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You could write a more substantive article by using categories: Programmers, entrepreneurs, investors, philosophical/ political/ activists, and behind the scenes or unsung guys. To stir the pot you could add most influential opponents.
Has anyone said Barry Silbert, Vitalik Buterin, and Daniel Larimer? The other names on this thread are European or American, what about Asia?
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I'm looking forward to exploring the South Island and to speaking on the panel The future of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technologies. I just caught this line on the website, Ps- we are throwing Andreas Antonopolous off the Bungy Bridge for a charity drive. The highest donator gets to physically push him off the edge! What's that about?  |
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Bitcoin core is just a wallet :p but I'am curious , who made the first bitcoin wallet ? Satoshi nakamoto too ? Oh yeah, I meant the protocol, not the wallet. |
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We're currently at Bitcoin Core 0.9 What will it take to get to 1.0?
Edit: Not the wallet, the protocol.
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The question isn't why anonymity so important to me, but why is intrusion into my personal life so important to you?
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Have you read the most recent blog post from Oleg Andreev, entitled "Bitcoin is not compatible with the State"? http://blog.oleganza.com/
Please excuse the huge amount of text I'm going to copy and paste, but I think it's worth reading. Bitcoin and State do not go together at all. Neither logically, nor economically.
Logically, if you think that the state is a useful and viable institution and Bitcoin is a useful and viable technology, you are lying to yourself. State is a hierarchical construction of “trusted third parties” (TTPs). In theory, some social interactions may involve a conflict that may be resolved by a trusted third party (arbiter). In a nation state it is ultimately some government agency (e.g. a cop). In case there’s a conflict between a citizen and a government agency, there is another government agency to watch over it. Thus, a cop is watched by his chief, a chief is watched by a court, court is watched by a parliament or a president, and those are being overthrown by an angry mob from time to time. The theory goes that every single conflict can be justly resolved by the state if parties cannot resolve it by themselves.
Bitcoin is an attempt to remove some trusted third parties from equation. That is all sorts of financial institutions including government regulators. From the Bitcoin perspective, it is a moral hazard to enable control over money supply and monetary flows to a hierarchy of trusted third parties. History is full of examples when private banks and government agencies could manipulate and destroy entire economies by being able to produce money without limits or censor its use. Bitcoin is strange and a bit complicated way to protect all users of money. Users can transact without need for any third party to record and acknowledge their transactions, and what’s more, no one can even become a third party by hijacking the system and imposing controls and rules on its usage. The former is not possible without the latter.
So if you support the idea of Bitcoin, you acknowledge the hazard of entrusting the entire economy to trusted third parties. You acknowledge that the ultimate power must be spread thin among every single participant and never be entrusted in hands of a few, even if it’s a democratically elected government. (Trusted third parties on top of decentralized foundation are fine as long as every person has equal access to that foundation and can jump off anytime.) But if you acknowledge the hazard of TTPs, then what arguments are left for any other government activity? Government is the ultimate trusted third party to resolve disputes in the entire economy. If there’s a conflict in a monetary system and we need Bitcoin to resolve it so no banker, judge or president could have personal interest in it, then the same applies to any other conflict. Every conflict could have someone’s personal interest in it to screw things up. The fact that we rely on the government to resolve it only shows that we couldn’t find a safer way yet. By supporting Bitcoin you give up all arguments for validity of the State.
If you, however, prefer the State, then supporting Bitcoin is illogical: why do you need such a complex and hard to understand (for non-hackers) system if every problem can be solved with trusted third parties? Look, Visa processes bazillion of transaction per day by just flipping the bits in their database. Bitcoin cannot do that, it is a consensus network that needs everyone to be aware of all transactions. Making instant payments requires extra complexity on top of that existing complexity. Also, there’s constant hazard of computer viruses and backdoors that steal your coins. If you believe that problems can be efficiently solved simply by electing trusted people, than Bitcoin is a huge overhead. So you should pick one: Bitcoin or State.
But most importantly, Bitcoin and State will never survive together for economical reasons.
State exists because it can. It can pay for its expenses, pay for those who enforce the laws, write the laws, brainwash children in schools and adults in evening news.
