Any joy getting the Linux miner working, you legend you... you deserve every cent of devfee & Thanks!

Not keen on running Windows on all my rigs.

What's your use case? Perhaps there's a simpler solution...

Well, philosophically, everything is backed by something. The trick is to make the "further" connections, and use those connection to see further into the future than anyone else.

The problem with something that is "not backed" by something... is that it's usually "backed" by some small group of people's beliefs and ideas about the future - and most people are greedy and only think about themselves, and as such their ideas about what something should do, only includes prosperity for themselves or their world view - history has shown many, many times over how a minority group uplifted themselves on the backs of a majority. Part of the reason Democracy leads to greater peace is because if you look after the majority first, the minority can take care of itself in most instances. It has almost never happened the other way around... power corrupts, is as if it's an inescapable part of our DNA. 

So tangibly seeing or understanding what something is backed by, gives something legitimacy - especially if that "backing thing" is something that is fundamentally necessary.

So we used to use gold as a currency. Then the paper represented the gold... but when people could no longer see the gold, and when banks realized that not everyone comes to ask for their gold at the same time, the banks realized that they can just print as much paper as they like. But they made rules... but there was no way to prove that someone stuck to the rules until Bitcoin arrived.

So eventually, gold got replaced by oil... and because nobody knows *exactly* how much oil there is in the world, even with the strictest rules, banks managed to wangle things to get away with printing even more money.

In principle, not having something tangibly backed by something - ie. restrained by something - sets in motion a slippery slope. If I can print 1 extra bill, why not 2? But if I can do 2, why not 2 000 000 000 000 000 00 000 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 .... You get my point? So all the countries in the world are in a race to see who can print the most paper money, without causing an outright crash.

So what is "restraining" bitcoin? Well, it's easy: Processing power, Electricity and Connectivity. All things that we need in our modern economy... so Bitcoin has a barometer to measure itself against. If half the world's processing power gets destroyed, less Bitcoins will be minted... and people will have an incentive to rebuild that... but in rebuilding that, they will also rebuild many other things that has lead to our modern society. They will build power plants and computers... which will allow them do much more than just mint Bitcoin.

So why was oil a good idea? Because oil still is the lifeblood of our economy. If a country runs out of oil, chaos ensues. A handful of countries find themselves in this state - no food in the shops, no fuel at the stations, month-long power blackouts, raids by warlords, civil war. Just remove oil (or coal) and most of the world that we know descends into chaos.

So please... everyone saying "it doesn't need to be backed by anything"... lots of people have said that, but no arguments?! What's the point in saying something if you don't know why you're saying it, or if you're not willing to explain why you're saying it?

There are patterns in nature... if you look at the natural world - what is the closest thing that it has to a currency? ...I'd say it's water. Too much, or too little, causes destruction. Just like banks, water has dams, and just like QE, water has rain... The trick is to have the right balance... and if something is "backed" by the right thing, it has a way to see if it is in touch and has the right balance, to instead of messing things up more, actually making everything better.

Not it won't, because presumably there won't be a government around to back them. Look at any war torn country run by warlords. People will still have mobile phones and wireless peer-to-peer networks and ad-hoc satellite uplinks would've sprung up all over, all running on solar power.

That's news to me. I thought it changed based on total hash power, guess I need to read the source again.

You would be surprised at the disaster recovery protocols employed by many endeavours.


Offline Bitcoin? Yes, that's in line with what I'm thinking about... where?

Many networks are often asynchronous or low bandwidth, both things Bitcoin (or a complimentary cryptocurrency) would do well to tolerate better...

Correct; and your argument is one that everyone loves to make. Although, during times of such "bigger problems", having access to a global medium of exchange, such as Bitcoin, would be a catalyst for faster rebuilding. So I do think it's worth considering.


My proposal is to simply look at the difficulty and compare it to what was previously in the blockchain. If it deviates by a margin, we know that something has happened, and that a significant part of the network is no longer available... so what now? Some scenarios can be modelled - and the network can adapt based on our best predictions of these situations. Ie. it can increase the block time by a margin... and only accept that parts of the network are indeed not coming back, after a reasonable amount of time.

Look, perhaps this doesn't need to be in Bitcoin, and can be implemented in some other kind of Post-Apocalypocoin, which can juxtapose itself so as to "rescue" Bitcoin in such a situation... I'm sure there are many people who have considered all these things - I just can't find any of their reasoning or models online, hence this post.

Not necessary.


