Re: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?)
You're missing that setting the goal creates a net effect, it's no longer karate or boxing, it's mma. We aim for a perfection and achieve various degrees of success based on preferred taste--sooner or later, you will get there, or not, but all your negative energy helps 
You are the one with the negative erroneous phrase "of course" in that context.
Keep trying to shoot me down with nary a veil concealing your envy to save your pathetic Moanuro and Crypo Kongdung good ole boys club of robber goats and baronistas. Keep trying in vain.
TheFascistMind = iamnotback.
The following is a rebuttal to you, rpietila, and r0ach which I wrote presciently wrote 2 years in advance, knowing that one day you'd need to read this:
One last attempt to explain how I see that the rich buys club is incongruent with the future.
I could summarize all my posts in this thread with the following outcome in the movie Braveheart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdlL65LD6I4
You really should watch that and see the unexpected SWAN impale the rich boys British at the end.
Sorry that is just a constant size reduction and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that ring-signatures can't be pruned, except by some other restrictions such as an expiry on coins.
There IS an obliterating black swan (i.e. Taleb's unexpected long-tail statistic event) they don't see, whilst they be doing busy-bee grunt work of fixing databases for a broken design, making a gui, etc..
And this produced how many million user products?
I have produced (one as a co-developer) three separate "million user" level products since 1980s. With a lot of goofing off vacation time in between (mea culpa).
I suppose this was directed to me as well as any others who aspire.
This is analogous to the inefficiency of saying that anyone who wants to buy french fries needs to travel to Belgium.
Those who are truly capable don't need any money. There will be too much money trying to be rammed down their throat.
Money is the weak thing to hold. Knowledge is strength.
My suggestion to you was to be more friendly and spread an insignificant (for you) investments around on all promising endeavors in order to be respected for your 1% instead of resented by the community. Also to give yourself more chance on not missing the swan boat when it comes. Your "Rpietila's Altcoin" thread instead of being a jovial and spirited discussion of exciting developments, should be renamed "Rpietila's Monero Membership Club". I am not upset about it, I am just relaying to you how it appears to others who are not brainwashed by "Monero is the answer".
You've already been friendly to me and you even gifted me 2 BTC. There is no problem between you and I. I am writing to gift you feedback, because in my analysis you are in the process of committing a fail and possibly a mega-fail.
Expecting busy hackers to go through personal interviews with you is I am sorry to tell from the perspective of a hacker insulting. I am not insulted, but I am telling you what sort of actions and attitude breed animosity. We build our reputations by our code, not our talking.
"Talk is cheap, show me the code" Linus Torvalds
"Those who can't build, talk" Eric Raymond
Your stance is fundamentally incongruent with the open source movement. Open source projects will spawn more and more granularly (smaller teams) and stored capital and top-down organization will become more and more irrelevant.
This is a virtual new economy; we only need to click a button to make an investment. We don't need to travel across the world. And we don't need to invest everything in one thing or two things, thus we don't need to know all the answers before the questions can even be asked. Creativity spawns serendipitously not as planned (even my own work lately proves this is true, because I didn't plan all the ideas I discovered along the way).
Open source is the odds of large numbers.
"Given enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow" Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds
"Given enough experiments, all possibilities are achievable" Shelby Moore III paraphrasing Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds
Eric Raymond noted that is the only known positive-scaling law in software engineering, i.e. that efficiency improves the more autonomous N actors involved. Design by top-down grouping or committee is not the same scaling law.
We don't have time to waste on top-down bureaucracy.
Warren Buffett doesn't do angel investing, because he wants to evaluate companies based on well established metrics. Angel investing is a game of more risky probabilities. Thus efficiency of scattershot is more important. Angel investing will become less and less like an exhaustive evaluation and more and more spontaneous and small, e.g. KickStarter. Everyone gives a little bit, not one big whale slowing everything down.
