Search for 2-of-3 multisignature transactions.

Basically you can create an address that need the signature of 2 out of 3 keys in order to be spent. The escrow, as well as both parties of a transaction would each hold one of the keys. Only with the agreement of at least 2 of them the money would be moved.
So the worst the escrow can do is to be a "bad judge" in a conflict case. He can't steal the money.

How do you even detect a fork's happened?

And how does "change their settings" fix the problem? How do you decide which fork is good and which is not? If human intervention is necessary, we may suppose that at best it would take several hours - probably several days - to come to an agreement on a "good UNL". Doesn't that open the door to dangerous double-spends? (imagine a Bitcoin reorg of hundreds of blocks)

Am I the only one finding it suspicious that such attack on MtGox came soon after CoinLab lawsuit?

Perhaps I'm just being overly paranoid, but Vesseness looks increasingly suspicious to me. He surely has some contacts... VCs, big law firms... He chose Washington D.C. to siege TBF (any place with more lobbyists per m² in the world?).

Could he have anything to do with this?

Bump.


But how do you solve it? How do you know which ledger is correct? You manually pick one, randomly? How do you get everybody to pick the same?

Assuming all sides of the fork(s) are honest, there should be a deterministic way to solve it.

Does anyone know, with a good degree of certainty (not guesses), if this has anything to do with Vesseness and their lawsuit?

I'm increasingly suspicious about this individual. He seems to be a man of "contacts". (VC support, opening TBF on Washington D.C. etc).

If you note my quote above, I was answering to your comment of "riches lining up to lend it".

Who are most of these buyers?
The Social Security? The Fed? Foreign governments/central banks?

None of these use their own money to buy these bonds.

I wouldn't be so sure about "riches lining up to lend it".

According to business insider, US households + private pension funds together barely sum up 10% of the total amount. And even if you add mutual funds and commercial banks, that's still less than what the social security alone lends to US federal gov. That article is of 2011 btw. I wonder if the Fed share hasn't increased since then.
Also, remember that many of these funds are contractually obliged to invest their clients money in "officially safe" investments. Lots of people put money in these funds without even knowing where it's going.

Ah, sorry.
The technology won't be banned. I mean, even dumb politicians can see the amount of good uses these printers can have. At most, they'll try to control/regulate it in order to forbid the printing of certain contents, pretty much as filesharing indeed (which is not banned, they just attempt to ban particular files). They'd fail, as you noted.

Unfortunately it's easier to enforce it than you might think. The reason being that as soon as you use an illegal gun - even for self-defense - you might face jail time.

I grew up in Brazil. It's a violent place. Owning a gun legally is very difficult. Buying one illegally is easier. Even though, I never attempted to buy one, and probably never would. Most burglars are only after your money, and if you surrender it, they don't kill nor hurt you. On the other hand, if you use your illegal gun for protection and end up with a dead body on your living room, you might go to jail. Even disregarding the psychological weight of knowing you took somebody's life, I'd say it's wiser to just give your money than face jail just to save it.

Anyway. I hope 3D-printable guns kill for once the wrong idea that gun prohibition can reduce the number of guns available to criminals. And I hope that changes the mind of enough anti-gun people, and legal gun ownership becomes easier around the globe. Because otherwise, I'm not sure how would they help. Most honest people who can't have legal guns would likely be afraid to print their own. And those who already can don't need to bother, conventional guns will remain much better for a long time.

Inflation is worse than default, that's not just a matter of opinion.

Inflation draws purchasing power from money owners, which is the equivalent of taxing them to pay government debt, with the difference that inflation is the worst tax possible, as it affects proportionally more strongly the poorer and the more ignorant, and worse still, as it's practiced today, it causes economic cycles that destroy capital.


No. Government debt is not a voluntary contract as you claim, because those who are left with the burden to pay did not consent with it. The equivalent analogy is I lend you money and then you force others to repay the debt for you.

Forcing innocent taxvictims to pay government debt is not only unethical, but economically unwise too, as with every non-voluntary trade/agreement. As government itself cannot repay its debt out of its own resources since it does not produce anything, there's no better solution than a default, in spite of all the chaos it would cause in the short term.

For all practical matters that is a partial default. Actually, it's economically worse than a default.


Awesome site.

I'm very pleased to see your involvement with Bitcoin. Bitcoin and Seasteading are two things that fascinate me.

Since this seems an AMA, I'll shoot my questions too.
I've noticed you do intend to provide a considerable level of economic freedom on board, by not collecting taxes, by choosing contractual arbitration as preferred resolution dispute etc. That's awesome. I hope to soon see Blueseed on the top of indexes like those of the Fraser Institute or the Heritage Foundation.

But what about the more "social aspects" of freedom? Some of them tend to be a taboo in US (and many other places), where things as banal as drinking alcohol outside might be illegal. I hope you're not willing to mimic these authoritarian behaviors. So...

