The government chose to limit themselves to Ulbricht and a couple of his lieutenants. Much much more was possible.
I assert rather they limited their scope of enforcement because they know they can't regulate jaywalking on rural roads. Once it becomes clear to the people that the BIG government is impotent, checkmate on BIG government. CoinCube, the cathedrals you pray to (respect or wary of) are collapsing. Hope you get out before the roof caves in. (note to self, might take longer than hoped though) Taking me out is irrelevant. The trend is already underway and rpietila's prior post is salient. Waving a red flag in front of the Big Rhino (US Government) is never a good idea.
...
And, keep in mind that they are looking out for THEIR interests much more than they are looking out for us.
Indeed TPTB have no incentive to fuck with you individually (other than their inexorable ass diving with inflation, taxes, etc), unless you make it such that they must fuck with you or lose their own credibility. |
|
|
|
The experiment will likely fail if it the network is NOT upgraded and the limit eventually removed. The limit has already been reached anyway.
no. and no. The first one is opinion. The second one is fact. I have seen plenty of blocks come through at 9xx kb, so yes the 1mb limit has been reached. yes. and (soon) yes. If Bitcoin is not "up"graded to centralization, then it withers on the vine because the ideological delusionfever was that we were going to decentrallyventure-capital scale this out to every human in the world. If we "down"grade to a hobbiest store-of-value then the network effects that allow us to exchange Bitcoins for other things fall away. In short, Bitcoin is a cooperative effort between mainstream media, financial powers, and the ideological geeks who got fooled (yet who cling to their delusions about MSM and TPTB defecting   ). Without that cooperation, it never happened. I want to try a new experiment. We freedom fighters and knowledge age workers go make a coin that remains decentralized by design without ideological dedication, and it scales to our virtual markets. We spin our economy off from the dying NWO industrial age morass of socialism, and we grow our economy over 2 decades to become the main economy by 2033. |
|
|
|
yes, the avg Venezuelan doesn't care about running a full node. he cares about reliable, cheap tx's. sad thing is, if we stay at 1MB blocks, he might never know about Bitcoin. and he certainly will never learn about the more complex concept of digital gold.
I agree actually that decentralization doesn't scale if it relies on ideological consensus dedication. And that is why a major overhaul of the design of crypto-currency is required in order to align the incentives properly for decentralization. Bitcoin's design is fundamentally flawed and can't be rescued. The forces are already in play that prevent even Bitcoin adopting my superior design which even Satoshi foresaw... The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.
|
|
|
|
... Please note Satoshi chose to include in the blockchain a newspaper quote from an article about bailouts for TBTF banks, instead of one from an article about excessive bank, ATM, or credit card fees. Bitcoin is revolution and financial freedom, not a nifty gadget to put in retail points of sale. If a guy in Venezuala (or Florida) can't be his own private bank by running a full node over TOR on a slow 5mb DSL line, this experiment has failed. Satoshi did not create Bitcoin because he was mad about the 50 cent credit/debit surcharge on his iced Americano, and you can't kill/obsolete the BIS with some stupid VC micropayment daydream internet-of-bullshit Visa-wannabe transaction network. And there is this: The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.
If we subsidize blockchain bloat, we'll get more of it. That most precious resource should be optimized, not diluted. The sooner you Monopolist Maximalists get over the fact that GavinCoin doesn't have the required 80% consensus, the better. The max doesn't have to stay 1mb forever, but now is not the time to potentially undermine the diffuse/defensible/resilient nature that provides BTC's antifragilty. I agree with everything you wrote above, except 1) Gavincoin has 80% of the mining consensus (which is centralized already), you freedom figthers lost and you will soon be forced to admit it, 2) Micropayments are undesired if done by Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc, but there is a way to do this without centralization and SOBO you will not get enough network effects from just making a decentralized store-of-value that can't be spent nor converted to anything any where  . (SOBO = statement of the blatantly obvious) We are headed into a global contagion where physical black markets will not exist. You will not be able to trade crypto-currency for legal tender nor for gold. The only economy left standing (other than the NWO monetary reset) will be the anonymous micropayments economy of the fledgling Knowledge Age.
Running a full client is ALREADY too resource-intensive for average Joe. The blockchain.info model is better suited for average Joe. That model has proven to solve the problem of trust in an environment where trust has been violated a majority of the time. Average Joe will be his own bank with a simple web interface where he has full control over his keys.
excuse my ignorance, but why is average joe (or average jose in argentina) "required" to run a full node.
why cant they run an spv client? Are spv clients like multibit unsafe (or not safe enough?) once sync'd to the rest of the nodes. satoshi believed that the vast majority would use spv clients. was this an unwise decision to make?
