bitcoinisland.org/join

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
On March 22nd, I will release DeesCoin, the first offline cryptocurrency with a paper blockchain.

There will be fourteen million (pre-mined) DeesCoin, in total. Five million will be offered via auction over the next 16 weeks, beginning on the 29th, in batches of (31,250). Nine million will be reserved to pay workers at the Dees Ranch.

DeesCoin will be managed by a single offline functionary and a peer-to-peer network of client nodes. The blockchain will be stored on each node, and can be backed-up in paper form. Transactions will be processed manually.

Sixty percent of the yearly wheat harvest at the Dees Ranch, over twenty years, will be converted to Bitcoin or some other liquid currency and traded for DeesCoin at regular auction.

An announcement to begin recruiting workers will appear here soon. Offered wages will be (5,000) DeesCoin per month.

bitcoinisland.org/join

This is just yet another in a long list of potential block size limit growth schedules.  For more information, please see the original post on Reddit.

The long and short of it is, if you accept Pieter's argument that network bandwidth grows at 17.7% per year, and you accept the argument of Gavin and the majority of miners that the current technological limit to block sizes is 8 MB rather than 1 MB, then it is possible to combine the two proposals in a way that promotes growth in the short term without requiring a large initial jump in block size, yet which converges to a 17.7% growth rate in the long run.

This schedule uses a decaying growth rate for the block size limit in the same way that Satoshi chose a decaying growth rate for the block reward.

I've made a spreadsheet showing three schedules for comparison, annualized and rounded off for clarity.  The first is (roughly) Pieter's proposal.  The second is Gavin's proposal modified to use Pieter's 17.7% annual growth rate.  And the last schedule includes an initial period of high, yet decaying growth rates, converging to a continuous 17.7% growth rate.  All three schedules end once they reach approximately 128 MB, which is my proposed minimum block size (required for everyone on Earth to have the opportunity to perform two transactions per year).  The ultimate maximum size is intentionally left undetermined, for simplicity of comparison.



As you can see, compared to the other two, the decaying growth rate schedule has a few advantages.  First, it reaches 128 MB a full twelve years before Pieter's proposal.  Secondly, there is an initial growth to 2 MB which (based on historical data) will be necessary in order to accommodate transaction growth during the next halving.  Yet, there is no harsh initial jump to 8 MB as with Gavin's proposal.  And, thirdly, the block size with the decaying growth schedule remains below the combined growth of an 8 MB jump with 17.7% annual increases the entire time.  So it remains within the parameters of both initial conditions mentioned above.

you should watch the video:
http://sacredgeometryinternational.com/graham-hancock-and-joe-rogan-discuss-randall-carlsons-paradigm-changing-research

I can’t help feeling that this thing happened so suddenly and in such an extraordinary way, that maybe this is the missing link, that we are looking at the fingerprints of a lost civilization, the survivors of a lost civilization who settled there with all these skills already in place and introduced them into the local culture.  Because this period twelve thousand years ago plus, is the period when the earth went through gigantic cataclysmic events because the earth was struck by a comet.

That’s what we are talking about here and you have this episode that geologists call the Younger Dryas, which is an episode of a sudden deep freeze strikes the Earth, the earth has been emerging from the ice age until 12,980 years ago and amazingly you can date it that precisely, give or take 5 years this happened 12,980 years ago, and then suddenly the Earth flips into this thousand year deep freeze.  That nobodies ever been able to explain before, that they called the Younger Dryas and we now we can say for sure that the Younger Dryas was caused by huge amounts of dust being projected into the upper atmosphere of the Earth by this comet impact.  And that that dust enshrouded the whole earth and set into motion what we would call a nuclear winter today, where the Sun’s rays could no longer reach the earth and the earth went back into deep freeze and to me this is the smoking gun that lost us a whole civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

The Younger Dryas is often linked to the adoption of agriculture in the Levant.

For those not familiar with Graham Hancock

It's probably not clear to most of you how this is related to Bitcoin, but it is.

I think it's time to have a little discussion about the origins of Sidechains, and to dispute a claim made recently by a certain core developer that they have no application to Bitcoin scaling.

This post was prompted by a thread here regarding the claimed origins of Sidechains and their relation to Mike Hearn's Lighthouse.  I'm going to lay out an argument that this claimed history is not entirely accurate, and perhaps some of you can see how the Lighthouse is relevant to the discussion.

