What I cannot figure out is why this thread is not moved by the moderators who are usually fairly active at moving posts to the most apporpriate sub-forum (and I applaud their persistence and often enough, their judgement as well.)  My conspiratorial mind wonders if the moderator is an investor or something (~hazek?)

BTW, what is 'NSFW'.  New Service For Wankers?

A don't trust nor like AT&T, but the same goes for the other carriers as well.  It's not going to impact who I do business with, but that's mostly because I don't have many options an not much choice in the matter anyway due to how peering works.  Doubtless this was analyzed by a marketing department within the organization.  In the San Francisco incident (and probably most others) it is the government who is almost completely to blame anyway.  AT&T's CEO didn't wake up one day and decide he wanted to spy on people.  The idea, and who knows how much of what kind or pressure, was brought to bear on them.

On top of that, for every soul who is annoyed at AT&T's malfeasance there are five more who consider them heroes for helping to kill Bin Laden.

With respect to packet snooping between my Windows box and the net, I've done it on occasion.  It's interesting but tedious.  And like I said, I would anticipate that people who have their shit together would be passing data back in a way which would be hard to recognize via simplistic methods of analyzing discrete packets.  I mean it is not my forte', but I would certainly be deigning root kit keystroke loggers to cache data and embed it in other expected transfers (like update scans and what-not.)

Mt Gox complies with AML which makes them greatly valuable to the Japanese government and other governments with whom they cooperate.  Of course Mt. Gox is used for money laundering to some extent which is part of what gives it value because, being something of a choke-point in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Mt. Gox vastly more useful alive than dead.  The minute Mt. Gox stops playing ball they will be shut down.  Of this I have little doubt.


I never kept anything on any exchange that I could not afford to lose.  Doing otherwise would be utterly stupid in my opinion.  It was quite easy to move the bulk of my BTC assets into deep storage, and I don't see that changing even at a low processing rate and irrespective of what happens with fees.

If simple and lazy people abandon Bitcoin because they get ripped off (as a result of said deficiencies) I say goodbye and good riddance.  In a lot of ways such people are useless baggage which limits the potential of the solution.  I may feel that way in part because I personally have no plans to try to exploit them though.

Edit: word fix.

I doubt that.  Everyone who tries to run a Bitcoin related business larger than a process on a machine under their desk has one of two reactions when the powers that be tell them to jump:

1) Ask 'how high'  (e.g., Mt. Gox)

2) Exit the industry (e.g., GLBSE)

Makes perfect sense since there are distinct limits to the amount of pressure that an individual is willing to tolerate for a particular reward, and they tend to be well under what is possible to apply.

Crypto-currencies generally are a tax-mans dream.  Taxes can be assessed at the mining level and I have every expectation that they will be when a certain level of consolidation takes place.

This is the main reason I do not wish to see a situation evolve where operators cannot be widely distributed, reasonably covert, and operating on a budget which can be written off without much pain.

Ultimately I don't trust that it will be possible to find friendly jurisdictions in which to operated large scale efforts.  Bitcoin (in it's original form) is not a very welcome development to any central government and any protection it may enjoy as an artifact of geopolitical economic conflict is likely to be transient.

You are dead right about corporations caring about profit only.  It is actually a legal obligation.  If playing ball with the state security apparatus balances out as more lucrative than some loss of credibility, and thus business, that is exactly what they will do.  In the end nobody gave a shit about AT&T.  In part because everyone else was probably doing the same thing (except perhaps Verizon who's CEO, interestingly, ended up in some trouble with the SEC making it one of the very few occasions in recent memory that that body has hassled anyone higher than a 20-something year old goober who didn't pay attention to the legal department's memos about what not to put in e-mail.)

Nobody really gave a shit about Carrier IQ either.  I don't doubt for a minute that the same things (keystroke logging and what-not) continue but I suspect that the processes and messaging will be better hidden to avoid detection.  Just like Bitcoin ought to be thinking about in my opinion.

I don't know about others, but I don't stand to make a dime on whatever transaction fees and what-not you are talking about.  I'll only mine if I feel the system is at risk, and in that case I expect to absorb the cost out-of-pocket.

I do stand to lose quite a bit monetarily if the system is subverted and I do care about that both for personal and for philosophical reasons.


