Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Fakhoury]

Gold preparing to take the next dive.

mayeb the last one

but probably not.

i firmly believe we will see <900$ gold and eventually <500$ gold

yes, gold is useless in the new digital age.

Kindly tell me, when gold goes down in terms of price, how bitcoin makes use of this ?

Thank you.

[1713545226]

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[1713545226]

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[Peter R]

...
The UXTO constraint may never be solved in an acceptable (sub)linear way, or the solution(s) could for political reasons never be implemented in BTC.
...

Almost certainly 'never' by any realistic definition of various things.
...
Solving 'the UTXO problem' would require what is by most definitions 'magic'.  Perhaps some future quantum-effect storage, communications, and processing schemes could 'solve' the problem but I'm not expecting to pick up such technology at Fry's by the next holiday season (Moore's law notwithstanding.)

A comment from chriswilmer got me thinking…

The UTXO set is actually bounded. The total amount of satoshis that will ever exists is

   (21x10^6) x (10^8) = 2.1 x 10^15 = 2.1 "peta-sats"
...
...
OK, now let's be reasonable!  Let's assume that 10 billion people on earth each control about 4 unspent outputs on average.  That's a total of 40 billion outputs, or

    (40 x 10^9) x (65 bytes) = 2.6 terabytes

With these assumptions, it now only takes about 20 of those SD cards to store the UTXO set:

    (2.6 x 10^12) / (128 x 10^9) = 20.3,

or, three 1-terrabyte SSDs, for a total cost of about $1,500.  
...

I have thought about this bounding (mostly in the context of the current rather awkward/deceptive 'unspendable dust' settings.)  I think that there is currently, and probably for quite some time, some big problems with this rosy picture:

 - UTXO is changing in real time through it's entire population.  This necessitates currently (as I understand things) a rather more sophisticated data-structure than something mineable like the blockchain.  UTXO is in ram and under the thing that replaced BDB (forgot the name of that database at the moment) because seeks, inserts, and deletes are bus intensive and, again, in constant flux.

Agreed.  The UTXO can be thought of as "hot" storage that's continually being updated, while the blockchain can be thought of as "cold" storage that does not have the same requirements for random memory reads and writes.  However, the UTXO doesn't need to sit entirely in RAM (e.g., the uncompressed UTXO set is, AFAIK, around 2 GB, but bitcoind runs without problem on machines with less RAM).  

...but would be interested to see a proof-of-concept, simulator, prototype, etc.

Agreed.  What I'm curious about is the extent to which the UTXO database could be optimized algorithmically and with custom hardware.  

Consider the above scenario where 10 billion people control on average 4 unspent outputs (40 billion coins), giving us a UTXO set approximately 2.6 TB in size.  Now, let's assume that we sort these coins perfectly and write them to a database.  Since they're sorted, we can find any coin using binary search in no more than 36 read operations (about 65 bytes each):

   log₂(40x10^9) = 36  

Rough numbers: A typical NAND FLASH chip permits random access reads within about 30 us, a typical NOR FLASH chip within about 200 ns, and perhaps less than 20 ns for SDRAM, so it takes about

   36 x 30 us = 900 us (NAND FLASH)
   36 x 200 ns = 7.2 us (NOR FLASH)
   36 x 20 ns = 0.72 us (SDRAM)

to find a particular coin if there's 40 billion of them.  If we commit 10% or our time to looking up coins, to match Visa's average rate of 2,000 TPS means we need to be able to find a particular coin in

   (1 sec x 10%) / (2000 /sec) = 50 us.  

My gut tells me that looking up coins isn't too daunting a problem, even if 10 billion people each control 4 coins, and, in aggregate, make 2,000 transactions per seconds.  

...Of course, the UTXO is constantly evolving.  As coins get spent, we have to mark them as spent and then eventually erase them from the database, and add the new coins to that database that were created.  If we assume the typical TX creates 2 new coins, then this means we need to write about

    (65 bytes per coin) x (2 coins per TX) x (2000 TXs per sec) = 0.26 MB/sec

Again, this isn't fast.  Even an SD card like the SanDisk Extreme Pro has a write speed up to 95 MB/s.

