RAJSALLIN, you did an excellent summary of my views. Also there is the new selfish mining attack, which when combined with the withholding attack that miners can do on pools, probably (allowing the very small chance for myself to be wrong on the technical analysis) makes it impossible to stop a determined adversary from destroying the honest pools. I have detailed this in comments in debate with cunicula over at that hackingdistributed site. And I have proposed fixes for all these things, including your summary.
I sent the following message to SlipperySlope in private email when he declined to assist me on a mathematical model because he "puts his full faith in Bitcoin". I did get to see his photo so I have an estimate of his age now:
I hope you realize that Bitcoin stops providing sufficient funding to miners from coin rewards by 2033 (<1%) or 2040 (<0.2%) and that funding is expected to come from tx fees. However, due to the very easy transactions withholding attack, a cartel such as Amazon.com could offer the wonderful deal of 0% tx fees to people who send their transactions to Amazon's servers. Amazon could then refuse to send these to other miners and process them all on Amazon's servers when Amazon's server win the block solution. In this way and by also combining the recent selfish mining attack in clever ways as I have outlined, Amazon (or other cartel) will take over all mining. At that point, they can change the protocol if for example the government requires them to do so by law, converting it to a fiat.
There is absolutely nothing you et al will be able to do to stop it at that point, because Bitcoin will already be too popular.
You don't care that you are about to turn the world into the 666 outcome?
And you refuse to support an altcoin that could fix this?
You must be one of those selfish boomers who always think of themselves and never for the future of mankind.
I am X-gen. Any other X-gens here? It is up to us to save the world, the boomers don't have a clue, they caused this sovereign debt crisis. I don't mean that as a personal insult against any one, it is just a fact of the perspective that generation experienced given the environment they were nurtured up in (the golden age of the 1950s probably the richest period in modern western civilization, especially in the USA). As smart as rpietila is, our differences apparently stem from him being European (socialist mindset was ingrained there earlier) and myself being American, or perhaps generational (I forget his age...seems I remember he is younger than me even though I have all my hair, hehehe
).
The notion that the core devs and/or the masses could recognize this problem and provide a fix at an opportune moment is in my opinion impossible. No one wants to change anything major in Bitcoin because it risks upsetting the apple cart, causing a fork, and otherwise interrupting the meteoric rise in the price. Everyone is focused on only one major goal, which is all about price and maintaining the uber critical consensus.
This was a very clever Trojan planted by the elite, because it has an economic reward which is irresistible. Only a very few people have the discipline to see past their own greed to the final outcome of this.
If I am wrong, then the core devs step up to the plate and fix this immediately. But can you get the Bitcoin community to accept even a small perpetual debasement? No. Too many are irrational, selfish goldbugs. I've already explained why in the threads RAJSALLIN has apparently read.
So I am saying I would love for core Bitcoin devs to fix the problem that I see, yet I don't think they will nor can.
RAJSALLIN, I hope you are reporting every Bitcoin spend as a capital gain (or are very confident in your ability to use a VPN with Tor which even I am not). Because my expectation is if you are a USA citizens (we must pay capital gains, apparently Europeans not) is the bankrupt socialism will ex post facto send you a bill for unpaid taxes, penalties, and interest. It is the penalties and interest that will take 300% of your net worth, thus causing you to go to prison because you are unable to pay the IRS even if you wanted to. Feinstein has already proposed legislation (in recent highway appropriations bill, may have passed already) that if you owe the IRS $50,000, they cancel your passport. As for Europeans, they think they are safe because (unlike us screwed up the ass Americans) they pay no income taxes if they reside outside the EU, except for perhaps a small net worth tax in some countries, and I believe they are not liable for the VAT if they transact outside the EU. A little bird in my intuition tells me that there is no way the Europeans are going to escape while the Americans are not. Europe is more bankrupt than the USA is. I don't know how they will do it, but EU is rapidly being federalized and soon Finland (rpietila's nationality) won't be setting the laws and instead the EU will be. France is already pressuring the EU to adopt all sorts of crazy taxing measures, even suggesting to tax the internet traffic coming in and out of the EU. And the implosion hasn't even occurred yet. We will see the true craziness once the masses are really suffering as the Greeks are now. If Finland was sovereign, I would say rpietila has nothing to worry about, but alas I think it is too late for Finland to keep its sovereignty. If I were rpietila, I would consider buying a second citizenship but then he has to be careful that such a backend country doesn't also try to tax him as the world goes into the shitter after 2016.
As for paranoia, the boomers think I am insane. Their whole life government and society has been good to them. They've always been on top. Why should they change now. They just can't fathom such a global collapse and total shift from big government to minanarchy. It isn't what I think or want which matters, it is the math of the debt. Government is peaking now, and the world will collapse into minimal government. This is undeniable if you study the debt-to-GDP levels, the "$quadrillion" of credit-swap derivatives, and the world history of how just structures resolve. My 67 year old mother told me it makes her heart race and blood pressure go up, so "please just don't tell me".
Am I paranoid about the tax outcome? I mean the typical thought that goes into the mind of people who think I am paranoid or insane is "if the governments do that, we are all doomed, thus they won't". Humans are herding creatures. They feel safer in numbers. Normally the lions only pick off the weak stragglers on the edge of the herd. But the killing fields of modern history come from technology. Government exists because it has a monopoly on force (this is the academic definition). Government now has the technology to see everything you do. And they are. And they have the technology to tax everything you do. And thus they will, when the society is bankrupt and they have no other place to seek revenue as the global economy collapses and there is no income. How can they tax income if there is not sufficient income in a global collapse? How can they tax VAT if there isn't sufficient commerce in a global economic collapse? Thus they will tax net worth. And they will accuse you of intentionally speculating and destroying the global economy.
Remember every crisis has to be blamed on some group that the government wishes to attack. Hitler blamed the weak for bankrupting the universal health care system, and so the purges began, then this morphed into the "jews" who were accused of perpetuating the hardship from the war reparations. Who will the G20 blame for this crisis? Haven't you heard the rumblings of socialism over there in Europe? They are already talking about banning speculation. Don't you see the recent G20 meetings have made resolutions about going after tax havens.
Ignore politics without anonymity at your own peril.
