I hope this wasn't because of me.  There is some really interesting stuff that shows up in TED talks, and it can be a great way to get interesting new ideas, like bitcoin, out there and in front of a fairly big audience.

But it is also and at the same time, a support group for narcissists.  That shouldn't surprise anyone, because it is essentially a generational evolution of the other big narcissism support group, TV news.

This is most easily seen by watching a few talks that are outside of your area of interest.  Since you won't be focused on the subject, you'll be able to see the other clues more easily.

The hash of a pruned block will not match the hash in the header, and thus a pruned block cannot be verified.  Checkpoints will help this a bit, in that you'll have a verification chain (by a signature on the source code or binary) that says that someone "trustworthy" claims to have verified up to a certain point.  But you won't be able to prove it unless you have, or can get, the full chain, but you don't need to have all of it at once.

Can I ask why you don't want to use your own code to manage balances and transactions?  It seems to me that you need to do those things anyway, at least in most scenarios that I'm familiar with.

Ever watch the debug.log while a new chain was starting?  The churn is amazing.  Just having a pool up with long polling means that you will be mining as if you had many times your actual hashing power, because you'll be the only entity not wasting 99.9% of your work.

During the early hours, I'd bet that a LP-enabled pool with like 10% of the hashing power and a client hacked to ignore incoming blocks could completely dominate 100% of the chain for at least a few difficulty cycles.

This is TED.  The problem isn't "promotion", it is that you are trying to promote the wrong thing.

Try rewriting it in the language of self-promotion.  You explain the social implications, but the subtext needs to be that you are totally awesome because you understand this cool new thing, and by extension the audience will be much cooler than all of the dumb proles out there because now they know it too.

And before anyone flames me, go watch a few talks.

You don't think I can write a bot that submits orders through the same website that humans use?  HTML is very easy to parse and interpret.

You've never met anyone that had serious faith in their atheism?

Mining is the least important part of mining.

Pretend that gold was the only money around, and that there was exactly one once of gold in the world, and that it had already been mined.  No one would be employed mining gold, but many people would be employed assaying tiny specs of it.

Bitcoin mining has a lot more to do with assaying than it does with mining.  We are verifying that no fake gold is coming to the market.

Just that in the bitcoin world, we only have access to a third of that ounce of gold, and there is a strange quirk of the assaying process that makes more gold show up whenever we successfully complete a test, and that the amount of new gold will gradually diminish at a fairly regular rate until the whole ounce is here.

Oh, and real gold can only be divided to a finite degree before it stops being divisible (or stops being gold!).  Currently we don't bother dividing bitcoins beyond a certain size because there is no point to values that small.  But there is no limit to how finely we can divide bitcoins if we ever need to.  A few more bits and we could assign a part to each and every atom in the solar system.  A few bits beyond that and we could give a part to every quark, electron and photon in the universe.

Ooh!  I know this one!

! Buying( bitcoin ) --> ( Interested( bitcoin) | ! Interested( bitcoin ) )

And if I could only remember where I last saw my discrete math textbook, I could prove it!

I'm always curious when I read these threads.  Exactly how would bots be prevented?

Does the existence of things like curl, or various schemes for breaking CAPTCHAs change your plan at all?

Are you at all bothered that banning bots (and enforcing the ban!) would mostly hurt legitimate vendors that need to hedge their exposure so they can continue to operate?  Or that the big traders will have the resources to most easily bypass whatever scheme you suggest?

If the mixer is designed well, and if the operator of the mixer is trustworthy, then it doesn't matter much what coins you get back, the same ones, or different ones.  The crypto community probably already has a pretty good idea of which properties the mixer needs to have.  I bet that the cypherpunks list probably even had detailed discussions on how to create a distributed system that didn't rely on the trustworthiness of any particular subset of mixer operators.  We just don't know which thread to look in, because they didn't know they were talking about bitcoin at the time, they thought they were talking about an email mixer, or how to protect an onion router from traffic analysis attacks, or something.

I liked the paper, by the way.

I always consider claims of anonymity to be false until shown true.  And even then I'm still cautious.  I remember well that the first few things I had read about bitcoin made claims about anonymity that (surprise!) later turned out to be less than true.  I tend to blame journalists for bad journalism, but in this case I might be willing to cut them some slack.  Bitcoin is hard.

