Hmm. Rickards also thinks 2018 is when the bad stuff starts...
By "he", I meant Rickards, not Armstrong.
My point re black markets is that participants CHOOSE their currencies. I am not saying anything about creating black markets, only noting that some of them already like BTC. But, BTC seems too hard to use for the masses.
Actually, I look forward to seeing anything you have to release in 2017. "Massive liquidity" sounds promising.
Now get back to work!
I just mean that we need mainstream markets, so that we have enough liquidity to minimize the control the elite would have by collapsing the financial system they control. I think of black markets as being illegal, distrusted by most, and heavily fought by TPTB.
The elite do not fight what is popular, rather they try to co-opt it. Because they know it is futile to stop people from that which they can't stop people, e.g. having sex. Instead they co-opt sex with their control over media.
Bitcoin is co-opted by economies-of-scale in mining because proof-of-work is not the correct design. These mining interests are blocking larger block size, because unlimited block sizes means bankruptcy for all miners when minted rewards get closer to zero. We have a technical problem combined with a political problem, but the political problem originates from the choice of proof-of-work as the consensus mechanism. I explain this in great detail in my white paper. The following are applicable:
http://btcmarketwatch.com/2015/08/the-blockstream-business-plan/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1671480.msg16837201#msg16837201Add this from my whitepaper:
2. A normal system in nature is small things grow exponentially faster than large things. Most small things don't grow large enough to become stable large things, e.g. the competing saplings in the forest, because they have more competition and friction, e.g. a higher portion of a lower income is budgeted for food instead of savings and investment. A stable power-law distribution appears to be one where large things peak and decay, which retains competition and renewal.
Satoshi's design appears to be a power vacuum which can only reach equilibrium at winner-take-all on mining, thus appears to be incongruent with a long-term stable power-law distribution. Examples include the selfish and stubborn mining attacks and propagation delays, all of which accrue more than proportional rewards (thus accumulating ever more hashrate) to those with more hashrate due to wasted mining of the others¹. Also there is variance[Meni2011] and the cost of verifying a disproportionate volume of transactions. These factors force miners into pools and ostensibly eventually the winner-take-all pool. We can't presume that a multitude of pools aren't all controlled by the same entity behind the scenes, i.e. a Sybil attack on objective decentralization of the network hashrate.
As explained in the Power-law Distribution Control section, the long-term stabilty of the power-law distribution is not the same as the Nash equilibrium of the game theory of the protocol.
3. If the block size is constrained then the transaction fees will rise to value of the most expensive transactions, as transaction volume exceeds the block size. If the block size is unbounded then the transaction fees will decline to less than the marginal validation costs since some transactions will be added by other than the marginal cost miner. And as marginal miners are less profitable (for this reason and those from #2) eventually transaction fees drop to the validation costs of the winner-take-all miner, yet at this point the miner can presumably require any transaction fee the market will bear[Recycled]. Monero has a variable block size algorithm, but this is effectively the same scenario as the unbounded block size because block size will trend to the transaction volume and fees which are profitable for the lowest validation cost miner[TPTB2016].
A perpetual (aka tail) block minted (aka coinbase) reward subsidy complicates the analysis, but due to #2 the winner-take-all monopoly (first perhaps a cartel) insures that transaction fees will eventually rise to what the market will bear in order to maximize income for the victors.
There is no possible solution to the block size dilemma in Satoshi's proof-of-work design.
[Meni2011]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4980[Recycled]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg16853429#msg16853429[TPTB2016]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1183043.msg13850005#msg13850005¹
https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243 http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/796 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1361602.msg15823439#msg15823439 https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-block-time/As for the masses trusting and desiring crypto-currency and wanting all their data in a decentralized consensus ordering database (not necessarily a blockchain if we don't use blocks), Steem(it) already demonstrated some innovations and we need to tweak the aspects that Steem(it) did incorrectly.
Taking money from the collective and paying it out to participants via voting is an incorrect paradigm for onboarding the masses, for reasons I have already explained in my blogs on Steem(it) and also in the Steem thread in the Altcoin Discussion forum. The consensus system employed by Steem(it) is DPoS and although this is an improvement from Satoshi's proof-of-work, it has some technical weaknesses around asynchony liveness and is subject to a winner-take-all power vacuum on stake control of the delegate witness and the fees they are paid.
My design fixes all of this. Yet the implementation is vaporware at this moment.
As you all know, I have a problem with my liver and digestive system. For example, I just woke up from 8 hours sleep, but I feel exhausted and lacking of energy to think clearly upon waking up. It is as if I didn't sleep. But if I don't sleep, it gets even worse, where I am in delirium. So there is no way that in this health condition, that I am coding and working with the energy and efficiency of my healthy self. I not even producing at 1/5 the rate that I would without such a health problem. Any way, I am limping along as best as I can, and will be in Singapore at the National University Hospital which has research department and entire building for Hepatology and Gastroenterology. And they have research doctors there who had originally been schooled and trained in the UK. So I go there in 2nd of January to get a proper diagnosis and hopefully also some sort of treatment. I can't know in advance if the problem will require surgery or if it is microflora (bacterial) or what. They've got to look inside (endoscopy and MRI) and do lab tests that aren't available here in the Philippines. I wanted to go in November, but it didn't work because 1) I only have 9.5 BTC of funding and no medical insurance, so I am hoping for a higher BTC price by January, 2) the head of the entire department will be my doctor, but he is on vacation from end of November until Dec 19 and I couldn't arrange my exit clearance with immigration and the flights for early November and I don't want to go mid-November, because maybe not enough time to complete the treatment before he goes on vacation, 3) going around Xmas & New Years is prohibitively expensive for the flights & hotel, 4) my immigration fees and visa for Philippines is paid through January 13, so better to not waste that by leaving the country earlier.
So for example I will go jogging now, because that is what seems to give me a bit more energy. I have been tending to jog 2 - 3X per day. But it doesn't stop the yellow color and pain at my abdomen. There is something seriously wrong inside there at my liver and upper portion of the digestive system. In January, I will have documents I can scan and share so that no one will be able to think I was lying. Believe me, if I wasn't sick, I wouldn't writing anything here in these forums. I'd be having too much fun producing and making progress at a much faster rate. I am praying my problem can be resolved in January. Thus NUHS has also done FMT (fecal microflora transplants) as well as I am sure very expert in surgery if for example my organs in there are bound together after floating in stomach acid in 2012 due to the perforated ulcer I had at the time. However, one thing that is perplexing to me is that well before the perforated ulcer in 2012, even as early as 2009/10, I was having the symptoms of swollen feet and uncontrollable muscle contractions (especially in my feet) which I still get now and seem to be correlated with my gut problem. So perhaps my health problem is something viral or bacterial, which preceded and precipitated the perforated ulcer. January is a significant month in my life. I been in 4.5 years of utter hell healthwise. And since 2006 when my ex gave me a very nasty strain of HPV that had me bed ridden for a month and never quite the same hence, I've been having autoimmunity symptoms. So maybe I am just destroyed. I will hope to find out in January. Nevertheless, I will release this crypto project even if I can't be cured. I will need to find another programmer if I am not going to get back my normal health. I will have to transition just to a thinker and adviser in that case. I have a plan B for that, which will involve a small ICO after making it to testnet, so I can hire a top notch programmer. Until January, I am trying to get as much work done as I can in this poor health condition.
