Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 225. (Read 2032248 times)

^ I think this is spot on. The practical essence of decentralization is what needs to be maintained; that is not usefully measurable by a raw node-count number.

Szabo agrees, btw:


https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/610654279775461376

So looks like you're, as usual, in good company, Peter.

I try to never play in a game where other's have superior info, though sometimes it's not avoidable.  I don't play the various mainstream markets for this reason.  I'm also lazy.  It's funny and half-true that I don't really care that much about ROI, and if someone jumps out and back in again and does better than me, more power to them.  They have my respect for having balls, skill, and luck.

I've timed various things about as perfectly as possible (so far), but it has been almost complete luck and in a funny way that I cannot put my finger on, I think it has been a result of fairly deliberately not trying very hard to maximize my ROI and such.  I seem to be uniquely bad at predicting price behaviors on less than year long intervals.

Sometimes I've had myself half-convinced that if I had to choose between Bitcoin achieving something substantive for humanity and Bitcoin making me rich, I'd choose the former.  Sometimes not.  Since I've made some money already I'm pretty sure that I will put a fairly significant emphasis on furthering other goals going forward.  At this point I see the goals of making money and having Bitcoin (or a follow-on) being worthwhile as being fairly aligned but this is just and accident of fate.

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I also do anticipate that sidechains will be 'half-alt' in most situations.  I anticipate that the maintainers of them will generally have their own inflation/deflation schemes among other things.  I'd anticipate (and look forward to) situations where an sidecoin had sort of a 'buffered peg' such that they could play with the circulation but not so fast that they could rip people off.  As long as things are what Peter Todd characterizes as a 'glass bank', I'm cool with that.

I think that some of my conceptions of sidechains are at significant variance to what Back is thinking and I say that in part because he is anticipating a very much smaller number of sidechains that I am anticipating. That's fine with me...and probably would be with Back as well I'm guessing.  It's possible to have an unknown future but be pretty confident that whatever it is will be better than the status quo.

There is where I diverge from Armstrong. He characterizes FDR's confiscation of gold and the devaluation of the dollar as necessary to restart to economy. Whereas I follow the late One Handed Economist who pointed out that Americans were eating more butter and chicken per capital in 1933 than they were in 1929, and then almost no butter in the great sacrifice of the war. The war was also the way to pull women out of the house and introduce them to working.

FDR was apparently a former Wallstreet guy and was aligned with the banksters.

The New Deal socialism, the turning of the income tax into tax on all wages when by law it is only a tax government wages, etc all took place during his dictatorial reign.

No, its not revisionist bunk. If the environment was so hawkish the US could have just joined the war on the allied side without a catalyst. You're really almost agreeing with what I wrote, so my use of 'FDR's platform to remain isolationist' is what is to blame / incorrect. It would have been better to say he came to power in an environment where public sentiment and congress were decidedly dovish. Platform isnt the right word. The events of ww1, not joining the league and the effects of the depression were a big part of the landscape in the early to mid 30's. Even in 39-40 the sentiment was still anti-war. the Allies also were being pushed back, France capitulated and an invasion of the UK was a possibility. He wasn't overtly hawkish, often meeting Churchill in secret, so he needed a spark as you wrote. Blocking supplies to Japan was what caused it, as without oil the Japanese war machine would halt. This backed Japan into a corner and culminated in the attack.

Probably true, but that sounds a little like a fools errand to me. I realise the system is vastly more complex than I can understand. It's nice watching the pieces fall into place though. I think that's where I get the most satisfaction.

edit: reuters has it too now http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/16/us-eurozone-greece-bitcoin-idUSKBN0OW2DS20150616?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews

enjoying this narrative 

U repeated exactly what I said.  And then didn't read my partial soln

Voting schemes are not the simplist thing that could work.

So someone rents hard disk space on Amazon AWS during the voting period and becomes many unique entities.

You were correct that there is no way to prove one computer, one vote. PoW doesn't work by voting. It works by random chance. The only problem PoW solves is consensus on ordering.

Ah I grow weary in this thread.

Yes the BIP 100 voting scheme seems a bit under developed at this point.  The problem is that POW mining is the only way to prove independent existence, this is the basis of distributed consensus -- you can easily create a bunch of fake AWS "full" nodes for example -- 1000 nodes just forward requests to a single full node.  And if you could solve the voting problem without using mining, you could use that solution to remove mining from consensus (i.e. from bitcoin).

One way to prove unique nodes is to require that every node use asymmetric functions to encode the data to be stored, with uniquifying "salt".  This is essentially hashing but backwards.

For example, every node chooses a unique 256bit identifier (salt).  Then for every 8 or 16 bits of blockchain data Di, it finds and stores Xi such that Hash(Xi + identifier + i) = Di (where "+" means "append").

This search happens continually as the blockchain is being created.

Now a client can validate the uniqueness of storage by another node by requesting random chunks of data from the node.  The node responds with its ID and Xi0-i1.  The client can then quickly validate this by running the hash function and comparing the result to its own blockchain.

A "full" node (one that is calculating this data and storing it as the blockchain is created) will be able to respond quickly where one that is not doing so will have to calculate the reverse hash function (essentially a random search like mining but easier because only 8 or 16 bits) on the fly.

Once you have this "proof of storage" you might be able to turn it into allowing node voting...

But by denying the knowledge of the power you are up against, it enables to you believe in fantasies about human ability to overcome with a network design which is fraught with centralization vectors and inertia.

