I'm going to selectively quote here, because I feel that we're in agreement on some of this stuff and I'd rather get to the heart of the matter, since this is fairly off-topic already.
But if somebody wants to waste a good amount of money to have something stored in the blockchain, let 'em.
Why? "If somebody wants to waste a good amount of money to steal your heirloom, let 'em." (analogously equivalent) doesn't sound like an appropriate answer.
Hmm. Not a good analogy. 1) The "heirloom" is already being freely passed around, 2) the "thief" is paying money to the police who are being charged with protecting/distributing the "heirloom" and thus the "thief" is kind of helping to further protect/distribute the "heirloom", which was the desire of the heirloom owner in the first place. Tangible-world (limited resources) analogies often don't really equate to digital-world scenarios (not quite unlimited resources, but close enough to make comparisons very difficult). The miners are the gatekeepers of Bitcoin and the people who are paid money to secure the blockchain. If somebody wants to use the blockchain for their own purposes, but they pay appropriate fees to the miners then I really can't complain. I realize that disk space, and working memory space, is not free, nor is it unlimited. However, this is a larger problem with Bitcoin that is only being slightly exacerbated/accelerated somewhat with "on-the-blockchain" alts such as Counterparty.
The blockchain has always been intended for financial data, and everyone who has it implicitly agrees to store it.
The same cannot be said of any non-financial data.
Can you point to non-financial data usage in Counterparty or Mastercoin? They were both created to enable the creation of further tokens, some of which may end up having little value, but all are certainly intended to have some value.
Identification of spam in filtering is an independent matter from whether it is spam.
There are proposals for identification of valid hashes at least (look up P2SH2), but hopefully we won't have to use them...
I remember looking at the P2SH^2 stuff a couple of months ago when all of this was going down in the Counterparty thread, and it seems to me that it's a non-solution. It's just a hash of a hash, right? That doesn't prove that the first hash (which will still need to be published) is actually a hash. The only way to prove that a hash(X) is actually a hash, is to provide the (X) that it's hashing.
The first hash doesn't need to be stored in the blockchain, only relayed to the miner.
Is there anything like this existing in Bitcoin today? Something that is produced alongside a transaction and relayed with the transaction, but not reflected in the blockchain? Wouldn't this lead to a problem where clients would not be able to trust the transactions in the blockchain, because they are not fully self-proving? What if a bad miner decided to include transactions where the inside hashes weren't relayed? Wouldn't this cause consensus problems everywhere?
The 80/40 byte OP_RETURN is merely a matter of node-specific relay policy, and should not in any way affect how anyone implements their protocols, which should be done correctly, without regard for others' policies.
If people want to support these new protocol standards, they should adjust their policies accordingly.
So do you mean that there is a place in a .conf file or something (i.e., not in compiled code) where node runners can simply "switch on" 80-byte OP_RETURN?
I suspect part of the problem is that securities are highly regulated in some countries, and people have a misconception that decentralisation bypasses the law.
People who seriously want to support Bitcoin shouldn't encourage anything that would lead to illegal use of it, since that is only liable to harm Bitcoin.
I don't really think that argument holds water. Technology moves faster than the law can react. There are illegal uses for the Internet, e-mail, text messaging, cryptography, you name it. Personally, I think it would be positive for Bitcoin if it were widely thought of in the same way, as a "platform" upon which people can do good or evil. It is the same with money, banks, guns, cars, electricity, spray paint. You name it, people can find an illegal use for it.
Yes, and it could all have been handled by a centralised stock exchange better.
And a centralized stock exchange would have required a bunch of fees and legal rigamarole. It never would have even gotten off the ground. The whole thing was over and done in a year or so (sorry for your losses, BTW, if indeed there were any; IIRC, most "shareholders" in the ASIC company ended up making a decent profit); how long do you think it takes a company to get listed on a stock exchange? Even just getting your incorporation papers from the state can take a couple of months. Of course, I understand that most of that legal rigamarole is designed to protect the masses, but it also hurts the masses because it keeps entrepreneurial people from raising money, and it keeps people of average means from being able to participate in startups. It is my hope that by the time a case involving crypto-equity comes before a court of law in the US, its use will be widespread enough that shutting it down is simply not an option. That cat's out of the bag. You can't stop the signal.
Adam Back and Austin Hill recently raised funds to develop it (they're forming a company named Blockstream).
I don't know how much of the company details are public at this time, so I'll just have to simply say they have a competent team to work on it.
(disclosure: I'm planning to do contracting work for Blockstream myself)
Well, that's cool, but are they going to be able to have their code integrated into bitcoind? Are miners going to actually mine these daughter chains for the transaction-fee scraps?
On another/related point, if merged-mining is so attractive and viable, why does Eligius only merge-mine Namecoin and not some of the other coins that you mentioned in the github thread? (Ixcoin, etc.)