block rewards will get smaller, and the required TX fee will get larger.
guess you didnt catch that news about double spends?
Maybe when there is no more coin being generated, then I'll agree that TX fees must go up. We are a long way from there. It's still drastically better than credit card fees. correct but Credit Cards are accepted everywhere. LOL Bitcoin is so young I don't know what you are expecting. Oh wait yes I do - Troll confirmed. Im just reasoning through your failed arguments. But 'troll' seems to be the standard response of someone who doesn't have anything useful to contribute. As it currently stands, Bitcoin is not really used for any significant commerce. People like yourself who insist that it can be used for such typically dont have any experience or credibility in this subject matter. In my view, Bitcoin could be used for most commercial functions but you would need to add a lot more, which will invariably increase the costs associated with it's use. What youre left with in the end is a very expensive Paypal that does a lot of SHA-256 hashing. Usually, these kind of oversights have a way of working themselves out, but there's a lot of people who bought a ticket on this ship and theyre not going to let it sink now. just to give another example, I've done a few consulting assignments where I agreed to be paid in Bitcoin. It was unbelievably complex, unwieldy, if not expensive. These simple facts of Bitcoin's usability doesn't seem to deter a certain core of Bitcoin users. Practically all of this core of bitcoin users are youngish whiteish males. |
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block rewards will get smaller, and the required TX fee will get larger.
guess you didnt catch that news about double spends?
Maybe when there is no more coin being generated, then I'll agree that TX fees must go up. We are a long way from there. It's still drastically better than credit card fees. correct but Credit Cards are accepted everywhere. |
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Bitcoin is a virtual gold rush right now. There are so many opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship that it's hard to sleep at night.
there's a lot of opportunities to exploit people's naivete, assumptions and ignorance(coupled to sheer greed) regarding this technology. I agree and that's why the term "virtual gold rush" is appropriate. There is great promise of rewards but be careful of the risks involved. In any case, it's an exciting time to be involved in bitcoin. what required is a restatement of the goals here. It was supposed to be a PEER TO PEER currency. IT wasnt supposed to have blacklists, it wasn't supposed to have a monopoly of processor banks, even the concept of 'mining pools' seems to have been out of the scope of the initial design. Some of these other supposed leaders suggesting we come international accords regarding Bitcoin? this is not fulfilling the original goals of this software, actually it's fulfilling the goals of the groups this software was meant to circumvent. Unfortunately, not enough people see that right now, but plenty will eventually. reconsider what we currently have from a user perspective... we have 1) a great deal of centralization 2) increasing tx fees 3) unclear valuation 4) unreliability. Increasing tx fees? I just sent a transaction the other day for half a cent. Unclear valuation? No I think it's pretty clear at the moment. Unreliability? I haven't had any troubles so far. Go troll somewhere else. block rewards will get smaller, and the required TX fee will get larger. guess you didnt catch that news about double spends? |
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Really, what is the problem here?
I think it is fantastic that companies in in the bitcoin space fund developers to improve bitcoin.
We have seen this with other open source projects over the years. Let me mention Linux as an example.
If you have a profitable bitcoin business I would expect you to care so much for bitcoin that you would fund it's development.
We need to free as many brains as possible from lame day time jobs, so they can help us all by improving bitcoin.
+1 I agree with that, in a simple word "motivation", when Devs are offered time and motivated financially their productivity will be much better... we saw that happens in many projects and I am glad to see this happening with Bitcoin. up until a certain degree when you have so much commercialization that the technology ceases to be attractive to the average person. In the case of bitcoin it's even more accentuated, because it itself is(an grossly overvalued) commodity. |
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Bitcoin is a virtual gold rush right now. There are so many opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship that it's hard to sleep at night.
there's a lot of opportunities to exploit people's naivete, assumptions and ignorance(coupled to sheer greed) regarding this technology. I agree and that's why the term "virtual gold rush" is appropriate. There is great promise of rewards but be careful of the risks involved. In any case, it's an exciting time to be involved in bitcoin. what required is a restatement of the goals here. It was supposed to be a PEER TO PEER currency. IT wasnt supposed to have blacklists, it wasn't supposed to have a monopoly of processor banks, even the concept of 'mining pools' seems to have been out of the scope of the initial design. Some of these other supposed leaders suggesting we come international accords regarding Bitcoin? this is not fulfilling the original goals of this software, actually it's fulfilling the goals of the groups this software was meant to circumvent. Unfortunately, not enough people see that right now, but plenty will eventually. reconsider what we currently have from a user perspective... we have 1) a great deal of centralization 2) increasing tx fees 3) unclear valuation 4) unreliability. |
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Bitcoin is a virtual gold rush right now. There are so many opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship that it's hard to sleep at night.
