Thanks for your reply.  I think the details are important here.  "I have a way to make a secure lightning network if TXs were not malleable" is not the same as "I have a proof that lightning networks will only work securely if TXs are not malleable".   Sadly I'm not qualified to tell you at the moment whether one, both, or neither of these are true.

/begin rant

This "if bitcoin is to compete with other payment systems" stuff is all nonsense.  Bitcoin is a unit of account.  A public, verifiable, noncounterfeitable unit of account.  Visa, Swift, and ACH don't offer that.  There's no competition. All of these work on top of bitcoin just as well (or better) than they did on top of funbux.  .    ,

/end rant

Anyway, even if someone were to come up with a proof that certain forms of payment channels are only possible with a hardfork level protocol change..  it still wouldn't happen.  I'm still interested though!     

Well hey, why don't you educate me then?   What is missing from the simple example I gave?  I tried to make it very simple.. sure I can think of some things about life that are not exactly imitable by farms of spherical cows.  Which ones do you have in mind?  Or is it something else entirely I am missing?  I'm sure you will agree that in some instances, e.g. cancer, population growth is not the greatest marker of long term health.   

You should necessarily agree that even if you have lost hope in this dwarf in ever leaving ignorance, there might be a forum reader somewhere that could benefit from your current expenditure of energy here.  Otherwise..  why bother?  Lets hear it    

Sorry I am slow.  What won't be as efficient?  I guess I don't understand the problem exactly.

https://blog.bitgo.com/malevolent-malleability/  <-- I see here a list of how folks who didn't know what they were doing could make mistakes, and a conclusion: "The general consensus up to this point has been that malleability is an annoying but not critical system-wide problem. "

Anyway, if for some reason you can't figure out a way to actually check that funds have been sent and arrived at the proper address, or to not reference any TXs by number, you can always pay a miner a few extra milliies to put your TX with exactly the bit order you like into the block just where you want it. 

I'm not sure that's the case, but of course I could be wrong.  Can't you build it to actually check receipt of funds?  I mean, that should in theory be the important part of making a payment anyway, rather than thepayment ID.  Please let me know what I am missing here.     
 

Aha, OK gotcha thanks I see your point now.  Yeah, they are relevant in that they help us stay alive (survivability), barring that, not so much.  A pile of food in the larder does indeed become irrelevant after the inhabitants capable of eating said food all died off.  Well not to the bacteria in there or the people who come and find it but that's a different story.   


Well my apologies if I misspoke.  Certainly different infrastructures are decaying and growing simultaneously..  for example railroad in north america and bitcoin infrastrucure worldwide.  My point was not to claim any one type or other was increasing or decreasing but that in general the use of counterfeitable currencies in the construction and maintenance of said infrastructure can only be a detriment to its long term survival. 



Topsoil, hardwood, fish stocks, helium, groundwater reservoirs, glaciers, natural gas to name seven. 

I didn't mean the trees in Vegas were being chopped, haha, sorry.  I meant that the trees in the Amazon are being chopped and traded for fiat..  while others are printing fiat and it gets spent air conditioning Vegas - a process which leads to depreciating the value of the tokens which were given in exchange for the trees.  You see how that goes. 

 

Thanks for your reply.  Well certainly we don't want to lose integrity!  That is important emphasis thank you.  

One can split data apart, move it around, stack it in different piles, but if one has thrown out the instructions for how to put it back.. well, one is royally fucked at that point or at least out the original data.

So a couple things come to mind:

1) Malleability of TXID has never been an issue or a problem

2) The fundamental data we need for integrity is still the fundamental data we need for integrity.  Nothing has really changed.  If you come up with a clever way to store data that helps miners be efficient, that's great.  Not that any of them would bother looking here anyway for such ideas.  Nor would they care if pull requests are "approved".  Just grab the code and run it if you like.  
    

Wait a minute.  Lets just stop right there shall we?  Because I was under the impression that a transaction, and in fact any information at all, could already be divided up in to ones and zeros and handled any way we liked. 

Isn't a "single chunk of data" actually a bunch of ones and zeros that any client, miner, observer, bot, or individual, and do whatever they want with - put in tables, trees, hash them, store them.. whatever?  That is, already? 

What am I missing here?  How is this a thing to be discussed or debated?  Go, split your transactions up any way you like.  Nobody is stopping you. 

Personally I have some code that only keeps the first 20 base58 digits of btc addresses, dropping the rest, to save space.  I didn't make a post on a forum about it or a talk at a conference though.  You don't have to ask permission to manipulate public data. 