Of course, this is the speed for sequential writes, and we'll need to do plenty of (slower) random writes and erase operations, but note that 0.26 MB means that only  

    0.26 MB / 2.6 TB = 0.00001 %

of our database is modified each second, or about 1% per day.  


My questions, then, are:

  - To what extent can we develop algorithms to optimize the UTXO database problem?  
  - What is the best hardware design for such a database?

[adamstgBit]

Gold preparing to take the next dive.

mayeb the last one

but probably not.

i firmly believe we will see <900$ gold and eventually <500$ gold

yes, gold is useless in the new digital age.

Kindly tell me, when gold goes down in terms of price, how bitcoin makes use of this ?

Thank you.

poeple try to figure out why gold is collapsing, then they learn about bitcoin and how its like gold but better...

Bitcoin: Divisible  Gold: ever try to take 42.00$ worth of gold off of a 1oz gold coin? fuck no! that's just crazy!?

Bitcoin: Impossible to counterfeit       Gold: fake gold plated coins and bars are known to be on the market, nearly impossible to know without drilling a hole in your bar / coin.

Bitcoin: Scarce    Gold: who the fuck knows how many Mega Tones of Gold are hidden in the next Asteroid

Bitcoin: Portable  Gold: Ever try to cross a border with 10,000$ of gold in your ass??

Bitcoin : Fungible  1BTC = 1BTC always  Gold: 1 gold coin don't necessary have the same value as another gold coin, in fact they all have slightly different values.

Bitcoin: Shiny As fuck   Gold: only Shiny because it's been processed and polished , a long and expensive process  


side note gold has a $6,946,890,374,198 market cap

gold isn't threatening to displace WU
gold can't be used online
gold can't be used for micro payment
gold can't survive bitcoin period the end

[kaykawa]

Bitgold looks good,

I'm saving my $$ in gold,

The only "issue" is the time of "transactions", are a bit slow, imho.

(24 - 48 hrs)

[Wekkel]

Gold preparing to take the next dive.

mayeb the last one

but probably not.

i firmly believe we will see <900$ gold and eventually <500$ gold

yes, gold is useless in the new digital age.

The same goes for paper. Gold has its use and it have its day, eventually....

[Adrian-x]

some call it altruistic but I prefer to think they will use greed for the grater good.

 

Nash was a great man.  watch the video:

https://twitter.com/cypherdoc2/status/602533856290349056

thanks,
I had seen that but thatch itagain, we are interdependent, its great, I also revised my post as it didn't express my thought as intended. (i love my predictive text ;-)

[kaykawa]

With the upcoming collapse of mainstream Western fiat currencies, including the U.S. dollar, cryptocurrencies could very well save us.

[sickpig]

http://blockstream.com/2015/05/27/welcoming-new-members-of-team-blockstream/

[sickpig]

Blockstream hired Rusty Russell to work on a lightning network implementation. This is going to be big.

Now it appears that the development efforts for sidechains and lightning networks are coming together. Russel, who joined Blockstream a few weeks ago, is working on lightning networks, and one of his first actions was to set up a Blockstream-hosted mailing list for “Discussion of the development of the Lightning Network, a caching layer for bitcoin.” The new mailing list archives are freely accessible.

“They hired me,” Russel said on Reddit. “We agreed I’d be working on developing lightning. I set up a mailing list and am developing a toy prototype to explore the ideas. Will put on github once that’s ready (two weeks?) but it’s a long long way from anything someone could use. I’m excited about lightning, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

[cypherdoc]

Dow down - 115.24.

All hands on deck.

[cypherdoc]

Blockstream hired Rusty Russell to work on a lightning network implementation. This is going to be big.

Now it appears that the development efforts for sidechains and lightning networks are coming together. Russel, who joined Blockstream a few weeks ago, is working on lightning networks, and one of his first actions was to set up a Blockstream-hosted mailing list for “Discussion of the development of the Lightning Network, a caching layer for bitcoin.” The new mailing list archives are freely accessible.

