Topic: Bitcoin adoption slowing; Coinbase + Bitpay is enough to make Bitcoin a fiat - page 17. (Read 67180 times)

I wonder what effect could a CPU coin have if it has too much value in the CPU industry, are we to expect Intel and AMD for example to withhold fresher iterations of their CPUs for private mining, or charge much higher, or the opposite way getting preorders that will fund their research at a faster rate?

Any chance that your coin works with a UltraSPARC T2 chip?

I'm making the claim that the miners would be forced to collude else transaction fees would trend down until they equal miners' costs under competition, because there would be no limitation on slots per block for transactions to compete for.


Agreed but that is orthogonal to my point. My point is that transaction fees force either the miners to collude or the Bitcoin developers to control the network with block size to set a desirable transaction rate. The latter gives the Bitcoin developers too much power.

Transactions fees turn off the free market. I propose to fix it by saying an altcoin should make transaction fees 0, fund mining from perpetual new coins, and control transaction spam another way (which I know how to do).

Upthread I explained in great detail why perpetual debasement (new coins) is very desirable from every possible consideration. Goldbugs need to read my explanation so they can break out of their incorrect macroeconomic understanding.

Also I thought of another attack possible due to transactions fees (but most didn't agree and I believe they couldn't understand my point).


I know how to do this.  

Cpu-only is one aspect, and the other is controlling the sizes of the pools.


Yup, but we can't eliminate pools. Can you imagine a smaller miner earning a coin every 6 months (e.g. when the coin is worth $10,000). Instead the pool helps the small miner earn 1/180th of a coin every day.

We also need pools because it is the only way to control orphan rate and get sub-1 minute transaction speed. Also we need pools for another very important reason.  


We must have pools.


Make transaction fees 0, fund from perpetual debasement, and contemplate a design to prevent pools from growing too large.

A significant weakness of ASICs is they can't be repurposed. They are bricks without mining your specific coin (or if a new generation of chips come out). See the following two posts for one reason that is a potentially very big problem w.r.t. to electricity consumption for Bitcoin:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6053844
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6061770

Also ASICs can't be purchased any where. The goal for mining should be that anyone can get coins by converting their fiat to computer hardware. This makes the computer a form of non-divisible, yet fungible proxy for cash. Since the government is phasing out cash, I find that to be very important.


Now I will drop a bombshell insight that I had been keeping secret.

If the cpu coin is widespread enough to drive sufficient demand, the price of Botnets will simply rise to match their hardware cost. They aren't unlimited in supply. Botnets compete for the same computers that users will want to use to mine with. No problem really if thinking big, only while small it is a threat.

Cloud computing won't have too much of an advantage, only the economies-of-scale on electricity mostly, but the wise small-scale miner can locate with microhydropower to beat them and the home miner doesn't care about electricity cost. The Tilera CPUs won't compete. If you mean admins hijacking their company servers to use their downtime, this is just a form of Botnet.

Also the word will get out. People will start reclaiming their computers from hijackers. Thus driving the price of Botnets up further.

In the near-term, the botnets won't have the right CPUs in most machines, so they will run inefficiently, something like an order-of-magnitude less than a recent Haswell.

Also the value of the coin scales to the value of the mining network, so if home users drive difficulty to the moon (because the electricity cost isn't significant compared to other appliances), they will also drive the price of the coin to the moon.


And several others reasons it doesn't make sense.


I know the solution.  

All of the above. The foreigners have been trying to hide their capital in USA real estate and the G20 is going to cooperate on tracking it all down. Property taxes are going to skyrocket because all the municipalities are going to be bankrupt and also the pension plans. Detroit and Greece are dry runs for what is coming every where in the developed world, including even Germany where are majority of municipalities are bankrupt on an accurate accounting. This all comes from Martin Armstrong. You can find the citations on his blog if you read a few months worth of posts.

If I were you, I would do some research into whether you should sell (before Sept 2015) into this ongoing dead cat bounce in the USA. I can't advise you because everyone's circumstance is unique, i.e. location, etc.


I had seen multiple estimates on the derivatives ranging from $300 trillion to a $quadrillion from 2007 to 2010, then I stopped tracking it. Google can surely help you.

The estimate of unfunded social liabilities is my own (out of my arse wild) guesstimate based on some reliable numbers I had seen from David M. Walker (former comptroller of the GAO) of $150 trillion for the USA alone and I am sure it is much worse in Europe as they are more socialist. You can Google on him to confirm.

Someone asked me to comment about Mastercoin.

Yes we need smart contract type features in crypto-currency.

I expect this post will cause the "No" votes to increase significantly, because many are putting their hopes in Mastercoin, Ethereum, and BitShares (ProtoShares).

