Nice plan Phinnaus; you, Goat and Maria on a farm declaring sovereignty under the 10th amendment. It's almost biblical.
It's a start, but needs some natural disasters, murder, sodomy, etc stirred in. |
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For one, if someone takes ownership or control of the commons, they are not the commons any more.
Indeed, having a "commons" is the problem in the first place: no commons, no tragedy of the commons. Bitcoin has no commons. Every node is owned by someone and they control it, therefore no commons, therefore no tragedy. I say you are missing the forest for the trees. The entire Bitcoin economy and ecosystem forms a very viable and very real 'commons'. For two, it is very much the case that the 'tragedy' occurs absent a mechanism to prevent it. 'forcible ban' or otherwise. You seem utterly backward on the whole 'tragedy of the commons' principle. To me. That's good, because most economic reasoning seems exactly backwards from common sense. If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is utilized without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns — lumber and game of the forests, fish of the water areas, and mineral deposits of the subsoil — do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation. For them the erosion of the soil, the depletion of the exhaustible resources and other impairments of the future utilization are external costs not entering into their calculation of input and output. They cut down the trees without any regard for fresh shoots or reforestation. In hunting and fishing they do not shrink from methods preventing the repopulation of the hunting and fishing grounds. This can only happen when there is a commons ("public property"), which can only happen when there is a ban on ownership. There is no ban on ownership of Bitcoin nodes; each node operator owns his or her node and has control over it. No commons for there to be a tragedy in. In Libertarian fantasy-land it sounds good, but in the real world there are countless examples of unmitigated disasters when the commons are divied up (or simply taken by those with the means to do so) and extracted out of existence. One of the first which comes to mind is the salmon fishing in Bristol Bay which I participated in for many years. You won't find a bigger set of right wingers and libertarians than commercial fishermen, but every one of the recognized the value of treating the resource in a sustainable and managed way. Especially those who had been around in the bad old days. For three, a lot of us, and especially myself, are pretty leery about individuals 'taking ownership or control' over the certain aspects of Bitcoin's function. Indeed, the difficulty of doing this is a major 'selling point' of the Bitcoin solution. In part because of the ill effects of such control in other solutions. Only the nodes are owned, not "Bitcoin" (the system). When only .0001 percent of the community has the realistic ability to operate a node (much less a mining setup) the system will be for all intents and purpose operated at the pleasure of a very small group of very probably like-minded people. "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary." - Adam Smith
I the open source world of Bitcoin, the protocol is the law. And the users are those who enforce the law. To the extent that it is practical at least. |
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Tragedies of the commons only happen if there is a forcible ban on anyone taking ownership or control of any part of the commons.
WTF?!? For one, if someone takes ownership or control of the commons, they are not the commons any more. For two, it is very much the case that the 'tragedy' occurs absent a mechanism to prevent it. 'forcible ban' or otherwise. You seem utterly backward on the whole 'tragedy of the commons' principle. To me. For three, a lot of us, and especially myself, are pretty leery about individuals 'taking ownership or control' over the certain aspects of Bitcoin's function. Indeed, the difficulty of doing this is a major 'selling point' of the Bitcoin solution. In part because of the ill effects of such control in other solutions. |
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I use Bitcoin because it is built upon certain principles and built in such a way that those principles can't be "legislated" away with a rule change. If this isn't the case I have no use for Bitcoin.
A hard fork has to happen before year 2036 in order to bump the timestamp from a 32 to a 64 bit integer. Will you be ditching Bitcoin for that reason? What's the difference between calling the 32-bit timestamp requiring a hard fork to change a fundamental principle and any other hard fork change? If your answer is "a change tweaking the economic side of things" does that mean the Bitcoin contract only includes economic reasons and not technical? Who defines what change is economic vs technical? Why do you think this contract exists when nobody's bothered to spell it out? It appears to me that what we have here is a situation where some people have dreams of being the next JP Morgan by forging Bitcoin into a solution whereby only a few can run it. Namely themselves in their dream world I suspect. The pesky block size limit is interfering. The sad thing is that Bitcoin is already large enough that these folks would likely fall to the 'big fish, little fish' phenomenon...although they still might make some money off it. A lot of people who were initially drawn to the Bitcoin solution will innately reject the centralization which would occur with unlimited growth. Hopefully the core developers who most people put a some of faith in will as well. Confident assurtions that Stratum is 'the future of Bitcoin' aside, a lot of us are going to think it sucks just on principle if nothing else. Not to mention disgust at ham-handed OPs on the bitcointalk.org forum trying to put words in Gavin's mouth. Edit: --- I should have read the corresponding tech thread first. On that thread I strongly agree with the OP of this thread's stance, and disagree with the Gavin's and Mike's posture on the topic. I believe that both Gavin and Mike underestimate the risk of Bitcoin needing to deal with an actively hostile block of governments and corporations in the days and years ahead. Edit 2: Oops, it is ~retep who I think argues eloquently and to my way of thinking on this point. Not necessarily the OP. |
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If your wallet hasn't changed since you saved it, you don't need to wait for the block chain to sync. You can just spend the coins immediately. So your scenario isn't really an issue.
