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- Named Satoshi - check
- Programmer/Developer - check
- Interested in Virtual Worlds/Systems - check
...that's about it |
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The revolution won't be televised, but is it going to be orchestrated through internet forums? What are we really doing? I believe in crypto's disruptive nature in regard to present monetary and social systems, but are we the revolution itself? Will it be through this passive non-engagement that we'll overturn the systems of power and exclusive control? In other words, if we just go off and play with our own currencies and pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist, will it go away? Are we working under the premise that crypto will ultimately overtake the market-share of world currencies, rendering the status-quo obsolete (and in effect overthrown)? I'm an ardent supporter of the Linux operating system. I believe it to be superior to the status-quo (Windows) in almost every way imaginable. However, I don't really have any expectations that Windows is going anywhere anytime soon. It has a stranglehold of most corporate computing, and through many different means, more software and services are written for it than any other OS. I can't change that. I can tell everyone I know how great Linux is, but I can't buy Linux boxes for them, and I definitely can't influence what major corporations are doing about their choices in computers. The centers of power (the major market players) are caught in vicious cycles, driven partly by their own influence of the very markets they are buying into and also by the market itself. Deviating from the well worn path presents itself with difficulties, despite how much more rewarding/productive/fulfilling the journey might be. I have to accept that fact that Linux is up against a system that has already been bought and sold by software monopolies which cannot afford to allow others to the table. They depend on exclusion, control, and an ultra-proprietary model of operation. What I mean to suggest by describing the state of the computer OS ecosystem, is that hierarchically organized power is good at one thing, and that is attaining more power. This is its ultimate goal. Its medium of operation comes second place to its pursuit of power it seems. Monopolies don't have to worry about their products because they have no competition to respond to. In the same way, we could consider that the present banking and monetary systems are monopolies. Through their use of legal, military, corporate, and social engineering, they've crafted a rather comfortable seat for themselves in the global sphere. Do they really feel threatened by crypto? I know some of you will point to recent legal action as signs towards a positive affirmation, but do they really? Will oil reserves be bought in Bitcoin? Will Blackwater (or whatever they call themselves nowadays) be payed in Bitcoin? Will Halliburton be accepting Bitcoin any time soon? How about the bond payments due to China? What about BP? How about the major banks themselves? Will JPMorgan be paying its multi-billion dollar expenditures in Bitcoin any time in the near future? What is my ultimate point, you might be asking... I want to ask you one thing. What are you doing to change any of this? Buying weed off Silk Road? Maybe some video games or graphics cards from here or there? Trolling on the forums, or even worse, on the BTC-e trollbox? Are you day trading alt-coins? Maybe you're telling all your friends about crypto? Are you working on a Bitcoin startup? Maybe you're doing odd-jobs and hoarding crypto in hopes of getting rich? Are you mining? Is this your revolution? Is this what we'll write in the history books? Let me state my point as explicitly as I can. Bitcoin will not change the world. People will change the world. Bitcoin is a symptom of a sick society, not the cure. You've become too comfortable with being a consumer. You consume things. Your food, goods, services, love, humor, compassion, pitty, and ultimately other human beings. As a consumer, you are fundamentally a spectator to the world around you. You are tossed in the wind, going in whatever direction the gusts will take you. As a spectator, your attention is fixed on what's immediately in front of you, and right now it's Bitcoin. Take a step back. Look around you. I don't need to tell you that we're in a load of shit. You already know that. But do you know exactly how deep we're entrenched? If you do, then you surely know we'll need a shovel or two. What's more, you'll know that things will have to get quite messy if we're going to dig our way out. |
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What do you guys think of them? What's their angle? It's my opinion that they're not the simple Bitcoin evangelist/enthusiasts that they portray themselves to be. What I do know is that they're interested in a regulated Bitcoin, and especially after their recent SEC filing, I've been running through a number of theories as to what their ultimate goal might be in all of this. I'm interested to see what you guys think.
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For all you people who just can't get enough of the trollbox, I've registered a freenode IRC: ##trollbox (take care to notice the double hashtag)
The site based version has gotten to be a little too troll-infested for my tastes, so this should act as a better venue for trading discussion. I'm sure with time it'll suffer the same fate as the original trollbox, but for the time being, this could be a nice remedy. Hopefully advertizing on bitcointalk will bring in relatively serious heads and leave the noob-tards to the website.
There's no 20 second delay, and you can post links without modifying them, and best of all...no Simplyfun! Also, you can use CAPS to your heart's content.
Hope to see you there!
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I was wondering if there's any way to remotely link to an Electrum client. I know that you can do this with bitcoind/bitcoin-qt through JSON-RPC, but as far as I can tell there's no way to accomplish this with Electrum. Does anyone here know of any solutions to this? Would I have to host my own Electrum server?
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I recently set up Electrum on a Raspberry Pi for a development project that I'm working on. I was wondering if any of you could spare a satoshi or two to help me test it out?
1KhmkrjtSCRAkZjjW1TTCRXvsMpshBuyJd
I would greatly appreciate the help. I would use my own Bitcoins, but I'm at work right now, and I don't use cloud wallets, so all my coins are at home.
