Topic: Bitcoin adoption slowing; Coinbase + Bitpay is enough to make Bitcoin a fiat - page 10. (Read 67202 times)

Hi RAJSALLIN and other Swiss readers, what were you saying about not having worry there in Switzerland?

I hope you guys realize you need the serious features I've outlined, and you need someone who can actually implement it. There are altcoins out there that dropped the ball because they were designed by committee and then got into squabbles and squandered their amazing technological breakthrough.

You've got to be serious about this. This is no joke. And none of these "wannabes" or "ivory tower proof-of-concepts" (for lack of a better term coming to mind) out there are going to get the job done. There are guys out there with high cryptography credentials, e.g. Adam Back who created Hashcash which is what Bitcoin's proof-of-work is based on. But Adam did not figure out the application of Hashcash to decentralized crypto-currency for years. Satoshi figured it out. Now Adam is off on a tangent of side coins for Bitcoin, which can't deal with the major issue because mining can't be innovated in his approach.

There are groups out there with interesting cryptographic technology, but they don't have the single-minded determination and resolve to get all the features done. Then you have developers such as Evan who is making Darkcoin, who have that drive and single-minded resolve, but may not have the level of insight to pull off what is needed.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/ed-snowden-at-sxsw-theyre-setting-fire-to-the-future-of-the-internet/


Yup that what I been saying. You've got to make anonymity on by default and make it as easy-to-use as familiar non-anonymous tools.

Ah - how'd I miss that.

My mention of IRC was really more of a veiled suggestion that there are things I won't say here.  That I would be willing to on something that at least attempted to anonymize or obscure communication.   And if I'm in that boat - I am sure many more are who have much more to contribute than I do.

I am not half - or a quarter the conspiracy theorist that some of you are.  But there are things I will not say here.  If any governance monitoring anything bitcoin related.  These forums have their full attention.

I don't have the time for interactive discussion. Also I don't trust the anonymity. There is OTR, but still need to rely on Tor or VPN which I don't trust to be 100% reliably anonymous. Thus anything I won't say here, I also won't say in IRC.


I refuted that emphatically upthread. I don't even take it seriously because it can't address mining (because all side coins are merge-mined with Bitcoin's existing mining) where the crux of the problems are.

Any thought been made to creating an IRC type channel for further discussion on some of this?

On the issue of alternate currencies - this was an interesting listen.  http://letstalkbitcoin.com/e99-sidechain-innovation/#.U0gBC_ldX5N

7thKingdom, I don't have all the answers for the distant future.

Good to see that others are thinking deeply about the issues. I had also thought of that.

However one major point is that to maintain anonymity, the users must not use centralized wallet services. So unless the desire for anonymity decreases, I think the recipients of payments are going to demand they be paid anonymously which is going to force the users to use the coin correctly. Also I already mentioned upthread the idea that pools should blacklist other pools which are not implementing the anonymity features.

Seems to me nearly everyone will relish not paying taxes. I expect people will have some portion of their commerce that they declare and pay taxes on in order to justify their visible assets. This will give us a veto on government, voting by withholding funding instead of this futile "democracy" we have now. If your country is doing insane shit like making unnecessary war and water-boarding people, you withhold all funding. So this means taxes will only be well supported at a local level, because the broader the demographic, the more likely everyone has issues they don't agree to fund.

Also I am positing about a new paradigm of individually owned knowledge and direct users-to-users knowledge trading, thus there shouldn't be any more Amazons, Walmarts, Bestbuys, etc.. There may be search engines and categorizing services that provide the same aggregation, but the sales should be direct. Note some Europeans countries apparently don't have those large chains, so they may not know what we refer to.

I think the outcome will also depend on making decentralized websites a reality. There is a lot more work that needs to be done than just a crypto-currency. And these are the sort of things I would want to fund and be involved with technically (since I understand the technology I can play a major role).

In any case, it will hopefully be very interesting to see what happens if such a coin materializes.

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Disclaimer: I am not advocating that anyone break the law in their jurisdiction, nor providing any professional tax nor legal advice. I am merely discussing the theoretical and perhaps to be taken as hyperbole. Consult your own professional advisers.

I think we all agree the masses don't care.  Which is why, in order to avoid this situation, an alt cpu only coin is a necessary way to "opt out" of the current system and the downward spiral it is heading towards.  That said, there will come a time in the future, when all this is behind us, that the masses will finally come around and adopt this decentralized "knowledge age" cpu coin.  Maybe not a year or five years from now, but eventually.

So what happens then, when the masses are all running there own little personal miners and contributing to the network?  How are updates made and distributed to the network?

