As bitgeek pointed out above, a significant percentage of Israel consists of Arabs. None of the surrounding Muslim countries have similar percentages of Jews.

It's obvious that if someone spent 10 hours walking as an Arab in Israel it would be completely normal. The same can't be said of walking as Jew in Muslim countries. Or even soon-to-be Muslim countries like France.

What world do you people live in?

This morning I'm getting the feeling I logged into the nazicoinforum. There's even a fucking holocaust denying Saddam Hussein fan.

Seriously, what world do you people live in?

Your comment seems to mean, "I don't see what is Nazi about saying 'Zionist bankers are the puppeteers who are really in charge'." I'm not sure how to respond to this beyond saying we seem to have very different ideas about what the Nazis believed.

You're sick. And I find it disgusting that such Nazi propaganda is regularly included as offhand remarks on this forum without being challenged. Your society/government/money is not controlled by evil Jewish puppeteers. This was also not true in Germany in the 30s. It's just an idea that appeals to many, many sick people in the world.

I don't care if bitcoin goes mainstream. One of the reasons I like bitcoin is it allows me to be independent of a support system for Nazis like Eric Jarvies. I suspect the mainstream likes participating in a system that supports Nazis like Eric Jarvies. If I'm right about that, then fuck the mainstream.

They could get bitcoin via donations from supporters around the world. IS already has supporters leaving first-world countries to die in their jihad. It's completely plausible that they could collect large sums from small donations. They probably have 100s of millions of supporters throughout the world.

I agree that cash is easier for terrorists to obtain and use, but the topic wasn't about that. Governments aren't looking for a reason to ban cash. They might use a terrorist attack as an excuse to try to stop cryptocurrencies. I think the crypto community is making a mistake by pretending this isn't a real issue. I suspect it's partly because there's an overlap between people interested in crypto and people who think there's no such thing as jihadist groups trying to use terrorism to impose their beliefs on the world -- the "9/11 was an inside job" types. At any mention of terrorism or jihad, they tend to roll their eyes like it's all made up.

I'm not sure how people into crypto should be preparing for a terrorist attack partially funded by crypto. I'm also not sure how people should/will react in the aftermath of it if/when it happens. Yelling about "Building 7" (or whatever the "false flag" theory will be) probably isn't the right response IMO, but I do expect there will be a lot of that.

For the record, I think jihadist terrorism is very real. If some jihadis decide to use bitcoin or some other crypto to fund their activities, I hope they lose their private keys. And then set themselves on fire.

I guess Canada counts as NSA allied, unfortunately. I always use Tor and encrypt whenever I have someone's key.

To me it's like using a condom. If you don't use it, don't be surprised when you find yourself with some problems.

It's also like using a condom in the sense that since most people don't use Tor/encrypt/etc., the police state disease continues to spread. It's not just about protecting yourself. It's about whether you're part of stopping the spread or helping it spread.

A little context here: France doesn't have freedom of speech in the same sense as the U. S. They have laws against "hate speech". In fact, the people at Charlie Hebdo were taken to court in 2007 over their drawings. They weren't convicted. I don't know if Dieudonne will be convicted of anything.

It should be pointed out though, in very clear terms, that Dieudonne is a Jew-hating Nazi. In the U. S. it's not illegal to be a Jew-hating Nazi, but in France it's at least of questionable legality. (Here in Canada it's closer to France than the U.S. with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.) Maybe if Dieudonne is tried it'll help clarify whether or not being a Jew-hating Nazi is legal in France.

I personally am a free speech absolutist, so I think Dieudonne should be free to spread his Jew-hatred and I should be free to point out that he's a Jew-hater. It's better for things to be out in the open and to have the cards on the table.

People may think I'm trolling, or joking, or being needlessly provacative by calling Dieudonne a Jew-hating Nazi, but I'm not. Go read about him.  Since it's essentially illegal to do a Nazi salute, he invented an inverted Nazi salute ("Quenelle") that he could get away with. Jew-hatred never really went away in Europe, it just went underground with Europeans. Then they imported many North Africans for whom Jew-hatred never even had to go underground. This allows the Europeans to outsource their Jew-hatred. Sad. Clever, but sad. It's not surprising that a Jew-hating Nazi like Dieudonne would have such a large following and so many supporters. And that swastikas a regularly painted on Jewish graves in Europe. And that every once in a while a Jew-hater goes on a Jew-killing spree. And people pretend to be sad briefly, and then ignore it.

This was all an aside from the main point of this thread, which was, of course that Pope Francis has insulted a freedom that is as dear to me as my mother, so if I ever meet him it's good to know he's OK with me punching him in the face. Or shooting him in the head Charlie Hebdo style. I'm not sure if Pope Francis was talking about face-punching or head-shooting. Either way.

