The Holy Grail! I wish I could kiss the author of Bitmessage on his face.

[marcus_of_augustus]

My family has been building houses and shopping centers for many generations. If we reexamined a foundation we had poured, a foundation we had put blood and sweat and tears into, and that foundation was flawed, we repoured. While it is tempting to continue to build on that flawed foundation, perhaps add some arches and redistribute the weight of the house horizontally, the building would eventually fail. I tell you what, our houses and buildings have withstood the test of time. Don't let crypto-currencies die by building on a flawed foundation and ruining the reputation of crypto-currency. Break up the concrete, recycle that concrete, and transfer that value of the concrete and the experience to a new foundation.

Go for it, rebuild bitcoin from the ground up. It is an open source protocol operating in a free market ... just no need to spam a whole lot of nonsense on this thread .... go and start breaking concrete, get back to us when you have built your new mall we should all be shopping in (XRP only accepted I suspect).

[datz]

My family has been building houses and shopping centers for many generations. If we reexamined a foundation we had poured, a foundation we had put blood and sweat and tears into, and that foundation was flawed, we repoured. While it is tempting to continue to build on that flawed foundation, perhaps add some arches and redistribute the weight of the house horizontally, the building would eventually fail. I tell you what, our houses and buildings have withstood the test of time. Don't let crypto-currencies die by building on a flawed foundation and ruining the reputation of crypto-currency. Break up the concrete, recycle that concrete, and transfer that value of the concrete and the experience to a new foundation.

Go for it, rebuild bitcoin from the ground up. It is an open source protocol operating in a free market ... just no need to spam a whole lot of nonsense on this thread .... go and start breaking concrete, get back to us when you have built your new mall we should all be shopping in (XRP only accepted I suspect).

Appreciate the support, but the mall is already built.

[caveden]

Ripple does more than just solve the "multiple currency" transaction problem - it provides a more efficient validation and confirmation ledger platform. Mining is unnecessary and inefficient in the long run.

Perhaps, but I'm still not 100% convinced. For example, what's the answer to this question?

We will see higher and higher transaction fees as Bitcoin adoption increases if the block size does not increase.

I agree with that. And that's why the block size limit has to be lifted. Even if it implies a chaotic hard-fork due to the stubborn ones who want to cripple Bitcoin.... so be it. The majority will prefer the scalable and affordable Bitcoin, not the SWITF2.0 one.

[datz]

Perhaps, but I'm still not 100% convinced. For example, what's the answer to this question?

The forkers would be ignored and cut out.

Since every validation must be signed, it is blatantly apparent who is lying.

Liars or forkers are automatically detected and if they lie enough to meet a threshold can be automatically cut out of the network.

It is all reputation based - so if I have a reputation as a good validator people will choose to trust my node as a validator. This is how the Ripple protocol differs from the Bitcoin protocol.

With the Bitcoin protocol, any third party can mine on the network and exert control. Blocks must be confirmed by miners - thus miners and computational resources are always necessary for Bitcoin to properly function and must always be incentivized. Spamming the block chain is always an option without proper disincentives which inconvenience transactions and defeat the purpose of crypto-currencies even though they may still be better than alternatives.

With Ripple, the main members of the network may choose to accept or ignore validators. Ripple includes a framework for automatically detecting nodes going against the consensus. In the early stages, most validators have vested interests in Ripple's success. Thus, Ripple allows for fewer validators, less computational power, and decentralization/distribution. Imagine taking out all of the spammers, "dust bunnies," and bad guys from the Bitcoin protocol and eliminating mining. How much more efficient a protocol would it be? Even if 80% of validators that somehow managed to gain trust decided to fork Ripple dishonestly the major exchanges, institutions, and people who matter in commerce would cut them out immediately and would never trust them again as validators based on their signatures. The same cannot be said about Bitcoin.

What's more is that Bitcoin cannot change it's core without becoming an entirely different protocol. Building layers on Bitcoin may alleviate load on the block chain, but after the deflationary period this will only result in less fees for miners and less computational power, making Bitcoin vulnerable to the 51% attack as mining for bitcoin creation becomes less profitable. Maintaining the block size as adoption increases will result in higher fees in order to increase incentives for additional computational power in the network to confirm transactions. If we increase the size of blocks we move toward centralization and encounter some of the same problems. Even then, we still face transaction size limits in order to reduce spam. Imagine clients not paying a transaction fee and building up thousands of fee-less blocks which may take forever to be confirmed by miners since fee-less blocks do not pay. Even if Moore's law results in better connectivity and speed, we are still wasting all this electricity and processing power on mining just to prevent the 51% attack. Ripple helps solve these problems and is a happy medium.  

I would rather embrace a distributed, technically unified protocol that will transition from centralized to decentralized than a fragmented, bottlenecked protocol which will transition from decentralized to centralized. Ripple keeps things simple and allows for more functionality in one decentralized API.