The Knowledge Age is the end of the road for large stored capital. The power-law distribution of wealth will shift to stored knowledge. Actionable knowledge will be power-law distributed. It already is. Which is why when you are searching for a needle in a haystack, don't tell the needle to jump to your castle.
P.S. I do want to have friendships and vacation in nice resorts such as castles. But that is vacation time. I can't mix business with vacation, it doesn't work. When I am coding, I need to be where ever I already am where I can code now, not tomorrow, not after a conversation, not after a glass of wine, not after ... Procrastination is the bane of software development. My best work has come when I didn't have material comforts.
I have not taken a shower in 2 months. I haven't washed my clothes, they are stink like a pig pen. I have not been outside of my room nor seen the sunshine except to restock on food.
Time is of the essence.
Most of the impoverished don't have a credit card nor bank account.
The Paypal plan.
The reason Paypal couldn't just issue everyone in the developing world an account is because of jealousy thus legal and political risk. Governments would resist take over of their financial control by an overtly fascist corporation.
Peter Thiel et al are more clever.
Issue everyone a supranational digital account that is "decentralized and controlled by no one", when in fact it is centralized and controlled by the fascist powers-that-be.
Use this to force other countries into submission when they attempt to offer their own top-down centralized digital currencies, e.g. Ecuador.
The people are trapped either way in a fully traceable block chain and NWO Technocracy.
Monero (portmanteau of money+dying euro?) offers no hope of scaling to avert this rapidly developing fascist outcome.
C'est la vie. Fait accompli.
And the competing and equally devastating Apple Plan.
I could summarize all my posts in this thread with the following outcome in the movie Braveheart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdlL65LD6I4
You really should watch that and see the unexpected SWAN impale the rich boys British at the end.
Sorry that is just a constant size reduction and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that ring-signatures can't be pruned, except by some other restrictions such as an expiry on coins.
We start with swans, then it gets interesting, and hard.
There IS an obliterating black swan (i.e. Taleb's unexpected long-tail statistic event) they don't see, whilst they be doing busy-bee grunt work of fixing databases for a broken design, making a gui, etc..
I am also a business angel, funding people's things ever since 2004.
And this produced how many million user products?
I have produced (one as a co-developer) three separate "million user" level products since 1980s. With a lot of goofing off vacation time in between (mea culpa).
I am fine if you don't want to come to my castle but that is the necessary condition if you want to deal with me.
I suppose this was directed to me as well as any others who aspire.
This is analogous to the inefficiency of saying that anyone who wants to buy french fries needs to travel to Belgium.
Those who are truly capable don't need any money. There will be too much money trying to be rammed down their throat.
Money is the weak thing to hold. Knowledge is strength.
My suggestion to you was to be more friendly and spread an insignificant (for you) investments around on all promising endeavors in order to be respected for your 1% instead of resented by the community. Also to give yourself more chance on not missing the swan boat when it comes. Your "Rpietila's Altcoin" thread instead of being a jovial and spirited discussion of exciting developments, should be renamed "Rpietila's Monero Membership Club". I am not upset about it, I am just relaying to you how it appears to others who are not brainwashed by "Monero is the answer".
You've already been friendly to me and you even gifted me 2 BTC. There is no problem between you and I. I am writing to gift you feedback, because in my analysis you are in the process of committing a fail and possibly a mega-fail.
Expecting busy hackers to go through personal interviews with you is I am sorry to tell from the perspective of a hacker insulting. I am not insulted, but I am telling you what sort of actions and attitude breed animosity. We build our reputations by our code, not our talking.
"Talk is cheap, show me the code" Linus Torvalds
"Those who can't build, talk" Eric Raymond
Your stance is fundamentally incongruent with the open source movement. Open source projects will spawn more and more granularly (smaller teams) and stored capital and top-down organization will become more and more irrelevant.
