Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

There is no "natural mixing" that occurs, really. Inputs to a transaction are all controlled by the same party, unless you are using a mixing protocol like coinjoin.

Let's imagine a bitcoin thief sends three "black" outputs to three recipients whom were not involved with the original crime.  The first recipient then uses this black output along with two other white outputs to purchase something from Overstock.  The output that Overstock receives can now be thought of as gray and is an example of "natural mixing."  

It is the Overstock customer who screwed up here, and and Overstock may well reject the purchase, or require additional documentation and reporting. Let's say Overstock rejects the purchase and sends the coins back. The customer now has mixed gray coins that may be difficult to use for anything, instead of white coins that were clearly usable.

...

I think I see what you're saying Smooth, but I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make: the black listing can occur after the transactions took place.  So suddenly Overstock is stuck with coins that it accepted according to the rules (they appeared to be "white"), but that are now suddenly gray or black.  And if this can happen, then either the currency system is essentially unusable or the blacklisting efforts are largely ignored.  

Again, or they just act conservatively and try to avoid accepting coins that place them at this risk, which means rejecting coins of unclear or uncertain origin. If your coins come from some part of the explicitly-legal the walled garden (Coinbase, Bitpay, etc.), they will welcome you with open arms. Otherwise they may take a pass, even if you coins are (or might be) perfectly fine.

I don't disagree the currency system may become unusable under these conditions, or have limited potential. Fungibility is very important. It just isn't assured by the technology in any way I see.

you're missing the point that it might not need to be assured by the technology.

what might assure fungibility is mere market behavior.  it's quite possible the community herd instinctively understands that by accepting blacklisted coins we encourage a massive crowd effect which might positively determine Bitcoin's outcome as a successful currency despite your individual technical privacy concerns.

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[smooth]

There is no "natural mixing" that occurs, really. Inputs to a transaction are all controlled by the same party, unless you are using a mixing protocol like coinjoin.

Let's imagine a bitcoin thief sends three "black" outputs to three recipients whom were not involved with the original crime.  The first recipient then uses this black output along with two other white outputs to purchase something from Overstock.  The output that Overstock receives can now be thought of as gray and is an example of "natural mixing." 

It is the Overstock customer who screwed up here, and and Overstock may well reject the purchase, or require additional documentation and reporting. Let's say Overstock rejects the purchase and sends the coins back. The customer now has mixed gray coins that may be difficult to use for anything, instead of white coins that were clearly usable.

...

I think I see what you're saying Smooth, but I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make: the black listing can occur after the transactions took place.  So suddenly Overstock is stuck with coins that it accepted according to the rules (they appeared to be "white"), but that are now suddenly gray or black.  And if this can happen, then either the currency system is essentially unusable or the blacklisting efforts are largely ignored.   

Again, or they just act conservatively and try to avoid accepting coins that place them at this risk, which means rejecting coins of unclear or uncertain origin. If your coins come from some part of the explicitly-legal the walled garden (Coinbase, Bitpay, etc.), they will welcome you with open arms. Otherwise they may take a pass, even if you coins are (or might be) perfectly fine.

I don't disagree the currency system may become unusable under these conditions, or have limited potential. Fungibility is very important. It just isn't assured by the technology in any way I see.

you're missing the point that it might not need to be assured by the technology.

what might assure fungibility is mere market behavior.  it's quite possible the community herd understands that by accepting blacklisted coins we encourage a massive crowd effect which might positively determine Bitcoin's outcome as a successful currency despite your individual technical privacy concerns.

I do acknowledge that (or something else unforeseen that makes the problem go away) is possible. If I thought Bitcoin had no chance to succeed I would have dumped mine a long time ago.

[justusranvier]

Coinbase et al. may attempt to keep their users inside a walled garden that is only allowed to transact with other people in the same walled garden, but they won't get away with it in the long term.

I'm not so sure. That's certainly now how things are going now.

They are going to make the attempt. Whether because they want to, or because they are helpless pawns of regulatory forces beyond their control, is irrelevant.

In the end, it won't work. Unencumbered bitcoins will always have more purchasing power than restricted bitcoins. The price incentives this situation creates will ensure the eventual failure of their walled garden attempts.

[Johnny Mnemonic]

This is only a debate because at this point nobody (that we're aware of) has been falsely imprisoned due to mistakes in blockchain analysis. You can mix your coins all you want, but that doesn't mean your money can't be connected to something illegal.

[Peter R]

This is only a debate because at this point nobody (that we're aware of) has been falsely imprisoned due to mistakes in blockchain analysis. You can mix your coins all you want, but that doesn't mean your money can't be connected to something illegal.

Good point. And conversely, with a transparent blockchain it's more likely that the truth will prevail than with an obfuscated blockchain.

