Oh this idea has been proposed in the past. It is not a good one though because tying coin reward directly with difficulty means that as computing hardware gets better, people make more coins. It is a very big disincentive to use the currency when inflation is a factor of computing power. That is why with the Encoin and Decrits proposals I've made, mining is separate from network security and is based around a per-user approach rather than the lottery approach of bitcoin.


This is also addressed with Decrits. Early mining is rewarded in several multiples of the regular award, reducing over time until it reaches the regular award. Early adopters are still well rewarded, but they will not be able to purchase a mercedes from a couple dollars of electricity.


I think he stated it somewhat clearly:


This is a significant detriment to business and trade.

But the difficulty of SHA3 surely won't be the same as SHA2, so the target can't be the same. If SHA3 is more difficult, no one will use it, if SHA3 is less difficult, everyone will use it. Adding a separate target for each algorithm will add a whole bunch of headaches.

I, for some reason, am doubting the veracity of this claim.

I'm not here to educate you on what you could spend 3 seconds on wikipedia learning about. Your post was a complete mishmash of misguidance, but "opinion" comes more in to play on the other issues to which I replied in more detail. If you can't grasp the basic concepts, why on earth should anyone listen to anything that you have to say?

You have equated it with trickle-up economics. You are retarded and should have your posting privileges removed.

LOL. You apparently lack any understanding of the broken window "fallacy" at all.


The wage stagnation of the middle and lower classes has nothing at all to do with this, of course, and the fact that most can only afford to buy that which they helped produce on credit because credit is more readily available than wages. This is obviously the way it should be and it makes for a thriving economy. See: economy.


Obviously, in principle, it does not because of how much influence extra "trickle-down" money can have over politicians, and this sway is almost unilaterally used to benefit those who have the money to influence, not the general population. The "flaming-money-pits of government coffers" is simply a step removed from the private sector as all government spending does reach the private sector, and it in effect redistributes the wealth more evenly across the population. It certainly is not the greatest way to do it, but it is the only countermeasure to the private control of money.

I was the IT guy, I had no clue whatsoever that it was going on. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Anecdote: A small health center I used to work for got raided by the FBI (I think, this was many years ago and it was after I quit, might have been another three letter) for medicare fraud. They were committing a lot of fraud.

A collision or preimage attack on SHA256 wouldn't have any effect on bitcoin, as far as I can tell. This does not increase the brute-forcing ability of finding m + nonce where h < difficulty.
A collision attack on RIPEMD160 would be worrisome, but you still need to know the private key of the public key being hashed, and private key ECDSA operations are many magnitudes slower than hashing.

Relatively is a relative word. It is a hard fork and not an easy thing at all to accomplish. It will also void all ASIC hardware.

This is not how attacks on hashing algorithms work. At least, no one has ever studied the possibility of it because it would normally be retarded. In bitcoin's case, it would make a bit more sense, but I don't know if such a thing is even possible. Hashing algorithm attacks fall under the category of collision attacks, where m1 != m2 but h(m1) == h(m2) or pre-image attacks such that given a hash h find a message m that hashes to it. There is no such attack as "given m + nonce, find h < difficulty faster than brute force". Even MD4 and 5 are not broken in this sense at all and could potentially be used for bitcoin without repercussions other than being only 128-bit.

But this is extraordinarily, unbelievably, impossibly unlikely. The block has to be 1) a valid bitcoin block, which heavily limits what data can be used to find a collision and essentially goes back to using a nonce, and 2) limits you to ONE SPECIFIC hash whereas searching for ANY hash with the correct leading number of zeros is many, many magnitudes easier. Bitcoin mining is essentially already a partial-collision attack.

Even if there are collision attacks against SHA2, I don't think (IANACryptanalysist) it would even have much of an effect on how bitcoin uses it. There are no passwords being protected by it. Coming up with a hash with lots of leading zeros via a collision attack surely cannot be faster than simply finding one randomly with a nonce. Now that new code prevents any issues arising from new blocks having the same hash as an older block, there really is no particularly effective attack even if SHA2 becomes significantly weakened. If there is a collision attack against RIPEMD160, things are a little more dodgy, but you still have to have a private key that matches a public key that hashes to the RIPEMD hash.

Why is it fair to give it to the rich? Is there really any difference? (Besides the obvious that you and your bitcoin buddies stand to make millions.)


No, it isn't. You didn't even offer a solution, you offered the exact same problem with a shiny new box.

You guys are arguing the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_interest_rate

Nominal interest rates are meaningless. Less demand would likely be the result of the increased risk, which applies to both sides of the supply and demand curve.

Where is this concrete data on lost coins?

ASICs will have no bearing whatsoever on transaction volume scalability. All they do is crunch SHA2 hashes. Transactions are ECDSA verifications.

wtf bro, you brought it up


It isn't just biased towards early adopter profits, it's biased against a well-functioning currency. Deflation is stupid, especially at the insane levels required for the bitcoin-ilk to achieve any remote amount of currency market share. It is too early to tell and I'm not about to spend time reading the PPC code or envisioning future scenarios for it, but it seems like it will be even more early-adopter heavy than bitcoin.


Tying the cost to produce something more than just supply and demand would be a start. :cough decrits:

riiiight, need to work on that delivery then