That would require research into my own education over the past 30+ years.

This entire site is well written bunk.  Let me just address the first 20...

Based upon what assumptions?  Their links don't really say, the larger link is just more conjecture.  


Again, they produce no evidence for this statement, and it's provablely false.  Long distance IR measurements of Mars by NASA says that the surface of Mars has warmed over the past 30 years or so also.  Did we do that too?

Yes, the impact of climate change may be catastrophic, but very few scientists consider the effects of climate change on the economy.  It's simply not their field.  So the reaosn that there hav been very few benefits projected is actual economists consider predicting the effects of warming over  a century to be futile, so very little has been published on the matter at all.


To be precise, 97% of climate experts do not contest that humans are a cause of global warming.  That does not conclude that they all agree thathuman activities are the predominate cause.  Furthermore, the idea that a scientific consensus, even if true, represents reality is historically false.  This is just a short list of the crackpots who truned out to be correct, contrary to the scientific consensus of the age.

http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html

I won't contest this, but that data point isn't actually an argument for human caused global warming.


While it's true that the models were tweeked until they could accurately reproduce measurements we have seen in the  past, it's not true that those same models were able to predict the warming over the next several years, much less decades.  This is the great failing of the models, they simple arien't good enough

Yes, and they don't agree with each other.  Traditionally, the surface measurements are used in the computer models because there is simply more data than sats, but the surface monitors can be screwed with by changes in the immediate environment they reside, which is why they are the unreliable set to use.  Sat data does not, and has not, reported the same degree of warming, although they have reported some warming.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/

Says who?  Who has the expertise to say that animals cannot adapt over a century by migration?  And so what if they can't?  More species go extinct yearly than we have ever caused.


No contest here.

Sure, does not mean that climate change is human caused.


CO2 didn't initiate this trend either, since records show that the warming trend began well before the Industrial Age.


The vast majority of the climate papers in the 1950's predicted cooling, which wasn't a bad bet since even at the time the global average was over teh long term mean.

 And contradicted by many others.

The Little Ice Age, while not technically a true ice age, dropped the average temps by half a C in under that time frame.  Tens of thousands died of starvation directly, or due to complications of desiese related to malnourishment as a direct result of the fall in agricultural productivity during this time frame.


Sure, and so did Acid Rain when I was a younger man.  Didn't really pan out, did it?


But not over the past 10,000 years.  Again, roots have been found on islands north of Canada under several feet of permafrost.

Some scientists, others have lost their jobs.


No contest here.


Most being the oparative word.

 According to whom?  The movie "An inconvient truth" was so full of provablely false data points that a court ordered that it could not be shown to public school students because it might ingrain falsehoods into their education.

Only if humanity choses to do nothing.  I find this rather unlikely.  We already capture and move wolves for lesser reasons.  How difficult would it be for us to introduce species to the northern side of a mountain range?


That is an unsupportable assumption.  There is literally no evidence to suggest that any species cannot migrate fast enough to outpace global warming.


Again, you assume.  I shall again mention that tree roots have been found on islands north of the Canadian tundra under several feet of permafrost.  I have thousands of years of cliamte history to suggest that nature adapts quite effecively.  I doubt that you can find a single data point that says otherwise, unless you are going to claim that the islanders who lived on Easter Island to be part of nature.

All of those 'hacks' can be independently improved without affecting the bitcoin protocol, and the additional functions of an economy are intended to be seperate from the bitcoin protocol.  It's simply not necessary to include those things into the protocol.  Sure, hard drive tech is always improving, but techies have been trying to get the Internet to upgrade to IP6 for well over a decade, but that is not going to happen until the majority of the users have personaly evidence that IP4 broken.  The same is true with the bitcoin protocol, I don't want you screwing with a good thing & my opinion actually matters because you can't change anything without the consent of the majority of node owners.

I'm confused, so I going to ask this...

Which one of them are you talking too?  Or are you talking to both?

