Ya the "unknown" is definitely Tradefortress, if that helps.

Ugh. I was hoping my address would fall under the radar, but I suppose that was wishful thinking. In retrospect I should've proven I had access to the address and had Tradefortress send elsewhere. In my defense, I wasn't super confident he was going to send anything.

I'm not really eager to participate in tracing coins that ended up with me. I was partially reimbursed for a (bad) investment from years ago. If you believe that those two transactions were two steps away from a scammers address, then I guess you can follow up with Tradefortress.


Busy/happy is definitely a good way to put it. Coming into money so suddenly came with a set of problems I wasn't expecting to be dealing with, but they're definitely good problems to have.

It doesn't really matter a whole lot, but imagine for a second that what Tradefortress has said is true and he was hacked, and is returning 5 years later to try to make amends to his customers, you come by asking everyone reveal the transactions implying that not only is Tradefortress is a fraud but we might be part of it. Tradefortress could easily just list all of the transactions, but he doesn't out of respect to his customers. I expressed that I prefer it that way and you post the information anyway.
That's just real sweet of you.

Ya it worked out so well last time. Maybe this time you can post the name of the bank I use?

Maybe, only he really knows. Though I've gotten far more returns in purchasing power than I ever hoped to gain by investing in Coinlenders. If I could guarantee the same results, I'd do it all over again. (Obviously it was still a bad idea, and would still be a bad idea.)


This is patronizing. I knew to be cynical back in 2013, and I especially know it now. It wouldn't have helped me then, and it's not helpful now. I know that's blunt, and I'm sure you have good intentions, but I wish if I could go back I could have given myself very different advice.

I don't disagree with you per se, but focusing on cynicism is guiding people toward looking at investing the wrong way. There's all kinds of ways you can still get burned even if you're cynical. That's what really grated on me when I read it.

Edit: Whatever. I should've just posted my own thoughts rather than being argumentative. I apologize.

It's borderline impossible to arrest people internationally, so I wouldn't be holding my breath if I were you. This has nothing to do with trustworthiness and everything to do with the reality of international law.



I'm sure your intentions are good, but this really annoys me for two reasons. The first is I made the mistake of telling people how much bitcoin I had the first go-around and I don't intend on repeating that mistake. So the implication that we aren't posting the transaction and therefore possibly in on Tradefortress' potential deception is annoying.

The second is that this advice is useless. I've had a lot of time to reflect on the large amount of bitcoins I thought I lost, and there were many lessons that I learned that I won't bore you with. The most relevant lesson here is that controlling risk has very little to do with the "credibility" of the source. When I gave over my bitcoins to Tradefortress I spent days looking through his history and I couldn't find a single credible accusation against him, he clearly had a lot of knowledge about security, and even spent a lot of time pointing out vulnerabilities and scams in other offerings back in 2013.

My point is none of this made any difference whatsoever. It wouldn't have made any difference with MtGox, Theranos, Coinlenders or all kinds of other failed companies we could talk about. Credibility is a borderline worthless indicator, because everyone can make mistakes, and no one can hear a lie that the speaker believes.

So ya, don't invest in companies you don't trust, duh, but don't invest in companies just because you trust them either.

I can confirm that this is not a scam, and that Tradefortress is in control of his account. I encourage anyone that is a customer of Inputs.io/Coinlenders to contact him for reimbursement. He returned far more than I had ever hoped.

I suppose if we took a pessimistic view it could be that Tradefortress had the coins all along, has had a crises of conscience and is now returning a larger portion. In my case, I'm completely sure I would have sold my coins long before the price got to this point and as a result I'm far better off having giving them to Tradefortress than not.

I happen to think he's someone that accumulated a lot of bitcoins before and after the hack and now he wants to make amends to his customers. If that's the case, then he deserves a lot of respect. I'm not sure I'd have the character to do it if I were in his shoes.

In any case you should contact him if you were a customer.

What do you mean by "flaws"? I'm sure it works as written, but the design drives the network topology towards highly centralized nodes.

In other words; The "Green Squares" are on centralized servers and not on a broad distributed system, which is why I object to people that refer to DAG as some kind of alternative to the blockchain when it simply doesn't work in that use-case (A highly distributed trustless consensus).

