Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[rocks]

Yes, and what I'm saying is there is no cartel. A cartel implies there is some barrier to entry (for example by limited capacity of equipment). There is none here; everyone can mine, and in a protocol that hasn't reached the stage of specialized hardware, the startup costs are low and entry is very rapid. A huge amount of mining would come online within a day or two, and remember your proposal is for all this to be announced a month ahead, so plenty of time to get ready.

You are making a valiant effort smooth, but it is not one you are going to win with this one. He make the same argument with me, in that a mining cartel could "block" all transactions they want. He refused to acknowledge that a non-conforming cartel would simply be removed from the pool, and the network would continue with the remain honest miners. He refuses to understand that the network will continue as long as there are some remaining honest miners to generate blocks.

I refuse to believe that he can not understand this, and instead believe he is simply trying out and testing new FUD against bitcoin here. Some FUD is easily refuted, other FUD requires more discussion and understanding. He has already said that he is working with his government on educating the public on the scam that is bitcoin.

I also get the impression that we are writing a paper for him, that discredits his imagined dystopia.

Sure it could happen, it would just take a massive preponderance of stupidity and/or lack of self interest, or coercion.
If it did happen, I would suspect the coercion first.  Most miners of any significance have plenty of self interest and very little stupidity.

That's a good way to put it. He keeps putting up detailed scenarios, and then always asks "isn't this right" or "what is wrong with this" or "please read x, y, z and tell me what is wrong". Then someone does so, and he ignores the replies and comes back with a different scenario and repeats. Going onto internet forums and trolling for peer review is a pretty pathetic manner for one to perform research.

[1714037894]

1714037894

[sidhujag]

Us equities are new gold

[solex]

Us equities are new gold

Scrape a little at that gilt and see the dull grey of lead and tungsten.

[sidhujag]

Us equities are new gold

Scrape a little at that gilt and see the dull grey of lead and tungsten.

It is till its not

[solex]

Hmm. It was nice imagining that higher btc volumes would come from replacing fiat payments in real-world b2c and b2b flows. Perhaps not from a monkey swinging between palm trees:

5,000 transactions in 1 day
https://blockchain.info/address/17ZgzoQUAiCrCgSieYfGhAvToW9kn6uaLt



Apple Inches towards Bitcoin, Approves a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in Real Bitcoin
By Forexminute - Deepak Tiwari | Bitcoin | Jan 9, 2015 3:36AM GMT

There is a lot of scope for Bitcoin in gaming industry; however, this has not yet been explored. The step from Apple to approve a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in real Bitcoin, recently releasing it onto the iTunes store, is going to encourage others in the fray. A lot of game lovers have appreciated the measure from Apple.
According to the sources the game, SaruTobi, lets users swing a monkey from a vine, building up momentum before releasing him to collect power-ups and Bitcoin tokens as he frolics though the air. Developer Christian Moss told the media professionals that SaruTobi is literally Japanese for ‘Monkey Fly’, and this is pretty much the premise of the game.
He says that the user flings him across an 8-bit jungle collecting floating Bitcoin along the way. According to him he was in the process of adding typical Super Mario-style coins into the game when it occurred to him to use Bitcoin instead. He admits that he thought it would be a nice way to introduce Bitcoin to people who are not familiar with it yet.
The approval from Apple is also an indication that somewhere people at the organization think that the digital world can truly be Bitcoin’s natural environment. The iOS game has three main aims – attaining the greatest distance, collecting Bitcoin tokens to be spent on in-app items, and collecting the letters ‘SARUTOBI’ to unlock a Bitcoin ‘boost’ to spend on in-game items.
A Long Way to Go Says Christian Moss, the Developer
Developer Christian Moss says that the Bitcoin tips come from the game’s shared Bitcoin wallet, called a ‘pot’, revenue generated by the game (from in-app purchases and ads) is converted into Bitcoin and added to the pot. He informs that after the user has played the game for a certain amount of time, the game will reward the user by sending them a Bitcoin tip.
Moss is of the view that though he has come across a few concept games that use Bitcoin micro-transactions, nothing on the iOS app store he believes having a popular iOS app that incorporates Bitcoin can go a long way to helping it become mainstream. He further says that he is currently working on a new Bitcoin mining game.
He concludes and says that it is still in the early stages of development; however, the player will be able to dig, similar to Minecraft, and collect real Bitcoin."

