I, for one, am not just sitting on the balcony heckling. I've spent the last two years designing an alternative (see sig)--coin dispensation sans mining, after a fashion, included. I am very anti-bitcoin. I also believe that demurrage has little chance of being accepted when there will be people willing to pay in non-demurraging currencies. But that is also not the topic I was bringing up--I was questioning the motives of the developers when the foundation for the currency distribution has not a whit of a mention in the PR media. That smells bad to me.


I agree. I have even touched on this in my proposal.


I believe there is a third option you have not considered--perhaps the best of both worlds--and the proposal for it is in my signature. I won't mention it again here though as I know that sort of thing is annoying and I'm not here to promote Decrits.

Regardless of all else, Freicoin has not eliminated mining and will be either significantly easier to attack than bitcoin (is mining the source of voting in republicoin? even worse if so), or in the habit of wasting all sorts of resources like bitcoin in pursuit of a currency that will only lose its value.

I don't have strong opinions of the interview one way or another. I don't think he did well, but I understand that he was probably way out of his element. However, anyone getting on TV to talk about anything related to bitcoin better have general answers ready for questions like these. A generic question about bitcoin when he is expected to talk about MtGox should not completely fluster him.

The hashing speed of the network can't be directly monitored. Any site that shows a value is just making a guess by seeing how quickly blocks are coming in. If blocks start coming in more quickly (a random event) over a short period, it may think the hashing power is higher than it actually is.

The information in the block headers is less than a transaction's worth of bytes. So, not really, no.

Please test me.

Decrits, while only a proposal at this point, is intended to shake things up a bit.

For those watching this thread, the latest Decrits proposal is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.0

Wikipedia can explain these things better than I:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_tree

"In cryptography and computer science a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every non-leaf node is labelled with the hash of the labels of its children nodes. Hash trees are useful because they allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of larger data structures."



I can't teach crypto 101 and bitcoin 101 while also teaching decrits 101 in the same post. It is off-topic for the OP. I am willing to explain any of these things further in depth if the questions are asked (preferably nicely).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.msg2030308#msg2030308

A recap on some deeper reasoning behind the ideas of Decrits:

1) Decrits is intended to be a "trickle-in" type currency, where most new currency enters the economy in a random way. The randomness ensures that those with lots of decrits can't control new money, and they can't make credit/fractional reserve/debt money more appealing than "real" decrits. When demand for new currency arises, the people are intended to make it and distribute it, so there is little incentive whatsoever to accept a bank's credit.
2) An expanding economy is indicated by those willing to waste resources in creating new currency to facilitate trade. If decrits could be compared to a metal that does not have much utility other than in trade, then it would be a metal commonly distributed throughout the Earth that only requires you to invest tools and time.
3) Most of the time, enough of the currency will be in circulation so that it is not necessary to waste the effort and doing something actually productive will be much more lucrative--like a job. But if money for basic human needs is hard to come by, people will waste effort in making currency. This is the threat that all people should be able to have over the wealthy.
4) This further encourages increasing the velocity of money because money will then be given away freely. It discourages using money--a tool, no more--as a way to control or disrupt society.
5) If changing something as irrelevant as a hashing algorithm is what it takes to restore the balance, then the protocol must facilitate this in every way possible. Via section 4, a new currency can be created where the old currency can be accepted at a 1:1 value, while new currency can be created again by whatever means is easily available to the population.

If EvilMegaCorp owns the hardware, a large chunk of the shares, and a large chunk of the peers, it must still sanction the new currency or everyone will know it is a fraud (and the new currency will continue to operate), so it is in EvilMegaCorp's best interest to never attempt this control in the first place because it will lose all shares in the new currency. In completely different scenarios, currencies with different ideals could simply compete, or if developing countries have different needs they could have regional currencies, or if the network becomes too large for individual nodes to handle it could split into shards. These are the types of things that are necessary to account for if a currency is intended to replace fiat. It must be easy enough to foster these types of things to truly separate the people from goverbankwealthy controlled money.

If there is not consensus, the Decrits proof-of-consensus design allows both ideals to separate peacefully. Again, if peace is not desired, those who don't desire peace just look like bullies (or a huge takeover attempt) and accomplish little.

