If Back, Maxwell, Wuille, etc don't say exactly the same thing you did and encourage people to watch for it, I will be disappointed in them.


At some point for most people, money in USD terms probably becomes secondary to other goals and mostly just a tool.  Most people will never know what that point is for themselves.  A guy like Schmidt is probably at least as interested in things like his role in guiding the world through the technotronic revolution than he is in increasing his net worth by {n} million more dollars.

Back into a more typical scale, when I threw some fairly minor portion of my excess USD into Bitcoin I of course hoped that I would win in monetary terms, but I think it is fair to say that I was at least as interested in Bitcoin for it's potentially semi-revolutionary role in the future.  I considered the possibility that anything would come out of my speculation to be low, and that anything which I considered 'good' would be lower yet.  I have no trouble imagining Schmidt's calculations vis-a-vis his stake in Blockstream being similar.


I have been agitated since day one that the blockchain could be 'crippled'.  By bloat, be it by organic means or a strategic attack.  Once that happens it would be impossible to undo without some unpleasant and probably devastating compromises.

This concern about bloat has informed my own utilization of Bitcoin and my feelings about development direction.  It is exactly why I am so positive about moving forward on ways to address the problem, and as I've said before, 'subordinate chains' was the thing that hit me back when I finished reading the whitepaper in 2011.

I think it very probable that certain of the named names we are discussing here have the same set of concerns about the health of the blockchain as I do, and that it is a very good explanation for their work and ideas vis-a-vis structure of the blockchain.  In other words, I think that they probably organized under Blockstream in order to address blockchain issues more than they address blockchain issues because they organized under Blockstream.


I've had a strong sense that it is desirable for everyone who uses Bitcoin to also support it in some tangible way from an infrastructure perspective.  If this ever was a theoretically possible scenario, it died in the early days and I have to be practical about this.  I've only briefly skimmed segwit, but it seems like a practical 'engineering' realization that the real world structure that I (and I suspect others) would would like to see is untenable.  Seems to me a way of addressing the real-world flexibility problems while not necessarily permanently damaging the blockchain from a bloat perspective.  At least not right this moment.  My main concern about segwit is that the flexibility enhancements could make it more practical and likely to get stuck in the Chinese-finger-trap of bloat at some point in the future, but such concerns do not outweigh the benefits of potential progress on other fronts.  But I digress.

Italy police seize nearly 800 guns heading for Belgium.  A guy's gotta wonder how many of these shipments got through and if they are waiting for the next volley.  I suggest to my European brothers that they understand the 'precautionary principle' and consider applying it.  We'll have our hands full in this country just trying to maintain our 2nd amendment rights which serves as a tactical and strategic deterrent to various unpleasant things.

It's a perfectly rational hypothesis that some savvy business person predicted (or inferred and/or was tipped off) that 'native' demand for the shotguns would skyrocket for reasons which are now apparent and they were just setting up to make a dime.  Or that the whole story was a planted psy-op to achieve one purpose or another (this link is to the BBC after all.)  Either way, it would be worthwhile to follow up on these happenings since whatever is uncovered will help understand the environment.  We probably are moving into a phase where not understanding things can lead to very severe outcomes.

Seems to me that this is a pretty classic 'NWO' operation of moving stock around in order to achieve certain results.  I propose as a hypothesis that there are two main goals here:

1:  Immediate - Biometric 'branding' of the herd.  As I understand things, the contracts have already been signed.  Now it's just a matter of getting the herd to beg for it.

2:  A generation or two out - Foster right-wing political and social structures in Europe with hatreds toward other herds in a geo-politically desirable region.  Specifically SW Asia where there is an abundance of fossil fuel resources and some of which could be considered a legitimate part of a 'greater Israel'.  This shift to right-wing extremism will make it more doable to completely take over the target area when the time is right.

Just a thought.

Prepare for the next absurd green-screen beheading hoax.  Or maybe they'll start to 'do it live' as O'Reilly might say.  People are starting to wise up to these more humane style of psy-ops.

