Topic: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) - page 44. (Read 907212 times)

[1] Dash isn't using a built-in mixer for anonymity (built-in refers to into the protocol in my opinion). It relies on the masternodes, whom are coordinating the mixing process, to achieve anonymity. Also, something using the bitcoin-codebase can and will never be fully anonymous. Furthermore, what Dash uses is kind of like a work-around (see 2 -> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2zufu1/a_great_podcast_by_lets_talk_bitcoin_discussing/cpmvogy), while Monero relies on cryptography and math to achieve anonymity. Also, the anonymity of Monero is set in the core protocol, like dnaleor explained.  

[2] You must've missed the coinbase debacle, where they were tracking users and their spending. In addition, btc-e was blocking stoling evo coins, which shouldn't have happened with a perfect fungible currency. Imagine your cash getting seized, because it was used by a drug dealer before. I am pretty sure there were some more cases of fungibility, but can't recall them of the top of my hat currently. For some additional info on fungibility and why it is important, see the slides of this presentation -> http://www.slideshare.net/arnuschky/monero-geneva (5 untill 15, credits to the xmr.to team).

Disclaimer: I am a Monero proponent, so I might be a bit biased.

I might pick up a couple of thousand XMR. If it takes off I can quit my day job too. That's the goal.

Also keep stacking Bitcoin. I want a minimum of 30 before it goes above $300

Definitely, I also enjoyed greatly of my accidental week-long vacation without the 'net. Short term without Internet is good for everyone, even life without Internet is not probably unpleasant.

My assertion was just that the financial value of having the option to use Internet versus the (hypothetical) case of not having it. In my case at least, as a knowledge-age businessman, the value of Internet access is probably about worth my total marketable assets. Without the Internet, I would not have the assets in the first place. With the Internet, I can rebuild them. Without, I could hardly get any satisfying job. And I also value the social aspect a lot, since in this faraway country where I live, it is hard to find company to talk with  

Especially as they have day jobs..  

I was thinking more of dash which basically uses a built-in mixer for anonymity.  I could see fungibility possibly being an issue, but it hasn't been an issue yet, especially with all the coins that have been stolen and/or compromised somehow.  If it becomes an issue, I could definitely see something like XMR taking off.

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The bitcoin codebase is very much fungible. That is one of its primary strengths. Hard/soft forks are part of the process of its becoming "perfect" money.

edit: fungible is probably not the best word to describe the codebase. More like it can incorporate changes to suit the need of the people using it.
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You can't hardfork cryptonote anonymity in bitcoin.

The bitcoin codebase is very much fungible. That is one of its primary strengths. Hard/soft forks are part of the process of its becoming "perfect" money.

edit: fungible is probably not the best word to describe the codebase. More like it can incorporate changes to suit the need of the people using it.

Anonimity isn't a "feature" of a coin, it should be a core fundamental.
Having anonimity means having fungibility. Bitcoin isn't fungible. That's a BIG problem for a (good functioning) currency.

And we should also note that the anonimity of XMR isn't "added" to the coin, the protocol revolves around fungibility through ring signatures and stealth addresses.

I agree with your other points. A protocol should not do fancy things, but anonimity isn't fancy.

edit: Dash uses pseudo-anonimity as a fancy thing, added through masternodes that has indeed a lot of points of failure. I don't blame them for that, they don't have a choice. The bitcoin codebase isn't capable of becoming fungibel.

Soon come. 

I say the same. It is epic.

This has been an idea I have been speaking about to friends for a long time.  They generally laugh and scoff when I say that the advent of cryptocurrency, when in full bloom, will be seen as an event in human history at least as important as the internet itself.  Being a subset of, or dependent upon the global network, it cannot arguably eclipse it entirely, but since it will be the store of human value it's fundamental nature raises it's importance quite a bit.  Cryptocurrency is the progeny of the internet.  But the child may in time rise to heights not possible for the father.

We naturally underestimate the vast importance of money.  All of us playing tiddlywinks with the future here on bitcointalk will look back with amazement saying "if we only knew".  The game we play is to uncover the clues to what will eventually be seen as inevitable and impossible not to have happened.

It is a very valuable fog we wander around in here, now in the present.

Soooo, I don't know about all that other stuff you are talking about, but you did say one gem: 
 
The next test was whether the value of every marketable piece of wealth that I possessed (my net worth) was more or less valuable than the lifetime access to the Internet (thinking the somewhat stretched scenario that Internet could be disabled for me, or in general, for the rest of my life). Even though I am very little fan of being penniless, with Internet and all it enables, I can probably not only make a decent income quite instantly, even make back all I had in a few years at most. The alternative, living without Internet with a decent amount of money that is enough for the lifetime, is not appealing (in this age at least   ) 
 
This is something we all need to consider.  What's our own personal Internet number?  This is the dollar amount that would be worth getting offline and staying offline for the rest of your life.   
 
