Topic: Amateur hour - page 6. (Read 8301 times)

Are you seriously saying that something about the nature of currencies means nobody would ever change shift the decimal point? Or are you just trolling me?

'Since 1960, governments of developing and transition economies have redenominated their currencies on approximately seventy occasions.'
 -- http://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=remove%20zeros%20currency&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&ved=0CEoQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unc.edu%2F~lmosley%2FAPSA%25202005.pdf&ei=zXc_UZLpO8iNOKvLgKgE&usg=AFQjCNEv2UciW5vxGEzB1j3kpjb-6Bh9Nw

Please do explain what the point of distributing new coins proportionately to existing holders of coins?  It's the equivalent of changing the decimal place and claiming you are 10 times richer because of it.

For how smart you claim to be, you sure are disappointing me with your "solutions".

P.S.  I knew a guy on the internet who claimed he owned a lambo too.   

As a professional software developer this may be an opportune time to point out that the bitcoin code is an amateur production.

I have the greatest respect for Gavin and others that have donated untold hours to make bitcoin into a reality and I know from experience how tough self-funded development is.

Nevertheless, make no mistakes, the current incarnation of Bitcoin has a lot of ill-conceived design points and implementation weaknesses (as we have seen from the events of the last 24 hours).

Aside from the blunder that just resulted in a blockchain fork, there is a much larger, related issue looming on the horizon, which is the inability of the design to process large numbers of transactions. It is ludicrous we have people whining about "Satoshi Dice" creating numerous transactions. I could sit down and write a software component that could easily generate billions of transactions without breaking a sweat once it is deployed to a few thousand boxes, if I so chose, and yet you are concerned about Satoishi Dice generating a few million transactions. The problem of high-volume transaction handling needs to be answered at a new level which is, unfortunately, way above the paygrade of the current development team.

The comparison of currency to stocks by sd isn't apt. The two are not compatible.

I thought stock splits were done mostly for psychological reasons?  Because stocks can be traded in fractions, can they not?

Please show one piece of code you've actually written ->

That assumes
That assumes no other transactions on the network.  As tx volume increases legit users will raise their fees to ensure they are included in blocks in a timely manner.  That means you would need to start paying fees (and then increasing amount of fees) or find your tx excluded.  However yes with a "principal" of 144,0000 BTC you could add 1,000 tx to each block assuming you also could afford sufficient tx fees to "buy" enough space for them.

Oh good, you don't want to fix bitcoin you want to create ripple 2.0. Go ahead.

That assumes no other transactions on the network.  As tx volume increases legit users will raise their fees to ensure they are included in blocks in a timely manner.  That means you would need to start paying fees (and then increasing amount of fees) or find your tx excluded.  However yes with a "principal" of 144,0000 BTC you could add 1,000 tx to each block assuming you also could afford sufficient tx fees to "buy" enough space for them.

I assume coins would be split so there are more in circulation. Yes it's exactly the same as moving the decimal place as far as value is concerned but it's still done by major companies all the time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_split

Please do explain what the point of distributing new coins proportionately to existing holders of coins?  It's the equivalent of changing the decimal place and claiming you are 10 times richer because of it.

For how smart you claim to be, you sure are disappointing me with your "solutions".

Well, in my opinion there are several steps that would be key improvements:

- Create a chained trust system, this would allow a transaction to be verified by a logarithmically smaller number of clients; the key observation here is that to prevent double spending you do not need a majority of machines to vote, you only need a quorum of trusted machines; to understand this note that there are the so-called "5 degrees of separation" meaning that you "know" everybody in the world friend of a friend of a friend, etc. If each client has a "reputation" with its neighboring clients, you can create a web of trust such that a transaction can be verified with only a hundred or so votes, instead of the thousands (or millions?) now necessary. Also, these votes will tend to happen on the fastest machines, thus further speeding the process.

- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.

- Base transaction priority on reputation, not age/size the way it is now. This will speed transactions being done by the largest, most trusted players and push out DOS transactions in a way far more effective and secure than the current system which can be gamed in all sorts of ways.

I would note that a web of trust is also critical to protecting the network against a motivated minority from taking over the system. In the current system, its one machine, one vote. This ill-conceived design has the result that a small group of professionals using large botnets could outvote the network or a big enough sub-network such that they could seize or create coins. As the value of bitcoins grows the feasibility of this kind of attack is increasing. In a reputation system, not all machines have the same vote, but more trusted machines have greater weight, this prevents the possibility of a zombie attack.

P.S.  I knew a guy on the internet who claimed he owned a lambo too.   

If you wanted to make a sustainable attack of 1000 transactions per 10 minutes (which current network could probably handle), you would need at least 0.01*144*1000*100 = 144000 btc (making 0.01 btc payments for 144 blocks in a day, 1000 transactions per block, and each 0.01 btc input has a 100 day "cooldown period"). Does this look accurate?

If you wanted to make a sustainable attack of 1000 transactions per 10 minutes (which current network could probably handle), you would need at least 0.01*144*1000*100 = 144000 btc (making 0.01 btc payments for 144 blocks in a day, 1000 transactions per block, and each 0.01 btc input has a 100 day "cooldown period"). Does this look accurate?

That is false (or at best incomplete).  Spammy tx are spammy regardless of age and thus always low priority and thus always require a fee to be included by miners or relayed by nodes using the reference client rules.

How are you going to "fix" something you don't understand?

Right now, I not planning on re-arranging my life to take an unpaid position as a bitcoin developer. I am just saying that it is inevitable that the design and development move to a new level, so we, as a community, need to adopt the mindset that evolution must occur and figure out how to do that.

- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.

This is your post from august 2012. And you're telling us bitcoin has serious flaws? Yeah.