In this respect (among many others) Satoshi/Gavin/et-al have set a very workable example for the relationship between the 'designers' and the 'user community'.  For this reason it is most likely that it would serve as the model for other such efforts.  Or at least efforts which are likely to go anywhere.

Not sure where you got the idea that there is anything particularly different in my conception of the various exchange currencies (or even 'bakcoin', for that matter) compared to Bitcoin.

No more an no less than Satoshi, Gavin, and co are with Bitcoin.


Couple of afternoons + a few minutes to register the domain.

Most of the work was done in the shower.


Time will tell.  Actually it probably won't.  What I allude to is probably not the kind of thing which will have an obvious outward facing marker.

As long as my i386 router can be a full peer in the p2p network, I don't give a damn what it is called.

Bitcoin in it's present form supports a surprising number of enthusisest in our community just fine and still has significant room to grow in it's present 'undeveloped' form.  If the flexibility existed to do some non-trivial tweaks to the protocol that could likely add significantly to it's life expectancy.

My solution to the problem is simply to break the economies into parts which fit what the users might find comfortable, and I contend that these can be of sufficient size to meet most of an individuals needs.

While it is kinda cool to have my Skittles purchase live alongside someone's goat cheese sale in Mongolia, there is no compelling advantage, and almost no plausible advantage, to me as a user.  If it means pushing the monetary solution into what I and at least some others consider to be risky contortions, the choice for me is a clear one.  Given that choices exist of course.  I did document an expectation that a large contingent of Bitcoin community would resist with vigor and for a variety of reasons.

'close to par on a functional level' -ne (not equal) 'no different than'.

I can see a fairly high probability that you can 'choose' not to pay the transfer fee and get very poor service, if any, as a result.  Eventually.  Such a situation would be nearly inevitable if the barrier to entry for running transfer nodes is high, the cost is non-trivial, and it becomes practical only in select geo-political environments.

So the argument would effectively apply to Mexico.  Nothing particularly wrong there because one can 'choose' to pay off the street cop.  Or you can 'choose' not to and go through the justice system...if you are lucky.  Just the free market at work.

Not necessary.  Among the things that Bitcoin has done for the world, and for which I have the utmost respect, is exactly this.

Huh?  Exchanges have nothing to do with issuing crypto-currencies any more than they currently do for Bitcoin.  That's the job of designers and communities which interact with the designers (voluntarily in my idealized conception of things.) 


That kind of makes my point.


Don't hold your breath.  I've a very short attention span and would need to significantly develop certain skills which I lack.

Really my main goal with 'bakcoin.org' is to help break out a few folks who might have fallen into the old tunnel vision trap and get them to consider the possibility of a wider perspective.  I'd be content to achieve simply that, but would be generally proud of doing something more so who knows what the future holds.

Snip - planning to get back to these points later...for better or worse depending on my mood...


It is a misnomer to think of 'bakcoin' as money or currency at all.  If anything, it is simply a notational instrument that helps gauge the popularity of crypto-currency solutions.


The bold part is as close as one can come to encapsulating the very core goal of the project.

The 'exchanges' part are not really a factor, and not of much interest to me personally.  The free market will work things out in this respect.  Hopefully most people who are particularly interested in exchanges would not find bakcoin very appealing and would mainly ignore it.


Trust in just about anything has a significant 'monkey see, monkey do' component.  That's why Au which is actually quite useless is highly sought after.  (Parenthetically, I contend that the very simple nature of a chunk of gold has more than a little to do with it's reliability and thus the trust that it can muster.  This gets back to my 'simpler is better' philosophy.)

Trust can evaporate very quickly if people get burnt by trusting something, or see other monkeys getting burnt.  Indeed, my trust in many of the efforts to centralize control of masses of BTC value is quite low due to a fairly impressive legacy of fail here.  Similarly, I have more than a small amount of suspicion of those who make a profit by snatching fractions of BTC as they pass through time and space.  That renders the Bitcoin solution close to par with existing fiat solutions at a functional level and from the standpoint of the user (me.)

Yes, I considered jumping on-board and gearing up to run transfer nodes in a datacenter for fun and profit.  I still might, but the reality is that it is not my thing and I believe I would feel better about applying any effort I might put into crypto-currencies in a different direction.

