The main thing we are going to accomplish along your path are even more powerful multi-national corporations if indeed multi-national even has any meaning going forward.  They are the primary driving force behind 'sustainability' you know?  And, of course, the panic about CO2 is 100% or nearly so simply a tool to achieve these goals.

From Hardin's observations as I remember them, 'starving people fight inefficiently and mostly among themselves.'  That is exactly the herd dynamics one needs to pursue large goals with minimal interference from the masses.

Cutting back on available energy will kill literally millions of poor people who are on the edge.  I'll grumble a bit about being gouged, but I'll be fine.  What people who have a simplistic understanding of systems think is that people will pay a bit more for gas in their SUV's here in the U.S. and their mopeds in the developing world.  That thought uncovers the ignorance of how important energy completely across the spectrum of human life.  Our food, our clothing, our homes, etc.

Same family members I spoke of earlier have a dim conception of poor Africans getting by with solar cookers until they can get some solar panels (not even stopping to consider that most of them are hard pressed to get a pair of shoes.)  I hate to be the bearer of bad new to the eco-crowd but these people are not going to lay down and die.  They will do what all energy starved people have always done which is to burn every stick they can find on their way out.

With energy we could deal with climate change and kick as few people as possible out of the lifeboat.  Without energy we cannot sustain what we have now in what seems to ignorant people to be a optimal and stable environment.  You probably don't grok this stuff but it is a near certainty that those who have cultivated your disposition among the masses are completely aware of these things.

BTW, I am fully aware of the potential for overpopulation and a situation where it is simply impossible for there to be enough lifeboats.  I studied Hardin as a youth (instead of Rand like most here.)  Although I think it would be 'better' for earth and humans if there were fewer people I do not believe we are even very near that point where our population is 'unsustainable', and it is certainly not a crisis which calls for forced depopulation.  On the other hand, we could be looking at a leveling off at around 9x10^9 specifically because of the successful operations of the eugenicists I dis-agree with.  Not sure yet, but it's a compelling hypothesis which neatly explains a variety of observations.

I got to looking into the WWF a while ago.  Shocking...and entirely predictable for modern 'eco' folks.  I've a family member who was deluded enough to send them (or some eco mega-ngo) some money one time.  Now they and about 50 others send big glossy ads at a rate of about 1 old growth forest per week to their mailbox.

  http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10456

In reading about the Baka of Cameroon I found out that the other semi-local didn't really consider them human because of their stature and use to hunt them like monkeys sometimes.  The modern 'eco' crowd seems to hate human beings more than any other pest.  Once they take over it wouldn't surprise me in the least to see trophy hunts for Baka pygmies make a return.

Cryddit is probably among the 99% of well meaning but deluded souls who cannot see through the lies and propaganda to understand those who have shaped his/her mind.  The more I study things the more I am convinced that those who are up there out of cryddit's awareness are genuinely and vigorously evil.

No, it was a hypothesis.  I mentioned it in several ways in a fairly compact way.  If you will not entertain and explore a variety of hypotheses it is nearly certain that your view of the world will be highly contained and constrained and you'll be caught flat footed by almost everything of importance.

Please let's not get to calling it 'QT' for the coming battles.  That is simply the name of one of the graphical display technologies used for a pointless shell which chose to Gavin focused his energies on back years ago when he did much of anything.

Better marketing minds than mine need to come up with a name which indicates that we're talking about the protocol which was used for the first half-decade of Bitcoin's existence and represents one branch after the hard-fork.  Hopefully ultimately the dominant one of course.

I'll actually not argue strenuously with most of your points as most of them contain an element of truth and at the very least are amusing.

I will say that via very simplistic analysis which seems to elude all, and especially 'free marketers', all mining is destined to fail (and may ultimately take Bitcoin down with them.)  That's not to say that one cannot make some money selling pick-axes if one is lucky and/or scammy however.

I'll also observe that outwardly you seem to be displaying classic battered wife syndrome toward cypherdoc who one supposes is sitting on 10% of the BTC that you once controlled.  Of course it's possible that your activities with Hashfast are more complex than average.  Who knows?

From my admittedly tangential read, there is a hypothesis floated in legal circles that cypherdoc's involvement is somewhat more complex than simple shilling.  That is, his wallet acts as a protected buffer and his shilling fees exist as an excuse and to escape future legal 'violence'.  Whether I like or trust the legal system or not, I'd rather see the funds I put in to support it (my taxes) used to tug at this string than to help resolve disputes between other faceless corporate giants which is where most of the money goes.  That's only because I happen to be into Bitcoin though.  Ideally the court system and government generally would studiously ignore Bitcoin, but that ship has already sailed.

My comment about cypherdoc being a lieing piece of shit had nothing to do with the court system.  It had everything to do with him whining and crying to Maxwell about being a loser who lost money in order to get him to retract his negative rating when in reality he was sitting on a cool 3000 BTC which used to be in Hashfast victims wallets.

As for the court, I guess I am more of a Libertarian than you at this point.  I have close to zero confidence in them and by-n-large don't give a shit about what these corrupt asswipes say.

