Quote from: r0ach on July 09, 2016, 08:29:21 AM

Quote from: iamnotback on July 07, 2016, 10:13:38 PM

When China's mining oligarchy can implement MIT's ChainAnchor which turns off your ability to spend unless you comply with your local government's taxation and capital controls, then where Bitcoin is accepted is less relevant than whether it is no longer a permissionless system.

This is not a valid criticism that is Bitcoin specific due to what I said a few pages back. It's a problem inherent to ANY cryptocurrency you can possibly create, whether it's Bitcoin, Monero, Zcash, or Anonymintcoin:

1. The protocol change can in theory eventually be implemented on Bitcoin (and even Monero once it scales up) because Satoshi's block chain design centralizes. With a block chain design which doesn't centralize, it becomes more difficult to implement such a protocol change. A block chain should be practically unforkable. One of the issues that my design fixes, is that the miners are everyone, not just a few farms in known locations. The governments are not very successful when they try to regulate end users, because some people are hard-headed and there are always outliers who disobey and take their chances which causes others to become emboldened and copy them. The government can't stop what becomes popular and which is a leaky sieve (e.g. decentralized file sharing). They need a smaller set of entities (the miners) to regulate. Don't give up yet, I still have something to offer as a potential solution. Right now I am in the gym 3 hours intensely every other day, trying to will power my body back to condition that is conducive to sort of work I had done in my better years. I am sore and tired sometimes, but also I have significant improvement. I am also off on a tangent right now of trying to get my gf situated in either a job or small business so she is not disturbing me all day when I am on the computer. I need silence here at the house so I can code. She brings the dog upstairs and doing facebook on her mobile phone and every 2 - 3 hours some request such as "can we go buy ice cream". My health has improved a lot, but I am in the phase of grinding through the soreness of 3 hour barbell, boxing workouts and dealing with the soreness and my gut and skin are going through various phases of transformation towards healing but I am not yet at 100% health. We apparently don't cure a multi-year autoimmune illness 100% instantly. At least I don't look so frail now, and I very intense in my workouts (flames coming out of nose sort of intensity and not so incredibly exhausted the days after as before during the height of my illness). It is a battle of will power and discipline (which has been lacking on my side since I joined this forum, but I understand it is because of the illness I was dealing with).

2. Another strategy is to gain mass adoption of microtransactions because it is much more difficult for the government to prosecute billions of tiny transactions. We will bankrupt the government if they spend $1000 prosecuting every $0.001 transaction. The strategy I've been planning out is multi-pronged and it is economically clever.

3. If we have a form of privacy/anonymity for a while at least, and it is off chain (meaning even though the NSA records all traffic, they can't unmask the mixing even with analysis although of course this can break down with metadata as for any other anonymity technology although at least the IP address metadata is automatically mixed unlike for example Cryptonote and Zcash which require integration with Tor or I2P which are probably known honeypots of the NSA), then it can't be later unwound so that gives us a tool to use interim during some or most of the coming crisis. Even if the government ends up finally gaining control and the upper hand, that interim tool would have been available to us. I don't view anonymity against the national security agencies as very practical, except if you are very, very clever, resourceful, and careful (and even then all your effort might fail). So I think rather we should be looking for a way to make a currency that the masses can use. TPTB+Socialism are going after the millionaires and there is really nothing we can do to stop them. I think I can help the masses (which in my grandiose dream might cause them to reject socialism), which is what the wisdom in the Bible says to do. My suggestion is if you are millionaire or earn a lot of gains speculating, pay your taxes and do it all legally. Go find yourself a tax-free jurisdiction. Change your citizenship or residence accordingly. Play the game wisely.

4. Liquidity is a key attribute. For this we need scaling and we need a feature for mass adoption. This is why I have been working on microtransactions because it the feature that fiat and credit cards can't do. And I think it has huge mass adoption potential (in spite of the argument that says users don't want to pay per use and prefer subscriptions, I have a retort to that...).

Quote from: r0ach on July 09, 2016, 08:29:21 AM

Quote from: r0ach on June 29, 2016, 06:30:37 PM

It's inevitable that an alias system would be developed for any successful cryptocurrency. The alias system would de-anonymize transactions of even the most perfect system because...that's what it's designed to do by voluntary compliance. But, governments would then mandate all transactions be routed through the alias system or you're considered to be a criminal launderer. So it seems no matter what type of cryptocurrency you develop, you will be forced to use the government scaffolding alias system regardless, which transforms the cryptocurrency into an entirely different thing than what it's designed as.

Governments just say, hey, fuck you, you gotta route all your transactions through our 2nd tier system, nullifying whatever it is your 1st tier system does. This brings you back to re-examine the point emphasized by Ted Kaczynski about technology, where he states it's a net negative game for humans. It's always possible he's right and nothing you can create in the digital space can be a net positive for freedom. This is stuff that I already know well, but I still dabble in Bitcoin because it's not a debt based, usury based, or fractional reserve currency. No matter what they do to it, I don't think they can make it worse than the fiat system that already exists.

Yes, yes, I'm aware, you say they are going to use it to track people and tax 90% of all wealth. That's a problem that already exists before Bitcoin, and Bitcoin honestly doesn't improve their ability to do so much, if at all. Most transactions can't be done on-chain and will be done either off-chain or 2nd tier systems that have the exact same traceability as systems that already exist.

The Unibomber might be correct ultimately. Any way, I don't worry about creating an heirloom. I try to attack the problem the best that I can, and we will just see how it works out. I don't see any other option. We can't just go live in the wilderness and not use money, as that fights against all economies-of-maximum division-of-labor (including economies-of-scale).

In some respects, TPTB might view my work as a technological advance that aids the movement towards digital currency. I presume there are different factions of TPTB that have different vested interests.

The way to unite everyone, is to have a system that can't be owned by anyone. I think that was the fundamental ideological insight of Satoshi. But we need to make that a reality if possible.