General Comment: USDX: now @ 82.70

Another Score:  6/01/12
          year ago    now       delta mult
BTC     8.80         5.25       + 0.60
Gold    1542         1614      + 1.05

--------------------------
ref (for future updates):
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#czsg2011-06-01zeg2011-06-03ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv  (change date)
http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html  (hist cgi at bottom)
mult=now/year_ago

day           ya-btc  btc  mult    ya-Au  Au    mult
2012-06-01  8.80  5.25  0.60    1542  1614  1.05
2012-05-25  7.30  5.15  0.71    1528  1574  1.03
2012-05-24  7.10  5.14  0.72    1514  1558  1.03
2012-05-23  7.10  5.13  0.72    1515  1562  1.03
2012-05-22  6.30  5.09  0.81    1512  1560  1.03
2012-05-21  5.90  5.10  0.86    1514  1590  1.05
2012-05-18  7.50  5.12  0.68    1497  1592  1.06    
2012-05-17  7.80  5.09  0.65    1480  1574  1.06            
2012-05-16  7.40  5.09  0.69    1495  1533  1.03
2012-05-15  6.80  5.03  0.74    1492  1545  1.04
2012-05-14  8.50  5.00  0.59    1495  1555  1.04
2012-05-12  5.40  4.95  0.92    1505  1580  1.05
2012-05-11  5.00  4.95  0.99    1505  1580  1.05
2012-05-10  3.82  4.90  1.28    1510  1593  1.05
2012-05-09  3.75  5.03  1.34    1510  1590  1.05
2012-05-08  3.64  5.03  1.38    1497  1605  1.07

miscreanity's bastardization of 'physical' as in physical bullion in hand.  I liked it.

I would not rule out the possibility that those who have the capability would deploy their 'golden parachute' and save their own asses on a personal level.  The people who would be making these kinds of decisions on behalf of the rest of us are probably, as a group, as capable as any of arranging such an option.

I suspect I'll be playing it safe vis-a-vis PMs and get the phyzzz while I can.  I may go ahead and sit on a little more cash than I would ordinarily as a hedge against deflation (and with the hope that it impacts valuations more or less as classical theory indicates...)

Godamnit!  I only had days to go before wanting the do that USD->PM conversion.  I figured I would not be so lucky.  Maybe we could get just one more stomach churning plunge in PM's.

I had expected the USDX to need to drop more to produce an upward move in PM's at this scale.  As I look just now, it's only dropped to 82.70.  A lot of gold bugs might be very happy indeed when it gets back down into the mid 70's.  Unless they, like I, wish to do some more accumulation that is.

Certain of your points are well taken and I'm honestly not trying to discount them, but I think it worthwhile to cut to the chase real quick.  I'll try to get back to some of them.

I can envision a plausible and very high capacity solution where peers (of a high-caliber variety) offset the load by juggling the processing of block and reduction of them to Merkle trees, and also back-fill necessary transaction details on an as-needed basis.  After observing the BIP16/17 struggles, I'm not holding my breath for such a solution to materialize as a proven thing, nor am I looking forward to making the transition...but I'm drifting back toward being a bit more of a troll than I wish to be at this time...

To answer your bolded question:  "Because we can."

I felt a high degree of confidence in Bitcoin when I owned and controlled the entire block-chain and it was sitting on my desk.  Beyond the perception that this is what was mainly advertised, I naturally prefer the simplest solution possible to meet an objective.  All of my engineering experience indicates that this is the most reliable way to achieve the results that I want.  And my wants of a crypto-currency is mostly that I can use it reliably and not get cheated.

I cannot say that I find a 'one-world' crypto-currency to be much more palatable than a 'one-world' fiat currency, and that is even more the case if utilization is moderated by transaction fees to some extent.  Beyond that, I see no really compelling win and a lot of dis-advantages in terms of complexity and flexibility by pushing the envelop in order to achieve one.  The one argument for it that I see as highly compelling is the 'strength in numbers' argument.  My idea of coupling a dynamic collection of crypto-currencies only just tightly enough to enjoy the strength part but not tightly enough to encumber one another's being otherwise reflects this.

...big snip...

?? How?

That grudgingly extracts a certain amount of respect from me.  I am relatively familiar with holding unpopular opinions myself


Not clearly.  I don't own any and never paid all that much attention to them.