[Hunyadi]

Hmm. It was nice imagining that higher btc volumes would come from replacing fiat payments in real-world b2c and b2b flows. Perhaps not from a monkey swinging between palm trees:

5,000 transactions in 1 day
https://blockchain.info/address/17ZgzoQUAiCrCgSieYfGhAvToW9kn6uaLt



Apple Inches towards Bitcoin, Approves a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in Real Bitcoin
By Forexminute - Deepak Tiwari | Bitcoin | Jan 9, 2015 3:36AM GMT

There is a lot of scope for Bitcoin in gaming industry; however, this has not yet been explored. The step from Apple to approve a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in real Bitcoin, recently releasing it onto the iTunes store, is going to encourage others in the fray. A lot of game lovers have appreciated the measure from Apple.
According to the sources the game, SaruTobi, lets users swing a monkey from a vine, building up momentum before releasing him to collect power-ups and Bitcoin tokens as he frolics though the air. Developer Christian Moss told the media professionals that SaruTobi is literally Japanese for ‘Monkey Fly’, and this is pretty much the premise of the game.
He says that the user flings him across an 8-bit jungle collecting floating Bitcoin along the way. According to him he was in the process of adding typical Super Mario-style coins into the game when it occurred to him to use Bitcoin instead. He admits that he thought it would be a nice way to introduce Bitcoin to people who are not familiar with it yet.
The approval from Apple is also an indication that somewhere people at the organization think that the digital world can truly be Bitcoin’s natural environment. The iOS game has three main aims – attaining the greatest distance, collecting Bitcoin tokens to be spent on in-app items, and collecting the letters ‘SARUTOBI’ to unlock a Bitcoin ‘boost’ to spend on in-game items.
A Long Way to Go Says Christian Moss, the Developer
Developer Christian Moss says that the Bitcoin tips come from the game’s shared Bitcoin wallet, called a ‘pot’, revenue generated by the game (from in-app purchases and ads) is converted into Bitcoin and added to the pot. He informs that after the user has played the game for a certain amount of time, the game will reward the user by sending them a Bitcoin tip.
Moss is of the view that though he has come across a few concept games that use Bitcoin micro-transactions, nothing on the iOS app store he believes having a popular iOS app that incorporates Bitcoin can go a long way to helping it become mainstream. He further says that he is currently working on a new Bitcoin mining game.
He concludes and says that it is still in the early stages of development; however, the player will be able to dig, similar to Minecraft, and collect real Bitcoin."

I hope the game will become popular. This could potentially introduce bitcoin to millions of people. Perhaps, kids will adopt bitcoin and become 'native' users. I could easily see kids earning tiny amounts of bitcoin in these kind of games and then using those bitcoins to buy stuff from each other or from some internet site.

[cbeast]

Hmm. It was nice imagining that higher btc volumes would come from replacing fiat payments in real-world b2c and b2b flows. Perhaps not from a monkey swinging between palm trees:

5,000 transactions in 1 day
https://blockchain.info/address/17ZgzoQUAiCrCgSieYfGhAvToW9kn6uaLt



Apple Inches towards Bitcoin, Approves a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in Real Bitcoin
By Forexminute - Deepak Tiwari | Bitcoin | Jan 9, 2015 3:36AM GMT

