Amateur hour

[Blinken]

I wrote this bytecode while I was taking a dump just now. I believe it solves the max block size problem with a brilliant solution that requires an IQ of at least 140 to understand. If you deny the validity of my solution then you simply do not have the mental acuteness people like Blinken and myself are blessed with. I would develop it further but I have already done enough for you people.

Code:

41 20 ....

Thats text, not code.

Where do we begin?  Most code is text.  Being text therefore does not make it not code.  Most people would not refer to the mentioned block as text anyhow,  they would refer to it as hexidecimal code.   

Is it valid code that executes on something?  That is above my IQ. 

This is what the guys "code" translates to in ASCII:

"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. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of
hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing
the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of
events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As
long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to
attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The
network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort
basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest
proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone"

0x41 is a capital "A", 0x20 is a space, etc.

[Severian]

Blinken: No matter how skilled you are or pretend you are, it doesn't change the fact that you're a complete ass.

This is the second time I've had to post this in the past 12 hours. I think it should be the official motto of the forum:

Walter: Am I wrong?

The Dude: You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole.

-The Big Lebowski

[Blinken]

- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.

Please do explain what the point of distributing new coins proportionately to existing holders of coins?  It's the equivalent of changing the decimal place and claiming you are 10 times richer because of it.

For how smart you claim to be, you sure are disappointing me with your "solutions".

P.S.  I knew a guy on the internet who claimed he owned a lambo too.   

Hey, I am only 140 IQ. You probably need somebody like 165 to solve the bitcoin problem. :-)

As far as the mining is concerned, that was definitely the work of a 125. A much better idea is to increase the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume. This would result in price stability, an important characteristic of a currency which bitcoin currently lacks entirely. Note that the supply of bitcoins could also decrease if the transaction volume shrank. The way it should work is that the network continually adjusts the total supply of coins. Each holder does not hold coin totals, they hold a fraction of the total. So, your fraction never changes, but its valuation does depending on the volume of trades.

Price stability is important to the economy for numerous reasons which can you read for yourself in the book "The Stability of Prices" by noted economist, Simon N. Patten.

The idea of increasing the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume is interesting, but how are you going to do that without identifying the person behind each Bitcoin address?  If Bitcoin addresses weren't at least partially anonymous, then everyone could know exactly how everyone else is spending their money.  That doesn't sound like a great financial system to me...

It is my belief that price stability will come with adoption.  As more and more people begin using Bitcoin, the price will become more and more stable.  I'd say with mass adoption, we'd see stability come close to that of Gold.  I could be completely wrong - I am no expert - but this is what I currently believe we will see happen.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant. In practice what would happen is that as adoption increased the capitalization would increase, but the value of each bitcoin would remain stable. For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased. If we had increased the volume of the bitcoins outstanding by 6x then the price of each bitcoin would have remained relatively stable during the recent growth period.

[Blinken]

Blinken: No matter how skilled you are or pretend you are, it doesn't change the fact that you're a complete ass.

This is the second time I've had to post this in the past 12 hours. I think it should be the official motto of the forum:

Walter: Am I wrong?

The Dude: You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole.

-The Big Lebowski

I hated that movie, except the part where he lit his groin on fire and crashed the car. Actually, when the cop threw the coffee cup at him, that was pretty funny too.

[SgtSpike]

- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.

Please do explain what the point of distributing new coins proportionately to existing holders of coins?  It's the equivalent of changing the decimal place and claiming you are 10 times richer because of it.

For how smart you claim to be, you sure are disappointing me with your "solutions".

P.S.  I knew a guy on the internet who claimed he owned a lambo too.   

Hey, I am only 140 IQ. You probably need somebody like 165 to solve the bitcoin problem. :-)

As far as the mining is concerned, that was definitely the work of a 125. A much better idea is to increase the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume. This would result in price stability, an important characteristic of a currency which bitcoin currently lacks entirely. Note that the supply of bitcoins could also decrease if the transaction volume shrank. The way it should work is that the network continually adjusts the total supply of coins. Each holder does not hold coin totals, they hold a fraction of the total. So, your fraction never changes, but its valuation does depending on the volume of trades.