I will say that I have some suspicion of some of 'the greats' for being a little more on the pump-it-up side of the mining stocks than I am comfortable with.  My own suspicious and paranoid nature perhaps.

It is actually true that way way before 2008 someone made the point that mining stock will suffer a certain amount of the fate associated with any stock by virtue of the fact that the are, in fact, stock.  The Phyzzz, not so much.  For better or worse that bit of advice stuck in my head and has influenced my desire to have a footprint in that sector.  A negative influence of course.

You've name-droped a lot of the greats.  Who of these people share your current believe in the eminent collapse of Au?  Cuz it really does seem to me that yours is something of a lonely voice compared to a lot of the other people I've followed.

I think that Mish and very few others nailed the deflationary nature of the event that we went through in 2008, and indeed continuing to this day.  The thing is that it really did not have the impact on Au that I had anticipated having to sit through.  My best explanation is that under our 'modern' fiat monetary systems and financial structures, certain anticipated market artifacts can be well obscured.  There is a legitimate argument that when the piper's music becomes deafening we _will_ see the expected price collapses and they may effect Au, but I would _still_ rather be sitting on the phyzzz in that kind of scenario.

pre-post-edit:  And in a more recent post you've name-dropped a bunch more.  Same question though.

Got busy at work and just now saw your edits.  I see your other post as well, and owe at least an analysis of these stratum and such things before responding.  To say the honest truth, I've not been all that interested in crypto-currencies for a while, but our conversation is re-sparking my interest to some extent.


I remember struggling with a word to use there.  What I meant to indicate is, among other things, that as currently implemented there is one and only one block chain for Bitcoin.  While it is conducive to significant pruning and optimization, all of the load of the entire economy must, by necessity, pass through this artifact.


As I've heard it described, a load balancer would accept transactions and distribute them to processing cores to perform the workload which would otherwise swamp one core.  IIRC, that is fairly well described in the 'scaling' article.

There is no particular rocket science behind such an architecture.  As long as the workload is not terribly sequence sensitive it's a fairly simple solution.  And the nature of the algorithms employed by most load balancers allow them to work at close to wire speed of most media.  They can even do packet analysis, filtering, and modification (over and above what their job requires) at near wire speed.  Even properly designed deep packet operations can be amazingly efficient (which goes some distance toward explaining why I fear actively hostile infrastructure providers.)

There are several big problems here from my point of view:

1) Moore's Law notwithstanding, it will be a fair bit of time before such technology is within reasonable grasp of Joe Sixpack, and longer yet before he's running such a setup in his garage.

2) If/when the transaction load swamps what can reasonable be expected on readily available media (say 10G at this point) it'll be back to the drawing board.  Probably before that since the blockchain itself would be at some risk if it were maintained exclusively in something like memcached.

More and more people complaining about a blockchain size, load ave, etc.  That's in the here and now with Bitcoin being .0001% the size that it could be called upon to be.  Or less.

Beyond that:  More people showing concern about a 'network backbone' (I included.)  Theories about 'supernodes' with datacenter class network connectivity with hundreds of cores and load balances distributing the workload to them.  And even that only handles what I would consider relatively modest Bitcoin utilization in a more global view.  Beyond that I've not heard of anyone having any ideas.


Anything cold serve as a 'reserve currency' that met the demands of those using it.  In this case I think that the most critical aspect would be that people trust it.  A good part of my design philosophy here is to reduce the reason for people _not_ to trust it and/or trust it more than other things as a basis for notation.

My document currently does not expand on the concept that all of the 'sponsored exchange currencies' may gain some significant advantages by sharing the workload or supporting bakcoin.  For instance, they can use it as a free-form notepad (of modest size) and everyone will be securing everyone else's notes.  So, there may be other advantages that gold or seashells don't really provide.

I see the opposite as an Achilles heal of Bitcoin in some ways. A controlling factor in it's scaling and a regrettable factor dictating it's evolution.


It's arguably a mistake to label 'bakcoin' as a form of money...and certainly a mistake to think of it as one in any normal conception of the word.

The basic idea from an engineering point of view is that one starts with a full set of baggage then loses it over time.


Bakcoin is not at all 'ideal money'.  It's totally shitty money, and I tried to make that clear.  The reason for this is that 'good' money attracts 'poor' owners.  At least in terms of meeting the stated goals of the project.