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Topic: Economic Totalitarianism - page 72. (Read 345738 times)

sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
September 02, 2015, 09:09:01 PM
Thanks to klee and smooth for approving of my decision to make the anonymity features orthogonal, which IMO is what enables me to be the public face on the coin. I wanted to make sure that others think this is the correct decision, before buying the coin's proposed domain name with my credit/debit card. I assume rpietila also approves of that decision, based on his past stance that we should not fear government which he reiterated today. Again it makes no sense to attach the anonymity features of any such coin to myself, for if you want me to lead the improved consensus design then I need to not be in the crosshairs of those who hate anonymity features. If the coin can gain significant momentum from the advances in the consensus design, then the anonymity features are easy to fund and I'm confident there are a lot of great developers who are willing to peer review and implement the designs I already wrote down (their decision whether to do it anonymously or not).

W.r.t. to government's desire to move to trackable digital currency so they can easily tax everything that trades, I believe it is very likely the smart people in the think tanks for government know they need a competitive technological solution because if you put the government in control of some servers for all commerce of the world, then commerce would collapse because for example I registered my car for another year at the Land Transportation Office in the Philippines in January and as of yet the sticker for my license plate is still not available. The production of the stickers is constantly undergoing "re-bidding". This has been an annual ritual for the past 5 years and it is getting worse every year, in spite of the President claiming he has made drastic improvements in reforming the corruption and bureaucratic processes.

So I think instead they'd like a competitive system which they can regulate and which is inherently trackable. As long as the government can regulate the miners to force 666 KYC (know-your-customer) identification to accompany every transaction on a public block chain, then they track and tax everything. No need for the government to be in the business of running the world's servers for commerce, because if they do surely it will not be resilient and the entire commerce will have frequents "brown outs". AltcoinUK, just watch those national experiments to crash and burn as first examples. As Lazarus Long wrote, "the government specification for a mouse is an elephant".

So that is why I designed a consensus network which has the benefits of Satoshi's PoW, but also alleviates its weaknesses and including making it possible to push your transactions onto the block chain even if all the other mining nodes have come under control of the beast.

What I am trying to say is I believe nature always wins in the end. And the government can't have its cake and eat it too. I believe it will need resilience and in order to get it, it must have my design because for example Satoshi's design is destroyed if there is even a brief period of network fragmentation. And so the government will eventually have to accept that entropy of commerce can't go to 0. The cat and mouse game of cash will continue even with decentralized electronic money.

This is what I mean when I wrote Butterfly Effect. The government is not in control of the outcome. Nature is.

I will soon be posting some open source code up and announcing a proposed name. So we can really get the ball moving faster and everyone can realize I am not bullshitting.

Edit: we also have to bear in mind that those who are really in control also still want to have a fractional reserve system of finance so they can maintain control via the issuance of debt and/or the regulatory oversight of fractional reserves because private banks go bankrupt in the boom & bust cycle when they issue fractional reserves. Thus again their interests are for a competitive system they can regulate.

Regarding the entropy argument I made, there is no way one entity can be the bank and server of world. Entropy doesn't allow for that outcome. It wouldn't function. It violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.


Edit#2: good that I didn't decide to make the anonymity the second priority until recently. Otherwise I would have never discovered the holy grail of on chain anonymity. I still have the invention. I will pass it on for someone else to implement on the coin, so I become detached from the anonymity features. As for the anonymity network, I'll write down what is possible, but leave it to others to implement and the coin can fund this. I'll detail funding later...
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
September 02, 2015, 04:08:28 PM
Just when I thought I had seen everything.  I had to slap myself in the face while reading this coin description:

http://identabit.com/

The great satan Dan Larimer strikes again.





donator
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1036
September 02, 2015, 10:58:49 AM
Is it likely that people will ever realize that the "government" is not their servant, but a leech?

I mean, if they don't, the life of us freedom people remains difficult.

If they do, everybody's problems are over.

What bugs me in these discussions is that many think of government as their enemy. But there is no legitimate government that behaves such. The same as if you regard your father, mother, school, employer, God, etc. as your enemy. The system is very much wrong if that is the case. Any support for such a "government" should be withdrawn and peaceful people asked to stay away from it.
hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
September 02, 2015, 07:53:27 AM
I also agree with Marty Armstrong that the government in fact will shut down digital currencies at the moment when it interrupts tax collection on the large scale.

