Bitcoin adoption slowing; Coinbase + Bitpay is enough to make Bitcoin a fiat

[thaaanos]

A public ledger of transactions if augmented with more info about the transaction will certainly help to have a clearer understanding of where the economy goes. Instant statistics! probably an economist's wet dream.
The transparency of the blockchain will make it more difficult for Politicians to distort the reality. I think it is a great Idea (public ledger) on it's own.
I wouldn't easily discard that notion in searching for anonymity.

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[AnonyMint]

I am happy to inform that Eric says I am not banned as long as I can remain respectful and has allowed my input to be considered. I posted another summary of my idea.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479608

Thanks. A refutation would be more helpful.

The point is about the relative value of the autonomous knowledge (capital) economy versus the vertically integrated (monetary) capital economy. As the autonomy of creation increases in both granularity and speed-to-market (Linus principle of "publish often"), the number of nodes of sharing increases and the value of that knowledge sharing network increases by the nodes squared. We have chart confirmation of that law with the history of the Bitcoin price.

Specific example would be sharing a 3D printing design, and others autonomously iterating on that design. The design is open source. Music compositions, medical art, etc.

Thus the vertically integrated economy falls in relative value. How can you reason that we will pay the same or significantly for something produced by the economy that will be worth relatively much less than it had been?

With mass production, the value-added of the knowledge input was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of produced copies. Thus the knowledge networking value was insignificant. Whereas, when knowledge can directly create with near real-time publishing, the knowledge networking value increases by the square and outstrips any startup costs. Moreover, incremental edits amortize the startup costs over many knowledge networking connections, and the value is the square of the connections.

The key is that open source knowledge is always changing and the knowledge workers benefit from autonomously iterating each other's designs, because the value of the network increases by the square of the participants who share. Metcalfe's (or Reed's) Law is at the heart of why sharing creates more value for all participants. That is not saying all nodes connect with all other nodes, rather the value scales proportional to the square.

[AnonyMint]

thaaanos, I appreciated the discussion with you upthread. Please for time being limit your posts to 1 per day, because you are starting to repeat yourself, and remember you agreed to let me go program. If you have a significantly new argument, feel free to post it.

A public ledger of transactions if augmented with more info about the transaction will certainly help to have a clearer understanding of where the economy goes. Instant statistics! probably an economist's wet dream.

We don't need economists. The free market can anneal to optimized fitness when we don't obstruct it. There is nothing to be gained.

And we lose our privacy asymmetrically to the fatcats who will always be immune from any totalitarianism.

The transparency of the blockchain will make it more difficult for Politicians to distort the reality.

I don't agree, but it is irrelevant because Bitcoin will end up offchain fractional reserves.

There is no way we are going to force a public ledger on the fatcats.

The best we can shoot for is an anonymous ledger so we can opt-out of collective madness and keep our individual privacy.

If you want that kind of 666 tracking system, you go ahead and signup for government tracking. Some of us here don't want that, and we don't want to hear about it. You can make another thread for people who want the NWOcoin.

I think it is a great Idea (public ledger) on it's own.
I wouldn't easily discard that notion in searching for anonymity.

Sorry that idea is going no where here in this thread. The focus of this thread has clearly morphed and is now about the anonymous, automonous, privacy, individual rights coin. There are a lot of us who want that.

As far as I can surmise based on the votes and comments upthread and in my private message inbox, those who vote "yes" have listened to you and we didn't agree.

[AnonyMint]

blablahblah, 3D printers can print themselves. Grow up man.

It's called debate and I'm not letting this point slide. Please show evidence of 3d printers that can fully self-replicate, including printing their own embedded electronics, or your claim is busted.

I've seen the cool viral advertising where they print replacement plastics which are then assembled with manual labour, but AFAIK the only fully self-replicating things in existence, which are integrated enough to call machines, are biological. Or virtual.

Come on. You're talking about "material production at the asymptote" and stuff. This one should be a breeze.

Graphene may change that, and nano-printing, but it's not that what bothers me...
If you take a look at current printing market status you will see that the printer costs as much as a ink cartridge replacement.

Everything will be solved once you have even 1% of humanity doing autonomous knowledge production full-time.

The first computer was so clunky that they had to test 1000s of vacuum tubes if one malfunctioned:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC



We are at the cusp.

And you are going to swept away.

