Ya.  I've always been prone to try to anticipate the worst and try to figure out a strategy for it.  Most of the time the worst never materializes, and that's fantastic!  Sometimes my choices to prepare for the worst end up costing me, but on balance they have not.

In this case, my fears for the future are in some sense a memory/study/observation of the past.  I remember back to the struggles around availability of 'military grade' cryptography from back when the Internet fist became available to me in the mid 90's.  It was not at all clear that 'we' were going to win and there was much talk around escrowed backdoors and such.  I think the main reason we won is that there was a recognition that seeing who communicated with who was actually more critical than knowing what they said.  And we also won because of people like Hal Finney...and possibly because of Hal Finney.

I also think that fucking with anyone's monetary system is on par with an act of war (whether the transgressors fully recognize their transgressions or not...)  If distributed crypto-currencies end up having a noticeable impact on mainstream monetary systems, and if they cannot be brought under control, I do expect a pretty significant response.

I'm afraid I have to concur.  I sense that 'the powers that be' are holding back and getting their ducks in a row at this point, but that all large countries, at least, have more to fear from their own populations than they do from one another.  I imagine that what happened to Mubarak did not go past most of the world's leaders and they have no plans to allow such a thing to happen to themselves.

The media corporations are the main ones chomping at the bit and have jumped the gun slightly to give us a taste of what's in store.  It's not pretty, and I'll bet that 'we ain't seen nothin yet.'


I'm afraid that I don't have as much hope for Meshnet and the like as I wish I did.  It's a huge technical challenge in the best of circumstances, and to get it to work with anything resembling reliability and performance in the face of almost any resistance (like hunting down nodes (which are, after all, beacons)) will be a monumental challenge.

I think it likely that in order to enjoy free communications we'll have to go through a period of slipping through various narrow cracks, but eventually we'll win and things will open back up again.  It well could be the case that Meshnet and such things will be exceedingly valuable in that phase.

I can only speak for myself, and I don't think that it should be a big factor in this decision, but...

I will definitely be liquidating a fair fraction of my BTC holdings if I don't feel that the solution is on a trajectory to withstand very significant growth and very significant attacks.  It is in fact something I've been actively planning but a serious discussion about block size and off-chain frameworks has given me new hope.

Now, it is fair to say that I'm an unusual thinker in my system analysis.  I was buying with both hands in late 2011 based on analysis and intuition, and with a few exceptions it seemed like many/most of the people on bitcointalk.org were kind of on death watch.

I personally figured it was not worth trying to get them to talk to me until I was planning on doing transactions in the $100k range.  I tried to get some answers on their intro thread about how they were going to handle proof of identity and such and got nada.  They don't give me the sense that they are interested in piddling around with the small fry.  Same with Tradehill-II.

That is, to me, what the struggle over the block size and 'off-chain transaction solutions' is all about.

I and other 'minimalists' have some theories about how the attacks might go down and how to attempt to thwart them.  Other people have other theories.  It's hard to know who is right or how much time we have to figure it out.

I'm quite confident that in a general sense, 'distributed crypto-currencies' are here to stay and as they evolve they will adapt to whatever environment they find themselves in.  I think that there is every likelihood of a pretty bumpy ride though.

The beauty of off-chain solutions are that they have almost infinite flexibility to adapt to attacks.  Like a starfish, if you cut him to pieces each piece grows a new starfish.  In off-chain solution land, though, this would happen probably literally overnight in a lot of cases.  But it requires an enduring base upon which to ride.  That is, hopefully, a free Bitcoin network.

I found the rest of your note to fantastical to really comment on.  Sorry.

And you said it again.  Simply saying it twice does not, in and of itself, make it a particularly meaningful statement.

If mining is brought under control, you'll likely find your coins tainted/tarnished unless you pay the taxes and other fees which are required by the various powers that be.

These are likely to exceed by a wide margin what you would be paying on a free Bitcoin network, not to mention an off-chain framework built around on top of a free Bitcoin network.

I'd point out that a cat does not normally make her move as the gazelle approaches the watering hole.  She waits until her prey has become comfortable enough to drop it's head for a drink.  That is, of course, when the prey is most vulnerable and the attack is most likely to result in a kill.

In fairness, one does not really need to know what such things are to use them.

A much bigger concern in my mind is that one may need, say, 1Mbps of bandwidth which is free of disruption by commercial network carriers.  These players have little ability to act autonomously of government security policies even if they had a desire to do so.

I think it hopeful in the extreme to assume that any political leadership is going to stand idle by while the power inherent in controlling a currency system is eroded.  If distributed crypto-currencies never reaches the stage where it is a eats into existing monetary solutions and supplants some of their function then yes, we are probably safe from such attacks.  It is far from clear to me that such solutions will not achieve such a capability.

My guesstimate was based on an observation of what Arduino's can be pumped out at, the likely demand volume for such items if they can make money, and also the conjecture that if Avalon sold out they would order another run.

I could be wrong...I often am.

Even if they were, they've got a huge backlog.  The only way they could fill it would be to go with third-party assemblers, but they would probably be going backward on every order in that case.  I suppose they could simply jack the price and give the finger to their pre-order victims and I would not put it past them.

A more realistic observation seems to be that the Avalon chips on BKK K1 style devices could hit the market and reach a significantly lower price-point.  Maybe as low as 1/10 the cost by my guesstimates.  And it could happen quickly and soon.

