"Failure to Understand Bitcoin Could Cost Investors Billions" (Bitcoin's flaws)

[AnonyMint]

Evidently. And if 1 in 3 (even in this minimal and quite partial environment) makes you happy, count us both as VERY happy... dumb ass.

Why are you so scared that some people want their privacy that you must put your FUD spin on the poll results to try to create discouragement?

Because socialists are never satisfied if they don't control everything. Control freaks. People like you scare the shit out of me. And you outnumber us freedom lovers. And that is why the world is headed into totalitarianism. Remember I told you so when it gets really bad in 2017 to 2020.

Yep. It must be the reason why you use words such as "mandatory" and I use words such as democracy... you know the will of the people?

FUD. I already explained you are not required to buy the coin. You can use Bitcoin if you want optional anonymity (which means no anonymity as explained in footnote [2] in the OP, anonymity is a nearly all or nothing proposition).

Also 'mandatory' is not entirely accurate. Any user can reveal his identity there is no technological way to stop that. Rather I am proposing the anonymity is automatically on by default.

And democracy is a lie. So many people are going to have to relearn the painful lesson that democracy always ends up back at totalitarianism. I linked to the power vacuum of democracy upthread.

You don't scare me, you are just a freak side show in a corner street somewhere. The definition of a nutcase. Have a nice one, "freedom lover".

The bolded text displays your disdain for hackers and people who love freedom. The hacker people who created the internet by lying to the government which has provided all the prosperity and advancement you are benefiting from today on the internet. I was one of those people who helped create decentralized publishing on the internet. Yet you disrespect us and piss on us, and that is exactly what socialism does. It destroys itself.

Amazingly FUD way to characterize the vast research and technical acumen I have displayed in this thread.

I don't scare you because I am not a socialist trying to control you. And you believe your government can crush us (but you are subconsciously worried else you wouldn't be wasting your time in this thread). You scare me, because you are not satisfied unless you can FUD everything and have everything your way. You can't just leave us alone and let us make our coin and you use Bitcoin because in democracy everyone has to share and share equally. No person can be allowed to go his own way.

OK, Ill waste a couple more minutes: so democracy is a lie, right? Since there is only a real alternative (totalitarianism) so I gues you are advocating, in your "freedom lover" proposition, for a dictatorship beyond frontiers? Or is it some other 100% utopic proposition.

Democracy leads to totalitarianism at the end game where the debt peaks. You didn't read the power vacuum link I provided to you. If you are not going to do your homework and study, how can I teach you anything new.

We created the internet to function decentralized (i.e. anarchism = freedom) not top-down votes (i.e. democracy = debt slavery).

Analogously see the upthread technical explanation I made comparing Bitcoin's PoW (decentralized) to PoS (top-down control).

As for your anonymous coin, by all means go ahead and create it using your "vast research and technical acumen" obtained in Nutcaseland. Hey, they already tried Caynecoin, didn't they?

Again you show complete disrespect (and probably due to a lack of understanding) for the people who created the internet.

And you characterize as "nutcases" people who have studied throughout history the repeated failure of socialism and just want their privacy. This is precisely the kind of voracious, pit-bull attitude that prevails in totalitarianism. Look at what former POTUS Bush said, "you are with us, or against us". Look at the way Hitler worked the population into a frenzy to attack those who were "not the same as us".

Have a nice life.

Thank you. Best wishes for you as well.

[1713559903]

1713559903

[AnonyMint]

Hey "No" voters, what is the point of Bitcoin if it ends up a top-down currency? We could have just used Paypal instead.

Either you disagree with my logic that it is already nearing top-down control, or you ignore reality (forsake the ideals of a decentralized currency) because you want to earn money on Bitcoin's appreciation.

I have a feeling it won't work out well for you because socialism gets very destructive at its end game cycle.

[User705]

There is a much easier way for the government to take over Bitcoin than 51% attack and selfish mining. Simply tax the coin and per footnote [2] all coin is tainted regardless if you used Tor or not, so in effect regulate every pool and exchange. Regulation can accomplish much of the same goals as takeover. Then later the large corporations beholden to the government buyout the pools and exchanges, and then the drift towards cartels and corporate-fascism.

Don't you think that P2P mining pool can solve the problem of regulation or big corporations takeover?