Thanks for the note. I actually had not thought much about it, but it makes pretty good sense that things could potentially work this way. Without knowing the code well, it seems conceivable that the client would have trouble performing some operations unless it felt it was up-to-date enough (blockchain-wise) to validate one thing or another or optimize aggregation or whatever. All of my hands-on work to date has been under an up-to-date bitcoind. With an unencrypted wallet, your coins can be extracted with a hex editor. It is super easy, and no big deal if bitcoind can't read it.
If you encrypt the wallet, then it becomes a bit harder, but not by much (assuming you know the paraphrase)
I've never used the native wallet encryption of Bitcoin, but of course I use my own. My encrypted wallets are in the public domain, but the passphrases to them are in one of my safe deposit boxes. That aside... I presume that by 'coins' you mean the secret key can be extracted. I don't doubt it, and I expect that it would be reasonably easy (though perhaps tedious) to figure out which key in the wallet had value associated. What I've not run across are surgery techniques required to make use of the secret key in order to re-claim value in a safe manner. That is, how practical would it be to graft the key into the wallet files (or whatever) of various alternate clients and so on. Perhaps they tend to have some sort of 'import' feature these days? Last time I actually worked with Bitcoin it was unpleasant enough to manipulate wallet files that I never bothered to make use of vanity addresses. Actually, what would be really cool would be if one of the on-line wallets had a key import feature. Especially Instawallet which I prefer due to it's privacy and pedigree. I would trust an on-line wallet with significant value because it would be transient. And it would be quite useful to not need to install any software on my computer (or the computer I happened to be using) at all. |
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I wonder how many hardcore goldbugs will completely dismiss this.  Hardcore goldbugs don't own silver  I do. And I'm still up more in silver than in Bitcoin. But getting pretty close, and if I count all of my Ag purchases (which is only fair) I am pretty sure that I am actually doing better in Bitcoin than silver at this point. |
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I use Bitcoin because it is built upon certain principles and built in such a way that those principles can't be "legislated" away with a rule change. If this isn't the case I have no use for Bitcoin.
A hard fork has to happen before year 2036 in order to bump the timestamp from a 32 to a 64 bit integer. Will you be ditching Bitcoin for that reason? What's the difference between calling the 32-bit timestamp requiring a hard fork to change a fundamental principle and any other hard fork change? If your answer is "a change tweaking the economic side of things" does that mean the Bitcoin contract only includes economic reasons and not technical? Who defines what change is economic vs technical? Why do you think this contract exists when nobody's bothered to spell it out? It appears to me that what we have here is a situation where some people have dreams of being the next JP Morgan by forging Bitcoin into a solution whereby only a few can run it. Namely themselves in their dream world I suspect. The pesky block size limit is interfering. The sad thing is that Bitcoin is already large enough that these folks would likely fall to the 'big fish, little fish' phenomenon...although they still might make some money off it. A lot of people who were initially drawn to the Bitcoin solution will innately reject the centralization which would occur with unlimited growth. Hopefully the core developers who most people put a some of faith in will as well. Confident assurtions that Stratum is 'the future of Bitcoin' aside, a lot of us are going to think it sucks just on principle if nothing else. Not to mention disgust at ham-handed OPs on the bitcointalk.org forum trying to put words in Gavin's mouth. Edit: --- I should have read the corresponding tech thread first. On that thread I strongly agree with the OP of this thread's stance, and disagree with the Gavin's and Mike's posture on the topic. I believe that both Gavin and Mike underestimate the risk of Bitcoin needing to deal with an actively hostile block of governments and corporations in the days and years ahead. |
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I consider paper wallets a fair solution, not a great one.
