NPR has a story about The Lending Club (http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/10/481474919/with-lending-club-disgraced-an-industry-looks-for-lessons) that contains the following quote:


Someday such companies will be required to hash such loan applications and then publish those hashes on the BTClockchain as a form of public accountability, similar to the way legal notices are published in newspapers. That way you would "have oversight, so the regulation is actually being implemented and adhered to."  

Someday.

Start of the Internet of Things: chips embedded ubiquitously will send and receive bitcoins. One possibility: real-time traffic fines. Your GPS-enabled car/smartphone will instantly send bitcoin fines to your city or state upon a violation of traffic rules. Fines could be dynamic, based on your model car, how old it is, miles driven, and your own income and the nature of the violation -- repeat or non-repeat, etc. Smaller violations would be a fraction of a traditional ticket for the same offense -- at least at first. People will enroll voluntarily to get substantial discounts on their insurance.

It won't install, either on my Vista-loaded HP laptop bought in November 2008, or on my new Vulcan Windows 10 laptop bought today at Fry's. I get a standard error message, which refers me to a Squirrel setup file.

Are you saying that Kleiman wrote the white paper too? Any such claim can only be bolstered by convincing rough-drafts.

The mathematician Paul Erdos spent years wandering the world alone, nearly penniless and living out of his suitcase going from one mathematical conference to another, each full of a range of strangers and overly familiar colleagues and buffet-quality food and drink. He turned down numerous well-paying professorships offering light teaching responsibilities and leaves of absence that would have allowed him nearly as much leeway to wander. He always turned the offers down. A lonely old man, but also the great and well-known Paul Erdos. Someone once asked the aging and soon-to-die Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine, why he continued to go to ghastly do-gooder conferences in hotel meeting-rooms full of buffet-quality food and drink and a range of strangers and overly familiar colleagues. "Because it is expected of me," he replied. A lonely old man, but also the great and well-known Henry Luce.

What satisfaction could the inventor of Bitcoin derive from going incognito to academic meetings to talk shop with a range of strangers and overly familiar colleagues over buffet-quality food and drink? Maybe he doesn't go at all, and prefers to just bide his time and get rich. Or perhaps he is dead.

From Edgar Allen Poe: It will be in vain to follow, for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds . . . "er lasst sich nicht lesen."

I think the crowd has beaten you to it.

What is this -- a Master's class?

Since it was officially released bitcoin prices have shot up and some are claiming a cause and effect. Any word on how fast it is being adopted by modes and miners?

Didn't anyone follow the link (https://petertodd.org/assets/2016-04-21/MIT-ChainAnchor-DRAFT.pdf) to the MIT paper that Todd himself supplied? Suffice it to say, MIT does not propose a method of "bribing" bitcoin miners. The project is exactly about what it says it is about in the paper's title: "Anonymous Identities for Permissioned Blockchains". I'm a true-blue Bitcoin believer and user since 2011 and think the idea contained in the paper is a very interesting and potentially useful one. There is nothing in it to be afraid of.

An MIT rep involved in the project has posted a badly needed (if far too polite) corrective, at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4foatp/mit_chainanchor_bribing_miners_to_regulate_bitcoin/d2bs0tj

I must say that reading the comments here and on Reddit has been a disheartening experience. I'm no techie but I knew immediately that Todd was at worst a liar and provocateur and at best an ignorant and panic-stricken simpleton.  In either case, he set off a herd-panic because everyone simply took him at his word, like the townsfolk in the James Thurber story who ran screaming because the dam had broken. Only later did they remember that there was no dam. The next day, nobody talked about it.

As for Todd, April 1 is over. He should be banned permanently from Reddit. There is no excuse for what he wrote.

So like a cop at the scene of an accident, I will say: Move along, folks. It's all over. There's nothing to see here. Move along. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.

A fast 'n easy BTClockchain data-registration app would not substitute for formal copyright protection. But it would or could be the basis for applying for such protection. From my perspective, your comment about such a process being expensive and unprofitable applies to some aspects of our economy, not expensive and unprofitable for users. For example, if a researcher could in real time hash and copy/paste to the BTClockchain some critical data from an experiment, that means less chances for profitable theft from a co-researcher or competing company. It could be expensive for competitors to make use of that data for their own ends because now they could be obligated to pay for it. Even if the originator did not sue, public knowledge alone of the would-be theft would be harmful for the would-be thieves.

In modern societies there is a lot of such theft which can save thieves a lot of money and time. The old 1964 Air France advertising slogan Come home to [Paris, Nice, Europe, etc.] was stolen from the writer who thought of it -- and right during a meeting in front of numerous disinterested observers. When the writer first suggested it, his boss instantly took the ball and ran with it. The writer got no credit because there was no way to prove ownership or act of creativity. (A version of this incident was incorporated into an episode of Mad About You). But today, suppose a writer incorporated a possible slogan onto the blockchain before the next meeting, and made that fact known. If the idea turned out to be a good one, well, that's protection of intellectual property, and we can see from that example that intellectual property has its good uses. What's needed is not less intellectual property. What's needed is more. It would be expensive for some individuals and enterprises, but profitable for others. Society would benefit.