I think you have it backwards.  Government wants a digital only cash system.  Excerpt from my "Why Emunie is the Pandora's box of cryptocurrency" thread:

3)  Reputation variables and lack of PoW to create a closed system are really the key in linking biometric data to users.  This allows you to build the tax system into the coin/platform as well.  If the tax system is built into the coin, they can mandate any other form of currency or gold is an attempt at bypassing the tax code for money laundering, shutting down all alternatives.  Things like this are much harder to do with PoW & Bitcoin or Cryptonote.

You misunderstand the whole thing (I think).

The governments want and will roll out electronic money which is not equivalent to digital currency. Electronic money in this context means that there wont be paper money, so the government can tax the shit out from everyone due to channelling all payments via the electronic money system. That's what Armstrong says and it has nothing to do with digital currencies.

You're both saying the same thing. r0ach is also saying that eMonie is so government-friendly by its design (even more so than Bitcoin, I guess) that it could form the basis of the electronic money. I haven't studied it carefully enough to have an opinion on whether he is correct.




Yeah, I understand he is talking about sort of the same thing, but the issue is many here in BCT believes that when the government talks about electronic money they refer to a blockchain based decentralised solution. This couldn't be further from the truth. The governments' primary interest is to have a centralised electronic (i.e. paper and coin money free) system so the tax can be collected more effectively.
The crash and collapse is inevitable and therefore the tax - which will be the only remaining source of income for governments - will be collected this way.

That also means the government will hunt down all digital currencies that allows to hide money from the government. I agree with Armstrong that will happen, his arguments sounds logical to me.

legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
September 02, 2015, 07:47:53 AM
I also agree with Marty Armstrong that the government in fact will shut down digital currencies at the moment when it interrupts tax collection on the large scale.

I think you have it backwards.  Government wants a digital only cash system.  Excerpt from my "Why Emunie is the Pandora's box of cryptocurrency" thread:

3)  Reputation variables and lack of PoW to create a closed system are really the key in linking biometric data to users.  This allows you to build the tax system into the coin/platform as well.  If the tax system is built into the coin, they can mandate any other form of currency or gold is an attempt at bypassing the tax code for money laundering, shutting down all alternatives.  Things like this are much harder to do with PoW & Bitcoin or Cryptonote.

You misunderstand the whole thing (I think).

The governments want and will roll out electronic money which is not equivalent to digital currency. Electronic money in this context means that there wont be paper money, so the government can tax the shit out from everyone due to channelling all payments via the electronic money system. That's what Armstrong says and it has nothing to do with digital currencies.

You're both saying the same thing. r0ach is also saying that eMonie is so government-friendly by its design (even more so than Bitcoin, I guess) that it could form the basis of the electronic money. I haven't studied it carefully enough to have an opinion on whether he is correct.


hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
September 02, 2015, 07:44:25 AM
I also agree with Marty Armstrong that the government in fact will shut down digital currencies at the moment when it interrupts tax collection on the large scale.

I think you have it backwards.  Government wants a digital only cash system.  Excerpt from my "Why Emunie is the Pandora's box of cryptocurrency" thread:

3)  Reputation variables and lack of PoW to create a closed system are really the key in linking biometric data to users.  This allows you to build the tax system into the coin/platform as well.  If the tax system is built into the coin, they can mandate any other form of currency or gold is an attempt at bypassing the tax code for money laundering, shutting down all alternatives.  Things like this are much harder to do with PoW & Bitcoin or Cryptonote.

You misunderstand the whole thing (I think).

The governments want and will roll out electronic money which is not equivalent to digital currency. Electronic money in this context means that there wont be paper money, so the government can tax the shit out from everyone due to channelling all payments via the electronic money system. That's what Armstrong says and it has nothing to do with digital currencies.

EDIT:
Electronic money in this context what for example the Danish started to implement and what has been talked in London between the EU finance officials a few weeks ago.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
September 02, 2015, 07:41:37 AM
Notice that the top 5 (not even 3!) are in all China.
Is BitFury in China?

They're not. I misread the chart. An absolute majority is in China however.

Quote from: r0ach
Government wants a digital only cash system

Absolutely. The War on Cash is in the OP of this thread.

Quote from: klee
Kudos for making the right choice.

Agree. I don't care who is a sissy or not but I think it gives the coin a better chance. For a new coin to succeed given Bitcoin's dominance and the headwinds facing all crypto is an enormous uphill battle. It needs every advantage possible.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
September 02, 2015, 07:07:20 AM
I also agree with Marty Armstrong that the government in fact will shut down digital currencies at the moment when it interrupts tax collection on the large scale.

