Topic: Satoshi's spare change? - page 2. (Read 8969 times)

Are you joking me. You're worried about some dude with virtual play money having too much of it when there are a LOT more people in this world that have Billions upon billions of dollars - way more than Satoshi can ever hope to gain in a lifetime. 

This is like saying that you refuse to use the US dollar because there may be some unknown multi billionaire out there that you don't know about.

C'mon people grow up out of this jealousy of other people's wealth phase.

Only Satoshi has an alert key.

mcdett, I share your concern.  I don't think most posters here have thought it through, or their world view clouds their perception of the risk.

But I don't take you to mean that the bitcoin concept is flawed.  It seems reasonable that the first block chain (BTC) should acquire a sort of "beta" status, and now that the concept is (somewhat) proven, it is time to prepare the "production" currency with a high starting difficulty, perhaps 5% of the BTC difficulty.

To achieve a high initial hash rate, we could distribute and promote a policy (in the form of mining front-end software) that tries to create a genesis block for a new chain (call it "BC2") and, if it succeeds or receives such a block, keeps devoting X% (configurable, e.g., 25%) of mining power to the BC2 chain as long as the BC2 network hash rate exceeds Y% (e.g., 5%) of BTC's hash rate.  An attempt to start BC2 would occur after BTC block N (to be determined by agreement or by algorithm), and the validity of a BC2 genesis block would depend on its coinbase script containing the BTC Block N hash.

To determine N, one could simply coordinate with miners or, perhaps, establish a convention whereby a certain proportion (e.g., 5%) of a sequence of, say, 2016 consecutive blocks' coinbase output would have to go to addresses ending in the characters "BC2" to signal the start.  We have all seen "vanity" Bitcoin addresses that contain a few letters of someone's name.  This technique could be used to poll the mining community.  This sort of polling could go on indefinitely as support for the idea builds or wanes.

For ease of adoption and coexistence with BTC, BC2 could use the same network connections and protocols as BTC but a different magic number.  Nodes could query each other for BC2 support before block N.  (I don't know exactly how yet, but it seems like an easy problem.)  BC2 supporters could prefer to peer with other BC2 supporters or at least try to be connected to a few at N.

BC2's success wouldn't exactly wipe out BTC early adopters, provided that they pay attention to developments and trade some BTC for BC2 and/or BC2 mining shares early on.  But I think BC2 would be better positioned to take over world finance than BTC.

Would such a development allay your fear?  Do you see anything wrong with the plan I have outlined?

What kill switch?

Personally, I find this more worrying. One person has access to a kill switch, huh? Was that in the wiki?

Talk about a central point of failure.

Maybe this could be arranged so that 4 or 5 people need to push the button simultaneously .... not that I doubt Gavin's integrity but evil forces know exactly where to apply pressure, and it ain't by building massive hashing machines.

They don't control 25% of the economy. They own 25% of the currency currently in existence. The value of currency relative to all wealth is probably less than 1:50. As an example, the total value of assets in the world is estimated to be 30X global GDP, so ~2,000 trillion dollars. In comparison, the value of all the major world currencies is estimated to be $40 trillion. Wealth != just currency.

I think you're all missing the point.  There hasn't been this lopsided holding of equity since kings.  2% holding 50% of the wealth is far more desirable than 0.00000002% holding 25%.  I know you can all do the math.

This situation is a despot megalomaniacs wet dream.  Never in the history of human kind has one person controlled 25% of the economy.

I think we all WANT to believe that Satoshi is some humble quite person who only wants his bitcoins to go to helping poor kids down on their luck, but maybe, just maybe Satoshi gets corrupted (power corrupts), the point being is that there is tremendous amounts of risk piled into this one person.

I do think early adopters should be rewarded and this isn't some sort of jealousy thing.

Think of it this way.  If you want to believe that one day btc could represent the financial foundation of the world economy, then be VERY afraid of the person who controls 25% of it.

And the percentage of bitcoins owned by the very early adopters will go down to seven percent as the total number of bitcoins reaches 20 million. Furthermore, the vast majority of the wealth in the world is in non-currency assets. It's control of TRADE that gives one a monopoly over the economy, not control of a fixed sum of currency.

+1 ... take a look around, wise up, the evil elite are already in control.

Exactly. If twenty percent of the bitcoins in existence are controlled by a very few people, that's actually a very equitable distribution, a good and just start for the economy.

Globally, the top two percent of wealthy people control 50% of the world's riches. Bitcoin is a communist dream compared to the real world.

Hasn't the project been open source since before the genesis block?

