The impetus is to allow Bitcoin o be used by businesses and corporations, which often require TWO signatures on a check to send money. Currently you would have to assign a single person ALL the powers to spend money. That is a huge security risk for businesses. The "use a phone app to validate your sending coins" is just another bonus.
You also missed the point of P2Pool. It is exactly like a pool, in that you pool your mining power with everyone else, but it's better than a pool in that you pay no fees, you KEEP the transaction fees that pools usually keep, you get to configure your own miner however you wish and vote on whatever changes you want, you run your miner and pool software on your own computer, so don't have to worry about the pool going down for whatever reason, and being completely distributed, P2Pool can not be DDOSed. It's the best choice for capitalism, but is still not well known because it's so new and obscure. The "donations" are there to get people to bother to try it out, since part of a pool's appeal is total hashing rate: the higher the pool hash rate, the lower the variance. P2Pool had a fairly low has rate, thus high variance (there are still days when you won't find a block). Once more people join, the variance will go away, donation incentives won't be needed, and it'll be the superior option.

*cough* um... 


Stability for new features = bad. Stability for underlying protocol = good. How much has SMTP, FTP, and even HTTP changed in the last 20 years? Sure the last one got a lot of new features, but overall, not much. We don't want actual money changing around too much, since stability = predictability.


Actually a closer analogy is like having the US president veto ALL new laws passed by an almost evenly divided congress. Nothing will pass, and no new changes will be made unless people REALLY REALLY REALLY want it. In this case, miners really don't care about change. They have their equipment set up in a certain way, and changes only mean extra work.


Why? a 3% mining fee is a 3% mining fee regardless of the protocol changes. Why would Tycho or any other miners care?


Hmm... that's true...

^ This. If this whole thing has proven one thing it's that Bitcoin is a pain in the ass to change in any way, and that's good. Stability is good.

There's no incentive for others to wait or switch. Why would they be waiting for Deepbit?

Anyone else find it strange that Gavin would put this up to a vote with maybe two weeks notice, where no vote is the same as a "no" vote? With apparently most miners not even knowing how to vote? And the excuse that "if you don't know how to modify your client, you shouldn't be voting anyway" just resulting in an inevitable conclusion of almost no votes for it at all?
Two proposals:
1) Scrap the deadline, put up instructions on how to four for BIP16, BIP17, or neither, in a simple to understand way (precompiled bitcoind exe's preconfigured for specific votes maybe?), and just let the voting continue. Eventually once more than 55% of the miners are voting for either BIP16 or BIP17, implement the winner. With enough time it will happen.
2) If miners, despite securing the network and being the gate keepers to any changes, "don't understand the code anyway, and shouldn't be voting," which I sort of agree with, since I don't understand this completely, and don't think these important decisions should be turned into a popularity contest (disclosure: I like Gavin, I really don't like Luke, but what kind of people they are should have no bearing on their coding skills, of which I am not well enough informed), then don't vote. Gavin can push out his client, Luke can push out his. People will vote with downloads, and the stubborn ones will have to switch eventually. It will be forky and messy, and people may lose mining revenue, but Bitcoin will survive, especially in at this still early stage. It will also be a good test of how well Bitcoin will handle necessary radical changes, and we all know those will have to come eventually.

From what I gathered, they come from your own wallet. Basically you now have a private key stored in your wallet that you use to sign and spend coins from your public key (your public key is your wallet address), and with this change you can set up a wallet address (public key) that will require two or more private key signatures for the transaction to execute, instead of one. Or something like that. This will be built into the Bitcoin protocol and you won't actually see it, but it will allow Bitcoin developers to write software that works like ubikey for your phone, escrow services that require third parties to control and release funds, and accounting software that requires multiple people to sign off on transactions for business security reasons.

Completely false. Pretty much everything is assembled in China, thus the "Made in China" labels, but most of the parts are made in other countries. The iPhone, for example, is "Made in China," but China only contributes about $6.50 to the overall cost of the phone by putting the parts together. The parts themselves are made in Japan, Germany, Korea, Vietnam, etc.

Edit: Found the article http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704828104576021142902413796.html

You can't really change the protocol anymore. Rather, it is possible, but any change that radical the miners will very likely vote down. You can augment the protocol with something running alongside it. Having P2Pool built into every miner and bitcoin client is a possibility.

Won't change anything about confirmations, as the overall network is still secured only by hashing power. From what I gathered, it will just make it easier to require more than one key to send out your money. Think MtGox's ubikey, but for your own home wallet.

Yeah, I know, but I would feel better having it running, even if I don't even have a Ghash to contribute Then again, I looked at Luke's github thing, and being a non-techie windows user, I think I'll have to abstain from voting. I don't know how to do any of that

Thanks. I know it's just a test vote. I just want to help make this graph look a bit better http://blockchain.info/P2SH

Any hints as to how to configure my P2Pool/cgminer to vote for this P2SH thing?

Actually, I like the idea of bringing back mining in clients, even if it's CPU. If all clients mined by default (including mobile ones), using very low intensity and priority, the electrical costs per person would be negligible, but it would help secure the network as a whole, plus someone once in a while would win a sort of bitcoin lottery just for participating in the system. It would also provide a tiny incentive for people to leave their nodes running, especially if it's promoted to the type of people who don't understand bitcoin and finances in general, and buy lottery tickets (same person really)

Sent. Glad I don't have to worry about it any more.

