Topic: Bitcoin trades the inequity of dynastic power for the inequity of early adoption - page 11. (Read 11076 times)

The whole point of the blockchain, proof-of-work, everything, is to prevent double-spends without relying on a trusted bookkeeper.

The textbook attack is the double-spend - spend the same coin with two merchants, and make off with their goods before they can realize what happened. To prevent this, everyone needs to know what coins have been spent or not spent.

Who do we trust to say which transaction actually happened first? Your proposal seems to be, okay, we trust the exchanges. If they disagree, they all die, so they'll surely work out their differences and agree on the transaction order.

In the meantime, can you trick Alice into giving you something for coins that have already gone to Betty?

If a "trustworthy exchange" has secretly become insolvent for whatever reason, can't it generate a massive golden parachute for itself by assisting an evildoer in making a big double-spend? Even if it fails afterwards - it was going to fail anyway!

If those exchanges get shut down for whatever reason, what then?

The whole point of Bitcoin over earlier cryptocurrency experiments is to stop having to rely on any given party (e.g. the exchanges) to be a trusted bookkeeper and dictate the "true" order of transactions. Instead you trust that "all trustworthy people" can outvote "any given villain" in computational power.

If you think the former is sufficient, there's nothing wrong with that. But Bitcoin-type cryptocurrencies (and indeed, blockchains generally) are trying to solve a problem you don't have.

What do you look for in a cryptocurrency, if I may ask? What features are essential to you?

So other people having better foresight and investing savvy than you is inequality? Well, yeah. They are better at taking good risks than you, I guess.

No early adopter can print bitcoin at will.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Verbatim. God I love Commie-coin. Let me try it out.


Double spending! It WORKS!

revans, you can have my commie-coin too! Copy it a few million times and you can be an early adopter who can give them all away and feel good about it! BTW, please take a look at my signature if you are feeling like being far. I most certainly do not have just under a thousand BTC.

Love,

Bruce W.

I wrote on that earlier today.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1829444

No calculations, no network. No block generation. No transactions. No Bitcoin.

We can do it with fewer, easier calculations, but not none.

It turns out that's not really true. The calculations are pretty pointless now. Except as a really expensive random number generator.

[EDIT]

I wrote on this last night.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1826040

Are you interested in contributing to the solution to that?

"Pointless calculations," eh? In that case, cash out your Bitcoins, and donate your fiat to good causes, because giving Bitcoins to any "good causes" that accept bitcoin will only support additional "pointless calculations" to disperse and use those Bitcoins.

Those calculations are how the network works, chief, and you can't get rid of them.

What you write here seems quite fair, but the suppositions that follow don't really follow...

Some people are more productive and others less. What you describe above restates that fact.

However, bitcoin inequities don't follow from the same principles. Very productive people have zero bitcoins because they are busy building houses with their time. Other chronically unproductive people chose to burn cpu cycles instead. It seems like all cpu work was valuable, but it really wasn't. If one tenth as many people has burned one tenth as many cpu cycles... the same amount of work would have been done.

No, having more people throw more computational power at pointless calculations is the root problem, not something to which I wish to contribute.

Thanks for the link and clarity. I remember discussing the concept way back.
It's a clever idea but I'm thinking more like chodpaba now.

I do love your sig! It basically restates the thesis of this thread.

Neat idea.

Chodpaba was discussing a galaxy of different crypto-assets - I was expressing my enthusiasm about one implementation (separate blockchains being another possibility).

Basically, colored coins are a way to "create" new classes of transferrable object on the Bitcoin network, by taking some number of Satoshis and "coloring" them to stand for those objects. Here is a partially written proposal with some technical details.

This:

Exactly the problem you created this thread to fix.

In what sense do you qualify as a good cause?

Yeah, I think he's full of shit on that one.

This.

Even if you distribute the wealth evenly to everyone on the earth, after a while, some of them will go broke and some of them will become super rich

Even if everyone start the mining at the same time, after a while, some of them will quit mining and some of them will accumulate large amount of coins, especially when bitcoin still worth nothing at the first year (There are many altcoins started later and everyone had a even chance to mine from the beginning, but still most of the people quit because they worth almost nothing in the first year)

I do think that the coin generation speed could reduce 25% per year instead of 50% per year, so that total coin will be 3x the amount of the first 4 years' coin supply and it will give more chance for late adopters

Revans, I'm still waiting for my coins here!

This thread is moving so fast I can barely keep up!


Wow, brilliant insights! (My confirmation bias is showing! :-) )

I've been having similar ideas. That's what brought me back to this forum. If you're interested we can talk offline or start a new thread.



Qoheleth, Is this statement related to chodpaba's?
And could you like me to a reference on Colored Coins? I'm only recently back here.