The website is now live. I'll be running a contest to reward those who have managed to accumulate the most trust.

Introducing https://beforetheban.com/.

New to the crypto? Check out https://blockchainbios.com/ for a who’s-who in blockchain. Find out about crypto projects and get an introduction to the people you need to know and follow.

You can also earn bitcoin by suggesting changes to profiles! Details on the BlockchainBios bug bounty page: https://blockchainbios.com/bugbounty

An explanation of a Proof of Presence scheme for establishing consensus, told in the form of a story about a party.

http://everybit.com/?mode=focus&arrows=true&rows=2&cols=5&boxRatio=1&language=en&animation=true&query.sort=DESC&query.focus=AN1rKvtN7zq6EBhuU8EzBmnaHnb3CgvHa9q2B5LJEzeXs5FakhrArBqtcH83ZEtoLXJ1TsNyXbJeLGjW3WqHjQfwZxNwPABRL&cursor=AN1rKvtN7zq6EBhuU8EzBmnaHnb3CgvHa9q2B5LJEzeXs5FakhrArBqtcH83ZEtoLXJ1TsNyXbJeLGjW3WqHjQfwZxNwPABRL

EDIT: Ugly URL cuz apparently no shorteners.

Both the offers I received were in the $X,XXX range, but I suspect they were low-balling. There's no doubt the name has value, only question is how much.


So far this year Bitcoin.com.au sold for $23k, BitcoinWallet.com for $250k, and venture capital is flooding into the sector.

The same could be said of houses.

Like any established market, there are clear price ranges for different types of domains. We have a decade of detailed sales records (at places like dnjoural, sedo, namejet, etc) to draw on, plus our own experience. EveryBit.com just happens to be well outside my own domain name investment niche.

I just started using the domain everybit.com as a sample website for a project I'm working. In the past week I've gotten two queries about the name from people who want to build crypto-currency sites.

What do you think? Keep or sell? How much should I hold out for?

Hey all! I’m working on a project that needs an embedded currency to help allocate resources within the system. The goal is to allow participants to demonstrate proof-of-stake, yet at the same time I’d like to make ownership and transfers maximally anonymous. Here’s my proposal, your feedback welcome! If you happen to be near Toronto on March 25th and want to be involved with the initial development meetup, send me a PM for more info.

Project name: Puffball.io
Internal currency: Mycelium
Smallest unit: Spore

Rules:
1. A fixed number of spores will be generated at the beginning. There is no mining.

2. Every spore has its own blackchain record, maintained separately.

3. All transactions happen atomically; to trade 10 spores to someone else, you would sign over each spore to this other person.

4. By requirement, every spore must be signed over to a new key every X minutes (called a “period”, this length of time could change over time and get shorter as the system becomes busier. These periods are numbered sequentially).

5. If a spore isn’t “tumbled” during a period, it is considered dead and removed from the system.

6. To transfer ownership of a spore, the owner uses their private key to sign a message that encodes the public key of the new owner with the private key of the current owner, as well as some additional information (described below). To tumble a coin to themself, the owner generates their own new private-public key pair, and signs the spore over to this new address.
Ownership of each spore is invisible to everyone except the current owner, and the owner from the immediate previous period. The public key itself could be hidden (to third-parties) and instead some token could be used that proved the validity of the ownership transfer without revealing either party’s public keys.

7. (Possible) Each tumble could have a space for a fixed length message, encrypted with the public key of the new owner. To maintain overall system privacy, every transaction would have to include this field and it would have to be of a fixed length (it could be sent with the initial character “!” plus noise if no meaning is intended).

8. To make up for dead spores, and to encourage spore ownership, some fraction of the spores would be allowed to split every period, based on some unpredictable criteria that depends on the state of (a subset of) the system. When a spore splits, the private key for that spore signs over ownership twice, to two different public keys, and announces both tumbles to the network. If this method of spore growth proves technically difficult, then all (living) spores could split at pre-determined periods (for example, during a period that’s a power of number m).

