Is it just me, or is the idea of a proprietary blockchain silly? If validation is done by only a few, or just one, party, why not just have a database?

My point was, isn't it kind of early to call 467 a high? If this keeps going up, that dump will end up looking like noise.

Are we looking at the same charts?

Hopefully not... That stuff's all tears - tears of joy on the way up, grief on the inevitable drop down. Wouldn't it be nice if people could just keep their cool and not overreact?

Put it this way, back in 2011 I bought coffee from someone here who, I later noticed, professed to be a vehemently anti-racist white separatist. I didn't even know there *were* white separatists before that. Also had to look up the word 'miscegenation', my grade school latin didn't include that word.

If an attacker would profit from destroying the network's credibility (governments potentially), that kind of spending would make sense. For protection against double spends, yes, we're pretty solid. In fact, it would seem we're spending way more than need be on security if that is our only concern.

We should probably take this to a different thread, I'm already feeling guilty about going off on this tangent here. But quickly:

We already didn't 'leave everything as it is'. This is an entirely artificial system with a number of arbitary design choices. The 1MB block limit is an obvious example, and wasn't even originally intended to serve an economic function beyond limiting spam. It's not needed for a fee market: as block subsidy decreases fees must increase or miners will shut off. Thus, when the block subsidy is insufficient to pay for mining costs, miners are incentivized to require fees in order to accept transactions.

If you say X is the amount of transactions the network should, at most, be able to handle, you're making a policy decision. If you say there should be no limit and miners should decide whether they want to include 0-fee transactions, you're also making a policy decision. You can't pretend one is more of a "free market" solution than the other.

The network is considered roughly secure against economically sensible attacks when the cost of an attack is greater than the profit gained.In rough terms, the greater [network value] / [cost to gain 51% of hashrate] is, the less secure the network becomes. To increase security, you need to either decrease network value or increase the cost of gaining a percentage of hashrate. Both the small-blocks and large-blocks solutions essentially hope that a balance is naturally found where the cost of running the network doesn't hamper usage to the point that fees and subsidies aren't sufficient to provide security.

I don't have a solution here, but I think we're turning a blind eye to this issue of security vs. cost when that's the real question that needs addressing.

Are you saying we should change the BTC issuance schedule, perhaps stopping issuance now? That's redistribution of wealth, and it's holding the fee market back.

Or are you saying miners aren't being incentivized enough to keep the network secure enough, so in addition to the block subsidy we need fees to be higher? How do we determine how much security is needed and how much that should cost?

Or are you saying people should pay a fee just because?

How secure should the network be? What's the sweet spot between cost and security?

So, to pick the more relevant strain of off-topicness here: Do I understand correctly that the Ripple ledger is unaffected, but the main way people traded XRP for other currencies is now being shut down? And some way to transfer XRP from user to user will still exist even after Ripple Trade closes?

I haven't followed Ripple closely, but frankly, I think it's good news if it fails this way. The failure mode I was worried about was a series of cascading credit defaults if the system really took off. Never saw any reason to think that wouldn't happen, so good riddance as far as I'm concerned.

Where's the incentive for the exchanges?

how would the bots react to an extra input field on the posting page, one hidden from humans? I expect renaming or rearranging the fields is out of the question since that would probably break all the "good" bots here as well.

The Bitcoin discussion subforum's 1st page is now mostly spam. I guess this is the time most of the mods are asleep.

What happened to the  halving !?

Don't know about Coinbase specifically, but in general leaving your money with some small company in a jurisdiction you may or may  not share is not a very safe idea. In fact, I'm pretty sure trusting third parties with their funds accounts for the majority of BTC lost by Bitcoin users.

I'm not convinced the majority of Bitcoin users would be running full nodes even if the resource cost were 0. It's just not worth the hassle for most, unless the userbase consisted almost solely of idealistic cypherpunks.

Two things not mentioned in the review:

- it has PIN protection so just getting one's hands on one of these isn't enough to steal the BTC stored on one. (This was in one of the videos, but who watches those, right?)
- The price is, according to keepkey.com, 239 USD.

The format seems to be changing slightly. Maybe it's a learning algorithm, changing its parameters based on how long it takes for posts to be deleted. Pretty soon, it might be able to pass for the average sig campaigner here!

How long do you have to wait, on average? BTC-E is pretty much always lower than Bitstamp, so I imagine it'd take a while to find a profitable re-entry in to BTC.

Seems unlikely. Complete ideological conflict. That text doesn't say ISIS should be supported, it says ISIS is a cancer that isn't going away. ("We are now living with cancer. Time to accept it.")

What I'm taking away from that is that Taaki sees ISIS as proof the western powers can't deal with that type of non-state threat. I'm not sure whether he sees that as encouraging from an anarchist's point of view or whether he's saying it's on the public to renew Western civilization so it can survive.

What I'm definitely not seeing is a call to arms for ISIS.