I know Spoetnik can easily be the target of your loathing . . but you missed the post a little further down that thread the same day . .

AnonyMint has laid out a logical set of plans that would seem to unfold in a series of events, leading to a particular outcome. You both seem to  be in agreement that there will be an end in which everything will work out (after a series of events occur) . . which would be the logical end to any scenario in particular not just this one.

Your presented flow of events is, "people will wake up and we'll all be better off" . . which seems quite non-descriptive. Could you provide a basis for your argument? Perhaps one rooted in facts in the past, rather than one rooted in your own personal faith in humanity? I'm not trying to say that you're wrong, or that you have a baseless argument . . as faith itself is something fundamental that I can't really argue against or for . .

It's more that you haven't given much of a foundation for anyone to build off of. I'm just looking to you to provide an example(s), similar to perhaps the Bundy case, in which I can logically conclude that this wouldn't escalate toward MAD.

These same reasons lead me to wonder the degree of insanity this goes to when I see entire marketing teams form for altcoins. They're all marketing to the world that's been laid out before them, rather than the one they want to see or create. They've hidden behind an ego that must be protected at all costs.

It's a lack of true vision that I see, where the programmers have been beaten into punching keys on the keyboard, the investors sell short and long, the exchanges pick up the new daily hype at the drop of a hat, the miners struggle to run a program on their computer, the one-man markets take the money based on the demand, the consumer picks up a few more things they don't need and the dreamers are still sleeping.

Everyone's just doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, and that's what's coming to terrify me. Without a proper evolution into something new, we're left to be a revolution of squids in a sea of sharks. We're in the midst of what should be a coming total changeover to a new currency unit, and I hear not more than laughter at crickets.

I'd love to be of more use than just offer some finger-slapping a keyboard, but what is there to do really?

I had seen that a few days ago, not sure where I saw the link in the first place though. The whole video is basically showing just how far the entire basis of the movement has slipped. Just seeing that video makes me think of all the backs that have been broken to get this where it is today.

Sad indeed to see such a revolutionary concept being tied to a tree and embarrassingly beaten until it bleeds so freely.

What was once thought of as the vessel to carry us into a new world has become nothing but a real world joke.

It's very apparent, right now, that this is failing miserably. It's a toy with no more appeal to it than a common fad like a child's toy (note the adorable colors of the atm itself).

This movement needs a new face, or someone needs to start standing their ground. Of course, how could you stand without the correct tools on which to base the movement?

Afterthought:
Given this video as an example, I'd love to see different ways of getting this currency traded for a dollar. Easy ways that don't require your ID's, hand print, and eye scan, DNA, first born, a notable percentage of your wealth in the will . . etc. Sadly, representing oneself as a currency trader/exchanger comes with inevitable regulations that can (and are currently) easily be adapted to ruin the sale due to preexisting regulations we've placed on ourselves. Focusing on how easily it can be done .. it would seem some form of representation would be required in order to prevent this from happening.

Of course, the requirement for representation would only serve to centralize the idea of a decentralized currency. I think this is where many people are losing the concept. The basis of decentralization can only serve to clash with the world in which this was brought into. Naturally, the only outcome to this I see is to centralize the coin or decentralize the world. Right now the world is much bigger than the coin, so as a result videos like this will only continue to pop up. I guess I can understand, given that everyone's only trying to fit this into a world that makes sense to them. This is telling me that the concepts and fundamentals are being lost amongst the noise.


One more edit:

Looks like there might be hope, but it's still far off for some parts of the world.

Nice to see that you corrected it. I admit I should have a heavy bias toward leaving it uncorrected, but toward the end of it all . . a valuable service was provided and that needs to paid for somehow.

Total forgiveness would only serve to dump those lost monies back into the hands of every tax payer (with the bulk of US education loans now being handled by the government, and their persistence after bankruptcy), which I could only see would serve to kill off education if the costs (both previous and future) remain unchecked. Forgiveness alone wouldn't be enough to prevent the situation from happening again.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/.

More towards this . . who is going to ask or push for something like this? Going into education (USA is used for the examples), most of these people are complete idiots. Generally when they graduate, they are relatively intelligent (or at least now have the ability to become so) and have every hope in the world that everything will work out because they have a degree now.

