One person, two nodes, right. Because one computer should be enough for everybody, I'm sure every serious miner only has one. Sounds legit.


Short term gain != long term success.

As for your other arguments:
In Internet slang, a troll (pron.: /ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is someone who posts inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.

You trolled this topic long enough. Goodbye.

You do realize that only one person mining could've kept the network running, right? Try understanding the protocol first. And before you cry 51% attack, get real - securing the network was not the primary reason people mined, you're delusional - and any sort of attack would've been circumvented easily. http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2012/05/neutralizing-51-attack.html

And lol @ that guy blowing 300k worth of coins, some "apostle" he was if he spent that much that early. We're in the what? 4th year of bitcoin? You have your values seriously screwed up if that's the kind of guy you're worshiping, considering everything.


You're completely unfamiliar with how this started and what it was at first. You got here after it was already pegged to the USD.


Litecoin has the same curve as Bitcoin, it has the same problem.


Notice that Satoshi said "seems like the best formula". Doesn't sound like he was as convinced as you are, of course, in your own little world you must think you're smarter.


Lol, some source you quoted. That has no relevance to the fact that transaction fees were designed to be 0.01 and not 0.0005 as they are now. Blocks are already getting full as per the original design, so even 30 years from now, if the same limits were kept as now, miners would still only make 0.6 BTC from fees for every block they mine. They would've made 12 BTC otherwise, which would've been more than the subsidy a lot earlier than at the cutoff.


Here you go again with the miner point, see #1. You're making miners look bad by defending them so much - seriously. I never accused miners of anything, I just pointed out how the system could've been designed to make more economic sense.


Go re-read all of your replies and see how you're attacking me while I'm simply pointing something out without attacking anyone (unless provoked). I haven't overreached my investment and I don't have problems sleeping at night. Calm down.

"Reached Thursday, a VirWox representative said that the exchange has had multi-factor authentication since September 2012. “Bitinstant was not using it (they learned and do now),” the representative said in an email message."

Just so your comment doesn't look completely asinine (new favorite word in this thread) by itself, I'm going to help you out by saying that yeah, the fact MtGox is practically a monopoly is also somewhat detrimental. The rest of the exchanges are mainly only good for arbitrages as far as the actual big fish are concerned (if that).

It's not a myth. I know someone that sold during the mini crash a few nights ago at $42 and bought back at $35 and made 500 coins profit. This person was probably one of the main reasons for the crash as well, because he sold a sizable amount of coins (several thousands).

I personally sold at $42 and bought at $40 (gox lag...) and made several coins profit as well.

Your early incentives point makes no sense. What you fail at understanding in your reasoning is that the so called early incentives were not as big of a deal as you make them out to be. Bitcoin would've survived and slowly grown regardless - for the same reason people compete in Angry Birds and its market cap is as big as bitcoin's, or the reason they spend money on powerups in various pointless games - mining was fun.

A huge majority couldn't have known that they would eventually trade for actual dollars - proof stands in all the coins lost in the early days. And if they did, as early adopters they would've still had amassed a lot more coins than the late adopters. Logic.

A more gradual build up of wealth, rather than majority controlling stakes from the get-go would've helped tremendously in stabilizing the market.

In "Satoshi's Grand Design" the transaction fees were supposed to be 0.01 not 0.0005.

This would've made each block generate an additional ~12BTC in fees at current volume and probably more going forward, which would've offset some of the problems of the curve. Sure, 0.01 would've been noncompetitive for transactions lower than say 1 coin - so perhaps we're not using the coin as originally intended, and it was never meant to be used for micropayments in its current design. The official website even states: "Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world."

What I'm trying to promote here is putting some thought into all this, think about what we can learn from it. Try coming up with valid points so we can have a meaningful debate rather than defending early miners' ridiculous rewards - which make no economic sense.

Not trying to diss Bitcoin in any way, I'd really love to see it succeed and I have significant stakes in it - but the fact that people with as few as 10000 coins (0.9% of total coins) can swing the BTCUSD price up and down by more than 10% could scare away the companies getting into it. 10000 is not that much, SatoshiDice makes more than that in profit each month, and someone holding that amount and selling easily triggers a crash and can then buy more than 10000 in the aftermath before it recovers.

This rollercoaster isn't good for credibility. How can we prevent it?

Note that just from a technical point of view, in the protocol, Bitcoin amounts are expressed as an integer number of satoshis.

Should there be a need to add extra digits of "precision" in the future this would essentially be the same as multiplying the monetary supply by 10 for each extra digit of precision. One could argue against the "finite" argument in this case.

You didn't factor in the equation the fact that Joe Early could actually be Joe Banker or Joe Government who has a vested interest in seeing Bitcoin fail. They can crash the price to nearly nothing, then buy even more cheap coins in the aftermath. And if the coin still refuses to die, do it all over again a couple of years later. It's not rocket science, and people do it all the time for personal gain with smaller amounts (which is what causes the mini crashes).

Actually if Bitcoin were to fail because of this, Litecoin would fail as well because its generation curve is the same. It's a business problem, not a technical one.

You truly are clueless about what drives value. Please stay away from replying to things you don't have the mental capacity to understand.