And in my technical opinion no Mastercoin is not it:

http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php/FAQ#Why_are_there_only_SELL_orders.2C_but_no_BUY_orders

http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php/Myths#Misconception:_.22Some_of_the_advanced_features_of_the_Master_Protocol_are_not_technically_.2 F_economically_feasible.2C_specifically_the_Escrow-Based_Currencies.22

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rpx26/mastercoin_is_a_joke/

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/criticism-of-mastercoin-usd-warning-self-moderated-no-austrian-econ-283129

I don't believe the concept BitUSD in Bitshares will work as expected. I don't believe Ethereum will avoid being adversely impacted (if not destroyed) by a virus on its block chain. It is very dangerous to put a Turing complete state machine on the block chain. Even a finite state machine is dangerous because the multiplicity of states interact in ways that are difficult to enumerate in advance in the design stage. I haven't been following Ethereum closely for past month or two, so I don't know if they've done any significant re-design. I know Ethereum is using fees to hopefully control denial-of-service and runtime. That isn't related to the concern I am expressing herein.

I have some ideas about how to do this correctly, but this is not the right time to get into it. Too busy on other more urgent details for the time being.

And the most painfull of taxes is the land tax, where you are taxed only in terms of property size, regardless of income. So in a recession where most shops close down and shop owners see their income going to zero they are called to pay more taxes. This is the Confiscation mechanics on property

Maximizing entropy (disorder) is the maximization of the number of equiprobable outcomes, i.e. maximizing degrees-of-freedom. Btw, degrees-of-freedom is potential energy. Creating more unique (every human is!) instances life increases diversity, granularity, and degrees-of-freedom. Procreation is breaking down the concentrated gradient (order a.k.a. kinetic or thermodynamic energy) incoming from the Sun into maximum entropy or potential energy.

I got into this in the Information Is Alive! and The Universe essays at my blog (see my signature).

Schneider is semantically incomplete though on one point. jabo38 is correct, the goal of life is to maximize the instances life, yet life goes hand-in-hand with death because if nothing dies then procreation rate has to diminish or let's say the inertia grows greater than the possible forward change. So in that sense Schneider is correct as quoted.

That was appreciated but let's not discuss that philosophical tangent further in this thread, so we don't bury the main point of this thread. We've already built a sufficient case for the point w.r.t. to stated goals for crypto-currency. I strongly urge to move further discussion on that to the Dark Enlightenment or Economic Devastation thread. I will copy this post there. You can click "Quote" then copy+paste into a Reply at any thread.

I'll try to explain myself and further my argument a little so that I just don't look so silly.  In my belief, I think consciousness is not bound by the rules of space, time, energy and matter as we currently understand them today (although how we understand them in the future might be different).  Here is just one way of looking at it so that I am not completely silly (though still maybe a bit silly. hahaha)  Even though science says what I am saying is absurd, I think the concept has been with every culture going back to prehistory.  I gather that millions of people over thousands of years have reported having spiritual, religious, psychic, or otherwise paranormal experiences that would completely break physics as we know today.  For me to be right, only just one of those experiences of millions needs to be true and based on something that isn't yet understood.  For science of today to be right, all of them must be false 100% of the time.  I understand that 1000 people can be wrong, or even 999,999,999 can be wrong, but I only need that one in a million to be right.  At that point, we just need to upgrade science to include it.  I am basically siding with thousands of years of tradition of people saying weird things happened with their consciousness than the science of today.  

Anyway, sorry to derail the conversation away from bitcoin. And it is kind of pointless to defend my position anymore as I've already stated I am taking the gamblers position.  

I agree with you that this is the prevailing current theory.  I just think that in 50 years we will have an upgraded and different understanding of matter, energy, space time, and how life and consciousness play into these.  I know that is a weak argument in that I can't refute you with science.  I'm basically arguing the ridiculous point of "my imaginary science is better than your real science." It is just my gut feeling and gut feelings don't count for much in a forum like this.  So, I'll give it to you that you made the superior comment and I'll be left twiddling my thumbs hoping someday science upgrades proves me right.  Hahaha.  

Awesome - ty for the sources.

First raising taxes and then when that well runs dry, a nice haircut ala Greece or Cyprus. Otherwise known as bail-ins

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2012/sdn1212.pdf


Didn't figure a source for all G20 nations but the US has 128 trillion in unfunded liabilities itself :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/23/does-the-united-states-have-128-trillion-in-unfunded-liabilities/
Most of the G20 nations have a lot more social spending than the US so the figure doesn't seem impossible. I've seen it sourced before but don't have time to look more tonight.

Bonus info about IMF shell game:
http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3748

So, going from what you're saying, if the blocksize was unlimited as to increase bandwidth (as opposed to the artificially-imposed 1MB block-size limit), a reliable anti-trust mechanism/protocol would have to be in place to prevent collusion, nefarious or accidental. It seems to me that miners lack a check on their power, at least as of present in the current crop of cryptocurrencies. Currently, the only possible solution seems to be forking the chain, but without a fundamental anti-trust check, that does nothing to prevent future intra-blockchain monopolies and weakens stability.

So, how to check against the ability of mining monopolies to delay/reject transactions of their choosing:
if they're artificially raising the costs of transactions through monopoly power?
if they're targeting/censoring transactions by means of blacklists (for instance, MasterProtocol, Counter-Party, ColoredCoins)?