[aminorex]

This is only a debate because at this point nobody (that we're aware of) has been falsely imprisoned due to mistakes in blockchain analysis. You can mix your coins all you want, but that doesn't mean your money can't be connected to something illegal.

Good point. And conversely, with a transparent blockchain it's more likely that the truth will prevail than with an obfuscated blockchain.

The truth does not have a gun.

[domob]

Regarding the recent privacy debate here, has anyone seen JoinMarket? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=919116.0

IMHO that's a very interesting project, and may well finally lead to more liquidity in CoinJoin providers (simply due to a profit motive).

[TPTB_need_war]

Bond markets rarely if never go from $50 trillion "market cap" to "no ask" instantly.

(You probably meant no bid.) And besides they do: I was quite close to follow the shtf in Sept-Oct 2008, when mutual funds closed the redemption window as there was no bid for their assets, and consequently no way to calculate the daily value, nor liquidity obtainable to process the redemptions.

Yes "no bid". I meant sovereign bond markets and more specifically the bond market of the global reserve currency. When these beasts go no bid that is collapse of an empire, thus very rare perhaps every 309 years (I believe that might be the cycle according to Armstrong's model,haven't verified).

...but this resource grab is so out of whack in relation to global consciousness and fairness that it is not easily done. They need the consent of the sheep at minimum to do it, but otoh the population of sheep (the boomers) will soon experience a rapid decline due to the reason that TPTB is killing them via the big pharma! So it's not going to be easy.

And even if they manage to continue along these lines, they cannot easily destroy the knowledge capital which anyway grows every year, keeping the population's share of the total capital high.

You've hit precisely on my bifurcation of the global economy into a dying NWO and prospering Knowledge Age.

I do believe many of the youth are hopelessly ingrained with socialism ideology and thus they will support the NWO as a "reform the system, 99% against the 1%". You can clearly see this in both the Occupation Wallstreet rallies and even the posts of the younger guys in this thread (they think they are fighting for freedom yet they are really fighting for a collectivized outcome...and boy do they fight for it!).

capital flows into the USA will have no where alsoelse to go! because the investors won't have the knowledge or options and the capital is finally realized as destroyed).

I hope you realize Pruden's point that what you call "capital" here is "liquidity" and that is not affected by changes in asset values, rather it is diametrically the opposite: rising liquidity causes the fall of interest rates and they both cause the rise in asset values and vice versa.

And I hope you realize that my point is that "capital" can't be measure a priori. We only know the difference between "liquidity" and "capital" after the "the tide goes out, and we can see who wasn't wearing underwear" (Warren Buffet).

So relatively the knowledgeable capital—that can flow out of bonds into gold and crypto—is immense.

My bold 2013 prediction for forward escape and bitcoin singularity (the collapse of fiat and bonds, leaving only the CB's printing money to prop up their market in hyperinflation, and the printed money chasing bitcoin prices up to unfathomable heights denominated in currency, and quite high in purchasing power as well  - it is already the case that CB's buy all the new bond issuance as there is no sane market actor doing it with their own money!) was just a few years early. With the developments in Bitcoin in the last 2 years with TPTB buying clandestinely with both hands and enacting draconian regulation in this 100% transparent chain, I have more confidence than ever to the scenario becoming true soon.

You underestimate the degree to which socialism is ingrained in the psychology of the people.

And you underestimate the technological weaknesses of Bitcoin that put into the lap of regulation (that the people want!).

Afaics, your conceptual logic is astute (and even you formulate the concepts in a way that adds value to my understanding), but IMHO your analysis is not sufficiently pragmatically based in reality. That is why I was railing against your predictions and I was correct.

They are trying to use it for entrapment of the value to a thing they can control to a larger extent even than the present assets. For this reason diversifying to the private cryptocurrencies now is very prudent. Armstrong's model forecasts that the private assets will enjoy in the coming years, and that includes Bitcoin only to the point that it is perceived as a private asset. Unfortunately in my thinking it is strongly entrenched in a slide to not being one in the years to come.

There are at least two some what orthogonal phenomenons, A) mainstream thinking about what is an alternative asset and/or hot speculation, B) what is actually a protection against the government's (TPTB's) expropriation.

Bitcoin is likely to succeed wildly at A and I assert fail at B.

Problem cryptos have is that most people doesn't trust them (i.e. "they can go poof overnight"). Bitcoin will gain more trust because of the behemoths that will be offering online wallets, etc..

To get around this trust/scale dilemma requires a novel approach that can drive popularity that is orthogonal to misunderstandings and concerns about viability of decentralized digital stores of value. This is one of the key paradigms I addressed in my marketing design for an altcoin.

