Economic Totalitarianism

[trollercoaster]

There's no misunderstanding, read the thread/s for yourselves.

[sockpuppet1]

[...]
 
So why did Satoshi add the incorrect form of double hashing to Bitcoin 

If you were correct, then every brother and his uncle should be trying to find a cryptographer help them crack Bitcoin and become $millionaires by spending old coins that were allegedly mined by Satoshi and may otherwise never be spent if Satoshi is truly dead.

I tried to be nice to theymouse and Gmaximus and discuss in an open forum about how it might be possible to break Bitcoin so that it could not make one person very wealthy. But they want to play hardball, so...

Please kindly quote my post in case it is deleted by the mods.

P.S. My personal opinion is I speculate Craig Wright was hired by core to discredit Matonis and Gavin. And I was hired by myself to do the same to "core"; and I speculate "core" appears to be affiliated with the aforementioned individuals. Velvet gloves are off. No more nice guy. Bitcoin is a failed clusterfuck with 70% of the hashrate attributed to China, and one former cattle farmer in China planning to increase that to 98%. The miners and Blockstream are ostensibly colluding to put soft fork versioning into SegWit. There is $1 million per day flowing from n00bs into this raping system that ends up in miner's pockets and other connected parties. Electricity likely charged to the collective via State funded hydroelectric infrastructure. And the ecosystem has no real utility outside of gambling, scams, and other nefarious use cases.

[sockpuppet1]

Click to the word "Quote" read more:

I don't share your romantic guess of who created BitCON.

Btw, Craig says the name Satoshi comes from "the book" about the House of Morgan:

https://forum.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-discussion/the-name-satoshi-comes-from-satoshi-david-character-from-the-house-of-morgan-t7619.html

And Nakamoto means "in the book" in Japanese.

And Julian Assange knew Craig in 1996:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hozs5/wikileaks_on_twitter_wed_like_to_thank_satoshi/d2rdg7u

Don't forget that (I was told) a House of Rothschild person was sheltering Assange when he was still free in the UK. And note now how the UN is attempting to supercede the UK's authority on the case. There is always a globalist plan for these pawns, including Edward Snowden.

I think someone paid off Craig to discredit Matonis and Gavin. Gavin has now lost commit access.

The danger is not that BitCON fails, but that it becomes the new totalitarian digital currency.

Hope you are aware that ostensibly the Dr. Craig Wright can't be proven to have made the blog posts, which implicate him:

http://craigswright.com/

Meaning a failure of Bitcoin is not the big problem we face...

[sockpuppet1]

Personally, I don't think Craig is Satoshi, and not because of his looks. I don't care what he looks like. the thing is he isn't providing enough information to give enough proof that he is actually Satoshi.

The lack of a signed message, saying he'll publish documents and not have them available immediately, it all seems just a bit too sloppy and drawn out for him to really be Satoshi.

What is so ironic from my perspective (and I suspect the elites are also having a good chuckle about the blindness of you "useless eaters/cattle") is that once you review all the facts (<--- click to know what Satoshi Nakamoto really is), the fools are those who even entertain any thought that Satoshi could be a person.

The elites are playing us like a fiddle with BitCON. Seriously. I didn't reach this conclusion without extensive thought and rationality.

my assume if Nick szabo is the one of the team

Zero chance. Nick is both not smart enough and doesn't code prolifically enough.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1416544.msg14456412#msg14456412
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1284083.msg13239420#msg13239420 (Craig Wright was correct, Szabo was incorrect)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1393703.msg14196266#msg14196266 (did Nick ever create any s/w?)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14464292#msg14464292

[sockpuppet1]

I am speaking on behalf of TPTB_need_war aka AnonyMint, who is quoted in the OP, because he is currently banned for 9 more days due to calling theymos and gmaxwell out on their censorship of a potential technical back door in Bitcoin. There is a simpler explanation of Satoshi's obviously intentional technical error. It is obviously intentional because it was quite well known by 2009 that the HMAC formulation is more secure yet Satoshi used the more suspect double hashing everywhere in BitCON.

I will be editing this post and adding answers and rebuttals to the various incorrect posts that litter this thread. Please check back and read this post, because I will not be posting again in this thread, and instead I will edit this post to add new information as others continue to make posts that need to be refuted.

Please quote my post because the mods will probably delete it and ban me again.

"Blockstream implementing their SegWit soft fork Trojan Horse"

Lmao this guy is losing it. The blockstream FUDsters know no limits on their nonsense. The trojan horse was the Bitcoin XT, then Bitcoin Classic hard fork attempts, not segregated witness, segwit is actual advance in scaling Bitcoin. Whatever, it's a waste of time dealing with this shit.

Segregrated Witness is not the problem. The problem is that Blockstream is sneaking in a new soft fork versioning protocol at the same time. This new versioning protocol when combined with collusion with China's oligarchy control over mining, will insure together the elite can change the protocol of Bitcoin at-will any time. Why do you think Blockstream has received $70+ million in investor funding from the financial community. Blockstream has no viable way to make a profit. The company exists as a way to take control over Bitcoin. Note that Classic and XT didn't really solve the centralization problem either, but at least they didn't hand soft fork versioning control to the devil.

They will send their propaganda machine here to discredit me. They always do that. Then they ban me. They don't want you to know the truth. I don't care anymore. You fools are doomed. This is my last post on this matter. I have other programming work to do. It is up to you fools to get organized and stop being useless eaters and cattle for the elite. I can lead you to water, but I can't teach your dumb asses to drink. I tried to teach, but I get drowned out by the trolls and propaganda who are hired to keep the truth from you.