Definitely not since it is so easy for the centralized pools to have their miners compute shares for a competing P2Ppool but withhold block solutions from the P2Ppool (and submit them for themselves) thus parasiting the P2Ppools of revenue while not impacting the revenue of the centralized pool. So centralized pools which wanted to eliminate P2Ppools could do so (in theory).

...

That doesn't sound right at all.  A solution with a different payout address would no longer be valid.  Also they are spending hash power so it's not parasiting.  At most it will cause the pools luck to appear to be bad but since P2P users have altruistic reasons it isn't likely to cause them to switch.  51% attack is an overblown problem anyways.  As you stated yourself government actors have better tools to combat bitcoin  and for private attackers it is simply not economically viable.

[AnonyMint]

There is a much easier way for the government to take over Bitcoin than 51% attack and selfish mining. Simply tax the coin and per footnote [2] all coin is tainted regardless if you used Tor or not, so in effect regulate every pool and exchange. Regulation can accomplish much of the same goals as takeover. Then later the large corporations beholden to the government buyout the pools and exchanges, and then the drift towards cartels and corporate-fascism.

Don't you think that P2P mining pool can solve the problem of regulation or big corporations takeover?

Definitely not since it is so easy for the centralized pools to have their miners compute shares for a competing P2Ppool but withhold block solutions from the P2Ppool (and submit them for themselves) thus parasiting the P2Ppools of revenue while not impacting the revenue of the centralized pool. So centralized pools which wanted to eliminate P2Ppools could do so (in theory).

...

That doesn't sound right at all.  A solution with a different payout address would no longer be valid.  Also they are spending hash power so it's not parasiting.  At most it will cause the pools luck to appear to be bad but since P2P users have altruistic reasons it isn't likely to cause them to switch.

I appreciate very much the fact checking peer review.

Perhaps you do not understand well the "Share Withholding Attack" which is called Block Withholding in Meni Rosenfeld's whitepaper in the context of the decentralized pool case. And Rosenfeld's says "Sabotage" gives no benefit to the attacker. That is not correct in the decentralized case, because there is no way to hide the transactions and block details from the attacker for a decentralized pool (because there is no centrally trusted entity to hold the secret until the block solution is found), thus the attacker can submit the block solutions as his own (never giving them to the P2Ppool) and receive all the coin rewards instead of sharing them with the P2Ppool. In the decentralized P2Ppool case, each peer must adds its payout address thus the block has being calculated is different for each peer. The attacker will give to the P2Ppool the shares that are not block solutions, thus parasiting by receiving a portion of the coin rewards gained from the hash rate of the other peers in the pool when the block solution is found by other peers, but not reciprocating because the attacker keeps the coin rewards for block solutions he finds all to himself.

Please let me know if that caused you to understand, or if you still disagree?

A very thorough explanation which layman could grasp would take me a day or days to produce. I would need graphical illustrations as well.

51%50+% attack is an overblown problem anyways.  As you stated yourself government actors have better tools to combat bitcoin  and for private attackers it is simply not economically viable.

Perhaps so for Bitcoin because the government has an easier way to attack, yet if Bitcoin's coin taint anonymity is ever fix (see upthread the interview with Adam Back) the 50+% attack comes back to prominence. And for the proposed altcoin, the 50+% attack needs to be analyzed because the government loses some (most or all?) of its ability to attack with regulation due to the strong anonymity.

[AnonyMint]

Adam Back discusses centralization due to pools at 25 min, regulation at 30min, and non-anonymity coin taint fungibility at 49 min:
http://letstalkbitcoin.com/e77-the-adam-back-interview/#.UuK0zWTTnrk

Adam admitted that Bitcoin's fungibility model is fundamentally flawed and broken!

He mentioned some potential forthcoming research on zerocoin improvements but (in agreement with what I wrote upthread) that zerocoin was not practical now and probably not any time soon.

Adam explained that the 'mutable' option of Getblocktemplate allows pool miners to configure their own blocks thus claiming this reduces some centralization risk. However, mutable transaction blocks is not compatible with the oblivious shares fix for Share Withholding (Block Withholding) attack. Thus this feature can be defeated by those who want to force centralization. Rather my altcoin proposal is strong IP anonymity on by default which allows including the oblivious shares fix.

