MA is busy coding his model (he stated he is the ONLY coder on the actual model) and I am busy coding. Neither of us know the details of the other's expertise and code, thus neither of us should comment with certainty on that which we are not coding.
MA's stance is the government can shut down the internet and regulate the internet. I recently explained why that might not be true:
MA's stance is the government can shut down the internet and regulate the internet. I recently explained why that might not be true:
| 1. | Refer to footnote [1]: My You seem to confuse monetary digits and political power with real capital. As Warren Buffet said, "You'll know who wasn't wearing underwear when the tide goes out". The old world industrial capitalists can print international dollar debt to the tune of $9 trillion and cause filipinos to build redundant gas stations every 500 meters where a few years ago there was none, but misallocation of real capital destroys real capital and leaves those leaders with a dying NWO system of starry-eyed fools. The real capital that is working away like busy bees almost unseen is gradually taking over the world. Have you ever contemplated that all the systems those dumb asses employ depend on us[1]. |
| 2. | what happens when they (TPTB) notice? What's the countermeasures such an initiative should introduce to maintain its integrity; and most importantly, how could one rule out a (future) "chief software engineer" retaliate and alter a piece of code making a fork and dreadout the project together with the whole community? Critical code paths need to be highly scrutinized on any change. After the code is stabilized, the community should be alerted when a change is made to the so identified "critical paths". Checksums need to be enforced with a block chain to create a Web of Trust. Being open source, you can't kill it. You can Whack-A-Mole one protocol but another protocol pops up instantly. When the economy becomes valuable then hackers will be there to keep it running. Protocol tweaks can be made independent of critical paths. There are many defenses, but the question is do we as a community pool the resources to get 'er done. That has been my point all along as to why I was dissatisfied. We are not moving fast enough with our immense resources as a community. The sooner it is not hinged on one person, the better. Looks like in private it is becoming dehinged from me as we speak which a major development. I suppose it was necessary for me to speak recently. But I hope y'all understand I like to go back to being just the many names of AnonyMint. Note even compromised compilers can be defended against: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html |
| 3. | Once you put unbreakable crypto technologies out in open source, TPTB can possibly filter one protocol but a 1000 others will sprout, because where there is a demand supply will go. (And with steganography and perhaps alternative wireless networks, they may not be able to filter) The smart fork would enable spending the coins from the destroyed protocol into the new protocol, so it is a continuation of the preexisting value and distribution. TPTB can then play Whack-A-Mole.  The more the government stomps on commerce, the more demand for those technologies. I don't think they can break the core math quickly. And we'll always be driving ahead towards stronger math. Our community hasn't been organized. We haven't been funding mathematicians. My goal was to get the snowball rolling downhill. I sense the past tense is accurate now. Edit: TPTB rely on something not being too popular or co-opting the popular movements. How can they convince the people they are stomping on to prefer their walled gardens and jails? The count on being able to divide-and-conquer or pick off a few from the herd at a time, so the rest of the herd doesn't react. But if you do decentralization very well, then any individual can effect his own choice. One problem with Bitcoin from my view, has been we rely so heavily on network miners being not co-opted and thus the battle over BitcoinXT (aka GavinCoin). In the designer drug game (continuing metaphor), even if the state could outlaw drugs as quickly as a drug was presented to them, you could release 3d printer plans for new drugs as soon as the drug was outlawed and even have chemists (at home and of their own volition) modifying the drugs as they get the plans. The whole thing should and could be made effectively automated+autonomous+rigorously-modified and resistant to day-late-dollar-short countermeasures. |
| 4. | Popular game currencies have threatened the State enough that overtly totalitarian States had to outlaw them: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/06/china-outlaws-use-of-virtual-currency-for-real-world-items/ And insidiously totalitarian States in the West have effectively outlawed them by forcing anyone who exchanges fiat for them to be registered money services businesses under the AML clauses in the asinine oxymoronically named Patriot Act. So yes I agree virtual game currencies have shown promise but so far they lacked resiliency against the State (anonymity, decentralized exchanges, decentralized consensus that can't become centralized, decentralized scaling, etc). |
| 5. | There is one aspect that is still not solved for crypto-currency which is filtering of the protocol. The next TODO will be steganography and also figuring out how to keep the block chain online with HAM and shortwave radio should that become necessary. After selling some coins, we can fund the research & development needed on those remaining items. That is one reason we should not do a mining launch and then throw away all your money into hardware and electricity, when instead we can pool your money and put it towards solving all our needs. |
| 6. | Max Weber is another source of the canonical definition of the State as the entity with a monopoly on violence. Is your viewpoint that the State must crush any truly anonymous network? Frankly I agree with that threat. But why waste our time kidding ourselves that I2P and Tor are anonymous against the twee ladder agancias. If we want to test our strength, let's actually create the anonymous network and give it a whirl. I am hoping what we will discover is that the State is actually quite impotent once people discover they don't need to pay taxes on virtual commerce nor be controlled by arbitrary laws (e.g. the War on Drugs when in fact the Deep State is running the world's drug cartel). Personally I hate addictive drugs (include even sugar in that as I never eat it any more), because they destroyed my family. But it is not my place to decide for others their lifestyle and poison. And besides freedom is needed in more areas than just drugs. I will give you one example... |