This is a virtual new economy; we only need to click a button to make an investment. We don't need to travel across the world. And we don't need to invest everything in one thing or two things, thus we don't need to know all the answers before the questions can even be asked. Creativity spawns serendipitously not as planned (even my own work lately proves this is true, because I didn't plan all the ideas I discovered along the way).
Open source is the odds of large numbers.
"Given enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow" Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds
"Given enough experiments, all possibilities are achievable" Shelby Moore III paraphrasing Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds
Eric Raymond noted that is the only known positive-scaling law in software engineering, i.e. that efficiency improves the more autonomous N actors involved. Design by top-down grouping or committee is not the same scaling law.
We don't have time to waste on top-down bureaucracy.
Warren Buffett doesn't do angel investing, because he wants to evaluate companies based on well established metrics. Angel investing is a game of more risky probabilities. Thus efficiency of scattershot is more important. Angel investing will become less and less like an exhaustive evaluation and more and more spontaneous and small, e.g. KickStarter. Everyone gives a little bit, not one big whale slowing everything down.
The Knowledge Age is the end of the road for large stored capital. The power-law distribution of wealth will shift to stored knowledge. Actionable knowledge will be power-law distributed. It already is. Which is why when you are searching for a needle in a haystack, don't tell the needle to jump to your castle.
P.S. I do want to have friendships and vacation in nice resorts such as castles. But that is vacation time. I can't mix business with vacation, it doesn't work. When I am coding, I need to be where ever I already am where I can code now, not tomorrow, not after a conversation, not after a glass of wine, not after ... Procrastination is the bane of software development. My best work has come when I didn't have material comforts.
I have not taken a shower in 2 months. I haven't washed my clothes, they are stink like a pig pen. I have not been outside of my room nor seen the sunshine except to restock on food.
Time is of the essence.
It doesn't matter if Paypal accepts Bitcoin because users who are not investors (e.g. especially females and the billions of impoverished) have no incentive to convert from their unit-of-account (dollars) to BTC just to pay for something. They might as well just fund their Paypal transactions with their credit card or bank account. Bitcoin will not become the unit-of-account without the blessing of the government, because it has no distribution scale.
Most of the impoverished don't have a credit card nor bank account.
The Paypal plan.
The reason Paypal couldn't just issue everyone in the developing world an account is because of jealousy thus legal and political risk. Governments would resist take over of their financial control by an overtly fascist corporation.
Peter Thiel et al are more clever.
Issue everyone a supranational digital account that is "decentralized and controlled by no one", when in fact it is centralized and controlled by the fascist powers-that-be.
Use this to force other countries into submission when they attempt to offer their own top-down centralized digital currencies, e.g. Ecuador.
The people are trapped either way in a fully traceable block chain and NWO Technocracy.
Monero (portmanteau of money+dying euro?) offers no hope of scaling to avert this rapidly developing fascist outcome.
C'est la vie. Fait accompli.
And the competing and equally devastating Apple Plan.
Any other ideas of how to scale a crypto-currency to beyond 10 million users within 3 years or less from launch?
Build it into a game that becomes a massive hit.
Note 'game' has a wider scope of context than what you might be thinking. For example, life is game.
Oh, poor little him!
Continue your fantasies please.
Sometimes I think out-of-the-box. I don't claim to be a genius. I have a reasonably high IQ (probably not as high as aminorex on standardized tests) and some different approaches. Linus Torvalds probably doesn't have as high an IQ as Eric Raymond (clearly evident by reading their respective blogs), but Linus has a skill set of being able to contain the complexity of large projects which Eric may not possess (Eric wrote this).
This is embarrassing for me and the best way for me to depersonalize this discussion is for me to stop speaking. Because I have very strong opinions.
Sorry for rocking the boat. I guess I don't know how to not speak my mind.
Edit: I had sent PMs twice to Hal telling about the treatments I am trying, because my autoimmunity and his ALS may share the autoimmunity issue. I don't know if he ever read them, and I may have been too late. Perhaps a quote from him is apropos.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2f1ijk/hal_finney_was_bitcoins_first_follower_when_you/
Quote from: Hal Finney
"When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in."