I would say that by now, most people in the community (at least in the threads that I read) have a fairly good idea of the level of privacy actually available for various types of transactions.  Of course, an attacker with the ability to aggregate data from a lot of places can overcome casual efforts at partitioning and end up knowing a hell of a lot.

Some day, there will be a simple web based tool, like blockexplorer, but much more sinister.  You'll be able to punch in an address, and it will track things forwards, backwards and sideways.  It will magically divine every address in your wallet that you have ever received money from, and if you've ever used or sent to a static address, it will be able to tell you a lot about yourself and what you like to spend your coins on.

The good news is that places that generate new addresses for every transaction will make it much less accurate.  And hopefully a network of decent mixmasters will provide hard edges, or at least plausible ones.

Most people don't know how serious white collar investigations work, so they don't realize just how much effort it will be for someone to keep those edges solid.  Real investigations cast a wide net.  They look at someone, then they look at everyone around that person, and then everyone around all of them, and so forth.  They look for coincidences first, and then patterns, and then evidence.  Honestly, if you let it get to the evidence stage, you've already lost.

I see a lot of people on these forums that say things like "well, they can't prove <this step>".  It doesn't matter.  They don't need to prove that step, they just need to see the pattern, and then find some other step that they can prove.  Where there is a pattern, there will also be evidence of something, something that they can use.  They are professionals, and you are an amateur.  They are much better at finding evidence than you are at hiding it.

For anyone seriously considering hiding some crime behind bitcoins, I offer this advice.  Don't.  And if you ignore that part, try to avoid coincidences, and make damn sure you don't leave patterns.  Be many different people, with different personalities, different habits, different patterns.  And if you must transfer money from a wallet that can be linked to you (and this is any wallet that you haven't taken great pains to keep apart from yourself), to an illicit wallet, make sure it is for something legitimate, with paperwork, and hopefully eyewitnesses that really think that they saw you buy or sell something.  Don't try to launder funds more than once, unless you have a legitimate, documented, witnessed sequence of transactions that will look completely normal and mundane.  And finally, make damn sure that you lose a hell of a lot of money along the way.  If 50,000 bitcoins leaves one side, 50,000 bitcoins had better not pop up on the other side, not even months or years apart and from totally different directions.

Sorry.  This is long, rambling, and I think I veered offtopic a bit.  Fun though.

I didn't read this as him calling me shady.  I just saw him saying that he wasn't shady, not in contrast to anyone, but in general.

My posting history is a mixed bag.  In one post, I'll be a complete jackass.  In the next, I'll be patient and helpful.  In the next, I'll be both.  And so on.

In the spirit of disclosure, I'll say that my join date on these forums was essentially the day that I learned more about bitcoin than just the name.  In that time, I've mined about 100 bitcoins, and I've spent about 25 of them on various things like shirts, tokens, computer parts and dollars.  I wrote and operate my own bot, which is not at all like a traditional trading bot.  It has been far more useful than profitable.  Since it started, it has made a profit of about a half bitcoin (minus the value of my time, which is apparently zero), and hasn't made a trade in several weeks.

My question to Desolator was, and remains, "What about these trades makes them unfair?".

The larger point that was I was getting at was this:  On the exchanges, each party gets to set the exact conditions for the trade.  You tell mtgox, or tradehill, or whatever, that you want to buy or sell, how many bitcoins, and the worst price you'll accept.  You never pay more than you specified when you buy, and you never get less than you asked for when you sell.

In what possible way could anyone consider a trade which happens under the exact conditions that they specify to be unfair?

No discussion of stock picking is complete without The Tao of Alpha.

The problem that I see with most secularists is that they don't see that secularism is just as much a religion as any other.

And I find individual fundamentalist secularists to be at least as annoying as fundamentalist christians or muslims or jews, maybe a bit more.  In aggregate though, they are much worse because it is apparently socially acceptable to loudly display secularism as a status marker in bars.

The problem with this is that the chain doesn't have an end.  It doesn't even have a current endpoint.  All it has is the dividing line between blocks that your node knows about, and blocks that it doesn't know about yet.  It seems like a trivial thing, but the misunderstanding can have serious consequences.

But yeah, the progress bar could be better.  But you can't make it too good, or it will confuse users.  There is even a trope about it.

Using the last known block height like you suggest seems like a good way to do it.

