Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 582. (Read 2032291 times)

What do people think of this paper:
On The Longest Chain Rule and Programmed Self-Destruction of Crypto Currencies
Nicolas T. Courtois
(Submitted on 2 May 2014 (v1), last revised 10 Dec 2014 (this version, v11))
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0534

what you think the winklevii's motive is, or the rtf customers - that's opinion
How an ETF affects the price of an underlying asset - that's well understood.

Your post suggested that you didn't understand the latter, the search results I linked to explain it.

If lots of people buy the etf and its price goes up then the BTC price gets driven up through arb, so yes buying the ETF does affect BTC

Exactly my point. China will not always be the cheap labor market. Africa is China's China. I'm already thinking of ways to exploit sweatshops for PoS transaction processing. The Philippines has a lot of English speakers and they work cheap. Maybe if Bitcoin fails I can make it big with cheap staker sweatshops and farm them out. Muhuhaha!  

It can be that different security and assurances are required for different uses.  You could probably afford to lose the price of a cup of coffee.  Eg imagine pettycoin on a sidechain.  It has sharded validation.  He thinks he can get to 100k TPS.  I really dont think you want that on the main chain because its weaker, and he cut down a lot of bitcoin features to get it.  But its useful.


You probably for now dont want any of those things on the main chain if and until someone can firewall them in the chain or prove very robustly that they work.

If bitcoin rejects such things, it maybe that innovation moves to alts.  That would be a sad day to me because I think it could be the end of bitcoin and even cryptocurrency period as a store of value anyway.


Adam

No Jorge Timon.  The section on demurrage as I recall was just an "it would be possible" in the section on possible incentives there were multiple others.

You could it turns out implement opt-in bitcoin denominated demurrage on a sidechain (or interest, or other things - ie the argument that you cant do economic model feature coins on a side-chain is also false; its just that the cost is entirely bourne by those who opted into it, so whatever interest or demurrage or additional inflation there is, is bourne by the people who opted-in), so that creates a disincentive to opt in.  

Btw a number of bitcoin exchanges have turned fractional (inflation) without disclosing it, and then gone under when it was discovered.  Same for some big poker companies - they were using customer stake to operate the company when market moved against them.  Moving more things on chain is a way to avoid those, and side-chains gives the developer part of the community the flexibility to move things on chain.   At least you can say a hypothetical side-chain with some unattractive economics wont be a surprise as it is with the normal way these failures happen, so you can avoid opting-in in the first place.  The most obvious unattractive economics is - the operator takes your bitcoin.

If you're interested in demurrage there's an economic theory by Gesell, the arguments for opting-in are actually complex.  Perhaps a topic for a freicoin thread.

Adam

ASIC are mostly made in China

Outsourcing, slave wages, sweat shops, child labor, and economic terrorism will always give you that capitalistic competitive edge. Make ASICs cheap! Destroy your competitors. Go USA!

Justusranvier says that it is 'econ 101' that mining reward will fall to zero (and I say it's likely to dip below semi-regularly.)

If there is some other thing Justus is imaging which will incentivize entities to support Bitcoin, he didn't feel inclined to mention them and doesn't feel inclined to discuss them apparently.

Absent a more full explanation, I'd say things are just the opposite of 'incentives that make it a practical Store of Value', though I'd also say that it is not inconsistent with a pump-n-dump type of thing.


Actually, a sidechain backed by Bitcoin needs to have a functional Bitcoin in order to exercise peg operations (not to mention that it needs Bitcoin to remain trusted by the definition of 'backing'...at least unless it's trying to shoot the moon and supplant Bitcoin itself.)  To this extent every sidechain needs to support native Bitcoin even if it is not in and of itself profitable to do so.

I suggest that this mechanism of induced subsidization provides a more durable support framework than independent brute sha256 hashing and may even act to break up the mining pools which periodically grow to a size which causes discomfort associated with centralization.

 edit - back in 2011 I was calling sidechains 'child-chains'.  Had that label been chosen we could imagine children supporting their parent in the parent's old age...

The MOX fuel in #3 was provided by AREVA, the (semi-State?) French nuclear energy company.  France has a spent fuel reprocessing facility, in Normandy or Bretagne IIRC. 