There has been a noticeable PR push over the past several months by Blockstream employees to make the claim that Sidechains 1) were the sole idea of Adam Back (aside from the attributions in the whitepaper itself, of course) and 2) are not useful for scaling Bitcoin.  This is hogwash, as far as I'm concerned.  And it needs to be disputed not only in the interest of historical accuracy, but for the good of the Bitcoin community.

Several years ago, I made a thought experiment.  I asked myself "what is the best way to use Bitcoin as a true local currency, in an isolated community with poor internet access, especially once it has begun to scale to accommodate millions of users?"  Based on Satoshi's original plan of scaling up the block size, this would be a difficult task without relying on SPV wallets, which some consider flawed.  But I decided there should be a way to do so, even with some limitations, and that perhaps these limitations could even be engineered to have economic benefits.

The result of this thought experiment was Bencoin.  Bencoin was simply a method to deposit Bitcoins, off-chain, with a trusted third party representing a separate more localized economy, while still being able to withdraw them at will.  It represented a middle-ground between the then-common practice of trusting a third party with deposited Bitcoins, and using the blockchain directly for everything.  It was basically a low-trust, rather than zero-trust or full-trust, method of handling Bitcoins off-chain (and thus scaling Bitcoin), without the limitations and costs imposed by tracking large blocks.

It did, however, still have other drawbacks.  So I never pursued it beyond the proof-of-concept.  Instead, I began thinking of ways to deposit Bitcoins somewhere else -- not with a third party, but on the blockchain itself.  I started looking into the nLockTime feature, and eventually developed the first native Bitcoin Bond, locking Bitcoins on the blockchain in a way that they could not be spent by a trusted third party without the authorization of the depositor.

This represented an improvement over Bencoin.  The fundamental improvement of Bencoin was that Bitcoins deposited with a third party could be withdrawn at any time by the depositor alone, but the drawback remained that they could still be taken by the trusted third party.  With the Bitcoin Bond, locked Bitcoins can still be withdrawn (after a specified time) by the depositor, and *cannot* be spent by the third party without authorization of the depositor.

All of this was done in public, and is documented in various places on the Bitcointalk forum and the #bitcoin-dev IRC channel.  All of it occurred long before Blockstream was even a glimmer in its founders' eyes.  And the short leap from Bencoin to Bitcoin Bonds to one-way pegged Sidechains is, I think, obvious.

So, knowing this, I found it somewhat interesting when a lot of other history and precursors were mentioned in the Sidechain whitepaper, yet none of this.  I found it only mildly disturbing when the similarity was flatly denied by a Blockstream employee, having been pointed out to him on Reddit when the original Sidechains whitepaper was released.  But, now, I find it outright insulting that Blockstream seems to be engaged in a publicity campaign to downplay the capabilities of "their own" invention.

In fact, it's almost as though Blockstream would rather seize control of this idea and keep it for themselves, instead of allowing for the possibility that the scalability benefits of Sidechains or similar be opened to the entire Bitcoin community.  I'm beginning to think that may actually be what's going on.

Now, I'm not going to argue that Blockstream's proposed implementation of Sidechains is the best option for scaling Bitcoin.  It may not even be a good option, as is.  But it, or an idea like it such as Extension Blocks, is a valid option that should not be brushed aside based on the claims of a single developer that Sidechains have nothing to do with scaling.

These claims are wrong, at least, and disingenous, at worst.  The actual history of Sidechains' precursors is that they have a lot to do with scaling.  And there are likely several ways to implement them in order to enable Bitcoin to scale in a flexible and completely voluntary fashion.

If anything, I hope this post will at least convince you to question the claim that Sidechains or similar have nothing to do with Bitcoin scaling, or are not even a valid option to be considered in the scaling debate.

In an attempt to avoid any coordinated or future censorship, I've also posted a copy of this to Reddit.

Thank-you for your time.

Whose idea was it to put a Turing-complete scripting language into a browser, anyways?

Between a handful of technologies -- Javascript injection, Heartbleed SSL compromise, and advanced persistent threats living in firmware -- the goddamn NSA and their various collaborators have absolutely decimated the concept of a global censorship-resistant communications network.

That's what 20 MB blocks require.  That means, you receive the blockchain, that's 84 gigabytes per month.  You send the blockchain to one peer, that's another 84 gigabytes per month.

If you want any redundancy at all, as a true peer-to-peer network should, for whatever reason at all (resiliency, privacy, etc), you need to start adding on redundant pathways, and more data.

