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

[AnonyMint]

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.

I really appreciate challenges of this quality. Thank you.

A fundamental tenet of investing is buy low, sell high. So if we view these coins as investments, we would expect the larger holders to cash out on price rises, and buy back in on dips. And generally to lighten holdings as price trends higher. Because the wealthy could get trapped in an illiquid investment if they end up owning most of it at a very high valuation.

Also if we view these coins as cash, we would expect the wealthy would not hold most of their wealth in cash.

However, if we view a coin as the money system of society and we view control over the coin akin to control of a central bank, then we can expect the wealthy to obtain the majority of the shares of the central bank. As far as I know, this is in fact what they did in the Bank of England and the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

If there was some profit to be made from processing blocks in PoS, then there would be a profit motive for obtaining more shares in the currency. Otherwise, the interest in monopolizing PoS shares will only come when the currency is a dominant political and economic factor in the real economy. At that point, the wealthy buy up say 50 - 80% of the shares, then the remaining shares become the cash in the economy and the wealthy hold their shares as if they are shares in a central bank. The point is that nobody will sell off the currency at this point because it is the dominant one. At that point, you are right back to a fiat system. Buying up that 50 - 80% share would likely drive the price higher, thus further cementing the dominant role in the economy and the lust to hold it. If they do this as a transfer of dollars to the coin, i.e. hyperinflation of the dollar, then there is no dollar to return to any more.

I rather think they will long before that take control of these PoS systems with the much easier (less drastic) route of tax and regulation. Since I am looking at the design of how anonymity is achieved by integration with PoW mining (and that is a hint about my secrets), I am doubting that PoS anonymity can be made as strong. Thus PoS will be more susceptible to this form of government takeover.

Also I think PoS will be insecure at all times, because the ordering of who is selected to process a block can be gamed, e.g. who selects the initial seed of the pseudo-random generator and who selects the ids of the shares.

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

How do you dilute the shares of the wealthy who will otherwise own all wealth due to guaranteed ROI of usury backstopped by their control of government and that they don't spend their wealth on consumption?

Additionally I have explained above how I think PoS devolves to a fiat which I explained is a vacuous form of security if the threat is the boogeyman of fiat (thus Paypal, VISA, and Mastercard), thus only PoW is decentralized. And I also explained upthread why I think funding PoW from transaction fees destroys its decentralization. Thus only perpetual new coins will sustain PoW.

But the really big marketing problem with PoS is how to distribute the new currency in the startup phase to maximize interest and adoption? Adam Beck discussed that towards the end of this interview:

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

By distributing new coins via mining, miners are motivated because they can compete to gain a more competitive ranking in the coin ownership. If the PoW is cpu-only as Bitcoin was when half of its coins were mined, can potentially get the entire population excited about mining.

How can PoS attain similar marketing and adoption?

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[AnonyMint]

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!

Thank you for the appreciation.

It appears to me that Bitcoin will be around and growing for a long time, assuming that all the exchanges and miners can be brought into control of the government, which appears to be what is occurring now. After these controls are in place, then it can be allowed to go out to the masses. I believe this pause in the price rise coincides with the time needed to make this transformation.

For as long as Bitcoin is really just a dollar (e.g. most merchants use something like Bitpay instead of receiving Bitcoins they receive fiat), then control over the exchanges (including localbitcoins which I noticed is ramping up KYC compliance) is sufficient control to tax everyone.

How else would you cash out anonymously?

All the anonymity I could add to a coin wouldn't stop the government from knowing if you still cashed out via an exchange which is required to report to the government your identity. There would still be other uses of the anonymity, such as government and others wouldn't necessarily know all the details of your coin spends that were to entities that don't know your identity.

Thus we need to aim for a coin that becomes the unit-of-account for its sub-economy, i.e. I am suggesting the Knowledge Age may produce a bifurcated economy-- the physical and the virtual commerce. If we keep our coins and used them to spend in the virtual economy instead of exchanging them for dollars, then we would create this bifurcated economy with a unit-of-account which is not the dollar.

The coming confiscations in the physical economy will motivate the virtual economy to break away, since it is a much more productive sector and doesn't want to be retarded by the dying industrial age (e.g. massive manufacturing overcapacity in China).