For example when you answer questions like this;

No it's not "or 100 weak ones". The answer is that DAG works better the more centralized it is. That's the way it's designed. It doesn't work equivalently well between 1 "really strong [node]" or "100 weak ones".

On the flipside, Bitcoin's blocks, through POW and the block size limit, allow all transactions to be transferred to literally anyone that wants to run a full node. It's this rate limitation over time (made possible by POW on discrete limited capacity blocks) which allows this synchronization to happen, which is explicitly destroyed in the DAG protocol.

That doesn't mean DAG is "flawed", it just means that it doesn't work as a method to come to decentralized trustless consensus. That's why DAG/IOTA should be separated from the words "Distributed" and "Decentralized" with several paragraphs of clarification.

I am not a "Bitcoin Maximalist". Bitcoin has many flaws, but Bitcoin achieves decentralized trustless consensus which IOTA/DAG can not achieve because the DAG architecture fundamentally breaks the mechanism that allows consensus to form in a decentralized manner.

It's all well and good to use this wherever it's useful, but don't go around pretending that DAG is a magical drop-in replacement for the Bitcoin blockchain which allows "massive scalability" while maintaining anywhere near the same security guarantees and network topology.

You could have just saved yourself the effort and said, "Ya you're right, DAG doesn't work as a distributed consensus mechanism.", but whatever floats your boat.

I wish they'd stop referring to DAG as "decentralized", especially when years later there is no cryptocurrency in sight that relies on DAG that is also significantly decentralized, for exactly the reasons I explained... More than a year and a half ago.


http://forum.iota.org/t/discussion-removing-peer-discovery/939/2

IOTA requires that you manually assign peers because running on it's own it implodes from the bandwidth, because of course it does. It removed Bitcoin's throttling mechanism and now they want to figure out how to prevent these out-of-control blocks in this "blockless" blockchain. Sometimes the real world really is stranger than fiction.

It is not true that there is no such thing as ASIC-resistance.

Algorithms can be formulated that are not simple to manufacture ASICs for, like the Cuckoo Cycle. The reasoning goes that the more difficult it is to make an ASIC, the less of an advantage it will have against general consumer-grade computers. On the flipside, the complication raises the barrier to entry of competing ASIC manufacturers, thereby potentially centralizing the ASIC suppliers.

More importantly, it misses the forest for the trees. ASICs are not the core reason for centralization of mining, it doesn't even appear to be a significant factor. The most significant cause is comparative advantage in energy costs, which is just as advantageous even if you had an ASIC-proof algorithm.

While it's strictly true that running a node is not rewarded, rewarding them would not aid in decentralization. After all, it's trivial to run more than one node in a centralized manner, and a reward would only encourage that behavior.

Centralization is evidence that operating a node is non-trivial and that centralization offers a significant advantage and reward.

Ideally, we would like to see the cost of mining exceed the block reward in order to drive out centralized high-overhead competitors, while the charitable miners remain, while simultaneously hoping that the Work is high enough to secure the blockchain. When the problem is phrased like that, it's apparent that ASIC-resistance and node reward won't get you there.

In order for this to happen, casual users must be willing and able to operate a mining node while investing trivial time and resources to do so. In this regard, ASIC-resistance could be useful because it could negate the need to purchase specialized hardware. On the other hand consumer-grade ASICs could potentially make POW easier to offload from their devices. Regardless, just like they aren't the most significant factor leading to mining centralization, ASICs are not the most significant reason nodes are not trivial to operate.

The elephant in the room is the size of the blockchain. For a casual user, it's slow and tedious to download and verify, and it takes up enough space to be annoying. There is also the problem that the software is still not settled and prone to potentially consensus breaking behavior, meaning a node cannot be left to run without any user intervention.

1.) Running a node and mining should be unprofitable.
    a.) Mining should be done charitably.
        a.) Providing work should be trivial and easy to get started.
            a.) Bitcoin's consensus code needs to be settled indefinitely.
            b.) The blockchain needs to become easier and cheaper to download.
        b.) Some sort of religion. (Lottery?)