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post something like this.
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I want to host the blockchain (bootstrap.dat) on the cloud and then point Raspberry Pi's (i.e. their bitcoin clients) to it. Can anyone help me out with this? Is this even possible?
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Is there anyone working on a coin with a new hashing algorithm? SHA256 and scrypt have been thoroughly exploited in the last couple months. I'm by no means an expert in cryptography, but I've been looking into different properties of hash functions. Would there be any benefit to RIPEMD-320 over our other 2 favorites?
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One of the best papers I've read on Bitcoin. Mandatory reading for anyone who's involved. They explain why Bitcoin cannot be regulated under statutes concerning money laundering, namely because it cannot be narrowly defined as a currency. Bitcoin is not money. It is memory. This should be a sticky at the top of this thread. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2275730Enjoy! |
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Is this a stupid question? I can't find bitcoind 0.8.2 anywhere, just the qt-gui.
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I'm in the process of developing a web based technical analysis service for crypto-currencies. It will have normal and automated trading capabilities in addition to advanced charting/analysis tools. As of right now, BTC-e and MtGox are the only exchanges that I've integrated into the platform. More exchange integration is sure to come, although I'm seriously considering dropping Gox support (I want to do my part to undermine its market centralization, however insignificant my impact might be). My bots are basically all written up and feature many high level functions, but I was just wondering what sorts of end-user analysis functionality people would want to see in a service like this. Other suggestions are more than welcome. Feel free to rip apart my idea.
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Maybe it's just me, but this is beyond cool. Hopefully I'll live to see this in action on the Bitcoin network (if and when it ever reaches production stage). http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3886 |
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Centrally Planned = Centrally Destroyed Mt. Gox and friends are killing Bitcoin. While such centralized exchanges have been very good to people like me who have bots, they inherently concentrate the market into hubs that can be effectively targeted by Homeland Security and others. One of the great strengths of Bitcoin is that it evades interference from entities which draw their power from centralization. The United States government relies on this form of power to influence the world. Through internationally organized frameworks of law and finance, this institution has manipulated the course of history for almost the last century. Bitcoin has survived and flourished thus far because of its insusceptibility to centrally planned offensives. The US government cannot operate/manipulate in this framework because it's outside the scope of its dominion. We've seen what kinds of manipulation can already take place in these exchanges. When a few Tinklevoss-like characters with enough capital decide to participate in this economy, they hold the power to artificially influence the price of Bitcoin. This is entirely because of the way the Bitcoin exchange environment is organized. While the currency itself is decentralized, the means for acquiring it and trading it are consolidated into a few nodes. This is a fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin exchange system. There needs to be a way to transfer this exchanging power over to the people. This capacity is already built into Bitcoin itself with the wallet framework and the ability for individuals to effectively act as their own bank, but it is entirely confined to the transfer of Bitcoin, not Fiat. Because the majority of crypto procuring is in exchange for fiat, we inherently establish bottlenecks. We are still playing in their backyard, so they ultimately retain the power to kick us out and tell us to go home (or to jail). {proposed solution}: We Build An Elaborate Tree-House In Their Backyard Because we rely on a small number of money transfer services which have at most a few bank accounts associated to them (Dwolla etc…), we provide targets for authorities to go after. With Bitcoin, the target is an internationally diffuse mesh of computers which maintain an abstract concept. This is what makes it impenetrable to governments and all those who want to maintain the status quo. Fiat money, being tied to banks and the physical realm, requires that someone actually interfaces between the banking system and the Bitcoin world. Up until the present moment, this has been a small handful of companies like Dwolla. We can't go forward applying individualistic capitalist ideals, like having a handful of companies act as an intermediary between fiat and Bitcoin, and expect them to work in a decentralized economy. This idea may be unnecessarily bold, and even stupid (this is why I'm posting here. I want to see what the community thinks), but it could be good food for better thoughts. So I hope everyone brought along their appetites… We apply the concepts which are fundamental to decentralized services like Bitcoin and Tor, and establish a web of bank accounts which are linked together in a cryptographically secure blockchain which will also orchestrate the movement of funds from account to account. This would require ordinary people opening up checking accounts (these do not fall under Federal Reserve Board Regulation D, as far as I can tell), and subscribing to the network. This subscription would allow the network to process inter-bank transfers. There would have to be two distinct pools; the reserve pool, and the payout pool. The reserve pool would shuffle funds around and act as the digital bank vault, and the payout pool would be the transfers that are sent to individuals who want to cash out Bitcoins into their own private accounts. The people who have to initially open the checking accounts hold a huge responsibility, and at the same time, a huge risk. They could be assholes and withdraw money from the network node they opened (the network would have to immediately sense this and shuffle the money to other nodes). At the same time, they are the ones which will have to face the firing squad if and when it comes to that. This network would have to act similarly to the Tor network in that it would operate underground (in other words, it would be invisible due to cryptographic protocols). Instead of having 10 bank accounts which are bright red targets to authorities, we have a mesh of inconspicuous accounts with only a few thousand dollars in them. On their own they might be weak, but strung together into a network of millions of dollars worth of assets, they become part of a powerful engine for moving around Fiat. In addition, the ability to trade Bitcoin for Fiat becomes much more fluid. Authorities might compromise a node or two, but it's not as if we don't deal with this problem anyway. They might be able to kick a few of us out of their yard, but they'll have to spend an enormous amount of effort to tear down that tree-house. I want to make their job as difficult as humanly possible. There are obviously big flaws in this conception. How could we trust the openers of the accounts to not withdraw from them? Are there bank API's available for these accounts to be linked with for automated transfers? How would we organize the subscription service to this network? All of these wrinkles would need to be thoroughly ironed out for this to work, but if it were to be possible, I think this could be incredibly powerful. I'm interested to see what you guys think. Please let me know why you think this wouldn't work, apart from the points I've already raised. |
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While the recent action by the DHS concerning Dwolla's Mt. Gox transactions will not be a serious blow to Bitcoin, a precedent is being carried forth which could lead to much more extreme measures. The fact that the DHS is concerned about Bitcoin should suggest how powerful our beloved crypto-currency is, and how real a threat it must pose to the ruling class.