I don't think Bitcoin is best suited to match the needs of this virtual economy. Bitcoin lacks ZERO transaction fees. Why should we pay for transactions in this new virtual economy when we don't need to and it is actually detrimental as I explained upthread. Bitcoin lacks always-on-by-default strong anonymity. Bitcoin doesn't keep pools small to keep transaction processing highly decentralized. Etc...........

[cAPSLOCK]

By distributing new coins via mining, miners are motivated because they can compete to gain a more competitive ranking in the coin ownership. If the PoW is cpu-only as Bitcoin was when half of its coins were mined, can potentially get the entire population excited about mining.

How can PoS attain similar marketing and adoption?

ASIC resistant coins like Protoshares for example just end up with people running server farms of hyperthreaded multicore CPUs.  In the end you end up with the same problem though perhaps not as stark.

[AnonyMint]

By distributing new coins via mining, miners are motivated because they can compete to gain a more competitive ranking in the coin ownership. If the PoW is cpu-only as Bitcoin was when half of its coins were mined, can potentially get the entire population excited about mining.

How can PoS attain similar marketing and adoption?

ASIC resistant coins like Protoshares for example just end up with people running server farms of hyperthreaded multicore CPUs.  In the end you end up with the same problem though perhaps not as stark.

I don't agree that Protoshares is ASIC resistant. It is compute bound and thus it can be implemented to run more efficiently on an ASIC. The cpu-only PoW can not be compute bound (and that is yet another hint of my secrets).

But your point isn't that Protoshares will remain cpu-only, rather you are claiming that while a coin can be mined with a cpu (ASICs not yet developed for it), then server farms will dominate the mining.

I have a solid logic as to why I don't agree.

For the moment the masses are not interested in mining Protoshares because a) it isn't popular enough yet, b) the mining client isn't something Grandma could download and operate, c) Protoshares development was funded by the Chinese so they were ready from way before release to mine it with server farms.

Once the masses are mining they will mine at a loss, because their electricity costs will exceed the value of the coin. They won't care, because the coin value is rising, they won't notice the change to their electric bill, and the virgin anonymous coin is intrinsically worth more (even if sells for same price) than a coin obtained via an exchange. I think it has been established that the cost of mining determines the price of the coin, so this will push the price of the coin higher and higher much faster than Bitcoin (because the hardware is already owned, i.e. the value of all the PCs in the world gets moved into the marketcap of the cpu-only altcoin).

Thus server farms won't be profitable. Perhaps only micro-hydropower stream driven mining will be profitable. This was really a major epiphany when it hit me, I said "A ha!, this is it!".

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.

[moolaching]

Name new altcoin Digitoin, Masscoin, PCcoin, Silicoin, Ubiqoin, or Unigit ...?

Requesting your vote.

[AnonyMint]

Broken fungibility could destroy Bitcoin, as Bitcoin would not longer have just one price.

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!

... and the virgin anonymous coin is intrinsically worth more (even if sells for same price) than a coin obtained via an exchange.

mtgox 1btc = $360
coinbase 1btc = $650

Spread is now ~45%. Those assholes at mtgox have a license to print money: buy their own cheap btc from panic sellers, don't allow anyone else to transfer out but themselves, sell on another exchange like coinbase for an instant 100% gain, rinse, and repeat. Maybe that's the plan all along, criminals...

[coinmuse]

So, I am left wondering why this requirement is listed for the killer alt coin in the OP;

"provably cpu-only mining"

It seems to me that now that SHA 256 ASICs exit that are much less electricity hungry, that they would get pointed to the alt coin as BTC becomes too hard to mine.  That hardware can ONLY mine coins.  As BTC gets too difficult, owners of older ASICs will simply point them at other SHA 256 coins.  That is my theory.  Am I missing something?

[AnonyMint]

So, I am left wondering why this requirement is listed for the killer alt coin in the OP;

"provably cpu-only mining"

It seems to me that now that SHA 256 ASICs exit that are much less electricity hungry, that they would get pointed to the alt coin as BTC becomes too hard to mine.  That hardware can ONLY mine coins.  As BTC gets too difficult, owners of older ASICs will simply point them at other SHA 256 coins.  That is my theory.  Am I missing something?

