Not if they don't use the current ledgers, that show how many of what, such as XRP, each account has.

More likely one would change the default port and change the magic handshake bytes if the connection protocol has such a thing like *coins do, so even if you happen to find a different brandname at that port you'd recognise its not one on your network so not try to synchronise with it (after all, it won't think you own all the ripples!)

Oh and, give yourself all the ripples, of course.

Not that that is your motivation for making the new different network, of course.

Its just an unfortunate necessity that they have to start somewhere.

You'll divvy them up much better than anyone else would, of course.

After all, you can be trusted, others cannot.

And your idea of how to do it is the best idea of all.

-MarkM-

And severe focus on trivial transactions worth less that it cost to make them possible in the first place also might limit the economy.

If it comes down to transacting houses and cars or lollipops and chewing gum lets throw some lollipops and chewing gum in the glove compartments and pantries and stick to transacting cars and houses.

There IS anyway some direct relation: not enough total value of all 21 million coins means not enough miner savings to buy better infrastructure. So I challenge your assertion or want to see the formula known as "no direct".

Halve the exchange rate and you halve, directly, miners' capital savings.

Divide exchange rate by ten and you decimate the liquid production-capital of the economy.

Multiply it by ten ... would that multiply the liquid production-capital of the economy? By how much?

-MarkM-

Why? What is the proportianality of exchange rates to transaction rates?

Exchange rate is approx. $30 per coin currently at current number of transactions per second. What value of exchange rate will it take to drive transaction rate up to 4 per second?

-MarkM-

Brilliant! Send ripples to domains, equal to the total cumulative pagerank of the pages on that domain! You're a genius!



-MarkM-

Okay, try a related category: what things / processes are useful yet are worth zero dollars?

Air? No, wait, cylinders of air cost more when full than empty, next...

-MarkM-

Exchange rates determine whether a decreasing subsididy is a larger or smaller actual real income; double the exchange rate every four years and the subsidy is not shrinking at all, it is growing. Quadruple the exchange rate over the course of four years and the halved subsidy is actually double what the previous halving had adjusted it to.

So quite possibly mining will be completely covered by subsidies, maybe even ever-growing subsidies, until all the coins have been minted, in what is that, 136 years or so from now?

If the block size is to increase to fit more transactions into the money-supply, then unless we deliberately try to spam that size with trivial transactions wouldn't it be more reasonable to suspect that each increase in exchange rate could drive block size up, maybe not linearly but maybe somewhere between some value just under linear and some value down near the square root (some exponential function anyway) of the amount the exchange rate multiplied?

(Four times exchange rate = size multiplies by something between two and somewhat less than four.)

-MarkM-

Yes.

Nonetheless, the double-when-we-halve is such a slam-dunk we might as we might as well put it in, as you say we can always hard fork later. Hard forks get easier and easier, not harder and harder, as Gavin et al perfect the techniques for doing them smoothly.

Plus also, aren't massive swarms of independent ordinary typical nodes typically more agile, in general, than vested interests, old money, political parties, lobby groups, megacorporations and such (the "forks are politically impossible!" crowd) anyway already, in addition to that crowd being precisely the kind of folks/entities we desire to outmanoever / outagile ?

-MarkM-

I think that much is a slam-dunk.

But, while we are in there, doubling size when we halve subsidy also looks like it will be putting in place another four years ahead a value that will also be a slam-dunk by then or will motivate us really well to make damn sure that it is a slam dunk by then; and even four years after that the next value will either be pathetically too slow an increase or yet another slam dunk or just another damn good reason to make sure we manage to make it yet another slam dunk.

So I still think just double max block size when you halve subsidies looks like it would be much better than any fixed constant we could put in when we hard-fork.

-MarkM-

I still think no going back down. It is a technical limit not an economic one. If economic failure causes it not to be economical to provision nodes technically capable of operating the protocol that should provide incentives for more full nodes to appear, as more proper full nodes - ones that actually are able to operate within the protocol limits. Their appearance should be an alternative to adjusting the max block size down, not a consequence of having turned it down.

They aren't stupid, so it should not be "turn it down and they will come" but, rather, "they will come if they are needed".

That is kind of the flip side of turning it up not being "turn it up and they will come'" but, rather, "they will come if they are needed, whereupon turning it up will be safe/secure to do" or "they have come, time to turn it up".