there's a lot of opportunities to exploit people's naivete, assumptions and ignorance(coupled to sheer greed) regarding this technology. |
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as another example, there was a 'meetup group' going on in NYC. Basically the idea of the meetup was to bring people together to discuss bitcoin. Literally within weeks of this group gaining any ground, (at least one) of the founders was ready to cash out. He took the TRUST that the community instilled in him(how little and insignificant it was) and attempted to act as a gatekeeper for all 'talent' on Bitcoin in NYC. He didn't accomplish this, instead he just got a lot of people angry.
There's a delicate balance of community building and profiteering here. I don't see the tried-and-true bitcoin people making money off these companies, instead I see latecomer BS artists telling us they are 'thought leaders' and selling us gadgets and web sites.
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Really, what is the problem here?
I think it is fantastic that companies in in the bitcoin space fund developers to improve bitcoin.
We have seen this with other open source projects over the years. Let me mention Linux as an example.
If you have a profitable bitcoin business I would expect you to care so much for bitcoin that you would fund it's development.
We need to free as many brains as possible from lame day time jobs, so they can help us all by improving bitcoin.
the problem is: what needs are these various projects serving? we can't just applaud every single technology that couples itself to Bitcoin as 'good for bitcoin'. as for your example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies |
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company and mining monopolised?
In contrary. The monopoly of the core team is just breaking down, to be replaced by an oligopoly of those secure access to the team. certainly this authority and privilege are a commodity that can, and has, been marketed. And what is stopping any of you from becoming the "center" of bitcoin? Nothing. There is no such thing as bitcoin's center. It is open source and you are free to start your own dev team and go to town.
this seems to be the image that the emergent oligopoly wishes to preserve. |
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company and mining monopolised?
i dont think so. there is nothing stopping anyone setting up their own competitive companies or mining pools.
the problem i see is that the bitcoin community is filled too much by the young and unenergised. basically too many basement dwellers who would rather sit back and wait for others to do stuff instead of launching new projects themselves.
bitcoin is at the moment like the 1900's with very little industry and no competition. so if you dont like the fact that there is only one service that everyone uses.. then make a new service.
everything you've said here is misleading. where shall I start? there is nothing stopping anyone setting up their own competitive companies or mining pools. nothing except for everything. No one is going to get into mining unless it's profitable. It's only profitable if you have exclusive deals or ownership in the ASIC biz. bitcoin community is filled too much by the young and unenergised. on the contrary, it's filled with commercialized efforts that centralize everything, patent everything, and corner markets on everything. There are few opportunities left in this area. I'm not even sure what the remaining benefit is to using bitcoin for the average user... its COOL? It certainly isn't cheap, it's not very reliable, it's not fast. All of these things are likely to get worse. |
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Jeff - BitPay
Gavin - Coinbase
Mike - Circle
Does this remain a community project?
I certainly wouldn't call Bitcoin an open community effort at this point. 'Mining' has been monopolized, and most users interact with Bitcoin via some web service. This leaves a bulky, over extended internal protocol that requires huge processing power, and is inevitably going to cost much more in transaction fees. Going forward it's going to be more of a marketing effort by big banks to sell services, just like they always have. |
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well, I very much disagree. you can't shift property around which is rooted in national jurisdictions. also it does not make much sense, because there are no courts, no law makers, no government which applies those rules. to prevent fraud you need rules which have an effect. you can see this playing out with alt-coin scams. then people calling for the "police". what a bunch of nonsense. first people believe they don't need the government and no rules, and if something goes wrong the same people call for a man hunt. that's hardly an improvement. the political philosophy of bitcoin is in its infancy.