But thank you. You explained why you are easily willing to hop onto hope. You don't want to know. You prefer hope than hard reality.

And this is why the 90% slow burn in the NWO plan works, as I explained mathematically upthread.

Any way, if you are sincere in your desire for what is best for humanity, then the best way for the two of us to interact is via concrete engineering designs. All of this fighting over piecewise dis-analysis of the problem set is just noise. Then you can make your decision which one you support. Probably you will choose the hope and wet dreams of Bitcoin no matter what. Because that is just the way your personality and mind is programmed apparently. That is okay. We need a market of winners and losers. There can't be all winners, else there isn't a market, unless of course we are just expanding the pie for everyone so even the losers in the market are gaining nominally while losing relative to the winners. And only after the fact will we prove which choices were correct. I am not asserting that I have proven you will be the loser. I don't know for sure even what your future choices will be. And I don't know for sure what outcomes will be achieved, especially from my side.

Again thank you for your candid honesty. And I hope I have returned the same.

Edit: this hope curse is something I am dealing with too. I been trying to convince myself that what I want to embark on is not just hope. To gain some estimates of realism and the market. One thing I have learned from my past successes is, don't rely on others they slow me down. Don't expect anyone to help me, because they will just parasite. Close off the world and code and amazing things happen. "Have faith in yourself, you've done this before". Don't try to reason it all out. Code and ship it.

You know, this is like a complicated game. You have to speculate what others speculate what others think... So it does not have to be real in any way, the greeks do not have to be involved, but still it could be the reason.

You can be refuted on these points. Stay with hard physical science of the collapse of the buildings and the pools of molten lava that was superhot for weeks. Those can't be explained without thermite.

When you have looked at these issues with the relevant scientific background, then the comments that others make about extraneous BS just looks so damn lame there aren't really words to describe.

well, they could go BK; in a year or so.  

mining really is the last piece to Gavin's puzzle and that quote is telling.  everyone else in the space clearly has an interest in seeing tx growth; users, merchants, exchanges.  and they have expressed themselves as such.  the only one's that were questionable were the miners; esp the big Chinese one's that had spoken up a couple of weeks ago.  now that they seem to be clearly onboard with the Big Picture, which Blockstream clearly isn't, the only thing remaining is just exactly how much we are going to increase the block size.  since 8MB is completely fine with them, that should be the starting point.  we definitely should build in an automatic increase.

the only part that makes me pause is this voting mechanism for block size expansion which was part of Jeff's proposal.  but overall, quite positive.

That is the biggest bunch of historical revisionist bunk. FDR was the very opposite of isolationist and very strongly pushing the US to support Briton very early on. This was to the point where the US was essentially engaging the German navy on Briton's behalf on the Atlantic side. FDR explicitly intermixed US merchant ships with British convoys, providing explicit protection to the Brits. That is not isolationist.

The Germans however learned their lesson in WWI, where the US only entered the war after their uboats sunk US merchant ships. Without that Wilson would not have been able to get the US to enter WWI. So in WWII the Germans went very far out of their way to avoid a direct confrontation with the US navy or US merchant ships. Very far out of there way. To call FDR isolationist is absurd, he was pro-Briton.

This presented a problem for the pro-Briton FDR. He needed a spark, and found it in Japan.

Doom is not the ideal outcome.

It would likely mean any positive contributions they could make would be squandered.

FDR's platform was to remain isolationist, however as time went on it was increasingly obvious the US could not remain so as the Allies were beng dominated by the Axis throughout Europe and Japan had controlled much of Asia for years by 1942. In order to provoke Japan, the US (iirc) blocked oil supplies to the Home islands, amongst other things, effectively daring them to throw the first punch that would get the American public onside. Hitting Pearl Harbour (and Darwin in Australia) was an attempt to decimate the US fleet in the Pacific to stymie the effectiveness of the US when they eventually joined (as the Japanese knew was inevitable). and, iirc someone stood up in parliament (Denmark?) in the weeks before the attack and spoke of intelligence of an attack on PH.....

...The main issue I have with 9/11 is that there should be no stigma to asking questions, as the US (and indeed governments all over) have a horrific history of denying / colluding in these kind of circumstances (Gulf of Tonkin, Reichstag fire, many lesser). However, at some stage it became unpatriotic to do so. Evidently, asking more questions would have been appropriate in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent groupthink WMD / Iraq invasion disaster.

There are many aspects of the event that don't make immediate sense: WTC 7, some witness testimony, the probability of NORAD wargames on the same day under the same scenario (same thing happened in London on 7/7). These deserve to be explored and the commission report doesn't cover it adequately or at all.

Still, the most rational explanation is a lack of communication and failure of intelligence agencies to identify a known target & threat - but like with the NSA revelations, sometimes we can't even imagine the extent of it all.

i smell DOOM for Blockstream, gmax, and Adam:

“We have really good communication with Gavin Andresen on this issue."

then you refuse to acknowledge your logic is flawed.  i don't fit the profile of your accusation.  at all.  proving that you are just slinging mud hoping something sticks.

Because ultimately I will never have access to the evidence or the expertise to evaluate it, and most importantly: I don't care if it was Saudi terrorists or American terrorists who planned the attacks.

Even if the US government is 100% responsible for 9/11, it has done far worse than kill those 3000 people, both before and after the event.

So focusing on whether or not they are responsible is a bit like obsessing over whether or not a serial killer also deserves a parking ticket.

then prove it with the Skype.