Topic: Bitcoin adoption slowing; Coinbase + Bitpay is enough to make Bitcoin a fiat - page 8. (Read 67117 times)

Sometimes I wish this site wouldn't allow n00bs newbies to post in my threads, until they've gained some reputation. I wish I had a moderator setting for that. I could delete their posts, but that would make it look like I have no counter-argument.

Any way, I guess it is good to refute this drivel, but I grow weary of repeating myself...


Cash was anonymous and this did not lead to a world where 1 in 2 transactions are scams of some sort. Well actually the entire fiat financial system is a scam, but you wouldn't be bothered with that minor detail would you.

And even if were true, why would I care? Each party can choose to know the reputation of the person they are dealing with. Whether you pay with sea shells or wampums doesn't make any difference.

The anonymity is optional.

What you mean to say is you don't want there to exist any anonymous form of payment, because you want the police to be able to catch all the criminals.

This is the most insane fantasy bubble thinking which stems from reading Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid when you were a child and never living in the real world hence. First of all, the police are always last to the crime scene and when they are first it is because they are doing the crime.

More saliently yet, if you remove all anonymity, then when the power vacuum of democracy (i.e. promise everything, leave nothing unstolen) leads to totalitarianism as it does periodically through out history, then a fully tracked 666 society means megadeath and eugenics on a massive scale that will make Hitler and the Stasi look like child's play.



Sorry to bust your fantasy, but feudalism is not an economically prosperous paradigm. The velocity of money (commerce) plummeted and stayed that way as everything was buried into private hoards and warlords. The anti-usury Dark Age was miserable abject poverty. Have you forgotten Robin Hood?

And the barbarians co-opted and became (imitated) the Roman system, they were never conquered so to speak.

And the Roman system was all about maximizing production via road networks and military protection for commerce. It just so happened that in that era, manual labor was so valuable that the system ran the best on an indentured model, because otherwise there was no means to fund the military and keep the movement of goods over a road network that spanned Europe all the way to the UK.

I have explained upthread that we now enter a Knowledge Age, where knowledge is not fungible (manual labor mostly was) and thus slavery is a non-functional paradigm.


They can still track you. The NSA has satellites that can read the 2 inch (5 cm) VIN# on the dashboard of your car.  New cars have GPS tracking built in. There are cameras every where tracking your license plate. The government will soon require you join Facebook in order to receive government services (and that will include a permit to drive on government highways). They track your cell phone. etc.


We are fixing this. It is time to replace the internet protocols.


Yes on first part, and no on Bitcoin. We don't want government approved crap.


WiFi mesh networking is now in the iPhone and coming in Android.

I guess you've heard of batteries.

Choice is freedom.
If you aren't anonymous in a transaction since you trust the other party that should be your choice. But on the other hand it should be my choice to stay anonymous if I prefer so. In other words the choice and option to stay anonymous is what drives freedom. In a society were you have no choice and are instead forced to stay un-anonymous there is no freedom. Anyone who doesn't aggree with this should re-read Orwell's 1984.

Also we have come to a time and place were you can't compare a transaction from a 100 years ago to a transaction to today. 100 years ago you could make a non anonymous transaction with someone you knew and be certain no one elese saw this transaction. Today in a non anonymous currency you have the fear of the whole world witnessing the same transaction. So it's not solely the question of a trusted person to person interaction being anonymous or un-anonymous but a question of the network being trusted in the first place and that trust will greatly increase if you are certain the network is anonymous.

If you want anonymity use paper cash, gold etc, and stay off the internet.

The NSA revelations have merely proven what many have warned for ages. The internet is far from anonymous nor private.

Anonymint, I don't get what you are trying to convey here. You want a 100% anonymous internet based crypto coin that is fundamentally based on government approved and pioneered cryptography? And you want the world using it before your projected 2015-2016 debt apocalypse. Sorry to tell you, but that scenario involves rolling power blackouts(see Greece), kind of nips your idea in the bud. Crypto currencies require sophisticated infrastructure RUNNING in order to work.

Pottery records show activity collapsed after the 5th century.

That activity continued or increased elsewhere is of no consolation to those who had to abandon all their real estate as Rome collapsed from 1.3 million to 30,000 population. No mention those who lost their lives.


That shows how utterly stupid you are, to compare an abundant fungible resource to knowledge production that is not fungible.


You entirely missed the upthread point made that reputation does not require personal identity.

Btw, we always had anonymity with cash, now we are losing it. And so now we move to the slavery State if we don't have anonymity.

Dear @AnonyMint, we could hardly be further apart in our political views, especially the value and role of government.  Therefore I would rather not discuss that topic, but would like to comment on a few peripheral points:

* It is debatable whether Europe went into 600 years of darkness after the fall of Rome.  Our view of History is biased towards recorded History, and the end of the Empire meant the end of the largest and most punctillious record keeping organization of that Millenium.  The centralized administration collapsed, and with it the supply network that sustained the large population in Rome; but it seems hard to evaluate whether the life of the Europeans as a whole regressed in the following centuries, or continued to improve.  Many cities throughout Europe surely kept growing and became more "civilized".   Perhaps the "total degree of civilization" kept increasing, but in a quantitative rather than qualitative sense --- that is, a lot of people improved, while a few regressed.   To tell whether this happened or not, one would need statistics that seem largely unavailable.

Moreover, if one looks a bit beyond Europe, one can say that the center of civilization simply moved elsewhere, to the Caliphate -- that built an Empire about as large as the Roman one, and was just as civilized and progressive as the Romans had been. 

