Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[conspirosphere.tk]

what do you guys think of https://www.digitaltangibletrust.com ?
Anyone using it?
If btc rises much before pm I am tempted to use it.

Place your gold or silver in secured and bonded custody to receive your digital tokens.

This looks no better than paper gold.

yes but it seems somewhat more transparent and decentralized.
It could be a good compromise for who wants to trade frequently and stay liquid if it works.

Of course who wants to hodl forever does not need it.

[brg444]

what do you guys think of https://www.digitaltangibletrust.com ?
Anyone using it?
If btc rises much before pm I am tempted to use it.

Place your gold or silver in secured and bonded custody to receive your digital tokens.

This looks no better than paper gold.

yes but it seems somewhat more transparent and decentralized.
It could be a good compromise for who wants to trade frequently and stay liquidity if it works.

Of course who wants to hodl forever does not need it.

Decentralized?

The gold is sitting in one vault.

It's funny, that's exactly what we've been discussing for the last couple pages

Like you pointed out, there's a fundamental difference between the transfer of a bitcoin, and the transfer of a token that represents a claim on some external-to-the-blockchain property.  In the latter case (asset-backed tokens), all that is transferred is ownership (and ownership is really a social construct, valuable only to the extent that one's society is willing to enforce property rights [as control of the property in question remains a physical problem]).  In the former case (bitcoin), what's transferred is control itself.

Yes the token system is decentralized but the asset(gold) is not. It is still very much controlled by a third-party and no more transparent then regular paper gold schemes

[cypherdoc]

this sounds pretty amazing.  anyone see any holes?

http://blog.choosecase.com/

[cypherdoc]

i'm gonna argue how nicely mining is decentralizing based on this recent chart.  the nice Nash Equilibrium is equilibrating nicely.  the biggest growth is in the smaller pools:

[cypherdoc]

i'm also going to claim that it's being driven by the commoditization of hardware as indicated by the leveling off of the hashrate.  prices have plunged 10-fold allowing more and more smaller pools into the game.  this was predicted here long ago:



furthermore, now that money has appeared to slow to a crawl into the mining "bucket", i think it's now time for that money to flow into the BTC price "bucket".  so hold on.

http://www.coindesk.com/btc-chinas-new-pool-mines-3325-btc-five-weeks/

[brg444]

this sounds pretty amazing.  anyone see any holes?

http://blog.choosecase.com/

Yeah I'm impressed, plus the founder is super hot. 

Hole #1 : no working unit yet. still a prototype so let's see

I'm also curious about how the entropy and how they generate randomness. Even though I own a trezor I'm always kind of on the fence about using third-party hardware to generate my private key.

[cypherdoc]

oh Lordy.  from our favorite Bitcoin economist  

https://twitter.com/TheScottRob/status/539895264807378945

he's been crying about this for years.

[NewLiberty]

for those assets, what are the advantages of decentralization?

Lots of advantages in reliability and assurances.  More fundamentally it obsoletes some functions of auditing and government along with the associated costs to society.
It automates many of the administrivia of corporation management.

If you have ever run a public company, the advantages are more immediately apparent.

the pt that i was getting at is that until Bitcoin fulfills Satoshi's visions as a generally accepted and large enough form of currency or money, there will be no such trust or confidence given by the masses or larger financial institutions to embed asset derivatives into the blockchain as the "legal" ledger.

what will drive Bitcoins growth is a maintenance of its Sound Money function along with transactional growth which we are fortunately beginning to see w/o a doubt.  once it becomes a generally accepted global and apolitical public good as money, then it might be used to embed more riskier assets within the blockchain as with CP.

otoh, the blockchain may only ever be applicable to Bitcoin as Money.  in which case, all those speculative assets may just be bought and sold with BTC as they will become denominated as such with the records continuing to be maintained by those organizations responsible for enforcing those contracts.

if we use Bitcoin to win the Money Game, we win Everything.  that is where the problem lies.

Yes Yes...
This is why I would like to see SPV side chains implemented on some altcoins.  
In matters such as these, it is not as important to see how things work, as it is to see how they fail and under what circumstances.

[smooth]

i'm also going to claim that it's being driven by the commoditization of hardware as indicated by the leveling off of the hashrate.  prices have plunged 10-fold allowing more and more smaller pools into the game.  this was predicted here long ago:

The leveling off of the hash rate is almost certainly due to the 70% drop in price. You had huge investment pouring into mining, now you don't. What new gear is going into service is being balanced out by older unprofitable gear coming out of service.

That may in turn have some effect on pool concentration, but the effect is not clear to me, other than the obvious of say ghash not spending a lot on expanding the in house cloud mining right now.

