Hi there,

I'm building my own wallet app for Mac and iOS. The app will be open source when it's ready. Before that, to do things more efficiently, I open source CoreBitcoin, a clean implementation of Bitcoin protocol in Objective-C (with bits of OpenSSL).

The library is not complete yet, but with a help of volunteers I may finish it faster. It is also meant to be cleaner and easier to read by newbies than Satoshi code, bitcoin-ruby or libbitcoin. I try to make every step explicit, documented and simple.

https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin

Feedback is welcome. Thanks.

I'll probably pass by and see you guys there. Meet at 16:00?

This is hilarious.

If you are going to crack pubkeys, it doesn't matter if they are "lost" or simply stashed. Pick any key you like and start cracking today, because it'll be a very long journey.

Funny how some people get angry about "Bitcoin 2" proposal (not in this thread, I guess, but somewhere on reddit).



The truth is, Bitcoin is 100% voluntary. I like my current Bitcoin and don't need to care much about Bitcoin 2. If, however, there begins a noticeable market with Bitcoin 2 guys (will never happen, but let's imagine that), I can decide to voluntarily join this market. Or not. Either way I have choice and everyone's happy.

Why people get so stressed about Bitcoin2 proposal? No one can force anybody to start using it. And if many people would want to use it, it's their choice. You may feel free to join them or keep hashing good-ol Bitcoin. We have tons of altcoins around and none of them (including Bitcoin itself) is forced upon anybody.

I myself don't care about Bitcoin2 and some of their ideas can be implemented on top of Bitcoin 1 just fine.

You probably don't even need to send invalid block headers to anybody. You just connect to as many nodes as you can and store all block headers. If there is a fork, you will personally detect it and act on it. E.g. if your reimplementation of Bitcoin is buggy, you'll notice it by seeing a lot of fresh blocks that you cannot accept for whatever reason.

Neither Mises, nor Rothbard were assuming ideal conditions. There was a thought experiment of "evenly rotating economy", but it is only to investigate several ideas before applying them to real world situations. Both of them considered how coercion and other various real human actions change economic structure (Rothbard in a much more detailed and structured way). None was advocating any separate macroeconomic theory. Everything was discussed on a level of individual decisions (micro-economics) and how it may lead to some big-picture patterns.

Anarcho-capitalism, first of all, is non-agression principle. No one proclaims how society should be "modelled" or function. The only idea is to never allow institutionalised violence as a method of "solving" problems. Then, in absence of federal mega-mafia, people can figure out how to live their lives, how to protect themselves, how to communicate and how to resolve conflicts.

I don't see anything "dogmatic" in applying everybody's desire to live in peace to ALL activities in society. Dogmatism is what all other philosophers and politics use when trying to excuse their desire to apply force to achieve their ends.

If you are asking about voluntary welfare (vs. forced welfare), it is called insurance and/or charity. There is nothing new. You setup your own rules on how you distribute income and those who like them and like how you do your job, will give you money.

"Welfare" without violence is nothing different from any social activity. It has special name only because there is coercion which must be hidden under promise of "well being for human beings".

In voluntary community (e.g. in anonymous networks where kicking ass is impossible), such words as "welfare", "social security", "government", "law" lose any original meaning and purpose. You just have agreements (contracts), reputation, risks, demand and supply of services. Even "for-profit" and "non-profit" distinction is meaningless if you don't have taxes to pay.

Options when nonce overflows:

1. Change extraNonce.
2. Change reward address.
3. Collect new transactions in a new merkle tree (this can be done in parallel to iterating a nonce, so new merkle tree is immediately available when starting from 0). I'm talking about transactions that arrived after you started iterating.
4. Shake your mining box.  Maybe it'll help.

If Bitcoin was using scrypt from the start, you won't escape from ASICs. Just accept that people will optimize mining and there is nothing you can do about it. Like in every social organisation there are leaders, runner-ups and outsiders. Bitcoin is no exception. Communism never works. I, for instance, couldn't care less about mining BTC myself and don't see a problem with some bunch of guys having 70% of hashing power. Those who are interested in preserving the value of their coins would strive to process transactions "fairly" and distribute mining hardware as wide as possible.

I've read a lot of Rothbard before I noticed Bitcoin. And I realized Bitcoin potential very quickly. Rothbard would totally LOVE it.

