We are on our way to having universal fabricators on each home, and at some point, after the economy shifted the focus to raw materials and services, it might get so easy and cheap to make your own automatons that there will be almost no job for humans while at the sametime making things becomes extreelly cheap and easy for everyone.


I made this thread 'cause i would like to ask you how long do you think it will take before we reach the point when everyone will have at least one unifab, and how long (if ever) untill we reach the utopia-like stage, where even aquicring material to use with our personal synthetizers costs almost nothing?

In some cases it can be possible to analyze the blockchain and trace the moneyflow; what if the final target of a a transfer got encoded like the destination on onion routing,  each hop in the path only decryptable by the previous hop, each hop peeling away one layer (and for increased security, everynow and then adding a hop or two in the sequence, but less often than the "package" changes hops, otherwise it will never reach the final goal), and with the client relaying the onion routed trasfers whenever it gets one.



Obviouslly there is the risk unscrupulouslly coded clients could choose to not relay transfers and keep the money, for dealing with that, one way could be a distributed database of addresses and their respective reliability, whenever the netowrk acknoledges an address has received and sent a or'red package it's reliability goes up, and whenever it doesn't the reliability goes down (the final transfer wouldn't be considered onion routed, it would not have further hop payload; clients that send the initial transfer would create the path using random addresses found in the distributed database that got reliability above a given threshold (asking for a bigger threshold would likelly increase the difficulty in find a big number of nodes, and might also make the whole process take longer if too many people are using the same intermediaries, but going with the threshold set too low increases the odds the money will get lost before reaching the target. Solving conflicts when the database disagrees between peers would work kinda like chainsplits are delt with, the more peers agree with one version the more that version can be relied on (and perhaps whenever a client gets one version significantly more unreliable than others it would analyze the blockchain and calculate it's own database checking what matches and what is differerhaps an opptmization would be to onlyr verify the parts that don't match between the different versions of the database seen.

An additional benefit for running nodes could be a onion routing fee, whenever a client peels a layer and passes it on it could receive a percetntage or fixed value comming out from the money transfered, the reliability algorithm would need to take in consideration how big the fee offered was defined in the transactions and how much each node took from the package, raking negativelly those that take more than what was offered; the fee would have to stay outside, or be included in each layer so all clients can see it without needing to be able to decrypt the whole onion. And of course, running an exit node would provide you with plausible deniability for any payment you make since those payments could actually have been done by someone else and just existed the onion router network by our node.


Actually, forget the bit about nodes randomlly adding more hops, that would allow cheating (perhaps some sort of signing of each layer would be necessary so only the original sender can define the hops); though either way the transaction would get lost)





Of course this would mutiply the time for a payment to reach it's intended destination, but i wouldn't doubt some people would be willing to wait a little longer inorder to get more privacy. 


What do you think?

How different would Bitcoin be if it was designed to be handled completly by humans?

Can the proof of work dificulty be tweaked to an extreme such that regular people with spare time could solve blocks with pen and paper? How would the network work with people exchanging and copying sheets of paper? Would it be possible to get reliable confirmation of transfers in less than a day? What would need to be changed and what would work just the way it is?

Has anyone compiled a table, with a list of ATI cards sorted by their mining power, with NVIDIA cards aligned with their closest equivalent ATI ones in the table by their mining power,  with the electricity consumption of each also included? (i would expect NVIDIA cards would be aligned with much weaker and cheaper ATI cards, it's my understanding that ATI's are optmized for the type of processing used in mining, while NVIDIA's are optmized for somthing else)

In another thread someone mentioned Satoshi was last seen on the forum a few days after Julian went to jail December last year; the person said that proved they weren't the same person, but IMO the two dates being so close actually works towards suggesting they might be the same person.


What do you think and what makes you think that way?

http://www.lovemachineinc.com/
Just bringing this to your attention

I haven't really thought all that much about this yet, lots of details hazy or simply missing; i thought about posting here cause some people here might be able to contribute ideas and with some luck might even kickstart the project.


Two main "components" in the idea:

* The platform: A flexible and expandable bootstraping user modifiable environment, with object oriented capabilities ("object" in the programming sense)
Somthing like a MOO (Multi-Use-Domain  Object Oriented), but completly abstract at first, concepts like "rooms", "avatars", motion, spatial relations etc created from scratch from the basic elements; it should allow anything, want 4 dimensional spaces, go for it, non-euclidian space, no problem,  fractal dimensions, why not, 2d grid based environment with portals, sure. And the same way you define things, you define what is said on the network; for example, if you are working in a rooms based environment, besides defining the geometry of the room, you define how to translate raw parameters into a text description for text based clients, how the geometry is sent to 3D rendering clients, the physics involved with touching walls, friction, materials, textures etc, define access control and so on (inheriting things when useful instead of writing from scratch) . Protocols standardization would be based on popularity and community interactions.


* What the platform will run on: distributed decentralized processing and management network (somthing kinda like what Bitcoin and Freenet do)
People would run server nodes on their machines, contributing spare and/or donated processors cycles, storage space, bandwidth etc to run the backend. People would have ways to define what sorts of things get done, how much resource to use etc; both lower level and within the platform custom programing (choosing which types of worlds to (co)host,  restrict to things owned by a certain identity or groups of identities, what things from a certain type of world or even from a certain world to deal with etc) ; so depending on who is offering the resources and the rules programed on specific universe types, individual universes,  world types, individual worlds, item types and individual items etc, anything from anonymous wikilike virtual environments to highly controlled corporate 3d chatrooms and beyond can be done. And kinda like with Freenet, storage would get redistributed with the goal of keeping commonly accessed data closer (based on network speed and latency, not physical distance), but also do it in a redundant way both for load balancing and for resiliency purposes.





