Topic: State of Alt. Coins - Post Mike Hearn Announcement? (Read 2080 times)

I am suggesting the State (or those corrupt who control it) can charge the cost of mining to the collective (think the Three Gorges Dam that wrecked environmental devastation downstream, upstream and derivative effects all over China). I have made this point numerous times. And apparently (after everyone said I was crazy), it came true in China and if true was a factor that enabled China to capture an estimated 67% of the mining and 51% attack Bitcoin. Documentation of these statements is in my vaporcoin thread.

If the profit from shorting is greater than the reward, then it doesn't cost you anything. The free mining cost just makes it more likely you can sustain it long enough to reap your reward. How do we know the Chinese won't milk the investors while the block reward is high (mining at near $0 cost charging it the cost to the collective) and then also profit by shorting it all the way down from $1000.

We are bunch of naive geeks who are being reamed (mined) by savvy traders and strategists. These are no different conceptually than Rothschild's and Rockefeller's methods of yore. The players and technological field change, the game remains the same. (Yeah I am crazy conspiracy theorist whose analysis is always wrong)

Edit: haven't you been slightly suspicious of why the MSM publicized Bitcoin so much. That doesn't happen without the approval the global elite.

See my critique which says those technologies can't work:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13576188
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13580146
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13569559


Here is what I am doing... (albeit I have only about $20,000 at the moment and it isn't even my money...I have roughly $0 networth...yikes  )

US Dollar until gold makes it's low March 2016 (or thereabouts and < $1000 perhaps < $850), then buy physical gold coins (not bullion!) or an ETF proxy short-term while retaining some US dollars (until as late as early 2017 before capital controls will be pervasive) and wait for the cryptocurrency arena to become more clear. There is appears to be great risk of a major implosion of crypto land.

Trade gold or dollars for crypto as the situation becomes more clear.

Of course no problem with speculation with 1% of net worth (maybe 5% total max for speculative longshots) in promising technological ventures, but don't go all-in on anything which doesn't have the momentum and clarity that Bitcoin had in late 2012 and early 2013. And don't ever buy so much of a speculative longshot, that you lose your objectivity such as what IMO has happened to some of the hardcore Monero/Aeon investors (which would force one to go around thumping their chest instead of listening and continually readjusting based on available data).

Note I probably won't buy gold because I don't have enough capital to make it worth while, can't obtain the coins in Philippines, and I don't want to re-enter a brokerage again to buy an ETF. So it will be all US dollars for me.

Bitcoin has maxed out it's design at 1/10000 of the volume that VISA does daily.

The entire crypto space is  a "toy" in the sense that it's a Zero Sum Game...
Where 2% of the players have made off with all the money... and 98% are bagholders in denial.

Stocks, forex, poker, sports betting, crypto... it's all 2% winners and 98% bagholders.

I read your entire reply.  I don't disagree with anything you said.

I do think there may be some intermediate solutions on a programmable blockchain with projects like Augur (Intrade on the blockchain), decentralized exchange and currency type swaps.  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-01/blythe-masters-tells-banks-the-blockchain-changes-everything.

I'm also witnessing the continued clampdown of US government on currency (eBay reports to the IRS on yearly sales for individuals now).  I'm continuing to see it more and more.  This pressure / friction from the governments will at some point force free capital somewhere.  

Cryptocurrency is my hedge/bet on this.  Of the solutions that exist - what do you recommend?  Nothing?

And I never said otherwise.

Since when did "it is centralized" and "it has been 51% attacked" constitute a statement that Bitcoin had no utility  

You put words in my mouth that I never spoke, because you are trying to rationalize your investments in Monero and Ethereum. Thus you have lost your objectivity, not me.


I did point out in 2013 exactly how Bitcoin would end up failing, which I said would be game theory of centralization around mining. And I was correct.

I never wrote that Bitcoin would have no utility and in fact I wrote that the utility of Bitcoin was very inspiring. Why do you reckon I am still here in crypto if I didn't think so!

Problem Monero has is that there is very little demand for an anonymity for which the reliability is unprovable. It is a marketing utility problem, which Bitcoin doesn't suffer. Even if we did implement provable anonymity (e.g. Zerocash not Zerocoin), it still not clear if markets for anonymity would be great, especially if the decentralized, permissionless attribute isn't assured, because the government can simply take control over centralized mining and force the anonymity to be stripped off. OTOH, companies are saying that privacy is very important to them and perhaps they do not mean hiding from the NSA. And public block chains using encryption are superior conceptually to private block chains using perimeters defenses because even sneakernets fail (e.g. Stuxnet). But the things corporations want privacy on are the block chain 2.0 features that Ethereum is working on. The corporations aren't interested just in crypto currency alone as that doesn't have much utility to them. Cryptonote (especially combined with Confidential Transactions that hide values) is a very technologically interesting concept, but without any significant utility in the markets.