Watch the video!
If you emphasis on reading comprehension, the actual questions was how many processor cores is need to verify the incoming transactions + the mined block?
Since you asked, I just looked in the log file on a 4-year old Xeon server I'm using as a node. It takes approximately 0.14 seconds from the time a new transaction arrives until the time it is relayed. I believe most if not all of this processing is single threaded, which suggests approximately 7 transactions per second per core on a 4-year old CPU.
On the order-of-magnitude of 20 txs/sec per core on a late model CPU, i.e. an order-of-magnitude higher than Bitcoin (<1 tx/s) now per core but two orders-of-magnitude less than Visa (2 - 6K tx/s) now per core, means Monero (Cryptonote) can't scale to any where even close to global Visa scale and remain both decentralized for mining with fast block period (thus fast transactions), not to mention the likely order(s)-of-magnitude more scaling above that to reach ubiquitous global micro transactions and programmable contracts on the block chain.
So you would have to solve both this and the blockchain bloat in order to scale to global widespread use. It appears that one-time ring signatures are fundamentally incompatible with scaling.
Cryptonote can't encourage too much use with zero transaction fees, because it can't accept the scaling that can come with it.
I believe Zerocash has similar scaling issues. DarkCoin (and CoinJoin) has the simultaneity problem that fights scaling because to mix you need someone else who wants to mix with you at the same denominations at the same time (not mention being either theoretically defeated with jamming and/or Sybil attack on masternodes) and to perform this meeting with scaling you need global coherence on submitted txs which means either centralization (synchronicity) or no scaling.
(8 ) Every day we go lower, there has to be new sellers selling a growing number of coins to satisfy even stagnant demand. I would not bet it happening indefinitely.
You are ignoring my point about marginal supply and demand sets price.
We can't use fundamental demand arguments during a speculative move.
The lower the price goes, the more panic selling among those who bought at higher nosebleed levels during the 2013 bubble.
At what price did the huge surge in new buyers come last year? Looking at a volume x price chart from 2013 should tell us where the bottom should be.
Because price is now low, people are making this supposed loss of fungibility a big issue, as if it was the end of everything. We have been dealing with this kind of legislation in the PM industry for decades and it is not a big deal. It is not the reason why PM's are not practical to be used as money.
Sure you have to pay taxes on gains, but the fact that you have gains should be the interesting thing here. Even if there was a blockchain-level registration of all your bitcoins, and requirement to keep track of the cost basis of every satoshi, you would not even notice given proper software. This ruling is the beginning of all good things bitcoin, except the loss of anonymity which wasn't there to begin with.
Besides I am sick with this US-centricism. There are 220 other legislations out there to choose from if you don't like the ruling. In my opinion it was very reasonable and I can only dream of 18% cgt rates here..
Sure you have to pay taxes on gains, but the fact that you have gains should be the interesting thing here. Even if there was a blockchain-level registration of all your bitcoins, and requirement to keep track of the cost basis of every satoshi, you would not even notice given proper software. This ruling is the beginning of all good things bitcoin, except the loss of anonymity which wasn't there to begin with.
Besides I am sick with this US-centricism. There are 220 other legislations out there to choose from if you don't like the ruling. In my opinion it was very reasonable and I can only dream of 18% cgt rates here..
You ignore and did not address the point.
Also all jurisdictions are classifying Bitcoin as a commodity or property that is subject to capital gains tax. (It is irrelevant to my point, but Obama and EU are planning to raise taxes to 70%).
Bitcoin will continue to have value because it is an ignorance bubble among white male fanatics. It will also have value because it is the liquid backbone of exchange for an ecosystem that will solve the above problem with altcoins that are superior to Bitcoin. Bitcoin will also grow in value because it is the NWO coin and the governments are going to be promoting it and the institutional players will chime in with government compatible offchain services that eventually get the blessing from the government and exclusions to tax hurdles in order to increase mass adoption. At that point, Bitcoin will be effectively a fiat system. Any way, Bitcoin is already controlled by a few people.