For much of my life I considered 'eating healthy' to be kind of an indicator of benign fruitcakeism.  At least when practiced rigorously.  Now that I have a better understanding of what kinds of genetic modifications are being performed in some GMO's, not so much.  I still eat way to much shit food though.  Oh well.

It will be interesting to see if this particular mental disorder will be one of those used to preclude one from owning a firearm here in the land of the free.

I suspect that his attorney told him to shut his yap.  At least here on bitcointalk.org where he did much of his hard-core shilling.

Schmidt taking a share of Blockstream doesn't surprise or bother me that much.  I'm sure he has some hope of guiding the company's trajectory, or at least keeping informed on it, but I'm also fairly confident that the important players (esp, Back, Maxwell and Wuille) are well aware of and wary of this, and I think it probable that they would bail if it became a problem.  In the mean time, the work made possible by the availability of resources is open-source to a reasonable degree and if they split what (if any) is not open would probably go along with them.

My confidence in Back-n-co is not infinite, but they are by far the best bet as far as I'm concerned. I feel this way because of their documented history and the quality of their work.  It would have been really interesting to know how Finney would have felt or acted wrt to Blockstream.  I do have points of dispute with at least Back and Maxwell but they are minor and I feel that the overall objective for Bitcoin is similar to what I would like to see happen.

I might add that I don't care much about the 'client' (reference or not.)  It's the protocol which is key as far as I'm concerned.  Ya, having some control over 'the reference client' at this point in Bitcoin's evolution does probably translate into having some significant input into what is practical to do at the protocol level, but it is not a significant concern to me.  To me it's just kind of an organic reality and less risky than the alternate.  I didn't feel that way earlier in Bitcoin's evolution, and I probably won't feel that way half a decade from now (if Bitcoin is still around) but that's my stance at this point.

I've got a better (though not novel) idea:

Cultivate a pool of operatives who can attack 'the villagers' effectively.  This can be done through austerity to mold the behaviors of domestic resources, through immigration of select groups, etc.  These are not high-investment operations, and the 'villagers' will be paying the costs anyway through taxes.

To make the jobs of said operatives easier, deter the 'villagers' abilities to counter these operatives.  Ideas for this include restricting means of defense by the villagers (esp, disarming them), protection the operatives from being deterred by law enforcement, sharing intel about where pools of wealth might be found, etc.

The goal is to get things pretty even so that when the dust settles, both the operatives and the 'villagers' are mostly destroyed.  At that point the mop-up operations will be doable with persistent personnel who are more carefully selected and generally of higher investment.

Sure.  We all know (or think we know) that 'disk' is not really a factor in Bitcoin scaling...as useful as it may be for propaganda purposes...but here's an observation which goes to the subject of 'Moore's law':

About the time that Satoshi was birthing Bitcoin, I was building a new workstation.  2008-ish IIRC which is within spitting distance of a decade.  I decided to finally 'do it right' and throw costs out the window.  What I ended up with was an i-family chipset, and for bulk storage a couple of 1.5TB drives (which I built a mirror an encryption on top of.)

Now, in 2016, after a bunch of years and a possible disk anomaly in my mirror, I decided to do a bit of work on the system.  I replaced the disks with another set of WD 'green' drives of a whopping 2TB capacity.  A full 25% increase.  OK, I might have decided to go with 6TB drives if I were feeling the same about spending money as I was back then.  That would make roughly a 400% increase.  Impressive, but vastly out of touch with the Moore's Law mythology.  I might have decided to upgrade the motherboard as well...if the technology had advanced significantly beyond the i-class base that I already owned.

I actually don't doubt that 'Moore's law' has held up better than my 'consumer grade' experience of the decade or so, but it is fairly clear that the friuits of this phenomenon are realized by a wholly different class of beneficiaries.  And I don't trust this class to serve my interests when it comes to protecting my assets against attack.