If it is true that the masses either don't care or are too stupid to care, doesn't that again pose the same threat of having the masses unknowingly adopting code that goes against their own interests?  They will ultimately still be the majority.  How many people will update their clients without fully understanding what it is they're updating.  How easily could something counterproductive towards our goals be distributed in this way, getting the majority to consent to it without even realizing or caring?  While it would be harder to corrupt than bitcoin (which the masses will welcome with open arms when the time comes), it seems to me that there is still ultimately still a threat there simply because the masses will control the majority of the network.  No, there won't be any one individual who can be corrupted, but combined, the ignorant and indifferent will still pose a threat, no?

These same reasons lead me to wonder the degree of insanity this goes to when I see entire marketing teams form for altcoins. They're all marketing to the world that's been laid out before them, rather than the one they want to see or create. They've hidden behind an ego that must be protected at all costs.

It's a lack of true vision that I see, where the programmers have been beaten into punching keys on the keyboard, the investors sell short and long, the exchanges pick up the new daily hype at the drop of a hat, the miners struggle to run a program on their computer, the one-man markets take the money based on the demand, the consumer picks up a few more things they don't need and the dreamers are still sleeping.

Everyone's just doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, and that's what's coming to terrify me. Without a proper evolution into something new, we're left to be a revolution of squids in a sea of sharks. We're in the midst of what should be a coming total changeover to a new currency unit, and I hear not more than laughter at crickets.

I'd love to be of more use than just offer some finger-slapping a keyboard, but what is there to do really?

I had seen that a few days ago, not sure where I saw the link in the first place though. The whole video is basically showing just how far the entire basis of the movement has slipped. Just seeing that video makes me think of all the backs that have been broken to get this where it is today.

Sad indeed to see such a revolutionary concept being tied to a tree and embarrassingly beaten until it bleeds so freely.

What was once thought of as the vessel to carry us into a new world has become nothing but a real world joke.

It's very apparent, right now, that this is failing miserably. It's a toy with no more appeal to it than a common fad like a child's toy (note the adorable colors of the atm itself).

This movement needs a new face, or someone needs to start standing their ground. Of course, how could you stand without the correct tools on which to base the movement?

Afterthought:
Given this video as an example, I'd love to see different ways of getting this currency traded for a dollar. Easy ways that don't require your ID's, hand print, and eye scan, DNA, first born, a notable percentage of your wealth in the will . . etc. Sadly, representing oneself as a currency trader/exchanger comes with inevitable regulations that can (and are currently) easily be adapted to ruin the sale due to preexisting regulations we've placed on ourselves. Focusing on how easily it can be done .. it would seem some form of representation would be required in order to prevent this from happening.

Of course, the requirement for representation would only serve to centralize the idea of a decentralized currency. I think this is where many people are losing the concept. The basis of decentralization can only serve to clash with the world in which this was brought into. Naturally, the only outcome to this I see is to centralize the coin or decentralize the world. Right now the world is much bigger than the coin, so as a result videos like this will only continue to pop up. I guess I can understand, given that everyone's only trying to fit this into a world that makes sense to them. This is telling me that the concepts and fundamentals are being lost amongst the noise.


One more edit:

Looks like there might be hope, but it's still far off for some parts of the world.

This is so pitiful, at least the hosts are entertaining.

Nice to see that you corrected it. I admit I should have a heavy bias toward leaving it uncorrected, but toward the end of it all . . a valuable service was provided and that needs to paid for somehow.

Total forgiveness would only serve to dump those lost monies back into the hands of every tax payer (with the bulk of US education loans now being handled by the government, and their persistence after bankruptcy), which I could only see would serve to kill off education if the costs (both previous and future) remain unchecked. Forgiveness alone wouldn't be enough to prevent the situation from happening again.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/.

More towards this . . who is going to ask or push for something like this? Going into education (USA is used for the examples), most of these people are complete idiots. Generally when they graduate, they are relatively intelligent (or at least now have the ability to become so) and have every hope in the world that everything will work out because they have a degree now.

From that perspective, it would show a moral defeat to themselves if they were to change course and demand forgiveness on loans. One of the driving factors in their previous 4-5 years is undoubtedly that they are going to be able to pay back their expensive loans by getting an awesome job.

From the alternative perspective, http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/?level=nation&mode=graph&state=0&submeasure=27 indicates that 45% don't graduate bachelors degrees within 6 years. This means the 45% of the 14.5 million enrolled (last year's info) aren't graduating or are taking on excessive debt.

These same 7 million people will turn to more debt, like credit debt, to support themselves for the years until they either graduate or leave education. Who will tell this desperate group of people that their loans should be forgiven? How could you convince them, given the mindset achieved after seeing 55% of their peers graduating? From this perspective, they would seem like a sore loser to even ask for even a % of their loans forgiven.

What I'm saying is that there seems to be significant barriers, more than what I provided for sure, for the people affected by this form of debt from actually moving toward trying to ask for less of it. How do you convince a slave that their shackles are too heavy, or their tethers too short, without getting them in the mindset that they shouldn't be wearing them at all?