I agree with Greg Maxwell as quoted in that tweet. The issues of mining decentralization have not been solved, as far as I can tell. I don't understand what you are talking about in terms of nash equilibrium so maybe you could expand on that so I can learn something.

[brg444]

i'm also going to claim that it's being driven by the commoditization of hardware as indicated by the leveling off of the hashrate.  prices have plunged 10-fold allowing more and more smaller pools into the game.  this was predicted here long ago:

The leveling off of the hash rate is almost certainly due to the 70% drop in price. You had huge investment pouring into mining, now you don't. What new gear is going into service is being balanced out by older unprofitable gear coming out of service.

That may in turn have some effect on pool concentration, but the effect is not clear to me, other than the obvious of say ghash not spending a lot on expanding the in house cloud mining right now.

I agree with Greg Maxwell as quoted in that tweet. The issues of mining decentralization have not been solved, as far as I can tell. I don't understand what you are talking about in terms of nash equilibrium so maybe you could expand on that so I can learn something.

There's still a ton of investment going into mining companies  

Better guess is they are in R&D mode right now (apparently the case for KnC) and are not putting any significant rig setup online lately

I also disagree with the "commoditization of hardware" argument. We are nowhere near this scenario IMO.

[cypherdoc]

for those assets, what are the advantages of decentralization?

Lots of advantages in reliability and assurances.  More fundamentally it obsoletes some functions of auditing and government along with the associated costs to society.
It automates many of the administrivia of corporation management.

If you have ever run a public company, the advantages are more immediately apparent.

the pt that i was getting at is that until Bitcoin fulfills Satoshi's visions as a generally accepted and large enough form of currency or money, there will be no such trust or confidence given by the masses or larger financial institutions to embed asset derivatives into the blockchain as the "legal" ledger.

what will drive Bitcoins growth is a maintenance of its Sound Money function along with transactional growth which we are fortunately beginning to see w/o a doubt.  once it becomes a generally accepted global and apolitical public good as money, then it might be used to embed more riskier assets within the blockchain as with CP.

otoh, the blockchain may only ever be applicable to Bitcoin as Money.  in which case, all those speculative assets may just be bought and sold with BTC as they will become denominated as such with the records continuing to be maintained by those organizations responsible for enforcing those contracts.

if we use Bitcoin to win the Money Game, we win Everything.  that is where the problem lies.

Yes Yes...
This is why I would like to see SPV side chains implemented on some altcoins.  
In matters such as these, it is not as important to see how things work, as it is to see how they fail and under what circumstances.

i would prefer NOT to see the spvp implemented, period, for all the reasons i've already made ad nauseum.  let them experiment on federated servers.

i'm not even sure how you'd bring an altcoin into a SC with spvp since the monetary properties of such altcoins are usually so divergent and non-sensical to most Bitcoiners it wouldn't be worth anyone's time or effort.

[cypherdoc]

i'm also going to claim that it's being driven by the commoditization of hardware as indicated by the leveling off of the hashrate.  prices have plunged 10-fold allowing more and more smaller pools into the game.  this was predicted here long ago:

The leveling off of the hash rate is almost certainly due to the 70% drop in price. You had huge investment pouring into mining, now you don't. What new gear is going into service is being balanced out by older unprofitable gear coming out of service.

That may in turn have some effect on pool concentration, but the effect is not clear to me, other than the obvious of say ghash not spending a lot on expanding the in house cloud mining right now.

I agree with Greg Maxwell as quoted in that tweet. The issues of mining decentralization have not been solved, as far as I can tell. I don't understand what you are talking about in terms of nash equilibrium so maybe you could expand on that so I can learn something.

yes, you're absolutely right about the price drop also plateauing mining HR along with commoditization.

i don't agree with Maxwell or the other doomers about mining centralization.  here's where i talk about Nash:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68655.10175;wap2

[brg444]

for those assets, what are the advantages of decentralization?

Lots of advantages in reliability and assurances.  More fundamentally it obsoletes some functions of auditing and government along with the associated costs to society.
It automates many of the administrivia of corporation management.

If you have ever run a public company, the advantages are more immediately apparent.

the pt that i was getting at is that until Bitcoin fulfills Satoshi's visions as a generally accepted and large enough form of currency or money, there will be no such trust or confidence given by the masses or larger financial institutions to embed asset derivatives into the blockchain as the "legal" ledger.

what will drive Bitcoins growth is a maintenance of its Sound Money function along with transactional growth which we are fortunately beginning to see w/o a doubt.  once it becomes a generally accepted global and apolitical public good as money, then it might be used to embed more riskier assets within the blockchain as with CP.

otoh, the blockchain may only ever be applicable to Bitcoin as Money.  in which case, all those speculative assets may just be bought and sold with BTC as they will become denominated as such with the records continuing to be maintained by those organizations responsible for enforcing those contracts.

if we use Bitcoin to win the Money Game, we win Everything.  that is where the problem lies.