A bar-napkin type goal would be to have around 0.25-0.5% of all decrits tied up in the network's security. EvilCorp who is strong in fiat but weak in decrits can't do much at all here. It must accept decrits and the properties of decrits. Create specialized hardware to make a lot of decrits? Heavily limited by the restrictions in place. Lots of money distributed randomly to everyone but you. This is protection in the early years. EvilCorp can waste fiat effort to upset the system, but all it really accomplishes is adding power and value to Decrits. Value away from the powerful and to the people. Worst case scenario near-unanimous vote to change the algorithm and change difficulty. Money supply won't get too upset if the difficulty is off because difficulty and coin award is adjusted after each mint block.

There are massive consequences in value in trying to take control. And the people can wrest it back. It is an undefeatable system. I would imagine that those who become very wealthy under this system would be those that truly innovated and moved society forward. Putting the people of the world on level ground in regards to currency means that manipulating developing countries would be much more difficult--innovation by subjugation is much less profitable. Bank/government manipulations of credit and the money supply is an afterthought of a time past.

Everything I think real libertarians hope a currency can be, rather than wallstreet 2.0. Imagine the scenario leading up to the housing crisis. Banks give away subprime mortgages but then start running out of money, so interest rates increase, encouraging the production of new money, giving money freely away and making it easier for those to afford housing payments, allowing housing market value to be transferred into Decrits in the form of the people owning more of their property so that new people may also afford property. The end results is banks are a mildly profitable business in the business of helping people store wealth in property, breaking the system of never-ending debt.

Anyone interested in helping?

Reserved for more explanation of sections 3 & 4.

5/4/13: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=194994.msg2031259#msg2031259

Reserved for more explanation of sections 1 & 2.

4/29/13: Details on how Decrits is 99% attack resistant.

With the recent talk of stable currencies popping up again, I wanted to make a new thread regarding my proposal for Decrits, where the primary goal is to provide a currency that is fundamentally different from bitcoin in that currency can be produced for a stable cost--and much more.

This post is intended revise that proposal with my current notes and provide a digestible version that is a starting point for people to ask questions. I'm going to approach this with the same tactic as a famous gaming company and use The Four Pillars of Decrits as topic points.

Notes: Every time I use a number or a percentage, assume that figure is up for debate. I apologize for using a lot of acronyms, I hope it makes this easier to read. I am terrible at creating terminology, so please feel free to make suggestions. If you think an important detail is missing, please ask the question rather than pointing it out as a weakness or failure--I am glossing over a lot of details for brevity and to promote easier discussion.

1. Securing the Network Without Proof-of-Work: Reaching and Maintaining Proof-of-Consensus

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• A. The Consensus Block (CB) The CB, at its core, is simply just a merkle-root hash^? that 100% of Shareholders have agreed is the hash of the entire state of the network at a certain point in time. Disagreements are resolved by providing cryptographic proof. A CB point is locked in every 10 Consensus Days (CDs), which are periods of 87,660 seconds or 1/360th of 365.25 regular days. Network time will be roughly agreed on by using NTP pool.
• B. Consensus by Shareholders Consensus is determined by a group of peers called Shareholders (SH). Anyone may purchase shares in the network with Decrits using a special transaction^? and become a SH. The price of each share will be a meaningful amount (intended to be in the range of 3,000-5,000 USD), and this money is locked for a period of at least 1 Consensus Year (CY - 360 CDs), automatically renewing unless a SH declines to renew. Each SH will be selected to provide a Transaction Block (TB) for a specific 10 second period during each CB. Each new TB will acknowledge the last seen TB, and the SH that created it will sign the CB along with a hash of the changes to the network state as of that moment. Note: When there are less than the number of SHs required to make a TB each 10 seconds each CB, SHs will have to make more than one during a CB. When there are more, some SHs will confirm the TBs of others.
  
  • i. Shareholder Incentives SHs are primarily incentivized by receiving 50% of the transaction fees collected by the network. Transaction fees are 0.01 Decrits or 0.01% of the transaction amount, whichever is greater. SHs earn Shareholder Reputation (SR) as they perform their duty to the network without incident. This reputation is used to determine what percentage of transaction fees they will receive. The highest reputed SH will earn no more than double the lowest, and the SR system will only be on a scale of 2-3 CYs of service (e.g. after 3 years you are among the highest reputed).
  • ii. Shareholder Disincentives Reaching 100% consensus is of utmost priority. If a SH misses his TB, he must sign the prior CB within the next 10-20 CDs (depending on when he needed to create a TB). If he does not, his share will be destroyed, including the money associated with it. Missing a TB but then signing the CB results in a soft strike. If three soft strikes are received in one CY, the SH will be removed from consensus with his share returned less a 25% penalty which is destroyed. Creating a bad block (a second TB for the same time period or one that contains a bad spend) will also result in the share and money being completely destroyed.

