Quote from: Judson on December 09, 2010, 05:36:36 AM

Then do we disagree?

You are against the protocol being filled with "other uses" (like BitDNS - an exception to normal use). If the official client only allows standard transactions, then the protocol is not getting "minced".

I feel like BitDNS stuff like this is just a phase. It won't last long, and will eventually be forgotten by the discovery of a new way to mine Bitcoins faster with the same hardware (or applicable "next big thing").

I don't think this is going to go away, as there are other application for Bitcion which can use this same principle. As I've tried to abundantly explain, the method of "attack" here is also a more generalized database for other kinds of data besides DNS records.

The benefit to Bitcoins is in regards to the mining activity needed to produce block chains containing non-financial data: Either that CPU activity can be applied to the main Bitcoin block chain and thus strengthening Bitcoin as a whole or it can be applied to a "parallel currency".

I've heard it suggested that nobody would want to abandon Bitcion and its blockchain as it already has an 18 month head start with a huge amount of CPU cycles already devoted to its construction. Over time, I think that is generally true.

On the other hand, with a parallel currency devoted to some task such as processing DNS records or perhaps something else that may even have even more CPU resources thrown at it, I would argue that over time this "alternate" currency may have a substantially stronger currency train. There are no guarantees here, but certainly I could see some people throwing CPU cycles at some of these alternate application simply because of what they do in terms of say DNS records rather than even as currency. They will have this "alternate currency" which is then even better protected than Bitcoins, and my argument here is that the currency is thus a stronger currency which will drive Bitcoin out of the market place.

And like a Ronco advertisement, "that's not all"! Since there are concrete applications for this alternate currency (buying domain records, paying transaction fees on the "Bitcoin stock exchange", buying certification from a document registrar, etc.) there is also built-in demand for this currency simply to have it. That in turn is something that I think over time may even make this currency more valuable in terms of the overall size of the economy using these coins, further driving value out of the Bitcoin economy in a downward spiral. Bitcoin will then just be a cryptographically weaker currency with fewer people trading a relatively worthless currency. Is that really what Bitcoin users really want to see?