I don't agree. I reject every version of this argument. Specifically, I reject:

1) If you don't vote, you have no right to complain if leaders do bad things. You had a chance and you gave it up.

2) If you vote and the leaders you choose win, you have no right to complain if they do bad things. You got what you asked for.

3) If you vote and the leaders you choose lose, you have no right to complain if those who won do bad things. You lost fair and square.

4) If you don't vote, you are responsible for what your government does. You could have acted to stop it and failed to act.

5) If you vote and the leaders you choose win, you are responsible for what they do. You put them in power.

You can vote in self-defense or for the lesser of two evils without becoming responsible for the evils elected leaders do.

Yes. Your payments would go to the banks creditors, including you. And if you went bankrupt, it would be the reverse -- the bank would still have to pay out your savings to your creditors yet they would lose out on any unsecured loans you had.

Oversimplifying, when something goes bankrupt, all of its assets go into a pool that is used to pay off its liabilities. Any remaining liabilities dissolve.

It's possible that you might actually have a point, but I can't tell. What did I say that you think is "idealistic bullshit"?

That's fine. The problem is that I can't figure out what you're talking about. I thought we were talking about whether Bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme or whether its use as a payment system was something people could legitimately expect to add value. That was a reasonably interesting conversation but then you suddenly switched to full conspiracy mode.

Let's say you're right about all of that. Wtf does that have to do with Bitcoin? Okay, the whole world is badly broken and so is Bitcoin. But then, everything is. So your argument isn't *about* Bitcoin anymore. Your complaint then reduces to complaining that I'm not making the exact same argument you are making.

But we can have that argument if you want, and maybe I can convince you that Bitcoin is a tiny bit less awful because at least people can't inflate it.

No. Backing a currency is only needed to prevent the supply of the currency from being inflated without bound. And it's even an imperfect solution to that.

For inherently backed currencies like gold, there's always the risk some cheaper way to get or make the inherently backed item could be found. We could find a way to mine an asteroid made of gold some day.

For agency-backed currencies like dollars or redeemable certificates, the backing entity can always collapse or betray you. The US government can print more money. The organization that redeems your silver certificates can go out of business or declare an emergency and force a partial redemption.

This is a problem Bitcoin doesn't have. The only way to create more Bitcoins is for the stakeholders to get together and change the rules of the system. If you're going to worry about that, then no currency will work for you -- they all have remote risks on that kind of level. Gold can be stolen or seized by the government.

I don't think so. The value of the initial distribution of a crypto-currency is very low relative to the value of the currency as a means of exchange (assuming the currency is successful). And the value of the currency as a means of exchange is dependent on broad adoption.

If the currency doesn't achieve broad adoption, the initial distribution doesn't matter much because the total real value of all currency of that type in existence will never be significant.

For example, the early adopters of Bitcoin mined about 2 million Bitcoins at a time when Bitcoin was worth, at most, $2 apiece. That puts the value of the initial distribution to the early adopters at $4 million. That's microscopic compared to the current total value of Bitcoin.

I wish.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57575927/taxpayer-money-finances-irs-star-trek-parody/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/03/irs-regrets-making-star-trek-video/
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-star-trek-training-video-irs-apology-20130325,0,6505079.story
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/26/175390349/william-shatner-says-hes-appalled-at-irs-star-trek-parody-video

When I saw the section CBS described like this:


All I could think of was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A

It's not quite necessarily so. You can have unusual cases where competition is actually bad, at least for short periods of time. One of those cases is a significant risk for crypto-currencies.

With crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and the various alt coins, the usefulness of the currency as a means of exchange is dependent on how many people accept that currency. If you have lots of competition, it may result in each currency being better, however, it can also result in no currency ever getting significant adoption because that adoption is spread over more currencies.

So competition can lead to a case where no currency reaches critical mass, which can be worse for almost everyone.

This is one of the reasons Bitcoiners are hostile to alternative currencies. If they reduce Bitcoin adoption, they can reduce the chances or delay the time when any currency make a major impact. The tradeoff is that when a currency does make a major impact, it will likely be a better currency. If alternative currencies push Bitcoin to be better, that's a pure win.

The list of the guilty is so long I wouldn't even know where to start. The innocent people are depositors in banks that were purportedly government insured and ordinary people around the world whose governments are taking on massive debt and adopting greater and greater austerity measures just to pay for their past mistakes.