I think you have it backwards.  Government wants a digital only cash system.  Excerpt from my "Why Emunie is the Pandora's box of cryptocurrency" thread:

3)  Reputation variables and lack of PoW to create a closed system are really the key in linking biometric data to users.  This allows you to build the tax system into the coin/platform as well.  If the tax system is built into the coin, they can mandate any other form of currency or gold is an attempt at bypassing the tax code for money laundering, shutting down all alternatives.  Things like this are much harder to do with PoW & Bitcoin or Cryptonote.
legendary
Activity: 1498
Merit: 1000
September 02, 2015, 05:33:19 AM
In 2013 and 2014, I made a vow if ever I was involved in a coin, not to put my name on it. This was mostly to attempt to deflect politics and also for my personal safety against kidnapping and that sort of thing.

I have discovered that it is very difficult to gain confidence in a coin where the developers are anonymous.

Also I have discovered that my technical reputation carries some weight in this forum.

I think my original intention was w.r.t. to a coin with strong anonymity advances, and was also motivated by not wanting to be a target of TPTB. Well at this point, any such anonymity for myself is blown to smithereens and can't ever hope to get it back. I am old already at age 50. And the tail end of my career was destroyed by the Multiple Sclerosis and personal issues that exploded with losing vision in one eye in 1999. The point of saying this, is I don't have as much to lose as someone in a better situation.

Lately since I've been surviving on only leafy greens and coconut meat, I realized I could always survive even deep in the Amazon jungle or pretty much any where.

I've got one more chance to make my mark on my career. My intellect and coding abilities are still one of the best in the world (sorry but I know my abilities and this isn't bullshit ... if anyone thinks their abilities are top notch ... come on I'd love your help and competition!!).

Thus I have decided to put my name on my coin!

I will be leading this coin out in the open, which will make it much easier.

My coin will be launched without any anonymity features. That is a key point.

My anonymity designs will be offloaded to others and these can be added to the coin after the fact by others. I do not want to be held culpable for the anonymity stuff, although I will make sure all my awesome designs are passed on so they can be implemented.

My job will be to make sure this superior consensus design overtakes Bitcoin and gets spread out every where.

I will soon announce the name and make a thread for it in the Altcoin section, letting the community know it is coming.

Next we have a different plan for the community of this coin. We will not be doing the usual trolling in the forums. Instead we are going to have Wiki that anyone can make a comment to. These comments will remain in the history, but we will edit the Wiki and organize the logic so it is consumable by a person who comes to learn.

Means no censorship but we want to cut don't on the noise and focus on maximizing communication of essential information.

We'll post updates to the Altcoin forums, but we won't entertain tit'for'tat debates in the forums for our official moderated threads. Those who want can go to our Wikis. Of course any one can make an unofficial thread and go on and on and on in tirades should they wish.

P.S. just finished jogging at mid day tropical heat of the Philippines and I feel great.
Achilleas, Leonidas and Alexander the Great were not anonymous!

Kudos for making the right choice.

I am sick of all the Satoshis, BCNexts and Sunny Kings.

Sissys.
full member
Activity: 210
Merit: 100
September 02, 2015, 02:08:25 AM
Suda123 is a troll

Quote
Putangina mu bobo

Translate: motherfucker stupid


Yeah, they're after whatever seems serious and interesting on the forum. I've added him to "The List" today. Thanks for the info.

Actually I came from another forum, I think they were marketeers spamming BUY ETHEREUM but not bitcoin, then when I decided to look more into bitcoin it was really interesting. Also the forum back when bitcoin was going to hit 1k they were spamming buy bitcoin when it was 4$-7$.

What is more interesting where I live the politicians were doing meetings concerning bitcoin, the only people were there were rich old people,politicians etc.

They ended up inviting my mom *even if she was a wage slave* they thought she was a financial adviser so she got invited to the meeting then they were presenting an MLM bitcoin mining operation bitclub. So when I heard about it I was like wtf bitcoin is where I live lel.

SO I decided to check it out, the senator where I live personally does the presentations of bitcoin and the MLM buttcoin mining operation.

So I snuck in since they have no choice but to stack people under me, and the people under me are like business owners in shit LOL.

im just some guy that plays video games and elo boosts.

I read from the forum I go to that depending on what happens there are a lot of variables that could happen and im trying to find the boat to jump to.

these passed 2 weeks if I can compile all the information I learned, bitcoin forum has to be at least the pinnacle atm, but since this is regarding my future I can't full on troll.