“They hired me,” Russel said on Reddit. “We agreed I’d be working on developing lightning. I set up a mailing list and am developing a toy prototype to explore the ideas. Will put on github once that’s ready (two weeks?) but it’s a long long way from anything someone could use. I’m excited about lightning, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Explain to me why requiring centralized lightning nodes to be up 24/7 is a good thing?

[sickpig]

Blockstream hired Rusty Russell to work on a lightning network implementation. This is going to be big.

Now it appears that the development efforts for sidechains and lightning networks are coming together. Russel, who joined Blockstream a few weeks ago, is working on lightning networks, and one of his first actions was to set up a Blockstream-hosted mailing list for “Discussion of the development of the Lightning Network, a caching layer for bitcoin.” The new mailing list archives are freely accessible.

“They hired me,” Russel said on Reddit. “We agreed I’d be working on developing lightning. I set up a mailing list and am developing a toy prototype to explore the ideas. Will put on github once that’s ready (two weeks?) but it’s a long long way from anything someone could use. I’m excited about lightning, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Explain to me why requiring centralized lightning nodes to be up 24/7 is a good thing?

To buy your coffee? /sarcasm

I though that increasing on-chain bitcoin network capacity is necessary (even for a lightning network
implementation 3tps avg isn't enough(*)), that said I believe that a mainly-offline-sync-once-in-while
solution to increase system capacity even more is desirable.

This solution would be the result of a trade-off between different aspects: centralization, capacity, privacy, etc. etc.

As I already said I won't use LN to buy a house, but I will definitely use it for my daily expenses.

Sure If we were able to find some kind of mechanism that would not require a softfork, it would be amazing.
Unfortunately, as sidechains also LN need a new opcode (and a solution to tx malleability) to be properly implemented.

(*) on this podcast:

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/epicenter-bitcoin-joseph-poon-and-tadge-dryja-scalability-and-the-lightning-network

Joseph Poon & Tadge Dryja, authors of the LN white paper, explicitly state that a max block size
has to be increased to implement what they envision.

[cypherdoc]

...
The UXTO constraint may never be solved in an acceptable (sub)linear way, or the solution(s) could for political reasons never be implemented in BTC.
...

Almost certainly 'never' by any realistic definition of various things.
...
Solving 'the UTXO problem' would require what is by most definitions 'magic'.  Perhaps some future quantum-effect storage, communications, and processing schemes could 'solve' the problem but I'm not expecting to pick up such technology at Fry's by the next holiday season (Moore's law notwithstanding.)

A comment from chriswilmer got me thinking…

The UTXO set is actually bounded. The total amount of satoshis that will ever exists is

   (21x10^6) x (10^8) = 2.1 x 10^15 = 2.1 "peta-sats"
...
...
OK, now let's be reasonable!  Let's assume that 10 billion people on earth each control about 4 unspent outputs on average.  That's a total of 40 billion outputs, or

    (40 x 10^9) x (65 bytes) = 2.6 terabytes

With these assumptions, it now only takes about 20 of those SD cards to store the UTXO set:

    (2.6 x 10^12) / (128 x 10^9) = 20.3,

or, three 1-terrabyte SSDs, for a total cost of about $1,500.  
...

I have thought about this bounding (mostly in the context of the current rather awkward/deceptive 'unspendable dust' settings.)  I think that there is currently, and probably for quite some time, some big problems with this rosy picture:

 - UTXO is changing in real time through it's entire population.  This necessitates currently (as I understand things) a rather more sophisticated data-structure than something mineable like the blockchain.  UTXO is in ram and under the thing that replaced BDB (forgot the name of that database at the moment) because seeks, inserts, and deletes are bus intensive and, again, in constant flux.

Agreed.  The UTXO can be thought of as "hot" storage that's continually being updated, while the blockchain can be thought of as "cold" storage that does not have the same requirements for random memory reads and writes.  However, the UTXO doesn't need to sit entirely in RAM (e.g., the uncompressed UTXO set is, AFAIK, around 2 GB, but bitcoind runs without problem on machines with less RAM).  

...but would be interested to see a proof-of-concept, simulator, prototype, etc.