Are you thinking that a SHA 256 ASIC could be used to mine the proposed altcoin? The "provably cpu-only mining" means never could any ASIC nor GPU profitably mine the proposed altcoin.

[AnonyMint]

From private message (I do speak behind the scenes with those who disagree with me):

And besides all of that, I have long ago pointed out that Bitcoin is modular by nature.  If any of the alt coins come up with a superior system, Bitcoin could simply adapt to that new feature if there is a general consensus that said feature was truly superior.  Bitcoin isn't static, in short, and your analysis of problems all assume that there isn't an intellectual response by the userbase.  Perhaps it comes down to faith, but if you don't have any, why are you trying so hard?  Peter Schiff has no faith in Bitcoin, but nor is he here.

In the Adam Beck interview he says that drastic changes can not be made to Bitcoin until they've been heavily tested by an altcoin, because the risk to Bitcoin of an error is far too great. But by the time they've been heavily tested in altcoin, it is very possible for that altcoin to have established itself.

And there is one thing that Bitcoin will never implement, and that is always-on-by-default strong IP address anonymity. The vested interests (pools, exchanges, payment providers such as Bitpay) would never allow this, because they would fear government retribution. There is already too much inertia in Bitcoin being non-anonymous and thus amenable to the government KYC and AML laws.

The killer feature is cpu-only PoW, and no one knows how to do it.

[AnonyMint]

Bitcoin Killer Altcoin

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

• faster 1-confirmation block chain, e.g. 1 minute instead of Bitcoin's 10 min delay, if the orphan rate can be contained

A lot of altcoins can confirm in 30 seconds.

So why is bitcoins confirmation at 10 minutes?

Because that is the way it was created.  It is essentially an arbitrary attempt to balance fast confirmations against the costs of orphaned blocks due to network latency.

Is a 10 minute confirmation a good thing or bad?

Yes.

Is it possible for bitcoins confirmation time to be sped up?

Technically possible?  Yes.

Practicially possible?  No.

Anything below 1 min for block confirmation will have like 10 to 30% stall rate.

The reason Bitcoin can't reliably lower the block confirmation time is because the network latency between full nodes can not be known to be below some value. As well the validation delay can be significant for some full clients, because we don't know the hardware they are running.

Here is the discussion of and the equation for the orphan (i.e. transactions stall) rate.

This problem is theoretically solved in the holistic altcoin design I have proposed in the OP because fast network propagation and validation is assured by the design of the new hash, mini block chain account balances, mining only in pools to achieve the required anonymity while pools are prevented from being too large. I chose 1 minute to be conservative. I think this design could work reliably at 30 seconds or less. It could be lowered after extensive testing to confirm my calculations.

Also it may not be necessary to resend all transactions or separate the send from PoW header.

Edit to insert a followup:

Now, there isn't a snowballs chance in hell of all that happening on the blockchain in realtime.

That is not necessarily true. If the network propagation delay and validation time can be guaranteed to be fast enough, the block time can be lowered to what ever value the values allow for.

The issue is that full nodes would have to commit to having certain levels of connectivity and hardware. Essentially peers would need to talk directly (fully connected mesh network topology) to each other and so peers with low connectivity would suffer, but not the other peers. Thus the number of full nodes would need to be limited.

My insight is that the fully connected mesh connections between pools can be very high quality, while the connections between pools and their miners can be of varying quality. We should not look at pools as bad, rather we only need to limit their sizes so they don't overly centralized the network. Balance.

Payment processors also have to commit to certain high standards of connectivity and hardware.

[BldSwtTrs]

I really appreciate challenges of this quality. Thank you.

A fundamental tenet of investing is buy low, sell high. So if we view these coins as investments, we would expect the larger holders to cash out on price rises, and buy back in on dips. And generally to lighten holdings as price trends higher. Because the wealthy could get trapped in an illiquid investment if they end up owning most of it at a very high valuation.

Also if we view these coins as cash, we would expect the wealthy would not hold most of their wealth in cash.

