0.8 is ultraprune. Synchronization is a lot faster with 0.8 than before, but there are still a lot of other fixes that need to be implemented to really solve the block chain bloat 'problem'.

Do you know what the term is for somebody who has studied the Bible from cover to cover?







An atheist.

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet." (1 Timothy 2:12)

SD has always had transaction fees.

When Mike Hearn and others are cavalier about block chain bloat, it's because there are existing solutions being worked on. The process started with the 'ultraprune' branch that became 0.8, and will continue to improve. If all of the proposed optimizations are implemented, bitcoin can and will scale to VISA-level transaction processing, while being runnable on a commodity PC. It doesn't make sense then to devote valuable conference time to rehashing issues where we already know the work we need to do.

I did see that. Amazing how he just got away with it all.

Thanks for the comic relief afforded by your sarcasm.

Actually, I imagine that the core dev members, or at least certain of them, see the same value in SD that I do.  Namely, as a load generation tool capable of facilitating edge case analysis earlier than otherwise likely.

SD was almost single handedly responsible for helping discover the BerkeleyDB mis-configuration long before it otherwise may have been...and by an operator who was willing to work pro-actively to resolve the situation at expense to himself.

SD will also be responsible for understanding the impact of transaction fees on the economy and thus allow a better decisions to be made about how a design might best leverage that resource.

One of the booths at the conference was with three nonprofits, who have organized to try to get other nonprofits to accept bitcoins as well. They have never heard of us, and were very glad to hear that we exist, do the same thing they do (or try to), and have the perk that we provide (sending money). They were very interested in working together with us. Stephanie is the contact for fr33aid.com that I talked to, who interviewed me for their podcast. I sent this to her just now.

The idea that end users will not hold the entire blockchain, but rather use SPV clients, dates back to Satoshi's original whitepaper.

In a communist society you are limited in how you can use the shared resources. In a capitalist society you pay for the resources and use them however you see fit. It does not make sense to limit what you can use the blockchain for as long as a fee is paid to compensate.


This is correct, the argument is that sending satoshis back and forth allegedly bloats the blockchain.

was he referring to verses as "and the beast will impose its mark on them, and no one will be allowed to trade without the mark" in the apocalypse? Or what else?

Please post the exact reference, it must be funny!

If I have to sit through one more presentation which starts out with a history lesson about 'first, humans used barter, then blah, blah, blah' I swear I'm going to puke.  I walked out of at least one presentation at the start for this reason.

About the only thing which is more annoying is when a person asking a question takes 5 minutes of everyone else's time to describe how much they want to suck the presenter's dick or whatever.  Sometimes they don't even get to the question at all.


Of course.  Everyone likes a free lunch and sees a way to get rich by sponging off the work of others.


I missed Boussac's presentations being more interested in the tech end of things, but got a chance to catch up with him in person.  Paymium either bought or was given coins that I entrusted with ~jav, then either lost or stole them.  This gave me a good reason to wish to meet him.  Pleasant conversation in spite of the misfortune though.


I didn't meet up with him this time, but I've met him in the past.  I'm still waiting for an answer to my question about what he would do if the government 'just said no' to Bitcoin.  No danger of figuring that out at something like the conference though so I was not to surprised.


Didn't get a chance to say 'Hi' to Erik either, and kind of wanted to since we worked on a minor project in the distant past.  As for being 'thoughtful', if he had done anything more than regurgitate Austrian school hokum and bunkum I'd be shocked.  Again, I found more interesting things to see so I missed his stuff.

---

My favorite presentation was Eli Ben-Sasson's thing.  I can see a large number of places where the work could be applicable to distributed-crypto-currency-like systems and tangential tasks.  I'll be looking forward with great interests to developments in his team's work.

You can't.

You could some time ago to their Cyprus bank account, but that was shut down a few months ago.

This is for the most part very true but there is one senario where it is not namely estate planning.  The idea is to make your Bitcoins available to the executor of your estate after one death but not make them avalible to anyone while one is still alive. I have given this some thought to this and came with the following concept. Store the decyption keys on one or more 5.25in floppy disk(s) and place the floppy disks in one or more bank safety deposit boxes. Advise one's executor and family members where the floppies are stored.

Now after ones death the bank safety deposit box(s) are opened and the executor of the estate gets access to the floppy disks.  A yes it will take some effort and time for the executor put together the hardware and software in order to read the old 5.25in floppy disks quite likely a few weeks; however in this senario this is not a real problem since it can take months to probate an estate in any case.

One the other hand if the bank safety deposit box is compromised while one is still alive, then the obsolete 5.25in floppy disks will slow down an attacker long enough to allow the owner of the Bitcoins to empty the wallet before the attacker can read the old floppy disks even though the attacker has the floppy in their possession.  

Here are some places I use as part of a highly redundant Bitcoin backup strategy.

1) 3.5in floppy disks
2) 5.25in floppy disks
3) The hard drives of multiple computers from the most recent to some very old computers including a 30 year old 286, and an old Pentium 1 computer running Windows 3.1. The latter is the only computer running a version of Microsoft Windows that I use for anything related to Bitcoin.
4) Removable USB 3 hard drives
5) 1) + 4) stored in a bank safety deposit box
6) Encrypt the file and store it on multiple email and cloud services in different jurisdictions worldwide.

The idea is to be able to recover the Bticoins under many different scenarious from the mundane hard drive failure to a disaster affecting one's local community or country where not only is one's home wiped out but also one's bank safety deposit box etc.

2) is one of my favorites and is particularly suitable for storing unencrypted private keys. The idea is that if the floppy is stolen one has time to empty the wallet while an attacker is still figuring out how to read the 5.25in floppy disk. To further slow down an attacker  one can hide the floppy containing the Bitcoin keys among many old 5.25in floppy disks forcing an attacker to have to read multiple old floppy disks in order to find the golden needle in the obsolete digital haystack.

Both are bad ideas imho: totally vulnerable to theft, burglary, fire or otherwise loss of coins. And in case of Casascius Coins: can't back them up.

Time and time again, you refuse to come up with actual rational arguments. You can call me a wall as often as you like, but the fact remains that you're not presenting factual arguments. You are arguing against Ripple, the onus is on you to come up with arguments to back up your assertions. That is something you can do unilaterally, so don't blame me if you can't or won't.