I don't really have a strong opinion on the block size. I'm perfectly comfortable popping some corn and watching Gavin and MP go at it.

If I were king I would increase it modestly (less than 20 MB).

I don't know whether $100/tx would be fine. As a reserve currency it might be fine. As a transactional currency it obviously wouldn't.

I also don't know that $100/tx is a realistic estimate any time soon given that we are now at something like $0.05 to nearly aways get into the next block (and getting into the very next block is not always needed -- for a lower fee you can be still be very confident of getting in the next several blocks).

We have received some generous donations recently, increasing the project development fund by 100K+.

Reminder: the bulk of the fund is expected to be apportioned among the development team as incentive for working on the project, but there is a mandatory vesting period, including for the lead developer, which means the coins won't be moving at all for a long time (at least a year, but generally longer). Donating to this fund helps support the project but also help support the coin value by visibly locking up supply.

A portion of the development fund may at some point be sold and used to pay for project resources and direct expenses (hosting, etc.) but that won't be done at all until the coin has established a meaningful market value, and in the near term at least these expenses are expected to be very small. Currently the lead developer is paying all of the hosting costs.

balance: 417317.031120095562, unlocked balance: 417306.182423885751

I haven't had time to read the articles (links at quoted post above) but my initial response to the claim is that is suggests the "hard crash" theory is wrong. If we are already hitting the limit regularly, then the system is able to handle that. People will learn to use higher tx fees to prioritize urgent transactions, just as they learned to stop using zero fee for urgent transactions a year or two ago, and slightly longer term probably a bunch of spam will get forced off the network altogether. The market mechanism is working.

I've personally run into very slow confirms of low-fee-paying transactions twice, but it wasn't he end of the world (with a ten minute avg block time you have to be prepared for slow confirms anyway). The next time I do a transaction if I care about urgency I'll probably increase the fee a little above the default.

Let's try to keep this thread on topic, and focus our enthusiasm on where AEON is going (admittedly slowly at the moment).

Monero is more profoundly innovative than Facebook. Facebook was an interaction of MySpace. Monero is the first system of any kind in all of human history to provide untraceable, unsinkable transactions in a completely trustless, decentralized, end-to-end manner.

I'm still here. Development has slowed down a bit due to some other priority, but it will continue soon.

We all know you are perfectly capable of using a command line wallet. Quit trolling.

As for masternode ASICs, you're smoking some good shit. Too bad we're not all in the same place, you could at least share it.

I think its more likely that people like you who refused to hedge will get badly burned (conditional on this scenario playing out, and I'm not calling it likely), but many others who did hedge or picked a winner will do extremely well. To observers, the dynamics of greed make the latter narrative far more compelling than the former.

So no I don't really see a few cyperdocs losing money as the death of the concept, it is more like once-dominant Blackberry getting leapfrogged and steamrolled by iPhone and Android. Except of course, as I said earlier, Bitcoin isn't even dominant at all. If Bitcoin gets leapfrogged or fails, the popular perception of that event will be basically non-existent ("What ever happened to that Bitcoin thing we used to hear about?")

Let's just say I'm not necessarily a good example to use for generalizations, in part because I practice aggressive risk management, and also in part because I'm perfectly comfortable financially (I have no desire for a castle), so I don't see the need to take extreme risks.

I don't necessarily sign up for the moon shots (e.g. SpaceShipTwo -- see below). But on the other hand I incur large losses only rarely and always have a bullet left in the chamber when opportunity presents itself, so I've done okay.

I'm pretty sure my return on investment from Monero will always exceed his, but no I'm not particularly profit motivated by it, to answer another question from the thread. It's just interesting technology. If useful ideas from Monero end up being incorporated into Bitcoin (such as the dynamic block sizes), and then Monero withers away financially, i consider that a complete success. If you look at 1000 crypto coins after Bitcoin you will only find a few that actually do anything interesting at all, or even try to. Monero is one of them.