the system I designed creates a congress of authority nodes who can preside over the application of various laws(which are defined by the participants). Thus you can have things like refunds, bankruptcy, etc. It's more like a distributed government/legislation system that is specifically designed for economic purposes. It also has a stronger privacy model than Bitcoin. The main difference is it doesn't use PoW and it doesn't attempt to deliver 'zero trust' [1]. -bm [1] personally I think that the trust model for Bitcoin is flawed anyway. So what you got is a page rank algorithm as your proof of work? ;-) not exactly no. its similar to bitcoin in that it attempts to establish a trust model for a block chain. We don't attempt to establish an 'unbounded consensus' but rather a bounded consensus. So to host a currency you must have a number of people who you trust. for instance locate 10 people on this board, and they each run a node. Now the chain is based on this union of trust. If these 10 people appear to be conspiring, then no one will issue an asset on this chain, and it will be worthless. At first glance the promises seem far inferior to Bitcoin, but when you take into account how Bitcoin works in REALITY, it's much more effective cost wise. The basic technology will be released soon, and people can get a better idea of how to use it and what it's good for. I dont anticipate it replacing Bitcoin, but it does things that Bitcoin doesn't, such as a decentralized exchange, credit markets, etc. |
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Simon, it works like this- Color Coins ARENT ZERO TRUST. You must trust the Issuer. The moment you've done that, you not only lose this quality of zero trust, but you make the whole operation of mining pointless. You can move the equation around in several ways, but in all cases you don't need mining, you don't need hash power- it's a waste. They could try and move it in any number of different directions: 1) they try and put it on the main BTC block chain, and you will have transaction overload. You might get the miners to comply, but they aren't going to do so for free. So now we have this 'zero trust' but we have to pay for it. I can get the same thing from many other services. 2) they make an altchain, in this case they lose atomic swapping and don't have access to the hashing power in the main chain. Why do it? Why even use coin coloring at all in this case, you can just redesign the tx formats. In my view the people working on Color Coins lack vision and only see things in terms of the few things they know about Bitcoin. They don't have much understanding of how the greater world of money works at all. There is even a related project to Color Coins that as far as I can tell is some cheap pump and dump scam. these shortcomings I recognized a while ago and this is why I developed Confidence Chains http://altchain.orgI factor out a few things here and there, and you get something quite different. You get a chain of confidence, with nodes you must trust. The advantage to this architecture is many things, one of them is that you cannot disable it without disabling all the nodes. You can look at the whitepapers on the site, its all explained clearly and I haven't revised any of my claims BECAUSE THEY ARE BASED IN WELL UNDERSTOOD PRINCIPLES. Of course most all colored coins require trusting the issuer! The main advantage of using a decentralized block chain as opposed to the conventional way is that the colored coins can be exchanged in multiple exchanges and everyone can be assured that what I exchange in one is the same as the one exchange in another. That is a very powerful use case! Mining has almost nothing to do with colored coins. Sure you can devise some kind of mining scheme, but for what purpose? To create another kind of trust free coin on top of the already trust free network? Are you referring to Mastercoin? well that is a completely pointless exercise. I can see where you are going with the confidence chains and I do agree that a decentralized exchange would be better served on a network and protocol different from bitcoin. However, can you explain to me how your proposal compares to Ripple and Open Transactions? The main advantage of using a decentralized block chain as opposed to the conventional way is that the colored coins can be exchanged in multiple exchanges and everyone can be assured that what I exchange in one is the same as the one exchange in another. That is a very powerful use case!
