By itself, no.  However this is simply leveraging the merkle tree to reduce bandwith redundency.  There is nothing that requires that all nodes, even all mining nodes, store a complete blockchain.  Locally set pruning rules will permit any nodes that choose to prune to maintain a fairly stable blockchain size, as each new transaction confirmed permits at least one older transaction to be pruned, after a point.

Well, it's not really parallel blocks.  It's just that the blocks will be "naked"; in the sense that a block is really just the 80 byte header, the 'reward' transaction and the merkle tree.  The transactions can be included, or not, by any node.  However, as a matter of simplicity of the early network, blocks are still published with all of the transactions included.  This has never been the end goal.  It was intended from the start that blocks be published naked, which will reduce the network's overall bandwidth because transactions won't have to propogate twice.

This figure is based upon a rising risk of orphan blocks, and includes a great many assumptions about how the "average" miner is connected.  The figure varies based upon the current exchange rate, the current block reward, the average rate of orphans and the difference between the average rate and the rate that adding the extra transactions provide.  In short, the figure is a very well educated guess, but it's still a guess.  The fact that it exists, can be calculated based upon a lot of changing variables, and is higher than the minimum transaction fee only establishes that a market rate for transactions will always exist. If you need your transaction processed faster, provide a fee that exceeds whatever Gavin's Cost is at any given moment.  If you don't need your transaction included immediatly, then lower your fee and you can still expect it to process at some point.  This is not an issue at the moment, and with the decreasing block reward, isn't likely to be a limiting factor in the future.


Are you taling about the plan to permit blocks to be published as only the header and merkle tree?  And letting the netowrk nodes aquire the transactions that fit into those merkle trees from their peers "loose", in a manner similar to how the Stratum network functions?  This would do that, but this isn't the primary motive for doing this.  Right now, blocks are published complete, which means that the network bears the burden of propogating all transactions twice, which is just inefficient since most nodes already have all of these transactions in their own queues by the time any block is published.


We haven't given up on that, such solutions are simply off network/ out of band; take a look at the Stratum overlay netowrk, which does some things similar, and then imagine what happens when wallet services/bitcoin banks agree to link together over a similar overlay network.  They can simply agree to accept the word of their institutional peers that a member of theirs has issued a payment of such-n-such to a member of the receiveing institution.  Would work much like Ripple is intended to work with individuals, but can't really because individuals don't really know enough about each other to really develop the credit trust.  While there would have to be an imbalance limit, to be settled up periodically over the main bitcoin network, most of the time major instituions' interlinked balances would simply cancel each other out.  Micropayments of arbitrarily small amounts of bitcoin then become possible.

GAvin's Cost will naturally decrease over time, as it's primarily the block reward (and the market price) and the risks of losing all of one that imposses this theoretical costs of including transactions.  If the market rate remains steady, Gavin's Cost cuts in half the next time the block reward drops.  Eventually the transaction fees become the primary finacing method of professional miners, and Gavin's Cost only sets a theoretical price floor over time.


There is a method of mining that does not require a full blockchain, that was noted by Satoshi in the white paper.  Also, rapid bootstrapping of a fresh node is also possible out-of-band, simply by downloading a recent snapshot of the blockchain from a trusted source and letting the new client scan it.  Neither method is yet implimented, simply because it's not really an issue.


It wold reduce to less than that by simply instituting block pruning, which was described in the white paper as well, and is the real reason that the merkel trees were included in the protocol from the start.  You can hack your node to prune your own client now, if you like.  It's just not a standard feature in the reference cleint yet.


Again, take a look at Stratum.


Maybe, but I'm still willing to bet that hardware will outpace Bitcoin network demand growth.