[1] Note Fekete was the one who taught me that gold is used as a store-of-value because it has very high stocks-to-flows ratio.

To me as well. But confidence in gold was formed during millennia, cryptos have quite a game ahead for gaining the same level of confidence, because low inflation == premine, and there is no question that all the cryptos that exist have far too much tilted to gaining the low inflation too early, and attempting to make a huge value grab to early adopters. Despite its infancy, I dare to say that CKG is the most level-headed attempt at correcting the flawed economic thinking in cryptocurrency issuance.

We had that discussion about distribution recently the Economic Totalitarianism thread. I agree with the issues that have to be balanced.

But I don't think the primary reason for not hurdling the distrust curve is inflation concerns and speculators' opinions. Rather I think if you want to leapfrog Bitcoin you have to paradigm shift that issue. As I wrote, your idea to distribute CKG to those who play the game more is in line with that sort of paradigm shift. Now you just need to make sure they are spending the coin in the game and not just sitting on it as speculators only.

P.S. I am on the road and my replies are very rushed.

[TPTB_need_war]

• Accepted - Widely used and valued by the population - Not yet, Bitcoin misses here for now (gold is betterworse)

Sorry I can't register domain names for an altcoin anonymously with gold. I've never paid for anything with gold nor silver, yet I have purchased many things with Bitcoin.

[TPTB_need_war]

Monero is...what Bitcoin was promised to be (but is not, and likely cannot be) - private cash, and nothing more.

What was Bitcoin "promised to be"?  How does the Bitcoin of today not fulfil the description from the Satoshi white paper?  Bitcoin is more useful than Monero because it does not force privacy upon its users.  It gives its users the freedom to choose their privacy requirements.  Cryddit (Ray Dillinger) made a series of insightful posts beginning here arguing against all but niche adoption of strong-privacy coins.

Cryddit's logic is a dinosaur still stuck in the brick-and-mortar Industrial Age, and entirely missing the point of the Knowledge Age. In the Knowledge Age, we obviate the need for trust and everything moves to a meritocracy on the actual content and knowledge, e.g. open source. I have specific ideas of how this will interface with crypto which I won't detail now. You can't have a meritocracy if you can't avert the Economic Totalitarianism coming. We've moved beyond being able to choose. It is being forced on us.

Bottom line is a paradigm shift coming which is going to sweep away your jaded, outdated assumptions.

OTOH, I do understand the criticism that if you have strong anonymity in a coin, then the authorities might be more likely to crack down on it in the future. Thus my thought is that if you put strong anonymity in a coin, you better have all the other aspects worked out so that the coin can't be attacked technologically. Monero doesn't appear to have done that afaik.

Furthermore, even if you assume that protocol-enforced privacy is a positive (which I don't), the trade-offs made to get that privacy have real costs.  But we won't fully know what these costs are until something like Monero is trading at a much higher market cap and transaction volume.  

That being said, I like Monero because (a) it had a fair launch, and (b) it offers something unique.  I would love to see it overtake Dash (Darkcoin) and then Litecoin.  But I think best-case scenario for Monero is a few % of the bitcoin market cap.

Monero's anonymity is optional.

I am an autodidact psychologist. I think you like Monero's "fair launch" (no it wasn't entirely fairly launched but that is not relevant to the point I am making) because that "fair launch" has made it nearly impossible to fund the massive amount of work that needs to be done so that it could slaughter Bitcoin. And you really don't want any altcoin to slaughter Bitcoin.

Monero has one small piece of the puzzle done (but not quantum secure and thus in perhaps 15 years all your anonymity is removed), but not nearly enough to scale on all the various points about distribution, use as currency, and scaling the mining decentralized, etc.. And I am not 100% confident that Monero is anonymous but I don't make any specific allegation. I am just not yet comfortable because I haven't put in the effort to do the analysis in great detail on the crypto and the combinatorial type attacks on the rings.

Nevertheless if you need a few years of anonymity on a blockchain, I think Monero is probably the best there is right now. And kudos to the devs!

[TPTB_need_war]

Cryptocurrency 2.0 (or do I mean 1.0?) ideally would keep the distributive and verification aspects as a part of the tx/mining network as we know it, but somehow allow the acceptance of the transaction to be determined only by the individual/s who receive it.

You are getting closer and closer to my solution. Kudos. Smart.

[Carlton Banks]

Cryptocurrency 2.0 (or do I mean 1.0?) ideally would keep the distributive and verification aspects as a part of the tx/mining network as we know it, but somehow allow the acceptance of the transaction to be determined only by the individual/s who receive it.

You are getting closer and closer to my solution. Kudos. Smart.

stop talking

[klee]

TPTB_need_war do you think technology per se can help us?