Update: I wouldn't include those who consciously chose to put money beyond the insured amounts into banks paying unusually high interest (without investigating how they managed to get those interest rates or how stable the banks were) among the innocent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjYrursFkJQ

This video was made by the IRS, starring IRS employees, using $60,000 of taxpayer money. I was able to get through about 1 minute of it before I just had to turn it off. It is just awful on so many levels.

No, one confirmation would not be sufficient because there's a potential for two blocks to be found at the same time. The first confirmation is "special" because that indicates your transaction was chosen over any conflicting transactions and all that's needed is for that block to win for your transaction to win.

However, with faster confirmations, the probability of two blocks being found at very close to the same time (within the network's propagation time and miners 'switch over' time) is higher. So the faster confirmations are, the less "special" the first one is. With your SlowCoin, getting one confirmation would worth much more than it is in Bitcoin because the probability of two blocks being found close in time is much lower.

If you assume six Bitcoin confirmations is the confidence level you want, you're looking at 60 minutes on average to get it. If you imagine an alt coin with faster confirmations, you could have your first confirmation sooner, reducing the time to reach the same security level if you assume the same hash rate. It's only the time to first confirmation you can improve, and your cost of doing so is that the first confirmation is less valuable.

If you do the math, you get that's it's possible to reduce the time to "full confirmation" (with the above assumptions) by about 8-12%. 55 minutes average instead of an hour doesn't seem like much to celebrate.

No. It has to hurt the people who are *responsible* for the mess and those who chose to take risks. However, that's not on the table. Instead, the same innocent people are being made to pay for the mess over and over and then over again.

In terms of what it does, yes. The biggest exception would be flexible currency support for things like Bitcoins or silver dimes and cross-currency transactions. Of course, a lot of people and companies do find today's banking system to be pretty useful. If Ripple can be cheaper, faster, provide truly irreversible transactions, and be decentralized and open source so that anyone can participate and nobody can force anything down your throat, that's more than good enough in my book. That's where we're trying to go.

From this point of view, all the other things we're trying to do, like contracts, a native crypto-currency, and person-to-person credit lines are just extras. They might revolutionize money in the future or they could all fail entirely and Ripple can still succeed as a payment network.

I'm not offering any opinion about how much time it takes to secure a transaction sufficiently. I'm only explaining what units it has to be measured in -- how much effort it takes to undo it.

Huh?

If all else fails, change the subject. And, of course, do so as hysterically as possible. I'm not even trying to compare Litecoin to Ripple as I don't think that makes any sense.

I'm comparing Litecoin to Bitcoin and pointing out that a claim of "faster transactions" is simply bogus and is based on the misconception that 6 is some magic number of confirmations. People use 6 confirmations as a "magic number" with Bitcoin because they believe 6 confirmations provides sufficient *hashing power* on top of the transaction. Someone who believes 6 confirmations is necessary for Bitcoin would, assuming they understand the issues involved, likely not find 6 confirmations sufficient in Litecoin for transactions of comparable value.

I think you still don't understand how trust works in Ripple. For one thing, most people will wind up trusting just gateways, and gateways don't need to trust anyone to function.

Say there's a gateway that's a regulated financial institution, and you and I each trust that institution. First, all we're trusting is that their IOUs will retain value. We don't need to trust them to do anything. We don't have to be their customers. Now, you and I can pay each other by exchanging this gateway's IOUs. None of us need to do any business with the gateway, the gateway doesn't need to do anything (except maintain the value of its IOUs by performing redemptions for other people), and the gateway doesn't need to trust anyone.

And say you trust gateway A and I trust gateway B. Gateways A and B don't trust anyone. We can still pay each other so long as there's someone who holds IOUs from one gateway and accepts IOUs from the other gateway. All we've had to do is trust one institution that doesn't trust anyone else, and we don't have to do business with that institution or rely on them to do anything specific for us. All we're trusting is that they will continue to do business and thus their IOUs will hold value. And we only need do that for as long as it takes us to move money.

Similarly, the person in the middle who makes the exchange possible just finds that his gateway A IOUs turn into gateway B IOUs, two conditions he prefers equally anyway. Nobody has had to trust him at all because the IOU exchange is atomic and instantaneous.

And, of course, we all agree that if you trust B and B trusts C, you don't trust C. But that's fine, you don't have to. The system can act just as if you do even though C's default can never harm you.

I was rebutting your claim that "You cannot have a Ponzi scheme without a Mr. Ponzi type person lying to customers" and using Pirate as an example only to rebut that specific claim. It makes no difference whether Pirate is anything like Bitcoin. All that matters is that Pirate is a Ponzi scheme and would have still been a Ponzi scheme even if all the misrepresentations had been made by investors and none by Pirate himself or any "operator" of the scheme.