All of that has to fit within the data caps imposed by your internet service provider, along with all of your other internet usage -- all of the Youtube videos, other P2P programs, NetFlix, etc, for everyone who uses your connection.  In the US, the vast majority of home internet connections are limited to less than 400 gigabytes per month, most less than 250 gigabytes.

These caps are independent of your connection speed.  They are arbitrarily imposed by internet service providers.  They may grow with technological advancements, or they may not.

Other, developing parts of the world have to deal with other limitations.  Only in a few, highly-developed regions, are home internet connections both high speed and un-capped.

In response to this, there will be some hand-waving arguments involving splitting up blocks into transactions and getting each transaction from a different peer.  And that's great.  That's certainly an improvement over the current network.  But please understand all of the trade-offs involved.  There are trade-offs.

[worse]

This was an assertion that a lot of people made, starting a couple of years ago, after the first block reward halving.  Many seem to still believe it.  It seems to be a major reason for arguing for keeping the 1mb limit on the block size.  Many are still hoping (beyond hope) that this limit will lead to skyrocketing transaction fees, for exactly this reason.

I have never bothered to understand what makes people think this, until recently.  It just always seemed too idiotic to bother with.  But it really needs to be debunked.  Even some developers seem to believe it.

The argument is simple, that "artificial scarcity leads to higher fees which replace the block reward and ensure that the network remains secured."  It seems basic enough.  Many have said, probably even including Satoshi, that fees would eventually replace the block reward.  So it seems natural to think that this should start to happen as soon as the block reward starts falling.  Right?

No.  This simple, failed extrapolation stems from a very basic misunderstanding of the reason for even *having* a block reward in the first place.

The block reward is not a perpetual miner subsidy.  It is a distribution mechanism.  It has nothing to do with securing the network, even though that is a side-effect.  The reward started at 50 BTC per block.  A naive analysis would claim that, at the time of the first block halving, transaction fees should have "risen" to "make up for" the falling block reward.  The simple arithmetic shows that fees of at least $10 per transaction would have been required to produce the necessary 25 BTC per block.  That was the source of this entire school of thought.

But that would mean that block rewards would no longer *be* a distribution mechanism.  They would be a perpetual subsidy.  And it would have been an *enormous* subsidy.

In fact, if that had happened, Bitcoin would have been forever hobbled with built-in subsidies worse than the average inflation suffered by any fiat currency in existence.

A 50 BTC block reward (or transaction fees or some combination of both), continuing forever until all 21 million Bitcoins have been mined, would equate to a 12.5% annual subsidy paid to miners.  (At the moment it would be nearly 19%.)  That is worse than the Catholic church at the height of the crusades.  That is worse than the 4% cost of the US military.  It is worse than the 3% inflation tax of the Federal Reserve.  Only Zimbabwe and Weimar and a few other countries, at certain times, could claim a bigger drain on their economies.

Is anyone going to seriously argue that the Bitcoin economy should subsidize mining at a rate three times higher than the cost of the US military?  Who the hell would sign up for that?

No one.  No one signed up for that.

So, let's put this argument to rest once and for all.  Transaction fees aren't going to climb to 25 BTC per block.  When the next halving occurs, they aren't going to climb to 12.5 BTC per block.  Nor the time after that.  And not the time after that, either.  They don't have to.  No one ever intended for that to occur.  If Satoshi had wanted that, he would have just made the block reward perpetual and static, instead of what it is, a temporary distribution mechanism that falls over time.

"Candyland and the Nature of the Absurd"
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/58

Editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo gather at the offices of Libération

Libération was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lib%C3%A9ration

Rothschild's involvement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lib%C3%A9ration#.C3.89douard_de_Rothschild.27s_involvement

"The only way the player can be truly happy is to acknowledge the absurdity of the game, and play it anyway."

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_box

Do you know what's in the box?

BIS: Dollar Surge Endangers Global Debt Edifice

Wall Street Moves to Put Taxpayers on the Hook for Derivatives Trades

International bankers have built a literal monument to illegitimate debt.  They use money printed out of thin air to gamble on every aspect of the lives of average people.  Whenever this ridiculous system threatens to crumble under its own weight, they demand those same people bail them out.

The only way to escape this trap is through sound money and financial privacy.  Bitcoin can provide this.  We need to remain focused.

Price stability is being driven by services that allow pegging deposits to national currencies, which are used by immigrants, which are taking advantage of Obama's open border policies.  Obama is suppressing the price of Bitcoin.

tl;dr: Thanks, Obama.