How does the state pay for its expenses? First, the government controls money supply. If needed, money is just being “borrowed” from the government’s puppet bank under promise to repay the debt (with interest!) from the extracted taxes (or by borrowing even more from the same place). When the state wants to go to war, enormous amount of money can’t be just extracted and is being printed. Extra money flows into markets, prices go up, business plans get messed up, people’s savings get destroyed and they lose their jobs at the same time. But we are at war, so folks are better to work harder “for the children” and maybe even join the army (you lost your job, after all).
Second, the state is paid by all those good businesses that must use banking system to operate. And the banking system is all heavily licensed and cooperative with the state. A lot of monetary flows are monitored by the tax collectors. Natural greed makes people avoid taxation just like all other costs, but taxes are avoided only in black market and by small businesses working with cash. Everyone who accepts cash hides some percentage from the taxman. If not for personal greed, but at least under competitive pressure by tax evaders (e.g. your café cannot survive if you don’t increase your profit margin by not paying 10% of the taxes like all your competitors do). If you business has to work with partners over the wire, you had to use banks and pay 100% of your taxes. With Bitcoin banks are not necessary. Bitcoin allows you to trade with anyone on the entire planet with near-zero costs. More businesses would bypass Banks and as a side effect, more businesses would be able to withhold their taxes from the state. Competition would force other businesses to drive their costs down the same way. Bitcoin will become a black hole that grows and attracts more and more people in it.
From the point of view of tax collectors, however, it’s the other way around. In Bitcoin world government cannot pay cops IOUs it makes up. It must pay real bitcoins that it must extract first from the businesses. But as more and more businesses avoid paying more and more taxes, there is less money being left for the government. That means that extraction will become increasingly less effective and therefore allowing even more people to avoid taxation on even larger scale. This cycle would repeat until all government employees will run away to seek real jobs because their bosses wouldn’t be able to pay them a single penny.
So if Bitcoin continues to grow, the nation state would peacefully dissolve. If state is to be preserved, Bitcoin must be stopped and never allowed again. However, the more people invest in Bitcoin, the more interest, wealth and power is on its side to protect it against any aggression. They didn’t invest in Bitcoin to try it out. They invested to make it ubiquitous and global phenomenon and they all will fight hard to make it happen. At some point we will witness a critical mass of supporters that no one will be able to stop. And then there will be no state anymore. |
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If you use a Mac you can't boot from an USB, you have to boot from a CD.
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I'm shocked at the comments on this thread. Do you all work for JP Morgan or FinCen? The reddit thread has a deeper, broader analysis: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2aycxs/hi_this_is_ben_lawsky_at_nydfs_here_are_the/Highlight: Proposed Regulations (TL;DR):
45 days for existing businesses to comply with the new regulations and register with the state.
Background check required for all employees/founders.
Fingerprints of the above submitted to FBI.
Requires a bond held with New York State.
Requires written approval of all new business activities/offerings.
Requires that you keep 10 years of records of business transactions.
Virtual currency accounts not active for 5 years must be handed over to the state.
Retained earnings and profits of the company can ONLY be invested in US dollars: Federal bonds, state bonds, or money market funds.
Mandatory reviews every 2 years: financial condition, safety/soundness of business, policies...
Quarterly financial statements required within 45 days of the closing of each quarter.
Financial statements must be audited, use GAAP.
Typical AML/KYC requirements.
Cybersecurity requirement: requires security officer, security plan, audits, backup plan.
In marketing/advertising, you must include "Licensed to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services."
