1)  Knowing that the team behind it are not a pack of scammers.  Too many new cryptocurrencies are started by the same people who ripped off the investors in previous cryptocurrencies - and predictably they rip people off again.  Anonymous people who cannot be sued or prosecuted are not to be trusted in an environment rife with scammers.

2)  The team behind it being competent and having a good mix of skills.  A software developer by herself is not enough, unless the cryptocurrency is mostly a technical experiment (ie, not intended to become valuable); you also need someone who promotes its use as a currency (not as just a speculative vehicle) and operates a legitimate marketplace that accepts it as a currency, and someone who manages relations with a community of users probably via a website forum.  You might even need some poor sod who has to social-media, although I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

3)  It has to do something Bitcoin doesn't or can't do.  Otherwise people will just use Bitcoin.

4) If it's structured in such a way that the early miners have a disproportionate advantage (set up for minting more than half the coins that will ever exist in the first year, for example) it's probably unstable and will quickly collapse.  This is *ESPECIALLY* true if the development team sets things up so that after the first few months they've got their coins and some exchange accepts them - in that case they can just dump their coins; they have no further reason to stick around.

5) A coin should not be on an exchange unless the exchange would be losing profit by failing to trade in it.  An exchange makes it too easy to do a pump&dump.  If someone has to pay an exchange to put up a market in their coins, it can only be because their coins are not worth exchanging. 

Well, I'm pretty sure that miners (even with subsidized electricity) are selling over 90% of what they mine just to make expenses.  And it's not terribly unlikely that some are selling 100%. 

Make no mistake, mining is mostly about making spendable money.  And the way to make bitcoins spendable in the wider economy, is to trade them for fiat.

Eh.  The technology and coding is freely available.  What they're on about is him disrupting the financial system to some extent, and making holes that unsavory people were using for dealing contraband and laundering money.  

There are a fair number of jurisdictions where having a reasonable expectation that some serious criminal use of your invention would be likely, and going ahead anyway, can land you in jail.

Yes, that was how it worked in the initial versions of Bitcoin, and a lot of people still use "key" and "address" interchangeably - it's a habit that's hard to break.  

But a key is not an address, either.  

Starting with (I think) version 0.09 Bitcoin's standard client has been making all new txOuts have different keys.  Even when they get paid to the same address.  This is one of the reasons why Bitcoin now recognizes two different address formats; the new ones interact with some new algorithms to derive unique keys.  So payments sent to one of the new addresses, wind up having different keys.  No one looking at the block chain can tell they were paid to the same address, unless they know the private key for that address.  

This helps, but it doesn't give perfect privacy.  Snoops looking at the block chain  can usually identify txOuts that were held in the same wallet, as soon as they are spent.  This happens because when you make a payment from a wallet, it selects one, or some combination, of txOuts from all the addresses and keys it knows about, and snoops can identify wallets from watching which payments get combined.  

And even with this change to help preserve some privacy, someone can still send coins directly to one of the keys generated from the new-style addresses, resulting again in the possibility of multiple txOuts on the same key in the block chain.  

The UK though was handicapped going in.  It had just gotten burned worse than anybody else in the Eurozone by the mideast Asian banking crisis, before it had really gotten fully and completely recovered from Barents' bank getting Leesoned.  Plus there were Eurozone treaties intended to prevent countries from dragging each other down which had the unfortunate effect of preventing them from working together very easily as well.  I mean, yeah, it did completely suck on the ground, but the guys at Downing Street could have done a hell of a lot worse.  

And most of that money?  Didn't really exist in the first place.  The £45billion was less than the replacement value for a £65billion bezzle,  ie, the money that people were pretending was real in order to continue their scam.  It was distributed throughout the economy, in everybody's pockets, including the fatcats.   When they printed more money, the fatcats' holdings were devalued way more than the ordinary taxpayers'.  And now the £45billion that they printed is distributed through the economy, and they're coming back and making the fatcats pay back about £32billion of it.  So, yeah, you got ripped off, but you and the fatcats lost a very similar percentage of your wealth.  And as for your graph?  Smooth out that bump and you've got a net *increase* in property value over the last few years, so the bubble got popped but your economy didn't sink.  


Back to the uncontrolled six-to-eight year boom/bust cycle that characterized the "natural" state of the economy before economists figured out effective monetary policy, unless I miss my guess.  It was a lot rougher than the ride we've been having since WWII.  


Your faith in the wisdom of crowds is charming, but misplaced.  You can fleece sheep every year.

Why's that a problem?  People won't object, any more than they objected when MtGox did it.  Remember that, even today, more than half of Bitcoin owners don't remember MtGox.  They weren't here when it happened.  They already keep their coins in online wallets where they don't have the keys, make transactions with other people using the same online wallet which don't appear in the block chain, and never check the blockchain to see if their particular transaction went through. 

