Yes. So lets work on unlimited exchange rate, raise that high enough and raising other stuff will seem a whole lot less awful to stakeholders.

-MarkM-

The same crowd who argue for inifinite (no limit) max block size will use the the same arguments against this.

To them it is just another arbitrary restriction preventing all out class-warfare from playing itself out to its natural conclusion of "the biggest bullies win".

-MarkM-

Well litecoin seems to have initially targeted people who want to buy their bubblegum now now now not waiting ten minutes, so really if fastfood serving speeds at the checkout is the priority maybe losing the price of a pack of bubblegum now and then is worth it to get the checkout working faster, to these people?

If we want something really really super-secure, forgetting impatient now now now consumer-level applications entirely for super secure "your new Rolls Royce will be ready at the end of the week, please send the payment today so it will clear by the end of the week" applications we don't even need the ten minute blocks we can go with hourly or every twelve hours or every 24 hours and get oodles of hashing done on each transaction sufficiently hefty to be worth using such a chain for instead of trying to buy your Rolls with litecoin or even bitcoin.

Hmm maybe a Rolls with bitcoin, what the heck, maybe it is a consumer item for rock stars and such. But a fleet of a thousand cars for your car rental franchise maybe could go on the slow chain instead of the bitcoin chain.

-MarkM-

They would have to move their hoard of XRP to a new account every decode or few years or even just make moving it a regular yearly ritual. No big deal.

-MarkM-

You left out the fact that the first two doublings of amount of block space per ten minutes have already been done in litecoin. So when bitcoin first doubles, litecoin already did that, nothing to do yet. The next time bitcoin doubles, it finally catches up with where litecoin already is. It is only after that that litecoin needs to keep up; so far it is two doublings ahead.

Not to mention (but I will anyway) that litecoin already accepts that parallelism gets more scalability than serial increase. More blockchains is more scalable than bigger blockchains. Litecoin embraces that by already itself being an additional blockchain; some bitcoiners still seem to think it is vital to have only one blockchain in the whole universe, that bitcoin is so fragile, so precarious, that any other blockchains are a threat to it.

-MarkM-

With "pre-mined" currencies such as the U.S. dollar, the Euro, and in general pretty much all fiat, gift cards, queues, IOUs and so on, the value seems in the long run to come from how reliably the issuers can be trusted to buy back their currency when its market value starts to decline.

UKB, CDN, GMC, GRF, MBC. NKL and UNS are all 'full pre-mine" coins, each of them except NKL being the standard 21 million coins, following the tradition established by Bitcoin. NKL has 20 times as many coins, with the idea that that should result in it being worth about 1/20 of a "normal" (only 21 million ever minted) coin.

I thought none of them would ever "Catch up" to Bitcoin, let alone "surpass" it.

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

It will be interesting to see how things go, both with those coins and with Ripple.

Maybe Ripple will turn out to be a better platform for them to run on than the current Open Transactions implementation, at least until/unless they do ever attain sufficient volume of transactions to be able to attract merged-mining miners. (Enough transaction-fees to attract enough miners to secure them as blockchains again which is what they were originally before the disinclination of miners to merged-mine additional chains led to the realisation that blockchains are just too hard to secure without massive transaction volume.)

-MarkM-

I am not sure how you arrived at that specific quantitative prophecy but remember a lot of the scaling problem is by trying to grow serially instead of in parallel. Longer and longer serial blocks cause more and more problems in scaling, largely because they all need to be kept in sync as to the number of coins in total in that specific serial blockchain.

Multiple blockchains could let us attain that same $100 per blockchain, spawning however many blockchains it takes to saturate the world. Maybe one blockchain for every major city everywhere. Maybe also a few "outback" chains for large areas devoid of cities but nonetheless having populations.

One "world currency" is not actually or necessarily the be-all end-all goal "everyone wants".

We see "regional currencies" being advocated a lot in recent decades,een them throughout history.

It is not always ideal to adopt some foreigner's currency instead of using / creating your own.

It will be interesting to see how scalable Ripple's consensus system turns out to be. Maybe consensus by trust links is massively cheaper than proof of work and just as scalable or even more scalable; maybe all this electricty burned in hashing really is wasteful as some have long suspected, and Ripple's insight into how to dispense with that huge overhead cost is the breakthrough that will bring practical, affordable, decentralised consensus ledger cryptocurrency to the world.

-MarkM-

That is ridiculous.

You might as well say if international treaties limit the number of nukes, no one would use nukes, or if the air force only has so many jet-fighters, they won't use them, or the navy won't use aircraft carriers if there is a limit to how many have been built.

The market will adapt by making the best possible use of the limited resource, not by refusing to use it at all.

Its true we don't carry gold coins around in our pockets anymore, but an ounce of gold will still buy you a nice toga, belt, and sandals just like it always did.

-MarkM-

The borrowers are shorting the coin they borrow. If they want their collateral back, they are going to need some of that same altcoin they borrowed, to exercise their option on the collateral, aka to get their collateral back.

The main risk to the lender is that the shorting of the altcoin will drive down the value of the altcoin.

