Topic: Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch - page 17. (Read 55246 times)

BINGO! On this and everything else you've said in this thread. I just heard of BTC 2 days ago, so there's much for me to learn. From the limited understanding I have so far, it's already become fairly evident that one or a combination of several different things are in play here...

• 1) BTC is the creation of the power elite (using your title) and made to look homegrown.
• 2) BTC is a great product with an even greater marketing campaign but nothing more. Closer to "Cabbage Patch Dolls" in the '80s or "Beanie Babies" in the '90s, than a sustainable currency.
• 3) This is just one of the test currency models considered for the global, cashless economic system that will soon be implemented....more testing to come in the very near future!
• 4) BTC is genuine and was created in the high hopes of bringing something new, something free and something that works to the world
• 5) #4 is accurate and the only reason it hasn't been crushed by government(s), elite, the Fed, World Bank, etc., is because they're watching to see how they can use it themselves
• 6) #4 is accurate...at first, but it's been taken over by the powerful and is now (or soon will be) just another corrupt, evil and oppressive system that will soon be used to manipulate and control the masses

I've always been a pessimist, it keeps me from chasing after every wild fantastical new thing, I prefer it. While most of the things listed are quite negative in nature, there is nothing here that's so unlikely as the idea that BTC is going to replace the economies of the world with zero resistance, influence or intervention from the power elite (I do like that term...think I'll steal it ). There's also nothing here so unlikely as the fantastical belief that BTC will reach some of astronomical value some have predicted. The most prudent plan for people who have a sh*tload of them, is to watch for the perceived value to begin it's decline and then dump them quickly. Novelties like this tend to burn really hot and really fast once they catch, but they burn out every bit as quickly...sometimes quicker.

Yes, the BTC phenomena is pretty darned intriguing and interesting. As you stated though, someone will eventually come up with something better and BTC will fade into history like so many other novelties before it. My personal thought on the whole thing is, whether it began with the elite or whether it ends with them, this is just one of the stepping stones along the road they're building for the sheeple.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/03/29/cyprus-confiscation-of-assets-is-global-plan/


Not exactly correct. The P2P currency's distributed database keeps on running for as long as the peer-to-peer block miners exist and are incentivized and willing to process the transactions. It is impossible for any one to corrupt the database unless they control 51% of the Proof-of-Work capacity of those miners. The government can steal as many copies of the database as it wants, we always have another copy.

Without 51% attack, the most the government can do is to pass laws which compliant merchants will follow. But this doesn't stop the black-market of merchants from accepting the coins.

Even if the government gains 51% attack capability, as long as we have numerous P2P currencies, then we can continue transacting.

The main threat comes if we only have one P2P currency or if all P2P currencies have the same attack vector (e.g. merged-mining) and same kind of Proof-of-Work. Or the government amasses significant mining share and then gives it away free, thus bankrupting all the miners (in Bitcoin and Litecoin which stop paying mining rewards from debasement eventually).

When I said physical gold&silver are the safest store-of-value, there is one case that is an exception-- that is where you need to have the wealth accessible but not with you physically, e.g. crossing borders and other hostile environments.

I am experimenting with how to teach computer science over the internet:

http://copute.com/edu/

Check out the "Why Learn To Program?" in the Intro to Computers. And also see my one page Intro to HTML, as you type in html, it tells you what you did wrong.

I am currently trying to design a new programming language to replace Java. It is named Copute. It is not ready yet.

Thanks AnonyMint, this was very informative. 

See also my latter post that elaborates:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1705610

Per my prior post about the differences between gold&silver versus P2P currencies, my view is that we need competition amongst units-of-exchange. Contrast this with the qualities of a good store-of-value and unit-of-account-- which gold is probably the best because of its intrinsic quality of being rare. A unit-of-exchange does not need to maintain a "perfect value" over a long-period of time, because frankly there is no such absolute in the universe (don't ask me to get abstract because then I will drop my unified theory of the universe on you). In layman's terms, no one can say what is a perfect value, because there are so many relativities, e.g. we say Bitcoin is eventually never further debased, but the fact is the value of Bitcoin is always changing and new competing P2P currencies may always be gaining/losing relative confidence.

In my view the most important attribute of a good unit-of-exchange is that it is level playing field, meaning that what ever the rules, they can't be gamed. And a good unit-of-exchange is as inclusive as possible, and is as free market as possible. Beyond that, I say let everybody compete.

If you want to speculate on rising use and confidence of a new P2P currency, that is fine. But that is not a store-of-value, that is speculation (which is fine too, we need speculators). What we don't need is naive people dumping their life savings into the next Tulip Mania, thinking that tulips are unique and have some value which they don't have.

