Quote from: Rassah on December 03, 2013, 06:35:03 AM

Quote from: CoinCube on December 03, 2013, 06:15:13 AM

Why do you think they are bullshit? I read them multiple times and I came to the opposite conclusion.

I can't speak for MoonShadow, but for me they seemed like a combination of "difficult to digest" with "mediocre conclusions." Once I managed to process what his words were trying to say, the thing he was actually saying wasn't all that impressive, which only made it all that much more disappointing. Plus he still made some claims I find questionable. This is about his economic writings though.

Quote

Seems to me that he is not out of his league at all in fact I think he is holding his own rather well.

He may not be out of his league in economics, but you can't become and expert in economics, and then just claim that you are an expert in Bitcoin. The technology, and the way bitcoin actually works, is clearly out of his league. But instead of recognizing that, taking other's information into consideration, and actually learning about it, he seems convinced that, because he is so smart and is an expert in one field, that he is an expert in Bitcoin and understands it better after two weeks than the people who have discussed it for over two years. Note, this is the same mistake that a lot of economists have been making when they were writing news articles bashing Bitcoin.

AnonyMint is not out of his league in economics. That is to say, that he is obviously capable of understanding, and seems to have some kind of professional education in the topic. However, he spends a great deal of time restating commonly held economic myths in a somewhat novel way. It seems to me that he is either self-taught and young, or his professional education in Economics is incomplete. He understands it like a promising student.

That said, I agree with Rassah on his overall assessment. Even mastery of Economics (which AnonyMint has not acheived, imo) is not enough to understand Bitcoin. It's not even close. I had to learn a great deal about subjects that I was little better than a layman; including but not limited to, cryptography and other high math, psychology and programming. I am far from a master of these topics even now, but I am far better than a layman in each; and at a minimum understand the roles they play in Bitcoin. Also, I was here when Satoshi was still posting. I know some other things that aren't even mentioned in the white paper regarding security, some that are already in the main client, others that are not; that complicate (although don't render impossible) the execution of several general methods of attacking the blockchain or the network. I know, personally, that Satoshi foresaw much more than most of us understood. Bitcoin's elegant design was not luck. Personally, I came to the conclusion that the Satoshi on this forum was only a front man for a team of pros; because even thought a true polymath could do this, he often had some rather large delays between the asking of hard questions and their associated responses, implying to me that he was consulting someone out of view. Redardless, Satoshi (& company) did not expect that mining nodes would remain fair and trustworthy with one another. He/She/They fully expected that some major nodes would try to game the system to their own advantage, and that they can be expected some measure of success; but since these activities can be detected over time, that those nodes would be retaliated against in various ways. This is one reason that I, personally, have real doubts that Proof of Stake has any real future in cryptocurrency, since staking by it's nature assumes that nodes with high stakes won't turn malicious, and thus there is some level of trust placed on those 'supernodes'. Bitcoin does not have supernodes.

And it's in the retaliation aspect, not his analysis of (limited in scope) economic incentives that his attack vector collapses. He makes too many assumptions about how other nodes will respond. He assumes that all (non-negligible) nodes will react in what he considers to be the highest profit seeking manner; thus completely ignoring the fact that many nodes have economic incentives to resist the formation of a cartel, that many nodes have economic incentives to try to outcompete and otherwise undermine the primary cartel membership (in this case Amazon, and because Amazon has real competitors, just not direct ones) and that many nodes have no significant economic incentive in either case, but do have a vested interest in the network's 'status quo'. While he can present his attack, he doesn't respond to objections to his attack with any arguments, only insults and implications that he has already addressed such objections earlier. I've read the thread, he's done no such thing; at least not in a rational and non-hostile manner. Many of us have grown tired of his childish trolling masked as a somewhat intellectual debate.