[thaaanos]

Regarding Nerwork Value
How that Value translates into Price? My copy of linux which is very valuable to me, I got for free. I pay more for useless shit like bumber stickers, and flowers.
I put my trust in the Open Source, but not my money. Why I behave this way? (actual question).
Is there some inhibition in me to exchange physical tokens for virtual things? Is virtual micropayment going to ease this inhibition?
Will I put more money to creators if I have a 3d printer to create physical things?
The shift to a new paradigm has a lot of friction inside me.

Yes I know Last post truly.  Feel free to delete my noise.

[AnonyMint]

I am interested to read your posts and reply. Feel free to post again next day as you collect your thoughts for a while.

You would gladly pay a micro payment for downloading Linux if you knew you were supporting the developers, because you want to see it continue to improve and bug fixes to be made.

There are several business models which can fund open source. The business models that work depend on the granularity of creation. Linux is a huge (in man-years) monolithic creation, so it is limited to mostly corporate sponsorship funding models, e.g. RedHat. I expect this will be the crux of Eric Raymond's argument if he refutes me.

Some creations don't need to be modularized, e.g. composing a song isn't a huge initial investment. For the more complex creations, it is about getting our technologies of creation modularized. I was working on a computer language to do that by employing higher-order semantics from higher-kinded typing with pure functional programming, before I got sidetracked on Bitcoin. I will get back to that later.

So the idea is in order for you to make creations, you need to contribute micro payments to the modules you use in your mashup creation. An honor system will work because in the knowledge economy, reputation becomes so important. Who wants to use your modules if you are destroying the value of the economy or if you modules are usually of poor quality.

Your inhibition should decline when the modulars get smaller and more closely correlated to specific need you have to complete a project of yours. You will then see the creative value ("genius") in the person who created it and feel a symbiotic vibe, almost a personal connection with them.

As the modules get smaller, the politics decreases, because you can always find a module and culture to your liking.

Degrees-of-freedom is so elemental to attaining peace and prosperity.

This should be fun, it should be social, it should be friendly.

It is about freedom-of-choice, diversity, fitness.

[AnonyMint]

Another reason that transaction fees don't work.

I finally had a spare moment to contemplate the variables.

A key factor is the block size. If the block size is unlimited (and bandwidth is an insignificant cost), then unless miners have a monopoly they will accept transactions with fees as low as don't constitute a DoS attack, in order to maximize revenue.

In other words, they would have no pricing power at all (a Tragedy of the Commons) and the system would devolve into a partial-monopoly in order to gain pricing power.

A partial-monopoly in this case is enough % of the network hashrate to delay transactions (by that % of blocks) which do not include a sufficient fee.

If we limit block size, then the system doesn't scale.

If we let the Bitcoin foundation decide when to increase block size, then they control the economic market function, i.e. we've centralized Bitcoin.

Let us assume unlimited block size and partial-monopolies. Thus the transaction fee can always be forced higher in order to generate more revenue for the miners. Thus Bitcoin devolves (as coin rewards diminish) to a system that presents spenders with a choice between include a very high transaction fee or accept an ever increasing delay for confirmation. This will exacerbate as coin rewards diminish and volume of transactions increase.

If we instead assume limited block size, then the Bitcoin foundation will set the transaction fees, not the market.

Bitcoin is a broken design.

[merkin51]

I read through this thread and have to say, even though I think I only completely understood about 20% of it, it is quite a fascinating read.

Is this ultimate anonymity coin actually a reality, or is it just an unobtainable crypto dream? Is the knowledge and skillset out there in the coder community? Are people already working on such a coin? Will it be ready by 2016?!

[romneymoney]

Interesting article.

On one hand you have merchants using Bitpay.  These merchants don't want to hold BTC.  They convert it to fiat before it touches their account.  They are BTC sellers

On the other side you have hoarders who don't wanna to spend BTC because they are buying it for speculation.

As more merchants accept BTC thru Bitpay; this creates an asymmetry of sellers over buyers.   This puts a lot of selling pressure on BTC driving the price down.

So at some point the future the price will be driven low enough where there is an equilibrium of sellers vs buyers in order for BTC stabilize.  But if a better tech comes along like Ripple, BTC might just go extinct.

I would argue that there is at least one technologically better crypto-coin out there already just based on the number of alt-coins and the innovation and skills behind some of them.  BTC has the momentum in mind share, which is far more important vs. tech specs in this competition currently.  I'd stop short of predicting BTC is the dominant coin indefinitely, but it seems to be for the foreseeable future. 

[mgburks77]

They maintain their monopolies only because individuals can't take action.

You really hit home here. This is very true. When people have the tools to take action, they will do it.

this is the critical point

[AnonyMint]

Discussion continues over at the blog of the creator of "open source".