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
-Albert Einstein

[Its About Sharing]

Unfortunately, this is not closer to the singularity, but farther away from it than Ripple. Why would we go to offchain transactions with more moving parts when we have a far superior fully integrated platform? Ripple does more than just solve the "multiple currency" transaction problem - it provides a more efficient validation and confirmation ledger platform. Mining is unnecessary and inefficient in the long run. We will see higher and higher transaction fees as Bitcoin adoption increases if the block size does not increase. With so many systems and so many moving parts and bottlenecks, a Bitmessage/Open Transaction/Bitcoin build appears inferior from a Universal standpoint to an integrated Ripple platform. 

Thanks for the info about Ripple. I am interested in learning more about it, just not here.

Two points:

1 - You are making Ripple sound like a replacement for BTC when the designers say it is a compliment to it. Seems like BTC is doing well and with so many XRP's out there and the owners owning a ton, I don't see value in that.
2 - Could you answer this in a Ripple thread since this thread is about Bitmessage. This is really annoying from the Ripple guys, always jumping in BTC threads. If all the cryptocurrency guys did that, this place would be a big mess.

Thx,
IAS

[caveden]

Datz, I answered your post in the appropriate thread. If you could transfer the discussion to that thread I'd appreciate. Thanks.

[lunarboy]

Datz, I answered your post in the appropriate thread. If you could transfer the discussion to that thread I'd appreciate. Thanks.

+1 

[kodo]

Bitmessage is great 

[enric]

Only to comment about a new post  to focus in a peer to peer courier network:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166420.new#new

all the people interested are welcome!

[Anon136]

what does bitmessage do that i2p and freenet cant do?

[fellowtraveler]

what does bitmessage do that i2p and freenet cant do?

Please read how I am using bitmessage, in the OP (see pastebins), and tell me exactly how to do those same things in i2p and freenet. I would like to know.

Also FYI the whole idea is that bitmessage could easily be swapped out for other discovery layers.

[Cryptoman]

Unfortunately, this is not closer to the singularity, but farther away from it than Ripple. Why would we go to offchain transactions with more moving parts when we have a far superior fully integrated platform? Ripple does more than just solve the "multiple currency" transaction problem - it provides a more efficient validation and confirmation ledger platform. Mining is unnecessary and inefficient in the long run. We will see higher and higher transaction fees as Bitcoin adoption increases if the block size does not increase. With so many systems and so many moving parts and bottlenecks, a Bitmessage/Open Transaction/Bitcoin build appears inferior from a Universal standpoint to an integrated Ripple platform. 

I'm so happy to hear that ripple has everything baked right in.  Could you point me to the APIs for issuance and management of blinded cash tokens?  I seem to have missed them somehow...

[TheSwede75]

Unfortunately, this is not closer to the singularity, but farther away from it than Ripple. Why would we go to offchain transactions with more moving parts when we have a far superior fully integrated platform? Ripple does more than just solve the "multiple currency" transaction problem - it provides a more efficient validation and confirmation ledger platform. Mining is unnecessary and inefficient in the long run. We will see higher and higher transaction fees as Bitcoin adoption increases if the block size does not increase. With so many systems and so many moving parts and bottlenecks, a Bitmessage/Open Transaction/Bitcoin build appears inferior from a Universal standpoint to an integrated Ripple platform. 

I'm so happy to hear that ripple has everything baked right in.  Could you point me to the APIs for issuance and management of blinded cash tokens?  I seem to have missed them somehow...

Of course we should all use Ripple. What could be the possible downside to using a system of debt with a closed source and where the actual 'ripples' carry value in themselves and are all pre-produced to the tune of 100 BILLION and handed out to developers and company owners so that they can sell them and get rich..

Oh wait, did I just answer my own question?

[Anon136]

With this idea the exchanges are still centralized right? still points of failure. There is no reason why we couldn't have this totally decentralized.

why not just design a program that could scan the blockchain of bitmessage for buy and sell offers that match specific syntax and aggregate and display that data in a way that is easy for users to interpret. Then have built into the program tools that could be used to easily arrange for the creation of a risk fund (explained here http://nashx.com/about) by way of a multisignature transaction on the bitcoin blockchain. this way you can safely make transactions person to person with people you dont know ANYTHING about with out the need for any help from any third parties (unlike with the chaum bank provider)

You could even design algorithms to extract up to date prices for each market from the bitmessage blockchain.

[fellowtraveler]

With this idea the exchanges are still centralized right? still points of failure. There is no reason why we couldn't have this totally decentralized.

BTW, I like your proposal and I think you should code it.

However, in the case of OT, the servers are not failure points. If the users broadcast a discovery for a certain server and it doesn't work, then they can just use a different one instead. Federated.

[lightcoin]

Personal clouds communicating via XDI are helping to solve the p2p discovery problem.

https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiDiscovery

http://respectnetwork.com/development/

[dscotese]

I had some questions before I read this thread (14 pages!), but I didn't find satisfactory answers.  Having read through the thread, I will try to show why I think they are important questions before asking them...

