Quote from: EhVedadoOAnonimato on January 08, 2012, 06:46:59 PM

Quote from: k9quaint on January 08, 2012, 06:24:45 PM

I think you need to read up on what a pyramid scheme is. You seem to have to serious misconceptions about it.

My personal understanding of "pyramid scheme" is something that demands you to pay something to enter, and what you pay go to those that were there before you. For the scheme to keep financially healthy, the number of people entering must never decrease. It's what Social Security would be if it was voluntary (as it's not, it's much worse, it crosses the line of "ethically ok" to "ethically wrong")

Quote from: k9quaint on January 08, 2012, 06:24:45 PM

According to that logic, Worldcom and Enron were not criminal, they just exploited the stock market's ignorance about the true state of their finances. No ethical problem at all right?

I don't know what these companies did. Wasn't fraud involved? That's ethically wrong, similar to when Luke-Jr used people's computing power in a way that was not agreed upon.
If there was no fraud or violation of people's right than no ethical problem indeed.

Quote from: k9quaint on January 08, 2012, 06:24:45 PM

You also manage to say something is ethically ok and disgusting at the same time.

Of course something may be disgusting and ethically ok at the same time. Being disgusting is a subjective opinion.

Anyways, we're getting off-topic. Let's try to remain on what happened here, please.

This is exactly on topic. You make assertions about what is or isn't ethical, but don't have the underlying information to make an informed opinion.
Pyramid schemes necessarily involve fraud, particularly assertions about a products quality, or market penetration, or underlying value. That is why new investors are needed, without them the scheme cannot survive. Now who would invest in a dying enterprise? Someone who was lied to about it's prospects of course.

Luke-jr used the result of peoples computing power, not the power itself. Why is this distinction important and is it actually a distinction? People who signed up with Eligius did so in order to mine Bitcoins. Merged mining involves no additional work in order to function, it uses the results of other proofs of work in order to build its own blockchain. Luke used the results of the BTC mining to attack CLC. Eligius users would earned the exact same number of BTC had Luke-jr not attacked CLC. Since nothing was taken from Eligius users, no economic damage occurred. Eligius users did no extra work to take part in the attack on CLC.

These are the facts as I understand them (I might be wrong):
CLC was basically an unreleased version of BTC with first day merged mining and exchange support.
Luke-jr demonstrated how an unreliable pool operator can destroy such an entity.
Luke-jr did so without incurring any economic harm to or requiring any extra work from his users.
Luke-jr did not double spend CLC, only demonstrated that he could have by creating a separate but longer CLC blockchain.

Whether he should or should not have attacked CLC is a different question from whether he harmed his users while doing so. Of course, Eligius users who don't like Luke can always switch their operations to a different pool.

Should CLC have been attacked? Should a crypto coin with such a deep structural flaw deserve to survive? Both are interesting questions with deep ethical implications.

The entire premise of cryptocoins is that they are immune or at least very resistant to such manipulations as occurred with CLC. It appears that CLC was not resistant to, and in fact was highly susceptible to such manipulations. So, should we encourage people to place their faith (and cold hard cash) into such a crypto coin? Should we discourage people from doing so? If people are allowed to market fatally flawed products, should not people also be allowed to take steps preventing those products from gaining market traction?

I dunno, mostly because football is on TV right now Grin