Firstly, anyone thinking about 'replacing the banks' and 'replacing PayPal' better come prepared.  I think that most in the Bitcoin community are anything but prepared for what lies down that road.  We are likely starting to appear on the distant horizon for these folks, and certain other tangential threats are starting to appear.  This is why I care so deeply about the subject at this time.

Secondly, trying to compete head-on is, in my opinion, not the way to do it.  I'll bet most of my BTC (literally) that we end up smashed like bug if we try, and not only that but there will be massive collateral damage as well.

Thirdly, I have no interest in Bitcoin replacing VISA or PayPal if the results are even less desirable that what these folks already supply.  That also strikes me as a very real possibility.

Of course.  It would be absurd to think that a network carrier would install a Narus in their peering center, completely illegally, as well.  Oops.  Thank god for our congress and the concept of immunity to patch up indiscretions.

I seem to remember about a decade ago Microsoft getting caught red handed with NSA_Key or some such in their crypto library when they forgot to strip a service pack binary.  Nobody gave a shit then, and certainly they will not now after a decade more of conditioning and all those bad bad terrorists and all that.  After all, nobody is doing anything wrong and besides only paranoid wackos would believe in 'conspiracy theories' and nobody wants that label associated with them.

How about Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, and...well...other such entities?

BTW, I agree that hard disk size is not a constraining factor.  I doubt that very many people have to much concern about that particular aspect of things.  Those who are serious about leveraging the system to it's full potential will probably store the blockchain in RAM anyway I would guess.

Sure they would.  That is easy.  You just have to give them a button to push on a slick looking GUI.

At the end of the day, the basis for proof-of-work is harden the ledger so the concept of 'cost-free' is not really that big a deal (to me.)  In some ways it is pretty compelling that all of the mining effort in the world benefits by working for all block chains.  Kind of a win-win.

On the other hand, if various block chains became compatible in size to one another, or could form coalitions and display an adversarial posture, there will likely be attacks.  It makes economic sense and certainly it (resource conflicts) are more commonly observed in nature than not once a carrying capacity is approached.

I suspect that in the end a solution which relies exclusively on simple size dominance will be overcome.  But there are a lot of other possibilities I bet.

To facilitate scaling, I prefer to let the free market develop usability methods on a second tier.  I think that this will be less risky, more robust, and will provide much better solutions faster for end-users.

My feeling is that some of the core developers are to prone to write off coordinated state level attacks as wacko conspiracy theories.  For my part, I don't find such attacks at all improbable.

I would only feel comfortable in a solution where the messaging load is capable of being cloaked using steganographic methods.  This means that even consumer grade bandwidth needs to be knocked down by a significant factor.



Not coincidental at all.  This is a big fork in the road which will have a major impact on the end-point of the Bitcoin solution.


I don't think that propaganda or careful choice of words is the key to success on anyone's part.

Most participants and probably not being deliberately dishonest.  There are legitimate concerns on all sides, and everyone is coming at things from a somewhat different perception based on their backgrounds and so on.

Edit: syntax.  Then spell check fix associated with the term 'steganography'.

This is completely classic 'tragedy of the commons'.  It makes all the sense in the world for those who can obtain semi-exclusive access to the back end of the goose to run her dry.  They'll personally be better off in the end no matter how long the goose survives.

An interesting thing about most such tragedies (and there are many examples through history) is that almost every primary actor is capable of completely an honestly convincing themselves that not only are they not the problem, but that their participation is a huge positive if not necessary for the greater good.  Often enough, they can convince a lot of side actors of the same thing!

Well as I always say "If it feels good, do it."

Oh, and don't forget about the 'ignore' button over on the left there.

Many of us have felt that Bitcoin was advertised as a peer-2-peer solution where a large percentage of the participants in the economy were capable of being peers.  'peers' were never advertised as being people who could afford datacenter resources, and many of us to not trust a solution which requires such resources in order to function.

So, one group was sold a bill of goods, and unfortunately a lot of people in either group bought it.  Whether this 'false advertising' was deliberate I don't know and largely doubt.  I expect that even for those who did recognize the issue, kicking the can down the road was the path of least resistance.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84247.msg933058#msg933058


For my part, I feel more comfortable with a solution in which decisions are made in a transparent manner even if it means that people who have different points of view than my own have a voice.  I think it is possible to hold a variety of competing points of view without being 'dishonest'.