Instead of a tinfoil hat, I swear the guy has an entire tinfoil skull.  The sky is perpetually falling every day and it's always Armageddon forever.  A healthy dose of skepticism is fair enough, but don't take it to extreme, bordeline-crackpot, levels.

Bitcoin is just fine.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

So how many years from now china will own 98 % of mining power ??

Here is a link to the cryptocoinnews.com article and also an estimate follows in the linked thread. Realize that is just one former cattle farmer who currently mines 50 of the 1200 BTC per day and he plans to increase that to 200 BTC of the 600 mined per day after the halving. Just one cattle farmer will be mining 30% of Bitcoin.

Why would they do anything detrimental to Bitcoin? It would hurt them more than anyone financially.

With an oligarchy in control of the mining, they can choose to increase transaction fees to the maximum the market can bear, not the competitive rate for transaction fees. They could also work together with Blockstream to increase the 21 million coin limit, so they can earn more coins. None of this would hurt Bitcoin, because obviously none of you care. You will suck BitCon's cock because you think it is a "better gold" as Satoshi advertised it to you in the white paper.

Additionally these mega mining farms in China don't attain their loans and nearly free electricity without returning favors to the elite who are in charge. In effect, this means Bitcoin has become just another fiat system. They can KYC identification requirements on it the future and pretty much do what ever they want. And you will lick their balls because you have no other choice. Don't tell me you will switch coins, because no other coin will have the adoption and mining security.

I find it really hilarious how you think you are supporting something that will change the world in a better way, yet it is just more of the same oligarch controlled BS that we've always had.

how is that centralised? there's over a billion chinese 

It is rather good for Bitcoin, if a lot of people in China have some bitcoins

A billion aren't mining, only a few very well connected few. An oligarchy is taking form. The coins are only going to a few oligarchs

why they should destroy their own business? 51% will never happen, with their cheap electricity they are earning a shitload of money...

They want to maximize their profit and be in control of their destiny.

Most of these Chinese mining firms are pools, so like most pools that are extremely big, if they get too big, miners will hop to a different one.

It isn't just the pools that are the problem, but that the mining farms are large and concentrating the 51+% amongst a few oligarchs. This will only grow more centralized over time, because TPTB_need_war explained in his technical analysis, that profitable proof-of-work always accrues over time to maximum economies-of-scale. There are several reasons for that including propagation advantages of being the first to win more blocks, so don't waste hashrate mining on the wrong fork for a short period, which over time gradually depletes the other miners of relative profits. It is more complex than that. You need to read his entire analysis to understand.

I don't care if China controls most of the mining market, if people do care about that, they can purchase the mining power and start mining.

That is an incorrect understanding. As I explained above, the mining hashrate economically accrues to those miners with the greatest economies-of-scale. No one can buy mining equipment to offset that, because the miners in China are ostensibly getting nearly free electricity and nearly 0% interest loans. It is a corruption charged to the collective. Don't you understand how Communism works? We have this system now in the West too. Capitalism is dead. Long live Marxism!

I really don't care because I agree with you and many of us still don't sell our Bitcoins because if it goes mainstream in China or even a little popular, we'll be all rich/millionaires. The whole idealistic anarco utopia many still think Bitcoin is long dead, that's why Ethereum and other cool projects are emerging (even if they end up having the same fate eventually).

Look to be straightforward BTC hasn't been destroyed yet. It is very much living. I would suggest you to not worry about China and mining and focus on making profit with this system now. 

Exactly. You guys don't care whether Bitcoin ends up as a totalitarian digital hell. You only care about making a profit hell or highwater, come what may.

So if China owns a large portion of the system, we're doomed? But what if bitcoins are centralized in America or in Europe? It's going to be an entire story, right? I mean, once again western power has an influence to this point.

Why are you building a strawman argument to deflect the debate away from the important issue. Obviously it doesn't matter where the oligarchy on mining is located. The only thing that matters is that profitable proof-of-work will always end up entirely centralized. TPTB_need_war has explained why this is the case because he an expert on the economics and technology, despite what some trolls might want to mislead you to believe.

BTC will do right when there will be decentralized exchangers.

And that will only happen because of my work to fix the jamming problem that plagued all DE designs. The trolls want to ridicule me, and I don't yet get the recognition. But that is okay. I just want you to know the truth.

.... with their cheap electricity they are earning a shitload of money...

What you mean is they're stealing a shitload of money. 

Taxpayer money converted into electricity by government-owned power utility.

Electricity converted into bitcoin and bitcoin into privatized money by miners.

In China bitcoin mining is essentially just a channel to steal tax money.  The fact that it hasn't been forced to shut down or use non-subsidized electricity by now is probably evidence that someone is taking bribes.  (What a surprise!  That NEVER happens in China!   )

Finally someone with a brain stem! Congrats!

Yeah it is more of charging the expenses to the collective and keeping the profits for themselves. Same as the banksters did with the bailouts.

$1 million of your investor money every day going to those fat cats. And circulating back around as $70 million in grease money for Blockstream to rape you with.

Like the Capitalist West have been doing for years? The Chinese took a opportunity when they saw it and they used it... How can you blame them?

Yeah why care if the banksters keep the profits and charge the bailouts to the people. Love that Communist/Fascism, don't you?

well good for them if they are able to steal unfair and legal scam from government, called tax

Yeah it was great when the banksters stole the bailouts from the government! Excellent logic. 

Good to see you want BitCON to be all about stealing. Nice world you want to promote.

Personally I'd be more worried if the hashrate was under NSA's jurisdiction.

