@dragonkid

As I see it, China has some significant problems.  Overpopulation and poor land for agraculture for one.  China spends more on internal security than external defence because, like most nations, the most salient threat is from it's own people.  We'd be the same except that we spend such a huge amount to support our far flung empire.

China also is getting reamed by the US since we've parked in the Middle East and control access to energy at the moment.

By militarizing heavily for external conflict and eventually engaging, China would kill a bunch of birds with one stone.  Rally people around the flag so they forget their domestic problems, reduce their population and re-adjust the gender gap, end up parked in the Middle East and in control of land-based energy routes, control farm land in Africa, etc.  China could lose 10-to-1 against the US and still win (Most people achieve a 1 to 10 body count ratio against us, but then we normally fight on foreign soil and count women, children, pigs, etc.)

Anyway, I hope for everyone's sake that China's leaders don't take up my ideas, but I suspect that eventually the solution will turn out to be to sweet to pass up.  Particularly if they are looking at a revolution and loss of power anyway.

I dunno.  The goobmint (mine in this case) holding $5m and coinlabs on the hook for another $5m makes $10m that Karpeles cannot run away with.  He is also a known person with a significant and interesting business history and is unlikely to be able to disappear from the face of the earth as easily as some random plonker in Estonia or whatever like most of the competition.

I expect to get my money (though not necessarily from Karpeles) eventually or learn some things trying.  I've only put at risk the amount of money I can afford to have tied up for years or lose completely however.  That was deliberate from the get-go of my dealings with Mt. Gox (which started somewhat after they started having pretty obvious problems.)

Ya, I sometimes muse about the most likely way for Orwell's prediction to complete.  One must define such an entity by the makeup of it's 'inner party', and I think that it is as true in Europe as it is in the US that individuals of the 'inner party' and those who comprise the government are not particularly the same set.  My best scenario is if we went through a global economic collapse period where value was defined by gold, and the US simply flat out appropriated Germany's (which is pretty much certain to happen.)  At that point, coupled with Russia's energy supplies and favorable geography to gain control of energy transport routes, I could imagine Germany simply switching sides.  Being such a powerhouse, I've little doubt that the rest of Europe would follow (sans GB of course.)

Ultimately I suspect that the PNAC folk were right in that there is room for one more period of hegemony in a multi-polar world before a single entity takes over completely.  Even if they are right it does not mean that such a structure could not fragment but it might be difficult to provoke.  Anyway we are looking out several centuries for this stuff.  I personally, for whatever reason, find myself more comfortable and preferring a plethora of smaller states who jealously guard their independence and do the right thing as much as possible.

In some sense I see things organizing much like Orwell predicted in his 1984 with Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, but Western Europe ended up being part of Oceania (aka, 'the West'.)

Lots of Europeans like to piss and moan about the US pushing people around militarily, yet their governments almost universally join right in when instructed.  Economically even more-so.  Many, if not most, individuals in the US are getting pretty fed up with the belligerence in foriegn policy (and numerous other maladies) but at this point we have no real democracy at the federal level.  I would say that it must be pretty similar in the rest of the Western countries and thus their pliability.

Just as some of our leaders (or at least the think-tankers) dream of a 'better Middle East' and re-draw the maps to amuse themselves, I think it would be ultimately beneficial for humanity if the U.S. broke up into 5 or 6 separate states with at most a rough and narrowly defined mutual defense pact to deal with our strategic nuclear stockpile.  Some of the states, at least, would learn from the past mistakes and halt the influence of money in politics in their founding papers.  Those who were serious about this one critical thing would likely prosper given the fantastic infrastructure and nature wealth of the nation as it is currently.

Sounds like we won't be friends after all.

I guess Uncle Sam is bringing a little 'violence' down on DPR's ass, eh?  I suppose that in some twisted world having someone tortured before they are killed(*) is not the 'violence' that Libertarians are so hung up on, but I cannot seem to get my head around that one.  Maybe if I were more versed in Austrian School it would all fall into place.

(*) if there is any truth to the government's story, and unfortunately I question just about everything they put out for media consumption these days.

Anyway, goodbye and good riddance to Silk Road.  Sounds like it was in essence a honey-pot for quite some time as I always suspected even if DPR was to ignorant to know it.

Me thinks that Mt. Gox could solve the crisis of getting money to large swaths of their userbase rather easily by having an agent do cash deposits as does Bitcoin-Brokers.  Seems to work fine and takes about a day for everyone to be happy as Bitcoin-Brokers implements things.

Where there is a will there is a way.  We used to be able to get millions of dollars out to cash buyers literally floating on small craft in the middle of the Bering Sea, and that was 1970's and 1980's dollars.  Ironically, most of this money originated from accounts in Japanese banks.  Or at least it was Japanese firms who supplied the money.  Those folks like fish!

