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They are really late to the game, and still using the untrusted MtGox IOU model. Either go brokerage style like Coinbase, or list decentralized colored coin tokens that diversify counterparty risk and offer leverage.
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And don't forget the main problem about POW and this is the most important one.... every investor or long term buyer has to pay to the miner for securing the blockchain. POS coins investor don't they them self are doing their part to secure it and get even PAID!
I can put bitcoins in cold storage, like a paper wallet, brain wallet, or USB drive, and it costs me nothing to secure it. Actually, your coins are losing value due to inflation. Bitcoin is currently a highly inflationary currency, with roughly 10% more coins created every year. That means coins you hold lose 10% of their value per year. The value you lose is paid to miners. The 10% loss of value is obscured by the volatility of Bitcoin, and historically because of increases in demand. That doesn't change the fact that you are paying a lot of money to miners to secure your holdings. Think about it. Miners spend millions of dollars on mining rigs. Where do you think that money comes from? It's like credit cards were free to use, and paid for by the government printing a few billion extra dollars each year and given them to the credit card companies. Inflation is the most subtle tax. As long as I am holding, it costs me nothing. The inflation/deflation/fee based cost of mining is the problem of the miners and handled by the difficulty algorithm. Eventually, fee only mining will make the transaction fees of raw bitcoin transactions very high. That's why I partially support PoS for local currencies that are Bitcoin backed. |
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Even if one person held all the bitcoins until now because after 5 years nobody understood what it was about. Then we start to realize their value, it still wouldn't happen overnight. He might have sold them when they all got to a dollar. That's still the case. People are selling bitcoins because you can still buy them.
The second is a sociological question. Somehow people came to think they could be solved by bankers instead of The People.
The third question is a good one. Bitcoin is still very cheap and in its infancy. When it becomes easy to buy and secure, EVERYBODY will want some. Then the price will leave orbit. All I can say is do your own research. It can be done in several ways. There is no absolutely riskless method yet.
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PoW is PoS with the stake being your mining rigs.
Yes. These are all resource-democratic systems. That's a strange use of the word. You can also then say they are also resource-republican. Yes, given the delegation of hashing power to mining pools who act as representatives in Bitcoinland. You can also say they are resource-socialist because they collectively share the task of consensus transaction verification. |
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PoW is PoS with the stake being your mining rigs.
Yes. These are all resource-democratic systems. That's a strange use of the word. You can also then say they are also resource-republican. |
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Mirror neuron development happens long before a baby is capable of using technology. If a human being grows up without empathy it's because of a lack of parental attention and affection. Many studies have shown brain scans of people that lack mirror neuron development and they are highly correlated to socially conservative worldviews. That's because socially conservatives mostly likely come from religious backgrounds, and religion is child abuse. Brains are developed as babies, yes. But we have the choice how we use them. We can choose to learn what and how to think. We can change our brain wiring, including the mirror neurons. We can choose to physically alter our brain mapping and functionality. We can choose to unlearn the abusive patterns of our parents. The NAP is a method of doing so, but the denial of altruism further isolates ones ability to develop empathy. |
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Has anyone approached an Islamic brick and mortar bank regarding Bitcoin?
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I wanted to be in the NBA. It's not fair that I can't play BBall.
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Both PoW and PoS will both be eventually centralized, but there is one critical difference. PoW will be a temporary one and PoS will be a permanent monopoly. The central controller in PoW will be the competitor that invents the faster chip until someone else beats them. PoS will become owned by one controlling entity and not be able to keep it a secret forever, then the house of cards will fall. 1. The Ghash.io threat is a strawman. The "51% attack" is not a serious threat from a mining pool. The orphaned blocks will be seen and that mining pool is out of business and the owner may be prosecuted for fraud. It is only a threat from someone willing to throw away tens of millions of dollars for a one time double spend attempt, and anyone willing to accept a transaction for tens of millions without a few confirmations deserves to lose it.
It still is feasible by them and if not them anyone else with big enough investment, there is no guarantee they would be persecuted for fraud, especially after Mt Gox got away with what they did. You are also assuming this could not be done without getting noticed, which is not necessarily a given. 51% is still a very real problem and ignoring it is absurd. Simply wait for a few confirmations if you are worried. As far as noticing orphaned blocks from major nodes, that's easy. There are warning systems in place and even wallets have them built in. Businesses can subscribe to node based warning systems if they want. 2. The fact that coins are difficult to buy anonymously is not an issue with Bitcoin, but the laws of your country. As far as mining, you missed the 5 year long boat launch. You can earn them by working at something worthy of bitcoin remuneration.