Chinese miners have acted OK so far

You haven't studied the history of oligarchies. They can only act one way. Give it a little time. The collusion is taking form. By the time, you realize it, it will be too late to do anything about it or to change. Bitcoin will be too well established by that time, just like fiat is now. You will bend over and take in your ass, because you didn't think it was a problem when I told you and then when you realize you will have no more choice nor options to pursue.

[OROBTC]

...

sockpuppet1

Well, I guess you may want consider some gold after all.

Spending some BTC on gold is OK with me.  If BTC has deep flaws (I don't know!), then gold is a great purchase.

*   *   *

An interesting Zero Hedge today piece on the apparently failed LBMA "gold market", if this is true, yow...:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-08/death-gold-market-why-one-analyst-thinks-run-london-gold-vaults-imminent

[sockpuppet1]

Note I am not referring to a price decline per se, my point is about the other ways a fiat can be used against the people, such as forcing all our transactions to be tracked with digital identification when we sign our transactions. Forcing us to pay a tax to the world government on each transaction we sign, etc.
...
Mining altcoins to exchange value for BTC, does not decentralize the protocol of the Bitcoin block chain. Only the Bitcoin miners control the policies of the protocol.

If 51% of them decide to change the protocol and the Bitcoiners are unable to mount a successful political campaign to organize a fork, then the oligarchy wins. And if they do fork, they would need to change the hash algorithm, otherwise the oligarchy could simply take over the fork as well. The delusion about forking is the the Bitcoiners can't agree on anything, so they certainly couldn't agree on a new proof-of-work hash algorithm. Besides, no one cares. Everybody only cares about profit and using what is already popular. No one here has a clue about how to organize to make something widely adopted and popular. The elite are in control. Now get down on your knees and pray to the elite, because they own you.

Economic Totalitarianism taking form in this forum perhaps... any way this is the last I will say on this matter ...

Well gleb gamow and SebastianJu both got temp banned too for similar reasons not too long ago.   At least the forum rules are being enforced somewhat fairly.

Which similar reasons?

Tisk tisk. Keep your posts in Meta or ...

"Tsk. Tsk" are the words I expect to hear from your grandmother calling you to have your daily scolding. I don't cowtail to theymos' delusions, technical incompetence, and censorship.

If I may express some frustration w.r.t. to desire to troll and censor, "Fuck you and theymos too". TPTB_need_war doesn't care. He can always subvert any ban.

Any way, TPTB_need_war is too busy programming. He has provided a public service.

And yes he was banned for revealing a potential back door in Bitcoin[1]. Just goes to show how theymos and gmaxwell are protecting you.

And yourself, how about you grow up and learn to tolerate open dialogue.

P.S. permanently banning TPTB_need_war is perfect for his plans. I hope theymos has the balls and the technical knowledge to attempt it.

Also I didn't start this thread. I didn't ask for this thread. I wasn't intending to post in this subforum at this time. Blame the person who created this thread. I read so much misunderstanding and slander of TPTB_need_war that required clarification and correction.


[1] In the ban message and in theymos's private message which is quoted by TPTP_need_war, theymos indicated the reason for the ban in addition to his incorrect claim of spouting technical nonsense, he also alleged spamming of messages in several threads and the ad hominem attacks against others. Theymos appears to be protecting Foxpop who hurled ad hominemfirst, and CIYAM who also hurled ad hominem first. TPTB_need_war had stated that the reason for posting in numerous threads, is because the mods allowed people to make numerous duplicate threads on the same topic about Craig Wright claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Do take note that at the time he was having the debate with CIYAM, he had thought that Craig's signature had matched the hash of the Sartre text because he was misled by sloppy reporting and sloppy writing of those who did the technical analysis. It was only later that he learned that was not the case. And after all, his alleged back door in Bitcoin remains potentially true. You don't ban people for these incorrect reasons and expect to remain respected and expect others to not want to overcome inappropriate use of influence. There is too much ignonymous influence in Bitcoin.

...absolutely petrifying.    

You did it to yourselves. Now you will reap what you have sown.

I am an American who doesn't share your looney European Marxism. Last time it was a million in the gas chambers. Let's see how it goes this round.

Shut up and get back to work on building your copy-leftist clusterfuck.

I don't associate with scum like you. I compete and overcome. Bye. Unless that is you want to say those words about my kids to my face. Otherwise we have nothing more to discuss. Enjoy your life.

[trollercoaster]

http://www.coindesk.com/liberty-reserve-founder-20-years/

[OROBTC]

...

One way that some have used to escape Economic Totalitarianism (but, really, more to escape TAXES) has been to use offshore entities in "user friendly" countries.  Panama has been a favorite for decades.

Well, the journalists who broke the "Panama Papers" story have released their online-searchable database.  See if any of your friends are there!

More info on thread I just started:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1466739.0

[sockpuppet1]

http://www.coindesk.com/liberty-reserve-founder-20-years/

He was not careful w.r.t. running arguably afoul of laws preventing the use the word "dollar" in ways that might offend the US Treasury.

This is one of the reasons I created the following linked thread to make sure I understood well the laws that might govern the creation of an altcoin:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.0

[sockpuppet1]

Does anyone agree or disagree with this presumption of mine?

Of course I disagree with it, otherwise I wouldn't own any Bitcoin.  The marginal cost over time of Bitcoin shows an ever increasing percent being energy costs.  This means sha256d will likely be commoditized.  There is no Chinese monopoly after that happens.

r0ach I like you, but you wrote nonsense.

Amazing to me that you still don't understand why Satoshi's design will always centralize.

