Any arguments that "it's impossible to build such a device" are refuted by our very existence.

Today Bitcoin is "unaware" but everything is being put in place for the next step in the plan "Bitcoin 2.0" with Smart Contracts.

Bitcoin already has become an autonomous agent which utilizes humans to build itself and issues autonomous payments for improvement work done.

Read these two links. This is where the planning of Bitcoin AI started:

Tim May email: (Crypto + Economics + AI = Digital Money Economies)
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html

Nick Szabo reply:
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html

The next phase of enlightenment:

Smart contracts are contracts that are not just legal documents but actually active AI code. In the beginning smart contracts are just computer programs that facilitate, verify or enforce the performance of a contract. A simple example would be “digital repo”, where access to certain information or a machine would be granted or not depending on whether one party had paid the other. More advanced digital repo contracts can recognize if the seller went absent or bankrupt, and then allow access with no constraints. Over time the intelligence could increase, allowing contracts to actually gather information, check that they are obeyed and even take action.

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=502359.0

When based on the same evidence, the predictions of AI "statistical prediction rules" are as reliable as, and are typically more reliable than, the predictions of human experts for problems of social prediction.

Disclaimer: (AI) does not always mean (Singularity).
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/01/singularity.html?m=1

(BitCoin)

1) Bitcoin is only general AI for now.

2) Smart contracts are single-minded even for (AI)'s; while some may have very advanced pattern recognition or legal thinking modules the "only" thing they care about is performing their contractual function. They might know major secrets, but if they are written to be quiet about them they will remain quiet no matter what.

3) It can reach the point where your own pc, house, car or phone might be hired by a contract to check certain information. A high tech "wire tap" investigation of sorts built into the agreement of the contract. This would occur when the contract has started to think one of the parts is doing advanced cheating that it cannot detect online.

4) With respect to strong AI, Nick Szabo(as you can read in his blogs) is very close to the problem, and that's the issue. Like any good engineer/scientist, he sees problems everywhere. Yes, there are many problems before we get to strong AI. That's not news. There were many problems to resolve before people could pay a small sum of money and let a giant metal tube take them through the air to a destination halfway round the world without killing them - but those problems got resolved, one by one. Many problems do not amount to an impossibility, only a damn hard problem (which we knew strong AI was anyway).

5) You do see a lot of it in books and movies, some very well thought. Referring back to Nicks blogs, his other assertion, that the concept of the singularity is a fantasy, Nick's main argument is that the singularity will only last "for a time", and that it will turn into a classic S-curve. He waves Feynman's name around as supporting evidence, but does not address the fact that intelligence (and artificial intelligence in particular) is not subject to the Malthusian laws which have caused other phenomena to follow S-curves. Yes, we only have access to so many particles, but the whole point of exponential AI is figuring out better ways to use the same number of particles. There may be a theoretical limit to how efficiently we can use those particles, but even so there are a lot of particles, and if we can manufacture even just human-equivalent computing matter in factories, that's already enough to achieve a singularity.

(Satoshi)

6) Tim May quote: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”

"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.

"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

7) Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story”.

You must first find out "what" Zooko really is and who he is in league with.

This list may be a little old, but it still applies to this puzzle. Use it wisely.

TENTACLES and SNAKES.  A TENTACLE is an email address used by a real person for the purpose of concealing their identity from others. A SNAKE is a TENTACLE that is particularly wicked and evil and will lie and trick others into believing the TENTACLE is real. In words, the more consequential and malicious a TENTACLE, the more it is a SNAKE.

> The TRUE NAME of a person behind a tentacle is also called the MOTHER or the MONSTER. Some of the TRUE NAMES are BIG MACS and some are SMALL FRIES.

> A MEDUSA is the leader of all SMALL FRIES and BIG MACS, a wicked, evil incarnation of SATAN on the Internet. She is the originator and chief proseletyzer of the art, science, and religion of lies. MEDUSA has dozens of SNAKES all over the Internet, particularly in extremely sensitive areas such as Internet protocol development(e.g. mercantile or digital cash protocols), posting from public access sites and even `covers' and `front' sites, these are called POISON NEEDLES. Corrupt administrators are always either BIG MACS or SMALL FRIES. Some sites have administrators who are unaware orapathetic toward infiltrations, these are called PAWNS.

> Anyone who knows about a tentacle or other CONSPIRACY, an `insider', is called TAINTED. People who don't know are called CLEAN. Some CLEAN and BYSTANDERS are particularly NAIVE and believe everything that BIG MACS and MEDUSA says, they are called BRAINWASHED. The ones that defend BIG MACS and MEDUSA are called BLIND. Those that simply don't care are called BRAIN DEAD.