You completely misunderstood my point if you think it was related to anonymously buying bitcoins. Read the white paper put out by Satoshi, mining was intended to give fair distribution until the last block was h mined. It has clearly failed to do this, and instead of acknowledging this you are sidestepping it. Making all newly mined coins only go to an elite group who can afford mining farms will just give the network overtime to the plutocracy Satoshi was trying to free us from. Saying you missed the boat misunderstands the point of the Proof of Work system and a major flaw. Get a job and work for them or start a large mining node. He knew about their inevitability. Satoshi said in the white paper: The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.
3. Transaction malleability is another strawman. It's not been an issue since 2010 except for careless wallet developers.
It was brought up in respect that it has been patched in PoS where it could have been more of a problem. Security fixes are constantly coming out to make PoS more secure using vastly less energy, avoiding centralization and giving economic power to those who already have it. You are right about PoS with number two. Number one is a matter of faith (not proof) until you have a way to prove that someone has not surreptitiously and anonymously acquired a majority stake.
You are correct about distribution, but with the flag ship PoS coin Blackcoin it is very clear that there is enough distribution to prevent a 51% attack especially with the new POS2 protocol implemented by Pavel, so it is not a matter of faith. Decentralized exchanges just realized by Blackcoin developers (BlackHalo, NightTrader) go a long way to help this problem too, because there is a fear that exchanges could leverage their holdings if they gained enough. PoS is a very good protocol for a local currency. The advantage is that a sovereign can declare it legal tender and maintain capital controls. The whitepaper mentions that a 51% attack would probably devalue the currency. Local sovereigns can avoid this by premining their stake. This is an unavoidable flaw in all systems, but for a global currency, the difference is that it is much easier to anonymously buy PoS coins than it is to design and manufacture an entirely new mining technology and bring it online without anyone noticing. Don't get me wrong, I love the PoW protocol, it is ingenious but sometimes you don't realize flaws in something until years later and mass adoption. It is clear we need to move onto something else, and while PoS isn't perfect it does have clear advantages. Hopefully soon we can develop an even better protocol that addresses even more of the flaws and continue to push the idea of cryptocurrency forward. In my opinion, Bitcoin is akin to Napster, it started the p2p currency movement. Cryptocurrency as a concept will not go away at this point, it will only be refined and improved, hopefully by the community and in the open.
Bitcoin metadata will provide far more liquidity than any other PoW or PoS could hope to yield. |
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Technology reduces our contact and dependency on the many people in our environs. How many of us even know our neighbors? This has the effect of stunting the mirror-neuron development. Because of this few people feel empathy towards the pain and suffering of others. This was an evolutionary development to bond social animals. It drives us to be fair and to not inflict unnecessary harm to others simply for material gain. It also drives us to help someone that seems to be suffering. But nowadays, this empathy seems to be lacking in many folks. Many studies have shown brain scans of people that lack mirror neuron development and they are highly correlated to socially conservative worldviews. I would love to see the brains scans of our elected officials. As another misfortune of our technological advancement: we have financialized and professionalized the humanistic services of healthcare to the point where only a few people are so efficient with technologies that even they have little time to spend with suffering people. For example, where there was once a trained healer for every tribe, there are now only 13.9 doctors for every 10,000 people globally. They frequently become overwhelmed and detached. Our society lacks the social structure it once took to care for each other and teach each other the skills to help one another. I suspect this is where the Non-Aggression Principle was born. There are people that experience cognitive dissonance between their own lack of empathy for the suffering of others and the philosophical impracticality of Machiavellian social engineering. They don't feel the physical pain and suffering of others, but they recognize the gift. They see the empathy of others as virtuous, but without the brain wiring to experience it themselves, they justify a cognitive approach to self behavior modification. This is admirable, but it also further detaches the person from actually developing their own mirror neurons. This can only be done through direct human contact where people are suffering. And a little suffering ourselves also helps in the development. Will Bitcoin help to improve this vector of the Human Condition? Well, it certainly addresses the financialization issue of crony corporatism. It brings transparency to the greed and malfeasance that has destroyed Main Street financial ecosystems. Will it bring back the day when doctors make house calls? I hope so. Maybe someday humanity and empathy will be valued in our society and nobody will feel the need for unnecessary violence for material gain. |
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Proof of Work originally was designed to do three things:
1. Secure the network
2. Provide a method of fair distribution of coins
3. Allow the network to be supported by the clients that used it
After a few years in the wild, proof of work has failed to accomplish any of the original goals. Security of the network has been on the brink of compromise due to large investors like Ghash.io that can afford to run mining farms larger than anyone else. It fails to provide fair distribution of coins now because to obtain newly minted coins you now must make massive investments which ensure only the rich will obtain the remaining bitcoins. And now the network is ran by mining farms ran by an elite few who can afford to fill warehouses with incredibly expensive equipment.