One crucial point you are not getting your mind wrapped around, is that the need to set a block size to control the level of transaction fees earned, is a power vacuum that forces an oligarchy to take control over the mining. ArticMine and I had explained that in great detail. I also I summarized that point again in the "Bitcoin IS basically DESTROYED" thread.

Orthogonal to the prior paragraph, you also don't seem to understand that commoditization and leveling the access to ASICs can't stop the centralization and concentration of Bitcoin mining into an eventual oligarchy of a dozen or so ASIC mining farms. Even if we assume that ASIC mining farms in China don't enjoy an unfair advantage due to ostensibly receiving State subsidized cheap (or free) electricity due to corruption, the centralization of Satoshi's profitable proof-of-work design remains inexorable and unavoidable (and regardless of geographical location of its occurrence). I had already explained why in great technical detail in the my decentralization and your "Satoshi didn't solve the BGP" threads, and here follows an incomplete summary quoted from the "Bitcoin IS basically DESTROYED" thread:

Most of these Chinese mining firms are pools, so like most pools that are extremely big, if they get too big, miners will hop to a different one.

It isn't just the pools that are the problem, but that the mining farms are large and concentrating the 51+% amongst a few oligarchs. This will only grow more centralized over time, because TPTB_need_war explained in his technical analysis, that profitable proof-of-work always accrues over time to maximum economies-of-scale. There are several reasons for that including propagation advantages of being the first to win more blocks, so don't waste hashrate mining on the wrong fork for a short period, which over time gradually depletes the other miners of relative profits. It is more complex than that. You need to read his entire analysis to understand.

From the beginning, this has always been a possibility: A banker who can effectively create unlimited fiat money can easily acquire all the mining infrastructure and control the network hash power (Of course he don't need to do so through one single entity, it will look like that many people control the mining infrastructure, but when a vote happens people will discover that over 90% of hash power is controlled by a few entity and can go against majority of people's will)

PoW method is vulnerable to large capital taking over. This is the nature of PoW, so some people have suggested to use a PoW+PoS hybrid model for the future mining, but without major hash power, how do you implement this change into the network? Why miners should give up their dominance power today? It seems only a fork or re-design of a new coin can start afresh

There are several technical factors you need to take into account. For example, the greater the hashrate (of the pool if not solo mining), the more often the miner is mining on the block that won't be orphaned. The propagation delay of block announcements (or any group with 33+% of the hashrate colluding to delay block announcements, which was explained the research paper Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable), means that those with more hashrate are more profitable given the same unitized hardware and electricity costs. Ditto that every miner (or pool) has the same cost of validation regardless of their hashrate. This means that even if everything is fair and equal, naturally over time the mining will centralize to an oligarchy. This is a property of profitable proof-of-work and there is nothing that can be done to fix it. TPTB_need_war made an entire thread about this to discuss it in detail. The flaws of proof-of-stake are also discussed in that thread and I urge Minecache and others not to turn this thread into a PoS vs. PoW discussion. Bring the PoS vs. PoW debate over to that other thread, other such thread if you want to debate that.

What TPTB_need_war concluded is that the only design that can remain economically decentralized is UNprofitable proof-of-work. This means that every spender would send some PoW share with each transaction. The details are complex and it can't work the same as Satoshi's design. Most of the details are already explained in various posts that TPTB_need_war has made spread out over many different threads. But he is not implementing this design right now, because he is busy on the other programming priorities I mentioned.

Any way, there is no solution to that will remain immune to the fact that humans are manipulated like a herd when it comes to politics. And they are lazy. And they are easily duped by the elite. So even if TPTB_need_war implements his solution, it is likely that the people will still end up sending their PoW shares to an oligarchy of "pools" even though unprofitable PoW means no one gains by using a pool. People are just dumb. But we might have a fighting chance with this redesign of Satoshi's flawed design. Many people have criticized this UNprofitable PoW thinking it won't work because there is not the proper incentives and Nash equilibirum. TPTB_need_war says they are wrong and he will eventually publish a whitepaper to better explain all the details.

I don't know where we will end up with all this. But my guess is the elite will win and the people will lose. But some people are working on hard. Please don't disrespect TPTB_need_war. His is working as furiously as he can, and no one helps him. Maybe one day he will get some assistance and be recognized for his efforts. But he doesn't care! He is doing what he is doing as a labor of love and because he loves the challenge.

Of course, China being the top producers of Bitcoin isn't even a Bitcoin problem in the first place.  It's a symptom of China controlling manufacturing for everything on earth as corporations use their slaves for global labor arbitrage.

China being the current location of the centralization and concentration of Bitcoin mining is irrelevant to the point that profitable proof-of-work will always centralize into an oligarchy and thus offers us no long-term advantage to remove the evils and risks we normally have with fiat. The powers-that-be will be able to enforce capital controls even more effectively on Bitcoin transactions with the oligarchy control over mining, as compared to cash fiat transactions. So don't assume your Bitcoin can't be confiscated by the government. With control over the protocol with the oligarchy on mining, the powers-that-be can do what ever they wish. If the masses who are using Bitcoin don't stop using Bitcoin, then no one will be able to stop the-powers-that-be from doing what they want to Bitcoin's protocol given the oligarchy control over mining. No rational person is arguing that Bitcoin will stop functioning or that the price will collapse to 0 (although the chance of that happen does exist but quite small chance), but rather we are saying that Bitcoin as a decentralized asset which could be relied on as being impervious to control by any one, is "basically destroyed". All the clueless n00bs (or disingenuous trolls) who build strawmen arguments accusing of us saying that Bitcoin is destroyed and won't function, are just inane arguments which deflect the focus away from our factual point about the aspect of Bitcoin that is actually destroyed.