I will grant that there may be some perceived advantages to this. But what this trust model ignores are the risks and long term costs of PoW systems. I've already explained the drawbacks many times, they are in the record. No one will be convinced of anything until they observe the effects themselves, so it's not very much worth spending time establishing these theoretical concepts over and over again. I was supportive of Color Coins in the beginning, and I still like the basic concept- but the people involved with the project currently I dont associate with. They've repeatedly made unreliable and false claims and there is no attempts to rectify this or even acknowledge it. Thus you really have no idea what you're listening to with these people. Note also that IBM is involved with the Color Coins model. I think they see the potential to sell more hardware, but that isn't based on their own official statements. just keep in mind that last time I explained why Open Transactions doesn't live up to it's claims I was attacked by Chris Odom. I spend several months working with this character along with a number of other people. I have the records to prove this. AMOF, he *stole* the monetas.net domain from me. This board just isn't an environment where you can get facts easily. Given that, statements made about Open Transactions are largely untrue. It is not decentralized. It is a client-server system that uses crypto in a fairly straightforward way. It also has an unintegrated Chaumian E-cash component that was added by way of Ben Lauries Lucre library. This component does not work with the other parts of Open Transactions. Mind you, OT has NO REAL WORLD USERS. I don't take this project or Chris seriously. Also Chaumian cash, while theoretically sound I don't feel is very relevant today. The problem with it is that it's not decentralized, thus can be shut down. OT exhumed Chaumian cash, made the suggestion that they changed or improved it in some way(he didnt), and presented it as a novel new idea. I also sometimes wonder if David Chaum was involved with the creation of Bitcoin, but we can't know for sure. Regarding Ripple, It's also somewhat deceptive. They made a few tricky moves regarding their open source status. It's a commercial product and their business model was to sell and market XRPs(similar to Mastercoin). At one point I asked: If Ripple is open source, why can't I just issue a new set of XRPs? XRP2.0? Soon afterwards the project seemed to have faded out of existence. Ripple also has virtually NOTHING to do with the original ideas associated with this name. It's all part of the Googleplex mega-complex, which I will never(and probably can never) be a part of due to my outspoken opinions on the surveillance machine they are running under the guise of 'entrepreneurship' and 'startups'. Thanks to St. Snowden I can now say these things without being branded a mentally insane schizophrenic(which some people in these circles have already tried to do). Confidence Chains does a lot of things. Turns out that to support a decentralized ledger you need to build a few things that let you do lots of other fun stuff. It supports many financial functions, have look at the link in my sig. If you have an questions you can post them to the forum. I'll answer them personally. thx, -bm |
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At the rate altcoins are launching, I think coins specifically built for use as currency should be added onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Small alts have way too weak security. I've conceptually devised a way to do mint decentralized colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain that's nice to miners and keeps the small alts' hashing power dedicated to them (you won't have to compete with Bitcoin miners to mine Dogecoin for example). I'm copy pasting my idea from the colored coins google groups ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bitcoinx/mUb86IOeXdU). --- "Colored altcoins can be minted on the Bitcoin blockchain in a decentralized manner through the donation (or 'sacrifice') of Bitcoin to miners: turning those Bitcoin into a new colored altcoin at pre-determined rate."
In the past 2 years, plenty of new alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) have been created (namecoin, litecoin, dogecoin, etc), resulting in separate blockchains, and a distribution of hashing power. As we are heading towards a future where each idea, theme, and person will have their own currency, there are some problems with having the value locked up in different altchains. The problem is mainly due to the fact there will be a long-tail of chains with small hashing powers that will be extremely vulnerable to attack. Why?
Currently, private or personal currencies can be minted through colored coins. These coins are unfortunately centralised. If I mint 1million Simoncoin, it will invariably be in my control. If other people want them, they will have to pay me Bitcoin in exchange for the Simoncoins. In some cases, this is what is wanted, but it brings about trust in me to maintain it. The beauty of the traditional mining process is that it is freer, and more democratic. It gives people 2 ways to get involved with the currency: through contributing processing power to it OR buying it from someone who has already contributed processing power to it. The pre-determined rate at which it is minted AND the fact that it is not to the benefit of a centralised entity allows trust (and invariably value) to more easily flow into it. What if the 21 million Bitcoin were minted instantly in the beginning? It also means that the entity/theme behind it (be it Simoncoin, a meme, a band, etc) have more incentive to make their currency work as they have to keep its network effect growing. Admittedly I'm trying to articulate a difficult concept. If some currency (or stock) only 'represented' an entity (decentralized), instead of being 'backed' by the entity (centralized), its value will be more. The psychological barriers to entry feels lower: because people are taking part collectively in the concept. So, a future where colored coins can be minted in a decentralized manner, whilst simultaneously keeping the hashing power on one chain, solves the problem where the myriad of new altcoins will have to worry about keeping their chain secure and running smoothly. It should also be beneficial to the network. How?
This scheme works by looking at Bitcoin (the currency) as a proxy for hashing power. By donating to Bitcoin to miners, you are contributing hashing power as a proxy for a new colored alt. For each block, depending on how many people donated to a specific colored alt (say Simoncoin), you are rewarded proportionally at a pre-determined rate. As the idea is in a conceptual phase, I have not delved too deeply into the technical aspects of it, so I'm going to be using some 'psuedo-txes' to explain some parts of the technical implementation. Let's create Simoncoin. In block 400000, there is a genesis tx that specifies a standard monetary policy: 50 initial coins, 210k halving: something like "OP_RETURN gsimoncoin50210000". From the next block, Bitcoin donations can be transmogrified into Simoncoin. If only I am mining it, and I donate 0.00001 BTC to the block, I will receive all of the 50 Simoncoin. If 2 people donated 2 BTC each, it will be split 25, 25. As you can see, altcoins which are popular will have more competition in terms "proxy hashing power", meaning more Bitcoin is donated per block. Once the halving block is reached, less Simoncoin will be available to split up between the miners. The donation tx should (probably) specify for what colored alt it is for, and which address the reward should go to (thinking quickly in terms of technical specification). What about miners, mining their own donations?
