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wow! I found out about this paper quite late... It was forwarded to me by a friend...
This is basically my response to that friend to which I arrived rather hastily and independently i.e. before reading this thread or any comments on the article.
For whatever it worth.
"
Interesting, I had a quick read. He maybe a smart and credible guy,
but he does not get it, IMO.
His points on snapshots are rather irrelevant so I'll ignore it.
Than, first of all, he is trying to solve a non-problem and fails to
see that issue he is trying to solve is not a bug but a feature.
There is no problem with energy consumption, it is a very low price to
pay for getting rid of all the middlemen leaching a few percent from
every money transfer. Moreover, energy spent by miners on securing the
bloc chain is rather negligible in comparison to energy spent on other
ways to do money, when you consider, for example energy, required to
haul all the cash and gold in armoured trucks, smelting gold bullions,
coining coins, smelting metal for the bank vaults and so on...
Second of all, his "efficient solution" is very weak. Essentially, he
is proposing to replace voting weighted by pure computational power
(surely not very energy efficient way) to voting weighted by a number
of clients plugged into the network, without proposing any viable way
(since it is impossible) to ensure that this number of clients is not
faked. Therefore, he is effectively shifting proof-of-work concept
from doing lots of sha-256 calculations to opening lots of ports on
lots of IP's simultaneously. This could solve a problem of quick
propagations and wide distribution of information, but surely not a
problem of "double spending". Total epic fail!
He also has completely missed economic part of the system where
initial bitcoin inflation serves the purpose of subsidy to enable
quick growth of the network and making it secure from 50% attacks.
Busted... And bitcoin heavy hitters did not get to this yet, it is just me.
"
Did I get something badly wrong there?
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I would like to comment on "price is cheap" remark.
Please allow me to clarify. Price could be actually be very expensive. The thing is, I do not know it. I mentioned 10% as a starting price. It is a price below which I probably will not be interested at all, except maybe if there are no other bids and we are talking about fairly long term bookings.
From there it is basically a private closed tender or a rolling "first price, sealed bid auction". The highest "sealed bid" I receive on non booked capacity buy the service.
At the moment most of my capacity is engaged elsewhere, but it will get available again eventually.
I'll edit OP, to clarify this.
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How long does it take and how much does it cost to download 3 TB over sub Atlantic cable? Now compare it with shipping via fedex a 3TB HDD. This is what I mean.
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latency yes, bandwidth no
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You should be more worried about someone gaining over 50% of the network, that is much more likely than the US just deciding to attempt such a thing, and near impossible for them to achieve this goal.
If this became an issue, the bitcoin devs could just build gpu mining in the client. this should be set to turn on automatically, opt out only. then we would have a huge amount of people mining now, it would be far more power than any government could get. id estimate even all the cpu power would be enough. I am busy hedging against exactly this possibility LOL. |
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Better think how could you implement whatever it is you need on top of bitcoin protocol not within it. There must be a VERY compelling reason i.e. "life or death of bitcoin" kind to get any significant changes into the protocol at this point.
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support smaller pools (as opposed to near 50% behemoths) for the sake of bitcoin security
If I were you I would look at a pool which is in no particular order:
1. proven itself i.e. has at least some history and credibility behind it.
2. has low fees
3. has high efficiency
4. has compelling additional features
The begemonths are usually not very good in 2 and 3 department.
As far as variance is concerned if a pool solves 1-2 blocks per day on average it should be good enough.
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We need compelling reasons to spend our coins. It seems everyone is selling tshirts and random knick knacks that we don't need and can probably find cheaper in a retail store. We need retailers to start selling quality products instead of drop shipping random crap from china.
here we go, here is the answer |
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I think that it is unwise to trust any not extremely credible and trustworthy entity with your bitcoin life savings.
However, it might make sense for the sake of convenience to take some counterparty risks and use services such as mybitcoin and others when amount at risk is fairly small.
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I think of bitcoin as about an asset class, along with fiat currencies, metals, bonds, stocks, toxic CDO's etc...
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it is like complaining "unfortunately I've started mining in age of CPU mining and spent lots of bitcoins on my CPU's"
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For all I know, this image is public domain, I'd be happy to correct my actions should the author of the image contact me and ask for that.
Are you author of the image? Do you have definitive information about it's licensing conditions?
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Too bad that this thread has disintegrated into fight of legal misconceptions. Thanks to you.
I appreciate your initial point, and that's why I thanked you to you for providing the link. If I knew who is the author I would provided a link myself.
However, there is huge difference between practice and what some people think about law. Thinking that this website will get shut-down over some linked image is naive to the extreme.
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sue me BTW Thus your post is illegal both in the US AND the UK. This statement of yours clearly shows that you have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about. Be careful with throwing around allegations of someone being a criminal. It might be a costly thing to defend a defamation lawsuit. (Generally speaking, I will just ignore this) |
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UK is not a state of US and I am not subject to US laws, hence your point is moot.
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I do not infringe copyright any more that a thousand of other places similar image is posted on. But should you want to go legal on this, I suggest you to talk to imageshack.us first.
However, if you are certain that the website you linked holds copyright on the image than thanks for your link. I also maintain that the image linked in my post is more accurate than the one in your link.
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as they say.. one picture worth a thousand words. And I have 6 pictures for you. Edit: image removed, because copyright nazys bored the hell out of me  no offence to the copyright nazys, some points were indeed valid (ethical ones) Just because there are no consequences in this case, doesn't mean you should. The above won the argument for Matt. |
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nahh.. a few "backbone" bitcoin nodes will connect via ssh tunnels/VPN's and that's it.
They are gonna need to shutdown a bunch of satellites and cut a bunch of undersea cables to get somewhere.
In the end of the day (unlike bittorrent) we can dig up old modems and FIDO tech. As long as one can place a phone call bitcoin is going to keep working.
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