Adam claimed blind commits could help reduce centralization risks, but I found his argument to be flawed in several ways, some of which he admitted.

My analysis thus far is that "strong IP anonymity on by default" is a holistic solution with much fewer caveats.

Adam fears a strong altcoin because he said this will destroy the principle of limited supply of coins. I think he should accept a free market result, because a fundamental theorem of Coasian economics is that resisting the free market will only make a worse outcome later. I don't share his fear of an exploding supply of crypto-coins, because there are only a few (or maybe only one) design that can really be serious and overwhelming better. The market will recognize that the supply of truly better designs is limited.

[rarebitproject]

I don't see how verifiable CPU-only mining solves the processing power advantage in mining.  Pools, farms, and botnets can still be used get an advantage.

Don't you need to enforce a "one connection per person please" policy somehow?  If there's a mathematically rigorous way to do this of course that's the way to go.

I was thinking that the network might require a user to solve a capcha to connect and timing out the connection after a few hours (probably already has been proposed).  I know, this is terrible idea but it might be effective at keeping the mining egalitarian, which I think is what you are aiming at.

[knightmb]

Bitcoin Killer Altcoin

The Bitcoin killer will thus have at least the following features.

• provably cpu-only mining with botnet resistance (current proof-of-stake can't redistribute new coins to masses & I posit it isn't secure)
• built-in anonymity (to minimize non-anonymous users)
• small, reasonable perpetual debasement
• zero transaction fees (with economic transaction spam resistance)
• economically limited pool sizes
• oblivious shares
• selfish-mining fix
• mini block-chain design
• faster 1-confirmation block chain, e.g. 1 minute instead of Bitcoin's 10 min delay, if the orphan rate can be contained

It would not even need to an Altcoin because it just a different mutation of the original Bitcoin when you get down to the core. There is already a digital currency that does all this, but you won't hear about it outside the bitcoin bubble unfortunately. 

[rarebitproject]

Also, I think you are using the terms 'socialist', 'collectivist', etc. improperly.  There are anarchic forms of these political philosophies, which many believe are the ligit ones.

What you are referring to are the centralized, statist forms.  'State capitalism' is the preferred term for the system practiced in the former soviet union. 

Crony capitalism, what many believe we are now suffering from, is very closely related to state capitalism.  It masquerades as a 'free market', but is composed of what are essentially state-sponsored monopolies.

[AnonyMint]

Bitcoin Killer Altcoin

The Bitcoin killer will thus have at least the following features.

• provably cpu-only mining with botnet resistance (current proof-of-stake can't redistribute new coins to masses & I posit it isn't secure)
• built-in anonymity (to minimize non-anonymous users)
• small, reasonable perpetual debasement
• zero transaction fees (with economic transaction spam resistance)
• economically limited pool sizes
• oblivious shares
• selfish-mining fix
• mini block-chain design
• faster 1-confirmation block chain, e.g. 1 minute instead of Bitcoin's 10 min delay, if the orphan rate can be contained

It would not even need to an Altcoin because it just a different mutation of the original Bitcoin when you get down to the core. There is already a digital currency that does all this, but you won't hear about it outside the bitcoin bubble unfortunately. 

I studied Timekoin and concluded that the order of selection of the peers is not secure. It is the same entropy issue that I mentioned upthread for PoS. If you have a better whitepaper now than when I researched it Spring 2013, I will read to see if it deals with that question of randomized ordering in a way that satisfies my concerns?

[AnonyMint]

I don't see how verifiable CPU-only mining solves the processing power advantage in mining.  Pools, farms, and botnets can still be used get an advantage.

Botnets can be muted significantly by requiring 16GB of memory. One tradeoff is that makes mining not instantly accessible to users who don't have that much memory installed.

Another strategy is to require say 4GB memory and hope this causes those whose computers are in a botnet to notice their computer is running slow and paging virtual memory to disk.

Botnets become less of a problem as the number of legitimate cpu miners increases, because the botnets are being sourced from the same supply of total PCs in the world. Eventually legitimate cpu miners will far outweigh the botnets, so can gradually relax the memory requirements to fit the average PC.

I wrote in the OP that pool sizes must be limited. I am not going to tell you now the secret way to do it.

Don't you need to enforce a "one connection per person please" policy somehow?  If there's a mathematically rigorous way to do this of course that's the way to go.

