Gavin is an Agent

[hdbuck]

I am skeptical of its longterm success because it has still many flaws, that its fans, being unable to solve, prefer to call advantages.  To fix those flaws and allow it to achieve its stated goal, we need a few more ingenious inventions; which we cannot guess when oor whether they will be made.

The fundamental divide is between those whose goal is to create a wall of separation between money and State, and those do oppose that goal.

hum i thought the State was already separated from money, with central private banskters..

[acid_rain]

Well I do agree that when I first heard about its design, the whole idea of a public ledger (which is here to stay and be analysed forever) has flaws from a conceptual point of view IMO. Maybe take the good parts of BTC and redefine a new protocol would be more adequate in the case that BTC collapses on its own weight.

[justusranvier]

hum i thought the State was already separated from money, with central private banskters..

Why would you think that?

Do people use central bank money because of free choice, or because the central banks benefit from State-granted monopoly privileges?

[hdbuck]

To fix those flaws and allow it to achieve its stated goal, we need a few more ingenious inventions; which we cannot guess when oor whether they will be made.

What is Bitcoin's stated goal Jorge?

It is written right at the beginning of Satoshi's paper, as clearly as it could be.

A  purely   peer-to-peer   version   of   electronic   cash   would   allow   online
payments  to  be  sent   directly  from  one  party  to  another  without   going  through  a
financial institution.

And which flaws are preventing it from achieving this stated goal?

coinbase, bitpay et al. being the new financial institutions? ^^

[acid_rain]

hum i thought the State was already separated from money, with central private banskters..

Why would you think that?

Do people use central bank money because of free choice, or because the central banks benefit from State-granted monopoly privileges?

No one is arguing that BTC isn't a godsend from the bowels of human ingenuity. But maybe the protocol itself needs to be rethought from a software engineering point of view into making it scalable for the future.

[hdbuck]

hum i thought the State was already separated from money, with central private banskters..

Why would you think that?

Do people use central bank money because of free choice, or because the central banks benefit from State-granted monopoly privileges?

i think it is the opposite, as in the State abandoned their money printing privilege to the profit of private banking corporations and are now at their very mercy.

too big to fail remember?

[acid_rain]

To fix those flaws and allow it to achieve its stated goal, we need a few more ingenious inventions; which we cannot guess when oor whether they will be made.

What is Bitcoin's stated goal Jorge?

It is written right at the beginning of Satoshi's paper, as clearly as it could be.

A  purely   peer-to-peer   version   of   electronic   cash   would   allow   online
payments  to  be  sent   directly  from  one  party  to  another  without   going  through  a
financial institution.

And which flaws are preventing it from achieving this stated goal?

coinbase, bitpay et al. being the new financial institutions? ^^

You will always have the coinbases and bitpays of the world. Lamen people need to be spoon fed and things made easy. In software engineering terms its called user-friendliness. Otherwise there would never be a major adoption of anything.

[hdbuck]

hum i thought the State was already separated from money, with central private banskters..

Why would you think that?

Do people use central bank money because of free choice, or because the central banks benefit from State-granted monopoly privileges?

i think it is the opposite, as in the State abandoned their money printing privilege to the profit of private corporations and are now at their very mercy.

too big to fail remember?

State and corporations have joined in a system called corporatism.

yes but State's power is considerably reduced because of this. they are just public muppets now selling what's left of their respective countries (and people) to private interests..
hence it is nonsense to believe states have to be seperated from money, since they already are.

[justusranvier]

[JorgeStolfi]

A  purely   peer-to-peer   version   of   electronic   cash   would   allow   online
payments  to  be  sent   directly  from  one  party  to  another  without   going  through  a
financial institution.

And which flaws are preventing it from achieving this stated goal?

Some of them:

* Payments cannot be reversed, even when coins are sent to addresses that non one has the key, or as a result of crime.  That makes it unacceptable for most comercial and individual uses.

* Users are anonymous, which makes it much more attractive to criminals (much more so than cash, for obvious reasons).

* The fixed supply created the expectation of fabulous gains that turned it into a speculative pyramid schema

* That "ponzification" in turn resulted in extremely volatile price, that makes a bad currency.

* The block reward and the market price were too high, leading to a hypertrophied and unsustainable mining industry.

* For that reason, the cost per transaction is way too high.

* Mining got inevitably centralized (last time I checked, the top 5 Chinese miners had 60% of the hashpower).

* There is no mechanism to reward the relay nodes, which carry increasing load.

* Its design cannot support 1 billion users, maybe not even 10 million, even indirectly.

And a few more.  Before you say it, yes, I know that many bitcoiners see those as advantages rather than flaws.

[acid_rain]

A  purely   peer-to-peer   version   of   electronic   cash   would   allow   online
payments  to  be  sent   directly  from  one  party  to  another  without   going  through  a
financial institution.

And which flaws are preventing it from achieving this stated goal?

Some of them:

* Payments cannot be reversed, even when coins are sent to addresses that non one has the key, or as a result of crime.  That makes it unacceptable for most comercial and individual uses.

* Users are anonymous, which makes it much more attractive to criminals (much more so than cash, for obvious reasons).