| 7. | No CN coins and in fact no altcoins that I am aware of, have really solved the issue that centralization of mining can cause transactions to be censored. This is an open problem for cryptocurrency. This is only a problem if the miner can identify which transactions they want to censor by linkability or other analysis. Presuming that you can maintain unlinkability, miners won't censor transactions unless they want to censor all transactions. There's no easy fix for that - if someone wants to spend lots of money suppressing nearly all transactions, you are correct - they can do this. CN has a viewkey. If the government takes control of the mining because due to centralization they can regulate 51% of network hash rate, then they can require every transaction publicize its viewkey. Effectively the government can force anonymity to be turned off, if they control 51% of the network hash rate. Being able to guarantee that the mining will always be decentralized, is required to be able guarantee non-censorship. This is probably the major flaw of crypto-currency. I do believe I have a design solution and this should be published this year (hopefully). At this point, I wouldn't take my assertion as 100% given, because without peer review and implementation, one has to remember "devil is in the details" and faults could be discovered. |
| 8. | OROBTC, here is a kickstarter project that could give us all anonymous WiFi internet access and also make it much more difficult to censor and take the physical internet down every where: Coal Mine Canary: If they send out the men in black, to suicide this guy, it proves that the people in charge, kill puppies. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metamesh/meta-mesh-community-wireless-networks-for-all Whoops. Kiss that project above good bye: Update: The FCC just banned open source wifi router firmware in the United States. All manufacturs selling routers have to lock the firmware down. Permanent NSA/FISA court back doors for everyone. http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/07/FCC-Blocks-Open-Source https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/kdb/forms/FTSSearchResultPage.cfm?id=39498&switch=P This comes after hounding of the TrueCrypt developer and suppression of meshnet project at defcon. It shows that TPTB prefer to take action against the centralized aspects of the system, i.e. the manufacturers. This is why centralization of mining in crypto is so dangerous. |
| 9. | I have developed a design that has all the advantages Vitalik describes for private block chains, but on a public block chain. The scalability white paper he linked to in that article is a more abstract and generalized description of the scalability design I had also invented around the time he published this paper. This is the first time I've seen this research. Afaics his abstract paper does not deal with some of the intricacies of the economics that have to be solved in order to make the design actually work in the real world. Also he apparently hasn't realized that it is possible to filter out a 51% attack. |
| 10. | Well the block size issue has been a gift to me. Afaik, all crypto coins have this problem with a tradeoff choice between consensus decentralization and scalability. But I solved that problem, so it is just a matter of bringing the solution to market and watch what happens. I think a benevolent dictator or small group (say 2 like-minded peers sharing power), can be most effective in bringing a crypto coin to fruition. I think crypto coins need to be set on auto-pilot I think there needs to be built in some side-chain capability (assuming all bidirectional issues with that can be resolved, else some way to burn coins one-way to a new fork) so that HODLers can move their value out to a new fork gradually as a way to upgrade. This protects the value of the HODLers and allows for new technology. I don't agree with any changes made to the protocol of the coin after it has been stabilized (fixing bugs excepted of course). Note this depends on the eliminating the 51% attack, but I've solved that too. |
| 11. | Edit: We as a community are fighting for a mutual goal against a very well funded TPTB who control mass media and thus have annointed Bitcoin because they know they can control Bitcoin via its centralized mining and lack of anonymity. I posit we are wasting our resources by throwing our money into hardware and electricity when we could be using our resources to fund the developments for economies-of-scale needed to overcome. Btw, I am not referring to the consensus algorithm above but rather launch distribution and network security is a related factor but I have an innovation on that. I reiterated my thoughts about proof-of-stake recently here: Proof-of-Work vs. Proof-of-Stake |
| 12. | ... So if you talk about one of the most powerful weapons one can give to the local militias, that is an anonymous internet which can't be filtered nor controlled. Not an easy thing to accomplish. First you need the anonymity protocols (and Tor and I2P are broken designs). Then you need HAM radio backup for the internet infrastructure so the internet will always stay on regardless what the Feds do to the internet backbones. |
| 13. | there has existed for somehing like 35 years an analogue modem for 27MHZ, 142MHZ licenced and unlicensed. It's just a little PCB you solder to your mike / speaker points. There are multiple private 24/7 uplinks around the world. so you can mail and surf as you would normally, but slow. Around 2K baud, So try to sync your block chain on that. As a post apocalyptic internet it's fine. The entire internet will never go down. The main threat is segmentation of the internet and thus the block chain into competing chains. The solution is to HAM or shortwave radio the data between segments, and the miners slow down the block period as necessary to accommodate the slower relaying time. The coin needs a better (more efficient) design than Bitcoin on the way miners aggregate and relay data. This can probably all be solved once we get serious development back into a coin. Bitcoin development has become rigor mortis. Ham radio can be used to receive encrypted messages, so it can be used to send and receive bitcoins over very long distances. Imagine a scenario in the future where only Brazil has internet as we know it today and allows bitcoin to be used. We could use ham radio using encrypted communications for bitcoin sweep. Then again, ham radio communication seems easier to restrict than the internet. By the way, do you think in such scenario would be possible to use an old fashioned modem to connect with internet in Brazil using ham radio? "HAM" radio is a specific, licensed service with a prohibition on encrypted communications. I do believe that "high frequency" or "shortwave" radio, which is what you mean, will play a role in human liberty. So, it's funny this thread came up today because I was just thinking about HAM radio applications for bitcoin. Transactions over the radio wouldn't be super-feasible using voice modes (but perhaps using digital modes). They need not be encrypted, just signed. AFAIK, sending a cryptographically signed message for authentication should be fine since the data is in the clear. Here's an extensive write-up on the subject: http://blog.rietta.com/2009/08/authentication-without-encryption-for.html Quote WHAT DOES PART 97 SAY? Section 97.113 (4) "...messages in codes or ciphers intended to obscure the meaning thereof, except as otherwise provided herein..." Based on the above quote, we can use any method at our disposal to provide for secure authentication which does not obscure the meaning of communications. |