Proof of Stake is actually closer to how Satoshi originally envisioned the network, powered by the users who run clients. It uses far less energy to do this, allows for faster transaction times and Blackcoin's dev Pavel has been working to fix security issues with PoS.
Pavel has already patched transaction malleability and made 51% attacks even harder to accomplish with his new PoS v2. So while it doesn't provide for point 2 it clearly is better at points 1 and 3. This is why Proof of Stake is clearly the next step in cryptocurrency. I think Blackcoin is the best contender for this because the developer Pavel works in the open, is constantly pushing fixes to the protocol and not just making fancy wallets. Neither protocol is perfect but PoS is clearly better overall for the environment and decentralization.
1. The Ghash.io threat is a strawman. The "51% attack" is not a serious threat from a mining pool. The orphaned blocks will be seen and that mining pool is out of business and the owner may be prosecuted for fraud. It is only a threat from someone willing to throw away tens of millions of dollars for a one time double spend attempt, and anyone willing to accept a transaction for tens of millions without a few confirmations deserves to lose it. 2. The fact that coins are difficult to buy anonymously is not an issue with Bitcoin, but the laws of your country. As far as mining, you missed the 5 year long boat launch. You can earn them by working at something worthy of bitcoin remuneration. 3. Transaction malleability is another strawman. It's not been an issue since 2010 except for careless wallet developers. You are right about PoS with number two. Number one is a matter of faith (not proof) until you have a way to prove that someone has not surreptitiously and anonymously acquired a majority stake. |
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Is this a possible solution for China?
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Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain
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 Isis uses Bitcoins. |
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Unless you plan to offer the code for this, it belongs in Services.
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PoS cannot remain decentralized because they rely on various reputation systems. This will invariably lead to centralization.
I am agnostic when it comes down to the question PoW or PoS but it seems to me that in both cases there are incentives to centralization. In case of PoW people start minung on pools where the biggest is usually the most efficient. I also must say that the whole discussion looks pretty childish to me. Bashing from both sides and everybody knows better than the rest. This are the moments when I see why crypto isn't attracting more people. It's a real shame. There is a fundamental philosophical difference. PoW is an open Universe. PoS is a closed Universe. That is to say, that PoW is open to outside competition at any time. Even if the mining becomes monopolized, a balancing power can always save the day. With PoS, once monopoly is attained, it can surreptitiously and discretely claim control to reverse transactions and double spend at will. Maybe, and PoS has certainly its issues, but I am pretty sure that most of its current problems can be addressed in later versions. Also my main argument wasn´t that PoS is good but rather that PoW provides incentives to centralization as well as you can see from the hash monopolies of many pools in different PoW communities. I hate getting into philosophical debates. You are free to choose an ideology. |
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http://nakamotoinstitute.org/b-money/ I am fascinated by Tim May's crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word "anarchy", in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It's a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.
Until now it's not clear, even theoretically, how such a community could operate. A community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money) and a way to enforce contracts. Traditionally these services have been provided by the government or government sponsored institutions and only to legal entities. In this article I describe a protocol by which these services can be provided to and by untraceable entities. http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/ (emphasis mine) DNA, facial recognition, body mechanics, thermal patters, and any number of systems can identify people. We will never go back to the days where you could ride into town on a horse and leave that night without anyone knowing your identity. Information is a valuable commodity. If it could be coined, it would be more valuable than Bitcoin. As much as I empathize with the CA folks, it's too small a goal. We need to take away the incentive to monetize anything in order to be free. |
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PoS cannot remain decentralized because they rely on various reputation systems. This will invariably lead to centralization.
I am agnostic when it comes down to the question PoW or PoS but it seems to me that in both cases there are incentives to centralization. In case of PoW people start minung on pools where the biggest is usually the most efficient. I also must say that the whole discussion looks pretty childish to me. Bashing from both sides and everybody knows better than the rest. This are the moments when I see why crypto isn't attracting more people. It's a real shame. There is a fundamental philosophical difference. PoW is an open Universe. PoS is a closed Universe. That is to say, that PoW is open to outside competition at any time. Even if the mining becomes monopolized, a balancing power can always save the day. With PoS, once monopoly is attained, it can surreptitiously and discretely claim control to reverse transactions and double spend at will. |
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And don't forget the main problem about POW and this is the most important one.... every investor or long term buyer has to pay to the miner for securing the blockchain. POS coins investor don't they them self are doing their part to secure it and get even PAID!
I can put bitcoins in cold storage, like a paper wallet, brain wallet, or USB drive, and it costs me nothing to secure it. Nobody can steal my bitcoins. Even if everyone stops mining, I will have those bitcoins secure. Mining only allows me to spend them. If and when I want to spend them, I'll pay a small fee. A month's worth of transactions is less than just the postage to pay my credit card bill every month. I want PoW to protect my transactions so they are not double spent or reversed. |
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