Agreed.  What I'm curious about is the extent to which the UTXO database could be optimized algorithmically and with custom hardware.  

Consider the above scenario where 10 billion people control on average 4 unspent outputs (40 billion coins), giving us a UTXO set approximately 2.6 TB in size.  Now, let's assume that we sort these coins perfectly and write them to a database.  Since they're sorted, we can find any coin using binary search in no more than 36 read operations (about 65 bytes each):

   log₂(40x10^9) = 36  

Rough numbers: A typical NAND FLASH chip permits random access reads within about 30 us, a typical NOR FLASH chip within about 200 ns, and perhaps less than 20 ns for SDRAM, so it takes about

   36 x 30 us = 900 us (NAND FLASH)
   36 x 200 ns = 7.2 us (NOR FLASH)
   36 x 20 ns = 0.72 us (SDRAM)

to find a particular coin if there's 40 billion of them.  If we commit 10% or our time to looking up coins, to match Visa's average rate of 2,000 TPS means we need to be able to find a particular coin in

   (1 sec x 10%) / (2000 /sec) = 50 us.  

My gut tells me that looking up coins isn't too daunting a problem, even if 10 billion people each control 4 coins, and, in aggregate, make 2,000 transactions per seconds.  

...Of course, the UTXO is constantly evolving.  As coins get spent, we have to mark them as spent and then eventually erase them from the database, and add the new coins to that database that were created.  If we assume the typical TX creates 2 new coins, then this means we need to write about

    (65 bytes per coin) x (2 coins per TX) x (2000 TXs per sec) = 0.26 MB/sec

Again, this isn't fast.  Even an SD card like the SanDisk Extreme Pro has a write speed up to 95 MB/s.

Of course, this is the speed for sequential writes, and we'll need to do plenty of (slower) random writes and erase operations, but note that 0.26 MB means that only  

    0.26 MB / 2.6 TB = 0.00001 %

of our database is modified each second, or about 1% per day.  


My questions, then, are:

  - To what extent can we develop algorithms to optimize the UTXO database problem?  
  - What is the best hardware design for such a database?

Mike Hearns on reddit:

If the block creates the outputs that it does itself spend all those outputs will be in RAM cache. So they will be effectively free to check.

LevelDB is very fast, even on a spinning hard disk. You can't assume 1 UTXO = 1 seek.

https://github.com/google/leveldb

readrandom   :      16.677 micros/op;  (approximately 60,000 reads per second)

60,000 reads per second, for random access.

This isn't a problem. Gavin is being highly conservative and I think panicked a little - LevelDB effectively sorts keys by hotness (due to the leveled SSTable structure). So old/dormant coins will eventually fall to the bottom of the pile and be a bit slower to access, with the benefit that recent coins are near the top and are cheaper to access. People who try and create then spend coins over and over again to waste IOPs are going to be very frustrated by their lack of success.

And now I'm off to the airport for a two week holiday. Have fun guys!

[cypherdoc]

there's a real danger here that if the other 1MB core devs don't get off their asses and help out Gavin & Mike, their roles as core devs could be relegated to the dustbin of history.  this is a great chance for those talented devs who have felt rejected or humiliated from the likes of current core devs to get their foot in the door.  we clearly know they exist and in great #'s.  core dev is a highly coveted position leading to all sorts of great opportunities as the Blockstream core dev's refusal to step down in the name of conflict of interest very well demonstrates.

from Mike Hearns on Reddit:

[–]mike_hearn 70 points 7 hours ago

Short of some last minute change of heart by Wladimir and the other committers, it looks like Bitcoin XT may soon become more important.
I am looking for someone to help develop a website and logo for it. If you're interested please hop onto the mailing list and let me know:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bitcoin-xt
Or you can just email me: hearn@vinumeris.com
If things go ahead and running XT becomes the way to express an opt-in to larger blocks, I will also be looking for volunteers to help co-build the binaries with gitian.
Finally I am looking for anyone who has experience with managing patchsets in git. My current workflow of one-branch-per-feature plus one-branch-per-release is fiddly and fragile. I plan to reorganise things at some point. Suggestions for better approaches are welcome.

