No idea if it's "better than bitcoind", actually it'd be quite presumptuous to say so.

But usage of JPA is already an interesting point... Different databases could be plugged. Databases that support clustering or partitioning could be used.
"Fully normalized schema" doesn't always go well with high performance though...

I haven't checked the code or anything, but if it's for real, wouldn't this be the first alternative full node implementation of bitcoin?

If anything, it's an improvement in 'diversification'. And I'm glad it uses technologies I'm familiar with.
I wonder how the author plans to keep up with all the development done in bitcoind though... they have many competent people improving the code and adding functionality. Just to keep up would be an enormous effort. But anyway, writing such a thing was certainly an enormous effort already!

By the way, OP, why not reuse BitcoinJ code if it fits?

A trespasser is an "ethical subject", somebody capable of taking rational actions, thus somebody with rights, and by extension, somebody that must respect other people's rights and should be deemed responsible if s/he doesn't. A disease is not a responsible, rational being.

Let's put it in another way: imagine you have a restaurant, and without noticing it you serve rotten food to a client. The client gets sick. I consider you to be responsible. You can't blame it on the bacteria that "invaded" the food.


Not that "immediately", of course. Even if something is considered to be a violation of the NAP, there are several justice principles, like proportional punishment, presumption of innocence etc. These principles would render such scenario quite rare. For less dangerous diseases, nobody would bother searching a "guilty" transmitter, because even if you do find it, any applicable punishment would likely not pay for the trouble. And even for serious diseases, you'd need to prove that it was person X specifically that passed it to you.
That's why I don't think that, in a free society, people would manage dangerous transmittable diseases this way. It would likely be something closer to what Robert Murphy describes in the article I linked above: people using their discrimination rights to block sick people from their properties.

I believe you can argue that she was violating people's rights. You're responsible for your properties. If your dog escapes and hurt the neighbor's son, you're responsible. If your car loses its breaks all of the sudden, while parked, and end up running over some one, you're still responsible, even if you were not driving it. If your factory or nuclear plant leaks pollution and hurt people living nearby, you're responsible. And so on.

Mary was responsible for her body. Her body was the transporting a lethal disease. She could be deemed responsible.

I know a real case of a disgusting man who knew he had AIDS, and still would convince his sexual partners to drop the condom, obviously lying about his health situation. He managed to contaminate multiple women on the course of the years, on purpose. I mean, he wanted to infect the highest number of women possible. I consider this man is an intentional murderer - a serial killer if you will. And yet, there's no law or any recourse his victims could use to punish him.

All that said, I find the scenario presented by Murphy in his article more reasonable than a scenario in which victims would prosecute those who transmitted them the disease. For a start, it's hard to determine who gave you the disease. But yeah, if this second approach start being applied, insurances would probably cover your legal costs if you infect people. In such cases, these insurances would have an interest in isolating you from society once you get a transmittable disease, in order to reduce their expanses. Such quarantine could be foresee in your contract with the insurer, making it no longer coercive. There you have it, another potential solution to the problem. Both solutions may coexist.

And thank you for the vocabulary correction!

This topic has already been discussed by renowned authors, like Robert Murphy: https://mises.org/daily/2635


Great point. If you require previous knowledge of every possible outcome of a particular move, you'll never move at all.
It's a known fact - thanks to sound economic theory - that free markets are superior to coercive monopolies.

Come on. That's irrelevant. Bitcion URIs and QR codes already make a good job on that front.

A much greater blocker for wider adoption is the difficulty to protect a private key. The "public" simply can't do it right - even tech savvy people have issues! They will end up being robbed if they start using bitcoin.
While a serious solution to this problem (= dedicated devices) is not cheaply available, Bitcoin is not ready to the general public. eWallets with 2-factor authentication might be considered a partial solution. They may protect you, but they add counter-party risk.

I don't have anything in GLBSE to give up for.


Yes, you should not be afraid of his ridiculous blackmail. And you're wrong about "nothing moving". He'll have to release the data sooner or later.


