Bitcoin 2013: The Future of Payments - San Jose, CA - May 17-19, 2013

[Rassah]

For Mtgox it's a bit harder.

I remember MtGox used to pay Eligius pool directly for it to accept their free transactions. As in personal contract as opposed to mining fees. I don't know if that changed, whether they are using someone else, or if it stopped completely.

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[Seth Otterstad]

I was responding to: "the blockchain size will increase linearly".

I don't think there is sufficient consensus as to what will happen once the blocksize limit is removed. However the odds are very slim that it will remain a straight line.

The blockchain is not currently increasing in size linearly in a straight line, as you can see here:
http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

It is increasing exponentially because we are in the adoption stage where more users are added.  Once bitcoin reaches its potential market size, or once it hits a blocksize limit, the blockchain size will increase linearly.  We will never see sustained exponential growth in the number of monetary transactions that humans need to conduct.

Bitcoin merchant adoption and transaction fees have grown 1000% over last year, which is an extremely high rate that temporarily outpaces hard drive capacity growth, but this cannot be sustained very long.  Hard drive space and internet speed show no signs of slowing their exponential growth rates, so they will always outpace the bitcoin blockchain in the long run.  Exponential growth will always win out over linear growth.  People will be able to store the blockchain on their personal computers forever.

[Rassah]

Some day I'd like to see accounting software that uses Bitcoin addresses for individual accounts, let's you book entrees and move money around all day internally off blockchain, then at the end of the day balance out all the transactions and post the resulting ending balance transfers to the blockchain. That would allow for a third party permanent public record to reconcile to, and would allow a company to run its accounting finances on the Bitcoin network without spamming it with transactions (you can do multiple transfers between multiple addresses in a single transaction). That may contribute to blockchain bloat a bit, but it the verifiable account entrees in the chain may be s service businesses would gladly pay for.

[solex]

Some day I'd like to see accounting software that uses Bitcoin addresses for individual accounts, let's you book entrees and move money around all day internally off blockchain, then at the end of the day balance out all the transactions and post the resulting ending balance transfers to the blockchain. That would allow for a third party permanent public record to reconcile to, and would allow a company to run its accounting finances on the Bitcoin network without spamming it with transactions (you can do multiple transfers between multiple addresses in a single transaction). That may contribute to blockchain bloat a bit, but it the verifiable account entrees in the chain may be s service businesses would gladly pay for.

Yes. That's the sensible middle-ground which hopefully will be reached in the future. It reduces the problem of small transactions hitting the blockchain, but also keeps the blockchain open for all, instead of restricting it to bitcoin-banks similar to how the Fedwire system operates.

[maaku]

In practice that probably wouldn't bloat the UTXO set at all.

[sinner]

where are videos of Dan Kaminsky from the conference?

[tvbcof]

where are videos of Dan Kaminsky from the conference?

Someone kindly posted this recently:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=219519.0

Kaminsky was on the security one (at least...that's the only one I saw live.)

After midnight when my bandwidth become free I'll watch some of the ones I missed in person.  Satellite connection.  Bummer because I just got bitcoind (along with openssl, boost, berkeleydb, etc) compiled and I would like to be running it to see how it does on a high latency connection.

[Seth Otterstad]

What is Kaminsky's deal?  Saying there is a 0% chance for Proof-of-Work to survive the year?  Wtf?  He seems a bit misinformed about bitcoin mining.  He thought GPUs couldn't currently mine bitcoin profitably, and he also thought that one entity having over 50% of hash power would result in a bitcoin price of zero, which was obviously not the case when deepbit did it.  He also seems to believe that scrypt is ASIC-proof, which is not true.

[DeathAndTaxes]

What is Kaminsky's deal?  Saying there is a 0% chance for Proof-of-Work to survive the year?  Wtf?  He seems a bit misinformed about bitcoin mining.  He thought GPUs couldn't currently mine bitcoin profitably, and he also thought that one entity having over 50% of hash power would result in a bitcoin price of zero, which was obviously not the case when deepbit did it.  He also seems to believe that scrypt is ASIC-proof, which is not true.

Yeah I was puzzled by that as well.   None of the questioners asked him to clarify.  Of course most of the people lining up to "ask questions" are usually ones trying to push an agenda or make long monologs in the form of questions.   They already have their questions in mind before the panel start.

I wish he would clarify. I mean like it or not Bitcoin can't be changed.  It can be forked but barring a complete consensus of all users (not all miners or developers but all users) the existing network will continue to operate.  Nobody is going to get a consensus on moving from POW.  So not sure how he can be bullish on Bitcoin and at the same time say Bitcoin is dead unless it moves beyond POW.  If true (which I doubt) then Bitcoin is already dead and just doesn't know it.

[Seth Otterstad]

I missed meeting you at the conference D&T!  My favorite way of reading this forum is by doing a search for your posts.  The general post quality has become so terrible recently compared to a year or two ago, I can't stand it.

[tvbcof]

I missed meeting you at the conference D&T!  My favorite way of reading this forum is by doing a search for your posts. ...

Jeez, what were you going to do if you met him?  Hump his leg?

...The general post quality has become so terrible recently compared to a year or two ago, I can't stand it.

Always happy to do my part.

[jgarzik]

What is Kaminsky's deal?  Saying there is a 0% chance for Proof-of-Work to survive the year?  Wtf?  He seems a bit misinformed about bitcoin mining.  He thought GPUs couldn't currently mine bitcoin profitably, and he also thought that one entity having over 50% of hash power would result in a bitcoin price of zero, which was obviously not the case when deepbit did it.  He also seems to believe that scrypt is ASIC-proof, which is not true.

He's way off.  Check out @dakami and @jgarzik twitter.  There is even a bet on the floor (that he's trying to back away from).

[SamS]

where are videos of Dan Kaminsky from the conference?

Someone kindly posted this recently:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=219519.0

Kaminsky was on the security one (at least...that's the only one I saw live.)

After midnight when my bandwidth become free I'll watch some of the ones I missed in person.  Satellite connection.  Bummer because I just got bitcoind (along with openssl, boost, berkeleydb, etc) compiled and I would like to be running it to see how it does on a high latency connection.

Cool. Thanks.

[Bush]

Great idea