Actually, we did discuss this exact thing in detail about two years ago, RAssah.  My short answer is, of course any very well heeled individual and/or bitcoin based finance institution is going to go to great lengths to secure their own miing operations.  For comparision, most consumer bank branches have very large, very expensive valut systems; even though in our modern digital age such an expense is no longer neccessary for their primary business.  Bitcoin 'banking' institutions are going to compete in many different ways, and touting their hashing capacity is as much a psycological benefit for an online bitcoin bank as a time-lock safety deposit box safe is for a brick & mortor institution.  Also, I expect such banks to compete by advertising their ability to offer free transactions.  One might be able to offer those free transactions because the bank itself has recepriprocity agreements with major retailers such as Walmart, or they might just e able to do so by sponoring some significant mining operations of their own, similar to my Walmart example.  While Walmart would do it to process their own "free" transactions at their own meatspace counters in a timely manner, actual bitcoin based financial institutions would do it as a benefit to their membership.  While free transactions can be sent by anyone, only a bank with their own mining under contract can promise that those same transactions will be processed for "free" within any time frame.  It thus becomes a comparative advantage over a bank that just offered basic bitcoin banking services, and didn't sponsor their own mining gear.

Bitcoin banks offering free transactions, for their own reasons, would by itself undermine AnonyMint's transactions withholding attack theory.  If numerous institutions are offering free transactions within their own limited scopes, then no cartel can develop with the premise that free transactions processing is an advantage that only a cartel member would have access to.

Cutting out noise to address a particular point.


Except that I demostrated several reasons why that is not an economic fact; and that it's long been understood that there will be institutions willing to mine zero margin or less for other economic reasons.  One of which I actually do, wchich is use the heat for zone heating in winter (roughly 15% of the network hash power is "other unknown" which I would be part of) another being the competing cartels (Walmart&McDonalds versus Target & Burger King) mining for major players in competing industries, for which finance is not tehir primary business, but is already a cost center.


And that is the point Rassah & I have been making.  You don't respond to critisisms of your theory.  If you can't manage my objections to your theory, then you don't have a theory.

Not really.  Not only would I have to be able to know which coins are Satoshi's (only the first few hundred blocks can be assumed to be Satoshi's), I'd also have to know that he didn't sell those block reward addresses out-of-band.  Neither of these things are knowable, unless he tells us.  We'd also have to know that Satoshi himself was still alive, and some heir wasn't finally making moves with inherited funds.  Keep in mind that he stopped talking to us shortly before the last Tsunami killed thousands of Japanese in a single day.  If Satoshi is actually Japanese & actually an individual, he might be dead.


Go right ahead.  I don't agree that everyone will sell them, but I'll offer you an early deal.  Get out now and I'll pay you half price on all that you have.

Based upon what, exactly?

AnonyMint is not out of his league in economics.  That is to say, that he is obviously capable of understanding, and seems to have some kind of professional education in the topic.  However, he spends a great deal of time restating commonly held economic myths in a somewhat novel way.  It seems to me that he is either self-taught and young, or his professional education in Economics is incomplete.  He understands it like a promising student. 

That said, I agree with Rassah on his overall assessment.  Even mastery of Economics (which AnonyMint has not acheived, imo) is not enough to understand Bitcoin.  It's not even close.  I had to learn a great deal about subjects that I was little better than a layman; including but not limited to, cryptography and other high math, psychology and programming.  I am far from a master of these topics even now, but I am far better than a layman in each; and at a minimum understand the roles they play in Bitcoin.  Also, I was here when Satoshi was still posting.  I know some other things that aren't even mentioned in the white paper regarding security, some that are already in the main client, others that are not; that complicate (although don't render impossible) the execution of several general methods of attacking the blockchain or the network.  I know, personally, that Satoshi foresaw much more than most of us understood.  Bitcoin's elegant design was not luck.  Personally, I came to the conclusion that the Satoshi on this forum was only a front man for a team of pros; because even thought a true polymath could do this, he often had some rather large delays between the asking of hard questions and their associated responses, implying to me that he was consulting someone out of view.  Redardless, Satoshi (& company) did not expect that mining nodes would remain fair and trustworthy with one another.  He/She/They fully expected that some major nodes would try to game the system to their own advantage, and that they can be expected some measure of success; but since these activities can be detected over time, that those nodes would be retaliated against in various ways.  This is one reason that I, personally, have real doubts that Proof of Stake has any real future in cryptocurrency, since staking by it's nature assumes that nodes with high stakes won't turn malicious, and thus there is some level of trust placed on those 'supernodes'.  Bitcoin does not have supernodes.