Price stability is important to the economy for numerous reasons which can you read for yourself in the book "The Stability of Prices" by noted economist, Simon N. Patten.

The idea of increasing the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume is interesting, but how are you going to do that without identifying the person behind each Bitcoin address?  If Bitcoin addresses weren't at least partially anonymous, then everyone could know exactly how everyone else is spending their money.  That doesn't sound like a great financial system to me...

It is my belief that price stability will come with adoption.  As more and more people begin using Bitcoin, the price will become more and more stable.  I'd say with mass adoption, we'd see stability come close to that of Gold.  I could be completely wrong - I am no expert - but this is what I currently believe we will see happen.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant. In practice what would happen is that as adoption increased the capitalization would increase, but the value of each bitcoin would remain stable. For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased. If we had increased the volume of the bitcoins outstanding by 6x then the price of each bitcoin would have remained relatively stable during the recent growth period.

I agree - price swings in ANYTHING would be impossible to completely eliminate, and I don't think Bitcoin could ever reach the point of price stability like we see with a national currency.

Ok, I understand that trading percentages of the currency would be the backend way of doing it, and the number of coins per percentage would change according to transaction volume.  But I think you misunderstood the point I was attempting to make - apologies for not making it clear enough.  How would you know what the true transaction volume is when people can create as many addresses as they like and send coins between them?  Also, how would you know which address the Bitcoins were sent to vs which address was the change address?  Also, how would this transaction volume determination be made and agreed upon in a decentralized manner?

[DataPlumber]

The point is that we had a block chain fork yesterday and it can be attributed to existing serious weaknesses in the QT client code, and a failure to properly test the 0.8 release. The question is how we can step up the professionalism of the development effort to improve the design, quality and testing of the code so it doesn't happen again.

Actually, the bug was in the 0.7 client, and the problem wouldn't have been noticed if everyone had upgraded.  Pool operators had to back the chain down to 0.7 compatibility because 0.7 wouldn't accept a valid block that 0.8 accepted, and reverting to broken behavior was, at the end of the day, less disruptive to the network.

How mad can we be that a bug that had already been fixed, surfaced in an old client?  Might make more sense to yell at the people running the old client.  Or the wall, for all the good it'll do ya.

The many threads of this discussion remind me of an old song lyric from The Police:

Another suburban family morning
Grandmother screaming at the wall
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Krispies
We can't hear anything at all

[Blinken]

- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.

Please do explain what the point of distributing new coins proportionately to existing holders of coins?  It's the equivalent of changing the decimal place and claiming you are 10 times richer because of it.

For how smart you claim to be, you sure are disappointing me with your "solutions".

P.S.  I knew a guy on the internet who claimed he owned a lambo too.   

Hey, I am only 140 IQ. You probably need somebody like 165 to solve the bitcoin problem. :-)

As far as the mining is concerned, that was definitely the work of a 125. A much better idea is to increase the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume. This would result in price stability, an important characteristic of a currency which bitcoin currently lacks entirely. Note that the supply of bitcoins could also decrease if the transaction volume shrank. The way it should work is that the network continually adjusts the total supply of coins. Each holder does not hold coin totals, they hold a fraction of the total. So, your fraction never changes, but its valuation does depending on the volume of trades.

Price stability is important to the economy for numerous reasons which can you read for yourself in the book "The Stability of Prices" by noted economist, Simon N. Patten.

The idea of increasing the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume is interesting, but how are you going to do that without identifying the person behind each Bitcoin address?  If Bitcoin addresses weren't at least partially anonymous, then everyone could know exactly how everyone else is spending their money.  That doesn't sound like a great financial system to me...