I've always said that market forces will not distribute technological advancements evenly, and the reasons for this are fairly obvious (to me at least.)  At this point it probably is the case that the likes of Google, Facebook, etc, could run Bitcoin as the global monetary system for everything and everyone.  If not now, they will be able to within a few years while it is completely unlikely that lesser class infrastructure providers will.  Bitcoin could 'evolve' to take advantage of this support base, but in doing so it will lose any advantage it may have over established fiat systems.

From a market perspective, once the bandwidth capacity reaches a point when 'hive-mind consciousness' can be streamed directly into the brains of a household, there is really no more demand which makes it unlikely that further increases will be forthcoming.  The actually bandwidth required for this, after sufficient optimization of the protocols, may not even be all that great.  Basically, as long as a sufficiently strong message to spend all of one's debt limit on new shit is downloaded there is not a lot more that needs to be done.  That is within the reach of what is possible for a lot of people living in appropriately structured 'human habitats' today.

TBH, the term 'boy' in this context did not, in my mind, map to 'juvenile' in a chronological sense.  It was a standard insult effective only because it was applied to an adult in fact.  To that extent the humor itself was indeed 'juvenile', and I readily admit that such humor is effective on me from time to time.

Remember that time when I posted a standard picture of a sheep being sheep-like and Cypherdoc's mind mysteriously and immediately conjured up a sexual connotation?  Weird, but then the world is full of weirdness.


I'll gladly hold your beer, and will pull an ice cold one from the cooler for you when you get done.

---

BTW, I actually never understood the 'icedrill' context.  I only basically figured that this 'newb' was making fun of your experience with HashFast, but never cared enough to try to understand what went on there.  All I know is that you had some involvement as did cypherdoc and that it seems that there was a desperate outcome between you two...monetarily speaking.

Relatetedy, the 'iceblow' insult never seemed at all funny to me.  Doesn't rhyme or seem to have any connotation other than a random assertion of oral sexual behavior as best I can tell.  Perhaps it has some connotation associated with the Hashfast goings-on, but that is a black-box to me...mostly because it isn't interesting enough for me to bother to open the top.

Quality wise, "Boy ain't been right since..." and "you're a fag" are on different ends of the 'juvenile' humor scale.  But that's a matter of taste.

Hehe.  That's up into the same quality category that iCEBREAKER is famous for dishing out.  For general amusement purposes I can only hope that it spurs him to even greater heights.

I live in one of the whitest parts of one of the whitest states in the U.S.  Last time I was in town I saw a middle eastern family for the first time.  If they were anything other than a family with a couple of kids, they were doing a pretty good job of faking it.

In other cluturally similar areas I'm aware of other refugees from decades ago.  A Kurd and a Kazakh for instance.  They have become productive and integral parts of society as far as I am concerned.  The Kurdish guy owned the local gun shop.

As I mentioned earlier, I kind of toyed with the idea of sponsoring a refugee/family or at least letting them use a house I own and am not doing anything with.  The basic reason I would consider doing this is that I suspect that there is a better chance of a random one of these people being 'good Americans' than there is for someone who happens to be born here.  That is to say, I think they would be more likely to believe in certain historical values of our nation than there is for someone 'born and bred' (and vaccinated and indoctrinated) here.  They would also tend to be tough people who have known real adversity.

Ultimately, I believe that at the present time, the 'migration' to the U.S. and other Western countries is screened to achieve a goal which I do not agree with.  If the flow of migrants of the type I would like to see has not already been stemmed it probably will be soon and there is little which I can do about it.  Secondly, I myself would like to be able to run like hell if/when the shit hits the fan right here in 'the land of free, home of the brave.'  (And this was one of the things which helped Bitcoin capture my interest.)  Assisting an immigrant to live here might end up being one of those 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' type deals.

True that about the medical needs.  It is why it was particularly meaningful that ISIS found a well of medical care in occupied Golan and from what I read, in Israel proper.


From what I hear, the upper management of ISIS is being evacuated by the West.  The mercenary strategy which worked so well in Libya has failed in Syria so it seems, but it took a hell of a toll on the citizens of that nation.  When Putin publicly stated that ISIS (and others) were simply mercenaries and they work for whoever pays them the most (and he knows the pay-scale) it was only stating what those of us who've been paying attention have been hearing for years.