Thus I would prefer to see competing P2P currencies. We will be much safer as a human race with more diversity, not less. So we lose a little stability of value by having a diverse, chaotic free market, but we gain the loss of catastrophic failure modes (similar to the comparison between a Cathedral and a Bazaar):

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4867&cpage=1#comment-397396

If I created an alternative to Bitcoin, this actually removes the failure mode from Bitcoin, without them needing to modify the design. Because the power elite won't bother monopolizing Bitcoin, if they can't also monopolize the alternative P2P currency.

So actually what I am doing is helping make Bitcoin's future more stable at the same time providing an alternative to reduce failure modes.

This is very much like the bimetallic gold and silver standard, which reduced failure modes that could occur by attacking (manipulating the value of) just gold or silver alone.

So my response is let the free market flourish and build as many P2P currencies as we can. Then let the market pick the winners and the losers.

No person is smart and omniscient enough to manage the market and provide all its needs. We each throw out our contribution, and let the market decide how it plays out.

We backstop each other in times of individual hardship, if someone can't eat or otherwise failed big time. Individual charity makes you feel good. You know the person personally whom you are helping, who is down on his luck. That doesn't mean give them so much that they become discouraged to ever work or do their own. It means sharing some food, a place to sleep, and a way to rebuild. It doesn't mean triple-bypass surgery-- sorry they may just have to die if they did not save enough for that. Then again, if it is my mother, I will give her the money even if she didn't save. Family matters. When the govt pays for everything, family doesn't matter any more.

In my past, I had the experience to survive eating rice and salt. I did it to know what it was like. It wasn't pleasant, but it has made me realize that even though I like expensive things, I don't really need them that much. I live my life fairly simply, for the most part.

Greed is useless. Love, knowledge, and experience are irreplaceable.

Per my prior post about the 78 year cycle, we are headed into very bad times. But in the worst of times, is where the human spirit and innovation can shine the most.

We have generational differences. I'd really like you to read about the Long Wave Cycle:

http://goldwetrust.up-with.com/t9p570-inflation-or-deflation#4735

Yeah I used to own the domain name GoldWeTrust.com, but I let it go. I stopped working on ideas about currencies in 2010. I had some other things come up in my life. I dismissed the digital P2P currencies even though I had a rough design for one, because I felt no one would accept units created out-of-thin-air.  In hindsight, I did not factor strongly enough that unit-of-exchange is not store-of-value.

Any way, look at that link above. I am Gen X (age 47.9). Some here are Boomers, others are Gen Y, maybe even a few Gen Z here.

So the point is we will have different attitudes and perspectives given our different generational environment. My generation grew up somewhat neglected by our parents (but I don't regret this, I love my parents). Gen Z is growing up very spoiled (but facing massive technological unemployment). Etc.

So we need diversity. Because not all of us are the same. We are all competing to provide prosperity and fitness to the outcomes of future.

Degrees-of-freedom (diversity) is a game theory strategy of maximizing the breath of options, so that you can adjust to future without overcommitting to ONE FUTURE. There is not one future. The future is changing as we approach it. No one can predict the ONE FUTURE.

P.S. About gold as a store-of-value, although I am sure it will go up in value a lot from where it is priced now (maybe a further decline first though), I don't know if the future will include high interest rates again and thus gold declining in value relative to the currency that is being loaned at interest. There are no absolutes (of truth or value). Perhaps P2P currencies change the equation somehow such that we don't get a repeat of 1981 where gold declined when Volcker raised interest rates. This crazy period until 2033 is also about preserving value. For as long as the crisis is not resolved, physical gold&silver is the most reliable.

Being a newbie noob that is only now getting interested in Bitcoin, I can't say anything about the technical merits of your argument but if half of it is true then you'd be better off getting your idea developed asap rather than making argument and drawing attention before you have a fait accompli.  I'll be an interested user if it's not too geeky.  As per another thread here, a lot more competition would be a good thing and you've made good points about why one should choose your system over Bitcoin.  Bitcoin may have first mover advantage but it now also has a sticker shock problem in that folks of modest means may feel it's already too late.  

Leaving the technicalities of mining aside, I'm not sure about your argument about debasement of gold.  Just because a little is added to the pile every year, there are a few more humans too so it's not like the debasement of Roman coins with base metals.  The only 'debasement' as you define it occurred when the Spaniards discovered 'free' gold in South America.  Their only cost was shipping and a few bullets but after awhile, all that free gold depressed gold prices in Europe.  