What Europe typically did in the past was cancel the fiat currency quite often, as way to force the existing cash under mattresses to come back to the banks for exchanging to the newly issued currency, wherein the State could confiscate most of it. At least we always had gold as a money that the government couldn't cancel, but now the pervasive "Big T false flag" police state spreading all over the globe means one can't even transport gold any more without it at great risk of being confiscated under the false allegation of money laundering or terrorism.

We are headed into a clusterfucked world. I sure hope you all stop deluding yourselves.

[sockpuppet1]

BTC will moon regardless of this.

I have never taken the position that BTC will never go higher than $1000 again. I believe it is possible it has not yet formed a bottom, but that is not saying it has seen its highest top.

If I were TPTB, I would want the maximum number of people to incriminate themselves by moving their assets into Bitcoin, before going after confiscations for money laundering and other fine prints in the laws.

So yes I see another big runup of the Bitcoin price and the regulation will come later perhaps 2018 or even after 2020, and then they will start to confiscate the Bitcoins with the control over mining. And I expect clawbacks too meaning if you divested of Bitcoin, they will come seize your other assets. Or jailtime if you can't pay up. Debtors' prisons will return. Why? Because the governments are bankrupt, socialism is bankrupt, but the world is mostly socialists and they will not stop trying to take money from other people, so they will go find the money every place they can to steal it. This is the way socialism works. No one can defect. It is until death do us part.

We are headed into a clusterfuck. Many of you are delusional labeling me a Chicken Little because you don't want to admit the clusterfuck the world is in now. Enjoy.

Even if they wanted to, I don't see governments being competent enough to take over Bitcoin in the near future when the world economy implodes.  That's why I say no matter what you think about Bitcoin, it's going to play a vital role as a life raft to get to whatever is on the other side of "the great reset".  You can nitpick about random metrics of Bitcoin if you're able to survive past that point.  All I know is, Bitcoin will either be extremely useful and valuable then, or everyone will be killing each other in the street for cans of soup and no currency will have value.

Socialism will not die. I had predicted this in my widely syndicated 2010 essay which predicted the EU would not breakup:

“It amazes that otherwise bright people can’t understand the simple concept that economic collapse doesn’t convert collectivists into anarchists.”

Asia's debt is not promises to retirees, but rather corporate and LGU debt which can be defaulted on. Asia will crash and bottom 2020 and then rise up leading the world in socialism and totalitarianism, while the West collapses into a clusterfuck of the end-game of socialism death spiral. The conservatives in the USA are fighting to break away from the rest of the USA. The USA will fracture into regions because the gun owners in the USA are willing to die for their sovereignty. Europe will collapse into a Dark Age because no one can fight back against the Troika and socialism. Plus now there are more muslim Europeans being born than white Europeans. Game over. Checkmate.

China+Singapore is going to tie your Bitcoin white ass to the totem pole and give you 50 lashes.

Collectivism is a power vacuum and the argument is always about who gets to steal for and from whom.

Bernie: "Socialism can be repaired as long as I can be in charge of the stealing to insure it is fair".
Trump: "Stealing can be optimized if I am Dicktator-in-chief"
Clinton: "You'll tolerate my theft (for myself and my cronies) because as a Democrat I'll steal some for you too (and not remind you I funded it all by expanding an egregious future debt on your children's back)"

[sockpuppet1]

But that doesn't mean BTC won't be pumped again to pull more money into that trap. Fundamentals of it as true hedge against fiat/governmment isn't necessarily correlated to its price performance.

I'm not playing your "move from one pump and dump to next pump and dump" scam game.  Better to just hold what actually has fundamentals.  I'm not buying garbage IPO scams issued by Eastern Europeans, issued for profit with no technical viability, whose entire purpose is to defraud people.  If I wanted to do that, I would just use fiat.

Bitcoin is largest of the scams. It is pulling $1 million a day out of pockets and handing it to some corruption in China.

And you should really put more attention to what TPTB is saying.

Neither Smooth or I agree with AnonymintTPTB_need_war (aka sockpuppet1) about BTC mining having a predictable endgame.  It's entirely plausible that commoditization of sha256d could make most big mining farms extinct, with the only miners remaining being people that use the waste heat to power some other type of utility:  water heaters, central heating, industrial use, etc.

I destroyed this logic fail from smooth in the past. Did you miss it?

Electricity is nearly an order-of-magnitude less efficient way to create heat. No one is going to compete with nearly free electricity in China (due to corruption) by paying more to heat their homes.

Even if Chinese mining farms were not getting political favors in exchange for promising to follow the government's edicts on regulation of mining (which of course they will do as any rational person will do because if they don't someone else will avail of the offer from the government and of course the government of China wants to control Bitcoin, duh!), it would still be the case that Chinese mining farms will always have greater economies-of-scale which will make it impossible to compete with them by getting part of the electricity for heating your home for free, because again you could heat your home in much more efficient ways especially factoring in the capital cost of the latest generation competitive ASIC mining equipment, as compared to for example adding better insulation to your walls or double paned windows, etc..

You might risk the utility company diverting hash voting power for nefarious means in such a scenario, but what are the odds the utility companies of the US, North Korea, Iraq, Iceland, and whoever else all collude?

100%. We are headed into a top-down managed world. Take off your rosy spectacles and study the history of mankind and what happens at junctures like the one we are in now.

You're the only one I've read use the term commoditization for Bitcoin mining's future--what do you mean? And can you clarify how it fixes the centralization problem?