Bottom line is Bitcoin will bottom and then the price will go up again. It is an investment but not a solution to what we wanted idealistically. But it is a necessary stepping stone.
do i think 9/11 was an inside job? yes. herp.
do i think there is a a super secret cabal in charge of the whole world. no.
the truth is likely far more mundane than the hollywood NWO scenario.
some powerful/rich guys sometimes do some really bad stuff to stay in charge/rich. its always been like that. just the same as there have always been other guys who think they are super genius for figuring that out. it's not 'breaking news'.
do i think there is a a super secret cabal in charge of the whole world. no.
the truth is likely far more mundane than the hollywood NWO scenario.
some powerful/rich guys sometimes do some really bad stuff to stay in charge/rich. its always been like that. just the same as there have always been other guys who think they are super genius for figuring that out. it's not 'breaking news'.
Those bad guys wielded widespread power to pull off what they did and get the entire world to change into a police state against terrorism, yet you attribute relative impotence to them.
Have you not seen the billboards for example in London urging citizens to report anything they see, because of the threat of terrorism. Have you not traveled and seen that nearly all public venues (malls, airports, etc) have security guards that have hissy fits if they see even a hang bag laying unattended.
Or I guess that global coordination was just a random outcome.
You ignore the overt efforts of for example David Rockefeller who travels the globe working on the global coodination, such as his Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg group. These are all real institutions for global coodination.
You ignore that corporations and media all over the world push this junk science of man-made global warming. Just a random, uncoordinated outcome eh?
Can you tell me how fires and debris could bring the Eiffel tower down vertically in free fall entirely with not any portion standing nor falling off center?
Maybe thisStay away from that thermonuclear idea. That is outlandish and planted to make us look like kooks.
The best hypothesis I've seen thus far is the buildings were brought down with detonated Thermite cutting charges planted on the steel beams. There is much evidence of this, in spite of the steel was quickly shipped to China to be melted to destroy the evidence. The Thermite (which melts steel) is why it burned hot for weeks as can be seen by aerial IR photography. The melted angle cuts can even be seen on photos of beams from the rubble.
One problem I have with the Thermite hypothesis is that how could timing of the cuts be so tightly coordinated to obtain the free fall implosion onto self. Perhaps the Thermite was combined with traditional demolition charges. I haven't followed the detailed developments much in many years because the evidence is mostly destroyed and my understanding is satisfied based on other analysis that the government's story was impossible. Knowing we've been lied to and that it required some form of demolition is sufficient to prod me into the activities I am doing now to defeat this slide into totalitarianism.
(8 ) Every day we go lower, there has to be new sellers selling a growing number of coins to satisfy even stagnant demand. I would not bet it happening indefinitely.
You are ignoring my point about marginal supply and demand sets price.
We can't use fundamental demand arguments during a speculative move.
The lower the price goes, the more panic selling among those who bought at higher nosebleed levels during the 2013 bubble.
At what price did the huge surge in new buyers come last year? Looking at a volume x price chart from 2013 should tell us where the bottom should be.
Because price is now low, people are making this supposed loss of fungibility a big issue, as if it was the end of everything. We have been dealing with this kind of legislation in the PM industry for decades and it is not a big deal. It is not the reason why PM's are not practical to be used as money.
Sure you have to pay taxes on gains, but the fact that you have gains should be the interesting thing here. Even if there was a blockchain-level registration of all your bitcoins, and requirement to keep track of the cost basis of every satoshi, you would not even notice given proper software. This ruling is the beginning of all good things bitcoin, except the loss of anonymity which wasn't there to begin with.
