Sounds like some smart investors/money managers here.

Oh, and I hold PMs, bitcoins, litecoins, and still fiat. The percentages (mostly for fiat) vary depending on what I'm working on.

That's why I said we need to also establish Litecoin in the marketplace. Any screwups the Bitcoin Foundation makes won't affect litecoins, yet it can piggyback on all the success.

Sweet! It looks like Ogrr.com's member count is about 20K, so this about doubles that... Not bad!

That would only work if they pay attention to the YouTube threads with their videos... I think a more effective approach would be contacting someone involved with the show directly.

Interesting point. I agree.

Still, with MBRs as I suggest none of that matters; block size would be irrelevant to propagation. You get rid of the network effect which is where the latency builds.

Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies won't steal market share away from precious metals. Not the way I see it. I'm writing a post that explains it.

I believe the world will return to gold as the primary store of value. Central banks around the world already hold it, and people worldwide continue to recognize gold's value even if it's not easily exchanged. Currently the world pegs everything against the dollar, which is the world's reserve currency. That is ending.

The dollar fiat is self-destructing, and will probably take most other fiat with it. It's an interesting time...

I say interesting because if fiat wasn't already self-destructing this revolutionary currency technology we're all a part of would soon likely do the job anyway. Fiat currency can't compete. It's a choice between currency which can be inflated and manipulated or currency, such as gold or bitcoins, which can't. So the timing is right on. Fiat will take a back seat or disappear altogether and gold and precious metals will take the lead.

The reason cryptocurrencies won't replace precious metals is their value will be volatile for many reasons which I'll explain in my post. People will, IMO, hold precious metals for their primary store of value and use cryptocurrencies to trade.

This is not a scam or Ponzi scheme. As far as I know the proposal isn't even talking about paying out interest. Rather, it's talking about charging users fees to offer them secure Bitcoin banking services. Fred Wilson is a highly respected and well known VC. His firm probably often invests five times the amount of money stolen by the "Bitcoin Savings and Trust" scam (what was that around $5 million?).

We are using the current version of Bitcoin the community agrees is Bitcoin. That doesn't mean it's the same as it always was.

For example, my understanding is that early on a software issue allowed someone to generate a transaction giving their address millions of valid coins. The bug was patched and code was added to ignore the block with that transaction as well as all subsequent blocks after it. This change required everybody to upgrade - users, merchants, and miners - which everyone did and life went on. So we are not using that original Bitcoin, but something else we still call Bitcoin using some of the blockchain from that early version.

If you make a change incompatible with the blockchain, like changing the number of coins scheduled to be created then those coins (like Litecoin or others) will be rejected by the network. Of course, Litecoin is really still just Bitcoin, just another version.

No, that's not true. Confirmation simply let's you know a certain amount of computational work went into the block with your transaction, and the more confirmations you have the less likely it is that block will turn out to be invalid. Regardless of how fast the block is found you can have extremely large amounts of computational power necessary to have found it.

In other words, if Litcoin's network was already the same size as Bitcoin's network, and assuming there was no problem with invalid blocks due to network latency, then 1 Litcoin confirmation would be about equal to 1 Bitcoin confirmation.

Yes, you can. I'm working on a post that explains that in fact.

Bitcoin is set. If you make changes to it then it's no longer Bitcoin. It is something else.

What do you mean bisection of the hash rate? Difficulty is adjusted automatically so block creation moves toward the target regardless of hash rate. I think you meant bisection of miners, which would make more sense. But even that is problematic. How do you split miners mining coins into two halves? Mining, like Bitcoin, is decentralized.


Now multi-minute propagation is interesting, and something I hadn't considered for Bitcoin or Litecoin, so I can see your point. Invalid blocks do result currently with Bitcoin from latency of miners learning of found blocks elsewhere due to the network effect.

This problem should worsen as Bitcoin adoption grows and the network expands. So this could conceivably be a problem for Bitcoin, Litecoin, or any cryptocurrency with a block creation around 10 minutes or less on average. Mining invalid blocks is a waste of resources for miners, which would be a disincentive where there is supposed to be incentive. Frequently occurring invalid blocks also complicates trust in confirmations.

However, I think there is a simple solution. It's in everyone's best interest to know of a valid found block as soon as possible. This way work can start on the next block with minimal wasted resources for no reward. While it's not called for in the protocol I think there can be developed what I'd call mining block references or MBRs. This is simply one or more online resources (nodes or sites) where miners can report and check for found blocks. Since all miners (or a significant number anyway) would reference only a few nodes, polling say every few seconds, communication of found blocks could be near instantaneous regardless of network size.

The network effect exists now because Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized. However, smart centralization of some aspects, especially non-critical functions like this can be beneficial. Note this doesn't change the protocol. It's just a reference on top of how things already work. Satoshi's white paper says "When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes." It doesn't say how to broadcast that information to all nodes. I think optimization of that is easily accomplished with MBRs.

Yes, my analysis is things will get very interesting in the next several months...

EDIT: and remember, FED involvement doesn't mean shutting Bitcoin down. Bitcoin is a global project/currency. No person or entity can shut it down without shutting down the entire Internet.