The usual term is commodification, meaning affordable and
efficient consumer-level ASICs

14nm fabs are only owned by Intel, Samsung, and TMSC. Intel will probably be the first to 10nm, perhaps up to a year ahead of the others. It takes years to ramp up production to meaningful volumes. Commodization doesn't mean that consumers can get the most efficient hardware at reasonable prices. The cutting edge will always belong to the mining farm which places large guaranteed orders years in advance.

[sockpuppet1]

I destroyed this logic fail from smooth in the past. Did you miss it?

You did not because you insist China will always have some type of competitive edge over the "inferior" west due to ingenuity or corruption.

The centralization is due to economies-of-scale of mining farms. It doesn't matter where it happens. It just happens to be that China is very conducive thus it is happening there. But if China wasn't the low-cost leader on corrupt free electricity or cheap hydropower, then it would still be happening where ever it is. Because this is a fact of the INSOLUBLE economics of Satoshi's design.

Come on r0ach, you are smarter than this.

China is a logistics nightmare and maybe they have a hard landing never to be heard from again once the shit hits the fan.

Even if that were a possibility (and it is not), it still would be irrelevant.

China's main fear is domestic political dissent for a reason.  The top is all crooked and the bottom is eventually going to riot and send the country into chaos while all the leaders flee to Vancouver.

In your dreams. Even if that were plausible (and it is not), then still would be irrelevant.

The reason it is implausible is because China is an economic powerhouse that will reap huge economic growth as it allows its economy to diversify. They don't have the problems with huge number of retirees and people on social welfare and unemployment insurance. The West can't compete because of the burden of the cost of socialism.

China's economy will have a reset in 2020, but the Chinese are not going to abandon their culture. They will continue with the model of top-down organization. That is just the way Chinese people think. Do a little research on how their thinking about organization of society and capital differs from ours in the West.

Have you ever seen charts that show the wealth of a nation as a function of IQ?  It always shows higher IQ countries having more wealth, except in the case of authoritarian socialist regimes, then the IQ makes no difference and wealth of the nation plummets.  Due to China being a logistics nightmare, they will have to go more hardcore authoritarian than any other country on earth, and it will implode any type of ingenuity and it's impossible for them to keep up with other countries.  The second we put up tariffs it's over.

The sad reality is we are entering a new world order where even very great totalitarianism of China will be much more profitable than the abject failure of socialism in the West.

Get used to it. The ideals of our founding fathers are dead. They won't be coming back to the world for many decades from now. You and I will be dead by then.

Sorry to give you the bad news.

[sockpuppet1]

We have a nice thread that proposes AnonyMint's view that Bitcoin IS in fact destroyed at the very moment, by Chinese mining operations.

The decentralization is destroyed because Satoshi designed it to do that failure, but the functionality/operation of the coin is not (yet) destroyed.

Please understand carefully the distinction.

Yes Bitcoin IS basically ALIVE if you are referring to the functioning of the coin. But the control of the block chain is becoming ever more centralized and controlled by a small group of mining farm owners. And with this control, they have already started to do their 51% attacks on Bitcoin in order to control the block size and drive transaction fees sky high.

But don't worry that they are raping us and will be raping us more in the future. We love when the banks rape us by getting QE from Bernanke. We love the miners to do the same thing to Bitcoin. We love to bend over and take it in our ass. That is why we are Bit(ret)ards.

[sockpuppet1]

There's no single entity with 51% of the hash rate, so there's only a problem if you're working under the assumption that mining pools must be colluding because they happen to reside within the same arbitrary borders and communists made them do it... or something like that, anyway.   

Here's the state of the network over the last 24 hours:
http://www.teamhellspawn.com/hashdist.png

I remain unconcerned.

You are disingenuously spreading lies and you know it.

It has been explained to you numerous times that it is not the pools that are the only point of centralization but also the mining farms. There is one cattle farmer in China who is investing in a mining farm large enough to mine 30% of all BTC that is stolen from us via printing-coins-out-of-thin-air (aka coinbase block reward) to pay miners.

Also it is entirely illogical to claim that cartels and oligarchies do not cooperate with each other, when in fact all throughout history of mankind they always do, because it is the only way they can control the pricing and reap more profit for themselves. It has already been explained to you numerous times that the Chinese mining cartel prevented the timely increase of the block size by refusing to mine on Bitcoin Classic or XT. This is because they prefer to support Blockstream's Segregated Witness which will provide much smaller and delayed block size increases, so that they can drive transaction fees sky high. Also they support Blockstream's SegWit, because it changes the Bitcoin block chain protocol in such a way (insidious soft fork versioning) as it will make it virtually impossible for anyone to stop the mining cartel from changing the protocol in the future at-will.

Thus the Chinese mining cartel is already speaking and acting as a cooperating oligarchy and they have already 51% attacked Bitcoin's protocol, when they blocked the block size increases which would have kept our transaction fees low.

This is very dangerous for our future, because it means in the future when the Chinese government says to these mining farms in China (which control more than 50% of Bitcoin's network hashrate) that they must change the protocol to require that every transaction include a signed government issued identification number or that every signed transaction must include a tax contribution to China or the world government, then the miners will have no choice but to comply because otherwise they will find their $100 millions investment in mining equipment padlocked and confiscated by the government.

What kind of delusional fantasy world do you live in DooMAD.

Like clockwork, the truth is normally found at neither extreme but somewhere in the middle. I agree about doing nothing is not a solution.

Having said that, that the war is already started, doing nothing is not a solution.  Even if you actually believe this Armstrong guy is right, not everyone is a day trader.  It doesn't matter about chasing money left on the table.  All that matters is making sure you have something that has some type of fundamentals which isn't going to zero the day the great reset happens.  You know that day is coming soon.  You also know that Bitcoin will likely function perfectly fine when the day comes. 