permalinksavecontextfull comments (499)reportgive gold

[justusranvier]

there's a real danger here that if the other 1MB core devs don't get off their asses and help out Gavin & Mike, their roles as core devs could be relegated to the dustbin of history.  this is a great chance for those talented devs who have felt rejected or humiliated from the likes of current core devs to get their foot in the door.  we clearly know they exist and in great #'s.  core dev is a highly coveted position leading to all sorts of great opportunities as the Blockstream core dev's refusal to step down in the name of conflict of interest very well demonstrates.

from Mike Hearns on Reddit:

[–]mike_hearn 70 points 7 hours ago

Short of some last minute change of heart by Wladimir and the other committers, it looks like Bitcoin XT may soon become more important.
I am looking for someone to help develop a website and logo for it. If you're interested please hop onto the mailing list and let me know:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bitcoin-xt
Or you can just email me: hearn@vinumeris.com
If things go ahead and running XT becomes the way to express an opt-in to larger blocks, I will also be looking for volunteers to help co-build the binaries with gitian.
Finally I am looking for anyone who has experience with managing patchsets in git. My current workflow of one-branch-per-feature plus one-branch-per-release is fiddly and fragile. I plan to reorganise things at some point. Suggestions for better approaches are welcome.

permalinksavecontextfull comments (499)reportgive gold

If they are going to take this step anyway, they should dump all Bitcoin Core's technical debt by switching to btcsuite as their reference implementation.

[NewLiberty]

there's a real danger here that if the other 1MB core devs don't get off their asses and help out Gavin & Mike, their roles as core devs could be relegated to the dustbin of history.  this is a great chance for those talented devs who have felt rejected or humiliated from the likes of current core devs to get their foot in the door.  we clearly know they exist and in great #'s.  core dev is a highly coveted position leading to all sorts of great opportunities as the Blockstream core dev's refusal to step down in the name of conflict of interest very well demonstrates.

from Mike Hearns on Reddit:

[–]mike_hearn 70 points 7 hours ago

Short of some last minute change of heart by Wladimir and the other committers, it looks like Bitcoin XT may soon become more important.
I am looking for someone to help develop a website and logo for it. If you're interested please hop onto the mailing list and let me know:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bitcoin-xt
Or you can just email me: hearn@vinumeris.com
If things go ahead and running XT becomes the way to express an opt-in to larger blocks, I will also be looking for volunteers to help co-build the binaries with gitian.
Finally I am looking for anyone who has experience with managing patchsets in git. My current workflow of one-branch-per-feature plus one-branch-per-release is fiddly and fragile. I plan to reorganise things at some point. Suggestions for better approaches are welcome.

If they are going to take this step anyway, they should dump all Bitcoin Core's technical debt by switching to btcsuite as their reference implementation.

I like the freedom and choice, and the commitment to their best work such that they will endeavor to express it independently.
If only all of this were better communicated.  Without snarkiness, without ultimatums.

[iCEBREAKER]

Gavin moving forward. Will you be left behind? :

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34155307/

There you go again.  Using fear (this time, of being "left behind" from the glorious rapture of GavinCoin) to sell a hard fork.

The rough consensus of all non-Gavin core devs is against 20mb blocks in the near future.

But for some reason, Gavin will only accept a consensus which aligns with his position.  Who does he think he is, Linux Torvalds or Evan Duffield?

So how does Gavin the pointy-headed boss react to being unable to convince his coders and engineers?

By lobbying (*cough, panicking, cough*) the drooling masses in an attempt to overrule the experts with a stampeding mob.

That's not the path of "calm down already" suggested by Nick Szabo.

The Gavin tail is trying to wag the core dev dog, which guarantees the predictable "rancor" he's whining about.

Ironically, when the wheels fall off of GavinCoin because of UXTO assplosions or whatever, these spurned core devs will be the ones Gavin and everyone else will turn to for solutions.  Typical "Oops I broke it, now you fix it" pointy-headed boss behavior!   

If persistent full 1mb blocks turn out to be an insurmountable problem, consensus to modify that limit would not need to be manufactured with lobbying and tales of impending dooom.