It is my belief that price stability will come with adoption.  As more and more people begin using Bitcoin, the price will become more and more stable.  I'd say with mass adoption, we'd see stability come close to that of Gold.  I could be completely wrong - I am no expert - but this is what I currently believe we will see happen.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant. In practice what would happen is that as adoption increased the capitalization would increase, but the value of each bitcoin would remain stable. For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased. If we had increased the volume of the bitcoins outstanding by 6x then the price of each bitcoin would have remained relatively stable during the recent growth period.

I agree - price swings in ANYTHING would be impossible to completely eliminate, and I don't think Bitcoin could ever reach the point of price stability like we see with a national currency.

Ok, I understand that trading percentages of the currency would be the backend way of doing it, and the number of coins per percentage would change according to transaction volume.  But I think you misunderstood the point I was attempting to make - apologies for not making it clear enough.  How would you know what the true transaction volume is when people can create as many addresses as they like and send coins between them?  Also, how would you know which address the Bitcoins were sent to vs which address was the change address?  Also, how would this transaction volume determination be made and agreed upon in a decentralized manner?

There is only a single multiplier which is known to all clients. Every time a transaction is confirmed it has a effect on the multiplier based on the previous multiplier, the size of the transaction, and the time of the last transaction. There is a field of mathematics called "queuing theory" which lets you determine transactional volumes and velocities and balance them. These equations can be used to ensure that the multiplier remains proportional to current global transactional volume.

The adjustment is decentralized because it is part of the confirmation. When a transaction is confirmed the adjustment effect to the multiplier is determined at the same time and becomes part of the data of the transaction.

[wtfvanity]

Now, that I think about it, maybe the solution is to write an optional donation into the default client. If each transaction had a small donation to the development team, then they could potentially fund a larger operation, hire QC, etc.

You first invented ripple 2.0

Now you've invented devcoin 2.0

Great ideas, people already thought of them and made them into alt chains. I'm doubting your forum post 140 IQ. But then again on the internet you can say whatever you want. My IQ is 999.

[glitch003]

For such a genius, your code has some pretty glaring inefficiencies to it.  


You could optimize this to a single if statement of the form if(items < 1 || slots < 1 || slots > items) return 0;

      if( items < 1 || slots < 1 ) return 0;
      if( slots > items ) return 0;

You allocate arrays at a size of 100 and implement your own inefficient array grow algorithm which is less efficient than using a datastructure that supports growing natively.  

int[] aiNumeratorFactors = new int[100];

And the array grow:

if( aiNumeratorFactors[0] == aiNumeratorFactors.length - 1 ){ // need to expand list
               int[] aiNumeratorFactors_new = new int[aiNumeratorFactors.length * 2];
               System.arraycopy( aiNumeratorFactors, 0, aiNumeratorFactors_new, 0, aiNumeratorFactors.length );
               aiNumeratorFactors = aiNumeratorFactors_new;
            }

After inserting data into your arrays, you sort them.  It would instead be more efficient to simply insert the data into the arrays in the right order.  Essentially doing the sorting logic on insert instead of after the fact.

      java.util.Arrays.sort( aiNumeratorFactors );
      java.util.Arrays.sort( aiDenominatorFactors );

[SgtSpike]

- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.

Please do explain what the point of distributing new coins proportionately to existing holders of coins?  It's the equivalent of changing the decimal place and claiming you are 10 times richer because of it.

For how smart you claim to be, you sure are disappointing me with your "solutions".

P.S.  I knew a guy on the internet who claimed he owned a lambo too.   

Hey, I am only 140 IQ. You probably need somebody like 165 to solve the bitcoin problem. :-)

As far as the mining is concerned, that was definitely the work of a 125. A much better idea is to increase the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume. This would result in price stability, an important characteristic of a currency which bitcoin currently lacks entirely. Note that the supply of bitcoins could also decrease if the transaction volume shrank. The way it should work is that the network continually adjusts the total supply of coins. Each holder does not hold coin totals, they hold a fraction of the total. So, your fraction never changes, but its valuation does depending on the volume of trades.

Price stability is important to the economy for numerous reasons which can you read for yourself in the book "The Stability of Prices" by noted economist, Simon N. Patten.

