This is a pretty good reason why I'm not wondering if or when Karpeles will produce a full account of what he did and didn't know and when

Still has a team maintaining & updating it (driven by Andreas Schildbach's work on Bitcoin Wallet on the Android Operating system), but it shouldn't be on this list, because:

• Cannot be used for a full validating node (validates block headers only, then resolves transaction validity using BIP37 bloom filters)
• Is only a library; does not function as a standalone, executable Bitcoin client

Estimates of $ denominated daily transaction volumes literally are in the billions range, since 2017 at least. This cannot be all people sending money to themselves, some significant proportion will be commerce.



This is the solipsistic point of view, "I don't see it, therefore it's not happening". You've only got to look at this forum to see real Bitcoin commerce taking place, or go to a country like Czech Republic, where there is considerable anxiety about having a local currency that goes through alarming drops in the FX market; subsequently, Bitcoin is probably more used in Czech Republic than anywhere.


Defeat your lack of imagination with this thought experiment: the world exists beyond your everyday experiences! Amazing, isn't it!

There's no point trading something that doesn't have a purpose.

But Bitcoin does have a purpose: transfer. The most common type of transfer is international: either to avoid fees, capital controls or economic sanctions. Without that demand, there would be no multi-billion dollar monetary base, and Bitcoin would be just a speculative bubble that died a long time ago.

This is not much of a revelation.

"Money as content" is true of fiat bank notes too, and they've existed since the 19th century. The only thing that makes bank notes valuable is the information ($20 or €100, the content) and it's formatting (Bank of England or Bank of Japan designs etc, the type) printed on the note, which is no different from "content type" in concept. Can't send that information over a computer network? Yes you can: their network.

Money has been a content type since fiat was introduced (i.e. it's just information, not a real asset). The true innovation with Bitcoin is that we can send it on any network we like, and that there is no permission needed to exchange Bitcoin information.

That's significant news, although it will be more significant once Masventas have been doing this without problems from the Argentine government.


Of course, I'd prefer to see people move away from using banks, but it's interesting that using SWIFT has become so much of a problem in Argentina that even banks are going elsewhere. Hopefully, some Argentinians who are still wary of Bitcoin will begin to change their minds once they hear this story, and use Bitcoin directly.

And this is a very public way of undermining the "mass extinction" prediction story from a few days ago; there will be no Bitcoin extinction as long as there is still Bitcoin demand.

This implies fiat currencies do maintain a stable value long term, and we all know that's not true (although many aren't aware of this)



Maybe that's not such a problem... if most people don't sell regardless of how high it goes, all that does is attract more holders. This early phase in the adoption curve is always going to make Bitcoin more attractive as a way of investing than as a means of exchange, not least because the tech for the means of exchange part isn't finished yet (Lightning devs are still coming up with ways to improve on the base protocol as presented in 2015). "Investing" doesn't have to mean buy-low sell-high trading for fiat, I expect alot of people are trading to build up retirement funds (and see BTC as safer than a pension).

Price inflation

There's a huge amount of generalised price inflation stored up specifically in the kind of assets large financial firms have been buying. As soon as the market in those assets begins to become saturated enough, the owners will begin to sell, so that they can diversify their risk further (and the stock markets did experience a little jolt this year). Alternatively, central banks stop printing money and lending it to large financial firms. And then that's pretty much defining a top in all markets when it happens, and the price inflation will be even more pronounced.

Regular business owners don't pay attention to this stuff? You'd be surprised. Once the money starts flowing out of assets and into the commodities markets, even consumers will notice, lol

This is all assuming that every cryptocurrency is just an ICO with speculative value and no real-world use. One can be very confident that any cryptocurrency with genuine economic uses would survive an event such as is suggested (so Bitcoin and maybe only a handful of others, really)

It's unlikely to happen as a single event though, the market is too diverse for that. Experimental coins have been dying very slowly for years now, if ICO bans cannot precipitate "mass extinction", it's difficult to see what possibly could trigger such a possibility. After all, there's little evidence that ICO bans have ever been effective (but plenty of evidence that the worldwide market for ICO launches has carried on without issues, other than the high likelihood of simply failing to catch the market's attention of course).

@Elwar, pretty convincing answer.

I like the idea, I'll be watching with interest.

I realise it may take a while, but...

Won't this idea eventually suffer from the same problems that land based homesteading did? There are only so many inhabitable parts of the ocean, and the good spots will naturally attract more people, which in turn will naturally attract intelligent psychopaths that want to impose self-serving rules on those living there. How do you vote with your house if smart egomaniacs create a worldwide seasteading governance cartel? These clever assholes will even collude to make the rules are superficially different between the seastead communities, and so the illusion of choice begins all over again.