Instead of doing nothing, maybe it's you (and others) who should be threatening him instead of letting his ridiculous threats frighten you to the point of talking about "compromising" already? You shouldn't be compromising anything. He owes you, period.

A bit off-topic, but this attempt of blackmail from Nefario following his own mistake reminds me of that story about the bank who cashed-in an obviously false check: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/93a47a62-daf0-11e1-8074-00144feab49a.html#axzz2AHzRhGU0

Nefario behaved the same way the bank did. Instead of acknowledging the error and politely asking for people's kindness, he just threatened them right away.

He can't afford the risk of being sued.
And btw, it seems you fell quite easily to his ridiculous and outrageous blackmail. Have some self-respect!


But, wasn't it you who said that asset issuers are already breaking the law for the simple fact of issuing stocks in an exchange which is not friend of the king?
Sorry if I'm mistaken but in my memory you had said that.
If asset issuers are also breaking the law, it wouldn't be wise of them to sue Nefario.

Dishonesty and corruption make much more noise and "news" than honesty and integrity, despite being minoritary.

Do they sell gold too?
If buying and selling gold doesn't require this license, I fail to understand why buying and selling bitcoins would.

<off-topic>

IANAL, but I used to follow the discussions on seasteading. There's no natural island that's not claimed by a state, so there's no "international island"*. A vessel in international waters is supposed to carry a flag of a sovereign state, in which case it should follow the laws of this state. A vessel not carrying a recognized flag may be treated as a pirate vessel.

The bottom line is that, while you may manage to acquire a lot of freedom by "settling" in international waters, potentially more freedom than anywhere else in land, you also may just be attacked if you provoke large governments enough. I can't tell you if "anonymous banking" is provocative enough, but it's among the things the seasteading institute advises not to attempt (see page 15 of this document).

* Antarctica might be an exception. But states do have a sort of agreement concerning Antarctica. I don't think you could just build your new state there. And even if you could... I don't think you'd find many people willing to join you.
</off-topic>

They've said it explicitly once. Search for "Clearcoin". They guy had a successful business, managed to protect himself from most frauds, but still got shut down by Paypal. He was a verified user and all. The reason was because Paypal did not authorize bitcoin exchange.

I suppose UXTO means unspent transaction outputs (shouldn't be UTXO?).
That's a good argument.

I wonder how miners would charge for transactions then. If they charge per kilobyte, then merchants still have some interest in sending less transactions. But if it's not the size that matters to miners, they'll probably charge some other way...

I have no idea, but couldn't it just be that the machine you're using is not handling the load?
I mean, bitcoin-qt does a lot of disk IO during blockchain synchronization. Maybe your OS ends up doing lots of swap too and it stops accepting new TCP connections because it is not managing to handle it? I don't know, just trying to guess.
Maybe the best way to test would be using a SDD. Or with the blockchain in a different disk than the rest of your system, including swap.

I think he means that's misleading because it only consider the download side of it. If you're a full node you're also expected to be a relay, so you might have to upload what you download too.

It's hard to estimate how much you'll need to upload since you don't know how many of your peers will receive the data before you're ready to send them. Assuming only pool operators are full nodes and they're all interconnected, then you'll only have to upload transactions when the sender is directly connected to you and not to other full nodes. In this case you'd upload it as many times as you have full node peers. If neither the sender nor the receiver is connected to you (I'm assuming every thin client is using bloom filters), you may not need to relay the transaction at all.

But honestly, if nothing is done to create monetary incentives to relays, I believe those Microsoft researchers might be right and eventually full nodes will not relay transaction between themselves. They have no interest, actually they have a negative interest in doing so. In such scenario (which is not that bad btw), thin clients would better attempt to connect to every full node they manage to find.
Assuming this is the actual scenario, then perhaps we can estimate the total upload a full node would have to handle to be equivalent to the number of transactions times the average rate of false positives thin clients request. Say, if everybody requests 99 false positives for each relevant transaction, then a full node would likely upload 100 times what it downloads. But we should also consider that thin clients have an interest in dispersing their bloom filters in ways that no full node has the entire set. That would reduce the tps rate accordingly.