Oreally!  That is interesting.  I only looked at Litecoin early on and have lived under the assumption that they would have the same issues as Bitcoin (or worse) if they achieved the same utilization.  Although there were other things to like about Litecoin, generally I've been to lazy to have paid much attention since my initial scan.  If they are getting serious about scalability and retaining lower end users as a critical component of the network infrastructure I better take another look.

What is the best way to follow your work?

That is what I meant.  It is to bad that it's not being worked on.  Again, it was one of the things in the whitepaper which gave me some hope for the sustainability of the system as a more realistic community maintained solution.  I've suspected for some time now that once the perception of possible scalability in this respect was implanted, the goal of that text was achieved.


It's easy to get spoiled when working on high capacity networks and neglect to consider the various use-cases.  I've never argued that POTS or satellite should be supported as a baseline, but have argued that if they could it would result in a system which was much more difficult to subvert.  I personally don't think it is worth the tradeoff though.

As soon as a simple SPV client implemented in a language which does not effectively require un-trusted dependencies exists I likely use it for certain things.  Of course it adds no value to the Bitcoin network other than 'headcount' perhaps so I guess that the operators of the network will be extracting value from clients like this in other ways.


I typically try to plan my infrastructure investments (which are often more about time than money) for a reasonable life expectancy.  If the resource utilization rate is predictable then this is possible.  If, say, the transaction rate could change on a whim and necessitate a rapid escalation of the resources I need to deploy such a system then there is less likilyhood that I will bother in the first place.  I doubt that I am alone in such a calculus.

 - edit: to answer your question, I was looking for 1) a system which would allow me to compile my own OS, and 2) in a jurisdiction which was suitible miffed at the NSA spying that they may have take real steps to prevent it and have the technical expertise to do so.  I found myself here:  http://nqhost.com/freebsd-vps.html.  I also considered AWS micro instances which may or may not work.


If I ran bitcoind on a VPS there would be little or no need to run anything locally.  At least on a VPS that I could have some confidence in from a security perspective (a big question mark in my mind at this time.)

Nice one!  That is exactly what happened last time IIRC.  IIRC, that was the end of the Gingrich reign of moronism.

Now, many years later, I am both more aware of the nuts and bolts of our political machine, and more isolated from certain of it's tentacles (thanks in part to Bitcoin) so I am more in the 'bring it on' camp.

Wonder no more;  I build both from source code and released distributions along with organized and auditable patches.  I've done things this way since I started using FreeBSD in the 90's.

When I run bitcoind these days I run a build which includes a compilation of openssl, boost, and berkeleydb and I can select the source distribution and apply any patches I like along the way.  Further, I can re-build with any code tweeks to any of these items in a matter of minutes and have a new binary running seconds after that.

Actually, I don't run bitcoind currently.  I'm behind a satellite system and the block chain is twice the size of my total monthly download allotment (for which I pay $80/mo.)  Just the other day I was looking around for a VPS but unfortunately the block chain itself is starting to exceed the size that low tier VPS's support.

Speaking of, any news on the block chain compression front as mentioned in the whitepaper?  That was kind of a selling point to me (recognizing immediately the potential scaling issue.)  Last I heard (from you IIRC) ~sipa was trying to have a life and working on it sporadically.

I read on some tinfoil-hat site that a lot of things like riot control equipment and training was directed to be complete not later than 1 Oct 2013.

Also, the executive branch did everything possible to get us involved in a war in Syria which would be happily chipping away but new enough to be on people's minds about now but for Putin being a good chess player and Assad being a particularly intelligent and level-headed leader.

Of course the best explanation for the truly massive level of surveillance we live under, up to and including social relationship graphs of individuals, is to address social movements should they pop up.  The most likely reason for such an eventuality has always seemed to me to be the appropriation of people's financial assets to bail-in the financial sector (e.g., Cyprus.)

Is this the event the leadership has been waiting for...or I should say, the tip of the first domino?  If so, I would bet that things are fairly well choreographed and the supposed friction between the supposed 'adversaries' who make up or government is all just for show.

I had to use fax for machine parts from New Zealand the other day.  If the Japs like Faxes, so be it.  It should not be rocket science to use a fax, and even to automate things significantly with something like HylaFAX.  The suggestion that Mt. Gox cannot figure out facsimile machines and that is somehow to blame for trouble getting funds to customers smacks of bullshit to be blunt about it.

I guess you are addressing me since I was the only poster in the recent activity of this thread.  Can you point out the 'incorrect information' I supposedly spread?


Alas, Java VM joins Windows and Android as systems I stay away from for security work.  It at least has been possible at some point to compile the JVM myself but it's a hassle and never worked right on my system.  I trust almost no pre-complied systems from large companies (especially Oracle) and that had been the case since before PRISM was disclosed.  But is even more so now.