Bitcoin was Plan B.

Plan C? Clams.

I think this thread should be moved to "Bicoin Discussion."

Thanks for the responses. It is now clear that I have no ability to communicate whatsoever.

I don't want to launch another altcoin. And I'm not trying to "fix" bitcoin. I just wanted a fork so that people who are pro-POS can go there and stop creating a new thread every week saying "Why can't bitcoin be POS?" As for not making it POS, obviously if it's not POS then it doesn't accomplish that goal.

I looked for bitcoin plus (xbc). Thanks for pointing it out. I had no idea about it. But that wasn't a fork of the bitcoin block chain. If it were, I would have coins in their block chain and would be able to sell them now.

I guess the purpose behind people starting "Why can't bitcoin be POS?" threads every week really has nothing to do with the poster wanting bitcoin to be POS. Otherwise they'd be doing what this thread suggests. It would be easy to do.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to do something more productive: drink myself into a stuper and yell at brick walls in broken French. FFS.

The only PoS coin I have a few of are clams. I didn't buy them; I got them in the initial distribution last May. Interestingly, most people who got them in the initial distribution haven't bothered to sell them for bitcoins. If someone has clams and isn't selling them for bitcoins, that seems equivalent to buying clams (in the sense of opportunity cost).

Oh good. Looks like PoS wins and we don't have to redo this thread next week. Excellent.

Give me a plan on how to do this instead and I'll consider it. My impression is that I would have to get new testnet-related code into the code for the main bitcoin client. I could write the code and create a pull request (I guess), but I see no reason why it would be accepted.

I'm proposing to really fork bitcoin to create a bitcoinPOS.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=906176

The reason? Annoyance.

I look forward to next week's thread on POS vs. POW in which most of the same people write most of the same things.

TLDR: There are too many POW vs. POS threads, so let's fork bitcoin to annoy both sides of the debate.

There have been a lot of POW vs. POS threads. Here is a recent one:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=905385.0

I suggested there that someone should just choose a block time in the near future and modify the current bitcoin code to start using POS at that point. The effect would be to (purposefully) fork the bitcoin block chain into a POW chain and a POS chain. Everyone who has bitcoins at that block will have bitcoins in both chains. (Hopefully everyone reading this knows that if they "have" bitcoins on an exchange they don't "have" those bitcoins at all.)

To be honest, I want this to be done because I'm annoyed. I'd like for every repetitive POW vs. POS thread in the future to have someone come in and say: "There's already a version of bitcoin that is POS, go use it."

I'm POW vs. POS agnostic so I'd like this little project to be equally annoying to both sides. I suspect most people on both sides have chosen their side because that's where there investment lies (bitcoin for POW, some existing altcoin for POS).  Neither of these people will be happy about a bitcoin-POS fork. I expect it to be ignored by almost everyone.

Or we can pitch it positively and say it's an experiment. But I'm not going to hide that my main motivation is annoyance.

I think this should be easy to pull off. Here's what I think would need to be done. If I've forgotten something or someone knows details, please let me know. This annoying project is also a good way to learn about the bitcoin source code.

Step 1: Take a copy of the current bitcoin code, presumably the new v0.10.0rc1.

Step 2: Decide on a block time for the fork. I'll suggest a block time that would cause the fork on January 3, 2015. That's a week from today and the 6th anniversary of the genesis block. Block 337200 should occur on that day.

Step 3: Get rid of any hard coded peers in the code and replace them with peers we set up.

Step 4: I suppose we should change the default port number and introductory handshake with peers so that we connect with each other instead of the current bitcoin-POW peers. If we don't do this, bitcoin-POW will still end up disconnecting from us (presumably) because we'll be delivering bad blocks after block 337200.

Step 5: Change the block version number from 2 to 3 and only accept blocks with version number 3 after block 337200.

Step 6: Find where blocks are checked for POW and, if the block is version number 3, check for POS instead. I've looked at some POS altcoins and it seems they have a fake coinbase tx first in the block and the second tx is the coinstake. The coinstake tx is the one that would get the reward and fees. The reward schedule would remain the same: currently 25 bitcoins and halving at the same blocks as bitcoinPOW. Oh, obviously the staking difficulty would need to be reset to someone reasonable for POS starting at block 337200. The code for checking POS could be copied from an existing C++ POS altcoin.

We could run our current bitcoin clients up to 337200. Then copy or move the .bitcoin directory to .bitcoinpos or something. Then start up the modified client. Then we have bitcoins on two block chains (one POW and one POS) and we can respond to annoying repetitive threads with information about an annoying fork that both sides would rather ignore.