1. I agree doing nothing is not a solution. I am trying to do something, but my design requires that there be very significant transactions since the unprofitable proof-of-work share (not a block solution!) is sent with each transaction. So if I launch the thing with nearly no adoption and just HODLers, then it can be easily attacked by botnets. Thus before I can make the CC, I need to first create something that could drive a lot of demand for the use of the CC. That is why I conceived JAMBOX. But then I realized that the concept of JAMBOX (which basically means replacing the web browser with a mobile app browser) is actually a better career choice for me to work on than a CC. It also enables me to work on creating a new programming language, which will bring me great respect+admiration amongst my peers and will also secure my finances at the tail end of my career (which I desperately need is some stability in my life at 51 and trying to recover from a 10 year illness which REKTed my life/career, 4 years acute and as well I need to pay back my meager angel investors with some gains for them if I don't create a CC or let them take investment share in JAMBOX corporation). Btw, @keean who I met recently at the Rust forum (and is now in my contacts list at my LinkedIn, so you can view his CV) is discussing with me in private collaborating on a new programming language. He has published research papers with the famous FP guru Oleg. He already has a prototype of a language he had designed and maybe we could reuse some of that for the 10 programming language features I have concisely enumerated as crucial for the next popular programming language that will eat all the others to a great extent in terms of popularity. That is an amazing accomplishment for me that a person as accomplished and well connected (in the UK!) has agreed with me that the features I listed are very much needed and not offered by any other programming language on earth. He also approves of my recent invention to solve the major computer science problem known as the Expression Problem. We agreed the best strategy is open source it and hope others will join to help us, which we think is likely given his pedigree and also the features we are targeting. So I am on a major positive upswing in my career (and also apparently/hopefully health), but this is still far away from implementing JAMBOX and then after that a CC.

2. The reason I don't want to accelerate by jumping straight to the implementation of a CC, is because:

• I'm hedging my bets in terms of where I place my effort and thus my risks of failure.
• We have time, the collapse in earnest is not until 2018. Bitcoin will continue to function and not likely be regulated with capital controls before that, although 2018 will come very fast if measured in programmer man-hours needed to complete such ambitious projects.
• I don't want to put myself in a desperate position where I need to P&D in order to be financially stable.
• The LOC required will be immense over time, and I don't want to code it all the crappy languages we have now. It is like I am restarting or resetting my career, so it is time to do it right and with the right programming language.
• If I do a CC, I want it to be something truly different and adopted by millions and hopefully a billion users. My ambitions are very high. To match those ambitions, I need to do this development in a very high quality way and draw in these extremely smart people who are outside of CC.
• Smooth can't help me as much as someone who has a high, visible pedigree because he is anonymous (note I have my eye on Paul Phillips whom I have exchange some cordial messages on mailing lists in the past and because he wants to create the "perfect" programming language and he has the kind of extrovert personality that I love, as well as probably being raw IQ smarter than myself!). Also because he will consume most of the funding because his rate is very high. it doesn't help as much to raise more money in a crowdfund if the co-developer is anonymous. And fluffypony et al are already consumed/committed to their projects. There are so many talented developers out there, but most of them see no point in working in CC; whereas, with my programming language and app browser initiatives I may be able to pull in top developers from outside of CC. The @keean result is my first confirmation of my strategy. He also a very amicable person, as well as being extremely knowledgeable about programming, design patterns, and PL design.

3. About monsterer's criticisms of my unprofitable proof-of-work design, the salient refutations are there in the last few pages of the decentralization thread where I specifically rebutted him on his point about there being no proper incentives. I am too rushed (overloaded with tasks) to go dig up the link, you all can find it if you are really interested. Essentially monsterer's argument was that the profit from mining has to be greater than the potential profit from double-spending with a 51% attack. My refutation was that a) there is no level of maximum profit from double-spending attack, because there is no limit to the value that can be transacted in a block; and b) that motivation to supply the honest proof-of-work isn't driven by profit in my design but rather because it is mandatory. And btw, did monsterer disappear? The possible weakness in my design is that the spender will merely offload the computation of the proof-of-work to a server and thus the mining hashrate becomes concentrated. But even so there is a major distinction in the control and economics of that, which I will detail in a white paper. The problem with IOTA is not that the PoW is unprofitable, but rather that the structure of a DAG does not enable a single longest chain of truth, thus afaics the only way to force convergence to consensus is to use centralized servers and checkpoints. I will explain better the mathematical criticism of Iota in the future. I don't have time for the meticulous diversions right now.

[RealBitcoin]

Bitcoin is largest of the scams. It is pulling $1 million a day out of pockets and handing it to some corruption in China.

Dude c`mon, you cant just talk about bitcoin like that. Even if what you say is true, the benefits massively outweigh the drawdowns.

How many millions of people will be helped by remittances? They can just buy bitcoin at 1 atm, send the money home, and their family cash it out.

They pay like maximum 5% fee, and dont have to worry about paperworks and capital control.

I was just at a WU checkpoint and saw yesterday a grandma receiving money from her daughter that sent her as she was living outside.

Now imagine the money how much money goes to corporate bureocrats and useless midddleman in that transaction. Bitcoin by all means is much

better because it lets the money stay in the hands of the people.

[sockpuppet1]

Hey guys I have a question that just popped up in my mind. What if the price of Bitcoin doesn't increase much after the halving and with the cut in half block rewards and increasing difficulty, do you think the Chinese miners will go bankrupt or they will manage to break even and get a slight profit? Can the Chinese government offer the mining farms preferential electricity pricing lower than the average for the country?

