Topic: Bitcoin 2013: The Future of Payments - San Jose, CA - May 17-19, 2013 - page 4. (Read 17417 times)

Right at the top of my list of things to do. Thanks for the reminder

Speaking of that, is your ReDonate campaign ready yet?

SD has always had transaction fees.

When Mike Hearn and others are cavalier about block chain bloat, it's because there are existing solutions being worked on. The process started with the 'ultraprune' branch that became 0.8, and will continue to improve. If all of the proposed optimizations are implemented, bitcoin can and will scale to VISA-level transaction processing, while being runnable on a commodity PC. It doesn't make sense then to devote valuable conference time to rehashing issues where we already know the work we need to do.

LOL - I'm pleased, most people can't tell when I'm being sarcastic.

SDice is going to start charging transaction fees?

The question we are currently struggling with is (imo) related to the makeup of 'peers' in the system.  Quantitatively and qualitatively.

Your attempts to map this issue to broad political philosophies feels strained to me.  If anything, it is mainly a 'tragedy of the commons' type situation which is a concept laying in a somewhat orthogonal plane.

That said, my current preference is to provoke significant fees and see how things play out in the 'capitalist' mode.  This because I strongly favor and continue to see it possible that Bitcoin falls into a 'reserve' roll and leaves the heavy lifting of supporting a fair fraction of the world's exchange economy to a expanding set of dispensible solutions.


I think it is pretty fair to characterize this as a self evident and provable reality.  I'll take a second look if/when block chain pruning occurs.

Thanks for the comic relief afforded by your sarcasm.

Actually, I imagine that the core dev members, or at least certain of them, see the same value in SD that I do.  Namely, as a load generation tool capable of facilitating edge case analysis earlier than otherwise likely.

SD was almost single handedly responsible for helping discover the BerkeleyDB mis-configuration long before it otherwise may have been...and by an operator who was willing to work pro-actively to resolve the situation at expense to himself.

SD will also be responsible for understanding the impact of transaction fees on the economy and thus allow a better decisions to be made about how a design might best leverage that resource.

Finally, someone I respect discussing the subject. Isn't this the same complaint I've read about SatoshiDice? The devs don't seem concerned about SDice why worry about it in this case?

I have no info specifically, but I would suggest that generally speaking things which make a solution available to anyone with the capabilities which don't exceed your own, but come close to it would be considered less of a bug and more of a feature.  ...and Google has capabilities matched by very few.  I suspect that such entities could also derive business intelligence information from network analysis which would allow them to subsidize the operational aspects of operating the solution.  Much as they do with e-mail.  Such an intelligence value-add would be denied completely to lesser players.

I've worked with systems that generate data with no thought put toward clean-up.  By their nature, they never reach a state of equilibrium and become increasingly challenging to deal with.  Often they eventually lock up or collapse absent an overhaul.

Whether real or imagined, I was impressed by what seemed to be a concept of pruning the block chain which could potentially address some of the problem of bloat (though I always suspected that a determined attacker could subvert this more easily than something like the double-spending protection.)

Also, I thought I picked up on a concept of relay fees which would potentially keep verifying relay nodes (e.g., bitcoind/qt) in the game.  I went back a year ago or so and am pretty sure I found it again.  But it's buried and seems rarely discussed.  It could be argued that 'that is only for mining pool operators' I suppose.  And would anticipate mining pool operators making that argument.

I have heard pleas from dev to 'run a full node' (which, in my mind, conflict with the lack of focus on efforts to lighten the burden of doing so.*)  I had a chance to chat with Garzik briefly at the conference to obtain more information on this.  It might be noted that if one does not also hear a corresponding plea to 'punch a hole in your firewall', it was neglected for lack of time to explain.  Perhaps unfortunately, my bitcoind build seems to work fine without being accessible.


(*) not completely true.  The LevelDB and Bloom filter work helped immensely, although I sense that it was driven in part by a pressing need to simply keep the system operational and thus alive for long enough to get some more centralization in place.  And this without even barely touching the supposedly absurdly low 1MB block size limit and being less than 5 years into what is supposed to be a durable financial solution which people can rely on with significant funds.

The idea that end users will not hold the entire blockchain, but rather use SPV clients, dates back to Satoshi's original whitepaper.

In a communist society you are limited in how you can use the shared resources. In a capitalist society you pay for the resources and use them however you see fit. It does not make sense to limit what you can use the blockchain for as long as a fee is paid to compensate.


This is correct, the argument is that sending satoshis back and forth allegedly bloats the blockchain.

I have seen many more people willing to store hundreds of gigabytes of porn on their harddisk, then people willing to store the blockchain.

And it's not free lunch, you store the blockchian for your own freedom, which is not free, and miners are paid to run the infrastructure, that's exactly why Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme.

I was wondering if someone was ever going to give a real review of the conference. It's not very informative to constantly hear praise. That just lacks truth. Every time I have watched one of the "key players" questioned they usually appear inexperienced and never are asked the hard questions or put on the spot at all because of your "sucking the presenter" phenomena.

I was under the impression that colored coin making and tracking was done entirely from the client, not touching the Bitcoin network other than to send Satoshis back and forth?

Speaking as a non-crypto newbie,  when I saw what it took to download the block chain and run a node I just shook my head. I really don't understand how it scales --  and was surprised to hear the guy from Google suggest it wasn't a problem at the GigaOm event last week.