The banks over the last several centuries have issued receipts that were redeemable in return for commodities.  Some started issuing receipts behind which there were no commodities.  Then government said "that's Ok, we'll do it too so no one will ever have a reason to redeem for gold."  This is echoed in FellowTraveler's statements about colored coins.  If you don't know what happened after that, Google Rothbard banking, and the meaning of "fiat".

Part of OT's protection from this is the theory is that we will create "basket currencies" so lots of issuers are involved, and if one defaults, we'll be ok.  So I have a prediction to make, which could be prevented, maybe.

The same sociopaths who currently run the world will create lots of Nyms on OT Servers, untraceably, and issue digital currencies for all kinds of stuff.  They will happily redeem whenever someone requests it - for a generation or two, or perhaps just a couple decades or even years, depending on how short they can cut the average attention span with their government schooling and the mainstream media.  When they are ready, just as they were in 1933, and again in 1971, and then again when they passed The Authorities Robbing People (TARP), they will, in the subtlest way possible, stop those redemptions.  Some who have their savings in colored coins or various other digital currencies issued through OT servers from those sociopaths, those who see what's going on, will go to their coercive-government-sponsored banks and/or court-systems to make an attempt at recovering some of their life savings, and they will succeed.  They will have lost only a portion of their savings, and that portion will once again be in the hands of the same sociopaths who have it today through the efforts of the same depraved and immoral banking system that inspired Satoshi Nakamoto to invent bitcoin.

The problem of a person or group of people establishing a pattern of being trustworthy and then breaking that trust (and, while governments are still around, leveraging the brute force of the state to protect themselves) will NEVER go away (governments might - see voluntaryist.com), and there are very few systems in the world that handle this ugly feature of our race very well.  Bitcoin is one of them.

Open Transactions appears to me to be capable of handling it, but a fool is born every minute (probably more often now, thanks to the consumption of processed food - look up Weston A. Price if you're curious), and those fools are the foodstuffs of the sociopaths, and OT could make a nice oven for to cook them in (just as banking and fiat has for a century).  If OT is going to elegantly handle the attraction of those sociopaths, I think it will have good answers to my questions.

My questions are in what I sent to the Open Transactions team a day or two ago:

An issuer creates something that is tradable, but such tradable things should be redeemable.  In the video, the examples were game tokens and grams of silver.  Redemption obviously means that the holder gives the tradable digital issue back to the issuer in return for... something (game tokens or silver, in this case).  Any reasonable issue is going to identify that for which the digital currency can be redeemed in the contract that defines the issue.  My question is what happens when the issuer fails to honor that contract?

What I would expect to happen is that the holder of the issued currency sues the issuer in civil court and presents the evidence of the contract in order to have the court decide in their favor.  However, because the system is based on Nyms instead of names, the holder can expect it to be impossible to find the issuer.

The solution to this problem is publication, so is there a mechanism in OT through which a Nym can be tagged as having failed to honor one of its contracts?

[After reading the thread, I have to add: Any colored coin tied to that issuer, either for the currency itself or for a basket currency that has it as a component, will change in value depending on the perceived likelihood of such an "Issuer default".  And it's never a yes/no black and white thing until the moment that everybody capitulates to the fact that the issued currency is valueless.  Until then, it will go up and down.]

I have some other questions too, one of which is this: If the private key for a Nym is compromised, does OT have a mechanism that (any) holder(s) of that private key can use to mark it as compromised?  Is there a mechanism that allows the assets of a Nym to be available to some kind of "Nym heir," so that the mechanism through which the Nym is marked as compromised will cause its assets to become available to a different Nym?

[Anon136]

With this idea the exchanges are still centralized right? still points of failure. There is no reason why we couldn't have this totally decentralized.

BTW, I like your proposal and I think you should code it.

However, in the case of OT, the servers are not failure points. If the users broadcast a discovery for a certain server and it doesn't work, then they can just use a different one instead. Federated.

I do know a little bit of programming. I used to play around with python, invent little mathematical challenges for myself and then code a function that could be used to solve it out for fun. But i have no idea how to make something that involved, or even what i need to learn in order to know how to make something that involved. multiple tiers of ignorance going on here.

[caveden]

@dscotese

The whole point here is not to save fiat currency. If you're going to hold fiat-backed tokens, well, you're accepting all the problems you talk about. The whole point here is to improve considerably the process of exchanging fiat for bitcoins. Bitcoins do no suffer the problems you cite: you can be cryptographically sure your "bank" has your coins. But unfortunately we need - and we'll keep needing for a long time - to exchange bitcoins for fiat and vice-versa. If we could render such process much more reliable and censorship-resistant, that'd be a good thing, wouldn't it? That's the point here.

[mmeijeri]

And then there's more. OT can be layered op top of BTC too, totally bypassing fiat. It would add instant confirmation, totally untraceable digital cash and lots of more advanced financial instruments. .