Which is equally true for alternate implementations.

Since it's not possible for any implementation of Bitcoin to prove perfect compatibility with own present and past versions, treating any single implementation as special is incorrect.

They're all alternate implementations.

All of them, including Bitcoin Core.

Exactly so.

Right now Bitcoin is shedding the speculative adopters because for them it makes more sense to hold USD while the debt singularity is busy devouring Dollar liquidity.

While this continues Bitcoin will see organic adoption rather than speculative adoption.

The organic adopters are were already in the informal economy, and those who get pushed into the informal economy due to the effects of USD appreciation.

Sooner or later, appreciation of the USD is going to cause financial distress for indebted Americans (statistically speaking, all Americans). As more people get pushed over the edge and end up facing the gamut of civil judgements and their associated wage and bank account garnishments, the fraction of people who need Bitcoin's censorship resistance will increase.

Someone who's facing a 100% garnishment of what little money they have in the bank would do better to have all of that value in Bitcoin, even if there's a potential 90% downside risk. Keeping 10% is better than keeping 0%.

The last time we saw this kind of mass financial distress was 2008, and just like we saw then people will adapt to financial distress by joining the informal economy.

The major difference between now and then is that "cash under the table" income is no longer an option that's restricted to blue collar labor.

The ability to get paid by clients anywhere in the world without moving funds through the banking system means that tens of millions of middle class professionals now have the same opportunity. In fact, the are arguably in an even better position because anyone who produces digital deliverables can now access a global client base.

Hilarious how many people defend the 1 MB limit without realizing that it wasn't part of the original release.

It would be nice to have the option to configure this in the Settings page, as well as --skip--announce-check.

As someone who I don't like quoting said, "Bitcoin has become the universal bug bounty."

That doesn't sounds like a very good idea.

You've just described turning Bitcoin into a proof of stake system.

Thanks, NSA.

I'm sure it's been handy for ECDSA to be vulnerable to leaking private keys every time there's a signing event, and also to leak private private keys through variable-time operations.

Until very recently, this was not true for any Bitcoin clients.

The common way of performing ECDSA signatures requires 256 bits of new entropy for every signature, and if you get it wrong it's possible to reveal your private key.

There are implementations out there getting the initial key creation wrong too, not just signing?

Only if people are reusing cold storage addresses .

I guess that applies to people using paper wallets, which is another reason those things were bad ideas from the beginning.

You mean last few years?

Newest video from Cypherdoc's favourite artist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBP9dpVM70

What can she actually do, though?

The consequences of resuming QE are unaccceptable.

So are the consequences of not resuming QE.

Must be fun to be in any kind of decision-making position at the Federal Reserve right now.

The USD desperately wants to appreciate.

The reason the USD lost so much value over the last century was due, not to base money printing, but to credit expansion, a.k.a debt issuance.

Debt is temporary. It's either repaid, or else defaulted. Either way of resolving debt shrinks the money supply as much as the original issuance expanded it.

As long as the population was growing, and as long as the middle class had positive savings, it was possible to expand credit. Now both conditions are no longer true.

Since it's no longer possible to continue credit expansion, the only way to stop the deflation caused by debt repayment and defaults is to print more base money (QE).

When QE stops, the USD resumes its natural appreciation.

This is an effect of shitty network design.

Satoshi was right to realize that a currency should have a limited supply, but that doesn't mean he was right about (or even though about) the economic features of the rest of the software stack.

With a tiny handful of exceptions, all P2P networks are economically broken.

Consider a McDonalds restaurant. The more customers they need to serve, the more resources they require to do so.

Yet in spite of that fact, as the customer demand for McDonald's product increases, so does the number of stores!

Why is that the opposite of what happens with P2P networks? Because in the case of Big Macs, people pay for what they use. This customer action of paying for what they concume means that McDonalds doesn't really need to worry about how it will gather the resources it needs to scale.

That's an objection only brought up by people who don't understand money.

The reason the inflation schedule shouldn't change is the same reason you shouldn't put an anchor on an airplane.

In a way, the free market *does* solve that question though - because people are free to choose whether or not they want to travel in a boat or in an airplane.

Let's talk more about this requirement after you produce a workable definition of what "decentralized" means, and the arguments you use to justify your conclusion about how different situations will affect it.

I agree that sharding reduces security. I wouldn't propose sharding the blockchain as a scapability solution.[/quote]


You're saying that retaining the possibility for home computers to be full nodes is both necessary and desirable.

I understand that many people have made this claim over the years, but I am not aware of any attempts to actually prove either of those.

One of the problematic implicit assumptions I can identify in that claim is that if home users can't run nodes, the number of total nodes in the network would decrease.

Why would anyone assume that in a future Bitcoin economy that generated 100k tps of demand would not fewer business users running full nodes then than home users running full nodes today?

I though you meant one particular method of doing 100k tps was insecure, not the mere fact of achieving that rate.

Can you explain what about higher transaction rates inherently makes the blockchain less secure?

Yes, I can do math.

So 100k TPS means 2.25 TB / day of transaction data.

What's your point?

If you have trouble understanding how businesses survive the economic reality that competition in a free market reduces the profitability of all ventures over time, then maybe you can go ask them for yourself how they manage to deal with it?

There are millions of them in the world, so it shouldn't be too hard to find a few and talk with them.

Let us know how your investigation goes.