Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[thezerg]

i'm going to lock this poll by tomorrow and put up a new one given Gavin's "announcement" so get your voting in now.

How about all of the above, stop wasting gavin's precious time, and do it sooner to give ppl some confidence that micropayments will be economically viable so we can get on with building stuff on the blockchain. Stuff that actually delves into areas where fiat cannot go rather then merely providing small benefits to those who have already set up wallets and little to no benefit to those who must do the whole education thing and then the time inefficient fiat btc xfer btc fiat circus.

If Bitcoin's precious blockchain has no greater destiny than to be used for an eternal record of inconsequential "micropayments" the project has no future.

Stop trying to enable the fluffy VC daydream of 'enabling tipping economies' and worry about macropayments.

This is revolution against the BIS, etc. and a chance to evolve past gold as humanity's default store of value, not a call to replace Reddit gold/Dogecoin/TipBot.

The places "where fiat cannot go" that matter are brain/paper/hardware wallets, multi-sig, and realtime auditing, not giving some Redditard 0.000000001 BTC for confirming your bias with a snarky comment.

Too bad we have to wait an entire year to watch Mircea shit all over GavinCoin.  It's worse than waiting for the next season of Walking Dead!

Agreed.

Bitcoin is much better suited to the store of value function.

Why do you think Goldman Sachs et all are trying to pigeon-hole bitcoin as merely a "payments network"?

*also, increasing block size does nothing to address the "instant payment" problem.

The only thing Bitcoin needs to retain the SOV function is that it maintains its fixed supply. No one is talking about changing that. What you're forgetting is that thousands of years ago gold coins were in fact used on a daily basis to buy loaves of bread. Increasing usage in day to day TX's would maximize its utility as money and drive it's value much higher. The increase TX volume is clearly necessary to feed miners over the long run via fees.  Bitcoins usage needs to be driven to the far ends of the earth into the hands of a many people as possible to guarantee is safety.

Exactly.  I don't care about changetip.  I care about buying cell phone minutes, buying wifi access, per-play songs now that grooveshark RIP, email spam deterrence, cloud VM services, and other things.  And other compelling use cases like remittance.  For every person who uses that Bitcoin 2 way ATM in the Philippines (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/34t7pw/in_the_middle_of_a_busy_makati_city_street_in_the/), there is probably another person who accepts BTC from a friend simply because the ATM exists.

Yes Bitcoin is probably not the final solution to micropayments.  BUT micropayments will drive adoption.  And as Cypherdoc suggested above, the position we want to be in to reinforce SOV is one where Bitcoin has enabled a micropayment ecosystem which due to Bitcoin's incredible popularity has to move to an alt-coin or sidechain.  The position we don't want to be in is where Bitcoin limps along as an investment-mostly commodity but always in the back of investors minds is the thought that if just 3 companies shut down (for example, 2 exchanges and a payment processor), the ability to get out of the investment could drop dramatically and persist for a long period of time (forever).

SOV has the biggest immediate impact on price, but # users, # merchants, and # transactions is a measure of the "intrinsic value" which is what is backing SOV.  That's why we are seeing the latter rise but price stay steady.

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[justusranvier]

I don't think we need the same security model for buying loaves of bread that we use for buying homes,.

Of course you do, once you understand what the security problem is.

The entire job of the Bitcoin network is to make sure that the number of currency units is exactly correct at all times.

There's probably a hundred million loaves of bread sold every day, which represents a hundred million opportunities to improperly expand the currency supply.

[cypherdoc]

I don't think we need the same security model for buying loaves of bread that we use for buying homes,.

Of course you do, once you understand what the security problem is.

The entire job of the Bitcoin network is to make sure that the number of currency units is exactly correct at all times.

There's probably a hundred million loaves of bread sold every day, which represents a hundred million opportunities to improperly expand the currency supply.

Give me an inch and I'll take a mile?

Sounds like banks.

[cypherdoc]

I don't think we need the same security model for buying loaves of bread that we use for buying homes,.

Of course you do, once you understand what the security problem is.

The entire job of the Bitcoin network is to make sure that the number of currency units is exactly correct at all times.

There's probably a hundred million loaves of bread sold every day, which represents a hundred million opportunities to improperly expand the currency supply.

Give me an inch and I'll take a mile?

Sounds like banks.

Maybe the better analogy would be HFT bots that steal pennies on every trade. Multiply that by 100M and pretty soon you're making real money.

[justusranvier]

Multiply that by 100M and pretty soon you're making real money.

Here's an example of a money protocol that allowed for "only" 3%/year worth of double spending:

[cypherdoc]

Grinding higher

[justusranvier]

Far from it. Though I expect each can approach it on their chosen level and interpret it through familiar lens filters, however limiting and distorted that may prove to be.

I assumed you were referring to the Lightning Network method of creating a jobs program for soon-to-unemployed bankers rather than just solving the Bitcoin scalability problem directly.