I think it needs a political battle too from the people - time to unite & challenge this elite!

Tools/weapons will be of great help but 'blood' will be needed too.

If we are fragmented and isolated to each other behind anonymity, stealthiness etc how can we win this battle?

Guerilla warfare is enough?

Just questions that I have no definite answer...

EDIT: We have to use probably both Ninja tactics AND Spartan (heroic, self sacrificing groups of people)
EDIT 2: Anyone thinking just to get rich and 'escape' by himself is delusional IMHO. Also, if you think we are not at war... (last edit not directed to you TPTB)

[TPTB_need_war]

Privacy has not usually been considered a core requirement for money

Some where upthread I quoted Nick Szabo on "TTP" as disagreeing with you. He said personal property has always been orthogonal to the need to trust a third party. Without optional privacy, then inherently you must trust the society and the government not to steal from you.

I think what you meant to write is that privacy has never been a non-optional property of money.

[TPTB_need_war]

stop talking

correct. soon.

[TPTB_need_war]

TPTB_need_war do you think technology per se can help us?

I think it needs a political battle too from the people - time to unite & challenge this elite!

Tools/weapons will be of great help but 'blood' will be needed too.

If we are fragmented and isolated to each other behind anonymity, stealthiness etc how can we win this battle?

Guerilla warfare is enough?

Just questions that I have no definite answer...

EDIT: We have to use probably both Ninja tactics AND Spartan (heroic, self sacrificing groups of people)

In the one world reserve currency thread in the Economics forum (and else where such as my reply to rpietila a few minutes ago above) have argued that the masses are going to fall into the NWO outcome and there is nothing we can do to stop that. The political outcomes always favor the banksters, e.g. Napolean's revolution reestablished the same type of system that existed before it. The reason is because of human nature and the Iron Law of Political Economics (Google it).

I believe the technological win is a political win, because when people vote with their actions instead of the voices, then an economic avalanche effect occurs. This is what we were hoping for with Bitcoin, but the technology is not quite right.

We fight by switching our economy.  No words. Just a clearly superior option that people adopt because it makes their life better.

Remember I had linked upthread to where I point out the TPTB can't take the internet away from us because it has too high of an entropic vacuum sucking everything in. The best they can do is brainwash the masses into sticking with socialism and falling into the NWO and centralized client-serverservant-master websites.

Hard sells never work and mass manipulation is the domain of the Iron Law of Political Economics.

So in short, yes we win with technology but the devil is in the details of that.

[TPTB_need_war]

This is why I'll maintain privacy is a matter of usage, but is not a property of money.

Money without optional privacy is a Dark Age.

It is ridiculous to assert that viable privacy is orthogonal to money.

Privacy against the NSA with Bitcoin is very tedious if not impossible.

As we move further into the coming Economic Totalitarianism, the possibility of this Dark Age will become more obvious and visceral.

Problem for Monero is they sell it as being more robust anonymity than CoinJoin or DarkCoin, but Monero is not likely immune to the NSA either since I posit that both I2P and Tor are compromised. Monero's mining would become centralized too if the usage rose to what Bitcoin is facing now.

Climbing the wall of what we need technologically is a massive undertaking.

[TPTB_need_war]

The subset of people who need privacy can use both in a manner that achieves it.

If TPTB close off the ability to get an anonymous connection to the internet (e.g. public open WiFi and/or unregistered 3G USB dongles), then neither Monero nor Bitcoin can be used anonymous any more.

They are likely to pass regulations banning those in next few years. I have seen legislation and movements by the telcos and ISPs.

You could I guess rent a botnet to obfuscate your IP. But much better we fix Tor or I2P (if they are compromised by Sybil attack and timing analysis as I posit they are).

Bitcoin's lack of onchain anonymity means it is nearly impossible to maintain anonymity in any sane usage scenarios. Do we need to detail why? Hasn't this been explained already in Monero threads?

Also I think you are assuming that anonymity will be a rare usage scenario; whereas, I am think it will be normal one in the Knowledge Age.

Regarding "better mining algo", again this is not a property of money I think people who are resorting to these types of arguments to convince themselves that altcoin x is better are kidding themselves.

When Bitcoin is centralized and fully regulated you can appreciate that the mining algorithm goes hand-in-hand with driving the freedom that makes money.

[Carlton Banks]

stop talking

correct. soon.

no, I meant "shut up" (politeness gets you nowhere these days)

[TPTB_need_war]

stop talking

correct. soon.

no, I meant "shut up" (politeness gets you nowhere these days)

Would you care to demonstrate any logic to justify your command?

Do you have any authority to enforce a command on me? Do you want to have such authority? (if you do then you are antithetical to the goals of a meritocracy)