Topic: Amateur hour - page 4. (Read 8301 times)

Again, you convince me you know nothing about monetary systems.

If I'm not mistaken an author on Mises.org dismissed Bitcoin early on explaining it wasn't "backed by anything".

And, no, transaction volume is not an accurate proxy for demand. In fact, anyone around Bitcoin any length of time would know a large skepticism people have about it is that not much of use can be bought with bitcoins. The transaction volume can be a fraction of what it is now while having the exact same demand that's keeping the price at about $40 on MtGox.

So you think that if I send a transaction of 1 BTC to someone out of an address holding a 100 BTC input, that counting all 100 BTC as transaction volume is ok?  99 BTC of that isn't true economic activity, and shouldn't be an indicator of such.

Here's an example of how to game your system.

I plan to buy a car for 1,000 BTC.
I send that 1,000 BTC on a wild goose chase across many many different addresses, to generate false transaction volume and increase the multiplier.  I now have 1,100 BTC.  I send 1,000 BTC to the dealer, "saving" myself 100 BTC.  Because the transaction volume was false, I am left (at some point in the future when the multiplier re-adjusts) with 91 BTC, and the dealer is left with 909 BTC (roughly).

Regardless, I think your idea has merit as an experimental altcoin (it IS an interesting idea), just not exactly in the way you describe.

I think you still need a reasonable way to distribute currency at the beginning that doesn't just involve a multiplier (the way you describe it, it would be a 100% premine with a single person holding on to all of the currency until they decided to distribute it how they choose), but creates some method of distributing new currency to new users across many years.

I think that transaction volume should be indicated in "Altcoin days destroyed" instead of straight-up transaction volume over a given period of time.  This would prevent, to an extent, gaming of the system, though holders of large numbers of Altcoin days could theoretically game the system one time.  Maybe they put Altcoin days up for sale to be destroyed upon the date and time of the highest bidder's choosing or something.

I also think that some people might be more concerned with coins being added or taken from their account on an unpredictable basis than they would be of the price fluctuations inherent in Bitcoin.  Would people rather have a fluctuating number of coins in their wallet based on a best estimate of transaction volume, or would they rather have a fluctuating price based on free market buying and selling?

And finally, couldn't a decrease in transaction volume, which would cause people to lose coins from their wallets, theoretically feedback to itself in a deflationary spiral?  Something along the lines of, "Well, I only have 90 coins instead of 100 that I had yesterday, so I'm not going to buy that computer."  And then they only have 80 coins, then 70, etc, because no one is buying anything?  I mean, I'm not making the argument that Bitcoin doesn't also have the same potential problem, but this doesn't fix potential deflation-related problems.

noting the highlighted text

but instead you spend the exact same time reading threads unpaid
but instead you spend the exact same time writing threads unpaid
but instead you spend the exact same time whining about problems.

how about solve it for free without breaking a sweat and then you will know with confidence your bitcoins funds are that much safer, that the holdings you have will repay themselves with even larger profits due to the stability you give bitcoins. which results in a pay day for the work you have done.

which basically means you eventually get paid !

I love it when I make my point.

Your posts have ZERO! ZIP SUBSTANCE TO THEM!  SO ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, you may know something about programming, but you appear to know nothing about monetary systems.


Not true. To measure value you need to measure against something else. For obvious reasons bitcoins are commonly measured against dollars, but also other currencies and even precious metals like gold or silver. You cannot maintain a constant bitcoin value by simply modifying the number of bitcoins each account has. The number of bitcoins, as well as how fast they come into existence, is known. This is how a value for them was first established; a pizza was bought for about 10K bitcoins which established a dollar value for them. If the rate of bitcoins had been 10 times what it was then that pizza would likely to have been bought for 100K bitcoins, because that number relative to how many total that account holder had would have been commensurate. That's all the effect of increasing the number has; it means each individual bitcoin becomes worth less, not any constant value.


No, it had nothing to do with transaction volume. It had to do with the fact the rate of bitcoins coming into existence was not enough to keep up with the demand of people wanting them.

Did you say earlier you worked for the Fed? I would find that believable.

10 PRINT "YOU GOT A BITCOIN!"
20 GOTO 10

At least my posts have some substance to them and feature complete sentences.

Your 1500+ "heroic" posts consist almost entirely of one liners which are either insults, name calling or comments like "ROFL !!!!!!!".

Sums up this whole thread in a nice neat package.