Problem Ethereum has is that programmable block chains are an overly ambitious clusterfuck. And it isn't clear that the major markets for block chain utility require a fully programmable block chain. And the developers of Ethereum are basically clueless and have been making it up as they go along. You are basically investing in research. That guy Vlad has changed designs numerous times and has come up with some of the most stupid ideas, as even he admits. They haven't been able to think it through from start to finish as to what design they should use. And their current direction on scaling looks to me to be another clusterfuck.

However I am also curious about smart contracts, block chain applications, and programmable block chains. And maybe I will come to different conclusions after I have more time to analyze all the issues of those extended ideas. At the moment, my research is more focused on scaling crypto currency.


You mistake sobering analysis for being some form of demanding perfection. I demand only that I understand the issues of a technology.


Then you haven't read about the design I proposed in the decentralization thread I started this week in this Altcoin Discussion forum.


You are not forced to invest in cryptocurrency. An investor needs to be unbiased and flexible. For the moment, I am investing in the US dollar, until some clarity is obtained in the crypto scene.


I told rpietila back at the start of 2013 when Bitcoin was < $10, that I approved of his decision to sell $100,000 of silver and buy 10,000 Bitcoins. Unfortunately I couldn't follow him into the investment because I had been so ill since May, 2012 and had lost $75,000 in the markets during June through August. This was caused by some craziness in my life (something about my ex yanking my kids from the Philippines and my endocrine system going bezerk). So unfortunately I had to stay on the sidelines, but never did I argue against investing in Bitcoin when it was at such a low price. When Bitcoin hit $1000, I began to argue that the direction would be downwards and lately the clarity on the bottom should be < $150 in Q1 or Q2 2016.

At this point I am trying to contemplate what is going to happen to Bitcoin given these issues revolving around scaling. I don't see any technical solutions for Bitcoin other than to centralize and then raise the block size. Maybe that is what will happen. At this time, I need to be focused on coding and not trying to analyze the complex possibilities of what might happen with Bitcoin from here forward.



No problem I am happy we were able to discuss some of the details about Ethereum over there.

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Bitcoin clearly had momentum at the start of 2013, and it was a technological concept that was so revolutionary that it was clearly going to take the world by storm.

Ethereum not. The conceptual technology isn't even threshed out yet, and they are adding more and more complexity on top.

If I am somehow wrong about some killer app that requires a programmable block chain and some way that Ethereum's complex design process is able to solidify (and for all that to occur this year), then I will be quite shocked.

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We tend to get so excited about a programmable block chain because we think that implies that there are unbounded cases of apps that can be written, but as Ethereum is discovering as they go through the research process, is that so many limitations have to placed on the scripts in order to achieve scalability that I argue much of the generality is also lost. For example, scripts can't be allowed to read/write from any state that any other script could, because then commutativity of block chain ordering is lost. There is the Tragedy of Commons issue around fees (gas) that I raised. Etc..

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Bitcoin "is a fucking toy" when compared to VISA and yet in it's realm it has done quite well at being better than cash for many things.  I know a guy who purchased land by taking it across international borders.  I've used it multiple times for things VISA was not useful for.

By my measure bitcoin was a success and now it's outlived it's prime.  

I view Monero and Ethereum in the same light.  I'm sure you would have pointed out bitcoins flaws when it was $10 per coin and said "This will never work." out of some of the same principles you are using now.  

You are one of those who peruse perfection and I wholeheartedly respect that.  

But I'm not hearing any alternatives from you.  And as you so graciously pointed out - I'm a n00b.  I can't fix all the problems you point out.  So my two choices are opt out of the market.  Or pick the least bad losers.  When I perceive them to no longer be the least bad - I will move on to whatever else is the least bad.  I know it's not your strategy - but it's mine.

By your standards bitcoin was fundamentally broken years ago.  But it paid off for those who picked "the least bad option."

BTW I wasn't the one who posted your stuff on the reddit ethereum forum.

1,312,500 BTC mined per year @ $300+ profit = $400 million annually (assuming the very low < $50 costs for mining for 2 cents hydropower and latest ASICs). Chinese are mining an estimate of 67% of that apparently.

They can afford to build that custom software solution.

The Chinese miners are lying.

Expect corruption at the highest levels. Probably are getting subsidized electricity for free. Etc.

Bitcoin has already been 51% attacked. End of story.

We MUST eliminate profitable mining (my design)!

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Edit:


That was also one of my thoughts about the possibilities.

But also consider that the core devs of Bitcoin can't be this dumb. Surely they also know about this and have covered it up.

On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin:

And so the n00bs moved their delusion over to Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5


https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0rgdv

Don't you understand that "fundamentally broken" means they don't work for the features they claim that are an improvement over Bitcoin.

The link I provided to you for Ethereum explains that afaik they never solved the primary economic issue facing scaling programmable block chains, which is that every full node has to verify the block chain, thus every full node has to run the programmable script. But the problem is who to pay the gas (ether) to so that all full nodes are paid for verification? This has DDoS implications as well. In short, they never solved the core economic problem and thus Ethereum is just a fucking toy that can't actually work.

Ditto Monero as explained below (the arguments were in the links I provided to you before but again I am always forced to repeat myself because readers are so clueless about technology that they can't even understand what I write).