The idea of increasing the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume is interesting, but how are you going to do that without identifying the person behind each Bitcoin address?  If Bitcoin addresses weren't at least partially anonymous, then everyone could know exactly how everyone else is spending their money.  That doesn't sound like a great financial system to me...

It is my belief that price stability will come with adoption.  As more and more people begin using Bitcoin, the price will become more and more stable.  I'd say with mass adoption, we'd see stability come close to that of Gold.  I could be completely wrong - I am no expert - but this is what I currently believe we will see happen.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant. In practice what would happen is that as adoption increased the capitalization would increase, but the value of each bitcoin would remain stable. For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased. If we had increased the volume of the bitcoins outstanding by 6x then the price of each bitcoin would have remained relatively stable during the recent growth period.

I agree - price swings in ANYTHING would be impossible to completely eliminate, and I don't think Bitcoin could ever reach the point of price stability like we see with a national currency.

Ok, I understand that trading percentages of the currency would be the backend way of doing it, and the number of coins per percentage would change according to transaction volume.  But I think you misunderstood the point I was attempting to make - apologies for not making it clear enough.  How would you know what the true transaction volume is when people can create as many addresses as they like and send coins between them?  Also, how would you know which address the Bitcoins were sent to vs which address was the change address?  Also, how would this transaction volume determination be made and agreed upon in a decentralized manner?

There is only a single multiplier which is known to all clients. Every time a transaction is confirmed it has a effect on the multiplier based on the previous multiplier, the size of the transaction, and the time of the last transaction. There is a field of mathematics called "queuing theory" which lets you determine transactional volumes and velocities and balance them. These equations can be used to ensure that the multiplier remains proportional to current global transactional volume.

The adjustment is decentralized because it is part of the confirmation. When a transaction is confirmed the adjustment effect to the multiplier is determined at the same time and becomes part of the data of the transaction.

Ok, that answers the last question.  What about the two right before it that you conveniently avoided?

The fact of the matter is, there is no way to determine true transaction volume without knowing who is sending to who.  Therefore, this multiplier could be manipulated by anyone at any time for any reason, and would not be a reliably corollary for supply (and therefore price) to base itself upon.  You seem to want to simply ignore this glaring flaw in your argument for price stability.

[Blinken]

For such a genius, your code has some pretty glaring inefficiencies to it.  


You could optimize this to a single if statement of the form if(items < 1 || slots < 1 || slots > items) return 0;

      if( items < 1 || slots < 1 ) return 0;
      if( slots > items ) return 0;

This is done for clarity, not efficiency. Since the two tests are conceptually different, I separate them into different lines. The savings by combining the statements is not significant enough that it is preferable to the two-statement version.

You allocate arrays at a size of 100 and implement your own inefficient array grow algorithm which is less efficient than using a datastructure that supports growing natively.  

int[] aiNumeratorFactors = new int[100];

And the array grow:

if( aiNumeratorFactors[0] == aiNumeratorFactors.length - 1 ){ // need to expand list
               int[] aiNumeratorFactors_new = new int[aiNumeratorFactors.length * 2];
               System.arraycopy( aiNumeratorFactors, 0, aiNumeratorFactors_new, 0, aiNumeratorFactors.length );
               aiNumeratorFactors = aiNumeratorFactors_new;
            }

It is faster to do this. If you use collections class, like ArrayList, then each access must be through a method, as opposed to an array reference, which is much faster because it does not have call overhead. Also, if you read the source code to the add() method in ArrayList you can see that it does two internal calls making it much less efficient than my version. In fact, even the method ArrayList uses to expand its own array is slower than the direct memory allocation I do here, once again because of additional method calls in its ensureCapacity() method.