IIRC Japan also has a reprocessing program, started not long ago, which has already had a minor incident.

In the 1970s the nuclear industry and/or the NRC sponsored a detailed study of the risks of nuclear accidents.  They evaluated all the possible paths of failure through the thousands of components of a nuclear plant, and concluded that the risk was negligible, less than one major accident per century or so, among all the reactors in the word.  Yet Fukushima had FOUR major accidents, one after the other.  The first three of them much worse than the accidents considered in the study -- and the fourth one was not even loaded with fuel...

In the 1980s NASA asked for a similar study of the risk of loss of a Space Shuttle.  After careful analysis of all paths etc etc they concluded that it was less than 1 in 100'000 launches.  The empirical number was about 1 every 50.

Ltc is silver its more volatile than bitcoin or gold

1) I'd aver that the MM makes it less safe rather than "as safe as", given the competitive nature of the offering - for both SC and MC.
2) That there is no other mining code other than what these core devs have custody, with significant % of operations, enhances the gravity of the COI issue.

I'd evaluate #of transactions, mining fees generated, and # of BTC moved to the SC as primary indicators.
I am curious about how Blockstream get paid out though, just consultant fees for dev time?  If it is something more arcane, it may be a cartel worthy of investing in, just in case they are able to run away with all the marbles.

The reactors themselves were the ubiquitous GE boiling water design.  Of course all kinds of other design goes into building a plant complex...including arrangement and situation of backup power.  I thought I remembered one of the Japanese heavy industry corps (Mitsubishi or some such) playing a role here but don't recall the details.  I did read some article about various malfeasance in construction and it may well have been one of Palast's stories.

Anyway, the earthquake did not cause the disaster, and probably did not really even contribute to it.  I have zero doubt that a lot of stuff was faked including the seismic stuff, but that didn't lead to the disaster.  It could well have resulted in damage which would have made it difficult to re-start if it would not have blown sky high.  Daichi was the one which had meltdowns and spent fuel pool issues, but Daini down the coast also had some severe problems.  Daichi was so interesting that not much attention was paid to Daini.  Not sure if the problems there were seismic in nature or power related or both.  I've been meaning to follow up on that but we have yet to reach a point where decent information is available.

One of the more interesting things was that reactor #3 (the one which blew sky high) was burning 'MOX' fuel.  There is almost no reason to do so unless one wants an excuse to fuck around with plutonium, and almost no reason to fuck around  with plutonium unless one has a nuclear weapons program.  My theory is that there is really not much reason to have a domestic nuclear energy program at all unless it is in support of a nuclear weapons program.  As poor in resources as Japan is they may be an exception, but it is also the case that Japan (like Iran) would be fools not to have a nuclear weapons capability given the existential threats that they face.

I was watching like a hawk when the facilities started to go.  When reactor #1 went I could tell it was a hydrogen explosion.  When #3 went I could tell right away it was NOT a hydrogen explosion.  It is still unclear what exactly blew up but whatever it was left fuel rod assemblies scattered about.  Probably a fuel pool is my best guess, but it could also have been the reactor or a #4's pool(s).  I always argued that an explosion of a pool was the best thing that could happen as it would have resulted in relatively large fragments of nuclear waste rather than it all being atomized as smoke.  I (seemingly alone) wonder if it was not blown up on purpose.  I remember a mystery barge of U.S. origin dropping something off then hauling ass.  They said it was 'water'.

That's exactly what I said the last time LTC charts were posted. I got blasted with "LTC is down more than BTC"

Yes every white paper I've read in this space is garbage with the exception of Satoshi and the SC one (but note I havent analyzed SC paper fully yet).  However Cypherdoc to answer your question directly, CS is not an experimental science so you would not see the kind of study you propose.  In fact that is an indicator of poor thought.  You should be looking for an algorithmic proof similar to a mathematical proof.

Money substitutes will be created. They will not be as good as Bitcoin, unless they are a new currency we should switch to instead of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin development can continue in a way that makes money substitutes less necessary and attractive (improved scalability to enable higher transaction rates, more economically robust P2P network model), or Bitcoin could intentionally cede the field to the money substitutes in the mistaken belief that it's possible for Bitcoin survive that way.

