This looks good!

IBLT kicks most of the scalability argument for sidechains into touch and out of bounds.

I have over 20 years experience working on FX systems, and I strongly advise that the primary objective here, with the standards authorities, is:

[An official ISO code] = 100 satoshis.

If Bitcoin is to remake the mainstream financial world, this will give it a massive advantage, but obtaining any other official standard will be of little benefit in comparison.


If we can get two currency codes, that would be excellent. However, the standards people would want to see them alphabetically contiguous, so XBT:XBU could fly, but XBI:XBT is improbable.

That wall hasn't bought 1 BTC yet, and when there was a dip it was pulled and then dropped 20 yuan. Sellers see it and are holding back.

How Japanese Hyperinflation Starts (In 1 Chart)

That new bitcoin exchange in Japan may be an example of perfect market timing.

I like this too, and think it is the best option.

However, an alternative is to try and get two ISO codes, with XBT for 1 bitcoin and XBU for millionths (which would be used in existing financial systems).

Economies used to be mostly informal (free), before recent decades when computer technology has enabled governments to implement ever greater surveillance and micro-management of the financial sector, turning Orwell's 1984 from a warning into a road-map. Paper share certificates were similar to cash. Corporate share registers were intended to ensure that that people's holdings were secure, not provide a vector for state spying/control/censorship(AML) into people's financial affairs.

The definition of "informal" economy needs to shift back to the "free" economy it used to be.

Pretty much locked-in by consensus. And the conclusion in bold is important.

IBLT makes the Bitcoin protocol function more closely to how all its users expect it to work. Right now there are several thousand users who expect their transaction(s) to get confirmed in the next block, and thousands of nodes who have a very similar view of those transactions. Usually, miners are good citizens and include many of the pending transactions.

However, a block could be mined where all this consensus is ignored and the new block is full of transactions which the miner has "pulled out of his ass" (real-world business or not) with fees payable to himself, a scenario which makes the existing 1MB limit look like a safety-blanket. Apart from providing PoW security to older blocks, the new block is unhelpful, and many of them together is an attack.

Transactions from the consensus pool are in an IBLT but they are canonically ordered and XOR'd in an offset manner such that a small percentage do not have to be known in advance, but the rest do, because that is the only way to peel them off. This goes way beyond normal data compression because the receivers know most of the contents in advance, hence O(1) block propagation occurs, or at worst O(_logn).

The block propagation delay cost of including all transactions will be low, so the incentive improves for miners to rake in as many fees as possible, getting a high percentage of transactions confirmed within the 10 minute average.

A rogue miner gaming IBLT by withholding a new one for a few seconds, and broadcasting his secret/spam transactions first, could be frustrated by requiring 20% of IBLT transactions to be earlier than the mean age of the new block and the previous one.

Yes, but the pie is falling closer to our faces while time is passing and volumes climb steadily. This could have been done in 2012 with 3 years delay, or 2013 with 2 years delay...

A hard-fork, where nearly everyone has upgraded first, is a big fat non-event, like January 2000 after the Y2K changes.

Ideally the software version which enables scaling should be available a long time before older versions are incompatible, 6 months or even a year, to ensure as many nodes as possible have upgraded before the changes take effect.

Are you taking a break from the Wall Observer, lounge, rats nest?

Someone has picked up the torch 

Kalle Rosenbaum has written an IBLT test package in java, utilizing bitcoinj.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2jszdl/encodingdecoding_blocks_in_iblt_experimets_on_o1/

Land

The longer the market stays in a trading range, then the stronger the floor it is putting in. A year ago people would have been wetting themselves seeing a floor put in at $380.  A solid $380 means that $760 is on the cards sooner than later.

Got a poll going and early results are interesting. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827209.0
So far, $2 is not a popular fee for a transaction, and over half the respondents think transactions should cost 1 cent or less.

Absolutely, but scaling the block size according to the projected bandwidth growth rate (based upon the recent bandwidth growth rate) means that 1GB blocks are still many years away, mid-2020s. Storage shows phenomenal potential for further growth and durability. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/jul/17/5d-superman-memory-crystal-heralds-unlimited-lifetime-data-storage

In ten years time the block reward will be 3.125 btc, and the fees market much healthier, such that a dynamic "soft" limit could be introduced, if that is considered needed. You mention doing the right thing for future generations of Bitcoin users. We all want to do the right thing for them, but we have to concede that they will have far more information to make design and scaling decisions. What is important now is to introduce *some* scalability, ideally so that the ecosystem can grow, as much as computing technology (in the hands of a hobbyist or semi-professional bitcoiner) will allow, in the meantime.

The article is correct on the software version. Version numbers are not decimals, the points separate counts of major to minor releases.

0.10 is due in a "few" months. No one knows exactly when yet. When it is tested as much as is practicable  .

Yes. Sync time should be dramatically improved for all new nodes which use it.

This is a very interesting chart. It begs the question "Why?" Why has inequality steadily increased?
I think the reason is that in an unbounded monetary system the people who have first use of new money benefit the most. They benefit because the inflationary impact of the new money does not appear immediately. So banks, big business which get priority on loans, and the wealthy who can leverage their assets do so before the inflationary impact occurs. Ordinary people are using the new money after the inflationary impact. For the middle class this is a financial death of a thousand cuts.

The gold standard was weak long before 1971, so the chart reflects this, but the trend goes ballistic in a fully fiat system. Cue Supertramp, because this is the true crime of the century.

Absolutely. I'm a fan of market-driven pricing too, but it is still reasonable to try and find out what the market is thinking, especially as most users just let the default fee get applied by their wallet software. There is not yet an efficient fees market.