If your point was just that someone must make misrepresentations, then I agree with you. There must be misrepresentations and people must invest on the basis of them. That's why whether or not Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme comes down to whether investors' belief that Bitcoins may get future value from demand for them as a means of exchange is reasonable or the result of a misrepresentation.

The Cypriots were cool with bailing out the banks of Greece, Ireland, Romania, Hungary, and Portugal. Surely they won't revolt over being asked to bail out their own banks.

As discussed above, you can if the earlier investors make unreasonable representations to later investors in order to get new investors whose investment will wind up in the hands of the earlier investors. The earliest investors in a Ponzi scheme have the same incentive the creator of the scheme does.

Pirate, for example, could have just said "I'm borrowing money and paying x% interest" (which is true). He then could have shut up and let just his investors keep the hype going and make the misrepresentations about where the money was going. It still would have been a Ponzi scheme.

These aren't precise legal distinctions. The term "Ponzi scheme" covers a range of schemes with fuzzy boundaries. Their general attributes are:

1) Investors believing claims that they can get returns way above what legitimate investments provide.

2) Investors believing claims that their investment is very low in risk relative to the expected returns.

3) No reasonable expectation of a source of revenue for investors other than contributions from later investors.

4) No requirement for investor participation to get revenue.

5) Earlier investors are in fact paid from the investments of later investors.

Bitcoin meets all of these criteria except 3.

If someone claims Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme and you want to address that claim head on and honestly, what you have to argue is that there's a reasonable expectation that Bitcoins will appreciate in value over the long term due to demand for Bitcoins as a means of exchange. If you don't believe that, then Bitcoins as an investment basically *is* a Ponzi scheme.

This seems to me to be a very good argument. It does seem improbable that a scam could increase and decrease in value, sometimes remaining at a fairly stable point for some time. Either a scam is an amazing investment or people should be abandoning it. A feedback loop seems very difficult to sustain unless it has a significant component that's not speculative. I certainly can't think of any precedent offhand.

Theoretically someone could manipulate a market to do that. For example, Pirate could have made extra money by stalling a payment (claiming he had "difficulties", causing panic selling as people fear the Ponzi is collapsing) and then buying up his own debt at a discount through straw buyers. Then when he makes up the stalled payments with a little extra "to apologize", the price soars and he sells his own debt. Theoretically, a manipulator could do that for a few cycles. But pretty quickly the panic selling will stop. And besides, you can't do that with Bitcoins directly, you'll lose money. The manipulator has to be the counterparty in the majority of transactions (otherwise, anyone else can take all the profit you intended for yourself), and I doubt anyone could do that with Bitcoins.

Precisely. Bitcoin's entire design is based around the requirement that no central authority be needed. Pretty much everything else in the design exists solely to make that core requirement have as little downside as possible. If you don't see not having a central authority as a huge advantage, all those sacrifices are for nothing.

It would be like pushing around a car instead of riding a bike. If being capable of powered movement is not an advantage in your application, you *don't* want to use a car to get around because its whole design is based around that. But if powered movement is a big plus, then a car is *way* better than a bike. For an unpowered means of transportation, don't take a car and rip out the engine. Build a bike.

That said, there are some ideas from Bitcoin you could take for a centralized currency if they fit the rest of your design. For example, the way Bitcoin addresses are formed. The way transactions are formed and signed. The structure of a wallet. The way outputs are pulled in instead of having an account balance. The use of hash chains to permit a large amount of data, with history going back indefinitely, to be secured by securing a small chunk of data. And so on. All of these ideas might make sense in a centralized currency.

Once the server source code has been publicly released, you pretty much just install it, run it, and then tell it to generate a validation key. Then you can publish your validation public key either manually (by telling it to other validators) or by associating it with your domain. (Check out https://ripple.com/ripple.txt or https://weexchange.co/ripple.txt to see how domain association works.)

Validators actually need less horsepower than servers that deal directly with clients. They don't need to keep any history. The don't need to find payment paths. They don't need to handle "expensive" queries for complex information. Theoretically, they only need the current ledger. Of course, they do have to process all transactions. They do have to negotiate with other validators. They do have to sign validations and proposals. They do have the check the signatures on proposals and validations from other validators. They do need to do this fast enough to not hold the consensus process up. If part of a cluster, they can distribute the ECDSA signature checking load.