However, if we view a coin as the money system of society and we view control over the coin akin to control of a central bank, then we can expect the wealthy to obtain the majority of the shares of the central bank. As far as I know, this is in fact what they did in the Bank of England and the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The important thing here is the stakeholders perception. Empirical observation shows that stakeholders are viewing their stake as an investment, not as a stake of the future money system.

During the ascension of the coin, they don't make theirs decisions as if they had a stake in the money system of the society, they make their decision as if they had a normal investment. So they sell when the price increase. And by the time a cryptocoin will become the money system of society, the bigger stakeholders will be vastly diluted by their own profit taking and risk managing.

Central banking was not instaured because the wealthy has most of the money supply but because of political coercition. The wealthy were not wealthy enough to control the money supply by themselves, so they use coercition to obtain that control.

If there was some profit to be made from processing blocks in PoS, then there would be a profit motive for obtaining more shares in the currency. Otherwise, the interest in monopolizing PoS shares will only come when the currency is a dominant political and economic factor in the real economy. At that point, the wealthy buy up say 50 - 80% of the shares, then the remaining shares become the cash in the economy and the wealthy hold their shares as if they are shares in a central bank. The point is that nobody will sell off the currency at this point because it is the dominant one. At that point, you are right back to a fiat system. Buying up that 50 - 80% share would likely drive the price higher, thus further cementing the dominant role in the economy and the lust to hold it. If they do this as a transfer of dollars to the coin, i.e. hyperinflation of the dollar, then there is no dollar to return to any more.

Neither NXT or Bitshare will be profitable for miners, see this thread for NXT https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=458036.0. The ROI for NXT "mining" will be something like 0,05% per year, no incentive to hoard here. I don't understand the technical detail but I know Bitshares will implement also something that will make mining unprofitable.

By the time the currency become the dominant one, the wealthy will not be able to acquire a significant stake in it. Again, even the wealthiest aren't wealthy enough to have a significant stake in fiat.

How can PoS attain similar marketing and adoption?

For instance the distribution of PTS is done by POW mining, and PTS give a stake in Bitshares, which is PoS. So with Bitshares you have a PoS coin where coin distribution is done by mining. The best of both world.

Also when Bitcoin was mineable with a CPU, only a tiny fraction of the population was aware of what's going on. I think it's quite possible that today more people have the possibility to have a stake in a PoS coin via an IPO, than people had the possibility to mine Bitcoin in 2009/2010.
Recently roughly 2m$ were burnt for the distribution of XCP. I think a lot less than 2 millions $ were spend in BTC mining materiel in 2009. Furthermore we can except that several dozen m$ will be dedicated for the acquistion of Etherium coins.

Today if more ressources are devoted to coins acquisition than before, it's because there is more awareness among the crowd. More ressources devoted to coin acquisition mean today's coin (included PoS coins) start with a level of marketing/adoption which is way higher that the first PoW coins had.

[AnonyMint]

A fundamental tenet of investing is buy low, sell high. So if we view these coins as investments, we would expect the larger holders to cash out on price rises, and buy back in on dips. And generally to lighten holdings as price trends higher. Because the wealthy could get trapped in an illiquid investment if they end up owning most of it at a very high valuation.

Also if we view these coins as cash, we would expect the wealthy would not hold most of their wealth in cash.

However, if we view a coin as the money system of society and we view control over the coin akin to control of a central bank, then we can expect the wealthy to obtain the majority of the shares of the central bank. As far as I know, this is in fact what they did in the Bank of England and the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The important thing here is the stakeholders perception. Empirical observation shows that stakeholders are viewing their stake as an investment, not as a stake of the future money system.

During the ascension of the coin, they don't make theirs decisions as if they had a stake in the money system of the society, they make their decision as if they had a normal investment. So they sell when the price increase. And by the time a cryptocoin will become the money system of society, the bigger stakeholders will be vastly diluted by their own profit taking and risk managing.

Central banking was not instaured because the wealthy has most of the money supply but because of political coercition. The wealthy were not wealthy enough to control the money supply by themselves, so they use coercition to obtain that control.

They control all the fiat and credit of the world via the Central Banks. I surmise they can surely buy up a PoS system, transferring their control from existing fiat to this new fiat PoS system.