I wasn't referring to the migration of all species, I was referring to the migrations of human populations.  Once upon a time, the middle east was a cooler & wetter climate, and supported a much larger population than it does today.  It supports what it has today because of the ability to import food in trade for oil.  Without that, those populations will fade away in one manner or another.  The same is true for cities in the US such as Los Vegas or Reno.  The region cannot support the population that resides there, and without modern industry (with oil as a major industrial input) society would be unable to continue to move food grown in the plains states to those western cities.  For that matter, the plains states are plains because they were too dry to support natural tree growth, so even much of the water used there to grow crops wouldn't be possible without machines capable of drawing water from deep aquifiers and pumping liquid fertilizers hundreds of miles through pipelines.  Our greatest near term problem isn't climate change (particularly if it is actually caused by CO2) because our modern world runs on fuel with a diminishing return-on-energy investment.  Although there remains much oil in this world, the "low hanging fruit" of easily removed oil is almost depleted.  We depend upon ever more technically complex methods of extraction just to maintain the system as is.  By definition, that which is unsustainable will not continue indefinately.  When the (energy) costs of removing more oil out of the ground exceeds that which the oil can provide, no more will be removed and the great CO2 threat ceases to continue to be a threat.

I don't know when 'peak oil' really becomes a bigger threat, but I know that it must; eventually.  At least the climate change fanatics can rejoice that the resulting resource wars and population die-offs due to starvation will finally reduce the impact of humanity on the environment.

I, for one, do not deny that the climate is changing.  Nor do I deny that the trend is towards a warmer climate.  I won't even contest that human activity contributes in that general direction.  What I will deny, because I actually understand the sciences involved and how complex they are, is that we actually understand enough about the biosphere or the global climate to make the claims that some people will do.  I most certainly oppose the efforts to use the force of governments to compel people to alter their behavior under the claims that "the science is settled".  The science is not only not settled, the best & brightest openly admit that they don't really understand it all well enough to make a solid determination.  It's the politically minded hacks that compare climate change skeptics to holocaust deniers.  And even if the science were actually settled, there is very little evidence that we could actually slow that warming trend to any significant degree without killing off a large percentage of the population of the planet either by starvation or warfare.  

And all that before we even consider the possibility that a moderate rate of change (which is what we have actually been getting despite decades of climate change histeria, yes I'm old enough to remember the early 80's and the claims that Mexico and some of the Southernmost US states would actually be inhabitable by now) might actually be a net positive for humanity at large, even if it does prove to be a net burden on people who live in sub-tropical coastal regions.  There are massive tracts of arable land that could be opened up to productive agriculture and human settlement in the northern-most latitudes, predominately in Canada, Greenland & Russia.  See, there is one thing about global warming predictions that are not often talked about by those who warn against climate changes; and that is that the rising temp trends are not going to be evenly distributed across the latitudes.  Because of the way that greenhouse gases work (i.e. shortwave infrared light from the sun passes through mostly unattenuated to strike the Earth's surface, while longer wave IR tends to be 'refracted' back towards the Earth like shortwave radio waves are reflected by the E-level of the ionosphere, thus functioning like one of those mylar emergency blankets) the retained heat tends towards spreading across great distances.  So while the equater does get most of the sunlight and would warm somewhat, higher latitudes would tend to receive more IR heat from warmer latitutes than they radiate back.  Thus, most of the warming is going to occur in regions where a slightly warmer climate could make the difference between only growing winter wheat, or growing corn instead.  The climate is always, always changing.  As recently as 400 years ago there was still an inland sea in the Western US states, where the salt flats are today, that contributed to a wetter climate in that region than exists today.  Things change and populations migrate.  There is no reason to expect that it will be different after the Industrial Revolution, in that regard, than it was prior.

Also, keep in mind that the Earth is a closed system, and any externally gained carbon is less than trivial even over millinia.  At some point in Earth's history, it was a molten ball of rock surrounded by a mixed gas atmostphere.  There were no trees, and oxygen is never found free under such conditions unless all of the available carbon was already consumed.  So, at one point in Earth's history, all of the carbon (or nearly all) that we worry today about being released into the atmostphere was actually in that old Earth atmostphere.  So the idea that there is some point at which the amount of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere starts a positive feedback loop within this closed system to destroy life on Earth is both rediculous and provablely false on that data point alone.  For if it were true, how in the hell could live ever have evolved to start with?  I'm not saying that humans  are going to want to live that way but we are little more than a minor infection to the Earth's biosphere.

EDIT: I got the short & long wave IR's reversed in the above description, but other than that it is correct.