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479716

There is very limited ‘knowledge networking value’ for carrots. Extrapolate from there.

What does agriculture have to do with network value of knowledge creation?

Do carrots have anything to do with open source business models?

Carrots will continue their downward spiral of relative value. Iron used to be a precious metal. Commodities have trended downward in price for millennia. If knowledge can be unleashed from vertical integration gridlock, those trends should accelerate.

The refutation I expect is that there are many contributors to Linux and to aggregate value and then distribute it to the contributors requires business models such as corporate sponsorship. I agree a dearth of modularity is a barrier, but it doesn't apply to all types of creations. And I was working on higher-kinded semantics computer language to hopefully improve modularity.

Even for Linux we could ponder a pay-per-download micro payment with a new crypto-currency, then have a list of contributors ranked by LOC and distribute to them. Not sure if that works, but I am not going to try to pretend I'm as omniscient as you and know all the limitations of ingenuity of mankind.

[Corazon79]

I think it would be interesting to write an essay about some of these issues, to get everything together in one place.

If anybody wants to contribute some thoughts, I have just corrected my Bitmessage contact details in my profile. I didn't realise before, but the address had been cut short when I tried to paste it in...

[AnonyMint]

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479742

Performers and analysts are earning tips from their YouTube videos. These seed creative thought, which spawn other creations.

We will be able to produce all the food, raw materials, and energy we need with robots. There is no reason the price shouldn't trend towards zero, once the robots can build more robots.

The activity that can't be automated is creativity and knowledge creation. Thus it should rise in relative value.

[DieJohnny]

My biggest complaint with your post is that you fail to address the more unsavory side of bitcoin and that it is bitcoins limited supply, speculative investment, Ponzi scheme similarities.

Bitcoin never was worth billions because it is agrees transaction tool, anyone that says otherwise is a fool or a propagandist.

The greed of humanity is hardly played out yet with bitcoin, bitcoin will drop in price only until the new wave of speculative coin buyers sweep in and start throwing mor money at these coins.

The actual purchasing power and transaction coolness of bitcoin is a stupid sideshow and isn't worth talking about as a legitimate mainstream feature until 2025

[AnonyMint]

DieJohnny,

I have addressed it, such as in my very first thread Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch over a year ago.

In the following quoted post which comes from upthread, I had written about the need for perpetual debasement to fund mining (because transactions fees is broken design for several reasons):

To understand the symbioses more algorithmically, please read this summary I wrote yesterday:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=400235.msg6060440#msg6060440

I think that was fairly well written. One of my better posts. Please click to read it.

The upside is a 0 transaction fees design is a very attractive feature for consumers and merchants. And with a cpu-only coin, the debasement is going right back to the users of the coin any way. And it enables such a coin to be obtained autonomously without any other party nor exchange necessary. Even Bitcoin is being debased by 11% annually now. Of course exchanges should still be available, but they should P2P decentralized. No more Mt.Gox!

I had an entire thread about Bitcoin as Ponzi scheme in November 2013, although my view has somewhat moderated since there.

Also I have repeatedly stated glaring weaknesses in Bitcoin such as the 10 to 60 minute transaction delay.

Of course those issues need to be corrected in any altcoin that seriously wants to achieve widespread decentralized adoption.

Are you not interested at all in crypto-currency? Just curious.

[mgburks77]

Interesting article.

On one hand you have merchants using Bitpay.  These merchants don't want to hold BTC.  They convert it to fiat before it touches their account.  They are BTC sellers

On the other side you have hoarders who don't wanna to spend BTC because they are buying it for speculation.

As more merchants accept BTC thru Bitpay; this creates an asymmetry of sellers over buyers.   This puts a lot of selling pressure on BTC driving the price down.

So at some point the future the price will be driven low enough where there is an equilibrium of sellers vs buyers in order for BTC stabilize.  But if a better tech comes along like Ripple, BTC might just go extinct.

I would argue that there is at least one technologically better crypto-coin out there already just based on the number of alt-coins and the innovation and skills behind some of them.  BTC has the momentum in mind share, which is far more important vs. tech specs in this competition currently.  I'd stop short of predicting BTC is the dominant coin indefinitely, but it seems to be for the foreseeable future.  

I think a lot of that is due to inertia. There are definitely some technical weakenesses inherent to the protocol that leave it vulnerable to a currency that fits the criteria set forth by the OP, namely true anonymity and ubiquitous mining.

