Of course.  I got involved when Bitcoin helped Wikileaks skirt the visa/paypal blockade.  I figured that anyone having anything to do with Bitcoin was of significant interest to the intelligence agencies by that time if not before.

Indeed, I assume that pretty much anything I do on-line at all (and a lot I do off-line) is monitored by the NSA and stored indefinitely, and I made that assumption prior to Snowden.  If one has worked in security it is natural to assume the worst as a design criteria even though it is not normally the case.  One has to make this assumption in order to come up with robust designs.

XT would make a dandy sidechain.  All of the bloat, monitoring, black/white-listing, centralization, state licensing, etc, that anyone could wish for, and all backed up by Bitcoin without harming Bitcoin in the least.

I've never heard anyone ever say that Bitcoin should be off-limits to anyone who is willing to pay the going rate for transactions on a secure system.  That is, one which throws a huge amount of power into locking the transactions, and maintains multiple copies of the transaction on multiple systems scattered around the world and retained indefinitely.

The cost of such a solution is significant.  The costs could come down to a very low level by centralization and consolidation of the support infrastructure just as has been the case for other many other on-line services.  That is very undesirable from a security standpoint however.  To me it would destroy any value Bitcoin has at all.  Exponentially growing blocks as Gavin and Mike have tried to ram home are a sure-fire recipe for severe centralization eventually.  They pretty much bake it in.

Sidechains leverages the power of of the core solution with autonomous chains to take the load of less critical transactions.  It ties things together with immutable math rather state sponsored judicial systems which are increasingly capricious.  They are, to me, a pretty strong win.

I use Bitcoin for real transactions with some value behind them.  Sounds like a PissAntCoin sidechain would be right up your alley.


Again, you really need to brush up on some of the 'elements' technology that the Blockstream guys are working on.  When you hear terms such as 'timelocks' and multi-party signatures perhaps they will start to mean more to you.  Probably not though...you may simply not have what it takes to conceptualize some of the non-trivial use methods that others have moved on to.

I've missed these, but in fairness it could be my own fault.  I follow only trolltalk and some of the links provided from here.  I don't even follow the commits anymore.


I guess you are missing the forest for the trees perhaps.  The idea that anyone can grab a reference implementation and do their own sidechain makes it kind of obvious to me how sidechains could solve the scaling problems and add a whole bunch more desirable niceties to the ecosystem as well.

As for LN, I have not followed it that closely.  My impression is that it is subtly different from how I envision sidechains, but very interesting technology which will be valuable to develop and experiment with if nothing else.  I figured that perhaps continuing development on LN might have been a way to draw in some of the high-end technical talent that was already working on it no matter what it becomes.


Considering that most of the Bitcoin 'core developers' who are worth a shit are involved, that would be true with or without the Blockstream umbrella.

The fact that sidechains and Blockstream has you (Stolfi) running scared is one of the best indicators yet that the may live up to the hopes I have for them.

I absolutely won't be using sidecoins that offer me only such a thing.  I don't have any paper-gold either.

I want strong and well researched crypto that allows me to be sure that I can exercise at my own digression any of the contract terms I agree to.

I have not performed a bitcoin transaction in over a year.  It is not an appropriate solution for any transaction I've wanted to perform over that time period.  I pay a .01 BTC transaction fee when I do because it was about right for the service I was getting.

I very much look forward to being able to do minor transactions in such a way that will not compromise the core Bitcoin solution.  As soon as a micro-tipping sidechain comes out, I will peg some BTC to it and transact frequently.  In this way, one on-chain transaction will represent thousands of real-life transactions.  As a side benefit, one will not be able to analyze my behavior just by reading the Bitcoin blockchain.

It may or may not be.

Tyson is a big scary violent black criminal to many people.  As a stock photo, a picture of a crypto-currency ATM sporting Mr. Tyson's image could have certain psychological impact on a majority of sheeple who view it, and one which is of is useful for certain psychological operations.

If I were retained to devise psychological operations in support of those who are threatened by a possible rise in crypto-currencies and/or wished them not to be considered as a wealth protection method, this is the kind of thing I would do.

Actually, the real draw to me is that sidechains are an approach to NOT changing Bitcoin.  One of the whole points is that in Bitcoin's current and fairly simple and well-proven form it can backstop an infinite number of customized sidechains but be isolated from problems or failures of any one of them.  Every new functional addition to Bitcoin introduces new possibilities for attack.  Freezing it as a workable system as soon as possible is, to me, a very good thing to do.  My computation of value of each BTC is a function where security and robustness against attack is the dominant variable.

A side-effect of this isolation is that each side-currency is a black box to Bitcoin.  In order to track users, an attacker would have to maintain visibility into the workings of any sidechains that he/she participated in.  Since the focus of some sidechains would likely be privacy and/or security this would make an impossible approach even more impossible.  I expect significant efforts to thwart the development of sidechains for this reason.  At the end of the day, however, the cat is out of the bag and some sort of subordinate chain ecosystem will develop eventually.  As a BTC hodler, I'd hope it would be sidechains using Bitcoin as it's backing store.