There is a lot of scope for Bitcoin in gaming industry; however, this has not yet been explored. The step from Apple to approve a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in real Bitcoin, recently releasing it onto the iTunes store, is going to encourage others in the fray. A lot of game lovers have appreciated the measure from Apple.
According to the sources the game, SaruTobi, lets users swing a monkey from a vine, building up momentum before releasing him to collect power-ups and Bitcoin tokens as he frolics though the air. Developer Christian Moss told the media professionals that SaruTobi is literally Japanese for ‘Monkey Fly’, and this is pretty much the premise of the game.
He says that the user flings him across an 8-bit jungle collecting floating Bitcoin along the way. According to him he was in the process of adding typical Super Mario-style coins into the game when it occurred to him to use Bitcoin instead. He admits that he thought it would be a nice way to introduce Bitcoin to people who are not familiar with it yet.
The approval from Apple is also an indication that somewhere people at the organization think that the digital world can truly be Bitcoin’s natural environment. The iOS game has three main aims – attaining the greatest distance, collecting Bitcoin tokens to be spent on in-app items, and collecting the letters ‘SARUTOBI’ to unlock a Bitcoin ‘boost’ to spend on in-game items.
A Long Way to Go Says Christian Moss, the Developer
Developer Christian Moss says that the Bitcoin tips come from the game’s shared Bitcoin wallet, called a ‘pot’, revenue generated by the game (from in-app purchases and ads) is converted into Bitcoin and added to the pot. He informs that after the user has played the game for a certain amount of time, the game will reward the user by sending them a Bitcoin tip.
Moss is of the view that though he has come across a few concept games that use Bitcoin micro-transactions, nothing on the iOS app store he believes having a popular iOS app that incorporates Bitcoin can go a long way to helping it become mainstream. He further says that he is currently working on a new Bitcoin mining game.
He concludes and says that it is still in the early stages of development; however, the player will be able to dig, similar to Minecraft, and collect real Bitcoin."

I hope the game will become popular. This could potentially introduce bitcoin to millions of people. Perhaps, kids will adopt bitcoin and become 'native' users. I could easily see kids earning tiny amounts of bitcoin in these kind of games and then using those bitcoins to buy stuff from each other or from some internet site.

I would have thought Zynga would have done this long ago. I hope they become the next Zynga.

[sickpig]

(answer to "what is constant time?")

A countermeasure against

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack

?

Although I can't think of a practical scenario where a typical user would ever be exposed to this, yes, the concern is side-channel attacks (e.g., a timing attack):

( ... cut a lot of helpful links, quote and explanations ... )

I think deterministic signatures are much more important than constant-time signatures (there's been a non-trivial amount of funds lost due to the repeat k-value problem but I doubt a single satoshi has ever been lost due to a genuine side-channel attack).  Someone like gmaxwell could comment better on the practical risks here…

I concur with all you said. I think that Pieter Wuille took a chance to snap in this "constant time" thing while writing libsecp256k1. What seems weird to me is that they don't mention the main advantage of replacing OpenSSL with such "custom made" signing tool: speed.

Quoting a gmaxwell's email to the bitocoin-development mailing list (related to the headers-first sync feature):

(I'm using 295k as the target here because after that point ecdsa
dominates, and then your 6+x faster libsecp256k makes more of a
difference)

(bold is mine)

about that matter, this is an interesting post on reddit by gmaxwell (aka nullc):

On why 0.10's release notes say "we have reason to believe that libsecp256k1 is better tested and more thoroughly reviewed than the implementation in OpenSSL"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2rrxq7/on_why_010s_release_notes_say_we_have_reason_to/

to make a long story short: while working on this new libsecp256k1 Pieter Wuille and Greg Maxwell found a new OpenSSL flaw (CVE-2014-3570).

@cypher, this quote could be interesting to you:

This library is part of what Pieter and I are working on at Blockstream.

[cypherdoc]

A Latin American tragedy

http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-latin-american-tragedy.html?m=1

[molecular]

A Latin American tragedy

http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-latin-american-tragedy.html?m=1

good read.

it ends with the suggestion that this is not a wholly latin american story, pointing to greece.

[cypherdoc]

A Latin American tragedy

http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-latin-american-tragedy.html?m=1

good read.

it ends with the suggestion that this is not a wholly latin american story, pointing to greece.

yeah, i like how it went thru the process/stages of financial destruction.  i fail to see how Bitcoin could not help that situation esp when all the corruption is coming from the top.

btw, thx for your contributions to the IBLT discussion over on Reddit.  insightful.  feel free to share them here to help us all understand better as we go forward.

[JorgeStolfi]

A Latin American tragedy
http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-latin-american-tragedy.html?m=1

A complicated analysis, too long to read, but does not seem to give due relevance to one main factor:

Unlike its Latin American neighbors,  Venezuela has little domestic production of anything but oil.  Almost everyhing, inclding food, is imported with revenue from oil exports. The socialistoid regime of Chavez and Maduro redistributed that revenue, but did not change this fact.  With oil  prices down 50% or more, no fiscal or monetary policy will avoid the crunch in their standard of living.