Snom VoIP phones run Linux, have a display, a keypad, an ethernet port, programmable I/O lines, and can be purchased with Bitcoin.  The high-end models have large displays and USB ports.  This could make a simple Bitcoin point-of-sale device with some software and a (optional) NFC dongle.  A hardware wallet could be used to store coins offline, or the phone could obtain addresses from a centralized server.  Perhaps even Cisco phones could be used as well.  Could this be a simple way for small businesses to accept Bitcoin?

Does Allegro have plans to add Bitcoin support?  Has anyone asked them?

[In this community economics would be decentralist]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_%28Huxley_novel%29

If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihuatanejo_Project

The Zihuatanejo Project was a psychedelic training center and intentional community created during the beginning of the counterculture of the 1960s by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert

The idea for the community was influenced by Aldous Huxley's fictional novel, Island (1962)

Dr. Timothy Leary - Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Every month, your employer transfers Bitcoins into a time-locked address that can't be transferred out before you reach retirement age.  You have the key to the address.  You can verify the transfer on the blockchain.

No middle-men.  No funny business.  No brokers with pyramid/eyeball shaped logos.  No "oops we went bankrupt and lost your retirement."  No bail-ins.  No raising the age of retirement.

Just Bitcoin.

I mean, that's what I would do if I were them.  Their business model seems to have a lot of risk if the price of Bitcoin fluctuates, what with the chargebacks and no conversion fees and storing balances in fiat and insurance and such.

Based on what I've seen, they make more money as the price of Bitcoin rises.  And they have a chunk of money backing them.  So, I would guess that they are making a bet the market will be on the upswing soon by choosing to open now.  Sound reasonable, or no?

All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God, of course.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

-Jean Beaudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra
http://kareneliot.de/downloads/JeanBaudrillard_Simulations_and_Simulacra.pdf

Am I the only one who has this problem?  Every time I try to pay, or go to their website, it is almost completely unusable. 

I'm getting some good ping times, but I'm not sure I believe them.  Their IP (141.101.123.162) is assigned to the EU.  I'm getting 17 ms ping times, and it's not even physically possible to go that distance in that amount of time.

What the hell is going on?  It's been like this for months.

I really believe that we are now in a relationship to the trancendental object at the end of time such that the revelations are daily -- the unfoldment, the connectivity.  We can see light at the end of the tunnel.  I mean... I've had long practice with this, I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980, but I never knew what... how it would come or what it would be.

In the last few years, with the rise of a technological, a cultural artifact like the internet, I now see how it will make its way into the world.  We are building the nervous system of the human over-soul.  We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies... societies -- human groups run by rules... into telepathic collectivities of some sort.

The chaos of the internet is chaos only to the constipated order-freaks of the human sociological machine.  It makes them uncomfortable because they can't find the head, they can't find the hierarchy.  But it's head and hierarchy that has distorted and made institutions, uh, so abrasive and uncomfortable for the people who inhabit them.

So, I really believe there is no contradiction between technology and the spirit.  There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience.  There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyper-spacial cyber-culture and paleolithic, archaic culture.

We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter.  We have come to the end of our separateness.  Uh, this is all very scary.  None of us know what it means.  But the forces that have been called into being are now, uh, beyond the control of any institution or any strategic planning committee, or any banking committee.

These things have a life of their own.

There is a morphological unfoldment occurring on this planet.  It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being.  We are a perfect part of this.  Individually, our hope is to understand and participate in the epiphany.  There is no blame.  Nothing is off-kilter or wrong or un-natural or artificial.  No principle has been betrayed.  This is how it is supposed to be.

But, as it picks up speed, it's going to become more and more frightening, as most metaphors fail.  And this is why the rise of cults, and why the grasping at autological straws, and why the whisperings from various corners of the universe have grown to a roar.

Because we are uncertain.  We are not sure.  But, you become sure by connecting to the source.  And then what you become for other people is a source of reassurance.

A perfect metaphor for understanding this situation is... a birth.

A Few Conclusions About Life

Cantor Fitzgerald traders were insider-trading the options on the attacks that killed them.  Unbelievable.  Insider information provided by Jim Rickards in his new book The Death of Money reveals the CIA was aware of trading on targeted airlines leading up to 9/11.  Max Keiser corroborates this with his own experience.  Amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI0GUdYwS68&list=UUvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg

People always ask why 9/11 whistleblowers don't come forward.  This is why.  They are afraid to speak out too soon.  Many have been killed.  But enough people are out there, keeping themselves in the public view so that they can safely reveal their piece of the puzzle when the time is right.