Do you really think that people will spend bitcoins to buy freicoins THAT THEY DO NOT WANT? Really?

Actually that really is a coincidence (besides, Frei/“free, unencumbered, liberal” and Fried/“peace” are related lexicographically more by chance than by etymology).

“Freicoin” was the name given to a hypothetical bitcoin-based demurrage currency promoted by @jtimon on this forum about a year ago. It was through conversations with jtimon that parameters of this proposed alt chain were set. “Freicoin” itself is an nod to “Freigeld”, the hypothetical state-backed demurrage currency used by Gesell in his economic theories. In this context, “Frei” means free, no-cost, or unencumbered, and is a reference to the approx. 0% interest and easy access to credit it would provide.

Second, choose a new name. Forget about coin being in it and think of the name as your key sales tool. Freicoin is too German-sounding for US users.

I don't think Bitcoin requires that fix. The feedback system in Bitcoin is either asymptotically stable in the Lyapunov sense or extremely close to being asymptotically stable. By extrememly close I mean that the maximum amplitude of oscillations that could be introduced in it is on the order of LSB in the very narrow floating-point format that is used to represent the difficulty.

On the other hand the designers of alt-coins cranked up the gain in the feedback loop and applied asymmetric clipping in the feedback signal. The resultant system is probably still stable in the Lyapunov sense but no longer asymptotically stable.

Satoshi either understood the stability problem in the theory of closed-loop control systems or at least consulted somebody who understood the problems.

On the other hand the designers of alt-coins are like kids who stood up with microphone in front of the speakers and cranked up the gain on the amplifier.

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

<sipa> galambo: i use an exponentially decaying average over time (which can be considered an IIR) to calculate averages of block-finding-speed (weighted by difficulty) and average age of recent blocks, and feed those to a maximum likelyhood estimator that estimates average and growth rate for an assumed poisson-like process with exponentially changing rate
<sipa> assuming the actual hash rate is a function of the form A*exp(B*t), it will give a very accurate estimation of A and B
<sipa> but the hashrate that results from this calculation is effectively an extrapolation (it uses data from the past to guess the current speed)
<sipa> which makes it inappriopriate as a difficulty function

This is a subtle but important point.  A while back I wrote a section about it on the bitcoin wiki.  The Satoshi client never uses "number of blocks deep" as a measure of confidence that a transaction is valid.

A truly trustless thin client needs to be able to be able to verify a recent block's height (that there really are 180,000 blocks before this one and they obey the max-difficulty adjustment rules) rather than its depth (that there really were 6 blocks built on top of it -- also known as confirmations).

It's possible to do height verification probabilistically without 2GB of disk+download, but you need more than a tree-of-unspent-transactions to do it -- the block chain has to look more like a tree giving you multiple hash-secured O(log n)-long paths from any block to the genesis block).  These "shortcut ancestor links" can be added without 51% agreement.

(2)  As echoed by others, I believe that a hard-forking blockchain change is going to only happen in the event of a crisis.  To do so requires more than democracy -- it will seriously impact the entire network in a detrimental way.  There are users who are still using version 0.3.X bitcoin clients not because they want to, but because it works, and they don't follow the forums or Bitcoin news or anything of the sort.  And the hard fork exposes them to all sorts of malicious behavior by others who would exploit their ignorance of current events and manipulate the abandoned chain that they are stuck on.

To maintain confidence in the system, a hard fork is going to need more than democracy -- it's going to need super-majority, probably 80-90% ... and gaining that level of consensus is pretty much impossible for new ideas that are not well-understood -- unless the idea has been in the wild, and in use for many months/years and is already used by 80%+ people.

The idea of using a second blockchain is actually a way of creating a "staging area" for such ideas on the main network (like galambo said) without actually risking exposing that network to any of the unforeseen issues that could arise.  It can be used to add such functionality to the network without actually changing the network.

In this way, the meta-chain can grow and develop as people start using it and understanding it.  People start building infrastructure on the availability of the information in that chain.  Once it has become ubiquitous enough and time-tested as a pillar of a part of the network, then you have 80%+ agreement amongst users without even having to ask for it.  At this point, a hard-fork is entirely feasible -- or at least orders of magnitude less disruptive.

You're right, it's not the only way, but I think it's about as good as it's going to get.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the change your talking about. But I think this is dangerous.I use bitcoin because i trust the protocol behind to never change. If the majority or the devs can push a change in protocol, then I'm out. A way to compress the blockchain fine. A fork, hard or soft... mmmmm seems dangerous to me.

That's not the first picture. And that is the second redesign. You weren't here that long ago, otherwise you would have seen other things. This for instance: http://butterflylabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1817.jpg

And maybe this: https://eclipsemc.com/bfl/bfl-8.jpg <-- 25 Nov 2011, and it hashes! More here: http://eclipsemc.com/bfl/

It was at the point that they discovered that the power subsystem was insufficient, requiring a redesign.

On that list, I calculated that there were 4302 TXs that paid an insufficient fee for their priority which was 3.7% of the total. If someone double checks that I would appreciate it.

If I look at all transactions on the list:
Fee-paying transaction average confirmation time: 30.3 minutes
Fee-less transaction average confirmation time: 30.73 minutes

If I exclude the transactions that didn't pay a sufficient fee:
Fee-paying transaction average confirmation time: 30.27 minutes
Fee-less transaction average confirmation time: 29.07 minutes

It wasn't this bad before the transaction volume rose. Back then, there was an advantage to paying the fee. But now the fee-payers have to wait just as long.

Yeah, just because photos of a finished PCB don't constitute a design. Right. Uh huh.

Nice distortion of the facts. BFL takes payment upfront, then delivers months later. Enterpoint takes payment and then ships immediately.

By "finished design" I meant "a design that the forum has had no input into" but I didn't expect you to catch that. They also had a design that never shipped, but that was mining at reduced speed due to poor design choices.

No clue about any of this stuff, but thank you guys for working on this.  I think it's important to have this sorted out before adoption and use gets really heavy.

They (BFL) suddenly appeared with a website and a promise of extraordinary performance, including a finished design.

You're mem, aren't you?  +1 for the ignore list just in case.  Furthermore, these guys aren't geeks;  they're educated individuals.  You've obviously got nothing to add, it'd be my suggestion to shut-up and maybe you'll learn something.