IMPORTANCE: Securing the network requires only the energy needed to validate transactions, the bandwidth needed to distribute them, and the storage to hold the network state. No proof of work is necessary, therefore the amount of energy required to secure the network is magnitudes lower than Bitcoin. Using an account ledger instead of a transaction ledger means that both storage and bandwidth requirements are also significantly reduced. Transactions will be typically confirmed in 5-15 seconds depending on network propagation lag, though if a TB is missed they may take an additional 10 seconds. As long as the TB chain is unbroken, these transactions are secure unless a massive network split occurs within the next 10-20 CDs before it has been accepted into the CB and signed by 100% of the consensus. Even then, as with bitcoin, unless your transaction is being specifically targeted, it should still be secure.

2. Decentralizing the Network: Incentivizing Network Propagation, Preserving Anonymity, and Checks and Balances

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• A. Primary Network Propagation via the Cloudnet (CN) The Cloudnet is a group of peers called Cloudnet Peers (CNP). Anyone may become a CNP by creating a special transaction that includes an IP address (IPv4, IPv6, tor, i2p), an asymmetric encryption key, a public key, and a deposit of 1/20th of a share. This information is stored in the CB. A CNP will be able to retrieve his deposit fairly easily but with some restrictions to deter abuse. New CNPs will make efforts in connecting to several other CNPs, and they will accept and retransmit new transactions and network data as well as provide an access point for Cloudnet Clients (CNC - "light" clients) to retrieve (provable) portions of network data.
  
  • i. Cloudnet Peer Incentives CNPs are primarily incentivized by receiving the other 50% of transaction fees collected by the network. A portion (10%?) of these fees will be distributed based on Cloudnet Peer Reputation (CNR) which is gained by being in the top 90% of credited CNPs during a random interval of the previous CB. CNPs receive credit by CNCs who use their identification code in a transaction. The other 90% of the fees will be distributed in a bracketed manner (slight bonus to the top, slight penalty to the bottom) towards those who were credited with transactions during that random interval.
  • ii. Cloudnet Peer Disincentives CNPs are required to provide a public key so that their identity may be proven to a CNC. A CNC may request that a CNP sign information retrieved so that the CNPs deposit is destroyed for providing provable disinformation. CNPs will lose reputation over time if they are not credited during the random intervals.
  • iii. Shadow Peers Shadow Peers (SP) are CNCs that dedicate some bandwidth to transmitting network activity between other SPs. SP information will be given out very sparingly by those that request it of CNPs. In the event of a major DDoS attack against the published CNP addresses, SPs will continue to transmit network activity.
• B. Preserving Anonymity of CNCs Providing an asymmetric encryption key allows CNCs to connect to CNPs in a completely encrypted handshake process, preserving anonymity against outside observers. The public key provided by the CNP will ensure that no man-in-the-middle attack can be taken against a CNC. The default CNC implementation will provide a weighted but random system for determining whom to credit to preserve CNC->CNP anonymity. CNCs can trade bandwidth for privacy and retrieve blocks of information rather than account-specific information. Support for tor and i2p should be part of the protocol from the start to allow for "preserved anonymity" connections that can operate with much less bandwidth and only send or retrieve necessary information.
• C. Preserving Anonymity of CNPs (and SHs) CNPs will often have to associate IP addresses with account numbers when joining or cashing out of the CN. This is terrible for privacy-minded people and they should not have to be forced to use some outside "laundry" service to disassociate this connection. To provide this, buy-ins and cash-outs may be performed with blind transactions (invented by Chaum). More detail here.
• D. Checks and Balances Transmitting network data is a voluntary activity by each CNP. If a significant group of SHs are intent on disrupting the network, CNPs do not have to transmit their TBs. This means, assuming enough CNPs agree that disruption is being attempted, honest SHs down the road are unlikely to see the disruptive blocks (e.g. ones that drop all transactions or do not include important transactions). This will cause strikes to be accrued against disruptive SHs and potentially destruction of their deposit. This is an effective and decentralized deterrent against malicious SH activity.