As happened in Greece, Italy, and Spain, the "austerity measures" that bankers (and banker magazines) want to see applied would mean diverting a larger portion of the people's wealth and revenue to bankers, to ensure that they would contunue to profit while the rest of the country gets even worse.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

A Latin American tragedy
http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-latin-american-tragedy.html?m=1

A complicated analysis, too long to read, but does not seem to give due relevance to one main factor:

Unlike its Latin American neighbors,  Venezuela has little domestic production of anything but oil.  Almost everyhing, inclding food, is imported with revenue from oil exports. The socialistoid regime of Chavez and Maduro redistributed that revenue, but did not change this fact.  With oil  prices down 50% or more, no fiscal or monetary policy will avoid the crunch in their standard of living.

As happened in Greece, Italy, and Spain, the "austerity measures" that bankers (and banker magazines) want to see applied would mean diverting a larger portion of the people's wealth and revenue to bankers, to ensure that they would contunue to profit while the rest of the country gets even worse.

Let the people buy gold.

[molecular]

btw, thx for your contributions to the IBLT discussion over on Reddit.  insightful.  feel free to share them here to help us all understand better as we go forward.

do you mean this thread started 5 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2d7ofh/technical_discussion_of_gavins_o1_block/ ?

[molecular]

Let the people buy gold.

*adjusts monocle made from bitium*

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Let the people buy gold.

*adjusts monocle made from bitium*

 

[cypherdoc]

btw, thx for your contributions to the IBLT discussion over on Reddit.  insightful.  feel free to share them here to help us all understand better as we go forward.

do you mean this thread started 5 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2d7ofh/technical_discussion_of_gavins_o1_block/ ?

yep

[molecular]

btw, thx for your contributions to the IBLT discussion over on Reddit.  insightful.  feel free to share them here to help us all understand better as we go forward.

do you mean this thread started 5 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2d7ofh/technical_discussion_of_gavins_o1_block/ ?

yep

not sure which parts you found insightful, but here's the gist about this proposed application of IBLT (invertible bloom lookup tables) from my point of view for anyone who wants a tldr on this:

IBLTs (Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables) are a data structure of tremendous beauty. They allow synchronization of sets of key/value pairs using constant (pre-determined) size of the synchronization message. They work well if the differences are expected to be small, but can potentially fail completely if they are too large for the size chosen. Another nice feature is that in case of a one way master -> slave synchronization, there is only one synchronization message that can be used in identical form to synchronize an unlimited number of potentially different 'slave' sets. Essentially the synchronization method contains information about the complete master set, but in a lossy way such that it can only be retrieved if a large enough number of key/values of the set are already known by the slave.

The idea is to apply this to the problem of bitcoin block transmission. The assumption can be made that the set of transactions in a freshly found block is already known to a large extent by the other miners because transactions have already been broadcast and inclusion policies are fairly uniform or at least predictable. So an IBLT of a chosen size (the miner can choose the size) can be used to propagate the transactions of the block (master) to the other miners (slaves). Since the slaves can make a pretty good estimate of the set of transactions that might be in a newly found block by using some standard inclusion policy, the size of the IBLT can likely be chosen to be quite small.

One effect of this scheme is that this IBLT synchronization message would be the same size, no matter how many transactions are included in a block. This is in contrast to the current situation where the synchronization message is essentially the block itself, so its size depends greatly on the number and size of transactions included. It is clear that miners are incentivized to mine smaller blocks because that greatly increases the probability of winning a potential race in case another miner found a block at a similar time due to transmission and therefor block propagation delays in the network. Thus using this scheme would remove the incentive to mine small blocks by removing the cost of larger blocks. Gavin calculated this cost to be some non-negligible number.

A possible downside could be that non-standard inclusion policies (think eligius, for example) might necessitate a large IBLT und thus be disincetivised.

What this doesn't do: it doesn't magically solve any scaling issues. At most it reduces the overall bandwidth requirements by 50%. Miners still need to have enough bandwidth to receive all transactions that are being broadcast.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Hey guys. What is being done (or what can be done) about competing with the likes of Visa as far as number of transactions it can accomodate and how quickly?

[xcrabber]

Hey guys. What is being done (or what can be done) about competing with the likes of Visa as far as number of transactions it can accomodate and how quickly?

SIDECHAINS