I like this place a lot, the shills here and fud are called out and rektasaures

I have never saved money or invested in anything whether or not bitcoin fails or succeeds I learned way to much.
legendary
Activity: 1484
Merit: 1002
Strange, yet attractive.
September 02, 2015, 01:47:15 AM
Suda123 is a troll

Quote
Putangina mu bobo

Translate: motherfucker stupid


Yeah, they're after whatever seems serious and interesting on the forum. I've added him to "The List" today. Thanks for the info.
legendary
Activity: 3416
Merit: 1059
September 02, 2015, 01:40:23 AM
Suda123 is a troll

Quote
Putangina mu bobo

Translate: motherfucker stupid
full member
Activity: 210
Merit: 100
September 02, 2015, 12:20:49 AM
Brace yourselves, the window lickers are coming.
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
September 01, 2015, 11:06:46 PM
In 2013 and 2014, I made a vow if ever I was involved in a coin, not to put my name on it. This was mostly to attempt to deflect politics and also for my personal safety against kidnapping and that sort of thing.

I have discovered that it is very difficult to gain confidence in a coin where the developers are anonymous.

Also I have discovered that my technical reputation carries some weight in this forum.

I think my original intention was w.r.t. to a coin with strong anonymity advances, and was also motivated by not wanting to be a target of TPTB. Well at this point, any such anonymity for myself is blown to smithereens and can't ever hope to get it back. I am old already at age 50. And the tail end of my career was destroyed by the Multiple Sclerosis and personal issues that exploded with losing vision in one eye in 1999. The point of saying this, is I don't have as much to lose as someone in a better situation.

Lately since I've been surviving on only leafy greens and coconut meat, I realized I could always survive even deep in the Amazon jungle or pretty much any where.

I've got one more chance to make my mark on my career. My intellect and coding abilities are still one of the best in the world (sorry but I know my abilities and this isn't bullshit ... if anyone thinks their abilities are top notch ... come on I'd love your help and competition!!).

Thus I have decided to put my name on my coin!

I will be leading this coin out in the open, which will make it much easier.

My coin will be launched without any anonymity features. That is a key point.

My anonymity designs will be offloaded to others and these can be added to the coin after the fact by others. I do not want to be held culpable for the anonymity stuff, although I will make sure all my awesome designs are passed on so they can be implemented.

My job will be to make sure this superior consensus design overtakes Bitcoin and gets spread out every where.

I will soon announce the name and make a thread for it in the Altcoin section, letting the community know it is coming.

Next we have a different plan for the community of this coin. We will not be doing the usual trolling in the forums. Instead we are going to have Wiki that anyone can make a comment to. These comments will remain in the history, but we will edit the Wiki and organize the logic so it is consumable by a person who comes to learn.

Means no censorship but we want to squelch the noise and focus on maximizing communication of essential information.

We'll post updates to the Altcoin forums, but we won't entertain tit'for'tat debates in the forums for our official moderated threads. Those who want can go to our Wikis. Of course any one can make an unofficial thread and go on and on and on in tirades should they wish.

P.S. just finished jogging at mid day tropical heat of the Philippines and I feel great.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
September 01, 2015, 10:58:10 PM
Edit: not to mention that most likely many of 21 Inc's subsidized cell phones will be distributed in the Asian Union, which China will control.

I honestly think that China's national authorities don't really care about Bitcoin and consider it well below their pay grade (which I don't happen to disagree with) but if this became important they would just ban 21's chips in phones distributed (and mostly manufactured remember) in China, or even better clone the 21.com chips to make 88.com chips instead and control it themselves.
full member
Activity: 224
Merit: 100
September 01, 2015, 10:36:09 PM
First of all, I maintain the biggest win for a new crypto coin is to fix Bitcoin's scaling and centralization problems. Also to enable perfect 0-confirmation transactions and microtransactions, so the social networks such as Facebook can be enabled to use crypto for Likes, etc.. That is paramount to anonymity and that is the first goal of producing a coin that functions on a testnet asap. That is the Bitcoin killer and now that my health is fine, this should be brought to testnet as quickly as possible.



You are incorrect that having access to all the underlying packets means the authorities can unmask your anonymity with a properly designed and implemented anonymity network built on a higher network layer on top of those packets.

With an anonymity network, the packets do not proceed directly between the designated ends of the communication. They are instead mixed with many other communications, so it becomes indeterminable which source packets are designated for which ends. Even the ends can become indeterminable, because it is not clear which node is the end and which is a relay.

