I mean a haircut across all the network balances. Transactions are unaffected. Demurrage, at least to me, implies a predictable rate of loss over time. The flat tax described in the "new musings" proposal is about only doing it when mining is insufficient to replace destroyed tx fees. To avoid tx confirmations from taking too long, the haircut happens and the difficulty gets lowered.

I haven't followed everything that has been posted, and I believe you sent me an early stage design doc awhile back, qxzn, and I think I was fairly dismissive of it because of this issue.

In addition to the ones already listed in the thread, I also proposed this:

New musings for a stable currency

Which suffers from the same flaw but does address it.

However, as Red has thoughtfully mentioned, Decrits is my stable currency design of choice because it eschews the problems of the bitcoin block chain. I am still refining Decrits and have come so close to bringing many new cryptocurrency ideas together into one package. Unit tests of the primary consensus-based reputation design will be my first real coding task, which will be out eventually. But if you are looking for a solution to a stable value currency, there is no design that I have seen that compares to Decrits. I don't think anyone else has put as much effort in. What can I say except that I'm a total geek for the idea.

I was speaking on a scale bigger than just the foundation. Bitcoin isn't just about making some people wealthy for the greater good, those wealthy people are also going to be in positions of power and will shape the future of the currency. Perhaps, THE WORLD! For better or worse, the players are already pretty well-set. Ergo you will continue to have no say. But I'm just a raving bitcoin hater.

Let me know how long you're standing around waiting.


I have followed the foundation *very little*, but I do recall that mtgox was the first or one of the first "top tier" donators for like 10kbtc yearly? Do you think a sane business would expect nothing in return? The political will of bitcoin has started and the major players are going to be the people who have lots of bitcoins. This is what you guys wanted, right?

Yeah well bitcoin's Stallman decided he wasn't up to the task, so again I ask, who do you think is going to do this? You can't just will a Richard Stallman to exist to help bitcoin.

The bitcoin universe is still pretty dang small bro, you should be happy that there are people who are willing to spend time and effort to help you make money. If all the business guys resign from the foundation, who will step up to spearhead such things? Programmers? I don't think so.

This is pretty vague. Is there something in particular you have a problem with?

You need to realize that there is some distance between regulation of fiat->BTC and vice versa and regulation of bitcoin itself. He is referring entirely to the former, not the latter. You would be silly to not want regulation of the exchanges and such, it is the only real way to bring legitimacy.

:shrug: The dips would require more investigation, but I see that about 90% of those coins were mined within a hashrate factor of 2-3. The first chunk appears to be mined at around 5-6Mh/s, then the rest is 2-3Mh/s, save the dips. Additionally, variance is a b*tch sometimes.

I'm not sure how you conclude that it was unlikely that only one person was mining. There are two dips that look as if Satoshi's power was cut off due to the massive amount of electricity he used mining. Or perhaps he contemplated the failure of his plot for world domination and had two periods of despondency.

Before the teeth sink in--I am joking.

Do you have solid proof that this is the case? That nothing was tweaked to improve the speed of CPU generation? No one should be in the habit of taking someone's word for it.

Over what range would you feel comfortable assessing the hashing power of the network? 100 blocks? 1,000? From blocks 1-1,000, there was a duration of 10 days, 3 hours, 40 minutes, and 18 seconds. 14,620 minutes. That's 14.62 minutes per block, or an equivalent of 4-5Mh/s.

You know what, forget it. Sergio derailed this thread from the start with the sensationalist headline and a poorly spoken OP. The pseudonymity of bitcoin allows you guys to counter virtually everything in regards to how much limited cryptocurrency is in the hands of a very small group of people and encourage everyone to rush headlong into this wonderful new system.


Again with the sleight of words. He did not ever argue 7.5Mh/s on a single desktop. It is not unfathomable for the person or group that is satoshi to have multiple and likely high-end machines. Plus it would make sense to have several locations operating for better network boostrapping. This is common sense. If bitcoin was mined at a rate of approximately 4 contemporary PCs, occam's razor would suggest that satoshi was running it mostly by himself, unless you want to argue that the creator may just well have abandoned mining.

The distinction here is you are trying encourage the thinking of perhaps 40-50 PCs mining, oh so decentralized, when the reality was more likely 4-5 PCs. Hard to prove though! Especially with your 47kh/s anecdote.

No, you're making up reasons for why they are not reliable because they do not facilitate your argument.


I have a tendency to be facetious in the face of excessively poor arguments.


That was not Sergio's claim, his claim was that Satoshi mined the majority of the bitcoins from blocks 1 to 36k. He did make a big mistake in misunderstanding the difficulty though. It does not, however, discredit some of the other arguments made that I've been making since 2011.


And you've spent a lot of time arguing that CPUs were so unbelievably slow "back in the day", even using anecdotal arguments that are likely unprovable to lend weight to your claims.

But we know this propaganda works well, don't we?

your awful post

4 posts later

You are drawing what you're saying from the time differential between blocks 0, a block that comes with the software, and block 1, the first block to presumably be mined either in anticipation of immediate release, or just after release. From block 1 on, there is hashing power to maintain a near 50btc/10min, yet you continue to argue about the haziest of hazy possibilities other than occam's razor. And more technical gobbledygook "moved around and restructured while testing or in preparation". Maybe people's brain will fall asleep while reading that and assume that you're making sense.