I think you're more skeptical of PoS than I am, but I agree with what you're saying here.

Since you're sure you'll sell the forked coins, I'm curious: have you sold your clams? I get the feeling most people (including me until recently) don't realize they had clams. When I found mine, I sold some and kept some.

Then you and I were talking about two different ideas.

Someone should just fork bitcoinPOS from bitcoin, including forking the block chain. Both have the same starting base and then everytime someone starts another "Why doesn't bitcoin use POS?" thread someone else can respond: there's already a version that does, and you already have bitcoins there.

I really might do this, just out of annoyance with the same thread being posted over and over and over. I don't have a strong opinion on POW vs. POS. It's more that I'm annoyed that people don't just reply to the hundreds of threads on this that already exist rather than start a new one.

I suspect most bitcoiners would just ignore the bitcoin-POS fork and I doubt there would be much demand to buy the coins on the fork, at least initially (effectively making the market cap small). This would have the side effect of ensuring the available coins cannot be concentrated in a few hands. 12 million or so of the coins would just sit unmoved like Satoshi's 1 million or so do in bitcoin-POW. I'm curious what would happen in the long term.

I guess we'll never know though, because writing code like

if block >= 338000 then
   checkStake...
else
   ....

where the code for checkStake is ported from some current PoS coin would take a really long time. I guess I could do it, but first I'd need an IPO to raise...1 million dollars. 

I wrote some python code to simulate what might happen with different coinage possibilities.

https://privatepaste.com/ae9dfdbb6c

It starts with 69917 txs staking, 75% of which are "JD" and are distributed with values based on the stats published by dooglus a couple of days ago. The remaining 25% are "Not JD" and have a similar distribution of value. It starts assuming the block count is 69917 and every tx is marked with which block it appeared, chosen at random.

The code is slow. I ran it with 5 different coin age algorithms for 1500 "ticks" of a clock. This takes about 5 minutes but it corresponds to what would be a few hours of really staking. I'll give the results below, but they really should be run for much longer to get more reliable numbers. So far it doesn't seem like there is any difference between the algorithms. In every case JD stakes about 80% and there in about 4% of cases Not JD could have staked but got orphaned.

Each coinage function assumes coins mature after 510 blocks. After that the age is either (1) constant [like clams is now], (2) depends on the log of age (i.e., how many blocks old it is), (3) depends on the square root of the age, (4) depends linearly on the age, (5) depends on the square of the age.

(1) Constant, like now:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_const_mature510)

Total blocks: 270
JD would stake: 218 -- 80.7407407407%
Not JD would stake: 52 -- 19.2592592593%
Not JD would get orphaned: 13 -- 4.81481481481%

(2) Log age:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_log_mature510)

Total blocks: 368
JD would stake: 295 -- 80.1630434783%
Not JD would stake: 73 -- 19.8369565217%
Not JD would get orphaned: 13 -- 3.53260869565%

(3) Square root of age:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_sqrt_mature510)

Total blocks: 389
JD would stake: 310 -- 79.6915167095%
Not JD would stake: 79 -- 20.3084832905%
Not JD would get orphaned: 13 -- 3.34190231362%

(4) Linear:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_linear_mature510)

Total blocks: 732
JD would stake: 594 -- 81.1475409836%
Not JD would stake: 138 -- 18.8524590164%
Not JD would get orphaned: 31 -- 4.2349726776%

(5) Square of age:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_square_mature510)

Total blocks: 779
JD would stake: 633 -- 81.2580231065%
Not JD would stake: 146 -- 18.7419768935%
Not JD would get orphaned: 33 -- 4.23620025674%

If someone wants, I'll run one or two of these (or some other coinage algorithm) overnight to get better numbers.

Do you mean there is a planned Nxt asset which will be initially distributed using a snapshort of the bitcoin block chain? Clams did something like that. It's one of the few altcoins I've looked at, simply because it turned out I had some and they are now worth a few mbits each. I'm sure if a Nxt asset does something similar, I'll look into it.

Hasn't this topic been rehashed enough?

Bitcoin is currently roughly at block 336000. Someone could easily make a fork of the bitcoin code that says, e.g., starting at block 338000 (in roughly in 2 weeks) this fork is proof of stake. So it starts with the same blockchain as bitcoin. Same reward system (currently 25 bitcoin reward per block) and same limit (21 million). Call the fork bitstake or something. Or, hell, keep calling it bitcoin and if you are pro-PoS then refer to the original bitcoin as "bitwork." Then see what happens.

Just do it. Then see. It seems like doing it is less work than discussing the topic 100 times.