The first article is quite good.  But money only had to be invented once, more or less.  That it started out as a way to standardize debt isn't really important, because eventually the gold -> paper -> bloodshed cycle took root.  The obvious examples are Rome, France (revolution era), and everyone on the planet today.

The second link less so.  I don't think that the author realizes that the system he is describing is almost identical to the system we have now.  The main differences that I see are that he proposes rolling back the whole specialization/division-of-labor thing that we've been working on for the last couple thousand years, at least in regards to creditworthiness assessment, and socializing the costs of bad lending decisions.  And shit, we've pretty much done the second part already.


Possibly.  I don't think that the situation could be fully analyzed in advance, it would really depend on a lot of details specific to the time and place.


Except that inflation and demurrage are different words for the exact same thing.  They both mean "money is worth less tomorrow than today".  The mechanism isn't important, unless you are talking about specific implementations rather than general concepts.  And if you are talking about specific implementations, I will agree that the one we use today sucks, but the sucking is political, and merely changing the name won't prevent the exact same thing from happening after you change the name.

Also, the thing that you call the basic interest rate is the lowest interest rate that people are willing to pay to finance good productive ventures.  Capital yields can't fall below that level by definition.  Or more accurately, if it does, it is an economic loss compared to what it should have been.

And finally, trade and speculation aren't evil.  They help capital find the right places to be.  They only look evil right now because the men with guns (government) are letting their friends abuse the system to do things that sorta look like trade and speculation, but are actually robbery.


I don't believe this for a second.  As long as the broken system is allowed to exist, it will seek (and find!) ways around obstacles.  The only way it could work is by taking power away from those that abuse it.  And if you've cured the disease (abuse), why replace one of the symptoms of abuse (inflation) with a synonym (demurrage)?


Sure gold money is flawed.  It is just much less flawed than anything else I've ever seen proposed.  Humanity always returns to gold after a bloody revolution because it can't be abused, which is important when the revolution was against those that had been abused the previous paper issue.

Tell me more about these unfair trades.  Start with exactly what about a trade makes it unfair.

Reply to jtimon, not quoting for obvious reasons.

One thing that I don't like about that equation is that it is too simple.  If we ignore other currencies, the left side is fine.  But the right side is nonsense, it should really be:  (P₁*Q₁+P₂*Q₂+...+P_N*Q_N)  You can create the quantity P*Q which has the same value, but you are making a huge mistake if you then think of P or Q as having independent meaning outside the product.

I don't use time-preference as defined in a textbook, I just mean "preference for one time over another".  If you are quoting a formal definition widely understood by economists, then the misunderstanding is my fault for not brushing up on the lingo.  Also, if that is the case, economists are even nuttier than I thought.

I gather now the cause of my misunderstanding on the island story.  You did say "money with demurrage", and I totally missed the "with demurrage" part.  The idea of money with rot built in isn't natural to me.  The history of money is a cycle where humanity tries to make money as nearly indestructible as possible, then politicians invent inflation which first rots money, then replaces it with junk, then rots the junk.  Then there is a great unhappiness, and the survivors start the cycle over.

In the baker example, I'm saying that a baker might be better off by letting the bread rot rather than lending it out, whether for interest or not.  Giving it away wasn't even a consideration.

That last two bits tie together very nicely.  I was going to say that a rational lender and a rational borrower would strike the exact same deal under demurrage as they do under inflation, or even deflation.  Then I went off and read the link that you posted again, and I got the same feeling that I had at the end of my previous post:  Once again, you are so close that you could reach out and touch it, but you still don't see it.

Inflation and deflation are neutral concepts.  Neither one has any meaning at all.  If someone added a zero to all physical currency, multiplied all bank accounts by 10, and multiplied all prices by 10, we would hardly notice.  The same would work if they divided everything by 10.  The same works if it happens every night, or every hour, or continuously.

The distortion in the world is clearly not inflation, it is with the specific way that inflation is implemented, first in one place and then flowing out to the rest of the world unevenly.

You clearly dislike inflation, but you are putting all of your efforts into replacing it with inflation-by-another-name (aka, demurrage) when you should instead be thinking about how to change the political structure that hands out favor in one place at the expense of the rest of the world.

If you really don't know what this is about, consider yourself lucky, and leave it at that.

If you still want to find out, it won't take much effort to figure out.

While very few people like it when moderation is done to them, very many people prefer it when moderation is done for them.