Banks just take it to the next level, where they can do the same thing between *ANY* two bank account holders, not just the ones that use the same bank.  People will never notice the difference.

Seems highly likely to me.  There is less risk to them of losing their coins to a hack or a crack or a botnet, if they let pros keep the keys secure.

Ding.  In most countries, the system worked.  The fatcats got immediate handouts to prevent systemic collapse, which pissed a bunch of people off since the fatcats were mostly responsible for the crisis in the first place.  But in almost all nations, including the US, the handouts stopped and the fatcats have mostly been required to repay them as loans.  And in about half of all nations, (the less corrupt nations), prosecutions are following on now that the economy is somewhat stable again.  So -- in most of the world -- the system worked.

I worry though, that one of the nations where the handouts have never ceased and never been paid back, and prosecutions did not follow recovery, is China.  I fear that it's heading for a big collapse, and it is among the biggest economic powers in the world.  If they don't smarten up pretty quick, they could bring the whole system crashing down again.

First: I wasn't calling for a change, I was just pointing out that the banksters will simply adapt.  Bitcoin can't break them, nor even lower the amount of profit they can rake off ordinary people.  

Technically, you can use cash for everything local that you can use a bank for.  But you wouldn't want to, because cash can be lost or stolen.  All Bitcoin can do is delocalize cash.  Aside from the local-only limitation, dealing in bitcoin has all the same disadvantages as dealing in cash, IE, it can be stolen or lost and if that happens there is not shit you can do about it.

Ordinary people have a choice between getting their keys stolen out of their phones, or the cloud, or their computers, by hacks and data leaks, or keeping the keys secure offline where they can't use their money, or paying banks to deal with the security.  If they actually want to use their money, paying banks to deal with security is the obvious choice.

And as for sucking the advantages out of things for the sake of profits, THAT IS WHAT BANKS ARE FOR. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't BE banks.  

With central banks and fiat currencies, yes. Bitcoin has no central bank that can issue more coins, so that particular problem isn't real. 

But all commercial or private banks would treat it exactly the same as they treat anything else; they'd have a fractional reserve ratio where they'd loan out (pieces of paper giving borrowers a right to claim) about three times as many coins as the banks actually have.  And then charge the borrowers interest, and we're right back to the debt model of money.

Aw, crap, you're exactly right.  I hit it when I made the topic, but then I went back to edit the topic (ironically, to add the moderation note) and didn't realize I needed to hit the button again.  So ...  Hmm, we've already got some nontechnical crap in this thread and I can't delete the post.  I guess I'm going to lock the thread so it doesn't contribute to the flaming that people can't seem to resist.  Besides, both of the people who've responded on-topic have pointed out the problem; miners would have an incentive to publish bogus blocks in order to force their competitors to waste time.  So, really, the discussion is over.  It floated as an idea, and it got a proper rebuttal. 



Yes, you're right about that.  I was talking about a new node type somewhere between full and lightweight.  It could verify the whole chain of blocks goes to the genesis block, and show that it has more PoW than a bogus chain could have.  And it could verify the tx in whatever bundles it happens to download (because it's getting a payment or verifying that one it sent got into the bundle).  But it wouldn't attempt to check the entire transaction record.

It would be a little less useless than the usual lightweight client, in having the ability to do "spot checking" of the transaction bundles, but not as good for security as a full node.


Miners put a merkle root - the hash of a tree root, where the leaves of the tree are unspent txOuts - into each block.  The merkle branch is sufficient information to traverse the tree to the txOut in question - demonstrating that the txOut is part of that data means demonstrating that it hasn't been spent yet.

Anyway, thanks to me forgetting to hit the self-moderate button, and then 2code doing exactly the thing I intended to moderate against, I'm going to lock this topic.  It was a bad idea anyway, as you've pointed out.

No.  Trust me on this, I work security.  People aside from a small minority never demand freedom.  They demand convenience.  They demand freedom if and only if not having it is inconvenient.

And banks are in the business of making it convenient for them to hold your money.

Sure, there's a need for banks.  Maybe I don't need banks if I use bitcoin instead.  But most people aren't computer security consultants who've written a hell of a lot of crypto code.

Homer Husband and Harriet Housewife do not have the ability to keep botnet hackers out of their windows boxes. 

Nor do they have the wisdom and tech savvy to keep the coins secure while using them. 

So they can hold them and have them stolen, or they can let the banks hold them. 

Letting the banks hold them has a bunch of advantages.  Use the charge card anywhere, use any ATM, not worry about theft because the banks are insured, and so on.  Even if they get zero interest, they'd still rather let the banks worry about keeping the keys safe.