Or is the tech likely to become so flexible that a very high percentage of the ocean (60-80% maybe?) is affordably inhabitable?

Cobra's started to say slightly weird things recently, but this isn't one of them. Make of that what you will.


Clearly there is no serious immediate threat. If Luke-jr was right about how easy it is to orphan short sections of the blockchain, BTC price would become chaotic if that happened and was made public. Only a miner/pool with a multi stage strategy to destroy Bitcoin could seek to benefit from that (Bitmain springs to mind, sadly).

So on the one hand, a contingency plan is needed to switch to a different PoW (a plan would be needed eventually anyway, as the current PoW algorithm won't be collision resistant forever). Switching to something else would necessarily also have the effect of decentralising mining, as it would make no sense to switch to something for which an ASIC would be cheap or quick to develop.

But on the other hand, Bitmain are becoming a little less dominant over time. Too slowly, but it's happening. If every small electronics producer in the world were manufacturing SHA256 ASICs, we could at least hope there would be a few Venezuelas among them to defy whatever cartel gets formed

That's one hell of a contradictory position you have there.

The same contingent of scientists selling the global warming position will necessarily claim that Bitcoin mining will destroy the ecosystem. So, they're right about anthropogenic climate change, but wrong about Bitcoin mining with fossil fuels accelerating climate change? Do we need to consult the wider internet just to demonstrate basic logic?

This.


All electrical use incentivises cheap and sustainable generation methods in fairness, cryptocurrency mining simply needs to respond to those incentives with far more sensitivity.

Right, you're saying there's no doubt, got it.





Ok, so now you're saying there is considerable doubt, interesting. You changed your mind very quickly!



They're closer to 100% agreement than any other demographic. Which, as you're demonstrating, isn't that close.


Any other ways you'd like to help me prove that anthropogenic climate change is far from proven or consensus science?

uh oh

So: lend your money to a company-that-isn't-Coinbase so that they can invest it for you in a way that will pay you a rate of return which tracks the aggregated value of a basket of leading crypto-space indexes that blahblahblah-blablablablablablablabla


If anyone gets their fingers burned here, don't say you weren't warned.

Not any more. Chinese mining operations have been relocating from China since the Chinese government became more belligerent about Bitcoin businesses last year.



Whether or not CO² emissions cause significant problems or not is disputed science. Climate scientists are in major disagreement about this.

The only group of people that are near 100% in agreement about CO² emissions being a serious problem are: Politicians.

There's an unfortunate endgame to the central bank paradigm.


In principle, once sovereign debt of any state becomes too high (as a % of GNP), the debt becomes unpayable (and it is convincingly argued that because the interest on sovereign bonds isn't created as part of the money supply in the same way that the principal is, that all national debts will end in default on some timescale). Argentina's creditors have recently attempted to use any means necessary (both legal judgements and force) to re-coop their losses, and they go after state assets. That means productive infrastructure that taxpayers supposedly own (lol).

And so the conclusion may well be that the central banking system is the most spectacular long-con ever conceived. When we consider that (for instance) those who instituted the US Federal Reserve provided zero capital for the institution in the first place, it can be argued that central banks represent a leveraged buy-out (where money is borrowed to buy up a company) of an entire country, on behalf of those who buy the bonds (often acquaintances of the central bankers).

It's spectacularly clever if designed that way. All the labour and resources needed to build all that infrastructure existed, the infrastructure itself wouldn't exist if not. The financial system basically lies: all this infrastructure wasn't affordable today, so we'll just throw the part that couldn't be afforded on the national debt. This is essentially a system that creates distortions in prices such that no public money ever gets spent on public infrastructure, it's always borrowed from the central banks, who literally have and provide nothing of value in return (except their debt tokens!). Then the phantom debt can be used to buy the entire state apparatus over the course of a few centuries. It's so clever that the general public sort of deserve to be treated like this, it's so sophisticated as a form of theft that there's not much point in trying to explain it to most people.

More often than not, predictions of events influencing price are just market manipulation, and the news outlets are just as guilty as the people adding their whispers to the rumors. This case could easily be such a contrivance, I'd never heard of the Consensus conference until this year

Oh the UK government have that covered for you, the recent rise in knife crime has prompted politicians, newspaper columnists and psychiatrists to call for a ban on knives with points. Which is very similar to what the rules are in prisons, if I understand correctly, lol.



Listen, governments don't really want to solve problems. If they were ever effective at solving problems, they would end up with no problems left to solve. Creating and perpetuating subtle problems, and then treating the consequences (instead of the cause) is how politicians stay in business. We're here (using and championing Bitcoin) because of one of the most subtle problems (propped up by politicians) that exists: central banking