Essentially that, yes.  I'm bummed out that it takes so much overhead already that users (including my friends) are discouraged from running a full node.  In other words, are no longer reasonably capable of being 'peers' the the supposedly 'peer2peer' solution.  That lie is finally starting to be deprecated it seems...years after I suggested that it might be intellectually honest to start doing so...  Anyway, the issue will only get worse when they need to process data for everyone who wants to use Bitcoin as a reliable messaging and storage solution.

It does seem that there is a significant overlap in the groups of people who bitch most loudly about the fees/block size are they who are all ga-ga about colored-ish utilization.

Agreed. One problem common to almost all the panel sessions was the inexperience of the moderators.  An experienced moderator knows you don't passively sit there, asking every panellist to comment on every question, that the questioners needs to get to the point and that the key to a good panel is *controversy* or debate.... exploring areas of dispute/disagreement is a great way to get to the heart of the panel.   An hour of listening to people say "I agree" is not ideal.


Not sure I understand.  What are you objecting to?  The repupurposing of the bitcoin network for the tracking of real-world assets? something else?

Did you go to the same conference, or killed time instead at the comic convention next door?

If I have to sit through one more presentation which starts out with a history lesson about 'first, humans used barter, then blah, blah, blah' I swear I'm going to puke.  I walked out of at least one presentation at the start for this reason.

About the only thing which is more annoying is when a person asking a question takes 5 minutes of everyone else's time to describe how much they want to suck the presenter's dick or whatever.  Sometimes they don't even get to the question at all.


Of course.  Everyone likes a free lunch and sees a way to get rich by sponging off the work of others.


I missed Boussac's presentations being more interested in the tech end of things, but got a chance to catch up with him in person.  Paymium either bought or was given coins that I entrusted with ~jav, then either lost or stole them.  This gave me a good reason to wish to meet him.  Pleasant conversation in spite of the misfortune though.


I didn't meet up with him this time, but I've met him in the past.  I'm still waiting for an answer to my question about what he would do if the government 'just said no' to Bitcoin.  No danger of figuring that out at something like the conference though so I was not to surprised.


Didn't get a chance to say 'Hi' to Erik either, and kind of wanted to since we worked on a minor project in the distant past.  As for being 'thoughtful', if he had done anything more than regurgitate Austrian school hokum and bunkum I'd be shocked.  Again, I found more interesting things to see so I missed his stuff.

---

My favorite presentation was Eli Ben-Sasson's thing.  I can see a large number of places where the work could be applicable to distributed-crypto-currency-like systems and tangential tasks.  I'll be looking forward with great interests to developments in his team's work.

I flew in from London to attend the conference and thought it was great.  My main observations and reflections were:

* The quality of the dialogue was extremely high.  A core understanding of Bitcoin and how it works was assumed - which enabled the discussions (lunch, panels, presentations, etc) to focus on more advanced topics.   Examples: the frequent references to coloured (sorry, "colored") coins, the altcoin panel and the various speakers on payments system (e.g. BitPay and Paymium)  --- they all assumed an intelligent *and* knowledgeable audience, which allowed them to go far further than a typical conference session.

===> Reflection:  this was great for a conference such as this but we should not forget that almost everybody in the world who was *not* at the conference is still struggling with the core Bitcoin concept, if they've even heard of it....  i.e. people leaving the conference shouldn't make the mistake of assuming everybody *else* thinks this way or has come this far in their thinking when we get home...

* There was a pervasive sense of optimism:  most speakers took it as a given that Bitcoin (or a successor) is going to change the world and that the only question is how quickly and who builds the most successful platforms/exchanges/products/tools, etc.

* The colored coin concept is HUGELY powerful - I had thought it an interesting diversion before I came but, after it was explained a few times, it made me realise just how versatile the core "distributed ledger" metaphor really it.   

* The Paytunia/Paymium presenter included a *really* powerful slide that I think could be used to explain Bitcoin in more contexts.  It had three diagrams.  1) four boxes representing the Visa/Mastercard payment system (merchant/merchant acquirer/issuer/customer), 2) three boxes representing Amex/Paypal and 3) two boxes representing cash and Bitcoin - i.e. direct payment from payer to seller with no intermediaries, etc.   In one chart, it explained why Bitcoin was different to everything that has gone before and justified the claim of others that Bitcoin is "cash with wings".   I presented on the conference to some colleagues yesterday evening and used this slide --- it helped their understanding immensely.   

* I was hugely impressed by Gavin.  Beforehand, I wasn't sure what to expect from his "state of the coin" keynote but I thought the tone was just right.  It was essentially a list of: "here are the things I worry about" --- *exactly* what I would expect from a chief architect/lead developer on a complex project.  I thought he got the tone just right

* I must admit I walked out of Charlie Shrem's pitch - it was rambling, unprepared and barely coherent.  Odd - I was expecting much more.

* I caught the end of Erik Voorhee's talk and all of his panel discussion.  Both were excellent. He is extremely eloquent, articulate and thoughtful in how he presents the topic.

===> Reflection: I don't think his style would translate well in all cultures - his political worldview influences his choice of language (understandably and deliberately) but I suspect this would result in the phenomenon of him and an interviewer "talking past each other" in, say, the UK.  Something for him and others to consider as Bitcoin awareness spreads and mainstream outlets increasingly invite Bitcoin experts to interview


All-in-all, a great conference and I left convinced that "math-based currencies" are going to change the world.

Bitcoin's major hurdle to overcome:   Stan Lee tells more credible stories than 90% of the "bitcoin elite". 

Looks at wiki image looks at photo looks at where Stan Lee was during that period
http://www.mercurynews.com/sal-pizarro/ci_23260859/pizarro-comic-book-legend-stan-lee-coming-big
== Legend Found