If mining isn't decentralized, then you've lost control over Bitcoin to the financial elite. ...
Blockchain size is not the main issue with micropayments (no amount of pruning is scalable if the unpruned chain isn't scalable, i.e. scalability is a different complexity class from bounded compression). Rather as I discussed with thezerg upthread, at some scale micropayments force centralization of full nodes due to processing and bandwidth requirements. I argued that renting a hosting server is not decentralization, because the authorities can regulate the ISPs. Anonymity derives from mixing targeted activity (monopolization of mining by the cartel that runs our world) with untargeted activity (users surfing the net from a home ISP connection).
...
The 20 MB blocks will drive more centralization of mining. And you can't fork away from that... ...
Until we make crypto-currency technically impossible to monopolize, then we've given them no choice but to do what they do best.
Bitcoin's design can't resist monopolization. Impossible. Do I need to repeat all the detailed reasons again?
...
...
You can't fork away from the masses whom are owned by these mainstream elite who are now taking over Bitcoin. No one will follow you. Money requires some critical mass.
If you are going to fork, you must do it now and build some critical mass (even if smaller than Bitcoin's mass).
Which is precisely what I am intending to do very soon, i.e. fork those of us who are aware into a design that technically can resist all forms of attack on the decentralization and permission-less attributes.
Until you have that, you are just blowing hot air here.
...
Very simple. They have monopolized the mining (ASICs concentrated into farms, 21 Inc, pools hidden behind Sybil attack) and the userbase (Coinbase, Paypal, Circle, Bitpay, etc). Checkmate.
...
P.S. Bitcoin will succeed in being widely adoped, because the elite want it to succeed. But they will be in control of Bitcoin. The decentralized, permission-less quality of Bitcoin will be a propaganda lie only, not reality.
|
|
|
|
From the thread, One-world reserve currency inevitable and will enslave all nations?As I have outlined in this thread and else where on these forums... http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/31006The prospects of the Federal Reserve remaining on track to raise interest rates later this year are still settling in yet people fail to grasp that raising rates will be bullish and it will confirm the capital flows are moving into the USA. We have a serious divergence between the USA and Europe. Not merely is the USA the best situated from the problem of the graying of society, but the lower taxes in the USA remain key as well as the fact that FATCA does not apply in reverse. Foreign citizens can come to the USA and open bank accounts without a problem, Americans cannot leave the country with the same privilege. So the capital inflows are pointing straight to the USA and as real estate on the high end and stocks look good, more and more capital will travel into the USA. The Fed will be accused of creating the bubble since the domestic press will never understand the complexity of the world economy as a whole. So the Fed will be blamed for creating a bubble both from the media (rich are getting richer) and from Congress.
Meanwhile, there are growing concerns that financial woes could engulf Spain in addition to Greece. Higher interest rates for the world’s largest economy could lessen the the likelihood of economic survival among the allure the emerging markets and add to the problem of Europe going negative. Everything so far appears to be shaping up for a Phase Transition in the USA. That will baffle most and will place the maximum amount of pressure of Asia and Europe. By the time we get to the other end, they will be calling for a one world currency – watch. |
|
|
|
As I have outlined in this thread and else where on these forums... http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/31006The prospects of the Federal Reserve remaining on track to raise interest rates later this year are still settling in yet people fail to grasp that raising rates will be bullish and it will confirm the capital flows are moving into the USA. We have a serious divergence between the USA and Europe. Not merely is the USA the best situated from the problem of the graying of society, but the lower taxes in the USA remain key as well as the fact that FATCA does not apply in reverse. Foreign citizens can come to the USA and open bank accounts without a problem, Americans cannot leave the country with the same privilege. So the capital inflows are pointing straight to the USA and as real estate on the high end and stocks look good, more and more capital will travel into the USA. The Fed will be accused of creating the bubble since the domestic press will never understand the complexity of the world economy as a whole. So the Fed will be blamed for creating a bubble both from the media (rich are getting richer) and from Congress.
Meanwhile, there are growing concerns that financial woes could engulf Spain in addition to Greece. Higher interest rates for the world’s largest economy could lessen the the likelihood of economic survival among the allure the emerging markets and add to the problem of Europe going negative. Everything so far appears to be shaping up for a Phase Transition in the USA. That will baffle most and will place the maximum amount of pressure of Asia and Europe. By the time we get to the other end, they will be calling for a one world currency – watch. I hope everyone has seen the revelations about Larry Summers and 21 Inc. |
|
|
|
I now think that operating in the allegedly illegal market, while you otherwise refrain from violence and fraud, is ethical. And with some caution, not dangerous.