Certainly, it's been observed that the fixed number of Bitcoins could lead to hoarding which hurts everybody as money disappears from the banks into this black box, exacerbated by the banks' leverage in reverse.  Your idea of perpetual mining at say 2% annual increase is close to what central banks are trying to achieve so we are used to it but I do worry that when businesses relay on constant inflation (rising prices) to bail them out of bad decisions, then it makes them stupider.  

Standing back, while everybody, especially Libertarian types decry that gummerments print fiat money out of thin air, I think we ought to keep in mind that the provision of money to the economy is a sacred duty of governments.  Lincoln understood this.  Instead of trying to invent digital currencies because politicians are corrupted, the people should wake up and vote right, which is to say, a pox on all mainline parties.  Hopefully people are slowly waking up.  

As for marketing, being exposed to Bitcoin for the first time, I was rather shocked at the amount of storage required for the sync files and how quickly that has grown (1g to 6g since start of 2012).  How big will that get once millions start using it?  I still run Windows XP (and hope to continue) and also a small Linux distro (live CD) with limited storage, so I'm interested in a system that isn't too complex, can run on older smaller systems and yet is still secure.  Tall order but I hope you succeed.  You'll certainly appeal to the 'Occupy' crowd.  

Best of luck.  

You force me to explain in this thread even though I said I wasn't

I don't want to appear irrational so let me prove to you that you can use cycles to predict the future. Yes there is chaos, but that chaos is occurring orthogonal to the forces of nature which have regularity of waves. The 78 year cycle has nothing to do with the sun or BS like that. It has to do with the 26 year generation of human reproduction. Since humans take years to become educated and contribute new technologies, then the technological change follows this cycle.

Every 78 years we have a huge wave of technological unemployment that causes a crisis. Go to following link and view the chart of history and the technological paradigm shifts every 78 years and corresponding downturns and wars:

http://www.mpettis.com/2013/02/21/a-brief-history-of-the-chinese-growth-model/#comment-21689 (see textual chart)

The last generation can't adapt, so you have 26 years downturn while they hold onto political power. Then 52 years of boom as the new technology is spread out. Then repeat.

So the downturn will bottom 2033. We will have a war interim.

I'm just messin with you, your points are valid, no doubt if we survive long enough, bitcoin will be used as "the kill switch" by the cartels who will gain all the mining power.  Like I said, the prison cartel has the cheapest labor in town.  I heard Ratheon has prisoners making Patriot missiles for .50 cents an hour!  Those guys can easily run litecoin on their machines as well I bet.  So your theory is sound.

But #5 above is the sort of manic stuff that Martin Armstrong comes out with, and its all about sun cycles and so forth, and guess what?  Nature does not obey timetables like that.  Whatever is coming, Martin Armstrong will not be predicting it.  I am really put off by people who think they are mathematical prophets.  Chaos always flies in their faces, and that is as it should be.

There's a dude on the Internet who likes to call himself "Last Prophet" and he lurks on all the conspiracy forums yakking on about how he "told" us years ago, how things would go this way, and what's next.  Seriously bro, people get sick of prophets.  How many prophets called bitcoin as the raging billion dollar bull that it is right now??  ZERO, thats how many.  It's going gangbusters and looks likely to continue.  So prophecy can bite my ass, though I am sure Martin Armstrong and his Princeton crew will find ways to project more future talk, no different than Alvin Toffler and the Watchtower Publishing Society, everyone wants to be the ones who "called it" when shit hits the fan.

I'm not arguing really, because your thread here is legit, and seems to be a way for you to discuss your 'better' coinage based on disk space.  I think your idea has merit, and will probably be one of the bitcoin army of multiple crypto-currencies that will allow us to survive the epic shitstorm coming, but bitcoin is what ushered it in, and nobody called that.  Satoshi, whomever he was/is, was the first to make it real, and no, I do not feel your fear of cartels will come to pass, because there will be others (like yours) which people can dump their bitcoins and buy, when they feel yours is better.  Frankly, I want you to succeed, and I look forward to your articles and for you to be one of the 1000 alternate crypto-monies that free humans from the tyranny of debt and usury.  Go with God my friend.

At this moment in time, when banks are outright getting ready to raid their own depositors, and unleash hell on the people, I am quite bored by the prophets who are trying to appear smart about it all.  I look forward to the day when money, and voting, and taxation, are all lumped into some digital tool which allows us all to have more freedom and less tyranny.  I suspect you might be on the right track to make that happen, so we agree.  But good luck getting developers to make stuff that virus makers cannot destroy, because I have worked in IT for ten years + and developers, imo, are some of the dumbest people around, always wanting the latest version of Java though it's completely open to all kinds of exploits.

