This is sophomoric beyond my wildest dreams.

Here's the basic pattern to this behavior --

1) Somebody makes an observation or argument;
2) Quick! Immediately loosely link whatever was said to a canned bush league piece of polemic vomit that you were looking to say all along no matter what was said!
3) Make sure to say presumptuous things about the mental faculties of the person you're responding to.

Very classy son, keep it up!

There is a world of difference between a private company doing business in a free market surviving by providing beneficial services to its customers versus the state-sponsored pyramid schemes being depicted in those graphs.

This whole line of argumentation regresses into the absurd ad infinitum.

There will never ever ever ever ever be something that somebody somewhere couldn't oppose as being centralized.

If I decide to open a small business repairing tractors, suddenly I am a centralized point of failure pyramid scheme monopolist because something happens in a centralized place, i.e. my shop. I order parts, hire other mechanics, etc. all without everyone else in the world being involved. God forbid, I'm a criminal destined to collapse at any moment and steal everybody's broken tractor assets!

This is the rational way to look at things. Decentralization isn't a religion. There are plenty of problems out there that we don't have decentralized solutions for, so there's no way around people wanting off-blockchain services at least for the time being.

It's all well and good for people to have opinions about shunning centralized actors, but one of the foundational cypherpunk ethics is show me the code. We don't have the software yet to do everything the most ideologically-pure way that would satisfy zealots, so they're just going to have to deal.

It's like the BTC-e trollbox has become a sentient being.

I think this kind of development is just indicative of the culture of political dysfunction in the United States. The Federal Government has obvious constitutional authority over this issue but refuses to act (because the Federal Government does not do a single thing ever for the past several decades that isn't dictated by its corporate patrons), and thus produces a chilling effect, by creating a vacuum in which 50 different prior restraint regimes have to run amuck. Now states have to reinvent something that the Federal Government was supposed to be in the first place by banding together on an ad hoc basis.

The concept of an open neutral system means that people are free to use it in ways that you don't like, and they're not stopping you from using it the way you like.

A great analogy is GNU/Linux. IBM can go ahead and contribute to it and load it on their own commercially-sold servers, but that doesn't stop a teenager in a third world country from learning about programming by loading Debian onto a Raspberry PI.

Even on a practical level, a while back when I explained Bitcoin to my mother, the very first thing she thought of was that she wished this existed back when me and my siblings were in college, because she could immediately send money to us whenever with no hassle.

People are not gullible simply because they are willing to accept higher levels of risk than you are. The tone of this overall conversation seems to suggest that there is some objective rationally-derived level of risk acceptance that acts as a cutoff for being a moron, and somehow whoever the poster is gets to be the arbiter of that cutoff.

This is very reminiscent of some very basic interpersonal cognitive bias, whereby in hindsight we tend to interpret bad outcomes for somebody else strictly to stupidity rather than bad luck.

Obviously this should be taken with a grain of salt because it's a generalization, but becoming a university professor is basically the fallback position for somebody who has academic qualifications but no discernible value transitioning into the real world. It's a self-selecting population of failures who simply succeeded keeping their nose clean and going along with whatever the groupthink flavor of the month is in academia.

A convenient way is go to

http://blockexplorer.com/q/probability

That webservices link returns the probability of any given hash being successful based on the current difficulty.

Your hashrate expressed as hashes/s multiplied by 86400 seconds in a day tells you how many tries you get to solve a block every day.

If we call those P and H, based on the expected value theorem your average BTC income per day (not counting tx fees or pool fees, which could be estimated in if desired) --

P * H * 86400 * 25

P * H * 86400 itself basically tells you what fraction of a block on average per day you would win

This can be the new anti-China. "Paypal STILL considering Bitcoin"!

A couple very pertinent suggestions for this poster's publication to attempt to rise out of bush league status --

1) Using first person out of nowhere in an opinion piece like this is the kind of thing that gets you mediocre to failing grades in a 101 college English composition class.

2) Opinion pieces require some amount of reasoning in order to in some way support these huge and embarrassing over-the-top generalizations. You don't have to re-invent the wheel and develop an entire theory of economics from scratch here, but statements like the follow with no substantiation simply make you sound dumb:




Basically these are valid topic sentences for a paragraph, but instead of using the remainder of the paragraph to elaborate and develop these ideas, you lose us in some kind of corn maze.

3) Anticipating the reaction of the reader without having actually made any claim yet makes you sound like you're passive-aggressively attempting to manage their thinking. That's a serious turnoff that makes people want to just stop reading. A great example is this paragraph, which basically accomplishes nothing but insult the reader's intelligence for no apparent reason:


None of these attributes are necessarily out of place for an informal sort of forum post or discussion, but since this information is being presented as a bona fide article linked to something that appears to be attempting to function as some kind of news site, you are desperately in need of some constructive criticism like this to just rise to the level of at least entry-level English composition standards.

It would be fascinating then if the centralized pools actually mined on top of p2pool themselves. P2pool could act as a sort of "granularity layer" dividing the block reward hundreds of ways. We would still have a mixture of centralized pools and maybe people mining on top of p2pool themselves directly, but the variance reduction incentive to join a large pool would decline dramatically.

Would p2pool have potential scalability issues if adopted on a scale much larger than now? For example, would the coinbase transaction be a problem with potentially tens of thousands of payout addresses? Also, if the solution to that issue is increasing p2pool share difficulty, isn't that just re-inventing something like solo mining in the long term?

I think there's merit to that opinion, in the sense that Ripple is not necessarily directly competing with what a Satoshi-style system is purporting to do, but it has a strong use-case in improving the legacy counterparty-laden interface between crypto and the status quo.

I think these kinds of ideas centering around having proof-of-work do some kind of useful work are horribly misguided and just a bad idea in general.

Two main reasons, one cryptographic and one economic --

1) Having a non-arbitrary proof-of-work undermines the security of the system by undermining the randomness of successful proofs.

2) Having a side-utility of proof-of-work outside of the functioning of the system itself introduces the risk of economic incentives that could interfere with the incentives internal to the system.

I think Ripple is at best a stepping stone toward a more crypto centric mainstream and not in any way an improvement on the satoshi concept. Ripple doesn't allow for use cases without counterparty risk unless you're strictly in XRP, and their distribution of XRP basically guarantees that will never happen. Ripple is attractive in the short term if you believe that regulators will succeed in not letting us have nice things, but otherwise I don't see any advantages over truly-decentralized solutions.

I think he really means the use case of Ripple as a platform for BTC trades, and not specifically XRP as an asset.

The percentages may be a several order of magnitude overestimation, but the underlying princple is extremely plausible.

Replace the word "liability" with "obligation" or whatever general English word you want to use, and the argument still holds up. Your rhetorical spasms here sound good dramatically but the entire point you're trying to make is a sloppy equivocation on the definition of money, then you're acting like it's outrageous that somebody else produces an argument that doesn't accept your at best controversial baked-in assumptions.