Middle class people have pension funds and benefit from endowments (via improved campus resources, presumedly without increased tuition).  The poor don't invest in anything, as a true poor family couldn't have paid for a flat screen anyway.  He was using the term 'poor' to refer to the American lower middle class, who most certainly do have pension funds and 401K's, just not much of either.

That would be true about now, but that is also one reason pruning isn't high on the to-do list.  In a future, wherein Bitcoin processes transactions on the scale of Paypal or Visa, the pruning of spent transactions will be a very useful thing.


Yes, there is a reason; and because of that reason, and the sentiment that you have expressed above, not every node is going to prune.  Thus, the entire blockchain will continue to exist somewhere on the 'net forever.  However, this isn't particularly useful for a node processing transactions in a live production environment.  If you truely feel this way, then you can feel free to commit some of your own personal resources to make certain that a node with the complete and unabridged blockchain continues to exist.


Agreed.

http://www.escapefromamerica.com/2011/08/is-it-getting-harder-to-become-an-expat-and-escape-from-america/

I'll just leave this here.

There isn't any real need for a large number of nodes that keep a full copy of the blockchain.  There probably isn't any real need for any node to keep a full copy of the blockchain unpruned at all.  Pruning of transaction data that 1) is older than a certain period of time, say three months or15K blocks or so and 2) has been referenced (spent) and the referencing transaction has been referenced (i.e. the transaction is at least two transactions long spent) will eventually result in a fairly stable blockchain size that mostly varies by transaction volumes over those three months.  Some clients won't keep spent transactions unpruned at all, and will thus have a much smaller data footprint, growing only by the size of the block headers; which amounts to about 4 megs per year.

That said, some nodes will keep full copies of the blockchain, if only for archival reasons.  It's not neccessary that these nodes have high bandwidth or super powerful machines either.  I have a VPS that can keep up with the blockchain just fine, that I direct my other client(s) to bootstrap and update from, since I don't keep clients running either on my home machine nor my android phone and I don't want either to announce to the network or to the bootstrapping IRC channel that they exist.

BitcoinJ clients do this, because once they are started for the first time, they create their own addresses and have no logical need to assume that such addresses have existed prior to themselves.  They download the most recent blocks, and then keep up with the chain, but then I think that they only keep the block headers and discard the data in all blocks that do not relate to coins sent to themselves.  It's certainly possible, there just isn't a real need for a regular client that can do this just yet.

Despite the common belief that you are free to move to any nation you choose, an American is not free to revoke their own citizenship without the permission of the US State Department.  They don't make it easy, and wouldn't make it possible if they could get away with it.  I'm not claiming it's right, I'm saying it's reality.  Move to Israel and get citizenship there, get a job, and return to the US on a Israeli visa and they might just leave you be.  But if you move to Israel, start a company and become wealthy entirely beyond the borders of the US, and return to the US under any method using your own name, you can expect to pay out your unpaid federal income taxes earned abroad if you wish to see your wife in Israel again.  It really is all about the money.  If you don't have enough earnings abroad for them to care about, they won't.  If you end up making a fortune, you can expect a shakedown eventually.

It's in the white paper.

No.  Not slower.  Not the network, anyway.  Perhaps your particular client, but only if your machine & internet connection suck.


I can't compromise the network, and it can reach infinity until a client with the capacity to 'prune' spent transactions from the old blocks is developed.  Pruning of the blockchain is part of the protocol, but isn't implimented yet, and likely won't be for some time.  It probably isn't going to become a priority until the blockchain is around the 10-20 GB range.  Any computer newer than two years old and with a decent broadband connection can handle this kind of database.

I never thought that anyone should be the 'face' of bitcoin to start with, but the media needs someone to be the point man.  BW stepped up to do that task.  He should not continue, regardless of the truth or fiction among these accusations.  Still, I'm questioning the vitrol of many of the posters in these threads.  Some facts exist.  Some of them quite damaging, taken alone.  I take such things with a grain of salt.  I'm not here to defend BW.  Honestly, I don't care about his reputation.  I do care about this forum, and think that most of this is way out of bounds, but I havn't yet done anything to prevent it.  Members have a right to say what they want, to a point, even if what they have to say is false or generally asshat-ish in nature.  But there is an aweful lot of blaming going on here lately.  Sometimes we get scammed.  Take your lumps and move on.  Don't trust BW or any anonymous wallet service again.  But none of us are going to get compensated by BW, whether that is the proper course or not.  And nor is it ours to decide if it is the proper course.  If you have evidence that BW is actually responsible, please present that to a detective at the fraud devision of the NYPD.