It is the case that I fund the justice system through my taxes and I would not shed a tear if they make cypherdoc squeal.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend sometimes.  Same goes for other Libertarian scammers who didn't pay attention to the old adage "If you cannot stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen."

I happen to agree with the court that it is inappropriate for what's left of Hashfast to attach cypherdoc's 3000 BTC at the present time.  Again, if they rightly or wrongly do him much greater 'violence' in the future, well, golly gee wilikers...couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.


Cypherdoc made no allowance for his being a clueless jackoff when he was shilling hard for Hashfast.  Yes, those who didn't do their own due diligence on the guy (and the company and Bitcoin itself) and lost money (edit: or lost something) and they are primarily to blame, but I'm certainly not going to shed any tears if cypherdoc takes a hit for his own (very optional) role in the smoking crater that the endeavor very predictably became.

Best I can tell, iCEBREAKER is saying that cypherdoc helped scam people fair and square, and attempts to use 'violence' to clawback the ill-begotten 'nobly achieved' gains from him are improper.

This seems to be the standard party line from the hard-core Libertarian wing throughout the history of Bitcoin (or at least since I've been involved.)  I've actually come around to this viewpoint somewhat relative to my initial stance.  That said, I don't really believe that calling attention to cypherdoc's malfeasance are 'violence' in the standard form (such as use/mis-use of the state sponsored judicial system.)  Cypherdoc made a big thing of all the due dilligence he did before pumping Hashfast (and nothing at all of the money he was making shilling for them which, in fact, he tried to hide to the extent that he would flat-out lie to Maxwell about it.)

Cypherdoc can keep his money as far as I'm concerned (which is easy for me to say as someone who didn't even bother to know what-the-fuck Hashfast was much less send them (and cypherdoc) a bunch of my BTC.)  What comes around goes around.  In the mean time, informing people of his reliability in terms research and suggestions and the like should offend no one.  Not even uber-Libertarians.

One need not be excessively paranoid to suspect that censorship will closely match what governments wish it to when a system is completely under the wing of a handful of huge corporations which operate completely at the pleasure of the government (which they, at best, play some role in molding.)  As Peter Todd mentions in his conversations with these people, it is perfectly obvious to this group that censorship is a no-brainer and the only logical way the system can work.

Similarly, one need be more of a historian than a paranoid freak to suspect that governments will formulate policies which protect systems which empower them and their sponsors.  I will not be using Bitcoin if/when it relies on the kindness of governments for it's function and thus their protection will not be of benefit to me.

To me, 'the architecture of the network' not only matters but it is the most critical aspect of Bitcoin and the aspect which will define whether it has a chance of keeping the two promises you mention or not.

As an exercise for the interested reader, one might consider Mike Hearn's statement that 'there is no difference between confiscating someones money and keeping them from spending it for 20 years' via mining consolidation and censorship with his statement about a small integer number of copies of the blockchain worldwide supporting a perfectly workable system.  It ought to be abundantly clear where HE is wishing to go with this thing, and one might consider this before dedicating ones efforts toward projects aimed at bloating the system as quickly as possible and at all costs (very much including power-grab 'benevolent dictator' style forks and internecine warfare which is almost certain to collapse the ecosystem of it's initial form.)

He's 100% right about that.  Bitcoin could probably survive with a single blockchain much like the federal reserve maintains one source of truth.

The statement is enlightening because it demonstrates the stark differences of Bitcoin in our world that different people have.  Like you and I for instance from everything I can see.

If one sees tainting as a good an necessary thing, and understands the communications optimizations which are possible between large and well funded business entities, then a small integer number of existing blockchains makes all the sense in the world.

Nye is an entertainer (as was Carlin.)  I prefer to try to get my information about science from scientists when possible.

People who are not afraid to test their skills to at least follow some more complex analysis from an actual atmospheric physicist may be interested in these links which I've posted before:

The absurd picture you paint about ice cores is decimated by the analysis described here:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeCqcKYj9Oc

and a more recent presentation from the same guy given in 2015 which is slightly less mathy shows that if we burn all the fossil fuel we know about in the worst case scenario, the human contribution to global warming could possibly be around 0.4 degrees C iirc.  Maybe it was 0.2 C.  That way out after year 2100.  Pay particular attention to the opacity of the atmosphere with varying CO2 and where it levels off.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCya4LilBZ8

Yes, the guy was ejected from academia.  I personally feel that in today's academic and scientific climate (no pun intended) that fact strengthens his credibility greatly.

Considering the facts that humans are a tiny contributor to CO2, and CO2 is a trace gas with a modest 'greenhouse' effect compared to others, the result that human use of fossil fuels has a minimal effect on temperature is actually quite intuitive.

The simple fact that CO2 is nearly 400 ppmv and has continued to rise while global surface temperatures have been stable for nearly 20 years now pretty much blows the rather bizarre notion that CO2 is driving temperature out of the water.  As Salby puts it (for different analytical method but same result) it 'makes it clear which one is the cart and which one is the horse.'  It also explains why the probably billions of dollars worth of computer models of climate upon which our policy (more taxes, more 'social justice', more govt power) is based are proving uniformly bogus as time goes by.

