Address backup is in Roger's hands, so if anything happens to me, the funds won't be lost.

How come everyone around the areas where this is happening is just idly sitting by and allowing it to happen? Are they ok with it or something?

The benefit, in this case, is capitalism, and the drawback is lack of capitalism. More specifically, the benefit is someone being a capitalism, participating in the capitalist system, and making wealth for themselves. The drawback is someone not being a capitalist, not taking advantage of capitalism, and then getting in trouble when they didn't bother earning or saving. If you are climbing a cliff, it's not the cliff murdering you if you let go.

For later, then (P.S. I started writing this earlier in the day, had to get to some bitcoin related work, by the time I got back it was 1am, and I'm sleepy and not entirely lucid. So, apologies if I don't make too much sense here)


If you are the government, unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, or want to deliberately destroy bitcoin, then the answer is "not necessarily." If you gaining 51% puts your voter's money in jeopardy, and gets your politicians voted out, or worse, ruins the wealth of the senators already in power, it may be something that governments will avoid. Don't forget that people who run the place and make all the decisions are wealthy as hell, too. Also, as in the selfish miner countermeasure, if a government or some pool threatens to take over with a 51% attack, and is considered malicious, some pools can band together and create a "Bitcoin" fork that would split from the new "Govcoin." Though that will likely result in massive forking, chaos, and general collapse of the monetary system. And subsequent beheadings of government officials...
Personally, I think governments will lose the funding to support their monopoly on force before they realize what is happening...



All transactions get propagated through the entire network of bitcoin users, with miners eventually also hearing them. So if you suggest that a mining cartel can somehow keep transactions from being broadcast, and keep other competing miners from hearing about them and mining them too, you are mistaken.
What I was asking about was the attack where a 51% cartel mines blocks that include only the transactions they wish to include, or includes no transactions at all, effectively stopping all transactions and freezing bitcoin. The simple solution to this problem is just to modify all clients to only accept blocks that have the most amount of transactions included, which can, and likely will, be done way before that becomes a problem.



I mean, can miners screw with Bitcoin by implementing arbitrary rules, such as increasing the total number of bitcoins, or creating nonstandard transactions, and forcing everyone else to eat them. I think the answer is no, since their blocks simply would not propagate. Point is that it is the clients that largely control the blockchain, not the miners. So if there are fixes, such as to accept blocks with the most transactions, already implemented into the clients, then the 51% attacker won't be able to do all that much harm.


Greater good as in social programs. Or greater good as in seeing their bitcoin wealth slowly diminished, for the benefit of a government mining operation taking bitcoins to use for social programs or whatever.


Obviously there will be a battle between people's self interest as bitcoin owners, and government's self interest as an authoritative body. I think people are too apathetic to care now, but may not be as more and more responsibility is put on them by bitcoin itself.


The incentive that I think individuals will have will mostly be "mine" and "gimme." These are the incentives that drive file sharing, to the detriment of the ultra-authoritative RIAA, Silk road users (and drug users in general) to the detriment of the DEA, soon 3D printed gun makers to the detriment of the ATF, and likely sooner bitcoin users to the detriment of the IRS. The simple incentive with bitcoin is "My bitcoins woth more = good, my bitcoins worth less = bad." That incentive can lead to "group wave effect" (?) of believing 51% power over mining, and possibly eventually everything, as bad, since that will make individual's wealth decrease



Oh yes, not arguing that point. The major change between past and future is that a big mob of people used to be able to wield enough power to take the funds needed to support the benefits, and soon enough that will not be an option any more. Well, to a point. They can still take possession and control of physical property.

That's fine, but no one will believe you that it isn't just a magic trick. Come on dank, show us you can read the future like you claimed you could Or at least tell us what price bitcoin will be at by the end of the month.

Hey, speaking of computers and stuff, dank, serious suggestion: Your rhythm skills are really sucky and needs improvement, and what might help and motivate you to getting it perfect is you getting an account at www.ujam.com and using that to structure and improve your music. Don't know if you've heard of that service, but it can do some incredible things for music, even if all you start with is a basic melody.

So... VoluntoCapitalism? Or VolunterioCapitalism? 

Some RBE types consider a person starving, or dying from a disease they can't afford to treat, as "violence" or "murder" perpetrated by capitalism. Seriously.

Lucky would be winning once. Extremely lucky would be winning twice. Impossible would be winning three times, in a row. And it should be very simple for you. If you fly, other people won't fly too, they'll just start questioning how you did it (magicians in La Vegas "fly" all the time). If you win the lottery three times, no one will question your power.

Yeah, that's true, And if we stay on topic, more and more police will become ex-police, and thus join the rioters. So it will be more and more up to the private security, paid for by the entrenched wealth, to stop the rioters.


I think they are rioting because they think those who have money, and are refusing to give up to 100% of it away to support their social system, are somehow "stealing" from them, since how else does one make so much money? (obviously they don't know, otherwise they would have had it)

Well, then we are actually in agreement.


