I very much doubt it becomes a "better" Paypal for the masses for the simple reason that it isn't better.

I would be bet on failure over widespread usage of a coopted system. In fact I'd lay significant odds on that bet. (Though failure is somewhat difficult to define precisely -- let's say significant loss of value and usage.)

The forum mods didn't, the Vcash scammers deleted it. Use the unmoderated thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1441959.0

Warning about self-moderated Vcash threads: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1472763.0

No. Frankly I only have a small stake in DAO and I follow or am involved with a lot of different projects so it is a real PITA to visit all these separate forums. I have been following some of the discussion on reddit, but I didn't see a lot about the slockit proposal specifically. If there is something particularly useful please post or send me links.


That is quite prudent, especially considering that the scale of DAO is now far beyond what anyone could have predicted. It needs to adjust and adapt.

STEEM already does this, and has since the blockchain launched two months ago. No fees or PoW.

EDIT: No GUI unless you count a web wallet, so I guess it doesn't quite satisfy the OP

I have a better suggestion that should help prevent any future mistakes: Let's just all stay here and carry on the discussion on the unmoderated thread.

You're missing the the point: It couldn't be shut down like Crypti, just because the developer(s) wanted to cash in.

(BTW, while it's obviously a small coin and mocking or bullying it based on size is pretty pathetic, its value is higher than it was before the shutdown attempt.)

I have no idea why they deleted my posts discussing the reasons why "carrier grade" miners were a bad idea (or at best a risky bet on high BTC prices and continued rapid price appreciation that didn't pay off). It certainly doesn't improve my opinion of them though.

Normally yes, you can join by signing up on the web site (nastyfans.org) and buying one or more seats. However, I read something here about the nastyfans services being down (including seat trading?) so it may some time before that is possible again.

The proposal should be approved for a small amount of seed capital after which the progress of development, and the quality of the financial disclosure (i.e. accounting for how it was spent), can be carefully evaluated for another possible small renewal.

This is especially critical given the new and experimental nature of the DAO concept and business model. If slock.it is able to abuse its privileged position (i.e. why is slock.it literally the only proposal on the DAO fundraising web site?) to syphon a large amount of funds from the DAO with minimal accountability, then the DAO will be a failure right from the start.

I have several thousand DAO tokens, treating it as an experiment, so in practice my vote counts almost not at all. My plan is to split off and retrieve my funds if I see the DAO having been 'captured' by slock.it and used as a piggy bank for imprudent and excessive spending on a very risky concept. For now that appears quite likely, but I suppose some miracle is possible.

I bought a little because I got confused by all the mania and thought it was Powerball. When is the drawing?

Monero is doing fine, near peak market cap after two years (a peer group you can count on one hand easily), good liquidity, etc. Just as it has outlasted countless temporariy-hot ICO, etc. projects that allegedly had better ways to pay for development, it will likely outlast LISK as well.

Furthermore, unlike projects such as Crypti, no one could "close the project" even if they wanted to. You would have to convince literally 100% of the developers and community members -- something that isn't ever going to happen -- otherwise the project would continue. A good example here is Dashcoin, which Evan Duffield tried to buy and close, only to have the project switch repos and continue.

I would guess these two observations are not unrelated. A good test as to whether a supposedly decentralized cryptocurrency is worth giving any attention at all is to consider whether it would be plausible for someone to close it down.

You make an interesting comment at that linked post:


The language popularity results have become quite a mess. While Java and C have slowly fallen out of favor and C++ popularity has collapsed, it isn't clear what is replacing them other than a lot of fragmentation.

It might be interesting to survey the top, say, 30 or 50 languages and reslice the data by features (and combos of features) to see what programmers want that way rather than looking at specific languages. As you say, anything (and by this I mean features or collections of features) that has been around for a long time and is not gaining in popularity is probably not a good bet any time soon.

I don't see any of this happening with BTC. I agree with r0ach that it is a lot like cash here. In a bank run, banks fail because people want cash, not deposits. Exchanges may fail because people want physical BTC but it won't make physical BTC less valuable, it will make it a lot more valuable.

But paradoxically people may want USD, especially cash, even more than BTC, which wouldn't be anything new, so the BTC price in USD may fall even though the deleveraging of BTC shorts is acting to push it higher.

r0ach, the problem is that most of BTC's current value is risk-on speculation. If speculators want to de-risk, then BTC goes down. That competes with wanting hard assets (driving BTC up), and it isn't clear which effect dominates. I suspect down, because I don't think BTC has matured enough to be viewed as a safe haven by anyone other than a few crypto heads. Someday it may get there, but not yet.

There is leverage from lending BTC for income, but if holders fear counterparty risk and instead pull their coins off exchanges that will only squeeze the shorts and drive the price higher, potentially much higher. I don't think anyone really knows how much short leverage is out there.

I'm ignoring halving effects, miner ASIC doorstops, etc. I don't know how to analyze that.

That's not evidence of Bitcoin operating outside a Nash equilibrium, which was CfB's argument. Most of the hash rate 80%+ obviously mines on very large pools. The rest may do something else, and it might even be a bad decision on their part, but that little 20% doesn't really affect how Bitcoin operates.


I don't know which pools support getblocktemplate, but there's no evidence of anyone using it (most if not all ASIC gear just connects directly to the pool and uses stratum). Seems like that concept mostly died when Luke-Jr lost the original argument with slush.

I haven't read that paper but from the abstract it isn't obvious how this would relate to miners on a pool which is almost all Bitcoin mining right now.

Miners can not operate anonymously nor do anything useful with selfish mining or double spends as long as they are mining on pools, which the huge majority of the hash rate is currently doing. Only the pools themselves could do that, and they aren't anonymous.

If a large anonymous solo miners existed and had the opportunity to engage in selfish mining but didn't, your theory would be validated, but how could this ever be tested? I think it is impossible.

You could argue that a bunch of large miners would be better off on private pools or something, and by choosing to use public pools they are not in a Nash equilibrium, but the whole argument becomes complex, since pools benefit when other miners join them, so there is an incentive to be public, large visible actors such as Bitmain might be better off using a visible public pool since it isolates them from false accusations of misconduct, etc.

Also, the theory of selfish mining has some repeated game problems, since it assumes everyone else doesn't selfish mine. If others selfish mine, the defense is to selfish mine yourself, and if multiple large miners of equal size all selfish mine, then it is obvious none retains any advantage. If there are several large miners (or pools), they may be better off not bothering to start the conflict, especially given even small potential for reputational consequences.

r0ach = Half of BTT? Well maybe there are lot of sock puppets on here, lol. 

Anyway, I don't think you can easily answer "how much reputation" cost, but you can't say that failure to take short term advantage is not a Nash equilibrium when reputational costs exist, because that is an alternate consistent explanation.

I agree they apparently made high quality equipment (which I think they called "carrier grade") but frankly that was really, really stupid. This is not audiophile gear or even laptops, nor is it carrier gear.

Mining is 100% a commodity business that is set up to race to the bottom. Lowest costs wins.

If I remember you correctly from the good old days of mining, you've been a miner long enough to understand how important it is to optimize your costs and get the most from the least.

They might have been able survive had BTC prices stayed high, but it didn't make their strategy a good one.

EDIT: This reply was deleted from a moderated Vcash discussion thread. It is otherwise unmodified.


FYI, I have no sock puppet accounts, and have never used any sock puppet accounts.

It isn't "old news" because last I checked, the Vcash code was still violating the Bitcoin license. I haven't checked very recently though, if he has addressed the issue constructively you can let us know, although that still doesn't excuse the false claims about having been written from scratch or that he built it from the ground up.