Quote from: Flip Tulipcoin on December 19, 2011, 08:49:45 PM

Quote from: SgtSpike on December 19, 2011, 08:03:56 PM

Quote from: Flip Tulipcoin on December 19, 2011, 07:37:41 PM

By default, the Bitcoin client accepts whichever chain is the longest as the "correct" blockchain.

No shit? To borrow a phrase from the mayor of Chicago, that's fucking retarded. Are you suggesting that this preposterous business of spinning wheels at ever increasing rates is necessary to maintain the security of the blockchain? If so, failure is inevitable. So many flaws, thanks for pointing this one out.

Ok, bright and enlightened one, what is your solution? I see nothing wrong with accepting the longest blockchain as the correct one. I can think of no other way to successfully implement a decentralized account ledger. You seem to be so ready to criticize Bitcoin's methods without offering up any solutions of your own. Once you can solve all the problems that Bitcoin solves, people might start taking you seriously.

Quote

Give the technical details.
The means of benchmarking GPUs, FPGAs, or whatever are too obvious to waste space on, in fact the more heterogeneous the platforms, the better for having them cross-check each other. Besides, existence proofs are always compelling, witness the BOINC project does this for CPUs and GPUs as well and it is not centralized other than as a matter of recordkeeping convenience. Of course, the BOINC project generates work of tangible value, whereas bitcoin asks for unbounded resources just to barely keep itself going, so there's a shared interest in central recording in BOINC.

It's been said before, but Nakamoto was very prudent not to burn his real identity on a 1.0 prototype. He's obviously much more clever than the folks who have internalized his work as gospel, a silly thing to do with a wholly synthetic mathematical game.

What kind of jargon are you spouting off about here? Way to completely generalize when I say "give details". Roll Eyes

Again, if you have a better system than Bitcoin, by all means, spill out the DETAILS. Just saying "it'll use BOINC" isn't enough. How would you create a public ledger that is unchangeable, yet decentralized?

Too funny! Ok, sonny, I won't trot out the string of degrees I have in mathematics, economics, and law. I won't cite my 30 years of experience in the financial services industry with 20 of that on Wall Street. I won't even discuss my role as one of the earliest implementors of the RSA cryptosystem in that industry. All that was a long time ago, I would pay people to do that stuff for me now had I not done so well as to be out of it completely. None of that is relevant in a world born yesterday.

In any case, the only practical value I see in bitcoin is as a transactional system.

I am sufficiently experienced to recognize that in the worst case a black box behavioral emulation of bitcoin as a transactional system could be built, perhaps out of as little as hamster wheels and rubber bands, perhaps more. Decentralized distributed data models are very common, there are many solutions to maintaining coherency in them. So on and so on. Yawn, been there, done that.

A really good way to not get sucked into the paradigms of a given tool set is to start with requirements. Rather than retype the work of others, I would suggest you take at look, FOR EXAMPLE ( just like BOINC is an EXAMPLE, you dingbat ) at this refined set of proposed requirements posted elsewhere on this forum:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54222.msg647423#msg647423

You shouldn't be surprised that the adults in the room are not taking bitcoin as seriously as it takes itself, many of them have seen a lot more than you have. Did I mention I knew some of the implementors of Flooz? Cheesy

Ok, so you have credentials and experience. I applaud you.

Now with all of those degrees and years of experience, why have you STILL not come up with an answer to the question I continually present to you? You criticize Bitcoin for its wastefulness of resources, but what sort of security would you put in place of raw hashing power?

Again: How would you create a public ledger that is unchangeable, yet decentralized?