If there was some profit to be made from processing blocks in PoS, then there would be a profit motive for obtaining more shares in the currency. Otherwise, the interest in monopolizing PoS shares will only come when the currency is a dominant political and economic factor in the real economy. At that point, the wealthy buy up say 50 - 80% of the shares, then the remaining shares become the cash in the economy and the wealthy hold their shares as if they are shares in a central bank. The point is that nobody will sell off the currency at this point because it is the dominant one. At that point, you are right back to a fiat system. Buying up that 50 - 80% share would likely drive the price higher, thus further cementing the dominant role in the economy and the lust to hold it. If they do this as a transfer of dollars to the coin, i.e. hyperinflation of the dollar, then there is no dollar to return to any more.

Neither NXT or Bitshare will be profitable for miners, see this thread for NXT https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=458036.0. The ROI for NXT "mining" will be something like 0,05% per year, no incentive to hoard here. I don't understand the technical detail but I know Bitshares will implement also something that will make mining unprofitable.

Tragedy of the Commons. These systems won't be secure. Their designers are Communists disguised in Austrian economics facade, i.e. wolves in sheepskin.

How can PoS attain similar marketing and adoption?

For instance the distribution of PTS is done by POW mining, and PTS give a stake in Bitshares, which is PoS. So with Bitshares you have a PoS coin where coin distribution is done by mining. The best of both world.

Sorry this is not the "best of both worlds". This is a Frankenstein combo. The perpetual security of mining and ongoing (small, reasonable, annual percentage akin to gold's debasement rate) redistribution of wealth from the upper 1% to those who apply their ingenuity, risk, and effort to provide the security is replaced with a Tragedy of the Commons which is precisely the power vacuum chaos that will demand a leader step in and take control, i.e. fiat.

Bitcoin has similar Tragedy of the Commons problem, because new coin rewards decline and are replaced by transaction fees. I have explained this exhaustively already, so I won't repeat the argument.

Also when Bitcoin was mineable with a CPU, only a tiny fraction of the population was aware of what's going on. I think it's quite possible that today more people have the possibility to have a stake in a PoS coin via an IPO, than people had the possibility to mine Bitcoin in 2009/2010.

A one time event, like a land rush for money. Brilliant.    

They have no clue about the Austrian theory of how money comes to be adopted, nor any sane logic about how to make a coin that sustains adoption and security growth ongoing.

Recently roughly 2m$ were burnt for the distribution of XCP. I think a lot less than 2 millions $ were spend in BTC mining materiel in 2009.

Scams abound now.

Furthermore we can except that several dozen m$ will be dedicated for the acquistion of Etherium coins.

I thought it was a PoW coin. Are they doing a land rush sale of a pre-mine? Or do you mean invested in mining it at launch?

Today if more ressources are devoted to coins acquisition than before, it's because there is more awareness among the crowd. More ressources devoted to coin acquisition mean today's coin (included PoS coins) start with a level of marketing/adoption which is way higher that the first PoW coins had.

Agreed. But this should be done through competitive mining, as this is a decentralized security and money model ongoing.

[MoonShadow]

From private message (I do speak behind the scenes with those who disagree with me):

And besides all of that, I have long ago pointed out that Bitcoin is modular by nature.  If any of the alt coins come up with a superior system, Bitcoin could simply adapt to that new feature if there is a general consensus that said feature was truly superior.  Bitcoin isn't static, in short, and your analysis of problems all assume that there isn't an intellectual response by the userbase.  Perhaps it comes down to faith, but if you don't have any, why are you trying so hard?  Peter Schiff has no faith in Bitcoin, but nor is he here.

In the Adam Beck interview he says that drastic changes can not be made to Bitcoin until they've been heavily tested by an altcoin, because the risk to Bitcoin of an error is far too great. But by the time they've been heavily tested in altcoin, it is very possible for that altcoin to have established itself.

Addressing only this point.  This is Adam Beck's perspective on this only.  He is likely correct, but if the alt-coin killer feature is obvious after implementation, Bitcoiners will quickly choose to either migrate to the new coin (selling their stake in Bitcoin, and therefore losing interest in the outcome) or advocate for the change to be completed quickly.  Or both at the same time.  In the long run, it doesn't really matter which is true, or whether or not Bitcoin remains the cryptocurrency of choice.