IMPORTANCE: Being a transmitting node pays dividends. This encourages as many people as is profitable to transmit data for the network. The group securing the network is balanced by a different and larger group transmitting for the network; the "powers" are separate. Bitcoin transaction fees can be lower if transmitting nodes are fewer because the miners are the source of approved transactions as well as the price of transaction fees. Because transaction fees are set with Decrits and the costs of securing and transmitting are low (no mining), the securing and transmitting parts of the network will expand as transactions increase. The Decrits network is encouraged to become more decentralized as it expands. The Bitcoin network is encouraged to become less decentralized as it grows because transaction fees can be reduced as less energy is required to secure the network. Since energy is not required for Decrits' security, many, many more people can participate. With Bitcoin, the more people that participate, the higher the transaction fees must be.

3. Creating Money: Making it Stable and Energy-Efficient

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• A. Producing a Mint Block (MB) A Mint Block is a potential block of money that can be created by the network if several prerequisites have been met: 1) Sufficient transaction activity has occurred since the beginning of the last MB, 2) The current/prior MB has been completed, and 3) Between 5 and 10% of the MB's monetary award must be "burned" by potential minters in a limited time frame to join the Mint Block Queue (MBQ) to create new money. The MBQ is joined individually by those wishing to create currency and each queuer will be assigned to create 2-3 coins. A full MBQ proves to the network that sufficient demand for new currency exists and sufficient power is ready to create it. More details. These restrictions place a brake on unbound monetary creation.
  
  • i. Adjusting Difficulty Difficulty is adjusted after each MB by dropping the 25% fastest and 25% slowest queuers to create currency, and comparing the middle 50% to the current difficulty. A speed increase will directly reduce the award of the MB (e.g. if speed increased 3%, each coin produced will award 3% less). This is so that technological advances that create profitability, not economic demand, are disincentivized. The next MB's difficulty will be adjusted based on a weighted scale of the last 10 MBs. This is so that it requires a sustained change in the power of the network to really increase the difficulty. Difficulty will never decrease; producing a block more slowly than expected will simply set the increase at 0%.
  • ii. Minting Incentives and Disincentives To avoid difficulty stagnation and to penalize those who join the queue more times than their system can reasonably handle, queuers who create coins in the top 50% will receive additional money while those in the bottom 50% will take penalties. The initial idea for this is also described in this post. However, to avoid potential ways to game the system (including using ASICs), each queuer will be compared with a random sample of his peers rather than the whole MBQ. There are other designs that increase the profitability of being honest* (or reduce the profitability of being dishonest) that go a bit beyond the scope of this document.
• B. Producing Energy Efficient Currency All of the difficulties associated with minting are in place so that new currency is created only when the value of Decrits are profitably above their cost to produce. However, this is not at all energy efficient. To provide energy efficiency in currency creation, free money will be distributed to users of the network (not minters) based on minted money. 5x the MB award will be given to either the sender or receiver of a random set of transactions during a certain time frame before (and potentially after) the MB based on multiples of the tx fee; 5x will be awarded to a random selection of accounts based on each account's percentage of the total amount of currency in existence. If a second MB is started within a time window of the first, these multiples will increase to give out more free money in response to network expansion. More details: at the end of this post and here.
• C. Achieving Stability and Reducing the Hardware Tax The intent of the complicated process of minting currency is to provide a stable cost to produce new currency. This in turn, I believe, will result in a reasonably stable value when compared to other commodities--perhaps even providing a stabler value compared to the whole basket than many or most other individual commodities. This requires a deeper explanation for the reasoning behind the design decisions which will be provided in the next post.

* - I use the term "honest" to mean network users whose actions do not threaten the stability or security of the system. I use this in a very general sense--the network itself will not specifically identify or penalize users it thinks are dishonest, but it will make their actions more obvious and it will give time for honest users to respond. I will go into detail in the next post.

IMPORTANCE: To provide a strong base for a currency, people must want to use it as currency. People must also be able to create it as necessary in the face of economic expansion or manipulation. Hoarding can not manipulate the price upwards because minters can create new currency in response. During network expansion, transaction activity will receive a greater amount of new currency (in terms of award to volume) than minting or hoarding. This encourages both spending and accepting Decrits--and without the dire need for businesses to convert back to fiat. When the network is stable, hoarding offers no incentive over stuffing a non-price inflationary currency under a mattress.