It's indeed very cool. But I don't know how step 2 actually works. I suppose I'll have to read that 17 pages scientific paper on Secure Multi-party Sorting linked there..... 


No. The transaction is already built with the correct outputs before you sign. You verify that your output is there.

I didn't know about the pull request. It's a way of doing it, of course. But looks more like a "hack" than a clean solution to me. It generates twice as much transactions in the chain than what's necessary, and the merchant will end up spending more in fees.

Is it really that bad? I mean, do you really want to make every price component explicit? Why just the transaction costs in particular, and not every other?

The problem is not aggregating price components and only displaying the total, the problem is not being allowed to discriminate by means of payment (setting different prices).

In the particular case of bitcoin, explicit transaction fees imply the user not only has to see a tiny price component s/he not necessarily cares about, but s/he also has to choose how much to pay. Even if you manage to abstract the mining process, people will still be in doubt about how much to give. Customers tend to be lazy. IMHO it's better to leave this task to the merchant.


Competition will sort things out. I don't think it's "all or nothing".


He can display the total if the fee is calculated within the price, not outside of it. Like sale taxes in general.
True, that would mean the merchant wouldn't be able to know the exact amount he's going to receive before the transaction takes place. But as fees are supposed to be tiny this shouldn't be an issue. Parameters to specify a ceiling proportional to the transaction amount could also be available, solving this issue and at the same time forbidding an "evil customer" from arbitrarily creating a transaction in which the fee would be too large.

Parameters can be specified, instead of an absolute amount. Like amount per kilobyte.


I once was talking to a colleague about bitcoins, and once I mentioned "transaction fees", his reaction was an immediate "ah, it won't work then, everything else is "free"". I tried arguing that in reality CC aren't free, the fees are embedded, to which the response was an insistent "but it's free to me, I don't pay anything. Why do I have to pay transactions fees in this money of yours?". That led to a discussion about "transaction processors not being forced to process your transaction etc". Things started getting technical, even though I was trying to avoid it.
It's hard to explain the concept of "voluntary transaction fees". Maybe if you rename it to "tip" instead of "fee", but still.

And even in this forum you can find "bad reactions" to the concept of transaction fees. Look:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=111868.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=19528.0
I guess people just want to remain oblivious or not have to care about it even if they know the fact that they're paying. They just don't want to mind with it.


Why can't the merchant take this responsibility to himself, if he thinks it will make it's clients lives easier?

Oups! Thanks for the remark.


If it's really economically inefficient, the use of such feature will be spontaneously ruled out by market forces. In the end, nobody would use it.
But while the feature doesn't exist, you can't really claim that it's use would be inefficient. Reading the rest of your post I believe you're making your judgement by looking at what happens on the current scenario of state intervention in the fiat word.


They definitely care, and if they could set different prices for different means of payment, they likely would. The problem here is that laws typically forbid it. The nice thing with Bitcoins is that it's not only a means of payment, but a currency too, so the price will necessarily be nominally different. Merchants can then embed the discount with no problems. In the worst case, it can be disguised in the conversion rate.


Exactly, and IMHO asking for an amount + fee and then explaining that this fee will go to the p2p node who manages to process the customer's transaction and blablablabla is not convenient at all to the average Joe. People will not use bitcoin if they have to understand how it works "inside" before using it. Asking them whether they want to add a fee or not, and of how much, will automatically trigger questions of "Why? What's the purpose of this fee? Miners what? Geez, this is too complicated, get me my credit card please".


But customers will be paying the costs.

Understand that a merchant may use this feature in order to make his customer's lives easier while still setting different prices, depending on the means of payment used.


This has nothing to do with the proposal. This is only another bad consequence of state regulations, specifically, those which forbid different prices for different means of payment.


What's the problem in the merchant adding a fee? Currently, the only way they can do it is by creating an extra transaction, generating unnecessary load to the blockchain. With this proposal, they'd be "adding" the fee without creating any extra transaction. I really don't see what's bad in it, since it's optional after all. Why only the sender "has" to pay for the transaction costs, why can't the receiver take such charge to himself?