This here is the core of Bitcoin - the tx data structure:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#tx

Yes indeed what he says is entirely in line with what he has said before. That we should do a SOFT fork to see how ready the network is.

He is not even proposing a hard fork yet, only running a soft test on alternate software implementation of Core (still vanilla Bitcoin) if he can't convince core devs.

Even if he becomes frustrated enough to use Xt instead of Core, what he is saying is that there still will be NO hard fork until there is a super majority.

I don't think anyone serious in Bitcoin space would switch until there was a super majority.

Bitcoin-Xt readme/project description + code here:
https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt

Bitcoin is a revolution, revolutions are controversial.

OP understands that better than the people who talk about "financial evolution" and regulation like its some important and necessary thing.

OP is just betting on the wrong side, Bitcoin will crush all.

You have to remember that it is a temporary situation, once the block reward is halved a couple of times more mining should find a more natural very low cost equilibrium between security and low voluntary TX fees.

I've been testing something a while now sending 5460 satoshis frequently to/from the same address using 0.000015 as a fee and I usually got in in the FIRST block.

Maybe your wallet is not in synch and/or the transaction was never sent?

I had not thought of that in this context.

Well your proposed solution of having different TX types where one is flexible and the other is not or something similar seems good to me.

You're correct, TX malleability is only an issue if people use the TX hashes as Ids.

This is because a script saying 1=1 can be changed to saying 1=1=1 and it will still be correct (gross simplification), but the hash of the entire TX changes.

Obviously scripts cannot sign themselves because it would change the script.


"Fixing" malleability would also mean making the script system less flexible which I am against.

It has even been shown that very few of the losses of MtGox could be blamed on TX malleability - it was a total lie.

Technically it could be done rather simply:

1. Miners start to sign blocks before publishing them with an address holding a lot of coins.
2. The signatures are transmitted along with the blocks.
3. Full node clients add another layer to their block acceptance logic so that a high value signature is required in addition to difficulty.

However it would almost immediately result in a hard fork so its something everyone would need to agree on.

Even in the case of a massive 51% attack I don't think its the way forward, someone holding a lot of coin like say the NSA could go in and permanently control the blockchain under proof of stake.


A better system would be signed blocks where full nodes accept chains as normal - except if the miners they trust don't make a block for 1000 blocks. Signing would not be required, but optional.
Each modified node would only require 1 trusted signature out of 1000 blocks.

This would mean that everything would continue as normal unless someone started blocking transactions and miners in which case the modified nodes would hardfork and in my opinion continue to work as Bitcoin should.

"Proof of trust"

I guess you could buy oil futures now and cash out in 1-3 years for a 10-50% profit then repeat after the next crash.
Barring the futures market you use isn't a scam/doesn't crash and the next crash doesn't hit right as you have to cash out.

Personally I bought some shares in a windturbine coop kinda thing. Its not mega profitable at the moment though.

Being an investor is pretty hard

Well in a 20 year timeframe? Definitely.

Short term it can be complex, see these 3 phases: Price goes up -> Economy crashes -> Price goes down.
Is oil abundant in the third phase? Not really.

Now what recent crisis could have temporarily lowered prices? How about the massive embargo of Russia and the Ukraine conflict creating market uncertainty - and yet prices will be back up eventually.

Can you explain the blind signatures in detail? I mean I can name a bunch of cryptographic algorithms too, but it makes no sense unless I explain what I'm doing with it and when.

Some mathematical functions can be executed on encrypted data and when decrypting the result you will get the actual result. HOWEVER is ECDSA one such function?
If it is, how does this help you?

You say the participants submit to the server their outputs... right there; a bitcoin output is your address - so if that is what you submitted, the server will know exactly where each participant wants their money to go.
It won't matter WHERE it comes from to the FBI.

It won't matter if the other participants don't know where they sent their money (due to blind sigs) if the server knows. An attacker could set up and run a bunch of mixing servers and voila all coinjoins are unmasked.

This is why I suggest switching WHO is the mixing server from round to round.

The reason they can't cut production is that their entire state is a giant socialist "paradise" with a thousand princes. If they turn off the flow their entire state will implode in ISIS like instability.

They don't have ample to spare for politics anymore and their production has peaked years ago now. Soon (5-20 years) the entire country as we know it will be in trouble/disappear.

You can also look at satellite pictures from before ~2009 I think and after, they used up all their ground water and their crop production fell in a single year by 75%. Now mostly they import food.

Trust me you don't want to be a Saudi they have nothing but oil, no skills or education and the oil is running out.

Shale is a desperate attempt at getting more fossil fuels and leaves you with poisoned or foul tasting ground water - in a world where water is a scarcity.

The recession everyone is feeling right now is because mankind is currently getting the most fossil fuels it ever will. It's a recession because we are not constantly getting more cheap energy, but not an outright depression because we are still getting a lot.

Now, once we start sliding down the bell curve things will get nasty. It will be slow, you might not even notice unless you compare your life to 5 years ago, but it will come.

It won't just be prices and jobs either, I'm noticing that politics are getting more extreme in many countries. I think once resources grow scarce people start to favor fascism a lot more.

Around the last crash Greece had an all out neo nazi militia training themselves for a coup that the government shut down. And again: currently we have MORE fossil fuels than 20 years ago.

I'm really worried about the future sometimes.

I'm guessing Bitcoin will make the debt easily payable sometime after 2025... as all fiat starts disappearing.

