"Too old" is a subjective measure and will be disagreed upon. Not everyone is going to see everything at the same time. And disqualifying "too old" means you are accepting a permanent fork if there has been a network split for more than the "too old" amount of time.

A hell of a mess that has a dead simple solution - longest chain wins.

Is it the best solution? It certainly is an inelegant one, but it does fix the problem. I have suggested using a bitcoin days destroyed mechanic in addition to longest chain wins under attack-like scenarios, which doesn't even require a soft fork and would only be an incompatibility issue if the problem occurs, but people around here aren't too interested in straying from the satoshicode.

It could but it doesn't because "there can be only one". While this could be an attack of hashpower, it could also be an attack (or mishap) on the internet infrastructure that has caused a separation of mining powers for some time. When they rejoin, your solution would cause a fork that would have to be resolved by the users instead of by a computer.

These steps aren't necessary. You could prune everything down into one block with just txouts and use that as the genesis block itself. Sort of starting with a clean slate but with coins being currently where they are. No bitcoin client is going to accept this fork, so you may as well put some effort into making LNC less of a hassle.

Seems like it falls under the obvious category to me, the question is always whether or not services are willing to release this kind of information, especially when you take into account that not everyone has to believe that bitcoin's anonymity only applies to non-business entities. It isn't a slam dunk to say "if businesses reveal private data we will know if they're cheating!"

edit: I'm of the opinion that they should, while of course keeping account information private yet verifiable by the account holder. And I think the OP's assessment is correct in that businesses that go this route will find people seeing them more favorably than those that don't.

As gmax alluded to, this is all irrelevant. The nonce itself is part of the block. If the block's hash does not fall under the target difficulty, a new hash (read: block) is created by changing the nonce. I think the OPs question is more "given a set of transactions and a single timestamp, is it possible that all 64-bit nonce values could be exhausted without finding a hash that beats the difficulty?" and the answer has to be yes, or the hashing algorithm is suspect. But the odds of this are definitely related to the difficulty, somebody better with math than me would have to work that out.

Well said. Check out the link in my sig; you might find something more to your liking.

But if you are trying to lock coins during inflation, there probably shouldn't be free coins being given out. I suppose if you could determine, somehow, that there are too many coins and then later reward those who locked money. But this seems convoluted to me. Like I said, stop worrying about a little bit of inflation. If there is more than a little bit, there is something wrong and locking coins isn't going to fix it.

As others have mentioned, if this technology is available to you, it is available to someone else. They may start mining for the first time and lower your profitability by increasing the difficulty. The only time you could reach a steady-state is if everyone in the world were mining.


 

Would this not be the best case under any scenario where crony capitalism or whatever term you want to give to the us government+MIC+financial sector loses a lot of its power? Electricity is only one part of bitcoin mining. Energy use encompasses every stage. Bitcoin is not more efficient with renewable energy if billions of tons of earth are being dug up to find silicon for circuit boards to produce devices designed to mine bitcoin in a more electrically efficient manner in an ongoing effort to compete for more of a fixed piece of pie.

Whether it does or not, you have not come up with a way to incentivize it, and thus no one (rational) will do it.


It's all good, I prefer discussing this stuff in threads rather than the numerous questions I get over PMs because then I don't have to repeat myself!

In the other StableCoin thread - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178140.msg1890016#msg1890016 - Although I did paste it in this thread as well, there is more context there

Relevant part is at the end:

"In addition to all of this, we must eschew mordorcoin and give money away for free. Now we know for damn sure that new money is needed with the difficulties associated with minting. The written decrits proposal proposes giving away 5x of this block of coins to transactions and 5x to existing accounts, both randomly (blocks of accounts will be stored together, and this will be the starting point for awarding free money to them because awarding every account is infeasible in a network of any reasonable size). This area can be nitpicked, but I have come up with some very solid solutions.

In addition to that, because network expansion could easily outpace the time constraints set on Mint Blocks, each successive Mint Block within a defined period will increase the tx/account award further. The second block in a row will award 6x to each. The third will award 7x. This may max out at 10 each, or maybe it could go on continuously (perhaps after 20x the difficulty could start increasing say 3% per block; with so much new money in circulation [especially to transactors], if this causes mild deflation it would likely not have any problems being counteracted). So even in the worst case scenario of everyone instantly switching to ASICs and intentionally not raising the difficulty, designing and producing those ASICs will never be profitable. Plus the inflation has to catch up and raise the average amount of transactions over an extended period, or the ASICs will simply run into a wall where they can not mint for extended periods."


