A frozen address with time-activated release would be far more secure than an offline address.

The requirement to 'keep a private key secret' makes security depend on humans, and humans are fallible.  Best to outsource security to the protocol as much as possible.

I can see lots of real world scenarios where a time-locked address would be useful and an offline address isn't good enough:

(1) A large 'bank' or exchange that has billions of dollars worth of bitcoin in cold storage. Even if the bank assigns multiple signatories to spend those bitcoins, they could be kidnapped and forced to disclose the private key.
(2) A famous rich person who is publicly known to own a lot of bitcoins.  Again, the frozen wallet would discourage kidnappers.
(3) A problem gambler who wants to keep his retirement fund safe from himself.
(4) A single parent who has terminal cancer and greedy relatives, and who wants to leave his bitcoins to his 13-year old child.
(5) A bitcoin enthusiast who lives under a tyrannical regime and fears that the authorities might imprison and torture him in order to obtain his bitcoins.

As bitcoin gains in value and maturity, these kinds of examples are going to gain relevance.

Why should people return to silver and gold when there is a far superior alternative?

Psychologically, this is an important milestone. It marks the end of the 2011 bubble and the beginning of a new chapter in the history of Bitcoin.

The only difference between quantum cryptography and classical cryptography is that quantum cryptography is (allegedly) provably unbreakable and classical cryptography just hard to break.

However, quantum cryptography doesn't solve the fundamental problems discussed in the OP: Knowing who to trust and hiding your private keys.

I think that 'Post-Crypto' in the context of this talk doesn't mean abolishing crypto entirely, but rather to stop relying on crypto for certain tasks.

Private keys are only effective if they are stored in private places, but on the internet nothing is truly private because every system has holes and leaks.  Crypto alone can't be used to create the private places that it relies on, so we need something else, like Trusted Computing, to do that job.  I think that's the gist of it.

Even better:

CoVar(txfee*priority)

Priority is already used by the protocol. It's defined as:

priority = sum(input_value_in_base_units * input_age)/size_in_bytes


Giving a higher priority transaction a bigger weight makes sense intuitively, since we already use priority as a criterion for excluding certain transactions.

Strength in Numbers

OK, auf meiner Trust-Liste steht jetzt, dass molecular mir 0.01 BTC schuldet, und dass ich 0.01 BTC an yossarian schulde. Mein Kontostand ist also wieder Null.

Was geschieht jetzt, wenn yossarian meinen Schuldschein weiterverkauft?  Findet der irgendwann den Weg zu molecular zurück? Verschwinden dann die roten und grünen Barren auf meiner Liste oder muss ich die Schulden irgendwann manuell eintreiben/zurückbezahlen?

Meine Ripple-Adresse lautet:
rG8VFQPaJB2gNjx29Et1wKUJettQP1eLmk

Bin auch am Herumspielen. Ich habe schon 0.01 blockchainBTC gegen 0.01 rippleBTC getauscht, via Benutzer: molecular.  Wenn du Lust hast, können wir den Gegentausch versuchen und sehen was passiert.  Bin gespannt ob es funktioniert selbst wenn du nicht mit molecular verbunden bist.

Satoshi's opinion would help the community to decide, not because he is more competent than the current core developers, not because he is an authority figure but because it would reassure investor confidence.

People invested in bitcoin because they expected bitcoin to behave in a certain way in future.  In some cases, this expectation was based on the assumption that there is an implicit contract or consensus that the protocol is set in stone (a flawed assumption perhaps).   In other cases, this expectation was based on Satoshi's word.

Satoshi's opinion matters simply because many investors/stakeholders think it matters.

 

To me, it looks like it is both a commercial and community project.  Is that a paradox? Not necessarily.

It looks like the pre-mined pre-issued XRP are a way for the developers/founders to monetize their work.  That's fair enough in my opinion, even though they overdid it by keeping such a large share.

I too would have preferred a "pure" community project, but the commercial element won't stop me from using Ripple.

I'm happy that someone is working hard at making this idea happen.  At least the XRP pre-issuing is giving the developers a motivation to keep working at it.  I prefer an imperfect Ripple that actually happens in the real world than a perfect, idealistic Ripple that languishes as an idea on a mailing list for 10 years. 