I mined ~100% of the Monero I have, and then some.

You're confusing cause and effect here. I'm involved with Monero specifically because I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument, and Monero has technology that is actually interesting and actually adds something meaningful (unlikely dumb clones like Litecoin). At least, I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument yet (at some point if Bitcoin continues to grow, perhaps after another 10x-100x, it will likely be correct). I consider Bitcoin to be a tiny pimple on the scale of global currencies and finances, so if anything the network effect is working very much against it, not for it. Cryptocurrencies have to succeed on the basis of compelling advantages that overcome a network effect, and if Bitcoin can do that, others can too. I see Bitcoin's lead now as being about as relevant as Novell's with Netware:


Or perhaps in line with platforms that once had a hugely dominant market share and weren't even replaced, directly, by anything (example: Palm Pilot).

But even that isn't right, because Bitcoin does't currently have a hugely dominant market share anywhere, outside of a few enthusiasts. (Don't misinterpret this as "Buy Monero instead" -- obviously Monero has even less of any kind of share.)

However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.

BTW, I also agree with a lot of your points about sidechains and other bitcoin development issues. I don't fully support the 20 MB idea because I think 20x is just too much too fast, but if it was intended as a negotiating tactic to get something more modest through, then well done Gavin.

Yeah I agree, but it is still much better than being able to take 100 coins, split into 100 outputs of 1 coin each, and get 100x as much of the spin off for the cost of a small transaction fee (if that). That's just absurd.

Actually in their terms of use they say that lenders would not be paid.


This may indeed be (short run) reputationally preferable to giving the losses to the lenders.

I love that a user with a profile name of extreme facials is more insightful and clever in presentation than our resident troll.

Ignoring that proof of stake is pointless (it doesn't work unless ultimately centralized, in which case there are better solutions), the distribution method for CLAMs is untenable in terms of susceptibility to fraud, and the impossibility of demonstrating that there wasn't and isn't an enormous hidden premine.

Specifically, there is no way to know that insiders didn't create or control enormous numbers of, for example, non-dust DOGE outputs. Of course other coins could be used but it seems likely that DOGE would be the easiest place to hide such a premine.

The only distribute-to-outputs method that isn't susceptible to this form of manipulation is to distribute according to the balances.

You yourself have made the argument that it is vastly harder for authorities to impose draconian requirements directly on users.

If mining becomes centralized, however, then miners can indeed impose (or be compelled to impose) whatever requirements they want though, such as identifying yourself with secondary information, even if nothing within the primary protocol supports identification directly.

So yes, decentralized mining is a requirement for a coin that uses mining to have decentralized anything (including privacy).

I don't think fungibility is a problem, again as long as mining remains decentralized (and if it isn't then all bets are off) because the coins will get remixed into the fog within several hops, or sooner if people have a reason to mix aggressively.

The important point is that ordering is the only hard part. As you say, we've had digital signatures, and ordering is easy to do in a centralized system. Mining is needed to provide ordering in a decentralized system

As far as distribution being unimportant, we probably disagree a bit. I've never been sold on the idea of transaction fees properly incentivizing mining, so I don't really see the system as viable if distribution were to really end. Of course that won't actually happen in the current design for 100+ years so maybe it doesn't matter.

I also don't think think just a few words from satoshi in the white paper (or anything else he wrote) really suggest he did any careful analysis of how or if transaction fees as incentive would work. It seemed more like a kick the can approach, or an error.

That and ordering. The entire purpose of mining (other than distribution) is to establish ordering so that if coins are double spent the new location of those coins is not ambiguous.

Exactly right. Nobody is going to use this for 100K+ transactions right now. People need to use it for 100 and 1000s transactions, then someday for 10Ks, and then finally for 100Ks and beyond. Silk Road and Satoshi Dice played a big role in growing Bitcoin because they did exactly that. People started with smaller transactions -- that the system could accommodate at the time -- and then both the transaction size and the system capacity grew together from there.