I am trying to find a thread or forum with a currently active discussion of sidechains. Is this thread the only one?
go a couple pages back you'll find hundreds in a row Thanks. Indeed, I found a couple of threads with more pertinent titles, but they seem to be dead, nothing like this one. Should this thread be split and moved to develpment perhaps? The SnR of bitcointalk.org is so low these days that the only hope of finding useful conversations is in large, long-running threads like this one. Spammers have completely taken over every other part of the forum. |
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Why did gold-backed notes appear in the first place? Was it not because of market demand for a more liquid, transactional medium of exchange? Of course this was playing into the hands of banks but gold was not rid of its medium of exchange function so much as people found its natural properties in that regard to be inconvenient and cumbersome.
I see the same thing happening now. Replace papernotes with sidechains and central bank for the Bitcoin protocol.
In certain ways Bitcoin will function very well as a medium of exchange but the nature of its protocol also results some shortcomings with respect to its utility functions and flexibility as an asset class. Gold's liquidity as a MoE was limited by the fact that it had (a not inconsiderable amount of ) mass. Bitcoin's liquidity as a MoE is limited, not by anything inherent to its capabilities, but due to the fact that its ability to process transactions is artificially constrained by a production quota. This is not sustainable. If that production quota is not removed, then Bitcoin will be replaced by another cryptocurrency that lacks such an artificial constraint. The idea that you can keep the production quota in place and the market will tolerate transacting on sidechains while paying expensive the expensive settlement fees needed to keep Bitcoin around as a unit of account is a economic pipe dream. If the Bitcoin's blockchain is forbidden from being used for transactions, then the market will replace both Bitcoin and any sidechains that depend on it for a less-restricted currency. |
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If I'm reading you correctly, then I agree. It's ludicrous to think you can separate a BTC unit from its blockchain and think it can maintain its value as "fuel" for other asset trading. The blockchain by itself cannot act as "backing" for those units. The best way to summarize what I am saying is: if we want Bitcoin to function as a store of value, then we have to use it as a medium of exchange. |
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i think Adam's goals are laudable, ie, wanting to expand the universe of assets traded for Bitcoin. The problem I've always seen with the "gold 2.0" viewpoint is that it relies on a bad understanding of history and a worse understanding of economics. Some people think that gold is an example of a free-market store of value that was not also a medium of exchange, but it's not true. During the era where gold was held as a reserve asset and people started exchanging gold-backed notes instead of the gold itself, the sole reason that arrangement worked is because central banks hoarded gold, and their activities were subsidized by the taxing capability of the state. The idea that it's possible to separate a store of value from its medium of exchange function is an illusion that can only be propped up with a substantial expenditure of institutional violence. The last thing I want to see is Bitcoin turned into a system that can only survive under those conditions. If that's Blockstream's plan... |
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If nothing else for those who view bitcoin as gold2.0 (and I do myself) What exactly do you mean by "gold2.0" If by that you're talking about some kind of rarely-moving thing that acts as a store of value without being a medium of exchange, then what you want is impossible and trying to make it happen will destroy Bitcoin. |
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Mastercoin flushed.
Speaking of those guys, they are getting desperate now. They are changing the name of the project in an attempt to escape their past bad press. Several developers have quit in disgust. D.J. and JR. W. are sending out emails trying to recruit more projects like Maidsafe they can use to pull more MSC bagholders. I don't think it will do them much good in the end. |
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Has anybody noticed that Bitcoin actually has the potential to eliminate theft, like, for real?
Yes. Probably in more ways than you were anticipating: I am fascinated by Tim May's crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word "anarchy", in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It's a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations. |
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It would be nice to see a movement to take hardware back to its EE roots and stop using Turing machines where they aren't strictly necessary.
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Is there a way to provide your own self generated seed to Trezor, or do you have to use their code when plugged in? At least the code itself is auditable, but it's not clear to me if the code generates the HD seed itself, of if the code merely provides some amount of randomness which the hardware then uses to create a seed in an unknown and thus not auditable manner. If it's possible to restore a seed from a backup, then in principle it should be possible to create your own from scratch. |
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If you create a HD wallet that ONLY creates multisig transactions, would that prevent addresses from being reused?
What does multisig have to do with address reuse? |
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It seems like there is a market for a device which will generate 256 bits of entropy once and save it forever.
256 bits of entropy should be enough to last a lifetime (except if any of it gets compromised).
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Keep in mind that even a sane USB device (on which no firmware attack will survive a power cycle) is not safe vector per say. You could simply attack the data written on it rather than the firmware, like say, tamper the change address (Armory will warn you of that however).
I stress this point because in an adversary situation (when an attacker can run arbitrary code on your machine), it will be entirely easier to modify the data written to the USB key than attack its firmware. Granted, it may not yield as large a reward as the USB attack. Right now the hardest-to-close attack vector with offline Armory is using a compromised USB device to allow malware to cross the air gap. A piece of dedicated hardware that would securely transfer the necessary files from a possibly-malicious USB drive to a clean drive could help considerably. Until you get the audio cable method, or maybe animated QR codes, working the next best thing is using CDRs instead of USB drives. That is a bit slow and wasteful, however. |
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Can't be sanitized if bad usb is actively modifying the files on the fly
Presumably part of their solution would involve having hardware in which you could plug the dirty USB drive that would not have any modifiable firmware which BadUSB could infect. |
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This project does not yet protect against BadUSB style exploits, however their approach might be capable of being extended to doing so.
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Conformal isn't the only company developing btcd, by the way.
Monetas is using btcd exclusively on the server side of our products and we're adding a significant number of new features to btcwallet as part of that process.
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The question I suppose is how much communism is too much? 15%, 30%, clearly 100% is fatal, and anything more than 50% is probably also terminally toxic. How much cancer is terminal? Are just a few couple metastatic cells ok? |
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It is a killer combination and one that not all VCs into bitcoin understand yet I think.
It is a combination that is deeply threatening to people whose entire livelihood depends on individuals and businesses not having those capabilities. |
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