[iCEBREAKER]

There's a peculiar kind of incoherence about people who can argue both for decentralization and also argue that users of the system can not be relied up to decide their own best interest

IOW, the tragedy of the commons is a concept unknown to you:

A 20x resource and cost increase will have impact.

The cost to throw 19MB of spam into the blockchain is suddenly the same as the cost of 500KB today. These costs are magically externalized onto the volunteer network.

It is very easy to vote for a plan when others are bearing the cost.

-jgarzik @ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/356twp/nick_szabo_zooko_pwuille_gavinandresen_infinity/

Please go back to designing JustusCoin; we don't need your economic illiteracy creating incoherency and confusion here.

[cypherdoc]

Gavin moving forward. Will you be left behind? :

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34155307/

There you go again.  Using fear (this time, of being "left behind" from the glorious rapture of GavinCoin) to sell a hard fork.

The rough consensus of all non-Gavin core devs is against 20mb blocks in the near future.

But for some reason, Gavin will only accept a consensus which aligns with his position.  Who does he think he is, Linux Torvalds or Evan Duffield?

So how does Gavin the pointy-headed boss react to being unable to convince his coders and engineers?

By lobbying (*cough, panicking, cough*) the drooling masses in an attempt to overrule the experts with a stampeding mob.

That's not the path of "calm down already" suggested by Nick Szabo.

The Gavin tail is trying to wag the core dev dog, which guarantees the predictable "rancor" he's whining about.

Ironically, when the wheels fall off of GavinCoin because of UXTO assplosions or whatever, these spurned core devs will be the ones Gavin and everyone else will turn to for solutions.  Typical "Oops I broke it, now you fix it" pointy-headed boss behavior!  

If persistent full 1mb blocks turn out to be an insurmountable problem, consensus to modify that limit would not need to be manufactured with lobbying and tales of impending dooom.

take a look at how a rag tag army of volunteers can clog up the network.  we're still stuck at over 23000 unconf tx's, with a peak around 25000, now about 2 hrs later:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37rwph/stress_test_for_the_next_few_hours_ill_be/

[TPTB_need_war]

Pretty bold claims from Middleton, but I have tried it and it works, at least in a beta phase, not vapor phase or proof of concept phase, but beta phase.  You can trade all tickers that Cypherdoc mentions on here.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's not a fair presumption. Most tech dudes (and most people in general) use the financial system and have absolutely no idea how it works. Does that mean that your money doesn't spend? Veritaseum, from a capital perspective, is fully decentralized. It is the only automated system that I know of that is fully autonomous in that you keep your private keys private and on your client under your control. All transactions are peer to peer through the blockchain, and our server doesn't touch, house, hold, custody or control a single satoshi of your coin. Read http://veritaseum.com/index.php/homes/1-blog/128-will-new-vc-investment-trump-the-returns-of-the-early-movers-in-the-digital-currency-space-quite-possibly-let-me-show-you-how and http://veritaseum.com/index.php/homes/1-blog/94-bitcoin-1-0-vs-2-0-or-a-comparison-of-legacy-exchanges-veritaseum-s-ultracoin for the difference between centralized and decentralized systems.
As an aside, the vast majority of bitcoin traders don't seem to have a problem with centralized systems as they freely send their decentralized assets to fully centralized entities to house, trade and exchange. Just a little food for thought.

If it is really just a protocol, then by definition there is nothing to stop someone from bypassing your client and writing directly to the protocol, cutting out the Middleton-man.

I am assuming there is some proprietary lockin somewhere in there, but without code and technical documentation, why should I (or other hackers/geeks/tech dudes) consume my (our) time trying to understand the system using inefficient means of trying to deobfuscate what you ostensibly (at least last time I looked) want to obfuscate. I will take a quick glance at the links above, but if they don't get direct to the technical points (as what I saw on your website before) then I will not expend more time.

P.S. some of us do understand both economics and programming. That is not to say I have any insider or real-world WallStreet experience (thank the almighty for that blessing).