When the law conflicts with morality, you need to either compromise your morality, or disregard the law. (I, for one, am not into watering down my morality, no matter what gains are to be had for doing it, or what dangers await for those not doing it) Original Bastiat quote: When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the lawMorals are one person's arbitrary religion (i.e. conflicting unfalsifiable opinions) versus another. Rather I would replace the word morality with ethics. Ethical standards exist because they are consistently and congruently win-win (or at least that is how I unambiguously define ethics). What you are really asserting here is that when society has become dysfunctional, the ethical option is to opt-out in order to promote win-win directions. Some can argue that there is no clear win-win, because there are always some losers (in the near-term). I think in every case we can drill down and reason out how ethical choices are really win-win for everyone despite some shifts and inconveniences. For example, many in this thread have argued that anonymity and pursuing maximum division-of-labor and automation in the coming Knowledge Age would render many people jobless. What they fail to realize is that those jobs are already unprofitable and bankrupted. It is only the $227 trillion global debt bubble that has misallocated capital (destroyed that capital) and sustained uneconomic activities. Thus the sooner they are forced to adjust and retrain (or train their offspring), the sooner the world moves away from the abyss and towards prosperity. |
|
|
|
a store-of-value that can't offer anything for the micropayments of the fledgling Knowledge Age, is going no where in terms of network effects.
Bitcoin is going to monopolize network effects in the NWO paradigm that most of the masses will fall into. If you are going to create an alternative, then you must identify the unique network effects of the alternative market.
Micropayments are only feasible given a prunable mini-blockchain like XCN's, or perhaps vaporware such as the Lightening Network. Blockchain size is not the main issue with micropayments (no amount of pruning is scalable if the unpruned chain isn't scalable, i.e. scalability is a different complexity class from bounded compression). Rather as I discussed with thezerg upthread, at some scale micropayments force centralization of full nodes due to processing and bandwidth requirements. I argued that renting a hosting server is not decentralization, because the authorities can regulate the ISPs. Anonymity derives from mixing targeted activity (monopolization of mining by the cartel that runs our world) with untargeted activity (users surfing the net from a home ISP connection). Going one step further, the requirement that full nodes (and mining in general) have to see every transaction is centralization and is one of the main design flaws I see in Bitcoin. Is this that great of a riddle? I don't think so. Just think about the only one thing the blockchain needs to guarantee in order to make crypto-currency valid. Is that still not yet enough hints (including prior posts with hints) to deduce my design? |
|
|
|
we would end up with an Austrian fork and a Keynesian fork dueling it out
Aptly put. Perhaps the (roughly) two camps could agree to a 'velvet divorce' enforced with some social agreement and crypto-magic. Gavin's Keynesian fork, with its inflated transaction supply, can continue its futile quest to mimic Visa, Mastercard, dollar bills, and pennies until the UXTO buffer pukes blood. Satoshi's Austrian fork can continue to represent a new store of value and settlement system, guaranteeing for the first time in history every human the opportunity to be their own bank. My stance is that a store-of-value that can't offer anything for the micropayments of the fledgling Knowledge Age, is going no where in terms of network effects. Bitcoin is going to monopolize network effects in the NWO paradigm that most of the masses will fall into. If you are going to create an alternative, then you must identify the unique network effects of the alternative market. |
|
|
|
I used the term 'permission-minimized.' How many times has someone been prevented from spending their coins? None that I am aware of. It's just another theoretical attack that doesn't work in practice.
Either it is or it isn't. This is the exact issue I'm trying to draw attention to. It is a big assumption to make that the pressure for miners to conform to government edicts will not increase in step with bitcoin's influence on world finance. By the time that happens, and without an alteration in the barriers to entry for mining or the miners ability to control transactions, then mining centralisation will become even more entrenched. How are you going to feel if a future mining majority decides that Austrianism is no longer fashionable any more, and Keynesianism is back? 500 BTC superwhales could end up with something closer to 500 dollars.It is highly unlikely to happen as radically as you describe. If this were to happen, then most likely we would end up with an Austrian fork and a Keynesian fork dueling it out, which I could see possibly happening. Users would have to make a choice between one or the other, or a combination of the two. This is the likely outcome in your scenario because bitcoin is global and can be forked easily. The dollar or Euro cannot be forked with a new set of rules applied, so this scenario is impossible with legacy currencies. You can't fork away from the masses whom are owned by these mainstream elite who are now taking over Bitcoin. No one will follow you. Money requires some critical mass. If you are going to fork, you must do it now and build some critical mass (even if smaller than Bitcoin's mass). Which is precisely what I am intending to do very soon, i.e. fork those of us who are aware into a design that technically can resist all forms of attack on the decentralization and permission-less attributes. Until you have that, you are just blowing hot air here. |
|
|
|
What stops government saying "never mind your sound money game, allow me to introduce you to the game we're actually playing..."
