Yeah just keep on doing what you're doing dickhead (do you expect me to be nice after you intentionally slander me twice and both times you are in error?).

There you are being either "not the sharpest tool in the shed" or intentionally disingenuous again. There is no correlation between what Cypherdoc wrote and the whitepaper....

2 things:

1.  i think ppl under-appreciate the extent to which all participants in Bitcoin, including miners, volunteer and want to be part of a system that has the potential to make themselves extraordinary profits if it works as intended that being in an open, honest manner.  there's a lot at stake in constructing a new financial system and those profits can only be made if it works properly as advertised in that open and honest manner that ordinary ppl can depend on.  this is what will result in the trust needed so that the vast majority of humanity can buy into such a reliable system.

2.  i think that the majority of ppl in this world want to be honest and wish to live in a society that has order.  no one wants to live in chaos.  everybody loses.  in order for society to continue to progress and evolve, order, dependability, and a semblance of honesty is needed.  thus, in a system with so much potential to do good, like Bitcoin, the overwhelming desire is for participants to want to do what makes the system thrive.  to the extent that cheating, dishonesty, and colluding erodes confidence and threatens that goal, most participants will avoid those activities.

6. Incentive

By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.

The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.

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.

That is the same faith we put into a top-down democracy. Fact is a power vacuum sucks in those who can maximize the exploitation of the power vacuum.

You are violating the fundamental tenet of Satoshi's white paper which is decentralized trust, meaning we don't have to trust that people are honest.

It's about TPTB_need_war, AKA AnonyMint, AKA TheFascistMind.

It's particularly rich coming from someone that changes their ID every 10 minutes.

You've always been the disingenuous debater in every discussion I've ever had with you.

You are violating the fundamental tenet of Satoshi's white paper which is decentralized trust, meaning we don't have to trust that people are honest.

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.

I guess it is in the eye of the beholder. I still see 3 pools with >50%. The other tiny little slices don't matter at all as long as the top 3 agree and if even two of them agree, the tiny slices still hardly matter at all.

Similarly if Bob correctly handles the received notification transactions he can be confident that he can not be tied to the payment channel.

Let's say for example I am a Snowden sympathizer and the government has outlawed payments to Snowden and the government also suspects that I might want to illegally give Snowden payments. In such an environment identifying the creation of a payment channel to Snowden might be enough for the government to determine guilt, regardless of whether or not they identified the actual payments. So if they knew my payment code and Snowden's payment code, could scanning the blockchain history result in identifying the payment channel (not the actual payments).

I understand this situation is a bit of a reach, just trying to understand it though.

Both Alice's and Bob's payment codes are known since they are public and in addition the time frame of the notification transaction is also known. Couldn't such an agency then look for all transactions in that specific time frame that might be a notification transaction and try them until finding one that matches? Does such an attack gain information for Eve, or are there reasons this isn't possible or useful?

If an attacker knows that certain UTXOs are associated with a particular individual (Bob), and if the attacker then sees those outputs used as inputs to a transaction which creates an output at a known notification address (Alice's), then the attacker can assume a probability that the Bob will send some bitcoins to Alice at some point in the future.

Bob might have sent a decoy notification to Alice, so the attacker can never be sure. All the attacker knows that Bob will sent Alice somewhere between 0 and 2³² payments to Alice between the time of the notification transaction and forever.

The attacker might assume that any payments appearing in the mempool immediately following the notification transaction are a payment between Bob and Alice, but that's a problem that tends to solve itself as the transaction rate increases and can be addressed by intelligent clients which make sure to put a random amount of temporal separation between the notification transaction and the first payment.

You have said one sentence on which we agree, and one on which we don't. 

I do not give a crap who developed a sort algorithm, because I can tell when things are sorted correctly and I can prove that the algorithm does sort things correctly in every case. 

And hashing, given the level of mathematical sophistication and effort applied by people who are NOT controlled by any particular agency, is not very different from sorting in this regard.

but you have to back up around 2y to understand why he's doing this.  my conspiratorial mind says this is when gmax first hatched the idea of Blockstream and started working on gathering up most of the other core devs into the scheme.  since that time, nothing substantial has gotten done around the core protocol as solex pointed out above.

Apparently they are the only developers capable of making any change at all.

Bitcoin needs to do an Uber and scoop up as many users as fast as possible round the world before gvts, regulators, and banks can stop it.  we may already be there fortunately but we do have a ways to go and it's clear that 1MB is an artificial cap on growth.

I didn't know hashes could be used for encoding.

I think I first heard this objection to a larger maximum block size from Peter Todd, Chief Scientist of ViaCoin

This pull request contains fixes from the results of a thorough audit of txscript to find any cases of script evaluation which doesn't match the required consensus behavior. These conditions are fairly obscure and highly unlikely to happen in any real scripts, but they could have nevertheless been used by a clever attacker with malicious intent to cause a fork.

Test cases which exercise these conditions have been added to the reference tests and will contributed upstream to improve the quality for the entire ecosystem.

Really? Only "contributors" have the right to raise concern now?

This thread is getting over pompous.