I guess some of the key goals are:

* Do not depend on centralized servers

* Do not assume the platform developers can think of all possible ways the users may use it and therefore do not impose any hardcoded behaviors (don't assume people will always use a 2d screen, don't assume people will not want to fly, don't assume people will want humanoid avatars, don't assume people will expect moving in a straight line will always move away from starting position, don't assume people will want to restrict who will be allowed to obtain and use copies of their creations, don't assume people will want static environment geometry, don't assume two people are expected to see the same scene the same way, don't assume people will use text based or 3d clients, don't assume communications will happen via TCP/IP or similar etc)



Basicly kinda a distributed, decentralized "anarchist" virtual multiverse platform capable of mimicking and exceeding all virtual environment platforms out there and being twisted to suit anyone's needs and desires without getting in the way of anyone else twisting it to suit their different needs and wants (could even become kinda like the Internet (or equivalent) in the future as described in  many different fiction works, "sites" can be anything from a room to a whole planet to an interactive virtual newspaper to somthing that requires a virtual computer with a virtual screen running a oldschool browser rendering HTML text to a surface; and where you can be a floating giant version of your wetware head, floating eyes, a smell, nothing, just your shadow, millions of intelligent independent point-like entities etc, you enter into games as if it's just another place you go except it applies certain restrictions on what you can be, what you can do etc, but you can still pull out a game gun in any place (that doesn't restricts you from doing it), ride game vehicles in shared public areas etc)

This is somthing i thought about reading some of those threads about physical bitcoins.


It would work kinda like a debit card.


You carry with yourself a smart card containing your identification with the "bank" and some challenge response software to prove the card really is authentic and it's the one associated with your account (instead of just an ID number that needed to be made public, exposing the card to clonation).

Bitcoins you own are deposited into your account in the "bank".

You go to a store, and when it's time to pay, you present your card, the cashier places it into the machine and the machine talks with the bank securelly, confirms that you have the funds, and then tells you how much the cashier is asking you and requests your password or signature or somthing like that to authorize the transfer.


If you go ahead with it, the "bank" subtracts that ammount from your balance and triggers the transfer in the Bitcoin network (making transactions transparent), but instantly adds that ammount to the store's balance (everyone involved trusts the bank to keep it's word, the bank got some additional reserve to cover times when the network takes too long etc) and transfers between accounts on the same bank are presented to customers not as the raw current state of the bitcon addresses but as the instantaneous layer, the result of all transfers pending or verified by the network; transfers to other banks, or to arbitrary bitcoin addresses remove the amount from the bank account balance instantaneouslly, but from the receiver's point of view is just a regular bitcoin transfer.



I know that this has most of the issues associated with centralization, single point of failure and stuff, but i would think this would be quite usefull for regular people on their daily life.

And it got several benefits over carrying a whole device running it's own bitcoin client, like:

* Instant trusted payments

* Can fit inside your wallet

* All the technology already exists and people are used to using it already.


And it stil works on top of the bitcoin network without competing with.




Eventually there might be some laws forcing people to provide true documents relating to their identity to the banks/operators, but till then, just going into an agency (or perhaps even online) transfering some money to a new address owned by then would be enough to get you an account and a card for that account. And from then on all you need to provide to receive money is the account id (for transfer from another account in the same bank) or the bitcoin address of the account (for transfers using just the bitcoin network), and stores and other places  could buy a compatible machine, program their account id in, and plug it to the Internet and they're set. Without a machine to make transfers you could still do it with things like webbanking, thru the phone, going into a physical agency etc.





This still wouldn't completly replace paper govt money with bitcoin, but would make it compete with it, or rather with "plastic money" and other instances where people pay and receive govt money without actually seeing the paper notes.

Does anyone here speak Lojban? How is "Bitcoin" translated in Lojban?

I live on Brazil, i do have access to an international credit card (not mine, but of  someone i know), i have a savings account on bank Itau but i got someone that has a full account there too.


What are the ways i can buy BTC and what is involved in each case?

Using an international credit card (one that is issued in a country but is accepted in lots of countries), is there somewhere i can buy BTC?

edit: i mean without a middleman, no Paypal etc, i pay with the CC and the person or entity sends me the equivalent in BTC to the address i provide.

Do you got a bank account on Brazil? I would be particularlly interested if you got an account on bank Itau (so i can transfer without significant fees nor hassles).


I wanna try buying a few BTC using brazilian Real, and after a few small transactions to get a feel and evaluate the exchange rate, how fast things happen, reliability etc, i might be interested in investing up to around R$100.00 total at this moment.

What are the odds that the Bitcoin network will suffer a freak alignment of connections where big cluster of nodes will clump up remaining separated from each other for prolonged periods before eventually dissolving back into a more homogeneous foam?

I can't find anywhere the checkbox to subscribe to a topic i'm posting on, nor the link to subscribe to threads without posting. Can someone please fix the forum?