And the banks are completely ready to loan out more than they've got.

There is no currency that banks hate.  Not if they can make money on it.

Once the regulatory and tax and volatility issues are settled out or predictable, they'll cheerfully accept bitcoin, or even denominate accounts in bitcoin.  Of course the depositor won't have the keys to those accounts.

They'll even offer interest, provided it's slightly less than they can make by loaning those bitcoins out.  And they'll loan it out by handing people (slips of paper that say they own) a particular amount of bitcoin.  Which allows them to loan out more to debtors than they actually have from depositors.

In short they'll just treat it as one more currency.  One that has its own slightly peculiar inter-bank settling channel.  

Ow.  Yes, that is true.  And miners would have an incentive to make their competitors waste time mining on bogus blocks.

So.  No improvement for the miners, at all. 

Not quite correct but close.

A txOut is not an address.  "Normal" transactions create one txOut per address, but if the same address gets a lot of different payments from different transactions, then there can be 30 BTC at that address all split up among hundreds of different txOuts.  This is discouraged, by the way; it's bad for everyone's privacy and considered rude.

But it used to be very common.  Change from a transaction would often go back to the same address/key that an input for the transaction came from, and certain online casinos would take a single address for a player and send all winnings there.  Modern clients don't do this by default, but they can still be commanded to send coins to an old address.  And for a long time some asshat was going up and down the block chain sending one-satoshi outputs to random old addresses, for reasons I'd rather not go into right now.

So let's say someone did a lot of *successful* online gambling way back in the way back when all the bitcoin casinos were paying all winnings to the same account for a particular winner.  She's got that 30 BTC split up among hundreds of different txOuts.

Then when she spends 10 BTC (getting a new gaming computer maybe) her client is going to look at all the available unspent txOuts and assemble a transaction using, maybe, 50 to 90 of them.   She'll go slightly over the target amount and get change returned to her in another txOut and for any current software, the change will be at a different key/address.  But the unspent txOuts will still be sitting there at the original address. 

NOTE: Moderated topic.  Inflammatory or inflamed posts arguing for or against block size increases, or being butthurt about the action/inaction taken on that issue, or insulting any on the basis of taking either side of that debate, or alleging or accusing about conspiracies on that topic, or trolling or baiting people who might go nonlinear about the topic, will be deleted.  This is to be a purely TECHNICAL discussion, not political.  Capisce?

It would be relatively easy to make the blocks contain hashes of off-chain bundles that record additional transactions.  These bundles could then be whatever size, or they could be one-megabyte and there could be dozens or hundreds as needed.

Nodes getting just the blocks could then easily verify that a block chain has grown from the genesis block and see how much proof-of-work it contains, allowing them to pick valid longest-chains without tracking the bulk of transactions.

Spending a txOut would require transmitting both the merkle branch of the txOut in the current txOut set (to show that it hasn't been spent) and the bundle containing the tx record where that txOut originates (so that the client can check the old transaction).  The receiving client could then check the validity of the txOut.  

And, poof.  You create another level of "lightweight client" that checks the block chain itself but doesn't check individual transactions except for those transactions that directly affect it.  And the block size no longer limits the transaction rate.

So it would scale better, or at least it wouldn't fail with a hard limit when transaction rates increase.  

But would it scale better *enough*?  Regardless of how it's done, lifting the tx rate limit means increasing the bandwidth/storage limit for anybody who's downloading and checking the full transaction record - by the same amount as
if you had increased the block size limit itself.  Because, ultimately, they are the same limit.

One advantage to miners over just increasing the block size: you'd only need to download the block itself to get the ability to form a new valid block, so you still get the propagation times etc of one-megabyte maximum-size blocks.  You aren't particularly penalized for bandwidth, provided you can use your bandwidth FIRST to get the block and THEN start downloading the bundle.  

The disadvantage is that miners who haven't yet finished downloading the transaction bundle would risk orphan blocks if they include any transactions that were available before the previous bundle because they wouldn't know yet whether those tx were in the bundle.  So if a tx didn't make it into the very first block it could have been in, it might be a long-ish time before anybody would risk including it in a new block.  

And who, exactly, is paying you for cam girls?   

Honestly, the only reason I started this thread was because they were getting too close to figuring out who I am in real life.

If I can get people to keep them distracted with bogus claims, I'll have a little more maneuvering room, right?  

It's sort of a mind-game opSec, so I can eventually spend my million Bitcoins.  But only if other people claim to be me, too.  Right?  And don't worry; I'll never provide the kind of proof to show that you were lying.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Spartacus was Satoshi Nakamoto.

I am Spartacus!