> When MEDUSA infiltrates many sites and spews extremely dangerous disinformation and propaganda, this is called SABOTAGE. Telling people to go somewhere else and dominating conversations with irrelevant topics is called STRANGLING or GANG RAPE. Stealing sensitive information from others is called ESPIONAGE. Sabotage, strangling, espionage, and other types of cyberterrorism are called POISON. MEDUSA hides her activities beneath the various phrases PRIVACY FOR THE MASSES, the CRYPTOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION, and CRYPTOANARCHY in respectable media outlets like Wired and the New York Times. Sometimes this is accomplished by fooling reporters, but note that not all reporters are CLEAN, and bribery may be possible.

> MEDUSA is the orchestrator of a MASSIVE INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY to STRANGLE, SABOTAGE, and POISON THE INTERNET. Anyone who can drive MEDUSA and all the corrupt BIG MACS from Cyberspace and from the real world forever is called THE SAVIOR and said to have DRIVEN THE PHARISEES FROM THE TEMPLE.

I'm saying he doesn't know much about anything.....here is a typical Vitalik statement:

Vitalik Buterin:

"…lower threshold that the total satoshi count manages to fall just below: the largest possible integer that can be exactly represented in floating point format"

Bullshit detector tripped!

Floating point since forever had two flavors: binary and decimal. The most well known standards are: IEEE 754-1985, IEEE 854-1987 & IEEE 754-2008. The only remaining question is which flavor of bullshit is being served here:

1) undereducated/incompetent
2) intentional deception/preliminary setup for future fraud
3) two-for-the-price-of-one mixture of the above

Standard links for those who are not afraid of the truth and not afraid to admit that they may have slept through some lecture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point
http://speleotrove.com/decimal/

                                                                                               ©2112

Let me try to translate Vitelik's bulshiteese into more straightforward English:

Quote from: me in somebody's else voice

"I have zero experience in working with actual financial software. I even have no amateur's interest in learning how it works. I'm writing a demagoguery targeted at the lowest common denominator of code monkey: Javascript or PHP programmer for the web services."

                                                                                                                                                                                    ©2112

Do your research......

http://originalcontroltheory.tumblr.com/

.....and there is another thread about this stuff going on right now........

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=235289.msg9636129#msg9636129

^ Good Post, Here's more of Tim C. May on the subject....

Tim C. May: "This makes Yahoo, Amazon, EBay the easy targets for lawsuits by foreign governments, lawsuits by PC groups in America, boycotts(which are OK, of course), and even direct actions against corporate officers. How long will it be before corporate offices at EBay are  bombed because birth control stuff is sold on EBay? How long before the President of Amazon is assassinated one night for "allowing" books like "The Satanic Verses" be sold on his system?"

"These three companies are representative of the trend toward a corporation, readily traceable to a physical location, acting as the "marketplace" location. Even more abstractly, Napster only distributed an _indexing_ application and then provided a forum for indices to be published. And yet what has happened with Napster is and was predictable. (If you set up a music pirating system, as seen by others, and paint your name and address on your back, you _will_ be sued. A bunch of us pointed this out at a CP physical meeting in early 2000, when Napster was just starting to become known.)"

"There's a better solution to this "big targets problem": peer-to-peer, a la Gnutella, Mojo, etc. No identifiable nexus of corporate control. Online clearing. Reputation intermediaries. Digital cash (not strictly needed, if N (number of sellers and buyers) is large enough and there is no central clearinghouse which can be sued.)"

"Making the agora disappear into cyberspace, whether by sheer numbers of sellers and buyers (peer-to-peer) or by robust encryption (a la BlackNet) is an important goal."

"The Theory of the Corporation" needs revisiting."

"So, what's the solution?"

"The solution is that the technology clearly exists to allow entities to reside in cyberspace. What is lacking, as always, is the means to collect untraceable digital cash..clearly a bidirectionally untraceable system, "true" digital cash, is needed." ~Tim C. May

@ BADecker

Please don't take this wrong, but you are abusing personal boundaries by trying to push your personal beliefs on other people. I am not a doctor, but you seem to be displaying many symptoms of schizophrenia. I am not trying to joke or ridicule you, but do you hear voices in your head? Maybe Jesus or God may be helping you out a little. I am concerned that you may need a good mental health evaluation. Please don't get so upset if the whole world doesn't believe in a magical man that lives in the clouds. You can't let yourself get so upset because people won't do what you want them to. I'm talking about acceptance. You have to accept every person, place, thing or situation for what it is. You are not the director of the play. If you seek true love and peace in your life, acceptance is the answer.