In Bitcoin you "vote" for what will happen to your own money, not the money of others. This is the big difference, and the reason why the state can not co-opt it. Did they not teach you in Political Economics 101 that democracy and voting is power vacuum, thus a winner-take-all paradigm? Will you continue to eat the democracy lie for breakfast that the intellectuals have been feeding you ever since you stopped accepting a mirror in exchange for your ancestral land?
Bitcoin does what the economic majority want, the only question in my mind is does the economic majority want to adopt the immutable rules of Bitcoin, or does the economic majority want to tweak the rules by manipulating politics.
Does the ecomonic majority want permissionless, borderless bitcoin or something else? Does a cow not want to eat grass? Does a human not want to urinate and shit? Some things are immutable because otherwise they can't exist without. The elite exist because they enslave those of you who wish to be enslaved because you eat delusion every day. Without that paradigm, they can not exist. Larry Summers and the financial elite can't give up their power and join a power-sharing arrangement in a decentralized Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is a power vacuum that is winner-take-all by whoever will monopolize the mining and users. Until we make crypto-currency technically impossible to monopolize, then we've given them no choice but to do what they do best. Bitcoin's design can't resist monopolization. Impossible. Do I need to repeat all the detailed reasons again? That power elite conspire to capture power vacuums is fact, not theory. Conspiracy theory is a term used by people who wish to live in a fantasy nirvana of democracy, voting, equality, human rights, etc. (it doesn't exist, the world is run by a Club and you ain't in it). All lies pitched to you by those whose role is to capture the power vacuum you've collectively laid out for them. |
|
|
|
Assume some or all of the individuals in this list are saboteurs instead of defectors. What types of attacks can they carry out? What countermeasures are available to defend against those attacks? They are not defecting. They are saboteurs (or allies depending on your goals) subsuming Bitcoin into the mainstream financial system and the plan for the NWO. Very simple. They have monopolized the mining (ASICs concentrated into farms, 21 Inc, pools hidden behind Sybil attack) and the userbase (Coinbase, Paypal, Circle, Bitpay, etc). Checkmate. Do you eat delusion for breakfast every morning? P.S. Bitcoin will succeed in being widely adoped, because the elite want it to succeed. But they will be in control of Bitcoin. The decentralized, permission-less quality of Bitcoin will be a propaganda lie only, not reality. |
|
|
|
|
INVALID BBCODE: close of unopened tag in table (1)
|
|
|
|
|
For those who know my Bitmessage address (public key), you can now message me or check for messages from me. I am now running BitMessage again.