What BTClockchain data-registration promises to do is democratize intellectual property. Giveaways and live performances are one thing -- The Grateful Dead allowed audience members to openly and professionally record performances. But the band's lawyers would have sued anyone who tried to sell those recordings as official offerings. Allowing the recordings was probably just good PR.

As for Hinrikus, Hearn, and Dimon, my guess is that none of them were thinking of data registration when they announced Bitcoin was either over or doomed to be. Which will be very bad PR for them.

Taavet Hinrikus did say it is early days. It is indeed. Bitcoins will not soon compete (never mind replace) fiat at the point-of-sale except on the Dark Web. My own view is that the BTClockchain will end up being used massively for data registration by FIs and banks using it to back up their permissioned-blockchain hashes as a form of public accountability, like legal notices published in newspapers; and by the public for routine notary purposes. Ethereum will play a role in this and also expand bitcoins' use as a contractual currency. And apps will allow writers and photographers to quickly and cheaply register their keystrokes and pixels on the BTClockchain. As of now (this instant anyway) the bitcoin price is rising and Blockchain.info shows a steady stream of transactions as it always has. Their precise amounts ($.09, $30.73, $3945.76, etc.) indicate more than speculative trading. They indicate use in commercial transactions. There is every reason to believe that those kinds of transactions are here to stay and will grow over time -- and that Hinrikus, Hearn, and Dimon will come to regret their remarks.

What Taavet Hinrikus said:


What I think he meant:


What Taavet Hinrikus said:


What I think he meant:


What the article's author Daniel Roberts wrote:


What I think Roberts will wish he had written:

I would like to nominate Friedberg's article (http://www.riddellwilliams.com/blog/articles/post/hard-fork-conspiracy-treacherous) for consideration as February's   FUD o' the Month . (Predictably it was picked up by Forbes' FUDster Janson Blomberg -- see http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/02/13/is-the-looming-bitcoin-hard-fork-illegal/#24b4a50d4b13).

As justification for my nomination, I cite the following as Friedberg FUD:


This is FUD because the U.S. government does not consider bitcoin to be a currency and is not "likely" to in the future, in spite of a pending case in California involving a bankruptcy (see https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-commodity-currency-california-bankruptcy-judge-decide/). The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission ruled on September 17, 2015 that bitcoins are a commodity (see http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7231-15) and on March 25, 2014, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service ruled (see https://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS-Virtual-Currency-Guidance) that bitcoin would be treated as property for tax purposes, stating in part:


Second Friedberg FUD nomination citation:


This is FUD because Bitcoin Classic requires that at least 75% of miners and nodes adopt it before the fork becomes operational by requiring remaining miners and nodes to convert. With a fork that strong, there is no way the current block-size implementation could ever catch up computationally, and so would never be secure enough to warrant further use. (For a good anti-FUD video on Classic, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7jt5558bVY.)

In other words, no competing forks and bitcoins, and no more Friedberg FUD. Please submit your ballots by March 1.

One of the violently masochistic pleasures of being even minimally knowledgeable of the Bitcoin world is witnessing the tragicomedy of mainstream journalists and establishment pontificators publicly trying to make sense of it. If it hasn't been mentioned here already (and apologies if it has), consider one such pontificator's unfortunate take on Hearn's histrionics:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/01/19/r-i-p-bitcoin-its-time-to-move-on/

Reminds me of what the late novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote on the subject of literary translations: 

What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s speech, a monkey’s chatter . . .

It only hurts if you don't laugh.

Hearn's tone deaf cri de coeur doth protest too much and reminds me of what writer Mary McCarthy said about playwright Lillian Hellman: her "every word is a lie, even and and the." It's a pity the crowdsourcing prediction-market system Augur.net isn't up and running yet. It would have been a counterbalance to the news media's use of the "issue" as breathless click-bait and I agree with those who see the price drop as a herd-panic over the Cryptsy crash.

Bitcoin isn't dead. It's just doing what all successful revolutions do: taking on a life of its own. Kind of like the election of Andrew Jackson.

Sorry for the holi-delay. Earlier you painted what was to me a rather alarming picture of the process of transaction-confirmation:


But to further make my counter-assertion that the 7-transactions-per-second limitation is and will be irrelevant to many users; and that all legitimate and fully fee'd transactions will be always be routinely confirmed, go to:

http://allcoinsnews.com/2015/12/28/uproov-first-to-offer-mobile-proof-on-the-blockchain/

and look for the statements "There is virtually no time lag between the taking of the photo, video, audio and its encryption to the Blockchain for any manipulation to be performed, it is instant," and "This ground breaking technology means it will be very difficult to argue against a Uproov photo or video, as an encryption key is permanently time-stamped instantly into the blockchain, making it unchangeable and the perfect court evidence if need be." What is lacking is any discussion of a delay in confirmation-time or a fear of a random chance of non-confirmation. Clearly what matters to this for-profit business -- what is essential to their service -- is the instant broadcast (publication) on the bitcoin ledger of a transaction that will -- not probably -- be confirmed. (You can also go to the website https://uproov.com/)

Other business are already depending on the same thing. I think that if your description was accurate, then these businesses could not exist because they could not guarantee instant and permanent incorporation of a transaction onto the blockchain. Claiming they could might make them liable for damages caused by a randomly failed confirmation and the possible excision of a critical transaction from a majority of miners' block-hashing.