I was thinking that the network might require a user to solve a capcha to connect and timing out the connection after a few hours (probably already has been proposed).  I know, this is terrible idea but it might be effective at keeping the mining egalitarian, which I think is what you are aiming at.

Impaler and I discussed that. I decided it is untenable basically because it requires top-down control in order to generate and verify the captchas.

[AnonyMint]

Also, I think you are using the terms 'socialist', 'collectivist', etc. improperly.  There are anarchic forms of these political philosophies, which many believe are the ligit ones.

What you are referring to are the centralized, statist forms.  'State capitalism' is the preferred term for the system practiced in the former soviet union.  

Crony capitalism, what many believe we are now suffering from, is very closely related to state capitalism.  It masquerades as a 'free market', but is composed of what are essentially state-sponsored monopolies.

The variations in terminology are attempt by academics to classify different symptoms and manifestations of what I believe to be the same underlying disease. I want to go to root disease which is the power vacuum created by the fact that society demands leaders and can't find an equilibrium that is decentralized and leaderless.

I believe if you take away the ability of leaders to tax, they won't be able to give society what society demands they give them. And I believe this will be check on the power of the power vacuum. The tax will be voluntary, so they can't go exceeding the Laffer limit and voting will be done decentralized opt-out rather than "winner takes all" elections. I believe local communities can be more fair (people know each other personally) and work together on community funded projects.

I am very sleepy so the above is not my best possible prose and explanation.

Also I am running out of time to be sitting always in this thread to answer. Will eventually need to let it go.

Hopefully I've made my main points clear enough.

Here on links on the IMF plans for confiscation:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-international-monetary-fund-lays-the-groundwork-for-global-wealth-confiscation/5354553
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-12/europe-considers-wholesale-savings-confiscation-enforced-redistribution

[rarebitproject]

I don't see how verifiable CPU-only mining solves the processing power advantage in mining.  Pools, farms, and botnets can still be used get an advantage.

Botnets can be muted significantly by requiring 16GB of memory. One tradeoff is that makes mining not instantly accessible to users who don't have that much memory installed.

Another strategy is to require say 4GB memory and hope this causes those whose computers are in a botnet to notice their computer is running slow and paging virtual memory to disk.

Botnets become less of a problem as the number of legitimate cpu miners increases, because the botnets are being sourced from the same supply of total PCs in the world. Eventually legitimate cpu miners will far outweigh the botnets, so can gradually relax the memory requirements to fit the average PC.

I wrote in the OP that pool sizes must be limited. I am not going to tell you now the secret way to do it.

Don't you need to enforce a "one connection per person please" policy somehow?  If there's a mathematically rigorous way to do this of course that's the way to go.

I was thinking that the network might require a user to solve a capcha to connect and timing out the connection after a few hours (probably already has been proposed).  I know, this is terrible idea but it might be effective at keeping the mining egalitarian, which I think is what you are aiming at.

Impaler and I discussed that. I decided it is untenable.

I hope you can achieve this, it's sorely needed.


Also, I didn't know about TimeKoin.  I was investigating cryptocoins that eliminate mining and was thinking it might be a good idea simply to allow a randomly selected user to create the next block.

There is also Emunie, which works by rewarding prior work with newly minted coins, i.e, it pays wages.  It also attempts to peg the price of the coin to the US$ or basket of commodities.  It's also closed-source, so its not really an option for adoption, but I found it interesting.

[User705]

...
Perhaps so for Bitcoin because the government has an easier way to attack, yet if Bitcoin's coin taint anonymity is ever fix (see upthread the interview with Adam Back) the 50+% attack comes back to prominence. And for the proposed altcoin, the 50+% attack needs to be analyzed because the government loses some (most or all?) of its ability to attack with regulation due to the strong anonymity.

You are likely correct that if an altcoin has stronger anonymity then perhaps governmental actors may want to consider a 50%+ attack.  The solution is PoS.  I'm not sure what you mean by "current proof-of-stake can't redistribute new coins to masses & I posit it isn't secure"  The security aspect seems to be currently working ok for Nxt.  The distribution issue is purely an economics problem and since any crypto is easily copied what's the problem with distribution?

[AnonyMint]

proof of stake is the solution to your concerns.