|
|
|
|
This has been one of my most interesting reads in awhile. Thank you. A rational person does not waste his time on fantastical prose that is entirely lacking of any substantiation and fails Occam's Razor. In the 1-in-a-billion chance that the above linked text was information, I will take my chances on ignoring it. Following 1-in-a-billion forks in the road can lead to a lost life. |
|
|
|
I will be making a post later in my day (GMT+7) to make some counter points on this article: On the Clothing of Emperors: A Rant about 21.co and the Future of Bitcoin MiningMy main points will be: 1. Marginal-cost of electricity and variable seasons of the Bitcoin price market vs. speed of deployment of fixed capital investment (Economics 101 lesson) 2. (Politically obfuscated) goal of >50% control of hashrate to increase profits in side-channels, including but not limited to a near monopoly on setting txn fees. 3. TDP is only limited on cell phones by the mass and/or extent of heat dissipation apparatus? P.S. I made some comments about the recent downtime of bitcointalk, and I noticed the timing of the takedown was approximately immediately after I wrote my prior jaw-dropping post and my post which solidified some of the essential points of my allegations against 21 Inc.'s business model. I am not totally ruling out the possibility that the the-powers-that-be are scrambling to figure out how to squelch these revelations. A friend of mine has agreed to pass on these revelations to those who can publish them far and wide in the alternative media scene (think Alex Jones and spin offs). It is possible they wanted to view my private messages, if they don't already have them since I turned off email notification and assuming the elite aren't in control of the certificate issuer for the SSL certificate for this site. In any case, they won't learn much from my private messages. They would need to crack Bitmessage instead. OTOH, it is not likely that elite are concerned about the unproven capabilities of some nobody like myself. They have bigger fish to fry and the masses are probably going to fall into the NWO no matter what we all do here. Also I should add the Larry Summers and Robert Rubin were instrumental in the repeal of Glass-Steagal during the Clinton administration. Also note I emailed Martin Armstrong about these revelations and he did not print it, even though he is the one who has been harping on Larry Summers and the move to electronic cash. The only reason I can think of for him not writing about this, is because it is blatant evidence of a globalized plan towards a global Technocracy — something which he denies the elite are capable of planning or coordinating on a global scale. Martin claims the elite are fools who can't trade well and need a public backstop so they can gamble with other people's money. He doesn't agree that there is a global coordination amongst the elite with long-range plans for NWO control. Thus this is evidence that either Armstrong is disingenuous (censors to fit his irrational ego) or worse he is in bed with the elite helping to promote globalized "solutions" such as his calls for coordinate political and bond restructuring reforms harmonized with a move to a NWO one-world reserve currency. |
|
|
|
In my estimation, recent state-level marijuana legalization events are of equivalent magnitude to the fall of the Berlin wall in terms of what it means about Washington DC's internal control over the US, and probably means the US empire is approximately at the same point it its life cycle as the Soviet empire was in 1989.
And then most of Russia's resources were handed out to a few oligarchs who are beholden to the cartel. And do you know who was over there organizing that? Larry Summers. The same former US Treasury and World Bank official (also was nominated to replace Bernanke) involved with 21 Inc, who first floated the idea of negative interest rates and eliminating cash. Do some research folks. Didn't know Summers was involved in that. So it reads like due to the 2008 crisis, DC can't exercise control over the states as their political longevity / security has taken a large hit (struggling with revenue / solvency / unemployment concerns etc). Weed brings in much needed revenue. Economic conditions resulting from 2008 also gave rise to Bitcoin. Bitcoin was created by the DEEP STATE as a strategic move to coop existing banking and currency systems in order to drive the move to digital currency and do to this power grab in a obfuscated manner that fools the geeks and turns them into gullible accomplices. Are you not aware of the $3+ trillion black budget of the DEEP STATE? Donald Rumsfeld (while he was Secretary of Defense under POTUS junior Bush) announced on the eve of 9/11 that such amount had gone missing from the DoD's budget. Conveniently the next day all the records of the investigation and the investigators were eliminated by the airborne attack on that one specific section of the Pentagon (with of course the alleged leaks of former Vice POTUS Cheney commanding the F-15s to stand down and allow the attack to proceed). Catherine Austin Fitts (former Asst to the Secretary of HUD, Jack Kemp and former Wall Street insider) has written extensively about the Black Budget at her http://solari.comBill Moyers did a TV documentary on the DEEP STATE. Armstrong has a letter from the SEC confirming that all the tape recordings he had of the bankster manipulations were destroyed at the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Etc.. The evidence weaves a story. Control over the drug trade is not about funding as much as it is about corrupting other officials, governments, and societies. It is one element in a full spectrum matrix of power and control. I can see they are trying to take this forum down again. Keep getting "Bad Gateway" which is what happened right before it went down a few days ago.
Edit: a very smart friend of mind relates to me that a Soros foundation was contributing money to the campaign to legalize marijuana in Colorado that was eventually successful. And notes that the-powers-that-be have objectives to simultaneously both restrict and promote drugs. They promote them because a population in a stupor is less resistant to erosion of freedoms and quite dependent in any collapse scenario. They restrict drugs because this gives them legal control over those individuals they've promoted to use and traffic drugs. Note that legalizing marijuana is also synonymous with agreeing that plants should be regulated by the State. Otherwise, why is it necessary to legalize use of a plant? You see the-powers-that-be are playing game with you, regulating you at the Federal level unconstitutionally then getting you to pass laws at the State level to admit their unconstitutional Federal laws are the law, thus enslaving yourselves by bringing plants under the prevue (jurisdiction) of law. Simpleton thinking falls for the ploy that legalizing MJ is any form of increasing freedom. Rockefeller's foundations and NGOs were instrumental in funding everything from 1960s activism, to feminism, to environmentalism. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