From that perspective, it would show a moral defeat to themselves if they were to change course and demand forgiveness on loans. One of the driving factors in their previous 4-5 years is undoubtedly that they are going to be able to pay back their expensive loans by getting an awesome job.

From the alternative perspective, http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/?level=nation&mode=graph&state=0&submeasure=27 indicates that 45% don't graduate bachelors degrees within 6 years. This means the 45% of the 14.5 million enrolled (last year's info) aren't graduating or are taking on excessive debt.

These same 7 million people will turn to more debt, like credit debt, to support themselves for the years until they either graduate or leave education. Who will tell this desperate group of people that their loans should be forgiven? How could you convince them, given the mindset achieved after seeing 55% of their peers graduating? From this perspective, they would seem like a sore loser to even ask for even a % of their loans forgiven.

What I'm saying is that there seems to be significant barriers, more than what I provided for sure, for the people affected by this form of debt from actually moving toward trying to ask for less of it. How do you convince a slave that their shackles are too heavy, or their tethers too short, without getting them in the mindset that they shouldn't be wearing them at all?

You mean browser? A great start is just downloading it. It's actually pretty friendly to use. You can take it much further, but in the very least just using the browser takes less than 5 mintues to see some great differences.

Thank you for helping me to refine this point in my mind into a something that I would undoubtedly come to use. I was having trouble linking quite a few conclusions i see everywhere with presumptions I've held for a long time, and though I have had the idea put in front of me many times . . this one seemed to drive it in quite well.

This thread moves faster than my capacity to take in all the sourced links and shared insights, but I hope to be able to catch up with the discussion soon enough when I can get more time.

The only way to make the point clear that something along that line is total bullshit is with your wallet.

Telling everyone to simply move along is belittling the situation, and I won't have it.

I've decided to speak with my wallet, and will be staying away until he stops cutting out 10% of the coin every other fucking week.

Instamine, Hacked exchange, reduction from 80million to 20million, 10% of mining goes to node fees, darksend nodes require 1000 fucking dark (which in my eyes is a blatant attempt to force us to buy more with the incentive of 10% of the mining, why not start at 100 until the coin is a bit further along?), and now even mentioning a 10% airdrop? Fuck that.

I've stayed quiet on a lot of it, but with this I'm done. Anonymity isn't worth is. Clearly the guy's a great programmer, but lacks as an economist.

1. is it more efficient than qrk? Are cats more efficient than dogs? No definition here so I'm answering to the best of my ability
2. is it more secure than qrk? 83% more secure, your definition is undefined so I've provided my own
3. is it more efficient than scrypt? or is the miner just crippled and can't use the full potential of the card?Scrypt utilizes RAM heavily. The power savings is manifested through not being memory hard. So yes, more power efficient than Scrypt in the sense that the algorithms themselves are designed to use the GPU core rather than the GPU memory.
4. are there more efficient miners already out for x11 that are more optimised? Are there more efficient scrypt kernels running for cgminer? Yes, but not by more than a couple percent. Same here with x11
5. is it more asic resistant that qrk? Yes, in the sense that someone has to spend the extra time to hash 5 extra functions that quark doesn't have. Dont bring back to me the pseudo-random choice based on the if/else statement.
6. is it more asic resistant that scyptN , scrypt jane Scrypt N is different that Scrypt Jane. I can tell you that it's more asic resistant than Scrypt-N because I've already seen advertisements for scrypt ASICs saying that the Scrypt parameters are configurable.
7. is it x12, x13, x99 going to be better? will we need to fork all of the coins over and over again?Not sure where you're going here. Are you asking if something better will come along? Shit yeah something will most definitely be around that is a better solution in year 3056.


Your questions are designed to be completely loaded, sir. If you want people to stop being so hostile then perhaps you should attempt at engaging rather than presenting yourself as hostile. Else, you will be dismissed .. based on the entire thread of dismissive arguments.

From what I see, you don't want actual answers . . and want only to see shit. Nobody can help you understand if that's all you want.

What defeats your rebuttal in this case to me is that the 50-60% implied rate of continued success is still "good enough" based on his original argument.

This is telling me, as part of the masses in this one, that in a decade and a half I'll have a 50-50 shot at losing my job . . so in the very least only half the illusion is fake. Note the wording there . . no pun intended.

