Well, you're right that they should be discarded and that they don't matter. But it's easy to see why people think it does matter:

1) so far we've seen 1 head and 9 tails
2) we know that in the long run we will see roughly the same number of each
3) so therefore we must be 'due' to see more heads than tails

1 and 2 are true, and naively step 3 seems like a natural consequence of 1 and 2. That is where the error happens. Step 2 happens in spite of step 1, because "in the long run" the difference in step 1 becomes insignificant. There's no tendency to reduce the difference, only to make it not matter.


You need to take into account that one of the sites may be cheating its investors. If everything else was the same I think it would make sense to invest with the more profitable one, since they are less likely to be cheating their investors. But this (much like Twitchy's comment that maybe the coin has tails on both sides) is kind of beside the point. For the purposes of this discuss we should assume a fair coin, and a fair gambling site.

OK, but I think the late 500k dig is still 'bigger' than the 60k lottery, even when adjusted for inflation.

The 60k lottery winnings diluted a 70k supply, so the lottery winnings represented 60/130 of the supply. By the time the whale digger appeared, a further 450k had been staked. The lottery winnings would have staked 60/130 of that, or 207k, and so would have been worth around 207k+60k = 267k in total. The digger dug up 500k coins, so around twice as much even after adjusting for inflation.

But yeah, the whale digger was only twice as big as all the lottery winners combined, not ten times as big as I previously claimed.

It's always better to get in early than later for sure. My point is that there were many less CLAMs created by staking during the three months that the lottery ran than in any three month period since then. If you're looking for "the premine", the lottery isn't it. I would suggest that the "whale digger" is a much richer seam to mine if you're looking for a foundation for building a conspiracy theory.

Here's a picture showing the scale of the two things : the whale digger claimed almost 10 times more CLAMs than all the lottery winners combined:



Edit: oh, but I see your point. The lottery created ~60k CLAMs into a market cap of maybe 70k, almost doubling the supply, whereas the whale digger created 500k into an existing supply of 800k, adding only around 60% to the supply, so it's possible that the lottery winners would have ended up with a bigger share of the supply than the whale digger, if they had held and staked their winnings.

No, of course not. We are talking about patents, not the price of power.

If you're choosing to mine in a place where you're paying so much for your power that you can't compete, that's your choice. It is also a separate issue from whether Bitcoin mining should be patent-encumbered.

Where are you seeing that?

I expect you are noticing that the price is down over the last few days, and jumping to the conclusion that new coins have been dug up, but checking the blockchain I see very little digging since the "whale digger" in December:



Here's a close-up of the time since the whale digger stopped digging:



Note how almost all of the inflation of the money supply in the last 5 months has been a result of staking, not digging, and how recently the total number of coins staked into existence overtook the number of coins dug into existence again.

I expect that this drop in price is the result of someone selling a big batch of CLAMs that they bought cheap from the whale digger in December. They've been holding them until now, hoping the price would go up further, and have just given up waiting. That's just my guess however.


You cut my quote off too early. Check the following two paragraphs and you'll see why the lottery wasn't like a pre-mine at all. It earned you 0.1 CLAMs per block almost all the time, and more very rarely, for an average of *less* than 1 CLAM per block:



I think the lottery was poorly thought out, but not intentionally exploitable. I didn't hear that Rat4 was ever thought to be a major holder of CLAMs. It's possible though.

I don't think I ever deposited more than 1 or 2 BTC, if that's what you're asking.

You can see my chart here: https://www.bustabit.com/user/dooglus

I am up 2.76056356 BTC on bustabit. So yes, they have.


Each game's seed is the hash of the next game's seed, so every game is entirely predictable if you can run time backwards. Given the seed for game N you can know the crash points for games 0 through N-1.

Other than that, there's no way to easily predict future crash points unless there's a flaw in SHA2

I've never edittted your posts. I have only selectively quoted them.

When quoting a post, only quote the part you are replying to (like I did right here). There is no need to repeatedly quote the same irrelevant history over and over. It's just annoying for everyone. If they want to see the full context they can click the link directly above the quoted part.

True. But can they export patent-infringing hardware to the West?


20% isn't minor. It will be the difference between being able to mine profitably or not.

There is a physical limit to how fast hardware can mine. Hardware which is allowed to skip repeating part of the hashing process will be able to mine faster and cheaper than hardware that cannot. Eventually the faster hardware will be profitable and the slower hardware will be uneconomical to run.

Bitcoin was designed to allow anyone to be able to mine it. A mining environment where one entity is able to mine 20% faster than all the others because they are using government power to cripple the competition doesn't work out well for Bitcoin as a whole.

So even though you believe that we came up with the idea independently of each other, one person should be allowed to use the idea and the other shouldn't?

That really just makes no sense.


You appear to be confusing patents and copyright. They're quite different things. You can't independently write the same novel. If I tried to publish a copy of an existing work then clearly I have copied it.


You have more faith in the patent system than I do.

I don't want to use their work. I want to use an optimization that I came up with independently, but which they are attempting to claim some kind of ownership of.

Are you telling me that my idea is not mine because you had the same idea? That makes no sense.

Are you claiming that the recent rise in price is related to the coming halving?

Previously you were saying that it is not possible for the increase due to the halving to happen before the halving, but now you seem to be saying the opposite?

Are you saying that the halving is somewhat priced in now?

You're confusing me.

I would prefer not to have the balance displayed to casual browsers. If I lend the phone to someone I don't want to have to worry that they'll poke around and see my balance.

I wonder what Rassah meant by "For not you just havery to remember to back out of the app completely" recently. How do you "back out completely"?

This is different than buying more efficient hardware because I am free to buy the hardware from any vendor I like, or create my own. There's no law telling me that if I want to use the more efficient mining algorithm I need to gain permission from a particular person.


"a patent troll is a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art"

In this case the idea being patented is the that of not repeating the same calculation multiple times. It's hardly a novel idea. Requiring a licence before allowing people to omit repeating the same calculation multiple times isn't right.

We don't have a free market. I assumed that much was clear.


If you were able to patent cows in general, or "milking" as a process such that everyone else had to license "your" technology from you to be allowed to own and milk a cow then you would have a point.

Buy it about 5 years ago, and wait.

No, that's wrong. If ever miner licensed the optimization and so was able to mine 25% cheaper, all that would happen is that the difficulty rises 25%. Everyone ends up mining the same number of coins, and the patent troll collects his 5% tax from every miner.

That's not "win win" at all. It's "win lose lose lose lose", where all the miners lose and only the patent troll wins.


Why wouldn't they? Given the change between collecting 5% of every coin that is mined and not collecting 5% of every coin that is mined, which would you pick?

Bitcoin is meant to be permissionless. Allowing a single entity to patent part of the mining process such that we have to ask their permission to continue mining efficiently is not acceptable. It's not even as if there is any novelty in the patented scheme. The "new" idea is basically "avoid unnecessarily duplicating work".

Patents themselves (using government to give one party a monopoly at the expense of all other parties) are against free market principles.

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-virtual-guns-counterstrike-gambling/ says:


but also:


Is that saying that Valve takes a 15% cut of every deposit and withdrawal? If so, I don't see why it's so popular. Who would be willing to pay a 15% fee each way?

How exactly did you create the watching-only wallet?