After inserting data into your arrays, you sort them.  It would instead be more efficient to simply insert the data into the arrays in the right order.  Essentially doing the sorting logic on insert instead of after the fact.

      java.util.Arrays.sort( aiNumeratorFactors );
      java.util.Arrays.sort( aiDenominatorFactors );

How do you know what the right order is? Each list of factors begins as a union of the factors of multiple numbers. For example, if you have 15! then you have factors for 15, factors for 14, factors for 13, 12, 11, 10, etc. So you have sets like {3, 5}{2, 7}{13}{2,2,3} etc. These sets must be made into a union: {3,5,2,7,13,2,23} and then sorted. When you are creating the union there is no way to know where each element will appear in the sorted array ahead of time.

[Blinken]

- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.

Please do explain what the point of distributing new coins proportionately to existing holders of coins?  It's the equivalent of changing the decimal place and claiming you are 10 times richer because of it.

For how smart you claim to be, you sure are disappointing me with your "solutions".

P.S.  I knew a guy on the internet who claimed he owned a lambo too.   

Hey, I am only 140 IQ. You probably need somebody like 165 to solve the bitcoin problem. :-)

As far as the mining is concerned, that was definitely the work of a 125. A much better idea is to increase the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume. This would result in price stability, an important characteristic of a currency which bitcoin currently lacks entirely. Note that the supply of bitcoins could also decrease if the transaction volume shrank. The way it should work is that the network continually adjusts the total supply of coins. Each holder does not hold coin totals, they hold a fraction of the total. So, your fraction never changes, but its valuation does depending on the volume of trades.

Price stability is important to the economy for numerous reasons which can you read for yourself in the book "The Stability of Prices" by noted economist, Simon N. Patten.

The idea of increasing the supply of coins proportionately to the transaction volume is interesting, but how are you going to do that without identifying the person behind each Bitcoin address?  If Bitcoin addresses weren't at least partially anonymous, then everyone could know exactly how everyone else is spending their money.  That doesn't sound like a great financial system to me...

It is my belief that price stability will come with adoption.  As more and more people begin using Bitcoin, the price will become more and more stable.  I'd say with mass adoption, we'd see stability come close to that of Gold.  I could be completely wrong - I am no expert - but this is what I currently believe we will see happen.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant. In practice what would happen is that as adoption increased the capitalization would increase, but the value of each bitcoin would remain stable. For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased. If we had increased the volume of the bitcoins outstanding by 6x then the price of each bitcoin would have remained relatively stable during the recent growth period.

I agree - price swings in ANYTHING would be impossible to completely eliminate, and I don't think Bitcoin could ever reach the point of price stability like we see with a national currency.

Ok, I understand that trading percentages of the currency would be the backend way of doing it, and the number of coins per percentage would change according to transaction volume.  But I think you misunderstood the point I was attempting to make - apologies for not making it clear enough.  How would you know what the true transaction volume is when people can create as many addresses as they like and send coins between them?  Also, how would you know which address the Bitcoins were sent to vs which address was the change address?  Also, how would this transaction volume determination be made and agreed upon in a decentralized manner?

There is only a single multiplier which is known to all clients. Every time a transaction is confirmed it has a effect on the multiplier based on the previous multiplier, the size of the transaction, and the time of the last transaction. There is a field of mathematics called "queuing theory" which lets you determine transactional volumes and velocities and balance them. These equations can be used to ensure that the multiplier remains proportional to current global transactional volume.

The adjustment is decentralized because it is part of the confirmation. When a transaction is confirmed the adjustment effect to the multiplier is determined at the same time and becomes part of the data of the transaction.

Ok, that answers the last question.  What about the two right before it that you conveniently avoided?

The fact of the matter is, there is no way to determine true transaction volume without knowing who is sending to who.  Therefore, this multiplier could be manipulated by anyone at any time for any reason, and would not be a reliably corollary for supply (and therefore price) to base itself upon.  You seem to want to simply ignore this glaring flaw in your argument for price stability.

I don't see why it is necessary to discriminate the change address. When a node confirms a transaction it has complete knowledge of the amounts of bitcoins involved in the transaction.

