you are trying to do except allow the blocksize to stretch; and I have concerns about the bounds of this rule. Without the priority system, this rule would permit blocksize spamming anytime there were only free transactions in the queue, so there would have to be a minimum allowed average fee, even if that were just .00000001 bitcoins, but then that would prohibit any transactions from being processed at all in the absence of a fee paying transaction even if there was an altruistic generator who won the block. So there would have to additional rules to permit altruistic generators to help clear transaction backlogs, because there is bound to be more free transactions to process than fee paying ones for the foreseeable future. I offered a plan before you posted yours, and no one commented upon it either. It would only take one non zero transaction to cut out the freeloading spammers. A generator could inject one himself, which would force clients to match it or come close. Anyway, da2ce7 has me half convinced that miners should be imposing their own rules on the blocks, forming a democracy. It's not like anyone can stop this anyway: A miner is always free to reject any block, for better or worse, for whatever reason it sees fit. So, I guess the conversation about block rules is moot and the question of how to keep fees up is in the hands of the mathematical (game theory) viability of the protocol. Has Satoshi already figured all of this out, I wonder? |
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For example, for a block to be valid, no more than half of the transactions in the block can have fees below the average fee for that block. So, if 10 transactions have a fee of 1BTC and 10 more have a fee of 0.5BTC the average is 0.75. Now half the fees are already below this so an additional transaction with a 0.5BTC fee cannot be accepted, but a 0.8BTC fee is okay.
'No more than half less than the average' will not maintain the transaction fees, without other factors pushing up the fees. The fee will progressively get lower as the low side will get attacked harder than the high side. In the above example a transaction fee of 0.751 will increase the average very slightly, then the next transaction fee of 0 will lower the average (relatively) much more. Well that's just fine. if there are no other fee paying transactions, the generator can accept the 0.751 and the 0 and still satisfy the rule, but he can't accept another 0 fee tx. Though, I now believe it is flawed for other reasons. The current breed of stock generators, generate continuously, and only ignore a block if it is deemed illegal.
When transaction fees become the main incentive to generate a new breed of generators will be developed that will maximize the profit made. One of the features of this bread of generator is that certain 'rules' will be voluntarily agreed upon, some will not accept blocks that have two many low fee transactions, and will wait for blocks that have only higher fee transactions.
The risk of a generator who accepts too many (new) low fee transactions is that the most of the network will ignore and orphan it's block.
This is an interesting, market based solution. Generators can stop competitors from undercutting them, by "voting" out blocks that don't adhere to their own customized rules. I'm not convinced that it is sustainable. It looks like a problem for game theory. If generators get too greedy, accepting all transactions, They run the risk that most of their peers will reject their hard work generating a block. If they reject blocks that their peers have accepted, they'll waste time working on a smaller block chain. If this sort of thing works, then miners should be doing it now! This will stop the spam problem: If miners start rejecting blocks that are too generous to spamers, we shouldn't need a block size limit. I suppose, though, that the block size limit IS an implementation of a voluntary rule. Though a rather primitive one, it's sufficient for now. Perhaps miners will converge to using an optimal rule, similar to what I've described and I'm trying to preempt this development. This definitely looks like the problem of finding an "optimal strategy" in game theory. |
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Does this pose a problem? what if, after all the coins are generated, people lose their wallets over time, and eventually theres only like 10 bitcoins left that are actually transferable?
Eventually the Sun will burn out and everyone on earth will die. So yes, but with 8 decimals of divisibility Bitcoins should last a long time. And even beyond that, the code can always be forked, modified, etc so that issues are fixed, or new and better currencies are spawned. That's the beauty of open source. All that is needed is a patch to allow for increased precision of transaction amounts. Bitcoins can be divided forever, loosing coins is not a problem at all, except for the person who loses them :-( |
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In the future we will have generators that will _not generate_ until there is a certain amount of high fee blocks waiting, and then they will automaticity turn on their massive generation capacity and quickly generate the block. This leaves the average difficulty relatively low, and makes a strong incentive to include larger fees. These generators plainly won’t include any low fee blocks, low fee blocks will have to wait around for a charity block.
How will the fees build up if the smaller generators are constantly processing them. there isn't going to be a sudden influx of high fee transactions... The large generators will simply be leaving all the profit to competitors. And if the competitors are snapping up any transaction no matter how small the fee, there is little incentive to pay a high fee in the first place. There is a lot of guessing going in this thread, for we seem to have all fallen victim to the idea that we can guess the nature of a market that doesn't yet exist. As it is now, there is no incentive to pay a transaction fee at all, as the fee structure that currently exists is intended to limit spamming without prohibiting legitimately non-conforming transactions; not offer a profit motive to generators decades away. The fee structure can be altered without much difficulty on a technical level, but the future political issues are as difficult to predict as the market is. Yet many seem to get blinded by the profit motive as the only motive for generation, which can easily be shown to not be the case presently, and I have seen no compelling reason as to why it must become the only reason in the future. I just feel that any motive other than profit, will not be good enough. I agree that profit is not the ONLY motive for generation as you have pointed out, but other incentives are just too weak and will result in too few generators. The network will be too weak and will surely fail. How high do you think the difficulty would be now, if there was not the 50BTC incentive to generate? I think it would be < 1000. No one has commented on my idea of placing a rule on fee distribution on blocks to prevent the acceptance of arbitrarily low fees. For example, for a block to be valid, no more than half of the transactions in the block can have fees below the average fee for that block. So, if 10 transactions have a fee of 1BTC and 10 more have a fee of 0.5BTC the average is 0.75. Now half the fees are already below this so an additional transaction with a 0.5BTC fee cannot be accepted, but a 0.8BTC fee is okay.
This forces clients to compete with each other for the current block, eliminates the need for a fixed block size (ie. fixes the spam problem) and scales to accommodate any number of transactions. If a spammer sends lots of small-to-zero fee transactions, only some of them, if any, will be accepted, because you can only include max 50% fees which are below the average. To include more smaller fees a generator will have to include more larger fees. Think about it, clients will compete and a stable market rate for fees will be established. Tiny fees, too far below the market rate will not be accepted soon and fees above the market rate will be guaranteed to be accepted in the current block. It's a simple protocol rule for generators which should be computationally cheap. Do you guys get this? Perhaps I haven't thought it through enough, it's just a proof of concept; the exact details can be refined. Does anyone have a reason that this can't work? Maybe it's just a really crap idea, but I would appreciate SOME feedback, please. |
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