Edit: I glanced at the links. Reggie we know already all about the virtues and design of decentralized exchanges. We understand the use of a mutually trusted "Facilitator" (Escrow agent). We understand the need for decentralized, consensus data feeds (which you apparently don't yet have in your system). We do not need to read all that shit over and over again. When we ask for technical documentation, we mean precisely that and none of this marketing overhead. Some of us are much more aware than you may think. We are also thinking about these sorts of designs and markets too (believe me you were not any where close to being the first).

I do not understand how to expect to gain traction. You can leverage your reputation and connections in the financial sphere, but afaics you do not know how to interface with the tech dudes who are the core of the Bitcoin sphere. IMO, if you want us on board, this has to be a collaborative effort and open source system. And so then how do you make your ROI on this? Does this project have its own coin (I think not). The world is not going to adopt Reggie-wallet. Sorry. You will need an open protocol and another way to make your ROI.

Perhaps there is some way to leverage your strengths and the open source community, but afaics you haven't partnered with the right CTO to get it done. I see more of a closed-source, proprietary, marketing spin philosophy thus far.

Also you appear to be building a specific protocol for trading options. Ethereum (and CounterParty?) is in the space of creating a programmable block chain wherein there can be a free market competition amongst protocols. I suggested last year that Ethereum can never scale and the only solution is merge-minded chains for programmable chains.

Some of us are thinking much bigger and more open than you. You should not assume you are the next Google. I highly doubt it.

P.S. your calls on Apple and Google were obvious to me also (before I found out about you on Zerohedge). I had written similar predictions on http://esr.ibiblio.org perhaps before you did. My point is your very boastful marketing spins are out of proportion to the technical acumen display openly thus far. Perhaps your team are technical wizards, but I don't know.

You are awfully confrontational. Why is that? What boasting are you speaking of. I believe I have over 80 vindicated contrarian calls covering many industries and sovereign nations, going back to 2006. Is that what you consider boasting? If so, it's not - it's marketing, designed to inform those who don't know who I am (likely many in this forum) of what I've accomplished in the past. Now, on to your points.

Anyone can, with enough effort, reproduce anything that's done on Wall Street, yet somehow Wall Street thrives. The reasons are a) its often difficult without both capital resources and specialized knowledge b) its really just not worth it much of the time c) many don't know how.

We are a financial software company, thus our core audience are financial types, not "technical dudes" as you describe them. Goldman, Bitfinex, itBit, JP Morgan and Citi don't have technical documents on their site describing what they do and how they do it. They offer you a service and/or solution and you decide if you want to use it. For some reason, you are not comparing us to our competitors, you are comparing us to a technical concern. I don't believe that is fair.

As for understanding economics, that has little to do with what we have built. Financial engineering, valuation and markets knowledge are much, much more useful in understanding what we're doing than economics will ever be.

As for proprietary lock-in, we let you keep your keys, and the code is on your client. We provide a service, just like a financial institutions does. It's simply that since our service and code is based on autonomy, you are in control. The institutions that you are used to dealing with are heteronomous, hence they must usurp control to reap margin - two very, very different business models. You can guess which one I think is superior. Time will tell if enough of the world agrees with me.

Your assertions about who was the first to do this and that are totally unnecessary. For one, you have no idea when I started doing anything that I did. In addition, its a useless debate anyway. Who really cares who was first, second or third? Really. What actually matters is who has a usable product now, and will that product be able to blossom and grow into the future. Isn't this correct? Now, enough of the unwarranted challenges. I'm here to work with you guys.

If you want to work with me to improve the code, then by all means let's do it. The code is not open sourced for legal, business and logistical reasons, but I as founder am willing to have the community work on it, we just need the resources to manage such. Keep in mind that this is going significantly above what ALL of our competition is willing to, or has done thus far. As for our CTO, he is quite qualified. Very, very few CTOs can right competent legal contracts. Very few IP lawyers can architect and design competent legal code. Our CTO is ivy league trained in both fields and has 15 years experience in payments with some of the biggest names in the industry. I'm proud to have him on board as part of the project. We are more open than any derivatives concern that I know of. If I'm mistaken, then please point that out.

