Quote from: bji on July 27, 2011, 07:33:27 AM

Quote from: cunicula on July 27, 2011, 05:26:18 AM

Quote from: bji on July 26, 2011, 06:51:06 PM

3) Most of these ideas completely miss the genius idea of bitcoin which is to produce a system of fully disclosed information that anyone can use to validate any transaction. People propose all kinds of ways to 'peg' bitcoins value relative to something else, or to modify the number of bitcoins generated, or to introduce esoteric new transaction types that have some secondary effect ("contingent claims"), but without any idea how such things could ever be validated realistically and identically by all bitcoin peers. Any source of external data, such as a "current value of oil" or "current value of gold", cannot implicity be agreed upon by all bitcoin peers, so immediately the ability for all peers to validate transations goes away.

If you are referring to the specific "contingent claims" that I proposed, your criticism here is very far off the mark. My proposal suggests derivatives based upon mining difficulty precisely because difficulty can "be validated realistically and identically by all bitcoin peers." Difficulty derivatives do not require external data for validation.

If you are referring to "contingent claims" as a general concept, you might choose your language more carefully to avoid confusion.

I was referring to it in the limited capacity in which I understood it, and in my understanding it introduced transaction chains that require extra work to validate. But the comments I made in the specific topic never were addressed so I don't know if I was off the mark.

Oh, you are right. I did fail to respond to you. Your post was unusually thoughtful, so I wanted to take my time in responding. Then I got distracted. Sorry. I will bump the thread with a response soon.