Coupling this with the idea that most things (like food) should have a significant loss in relative value (thus becoming more affordable as per prev. discussion in this thread) . . then I would logically conclude that my government would just increase taxes . . successfully allowing our game to continue.

From this standpoint . . I'd need more to be able to agree with you, because if 50% lose their jobs, taxes double, and my ability to get food and live in a home becomes increasingly lower (like to the point where I can afford double taxes) then I'm still missing your point because it still appears as if nothing would be too damning (even though I personally share your opinion).

Maybe we could expand into a more detailed breakdown? Do you have any more examples?

Using the example of a business owner, these are probably the most painful words I've ever had shoved in front of my eyes.

How can you expect that a publicly available and accessible blockchain would ever help me out, or be in my favor?

Excluding the grand talk of governments and elites for the sake of this more targeted argument . . what happens when my competition becomes aware of the other businesses I work with to every minute financial detail? Bedlam is what happens.

To willingly put my competition in a stance that would simply allow them to buy-out my suppliers by tracking their transactions with me, compel my customers to work with them instead (by again discovering what they are buying and sell it to them), or uncover private company information relating to proprietary processes (By introducing yourself, an original competitor, to me as a simple equipment supplier that needs to know about my processes in order to sell me the right things). . you're asking the world to burn. You're putting people in the unemployment line, because I'm losing money.

A public ledger isn't one of the greatest contributions that bitcoin has provided, it's the biggest weakness. It's where Satoshi stopped in my eyes.

Software may be open source, but the processes by which Quaker Oats or Wellbutrin are created are not. It would be insane to ask that it would ever be.

You may use the example of 3d printers to refute this, but there are and always will be processes that are in competition due to something crucial that printers can never provide.

Things like plant seeds or pre-grown plants, bred animals, pharmaceuticals, that specific taste to your food that's not like everything else, and knowledge inside my head (and how it gets there) will never be be able printed by sheer definition of what they are - unique. These are just a few examples, but they're endless.

You can print a fork but you can't print the uniqueness in these examples (though you can still print unique things). You can open source software, but as I read before in this thread -- it's always changing. To this effect, uniqueness is preserved.

You can, at some point, make the processes open source due to their relative value decreasing, but the mind through which they were introduced can never be open sourced. New uniqueness will eventually replace the old. It can never be a completely open door though, because for every one mind . . there is another with different ideas about the same thing.

You telling me that these types of things don't matter and are actually a good thing -- by having a public blockchain -- is totally wrong. To say otherwise is piercing holes in anything that can, or ever has, held value. Without some form of privacy . . the value just leaks out. There's no incentive to adopt. Provably so, with the three main parties involved with bitcoin today being a small consumer base, one man shops that are desperate for an edge, and investors. The former two are not particularly concentrated sources of value, so this leaves little for investors to play on.

The next step is real business money. The only way to invite this, I see, is by allowing privacy from competition.

Well, if they must come then I'd hope them to be more in line with your dreams than the estimation.

I guess I'll be doing some digging on FPGA's, to get a better understanding on how fast they could implement x11.

I was waiting for someone to call me on that. Happy someone's paying attention, sometimes it seems like I just get skipped over.

But from my simple understanding of FPGA's, wouldn't saying that if one could hit 300m# as was implied . . it wouldn't be much of a leap to say that a comparable ASIC would reach well over 1G#?

This seems very unrealistic, based on the typical GPU hashing speeds I see. Unless the miner were to be so inefficient that it makes these numbers non-scalable I can't see an FPGA coming to 300m#.

I understand. I myself am not aware of the full ins and outs of the anonymity level behind CoinJoin, so it seems we're on the same level with that respect . . in that we're both repeating what we've heard or read for the most part.

On the other hand, I am very willing to keep myself very open to the possibility that even intelligent people are suspect to some form of bias, misunderstanding or lack of immersion.

Actually it was that same openness that led me toward reading up on CoinJoin so that I might find differences in how it was applied in DarkSend.

My initial wording was designed to see if you think anonymity in general is a wasted effort, or if you think the attempt at it in DarkSend was flawed.