We don't trade options. You are mistaken. We deal in smart contracted, OTC, P2P swaps. I believe our system is more advanced than anything available on Counterparty and Ethereum, and more importantly it is up and running and working right now.

You said, "Some of us are thinking much bigger and more open than you. You should not assume you are the next Google. I highly doubt it.". Well, I love you too! :-)   May I suggest a more friendly, less insulting approach? I don't recall assuming anything of the sort.

In the marketing blog posts which you linked to in your prior post in this thread, I've read the comparison to the next Google et al; and afaics there is not a clear delineation whether you are referring to the trend of Bitcoin 2.0 or your effort specifically. It comes across (at least to me) as wanting to sell yours as the big breakthrough vastly superior (in terms of being first to innovate, patents, and insight) over efforts before and ongoing in crypto. I found that to be paradigmatically (not personally) offensive because you are creating a for-profit company approach and as I understand the entire point of decentralized crypto-currency is to remove the profit from the center of the network and push the profit out to the ends of the network.

Thus finally fulfilling the essential End-to-end Principal of the internet's network design onto the monetary attributes of the internet.

I am so fanatical about that attribute of crypto-currency not even for ideological preferences, rather pragmatic because I believe we are headed into a totalitarian abyss of epic proportions[1] and only systems which are monetarily End-to-end structured will prosper medium-term (2018+) and beyond.

Note I am not a Communist and I am not against profit. I am speaking about the paradigm of where profit originates (at the ends, where the Knowledge Age producers are[1]) and about Anti-fragility and resilience of networks and societies.

So let me respond to all your posts by saying I don't dislike you and I don't have any personal animosity towards you. I am actually a very friendly, smiling, and amicable person. At the moment, I feel an intense tiger fight inside of me because of what we are facing here. I think perhaps you are oblivious. And thus you are proceeding in mainstream financial circles as if no paradigmatic cliff is awaiting you and the mainstream.

Someone important asked me in private about your effort, and my pragmatic advice was essentially, "it is too non-standard for the WallStreet types he wants to target, and too closed-source, top-down business model for the rest of us in the Bitcoin sphere to adopt". I don't think you have a market. Thus you can offend (or cause us to ignore) the techie crowd that want an end-to-end monetary world and fail to gain the trust of the mainstream as well (btw if I was a mainstream investor and I saw all that bling-bling imagery and "blahblahblah" verbiage all over your website, I would leave and not come back. Get to the point and make it look more conservative like a financial services company). Perhaps I am wrong if you can target the Europeans who will be fleeing their October 2015 economic cliff into US dollars and US dollar assets. Afaik there is no coin attached to your effort, thus there is no wealth effect reason for the speculators to stampede into your effort. Afaics, you are trying to sell services with a proprietary model that violates the End-to-end principle.

Perhaps we can find some way to work with your system by attaching some open-source interoperable interface on it. For example, if we can figure out some way that individuals can trade mainstream assets anonymously with minimal counter party risk, that is big plus. Note that any such interoption is going to (via decentralized innovation) over time subsume your business model into the superior economics of the End-to-end principle, except for any server services that can't be subsumed due to social or technical limitations.

I think we need to dig into the details before we can make any more definitive statements than those abstractions.

One of the frustrations is your business model and marketing choices, has made it very inefficient to dig into the details. You are probably losing synergy opportunities by not interfacing to the techie crowd in our preferred modes of interaction (e.g. show us the code and technical documents on a github account).

Closed source will die over time except at the ends of the network.

The crypto market is choosing leaders who (and movements which) can fulfill the End-to-end Principle of meritocracy onto the monetary attributes of the world.

P.S. I was aware you had chosen your CTO for his experience with law in addition to his technical acumen. I am not claiming he isn't talented. Rather I am just addressing the market and paradigmatic realities as I see them. He was chosen to lead a business model which I believe is antithetical to the direction crypto and the world is headed.

[1]	One-world reserve currency inevitable... Economic Devastation Economic Totalitarianism Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? Thus do we need anonymity?

Note I formerly posted under the pseudonym AnonyMint and several others.