All this discussion about the XRP price is petty.  Speculators are gonna speculate.  There isn't much anyone can do about that in a free market, not even the Ripple founders.  Who cares if there is hoarding of XRP? Who cares if there are XRP bubbles?

It terms of Ripple functionality, none of that matters. Neither does it matter that a single entity holds 80% of XRP.  That does not make them a "central bank".  Even if OpenCoin held 99% of XRP, once Ripple transitions to a community project, this will not allow them to "buy" consensus or to block certain transactions.  Maybe they can manipulate or crash the XRP market. Who cares? That will only affect people who transact in XRP, not those who transact in other currencies.  And the ability to transact in arbitrary currencies is the main selling point of Ripple. The XRP are just an auxiliary tool.
 

The problem I see with trusting too many people is that ripple money will seek the "path of least resistance".

If you grant trust to hundreds of people, all it takes is for one of those accounts to be hacked,  and some anonymous hacker ends up owing money to you instead of the person you trust.

These might be concerns for the future, but right now, we need to start somewhere. In order use/test the full functionality of Ripple I need a minimal web of trust. I don't mind losing a few bitcents just for the entertainment and educational value.

The reason I am only granting BTC is that they are easy to collect both in meatspace and outside.

Ok. So far, I've granted trust to:

bbit
Severian
Peter Lambert
lebing
Belkaar
Melbustus
gweedo
phelix
kokojie
Mageant
herzmeister
ribuck
AlexNeto
molecular
grondilu


I granted tiny BTC amounts for testing purposes.  I'll keep it tiny until I figure out how exactly Ripple works.

I'd be very grateful if some of you reciprocated, so that I can play around with finding paths etc.

Me: rG8VFQPaJB2gNjx29Et1wKUJettQP1eLmk

Received ripple BTC and sent blockchain BTC!

molecular: will you send me 0.01 Ripple BTC if I send you 0.01 Block Chain BTC?

I am:

rG8VFQPaJB2gNjx29Et1wKUJettQP1eLmk

Here's mine:

rG8VFQPaJB2gNjx29Et1wKUJettQP1eLmk


[edit]: Trusted molecular for 0.1 BTC

Nobody ever got rich through hard work alone.  Making money is all about controlling capital. Money is poorly correlated with work.  Why does a quantitative analyst earn 10 times the salary of a physics professor, even when they have similar skills, and even when a physics professor's job is 10 times more intellectually demanding? It's because the quantitative analyst controls a huge amount of capital and the physics professor almost none.  

It has always been like this, but this generation is more aware of it. If you have a friend who makes easy money in finance, real estate, or whatever the next bubble is going to be, then you are going to think, why should I bother working my ass off as a teacher so that I can save $200 a month?  I want to have a good life too. Fuck the future.

The fact that savers are being punished by governments and debtors rewarded aggravates the situation even more.

  

Then use a VPN instead of Tor.  In the age of data retention, not using a VPN for all your internet activity is like handing over your privacy on a plate.  They are not that expensive anymore and they are easy to use. There is no excuse not to!

Blockchain.info only shows which IP address relayed the transaction. This is not proof that the transaction originated from that IP address.

I suggest you hook up your full node to Tor. That way you will relay random transactions from the inside the Tor network, in addition to your own transactions. This will give you plausible deniability, because it will be impossible for an external observer to distinguish your transactions from random Tor users'.  

We should be very careful about the hard fork, but we shouldn't be paralyzed by fear either.

One could equally argue that NOT upgrading is playing with peoples' lives.  Nobody knows what's going to happen.

I am still undecided on this issue, but I doubt that a conservative hard fork will trigger panic selling. Eg. increasing the limit from 1 MiB to 10 MiB, as sugessted by Peter Wuille, will bring benefits of a higher transaction rate while still allowing normal users to run a full node.  Investors understand this.  

The switch doesn't need to be catastrophic. It can be announced 6 months in advance and it can be done in a way that it only happens once 99% of users have upgraded to the new client already.

As for people putting their life savings into bitcoin, well, they have been repeatedly warned against this by Gavin and other community members, and you can't really blame the developers if people invest money that they can't afford to lose.