Yeah, you like keeping the argument going, don't you?  You'd be one of the reasons then. 

I'm a pessimist.  That's why I didn't get in *way* early.  Sometimes my pessimism is misplaced. 

But sometimes it's not. 

Incidentally, I think you're mistaking a mirror for a window.

Y'know what?  I'm up.  A lot.  And there's no way it was the wrong move, if the alternative is placing my faith in a community that is STILL not able to resolve this stupid argument.

Okay, it went up further.  But, a year later, Y'all still haven't got your damn act together, major players (like Microsoft, which once accepted Bitcoin) are now adopting alts (like Factom) for real business, and I don't know when you're going to implode.  

They wouldn't have switched to an alt unless they, like me, had a look into the dysfunctional community and said "there's no way this can succeed."

Is censorship a serious problem?  'Cos I don't give a damn about the sides in the debate, and I could put up a fair forum to discuss cryptocurrency.  I would cheerfully do so if people make it worth my time and recoup my bandwidth expense by contributing half the revenue from any signature ads (which might have the additional benefit of reducing the incentive to place signature ads).

I would cheerfully delete posts that bring up topics strictly forbidden on given forum sections, but every topic specifically forbidden in a given section would be specifically allowed in some other section.  Also, in the interest of NOT allowing monitoring of who's reading which threads, I would insist that all signature ads be the same size (in packets and pixels, not necessarily in bytes) and served from the same machine (over https).

Bluntly, I am no longer a partisan.  I used to care about the block size debate, but I don't care any more.  I care (a little) about banal rudeness and (a lot) about any issues that impair the forum's usability, but any rules about such things would be the exactly the same for everyone regardless of what position they take in any debate.

Bitcoin gambling sites are entirely functional as (probabilistic) mixers, if you trust the gambling sites.

Wanna mix 10BTC? Just make a hundred 0.1BTC bets at even odds.  50 of them pay out double (minus the house cut) and 50 disappear.  So you get your 10BTC back, minus the house cut, and the house cut in that case is just a mixing fee.

But that's not really what coinjoin is supposed to accomplish.

Buying and selling bitcoin is in fact "trading a marketable asset for profit" - which means a dealer who does this a lot does in fact come under KYC laws, mandatory reporting statutes, and, yes, taxes.

If the police know that you buy and sell an average of a dozen bitcoins daily, and you haven't been jumping through all those hoops, then yes they can arrest you and yes, if they can seize your wallet they will.

They probably won't bother arresting you though, unless they're pretty sure they can get the keys to your wallet.  Not worth their time if they can't get the forfeiture money. 

Laws?  What, you thought they were there to enforce laws?  Well, sort of.  But they are certainly more motivated to do so when it's profitable.

Indeed.  So can banking.

Well, as I said, 10K bitcoins will forever be known (at least so long as Laszlo is remembered) as a pizza. 

Banks will implement their own block chain to keep track of accounting
   a) in fiat currency
   b) in allowing transactions vital to their business model which Bitcoin does not allow.

They may also deal Bitcoin as a commodity with its own rules, but it simply isn't compatible with their primary accounting goals, so they'll ignore it for those purposes.

Look at it this way.

If dumb people lose their money when dealing in Bitcoin, then most people won't be able to use Bitcoin.  Because most people, even people who aren't dumb as a rule, are dumb at least twice a month. 

If most people can't use it, then by definition it never reaches mainstream adoption.

It's a valid problem.  The solution however, is far from obvious. 

Somebody who paid 10K bitcoins for a pizza might have second thoughts about it these days.

Hal Finney was worried about potential denial of service, and for that reason he and Satoshi eliminated several opcodes on the grounds that they could create programs that would take infinite time to run.

Bitcoin now also protects itself by putting an absolute limit on number of instructions executed, meaning there would be very limited risk in re-introducing those opcodes.  But the limitation on tx complexity would still exist, even with a Turing complete scripting language, because of the hard limit on number of instructions to be executed.

Ethereum has a different system, where the transaction has 'gas' that determines how many instructions to execute. This allows people to put arbitrarily complex programs on the Ethereum chain provided they pay for enough gas to actually run them.  But yeah, you could read that anywhere.

In order for a miner to "pick" the last digit of the hash, they'd have to pass up a block subsidy plus a block's worth of transaction fees should the last digit of a qualifying hash (one that's low enough for the current difficulty) fail to match.

Passing up a chance to get a block subsidy is a pretty big deal.  Block subsidies are 25BTC at present, as someone said.  Soon though it will drop to 12.5BTC and miners may start withholding blocks if it looks like they could make more with the betting.

You can institute any conversion rate you want. 

That said, proof of burn is stupid.  It ensures that people coming to your side chain lose an amount of value proportional to their issue of sidechain coins, but that value is lost - ie, it doesn't support the value of your sidechain coin at all, because you can't redeem it.  People aren't "buying" the sidechain coins because the sidechain is gaining no value whatsoever from their sacrifice.  If your sidechain crashes or ends or peters out, it's worth exactly the same as any altcoin that crashes or ends or peters out.  IOW, with proof of burn only, it is just another altcoin, not a sidechain. 

Now, if Bitcoin implements a way to show proof of burn in that other block chain and awarding bitcoins that have been "burnt" to your alternate block chain, then you have an actual factual side chain as opposed to an altcoin.  But for it to be a side chain, coins have to be redeemable in both directions.  And it's value will be absolutely pegged to the value of Bitcoin, less transaction fees for converting. 

I am a cryptography expert, and I AM 100% sure.

If the hash does what it's supposed to do, then having a privKey that hashes to a particular value will give you absolutely no advantage in finding another key that hashes to that value. 

That said, there are hashes like MD5, which don't do what they're supposed to do anymore because somebody figured out a way to attack it that gives hash collisions on demand.  Ripemd160 could eventually become such a hash if somebody figures out a good way to attack it.

The odds are against it though. 

Short answer: 

No. 

Nobody wants the kind of chaos that would result from using the same names to refer to different denominations before and after some date. 

The floor's open for new names for other units though. 

Like, instead of a kilobitcoin, you could call it a "slice", or instead of 10K bitcoins you could call it a "pizza." 

I guess you could come up with names for smaller units too, but nothing has happened yet to give names for the smaller units much meaning.

Bitcoin can never be more than niche, due to its scaling issues.  Transaction fees will escalate to make it impractical for all transactions less valuable than, say, a week's pay for a professional in a first-world country.

Bankers may use it as a settlement channel, or lend (pieces of paper redeemable for) it at fractional reserve.  But there is absolutely NO way that bankers will not figure out how to profit from it.

FTFY.

You write as though you are under the impression that more than 10% of Antpool's hash rate isn't owned by a single business.

What one miner decides is what 90+% of Antpool's mining power will do.  And I'd bet on 90% of the stuff he DOESN'T own just sucking along for the ride.

It isn't that I don't like what Bitcoin's socioeconomic majority decides.

What I don't like is that they are refusing to even attempt to decide.

If people aren't even willing to work together, this will fail.

Yeah.... that.