Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[TPTB_need_war]

4.  having grown up in a relatively disadvantaged manner with other like kids, i have learned to be thrifty, not take anything for granted, and fight for what i want and believe in, not only academically but physically.  i have a strong desire to advocate and protect the disadvantaged.

I picture you originally as lower-middle class half-Asian (or hispanic or are you native american?). I (European descent with just a tinge of native american) grew up so fucking poor that my sister and I were the only white kids in the all negro elementary school in Baton Rouge. The black kids had never touched fine hair, so my hair constantly greasy from hands coming from behind. In Middle school had to take 3 transfers on the public bus (not school bus) meaning I was standing out in the cold (in winter) and my pants only came down to above my ankles because we couldn't afford new ones. We lived in squalor. I ate peanut butter and crackers for meals sometimes (which is probably another reason I have Multiple Sclerosis now because peanuts are a toxin) and red beans with rice often (legumes even after soaking & cooking are a toxin).

Hitler grew up not wealthy too, justified his action with idealism about helping the world, and determined the best way to do that was winner-take-all, eliminating the inferior diversity. That is exactly your analogous attitude about Bitcoin. You'd centralize at any cost, just as Hilter did and it was his undoing as it will be yours.

Edit: the point is idealism and empathy says nothing about correct conceptualization. When these bleeding hearts go political, it is very often a sign of madness (or the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds).

[TPTB_need_war]

Jefferson was philosophically opposed to slavery (supposedly) but he was a slave owner.  I recognize both the limitations of 'hard money' and the engineering benefits of Keynesian monetary management schemes and debt-based money.

...

The main reason I have most recently rejected 'socialism' with significantly more vigor is that I see more clearly that we are way more advanced along this path than I had realized.  We overshot any possible usefulness and are on the steep downward path toward totalitarianism.  The 'socialists' seem to be thinking that they could leverage the utility of crony capitalism to perhaps grease the rails.

...

I am apolitical, thus I believeknow what is shall be.

Power vacuums have been in control. This can only be changed with technological advancement. I'd rather let my code do the talking.

[TPTB_need_war]

i have a strong desire to advocate and protect the disadvantaged.

I don't. I have a strong desire to create technology that maintains free markets by eliminating power vacuums that suck society into dependence.

I presume you got where you are by depending on the debt bubble and the government student loans, etc.. In other words, you want to make sure the party keeps rolling for others as it did for you, so you will have enough customers willing to overpay for what a robot will be able to do for 1/1000 of the cost in another decade or so.

ppl trust me to operate on their eyes for God's sake.  i have saved literally thousands of ppl from blindness.  both here and on volunteer trips in foreign countries.

And with the dumb blunders you are pulling here, you could harm billions of people more than you helped (although I think/hope your efficacy will be highly squelched by those who are coding and not talking).

Many of us helped a lot of people.

I am not criticizing your humanitarianism nor the importance and appreciation of your vocation. Rather I am just saying that it has nothing to do with the harm you are potentially doing by slobbering all over a technology and economics that you don't understand as we software engineers do.

6.  these types of blessings give me clear conviction to advocate for what i think is best for Bitcoin, and not for my pocketbook.  yes, Bitcoin could go to zero and it wouldn't effect me in a detrimental way.  at_all.

Then why would you get involved with the HashFast scam. Doesn't make sense that you would risk a stable professional practice.

political blablahblah

We are coding. You can not stop the technological freight train coming.

If you were smart, you would have long ago started figuring out how you can board early.

[TPTB_need_war]

Many Core developers are risk adverse, it's their way or the highway as they are the gate keepers, they are also the ones who would have to fix any problems so they feel they are better equipped to make this decision. - problem is this has highlighted a conflict in development and that is central controlled policy makers decided for us which brigs into question the whole idea that Bitcoin is decentralized.  

In my view If anything we should be planning for Bitcoin growth and working on ways to prevent the existing mechanism from abuse.  

Blockstream (i.e. the Core devs) are planning to unleash the freedom for anyone to innovate on BTC pegged value, which is precisely what you are clamoring for.

[TPTB_need_war]

Much of the blocksize-limit debate is about keeping Bitcoin decentralized.  But I'm not even sure we even agree what that word means!  I'll propose the following as a working definition:

  "A system is decentralized if no entity exists that can exert veto power over the consensus process."

Interestingly, according to this definition a system cannot be more decentralized or less decentralized.  Similar to how a woman cannot be a little bit pregnant, a system is either decentralized or it is not.  

Of course there's certain behaviours that a woman can do to increase the chances of moving from the "not" state to the "pregnant" state, and certain precautions she can take to decrease these chances--but this is a different matter entirely to whether she is or is not pregnant.  Analogously, there are certain designs that may be more (or less) robust to moving to a centralized state, but that's a different thing from whether the system is or is not decentralized.  