Many will likely find this a difficult question, and I encourage them to go without any Internet access for a couple of days before they attempt to make a decision. 
 
After having recently been on an island vacation where there was no hope of any Internet access, I can say it's not so bad.  You soon adapt back to how we were in the 80's.  People become much more important, and life slows down a lot.  Local happenings becomes much more significant.  But progress and personal growth slow way down too.   
 
So in many ways this would correspond to an ultimate retirement, as the Internet is the right to participate in our global consciousness, and without it you are just a fat happy neuron, waiting to die. 
 
In fact, it bears marvelling at just how efficient the Internet has made us as a species. 
 
All forms of science and mathematics are now moving so quickly that even the brightest among us has trouble catching up.  It used to take an entire human lifetime for progress on one theory to emerge and popularize.  Now we are creating mathematical structures and ideas which are impossibly intricate and they are seeing widespread global adoption in mere years. 
 
Now...  Imagine that bitcoin and crypto (and Monero) is about to take our civilization the next order of magnitude up, and the apprehension you feel is justified. 
 
This is what the *whoosh* part of an exponential (or maybe even hyper-exponential) curve feels like, and we are lucky to be part of it.

Ah, could you try to start using a word apart from "authorities" when you refer to banksters and their tools. As a Christian, I have a reverend feeling toward 'authority', actually to the point where I repented to God in tears that I could not submit to the banksters and their tools as they are 1) evil, 2) liars, and 3) usurpers of the power (despite that they are 4) commonly regarded as the government authority, and 5) coordinate the public functions, etc., obviously possessing the power that determines the de facto authority). God's eventual response (note, this struggle took about 6 years of my active adult life), was:

"You don't need to submit to them."

I understood this much more vividly and in detail, but dare not quote God ( ) in any more detail than I can be sure that he appreciates. I have take the liberty to mention this to people in the same position as me, if they could feel freedom in their conscience from the idea of being liberated from submitting to the earthly institutions usurped by the bankster mafia. Most people do not feel the freedom, evidenced by the vigor in their attacking me of being a lawless person whose end is terrible. Well, whether anyone's end is terrible is always a subject to interpretation: our Lord Jesus Christ as regarded by some was ended quite miserably, but others regard him living ever more and still having some quite nice stuff happening in the future.

But actually I wanted to write about private capital. Don't underestimate that in the Knowledge Age, immaterial (human, virtual) capital has become more prominent. When pundits lament on the destruction of physical capital caused by the government gone mad, expropriating, misallocating and destroying everything that moves (or especially does not move) - the value of the Internet, communication, networks, stores of immaterial knowledge (Wikipedia) and tools (software libraries, 3D-printing instructions), has grown astronomically with no proper accounting.

To illustrate this, I again ran the thought process whether all my material wealth is more valuable than all my immaterial. Naturally, the material wealth did not have a chance, as the market value of my crypto alone trumped it.

The next test was whether the value of every marketable piece of wealth that I possessed (my net worth) was more or less valuable than the lifetime access to the Internet (thinking the somewhat stretched scenario that Internet could be disabled for me, or in general, for the rest of my life). Even though I am very little fan of being penniless, with Internet and all it enables, I can probably not only make a decent income quite instantly, even make back all I had in a few years at most. The alternative, living without Internet with a decent amount of money that is enough for the lifetime, is not appealing (in this age at least  ).

So, the physical capital is deteriorating. But the total capital in the world is imo still growing, and at a very nice pace. The depression of some classes of people is (imo) not that much caused by their tightening material situation, but because they are unable to offset it with increasing their immaterial capital (and by "spending" that capital = enjoying the satisfying virtual experiences (don't mean TV here..)). Also if they were capable of harnessing the massive growth of knowledge, they could easily better their material need as well, even to my claimed level where the access to Internet is more valuable than the nice total of all my different physical and virtual assets.

I have even left some of my physical assets badly protected. Gametheoretically, it does not make sense to spend time protecting something that you can more easily reacquire if it is lost. If the bankster tools get pissed off with me - if they have any logic - they don't even care to expropriate my wealth. They already tried in 2008, which was such a miserable failure that I actually multiplied my new worth as a result. They would go directly after my communication, which they also did with Martin Armstrong when he attained a high enough level of clarity of thought. The cruel and unusual treatment of forced total communication blockade (also imposed on me in 2013 for a few weeks) has a twofold aim of 1) making you mad (the deficient diet contributes as well), and 2) destroying your level of knowledge = your capital, the important part, not the physical part which rusts and gets stolen, and can anyway be bought anew if you have enough knowledge capital.