In the end, the hypocrisy of humanity in regards to sex and drugs, will allow evil to prevail, unless bitcoin can become the springboard for a larger discussion.  If somehow, the nature of bitcoin can accomplish a paradigm shift, it will be in the realization that the bitcoin chain is a collection of all kinds of black market activity.  And if the discussion happens on a large scale, it will basically have to admit, that the hedge fund which has 10,000 BTC in it, has its purchasing power enabled by thousands of heroin junkies and pirates, and consensually or non-consensually photographed nude persons of legal or non-legal age in it.  When a hedge fund buys into bitcoin, and grandma and grampa are thereby is profiting openly from black market transactions, humanity reaches a zero-point nexus, where they will either accept what they are (what WE are), or it will implode.  Based on the current pace/velcoity/vector at this time, it seems far more likely to implode than to become real (less hypocritical).  This means that bitcoin won't have time to get to the point you are describing because that point is way in the future, whereas the effects of bitcoin on the black market are happening this minute.

You ever read "Friday" by Robert Heinlein?  That's probably the best prophetic book I have read.  And so the description of uber-tech combined with complete reformation of all Earthly paradigms, is what I am getting at.  No prophet predicted bitcoin, and no prophet, can predict whats coming next, except that it will involve tears and orgasms, as humanity is based on those two things.  I am sure there is room for your idea for super-bitcoin based on disk space, intelligent transaction cost-schema, and debased hashed coins, in that future.  Keep this thread going until 2030 and you will have saved humans.  Thanks, in advance.  

Problem with that as I argued in my prior replies to jorbis (review them please), is that there are market inertia you simply can't undo, e.g. simpleton users don't like to change their software, merchants can't upgrade easily, etc. And how do you communicate to all them? How do you do a unified upgrade? And maybe they refuse, because they don't feel harmed. The power elite are very crafty in obfuscating the damage in for example taxes or government theft. They then get their profit from the public backstop. Meaning they don't have to directly attack the users in order to gain transfer pricing rents on all merchants, they might even get it through a govt tax on all merchants (which exempts them), so the users may not have an incentive to switch.

It isn't as simple as you want to think it is. Better to eliminate the weakness from the technical design.

1: cartelization or regulations, are what might cause digits to go poof?  But couldn't cartels hoard gold like how FDR stole gold and stuffed it into locked vaults?  Couldn't regulations cause gold to be illegal?  All it takes is a buttload of AK 47s in the hands of the right soldiers (backed up by 50 caliber technicals in the street and artillery on the hill or drones in the sky) and gold can be squeezed out of any people and taken away.  once said gold is taken off the market, then fractionalized debt note currency can be issued, like FDR and the FRB did.

2: A known rate of debasement for gold?  How long does it take to coat a tungsten bar in gold?  How quick is that debasement accomplished?

3: This one might be true, sure, but gold has to have a form, and lots of forms are serialized.  But yes, gold eagles for example, are not serialized.  However under point #1, it takes only the right authority to force all gold eagles to be stamped with a serial # and any without the number, become illegal.  So force becomes the key driver.

4: I agree with this part about not putting all your money in them, but if someone feels that the black markets (billions of dollars in secure flowing cash from heroin and Afghanistan wars) will go all into bitcoin to cut down on their laundering costs (making bitcoin go to insane levels), then he might take that risk thinking he could get out before the cops crank down on bitcoin.  But long term, war is the only sure thing when humanity is so rich in hypocrisy. Speculation is different than savings I guess.

5: Yeah, but like I said, flexing the established crime/black markets as bitcoin and its children-knockoffs will surely do, will surely cause war on a global scale, to either control the black markets or stop them, so its moot.  But probably you might be right.  I do not see humanity overcoming its hypocrisy with regard to sex and drugs, so war and chaos must be the result.  In such a case, logically, the guys with glasses are killed first because intellectuals are the first to be purged when true evil (Marxism), righteously decides to press everyone toward righteousness.  I mean that true hard core marxists will just gun down drug users in the street, they are essentially nihilists.  The nature of bitcoin and SR drug market means the drug war will ramp up to the maximum, and government will be threatened as will gangs (who traditionally live off drug distribution which is being taken from them via bitcoin and SR) and so society will probably not survive.  Crypto, however, will survive everything, as its mostly indestructible so long as two computers remain.  Computers doing math on prime numbers is pretty basic, and even if there are only 10 humans left after the shake out, one of them will be able to run a computer and do crypto, which will give them more power than the other nine.