So we actually need two distinct terms: "decentralized" is one of them, but we need another term that refers to the system's likelihood of remaining in the decentralized state.  

That is fine for as long as you don't revert to conflating 'entity' with 'node' as you've attempted to with your past simpleton arguments.

[TPTB_need_war]

There may be bug (or luck to find some number) and then creating bitcoins out of nothing. And nobody can verify.

That is the risk - the scheme relies on the security of ECDSA to protect the currency supply.

We're already relying on ECDSA to protect our balances from overt theft, so I'm not sure how much it actually changes the security model to also rely on it to protect our balances from covert theft via counterfeiting.

The reason I'm interested in amount blinding is that my current project is working out a multi-step plan to kill graph analysis. With the right plan and without blinded amounts we can kill graph analysis, but with blinded amounts we can drive a stake through its heart to make sure it stays dead.

We are also using SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 hashes to protect our balances. So even ECDSA is broken our balances can be safe and then ECDSA replaced.

Actually, the best path to a safe balance is not having a public balance at all.

https://i.imgur.com/fUVBvXK.png

https://i.imgur.com/FY7q54I.png

https://i.imgur.com/MUOwbae.png

One of the problems with making the amounts public in Cryptonote is that it makes transactions and wallets more complex (and consume more bandwidth) because mixing is done on equal denominations (of a power-of-10 in Monero case).

The value hiding protocols also require smallness and non-negativity proofs on the transaction outputs in order to restrain the printing of money out-of-thin-air, and these might have vulnerabilities in addition to the hardness of the discrete logarithm assumption of ECDSA. Today I introduced an idea for eliminating those extra assumptions at the cost of revealing the relative values but not the magnitudes.

[TPTB_need_war]

political blabber

He missed important technical and economic arguments, but that is okay because I doubt he would understand them any way.

Disgruntled Bitards-to-the-moon since we've obliterated their illogic in their own thread, lol.

[TPTB_need_war]

I'll still vouch for Frap.doc's character.

So why did he allegedly (court deposition I read, and he refused to provide a link to his rebuttal deposition) take 10% of every HashFast vaporware sold (whether he promoted that referral or not) and promote it here on the forum? How can that company be sure he is doing all the referrals if it was not obviously intended to be vaporware. Obviously they all knew what they were doing.

How could someone with good character swindle people?

He says he can't comment on the case, but he could I assume provided a link to his public deposition so we can hear his side of the case. I don't like people prying into my private life, which why I would not try to use my reputation to sell something (including an altcoin). I don't understand why a successful eye doctor would jeopardize his privacy.

[TPTB_need_war]

Non-trivial revenue from fees would throw a huge monkey-wrench into that plan, and in particular because a blacklisted (or non-whitelisted) transaction instigator could and would pay even higher fees.  I wonder (and suspect) that that is part of what is driving the desperation to not have transaction fees become a significant part of infrastructure support.

I suggest a slight variation that rather by making their blocks larger than the smaller full nodes can mine without delegating to a pool (which could then censor on KYC or whatever as need be[1]), larger nodes get more revenue per block thus they can drive difficulty so relatively high that smaller full nodes become a shrinking percent of the hashrate.

Remember with control of 51% of the hashrate, any block can be filtered out of the longest chain. I already obliterated rocks' illogic on his claim of the ability to prove such an attack is underway.

[1] I am aware of the newer pool protocols that allow miners to insert transactions (which not all pools support), but if oblivious shares (hard fork) was implemented then pools could ignore these since they miner could not send their winning block directly to the P2P network. One way to probably force the implementation of oblivious shares is with a significant hashrate to do the share withholding attack on pools that don't support it.

[Odalv]

We are also using SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 hashes to protect our balances. So even ECDSA is broken our balances can be safe and then ECDSA replaced.

Pray tell how you will replace ECDSA when the coins are already assigned to keys for it?  (and when everyone and their sister constantly reuses addresses). A compromise of CT would mean that it was feasible to find discrete logs in this group, with that, anyone who learned your public key could recover your private key.  There are scenarios where the hashing, absent any address reuse, helps  (e.g. say the discrete log finding takes weeks)-- but it's important to not exaggerate the gains.

But indeed it isn't the ~quite~ same.

It's perfectly possible to construct schemes for private values which are unconditionally sound; meaning that there is no cryptographic assumption behind their inflation resistance, and a cryptographic break would only result in a loss of privacy.  I had previously thought that it was necessarily the case that any such scheme would have to be less efficient; but I have since realized my original reasoning for that was incorrect; though I do not (yet) know of a way to construct an unconditionally sound scheme which is anywhere near as efficient as CT;  but finding one is on my TODO list (though it falls below other improvements for CT privacy and network security that I'm working on).

I do not know :-), but maybe in case that ECDSA is broken we can split transacion into 2 part.
 1. broadcast transaction without public key (I do not know how to prevent from spaming)
 2. and then confirm transaction by broadcasting public key few blocks later.