According to this timeline, the code was released November 2008:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History

If people got in early, and the project subsequently gets big, it's fair that they profit big. They took the risk of investing time into something that had no certainty of becoming valuable and they were the ones lucky and smart enough to find the project first.

As far as early users using their bitcoins for ill, given there will always be people who are far wealthier than them, I don't think that's something we really need to worry about. Do you stay up all night thinking of all the things the oil sheiks in the Middle East can do when you buy gasoline?

I agree with syn.  The questionable status of the early blocks weighs on the value of BTC in my mind.  If enough people feel the same way (especially in the example scenario of a Satoshi character wielding BTC for evil) then a competing chain could quickly arise and sap BTC's exchange value.  I might be willing to hash on one and/or sell some BTC to buy the new currency even now, because of the aforementioned weight of uncertainty.

By the way, 2009-12-30 was at block 32300, according to BE: http://blockexplorer.com/b/32300

BE shows (as of a few weeks ago when I checked) a lot of early coins not yet redeemed, and many others simply aggregated to 1000, 10000, 50000 BTC coins.  There was once a 400000: http://blockexplorer.com/t/6SRV1apueQ

-John

I do have 00.02btc (I was a very early miner), but what does that have to do with my argument?

I was asked earlier to provide specif examples of scenarios that could be a problem for the currency, so they could be addressed (supposedly in this forum).  I did as asked.

I don't believe one is, "unhinged," if they point out the substantial risk of having 25% (at this time) of the currency in an anonymous state.  Again I'm not worried about someone using it to buy or sell on the market, I'm more worried about the political power/corruption associated with that much concentration of money (as a share of the btc economy).

Which of my scenarios is the, "craziest," or the one that would best illustrate that this author is, "unhinged?"

do you even have 0.02btc ?

you come across sounding a little unhinged ... and from me, that is saying something ... no offence intended, truly.

Rather than trying to restart the block chain, why not just create a fork instead? It has the same overall effect, plus you can set your own rules rather than limit the supply to 21 million. As a benefit, you don't have to convince anyone of anything, except to use your currency rather than Bitcoin, and you don't piss off a bunch of early adopters.

Scenarios (assuming btc takes off big time)

1 - btc originators method of staying anonymous wasn't as good as thought.  Secret ops team from a fringe political group acquires 12% of world economy (possibly creating a more terrible master then our current state)
2 - btc originators have their own crazy ideas on how the world should run (use that polX from earlier post), and use 12% of the economy to make it happen (possibly creating a more terrible master then our current state)
3 - I'm a major company considering leveraging btc for a multi-billion dollar insurance binder.... of wait we can't.... some crazy dudes who hang out in teh shadows and possibly have crazy political ideology (or some weird god complex) hold 12% of the currency, therefore too much risk
4 - Give me more time and I'll dream up more of these.


You're right.  It isn't ANY of MY business.  What is my business is possibly using this to generate a ground swell to restart the block.  I know this is a radical departure, but I ultimately want to see btc succeed in a massive way.  I don't see it succeeding with 24% now, 12% in 2045 (or whenever the block stops rewarding coins (non-fee ones)) of the currency being in a state of complete unknown.

my 00.02 btc

I think that it's none of my business, yours, nor that of anyone else. I'm not sure how you think it's inevitable that the magical government agents will unmask satoshi, but I'm pretty sure he's counting on it not happening.

Please see my above post and revise your "20%" claim, it is overstated. Please list out the threat scenarios to you or current bitcoin holders of a single unknown individual having a MAXIMUM of 12% of total bitcoins. Please make them specific so they can be refuted if possible.

This is actually something we need to spend a few cycles thinking about.  I think one of the biggest risks to btc is the fact that founders are playing this bullshit anonymous thing.  These people are not anonymous.  A govt. if they wanted to could uncover them rapidly, and they will once the value of btc becomes high enough.  The problem here is that these people will be gotten to eventually.  They can eather open themselves up to the community and be transparent on their holdings and the intentions of these holdings, or we can wait until a special forces group under the cover of night grabs them and then 20% of the btc economy is now in the hands of that group.  Which option to you prefer?

True. It's also assuming that those who had accumulated it early didn't blow it all on 10,000 BTC pizzas or cash out when it hit the ridiculous high of $0.40.

Not only that, but history is littered with examples of people who came across vast sums of wealth quickly, and subsequently blew it.

Even if the first few people had 20% of the wealth, it will surely end up filtered through the hands of hookers and dealers at some point.

Just like many lottery winners end up broke after a few years.