OK, well it depends on other factors.  For example if you have a farm with 100 cows that live comfortably on your acreage, you have a certain amount of wealth from your operation.  Now imagine 100 of you live there.  Each one will have access to less of the wealth.  It's not a huge stretch to move this example to the whole planet considering constant solar influx.

Clearly homeless populations are likely to go up with larger populations.  I think you will find that a certain level of poverty is correlated with population density.  But yeah, these examples are too simple and one should consider exactly what might be meant by the whole shebang and multifold growth. 

??!!??? 
Life is irrelevant to humans how?  Remember we ARE a bunch of animals and plants.

Animals, Mammals, Primates, in particular humans, require and are part of a large web of interconnected life forms.  Have you ever heard of e.g. food?  It's not exactly irrelevant to your economy.     


Compared to what would happen if sanity were considered and failures were allowed to fail instead of being propped up with "lets issue tokens to avoid market forces".   

Sure lets look at the construction and use of the roads.  You asked for a qualifier.  That's good.  Because a blanket assertion that "roads are good" would sure look bad especially after what appeared to be claiming that life is irrelevant.  Roads can suck and be way to expensive to maintain, destroy arable land, and make property more worthless.  Or they can be hugely important to commerce and getting people what they need to pursue happiness.  The difference needs to be decided by the people who use them and by the people who pay for them.  Not by:  "Oh roads.  They are good.  Here let's print some tokens and build them in the most inefficient and short lasting way".  Look at the construction and use of the computers and the internet.  Look at railroads.  Yes people are progressing and building things but we they are held back by the heavy weight of continuous theft and malinvestment.   


Great example.  NPK fertilizers are not solely responsible, but certainly part of the system that has reduced the once great heart of agriculture in north america to near desert status (actually deserts show remarkably higher biodiversity).  Desertification is par for the course around the globe at this time.  Why?  In part because those farmers using fiat are being constantly robbed.  To stay afloat they need to deplete the resources maximally, even then of course they won't stay afloat.  It is impossible to stay afloat if you imagine a fiat currency to in any way represent wealth.  So it's:  chop the trees all down now.  We need to pay for air conditioning of open air decks in las vegas and trillion dollar wars so cut it all down.   


Forgive me but I've seen no evidence that you are literate here.  Literacy rates are lower than ever.  I estimate them at 2%.  By literacy I don't mean "can read stop signs and twitter", I mean a minimum of 1000 pages printed material per month.  Competence in at least two languages.  Basic shit that any college would have required a century ago.  "Oh a higher percentage are going to college now we are so literate!"  <-- you must be kidding us!  Too funny. 

The great thing is that while it might be entertaining and educational to argue these topics here, it is in no way necessary to convince anyone.  There isn't any policy change or vote required to turn the corner of history and get out of the dark ages.  We already are doing it. 

What makes you think $10000 (whatever that might mean to you, lets say quality M0 notes) will be worth anything in even 5 years?   

This is a good point about population feeding back into ability to specialize.  I'll be sure to bring it up with the Malthusians and various other "blame all problems on too many people" proponents, thanks   And my apologies: carrying capacity and population growth is indeed a worthy topic that should be given some airtime whenever it comes up, no matter how off topic it might seem. 

Not necessarily.  It depends how they are used.  If it is truly more output in a long term sense, then yes.  But one must keep in mind the story of the Lorax.  In the end everyone was poorer overall.  Not because of the technology but because of the idiocy. 

Greetings.  Well actually I know far too little about wealth of society, which is kinda why I'm here.  Perhaps expose some of my ignorance and maybe pick up a few new ideas no?   Stranger things have happened.  

But since we got some formalities out of the way maybe this could become a more interesting discussion.  

First thing that should be said is that there is no economic model behind bitcoin.  At least not necessarily.  Just like there is no economic model behind 79 protons.  Or "corn".  They are just things for us to use as we wish, with certain properties.  Properties that are useful for certain uses.  An economic model implies a household; whether one can sustain things like food, shelter, clothing, water, and other things one might need or want to keep up in life.  Economic models are often in flux, as one adds new activities, needs, desires.. and problems arise.  There are necessarily many such models simultaneously overlapping.  Individuals, families, and larger corporations.. all the way up to Gaia herself.  

