It's on the interest of miners not to have huge blocks, which they didn't mine, occupying space on their hard drives. Also I believe it's on their interest not to split the network. So, they can create rules of the kind "I won't build on top of blocks larger than X unless they are already Y blocks deep already". They can actually have multiple rules with different values for X and Y. If most miners roughly agree on these parameters, it would be really hard to keep a chain with a block larger than such limits.

Plus, if they want, they can actually use the same mechanism to try to boycott miners which accept transactions with "too low fees". "I won't mine on top of blocks which had transactions paying less than X/Kb unless it is already Y blocks deep". That would be another "decentralized" way to deal with the incentives issue, besides the eventual insurers.


It would be a backward incompatible change, so it would need to be scheduled with a good advance to minimize this risk.


Not entirely sure. As it would be faking transactions, only their blocks would push the limit up. Every other "true block" would be way below the limit, pushing the average down. The amount of waste these abusing network would manage to create would be proportional to the amount of processing power they have, and I don't think you can gather that many people for such a pointless attack...

Maybe phones would only be the consumers of such services. The providers could be people better equipped, in their homes, allowing unknown people to use their home connection, for a cheaper price than what they would normally pay for 3G...

And I think this is the point of this thread, and for this very reason I must subscribe here.

This is very interesting and has great potential, I'd like to participate, or at least follow closely whatever you come up with.

I fully agree there.

This guy needs to learn some economics. His take on "free things cause unemployment" was so wrong... He could start reading some Bastiat; http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html


If I understood it correctly, it is a common protocol for issuing centralized tokens for anything. The idea is that people can exchange different tokens, from different issuers, digitally, using the same protocol.
I also don't know much about Open Transaction, I would need to learn more. I wonder if with alternative chains and merged mining we couldn't actually completely decentralize the double-spend verification part of the Open Transaction protocol, making it less centralized. It is inherently centralized anyway, since we're talking about token issuers.

Reviving this old topic just to say that my opinion on this subject has mostly changed, mainly after some very interesting talks with Stefan Thomas and others (even the great economist Detlev Schlichter was there ) during the bitcoin conference in Prague.

We probably don't need to mind with fixing a max block size on the protocol. The spam problem is a problem for pool operators and solo-miners only, as already said in this thread. And the transaction fee "tragedy of the commons" scenario would probably be better solved by market agents (like insurers) than by arbitrary rules on the protocol. By fixing arbitrary rules, we will either not create the amount of incentives needed, or, more likely, we will create more incentives than what's actually needed, provoking unnecessary waste of resources.

I can't, my account is not verified.

Ha, nice to recognize people here in the forum. We've talked during the conference, OP. I'm the Brazilian-living-in-France guy. Guess I'll just add a photo of me too so that people can recognize me like I just recognized you.

About the topic, I agree with those saying that bitcoin can be both things. It's clear that so far, it is not a good store of value, and won't be for a while. But I'd expect it to become stable one day.
But you and Tony are correct when they say that currently, bitcoin is "only" a superior means of payment. Most people should only use bitcoin like that, for now.

There was also the announcement of that dedicated device development, by Clemens Cap.

Just adding my voice to all those saying that the conference was a great experience.

The talks were good, and meeting so many other bitcoin enthusiasts was also great. I hope I can keep in touch with most of them.

Prague is also a nice city, even when we add the frozen weather to the equation. Impressive how it has good infrastructure and at the same time prices are so low. A hotel of the same quality of that Panorama one would likely cost three times more here in France. And what can I say about those cheap beers and the deliciously cheap pork meat! You made a good choice of venue, for sure!

My sincere congratulations to everyone behind the organization of this great event!

Will there be anyone selling bitcoins for cash (euros) during the conference?

Same thing here. The directory /data/data does not exist. Where else could my wallet be? Do I need a rooted android just to find the wallet?

What's BitMarket.eu current situation?
I mean, I can see trades keep happening, but I wonder if the site is running on "auto-mode".

Not that we can demand anything since the service is free after all. Just to know how much should I expect of it.

That's the protocol. Every bitcoin full node will verify that each new block respects the difficult factor. If somebody starts producing/accepting blocks which don't follow this rule, s/he will end up with forked chain.

There's no "hard guarantee" that a good number of people won't switch to a different chain that doesn't follow the current rules. It just hasn't happened yet and I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon.

I don't condemn your attitude, I'm just not confident it will be effective, particularly considering big governments as USSA. It might be more effective in places where financial privacy is less attacked and the government doesn't depend that much on inflation, like Switzerland.

I don't view the regression theory of von Mises as a claim that money must arise from a commodity. That, IMHO, is a bad interpretation.
I view such theory as an explanation of how money economies started from previous barter economies.

Bitcoin does nothing to invalidate such explanation, nor such theory implies that bitcoin could not exist/work.

The link between the bitcoin money economy and previous barter economies was made the day some people decided to exchange bitcoins for dollars. There's a topic on this forum about it.

No.

It's funny how people adapt their expectations. What do you mean by "for so long"? A couple months ago the price of 1 BTC was below $1. It's changing damn fast.

There's medieval Ireland too, which stood for almost a thousand years with no concept of state justice.
I'm not aware of this Asian example. How was it called? Do you have a good text about it?

That's a possibility, both the small population and the small territory.

The small population makes it a bit harder for "interest groups" to largely benefit from the effects of public choice, since there's not a big crowd to which they can externalize their costs.
And a small territory makes it harder for government to abuse since people can easily emigrate. That's even stronger in Switzerland since everybody speaks at least one "foreign" language, so there are even less barriers to emigration. Also, the lack of a national language may make it harder to create a national identity, and therefore, less nationalism. Nationalism is clearly something that helps governments to expand.

But still, although I think it makes some sense, I wouldn't defend the theory of OP as something very certain.