Yes Yes...
This is why I would like to see SPV side chains implemented on some altcoins.  
In matters such as these, it is not as important to see how things work, as it is to see how they fail and under what circumstances.

i would prefer NOT to see the spvp implemented, period, for all the reasons i've already made ad nauseum.  let them experiment on federated servers.

i'm not even sure how you'd bring an altcoin into a SC with spvp since the monetary properties of such altcoins are usually so divergent and non-sensical to most Bitcoiners it wouldn't be worth anyone's time or effort.

I'm quite sure NL was referring to a SPV proof trial test on an altcoin before merging it into Bitcoin.

[Peter R]

this sounds pretty amazing.  anyone see any holes?

http://blog.choosecase.com/

Yes, that's very cool! 

What's unfamiliar to me is how the device gets mobile internet access, in over 60 countries, without roaming or monthly fees:

The device doesn’t piggy back off your phone for Internet access. It has a dedicated GSM chip and a multi-IMSI embedded SIM card that allows us to hop from carrier to carrier without roaming fees. Bitcoin is a global currency so it seemed silly to have a wallet that didn’t work globally as well. At launch, Case will work in over 60 countries without any monthly fees so you can use it to execute unlimited transactions around the world for the life of the device.

Does the hardware manufacturer somehow pay the carriers so that the devices "just work"? 

Here's some literature on multi-IMSI SIM cards:

http://www.racowireless.com/multi-imsi-sim/

[smooth]

What's unfamiliar to me is how the device gets mobile internet access, in over 60 countries, without roaming or monthly fees:

Amazon does something similar for Kindle readers (they claim 100 countries). I don't know who is being paid or what the payment model looks like.

[cypherdoc]

this sounds pretty amazing.  anyone see any holes?

http://blog.choosecase.com/

Yes, that's very cool!  

What's unfamiliar to me is how the device gets mobile internet access, in over 60 countries, without roaming or monthly fees:

The device doesn’t piggy back off your phone for Internet access. It has a dedicated GSM chip and a multi-IMSI embedded SIM card that allows us to hop from carrier to carrier without roaming fees. Bitcoin is a global currency so it seemed silly to have a wallet that didn’t work globally as well. At launch, Case will work in over 60 countries without any monthly fees so you can use it to execute unlimited transactions around the world for the life of the device.

Does the hardware manufacturer somehow pay the carriers so that the devices "just work"?  

Here's some literature on multi-IMSI SIM cards:

http://www.racowireless.com/multi-imsi-sim/

i'm interested in the signature scheme.  i know that Trezor was delayed for all that time since they decided, at the last minute, to convert to the HMAC deterministic nonce generation scheme.  i think this was stimulated by the Android hack of non-random PRNG.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6979

[cypherdoc]

What's unfamiliar to me is how the device gets mobile internet access, in over 60 countries, without roaming or monthly fees:

Amazon does something similar for Kindle readers (they claim 100 countries). I don't know who is being paid or what the payment model looks like.

wow, seems ripe for exploitation.

[Erdogan]

this sounds pretty amazing.  anyone see any holes?

http://blog.choosecase.com/

It looks good. The server key could be lost of course, and the fingerprint could also be compromised. And the device is kind of complicated. Expensive. But probably good, probably comparable to the trezor in security. This one could be better for point-of-sale operation.

[brg444]

What's unfamiliar to me is how the device gets mobile internet access, in over 60 countries, without roaming or monthly fees:

Amazon does something similar for Kindle readers (they claim 100 countries). I don't know who is being paid or what the payment model looks like.

wow, seems ripe for exploitation.

IIRC these are capped at 50 mb (per month?). The logic is they can cover the data charges by selling you more book from the Amazon bookstore.

I could see Case being able to cover the costs considering the amount of data consumed by an hardware wallet is likely to be very small.

Note that we don't know the price yet of the device yet so that could come into play.

[rocks]

What's unfamiliar to me is how the device gets mobile internet access, in over 60 countries, without roaming or monthly fees:

Amazon does something similar for Kindle readers (they claim 100 countries). I don't know who is being paid or what the payment model looks like.

Bought the wife a Kindle DX while we were living in Asia. At the time she spent 2-3 hours a day on buses and subways traveling to various jigs.

The Kindle DX connectivity was both free and worked flawlessly everywhere she went. It was one of the few times we've been pleasantly surprised by how well something worked beyond our expectations.

But the connectivity was only useful for purchasing and downloading kindle ebooks and not much else. That's a several MB's per month at most and why the model works. Doubt you'd be allowed to run a Bitcoin node over that free connection...