I love the fact that it's hashing rate is continuing to increase, and soon it'll be stickied in the forums (meaning it'll be in the Top 10.)

At the risk of rehashing a settled issue, I have a stupid question:

It is already cryptographically possible to have two or more devices each have access to a portion of a private key, and be able to combine these portions to spend funds in such a way that no device gains access to any more of the private key than it already had, correct?

If this is the case, I'm wondering why it's considered mission-critical to implement scripting for multisig and for extra security measures in general by altering the protocol, rather than letting the owners of the private keys take responsibility for securing them and preventing unauthorized spending.

We could change the code to allow further subdivisions if necessary. It would still maintain the 21 million bitcoin cap.

Missed this or I would have contributed, but I certainly want to see the finished product!

Nice! Just finished the addition of the video.

I've never really gotten how that addressed the concerns. Someone with resources could just buy several thousand high-powered CPUs and do the same thing as folks spending a lot of money on GPUs.

Really, if there's something that can be bought and that is good to own, there's no way to prevent the rich from owning more of it, whether it be gold, U.S. Senators, or hashing power.

I'd run with the simple fact that gold can't be shoved down a wire and spent online, and that any gold-backed electronic commerce comes with all sorts of risk from the centralization necessary to operate it.

"Online commerce is here to stay, and we need digital cash. Would you prefer it be golden fiat, yet another promise-to-pay that can fail like it has before, or to be an actual digital commodity, limited in amount and with a free-market exchange rate, that's almost frictionless in it's utility, and that is always paid-in-full?"

Yes, over time, only those with a lot of capital will be able to mine efficiently. But it's not like only businesses in a narrow industry, or only the top three global corporations will be the ones involved.

Even if it costs $10M to do significant mining, since bitcoin will have become mainstream by that time, there will be plenty of big businesses that could get involved if they chose to, possibly thousands. It's been suggested that many might jump in just so they have a way to get their own transactions processed without any fees, since by then fees for quick processing will likely be non-negligible. And of course, there will continue to be new businesses springing up whose only function is mining, distributing profits to the shareholders.

tl;dr - It's not a real concern. Only the scale will shift, not the level of centralization.

Great to hear!

I'll continue to be on the lookout for developments, and plan to make a small donation to you for everyone who posts feedback on the alpha release in this thread (for a short while, anyway.) More for positive feedback, but it looks like there should be plenty of that.

Well, this one isn't an MP3 yet, but it's just audio clipped from a podcast, so no important visual data would be lost if any kind soul took the time to convert it to an MP3 and upload it someplace.

The hour-long interview with Roger Ver on the Free Talk Live radio show/podcast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAFGRrp_kc

Don't get so worked up. You'll just increase your blood pressure and die early.

Sorry... I don't have time to provide citations.

Just a little fix for ya.

Good points all around.

Well, that's the hope anyway. Depending on the scale of the curve, if done wrong, sigmoid-coin could start taking off after the first block reward decrease (kind of like bitcoin,) or it could start taking off while the block reward is still at 1.5625 BTC, and I don't think that kind of reward is going to prompt a bunch of for-profit miners... yet with a popular coin, and a low difficulty, you'd sure get a lot of "miners" jumping in with the intent of taking over and/or destroying the blockchain. Basically, there's no way a specific curve can be an automatic cure for what you're considering a problem.



True, but would you drop millions into an ad campaign for an untested new form of currency? And what if, instead of people paying attention, the only ones who did were banks and others who might find the coin a threat? The incentive for adoption is at least as important as the ad campaign... all the ads in the world won't persuade me to jump on board with a new technology that I see no advantage to getting involved with, but if the campaign is big enough it WILL broadcast the existence of that new technology to exactly the wrong people.



It would make a difference because potential miners would look at the curve, and say "meh, I'll wait until the block reward increases. No point in jumping in this early." The last thing you want is growing awareness without a growing number of new miners.



But you can't predict how long miners will wait to jump in, and hence how many coins early adopters will have. My contention is that it might be just about as many coins as they have now, relatively speaking.



I don't understand. How is one big business being the big early adopter any better than having several independent geeks be the early adopters?



A quick scan of the material at the link and at the wiki doesn't seem to address the number of participants. Could you boil it down to the essential idea? How does encoin directly address making sure the number of participants is followed by the output of coins?



I think you're underestimating what it takes to encourage early adoption.