You are a n00b and you don't do enough research to know what you are writing about. Why should anyone believe you?

Monero is not anonymous when your metadata can be correlated. One example of metadata which unmasks your anonymity is your IP address. And no, Tor and I2P mixnets do not hide your IP address from the government, in fact they are thought to be Sybil attacked honeypots that not only tell the government your IP address but also alert the NSA et al that you should come under extra scrutiny.

And IP address is not the only metadata that can destroy your anonymity in ring signatures. Other examples can include cookies in your browser and other activity you did on the web. Other examples also include telephone calls and other activity you did around that time, which have statistical significance.

I wrote about that in the link in the post I made upthread which is quoted below.


Ring signatures do not obscure everything. Only Zerocash can obscure everything so that then metadata is no longer a problem. I see Vitalik @ Ethereum has been reading my Bitcointalk posts, because now he has written a blog post to copy most of the points I have been making for the past months.

Additionally I have been making the point since the BCX incident that ring signatures can theoretically be unmasked by combinatorial analysis of the block chain. In the recent debate I had with Monero's cryptographer Shen-noether at Reddit about his white papers, I pointed out that his proposed solution to combinatorial unmasking was flawed. He and smooth did the usual ad hominem attack on my person, and then I rebutted them with logical facts and they were forced to finally put their tail between their legs.

Bullshit. So much bullshit in these discussions of cryptocurrency technology. Especially coming from all the Monero pumpers who haven't done their homework, because they are retarded, closed-minded, and boastfully so.


Just a (arguably plagiarized) copy of Cryptonote technology, so same conclusions as for Monero.

https://z.cash/ is the only potential solution for making metadata correlation irrelevant, but all I know about it is here:

http://zerocash-project.org/

Seems the project died or stalled? Afaik they've been quiet past months or most of 2015?

Also scaling issues will probably still apply thus it is possible that Zerocash doesn't scale to world wide use, or other problems such as DDoS. I won't know until I dig deeper into it. Perhaps they discovered such issues and stopped working on it.

Anonymity is very difficult to achieve. I would guess maybe impossible once all the technical factors are considered. But I am still willing to try. I personally will come back to Zerocash's technology later, after I finish fixing block chain scaling and decentralization (which is more important priority and more realistic).

"Broken" and "Success" are relative terms.  Both are broken less than bitcoin and bring attributes to the table that fiat does not.  

If you have any suggestions that are less broken ... I'm all ears.

An absolutist uses words like broken.  A realist uses terms like "best alternative".  Opening myself up to all available options those are the two answering the big questions.  Privacy, programmable blockchain and both more scalable than bitcoin.

What alternatives are less broken than these two I mentioned?

bigger question

Are the Hearn, BigVern, and the BTC market down turn all related?

The bitcoin whales are becoming more and more a collective of hacker/thieves.  Eventually about $6B in market capital is going to try to squeeze into the alt market.  The Cryptsy chaos seems an effective event to muddy the ALT waters.

Both are fundamentally broken.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13518156 (Ethereum)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13569087 (Block chain scaling Tragedy of the Commons applies to Monero also)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13569178 (Monero's anonymity is unreliable/unprovable and thus useless for fungibility or other important use cases)

I know what you are implying. Be careful you don't conflate the person (and his health struggles) with the facts.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13569775
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13569312

There are two interesting coins.  Ethereum and Monero.  I've found nothing else.

Mike Hearn announcement just put an exclamation point on everything everyone knew.  Bitcoin can't innovate and can barely scale enough to keep up with a very laxidasical demand.  

You know what happens if I let this happen to my network - wait for it to slow things down before doing anything about it?  I get fired.

Bitcoin's approach of squabbling for years on end over a trivial 1mb increase (to anyone who's paying attention and realizes that bitcoins value comes from the innovation of the blockchain) is proof that bitcoin isn't in the future far enough.  Maybe it's two years or fifteen - I don't pretend to know.  But whatever "blockchain" is in the future for the general ledger - bitcoin isn't it.

Q.E.D.

The reasons Mike Hearn got out is that Bitcoin has just been 51% attacked. As I explained upthread. That is not a minor event. It is the first 51% attack on Bitcoin, and thus likely a death spiral for Bitcoin.



Why do you scream when you've been incessantly warned that storing your crypto currency with any third party is inherently unsafe and can never be safe.

That is why we need decentralized exchanges, but these have technical challenges that have yet to be overcome.


Btw, his mannerism and face/facial expressions remind me so much of another alleged scammer Evan @ Dash in the recent Evolution videos.

There are already so many threads about these same things.  I could give a shit about a dev selling his bitcoin and getting out, but the Cryptsy thing pisses me off.  The high level of scuntitude they've displayed and complete disregard for their customers just makes me want to scream.  I did in my car on the way home, but it didn't help.

What a day for bitcoin, eh?

ArticMine is correct about the problem and incorrect to claim Monero (or Aeon or any other crypto currency) has a solution. Only my design has a solution. Details at the following link:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13569087


Facts don't have an ego.