9. In addition to the public address of the new owner, the tumble also encodes the current period number and a Bloom filter that includes every spore that was both alive during the previous period and that meets some randomly generated criteria (for example, its token shares the first N digits with a hash that is derived in an unpredictable way from the state of the system).
This requirement is intended to prevent a spore from trying to “catch up” after not broadcasting new keys for several periods. Before including an external spore’s identity in its Bloom filter, a spore needs to verify that it was included in those Bloom filters which should have included it during the previous period. Otherwise this spore itself is considered “dead” by the system. Spores would also be responsible to exclude other spores in if those spores split when they shouldn’t have (the equivalent of a double spend).
This method of consensus introduces weaknesses, see below.

10. To prove that a particular user controlled a certain number of spores, they could announce in advance some function of the public token for those spores during a future period. To prove ownership with a higher level of anonymity, users could announce what digits would be in a sparsely populated Bloom filter of all the spores. Here there would be a tradeoff between anonymity and the certainty that a proof of stake isn’t faked. However, for a large number of spores in the system and a high claim of ownership, figuring out exactly which spores were included could require an extremely high number of calculations.

Key advantages
1. High anonymity: Even if you knew ownership of every coin during a particular period, it’s possible that none of this information will be correct by the next period.

2. Zero transaction costs. Each spore has to broadcast its information to others, and include information from other spores, to avoid being killed. As such, everyone with an interest in the system is required to maintain it. Spore tumbling could be outsourced, but this would either have to be to a trusted third party, or there would have to be ways to provide tumbling services with enough information to continue keeping a spore alive, but not enough to steal it.

3. Transparency of market size. Because untumbled spores are removed, there are no zombie spored or lost wallets.

4. All resources go directly into maintaining the network. There are no difficult proof-of-work puzzles to be solved.


Weaknesses
1. A disruption to the network could cause major problems, as a the validation of each tumble relies on the ability to “see” the current state of many of the other spores.

2. Because an individual owner of spores has a vested interest in reducing the number of spores that they don’t control (to corner the market), they have an incentive to claim other spores are dead even when they are still alive. But because taking this action will likely cause this spore itself to be flagged as dead, that serves as a disincentive. However, if enough spores “went rogue” and began broadcasting incorrect information, this could have a cascading effect throughout the population of otherwise honest spores, as some percentage of them incorrectly trust the information of rogue spores.

3. For maximum anonymity, each period X should be as short as possible. Additionally, each period should include a sub-period during which no new tumbles are announced, to give a chance for each spore to include all the new information in it’s calculation, and to share with other spores their own new information. However, the shorter the period, the faster this communication needs to occur, and the more likely that a network failure could result in disruptions.

4. Spores cannot change hands at a rate greater than the length of a period.

I have a background in programming and took some CS classes at the U. At this point the language I know best is R. The profile here is under my real name, add a .com to see my personal website and read my "about" page. 

Right now I'm putting together a proposal for a startup in the DAC space and will be investing heavily with both my time and money. I've been watching the world of digital cash for a long time, since the days of DigiCash and Flooz (yup, best name ever). I thought that once I dug into the details of the Bitcoin I'd want to do something directly related. However, I'm more and more convinced that while the technology and ideas behind Bitcoin and the "alts" are the future, the giant blockchain record of every BTCX will one day seem more like a burden than a tool of liberation. 

Thank you for the compliment. To clarify I don't think CoinJoin or any other technique, by itself, would solve the anonymity problem. You are correct that any time you have well documented transfers flowing in and out, protecting privacy within the black box is going to be extremely difficult. Cash is (mostly) anonymous because everyone uses it all the time; the herd (noise) obscures the individual (signal).

[/quote]

Hi rat,

1. I don't know your experience, but privacy was overstated to me. I head the term "as private as cash" or "digital cash" on several occasions.

2. I suspect these political views aren't worthless to the founders themselves, nor are other fellow-believers indifferent to what their tool becomes.

3. "basement-dwelling fat nerds"?