Well, the thing is Bitcoin has been mentioned a lot on Hacker News, which is how I heard of it myself. To understand what HN is think of a community/forum for technology geeks, a scrappy cutting edge business school, and investor stake out, and merge them. The site was created and is led by Angel investor Paul Graham, who has gobs of respect in the tech-entrepreneur/investor community (seeing as he was a successful tech-entrepreneur himself). And while VCs can let's say screw entrepreneurs quite often, Fred Wilson appears to be a rare exception, someone whom Paul Graham speaks highly of.

What does all this mean? It just means that something like Bitcoin, a truly revolutionary technology project, has been exposed to probably the best community on earth for its own growth. I'm pretty sure a good bit of Bitcoin's project development, in all areas, stems from HN exposure. For example, forum member Mike Hearn from Google is openly and actively working to help Bitcoin progress. I would think he first learned of it because of HN. Coinbase.com has also been selected for funding by Paul Graham's Y-Combinator, which means he also views Bitcoin favorably.

So I think things are moving fairly fast for Bitcoin, indeed. The world will know about it soon enough.

No, this doesn't necessarily mean Fred Wilson is planning a Bitcoin Bank. It does suggest he is positively in tune with Bitcoin, though.

Apparently bmfiddle.com lets you share ideas for business models with others. I've seen the drag 'n drop technology employed there before. It's really cool. You can plan pretty much anything, business projects, events, to-do lists, and see everything organized in a convenient at-a-glance format. What's more, since it's online others can view and, if you allow it, edit/re-order things for possible improvement. Very cool.

I've often talked about the need for a proper Bitcoin Bank, and how it could operate. It appears Mr. Wilson is thinking along the same lines.

As I've often said before I believe eWallets will play a big role when Bitcoin becomes more mainstream. With eWallets transaction size doesn't matter. Neither does network scalability. You can still do transactions free (wallets profit by premium services and/or ads) and transactions are instant - no confirmation time. EWallets can also improve the user experience in ways the core network can't, such as simply using someone's email address instead of a hard to remember jumble of letters and numbers, searching payment history etc.

This doesn't mean the core network won't be used. There will always be a use for that because it's where the true authentication of coins comes from. However, once you have user saturation in the millions you will see Bitcoins traded on both the core network, and on services built on top of it.

Note this doesn't mean users put the majority of their wealth in eWallets, transferring ill-advised trust and risk to them. Rather, users keep minimum balances on the service, while storing the bulk of their wealth in a more responsible way, such as Armory cold storage.

I'm actually in the process of writing a post with more thoughts on the future of Bitcoin.

+1 for Coinapult

Traditional banking is now coming around to customer transfer convenience, but they have a long way to go. Banks could have done so much more so long ago. Bitcoin is now on the scene and I doubt banks will be able to out-innovate/out-technology Bitcoin as things get going. Too little, too late.

Very close. Send money to anyone using their email address.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91431.0

cypherdoc, my opinion on the matter is the Bitcoin Foundation was a special case.

Technically, the announcement of it belongs in Service Announcements/Discussion, yet it remains on the main forum. I think this inconsistency is tolerable given the significance of TBF. The community reacted strongly to it, in more than one way. So complaining about moderation inconsistency over that announcement is understandable, but I think a bit rigid.

Damn, hazek! You are on a roll my brother. School these fools on liberty.

BlackHeartFund, I really wish I had time to continue this discussion as it's a fun one

I've got to go, but I'll just address a few ones because I simply have to...


No, that's not how it would work. lol It would never get as far as agents rounding up guns, and they wouldn't be that stupid. Estimates put gun ownership in America at about 80 million. There are about 300 million Americans, so I'd say about 1 out of every 3 Americans being armed is about right.

Now, if the relatively few people in Washington tried to craft such a gun control law you can bet, first of all, even more Americans would acquire guns. Second, there would soon likely be organized militias to give some order and direction to those 80 plus million armed citizens, and an armed march on Washington would probably happen, with the government powerless to stop it. How many agents do they have? A few hundred thousand, at most? Even the US military doesn't come close to those numbers, with only about 1 million on active duty; and many officers would join pro 2nd Amendment ranks anyway, because they swore to uphold the Constitution, not whatever leader is in power at the time.

The Founders of America knew what they were doing.


First of all, bitcoins are not going anywhere. You have to realize there are many industries Bitcoin threatens to take over and dominate - both legal and illegal. Let me just give one example of each. International money transfer fees are multi-billions of dollars every year. As you know Bitcoin can effectively drop the transfer fee on any amount of money to near zero or zero. On this fact alone bitcoins value can be estimated to be worth billions of dollars annually in savings. Next example, is of course drugs, where bitcoin is already flourishing. How much market share does bitcoin currently have on global drug trade? 1%? Less than .2%? Now consider how much the global drug trade is worth priced in dollars... Trillions. And you respectfully disagree and say bitcoins value if forced underground would drop to almost nothing?  

And we're not even talking about fun stuff like guns and prostitution yet.