Some lenders see this kind of lending as a chance to buy cheap altcoins themselves. They can buy what the borrower sells plus if the lender wants the collateral back they also get the same amount of altcoin back plus the option premium.

I don't see a big problem with the system, what is this worrisome risk you think the seller of the option is taking on?

-MarkM-

So how do you freeze your address-sealing keys, to make sure no-one can use them to unfreeze your frozen accounts?

Its turtles all the way down.

-MarkM-

Ripple does not place the barriers, even if they be only psychological, to entry of massive capital that Bitcoin does.

People looking to be able to conveniently move billions around might wonder whether Bitcoin is big enough for them yet, given that every billion they put into it enriches any of their competitors who already own bitcoins. Why, they might ask themselves, would I want to make my competitor a whole bunch of money "out of thin air" by driving up the exchange rate of a currency he owns maybe thousands of times more of than I currently own. Assuming I even own any at all yet.

But with Ripple, they can issue a few billions of their own IOUs and their competitor's IOUs do not magically jump in exchange rate as a consequence. So it provides a more-level playing-field for new entrants.

-MarkM-

There are some people who seem to think bitcoin cannot tolerate any "competition", somehow being such a delicate flower, its own growth so unsure, that it needs a total vacuum around it, nothing similar on the horizon, in order to have any chance at all itself. All of which is just silly.

I do not want to spend bitcoins until they get to where they are going, which should certainly be hundreds of dollars per coin and hopefully more like thousands per coin by the time they reach any kind of reasonable plateau. Thus it makes a lot of sense to me to have other coins so one one has something to spend that doesn't involve selling off any of one's currently insanely-undervalued bitcoins.

Some people have found altcoins particularly useful as things they can borrow, using their bitcoins as collateral, to buy more bitcoins. Though actually lenders often find it better to implement such loans using options contracts than to get the whole "debt" concept involved, so that they don't get stuck with fiat instead of the actual coins they want in return for the collateral.

(e.g. "For 100 BTC, I will sell you an option to buy 100 BTC for X altcoin, plus a lump sum of Y altcoin" type of constructs.)

-MarkM-

SImply run the client yourself on your own local machine. It does not actually need to be on someone else's webserver at all, you can browse it locally as a file:/// type of URL

-MarkM-

Bitcoin has been rallying so fast lately that people have tended to cash out altcoins for bitcoins to get a ride on the faster growth-of-value curve. When altcoins are going up in value faster than bitcoin the reverse happens. A lot of the changes are "reactive", people reacting to what already happened, maybe even too late, and magnifying the original change that motivated them to make a move.

Litecoins are, as previous post shows, way up over six months or more. If you're looking for all time lows to buy in at, DeVCoin might look better right now as it actually is ridiculously low. But all the altcoins that I actually have enough of to consider selling are so low right now compared to bitcoin I haven't used any to buy bitcoins with lately because buying bitcoin near its all time high using altcoins near their all time low doesn't seem all that brilliant an idea.

(I don't have enough litecoin to bother selling, that, not it being anywhere near an all time low, is why I have not sold litecoins to buy bitcoins.)

-MarkM-

Litecoin also has four one-megabyte blocks per ten minutes, doesn't it?

So already offers four times as much transaction-space as bitcoin?

I am also not convinced that "one world currency" constitutes "decentralisation" of the world's financial systems.

Possibly it is better to be able to move elsewhere each time the powers that be grab control of some huge majority of the money in any particular system, maybe even go for agility where they are constantly on a treadmill trying to grab a majority of more and more and more new systems until maybe in some distant era they will realise no matter how much they want to control everyone, some people will (one maybe hopes?) find some way to retain some freedom despite them.

-MarkM-

Damn, forgot about the speed of light. We're doomed whatever we do, at least the pony express produced fertilizer, not sure these discussions are all that fertile anymore...

How could God have been so short-sighted? A hard limit, srsly? What was she thinking?

-MarkM-

So not until then will we see whether transactions are so worthless that the only application that can afford to pay for them is an application that amounts to a "throw away money" game? No legitimate use can possibly make better use of the space we already have than Satoshi Dice does?

If that is the case we seem to have been throwing away money all along on building the worlds most useless, albeit most powerful, distributed system, thus maybe should rather shut the experiment down than throw even more money at providing unwanted blockchain space that transactors (other than those in the business of throwing away other people's money) do not want.

-MarkM-

So it'd be like the search engine circle-jerk back when the most relevevant possible page, in the engine's eyes, was its own output.

So we got what, a big three in each part of the world?

Modulo the fact that blocks are not cultural/linguistic the way web pages are, so maybe the big three can be the same big three world-wide, no "you don't even speak our language, you don't understand the nuances of our pages, thus your searches suck" effect helping very-different cultures to prop up a big one of their own (do they even get to have a big three, or do the regions where the big three aren't the biggest only have a big one of their own not their own whole big three?)

Way to not centralise. Are the big number two and big number three still shrinking relative to the big one or are they becoming more equal?

-MarkM-

We immediately put in a block number at which max block size will be read from the config file instead of being hard-coded into the code.

Then sit back and yack until what actual number to put in that spot in the config file becomes clear.

-MarkM-