Dude, the Sun's output varies over an 11 year cycle, and a longer ~300 year cycle; and those are the two that we are aware of.  The Sun occilates, and it takes less than a 1% variance to swing the entire planet from an ice age into the Medieval Warm Period.  You have heard of that, correct?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

While the claims on Wikipedia are that the MWP were not as warm as the modern era, the facts say something different.  For example, it's a known fact that there were grape vineyards & wineries north of London in Britain, with legacy streets still named "Vine Street" that harken back to that age, while grapes won't grow in those same regions today.  Also, north of Canada is a wide expanse of islands hidden in the permanent ice beyond the arctic circle; the roots of trees have been found on many of those islands, hundreds of miles from where trees grow today.  The Norse settled Greenland during the MWP, and for decades children were taught in school that it was named as a fraud in order to get settlers to join the founders.  In reality, it would have been pretty green in the southern end of Greenland during the MWP, and we now know that those settlers fared pretty well for generations on grassfed sheep before the Little Ice Age slowly killed off their grasslands & sheep and drove them into the sea in order to survive.

But those aren't actual problems, the protocol is self-healing as it is.  You're trying to debate a new solution to a non-issue.


It's precisely because the system is so stable that modifications to that system are verboten in the majority of minds here.  The old addage, "don't fix it if it an't broke" applies here.

Good God!  168 yards!  With a handgun!  I'm calling bullsh*t.  That's a football field and a half.  At that distance it would have been difficult for an adult with 20/20 vision to determine which one was the cop!   (excepting, of course, that one assumes that the one next to the cop car is the cop.)  That distance is a respectable rifle shot.

Expecially since those activities are not the predominate causes of climate changes. 

It's not impossible, just astronomically improbable.  Those are arbitrary parameters decided by Satoshi, and in all the time since there has not been any proposal for altering them that could offer more than a marginal improvement, if that.  For example, the 10 minute block interval could have been 6 minutes, 12 minutes, 15 minutes or any other arbitrary number of seconds; but it could not have been a small number of seconds because the interval was chosen as a balance between transaction confirmation time and the expected future network propogation latency.  10 seconds, or even 120, is too fast and would result in a great deal many more network splits & orphaned blocks; potentially causing a congestion feedback. 

Also, the block interval time cannot be variable, due to the interlocking structure of the blockchain's design & purpose.  If block intervals were variable; 1) the block reward would either have to be variable also, which would make the task of verifying that the block reward was a valid amount quite difficult for an individual node to perform or the distribution rate of newly issued bitcoins into circulation would no longer be predictable, and that would be bad; and 2) the relatively common blockchain splits would be significantly more difficult to resolve in any automatic fashion, which is the only way it could be done.

Are you talking about an index within a block?  No, too big times too many full clients.  A better idea would be what I mentioned earlier, a web accessible block index on a regular webserver.  It's not like any particular client needs to trust the index, as it just references blocks that can be downloaded and verified over the p2p network.  Also, the external index could do the 'last harder hash' index after the block is produced, and this wouldn't require any changes in the codebase or protocol.  For that matter, every full client already indexes everything, and that is how blockexplorer.com works.  The trick is just setting up a machine readable standard for light clients to query the indexing server, and then hunt those blocks down over the p2p network.

I assure you, that neither of those parameters are up for debate.


Orphanced forks don't need to be 'absorbed' into the main chain, and self-adjusting difficulty without timestamps is too complicated to impliment across a massive, distributed p2p network with connections that vary by orders of magnitude.  This will not fly, and your current proposal isn't likely to be incorporated into the main chain, either; without some overriding gain.  Incremental gains need not apply here, it's about two years too late for such things.

Average block solving time will never be reduced to anywhere near 10 seconds.

Of course they are, just +1 on your block count, then "up".  Or just change the higher last hash to one that is higher than both the last hash & the current one.  The idea of choosing to be higher than the last hash is to avoid duplicating the existing liner structure of the blockchain.

patience.  By choosing to not pay the fee, you can expect it to be delayed until it's aged enough to be picked up by a miner as a free transaction.

Don't need too, I can recycle the cases of fired rounds a hundred times, and the bullets themselves can still be made of lead ball.  It's not like this kind of thing is ever going to be accurate enough to justify a precise, jacket bullet.

Actually, you would know how many there are, because the current block number is part of the header.

I'm starting to see value in this idea.

EDIT: but what happens if the difficulty drops or levels off ofr a long peroid of time, what prevents a uselessly large interval?

I've already checked, and the guy that managed to make an AR-15 lower receiver is involved in this effort, so I already know that these guys aren't just looking to make a quick buck.

Besides, my money, my business.