But the problem is that the existing anonymity networks do not implement this correctly, because it is not easy. I know what needs to be done technically. I am capable of doing it, if my health continues to be good.

Latency will definitely increase with an anonymity network. But if the web apps are properly designed to cache more data client side, then you will hardly notice. Most web programmers are not even designing for latency at all.

You are correct that meta data can unmask the anonymity network and that is why the solutions need to be more much holistic. Tor and I2P attempt to integrate with existing web sites and web clients, and that is one reason they fail to be robust against the authorities that can record every packet.

We shouldn't assume the government can ban encryption and anonymity networks.

  • There are many governments. Coordination takes years to organize.
  • If an activity becomes popular on the internet, it becomes difficult to ban it, e.g. music file sharing (remember they banned Napster). There are billions of people in the world and they can tinker and find innovative ways around authorities when something is in high demand, e.g. WiFi can be beamed 50 kms with a simple parabolic dish setup.
  • Even if the future world government does ban everything, we have those features interim.
  • It will take years before any crypto currency would disrupt taxation on any significant scale.
  • The corrupt authorities want to hide their ill-gotten wealth also. They have an incentive not to ban it especially as the entire system starts collapsing. The bastards at the very top have to be careful, because the underlings aren't just going to roll over. There are many competing interests. The world is still complex. Don't try to predict that you know the Butterfly Effect outcome of creating better technologies.
  • The anonymity should be an optional feature of the coin.
  • It should be impossible to censor the coin network of anonymous transactions (Bitcoin, Monero, and all existing PoW coins can't make this guarantee due to scaling requires mining centralization).
  • Anonymity is also useful for privacy, not just hiding from authorities. If you become a crypto $billionaire and the economy is collapsing, you don't want to be a target for kidnapping.

Even without an anonymity network, you can still use an open WiFi to send your transactions to the block chain anonymously (even using both is great), and thus improving upon Monero's on chain anonymity is important.

As for what is best to do action wise. You can hide from the authorities if you want to, and then later you can decide when you sell and time to report capital gains taxes, whether you will declare or not, depending on the situation in the world at that time.

Also best if you restructure your residency and citizenship so you are not required to pay taxes nor declare. And then be anonymous on top of that. So that you basically are not a visible target in the system.

I did a search at instantcheck.com and it couldn't even find me. It found all my relatives. I been gone from the USA since 2006 so I am not showing up in many databases. That is what you want. Disappear.


P.S. So far no re-occurrence of that dreaded shit Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Frankly I don't know how I was productive at all with that shit. If you've never had it, you have no idea. Thinking "walking dead" or zombie. It is horrible.

Disclaimer: I am not a tax adviser so consult your own. I am not advocating anyone break any law. Act on your own decisions. I am just sharing my ideas.

so do i buy monero senpai ;-;

buy at your own risk. kappa.

but yeah, i say heck with taxes, and just have a dont get caught mentality. rules are made to be broken.
full member
Activity: 210
Merit: 100
September 01, 2015, 10:13:28 PM
First of all, I maintain the biggest win for a new crypto coin is to fix Bitcoin's scaling and centralization problems. Also to enable perfect 0-confirmation transactions and microtransactions, so the social networks such as Facebook can be enabled to use crypto for Likes, etc.. That is paramount to anonymity and that is the first goal of producing a coin that functions on a testnet asap. That is the Bitcoin killer and now that my health is fine, this should be brought to testnet as quickly as possible.



You are incorrect that having access to all the underlying packets means the authorities can unmask your anonymity with a properly designed and implemented anonymity network built on a higher network layer on top of those packets.

With an anonymity network, the packets do not proceed directly between the designated ends of the communication. They are instead mixed with many other communications, so it becomes indeterminable which source packets are designated for which ends. Even the ends can become indeterminable, because it is not clear which node is the end and which is a relay.

But the problem is that the existing anonymity networks do not implement this correctly, because it is not easy. I know what needs to be done technically. I am capable of doing it, if my health continues to be good.

Latency will definitely increase with an anonymity network. But if the web apps are properly designed to cache more data client side, then you will hardly notice. Most web programmers are not even designing for latency at all.

You are correct that meta data can unmask the anonymity network and that is why the solutions need to be more much holistic. Tor and I2P attempt to integrate with existing web sites and web clients, and that is one reason they fail to be robust against the authorities that can record every packet.