But anyway, develop your hash-currency, and sure, some people will mine them and you'll get your fame.  There will have to be lots of crypto monies, to give people a chance to survive the coming chaos.

Can anyone comment on this comparison of physical gold & silver to P2P currencies. Is the following accurate?

Thanks.

No. Please don't confuse this thread with the overt 51% attack.

The 51% overtly malicious attack is a separate issue and that threat will continue to exist in both Bitcoin and my design, but I don't think it is much of a threat, as I explained in the following linked post:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1702033

The threat I identified is a slow-moving insidious take over of mining, by giving it away free (and making more profits from the opaque control it gives) driving other miners bankrupt who can't collect those rents from the monopoly control of consolidation of merchants. Then using this power some decade(s) from now to turn off the ability of dissidents to buy and sell (thus starving them to death perhaps).

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1701600
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1701584
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1701724

Note you might still see many merchants, but they would all be paying a rent to the monopoly, maybe even INdirectly via a tax to make it even less obvious to the general public. The cartel can hide (obfuscate) their rents in the government taxation, because they own the politicians. By removing this design weakness, we starve them for capital. We strangle their necks without ever touching them.

Consider it a form of digital decapitation, i.e. "off with their heads". Much less bloody. Perhaps we can imagine they will go grumbling into the alley and get drunk in their sorrows (actually I am afraid they will push the nuclear buttons if we start winning, but let's hope it all crumbles like the Berlin wall).

To battle the cartel, you have to play in long timeframes. They are very patient and rely on the short-sightedness of humans to win.

How do you know I am not Satoshi? (Answer: only the source code matters correct?)

Name?

Would the community accept Java?

I would really love to code in Scala (but avoid the shit that makes it hard to read and understand), and (maybe later migrate to my Copute language which I am designing).

Perhaps the first step is to fork the C++ code with say 2.5% annual perpetual debasement (or maybe greater in the start and scale it down to give early adopter miners more incentive), without the hard-disk proof-of-work?

Then move forward on the hard-disk version with new code base.

Very fascinating thread. Are you saying there is no way to change the mining reward system to prevent the 51% takeover scenario (eg by a cartel)? I assumed bitcoin developers were already working on this issue..

Agreed. That and user-friendly strong privacy.

What language are you going to be writing it in? Send me the source if you need someone to look over it.

Exactly. That is why I didn't just implement first. I need to see what the market thinks.


That won't happen. Too many people don't understand and would view that as treachery.

Very clever the trojan horse that Satoshi planted. I may not be able to defeat it. (but I found a secret weapon, see below)

However, realize I don't need to beat Bitcoin. I only need it to be enough marketshare that it doesn't wither. So then we have the option in case Bitcoin never fixes in future.

Isn't that worth throwing a few coins my way? (even if you keep most in Bitcoin)

Due to "smaller things grow faster", you may earn more appreciation in my design.

And you mine in my design with only your PC (no need to buy ASICs or GPUs), and get free coins too. Media would love this, they can show themselves earning a coin during a broadcast with a regular PC.

The ability for common people to earn coins simply by downloading the client, is the killer feature that could overtake Bitcoin.

More users == more marketshare.

I've been known to be clever jerk

There is also another effective constraint and it is related to bitcoin's first mover advantage and the length of time until the deficiencies that you've identified become apparent to the bitcoin users/miners.

It won't be until the block reward drops sufficiently low that the issues with fees structures becomes apparent. Until then competing with bitcoin's zero-debasement protocol rule in the open market will be nigh on impossible and meanwhile it will keep building on its first mover advantage.

So not only do you need to produce a monetary product that competes with bitcoin in the long term, when it will be easier due to better fee structure, debasement rules, etc ... you also need to compete with it in the short term to gain enough market share that your product can survive long enough to prove itself when the "abstract" problems of bitcoin become real. Also you run the risk that bitcoin could always just adopt any solutions you provide to their long term problems and incorporate them into the source, since by necessity your product will be open source also.

Edit: this is all not to say that it can\t be done, just it should not be underestimated the size of the task. Strong anonymity or inherently easy to use privacy of transactions is an area that bitcoin can be competed with in the short term.  ... which is why I'm following this thread. Zerocoin has some good ideas it seems.

GATA.org published. That is the first one possibly instigated by me. I emailed James Turk who I assume contacted Bill Murphy (I also have contact with Bill but didn't email him yet). "Is Bitcoin better than Gold?"

May only be in the subscriber area so far. I haven't had time to read it yet.