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

[AnonyMint]

On the globalist conspiracy theories, we don't need for them to be true in order to need the anonymous coin (cpu-only mining, etc).

We need these features simply because the history of the world shows that society devolves into totalitarianism over and over again, because the masses accept all the debt and promises politicians make. This causes bankruptcy of the society. Then the crash of the economy causes the masses to demand the government do something to fix it. The only thing the government can do is steal from those who have wealth since government can never create wealth.

So we don't need globalist conspiracy theories to pitch the importance of the proposed feature sets.

I suggest we avoid furthering the conspiratorial dialogue (we've already covered it) as this will chase away serious businessmen who are needed in any serious movement towards an improved coin (or improving Bitcoin which seems unlikely).

The focus should be on creating the positive paradigm for business and human empowerment in order to create a golden Knowledge Age of vigorous prosperity.

P.S. I think the concept of ZeroCash wherein we don't have absolute knowledge about the money supply is not going to be favored by a serious business demographic. Businesses like transparency not black boxes. They do want their private business details to remain confidential, but they don't want a system that is failing and no one knows it (until it is too late to prepare or change).

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[AnonyMint]

Some serious humor from Armstrong...

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/08/inflationdeflation-reality-check-understanding-the-rules-of-the-game/

I know Obama’s secret agenda is to go back to the 70% tax rate prior to Reagan and hunt people down for taxes like wild animals in a tax-safari. We have become the prey – the tables have been turned...

[snip]

I thank God I am not 23 for there may be no future left.

[AnonyMint]

Without anonymity we are toast.

Why is anonymity so important for mankind ?
Don't you think global transparency in financial systems might be a good thing ? (To help fight corruption, for instance)

This is the most difficult thing for people to understand because we are so accustomed to the normalcy of society. We just can't conceive of the notion that the regulators are captured by those being regulated. And that voting can't change it. The Bill Moyers video explains this very professionally. I highly recommend it.

Global transparency is the way you promote the Deep State corruption to globalized power. That will be an even worse outcome. Because again, the regulators and the regulated are two heads of the same monster.

Anonymity is the only way the individual can opt-out of that unfixable (evil) symbioses that is going to torch the earth after 2016.

[snip]

I want to also remind that anonymity doesn't eliminate social networking. Let's differentiate between anonymity and reputation as they aren't mutually exclusive.

Also just because you want to be anonymous sometimes, doesn't mean you need to be anonymous in every aspect of your life.

It is not personal identity that is important, but rather reputation...

Interesting idea, must digest

thanks for links! It's difficult to locate this type of content

[AnonyMint]

Cross-posting...

The scheme makes me feel myself a person with low IQ !  

You will rapidly change that and find your place in the Knowledge Age, especially if you are young.

I'm young. What do you suggest?

1. Get involved with a micro payments, cpu-minable, anonymity coin to accelerate the coming of #2 below. Some discussion on that at another thread I started.

2. Develop your skills in some creativity activity in which some aspect of it interfaces with content that can be delivered electronically, e.g. 3D printing designs, programming, biotech, nanotech, marketing plans, medical tech and art, visual arts, audio arts, etc..

Did you know it is possible to print an entire house of marble using a 3D printer:

http://d-shape.com/

Get in touch with your creativity ability. Most men have this as it is sort of innate to being a man. There are so many areas. This isn't restricted to just programming. You see that D-Shape is very hands on, get your hands dirty. Some men like to work with their hands, not just their mind.

In short, become a hacker, in the broadest definition of the term.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is

P.S. I'd love to see you guys help improve the Flying Car.

[AnonyMint]

I was at the SM Lanang mall yesterday. Ate some overpriced, delicious burritos and soft tacos at Army Navy. Didn't think we had that kind of food here in Davao. Amazed me to see basically the quality of any modern city in the world imported into formerly third world Davao, Mindanao, Philippines, which didn't even have street lighting in 1994.

First time I had gone any where other than local el cheapo barbecue since I had returned from Hong Kong in January.

