Quote from: thezerg on July 11, 2015, 01:52:29 PM

iCEBREAKER makes 2 posts IN A ROW without ever realizing they espouse mutually incompatible futures for bitcoin. The first talks about how fees will increase given limited supply of transaction space (block size) -- a fact that was never in doubt. And it includes an awesomely honest quote from MP (which others have already commented on) which basically espouses plutocracy -- rule by the rich (although "rule" in this context may be more that the rich do whatever they want and everybody else sucks it up).

The second post talks about the growth and value of the "underground economy" (of which the black markets are a subset) and how technologies should be focused on it. However, the underground economy is characterized by lots of small transactions. The underground economy isn't going to fit in 1 MB, and can't afford high txn fees (please read Hernando De Soto, The mystery of Capital). The only thing that will fit the 1MB block limit profile are large settlements between banking institutions.

The recent spam was a technical test and succeeded, as far as it went (we did not see the sustained mempool growth we will see when demand is consistently above 100%). But it was not a social test. Recently on reddit we are hearing exciting reports of 1000s of new customers (likely operating in the underground economy) getting their first bitcoin ($5 to $10 worth) for backpage advertisements.

What if the message coming from them had been different? What if it had been: "This is unusable. I don't want to pay this $1 (aggregate of a minimum of 3 txns, 1 xfer to wallet, 1 to plausible deniability address, 1 to backpage) fee to get $5 of backpage ads. And its taking forever to see the bitcoin actually show up in my phone!"

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on July 11, 2015, 12:17:04 PM

Frappuccino_doc's car insurance is about to go up.

Because the Gavinmobile just got wr3cked, again. Tongue

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Transaction Fee Market Develops Amid Surge in Transaction Volume
http://qntra.net/2015/07/transaction-fee-market-develops-amid-surge-in-transaction-volume/

The illusion that every coffee might end up on the blockchain has faded [this] week to reveal the glory of a robust, attack and censorship resistant settlement network of actual value.

EDIT: Great minds think alike:

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on July 11, 2015, 11:36:27 AM

Quote from: msin on July 11, 2015, 01:53:54 AM

The recent surge in Backpage BTC use proves how spot on Justus was with his Black Market blog post. Its obvious that BTC will change how we do commerce, no the other way around.

Agreed. Justus hit it out of the park with that one.

Sigworthy quotes therein:

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Every time a new startup launches, or a new software project announces, ask one question: Does this new thing improve the black market?

If the answer to this question is no, then the thing is useless.

Anyone who isnt actively working to expand and empower the informal economy is wasting their time.

I admire how you care about poor africans who cannot afford to pay 0.001BTC for transaction while "you"(your white horse) stole 3,000 BTC into your pocket.