I doubt it. $200 bn isn't that much (compared to trillion+ questionable mortgages in 2008) and most of that debt was always considered high yield (i.e. risky), unlike mortgage bundles that were sold as AAA so leveraged sky high.

But you never know. Conditions may be worse today in some other ways.

Anyway, I wasn't suggesting that fracking wouldn't shut down, only that a deliberate strategy from OPEC to shut down fracking doesn't make sense. Predatory pricing can make sense when you can shut down a competitor which then has huge startup costs to return to the business once you stop dumping and prices recover. I don't see that at all. Fracking may consolidate but those larger surviving operators will be right back at it as soon as prices go up.

Discount is increased to 5% below NAV (95% of NAV). For the rest of the details see above.

To be clear "no public stock" doesn't mean no stock. VC pump-and-dump works pretty much the same way as coin pump-and-dump or even public stock pump-and-dump. Hype the company, sell equity at progressively higher valuations, and then arrange for an "exit."

No I'm assuming that given the choice between software upgrade A, from some foreign source, that modifies the protocol in favor of some other interest group, or software upgrade B, from the same place they got their software in the first place, that protects their own interests, they would choose B.

As for who would mine on their PC, that is simply incentive based. The same 25 BTC are being produced every 10 minutes. If running a little program on your PC allows you to "generate free money from the interwebs" then, sure, many people would do it. Not only many of the existing million or so BTC users but many other as well (historically BTC mining booms have attracted new users -- as expected via greed -- especially during the CPU and GPU eras).

Given 25 BTC being mined every 10 minutes, profit motive will attract people to mine on their computers, mine on the old computer in their attic, mine on their friends' computers, buy new computers, etc. until approximately the same 150 MW is mining as before. As for cloud mining, I suggest you do some industry research to find out how much cloud computing capacity is available and how much it costs. You will find that your assumptions about what is available to be grossly inaccurate, if you think cloud mining is a serious threat (in fact, it would initially be more of a source of honest profit-motivated mining, before becoming uncompetitive).

Please redo your calculation after recognizing that even if only 10% of users get involved, at all, with mining, many of those will get involved on a significantly larger scale. At the low end that means 2-10 computers, or building GPU rigs with a half dozen GPUs (each roughly equivalent to a desktop in capacity), etc. At the high end it means semi-pro to pro-farms with dozens of rigs, initially, even larger over time. Oh, and let's not forget botnets. They'd also join the party, bringing many more computers to grab their share of the "Free Internet Money!"

This is not theoretical; every aspect of what I wrote in the previous two paragraphs has happened during every BTC mining boom and every altcoin mining boom. Your claim that it wouldn't is backed by no historical or other evidence whatsoever.

Let me be clear about this -- I don't expect any of this to happen. I won't happen because everyone -- including the miners -- knows that it could and would happen if a mining cartel tried to exercise the power you claim they have (but actually don't) to fork the protocol in its favor. Therefore it won't happen.

If a mining cartel does indeed fork the protocol in its favor as your model predicts, then I will come back here and eat crow. If it doesn't happen (over some reasonable period of time -- say by the next block having or the one thereafter), will you do the same? As you know I would prefer a substantial bet, but you apparently are either not confident in or insincere about your statements or don't like the idea of receiving free money from a stranger on the internet.

Atrides is creating a fork of OpenBazaar (a decentralized marketplace application) that will use XMR.

Secondary offering - Smooth Investment Fund

Smooth Investment Fund is making a secondary offering of 300 units at 97% of NAV. This is a 3% discount off of the value of the underlying assets (which are in general priced at their midprice).

The funds will be used to purchase one each of the recently issued Bank bonds at their original offering price. A small amount of remaining funds will be used for general investment purposes.

The current NAV is 0.97m per unit.  

The offering will close when fully subscribed and price at the then-current NAV times 0.97. All buyers will pay the same price.

Current assets of the investment fund:

2000 CKG
45 town hall
100 NP
100 smooth QC
100 stoneton
82500 stone

Thank you to all of the recent donators!

Those are technical objections to what you wrote because what you wrote and the conclusion you reach depend entirely on statements about how the community would react. Do I need to quote them for you? If I'm not mistaken NewLiberty already did so.

Good point. I'm doubling my donation.

Your rhetoric is still ridiculous. Users upgrading to the next version of software from where they got it in the first place does not make them "rebels."

This is the part you don't seem to understand. "Bitcoin" is not a static protocol that Satoshi wrote down in a paper six years ago. "Bitcoin" is what the community decides it is. For example, Satoshi's paper does not include a 1 MB block limit, yet that is very much a part of "Bitcoin" today. There are countless other elements of the system that exist in the form they exist today because of specific software that its users choose. Bitcoin tomorrow will likewise in all probability be something different (if there is ever another hard fork; opinions differ but my guess is there will be).