My read is that the 130nm and actually much more advanced than the 110nm ones and I don't sense that Avalon denies this.  It would be ultra-cool if ASICMINER distributed them raw.  Maybe they have plans to but I've not seen it.

And hopefully the next gen of chips are well underway by at least some people who see the value in distributing them widely.

Eventually it will dawn on the business types that only a handful of entities are capable of consuming the whole pie, and that if Bitcoin proper can remain a rock solid core there will be many many slices of pie which will be plenty big enough to keep them busy.  At least those who's primary interest is economic.

Admittedly it is bit presumptuous for me to play business guy however.  It is probably true that one can be severely dis-advantaged by jurisdictional differences in a marketplace which is truly global.

'satoshi' did it.  It's much easier when standing on the shoulders of giants.


Ya.  I explained/apologized in advance.

For the record, Tor was not really on my mind for this.  I've never convinced myself that Tor is a sufficiently reliable framework in 'war time' environments.

Paracoin is mostly envisioned as a platform upon which to reasonably experiment with constructs which would push core infrastructure to the network's edge...and beyond if need be.  These might include rewards proportional to desired diversity in terms of geo and political situation, transaction messaging protocol, peer count, and such.

My latest thoughts have to do with 'two-pass' mining where the 'tip-blocks' are secured with suite of diverse and non-predictable algorithms while the trailing blocks are locked with high difficulty sha256.  Hopefully this could reward both those running FPGA (hopefully at home) while anyone with an investment in current ASIC and what-not could continue to participate and secure the solution.

But anyway, I would strongly prefer that Bitcoin proper remain the 'gold standard' as a source of truth in distributed crypto-curency land.  'paracoin' and things like it are only a fall-back should Bitcoin go the way of PayPal due to excessive commercialization and associated capture.  It probably understates things to sat '>90%'.  It's probably closer to '>99%'.

  Edit:  More clear about 'edge'.

We are probably not.

The attacks which concern me the most have to do with deep packet inspection, near real-time network mesh analysis, and targeted packet filtering.  And relatedly, discrimination of encrypted traffic that was not encrypted in an 'authorized' manner.

I don't believe that "Moore's Law" is really very applicable to Bitcoin since Bitcoin is very much in it's infancy (among other reasons) but I won't overload this note with that topic other than to say that "Moore's Law" almost certainly helps the likely attackers of Bitcoin more than it helps the defenders.

I'm in the rural Western US.  The only hard-line I have is POTS which on a good day gets 19,200 bps.

Since mid-2012 I've been able to have a surprisingly usable satellite connection (Exede) but it goes down for long-ish periods quite regularly and for $80/mo I am capped at 15GB per month.  It also has typical satellite latency which impact certain software architectures.

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I'm not suggesting that Bitcoin be designed around allowing me to be a peer (though it would be nice if I could be.)  The main reasons for this are that it would be to limiting to be realistic, and it would not offer the protection against system level attack to make it worthwhile.

  edit: bps, not kbps.

I anticipate that what will develop will be a selection of turn-key engines which will gaurentee to people like me that people like you are running a service which is highly likely to be legitimate and will achieve the result I want.  As a bonus, it will be free to you.  You can then focus on value-adds which are important to your customers.

Everyone wants a free ride on the blockchain.  If it's offered I'll hop right on (as outlined in my sig.)

At this point I still hold hope that Bitcoin proper can evolve to form the backbone of a solution that we, as citizens of Planet Earth, badly need.  If Bitcoin can move to that role without being 'PayPal-ified' by well capitalized corporate interests it will be better for everyone.  Or everyone I care about, at least, and that certainly includes efforts such as 'bittip'.

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I'm sorry to snip the remaining, but I'm exasperated with this conversation and I don't believe that it is achieving much for anyone at this point.  Once some other material which explains the basic problems, principles, definitions, and possibilities makes it's way around, we can re-visit some of this stuff.  These were only touched on in the vid due to lack of time and lack of development.

Here's an interesting thing I just conjured up:  From a doc 'UnitedStatesComp.pdf'


To save one the math, I get about 5 tps.

Seems to me truly a no-brainer to consider various forms of off-chain transactions vs. trying to shove everything onto the blockchain.  Even with 'ultra-prune'.  The only real question is when.  A median of $25k and average of $3.5M is pretty alarming...though we are talking about $380T here...  It cannot be said that I am not a 'USD user' by virtue of the fact that I've never performed a Fedwire transaction.  The same would stand for Bitcoin.

If the 'source of truth' for values is stored on 1,000,000 power-users computers distributed around the world (and processed by the same) vs. in some computer system owned by the federal reserve (or BIS or whatever) that is a pretty revolutionary thing.  If the same basic solution consists of Google and Facebook, or even a few thousand DWolla-sized entities, that is a much less compelling to me.

Ultimately, I think the appropriate factor to weigh most heavily in a decision about data rate is what, exactly, is required to protect against which particular threats.  Various economic factors will certainly play important roles in this equation, but I truly believe that they should be secondary.  This because resistance to attack will ultimately define the value of the solution in my opinion.

In terms of the excess inventory both now, and 6 months from now, I'll pay the most attention to what John K might think.  He didn't take on the task of being an arbitrator, nor does his compensation package account for such a service, but he seems pretty good at it if he can spare the time...and is willing to graciously take the risk of the fallout.