[cypherdoc]

I'll still vouch for Frap.doc's character.

So why did he allegedly (court deposition I read, and he refused to provide a link to his rebuttal deposition) take 10% of every HashFast vaporware sold (whether he promoted that referral or not) and promote it here on the forum? How can that company be sure he is doing all the referrals if it was not obviously intended to be vaporware. Obviously they all knew what they were doing.

How could someone with good character swindle people?

He says he can't comment on the case, but he could I assume provided a link to his public deposition so we can hear his side of the case. I don't like people prying into my private life, which why I would not try to use my reputation to sell something (including an altcoin). I don't understand why a successful eye doctor would jeopardize his privacy.

go here, register, then read my Declaration and Responses if you want:  https://www.pacer.gov/

[cypherdoc]

yes, Monday is going to be ugly:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-28/ecb-says-greek-bank-holiday-now-necessary

[cypherdoc]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  you must supplement that income by onboarding as many tx paying fees into the main Bitcoin blockchain if you want to survive long term.  offboarding those tx paying fees into centralized services like Coinbase or Bitpay will not help you.  what this means is that you indirectly need to grow the userbase that generates these tx paying fees.

you have no choice but to increase block size limits, and soon, otherwise unconfirmed tx's and unaffordable tx fees will drive new and even existing users away and you will forever be dependent on a small community of geeks and developers for business profits.  not a sustainable situation.

[NewLiberty]

We are also using SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 hashes to protect our balances. So even ECDSA is broken our balances can be safe and then ECDSA replaced.

Pray tell how you will replace ECDSA when the coins are already assigned to keys for it?  (and when everyone and their sister constantly reuses addresses). A compromise of CT would mean that it was feasible to find discrete logs in this group, with that, anyone who learned your public key could recover your private key.  There are scenarios where the hashing, absent any address reuse, helps  (e.g. say the discrete log finding takes weeks)-- but it's important to not exaggerate the gains.

But indeed it isn't the ~quite~ same.

It's perfectly possible to construct schemes for private values which are unconditionally sound; meaning that there is no cryptographic assumption behind their inflation resistance, and a cryptographic break would only result in a loss of privacy.  I had previously thought that it was necessarily the case that any such scheme would have to be less efficient; but I have since realized my original reasoning for that was incorrect; though I do not (yet) know of a way to construct an unconditionally sound scheme which is anywhere near as efficient as CT;  but finding one is on my TODO list (though it falls below other improvements for CT privacy and network security that I'm working on).

I do not know :-), but maybe in case that ECDSA is broken we can split transacion into 2 part.
 1. broadcast transaction without public key (I do not know how to prevent from spaming)
 2. and then confirm transaction by broadcasting public key few blocks later.

Consider also whether this is a fundamental justification for the development of side chains.  
A break in ECDSA (or even a perceived break) could instigate migrations to secured chains for resilience.

[shmadz]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

[cypherdoc]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

[Cconvert2G36]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

Just like 2012, unprofitable miners drop off, difficulty falls, BTC income per TH rises. Of course tx volume needs to rise greatly and create a larger fee incentive eventually, but I don't think the time preceding the drop to 12.5 is that period.

[cypherdoc]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

Just like 2012, unprofitable miners drop off, difficulty falls, BTC income per TH rises. Of course tx volume needs to rise greatly and create a larger fee incentive eventually, but I don't think the time preceding the drop to 12.5 is that period.

Why should we trust your assessment of what the proper time period is? 

Why not lift the limit entirely and let the market figure it out?

[Cconvert2G36]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

Just like 2012, unprofitable miners drop off, difficulty falls, BTC income per TH rises. Of course tx volume needs to rise greatly and create a larger fee incentive eventually, but I don't think the time preceding the drop to 12.5 is that period.

Why should we trust your assessment of what the proper time period is? 

Why not lift the limit entirely and let the market figure it out?

BTW, I'm FOR lifting the blocksize to at least 8MB, preferably higher, and with built in scaling.

I just don't think relationship between the two issues is all that important, at least before this upcoming halving, and maybe the one after that.

[cypherdoc]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

Just like 2012, unprofitable miners drop off, difficulty falls, BTC income per TH rises. Of course tx volume needs to rise greatly and create a larger fee incentive eventually, but I don't think the time preceding the drop to 12.5 is that period.

Why should we trust your assessment of what the proper time period is? 

Why not lift the limit entirely and let the market figure it out?

BTW, I'm FOR lifting the blocksize to at least 8MB, preferably higher, and with built in scaling.

I just don't think relationship between the two issues is all that important, at least before this upcoming halving, and maybe the one after that.

Great to here that. Hope you mean it.

But you're  ignoring the fact that a vast majority of the community does  want an increase now. So why should we just go with your opinion again?