And that, kids, is why US prisons are so disproportionately blacks/minorities. Because wealthy  And here I though you understood reading comprehension, since you just brought it up a minute ago. |
|
|
|
I never understood how these US Marsals can auction these coins before at least one court officially finds him guilty. Is it normal in the US to sell these kind of assets before the end of the trial?
"Hey, I prooved I am innocent, so I can finally go home ... oh wait, they sold my house and took the money. Well... I won! Yeah..." Strange.
It makes sense when you understand that the use law enforcement apparatus is a machine that turns crime into profit. It's goal is to extract money from its victims and disburse that money to its beneficiaries. Direct victims are the people from whom theft is socially acceptable ("criminals"). Indirect victims are the people from whom theft is not socially acceptable, but who can be convinced to accept a protection racket which defends them from the "criminals". Beneficiaries are the employees of the system, the contractors who supply them, and the customers who can hire out their services in order to attack their rivals. |
|
|
|
So you've already convicted Mr. Dread?
Or is it just poor reading comprehension? If course it was a typo. I was thinking about your post and Miz4r's post at the same time. Whether or not Ross is DPR, and whether or not he's committed any crimes, the prosecutors have a very strong financial incentive to convict him. Their only goal is to convict him(*) - not to determine the truth of his guilt. Knowing this, Ross should know that minimizing the financial incentive they have to push for his conviction is in his best interests, so he'd want the coins they seized from him to be sold as cheaply as possible. * Well-known features of the US "adversarial" court system |
|
|
|
This actually means that Ross wants his coins sold at as low of a price as possible. The money at stake is the prize which the prosecutors are competing for, and to maximize his chance of regaining his freedom he'd want their incentive to be as low as possible. |
|
|
|
Regardless of all that, the same arguments that are thrown around about mining could be thrown around about data-centers in general (OMG! there will only be a single least-cost/massive-scale producer that will run everything!), or pretty much *any* industry for that matter; this is really just a (mostly) extrapolated-short-sight criticism of capitalism in general, not specifically bitcoin mining. Few industries actually coalesce to pure monopoly in practice. More specifically, this is an example of the natural monolopy fallacy. |
|
|
|
And what if they step down?
Should they also stop committing code to Bitcoin?
You want to save Bitcoin from a ghost by proposing that 40% of its core developers & 3 top commiters stop working on it.
Yeah, I'm sure that will play out well for the development of Bitcoin's own code. You've actually hit on a separate, but related issue. There is a subset of toxic people and petty tyrants among the core developers who believe that what they do defines Bitcoin and wish to be the eternal gatekeepers of what is and is not allowed. They can't actually earn that position by virtue of being superior software engineers, so they keep it by resorting to FUD and other underhanded tactics any time some other developers try to get involved. There's an extremely long list of people who would have tried to step up and participate, but have been effectively shut out by that cartel. Bitcoin will be in a much stronger and more secure position once Bitcoin Core is deprecated, or is at least relegated to a minority position on the network. Part of the reason will be that the consensus will be derived from software implementations with a better design and higher code quality, and part of the reason will be because of limiting the effect of toxic developers so that more people will be willing to contribute. PS: I still haven't forgotten that you never bothered to justify your "less decentralized" claim about colored coins. |
|
|
|
Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves. You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day. Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream? |
|
|
|
Colored Coins could be good enough for certain applications, just like Open Transactions could be.
Others certainly command a more important level of decentralization.
This is the second time you've referred to the concept of decentralizing with reference to colored coins without explaining exactly what you're talking about, in spite of the fact that what you're saying makes no sense at all. |
|
|
|
On one end of the spectrum, if a sidechain's 2-way peg can be severed at the whim of the sidechain devs, it would essentially be an altcoin and would presumably attract about as much investment as altcoins do (not a threat to Bitcoin).
