If there was a significant demand for non-standard transactions they could set up a separate node, perhaps only available to subscribers, in order to accept them. Of course the people wanting to send these non-standard transactions would need to pay for the additional risk of orphaned blocks, since they wouldn't be in the signature cache of other nodes.

Mining pools could offer this as a service by setting up a node that allows for lots of direct connections and bypasses the normal relaying rules, and which immediately includes qualifying transactions in the next block.

I think we may have cross-posted.


Any time you consume more than you produce (spending your savings) you depend on others to take care of you. The only difference is whether you are depending on anonymous producers in a market, or depending on people you've built up personal relationships with.


Is it less speculative to depend on your ability to predict what anonymous producers will want in the future, or is it less speculative to maximize your own productive ability and to build social capital with people you know and trust?

This is not to say that saving and speculation are bad, but I just don't think they are the best long term strategy to rely on.

I did not ignore it.

I don't like Kleopatra on Linux or Windows; it's a generalized solution to a problem that most people don't have.

GPA or KGpg work well, along with the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird.

FireGPG (browser plugin) is dead, although the code on GitHub mostly works. The replacement WebPG is under development but doesn't work very well yet.

Saving means consuming less that you produce in the present in order to accumulate that which you guess the producers of what you want to consume in the future accept for trade. It presupposes those producers will be willing and able to trade with you, and that whatever you accumulate now will still be in your possession when you want to consume.

Saving is much more speculative than maximizing and diversifying your own ability to produce new wealth because in the latter case more of the variables are under your control.

What do you do if an unprecedentedly severe economic disruption means the goods you want to buy aren't available at any price? How can the Permanent Portfolio preserved your wealth?

That is what I mean by "all saving is speculation". Nothing can guarantee the future ability of the economy to produce the goods and services you will want to buy with deferred consumption.

The majority of illnesses in the modern world are both chronic and preventable, so they can be minimized with appropriate lifestyle changes. For the risks that can't be eliminated you can hedge against by having a strong social network.

In the current worldwide fiscal climate the people who are already old are doomed, so there's not much they can do anyway besides speculate and hope. Those who aren't yet old have the opportunity to prepare before they end up in that position.

I think all forms of saving are speculation, and there's nothing with as much upside as Bitcoin.

To protect yourself from loss you should invest in your earning potential. Diversify your knowledge, skills, and experience so that no matter what happens in the broader economy you'll be able to earn a living.

Learning how to weld is a better investment than buying gold because practical skills allow you to produce wealth, not just trade for it.

I believe that phrase started out in the gun owner community, as in what someone would say if the federal government banned guns and started tracking down firearm owners based on purchase records.

"I don't have those guns any more. They all fell overboard in a tragic boating accident."

In any case it buys time, which has advantages and disadvantages.

I would prefer permanent algorithms that will never need to be changed, such as the difficulty adjustment formula, because making backwards-incompatable changes is dangerous and becomes more so as time goes by.

Presumably Bitcoin is still mostly used and operated by people who more or less believe in the same core principles, but as adoption goes up this is not guaranteed to remain the case. The earlier we make the necessary changes to allow Bitcoin to scale without requiring any more hard forks, the less leverage malicious stakeholders in the future will have when they try to get support for changing Bitcoin into the opposite of what it is.

I described two reasons I think people are opposed to scaling Bitcoin in this post, and I have a lot more sympathy for the latter reason than the former. I just don't see that as a reason to delay or avoid necessary changes. I'd rather make them as soon as practical.

I thought for a while that one could discover Satoshi's identify by doing text analysis on his posting style, but then I realized he was probably too smart for that. If Satoshi is still around and posting under a different name then that identity should have the complete opposite style.

I conclude, therefore, that MysteryMiner is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Lots of proposals floating around now; no guarantee that any of them will be implemented but it's probably best to speak up about it.

Subject line is misleading.

When did miners become helpless pawns of the greedy users who are forced to include every single transaction in a block unless they are rescued by having the size limited by protocol? Larger blocks increase the miners' hardware and bandwidth costs, and the odds of an orphaned block. The equilibrium price for transaction fees will be higher than miner's marginal cost. The idea that we have to mandate an upper limit on block size in order to have a pricing mechanism is ridiculous.

Transaction processing is a service which gets more valuable per Metcalfe's law as the number of possible transactions increases. Bitcoins emulate a scarce good that are only valuable if the quantity is limited.

The only reason to limit the block size is to subsidize non-Bitcoin currencies or to insulate existing miners from future competition.

No way to withdraw cash without being recorded on camera.

I understand that, I just don't agree. If you've got money in a bank account you're not going to withdraw it without being monitored, so you might as well send it to the exchange with the best liquidity to buy Bitcoins with. After you take possession of the bitcoins you have a lot more options with regards to privacy and plausible deniability.

The reason a customer would choose to connect over Tor is because they want additional anonymity at the expense of speed. You can't be ordered by a court to keep records of information you don't have and can't get.

There's not even a current Bitcoin-Qt rpm for Fedora, is there?

I don't know about the other clients but Armory won't let you spend until it's caught up with the blockchain.

It won't last forever; just until we move past the inflection point of the S curve.