[AnonyMint]

I wrote upthread that I am not that fearful of hyperinflation due to a proliferation of altcoins. To expound a bit, I doubt very much the market will choose to give equal weighting to numerous xerox coins. I think the market will focus in on one winner, or possibly two for example if one coin needs to be 90+% anonymous and the other needs to be compliant with government oversight. Perhaps someone can think of another market segmentation for why we might need 3 dominant coins. And the market may invest in a few best alternatives at lower market caps to keep the leading coin(s) honest, e.g. analogous to the bimetallic gold and silver standard. This should stabilize and not spiral off into hyperinflation, due the value of network effects, the market cost of changing brands (a.k.a. good will ... see how much difficulty moolaching has in finding a good alternative brand name), and the fact that the variables for a better design are limited (eventually we will stabilize and not be able to find a much better design any more). I agree with Adam Beck that we should try to find the minimum set of features that need to be in the coin protocol, so that extra features can be built orthogonally on top of that base protocol.

Also currency is not a store-of-value. It never has been due to Gresham's Law. The purpose of the dominant currency is unit-of-exchange. If you make the currency too finite (Impaler uses the word too "hard"), the bad (more debased) currency drives it out-of-circulation. Just look what happened to silver coinage in the 1960s all over the world it disappeared into private hoards. Note Gresham's Law requires the force of legal tender, i.e. the bad currency must be the one sanctioned by society.

So if we really want to build a dominant currency, we need perpetual debasement (or Impaler's Freicoin demurrage). And Bitcoin is never going to change to that because there are people who don't understand what I have written in this thread about perpetual debasement, and they will not change their (I assert is incorrect) logic any time soon. To change that in Bitcoin would fork the coin.

Edit: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=483989.msg5346113#msg5346113

I wonder what the future holds since there's always going to be new altcoins. Will any one coin really benefit? If one becomes too popular, then a new one is launched to try and recreate it and make some money.

The market will not take seriously copycat altcoins, because the vast amount of development resources will be in the serious coin that was first and done right.

Markets demand a winner, because otherwise there is no value and the entire crypto-currency concept dies.

Although the barrier to entry for a new innovative altcoin is not insurmountable as I explained, the network efforts are such that an exact copycat is not a replacement good.

Thus most (but not all) of these altcoins are just pump-n-dump schemes and (possibly ephemeral) marketing manias analogous to Beanie Babies.

[CoinCube]

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.

I have likewise been very impressed by the community.

I first came across some of the concepts discussed up-thread in a few months back.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342007.0

Since then the OP has managed to convert about a third of the audience to his point of view.
That is impressive considering that the initial reception was so poor and he was battling against entrenched views.

Regardless of the OP plans for his own alt coin. I think a critical mass has been obtained and market has is now primed. I know that I personally will be taking a very close look all upcoming alt-coins with strong built in anonymity.

[AnonyMint]

Regardless of the OP plans for his own alt coin. I think a critical mass has been obtained and market has is now primed. I know that I personally will be taking a very close look all upcoming alt-coins with strong built in anonymity.

I too am interested if any group can implement some or all of the proposed ideas. Also I am interested to study some of the orthogonal ideas (not mining security design nor anonymity) coming out of the Etherium project.

I too appreciate the quality of the community and especially that you did not get put-off by our discussion about AGW in the other thread to emotionally change your views on this issue.

Note cpu-only may be as or more important than stronger anonymity, as well the economic implications of the design to fund mining security not from transaction fees.

I am very appreciative of the rationality of the debate thus far in this thread. For example, rationally there was no falsifiable proof made on PoW vs. PoS, rather readers will have to form their own opinion from the debate. For non-falsifiable issues, the market must decide.

[CoinCube]

I appreciate it and especially that you did not get put-off by our discussion about AGW in the other thread to change your views on this issue.

Completely separate issues it would not be rational to conflate them.
In fact one could even argue that to do so would have made me a myopic dimwit and insane.