If a miner donates 5 btc for Simoncoin, and he mines the block, he will get the 5BTC AND a large portion of Simoncoin, not really 'donating' or 'sacrificing' the Bitcoin. I need some help thinking about this, but I don't see it as a big issue. Miners will have incentive to include all the colored alt minting donations as it will collectively be a bigger reward than keeping out other donations for a specific alt reward. In other words, all the transaction fees will be greater than the value of the colored alt rewards (that's what I'm thinking at least). Using Bitcoin as proxy hashing power also means that unlike traditional mining, ALL participants get their fair share. It's as if all Bitcoin miners (or miners part of a pool) got their fair share, even if they did not solve the block. There are thus cases where a miner will donate some BTC and re-earn it as reward, but that won't be the intent. They were just lucky. If they want to continue minting the colored alt they'll have to respend the Bitcoin as donation anyway, potentially losing it to other miners. There should also be a time-based incentives as well, mainly that IF no one contributed Bitcoin to Simoncoin for that block, the 50 Simoncoin is lost. This means miners won't just wait for a next block to win the reward. Alternatively, similarly to proof-of-stake, "coin-age" could be used in some way. But you don't want to detriment users who buy bitcoin to mint quickly to alts. Security
This process is beneficial to Bitcoin. It means hashing power don't have to distributed across alt-chains. One of the reasons why some miners turn to other altcoins are due to profitability. ie the altcoins are worth more than the hashing power when turned back into BTC or Fiat, compared to the hashing power being spent on Bitcoin itself. This process solves this. Miners will contribute to Bitcoin's success, but ALSO be able to rake in with the profitability of colored alts. If my small FPGA is earning 0.0001 Bitcoin per block, and I'm the only one mining Simoncoin, I will receive my full reward as IF I was the only one mining Simoncoin (ie taking the 0.0001 and donating it). It means like any altcoin, you are competing with the people hashing with you on that altcoin, but that hashing power now ALSO contributes to keeping the whole ecosystem of cryptocurrencies secure. Strain on the network?
If this starts working, there will be a lot more donations per block, for each colored alt that exists. Miners will be happy as it is a lot more money, but it could push the transactions per second quite a lot higher, as for someone that is mining a coin will have to donate BTC for EACH block to be able to receive the reward. A purer version could be where the mining rewards go straight as donations for the next block, paying/minting new colored alt addresses. In other words, miners also turn into minting pools. Your payout address is a donation directly to the next block, whilst simultaneously generating colored alts. I don't know if this is even possible. SPV?
Personal currencies need to be used as easily as Bitcoin. Thanks to SPV, you don't need the whole blockchain to transact. It's unclear whether this scheme will work. Bitcoins are being re-used again and again to create new currencies?
