Quote from: fellowtraveler on December 26, 2010, 11:24:07 PM

Quote from: em3rgentOrdr on September 17, 2010, 05:44:54 AM

Are you saying that market will develop with OpenTransactions whereby people use bandwidth/cpu resources as currency?But basically OpenTransactions isn't backed by anything? It is just that they will allow people to anonymously trade, and will thus produce a commodity of bandwidth/cpu resources? (I'm not terribly familiar with OpenTransactions)

Open Transactions is software that allows anyone to connect and issue currencies (just like Loom, if you're familiar with that) and then transact in them untraceably. So there could be a bitcoin-backed currency, an e-gold-backed currency, a goldmoney-backed currency, a fiat-backed currency, and a hundred others.

My point above was that using untraceable money, it becomes possible to pay for resources on anonymous networks, which would therefore solve issues of resource allocation on anonymous networks. And since the digital cash, in that case, is being used to pay for resources on anonymous networks, that means it could also be redeemed for those resources as well. Thus, a digital cash backed in Bitcoin would have value beyond just the "proof of work" that went into creating the Bitcoins, but would also have the value of paying for filesharing resources on anonymous networks.

In fact, the three pieces fix each other's weaknesses...

Bitcoin is fully-distributed but not untraceable.
Open Transactions is untraceable but requires a server.
Anonymous networks allow you to run a server but they run too slowly...
Open Transactions would solve issues of resource allocation on those networks, but requires an issuer somewhere to store the gold...
Unless you back it with Bitcoin, in which case there is no backing storage needed since that becomes fully-distributed.

Excellent! Basically bitcoin and open transactions are complementary means of exchange.

Do you have any good recommendations about relatively cheap and high-bandwidth VPS or other server that I could purchase anonymously with Loom or Open Transactions? Unfortunately, I'm not terribly impressed with the price/GB for the VPS servers listed in the bitcoin trade (and again am a wee bit concerned about the potential traceability of bitcoin by a clever adversary), but maybe there are other servers that could be purchased with Loom or Open Transactions instead.

This is sortof like Rock-Paper-Sissors, or one of those RPGs where you have Water weak against Lighting, Fire and Ice weak against eachother, Black Mages with high MP but low HP, Warriors with high HP but no magic, White Mages with poor attack but can restore HP, etc. (you get the picture). But then you get to put together your team which combines their special powers and is able to defeat any enemy/boss!

Sorry for the lame analogy. Cheesy