Now I will be repeating myself, but that proposal is over 9 months old and it isn't fair to go back and change it all to fit my current ideas because the discussion will look weird. But it covers the major points well enough. I have 40-50 written pages of tweaks and ways to make it work better as well as multiple ideas on how each facet could work. Things that I would like to eventually flesh out publicly to reduce the chance that I missed something. I think one more proposal will be in the works and then it's time to finally start writing code, and hope some more will join up.

So the gist is:

1) People in the financial industry should never work again
2) People voluntarily choosing to waste energy is more efficient than not voluntarily wasting energy
3) Energy is centralized because of the financial system (I've always wanted 3 separate power lines from 3 companies running to my house...)
4) % of GDP = % of energy used

you forgot

5) The financial system also is the cause of cancer and many other incurable diseases

I would like to point out that my proposal for a stable value currency (Decrits - see sig) solves this problem by separating the security of the network from currency creation. Detailed more in the thread, part of my goals was to eliminate the "hardware tax" where people are forced to ever upgrade hardware used only for mining -- aka a complete waste of resources in the grand scheme of things. The quick and dirty idea for why getting rid of the hardware tax is a necessary idea for a free and stable currency: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178140.msg1891309#msg1891309

If anyone still thinks that *anything* based off of bitcoin is worthwhile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181759.0

Perhaps proposals that do not require proof of work at all for network security merit further discussion.

Optimizing isn't free (neither are solar panels). And any time the actual costs of running these systems to secure bitcoin goes down, more people will buy in as there is an "investment opportunity!" which will in turn reduce the profit for those who haven't optimized, forcing them to upgrade, repeat ad nauseum.

To what real end? Something I've learned over going through the process of doing the whole stable currency idea is that you can't brute force the price to some acceptable spot, you've got to let it run free a little. Your view here is colored by bitcoin's heavy one-sidedness that comes along with its currency distribution scheme, and I think your fears would have very little place in a currency where the supply of new money was not so heavily restricted.

If hoarders hold back in an attempt to increase the price, minters create new currency for a profit and bring the price back in line. Hoarders are no better or worse off, though the value in the economy has arguably increased (hoarders chose not to revert back to fiat). Any rash of selling below the cost to produce coins is a lot less likely, because everyone has an idea what currency can be created for. It's a braking mechanism. Bitcoin's cost to produce tends to move with the price of bitcoins; a stable currency's cost to produce should try remain as stable as possible. So while bitcoin can lose or gain hundreds of % in a day and market movers can take advantage of fear, anyone manipulating a stable base cannot take advantage of that fear.

PS - An interesting side effect of the Decrits proposal, where people purchase 1 year shares for a meaningful amount of currency and receive a portion of transaction fees as payment for helping to secure the network, during periods where there is mild inflation due to whatever reason, buying shares for a small but guaranteed return will temporarily lock money. Periods where price inflation is experienced are even more beneficial times to purchase shares because the tx fee is a percentage of each transaction. Thus, inflation = more fees. It encourages temporarily removing money from the economy, and this locked money is an easily verifiable thing and part of normal network activity.

Don't forget that decreasing the number of blocks between difficulty changes would also make it easier to upset the difficulty repeatedly and on purpose. Simple fixes tend to have unintended consequences.

Lamport signatures are known for being QC-resistant, but they are also one-time use. There is a way to combine them with a merkle tree to get more uses out of them, but it increases both the public key size and the signature size, I believe--but perhaps just one or the other, I don't remember. NTRUsign is a QC-resistant DSA that is far more data friendly than any other, but it also has a very limited lifespan in the number of times a public key can be used to sign something before the private key can be discovered. Not as big of an issue for bitcoin, but keys and signatures are still quite a bit larger than ECDSA.

The solution to fix accidentally spending on both forks is pretty simple: use an incompatible address in LNC. Existing txouts will be acceptable as inputs, but new outputs can only be sent to LNC addresses.

Keep in mind anyone holding money for someone else (mtgox) is now wholly entitled to that money on your chain.

If you want your currency to go anywhere, you're going to need more than the few dozen gesellians. You can have your utopian view of how you can distribute the currency, I won't argue that. What I will point out, again, is that you are not advertising this feature to everybody. And you seemed to have compromised your ideals in an effort to get the currency out sooner, for whatever silly reason.