Yes. Value is subjective. Bitcoin acts here as the token for the security of the public ledger it moves upon. It's turning the hashing power into the system of the cryptographic shared ledger into support for additional currencies. It's like blood, keeping the system pumping. So. A request for comments: please. I have to do my own research into colored coins first to think up technical implementations. If anyone wants to help design this scheme in a feasible manner, I would love your help! Any questions are also welcome! Would love to hear your thoughts. Anything. The idea behind user defined currencies are quite different from an alt-currency that is mined. There really is no mining involved. A fixed amount is issued. Think about stocks, there isn't any mining, the company can issue as many shares at will. Think about a precious metal currency, the issuer will only issue an amount equal to what they have in stock. Can an alt-coin be implemented using colored coins? yes, but the mining will be peformed by alternate protocol and has no purpose but to distribute coins and not to secure the network. Securing the network is already handled by the based coin (i.e. Bitcoin or iXcoin) and the fact is you're PAYING to make transactions in the 'based coin' (BTC or what have you). The miners need some kind of compensation or they wont do it. Color Coins is not a good idea. I saw Simon's post on the BitcoinX list some time ago. If your experience is anything like mine, you wont get answers or acknowledgement on that list for any criticisms you have of Color Coins. A few people have spent money on it's development as a supporting technology for their business, so there are agendas there. Simon, it works like this- Color Coins ARENT ZERO TRUST. You must trust the Issuer. The moment you've done that, you not only lose this quality of zero trust, but you make the whole operation of mining pointless. You can move the equation around in several ways, but in all cases you don't need mining, you don't need hash power- it's a waste. They could try and move it in any number of different directions: 1) they try and put it on the main BTC block chain, and you will have transaction overload. You might get the miners to comply, but they aren't going to do so for free. So now we have this 'zero trust' but we have to pay for it. I can get the same thing from many other services. 2) they make an altchain, in this case they lose atomic swapping and don't have access to the hashing power in the main chain. Why do it? Why even use coin coloring at all in this case, you can just redesign the tx formats. In my view the people working on Color Coins lack vision and only see things in terms of the few things they know about Bitcoin. They don't have much understanding of how the greater world of money works at all. There is even a related project to Color Coins that as far as I can tell is some cheap pump and dump scam. these shortcomings I recognized a while ago and this is why I developed Confidence Chains http://altchain.orgI factor out a few things here and there, and you get something quite different. You get a chain of confidence, with nodes you must trust. The advantage to this architecture is many things, one of them is that you cannot disable it without disabling all the nodes. You can look at the whitepapers on the site, its all explained clearly and I haven't revised any of my claims BECAUSE THEY ARE BASED IN WELL UNDERSTOOD PRINCIPLES. |
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Let's take namecoin as one example, namecoin is merged mine, so it has at this time around 80% of the hash rate of Bitcoin. Namecoin performs a naming registry function that may be outside the scope of the current bitcoin functionality.
Now what about iXcoin (internet exchange coin), like namecoin, this is merged mined with around 40% of the hash rate of Bitcoin (in the 5 peta hash range). iXcoin can be specialized to handled 'colored coins'. It doesn't make sense to handle colored coins in the bitcoin blockchain.
if you do this, then you lose the 'atomic swap' functionality, which was a key sell of the whole color coins platform. The Color Coins project seems to be in a perpetual state of disrepair and revision. I've found many unreliable claims come out of that project. |
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I believe the ones that aren't merged mined are even more susceptible. You could take any one of the coins here: https://www.cryptsy.com/as long as it's not Scrypt, you can use the same mining power to fork the block chain. If you could set up some kind of short sell, you could make good money just shorting these coins then forking the block chain. Just a thought  |
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there is also the Color Coins project which will not only add transactions, it will multiply the RATE of transactions perhaps by a factor of thousands(perhaps even hundreds of thousands- there is no limit). at the minimum, having a full block chain copy will be impossible for the average user, further compromising the p2p aspect. |
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I believe the bitcoin network can handle the load, look at the hashing power we now have online with ASIC's and this number continues to rise. It will actually make transaction fees more "profitable" for miners in pools paying or sharing these fees.
Mtnminer
more profitable for miners, more expensive for users. |
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has anyone even discussed the threat of mining centralization to ALT COINS?
while we may or may not see a block chain fork event take place on the main block chain, these consolidated mining pools could easily fork one of the minor ALT COINS. also the way checkpoints work with the altcoins is never made clear. The question of who is setting the checkpoints for BTC is a serious concern, what about the checkpoint for the Altcoins?
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But in reality, by the time BitCoin is large enough for this to be a real issue it will be quite possible to freeze bitcoins by requiring miners to exclude transactions from blacklisted addresses. As miners will likely be spread throughout the world, this would require the co-operation of many different governments and a total freeze is impossible (as anyone can mine), but if enough hash power can be made to co-operate the difference between "your tx might confirm in 20 years" vs "your coins are frozen" is pretty small. Because mining will be concentrated in the hands of a small number of legitimate, regulated companies, once an international framework is put in place the actual freeze orders would be enforceable very quickly or even instantly (eg by requiring miners to poll a signed list of addresses from some web site).
blacklisted addresses
co-operation of many different governments
Because mining will be concentrated in the hands of a small number of legitimate, regulated companies
international frameworkyou have got to be kidding me. Let me sum this up for you: lets turn Bitcoin into Paypal, ok? except it burns electricity like crazy and uses incredible amounts of computing resources. |
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