* The fixed supply created the expectation of fabulous gains that turned it into a speculative pyramid schema

* That "ponzification" in turn resulted in extremely volatile price, that makes a bad currency.

* The block reward and the market price were too high, leading to a hypertrophied and unsustainable mining industry.

* For that reason, the cost per transaction is way too high.

* Mining got inevitably centralized (last time I checked, the top 5 Chinese miners had 60% of the hashpower).

* There is no mechanism to reward the relay nodes, which carry increasing load.

* Its design cannot support 1 billion users, maybe not even 10 million, even indirectly.

And a few more.  Before you say it, yes, I know that many bitcoiners see those as advantages rather than flaws.

As you said most of those points are considered to be pros rather than cons for 99% of the community.

The last 2 points are where the real problem is.

[twats]

Wasn't he CIA mole? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1076841.0

[pereira4]

If you were a Maxwell hater, you would say Maxwell is an agent. Same goes for Satoshi.. etc. Everyone that is not liked by someone, gets called an agent. But the thing is, we are all trying to make Bitcoin better in here, just with some different viewpoints, thats all.

[blablaace]

the forking nonsense is just FUD .. he's trying to drive the price down so he can buy it up on the cheap

[Gleb Gamow]

the forking nonsense is just FUD .. he's trying to drive the price down so he can buy it up on the cheap

With what money? The few bucks he made while employed at TBF?

[tvbcof]

...
And for the record, I'm a Canadian - I work for CSIS, not the NSA.

For some time now I've relied pretty heavily on the alternative media for information on how the world works, but it's a tricky situation because the alternate media is chalk full of whackos and moles.  Lately I've put more focus on trying to separate the wheat from the chaff here out of necessity.  It does seem that Canadians are well represented in the alternate media (and related) spheres, and in addition that they seem to be among the most convincing.

Like any interesting observation, it opens of a plethora of new hypotheses.  One of them would be that for (possibly historic) legal reasons, it is more convenient for certain arms of our (supposed) government agencies to employ them.  Another would be that the jurisdictional boundaries give foreign citizens a more confidence to act as they please though I personally don't sense any foreboding in doing what I feel is right for the most part.  Yet.  Associated with the last thought, Canadians are more culturally similar to us, may be bored with their own country, and look with worry to the goings-on of their Southern neighbor.  I would be

I'll say that being a 'conspiracy theorist' is fairly demanding intellectually.  It was a lot easier when I could watch McNeil-Lehrer (my don't miss show as a kid) and figure that one of the two sides was saying what I should be believing.

[hdbuck]

There is no point for argument as this is like beating a dead horse. Some ppl are just dumb as a door knob. Accept it.

You want contributions, i can tell you few points but retards here wont accept it:

1) Opensource means no central of control. I can change some feature of bitcoin and let others decide to use it or not. That does not mean i have successfully forked Btc to be "seriouscoin" (now you know why i have this username, been telling idiots who think btc is just a bunch of code)

2) Network consensus means others can vote for features they want, yelling others who create/change a feature is dumb and censorship. You want open , then stop being a retard and think .

3) Bitcoin mining by design WILL BE CENTRALLIZED. That does not mean bitcoin is no longer decentralized. You must be an idiot to think otherwises, the same kind of idiots who thought LTC was ASIC-resistent....

thanks, simply all those points makes perfect sense to me, with logic and valid facts behind. actually, I agree with them. anyway, calling others "dumb as fck" is just lowering your reputation here, even you obviously know, what you're talking about..got it?

who cares about reputation on some random anonymous internet forum? gavin?

such cheap talk in here, people got their threads, assuming they would be of importance somehow.. such a joke.

decentralized consensus means you can try lobbying and brainwashing people, there will always be others that disagree and tell you how full of shit you are.

[BusyBeaverHP]

Blockstream is the agent, why have one sock-puppet, when you instead can have nine to ruse the public into the illusion called "consensus"?

[hdbuck]

Blockstream is the agent, why have one sock-puppet, when you instead can have nine to ruse the public into the illusion called "consensus"?

there is no consensus, but only the one of money. question is.. who has more?

[QuestionAuthority]

Take a look at this picture of Peter Todd, look at his T-Shirt and tell me he's being ironical. You don't wear a T-Shirt with NSA logo unless you idolize them or work for them.

I remember the first time I met Peter Todd, Jeff Garzik introduced him to me, he just seemed to pop out from nowhere. My encounter with him was brief. But I noticed he didn't swallow the bait even then. So I don't really know his real motive being in the Bitcoin game.

lolololololol

I got that shirt from the Electronic Freedom Foundation's booth at 31c3: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/back-popular-demand-nsa-spying-t-shirts-members

Sadly the NSA isn't sufficiently self-aware to sell shirts saying "ALL YOUR DATA" with glowering, red-eyed eagle's... but they should be.

And for the record, I'm a Canadian - I work for CSIS, not the NSA.

Good lord, you're a 19yo Canadian boy? I guess young people are more aptly suited to think outside the box. Your youth is fine but you're Canadian! I may need to rethink my continued support for Bitcoin. That's aboot all I can stand. So you're a socialist that codes while ice skating with a tall cup of Tim Horton's coffee while listening to Celine Dion? lol