Ask them.  Chances are they'd just say the truth and I, for one, would be interested to know.

I personally 'shill for nothing'* for Blockstream and here's why:  Back in 2011 I concluded that the only tenable (though not necessarily the 'best') method of scaling was what I called 'subordinate chains'.  Parenthetically, this would also produce a lot of other strong possibilities in terms of security, anonymity, end-user flexibility, etc, etc.

When Blockstream was _finally_ formed to work on exactly the problem I hoped to see addressed, I was utterly delighted to see it composed of some of the people I had the highest respect for in terms of technical skill, ethics, and energy.  You cannot realistically criticize these aspects of sidechains developed under Blockstream without making the same criticisms of Bitcoin itself because these same people are in large part the very same people who got Bitcoin to where it is today  As an example, the collaboration between Maxwell and ~sipa to get rid of some of the potential problems in OpenSSL are really impressive works in computer science and security generally.

As has been pointed out, Mike has had very little to do with Bitcoin core to date and Gavin has had minimal input for some years.  I would argue (and have for years) that even when Gavin was more active, the crap he worked on was mostly either trivial or counter-productive and the priorities he set were stupid.

---

(*) 'nothing' is a bit strong.  I am a hodler, and I want my hoard to do well for me on a personal financial level, and for the betterment of free society if possible.  I see Blockstream as by far the most promising way for this hope to be realized.  As a disclosure, I've exchanged two messages with one of the blockstream guys about general technical and social matters and that is my extent interaction with them.  I've met Peter Todd and helped financially with one of the videos he spearheaded, but he's not part of Blockstream as far as I know.

I like this guy.  Much of what he says are thought patterns that have crossed my mind (which is not a one-to-one with what I 'believe').  He puts them into words reasonably well.

Anyone know if this guy is on bitcointalk and if so, what his handle is?

The 75% was just an arbitrary target the Hearn pulled out of his ass as something which would hopefully be tenable and provide some excuse to flip the switch.  Certainly it is not near the 'consensus' that Satoshi seemed to have been shooting for as a number needed to alter the character of the Bitcoin system.

Note that there is no problem with two chains (competing or not) existing.  People who go on and on about 'the longest chain' don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.  Core will continue to run just fine because of the thoughtfulllness of the designer to gaurd against all of the attacks he/they could think of.  XT's chain is illegal and irrelevant to Core.

A distinct minority in terms of count would be OK for XT to fork if need be.  Hearn could go ahead and flip the switch as soon as the number of 'compliment' SPV clients could be installed or upgraded on Joe Sixpack's device.  These would honor 'checkpointing' if he cannot get enough miners on-board.  The biggest necessity would be to get the corporates (Coinbase, TigerDirect, etc) on-board, but this is trivial; the state just needs to mandate a 'crypto-currency license.'

I like how the guy hammers on the exponential growth aspect of the XT blocksize growth scheme.  This is vitally important and seeming almost completely overlooked by those antagonistic to XT and conveniently ignored by those on the pro-XT side who make every effort to focus on a static figure like 8MB as though it were meaningful.  This exponential bloat is, to me, THE most critical aspect of the debate.  Here's why:

Most planning of any consequence looks decades out.  It is standard to compute future-values of money out to these time intervals in deciding what loans to take out to create what infrastructure and so on.

Exponential growth nearly guarantees that Bitcoin infrastructure will consolidate to the point where only a handful of large corporate operators have much influence at some point.  Large corporate actors and the state (or globe if NAFTA/TPP-like agreements gain momentum) work hand in glove.  This would give outfits like CoinValidation, who's business model is predicated on state sponsorship and enforcement, the green-light to move forward on their developments.  When these are in place, Bitcoin can be as useful as the Fed's USD to the current crop of mainstream financial sector players.

One can get a sense of who runs a country and with how much authority by observing who ends up disappeared or dead.  Judging by this, I'd say that those who emphisize the medical/industrial complex as a key element of our leadership here in the U.S. do so with some justification.

Unfortunately a discussion about this would be, to you, unintelligible 'gobbledygook'.  It is an interesting topic however, and one I'm happy to exchange ideas upon with anyone who is coherent in such topics.
 

Introducing the US Dollar into things is probably a deliberate attempt to confuse things, but also may be just an expression on your part of disjoint thinking.  The USD has nothing to do with any of this stuff and only confuses things.

The *must* part is completely dependent on what the user demands.  I will probably stick with 'simple' sidechains which adhere to a static peg initially.  Later on I may branch out into sidechains who's management is more sophisticated, but only after they've appropriately demonstrated certain technical internals to my level of satisfaction.