Here's my analogy:  If you walk into a room where someone left a greasy pan on a hot burner and the room is filled with smoke, do you assume that the smoke caused the heat in the pan and the opening the window will solve the heat problem?  Not unless you want an excuse to tax grease.

Don't worry.  According to Mike Hearn Bitcoin can survive just fine with 4 or 6 (forgot which) copies of the blockchain worldwide.

I wonder if I can get you to touch on my question here if you could:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68655.msg11817437#msg11817437

Theymos,

It would be nice to know if you see any indication that these ongoing problems could be attributable to issues on your end or not (e.g., obvious DOS or whatever.)  As someone who is chronically paranoid about global scale monitoring and systems such as quantum inserts and such, it would be interesting information to me.

BTW, I know with some certainty that my ISP (Viasat or at least someone upstream) can and occasionally does do deep packet inspection and injections.

I eat terribly poorly and use so much salt on nearly everything that accd to several of my girlfriends my cum is salty.  None-the-less, I seem to be as healthy as a horse, knock on wood.

I figure that my shit is top quality and would, for a modest fee, donate some of it to a select handful of persons from this forum.  Especially those having played a role in shilling or coding for mining gear scammers.  Top quality shit like mine could be taken orally and as a side benefit, it doesn't seem to stink.

"Swear to God;  Hope to Die;  Stick a needle in my eye."

Same here.  Viasat connectivity.

As best I can tell, about 50% of doctors are pure scammers and shills for the pharma (and related) medical/industrial complex.  Another 40% are clueless mainstreamers who simply regurgitate talking points from the pharma sponsored medical curriculum.  The other 10% are good scientists and honorable people who see through all the crap.

In the U.S., at least, I think that the whole field of medicine has moved to be mostly a system of wealth distribution and 'social justice.'  I swear to God I think that there are genuine efforts to make people sick as much as the other way around.

As far as I can see, someone who acts as their own attorney does indeed have fool for a client.  Not so with medicine.  In the few times when it has actually mattered I've gotten vastly better results by doing my own analysis and research.  There are a few exceptions but not all that many.

I cannot easily parse much of your comment, but to your question, sadly 'not really.'

When I got started in Bitcoin I thought they were to be.  Not sure why I thought that other than that it would make a lot of sense in promoting a widely distributed system.  I'm glad I made a mistake here else I probably would have lost interest in Bitcoin right away.

Transfer nodes may at some point be rewarded insofar as they can autonomously verify that they are not being cheated rather than needing to rely on others (as does Multibitch which, if network traffic were subject to ISP level packet filterer, would be highly susceptible to sybil attacks I expect.)  They also may be able to operate on tainted coins as the operator chooses if coin tainting rears it's head and cannot be beaten back like it has over the last few years (often in association with the XT guy Mr. Hearn.)

If I were designing a system a share of the transaction fee rewards would be distribute to at least the last few of the transfer nodes which delivered it.  There would also be a concept of 'connection value'.  So, one AWS node passing a message to another AWS node would be worth almost nothing.  An AWS node passing a message to a radio linked node in outer Mongolia would be a very high value connection.  The hope would be that this would foster the growth of a very robust 'neural net' type structure.

While you are bumming around here, Greg, perhaps you could comment on the first thing which hit me when I looked into IBLT.  Nobody else has.  The thought hit my partially because of who seemed to be promoting it.

1) w/ question

Solex posits the 'garbage in/garbage out' principle which IBLT is supposed to be able to address by helping everyone's mempool be syncronized.  It imediately struck me that some (if not most) people would consider blacklisted or non-whitelisted UTXOs as being 'garbage'.  It struck me that IBLT could be used as an efficient way for miners to be sure that they had 'properly' cleared their transaction list of 'garbage' transactions so they didn't 'waste their time' mining the 'wrong' transactions.  Has that danger/potential been explored by the techies?

2) w/o question

From my time as a mechanic and having a life-long interest in mechanical things, I will state that for optimizing efficiency and power, tight tolerances and precision are the way to go.  The trouble is that fairly small things that go wrong (say, a partial blockage of the radiator) can cause them to seize up.  When I raced motorcycles, the high performance ones were expected to be re-built after each race and the performance decline if one did not do this, or if any little thing went wrong was very noticeable and always fatal if one was performing near the top of the field (I was not.)

For rugged dependability one wants sloppy clearances, way over-designed parts, etc.  They don't run efficiently, but a lot of time that does not matter.  The most important thing is that the performance is predictable.

Trying valiantly to achieve high precision synchronization of every miner's mempools in nearly real-time across a network which is (hopefully) deliberately distributed seems like a bad idea.  Loose 'blocked' tolerances in transaction sequencing leaving construction completely up to individual miners just somehow 'feels' to me to be the way to go from a defensibly standpoint.  (Of course I don't give two shits about 0-conf transactions and consider them a negative, so it's easier for me to feel this way.)


Praise God!