Quote from: d'aniel on February 24, 2014, 08:04:17 AM

I don't mean to; there are definitely interesting things that can be done. I just question whether it's necessary to do them on the Bitcoin blockchain. A truly symbiotic application seems like it could work perfectly well using a separate merged mined chain, and atomic cross chain trading. (And if the application is competing with Bitcoin, then all the more reason to keep it the hell off the Bitcoin blockchain, if possible.)

If you think merge-mined chains represent proof-of-publication in a world of large pools, you misunderstand what the idea is. Fundamentally merge-mining is insecure without the participation of at least a very large fraction of the mining hashing power, which negates the scalability argument for merge-mining.

Quote from: d'aniel on February 24, 2014, 08:04:17 AM

Obviously pretty much nobody would object to that example. Yet consensus seems to be that using the blockchain for completely arbitrary data dumps is a bad idea. So yes the line is blurry, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or is safely ignored.

Even if there is consensus about that, which I myself am a solid counter-example, there isn't consensus about what exactly arbitrary data is.

Quote from: d'aniel on February 24, 2014, 08:04:17 AM

This implies a rejection of any defined purpose for the blockchain: "it exists for whatever the highest bidders want to use it for". For example, crowded out users that just want to transfer bitcoins back and forth would IMHO be rightly upset by this kind of transformation.

Equally those who had been putting a lot of effort into decentralized finance will be rightly upset by this kind of transformation. Which is why my advice to them is don't get sucked into the hype - blocking data in the blockchain is non-trivial and their applications don't have much to worry about. Furthermore blocking proof-of-publication/timestamping for hashes is outright impossible, and for many of these applications (e.g. colored coins) hashes is all you need. In fact, with some cleverness I suspect I could make the entire Mastercoin and Counterparty protocols be purely hash based and unblockable by generic mechanisms; I should put some thought into this...)

Quote from: d'aniel on February 24, 2014, 08:04:17 AM

I hope so! Better fundamental scalability is certainly the ideal solution. Since I like to keep up-to-date on these topics, what is your current favoured way to go here? Just the name of the proposal is fine, I can search through the chat logs/forums to get the details. Thanks.

#bitcoin-wizards is where this has been discussed. Working on a more formal paper for tree chains as well. I prefer not to discuss ideas here - much better to discuss ideas on open mediums like email lists that are archived by multiple entities.