I feel interested. I will research into this, thank you. Anyone can tell me where I can find the best practice for the paper wallets? The slow blockchain download process has already cost me 1 BTC fine interest. I have bought a 200 usd computer with a Atom CPU and 500GB hard drive to serve as a dedicate computer for the armory online client. I will kept the computer running 24/7. Is there anyone else who do the same as me? I used to run bitcoind on my Soekris based router under FreeBSD which simplified packet filtering and such. For doing cold storage work I used my workstation (also FreeBSD.) I stopped running both regularly in late 2011 when I stopped doing transactions and just use some coins I put in Instawallet since then. But I've only found occasion to do half a dozen transactions or so. Just recently I wanted to pull and test one of my deep storage wallets so I fired up the old build on my workstation and let it sync up (for the better part of a week.) If I run bitcoind permanently going forward I'll probably use a semi-dedicated headless machine which uses as little power as I can get away with...trying to project as best I can into the near future for sizing purposes. Else I'll bring up an instance in one of the clouds for that duty, but I'll not put any significant value in a client running in a cloud. Once I confirm that I can re-claim my deep storage, I'll probably archive my binaries and data, then try to build a newer version of bitcoind which will hopefully perform a little more efficiently. Then ensure that my old wallets work with it. |
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...
If/when we get to $60/BTC I will consider it a success.
...
How did you get to $60 as a success case? ... Sorry to be vague. That was just where I personally am at around 1000% ahead. Nothing deeper than that. Higher numbers seem plausible to me because the actual value on a per-BTC basis have nothing to do with the usefulness of the currency as an exchange vehicle, but the supply is such that the amount needed for liquidity could impact demand significantly. Of course people will also hoard for a time if values go on a run which could produce a very high spike. It's also entirely possible that attack, system failure, or competition could quash the value at any time. Attempting to capitialize on what ever fortune may be in our collective futures promises to be interesting and challenging. |
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I am just curious what the next excuse is... "Bumping facility was robbed only leaving the boxes the chips came in and some mysterious fans that were placed in the boxes."  I'd go with something like "The mean bad government confiscated all our chips." That would explain why they have zero which can be proven to work, and also would deflect rage away from their poor abused selves. An added advantage is that they could also string 'customers' along for a few more month with stories about how their lawyers are about to make a breakthrough in return of the property and so forth. I think that most of BFL's 'customers' could probably be kept on the line for years judging by the past performance. <Before I read post 112, I wish to reply to this, post 111.> With "so forth" consisting of Mt Gox safeguarding the chips, releasing them once the original true owners have been identified after providing proper paperwork. I just thought of another one. How about: "Damn bumping facility screwed up and fried the whole batch!" If people didn't believe that every single one chip got nuked, they might be able to come up with an Avalon and sand the markings off it. I do like the idea of trying to extract an identity theft kit from the victims though. Not sure how to work that one in. |
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 (click for larger version)data from bitcoincharts.com and netdania.com. I think I got the scales correct. Nice! pretty amazing, huh? Not really. We are about half way to what I would consider the floor level of 'success' in my speculative investment in Bitcoin. If/when we get to $60/BTC I will consider it a success. This is what I want to see in order to balance the risks I've taken in participating as a speculator. Now I of course hope to see a jackpot. I would define that as parity with 1 oz of gold. I do not even rule out the possibility of parity with gold on the 1 kg basis, but I am not expecting any of these as 'likely' events. Only possible. |
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I expect that to a lot of people bitcoin being a "person to person" (p2p) currency is a major part of the "contract" they feel they entered into when choosing it rather than, say, Paypal or Visa or whatever alternative type of system for transferring value online.
So maybe we need to move to a DIstirbuted Hash Table (DHT) based system or something of that kind, that lets these ordinary people running nodes of a p2p financial network connecting them directly with various friends and family and other participants in the network do it without needing the whole blockchain?
Maybe we could even move the work into buckets grouping transactions into hash-bucket groups to form one block per hash-bucket or something if one cannot actually divvy up all the blockchain DHT style or RAID style effectively?
Otherwise the basic plan seem to be to pull a bait-and-switch, selling people on a purportedly person to person grassroots currency then pulling the rug out from under them by migrating it to business-to-business then to megacorp-to-megacorp...
For it to be a p2p network, I think we need to do something like look at the median, mode or mean home computer on the median, mode or mean home internet connection and ensure our limits keep it reasonable for folks to run full nodes on such systems without sacrificing their ability to run their accounting software and their word processor and their browser at the same time...