It is true that clients can create spurious volume by ping ponging transactions back and forth, but I accept that as a possible source of error. In truth, we can imagine transactions of different importance. For example, two parties might be doing a business deal, but another transaction might be some guy juggling the coins in his accounts to tidy them up. The multiplication metric does not attempt to judge how "worthy" a transaction is, it just gauges the overall volume.

[bbit]

Blinken: No matter how skilled you are or pretend you are, it doesn't change the fact that you're a complete ass.

Sums up this whole thread in a nice neat package.

[Blinken]

Blinken: No matter how skilled you are or pretend you are, it doesn't change the fact that you're a complete ass.

Sums up this whole thread in a nice neat package.

At least my posts have some substance to them and feature complete sentences.

Your 1500+ "heroic" posts consist almost entirely of one liners which are either insults, name calling or comments like "ROFL !!!!!!!".

[greyhawk]

Snippet war! Everyone post a snippet of what they have written. I will evaluate and declare a winner

10 PRINT "YOU GOT A BITCOIN!"
20 GOTO 10

[acoindr]

Okay, you may know something about programming, but you appear to know nothing about monetary systems.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant.

Not true. To measure value you need to measure against something else. For obvious reasons bitcoins are commonly measured against dollars, but also other currencies and even precious metals like gold or silver. You cannot maintain a constant bitcoin value by simply modifying the number of bitcoins each account has. The number of bitcoins, as well as how fast they come into existence, is known. This is how a value for them was first established; a pizza was bought for about 10K bitcoins which established a dollar value for them. If the rate of bitcoins had been 10 times what it was then that pizza would likely to have been bought for 100K bitcoins, because that number relative to how many total that account holder had would have been commensurate. That's all the effect of increasing the number has; it means each individual bitcoin becomes worth less, not any constant value.

For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased.

No, it had nothing to do with transaction volume. It had to do with the fact the rate of bitcoins coming into existence was not enough to keep up with the demand of people wanting them.

Did you say earlier you worked for the Fed? I would find that believable.

[bbit]

Blinken: No matter how skilled you are or pretend you are, it doesn't change the fact that you're a complete ass.

Sums up this whole thread in a nice neat package.

At least my posts have some substance to them and feature complete sentences.

Your 1500+ "heroic" posts consist almost entirely of one liners which are either insults, name calling or comments like "ROFL !!!!!!!".

I love it when I make my point.

Your posts have ZERO! ZIP SUBSTANCE TO THEM!  SO ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Blinken]

Okay, you may know something about programming, but you appear to know nothing about monetary systems.

Actually, I am published author on economics and I have had articles published by Mises.org.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant.

Not true. To measure value you need to measure against something else. For obvious reasons bitcoins are commonly measured against dollars, but also other currencies and even precious metals like gold or silver. You cannot maintain a constant bitcoin value by simply modifying the number of bitcoins each account has. The number of bitcoins, as well as how fast they come into existence, is known. This is how a value for them is first established; a pizza was bought for about 10K bitcoins which established a dollar value for them. If the rate of bitcoins had been 10 times what it was then that pizza would likely to have been bought for 100K bitcoins, because that number relative to how many total that account holder had would have been commensurate. That's all the effect of increasing the number has; it means each individual bitcoin becomes worth less, not any constant value.

For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased.

No, it had nothing to do with transaction volume. It had to do with the fact the rate of bitcoins coming into existence was not enough to keep up with the demand of people wanting them.

The proximate cause is, you are right, demand for the coins, but it is hard for the clients to know what the "demand" is. They can know the volume, however, so the volume can serve as a proxy for the current demand level.

Did you say earlier you worked for the Fed? I would find that believable.

That was a joke .

[franky1]

As a professional software developer this may be an opportune time to point out that the bitcoin code is an amateur production.

I have the greatest respect for Gavin and others that have donated untold hours to make bitcoin into a reality and I know from experience how tough self-funded development is.

Nevertheless, make no mistakes, the current incarnation of Bitcoin has a lot of ill-conceived design points and implementation weaknesses (as we have seen from the events of the last 24 hours).