Also, the principle of "allow currencies or metals compete with each other like any other product" does not invalidate the tendency of people to come down to very limited amount of currencies if not a single one. History shows a lot of examples when we had multiple currencies only because of some restrictions (physical or legal).

I wrote in detail here:
http://oleganza.tumblr.com/post/54121516413/the-universe-wants-one-money

TLDR: People use money to trade for as many goods as possible (because everyone wants to have a choice and there is always uncertainty about the future). Therefore, ideal money which is cheap to store/transmit/verify will tend to become the dominant. It does mean we don't need competition in money, but this will be a competition to choose the limited set of the most perfect currencies. In old times we came down to gold and silver (because gold is impractical for small payments). In modern times we may have Bitcoin taking up 90% of transactions (big and small) with some hedge against hacks in gold. Silver probably will be less relevant in this situation.

You know why we don't really debate if McDonalds is better than Burger King? Because it does not matter. If you think McDo is better, you simply go there. But if government forces you to go to Burger King, does it make any sense to discuss if Burger King has good enough burgers?

The problem is not where everyone is looking. Discussing if fractional reserve or "bails in" are bad or good is irrelevant. The problem is where the gun is. If you don't like government insurance policy "keep less than 100K in a bank", you are free to go and create your own bank, with or without money printing, with any insurance you want. Except, now you will face the gun: you are not allowed to create any bank you want. And then you MUST obey legal tender laws, so if someone brings you a dollar bill, you MUST accept it as a repayment of the debt (even though you gave credit in, say, silver). In the end, multiple individual policies shape the market in a way that only a small number of banks with very specific policies can survive on the market. All the rest will either be pushed out by force or not be competitive.

If intellectuals like you spend all their time debating unimportant and non-black-and-white issues like bail ins, you will never expose the real root of all problems: not allowing people to do what they want to do and thus directing them into the shitty government policies. It does not matter which policy we are talking about. What matters is only gunpoint.

I'd say it is empowering anarchy. So what?

My point is that talking about levels of fairness in a situation which is already unfair to both taxpayers and depositors (almost every depositor is a taxpayer, by the way, and every taxpayer is a victim of taxation), is hiding the real problem. It's like discussing oral hygiene during tsunami. It's technically correct, but irrelevant. To add insult to injury, such technique is typically used by media and politicians intentionally to distract from real issues.

In our case, when the government and banks create a nice guarded prison for every citizen and then play with them how they want, anyone who says "taking money from depositors is fairer than from taxpayers" may be technically correct, but insults both groups. It is immoral to threaten peaceful people on any grounds, period. Threatening people for creating their own banks because of such "rules" is immoral. Anyone who invents "moral rules" to justify violence must either have a full mathematically-hard proof or shut up. I myself don't claim to know what's "moral", but my only definition of "immorality" is when someone claims to be moral himself and instead of working on a proof threatens to kill people.

It would be all well and good if you was free to create your own bank and your own currency to those who don't want to play that game. But the rules are such that you cannot do that. So if you need banking (and many people and businesses simply cannot work with paper cash for many reasons), you have to bear all the risks that these people create.

I have nothing against fractional reserve banking or "depositors bear the risk" etc. if only this was absolutely voluntary. But I bet if it was, very few people would be interested in that deal. After all, private ponzi schemes are "bad" only because of fraudulent investment promises, not because of the money distribution scheme. Call it honestly a lottery, don't force people to join and play as long as you wish.

Your quote about 256-bit keys has nothing to do with hash functions. It was about AES encryption.

Double SHA256 used for mining and hashing transactions is safe and will be safe for a very long time. Collision attacks and first preimage attacks are irrelevant. Only interesting attack is a second preimage for a given transaction hash or pubkey hash. But then it is still very constrained as you don't want *any* data matching existing hash, but a particular key that you can use or a transaction with keys that you own.

Then, even if second preimage attack suddenly becomes feasible, we can switch to SHA3 in tx merkle trees and bitcoin addresses, but still keep double SHA256 as a proof-of-work. The difficulty simply will get bigger and that's it.

If you are trusting your computer with your message, you can trust it to hold a secret for a fraction of a second. Once you send out a message, simply clear the secret from memory, so it's not swapped on disk or otherwise extracted due to some corruption later on (it's a standard security practice, btw: put some secret in memory, use it, then zero it out ASAP).

This is smart. Thanks for suggestion.

What do you mean? Sender must know the message it is about to send.