Also, don't forget that there is no reason why people who have a need to perform large value transactions are not perfectly able to use Bitcoin natively.  I would expect them to do so indefinitely.  Unless, of course, someone like Hearn comes along and manages to ruin Bitcoin for such a use.  Of course if that happened Bitcoin would also be useless as a backing store (aka, 'reserve currency') for a system of subordinate chains such as what Blockstream is spearheading with their sidechains efforts.  In that case they would just choose something else.


You clearly have not done your homework on why Blockstream's motto is 'trust everyone.'  The only sure-fire way to trust someone is to know that they don't have any opportunity to screw you.  The mainstream financial sector relies on state sponsored judicial systems to achieve this trust, and the trust is starting to crack and peel as this sector takes a bigger and bigger role in formulating the government through lobbying.  Crypto uses mathematics to establish this trust, and Blockstream uses crypto.  (Apologize in advance for the 'gobbledegook' that you see here.)


The real value of the work Blockstream is undertaking is that it would allow Bitcoin to scale to serve every individual in the world (even if by proxy) while remaining lite and tight and thus being able to defend against dedicated attack by those who are currently monopolizing and exploiting our established mainstream set financial mechanisms.  To me, there is a 100% chance that such an attack will happen and that it will be brutal if crypto gets even a little bit of a toe-hold to muscle in on their action.  We may or may not be on the cusp of doing so now.  Probably we are, and probably XT is an expression of these attacks.

No.  I don't believe in licensing code like this for one.  I would certainly give it away (or licence it under BSD style which I generally prefer to GNU for most things), but I suspect that others would do the same and do a better job.  I've not done almost any coding in three years, and I never coded around Bitcoin in any but the most simplistic and high level ways (but have noticed a plethora of libraries that would probably make the task on the trivial side.)

What would be kind of useful would be some sort of a service which would evaluate a proposed spend and at least tell a guy what the forumation is.  I expect that a lot of SPV wallets will be 'updated' to formulate spends in specific strategic ways.  If the poor user had some way to find out if something were happening which might be against their best interests that would be nice.

My goal in describing the above formulation was to get some fraction of the community interested to dig a little deeper into the basic workings of Bitcoin (spends, UTXO, wallets, etc) and thus be able to recognize certain things and better protect themselves.  Those who are not lazy in developing a slightly deeper understanding of certain of these mechanics may very well be richly rewarded for their efforts.

 - Run XT on some throw-away machine.  Load one of my wallets.

 - Get someone to send me a transaction which contains some 'codebase' from after the first illegal block which was mined.

 - Formulate some transactions which include some of this coinbase to make more tainted UTXO's (I call this 'XTaint'.)

 - Formulate some transactions which include my pre-fork UTXOs and a little bit of the 'XTaint' with the recipient being myself.  This will make new UTXO's which are recognized in XT but not in Core.  Now the coins are split.

 -  Take my XT coins to an exchange and hope that there is someone who wants to buy them for fiat.

 - Enjoy the fruits of my efforts in fiat-land (hookers and blow perhaps) while my Core stash remains unmolested.

Normally one's wallet makes the decisions about what UTXOs to gather into a spend.  I actually don't know of any utilities which allow one to formulate their own spends from their own select UTXO's, but I imagine there are.  If not, they should not be all that difficult to cobble together.

There is actually no particular rocket science to this, and I expect that it has been thought up independently by many other people.  As I said probably six months ago, the first XTaint (which I was calling 'gavintaint' at the time) will likely be a hot commodity because of this reason.

edits: minor for clarity

Damn spell-checker


I (a USian) actually have spent most of my life being pretty down on the U.S.  We were deeply involved in Vietnam when I entered life on Earth, and it's been down-hill from there in a lot of ways.  As I study history I am becoming more of an 'American Patriot' I must say.  There are, or at least there were, some things about this country which were actually really impressive.  Samuel Adams and some of his contemporaries have a lot to do with this.

edit: get quotes right-ish.

The world is full of mean and scary terrorists, dangerious drug lords, disgusting pedos, tax cheats who cause the good law abiding citizens to pay more than their share, etc.  Why would 'we' NOT want those who are looking out for us to have the tools needed to do their jobs as efficiently as possible?  Individual liberties have to be sacrificed for the common good sometimes, you know.  Haven't you hearnd?

One of the 'features' which I would expect to see in the XT pipeline would be what I call a 'forced spend'.  This would happen when black- or white-listing and individual identity systems were rolled in and proven.  A year or two.

A forced spend would be something like 'you have a year to dig out your deep storage wallet and send your coins to yourself (or whoever you choose) else they will no longer be valid.'  In this way the entire currency base would be known and a good starting point would be in place.  We are in an 'unfortunate' situation now where there are plenty of BTC which are not really understood by those nice people who are protecting us from terrorists and stuff.

The way this would effect Causius Coin (or whatever it was) would be that people would have to break the seal.  An alternative would probably be that the holder could produce them for physical inspection and registration.