Anyways, the label "CoinJoin", to me, just refers to any process that relies on mixing transactions through a trusted 3rd party in order to obscure the blockchain . . which I think severely limits most of the claims DarkSend makes due to pre-existing consensus . . but the developers want to give credit to them so it's mentioned anyways. It's their choice to give credit for original ideas.

The general consensus I've seen so far about DarkSend is that it's not 100% anonymous . . and the developers have been very transparent about that fact. Does this mean that it's useless to me? Absolutely not . . and I will try to provide details.

The major part where DarkSend differs is that it offers anonymity based on the cost that someone is willing to pay to remove it.

Every step in the original CoinJoin process now has a potential penalty that will be imposed for improper behavior by the anonymous, trustless third party doing the mixing. The third party is elected pseudo-randomly based on previous block data (We can assume this to be completely random pending someone being able to predict the outcome of the x11 algorithm).

What this means is that by electing a mixing node based on previous block data . . the chance that you are aware you are a mixing node is drastically reduced with every additional node on the network. In this sense, you are acquiring anonymity and removing the requirement to trust based on chance. This, along with penalties, serves very well in that you are effectively minimizing loss by theft of the master node. There are many more details and you are welcome to dig through them when the white paper is updated (unless you want to dig through the thread), or I can try to find them for you.

Now onto the anonymity part . . which still has some issues but is a damn good attempt and only getting better. By increasing the number of stages of mixing to ten, coupled with ip obfuscation granted by TOR . . higher and higher levels of anonymity are being achieved. What this means is that if I, being a business in this example, were to start conducting transactions with DarkSend . . then none of my competitors will be able to discover my wallet address, or my suppliers, or customers.

I can agree that the refinement is far off from business money entering the picture . . but it's a sure start in the right direction.

I guess what I'm getting at is that right now . . this is one of the best visible attempts at anonymity and taking all of this to the next level that I see. To not offer privacy limits the market caps to a small consumer base, one man shops and investors. The former two are not particularly concentrated sources of value to play on for investors.

This isn't an all or nothing attempt . . and it just can't be as simple as that. Privacy and anonymity can only be provided in stages until (or if at all) something better comes along. What I can say for certain is that if it can be achieved to an acceptable point . . then the other details will hardly matter.

Can you tell me why and how it won't happen? Please try to limit the discussion to just that, and lets remove ourselves from other things like the hashing function, amount of coins in circulation, distribution of coins in circulation, difficulty retargeting and mining capability.

Years of experience with manufacturing processes, specifically new process development, force me to double if not triple every number that that guy said . . assuming he's telling the truth.

So that's a few months x 2.5, 50k development x 2.5 (probably more, but sticking with consistency), 300M# x 2.5, 2k x 2.5 seems more reasonable to me.

If that few months x 2.5 is even close to a year then that's not nearly as bad.

Plus getting that kind of hash out of my GPU's would easily cost me above $50k in just computer parts . . so in comparison thats a far cry more reasonable than the scrypt asic field.

Nice

You should do one of those with unending unemployment lines, due to companies losing money b/c of public blockchains.

I've actually brought the discussion outside of this thread about three times in the last week.

When you're saying that your business competitors can get your business info, instead of the NSA snooping you out and putting you in jail for reasons that you don't know . . people are much more open to privacy in a blockchain.

Lucky I don't own more than a couple satoshi then!

Also . . the top two addresses are still only 2% of the supply according to your info. The value doesn't scare me as much as the actual amount in circulation that is in them.

What scares me about litecoin is that there's 27.2 million coins and 24.26% of them sit in two wallets, active at the last couple of days last year. Anything else means much less to me than that.

But that always seemed like a cop-out to me . . in that all I can think that was said when it was started was: "Well we can't figure out how to make it decentralized so we'll just start at the end and move toward the middle."

I respect the effort as a whole and hope it finds true growth, but it's basically like someone telling me: "I am rich now because I made a stake a long time before you did, and you should do so now so that you can spread the word." Just doesn't sit right with me.

Just because PoW coins are susceptible to the same centralization that NXT started with doesn't mean at all that it's not sustainable. It just means that nobody's came up with a way to slow the process to a complete crawl yet. I'm not ready to say, and probably never will be ready to say, that we should just abandon a PoW concept.