[mrhelpful]

If the fall our dollar started way way back, and comparing now shouldnt it be on the road to zimbawe money.

But its not doing this because other international reletionships doing the same thing for others and private loans to one another. Its crazy cause I just a recent documentary where this guy bought $3 mill companies with cash he didnt have and went to the bank asking for it.  

Since the rates were dirt cheap.

[lunarboy]

Auzzies going to be the first to tax savings? The war on savers heats up.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-04/war-cash-australia-leads-new-age-economic-totalitarianism

[cypherdoc]

*btw, I'm still curious what your full node consumes in bandwidth?

[cypherdoc]

just to memorialize the results of last poll:

[cypherdoc]

new poll

[Erdogan]

new poll

Cool, but this time there is no "unlimited" option.

[cypherdoc]

new poll

Cool, but this time there is no "unlimited" option.

well, certainly i'm no expert in polling; i just feed 'em like i see 'em.

if you have any suggestions, lemme know.

edit:  given Gavin's proposal, it looks like the "unlimited" option is off the table for now, so in this sense, this latest poll is heading in the right direction.

[Erdogan]

new poll

Cool, but this time there is no "unlimited" option.

well, certainly i'm no expert in polling; i just feed 'em like i see 'em.

if you have any suggestions, lemme know.

edit:  given Gavin's proposal, it looks like the "unlimited" option is off the table for now, so in this sense, this latest poll is heading in the right direction.

Yes, let's get 20 MB going, then new poll

[Natalia_AnatolioPAMM]

Multiply that by 100M and pretty soon you're making real money.

Here's an example of a money protocol that allowed for "only" 3%/year worth of double spending:

never realized it's that bad unless saw the graphs like this one

[rocks]

Multiply that by 100M and pretty soon you're making real money.

Here's an example of a money protocol that allowed for "only" 3%/year worth of double spending:

never realized it's that bad unless saw the graphs like this one

Even this chart is misleading, since it is linear it does not show how the dollar continued drop over the past 30 years. Instead it looks relatively flat.

The log chart shows how this process is continuing. Even though the dollar has already lost 98% purchasing power, dropping to 99% is really another 50% lose, not the 1% drop shown on this chart.

[sickpig]

With UTXO merkle tree the whole thing does not need to be in phone RAM.  Or even on the phone.  phone clients could validate and fwd txns iff they are connected to wifi.  The only parts of the UTXO merkle tree that needs to be processed is the logn route from each UTXO involved in a txn to the tree root.  So very doable on today's mid range smart phone esp with a good sized uSD expansion.

On that matter I've just found out an etotheipi's (armory core dev) proposal "Ultimate blockchain compression w/ trust-free lite nodes" that he made in June 2012. This is the summary:

Use a special tree data structure to organize all unspent-TxOuts on the network, and use the root of this tree to communicate its "signature" between nodes.  The leaves of this tree actually correspond to addresses/scripts, and the data at the leaf is actually a root of the unspent-TxOut list for that address/script.  To maintain security of the tree signatures, it will be included in the header of an alternate blockchain, which will be secured by merged mining.  

This provides the same compression as the simpler unspent-TxOut merkle tree, but also gives nodes a way to download just the unspent-TxOut list for each address in their wallet, and verify that list directly against the blockheaders.  Therefore, even lightweight nodes can get full address information, from any untrusted peer, and with only a tiny amount of downloaded data (a few kB).  

More recently TierNolan with his "Locally verifiable unspent transaction output commitments" is "sketching" his idea of a potential implementation. 

A proposal to help SPV nodes verify blocks is to commit the root of an (unbalanced) Merkle tree containing all unspent (and spendable) transaction outputs.

It is possible to create proofs of validity for each modification of the set.  The proof would prove that inserting an entry into a tree with a root of X will give a new tree with a root of Y.  There would also be proofs for removing entries.

it seems that the idea of an "UTXO" light node to add to the the list of the already implemented nodes (full, spv, pruned) is gaining momentum.

[HeliKopterBen]

Bitcoin, while its issuance is capped at 21M, the software can be duplicated thousands of times.

The ability to clone/fork the software is a feature, not a bug.  Take the Euro for example, which is under a round of QE right now.  Imagine if Euro savers could easily clone the entire Euro monetary system, take out the QE, and put the QE_less system into production to compete.  Which fork would win?  I imagine sound money would win.

The only thing that cannot be duplicated is processing power.  Processing power is in finite supply, so whichever fork garners the most processing power wins.  The ability to clone the software keeps the system honest.

[tabnloz]

Grabbed this off ZH

Australia to Introduce Bank Deposits tax in upcoming budget.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-04/war-cash-australia-leads-new-age-economic-totalitarianism

From a google search

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/financial-services/deposit-tax-banks-oppose-budget-tax-plan/story-fn91wd6x-1227284293520

ZH sees it as a trial balloon with US watching the reaction carefully.