* You are right that knowledge may be 1000x more valuable than matter, in terms of the results it may produce; but value does not equate to price (that is, how much one can obtain in exchange for it).  Just consider that air is infinitely more valuable than caviar, for example.

In a free market, the price of a product eventually settles to the cost of production plus a few percent.  But the cost of duplicating knowledge is almost nil now.  Threfore, if/when knowledge will be traded in a few market, it will cost almost nil.  We are seeing it happen now: newspaper paywalls, copyright, and DRM are only a nuisance, since people can get most of the news and entertainment they want from free sources.   

Copyright and patent royalties can be collected only when and where the government is corrupted by the "intellectual property owners" to forcefully prevent the development of a free market of information.   If that free market existed, "knowledge makers" would be paid only for producing new knowledge, and only while they are producing it; not for selling or renting knowledge that they "own" -- just as a mason only gets paid while he works, not for rent in perpetuity of the houses that he built.

* I am very skeptical of anonimity as a "weapon of freedom".  On one hand, one cannot build a functional society only with anonymous interactions.  What makes society work it is the network of person-to-person interactions, where the parties know and trust each other.  In anonymous interactions, outside the reach of government, there is no incentive to honor deals or build a reputation.

Bitcoiners claim that their contraption removes the need for mutual trust or a trusted intermediary in commercial transactions, but that is not true.  A commercial transaction involves two transfers, money in one direction and goods or services in the other direction.  Bitcoin only handles the former; but one still needs trust (or a trusted intermediary with teeth), in order to ensure that the customer will pay for the goods that have been sent, or that the merchan will ship the goods that have been paid.  I don't see how to get that with anonymous transactions and without a government to enforce honest dealing.

Anonimity would be important in times when democracy has failed and citizens need to conspire underground in order to remove an illegitimate, undemocratic  government.  Unfortunately, such governments can and will easily prevent anonimity.  Even technically sophisticated citizens will have little chance against a determined ditactorial government. 

I had no idea what this gibberish is supposed to mean, but if a side-chain is awarding new coins, then 21 million will increased. Merged-mining means the side-chain does not issue its own new coins.

Please study your Bitcoin 101.

Yes.  Naively, the side-chain proposal doesn't affect mining.  Transactions get processed on side chains despite a lack of coin issuance, because they are merge-mined, so the transaction fees are an approximately cost-less gain for the miners.  Fine.  But it doesn't matter which chain the mining occurs on because the same hashing gets done either way.  If a special chain does all the issuance, it can run at a different block reward rate.  If the block award rate is higher  (and the reward reduced proportionately) then the variance problem for miners is diminished by that factor.  Thus miners have much less incentive to pool.  The coin issuance rate is unchanged overall, so the 21 million limit is unaffected.  The only reason anyone could object to this is because they want to attack bitcoin, and it makes it harder for them to do so.

Are you sure? How would they insure the 21 million total supply isn't increased? That was the entire point of Adam's proposal and why it must be merged-mined.

http://twister.net.co/ Twister p2p microblog system.
https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page  bitmessage p2p messaging system

The issuance could be moved to a side-chain.  The attraction is that block rewards could then be issued more frequently, in smaller size.  This would reduce the pressure for pool consolidation, and reduce that vulnerability proportionately.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, perhaps.  Bitcoin may or may not be incrementally perfectible -- it is difficult to see a lilypad path of local pareto optima which takes us all the way from here to there -- but bitcoin could be improved and made more robust against these threats.  Re-decentralizing mining would be a very constructive step, and seems like an achievable one.

The very desirable step which does not seem achievable yet is changing the hashing algorithm.  Miners obviously would not co-operate.  But that may not be strictly necessary in order to prevent bitcoin from being seized through control of mining:  If the granularity of block rewards is small enough, pools will be obsoleted.  It is increasingly difficult to mine profitably.  Large pools may collapse in bankruptcy, leaving only fully distributed amateur nodes minting blocks, operating at a nominal loss, in order to keep the network strong.  After that occurs, a consensus among miners might be achievable, allowing a change of the hash function.

AnonyMint has laid out a logical set of plans that would seem to unfold in a series of events, leading to a particular outcome. You both seem to  be in agreement that there will be an end in which everything will work out (after a series of events occur) . . which would be the logical end to any scenario in particular not just this one.

Your presented flow of events is, "people will wake up and we'll all be better off" . . which seems quite non-descriptive. Could you provide a basis for your argument? Perhaps one rooted in facts in the past, rather than one rooted in your own personal faith in humanity? I'm not trying to say that you're wrong, or that you have a baseless argument . . as faith itself is something fundamental that I can't really argue against or for . .

It's more that you haven't given much of a foundation for anyone to build off of. I'm just looking to you to provide an example(s), similar to perhaps the Bundy case, in which I can logically conclude that this wouldn't escalate toward MAD.

I wouldn't say I'm dreaming just holing up hope that the masses will wake up.  I look at the Bundy case as a good thing to wake people up.  I do see the threats and trust me I'm saying things are gonna work out great.  Just holding out hope that people will fight for their rights.  I guess you call it dreaming I just call it keeping hope alive I guess.

I agree with alot of your overall assessment but I'm thinking there is more then what meets the eye to your analysis.  As you suggest there is much need for anonymity in the future.

 I think it's a better option to reaveal the things you know but don't want to share but that is your decision.I do appreciate the thought and effort you put into explaining your views.

Essentially yes, but there are scaling, redundancy, and minimum path (max bandwidth) issues, so need to use a DHT at least. I posted about this a bit in another thread I started. And also in this thread.

What if the website is included in the blockchain, like data in datacoin?