(Notice I do not say also stream a movie or even also listen to internet radio; I am content that they use their television and/or radio for that stuff. Heck let them use a telephone for voice chat too.)
-MarkM-
Nailed it. Again. 'Sharding' is a time honored way of dealing with scaling issues. It probably would have mitigated the concerns about centralization without unduly impacting the usability of the solution if it were implemented as a core design point. It was not, and it's probably not worth crying over spilled milk at this point. |
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yes that is why it is in the interest of the miner to make blocks very large but this isnt necessarily in the interest of the network as a whole. If blocks became too large miners with a slower internet connection would be at a serious disadvantage, the block chain would take up more room on peoples hard drives, and it would require more bandwith for nodes to operate. If the blocks became large enough it would become imposable for people with slower connections to operate nodes or mine.
Although it is my nature to prefer 'tight' solutions and ones with a theoretical upper bound enforced by design, one of the biggest concerns I have vis-a-vis growth is that higher quality bandwidth and clustered hardware starts to constrain the system to operate in environments which are more easily attacked. That is to say, if one basically needs datacenter facilities to run a viable node, the Bitcoin solution will be limited to operation in environments which are fairly easily identified and attacked through standard legal and financial means. Bitcoin has, I believe, the potential to experience very rapid growth due to the demand side of the equation. I would feel more comforted to be well ahead of such an event and have it be anticipated from an architectural point of view whether or not such an event comes to pass. I do expect that any significant attacks would coincide with rapid growth. |
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Is there a clear and concise form letter floating around bitcointalk or elsewhere that extolls the benefits received by businesses if they were to implement BTC?
If not perhaps we can put one together.
Key advantages...
1. No chargebacks
2. lower fees vs Visa/PP etc.
3. bitcoin volatility fears can now easily be allayed with Bitpay integration.
Bitcoin is the cats pajamas for merchants. It generally sucks for consumers though. For an example of this, look at the bASIC scam. e.g., who got their money back and who did not. Reasonably together people who used mainstream payment methods were made whole through chargebacks. Those who used Bitcoin will largely be sucking on it. It's the scammer's call. The fact that Bitcoin is a poor choice for consumers also detracts from it's value to businesses as customers may shy away from using it. If integrators start providing charge-back protection, they will have to suck the cost out of the userbase...just as do our current mainstream payment providers. Bitcoin is, in my opinion, mostly useful for revolving services (such as Mega) except that at some point smaller transactions will be indistinguishable from useless dust like SatoshiDice and will be impacted by whatever mechanism is emplaced to defend against such things. |
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Large organizations are terrible at keeping secrets. Even clever people make stupid mistakes from time to time. Even patriots defect from time to time.
I would say that defection at this point is basically part and parcel to being defined as a 'patriot'. That's a personal view of course, and based on my understanding of the nature of our country (the US.) Relying on secrecy in order to stay ahead in security is a bad strategy. The more experts you recruit into your research team, the higher the risk of leaks. All it takes is one rogue employee in 100. The fewer experts you recruit, the less competitive you become compared to the worldwide open research community in academia. Either way you lose.
Yes. The only silver lining to the massive dragnet and billion dollar datacenters is that casting a wide net yields lot so fish. If anyone is eventually called to account for their past malfeasance it will likely be due to the existence of this resource. But it is far from a certainty that this happy outcome will ever be realized. I looked around once a few years ago to see if there was some sort of open-source intelligence platform. Something like just interested participants inputting data about observations, and other participants writing code to analyze the data. Something distantly related to Wikileaks in some ways. Didn't find anything, and I 'm not sure it is terribly viable since the cost of attacking it (with bogus or crafted input) is probably orders of magnitude less than that of defending. Asymmetric warfare going the wrong way (by my point of view.) |
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Doing a "hard fork" is hard, but maybe better than putting in some automatic adjustment that someone could end up "gaming".
If each time the limit is to be raised another megabyte, or each time it is to be doubled, the whole "hard fork" thing has to be gone through again that might provide some security at least until the developers get the hard fork techniques down to a point where it becomes pretty much just a "rubber stamp" that goes along with whatever change they decide to make next.