Aside from the blunder that just resulted in a blockchain fork, there is a much larger, related issue looming on the horizon, which is the inability of the design to process large numbers of transactions. It is ludicrous we have people whining about "Satoshi Dice" creating numerous transactions. I could sit down and write a software component that could easily generate billions of transactions without breaking a sweat once it is deployed to a few thousand boxes, if I so chose, and yet you are concerned about Satoishi Dice generating a few million transactions. The problem of high-volume transaction handling needs to be answered at a new level which is, unfortunately, way above the paygrade of the current development team.

noting the highlighted text

but instead you spend the exact same time reading threads unpaid
but instead you spend the exact same time writing threads unpaid
but instead you spend the exact same time whining about problems.

how about solve it for free without breaking a sweat and then you will know with confidence your bitcoins funds are that much safer, that the holdings you have will repay themselves with even larger profits due to the stability you give bitcoins. which results in a pay day for the work you have done.

which basically means you eventually get paid !

[SgtSpike]

Ok, that answers the last question.  What about the two right before it that you conveniently avoided?

The fact of the matter is, there is no way to determine true transaction volume without knowing who is sending to who.  Therefore, this multiplier could be manipulated by anyone at any time for any reason, and would not be a reliably corollary for supply (and therefore price) to base itself upon.  You seem to want to simply ignore this glaring flaw in your argument for price stability.

I don't see why it is necessary to discriminate the change address. When a node confirms a transaction it has complete knowledge of the amounts of bitcoins involved in the transaction.

It is true that clients can create spurious volume by ping ponging transactions back and forth, but I accept that as a possible source of error. In truth, we can imagine transactions of different importance. For example, two parties might be doing a business deal, but another transaction might be some guy juggling the coins in his accounts to tidy them up. The multiplication metric does not attempt to judge how "worthy" a transaction is, it just gauges the overall volume.

So you think that if I send a transaction of 1 BTC to someone out of an address holding a 100 BTC input, that counting all 100 BTC as transaction volume is ok?  99 BTC of that isn't true economic activity, and shouldn't be an indicator of such.

Here's an example of how to game your system.

I plan to buy a car for 1,000 BTC.
I send that 1,000 BTC on a wild goose chase across many many different addresses, to generate false transaction volume and increase the multiplier.  I now have 1,100 BTC.  I send 1,000 BTC to the dealer, "saving" myself 100 BTC.  Because the transaction volume was false, I am left (at some point in the future when the multiplier re-adjusts) with 91 BTC, and the dealer is left with 909 BTC (roughly).

Regardless, I think your idea has merit as an experimental altcoin (it IS an interesting idea), just not exactly in the way you describe.

I think you still need a reasonable way to distribute currency at the beginning that doesn't just involve a multiplier (the way you describe it, it would be a 100% premine with a single person holding on to all of the currency until they decided to distribute it how they choose), but creates some method of distributing new currency to new users across many years.

I think that transaction volume should be indicated in "Altcoin days destroyed" instead of straight-up transaction volume over a given period of time.  This would prevent, to an extent, gaming of the system, though holders of large numbers of Altcoin days could theoretically game the system one time.  Maybe they put Altcoin days up for sale to be destroyed upon the date and time of the highest bidder's choosing or something.

I also think that some people might be more concerned with coins being added or taken from their account on an unpredictable basis than they would be of the price fluctuations inherent in Bitcoin.  Would people rather have a fluctuating number of coins in their wallet based on a best estimate of transaction volume, or would they rather have a fluctuating price based on free market buying and selling?

And finally, couldn't a decrease in transaction volume, which would cause people to lose coins from their wallets, theoretically feedback to itself in a deflationary spiral?  Something along the lines of, "Well, I only have 90 coins instead of 100 that I had yesterday, so I'm not going to buy that computer."  And then they only have 80 coins, then 70, etc, because no one is buying anything?  I mean, I'm not making the argument that Bitcoin doesn't also have the same potential problem, but this doesn't fix potential deflation-related problems.