This is not a time for merely accepting government action as it is handed out. We can not let these shameless impingements on our basic rights be applied without resistance. Why do they expect us to sit behind our computer screens and merely act in reactionary clicks and types as our freedoms are legislated away from us? Because that's been the precedent that we have set.
What are we going to do if and when it comes down to an internationally orchestrated assault on Bitcoin? What options do the people have against the power elite? I'm curious to hear what the community thinks.
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I was wondering if there's any interest in developing a Kickstarter clone which runs purely on Bitcoin. In the early days this might not have been as viable, since there wasn't as many opportunities to spend them. Now, as more goods and services are being offered in exchange for our beloved cryptocurrency, funding projects with Bitcoin is becoming more and more possible.
There's a lot of discussion here concerning the acceptance of this currency, specifically by merchants, as a necessity for it to survive and flourish. The fiat system, in addition to constraining merchant/corporate transactions to fiat, inherently establishes a worker class dependent on highly centralized institutions to provide them their living wages. Through the power of the state, this system has evolved into the Orwellian nightmare we all know and hate. Although we can always depend on individuals to collaborate on projects and provide salaries in a small business context, the Bitcoin community can not depend on the state to subsidize things like basic research, heating and energy projects, interest groups, telecommunications, artistic endeavors, or a whole host of services.
A framework similar to what we know as Kickstarter, could be the key to Bitcoin's evolution to another level of legitimacy. A rich and vibrant economy cannot exist on the backs of merchants alone. You need scientists, artists, inventors, writers, and thinkers of all denominations. These people cannot do what they do, and be businessmen at the same time. They need time to devote to their craft. They need financial wiggle room to think and develop their ideas and projects, without spending their time worrying about how to sell off widgets to pay the bills. In the fiat system, large institutions (universities, the music/movie industry, industrial/technical companies, newspapers/magazine/publishing houses) provide wage jobs for them which distribute paper money in order for them to go pump it back into the same system, creating a vicious cycle of dependence.
The only way to kill the fiat beast is to divert participation. After all, it is purely voluntary (in theory). We've already planted the seeds of the economy. You can buy things with a Bitcoin. If we can create an environment where individuals have a real choice between participating in the fiat economy and this one, then I think we have a real chance to change our world in a very powerful way.
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I was wondering if there's any interest in developing a Kickstarter clone which runs purely on Bitcoin. In the early days this might not have been as viable, since there wasn't as many opportunities to spend them. Now, as more goods and services are being offered in exchange for our beloved cryptocurrency, funding projects with Bitcoin is becoming more and more possible.
There's a lot of discussion here concerning the acceptance of this currency, specifically by merchants, as a necessity for it to survive and flourish. The fiat system, in addition to constraining merchant/corporate transactions to fiat, inherently establishes a worker class dependent on highly centralized institutions to provide them their living wages. Through the power of the state, this system has evolved into the Orwellian nightmare we all know and hate. Although we can always depend on individuals to collaborate on projects and provide salaries in a small business context, the Bitcoin community can not depend on the state to subsidize things like basic research, heating and energy projects, interest groups, telecommunications, artistic endeavors, or a whole host of services.
A framework similar to what we know as Kickstarter, could be the key to Bitcoin's evolution to another level of legitimacy. A rich and vibrant economy cannot exist on the backs of merchants alone. You need scientists, artists, inventors, writers, and thinkers of all denominations. These people cannot do what they do, and be businessmen at the same time. They need time to devote to their craft. They need financial wiggle room to think and develop their ideas and projects, without spending their time worrying about how to sell off widgets to pay the bills. In the fiat system, large institutions (universities, the music/movie industry, industrial/technical companies, newspapers/magazine/publishing houses) provide wage jobs for them which distribute paper money in order for them to go pump it back into the same system, creating a vicious cycle of dependence.
The only way to kill the fiat beast is to divert participation. After all, it is purely voluntary (in theory). We've already planted the seeds of the economy. You can buy things with a Bitcoin. If we can create an environment where individuals have a real choice between participating in the fiat economy and this one, then I think we have a real chance to change our world in a very powerful way.
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