4. Creating a Dynamic Network: Making it Scale and Adapt by Providing a Decentralized Foundation for Modifying the Network

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• A. The Voting System SHs and CNPs will be allowed to propose changes from either a predefined list of voting options or by proposing changes to the core code. The core code will be part of the Consensus Block so that updating to new code "on the fly" will be possible. Core code changes will not pass unless a 90% majority of SHs and CNPs agree. If less than a 90% majority agrees, it is possible for the network to peacefully split and allow one way transactions from the old to the new network for some period of time. This is another extensive topic that will be detailed in a future post.

IMPORTANCE: A sufficiently large network simply cannot and should not rely on a core group of developers as the only source of the reference implementation. By providing the core code within the network, "hard forks" are an issue of the past. Those wishing to fork the network can do so peacefully and retain value from the existing network. If many people (not SHs or CNPs) agree that the idea is better, they may transfer currency over to the new network. Future, unforeseen changes in the world or in cryptography may require quick and decisive action from the network. Waiting for millions of clients to update to new software or thousands of miners (or maybe only tens or hundreds in the centralized way Bitcoin has gone so far) is not acceptable in the face of major problems.

But you can't determine P without knowing Q, and Q can't be determined by transaction activity. Or any ungameable measure (same as P). Therefore whatever formula you come up with for adjusting MV in response to PQ will not suit the circumstances at least some of the time, probably most. It will probably be more stable than bitcoin, but bitcoin made every effort not to be stable, so it's not a fair comparison.


It isn't awareness that is the question I'm asking though, it is what you believe will be the economic results. How would an exchange even handle this? It will not be very user-friendly or intuitive, and I think from what I have seen you write (note: I wholly understand you are thought processing the idea) that this will cause bouts of unnecessary deflation.


Well it's hard not to assume you are referring to Decrits after asking about it. As I mentioned, it is easy to make the case of how your idea Y is better than weak idea X. If I may be so bold, it is not so easy to make a case of how your idea Y is better than the Decrits idea X.


But does it achieve stability? Stability that is better than bitcoin is not good enough, imo. I made a bold claim, probably in this thread, that I think Decrits could be more stable than the commodities it is being measured against. The only way this would be possible is if the standard deviation of a decrit is less than that of a basket of CPI items. The network would have to be quite large and ubiquitous before that could be the case though, but still in the mean time I think it can remain excellently stable barring irrational attacks. And there are potential defenses (even automated) against irrational attacks.


Right, which, IMO, means using transaction activity/tx fees as any kind of indicator of P or Q is a minefield.


I think by now you know my opinion on making this type of argument.


You are going from point A to point C here. By what mechanic is the need for energy minimized? You haven't explained this. You'll also have to tread very carefully if you intend for mining to be the security of the network, because mordorcoin will have a way of rearing its ugly head if that is the case.


Half-baked is nice n all, but Decrits is ready to serve. So it's frustrating from my point of view that people are willing to spend a lot of time and effort in coming up with some ideas that will be nicer than bitcoin without even making the attempt at understanding Decrits.

depends on what you want to discuss. if it is decrits or comparing your ideas to decrits, see sig

otherwise maybe this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178140.0

By reducing the velocity of money--a drastic measure. Are you familiar with the MV=PQ equation? Either P (price level) or Q (goods and services available to the economy) could be increasing that results in an increased V (velocity of money) assuming that the M (money supply) is unchanged. You are worried only about P and do not see that Q has an identical effect from the standpoint of transaction fees. Designing a system with some linear idea of how the economy is likely to expand is destined to be wrong. It is not a predictable process by any measure. Adjusting V will not make P stable.


It may be secure, but for any argument you can make that it is useful I can come up with a counter-argument.


Then what do you think will happen when people are cut off from trying to spend their money?


See the thing is, more fees being paid do not necessarily encourage the system to print more money, at least if we're talking about Decrits. Fees, on their own, have absolutely nothing to do with it. Only the willingness for a large group of people to invest time, hardware, and energy into minting new currency. For that to happen, Decrits must be worth more than their cost to produce. Even if a massively irrational actor decides to inflate the currency, all he has done has turned his effort into coins for other people. He cannot continue this behavior forever.


If you want instability, sure.


Case-in-point.


Even spam protection throws this off. I would imagine you'd need a minimum transaction fee, Decrits proposes 0.01, so that microtransactions do not tax the network. If microtransactions are popular, this would throw off your indicator by several times as it would see much higher fees than actual activity. "Too many microtransactions this week--LOCK ALL THE COINS!" You could argue to use actual amounts instead, but then you run into the significant problem of off-chain transactions/clearinghouses being left out of your indicator (which is also the case with tx fees).