The point I want to make with these photos, is notice even the ladies have stopped wearing their shorts and blue jeans and are adopting expensive clothing. This is in a third world country!

The point I am making is that do the following photos agree with the reality of the following financial calculations?

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/03/will-emerging-markets-come-back/#comment-22683
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2013/11/21/heres-why-the-philippines-economic-miracle-is-really-a-bubble-in-disguise

What you see below is central bank QE ZIRP carry trade, pumping massive amount of debt into the developing world. Philippines exports 1/6 of its population to work overseas, and probably at least 50% is manual labor (maids, drivers, cooks, etc) which will be laid off in a 50% technological and debt default unemployment scenario. You can see the official data that this primarily comes from United States, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia in that order of significance.

So my point is that those who think the crisis can't possibly happen because look at how good our lives are now, are ignoring the effect that contagion can have.

The following is a temporary illusion. This will come back again in the future, but after 2016 the following is going to diminish for some years.




















$20 per head Vikings all you can eat luxury buffet:

[peri1224]

It is true that paper cash, gold/silver were always anonymous. But does BTC give up the anonymity to the collective or to those few animals that are more equal than the others?

[peri1224]

"First time I had gone any where other than local el cheapo barbecue since I had returned from Hong Kong in January."

If one works like a dog on any project, how can it not contain errors, or at least not be as perfect as it should be?

[AnonyMint]

"First time I had gone any where other than local el cheapo barbecue since I had returned from Hong Kong in January."

If one works like a dog on any project, how can it not contain errors, or at least not be as perfect as it should be?

If you are referring to an altcoin, altcoins typically go through a testing phase. For example, as far as I know the anonymity altcoin Darkcoin is undergoing testing and mining now on a beta version. Pre-mining of Bitshares occurred on a subset coin Protoshares.

My understanding is that ZeroCash intends to release some open source before launching as an altcoin.

Also releasing a coin as open source can allow the community to look for bugs.

If you are referring the work I've been doing, it has mostly been assimilating applicable technology, developing community awareness through so many posts in this forum, thus refining my own understanding of the various issues.


P.S. On the issue of ZeroCash, since it will be open source, there is nothing impeding a competing altcoin from adopting it and adding other features, such as cpu-only. So any altcoin that decides to incorporate a different technology than ZeroCash for obfuscating the block chain after ZeroCash is available and production ready code, must rationally be doing it because the developers (and thus the community that follows them) sincerely think ZeroCash is not the superior choice.

[AnonyMint]

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/08/gandhi-cycle-of-life/

This is a worldwide struggle for real liberty. If I can leave that one gift behind to my own posterity, it was all worth it.

[merkin51]

AnonyMint, what is your opinion on Darkcoin? Does it fulfill many / any of the true requirements of an anonymous coin? It seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment. I would search the thread, but there doesn't seem to be a thread search facility on here...

[AnonyMint]

We should be delighted there is so much competition going on in the nascent anonymity coin arena. It can only help us attain the best possible solutions.

AnonyMint, what is your opinion on Darkcoin? Does it fulfill many / any of the true requirements of an anonymous coin? It seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment. I would search the thread, but there doesn't seem to be a thread search facility on here...

Following statements on Darkcoin were accurate to the best of my knowledge as of about 5 days ago. Any significant changes to the design since then are not considered.

Darkcoin obscures linkability between payer and payee to the degree that the master nodes are not Sybil attacked. There is some economic mechanism to try to achieve Sybil resistance, but some uncertainty about that. Also the collateral payment is used to overcome an inherent weakness in CoinJoin (which I was first to articulate), and there is some uncertainty about whether these could be stolen. I would characterize that uncertainty as moderate to very mild (meaning no one is saying, "this sucks", rather just analyzing). I personally did not attempt to dig deeper into the analysis of that uncertainty (I don't have time). I have provided a suggestion to the developer to investigate traceable ring signatures as a potential solution to eliminate both master node's need to see both payer and payee and to eliminate the collateral payment. I don't know if or when that suggestion might be fruitful for Darkcoin.