If anyone could produce currency simply by participating in the network, perhaps on their mobile device but definitely without special gear, there will be widespread adoption and the redundency characteristics of a decentralized network.

This "network effect" coupled with true anonymity makes what is essentially a "weaponized currency" that can counter fiat, which is itself a weaponized currency. Not by attacking the status quo but by providing an innovation that produces a better system for knowledge accumulation and transmittal to the next generation. Humans are opportunistic and will take care of the granular details of massive social change on their own terms once the tool needed is available. It has always been this way. Thus the eternal arms race between the individual and the collective advances a step and levels the field for the individualized knowledge production specialist.

The more I consider the possibilities the more excited I am!

Is this ultimate anonymity coin actually a reality, or is it just an unobtainable crypto dream? Is the knowledge and skillset out there in the coder community? Are people already working on such a coin? Will it be ready by 2016?!

It is in it's beginning but I'm confident it will be realized. It's too revolutionary not be produced by those who share the vision of human liberation. The "next step in human evolution" so to speak  

[mgburks77]

P2P decentralized

If this characteristic can be adopted for the platform it will only enhance the effects I mentioned briefly in my previous commentary. The crooked and incompetent exchange system is another weakness of btc that stands in the way of further adoption.

My biggest complaint with your post is that you fail to address the more unsavory side of bitcoin...

Cutting out the "middle man" reduces the insulating factor between individuals transacting a financial interaction.

Much of the crime that exists is due to the social alienation that is inherent in those brought up in a corrupt system. Most people know that the current social order is a mask for an exploitative relationship between capital and producers so they feel justified in looking out for themselves, and rightly so I might add.

So this platform not only represents a technical innovation it represents the potential for massive social change and liberation from enslavement to various flavors of collective production yet leverage the network effect for it's benefit in knowledge accrual and transmission.

Maybe mankind can leverage technical innovation to escape the cycle of wave function collapse. I'm starting to think it is a possibility. If so a society with very little interpersonal conflict ie crime is possible.

[mgburks77]

In other words, a so-called "bitcoin killer" currency will live up to all of the expectations many had for bitcoin but which never materialized when actually implemented. Instead what emerged was cartelization, centralized control of development, and interest from big financial players who want the same kind of guarantees offered by the fiat system.

A digital version of the current financial topology is innovative in that it satisfies many demands that currently exist so it is desirable but it isn't revolutionary and I think that was the hope many had for bitcoin when it was originally presented. You can see that hope is still alive in much of the bullish commentary you can read on this and other venues regarding the potential of bitcoin as the original cryptocurrency.

when they see the new concept realized they will immediately adopt

[AnonyMint]

Check this thread often for more details and news on the project.

I request we not discuss in this thread about any specific altcoin or altcoin project in this thread, because according to forum rules that should occur in the Altcoin forum. We can discuss about features we would like to see in an altcoin. We can compare and contrast with Bitcoin.

Any post related to the OP is welcome, but I really didn't want to hear that we should make a traceable public ledger so that we can make public officials honest. Nothing will ever make politics honest.   That is proximately as convincing as putting lipstick on a pig.

[pungopete468]

In other words, a so-called "bitcoin killer" currency will live up to all of the expectations many had for bitcoin but which never materialized when actually implemented. Instead what emerged was cartelization, centralized control of development, and interest from big financial players who want the same kind of guarantees offered by the fiat system.

A digital version of the current financial topology is innovative in that it satisfies many demands that currently exist so it is desirable but it isn't revolutionary and I think that was the hope many had for bitcoin when it was originally presented. You can see that hope is still alive in much of the bullish commentary you can read on this and other venues regarding the potential of bitcoin as the original cryptocurrency.

when they see the new concept realized they will immediately adopt

I agree with this.

Bitcoin was a great leap in the right direction, but it's never going to live up to solving the problems it was invented to solve. Sure, it did solve some important issues, but anonymity and decentralization are key pillars that Bitcoin failed to preserve. The Bitcoin community isn't just following Bitcoin for the name...

If a new protocol is written to incorporate true decentralization and real anonymity then the migration from Bitcoin to the new protocol will be swift. Obviously Bitcoin will be propped up by big money, they have an interest in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the most powerful tool for financial tracking ever invented. If other tools are developed to assist in tracking the flow of Bitcoins then it could be used to single out and isolate individuals based on parameters that would be defined by the authority who monitors the network. Bitcoin was invented as a tool to enhance personal freedom; it looks as if it can only serve as a tool to enhance oppression.

Anonymity is protection for the individual, decentralization is protection for the network...