We shouldn't assume the government can ban encryption and anonymity networks.

  • There are many governments. Coordination takes years to organize.
  • If an activity becomes popular on the internet, it becomes difficult to ban it, e.g. music file sharing (remember they banned Napster). There are billions of people in the world and they can tinker and find innovative ways around authorities when something is in high demand, e.g. WiFi can be beamed 50 kms with a simple parabolic dish setup.
  • Even if the future world government does ban everything, we have those features interim.
  • It will take years before any crypto currency would disrupt taxation on any significant scale.
  • The corrupt authorities want to hide their ill-gotten wealth also. They have an incentive not to ban it especially as the entire system starts collapsing. The bastards at the very top have to be careful, because the underlings aren't just going to roll over. There are many competing interests. The world is still complex. Don't try to predict that you know the Butterfly Effect outcome of creating better technologies.
  • The anonymity should be an optional feature of the coin.
  • It should be impossible to censor the coin network of anonymous transactions (Bitcoin, Monero, and all existing PoW coins can't make this guarantee due to scaling requires mining centralization).
  • Anonymity is also useful for privacy, not just hiding from authorities. If you become a crypto $billionaire and the economy is collapsing, you don't want to be a target for kidnapping.

Even without an anonymity network, you can still use an open WiFi to send your transactions to the block chain anonymously (even using both is great), and thus improving upon Monero's on chain anonymity is important.

As for what is best to do action wise. You can hide from the authorities if you want to, and then later you can decide when you sell and time to report capital gains taxes, whether you will declare or not, depending on the situation in the world at that time.

Also best if you restructure your residency and citizenship so you are not required to pay taxes nor declare. And then be anonymous on top of that. So that you basically are not a visible target in the system.

I did a search at instantcheck.com and it couldn't even find me. It found all my relatives. I been gone from the USA since 2006 so I am not showing up in many databases. That is what you want. Disappear.


P.S. So far no re-occurrence of that dreaded shit Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Frankly I don't know how I was productive at all with that shit. If you've never had it, you have no idea. Thinking "walking dead" or zombie. It is horrible.

Disclaimer: I am not a tax adviser so consult your own. I am not advocating anyone break any law. Act on your own decisions. I am just sharing my ideas.

so do i buy monero senpai ;-;
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
September 01, 2015, 10:09:57 PM
If China today tried to shut down Bitcoin, the rest of the world would fork the hash if necessary to kill the threat. The politics is such that people can be moved en masse against such threats. Coinbase, Blockchain.com and a few others can get together and make it happen.

The threat we face is not coming from regional concentration. It is from the cooperation of the TPTB globally to enslave us.

Any more off topic posts on this are just noise and frankly make me think the person writing them is not efficient.

Edit: not to mention that most likely many of 21 Inc's subsidized cell phones will be distributed in the Asian Union, which China will control.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
September 01, 2015, 10:05:20 PM
I can understand that one might argue other scenarios such as China holding Bitcoin hostage and better to have some control in the USA. I view that possibility as Nil, because as soon as China attempted to do that, pools will spontaneously sprout outside of China.

This is likely incorrect because the miners are in China as well, and they won't/can't use pools outside China possibly for political reasons but certainly because internet connectivity in/out of China is both generally poor and heavily restricted.

This is self-reinforcing (pools want to be where the miners are and miners want to be where the pools are, and also of course pools want to be where the other pools are, as long as they are geographically concentrated) as long as no one like 21 comes along with sufficient scale to disrupt it.

Furthermore, concentration in any country is harmful because it gives even other countries more power. US can ask or pressure China to force its miners/pools to do X and unless this is something that China specifically opposes, it will likely agree to do it. But to the extent that authority is spread out this becomes much harder if not impossible, as with your comments above about some countries allowing the sorts of anonymity technologies that other countries will ban/block. That can't happen if the whole damn thing is in one country.

tldr: Bitcoin today is effectively Chinacoin, and it's pretty much stuck there unless someone invests in breaking that monopoly.

Quote
Edit: emphasizing China is harmful, because then if the community organizes to attempt to force pools outside of China, they will think the problem of centralization is solved. Rather the problem is fundamental and economics. Can't be solved with Bitcoin's current design.

Some aspects of centralization are indeed fundamentally addressed by spreading infrastructure around, as above.

member
Activity: 82
Merit: 10
September 01, 2015, 09:44:12 PM
Notice that the top 5 (not even 3!) are in all China.
Is BitFury in China?
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