I don't believe PoS (proof-of-stake) is secure and it is inherently top-down control not decentralized crypto-currency. See my upthread explanations linked as follows. I have deleted your post, because you quoted the entire OP and only wrote the one sentence above.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5033780#msg5033780
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5111679#msg5111679
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5114040#msg5114040
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5114084#msg5114084
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5115441#msg5115441
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5115547#msg5115547

Also, I didn't know about TimeKoin.  I was investigating cryptocoins that eliminate mining and was thinking it might be a good idea simply to allow a randomly selected user to create the next block.

The problem is where does the entropy for the randomness of sequence come from in non-PoW schemes?

In PoW, the decentralized entropy is coming from the DECENTRALIZED hashrate that is randomly selecting nonces to compute as trialed block solutions until one is found. There is no need to invoke trust nor reputation.

Unfortunately non-PoW schemes have no way to generate that randomness, e.g. the seed for the pseudorandom generator will always derive from some top-down vote or reputation factor. The ordering will always be low-entropy, top-down voting, trust, and reputation. This is inherently top-down and centralized. This will put us right back at fiat again.

Sorry.

There is also Emunie, which works by rewarding prior work with newly minted coins, i.e, it pays wages.  It also attempts to peg the price of the coin to the US$ or basket of commodities.  It's also closed-source, so its not really an option for adoption, but I found it interesting.

No matter how much these non-PoW designs obfuscate the lack of entropy in very complex design specifications, they will never solve the fundamental mathematical issue. Because there is no mechanism for the decentralized entropy to be generated.

I thought very deeply about this and it is why I abandoned my own proof-of-diskspace design.

I need some expert mathematicians to work on proving this assertion more formally.

I am very sorry to have to spill the bad news on this. It means many people are going to be angry at me. Sorry.

PoW is the genius of Satoshi's contribution. That is the one aspect we can't discard.

You are likely correct that if an altcoin has stronger anonymity then perhaps governmental actors may want to consider a 50%+ attack.  The solution is PoS.  I'm not sure what you mean by "current proof-of-stake can't redistribute new coins to masses & I posit it isn't secure"  The security aspect seems to be currently working ok for Nxt.  The distribution issue is purely an economics problem and since any crypto is easily copied what's the problem with distribution?

Security by top-down control and reputation is fiat. That isn't the type of security that I want. I want security from decentralized high entropy where no one can take control of the system.

Without competition in mining, there is no way to select who to give new coins (or demurrage in Freicoin) to that isn't inherently controlled top-down, i.e. fiat. Then you still need socialism to take from the rich and give to the poor. Because the fact of life is that wealth is power-law distributed [1] because the wealthy spend only a small fraction on their personal expenses. So eventually with usury the wealthy own 100%. Thus you need a way to redistribute wealth else society fails into a Dark Age. The socialism way of redistribution can be gamed by the wealthy who buy the government. Thus decentralized competition through PoW mining is the only way to fix the problem that has been plaguing society during the entire history of mankind since Mesopotamia.

[1] Dragulescu & Yakovenko. Exponential and power-law probability distributions of wealth and income in the United Kingdom and the United States

[rpietila]

Excellent reply. If someone disagrees, he does not understand the issue.

Is the anything that can be done, except that the value of the liberty-loving people descends to a maze of altcoins, which are constantly changing and whose conversions are trustless with p&p exchanges?

[Jungian]

How about Zerocoin? Soon to be released

http://spar.isi.jhu.edu/~mgreen/ZerocoinOakland.pdf

Someone way more versed in crypto than me will have to be judge of that

[Spitfire396]

This does not contribute to the topic, but as my first post, I want to say that I'm truly amazed of the quality of this community. In fact, I think many contributers here are more serious than the players of the world economy. It's incredible that people like rpietila puts such an effort into the bitcoin economy, maybe even more than what they really need to earn money. What you are doing here is building the foundation for the future of the whole world economy, which will hopefully be much more fair and legit than what it is today. Bitcoin might not be the right cryptocurrenciy, but it will probably stay in use for a couple of years till this community has settled upon what to do next.

Thank you all for doing what you're doing!

[BldSwtTrs]

I don't believe PoS (proof-of-stake) is secure and it is inherently top-down control not decentralized crypto-currency. See my upthread explanations linked as follows. I have deleted your post, because you quoted the entire OP and only wrote the one sentence above.