As for the "minuscule CPU/GPU mining network," you are horribly confused about how mining works. A gazillion hashes/second doesn't make the network secure and in fact the number of hashes is completely irrelevant. What matters for the most part is the amount of electricity used and secondarily the cost of the mining equipment. For example 100 watts buys you something on the order of 200 GH/sec of SHA256D. The same 100 watts would buy you perhaps 300 hashes/sec of (to pick one with which I happen to be familiar) CryptoNight. These are approximately equal in value for mining; 200 GH/sec of one algorithm is not 2/3 of a billion times "more secure" than 300 H/s of another. These units are incomparable.

The current bitcoin network is about 150 megawatts. That's something on the order of a 1-2 million PCs using a CPU algorithm. At least until specialized hardware and mining farms developed, a bitcoin forked to a CPU/GPU algorithm would look a lot like a million bitcoin users all mining on their computers. Sounds pretty darn secure to me.


Again, the rhetoric is absurd. An upgraded version of bitcoin with a hard fork (it wouldn't be the first), used by the majority of bitcoin users, is not an altcoin, it is bitcoin. The users adopting it are not rebels, they are bitcoin users.


In your scenario, the cartel has announced its plan in advance and distributed its hard fork version to all the users. The rest of the community can do likewise. There need be no interruption.

Furthermore, under this wartime scenario transactions would likely voluntarily halt anyway, because no one could be sure that the original chain being jammed wouldn't turn out to be the surviving chain, so no one would accept payments that weren't mined on it. That would certainly be an inconvenience and damaging to bitcoin generally, but the cartel would have no advantage absent some ability to guarantee that their fork would succeed, which they can't do.

I did understand the so called logic, but it was false.

It is false because it assumes all such lists are showing power, but in fact they all show something else, generally pools. I've never seen a "mining power list," have you?

Even with a relatively small number of pools you can still have power distributed over many thousands (or even more) independent miners, because those miners are able to move their hash rate. No pool can be confident of maintaining a given share because hash power can shift and new pools can be created.

In fact this was not the case with ghash since much of their mining was their own equipment.

Of course you don't need to do anything, including BTC. It's all about opportunity.


Something like the query API used to be supported by monerochain.info but that site disappeared.

A version of the receive API is a good idea.

What sort of site are you building?

It will fail because the community will press what Adam calls the Big Red Button and hard fork.

Your cartel will lose the transaction fees they didn't earn when rejecting transactions on the original chain. They will also lose the value of the mining gear (and other brand value associated with their mining businesses). I doubt the community would go so far as to hard fork retroactively (eliminating the mining rewards from the empty attack blocks), but that is also possible, so its a risk the cartel would face.

You don't have to believe that individual end users would be behind this (I argue they will simple update their software from whatever its original source, which in no case of which I'm aware includes miners), but that the rest of bitcoin industry -- coinbase, bitpay, venture capital firms, hedge funds, etc. -- certainly would support it. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose from ceding power over the network to miners.

It is exactly this Big Red Button that will keep the future you describe from ever happening. Since your model fails to contain a mechanism that would prevent the outcome you predict, and that outcome will not occur, your model must be missing something. If it is not the Big Red Button that is missing from your model, what is it?

Correctly attributed quote:

Talk is cheap.

Keep on trollin.

Please continue to do that especially if you are able to solo mine with a full node. Not only do you support the project, but you keep the network strong and help decentralize mining.

EDIT: and thank you for your support!

i think the picture is likely somewhat misleading on the left side. Centralization has been declining overall for some time, going back to Satoshi's farm. At each technological shift there is a period of increased centralization as some subset of miners has a technology lead, but that is temporary.

This statement is logically false.

Are you sure you are really a computer science professor, because most of the ones I've actually known are really quite good with logic? I guess it goes to show the range of caliber is quite wide. Sorry to be blunt but your posts are full of logical fallacy after logical fallacy.

+1

Also, as far as I can tell he basically has one technical argument which is the alleged riskless strategy that miners can use to increase the block rewards. He apparently thinks that users are dumb enough not only to allow their own bitcoins to be diluted, but to not understand the repeated game implications of allowing the miners to succeed in diluting them once.

It is actually very similar to the other academic attacks on bitcoin (selfish mining, programmed self destruction, etc.), which construct a model of the world, reach a conclusion, and then argue there the conclusion applies to the actual world. In fact either the conclusion applies, or the model is incomplete, or both. If these academics were actually sincere, they would recognize that the latter is as interesting a result as the former, and indeed a more valuable one, since it helps in understanding the world. But in reality they want to grab headlines, press mentions, interview and panel opportunities and generally self promote, not pursue intellectual inquiry.

I'm still waiting for an answer on my bet.

I'm not sure the game of shutting down fracking really make sense. As I understand it (not being an oil industry insider nor expert), fracked wells are pretty small, which makes production rather elastic. If prices drop, fewer wells are drilled and production does stop, but the industry doesn't really go away. Equipment gets mothballed, supply production is cut, less experienced workers are laid off. But once prices go up back up the fracking starts right up again.

LNG involved massive facilities, huge political barriers, and time scales of a decade or longer, so stopping that with temporary low prices might be more plausible. If those projects get abandoned, to a large extent the clock is reset on them ever happening.