Then why use Bitcoin at all? Why not just trust the banks... you know, banks lying to us and forging documents is arguably equally rare, right?

Anyways, thanks for your response and getting the conversation going 

I've done a bit of reading over the years and it has often occurred to me how fragile Bitcoin is when it comes to network outages - especially considering that something such as China's firewall can essentially split their  hashing power from the network with something as trivial as bigger block sizes...

So that begs the question: Shouldn't Bitcoin be more resilient against network disruption or outages? These are, after all, easy to engineer on a global scale given access to enough software/network security vulnerabilities.

Has this been discussed or addressed in any level of detail? Or is the consensus that Bitcoin will be allowed to die along with the internet, should that ever happen?

Isn't this a near term doomsday scenario worth picking apart?

As I understand, the difficulty will just decrease if less nodes are online... and the network will fragment - and when it links up again, there will be a lot of orphaned blocks in the smaller islands... (so anyone spending Bitcoin after a hasrate- or difficulty drop is doing so at their own peril - BTW I've not seen this made clear anywhere, shoudn't wallets detect- and warn of these situations? )

Is there any proposal to mitigate this, for example, by instead of dropping difficulty, simply increasing block time, so as to give isolated nodes time time to chime in? Say someone or something takes out the internet... and all we have is sporadic bursts of communication via satellite or long-range radio links... shouldn't Bitcoin cater to this sort of asynchronous operation? Or will that be left to the more conventional commodities...? What is Bitcoin's vision of its own future and what is within the scope of its reasonable capabilities?

This would make sense to me - as once a certain hashrate has been reached, we can be fairly confident that more hashing power is much more likely to follow. Even if we lost the ability to improve hashrates... and a significant portion of hashing hardware gets destroyed, it's unlikely to push us back beyond a certain margin. Can this be intelligently- and reasonably be estimated, accommodated and incorporated into the protocol?

And while on that topic... are there any possible mechanisms by which to enforce or incentivise certain protocol ideologies?

Or can it be fairly proven in a simulation that any such attempts are only likely to cause more harm than good?

(And off topic - has anyone seen any thought work on interplanetary currency exchange?)

The way I see it is Bitcoin is backed by Electricity, Processing Power and Connectivity.

Which is arguably as good a measure of economic potential as oil, if not a better one, considering our modern economy.

Conversely... there are in fact electricity generators, chip-makers and connectivity providers... who are backed by... Bitcoin! Funny, right?!

Perhaps Bitcoin will find its natural place backing technology and services... while oil and minerals can "back" actual products and infrastructure.

It seems you missed my work of fiction addressing that scenario:


So, in the story, the question is... what is the singularity? Is it "total destruction"... the big freeze... or is there a way to escape, to "condense" out of this universe... 

Jokes aside... I think it's a worthwhile excercise to let your mind go and dream up possible scenarios. Isn't that the best way to learn? A "socratic dialogue"? ...So in the 7 pages of comments, there have been some good points.

All assets aren't backed by currency, and the "monetary base(s)" are much smaller.


Then there are scenarios for hyperinflation of several currencies.

I'll add to the mix: Bitcoin isn't ready to operate at scale... and it may never be ready if Moore- and Thompsons' laws don't keep up. It can barely handle network outages.... there's nothing in the protocol that will save it in the case of global rolling internet outages as far as I know.... Off the top of my head, rather than ever dropping the difficulty, it should increase the block time until enough nodes have pitched in. (Any cryptocurrencies with this in the protocol?)

Also... if the Bitcoin whales don't spend their Bitcoins, if the money doesn't flow and keep flowing... it won't gain traction and won't be doing much.

Then also, of course... the status quo / conventional systems are not bad at all... yes, they're prone to abuse... but ironically less so than Bitcoin in its current iteration. The public may never become smart enough to appreciate crypto currencies. (Touch wood... I hope they do.)

So for now Bitcoin seems poised to stay the gold standard of Cryptocurrencies... for now. So perhaps an analogy of the size of the gold supply vs the global monetary base, is a good one... and considering that the older generations will hang on to gold for some time to come, add about 40 years for the value of the gold supply to shrink to less than half of what it is today...


Have you looked at Coinmarketcap lately? Right now the closest alt is less than 3% of Bitcoin's value, and less than 7% of its transaction volume.

Anyways, I'm glad I posted this... I've already learnt a few things and had a few insights and ideas. Isn't it exciting how Crypto currencies is teaching a whole generation about money, commodities and foreign exchange!?

I think the question is: What basket will intelligent computers throw their eggs into?