When the price increase there is a huge selling pressure on those who have the largest stakes. That can be seen with Bitcoin where there is a 17% dishoarding rate every doubling and also with NXT for instance (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg5098747#msg5098747).

Basically the more adoption, the more the stakes are decentralized, the less trust is needed. Price increase (i.e time) is a force of decentralization.

And I don't see how the fact that you cannot distribute new coins is relevant to the security issue.

[AnonyMint]

Open-minded people, feel free to read those responses here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=457105.0

Readers can find my rebuttal to you at your thread (linked above).

The one point he made that I think is worthy of responding to here, is the often heard assertion that PoW wastes electricity for nothing.

(Orders-of-magnitude more electricity will be wasted if I am correct that non-PoW systems such as PoS put us right back at fiat again.)

Even in the worst possible case if the entire value of all new coins was burned as electricity with no profit to miners thus providing no utility for redistribution to deconcentrate wealth, still we need to burn some resources to keep the block chain decentralized. Else someone needs to refute my assertion that non-PoW schemes are not sufficiently decentralized to not end up being fiat again. (and see below how much electricity fiat societies waste because government capture allows debt to run amok)

I wonder if readers have comprehended my upthread posts wherein I explained that democracy = fiat. We can't eliminate fiat if we retain voting (tallied by and to create a top-down authority) and reputation systems of control, because top-down control over money is the definition of fiat. A top-down controlled digital fiat can be technically secure, but the security is vacuous in the sense it is not protecting us from the power vacuum boogeyman that we were trying to eliminate in the first place. We might as well just continue to use Paypal, VISA, and Mastercard.

And even in that improbable worst case where miners earn no profit, we gain the utility of distributing new virgin coins anonymously. This is for example a way that people trapped behind totalitarian borders can generate coin from within. It is a way for individuals to convert fiat cash into anonymous coin, by spending the fiat for PC hardware instead of via an exchange.

If we assume miners are making some profit (i.e. not worst case), then we also gain the utility of deconcentrating wealth. If we don't deconcentrate wealth then wealth will concentrate until the velocity of money collapses (as it has by 50% since 2008 while Gini coefficients are skyrocketing globally), then welcome to potentially another feudal Dark Age.

With cpu-only mining, I envision that economies-of-scale with huge rigs located in cooled data centers will earn less ROI than carting some PCs to a stream and running microhydropower, because I estimate the by-far lowest cost energy (micro-hydropower) will outweigh the very minimal cost-scaling advantages of a tower of PCs. Thus I see the (small, reasonable, annual rate of new coins or Freicoin's demurrage) redistribution of wealth going to the smaller guys with the most initiative, who are driving new technologies for harvesting renewable energy, i.e. the antithesis of waste.

And who says that when I drive an hour to work this is waste. It isn't wasteful if being there instead of here, is more efficient in terms of the face-to-face interaction and production achieved at work.

It is far more wasteful for a human mind to sit idle. The energy that the human mind can devise ways to more efficiently harvest isn't factored in by those who think human activity is wasteful. These (idiot, broken-record, never been correct every in history) Malthusians annoy the fuck out of me. It is as if they can't fathom that the human mind is capable of producing more energy than humans consume. Duh!

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/02/13/global-warming-why-it-is-nonsense/

It is impossible to have a finite supply of anything without a top-down controller stealing the thing.

Why, explain to me the exact reason why that would be true.

I already did. Because there is nothing finite. The Second Law of Thermodynamics assures us the trend of entropy is always towards maximum. You just try to find one finite bound of anything in the universe. You won't be able to find it. Even if you count the number of a certain species, you can't guarantee with 100% certainty it will remain less than some bound (e.g. changes that you can't predict such finding another planet which can host).

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#2nd_Law_of_Thermo

Human activity can be egregiously wasteful when it is top-down funded by debt (usury), because the lenders don't care if you default, because there is a central bank to bail out the banksters and socialize the costs of the wasteful investment. We have $150 trillion of debt in this world today. That is the waste Malthusians see (e.g. people who didn't earn it, doing debt-driven strip-mall-mayonnaise conspicuous consumption and adding no productive knowledge) but they misapply that observation to all forms of human activity. What needs to be removed is not all human activity, rather the top-down power vacuum (i.e. lack of decentralization) that enables the socialism and the wealthy to over concentrate wealth with usury backed by socialism.