One final transgression in this thread about the speed of progression of the global collapse...

Note the correction to my prior irresponsible statement. No one should be completely absolved of their responsibility else no one learns to be responsible. There need to be consequences, just not debt slavery for life. Typically 7 years (Jubilee) is the max allowed in the Bible for slavery, then you must have allowed and encouraged your slave to work him/herself out of the hole and be prepared to be a responsible member of society. Slavery should be an honorable duty to help than to exploit.

Many people went back to school to avoid the prospect of being unemployed and are living off the massive student loans. My ex informed me she took out a $25,000 loan to go back to medtech school, and she told me the advisers told her that if ever she couldn't pay it, she wouldn't have to worry about it.

Perhaps those advisers weren't paying attention when the USA changed the law several years ago making student loans ineligible for bankruptcy relief. I suppose there is means testing in bankruptcy court w.r.t. to extended payment programs for student loans, yet that means the debtor is a slave any way, because the debtor must be destitute and a judge is dictating the debtor's financial life.

There are a lot of resources in this community. I will come back to this. Have other priorities at the moment.

I am encouraged to note that others may come forward soon to take on the public aspect of role that I am not willing to take on being a lead developer on an anonymous altcoin.

I do not refuse to accept your point. Your predictions may very well come true, but I think that it is not a certainty as you make it seem. Unlike China, the United States actually has to pass regulations through a legislative process. I am well aware of the government's disregard for the Constitution, but public opinion does carry some weight. Congress's approval rating is 10 percent, Obama is despise by more than half the country, and the Federal Reserve/Goldman/Morgan is justifiably reviled by powerful elements on the left and the right. How will the government sell the idea that an amazing new free-market technology that is generating jobs, innovation, and wealth should be taken over by the hated banking sector? Imagine if the government tried to legislate that Tesla be taken over by GM, or that Netflix be taken over by Blockbuster. 

Because the masses don't care. They shop at websites, not via a downloadable Bitcoin client. The Amazons, Walmarts, etc.. will follow the government's regulation to send transactions only through regulated pools. The smaller retailers follow because they dependent on the larger ones and/or fearful of government enforcement, and the larger ones follow because they are the multinationals who benefit from their symbiotic control over the government.

I had made this point in great detail at the Transactions Withholding Attack. It is not surprising to me that the Bitcoin diehards refused to accept my point.

You are free to think I am wrong, and even try to succinctly refute my point here. But let's please not repeat ad nauseum that entire debate again in this thread. I don't have time and it will muck up this thread with too much extraneous tangential discussion. That thread is still open to debate it further there. I would prefer to keep this thread more high-level in scope so that it is digestible.

I think the following point about 'dependency' applies to my point about the masses above.


Note the system is going to collapse, and that can be either a rejuvenation or a hell hole. I was talking to my mother and said "didn't you say my grandfather walked around with a basket of potatoes on his head during the Great Depression?". She retorted, "no, he formed a trucking company and put people to work". It was FDR's New Deal that paid people to walk on the crops and use spoons to dig canals, that retarded the rebound.

You can see France's Hollande and Obama creating the same sort of big government, big brother non-solutions that FDR and Hitler did. You will see that Hitler had himself filmed with the youth by his side, and Obama tries to portray himself as a defender of the youth. But in fact these tyrants destroyed the youth. There is 60% youth unemployment in some countries in Europe. Armstrong says 50% of the youth want to leave France to find opportunity. The student loan problem in the USA is huge and going to put the youth in debt slavery for life, so we need to forgive allsome that debt.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/01/22/why-do-politicians-always-surround-themselves-with-children/






Note some claim Hitler thought he was fighting the international bankers for the betterment of the Aryan racial supremacy (perhaps that was an element of his megalomaniac delusion which allowed him to justify his other actions ... is it no wonder he became a reclusive, drug addict).

http://www.rense.com/general50/itle.htm
http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/6720

Some refute that.

http://realcurrencies.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/hitlers-finances-and-the-myth-of-nazi-anti-usury-activism/
http://mises.org/daily/5765
http://german.about.com/library/blgermyth08.htm


Armstrong has a blog post today which portrays the changing role of police, as I am sure all of us are very aware of in the USA at least.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/10/economist-asks-police-or-soldiers/

The one that is modified by government mandate to issue additional coins and have white/blacklists would be the fork, even if it has more hashing power, not the original Bitcoin protocol. Why do you think everyone would adopt the government-mutilated fork? People can still use Litecoin and Dogecoin even though they have less hashing power. In those cases, they are the clones; in the case you describe, the government version, even with more hashing power, would be the massively inferior imitator.

Some great points on using debasement to fund the network instead of tx fees. Always seemed strange to me to just assume that fees are the best way to go.