Hiding or discounting one point of view and decision making processes would create the most doubt in my mind.

Ya, such a thing would probably be considered a form of cheating.  I conceive of a situation where double-spends in this manner would be mined out of existence, and that might even allow the block chain to be pruned for efficiency.  As I recall, a spend on one chain can in theory be replayed on another.

If the system was run more to build credibility than to create profit (while in mothballed state at least) than all manner of things might be possible.  Another thing along these lines would be to accept a fair amount of latency which would offer the opportunity to use 'cheating' to protect against resource based attacks and deal with double-chain-spend attempts.

Hmmm....merged mining is a thought.

---

Another possibility would be a if simple third-party block black-list mechanism was in place.  This would allow security with very low mining effort.

This would only work mainly under the conception that this 'legacy' line were pretty much completely mothballed and operated unprofitably by enthusiasts.

The idea (and hope) would be that Bitcoin proper thrives and none of the concerns that some of us have come to pass.  Thus, the 'legacy' chain is never really needed.

I could see a situation where all mining proceeds were issued to current value holders (rather than going to miners.)

Of course if the worst happened and 'Bitcoin proper' failed in some way bringing 'legacy' back on-line, a lot of mining power would be available to secure the system in the normal (and vastly preferable) way.

In the mean time 'legacy' could be experimented with to develop methods of covert messaging, efficiency optimizations, and support for more capable secondary systems (a-la the 'Fidelity Bank' idea.)  A switch between 'cheating' and 'real' proof-of-work should be pretty invisible.

Of course.  Most people would.  That is fine.

I convinced of a situation where the 'legacy chain' considers one a value holder as long as the secret keys are not used to transfer value away on any other chain.  This would allow anyone who wished to to hedge their bets and retain the ability to use either system to do so by simply sitting on what they've got without spending it on any other fork.  Perhaps at least.  Figuring this stuff out is the goal kicking around some ideas.

Suppose (a post 0.8.0 Bitcoin release includes a block size adjustment that some consider undesirable and) a group of enthusiasts wish to more or less just stay with the old rules.

Said group might consist of people who are attached to the thought of Bitcoin retaining a light weight and simple protocol character which might be perceived as the best way to protect against attacks, accidents, or undesirable mutation of one form or another.

Said group may have the technical skills and financial resources to keep a light-weight system operational although certain kinds of 'cheats' may be required to thwart certain forms of superior resource attacks.

My own conception is mostly just along the lines of having such a solution grind along in the background and be available if needed.  It would be worth it to me (possibly) to earmark a certain fraction of my BTC stash to such an adventure, run transfer node(s) and probably even get into mining.

Is there a no-bullshit, non-political conversation going on about the details of the general mechanics of how such a system might operate?  How value in the pre-split block-chain value might be carried forward, what kinds of blow-back might need to be considered and dealt with, etc, etc.

If such a conversation is not occurring, is anyone else interested in analyzing such a thing...hopefully with minimal discussion about the pro's and con's of blockchain bloat and that sort of thing as there is plenty of this already.

Actually much of the US does not have particularly good bandwidth either.  I, for instance, pay $80 for 15G/month.

More ominously, almost all of us enjoy network bandwidth at the pleasure of our ISPs, and almost all ISPs operate at the pleasure of government regulatory bodies.  In the US, at least, the regulatory bodies operate at the pleasure of the lobbyists from corporations and other special interests.

Even 'normal consumer bandwidth' may need to be cut by a large factor to allow something like Bitcoin transactions to slip through the cracks if at some point it starts to threaten more mainstream (and profitable) solutions.

A situation where the very kernel of (what I call an) accounting system was light weight and higlhy distributed is very compelling to me.  The second layer may be heavy and centralized.  This is regretable and there will be fraud and abuse, but shutting such an overall system down becomes a possibly unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.

I've never put much faith in Moore's law.  The equipment accessible to me (in private life) is closer to what I used a decade ago than it is distant.  Come what may of Moore's law, I don't expect general accessibility to mirror the developments very closely.  Particularly if general accessibility poses a threat.


Garzik, Maxwell, an now ~retep are individuals who I find unusually credible.  I'll be following the work of these persons closely and potentially lending support as my resources allow.