An economics thought experiment. Lets assume we possessed an oilfield that can pump out new oil for $5 per bbl in total costs including amortization of the capital infrastructure. Lets assume we can pump out at a higher rate than demand. What happens to the price of oil? It drops to $5 so that we stop pumping oil at a faster rate than demand.

You see aggregate (non-debt-driven) demand for energy is never wasteful, because by definition it costs less to produce energy than it is worth. That is unless you believe some (Rothschild-funded top-down generated propaganda) Malthusian nonsense such as Peak Oil or Global Warming which tries to fool you into believing that anything in this universe is finite. Please define the edge of the universe? I did.

Widespread debt can cause humans to take on uneconomic activities which are not based on knowledge and maximization of profit. That would then be wasteful, and it would be reflected in demand exhausting supply. This is why Rome collapsed.

Also didn't the Romans suffer from inflation when they diluted the silver content of their coins in 3rd century to fund the wars and bloated Roman government.

There was only a very brief hyperinflation of silver in Rome in 3rd century as you will see on the silver price chart. That chart cost Armstrong $21 million to produce.

Rather major core governments never go willingly to destroy their power. Instead they do what ever is necessary to maintain it. You did not read all the hyperinflation links I already gave you as follows.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/03/17/what-are-the-odds-the-us-defaults/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/01/28/here-we-go-again-hypreinflation/

I really do not understand why people insist that HYPERINFLATION must take place. That ASSUMES government will print to meet its unfunded obligations rather than just change laws and fail to meet promises. They are cutting entitlements already. Yes Rome debased its currency to the point that its worth was 1/50th of its former value. However, the system devolved into a TWO-TIER monetary system where they refused to accept their own currency in return for taxes. Taxes were imposed “in kind” so they just came and took stuff. In terms of gold, the tax was by weight not by coin so you have tax-collector gold bars that have survived.

Everything is NOT fair and orderly. One of the reasons there was the invention of paper money in the American Colonies is because there was a shortage of coins. Britain insisted anything Americans purchased they had to pay in silver or gold. But what the British purchased from America they paid in copper.

Wasn't this the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire?

No. It was debt that misallocated all the resources, just as we have now with $150 trillion in global debt, i.e. $25,000 per human including babies, elderly and billions of poor earning less than $10 per day (how can they pay their $25,000 share!).

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4946&cpage=1#comment-402900

@Winter:
You attempt to remove blame from the effects of top-down governance. Agriculture in Western Europe declined for numerous reasons all of which can be attributed to mismanagement due to top-down control and the funding of such misallocation. Socialized debt is a future tax. The agricultural sector was suffering under increasing taxes after the hyperinflation of the 3rd century had adversely impacted funding for the military while there were increasing military threats to the east. Pottery records indicate production increased through the 4th, as the rural sector was squeezed for every drop by Rome. As with all debt funding, growth was too rapid, and irrigation was polluted by clearing for too many new settlements. The resultant malnutrition, declining production, localized warlords, and thus disease coincided with the collapse of Western Europe due to the bankruptcy of its top-down militarized, servitude model.

We will likely find the same top-down cause applies to of all Dark Ages– even the famines in Africa.

[AnonyMint]

How about Zerocoin? Soon to be released

http://spar.isi.jhu.edu/~mgreen/ZerocoinOakland.pdf

Someone way more versed in crypto than me will have to be judge of that

I have already explained three times upthread that Zerocoin can not work and unlikely to work efficiently and with sufficient confidence any time soon.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5097342#msg5097342
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5128980#msg5128980

It is not soon to be released. If someone releases in an altcoin as it currently stands, it will have egregious efficiency and confidence issues. Nobody has yet figured out how to make it efficient enough to work.

It doesn't appear to be a trivial problem that will be solved any time soon. And even if so, the crypto is too new and exotic to trust for at least another 5 - 10 years of cryptographers trying to crack it.

Whereas, the always-on-by-default anonymity that I have envisioned is based on a well known information theoretic security model (a hint about my secrets).

Edit: Adam Beck mentioned some related new work coming soon, and I believe it might this yet to be published Zerocash. In that linked list of prior publications appear to be work related to CoinWitness.