Thanks, S.Boxx

The Dark Enlightenment suggests that more is needed to sustain civilization than just efficient markets and a bandit-free expressway. What's been discovered is that the people in the civilization must share something in common besides self-interest, even if there is mutual gain. Without a meaningful organizing principle (like faith, blood, or vision of the future), civilization degenerates into pure consumer society, creating generations of selfish, entitled, atomized individuals with no motivation to sacrifice and build for the common good.

Is Bitcoin the meaningful organizing principle that will save us from a pure consumer society?

Edit for clarity:
Will the Bitcoin Revolution(vision of the future) help unite us together and give us motivation to sacrifice and build a society for the common good.

Just one from gmaxwell/nullc. I feel his review would be the best. Thanks

Are there any comments by gmaxwell/nullc on this altcoin system?

Let me guess, you want us to buy some FactomCoins or some type of tokens (other than Bitcoin) to make (you ritch), I mean make it all work? This all sounds REAL familiar....

@ Taras

Nick Szabo: “(assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)”…..Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme”.

Your statement is not necessarily correct, but you are correct about not enough proof to say it is 100% Szabo. A lot of history and education about Bitcoin can be learned by asking questions and researching where it came from. A person should be able to ask questions and research all things involving ones own life with being cencered. We should not discourage people from free thinking and using their minds to access history and make educated decisions for themselves.

2007 Szabo applies BitGold and his "Scarce Object" theory to Zookos p2p hard drive project.
"One possible answer to central mint vulnerability is bit gold -- a currency the value of which does not depend on any particular trusted third party. Another alternative is (an object barter economy"Scarce Objects")."
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

Scarce Objects =  finite supply of coins(Like Bitcoin)

This is a lot more than 10%......

On the subject of conversations:

Hal had told Satoshi about Szabo and BitGold and even though Satoshi answered everything else in that email he ignored the Szabo/BitGold subject completely like Hal never stated it.
Hal:
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09975.html
Satoshi:
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09980.html

If Szabo=Satoshi, we have to be careful about taking anything in Satoshi sources at face value. However, I am still fairly
optimistic: Szabo's history indicates someone who practice information denial, but not disinformation. I haven't been able to find any instances where he actively lies or deceives on a major scale.

*Szabo’s post for assistance:
“Bitgold would greatly benefit from a demonstration, an experimental market (with e.g. a trusted third party substituted for the complex security that would be needed for a real system). Anybody want to help me code one up?”
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09975.html

*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story”.

The reason Bitcoin had to be released anonymous:

Tim May: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”
"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.
"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

The first credit to Bitcoin in the white paper was a citation for Wei Dai’s “bmoney”.
The first paragraph of “bmoney”: (read carefully)

“I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations”.

And yes he did use other people's ideas and theory:

Szabo, and apparently Satoshi, had figured out that Hal Finneys “RPOW” could be used to solve the Byzantine General’s Problem, a problem in ordinary computing that demonstrates through “game theory” how a group of potential co-operators can come to the best consensus even with the possibility of having malicious operators among them. This was the final piece to the BitGold/Bitcoin puzzle.
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

* Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be.  Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply.  Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world’s M1 money supply at that time was”.
"We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure".

Szabo “came up” with the technology that will become ethereum including smart contracts which was solely contingent on Satoshi’s work that Szabo never knew would be produced?

Smart contracts come about because Bitcoin is the beginning of the completion of a “Kula Ring”, a unifying solution that bridges among other things, game theory, encryption, economics, finance, programming, and law… there are not multiple random people capable of this…..

This still is not enough evidence. It never will be. It was designed that was a long time ago.

People are working on these things.....three very good solutions:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281180.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN2TPeQ9mnA

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/07/mining-decentralisation-the-low-hanging-fruit/

I just received a PM from one of the main devs and they told me that Phinnaeus Gage was actually the one telling Andreas Antonopoulos what to say to the Canadien Senators through that white earbud Andreas had on at the hearing. They also said that Andreas has been Phinnaeus Gage's sock puppet for some time now.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=24792

I think this may go deeper than anyone could imagine. I know it appears he is still around using alt accounts but resent research has indicated the posts being made look computer generated from a database of Phinnaeus Gage's previous post from here and other internet sources. The alt account post seem real, but here's how it works to trick us:

 "Suppose that I'm locked in a room and ... that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken". And that i have a set of rules in English that "enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols", that is, the Chinese characters. These rules allow me to respond, in written Chinese, to questions, also written in Chinese, in such a way that the posers of the questions – who do understand Chinese – are convinced that I can actually understand the Chinese conversation too, even though I cannot.