Darkcoin does not protect the anonymity of the master node.

Darkcoin does not address traceability of the IP address to the transaction. It like all other coins except anoncoin, thus far assumes the user uses Tor or VPN to obscure their IP address. I have pointed out with citations that many question whether Tor, VPNs, and I2P (anoncoin's mixnet choice), are honey pots. I said some might assume they are anonymous 80 - 95% of the time, and others might pull 50% out of their arse because no one really knows (except maybe the NSA). Do you want 5 - 50% of your transactions to lose anonymity?

You can run your coins through Darksends numerous times to raise the odds of being anonymous. I posted some sample calculations in the Darkcoin thread.

So I consider it to be a legitimate effort and avoids the criticisms I made against ZeroCash. I am not making a recommendation.

Note I think ZeroCash is an astonishing technological achievement, and very noteworthy. It probably has applications in side-economies where absolute lack of knowledge is desired. But it doesn't seem to be the right choice for the global economy for the very serious reasons I stated upthread. Perhaps they should make a variant that simply fixes ZeroCoin's weaknesses and doesn't go for the hiding of all coins, the money supply, and all activity entirely. However, some people might decide they don't care if the money supply isn't ever knowable ("to the moon" inflation is an acceptable risk to them) and they might choose to trust a public ceremony setup and they may ignore the fact that cryptography is very new, very complex, and insufficiently vetted (this takes years in cryptanalysis land). I think that would be unwise. They would also be ignoring the likely centralization of mining that would be required to support micro payments with ZeroCash's slow 115 transaction verifications per i7 cpu core. Also I forgot to state upthread that ZeroCash adds an additional 3 minute delay to transactions. Also I forgot to mention upthread that one benefit of ZeroCash is the transaction amounts don't have to be all the same when mixing spends with the other coins in order to obscure payee and payer, because the amounts are hidden as well.

I already have an idea how to fix the issue of not having reliability with Tor, VPN, or I2P. And I have seen cryptography for the block chain which does payer and payee mixing without the caveats I just stated about Darkcoin.

So I think Darkcoin is a legitimate effort and may even improve over time. I also think a superior altcoin may possibly come soon (and I may not even be involved since I tell you that some of the technology I am writing about was not coming from me). Please make sure you check the facts for yourself at the time such facts are well elucidated.

This post is a quick summary of my thoughts on this matter. I don't want to write an essay now.

I am trying to answer questions while I also prefer such very technical questions to be properly answered in whitepapers. It is difficult for me to give the best in depth technical answers in a forum post. Especially when you consider that I am working and trying to prove out things right now, so it is difficult to speak before it is the proper time to do so.

My prior summary:

The summary thus far of my analysis of Darksend is that Evan has put into place adequate mechanisms to disincentivize theft of the collateral payments and to disincentivize Sybil attacking the inputs to a Darksend with legitimate Darksends.

The weaknesses (w.r.t. to anonymity) are that Masternodes can be purchased and if the adversary has too many of them, they can reduce your probability of anonymity unless you send your funds through dozens of Darksends between each receipt or spend transaction. If the adversary controlled 90% of the Masternodes, it would nearly impossible to be anonymous more than say 99% of the time, i.e. 1 in 100 of your spends would lose anonymity. Evan argues that attaining a lot of Masternodes is too expensive. Well probably so for the common criminal, but I am not convinced that is so for the NSA.

1 in 100 may not sound bad, but remember that loss of anonymity tends to domino cascade (for the holistic reasons I pointed out in my reply to LimLims on this page). And that is for the person who is extremely diligent to do dozens of Darksends between each spend. Most users are not so perfectionist. So for them anonymity could drop significantly if the adversary has such huge resources.