• Will gambling be allowed?
• Will recreational use of marijuana be allowed? Now that some US states have allowed it, you'd start worse than them if you don't.
• Will prostitution be allowed? Banning the "oldest profession on Earth" is so stupid I don't even have words for it. And since you're focusing on IT startups, you'll likely not have a balanced men/women ration. I would advice at least a tolerance-policy towards prostitution.
• Will individuals be allowed to carry guns on board? Will there be a place to practice shooting? If you allow the inhabitants to be the "preventive police" of the place, you may save a lot on security.

I also have a question of more practical nature: will there be a nursery/hospital on board? Will health insurance be possible? Do you have an estimate of costs?

And finally, I'm intrigued by these restrictions being mentioned on this thread, related to the fact that the chosen place is a "protected sanctuary" of some kind to some environmentalist religions. Isn't the place outside of US territorial waters? How can US enforce the protection of a sanctuary outside of its jurisdiction? Or does it just ignore international conventions on territorial waters?

Thanks, and congratulations for your work. I really hope you succeed.

OK. And comparing it with drilling holes in people's heads was totally coherent, relevant and "respectful".


I hope you're right on the last phrase.
And yes, in the end of the day significant miners get to tell what's accepted or not. So why embedding this particular policy in the default behavior anyway? (the particular dust-non-standard one, not the config options, which are obviously welcome)

That's your - and mine too - opinion.
Some people apparently see the blockchain as useful for data storage, or for message sending, whatever. Simply trying to censor them is dumb. It's the typical bureaucratic response to a perceived "problem": ban it!

The clever response is to imagine how could Bitcoin profit from it. And I can see no better way than to make them pay for such unconventional usage.


Don't be ridiculous (or troll harder). There's consent in Bitcoin usage. Apart from botnets and alike, nobody forces you to install Bitcoin in your computer.


They're not "imposed".

And yeah, that's part of the "game": the remuneration is diluted in this lottery-like thing popularly called mining. That's known in advance. You know you'll only get the fees of a transaction if you get to produce the block that contains it. As long as the remuneration you collect (inflation + fee) pays for the overall effort and costs you need to bear, you should be fine.
Although in general I'm for the internationalization of costs, you shouldn't get overly paranoid there. Sometimes it's more expensive to internalize a cost than to bear the free-rider. For example, have you ever seen a residential building trying to charge its inhabitants according to the amount of times they took the elevator?
(By the way, if UTXO ever becomes so huge that smaller miners can't bear to store it entirely - I honestly doubt it - they can choose to drop some transactions that they believe will never be spent. At the worst, some of these transactions get spent and these miners won't be able to fully validate the block in which they get included - if they get included by someone-, pretty much like SPV nodes. But they'll still be able to validate and mine all others, more "interesting" transactions. Another alternative would be to store these txs in slower and cheaper media, since they don't expect to access it. Anyway, I really doubt UTXO will ever get that big so this is likely a non-issue)


Great, at least people can safely opt-out. I still think it should be an opt-in though.


By deciding which use cases are desirable and which are not, and attempting to censor those considered undesirable. That's a judgement of value.

I insist: banning like this is dumb. Charging for it is more reasonable, and much more use-case-neutral.


I wouldn't call that "discouraging", I'd call that censoring them on bitcoind. Discouraging would be to make them pay.


It is not against their consent (botnets excluded, of course).

I agree with you, but it's still sad to see biased behavior being embedded in the reference implementation. It's like bitcoin.org. Not a monopoly, but still, the "reference". I'd very much prefer if it remained the most unbiased possible.

It doesn't make sense.
A 1 satoshi tx paying enough fees is certainly more interesting than a 1.000 BTC tx not paying anything.


Great. First you set up a biased "press center", now you embed arbitrary judgement of value in the default client behavior. This is degenerating fast.

In case you don't get it - and you likely don't - it should not be up to you, or any developer, to decide how Bitcoin transactions should be used, or what purpose they fill. You're basically inserting a rule in the reference implementation whose motivation to be is an attempt to censor certain use cases of the protocol, simply because you believe the protocol should not be used for such. That's just not right. Of course that the mining activity must remain profitable, and fees to block spam are thus something reasonable. But censoring any output below X no matter how much fees it carries is not reasonable. It doesn't make sense. If somebody is paying fees to store arbitrary data in the blockchain, just let him be.


Will bitcoind also disconnect from nodes that don't respect this policy, à la FATCA style?

By reading the description on GitHub I get the impression that every transaction with a single output below 54.3µBTC will be treated as non-standard, even if it carries other larger outputs, or if it carries lots of fees.

Is this correct?
Because it doesn't seem to make sense to me. Why should miners reject a transaction with 1 satoshi output which carry, say, 10mBTC as fee, but still accept transactions with no fees at all?

Wow.... and this is the individual picking who gets to be on the "Press Center"... indeed, not even Hugo Chavez would be so explicit.

Please, sirius, just shut this damn Press Center down. It's impossible to have any other consensus with people like this one I'm quoting. It's better to just delete this page from bitcoin.org.