I don't see why it is necessary to discriminate the change address. When a node confirms a transaction it has complete knowledge of the amounts of bitcoins involved in the transaction.

It is true that clients can create spurious volume by ping ponging transactions back and forth, but I accept that as a possible source of error. In truth, we can imagine transactions of different importance. For example, two parties might be doing a business deal, but another transaction might be some guy juggling the coins in his accounts to tidy them up. The multiplication metric does not attempt to judge how "worthy" a transaction is, it just gauges the overall volume.

Ok, that answers the last question.  What about the two right before it that you conveniently avoided?

The fact of the matter is, there is no way to determine true transaction volume without knowing who is sending to who.  Therefore, this multiplier could be manipulated by anyone at any time for any reason, and would not be a reliably corollary for supply (and therefore price) to base itself upon.  You seem to want to simply ignore this glaring flaw in your argument for price stability.

For such a genius, your code has some pretty glaring inefficiencies to it.  


You could optimize this to a single if statement of the form if(items < 1 || slots < 1 || slots > items) return 0;


You allocate arrays at a size of 100 and implement your own inefficient array grow algorithm which is less efficient than using a datastructure that supports growing natively.  


And the array grow:

After inserting data into your arrays, you sort them.  It would instead be more efficient to simply insert the data into the arrays in the right order.  Essentially doing the sorting logic on insert instead of after the fact.

You first invented ripple 2.0

Now you've invented devcoin 2.0

Great ideas, people already thought of them and made them into alt chains. I'm doubting your forum post 140 IQ. But then again on the internet you can say whatever you want. My IQ is 999.

There is only a single multiplier which is known to all clients. Every time a transaction is confirmed it has a effect on the multiplier based on the previous multiplier, the size of the transaction, and the time of the last transaction. There is a field of mathematics called "queuing theory" which lets you determine transactional volumes and velocities and balance them. These equations can be used to ensure that the multiplier remains proportional to current global transactional volume.

The adjustment is decentralized because it is part of the confirmation. When a transaction is confirmed the adjustment effect to the multiplier is determined at the same time and becomes part of the data of the transaction.

Actually, the bug was in the 0.7 client, and the problem wouldn't have been noticed if everyone had upgraded.  Pool operators had to back the chain down to 0.7 compatibility because 0.7 wouldn't accept a valid block that 0.8 accepted, and reverting to broken behavior was, at the end of the day, less disruptive to the network.

How mad can we be that a bug that had already been fixed, surfaced in an old client?  Might make more sense to yell at the people running the old client.  Or the wall, for all the good it'll do ya.

The many threads of this discussion remind me of an old song lyric from The Police:

Another suburban family morning
Grandmother screaming at the wall
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Krispies
We can't hear anything at all

I agree - price swings in ANYTHING would be impossible to completely eliminate, and I don't think Bitcoin could ever reach the point of price stability like we see with a national currency.

Ok, I understand that trading percentages of the currency would be the backend way of doing it, and the number of coins per percentage would change according to transaction volume.  But I think you misunderstood the point I was attempting to make - apologies for not making it clear enough.  How would you know what the true transaction volume is when people can create as many addresses as they like and send coins between them?  Also, how would you know which address the Bitcoins were sent to vs which address was the change address?  Also, how would this transaction volume determination be made and agreed upon in a decentralized manner?

I hated that movie, except the part where he lit his groin on fire and crashed the car. Actually, when the cop threw the coffee cup at him, that was pretty funny too.

Widespread adoption of bitcoins would certainly decrease price volatility, but nevertheless, price swings would still persist.

In an economically proper crypto currency each client would maintain a constant, the value multiplier, just the way it now maintains the proof of work target. The value multiplier would determine how many bitcoins each address has by multiplying the wallet's fraction. Thus, the number of bitcoins you had would go up and down, but their value would remain relatively constant. In practice what would happen is that as adoption increased the capitalization would increase, but the value of each bitcoin would remain stable. For example, the capitalization of bitcoins has recently gone from $50 million to over $300 million, with a consequent increase in the value of each bitcoin. This is because the supply of bitcoins has not increased as fast as the volume of transactions has increased. If we had increased the volume of the bitcoins outstanding by 6x then the price of each bitcoin would have remained relatively stable during the recent growth period.

This is the second time I've had to post this in the past 12 hours. I think it should be the official motto of the forum:

Walter: Am I wrong?

The Dude: You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole.

-The Big Lebowski