I will, but I must say, I know some stupid people with high IQ. They're not stupid because they are not intelligent, they are stupid because they are misinformed, or cling to incorrect assumptions on which all the rest of their claims are built on, and are so convinced in their intelligence that they have stopped accepting new theories long ago.

As the 160 IQ genius Dmitry once said, "I know some stupid people with high IQ. They're not stupid because they are not intelligent, they are stupid because they are misinformed, or cling to incorrect assumptions on which all the rest of their claims are built on, and are so convinced in their intelligence that they have stopped accepting new theories long ago."

Regardless of how authoritarian internal company structure is, if the company is not efficient, it goes out of business. If a government entity is not efficient, it gets tax subsidy. The state organization I work for used to be completely self-sufficient, surviving on loan repayments and insurance premiums (our department works in housing and mortgages). After the crash of 2008, we have become about 80% dependent on government tax-based subsidy, and only 20% self sufficient. That tells me that this department has made terrible decisions regarding whom to lend, and at what lending rates. If this were a private company, it would have been dead long ago. What's worse, since the rates we had were so low, it meant that all other mortgage banks in the state had to either give similar competitive rates, or lose all their business to us. In the end, I suspect the tax subsidized irresponsibility of this department has forced other banks to be just as irresponsible, and has hurt many other businesses in the process.
Yes, there are some government entities that are more efficient, but they are very rare, since if the entity is efficient enough to exist on its own, it doesn't need to be a part of government, and government only needs to establish regulations it needs to follow. And yes, I understand that some government entities can work more efficiently as a government monopoly than as competing free-market entities (power companies is an often used example), but that brings back the issue of transfering efficiency from elsewhere, and stifling innovation by hiding the true cost of what is being offered (e.g. monopoly electricity may be using up resources that are causing massive negative externalities elsewhere, and is stifling competition from wind, solar, and other alternatives)

Maybe they just don't know about Namecoin, just like they used to think that Bitcoin, if it starts doing bad things, can have it's CEOs subpoena'd and it's servers shut down.

Trust me, people will be WAY more bidazzled if you show that you can win three lotteries in a row. Plus, besides the money, you will have an absolute proof that your power is real, and that you are god. You don't even have to fly, since flying is easy to fake with wires and fake camera tricks, but winning the lottery, especially from different organizations, is almost impossible to fake.

Some assumptions we have to clarify:

• Is it in the best interest of a mining pool or conglomerate to have 51% of the hashing power? (Y/N)
• Are threats such as deliberately mining blocks with zero transactions a legitimate concern? (Y/N)
• Do miners have majority control over which blocks are considered valid? (Y/N)
• Are people in general altruistic, being ok with seeing their wealth diminish if it goes to "the greater good," if allowed to make that choice in private without coersion? (Y/N)
• Are people stupid apathetic sheep who don't care about what happens as long as it doesn't affect them directly?(Y/N)

I would suspect your answers are Y, Y, Y, and maybe Y and Y. If that is true, I would say you may be wrong on the first one (read my sig), definitely wrong on the second one, and mostly wrong on the third. Fourth and fifth are a tossup, and fifth may be a major issue, depending on how things pan out. Specifically whether a drastic decrease in social services will force people to start caring and being more responsible. Also, as is the point of my sig, just as P2P file sharing is forcing people to rethink intellectual property, threat of 51% attacks may force people to rethink democracy and majority control. If that happens, the first thing will become a big N, as will the idea of "democracy" and minarchy.

But, these are really assumptions that neither of us can answer concretely (except for the second one, which is trivially easy to fix), so...

That confirms my statement that police will fight for whoever pays their paycheck. It's just that in this example, their paycheck is being paid for by the tax paying rioters, who are pissed off at the broke, moneyless government.

Have you considered that the outcomes may be A) A dystopian future where bitcoin is led by cartels, B) An alt-coin is developed that resists cartel-style mining, or C) You may still be wrong in understanding how bitcoin works, and are missing a variable either in it's technology, or in the game theory it's designed on?

You sound like a "I said A or B, take it or leave it" kinda guy, and I have no idea why you seem to sure of yourself. (mostly I'm woondering why I haven't even heard of you until very recently)

Just need to jump in here a sec to say, if you think you are sane, and everyone else seems batshit insane to you, how can you be sure you are not the batshit insane one?  

*Pssst*... Not everyone here has a lower IQ than you do. Just saying.

Jabs aside, your post starts off with this:


There is a very subtle but extremely important question here that you may be missing, which I think deserves it's own post, and that is:
Does capital chase production and new knowledge creation? Or does production and new knowledge chase capital? Depending on how that question is answered may make the rest of your post completely irrelevant.

I missed this earlier. This is not true, because police forces, as well as private security forces, do not work for free, and will support whoever is paying their paychecks. In that scenario, it will be the people with the wealth, not the rioters who are rioting due to lack of it.

"Don't hash me, bro!"