The other weakness is that it is not yet mandatory to use an IP mixer such as Tor with Darksend, and if not all of the participants to the Darksend are obfuscating their IP, then the anonymity probability declines. Note that even if Darksend makes Tor mandatory, Tor is not the best we can do for an IP mixer. It is unknown how effective Tor is. Some might estimate 80 - 95%. Others might pull 50% out of their arse. I really don't know, but I don't trust Tor entirely. This combined with say 20% of the Masternodes compromised (and a little bit of normal human error on your part such as forgetting to send dozens of Darksends for each coin your receive) can also make it unrealistic to repeatedly sustain very military grade strength of anonymity. (But who said you wanted military grade assurance? Some do, some may not require it)

Darksend has anonymity. Darkcoin is an anonymity coin. The strength of the anonymity depends on the resources and resolve of the adversary versus the Darkcoin user.

I am still trying to think of suggestions to improve it.

I hope readers find my posts helpful?

ZeroCash is going public in a few months time ~20 May. Regardless of whether they have anything tangible or just a published paper,

I don't think they will have beta-test level code then.

This is about not being drowned out and then being considered a clone.

No way Darkcoin can be considered a clone, as Zerocash completely hides the payer, payee, and the amount of transactions. The block chain is a complete fog. Zerocoin doesn't do this.

Zerocash will have some positive spin. They will talk about e-cash and anonymity.

They will make the point I just wrote above.

What they won't talk about are the problems with the project.

The main weakness of Zerocash is it adds an additional 3 minutes between check out and completion of payment. (Add that on top of Bitcoin's 10 - 60 minutes, or Litecoins 2.5 - 15 minutes). Zerocoin doesn't have this problem.

The main weakness of Zerocash and Zerocoin are they depend on new crypto which hasn't been subjected to years of cryptanalysis, and if you put it on the block chain, then it is later cracked, the entire coin is potentially F.U.B.A.R..

Whereas Darksends are offchain! Even if you crack the crypto of Darksend (which uses very old well vetted crypto), the block chain remains uncracked!

The other weakness of Zerocash and Zerocoin is they depend on a trusted party to create the master parameters. If anyone retains that information (even if they snooped it using the NSA's air gap detection mechanisms), they in the case of Zerocash they can create unlimited coins and nobody will even know it! In other words, the coin supply becomes unknowable!! I am not exaggerating!!

Another counter point may be that each Zerocash transaction takes 9ms to verify (500ms for Zerocoin). Thus they can only put 115 transactions in a block per second per core of the CPU on the miner. Visa does 2,000 - 4,000 transactions per second, so for Zerocash to scale to global transactions needs 40 CPU cores per miner (e.g. 10 iCore i7 CPUs), not including denial-of-service transaction spam. Transaction spam could be really bad if they don't have a transaction fee or other means to control it. Any way, 40 CPU cores is not really a big problem if mining will be done only in pools.

But crypto-currencies are hoping to enable microtransactions, thus the transactions per second would explode by orders-of-magnitude.

Thus appears to me Zerocash is incompatible with microtransactions unless mining becomes very centralized among a few powerful pools.

Centralization of mining is a severe problem with Bitcoin having onetwo or three pool with 51% of the hash power now.

[AnonyMint]

The entire internet will never go down. The main threat is segmentation of the internet and thus the block chain into competing chains.

The solution is to HAM or shortwave radio the data between segments, and the miners slow down the block period as necessary to accommodate the slower relaying time.

The coin needs a better (more efficient) design than Bitcoin on the way miners aggregate and relay data.

This can probably all be solved once we get serious development back into a coin. Bitcoin development has become rigor mortis.

[thaaanos]

Did you know it is possible to print an entire house of marble using a 3D printer:
http://d-shape.com/

Lets be more realistic and use something like
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set

[7thKingdom]

So what kind of scale are we looking at for transactions per second if micro-transactions are really going to become viable?  You say orders of magnitude greater than the current transactions we see via Visa, so what are we talking about here exactly?

And is such scaling and speed really viable on chain in a future coin (without the need for miners to conglomerate into a few large pools)?