Now that's out of the way, where could he have disappeared to, or who could have abducted him?
NSA? AMT? BFL? Aliens? Satoshi?...We need to find out what really happened on that day to everyone's favorite legendary Member.

No FUD please, this is a serious situation.

Don't get me wrong, I understand Bitcoin with smart contracts would only be general AI, the "Chinese Room" type but it is still is the foundation for the beginning of strong AI.

The Singularity (Strong AI):

The human brain doesn't need to build a smarter brain. It just needs to build something of equivalent smartness (which should be theoretically possible, there's no reason to believe the human brain is the upper bound for all generalised reasoning ability) on a substrate like silicon which is subject to Moore's Law (and thus gets inherently faster with time) and which is immortal and duplicable.

Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and:

- 18 months later you can build one that's twice as fast using the same principles

- duplicate this brain and get the power of multiple people thinking together (but with greater bandwidth between them than any human group)

- run this brain for 100 years and get an older intellectually functioning human than has ever existed before

- duplicate whatever learning this brain has accumulated over 100 years (which, say, brings to the level of an Einstein) as many times as you have physical resources for (so, clone Einstein)
All those are paths to super-human AI from the production of a human-intelligence brain in a non-biological form.

So, if a human brain can make a computer brain, which is a reasonable assumption, then a human brain can make a brain smarter than itself.

Building a human brain in a non-biological substrate is not a miracle. It would be a miracle in the same way that transistors and penicillin are, not in the way that Jesus' resurrection is. I.e., a fantastic, happy, unlikely but possible event that will change the world for the better.

We know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of skulls. The question is then not to push the theoretical boundaries of computational capability beyond some theoretical level - but merely to achieve it again artificially.

This may be a better explanation:

1) Bitcoin is only general AI for now.

2) Smart contracts are single-minded even for (AI)'s; while some may have very advanced pattern recognition or legal thinking modules the "only" thing they care about is performing their contractual function. They might know major secrets, but if they are written to be quiet about them they will remain quiet no matter what.

3) It can reach the point where your own pc, house, car or phone might be hired by a contract to check certain information. A high tech "wire tap" investigation of sorts built into the agreement of the contract. This would occur when the contract has started to think one of the parts is doing advanced cheating that it cannot detect online.

4) With respect to strong AI, Nick Szabo(as you can read in his blogs linked above) is very close to the problem, and that's the issue. Like any good engineer/scientist, he sees problems everywhere. Yes, there are many problems before we get to strong AI. That's not news. There were many problems to resolve before people could pay a small sum of money and let a giant metal tube take them through the air to a destination halfway round the world without killing them - but those problems got resolved, one by one. Many problems do not amount to an impossibility, only a damn hard problem (which we knew strong AI was anyway).

5) You do see a lot of it in books and movies, some very well thought. Referring back to Nicks blogs, his other assertion, that the concept of the singularity is a fantasy, Nick's main argument is that the singularity will only last "for a time", and that it will turn into a classic S-curve. He waves Feynman's name around as supporting evidence, but does not address the fact that intelligence (and artificial intelligence in particular) is not subject to the Malthusian laws which have caused other phenomena to follow S-curves. Yes, we only have access to so many particles, but the whole point of exponential AI is figuring out better ways to use the same number of particles. There may be a theoretical limit to how efficiently we can use those particles, but even so there are a lot of particles, and if we can manufacture even just human-equivalent computing matter in factories, that's already enough to achieve a singularity.

Any arguments that "it's impossible to build such a device" are refuted by our very existence.

Today Bitcoin is "unaware" but everything is being put in place for the next step in the plan "Bitcoin 2.0" with Smart Contracts.

Bitcoin already has become an autonomous agent which utilizes humans to build itself and issues autonomous payments for improvement work done.

Read these two links. This is where the planning of Bitcoin AI started:

Tim May
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html

Nick Szabo
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html

The next phase of enlightenment:

Smart contracts are contracts that are not just legal documents but actually active AI code. In the beginning smart contracts are just computer programs that facilitate, verify or enforce the performance of a contract. A simple example would be “digital repo”, where access to certain information or a machine would be granted or not depending on whether one party had paid the other. More advanced digital repo contracts can recognize if the seller went absent or bankrupt, and then allow access with no constraints. Over time the intelligence could increase, allowing contracts to actually gather information, check that they are obeyed and even take action.

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=502359.0

When based on the same evidence, the predictions of "statistical prediction rules" are at least as reliable as, and are typically more reliable than, the predictions of human experts for problems of social prediction.

Disclaimer: (AI) does not always mean (Singularity).
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/01/singularity.html?m=1