I thought they did, but since you are apparently in agreement with them, the matter is settled: the 7-transaction-per-second limitation is and will be irrelevant for many present and future users of the BTClockchain.

 

I didn't mean that for certain purposes (such as archiving and smart-contracts) the institution would try to spend the bitcoin prematurely or indeed at all. They might be sending a minimal amount of bitcoin (with a sufficient/generous fee) to an address just to get that address on the BTClockchain. That done, the address might represent a database of Visa transactions (basically acting as a notary); or the address might be part of the computer code that a smart contract would look for before starting or completing.

On the matter of transaction confirmation by individual miners, I found two sources which contradict your position. At http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/16607/if-a-block-chain-is-considered-invalid-how-about-transactions-in-this-block-cha?rq=1 look for the answer to the top question "If a block chain is considered invalid, how about transactions in this block chain?"  At http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/30452/how-long-does-it-take-for-a-transaction-with-0-fees-to-be-confirmed-or-rejected look for the statement "No transaction can be rejected though, there's just no such thing in the protocol."

My original point was that, for certain purposes -- purposes that will continue to expand in volume and scope -- the alleged 7-transactions- per-second limitation does not and will not exist as a practical matter. Instant or near-instant publication (broadcast) will be as good as confirmation for those in no hurry to spend the token bitcoin that was sent for the sole purpose of establishing an address on the BTClockchain.

It is so declared: All legit and properly-fee'd transactions will be instantly broadcast and routinely confirmed.

Bang the gavel.

I'm not sure I understand you both. Knightdk, correct me if I'm wrong but I think you may have meant to say that even if a legitimate transaction is broadcast, because of the possibility of a bad transaction within that same block there is no guarantee the block will confirm and thus become irreversible.  Franky1, I think you may have meant to say that many people can still mess around with their own transactions and cause issues within their blocks, thus causing them to be orphaned. But as I understand it, should there be a bad transaction, the revised block belonging to the first miner to solve the new hash will be the one used thereafter and the fork will continue from there, orphaning the block with a bad transaction or miner's error. But the legitimate transactions within that orphaned block will surely not destroyed or ignored -- even the slightest practical possibility of such an outcome would invalidate the BTC system completely and it would never have been tried.

What I think I am saying is that because an institution will have full control of its own BTC transactions and will ensure that each one obeys the rules, once they are published they are as good as confirmed for the institution's own purposes, and so can immediately be used for a range of internal reasons, including initiating or concluding smart-contracts.

In light of what I posted on October 13 (see quote, above), I got a reflected sense of validation in reading the quote below, published October 29, on a WSJ blog site (Google: Barry Silbert's DCG Slows Down Bitcoin Deals)


Make it a right-click function. Fast and easy does it. 

Permissioned ledgers will face the same problem that was addressed and solved by the BTC system: how to prevent double spending and altered ledgers. It seems to me that permissioned systems could actually be viewed as being specifically designed to permit double spending and altered ledgers, outwardly for perfectly legal reasons while necessarily creating the theoretical danger of a hack.

Why? Because the 51% problem would be built in -- all the "miners" would presumably know each other and under certain circumstances could alter the complete ledger --- unless hashes of that permissioned-ledger were used to create a bitcoin address and a fraction of a BTC were sent to that address. If that were done frequently enough, then there might be no need for permissioned-ledger miners at all -- each hash would not have to have a series of zeroes in front of them, the way that BTC blockchain hashes do. Instead, each transaction would just be hashed once and then instantly sent to the BTC blockchain. Each such hash would be used in the next hash, etc., thus creating, in effect, a non-mined unalterable permissioned blockchain. Transaction confirmations within the permission system would be instantaneous. Also instantaneous would be the publication of each hash's bitcoin address on the BTC blockchain as an unconfirmed transaction. Since the purpose of creating the address in question would just be proof-of-existence rather than initiating a commercial transaction, confirmation time would be irrelevant. It could be done in snail-mail time.

Ultimately I think it comes down to this: if permissioned ledgers hash their data, where will such hashes be stored? In private or in public? If they don't hash their data, that would make their permissioned-ledger no different from a shared database -- which is the point raised in the Casares article.

Banks, reluctant to participate that closely with the BTC system, may initially opt for a middle solution: their own approved miners hashing to a level of difficulty that does not slow confirmation times too much.  Perhaps they would be paid by some kind of BankCoin token. But again the problem arises of the miners knowing each other, or at least having their identities stored in a centralized location that could in theory be hacked or opened illegally.

Thus will all permissioned ledgers lead to the BTC blockchain. It's just too useful to ignore.