I started reading in many places various disjointed reports of the 'refugees' moving to Europe where surprisingly rich in single military aged men of late.  Also that most of the 'Syrians' were not from Syria at all...or not by birth at least.  The thought that these mercenaries next benefactor would be paying them to operate in Europe crossed my mind and was almost to awful and conspiratorial even for me.  But the suggestion really fits the reports coming out of Germany now.  From where I sit is seemed like a completely far-fetched and strategy which could never work even if the goal was to make Europe look like Libya and/or fertilize a new set of extreme nationalist political movements.  Now I'm not so sure.  Getting people so mad that they would welcome full scale war and ethnic cleansing in SE Asia might actually be achievable if approached as a project which is expected to bear fruit a generation or two out.  In the here and now, people will soon be begging for bio-metric ID (if not chipping for all)...and the contracts with the corporations which will do this were signed a year ago from what I read.

The only thing I've seen Switzerland do right lately is to suggest to their citizens that they stock up on guns and ammo because it looks like it's going to get ugly out there.  To bad for the rest of the European populations that that is not a viable option for most of them.

The first step would be for you males to get yourselves back to standing up when you pee.  'Gotta walk before you can fly' we say.

I'm actually a little surprised to see you fall for that relatively obvious and ham-fisted explanation for why ISIS always seems so smartly geared out.

I will say that there seems to have been an interesting shift in the level of cooperation between Iraq and the U.S. between then and now.  Not exactly sure what to make of it.  Perhaps the garrisoning of Turkish troops withing the borders of Iraq and the giant sucking sound moving their oil in the direction of Turkey was too much for Baghdad.

Rio, which popped out 'Agenda 21', was a 20 year follow-on to a conference in Stockholm.  This shindig produced a delightful propaganda film called 'The Survival of Spaceship Earth' (and written by our current 'science czar' Holdren interestingly.)

One of the more interesting things about this film was that the concept of anthropogenic global warming was there but in a crude form which, as you point out, makes no sense from a basic thermodynamics point of view.  That deficiency was polished up to involve carbon dioxide by the time 1992 rolled around.  Now, 20 years on, it is pretty clear that this new and improved story-line also is bunk.

Aaron's condensation of the original 'spaceship earth' film happens to include a clip of the dude promising to study 'heat pollution'...with Rockefeller money no doubt...

http://truthstreammedia.com/2015/05/30/survival-of-spaceship-earth-the-ultimate-rockefeller-depopulation-propaganda-film/



The only time I've been impressed by the phenomenon was when I was waiting at a red light directly behind an M1A1 Abrams.  And more precisely, when the light turned green.

Hmmm...OK, here's a quick-n-dirty example of working with a govt.  Suppose I have a server and an analysis technique which can do some blockchain analysis.  Suppose the FBI comes and asks me nice if I could grind some data to help them find tradefortress so they could crush his balls.  I'd be happy to help.

WRT Gavin, he's been the highest salaried contributor to Bitcoin (through TBF) for some time as best I can tell (though it's hardly something I've looked into a whole bunch...and many of the contributors probably have done much better on their hodlings than on salary anyway.)  I never pitched a bitch about Hearn and Wuille being at Google, or Garzik being at BitPay.  In fact, I think it is a lot of times more healthy for a person to draw a decent salary so they are not as prone to pay the bills by cooperating with covert interests.  OTOH, everyone who is slipping code into Bitcoin should be watched like a hawk and called out when there is any potential for conflict of interest or other red-flags no mater who, if anyone, they work for.  I myself have worked for large entities and not felt that it impacted negatively my other interests so I believe that it can happen.  Garzik's work with BitPay is a huge potential red-flag since they seem to have bet on the wrong horse vis-a-vis scaling but I've not seen it really impact his work until perhaps recently (but probably not even then.)

(I was disappointed when Wuille went to Google and delighted when he left BTW.  I considered him to be the most critical contributor and something of a 'principle architect' before he went to Google and feared that his work on Bitcoin would be retarded at best and compromised at worst.  I never saw a real indication of either issue which made me breath a sigh of relief.)