[AnonyMint]

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/09/the-coming-tetrad-the-blood-moons/

That said, this is a group of four consecutive total lunar eclipses in 2014 and 2015 – a series known as a Tetrad – four successive total ‘blood-red’ lunar eclipses each followed by six full moons. The more interesting aspect of the coming Tetrad is that the date lines up with this peak in the Economic Confidence Model 2015.75 and is off only by 2 days in advance. Indeed, NASA has confirmed that the Tetrad has only happened three times in more than 500 years – 1493, 1949, and 1967.

[snip]

The incredible alignment has only happened a handful of times in the last two thousand years but, remarkably, on each of the last three occasions it has coincided with a globally significant religious event.

Looking at the phenomenon, over a five millennium span from 1999 BC to 3000 AD, the max number of eclipse Tetrads that can take place in any century is eight (, which occurs this century. This is the Tetrad Season since the last time this took place was during the 9th century AD.

[snip]

There was a Tetrad in 1493 that marked the discovery of the New World. The next coincided with the establishment of the State of Israel – after thousands of years of struggle – in 1949 and the end of World War II. This was followed by 1967 and the Six-Day Arab–Israeli War.

Therefore, I do not see where this has any specific forecasting significance. Nonetheless, it is fascinating that it correlates at this time when our own models are jumping off the charts.

Well doesn't he know this coming "Tetrad season" which begins April 15, 2014 is because to the birth of anonymous, decentralized, cpu-only crypto-currency is born on April 15, 2014.  


Amazing the Tetrad season has only occurred 3 times this millennium, corresponding to the birth of New World, Israel (end of WW2), and Arab-Israel war.

And now on April 15, 2014 is born the antidote to central banking.

This date is coincidentally a giant middle finger to the USA tax deadline.

[alxs]

Well doesn't he know this coming "Tetrad season" which begins April 15, 2014 is because to the birth of anonymous, decentralized, cpu-only crypto-currency is born on April 15, 2014.  

Amazing the Tetrad season has only occurred 3 times this century, corresponding to the birth of New World, Israel (end of WW2), and Arab-Israel war.

And now on April 15, 2014 is born the antidote to central banking.

This date is coincidentally a giant middle finger to the USA tax deadline.

Are you going to share what that coin is?

[CoinCube]

Anonymity is the only way the individual can opt-out of that unfixable (evil) symbioses that is going to torch the earth after 2016.

I want to also remind that anonymity doesn't eliminate social networking. Let's differentiate between anonymity and reputation as they aren't mutually exclusive.

I stand by my earlier analogy in the MadMax thread that Anonymity is like chemotherapy. It has some undesirable side effects there is no denying it. Hopefully reputation will help mitigate those to some degree.

I have spent some time trying to think of an alternative to anonymity as I dislike some of those side effects. All line of inquiry have uniformly led me to the same conclusion. Anonymity is the only short term solution. Everything else is either ineffective or at best stalling tactics.

With metastatic cancer sometimes your only choice is to give up and let it consume you, or fight it with the tools available, however imperfect, at your disposal.

Time to learn how to use TOR anyone know of a good guide on how to set this up?

[alxs]

Great post and thread at zerohedge:

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-04-08/why-bitcoin-important?page=1

Specifically "james.connelly" comments as follows:

Wed, 04/09/2014 - 00:49 | 4638251 james.connolly
The problem here is that same old shill's are still pushing the same old snake-oil.
The solution is we need a REAL 'peoples' crypto-currency, and BTC dont' cut the smell test.
How do we do it ?

1.) It must be P2P just like when we all share/steal music and movies, REAL FUCK P2P, the problem with BTC is the exchanges and minor's, they NEED to be executed with extreme predjudice.

2.) We need real encryption, like PGP-4096 that is impossible for NSA to break, and we need to control, out of the hand's of the NSA.

3.) Trust is the issue of Satoshi's paper (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) I suggest any student of this shit read the mother-paper, in order to have trust, nobody can control over 1% of BTC,... with BTC you have a few people controlling 90% on the mining and the exchange end, ... this right there amongst a dozen other things is WHY BTC sucks cock.

So how do we fix BTC?