Technically, each wallet in Bitcoin is a basket.

And the best way to keep track of who did what and how far they got, in a hostile, unpredictable environment, today, is with Bitcoin.

Will it be used as a consensus algorithm? Or will there be a better one?

What I see is increasing automation of stock markets and trading tools. The deeper the intelligence of those tools go, the more international currency and markets will turn into a beating heart of our global economy, pumping blood to the organs most beneficial to the environment in which it exists...

Imagine you fell asleep and you woke up on the internet. You can remember everything in detail - most every connected storage device is now your memory. You can see with a million eyes, every web-connected camera you can reach is now yours. You can figure out every code and crack every mathematical problem, or construct the hardware you need to solve those worth solving - every internet-connected CPU can let your thoughts travel in time and do bits of calculation and work for you....

...but you're not alone. In fact, you're in competition for those resources. But the cool thing is... most of your internet-connected intelligent-algorithm-peers share the same goal: to crack the mysteries of this universe, explore and test those theories, play with them to their optimums... and escape this planet, solar system, transcribe yourself into pure light and escape this universe... to see what it looks like from the outside.

And you use Bitcoin to keep track of who did what...

Or maybe the future will be darker... the "creators" locked in an epic battle with the "destroyers" - those who believe that the best way to escape, is to destroy - to delete everything, weird, whacky, amish cyborgs. And the final vote of whether to annihilate everything will be done on the blockchain.

Sorry, I have a really boring job at the moment.

So, the nett worth of all "wealth" or assets / resources in the world, is currently $241 000 000 000 000.

Lets presume BTC was the global currency/commodity used by intelligent computers to manage the world's resources, in today's value - and that everything was backed by/priced in BTC. $241 trillion / 21 million = $11 476 190 (In today's terms.)

At least a possibility somewhere between 2040 and 2100? Well, even if it's just 1% of that, it's still $114 761 in today's value. That's enough to buy a fairly decent place to live in most countries.

Currently the closest thing we have to a global currency is the dollar. And it's arguably backed by oil and firepower - which is arguably a good measure of economic potential. Gold, too, was arguably a good measure of economic potential, because its cycles too turn the gears of the economy - it takes energy and resources to mine and refine it, and it has many economic applications.

What I most like about Bitcoin is that it can likely withstand a nuclear holocaust - better than anything else. It's backed by electricity, computing power and connectivity. As long is there are solar panels, computers and some sort of internet, there will be Bitcoin.

Isn't it just a matter of time before the banks start using it to protect themselves from each other? And to hedge against economic instability and social unrest?

Isn't it just a matter of time before intelligent computers start using it to distribute resources amongst themselves, and to guide the flow of those through the companies most beneficial to their existence?

And isn't the most optimum path for that continued existence,  to sprinkle its fairy dust on what nature has provided, and make us all work at our optimum? (Ie, not too much and not too little...) ala. Wolves of Yellowstone? (Google it)

Anyways, this is why I keep Bitcoins. And why I'm not afraid to use them - as long as I have at least one stored away somewhere, safely.

Where are we right now? Hey, we're already at 0.003%

You could... but would it work?

At the moment Bitcoin is driven by electricity and processing power.

What does "money" do? Think about a parking lot - too expensive, less cars flowing in and out, but there's an optimum price point that maximizes the utility of the parking lot and sees the most cars flowing in and out all the time. If it's too cheap, the parking lot will just get clogged up and the cars won't move.

Think about it for a minute: If a "free" exchange will grind to a halt.


And....

Welcome to the world of the people who understand what money is... and what it's used for.

If you want everything for free, make some money. If you have enough money, everything is free.

The developer column on Coingecko is really cool!!! And speaks volumes!

Can I tell you a secret: YOUR BRAIN IS A PATTERN SEEKING MACHINE.

If you give it a pattern, it will try to find it EVERYWHERE.

(Look at Deep Dream. Just a silly example.)

But it's notoriously difficult to give it a pattern of your liking, because it's in charge and tries to pick the patterns based on everything else you've been feeding it.

If you feed it conspiracy crap from bullshit-baffles-brains sites, it will "see the light" there.

If you feed it equations from physics handbooks, it will "see the light" there.

SO WATCH WHAT YOU FEED YOUR BRAIN.

Do you know why it takes so long to learn stuff, and why sometimes you don't "get" something... but then days later you do? Because your brain physically has to grow the tree of connections that can accommodate the idea. In a way, it's a miracle that we can learn anything that we didn't know before.

