I'm not going to name the specific companies involved due to the risk of retaliation against the employees involved, but it might be worth asking the CEOs of established, respected Bitcoin companies about their policies regarding the right of their employees to express their own personal views in public.

I want to expand on this a bit.

Consider the modus operandi of David Johnston's Bitangels/Mastercoin mafia.

They rope in mostly young and inexperienced developers via their hackathons that promise (contracts worth up to) large sums of money, then make sure any vaguely interesting idea that emerges gets bolted on to a otherwise-useless appcoin.

They then spend a considerable amount of time promoting the resulting pump and dump. After all possible value has been extracted from the idea they simply move on like a plague of locusts to the next idea. (when was the last time you heard a progress update from APICoin?)

This process generates a large number of accomplices of varying degrees of culpability:

• The developers who get pulled into the system now have their reputations invested in the viability of the appcoin, not to mention the sunk costs of spending so much time on the projects
• The aspiring Bitcoin journalists who helped to promote the appcoins and who accepted advertisement money don't want to admit they participated in something shady without doing any due diligence
• The conference organizers who accepted money from the appcoin project don't want to admit that there are too many Bitcoin conferences to only accept clean money
• The people who bought into the IPO and didn't get out soon enough don't want to admit their money is gone
• The businesses who court outside investment know that some of the investors can't tell the difference between legitimate opportunities and P&D scams, and that many of the investors they court get involved in some of those schemes. They don't want the investors to become spooked and leave the space entirely.

I know of at least two different employees of Bitcoin companies who were required to censor their personal social media accounts on pain of termination because they were being publicly critical of scammy startups. In both cases, their employers cited common investors between the two companies as the reason why criticism could not be allowed.

I also heard one episode of a popular Bitcoin podcast where one of the hosts expressed some regret for accepting work from a project that turned out to be a scam and both other hosts immediately leaped into action to stop her attempt to assume some accountability (lest her example illuminate their lack of assuming similar accountability, presumably).

These bad ideas spread like viruses, and it's increasingly difficult to find somebody who isn't infected to some degree or another.

Not all of them.

Some of them, and they do as much as they can to encourage others.

Many of the others could be considered unwitting participants.

There are some questions I want to answer in longer form than what what a forum post allows.

Right now time is the resource in most short supply for me.

How much of it should I allocate to debating economics, how much of it should I allocate to preparing for the next round of OBPP ratings, how much of it should I allocate to describing what a transition plan from the current P2P network to a market-based P2P network would look like, etc. etc. etc.

I really don't feel like I owe any answers to people who have done less work than I to improve economic understanding and financial privacy.

What have you done to make either situation better?

There exists in society people whose interests are threatened by the existence of a universal, neutral, and incorruptible ledger.

Those of them who are aware of attempts to form one have very strong incentives to prevent that from happening by any means necessary.

Encouraging the development of multiple competing ledgers, either by investing in them directly, or investing in companies that produce them, or investing in propaganda to promote economic anti-knowledge, or investing in disruption tactics to slow down the development of the universal ledger are all actions such people could be expected to take.

I think you just identified the motive.

It would be great to have an open standard messaging protocol and get it implemented in many wallets.

Until all wallets that use mixing are accessing the same pool of participants, it's never going to work very well.

See Darkwallet for an example. They have an excellent GUI for mixing, but since they can only mix with other Darkwallet users, in practise their mixing capability is useless.

They are going to make the attempt. Whether because they want to, or because they are helpless pawns of regulatory forces beyond their control, is irrelevant.

In the end, it won't work. Unencumbered bitcoins will always have more purchasing power than restricted bitcoins. The price incentives this situation creates will ensure the eventual failure of their walled garden attempts.

This is not sustainable in the long term.

All that's required is that users put one non-reporting entity between every transaction between reporting entities. A non-reporting entity could be anyone or any business.

Coinbase et al. may attempt to keep their users inside a walled garden that is only allowed to transact with other people in the same walled garden, but they won't get away with it in the long term.

The coins are traceable, but the link between the coins and to whom they belong is less so.

Part of the consideration that went into the payment code proposal was finding a way to make analysis of transactions impossible beyond one hop.

Even if they want to do multi-hop analysis, it's possible to make that unfeasible.

Thanks.

This project will be more effective the more that wallet developers know that people read the reviews, so you can help out by widely sharing the link.

Also, we'll shortly begin a recruitment drive for volunteers to help produce the next batch of ratings.

There's a real need for comprehensive Bitcoin-specific economic education.

The Satoshi Nakamoto institute could have filled that role, but it doesn''t look like they are able or willing.

Will it ever be possible to run Armory without requiring filesystem-level access to the block files?

Seems like a change such as this makes such an operating mode more difficult.

I run bitcoind and Armory in separate virtual machines, and finding a way to share those files in a way that gets all the permissions right and satisfies LevelDB's locking requirements is non-trivial.

It would be great to have an option for Armory to maintain its own database using blocks it obtains via its peer connection to the node, rather than via direct filesystem access, without requiring a supernode.

What saved the long con for so long was the 20th century population boom and technological revolutions.

Those two factors created wealth at a faster rate than the central banks could destroy it. So much so, that it wasn't apparent to anyone that the central banks were destroying wealth at all.

That no longer appears to be the case.

The need to convince the older generation about anything is highly overrated.

The people we need to worry about convincing are the people who will be producing new wealth in the future - not those who are already (for the most part) done producing.

The question then becomes whether or not any technical solution is possible against attackers who have printers and aren't afraid to use them.

Wouldn't it suck to implement countermeasures against such attackers that not only won't work and also hinder legitimate use or, even worse, make attacks more likely instead of less likely?

Something that's more interesting than the anonymint noise is the under-appreciated fact that Satoshi believed Bitcoin's profit incentives were so strong that even if an individual accumulated a majority of the hashing power their desire to be profitable in bitcoin terms would be so strong that they wouldn't use that power to attack the network.

Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, but the people who are insisting that Bitcoin mining is too centralized should at least start out making their arguments by acknowledging that position and explaining why they believe it is incorrect.