I'm genuinely interested in your 'just horrible' interpretation if you care to elaborate.

From probably back in my early time on this board I'd advocated for simply having as little interaction as possible with any official governing body.  I think that was part of my argument against TBF...they had the potential to become a point of attack, and boy was that prescient (IMHO.)

I did not use the term 'ignore' since I've felt from day one that keeping a close eye on the attack modes possible from governments was critical.  And, of course, a development focus on not allowing the system to fall into traps which they could set.  I don't even mind cooperating with government bodies when it makes sense and does not pose a threat since governments do plenty of OK things, but always with a very wary eye toward attacks which I've felt are certain to come eventually (assuming Bitcoin didn't self-destruct on it's own.)

From day one (of mine) I've felt that Gavin wished to bend over backward to mollify TPTB and hope that they were nice to us as a result.  This has always struck me as complete folly.  This is the basis for my repeated assertions that Gavin is (at least) a foolish and nieve guy who to his core 'loves big brother.'  At this point I think there is an argument to be made that he is likely worse than that, or has at least evolved to such a state.

No matter what I've always considered it simple common sense and good strategy to understand the enemy and at least set up to leverage his weaknesses if it comes to hot warfare that cannot be avoided.  It's good engineering as well.  If that means organizing under a particular structure which has some meaning in the real world, that is fine with me.  I live in the real world and don't ask anyone else to do otherwise.

I'm at least as sensitive as most people to organizational structures.  When I heard of Blockstream organized under a corporate structure I had to put a little thought into how I felt about it.  After doing so, I concluded that it probably would be the most workable and effective way to achieve a result.

When I heard about Blockstream and their focus,  and especially to who the participants were,  I was overcome with delight.  I would not give a shit if it were organized under any structure as long as there was good transparency.  When Linked-in was a new thing I was somewhat negative about it due to the potential for abuse.  Social media generally was in a much less well developed state but the threats were obvious and troubling.  Having the participation of whats-his-name Linked-in guy was a mild pinkish flag to me, but I will always be watching them with a wary eye no matter what.  I cannot say that I am keenly aware of any gross negligence on the part of Linked-in observed over the last decade and a half.

For historical reference, I put the same level of thought into the Bitcoin Foundation when it was under consideration.  I concluded that the risks were greater than the potential rewards (and said so.)  I made a point of calling transparency into the picture and that is one of the areas where TBF failed miserably in actual practice.

Back to Blockstream and it's corporate structure, I would note that it might have some potential benefits.  Under TPP (and surely the upcoming TAP) corporate structures have access to adjudication in international cases and Bitcoin is certainly international.  Of course the judicial tribunals report under the U.N. security council so it is unlikely that a monetary solution which competes with whatever the bankster class favors will get much of a fair shake, but a corporate structure might provide some relief from certain kinds of action-packed nation-state abuse (of the type which Kim Dotcom got bothered by.)

I can only wish that I had the skills and accomplishments that either of these two have in their little finger.


Really?  So you think that I spent the time to create all of my posts going back to 2011 and Thermos gave me access to insert the body of work into the database?  OK.

BTW, I remember being so worried about Hearn achieving his long-term dream of killing Bitcoin through unlimited growth that I thought up some way to deal with the threat and bought a domain name in...whois...04/2013.  One of my first posts on this board back in 2011 proposed subordinate chains as a the most tangible and workable solution to the obvious scaling issues.


Oh that hurts.  I think I might start to cry.

The funny thing is that you and your apparent clone 'smooth' showed up in a timeframe when a lot of likely shills did pushing for Hearndresen style growth which is certain to push Bitcoin fully into corporate datacenter hands.  And maybe even shilling for the new protocol implementation 'btcd' if I remember right (and I may not but it's not important enough for me to look back.)

The good news is that there do seem to be some people who started out chumped by you folk's propaganda but wised up when your true colors came to the fore.  CIYAM and lauda-whatever come to mind.