PS - the announcement and the first blocks mined "in the wild" were on the 9th, not the 11th of January. But of course that ever devious satoshi cooked up a plan to make it look like he had enough hashing power for a difficulty of 1 on his own, and then to hide his tracks and make people not realize this, he manipulated the timestamps to make it look exactly like he had what he was trying to hide. BRILLIANT!


It sure does bring the total hashing power of the network well within one person or a small group for the first 30k+ blocks, though.

  I didn't omit it the first time in the post you didn't reply to. Let's go over your propaganda post in a little more detail, because there are quite a few subtleties.


What are the pre-public blocks? For what reason should we question the timestamps? If we look at just 1-10, the timestamps are minutes apart. Would Satoshi purposely fudge the clock just to make it look like he had more hashing power? Is that what you're suggesting?


That's all we know for sure? We don't know that the next blocks were all minutes apart and there was hashing power at the very dawn of the network to maintain something close to 50BTC/10min? And your argument for completely ignoring this is "the timestamps may not be accurate"?


Rounding that down clearly shows that Satoshi was not mining from the time he created the genesis block to the approximate time he released the software to the public. I am not sure how the timestamps align between the block chain and the message board, that might be something worth investigating. If processors were so slow, as you claim, then some 30-40 processors (estimating 100kh/s) were connected and mining at the dawn of bitcoin (block one). From a message board post that had responses from about 4 people? And this pace went on relatively uninterrupted for 30k+ blocks?


What does this even mean? Are you conceding that maybe he did have most of the power, but he was only borrowing it? As if this somehow makes the problem go away?


Your post was horrific, and everyone should feel dumber for reading it. There was not one cogent sentence. Just a bunch of buzz-word ramblings trying to sound like you know what you're talking about for the newbie-folk who will just eat it up as gospel.

edit: and I know that you are damn well smarter than that post, which led me to the conclusion of you being outwardly deceptive

Your argument for me being wrong does not follow.


gmaxwell, a respected and very highly knowledgeable member of the bitcoin community, just made the argument for Satoshi's initial hashing power being in the order of 14kh/s because of the length of time between blocks 0 and 1. As if he created the genesis block then immediately started mining, waited until he had the first block 6 days later, and then released it and immediately there was enough hashpower to mine the next 9 blocks very close to 10min/block. That is one dopey argument.

I'm sorry, that was a brain-dead mistake. It has been awhile since I've bothered discussing the satoshi drama. But the point remains that he indeed was anonymous and clearly spent lots of time and attention to detail in everything he did, so to somehow conclude after knowing this that he was careless when it came to his bitcoins is an asinine assumption. It doesn't matter what the exact amount is, whatever satoshi controls exists and is significant unless you want to put your head in the sand. There are other players like mtgox and slush and pirate and knight that may have as many or more. It is as easy to imagine 10-15% of all the bitcoins to ever be mined being in the hands of half a dozen people as it is to imagine that a vast portion of early coins have been lost. Just because an argument can be made for the latter does not mean that the former is not a distinct and realistic possibility.

The argument will continuously boil down to "you can't prove it, pseudononymous lol", with terrible evidence from both sides. However...


While Sergio has had a couple bad arguments in this thread, if this is true--I can't verify it because blockchain.info does not display the extra nonce and I don't see a raw copy link anymore--this would certainly have strong implications that satoshi indeed had the resources to mine 50BTC/~13min throughout the difficulty 1 period. 70 minutes passed between blocks 1-10. lol @ 14kh/s between blocks 0 and 1, that's obviously satoshi trying his hardest to mine for a week rather than him waiting for public release before mining.

I don't think anyone would have misgivings about Satoshi becoming fairly wealthy because of bitcoin. However, the type of wealth that satoshi is likely to possess is more than just "fairly wealthy" if bitcoin were to supplant a significant amount of the world's wealth store. He would be put right in the place of the bankers on Wall Street. Massive amounts of control over the liquidity of the currency. Able to bend political will to suit his own interests. No one can say for sure what those interests are or how this will play out. But to pretend this is only about jealousy that somebody got rich is a child's game. For the well-respected members of this forum to consistently reply in carefully crafted answers refined over time to downplay the significance of this is unsurprising due to the fact that they are also likely to benefit significantly if this becomes the case, regardless of what they say.




Bitcoin was never once publicly discussed prior to its release.* You can be damn sure he knew quite well how this could play out and that every coin he ever mined is absolutely secure. We're talking about genius here, but it is so easy argue that he was so smart up until it came to keeping track of his money.  

* This is wrong, it was discussed several months prior, quite late in the process of designing an entirely new currency.

People calling bitcoin a ponzi scheme has been the greatest boon for the bitcoin hype tribe. It's so easily defeated by showing that bitcoin does not fit the textbook definition of a ponzi scheme, and that makes it possible to completely sidestep the concern that the history books may call this a "bitcoin scheme".

Why don't we have to worry? Because you think you know what Satoshi is going to do? Sorry, that should not fly for anyone looking to invest in bitcoins.