At the other end of the spectrum, if it's mathematically impossible to sever the 2wp, then it is a true sidechain and the value seems to always remain with the Bitcoin ledger (not a threat to Bitcoin, at least not for this reason). From the description of the SPV proof, to get out of the sidechain it seems like you need to be able to create transaction in the sidechain which burns some sidechain units. If it's possible to block transactions in the sidechains, then it would be possible to prevent sidechain holders from cashing out into the main chain. |
|
|
|
http://blockstream.com/2014/11/17/blockstream-a-champion-of-bitcoins-core-values/http://blockstream.com/2014/11/17/blockstream-closes-21m-seed-round/we all share a demonstrated commitment to advancing an open source, cryptographically-enabled future that supports user’s rights and freedoms and creates lasting public benefit. These values are also core to the group of investors who participated in our seed round. Both Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla are well known for their deep commitment and generous contributions to companies, projects and causes that have benefited millions of people around the world. As Reid mentions in his post today, he sees Blockstream as similar to Mozilla (Reid is a board member of Mozilla). “And that’s why I’m participating in this first-round financing as an individual investor, and why Blockstream itself will function similarly to the Mozilla Corporation. Here, our first interest is maintaining and enhancing Bitcoin’s strong open ecosystem. And the structure we’ve chosen will give us the freedom and flexibility to prioritize public good over returns to investors.” We look forward to working with the community on fulfilling the potential of a faster pace of blockchain innovation, focussed and building on Bitcoin’s network-effect. “Can’t be evil.” That was the first thing Adam Back and I wrote on a whiteboard at the start of the year.
Blockstream is the first startup focused on advancements to the core technology underpinning Bitcoin.
...
Blockstream is the first company extending the capabilities at the protocol level to support massive scaling of Bitcoin and blockchain technology to a broad range of asset types. Put another way, the extension mechanism of sidechains, the company’s initial area of focus, allows any number of so far unthought of developments to happen in an open and interoperable way. Blockstream: A Champion of Bitcoin’s Core Values
Sounds like bad guys Maybe you don't know this because you're young and new here and this may come as a shock to you, but soundbites don't actually prove anything. In fact, those soundbites remind me of a conversation I had a little over two years ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113400.msg1227012#msg1227012 |
|
|
|
In this scenario miners will MM 100% of these chains because they have considerable economic incentive to do so. What you are suggesting is that they will forfeit a percentage of their revenue for obscure reasons. This is the same argument PoS systems to explain their security model. You've either proved that PoS is equivalent to PoW for distributed consensus, or you're advocating replacing Bitcoin with a PoS system under the guise of an upgrade. |
|
|
|
Do you not recognize there are applications that demand more decentralization than federation/oracles/OT can provide?
Would you trust any lesser decentralized schemes with money functions of Bitcoin that are not supported by the mainchain? That's not the point. You started out selling sidechains as an "equivalent level of decentralization and security" compared to the main chain. Are they or are they not capable of providing that? |
|
|
|
Does that make my argument any less true? You aren't making any arguments. You're inventing stories on the fly, without even bothering to maintain a pretense of consistency from post to post. |
|
|
|
The reason SPVP is proposed is because there are applications that are not implementable on BTC mainchain but still necessitate an equivalent level of decentralization and security. Can they really accomplish an equivalent level of security compared to the main chain?[/quote] I don't believe you can secure sidechains at the exact same level as the mainchain simply because that would require all nodes to recognize this sidechain.
My opinion is that by securing the work of all miners to validate a sidechain you make it much more decentralized and secure than any other federated options.
Get your story straight. |
|
|
|
Remember when a 1000 page thread was almost unimaginably long? |
|
|
|
The reason SPVP is proposed is because there are applications that are not implementable on BTC mainchain but still necessitate an equivalent level of decentralization and security. Can they really accomplish an equivalent level of security compared to the main chain? Do you know of anyone willing to go on record making that claim? |
|
|
|
The point is I have seen you challenge Blockstream's developers conflict of interest which I don't find very genuine considering you yourself have entrenched interest. Do I have commit access to the Bitcoin Core repositories? Have I ever been named as a "core developer?" |
|
|
|
That's right... I had almost forgot you are quite invested in a technology that is directly endangered by sidechains.
Your quick drivebys are more easily explained now. If I was just interested in promoting OT, I'd jump on the sidechain bandwagon because Monetas could use the opcodes in the same way that Blockstream plans to use them. If I'm in the business of self-promoting drivebys, why haven't I joined the ranks of people demanding to keep the block size limit in place to force more transactions off the main chain? Isn't that what I should be doing if your insinuation of my motives is correct? |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
