How could miners guess the UTXOs, or guess the transaction that spends them, based on just the hash of that spending transaction?

I'd be in favour of a mechanism that uses BTC as BitShare, or if that fails to get consensus, to use proof-of-burn to let existing holders of BTC transition 1:1 to the new currency.

The cake is a lie.

Hmm, you are starting to make me change my mind. Right now I'm at the point I was at two months ago with Bitcoin. I was intrigued, and thought they might be on to something, and it took me a couple of hours of reading up on the algorithms to convince myself the concept was sound. I'm going to put in those hours again, though I can't promise you I'll reach the same conclusion. And even if I should remain unconvinced, you have certainly opened my eyes to new possibilities. If it works, it's a clever innovation based not so much on new technology, but on a good understanding of (Austrian!) economics. Sent you a small tip for the entertainment value of this alone.

BTW, this reminds me of the unfinished Market.h and Market.cpp that Satoshi accidentally committed and subsequently removed. You are not secretly Satoshi, are you? If so, your cover is blown.

That is true, and it's one reason Ripple is a good system. But it doesn't get TF off the hook. He still needs to pay up.

Well said.


I think we're still at a stage before that. Governments and banks don't really understand Bitcoin just yet, and they are only barely aware of its existence. I don't think it strikes them as something that needs their urgent attention just yet. They see it as a fad, and as a toy for nerds that is too complicated for the general public. This will obviously change, but for now we still have time to make preparations. And of course, Satoshi - whoever he was - was already making preparations right from the beginning.

I'm not sure if I understand your question. That's indeed how it works now, except that the output is really owned by a script, not an address. In the most common case the script is unlockable by a signature corresponding to a given address, so what you said is almost correct. Or were you asking a more subtle question?


Why is that non-public information needed? To disallow a subsequent unblinded double spend of the same UTXO?

Hey guys, great meetup, it was nice to meet all of you and I'm looking forward to the next meetup.

This might slow down Bitcoin, but it wouldn't stop it.

Military grade cryptography changes the rules of the game forever, just as nuclear weapons did, though in a completely peaceful way. It exists, there are open source implementations in the hands of the public, it cannot be uninvented, and it has many legitimate purposes. It leaves society with a stark choice: either we allow it, in which case its tremendous power has far-reaching consequences, both good and bad, or we try to suppress it, in which case we need draconian measures and will likely at most succeed in taking it away from honourable citizens rather than criminals, who will not be deterred. Radical liberty or tyranny. There are of course less dramatic compromises in between, but I think we'll find that the power of cryptography makes these compromises unenforceable.

See: Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet

If their transaction records said "waiting for hot wallet to be replenished" instead of "finished" in that case and if they published read-only wallets for both their hot and cold wallets, then people wouldn't be so nervous if withdrawals took a bit longer. They already track the block chain status of incoming BTC deposits in the UI.

There's nothing unreasonable about keeping any amount for yourself, but it would be unreasonable to assume such a currency would take over the world. In the end you cannot sell your creation for more than market value, unless there is deception involved. One possible scheme would be to have one giant auction, a bit like an IPO. Or they could do what they in fact plan to do, which is to give away some to get the network going and then gradually sell the rest.

There would be nothing morally wrong with that, but then the trick would be to get people to use it as a currency.

It's both. The rippling mechanism combined with the distributed order book is a great way to exchange between all kinds of currencies, which is great for Bitcoin adoption. But it's a double-edged sword because it's also great for the adoption of XRP as a rival currency. If you are sitting on thousands of BTC or if you have thousands of dollars / euros invested in high end mining rigs, then that isn't a pleasant thought. It's perfectly all right to be opposed to this, as long as you realise that you are then opposing it for personal gain. And again, that's perfectly legitimate, but it works both ways. XRP has as much of a right to compete with BTC as BTC has a right to compete with XRP.

All this talk about Ripple being a scam needs to stop however. It's immature, unprofessional and unethical. If you want to preserve your investment, work to get the synergy you can get from Ripple and work to promote the advantages Bitcoin has over Ripple and to mitigate the weaknesses it has. Help fellowtraveller to build his slighly less decentralised partially competitive and partially synergetic Ripple alternative. Unlike Ripple it's not a double-edged sword and doesn't threaten Bitcoin directly, although it would also help Ripple.

I'd ask instead, when is it not acceptable? I think it's only unacceptable if you mislead people about it.

Another question is whether a premined alt-coin is interesting as an investment, and the answer is usually no. I think most alt-coins are created to give its creators an undeserved chance to strike it rich, but that only happens if gullible people are fooled into buying in because they have an unreasonable expectation the alt-coin will soar in value.

Meshnet and Bitcoin have great potential for synergy. Meshnet can help provide a decentralised communication infrastructure while Bitcoin can provide a payment mechanism for supporting the nodes and the communication links between them.

Come to think of it, boolean satisfiability isn't such a good choice after all. Hmm. Maybe NP-complete isn't such a good criterion.

Maybe the boolean satisfiability problem would be a better choice though.

You only have to do a polynomial amount of work to verify the answer, with difficulty N being adjustable.

That's not what the word scam means. But yes, be very careful until the code has been released, and make sure that if you use the system, you only use it for small amounts and short periods of time.

In the past week I had a stressful experience with Bitstamp, one of the Ripple gateways, though the problem was not on the Ripple side. Bitstamp is also a Bitcoin exchange and you can use it without using Ripple, just as you might use Mt Gox. I sent some EUR, which took about a day, and which was automatically converted to USD. So in a sense I now held USD IOUs, though not inside the Ripple system.

I could have bought BTC directly on Bitstamp, but since I wanted to support Ripple, I decided to take a detour through it. I withdrew my USD to Ripple, which happened reasonably quickly. I think the delay was due to needing manual clearance from Bitstamp. Now I held Bitstamp-issued USD IOUs in Ripple. Once inside Ripple, I exchanged the USD IOUs for BTC IOUs. This went fast and reasonably smoothly, except for some UI glitches. I then deposited my BTC IOUs into my Bitstamp account, and again, this went reasonably smoothly. I now had BTC being held for me by Bitstamp, outside the Ripple system, just as I would have had if I hadn't made the detour.

When I tried to withdraw my BTC, it again took a short while for the withdrawal to be cleared, but unfortunately it never arrived. It took about 48 hours to resolve this issue, with no feedback from Bitstamp except for an automated acknowledgement of my support ticket. Several other people were having similar problems, and I thought this might be the end for Bitstamp.

In principle, this had nothing to do with Ripple, and the situation was resolved this time, but it does show how risky exchanges and gateways are. 100 EUR was the maximum amount I was willing to risk through Bitstamp and Ripple, and only for a couple of hours, just for immediate conversion to BTC and withdrawal to my own BTC wallet. And right now I'm no longer comfortable with even that.

OK, fully confirmed now. This was not a pleasant experience. I'm going to have to think long and hard about what conclusions to draw from this.