The funny thing is that the BTC/USD curve does look like that, except for two extra "mini-bubbles" added to it (the one starting ~2014-05-20, and another one starting ~2014-11-04. 

May be a sign that these two mini-bubbles were generated outside China, perhaps?  LTC seems to be largely a Chinese thing.

It looks like I'm seeing BTC/USD in the future

Fukushima was designed, built and contracted to be rebuilt by Shaw Construction, an iteration of Stone & Webster.

The Seismic Qualification tests at Fukushima were also fudged.

My recollection was that the strength of the earthquake at Fukushima wasn't anywhere near the 9.0 reported at the epicenter, but I could be way misguided saying that.

http://www.gregpalast.com/fukushima-they-knew/


But there's no doubt that the inability to recognise possible disaster is in crypto land )

Bitcoin is successful precisely because of the arrangement of the incentives that make it a practical Store of Value.

What is at risk is the value secured by the existing incentive structure.

Your paper illustrated a mechanism to secure one's private key and the Bitcoin that are controlled by those keys, while allowing the value stored and secured by the Bitcoin incentive scheme to move onto a SideChain that has a new incentive structure, say one more favorable to the present economic elite.

Spv-multisig is undesirable as there is no central authority. When If a spv-multisig or decentralized proof exists in the Bitcoin protocol, it will changes the existing Bitcoin incentive scheme.

Some obvious SC's that could emerge are a PoS Bitcoin, with a fixed convention 2wp or a MM blockchain optimized to handle many magnitudes more transactions. In both theses examples there will be new revenue opportunities to validate transactions.

The miners or stake holders will have a new incentive to process transactions off the Bitcoin blockchain, this change in incentives will allow for new economic manipulation, and because Bitcoin is designed to disenfranchis (disempower) miners with diminishing returns, the resulting competition and market driven transaction costs will not materialize in the Bitcoin system but be subverted by a viable SideChain, (I believe it is possible to even engine this outcome)

The lickly outcome will not be a Bitcoin innovation but a alternate set of economic incentives and a more secure and predictable income for miners or stake holders, the net result is lickly to leave the incentive structure in Bitcoin improperly secured, and Bitcoin to lose its Master Chain status.

Wrong-ish.  The backup power generators were flooded and the fuel tanks for them washed away because nobody thought a tsunami of this magnitude was worth considering.  Not long before the event some archaeologists found evidence of periodic tsunamis of this magnitude and scheduled a meeting.  Tokyo Electric was invited but didn't bother to attend.

I, as something of a supporter of nuclear power at the time believed they hype that an accident of this type was not possible and that loss of electrical power would result in a safe shutdown.  Turns out that these old GE reactors (of which we have plenty here in the U.S.) are actually guaranteed to suffer core meltdown if electrical power is not available.

One thing I already knew is that nuclear plants are far more devastating that nuclear bombs.  This because a bomb (or warhead or whatever) must be transportable and is thus relatively small.  A nuclear power plant has many times more material available to contaminate things.  In brilliant designs like the old GE plants store several loads of spent rods on the roof of the building for convenience for the multiple years it takes the spent rods to cool down.  If they are not constantly underwater (in pools in the upper parts of the building) they will catch fire and the multitude of reaction isotopes will be vaporized do drift wherever the wind happens to be going.

Anyone worried about 'terrorism' should be plenty concerned about our nuclear facilities.  Fortunately the 'terrorist threat' is an almost completely invented by our government to terrorize us sheep so there probably isn't all that much to worry about except for natural disasters and incompetence.


Nope.  TMI was a Babbcock & Wilcox pressurized water design.  An amazing series of bad luck led to it's partial melt-down, but the POV valve one of the biggies and was known defective.  As usual, it was not known to the right sets of people.


One interesting thing about TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima is that the operators could stare right at giant problems and simply not believe their eyes.  Some combination of high levels of indoctrination about the impossibility of a disaster, and the subconscious recognition of what a disaster a disaster actually is and consequent unwillingness to accept reality.

I wonder if the same thing could happen in crypto-currency-land...