I knew about bitcoin in 2010, yet despite the potential for profit, I waited until 2011, until I'd heard more advertising, and got the impression there was finally the beginnings of an infrastructure, before I got involved. That despite the early adopter potential.

Giving early adopters 2x the coins, but making it so that amount is meaningless, isn't going to encourage much of anything.

There are two contradictory goals you have here: (1) encourage early adoption, (2) ensure that early adopters don't profit "too much." With item (2) in effect, what exactly are you going to use to promote item (1)? And if you're not really concerned about item (1), then what's to stop just the few people who care about the coin from being the only early adopters, leading to the exact same situation we have now?

TL;DR - There's still no method being given that demonstrably (or even theoretically) leads to a situation of having many, many early adopters.

The problem wasn't the difficulty. The problem was the lack of people who knew about the system, which meant few people mining, which is what kept difficulty low in the first place (and which meant those coins were split among the few people.)

The problem was there wasn't a national ad campaign so that everyone could have jumped in, and the early coins could have been distributed among more people.

That said...

The problem I've come to see with the sigmoid curve is that there's no incentive for anyone to be an early adopter, even with a national ad campaign.

If tons of people had started flooding into mining bitcoin early, they would have done so when the inflation rate was the highest, and the most coins were coming into circulation. Early adoption was encouraged.

With the sigmoid curve, why would anyone go in first? They would all be fighting over scraps of coins, and all the electricity they burned would be much more efficiently utilized past -2 on the horizontal line, when the coins start coming in abundance. Waiting would encouraged.

That suggests to me that either sigmoid-coin would never get off the ground (so few people would be involved early on it would flounder) or that only a handful of people, out of sheer love of the project, would be mining right up until the -2 point.... and you'd still have millions of coins in the hands of a few.

I admit, it sounds good, but I don't think it fixes the real "problem": the coins flowing into the hands of a few right up until they have a significant number of them.

I'd really like to hear a method that directly addresses the number of participants, and then their subsequent share of coins.

Plenty of people, in a sense, have this, at least in the U.S. It's called a bank.

Government thinks you're a criminal? Boom, your account is frozen. They think you owe them something? Boom, they take the money out directly. The fact that they don't do it that often doesn't mean it never happens. And most people still wouldn't DREAM of not having a bank account, or worse, banking with some *unregulated* bank that doesn't do what the government tells it to.

I've even heard the sentiment expressed in this forum that letting government take a little bit of control of bitcoin in some form or fashion is a good thing because it lends bitcoin legitimacy! To my mind, the idea of there being a push toward government-controlled (read: "regulated") multisig accounts isn't just plausible, it's a question of "when", not "if."

I'm still waiting to hear of a better method of initial cryptocurrency distribution. OP?

I do see the utility of this, but I find myself wondering if this will really be how the masses will handle most of their transactions; having to always use two devices for every spend can get inconvenient, and people like convenience. Still, yes, were this to become standard (which I personally would dislike) I could see a lot more unspent complex-tx outputs sitting around.



Hmm. I see your point.

Pretty much this.

Let's not mince words. Bitcoin has the potential to be a tool of financial freedom so powerful it could completely shake up the status quo.

It also has the potential to be a tool of financial control so complete it could qualify as a Mark of the Beast^(tm).

It all depends on the people. If everyone rejects government involvement and refuses to allow centralization, we win. If everyone just accepts government controlling it and forcing you to use it a certain way, we're doomed.

Hmm. I'm going by what I've read on the other thread. I seem to recall one of the big points of contention was that, essentially, "we can't screw this up, because if we do, we won't ever be able to fix it."

One example:


Perhaps its more accurate to say implementing either risks causing serious problems.




Unspent bitcoins are only kept by miners until they are spent.

Sure, there will be some "lost" coins... coins sent using complex transactions where the recipient loses the private key, dies before spending the coins, etc. But I think that's a negligible situation that shouldn't dictate the protocol.

I think the real question is, how long on average will coins sent via complex transactions remain unspent? If the intention is for most transactions in the future to become complex (which I'm seeing hints of, and if so, I'd love to be pointed to where this is actually discussed openly,) then I see your point, but I don't see that that as a given.

Even if the average time delay of spending coins from complex transactions is months (which sounds highly unlikely,) it still just delays the pruning. A "rolling amount" of temporary bloat from some unspent complex-tx coins doesn't seem like it would be enough to worry about.