Must disclose a long list of material risks with dealing with virtual currency: e.g., "not legal tender, backed by any government"
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I'm studying the "NotaryChains" project, described as "Creating a ledger of record for Bitcoin 2.0 applications, secured with the Bitcoin block chain". Opinions? White paper: https://github.com/NotaryChains/NotaryChainDocs/blob/master/whitepaper.md
Abstract: NotaryChains create a Protocol Stack for Bitcoin 2.0 applications. The NotaryChains allow Bitcoin 2.0 applications to define tokens and communications without having to reinvent a public ledger, wallets, etc. Efforts to use Bitcoin must face restrictions on data that can be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. NotaryChains allow Bitcoin 2.0 applications significant freedom in what data is managed. Bitcoin provides a "ledger of record" storing hashes for a NotaryChain server, that allow NotaryChain entries to be kept off the Bitcoin block chain, yet provably secure. These entries can be crafted to support a wide range of applications. Entries cannot be changed without breaking the hashes. Furthermore, entries can be chained to track changes over time. Each such "notary chain" can have its own rules and restrictions. This architecture allows for the easy construction of tokens or coins, securities, smart contracts, etc. NotaryChains allow the Bitcoin 2.0 applications to focus on their solution rather than reinvent the infrastructure to support the application. |
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If you never reuse addresses, and if you never create transactions with multiple inputs, and if you are careful about making change addresses difficult to distinguish from your spends, and if you take proper precautions at the network layer, then you're difficult to track. How do you make change addresses difficult to distinguish from your spends? What do you mean by precautions at the network layer? Tor? |
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I tweeted Andressen, "@pmarka If anonymity blacklist-proof features are built into the protocol or most wallets, will #libertarians go back to liking #Bitcoin?" His response, "@Ragnarly Maybe, but a lot of the same data mining techniques that work on email and IP addresses also work on the blockchain." https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/469880753229033472 |
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The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute? http://nakamotoinstitute.org/They're not quite a think tank but they have an extensive collection of cryptocurrency academic papers that are the foundation for rigorous thinking. |
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HighlightsIn summary, a service has launched that allows dishonest users attempt to defraud merchants, and now Mike Hearn is proposing as a solution that we change the Bitcoin protocol to allow a majority of miners to vote on the blockchain to confiscate the newly-minted coins of any other miner.
If this proposal sounds problematic to you, that's because it is. As several other individuals in the thread pointed out, this fundamentally changes the nature of the Bitcoin network and adds a mechanism via which other changes the Bitcoin users do not want (blacklists) can be secretly added at any time in the future. And Why are fundamental changes to the Bitcoin protocol, with wide-ranging implications relevant to all Bitcoin users, being discussed in relatively obscure corners of the Internet?
It may be the case that email lists are where programmers feel most comfortable "talking shop", but it also remains the case that Bitcoin doesn't belong to them.
Bitcoin belongs to everyone who uses it. No amount of code contributions will ever give some set of "core developers" the right to impose their decisions on the rest of the network. In fact, the degree to which they recognize that fact is the exact degree to which they will remain relevant to the future. Bitcoin users have a choice of software implementations these days, and implementations which attempt to rule the network instead of serve it will be dropped.
Individuals wishing to propose existential changes to the network should have that discussion in the public sphere, where the users are, so that those users have the best information possible regarding which implementations they should trust.
Core developers are not philosopher-kings who rule the network by imposing their judgement on the hoi polli, and they shouldn't act like it. (Note that this is not the first time Mike Hearn has floated proposals he knew Bitcoin users wouldn't like as trial balloons in relative obscurity). Once there is consensus among the community, or at least after they are aware of the proposal, then the development mailing list is an appropriate place to discuss how to implement it.
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non-technical but build-in/on-chain escrow
That would be cool, and I've read elsewhere it's perfectly possible. It would be cool, but how would it work? Any links to further info? No links, saw it in a shoutbox on other forum. Would still need real 3rd party middle-man to hold and release funds. Escrow transaction and details enter blockchain. Basically miners could place bids on escrow jobs, escrow amount they can handle proportional to their total hashrate and rating. Miners doing this escrow work get rated by buyers/sellers. Many jobs will not need miner to get involved, because the recipient of the items purchased for coin also have ability to release the coin. If buyer/seller disagree then the contracted miner gets involved; and then needs to work as current escrow agents do; talking with both sides, check proof of delivery etc. before releasing coin to seller. Basically coins can be "locked" into the blockchain, the buyer of the goods and a contracted miner both have the key to release the coins to the seller, after which the transaction is written properly into a new block and appears as a new transaction. I don't know the nitty gritty of what needs to be altered/added in bitcoin code. We have a "Trustless" escrow at https://anark.it based on the open source "Casascius Escrow" written by Mike Caldwell. Is this what you mean? |
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There's a glaring omission of a key category: Most effective in keeping Bitcoin unencumbered by the State.
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Dread Pirate Roberts, by the State.
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