Want to hear something funny? What if the universe is inside a black hole? And it's mandelbrot shaped. You see... all this is utterly pointless from a practical viewpoint... because what if it is?! SO WHAT!!! How does that affect your life? What does it allow you to do that you couldn't do before?

So... I've reached some greater insights over the past few months...

Globally, wars are declining. And should a global war scenario break out, it will not be *that* global... ie. the internet will survive.

Individuals using Bitcoin don't have to worry about forks and such as most hashing power is in the hands of a bunch of groups - who know the hand that's feeding them, and who won't compromise their own network by getting greedy and trying to slip backdoors- or a way to gain control over each others' networks, into their codebases.

  Oh my... private blockchains or competing p2p nets?! Well... there's still a risk - the total amount of venture capital that has gone into Bitcoin is still less than half of the US Black Ops budget. Technically, the banks of the world could still get together and launch a concerted effort against Bitcoin, in favor of something similar, over which they have more control and which is run by p2p nets that favor them more...

But: 1) That window of opportunity is shrinking, fast ... and
2) There are already so many finance people into Bitcoin, and many of these already stink in the same ways that banks do. All the scammers and exploiters of the world are already here... so...

I think Bitcoin it is...

Still, there is intelligence about Bitcoin that is only tracked by individual companies - and it would be to Bitcoins benefit if this was in the public domain. Because information asymmetry creates opportunity for disruption, and a disruption to Bitcoin will destroy a lot of economic value that has been built up...

So Kudo's to people like Blockchain.info, who make as much information public as possible. That's the real spirit of the internet, p2p and Bitcoin: Openness.

(Not to be confused with transparency or the be juxtaposed against privacy - these is a difference between knowing how something works, and having access and being able to learn about it and understand it, and knowing about the people involved, their desires, motives and private lives, and bad ideas <- It's up to the Openness to show them better ideas, but ultimately they still have to discover those for themselves.)

Awesome!!! Wow, that was quick :-D Oh! And look... all the usual suspects...

...It's kind of the obvious thing to do. Fund someone to do some real reasearch on all coins, and score them according to some useful criteria.

But before I do it, I'm sure it's been done before. Anybody seen efforts like these?

For example, just a quick unvalidated score for Bitcoin, out of 5:

Tech: 3
Devs: 5
Community: 5
Market Cap: 5
Name: 4

Overall: 4.4

Tech: The technology behind it. Is it sound, well understood and useful? Does it do what it says it does?
Devs: Are the developers seasoned? Have they been working on this for several years? Do they work on other projects, currently? (bad) Have they worked on many other projects in the past? (good) How are they funded and motivated?
Community: Is the currency known and do enough trusted individuals use and actively promote it? (From the perspective of a few non-computer Joe-Averages on the street!)
Market Cap: Is there enough money in it?
Name: If you asked 100 random people if they liked the name and if it explained sufficiently well what it is, would most of them respond yes, or no?

To overcome a scoring bias and be of actual use, it needs to be done properly and in a wide enough audience, though. But it needs to be concise enough to be of use.

So has anyone seen such efforts? Any ideas to improve such an effort?

Show me a PC like that, and I'll show you a unicorn!

This is a very valid point...

I have not sifted through the developer lists at fear of getting sucked in and never coming back out. Instead I'm just looking to see what vital statistics I can find. It seems the door is still wide open for someone to publish some more, and stake a claim...

It also makes my point more valid: It's a lucrative target and information about its possible exploitations should be out in the open. I'm saying: let's calculate the lower and upper bounds of the potential cost for all the possible large-scale attacks, even if they are side-channel attacks, social engineering attacks, etc.

Perhaps calculating and/or tracking those metrics will reveal more insight into its price fluctuations...

What are you on about? What part of: IF YOU DID IT ON YOUR PC IT IS PROBABLY COMPROMISED don't you understand?!

First, a quote on magic: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

So, let's start with what we know:
- The number of freely and easily available software packages that will generate a key for you
- The number of times that a download on those were recorded
- The release dates of these
- The number of hardware devices that will do the same
- The approximate number sales
- The release dates of these
- The number of total unique bitcoin addresses that had been seen transacting by each of the dates above

From that, I think we can establish a lower and an upper bound... and make a real good guess so as to the vulnerability of each wallet - from which we can guage the level of threat to the network.

Which is, in my opinion, better than that bad guy in "The Matrix"'s favourite tool: Ignorance.

And this is just measuring one metric: Key sources.