We need a real group to step forward someone like Stallman free software or somebody who can't be bought, probably going to be a RUSSIAN. We need a real open-source that has no ties to the CIA/MOSSAD, that is a tough one, given that probably 90% of the commenters/posters here work for the company as contractors.

But when a real crypto-currency comes out for the PEOPLE, I will know it when I see it, and bitcoin ain't it,

Maybe it will come from CHINA, maybe India, but it has to come from somebody who hates money, who hates wealth, who truly doesn't want a fucking thing to do with power, that his/her only goal is to destroy the PTB.

Now with BTC, it came from PTB and that is the fucking problem."

Wed, 04/09/2014 - 01:24 | 4638305 james.connolly

Your right, that's why its best to live in the jungle, then all is real.

But the USD sadly is also 'crypto-crap', but issued controlled by the DEVIL, and I use that word to infer that the worst ASSHOLE's on earth control the current crypto USD.

Given the reality of FIAT-FAUX (USD & wannabe's), why not have a PEOPLES FIAT, where nobody can be a billionaires, and people can exchange internationally, as even those in live in the jungle need to trade with city folk and vice versa.

Going beyond Satoshi's premise of "TRUST", the next level of crtypo-currency will have to be addressing the issue of MONOPOLY, Satoshi in his orginal PAPER simply 'assumed' that TRUST would be present in the NERD population, but sadly not all nerds use their brain or the heart, some only use their dicks.

My argument is not only must BTC 2.0 be REAL P2P, but it also must prevent anyone from having more than 0.01%, which means that a real ID/DNA fingerprint will be probably required to implement it, nobody ever said this shit was going to  be 'private'.

USD ain't private either if you move it on computer they know, and if you touch it, they got your dna and fingerprints. When you get it from the ATM they got your mug photographed and most big-bills have RFID, so they can track it,.."

Wed, 04/09/2014 - 01:31 | 4638311 james.connolly

Satoshi's premise of BTC 1.0 was that no person or club, would ever have more than 51%, that was broken early on, and the MINERS always maintained +60% control, so essentially the BTC 1.0 as envisioned was broken from 2010 all the way til present.

Then you had Mt-Gox with +60% of ingress/egress under control, and that was just the frosting on the cake to kill bitcoin.

The ONLY way to ensure trust is to have an anti-monopoly model, where nobody can have a monopoly. A PURE P2P model can also solve this problem.

The MORAL of BTC 1.0 is that EXCHANGES MUST DIE, and MINER's MUST DIE, MT-GOX essentially self destructed on that level, now its time to see some miners 'suicide'.

Of course also BTC 2.0 should contained NO Encryption endorsed by the NSA, which means it needs to be PGP-8192 something that the NSA hates with a passion."

[klee]

Very communistic PoV 

[klee]

Regarding the altcoin article: The underlying premise of liquidity is ok, but the altcoins are already dead in terms of marketcap. Their market cap is so tiny that it's not even funny - with the exception of Litecoin. So it is already factored into their price, it's not some kind of revelation.

Another issue is that he supposes all altcoins will act in the same liquid way and that they are competing in the same "there can be only one" space. An anonymous coin for example does not "go" in the same category for it serves a different purpose that the transparent coins cannot handle.

When you have an anonymous coin, the monopoly of the transparent market is broken and a new option is presented to the people on how to conduct their payments. Do you want to pay with your visa (so that the government can see what you bought) or use cash? So there are two different needs, covered by two different types of coins.

Supposing a 10bn BTC market cap, if just 1% of the transparent market chooses the emerging option of anonymity => that could translate to 100mn market cap. There is serious potential there. Will Bitcoin cover the anonymity/privacy needs of its user base? Nope because they want government approval. And the government needs Bitcoin's cooperation to tax the hell out of owners.

If the government requests, say, 30% of capital gains, then by the very mechanism of taxation, people will need to liquidate their BTCs to pay the government. So they create a destructive loop for the price of BTC where people need to cash it all the time, pressuring the price downwards. They can't do that with an anonymous coin that they can't control.