And it's in the retaliation aspect, not his analysis of (limited in scope) economic incentives that his attack vector collapses.  He makes too many assumptions about how other nodes will respond.  He assumes that all (non-negligible) nodes will react in what he considers to be the highest profit seeking manner; thus completely ignoring the fact that many nodes have economic incentives to resist the formation of a cartel, that many nodes have economic incentives to try to outcompete and otherwise undermine the primary cartel membership (in this case Amazon, and because Amazon has real competitors, just not direct ones) and that many nodes have no significant economic incentive in either case, but do have a vested interest in the network's 'status quo'.  While he can present his attack, he doesn't respond to objections to his attack with any arguments, only insults and implications that he has already addressed such objections earlier.  I've read the thread, he's done no such thing; at least not in a rational and non-hostile manner.  Many of us have grown tired of his childish trolling masked as a somewhat intellectual debate.

I don't deny that he is smart, but he is still out of his depth here.  Really, no one cares what his credentials might be, true or false, only his arguments matter here.  So far, I find his arguments sorely lacking in substance or merit.  His economic writings are bullshit.

Honestly, no one really gives a shit, Anonymint.

I find it all silly, myself.

Even if this statement is true, which I doubt, it's still a more level wealth distribution than US dollar denominated wealth is.

My younger brother has a tested IQ above 160.  He also has a mild case of Asbergers's Syndrome, and has real trouble making practical decisions as a direct result.  No one that has ever met him would think that he is so intelligent, particularly since IQ doesn't measure intelligence.  Only those who don't know what the IQ actually measures use it as evidence of their own superiority.

I rang in at 149 as a teen, BTW.

This last part is historicly false.  It's a widely held belief, mostly because of the degree of propaganda that the supporters of central banking have put out there over the past century.  There is, quite literally, no evidence that suggests that chartering of a central bank was ever an issue with any popular support, and particularly not in 1913 when it actually happened.  To be blunt, even the bill's planning and existance was a secret right up until it was introduced into congress, and passed with a flurry.  It makes Pelosi's "we have to pass it so you can see what's in it" bullshit look like high minded parlimentarly process.


Maybe, but not only do many actual economists argue that the Regression Theory is flawed, but Gary North doesn't even use it (if one assumes he is a true Austrian, I don't) in the proper sense.

I'm pretty sure that he meant that in the context of the level of work to rest ratio that prior generations have had to endure.  On net, he's correct in this sense, although it's not 'endless'.

AnonyMint, you neither understand of what you speak, nor know of whom you speak. 

True.  But the merit of an investment advisor is not in his ability to predict an ongoing trend, but to predict an oncoming inflection point.  If S3052 will be able to change his bullish outlook in time to avoid a crash, then I will be impressed.

then you haven't been around here long enough.  I've seen at least three bubbles pop since I've been here.  It's like the Bitcoin economy is moving along at 10 times the speed of the greater economy as it grows.  I don't doubt that we'll see a $10K BTC before 2020, and maybe before 2016; but it's not all up.  Nothing is ever all up.

Fair enough.  I don't think Gary North is a fair representation of Austrian thinking under any context.  While he makes for some great reading; I'd say he is very much a conservative, and is rather constrained in his thought processes to be called an Austrian economist, even if he claims the term.


Well said.

Looks like a book of matches and one of those wet-wipes you can get at BBQ resturants to me.