I'm not sure about the technical aspects, I just have my doubts. I mean lets say it lasts 200 years with no maintenance before the rebar rusts and the concrete crumbles. That would be very good right?
Ok we build a seastead there so far so good.

Now imagine all of America or all of France disappearing and having to be rebuilt every 200 years. I'm guess that would be devastating economically speaking to our little seastead.

I'll hand you that 1 seastead is better than none if only as a testing ground.


Just remember that people had been building planes 500-1000 years before the Wright brothers, they didn't succeed or start anything because they were the first. They succeeded and the airplane industry was made because they had the newly invented gasoline engine. In other words they had "hyper-diamond".

Anyway I'll give you an idea of my own: Not all areas need the same carrying capacity/stiffness.
If you want large areas you can split them up:
1. Industry/residential: Heavy carrying platforms - like your rebar concrete designs.
2. Gardens, parks, markets and other low weight human accessible ares: Thick sheets of plastic. Due to low load almost no robustness or carrying ability is needed and plastic material creep/breakage will not be major issue. I would suggest multiple linked disc type platforms of this type.
3. Farming: Specialized plants or algae put on basically bubble wrap. Spool bubble wrap into ocean. Spool the other end back and harvest crops. Large area can be utilized easily from a small central heavy platform like this. You could even replace the bubble wrap with tangled seaweed to avoid the need for plastic. Infuse with nutrients in spooling area at night. Nutrients come from sea bottom via sand pump or residential trash. (Seaweed could be fed to cows)

I would also look into capsule hotel designs for the residential areas. It might make it much easier to afford for the poor.

Okay so I like some of the ideas and I hadn't thought of locating on top of existing cables. The rest I knew about or had thought about myself.

However it all falls apart with your platform solution - its basically just another housing project in an existing city/harbor/bay under existing laws.
Are prices even going to be radically lower? Probably not by much - even factoring in the high city real estate prices much will be eaten by the platform costs.

Another architecturally edgy building for the rich - with luck maybe middle class city folk, but not really much "homesteading" or "sea" in it.


Floating concrete at sea won't work, it will crumble very fast. I know this because it has been done before at D-day WWII; they floated over temporary giant hollow concrete blocks and used them as floating landing harbors.
Concrete is very strong... and very brittle, it can't flex in the sea and so it breaks and crumbles.

You also can't just link many platforms, the links would be under immense stress and would either break or need maintenance.

Maybe you could build a static platform at some low depth ocean location maybe even get lucky and find such a location overlapping with cables and international trade - you "only" need some 1 billion dollars + luck to get that going I think

For real seasteading to work you would need some kind of ultra strong and flexible rustfree material that is also very cheap to build your floating areas from. Sign me up when hyper-diamond is invented.

EDIT: And again after spending all those millions you end with a relatively small area even if it works.
If you spent a similar amount of money on a small army and a plot of land you could have a REAL nation regardless of what local authorities wanted - with cheap ground that doesn't need maintenance and area to do a range of activities.
No matter what though starting a nation from scratch costs at least a billion or two with luck I would guess.

I'm not saying you can't get on a boat, I'm saying it might be difficult to have what most people consider a normal life there and even if you can you'll probably end up paying more for it than otherwise needed.

If you have a solution to all those things I wouldn't mind hearing them or seeing links. If you just really really want to wish away the problems and daydream I'll leave you to it.

I used to be into seasteading. Let me tell you there are a million things you haven't thought of.

If you really want to do it then buy an island:
http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/alligator-caye-parcel
http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/coral-island2

It still won't work, but its cheaper than a boat for far more area and unlike a boat it will not need brutal amounts of maintenance.

Things you haven't thought of:
Maintenance - Boats rust, even glasfiber boats need to be taken up once a year and painted etc..
Cost - Land is pretty cheap even in urban areas compared to a boat. Large boats costs millions. Remote areas of land where you could do whatever can be gotten for very little.
Jobs - What will people do? Even if we assume that our liberal ideas would create a 100 times better economy its pretty hard building an economy with 20 people on a boat/remote island.
Supplies - Remote as you are almost everything will have to be flown or shipped out to you adding even more cost/making you need a second ship/plane.
Seasickness.
How to get to the doctor.
Entertainment in a small area.
All the politics - Anarchy hur hur is great and all, but who decides where the boat goes or what to invest in. What is the political framework for dealing with a guy raping his daughter or is that fine? I'm guess there's a thing or two there you haven't considered in your dreams of blue waters and escaping the state.
Guns you need guns for pirates.
Internet - You won't have it that far out, not fast anyway. Wifi bridges can shoot 20km if you're static at the coast, but it's something to consider.
Power - How do you make it? You can't afford something big and efficient/the boat can't hold it so you would have to use a diesel generator and solar panels and shop each month for expensive fuel.
Also solar panels break/degrade after 10-20 years and give relatively little power in the meantime.
Housing - Can you build a house? Plumbing? Wires? Insulation? AC?
Women - Even if you have one she will go mental on you after a month at sea, most women will anyway.

Trust me I wanted to do this myself.
Do what I do now: Use crypto to hide WITHIN the existing states. Why should I run from my own country? I will take it back.

(Nifty idea with the BTC to speak thing.)

To the death, to death and glory!

I love Bitcoin, even if it goes to 0$. Better to have hoped and lost than to have been a slave to the state all my life.

If I were to trade bitcoins I would just attach my bank account to my accounting document and gains/losses would be determined by what I put in the exchange and what I got out.

A - B = C

Things are only complicated if you make them so