Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 285. (Read 2032266 times)

What will happen if companies like 21 inc litter the globe with their tech built into hardware devices? How could a hard fork ever work then?

i doubt that any cryptocoin can ever be on auto pilot as the crypto evolves as computerization advances.  what is secure today won't be secure tomorrow thus requiring continual updating.

the term hard fork is a bad one, imo.  even after 6y, definitions amongst early adopters varies.  in my mind, i think of them as necessary upgrades.  they are in fact necessary over time as situations change and crypto cracking techniques mature.  or even as the economic conditions change, like i think we are seeing now with the restrictions 1MB is causing.

the increasing block limit movement is Gavin responding to continued lobbying by the economic majority of Bitcoin users who are acting out of conditions in the real business world.  the crypto-anarchists hate this.  i get their point but as i've already said, if one's fundamental unit is the full node and not the user, i think you're doing it wrong.  network work squaring effects will correlate with the user, not full nodes.  we see this in all comparable models; Uber, AirBnB, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Full nodes are analogous to ACH or Swift which is simply the plumbing or transmission services for users.

small blocks are the ultimate in centralization.  all you have to do is look at the system as it is today as a result of 1MB blocks; confined mainly to the 2 most regulated geographic regions of the world, the US & Europe.  with usage still primarily by geeks.  that's a recipe for heavy intervention by regualtion.  who honestly thinks that Nasdaq will expand their trading systems while constrained to 3 tps? i think the Visa's and MC's are laughing at us while some of us fight hard to keep us constrained.   

This is a good point, and part of why I consider all current crypto coins to be not ready for prime time. When something is truly on permanent auto-pilot then we can accept it is a working decentralized system.

MP's point about Bitcoin is, I think, that it should simply never be hard forked. If it fails, it fails, and perhaps is replaced by something better. But the idea of any developers having that kind of power is a fundamental failure of the concept. It's worth considering.

Monero gives users a choice, either zero mixing for BTC style transparency or >0 mixing for privacy.

Monero's "innovation" is simply the decision to force all transactions to use a single fixed mixing routine.

Same thing that happens to anything else with back doors in it. It's back doored.

What protection do we have against this for any technology of any type, at any time?

I think open source (including the possibly of forking if the current developers go off the rails, voluntarily or otherwise) is the best chance we've got. If you know of something better, please tell.

Some of the privacy of Monero would be achievable using Bitcoin, but only if everyone changed their operational security methods.
JustusRanvier uses stealth addresses, which privacy would be further improved if he only transacted with others who also do this.  Ring signatures can also theoretically be accomplished albeit with some difficulty by using a client that could support this sort of key signing exchanges.

The problem for privacy remains, however, that since these are not a fundamental part of the protocol and a default for each transaction.  There are limits to the amount of privacy that can be obtained in the face of correlation analysis by a well funded reveal-er of such secrets.

I have to correct you for a bit here, Monero can be transparant on-demand. I also agree that a fully anonymous coin will probably get into some legal trouble.

This is the first video I've seen of Gregory Maxwell. This adds some confirmation for me of my upthread speculation about Greg seeing himself as critic and the smartest person in the room. He specifically states in this video that his role is more as a reviewer than a doer (even his stated goal is maximum impact with the least coding...which is a desirable goal but only if it is not the only one), right after admitting that he was wrong in 2004 about decentralized consensus being impossible. The audacity. Socrates taught us that recognizing that we are not omniscient is a primary attribute of cognition.

(Edit: in the "Selection Cryptography" portion of the video, he elaborates on why his role is appropriate — "Pragmatic has its place, but beware against biasing against competence")

No doubt this is a very smart guy with powerful crypto+math domain knowledge who can add considerable analysis and even new ideas. You'd definitely want him on your team (I would) if he can contain himself to a non-leadership role. But hand him the keys and you are likely to go too far down dead-end paths—e.g. CoinJoin—because my impression of him so far (limited interaction) is he is more of a narrow space thinker who doesn't pay as much attention to what is going on in the kitchen when he is in the basement (unless if he a lead on a very narrow space, orthogonally contained project domain such as an audio codec). And this is precisely what I told him the very first time he spanked me in public in these forums; I warned him that I am more of a pragmatic generalist and that we tend to paradigm shift around people like him (which is precisely what I am hoping to do accomplish this year). The first exposure I had to Greg was when I was very impressed by his forum post containing analysis of a proposed proof-of-work hash for something bytemaster was proposing (I forget the details).

P.S. I am only 10 minutes into the linked video and it is particularly poignant so far. I highly recommend it. So far it appears to be making the case for Monero.

I have a specific development schedule in mind which involves first releasing a base protocol then layering on top of it. Wouldn't it be better to be anonymous so the development goals can be completed rather than being behind bars and unable to contribute?

Fundamentally, Gavin has assigned himself this problem.  He is diligently canvassing and curating opinions on the problems and methods of resolving them.
It can be frustrating work, but it is fully necessary.

He is getting a lot of help in this effort so it is not merely a contest of wills and personalities.  Also...Both Greg and Gavin are on the same team and not opposed, though their weighting of the priority of tasks may differ, so it is not really so much a matter of winner/loser.

and this is fun: NSA errwhere!

> http://imgur.com/a/9CAfo <

how about that freedom^TM act? US people happy?

What do you mean by that?

Edit: the caveat I repeat is that Bitcoin has network effects and the Butterfly effects and serving as a reserve currency of potential altcoins raises the possibility that Bitcoin is a Trojan horse on itself.

Perhaps he is making a lot of profit painting the image of himself as a clever in-your-face thorn in the side of the USA regulators, and others flock to his coattails, but I would much prefer a more clever approach of silent action and anonymity. Ideologically I am mostly aligned with his stance, yet I don't see much value in the in-your-face approach...

The other reason is to simply get on the path of being a fully independent implementation that breaks ties with the Satoshi client. As per yesterday's discussion multiple independently developed implementations is a good thing. Sure with multiple implementations there is the risk that one or more are controlled by negative actors, but overall the risk of negative actors taking over is much less with several implementations than one dominate implementation.