It would not be the first time that someone fucked up and accidentally did the right thing.  My point is that no matter what the size, it is useful to bump into it and let the economics of transaction fees work for a while to find out empirically how the system functions.  This will allow certain systems to build up around the expectation of a more realistic mode of self sufficiency.

I think it pretty fair to say the 'satoshi' also elaborated on an end-point of the system being supported by transaction fees.  As opposed to, say, users being milked for the PII intelligence value they provide (as has become a reality for e-mail and www protocols.)  'satoshi' may very well have anticipated and welcomed this eventuality and you would know better than I, but I will say that if so he fucked up by making it a hard-fork to adjust the system to this trajectory.

Put another way, I don't think that someone 'supports' the kind of system I would like to see Bitcoin become by being exploited in the same manner that web service users are under many other protocols.


I am not doubting the veracity of your private e-mails with 'satoshi', and don't doubt that you flipped out when you saw the 'quick hack' (sans commit comments) and provoked this note, but there is an amusing parallel here between how everything the NSA does is legal due to secret laws which nobody else can see.  There is also a similarly amusing parallel between Jesus vanishing only being accessible to persons with special communications powers.  Again, I don't doubt that you posses such powers...it's more 'satoshi's divinity which I find debatable.

 - Edit in:  A hypothesis which also strikes me as possible is that 'satoshi' has been to some extent 'using' you (Mike).  I mean you have fearsome technical skills and drive, and also a positioning within the industry which has value of various sorts.  Your participation could be leveraged effectively by some management of the possible points of discontinuity on the evolution and endpoint of the Bitcoin system.

The first thing I do these days is to look at the web site for an 'about us' which gives personally identifiable or business registration info such that I could go after someone if they cause me a loss through theft.  I currently favor blockchain.info because the proprietor is not afraid to use his real name.  I saw no such thing on inputs.io, and a quick search for an announcement thread here which might contain the information of interest yielded nothing.

I'm curious about your issue with miicard.  The thing is pretty scary, but I did sign up using a bank account without a lot of funds on time.  They pestered me when I closed the account so it seems like the do ping one's bank account from time to time.

Actually, the thread had been pretty quite until you piped up.

For my part, I'm still waiting for a good read on the economics of transaction fees.

Growth at 7 TPS or there abouts is eminently manageable while retaining a realistic P2P structure (possibly part of the reason Satoshi chose it?)  Even notably higher transaction rates would be manageable and probably defensible in case of most significant forms of attack, but the key is that things have to be predictable in order to facilitate good engineering and planning for those who have an interest in trying to help support the system.

An exploration of the social and business setting in which Mt. Gox operate seems to me a perfectly fine way to kill time while waiting for Mt. Gox to send the fiat they have supposedly have in the pipeline.  If they provided any useful information to chew on related to the apparent failure of about half of the services they supposedly offer, the equation might change a bit, but they don't seem to be inclined in that direction.

I'm at day 37-ish awaiting my international wire with no results thus far.  It cannot be argued that a party runs and 'exchange' if their service is only good for one-way purchases.  That is to say, only fiat -> BTC is the operations work.

I currently remain of the opinion that it is most likely that the problems are mostly "not Mt. Gox's fault", but they are failing to provide much information to sustain that opinion.  Some rational for this communications failure would be understandable.  Some not.

One of the many things that would bring would be an increased justification for fine grained surveillance and other methods of population management.  Some may not see that as a particularly bad thing, and that would be particularly the case when faced with a loss of exploitative abilities which have evolved in conjunction with the evolution of our current monetary solutions.  Monetary solutions which I feel are probably nearing the end of their natural lifecycle.

In my part of the world I now pay and extra few cents per gallon for gasoline and diesel if I use either my credit card or debit card.  So, I drop by the ATM and pull out a pocket full of cash regularly.  No biggie for me, and to be honest it helps to be forced to 'do the right thing.'

Using cash for purchases of this and that, and in particular in the provision of sensitive material, is really counter-productive to the goal of individual population surveillance.  This tells me that there is less than perfect coordination between financial institutions and our internal surveillance frameworks.  I view it as a good thing.

OTOH, if somehow cash was deprecated to the point of non-use under a situation where 'naughty' purchases were already cut out from the electronic systems, it could be a pretty devastating combination punch.  I don't see such a deprecation as being eminent, but I also don't completely rule it out under a scenario of extreme economic crisis.

Ya, Ya, it's just that the name sounds so un-Japanese.  There was a similar thing in India IIRC, but now I cannot remember what it was.  OTOH, 'park' sounds outwardly non-Korean to my ear but it's got to be one of the more abused words in that language.

I wonder if Lawsons had an advertising windfall when Eddie Lawson was winning GP championships right and left on Japanese machines (just like everyone else in the sport.)  That was before any notable Japanese riders showed up on the scene.