Clearly blocks are plenty big enough currently, maybe even too big, since we are clearly not losing per bitcoin price/value due to high transaction fees nor are we even managing to discourage "frivolous" transactions (like "sorry, you lost, please try again" type messages which probably belong in IM or some other kind of chat system not in the world's permanent global ledger of the world's most important, most highly secured value storage system).
If the fees are not high enough to discourage every penny-ante gambler from yelling to the world about each and every few-penny bet they lose then the fees are probably too low.
-MarkM-
+1 Facilitating a dopey penny-ante gambling platform is hardly worth the cost of chasing people who might wish to operate transfer nodes (and thus be 'peers' in the supposedly p2p solution) to my way of thinking. If it takes higher fees to discourage pointless dust, I'm for it...with some regret. Other more theoretical forms of addressing scaling issues do not seem forthcoming. A second best would be to chase small fry into other crypto-currency solutions and have Bitcoin proper evolve into a backing store platform for 'the elite.' I just fired up my client after a year of down-time (thinking about digging into some of my deep storage loot to re-coup my initial outlay) and it has been catching up on the block chain for 4 days now. Not only that, but it's sucking the life out of my 4G i5 main workstation like no other software I've run. To be fair, it's a pretty old build of bitcoind however. Once I confirm that my some of my deep storage value is able to be re-couped, I'll try to build bitcoind from head again and see if the new database scheme is more efficient. |
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I checked out the huge, infamous Something Awful bitcoin thread and it struck me again that the most comfortable way SA goons (as they're called) can relate to anything is by taking the piss out of it. The purpose is comic gold first, truth second. That aspect of goon culture introduces a systemic bias against anything that is too new or different.
In the thread, I noticed people making major, obvious errors about Bitcoin and other things - errors that would be corrected in almost any other forum, especially the non-Bitcoin ones - yet no one corrected them. Again their primary purpose is to take the piss, and if a caricature is more funny to talk about they'll work with the caricature. They live and breathe on comic gold. Some of them even check these forums looking for gushing statements to poke fun at. It's actually kind of a nice reality check to temper the enthusiasm that can sometimes get out of hand here.
Therefore, I think SA will only support Bitcoin when it becomes funnier to make fun of Bitcoin's detractors, rather than just its supporters. Either that or when Lowtax figures out he can make money by offering premium memberships in bitcoin. Since reddit and 4chan - the closest thing SA has to siblings - already both accept it, it may be just a matter of time.
SA was in their heyday (vis-a-vis Bitcoin) around the time they outed Bruce as a degenerate scamming fuckhead. They were both very funny and providing a well needed service to the Bitcoin community back in those days. Since then the amusing goons have mostly wandered off and there are like 400 pages on the new thread re-hashing about 4 tired and not terribly amusing themes. To this day the SA forum is a good way to pick up on absurd threads on this forum since a number of SA goons seem to have little better to do than to scan bitcointalk.org more thoroughly than I. But even here one needs to go through like 10 pages of boring stuff to find a gem. I actually believe that I might have talked the most comically talented goon into plunking some money into BTC at around $3.00. I hope so because he'd be up nearly 1000% and his work was worth it. He shut up not long after that which is why I am hopeful that he was bright enough to have realized that it was worth a speculative bet. |
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I skimmed the thread and didn't notice anyone suggesting SomethingAwful !?!
I would gladly pay for a membership using BTC just to rub those idiot's nose in it. I'm sure I would get kicked out immediately for not towing the party line, but it would be loads of fun while it lasted.
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If it happens, then my prediction is that it will be when there is less than a 75% chance of getting a 1kb or smaller transaction with inputs totaling more than 0.1 BTC included in the next block with a fee of 2%.*
*This is a completely arbitrary and unsubstantiated claim that I've made up on the spot simply because it sounded good to me.
I guess (hope) you mean more or less a flat rate which would be around 2% on a .1 BTC transaction? If so, I've always thought that Bitcoin's best hope is to become something of a 'reserve currency' in which largish base transactions can occur. So it is not something I'd be particularly opposed to as one path forward for Bitcoin. If not, and a 2% transaction fee is in the ballpark of what people are gunning for, I believe it would pretty rapidly suck the life out of the economic actors who are not capable of providing actual infrastructure support...and the barrier to entry here is rapidly making this non-tenable for most. Such a solution would be no more desirable than current mainstream financial institutions to my way of thinking. |
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meanwhile, network hash grows at 2% a day...I have been one of the patient ones, but this is starting to tick me off
'patient ones' is a more charitable description than what others may be tempted to use  |
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