No, I am not scared of going to prison and be denied communication. I feel it is an eventuality, because it is currently the only way for the banksters to contain me. I cannot in good conscience shut up, because - and this is bold - I feel that God himself amended Bible by telling me that these guys in power are not the authorities that in general case we should obey (see Romans 13 for the general case). If I am not convincing enough to become an actual threat to them, then I am wasting my time and must pray more and try harder. They are standing on the wrong ground, and their end is terrible - it is told in the Bible.

And there is not much I can do to escape going to prison when they so decide. Hiding does not accomplish anything if the whole point is to be a public person. Whether to commit 'crimes' or not is a total nonissue; never have I wronged anybody, but that has in the past not hindered me of being convicted by the state tribunals of various made-up charges, according to, and sometimes even contradicting, the manmade laws, allegedly committing victimless crimes.

Of course my conscience does not allow me to commit any crimes, but the combination that the bankster tools can both make regulations at their pleasure and they own the courts and can therefore convict people regardless of their even breaking the regulation or not, and that all this has happened to me personally already, in a country not generally known to be among the most corrupted in the world (being #1 in the least corrupted instead  ), it is just futile to even try to please them in the small when they correctly fear for the very existence of their system in the large, and are not morally hindered to isolate you, torture you or kill you, to maintain their temporary grip over the God-created earth.

So enjoy while I am still with you!

I think maximum 10%, maybe as little as 2% of Bitcoins-in-holding need to migrate to the new coin.

So the question is not whether the new coin needs to be better in everybody's opinion, just that enough people think it's better.

I haven't converted all my BTC to Monero (far from it) but if I did, it alone would make Monero quite much more expensive.

The decision is not communist, it is individual. And gradual. You can hedge. More likely both coins win than just one. Most likely both go bust.


There is no hype (or at least no froth ). Do the numbers. XMR marketcap is <$4M. It doubles if $200-400k is invested. We are talking about one guy selling his house and completely turning the tables for the currency. It is ridiculous to even talk about it, and everyone with money or even without, scorns it for the small marketcap.

Yet I focus on the underlying facts, and like it a lot.

Bitcoin is plenty good enough. There are practical ways to achieve anonymity with bitcoin if you want to. Tumbling, mixing and swapping mechanisms can be made as secure, easy and decentralised as bitcoin its self. These methods are particularly easy and effective for moderately small sums of money like only a few thousand dollars. But transparency is the beauty of bitcoin in that it becomes harder to move very large sums of money on the blockchain anonymously. This is a good thing! you can watch HSBC laundering money on your own desktop. With bitcoin you can have a balance between anonymity and transparency that is ideal.

Riiiiiiiggght 

By whom?  When?

Bitcoin is not good enough.  That is the problem.  As a public ledger, it is good enough.  For cash or SOV purposes, it is falling shorter by the day.  Privacy is an essential requirement.

It's been said that bitcoin is "good enough".
Don't you think a significantly better coin is needed to overtake bitcoin, not a coin that only is a bit more reliable and anonymous?

I really don't see the hype around monero but I might get me some just in case

No pun intended, I'm sure. 

Nobody among common people with common resources. Governments might know who he is though.

I'm not a big fan of the anonymity coins.  Anonymity can be achieved in bitcoin, maybe not as efficiently as with cryptonote-based coins, but probably efficiently enough.  The fact that nobody knows who Satoshi is, nobody can prove what happened to mt gox coins, ect is evidence of this.  Transparency should be the default and the user can use anonymity if he or she so chooses. 

Bitcoin has kept a substantial lead on all other alt coins for several years now.  I have watched many rise and fall.  The question is, if a coin were to gain significant traction against bitcoin, how do you pick which one beforehand?  I suppose the best strategy would be to wait for that gain to occur, then diversify a bit into it, and hope it is not another pump and dump. 

I believe the most valuable protocol will be the protocol with FEWER features, especially when those features can be added on top of the core protocol.  Adding additional features such as anonymity, 2fa, ect to the core protocol introduces more points of failure.  For a global reserve currency, or at least for much higher levels of addoption, the best protocol will the the one with the fewest points of failure, mainly a coin that just manages UTXOs.  Any changes should be to improve security and optimise the existing system and existing features, not to add additional features, especially features that can be added outside of the core protocol.   So far, bitcoin is the simplest, most tried and true, most tested, and most optimized.  It will take a lot for another coin to take its place. 

Other systems that provide decentralized exchanges, marketplaces, and other functions that are just not possible with bitcoin, may be viable if their consensus protocols can be proven sound over time and at higher levels of adoption.  Bitshares looks the most promising.