That's the theory, but try it and see what happens.  If you are an American living and working abroad, you will be taxed by the US government.  I dare you to refuse to pay that tax.  Even revocation of your natural born citizenship doesn't fly, because the US won't accept it and most other nations that you might want to live in won't protect you should the MIB come pay you a visit in your new country of residence.

Salaries for paper pushing office employees, real estate lawyers via fees, deed investigations, etc.  The statement that a non-refundable deposit paid by the homeowner seeking aid, of a substantial amount in most cases, is plausible.  This, however, is what really got them in trouble.  Lacking a license in the state to do real estate, they shouldn't have been taking any money from prospective clients.  They should have tried to be more discriminating with those they thought they could help.  The subset of late homeowners that were still credit worthy enough for a land contract (which is basicly just another form of refinance, using a rent-to-own contract to sidestep a lot of real estate regulatory BS) is a narrow, but mathmaticly predictable, band of people.  They should have been able to eliminate 95% of the unworthy applicants based on a simple questionaire wherein they provide data on their finances, and via their credit background check.  Those who still had a good credit rating should have been able to refinance without them, it's those who had a very poor credit rating for other reasons that (no longer) applied to the homeowner.  For example, a divorced single woman, employed, who filed for bankruptcy due to the circumstances of divorce.  (Even a divorce does not relieve your responsibilities to pay for your deadbeat ex-spouse's debts, if they occurred while you were married)

25K BTC was cheap when BW bought them, and does he not have a job in NYC?  Was this judgement really unpaid or not waived?  If he really didn't have the funds, they might have let him out of it.  That would have been a different document.  Fleeing the state over a civil suit can get you a warrant.  I seriously doubt that BW would still be in the US if this were so.


How do you know that he didn't try to make amends?

Maybe I'm just too old.


Obviously some people do care if Bruce is battin' for the other team.  I see no evidence that he is a convicted fraudster, a civil suit is easy enough to lose.  Mismanagement is a valid cause for a class action suit, but it's not usually criminal.  Never attribute malice whenever incompetance is a reasonable explaination.  Again, a real con artist wouldn't have used his real identity if this were a con, nor would he try to defend himself in this forum once the game was done.  Obviously, Bruce's reputation within this community matters to himself.  What he should have done in 2005 was simply stop accepting new applications, or at least stop accepting a deposit for accepting new applications.  I've some limited experience with land contracts, and what he was doing was basicly matchmaking of real estate investors and homeowners who were treading water, but still a better risk than the standard metrics would imply.  Sort of like what Prosper.com used to do before the regulators shut them down.  This does not mean that the idea wasn't sound, just that as the market started to tank, the pool of risk worthy homeowners and the pool of available investment funds both dwindled away compared to the pool of soon-to-be-former homeowners.  That said, mismanagement does seem to be a plausible cause of failure, and not one that is easy for most businessmen to admit.  I think that a lot of this is about a subset of forum membership that got burned by Mybitcoin.com (I lost 29 BTC myself) and are too bitter to accept that they (we) all failed to do our due dilligence.  We should never have been so trusting of a faceless website ran by a largely anonymous individual, and we shouldn't be looking for prominant members to blame for our errors.  Take a little responsibility for your own actions, people.  I read today that some woman paid $180 for an Ipad 2 in the parking lot of a McD's; only to get it home and discover that it was a painted block of wood.  The woman called the cops, as this was obviously fraud, but what was she doing buying anything from the back of a van without checking to see if it was real!?  She claims that she didn't think that it could be stolen, either.  Really?  I assume that half of the electronics that I find on Craigslist are stolen, if their list price is less than half of the new price and the seller isn't willing to provide contact info.  Don't you?

It's past time for the members who lost funds to write it off as tuition to the University of Life, and learn from it.  Some of us may have paid more than others, but we should all be able to take a hard won lesson from this.

What is "SA"?

You're damn right.  Do you know the difference between a tax and a homeowners' association fee?  You know the fee before you move in, and are free to move away if you no longer wish to pay it.  I dare you to refuse to pay your taxes "due" and move out of the country.

Mods can't do this, only global administrators.

Maybe, but this isn't a courtroom, and your diatribe not evidence of much.  If he was a con artist, he was a crappy one, and still is.  What con artist would still be using an identity that could easily tie back to such prior events?  Particularly within a community that it is so very easy to obscure one's own identity.  What gain would there have been for Bruce to invest into Mybitcoin.com just to scuttle it?  Certainly he would have known that the blockchain would eventually trace back to himself and that the scandal would have devalued the currency.

Then you don't understand Capitalism, much less it's evils.

I'm either missing something, or we have been overrun with homophobes.  Why are there so many BruceWagner bashers lately?

True.  If you started it, you can stop it.  Unless you are a newb, but then you shouldn't be able to start threads anyway.