Besides I am sick with this US-centricism. There are 220 other legislations out there to choose from if you don't like the ruling. In my opinion it was very reasonable and I can only dream of 18% cgt rates here..
Sure you have to pay taxes on gains, but the fact that you have gains should be the interesting thing here. Even if there was a blockchain-level registration of all your bitcoins, and requirement to keep track of the cost basis of every satoshi, you would not even notice given proper software. This ruling is the beginning of all good things bitcoin, except the loss of anonymity which wasn't there to begin with.
Besides I am sick with this US-centricism. There are 220 other legislations out there to choose from if you don't like the ruling. In my opinion it was very reasonable and I can only dream of 18% cgt rates here..
You ignore and did not address the point.
Also all jurisdictions are classifying Bitcoin as a commodity or property that is subject to capital gains tax. (It is irrelevant to my point, but Obama and EU are planning to raise taxes to 70%).
Bitcoin will continue to have value because it is an ignorance bubble among white male fanatics. It will also have value because it is the liquid backbone of exchange for an ecosystem that will solve the above problem with altcoins that are superior to Bitcoin. Bitcoin will also grow in value because it is the NWO coin and the governments are going to be promoting it and the institutional players will chime in with government compatible offchain services that eventually get the blessing from the government and exclusions to tax hurdles in order to increase mass adoption. At that point, Bitcoin will be effectively a fiat system. Any way, Bitcoin is already controlled by a few people.
Bottom line is Bitcoin will bottom and then the price will go up again. It is an investment but not a solution to what we wanted idealistically. But it is a necessary stepping stone.
do i think 9/11 was an inside job? yes. herp.
do i think there is a a super secret cabal in charge of the whole world. no.
the truth is likely far more mundane than the hollywood NWO scenario.
some powerful/rich guys sometimes do some really bad stuff to stay in charge/rich. its always been like that. just the same as there have always been other guys who think they are super genius for figuring that out. it's not 'breaking news'.
do i think there is a a super secret cabal in charge of the whole world. no.
the truth is likely far more mundane than the hollywood NWO scenario.
some powerful/rich guys sometimes do some really bad stuff to stay in charge/rich. its always been like that. just the same as there have always been other guys who think they are super genius for figuring that out. it's not 'breaking news'.
Those bad guys wielded widespread power to pull off what they did and get the entire world to change into a police state against terrorism, yet you attribute relative impotence to them.
Have you not seen the billboards for example in London urging citizens to report anything they see, because of the threat of terrorism. Have you not traveled and seen that nearly all public venues (malls, airports, etc) have security guards that have hissy fits if they see even a hang bag laying unattended.
Or I guess that global coordination was just a random outcome.
You ignore the overt efforts of for example David Rockefeller who travels the globe working on the global coodination, such as his Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg group. These are all real institutions for global coodination.
You ignore that corporations and media all over the world push this junk science of man-made global warming. Just a random, uncoordinated outcome eh?
Can you tell me how fires and debris could bring the Eiffel tower down vertically in free fall entirely with not any portion standing nor falling off center?
Maybe thisStay away from that thermonuclear idea. That is outlandish and planted to make us look like kooks.
The best hypothesis I've seen thus far is the buildings were brought down with detonated Thermite cutting charges planted on the steel beams. There is much evidence of this, in spite of the steel was quickly shipped to China to be melted to destroy the evidence. The Thermite (which melts steel) is why it burned hot for weeks as can be seen by aerial IR photography. The melted angle cuts can even be seen on photos of beams from the rubble.
One problem I have with the Thermite hypothesis is that how could timing of the cuts be so tightly coordinated to obtain the free fall implosion onto self. Perhaps the Thermite was combined with traditional demolition charges. I haven't followed the detailed developments much in many years because the evidence is mostly destroyed and my understanding is satisfied based on other analysis that the government's story was impossible. Knowing we've been lied to and that it required some form of demolition is sufficient to prod me into the activities I am doing now to defeat this slide into totalitarianism.