In a real economy the population and adoption doesn't increase at the rate it does in a new economy/currency that becomes successful. Inflation in Bitcoin, for the short to medium term actually makes sense and is desirable. 100 people with 100 coins is the same as 1 million people with 1 million coins - it is not inflation. In a fiat inflationary economy, the number of coins arbitrarily increases without major population changes, the billion people with a gajillion dollars today are the billion people with two gajillion dollars tomorrow..

The way the wealth was distributed is plain wrong and leads to people controlling the market extremely easily. It could be argued that it's just an honest mistake however, Satoshi only had one shot at getting this right.

The flaw is that: You only need a few thousand coins to initiate a crash, have everyone else panic sell then buy back in at lower prices, essentially growing your portfolio every time and gaining more and more control. Basic economics and this is exactly what happened last night. A steady supply of new coins as adoption increases would have prevented that.

Regarding havoc in 21 years when the limit hit, there wouldn't be any - you fail at doing the math again. Assuming a generous 7200 coins generated per day and hundred of millions of users (at the very least), that's less than 0.000072 new coins per person per day being generated at that time.

You have to be extremely closed minded to not see the wealth distribution as a big problem for the foreseeable future, in regards to trading and market stability. I ensure you that I'm not crying here that I didn't buy in early, perhaps I did and am holding a sizable amount of coins - perhaps I didn't, that's not the point.

If there's one big flaw that has the potential of destroying Bitcoin's credibility and hinder its long term success, it's this. People control the market way too easily. Is there anything that can be done now about it? Probably not, which is the scary part.

Looks like your second day wasn't as lucky

Results here:
http://bit14.com/ShowPick/7485ca86-df0c-4c20-a8c1-5e9c80a08cb4

I don't think you understand how mining and feature adoption works. You might want to look at things like P2SH and its voting process before you post. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60829.0

That's entirely false, there are a few mining pools which have the majority of the power right now. They decide exclusively what protocol changes are adopted, not the actual end-users.

That's not working as intended, Satoshi intended for everyone to have equal voting rights, instead of delegating them to a few super powers (the pools).

There are various things at play in making something truly successful. Associating with the right people, bringing awareness and sometimes novelty factor is the most important, execution barely matters most of the time. (Not saying Bitcoin is badly executed.)

Regarding what is going to happen in the long term, we'll have to wait and see, in a decreasing reward system the market is easily manipulated, in an increasing reward system, the market is much more stable. That's all I'm saying. Conceptually, it's the right thing to do, and I'm waiting for someone to prove this wrong.

Well, it should be possible to write a script that checks the blockchain for bitcoins that were not touched at all in the past 2 years (atomically). Since they're traceable to their genesis, we should be able to find out exactly how many are in circulation and how many are being hoarded.

This is just a major flaw, I didn't say it's a critical deathblow.

If however Bitcoin2 was made today from stuff we learned from Bitcoin, I think it makes a lot more sense to have a reversed reward structure - please try to debate on that.

To everyone else being offtopic here, your air of superiority just makes you look dumb.

nwbitcoin: Have a tip, because Kurt Cobain and because you're probably the only one with an open mind around here.

Note to everyone: I'm very much into Bitcoin myself, and would love to see it succeed, but everyone should be at least a little worried that if an evil entity (government?) had millions of coins from the early days they could easily send the price back to $1 again, with a lot of people losing a lot of money.

However, I don't want to go into this debate again, we're strictly talking about the reward structure here.

It would be really interesting to see a visualization (graph/chart/printout ) of all the bitcoins being traded in the past couple of years, how many of them (atomically) haven't exchanged hands at all in the past 2 years? Since all coins should be able to be traced back to the moment they were mined, it should be fairly trivial to see how many times and the dates when they were transacted. No?

I think this would be valuable for finding out how much is being hoarded, and how much is in circulation.

I haven't fully looked into this tool yet to see if it can do this, but any pointers would be appreciated.

Yet, you're wrong. The distribution curve didn't need to look that way, people got into it anyway because of the same reason they compete for high scores in Facebook games. It was play money as far as they were concerned, otherwise they wouldn't have bought pizzas for 10 000 BTC. Note that WoW gold cost more than BTC for a long time.

However, even though things panned out this way they would've still been rich now, simply because there would've been more BTC/person mined in the early days than there are now. See my earlier post:


 It's simple math.

Edit: I should've said 7200 coins per day for greater impact (at max 50 BTC per block reward), not 50000. So yeah, think 7200.

Bitcoin today is not about mining, but if the reward structure was reversed it could've been. Perhaps the official client would've mined for you by default, strengthening the network at the same time to survive 51% attacks (opt-in of course).

Think about it, we've had an exponential increase in number of people getting into bitcoin, but the biggest chunk has already been generated. We're probably at 0.1% of total global potential as far as bitcoin is concerned, but more than 50% of the coin is already out there.

While the number of adopters is exponentially increasing, the supply is potentially exponentially decreasing. While this is a good thing for hoarders, I don't consider it healthy. Would've been a lot healthier if the two curves were heading the same direction rather than battling head to head.

The early comers would've still been awarded more, because they'd have been fewer.

100 people competing over 500 coins per day is still better than a million people competing over 50000 coins per day.

It would've kept mining feasible for a longer time for the average Joe, possibly helping boost interest.