4. I like to consider possible scenarios before investing in something, and see what others have thought about these. Fuck me, right? Speaking of which: 7. I looked through hundreds of messages here for discussion about these issues, do you have links?

First off let me say right away that I’m a newbie. I’ve known about Bitcoin for a few years, and have been watching from afar, but only recently decided to immerse myself in the technical details  — and equally important, the culture. I stayed away out of a suspicion that one of Bitcoin’s main claimed virtues (privacy) was oversold, and because I knew that it would hard for me to get into Bitcoin in a casual way.

What I’ve found so far is a an environment that’s far more complex and captivating then I’d imagined. It could help liberate the world from the chains of fait currency and the banking establishment, but it could also become a powerful tool for statist control. I’m sure this latter possibility is inconceivable to many within the space, but it would’t be the first time a vehicle of liberation spun around 180 degrees.

From what I can tell, the early adopters of Bitcoin skewed heavily libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, Rothbardian. As use of Bitcoin spreads to the general public, the culture surrounding it changes, becomes more mainstream. There’s a long history of online communities which, over time, became hostile to the original crowd and their laissez-faire ideals. Slashdot, Wired, Reddit. You can see the transition happening right now in the comments section at Zerohedge.

The reaction to the fall of MtGox shows that many Bitcoiners are now muggles (or matrix dwellers, if you prefer). These new users were raised on an intellectual diet of “market failure” and “much needed government regulation.” Their first instinct when things go wrong is to look for government to fix it. They’re comfortable with filing requirements, identity verification, withdrawal limits. They’re shocked to find out the BTC exchanges don’t have deposit insurance.

Here we get to an essential weakness of the protocol, at least so far as how it compares to the promised benefits. As a pseudonymous currency with a full public ledger of transactions, the privacy of everyone depends on the privacy of everyone else. Every single input and output from the real world to Bitcoin (every wire transfer you send to an exchange, every purchase of items shipped to your home), is a potential crack in the veil of privacy not just for you, but for everyone else.

I can see that developers are working on interesting technologies, like CoinJoin, which could be baked into the the protocol to enhance privacy. But right now, securing your privacy within Bitcoin requires additional, complicated steps (using tumblers, creating a new address for each transaction). The lessons from PGP email could not be more clear: if it’s a hassle, the vast majority of users won’t do it, which means that users of these privacy measures will be the ones who *really* need it. But because the defining feature of our new age is data interconnectivity, true privacy in can only come from increasing the amount of noise in the system, not decreasing the amount of signal. When the privacy of the network as a whole depends on individual users taking steps that make their lives more complicated, this privacy won’t survive.

Even if changes to the protocol make tracking harder by default, political changes could allow governments to view a nearly complete record of every BTC purchase and movement of funds. What’s going to happen if the IRS adds an addendum to the FBAR that requires you to list all of your public keys? What will happen when thousands of law-abiding citizens report their capital gains (and losses) from Bitcoin on their returns?

If your Bitcoin profits are turned into fiat and taxed to support the continued bailout of Wall Street, then nothing’s really changed. Bitcoin trading becomes one more acceptable way for people to make money that can be funneled back to the state and its favored groups.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s virtues compared to dealing with credit cards, in terms of lower transaction costs and reduced counter-party risk, could speed adoption among merchants, which in turn generates more data to connect buyers and sellers with public BTC addresses.  

Volatility, transaction malleability, exchanges gone bad… to me these seem like minor issues, taking the long view. They’re not why I’m still looking in from the outside, without a single satoshi to my name. These aren’t the reasons I decided to write this open letter to the Bitcoin developers and community at large.

I’m writing this because I’m worried that Bitcoin could become a far greater threat to fiscal independence than anything that’s come before. The history of the United States itself should serve as a warning. What began with a constitution to strictly restrain the government’s role, and a Bill of Rights as safeguard, is now a leviathan with effectively unlimited power. The massive economic surplus, fostered by the country’s laissez-faire roots, is now used to fund the largest welfare-warfare state the world has ever known.