Does this mean that we have to scale the ability of small miners to be as relevant in proving a block as a monopoly is, am I thinking in the right direction here? It seems that solo miners in the Bitcoin mining scene though probably have just as good a chance of profiting if not better through lack of pool fees (tradeoff: variance increases the smaller the % a miner is of the total hashrate), consequently in a democratic setting, they have as much power as a minority does in any given democracy, which is almost none (though they may have voice).

Instead of the gamble for one entity to receive the one block reward which allocates disproportional power to leading pool operators, how can the nature of the block reward be changed to promote decentralized mining as opposed to the centralization that the current schema promotes?

I apologize for any immaturity of these musings, I just wanted to get these questions out so as to flesh out the details with you all.

On the issue of a CPU coin.  I've been digesting litecoins move from GPU's to ASICs.  A lot of the GPU guys cry foul.  Diehard miners feel it's going to be great as they are looking at profit from the initial release.  But my instincts tell me - the profit made from ASICs are not going to previous individual GPU miners at all.  Even if the companies who sell the hardware don't create farms - there is too much opportunity for someone to bankroll the production of thousands of ASIC chips.  I don't see how to keep the distribution decentralized with ASICs.

On the issue of CPU mining.  I don't see how to avoid centralization as well.  Botnets and massive cloud computing power seem to me like they would be taking the lions share of the distribution.

PoS just makes no sense to me.  Give more to the wealthier?  

Ethereum team mentioned something about forcing each of the miners to keep a copy of the blockchain on their hard drive to avoid pools all together.  Essentially even with GPU mining the network is only partially secured when the blockchain isn't downloaded.  If you assume the miners are functioning as nodes - when in reality the pools are the only nodes.

I'm just having a tough time seeing a good solution for mining to avoid centralization.  

Matter, energy, and spacetime are all governed by the same physical laws. Life is a combination of the three acting in accordance to those physical laws.


No, they aren't. Life is a chemical reaction occurring on the surface of this planet and it's function is to degrade energy differentials. Read the article I posted. Consciousness and intelligence is simply a more efficient way of doing this.

A question about this.  Most wealth is stored - in my opinion - not in $$'s in the bank.  But in property and businesses that generate $'s.  Are you talking about robbing bank accounts.  Or bumping taxes up to 70%?

They could rob my bank account and I'd shrug.  If they took my two rent houses - I'd be hosed.


Do you have any sources for the derivative bets & social welfare estimates?

The way I see it, the laws of thermodynamics are best for explaining inanimate things.  Of course systems want to remove gradients.  That is until life is created.  Life has a different law governing it.  Generally speaking, the point of life (at lower levels) is to make more life.  This is someways is explained well in The Selfish Gene.  It will do this by any means necessary and those means often mean creating gradients.  So life doesn't reduce gradients, it creates them.  So Schneider is not correct in my opinion saying we are accidental by products.  The original spark of life might have been an accidental by production of nature being so active, but once created, all the life that has followed has not been accidental, it has been created very purposely and that purpose is to make more life.  The thing that most organisms do well, the whole central point of their life cycles is making more life.  Some animals even die right after procreating because they no longer serve a purpose.  Evolution is a great system by which life can make sure it is always spreading. 

Along the way, life started giving traits to itself that helped it reproduce and continue.  This is what is driving evolution.  The need for life to continue on at all costs.  At many points along the way certain animals developed sexual reproduction and then eventually sexual selection of partners with good genes.  A peacock with big feathers showed great health and therefore was more likely to have its children live on.  A bull that was very large could only get that way with a healthy disposition so the biggest bull passes on its healthy genes to the next generation and so on.  But with human's something interesting happened.  We started sexual selection based on intelligence.  Females chose the smartest men as those men were best able to provide resources to help raise the children.  This caused a consciousness and intelligence explosion in human beings.  See https://ontherapyaspse.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/geoffrey-miller-the-mating-mind.pdf

With intelligence and consciousness, human beings have far more resources and if making gradients helps serve their purpose, they can do it, if destroying gradients helps their purpose, they can do it.  But the purpose is no longer limited to just reproducing life.  A conscious being can choose (they it maybe hard for many) to have a different purpose.  Intelligence and consciousness are complete game changers. 

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-481122

also most big time crooks go to a lot of trouble and expense to launder money, which involve paying taxes plus added expenses

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/06/inflation-is-not-always-caused-by-change-in-money-supply-deflation-is-engulfing-europe/


Martin Armstrong is wrong on this point. It is important to refute him, because he arguing against anonymity.

Indeed legalizing drugs would lower their cost, make them more widely available, and thus through competition defund those Mafias that control distribution now. The taxing part has nothing to do with it! He conflated.

When drugs are illegal, non-criminals are unwilling to risk it to distribute them. Thus the criminals takeover the business.

I would prefer drugs weren't available, but the above is the economic reality. And it is not my right to impinge upon and judge for others what they want to do to themselves.