That last one though - "they have come, time to turn it up" - is worrying. Two ways around. One, the risk of over-estimating how large of a max size the installed base can actually already handle. Two, the bait and switch fly by night nodes you mentioned, that lure us into higher than we can handle without them.

I do not want someone to [be able to] spend a few billion on super-datacentres that convince us to let them drive all median/norm/average nodes out of business even if they do not then fly by night but whether they drive the previous median/norm/average to uprade or to go out of business or whatever I do not want them so big that their flying by night even matters.

Thus the idea of setting the max block size not by what the max ubermultinational or max ubernation does or could deploy nor by what outliers on the uber side of the mode/median/mean can handle but, rather, by what the vast swarms of independent ordinary typical full nodes already have in place.

If there are not vast swarms of independent ordinary typical full nodes, something probably is already going wrong.

Uptake (adoption) might even be best measured by rate of increase in sheer number of independent ordinary typical nodes.

-MarkM-

If you have to ask, you probably don't have the technical skills, in which case maybe the answer boils down to hire people with the technical skills and let them take care of the technical side.

If you mean how do you get licensed as a money services business, credit union or bank, even your legal team and your chartered accountants might not know that off the top of their heads.

-MarkM-

The moment they release the server source code we can all start our own networks and give away as many zillions of whateverwewannacallthems to whoever we choose. Fair enough?

-MarkM-

Oh well, next time maybe create a hundred trillion whatzits and give people fifty million each when doing giveaways, maybe instant internet multimillionaires wouldn't be as ungrateful as people who receive handouts of only a puny fifty grand!



-MarkM-

First thing to do would be apply the merged-mining patches, as bitcoin is only equipped so far to be the primary chain in a merge, not one of the secondary chains.

Then we could merge it alongside bitcoin0, namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, i0coin, ixcoin, coiledcoin and, if it is true that the net can handle extremes, even geistgeld, which has 10 second blocktimes thus could let us send up to 60 megabytes per ten minutes to really see how many megabytes makes how much problems.

60 times as many blocks per ten minutes is not quite exactly the same problems as one 60 megabyte block per ten minutes would be but still, if those who claim we can handle larger blocks cannot manage to run geistgeld credibly for any decent span of time maybe they will get an idea of the kind of problem larger blocks might present.

Firing up geistgeld now, it is worse resource hog than i0coin so I had dropped it from my merge even before dropping i0coin. Anyone wanting faster confirms and oodles more transactions per ten minutes though really should run it to find out what higher resource consumption could really do. (We'd have to actually send non-empty blocks over it of course, but even empty ones it eats a lot of resources compared to more-"normal" chains.)

I already added i0coin back into my mix so what the heck, geistgeld starting up again now...

-MarkM-

Well they have plenty of space, so that part is done. We'll see how the rest works out.

When the need more space signal (blocks getting full?) gets sent, that is when the markets are supposed to adapt, right?

Not order more inventory while you still haven't been able to get rid of the huge amount of inventory already on hand?

-MarkM-

Hmm I thought that was sarcasm when I saw the bit about miners driving up hash rates for no reason, but reading more I'm no longer sure if the post is sarcasm or serious.

-MarkM-

Nah, you can make unalterable timestamps with BBQcoin.

Oh wait, how difficult exactly do you need it to be for a 51% attacker to alter?

(Actually though I think people have pointed before to cheaper timestamping technologies.)

-MarkM-

Good question. Maybe its a prediction / assumption that we'll be stuck with excess inventory for a couple more years?

Exchange rates are falling though, so maybe the sky really is falling?

Oh wait, are they falling, really? Or just wobbling on their continued journey upward?

-MarkM-

That is absurd. One could equally well say by failing to use the block size we already have you aren't sending the market the "more size needed" signal.

"Damn, stuck with vast amounts of unsold inventory, should I restock? Maybe order larger quantity than last time around even?"

-MarkM-

What are we, old fogies? Its ""Bitcoin user not affected".



-MarkM-

Yeah but if bitcoins are worth $120 or more each by then, they are maybe just stupid not to have invested in some more bandwidth by then? Or some more ASICs maybe if bandwidth is low due to low hashpower resulting in low income?

Its still four times whatever they are making now with the gear they already have, divided by the block halving by then so double what they are already making now.

So lets get those exchange rates up!

-MarkM-