As to the "societal wealth" thing I can tell you my opinion about it fwiw.  Population size seems really not a good metric at all.  On top of the list for me would be survivability, that is: health of the ecosystem and preparedness for shock.  Biodiversity.  Also involved is education.  How much of your population can play Bach pieces in multiple keys on multiple instruments?  That is wealthy.  How many people really feel the funk?  That is wealthy.  How many George Clinton shows did people get to see this year?  How many nights did they sleep out under the stars?  These things constitute a wealthy society in my mind much more than having 10 kids.  

The ability to pursue happiness.  It's a vague phrase but it was chosen well and can get the point across, that we don't have to agree on exactly what it is but we do agree that people should be able to do it as they see fit, and that their ability to do so could be called wealth.  

The "grand experiment" of dimensionless token sheistery is an anathema to societal wealth.  Infrastructure is decayed.  Resources are depleted.  Educational systems have become frayed and broken.  Corruption and fraud are at the core of everything it touches.  How can one pursue happiness if one is beholden to the counterfeiters to no limit?  The amazing thing is how well people have done despite its perniciousness.            


In other news, I'd love to learn to think in reverse.  Please help.  It's a cryptographers dream. 
    

Hmm transactional utility without value?   Interesting. 

Hmm, not a commodity, yet I go to the market and buy it just like I do all other commodities.  Interesting.

Tell us more. 
   

 

Yes, of course. 

Since we're doing nonsequitur queries heres a few for you too: 

What procedure would you use to fit a set of data to an exponential curve, in other words determining the best values of A and B such that a dataset P_i(t_i) most closely matched the function P(t) = A*e^(Bt) ?  What criteria would you use to say the fit was "good"?  What criteria would lead you to describe the data as growing faster or slowly than an exponential? 

What fraction of the total bitcoin supply will 1 bitcoin be in 20 years? 

What fraction of the total USD supply will 500 dollars be in 20 years? 

Counterfeitable money didn't cause population increase and lack of pirates didn't cause global warming.  Seems dead obvious to me there but hey a lot of people like to get on the correlation is always causation bandwagon so what do I know right? 

LOLK!  As you explained earlier, fiat money ELIMINATES any reference point of the scale.  "Dimensionless" you called it.  Production of tokens is not tied to any physical unit or good, therefore every token is unverifiable as is the total supply.    

Your claim that "if the number of goods increases we have to create more exchange commodities" is laughable.  When apple makes more iphones do they issues more shares of Apple thus robbing all shareholders?  Are you afraid that prices will go down when there is a supply glut?  Guess what, that is called price discovery in a marketplace and is important in a functioning economy.  Issuing new dimensionless exchange commodities thus thwarting market forces and robbing existing holders is always and without fail unmitigated disaster.    

    

That plot appears to have been made from the "Hyde 2007" data in your link, though also mostly agrees with "McEvedy & Jones" from your link.  No I never wanted to talk about your population growth as it is a complete nonsequitur.  Seriously: this has nothing at all to do with exchange commodities.  What is your point here?  


But while we're here let me help you out with basic literacy.  "Exponential" means that the slope of a function is proportional to the value of the function.  Full stop.  df/dx = k*x.  That's what an exponential is.  Logarithms are an absolutely essential part of basic math as is understanding what exactly the number "e" is.  Until you are very familiar with these concepts I would recommend avoiding use of the word "exponential".

When you plot a pure exponential function on a linear scale you see that at the far right it shoots upwards.  It doesn't "go exponential" there.  It always is exponential.

Yes, every set of data you have in your wikipedia article shows exponential and greater than exponential growth from e.g. year 0 to 1500.  







 

You'll find that human population growth has been FASTER than exponential from roughly the year 0 onward.  This is due to MANY factors, the most commonly sited are agriculture, technology, favorable growth conditions, and societal behaviors such as acceptance of large families.  The use of internal combustion engines in agriculture especially correlated with rapid growth in the last 100 years.  

Nice non-sequitur huh?  As you yourself CORRECTLY pointed out earlier in the thread, what we have been using for exchange commodities means little with regard to e.g. slavery or other societal conditions, which includes those that influence population growth.  You're not really trying to imply now that people's being robbed via exchange commodity fraud has led to population growth are you?  

      

F the IMF

OP --  this should go under altcoins - scam reports

No I don't know that.  So you're saying the question is "how much money do I need to have some money?" ?

The question is broken any way you look at it.  Just retire if that's what you want to do.  If you have something else you want to do that requires some assets, then figure out how to get them and do it.