It sounds like you think that Decrits doesn't have a proof-of-work component. It does. Maybe you're generalizing. But the whole hyperinflation thing seemed to be directed at it.


I haven't seen you propose any way to minimize it, only how to hamfist a stable price based on incomplete information. What is your plan for this part of the equation? I've twice quoted how Decrits addresses this in this thread. I understand you're still developing your idea and I apologize for being harsh, but all of the concerns you state about what I've proposed are not really concerns and are things I have thought about and designed with in mind. You're using the same, weak arguments that everyone else does after getting an idea of what it is that is incorrect and not even bothering to quote the salient response points. I'd much prefer to argue my actual ideas rather than ones that look poor compared to yours; otherwise we go around in unproductive circles.

The initial bootstrap is tough. I was thinking 3 years. However, instead of pure mordor coin, the "early adopters" would get multiples of the coin award. Perhaps 10x for the first 4 months, then 9x, and so on until the last 4 months at 2x. This would hopefully be enough time to see a reasonable transaction volume and distribution of money among many people (while yes, giving it a slight pyramid distribution to encourage adoption that quickly flattens out). Then flip the switch and people no longer need to mint to get free money. Might be a big deal like the first bitcoin halve, and merchants would be encouraged to start getting in the game.


I'm sorry but I think this is a terrible idea. You propose the exact opposite of what you should when the economy is expanding--you are strangling it instead of encouraging it. All to prevent price inflation temporarily if something other than expansion is happening (and cause deflation if it is expansion). Assuming the currency creation base is stable, the value of the money should continue to oscillate around that point. Hell, even without the idea of price stickiness, merchants in a system like Decrits would not need to constantly reprice because of DCR->fiat fluctuations if they could be fairly sure of the stable currency creation base. This will take time and market penetration though.

Messing with account balances or locking coins is going to leave a terrible taste in everyone's mouth, and I don't think it accomplishes anything worthwhile.

If only there were a link in my sig that goes into massive detail about such a system.

Brenzi, the cost of the hardware will factor heavily into it, especially as electrical efficiency increases. Like I mentioned earlier with amortization. If the machine that gets 1000x mhash/joule costs 1000x, the overall resources consumed is effectively the same making the assumptions about cost being equal to resources consumed. Since electricity can be renewable but beat-to-death hardware is not very recyclable, the drain on resources probably gets worse as electrical efficiency increases.

This is so silly. Bitcoin isn't going to accept LNC transactions as long as the addresses are incompatible. If the addresses are compatible, no one should touch the software because the designer is brain-dead.

That is quite debatable. In fact, to think so is incredibly short-sighted with ASICs right around the corner. Maybe it's the largest cost *right now*, but are you familiar at all with the term amortization?

I mean we can use costs in $ as an indication of how many resources are being dedicated to bitcoin, can we not? You did the same by equating financial GDP with consumption.

I'm just going to make up some numbers here for second that I know are not real-world, but I that doesn't matter--as has already been explained and I will explain again in a second.

Let's say an ASIC and a GPU are both 100% guaranteed to mine bitcoin for 5 years straight and then fail. Let's say the ASIC costs $1000 and uses $1000 in electricity in that time. Total 5 year investment: $2000. Let's say a GPU costs $200 but uses $1800 in electricity. Total 5 year investment: $2000.

Your only counter-argument to this is "well the ASIC is 100x faster, it is therefore more efficient". Sure, in terms of mhash/joule, it is. In terms of resources consumed, there is no difference. All a 100x faster machine is going to do is drive up the difficulty and weed out GPUs. Now if the world were a static place, ASIC guy would win all the monies. Unfortunately for him, anyone with a computer has a built-in calculating machine that can figure out that there is a profit margin to be had by purchasing an ASIC.

Replace ASIC with "solar panel array" or whatever consumption activity that you prefer to make it sound better and you have the same thing. Resources must be consumed until there is only a small profit margin remaining from the mining system.

Your counter-argument to that is that this consumption will drive innovation (lol where's ur deflation economy now), but the innovation only drives to further consumption--expending the maximum amount of resources possible in the name of profit. Instead of acknowledging the fact that hey, maybe this is batshit, you must rationalize this epic fail in the most extreme of ways, namely hinging on the hope that oil will no longer be our dominant energy source in the near future. Pathetic.


Wishy washy, flippy floppy, bitcoin good bcuz i say so and if not good we change.