 

[AnonyMint]

thanks

(I am so tired of hearing from self-important, do-gooders who want to stomp on the free market. I was in California too long I guess. Now they want to tax breathing, i.e. carbon, so they can protect their perfect suburban habitat of manicured lawns. Spain even taxes sunlight. Efficiency and conservation? It is always the other guy. I program from a Nipa Hut and there is no lawn nor sidewalk rather chaotic natural weeds and mud. So please don't tell me about conservation. Do it. Instead they always want to spend other people's money. Guard your wallet! That is what this thread is about accomplishing.)

P.S. I further refuted the myopia that says electricity consumption with PoW is a problem.

[BldSwtTrs]

They control all the fiat and credit of the world via the Central Banks. I surmise they can surely buy up a PoS system, transferring their control from existing fiat to this new fiat PoS system.

I think by the time a PoS system become big, it will be too expansive to buy it, even for the wealthiest. Therefore they will need to buy it somewhere in its ascent, and that will deter the market to use it and another PoS system will win the adoption race.

And all of that is assuming there will be only one dominant currency. Which will probably not be the case. A lot of the socialist thinking come from the false premise that free market lead to monopolies. In the same manner that there is not one corporation which address each human wish, there will be no unique money. And if the wealthiest will not be able to even capture one succesful PoS system, a fortiori they won't be able to capture all the succesful PoS system.

Tragedy of the Commons. These systems won't be secure. Their designers are Communists disguised in Austrian economics facade, i.e. wolves in sheepskin.

I need to do some research to see what incentives are planned fo "miners". I would be surprised if there were not.

A one time event, like a land rush for money. Brilliant.    

It was not a rush for money, it was a rush for a highly speculative investment.

There is no money here and now in the cryptos landscape, only speculative investments. In your reasoning you can't treat something that is only a speculative investment as if it was already the money system of the society. It's a logical fallacy.

They have no clue about the Austrian theory of how money comes to be adopted, nor any sane logic about how to make a coin that sustains adoption and security growth ongoing.

A lot of Austrian economists have no clue either. How many of them disdain Bitcoin because it doesn't fit Mises' regression theorem?

See Hayek for the competition in money. He did understand Austrian economics and his views on money are more relevant than the all of the Austrian crowd together imo.

Scams abound now.

XCP is the antithesis of a scam. It was distributed by proof of burn, even the developpers had to burn their BTC to get some. It's arguably the fairest coin distribution since Bitcoin.

I thought it was a PoW coin. Are they doing a land rush sale of a pre-mine? Or do you mean invested in mining it at launch?

They are doing both. They will issue X ether via an IPO and then 0.4*X ether will be distributed each year via PoW.

[AnonyMint]

On this issue of having accounts to pay with instead of use BTC base money (i.e. cash), I already pointed out upthread that if I must have a zillion separate accounts, it is going to drive me crazy. I already have too many accounts on the internet to keep track of.

Instead a dominant set of providers would take over and we are right back to VISA, Mastercard, and Paypal again. Nothing gained. Why did we waste our fucking time inventing Bitcoin then.

So I entirely disagree that we need accounts for most things. We can build services that operate on the block chain without needing store funds in an account for those services. We can pay as we go, utilizing the block chain. This is the future.

We need less overhead in our lives, not more. Accounts are proliferated overhead and/or centralizing. We need decentralized freedom.

Also if accounts are holding our balances then they will naturally end up leveraged, i.e. fractional reserves. This is a repeating phenomenon throughout the history of man. We needed accounts when base money was gold, but we don't need them now. Our technology has improved. Money is no longer physical.

To backup our keys without giving a masterkey to a coinbase, we need to have physical copies of backups. Use a Print key or copy to removable memory card. Your software should tell you when to print/copy and store in your physical safe. If you find it more convenient and safe to have coinbase hold your masterkey, then you are giving up your anonymity because they will need to identify you if ever you lose your password.

In practice using 5 minutes or even 1 minute doesn't help as much as you'd expect, because it's still too long to wait in retail. It has a downside in that it leads to more resources wasted on discarded blocks.

As I explained upthread, a design is possible to bring each block chain confirmation down to 30 seconds or less and avoid the orphaned blocks.

Please don't be disingenuous to imply it is not possible. If you are merely stating that no altcoin has yet done such a holistic design, then I agree with you.