FYI, the wallet is now running in a secure Linux environment (was in an encrypted Windows folder before, though I run AVG and Malwarebytes, and haven't had a virus or trojan in my life ever). That wallet total is also now worth about $2,000USD (including funds I'm storing for those who asked). That's a lot of money. I sure hope someone asks me to do something with it soon... 

As mentioned in the other topic, Mt Gox or PayPal or Dwolla are fundamentally different in that they are ONLY transaction facilitators between two other unrelated parties. They don't issue or keep the money, they only let two other people exchange it, holding USD/BTC briefly, and after the transaction is done, have no more obligations to those two people.

From what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, your idea would result in an entity that itself creates the BTC, holds it until a buyer comes along, sells it directly to the buyer for USD, and then maintains a long term obligation to that buyer by promising to repurchase their BTC with the same USD they sold for. Am I correct? And can you see the difference? I have to trust Mt Gox, PayPal, and Dwolla for a day or two at most. I have to trust your issuer for as long as I hold your money.

Most (vast majority) of the people don't keep their money in MtGox. If MtGox were to run off with the funds, at most they would have a few $100k to play with. They have more of an incentive to hold as little as possible (reduces their liability), and to keep making money off trades, though even that isn't guaranteed to be a viable long term income.
In your system, who is checking the physical fiat reserves? Why should we trust that they are honest and not working with vault holders to skim off the top? And why would they care about reputation of they have the option to run of with ALL the Fiat, as opposed to just a fraction of it?



As I said, I seriously doubt a lot of people are holding their money in MtGox. Especially after all the losses and scandals last summer. High volume just means two people exchanged money using their system, and likely withdrew it as soon as possible. It doesn't mean MtGox sold BTC themselves and are keeping the money, as would be in your scenario. The point is not how much, or who, but how much control is there by free individuals, and how much of our well being depends on having to trust someone else.


Ah, I think I see where you're going with this. You want to essentially create shares of stock equivalent to $21m or whatever, and sell it on the market with the promise to keep the share exchanging system secure, and the price pegged to $1 per share. But, again, corporations issue and sell shares. For the promise of giving profits and being secure, they ask that you give them lots of your own money, which they then use for whatever they want with the condition that the buyers of that stock will like what is they do. Again, how is your proposal different from also asking for money from people that you'll be free to do with as you please? If it's not, I guess your main issue would be trying to sell your idea so people can give you their money.

The reason people are saying it's not possible is not because of the 21million/billion/trillion figure, but because what you are proposing is exactly the same as gold-backed fiat. Except instead of backing fiat with gold, you are proposing backing fiat with another fiat. And instead of already owning the gold and issuing fiat notes against it, you want other people to give you their "gold" in exchange for as yet not established fiat. And to answer your earlier question, I can trust an open source, mathematically established system, and can more or less trust some guy who has a small amount of tokens from that system and who is willing to trade them for a bit of my money, but who otherwise has no control over what the system does. It's a bit harder to trust someone who has most, if not all, of the tokens in this system, and who has the power and incentive to manipulate the system to their advantage. With bitcoin I am trusting a distributed mathematical system no one can control. With your system, regardless of how much financial data is available, you are still exactly as trustworthy as a central fiat issuing entity, and there is still nothing to stop you from clearing out that vault and running away to another country.

Btw, question. Let's say this works, $21m worth gets issued to the public (sold for USD), and then the peg gets released. What happens to the $21m still sitting in the vaults? Is it profit for currency issuers that they are finally free to do with as they wish?

The difference is that gold is already worth something. A closer analogy would be you setting up a vault and filling it with worthless mud bricks, which you then try to sell off for a total of $21million, by promising to hold on to the money people give you, should they want it back, in exchange for those bricks. Considering you'll be the central mud brick issuing authority, it would be no different from trying to establish fiat currency. Even if you can prove that you are not inflating your mud brick supply, the issues remaining are how will you prevent counterfeiting (who will do the hash mining for you?), and who will buy the these worthless mud bricks from you in the first place, especially since you'll be the ultimate "early adopter." Personally, if someone created something for nothing, and tried to pawn it off on other people for $21m, my first instinct would be to call them a scammer.

Oh, another issue is that when bitcoin gets issued and exchanged for fiat, you have one person holding bitcoin, and one holding fiat, both free to spend their money however they want. In your case, the fiat backing your mud bricks is tied up in the vault, required to back the bricks should anyone want to exchange it back, and being used to support the brick's value. Should the fiat in your vault start to severely inflate, the drop in value will translate to the bricks as well.

The human mind is what came up with the precise mathematical calculations to calculate interest with all the possibilities. I'll grant you, the average person who doesn't understand money likely won't know the calculations, and the interest will seem confusing and scary to them, but really just means more people should take time to learn it. It's their money after all.


That's exactly what interest calculations tell in extremely precise detail: your set fee for every set period of time, based on how much you have borrowed, and how much of a risk you are to the person lending you the money (determined by interest rate). With some religions, the only difference seems to be that they charge you the interest all at once, and call it something else.