The first to go bankrupt are the marginal miners, not the ones with the lowest electricity costs and the highest efficiencies due to very large economies-of-scale in mining farms.

The halving will INCREASE the centralization of Bitcoin's hashrate (to China's mining farms), not decrease it.

Satoshi designed the distribution curve this way. Who is your hero, who is your daddy who sold you to the banksters?

Dude c`mon, you cant just talk about bitcoin like that. Even if what you say is true, the benefits massively outweigh the drawdowns.

Oh the benefits of being raped by the banksters.

[trollercoaster]

http://www.coindesk.com/new-york-police-win-fincen-award-bitcoin-investigation/

[sockpuppet1]

... the only person more wrong on BTC than Anonymint is Armstrong.

You and Armstrong are both wrong on the future of BitCON:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1465136.msg14854131#msg14854131

As for the price action I predicted, stay tuned...

I think Armstrong will end up being correct about bitcoin (not surviving the other side of 2020) let's see..  

It is not clear if it will destroyed or merely turned into a tool to confiscate wealth, and a better Paypal for the masses. My bet is the totalitarian variant of the future. Click the link above to find out why. Men need a tyrant.

[...]

I think Armstrong will end up being correct about bitcoin (not surviving the other side of 2020) let's see..  

It is not clear if it will destroyed or merely turned into a tool to confiscate wealth, and a better Paypal for the masses. My bet is the totalitarian variant of the future. Click the link above to find out why. Men need a tyrant.

I very much doubt it becomes a "better" Paypal for the masses for the simple reason that it isn't better.

I would be bet on failure over widespread usage of a coopted system. In fact I'd lay significant odds on that bet. (Though failure is somewhat difficult to define precisely -- let's say significant loss of value and usage.)

I see even an oligarchy controlled Bitcoin as better than Paypal, because:

1. Bitcoin is a global politik; and thus even the Chinese mining oligarchy (cum banksters pulling the strings behind the curtain) can't do anything which isn't politically correct globally.

2. Thus Bitcoin will retain many attributes that Paypal as a corporate offering can't provide such as inability to deny any person in any account equal opportunity to access, inability to enforce holdbacks, block certain industries, and other arbitrary shit Paypal does which make my head want to explode. Bitcoin is a trojan horse launched by the global elite to subvert any localized attempt to block/control the shift to digital currency.

3. Thus I predict enormous adoption for Bitcoin, but just remember it will be owned and controlled by the global elite (aka the banksters). And the global socialism will enforce a global confiscation/expropriation of those with wealth, in the coming years. It will be a bittersweet success.

[...]

3. Thus I predict enormous adoption for Bitcoin, but just remember it will be owned and controlled by the global elite (aka the banksters). And the global socialism will enforce a global confiscation/expropriation of those with wealth, in the coming years. It will be a bittersweet success.

Meh, hardly anybody wants Bitcoin, and the only ones who do will just flee it and use something else if it becomes government controlled. Using Bitcoin now is a pain in the ass and something a relatively small number of people do at great inconvenience and only out of necessity (generally speaking holding it for as short a time as possible). They'll have no trouble switching to Zcash or whatever else if necessary for their purposes. The rest will just stick with actual Paypal and similar products.

The only ones with any real wealth in Bitcoin are speculators who treat Bitcoin like a Wall Street product (and often store it in easily-confiscatable form on exchanges anyway). Well yeah maybe their Bitcoin will get confiscated. Not really any different from any other Wall Street product, and not at all surprising (to me). A few of the smartest ones will probably be able to escape confiscation, again not so different from traditional finance.

For the moment Bitcoin is only a gambler's paradise, but the conversion to instant microtransactions is the key to launching it into mass adoption.

That is why the block chain size debate has been so contentious, because it is a battle over who (Chinese mining cartel + Blockstream, all controlled behind the curtain by the banksters) owns Bitcoin as it is scaled out.

It's pretty evident from the establishment embracing Bitcoin and things like this CME news, that TPTB will use Bitcoin as a golden parachute to escape the death trap fiat system they created.  They know it's extremely hard to do business using gold, and you would need to implode civilization back to the dark ages to make gold work again, so Bitcoin is their go to play to keep the wheels turning at an above caveman level.

Ever since humans stopped being hunter gatherers and settled land, it created abundance.  That's when the predator class arose to skim the abundance.  It's in TPTB' best interests to keep a high level of civilization running in order to skim it instead of having civilization implode back to ancient Babylon.  That would likely just implode their own standard of living as well once the caviar supply lines run out.

Yes, they create catastrophes to benefit from them, but I don't think they want ones so big that they become completely unpredictable and threaten their own power structure.  They always have some type of golden parachutes in mind, and Bitcoin is seemingly the only viable thing around for digital transactions in the coming great reset.  The world supply lines are very intertwined, and if you cannot do digital transactions on an international level because nobody trusts any of the currencies, then you immediately go back to the 1800's.  Do TPTB want to live in the 1800's?  Probably not.  They have to devise something to keep the wheels of the world turning.

Agreed, but they didn't create Bitcoin as the primary escape hatch from fiat collapse (which will instead be the one world currency reserve unit basket), but rather because they want to subvert any one nation's control over the digitalization of currency. They don't want a bastardized fragmentation of the digitalized commerce world. That is all good. The bad part is they control the global politik, and thus they control Bitcoin. They can easily incorporate capital controls and expropriation into the politics of regulation of Bitcoin and then they can easily implement it since they are funding and arranging the Chinese mining cartel and Blockstream's $74 million funding.

Edit: my take on the opportunities ahead:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14855669#msg14855669