ASIC-resistance, higher inflation, POW substitutes, and larger block sizes have all been proposed as ways to achieve a higher quantity of decentralized nodes. ASIC-resistance is at best an incomplete solution. The rest make the problem worse.

That's my 2 cents, anyway.

Thread;
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.0

Sure, but is that complication, reduction in security, and damage to fungibility, worth the increased throughput? I'm not so sure it is.

"Checkpoints" could be added after a certain block depth, which would sort of "tie up" all the lose chains, but that seems like just increasing block sizes, except messier.

Not the first or last annoying thing he's ever done...

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How about this; Put a "transaction redistributor" layer in wallets, so that users can either choose miners to send their transactions to, maybe simply based on presumed geographical node positions and hashrate, or else have a third party handle it for them. The third party is trusted to have them mined in a decentralized manner. They might certify miners, in order to verify non-collusion, but how the third party ensures decentralization is open to competition.
If the transaction doesn't verify over a certain period of time, or if users no longer trust a third party for any reason, users could always fall back to standard broadcasting of transactions. This way, users can try enforcing a decentralized mining process, even though it would mean slower confirmation times, and slightly more expensive fees.
For this to have any chance of working, miners would have to be primarily funded through transaction fees. I find that interesting because it's a separate reason why funding miners through inflation is improper, and why a robust fee market is desirable. I previously disliked funding through inflation only because a good medium of exchange should have a stable supply, for easier economic calculation, and the inflation rate isn't found through a market process.

I think this would be a difficult product to get users to adopt, because there doesn't appear to be any immediate benefit to them. It is also hard to establish trust with a third party, due to the nature of it being surprisingly difficult to prove nodes are decentralized, and therefore also difficult to ensure third parties are being effective.

Nonetheless, it is at least a method to incentivize decentralized nodes, and doesn't seem likely to make the situation worse.

An important property of money is fungibility, which means each unit is equivalent to any other. When you break up a chain into sidechains, subchains, "subchains", treechains, mini-blockchains or whatever, you end up introducing differences among different units of the currency. That's the goal with colored coins, but less obvious is that fungibility is damaged even when you aren't marking the coins explicitly.
Those differences carry a different market value, and so they would by traded as different commodities, which is at least one reason it doesn't work very well as a scaling solution.
Put differently, coins on a sidechain, subchain, "subchain", mini-blockchain, treechain, or whatever represent a different financial asset than coins on Bitcoin proper, even if redeemable in bitcoins.

If, on the other hand, you design a system in which each chain really is equivalently secure on the blockchain, and protected from double spends, then you've really just obfuscated a scheme of faster, or bigger, blocks, one way or another, and the standard caveats concerning that applies. That appeared to be what Peter R's "subchains" did, but what do I know? Maybe I misunderstood him.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1320095.msg13492452#msg13492452

There are various ways people have tried to get around this issue, but I haven't seen any that are all that compelling. For instance, Peter Todd says that in TreeChain's you can say that a transaction is safe once the work done on it exceeds the value of the transaction. At the end of the day it's indisputable that not all branches were created equal, and you're assuming different levels of security depending on where your transactions end up on the tree, thereby damaging fungibility. In the real world this would look like; "Oh you want to sell me a bitcoin? That's cool, but I'd like to wait for your branch to get more work on it before I feel comfortable doing that."

So what I'm trying to get at here is if you can somehow break up Bitcoin's transaction history while also preserving it's fungibility, that would be pretty neat.

That does absolutely nothing to address the Hard Problem of consciousness, which since it lacks any logical definition, is free of any falsification. So of course consciousness is immortal before it kinda dies and wasn't created just in time to live, whatever that means, on a gigantic little speck hanging on nothing out in the middle of nowhere, stupendously.
Something about the infinitesimal unlikeliness, so priceless, blah blah blah. Death.
Anyway what's the point of preserving peaches in a jar before throwing the whole jar into a fire? After all, the universe is going to die even more impressively than we will. Maybe I'm jealous.

Here's something; Maybe we're all the same person. Maybe I'm actually a hyperdimensional creature that gets caught up in nets of neurons and I experience each life one at a time, maybe in no particular order in time. Maybe when I die, that consciousness will slip out and cling to a kid from K-Pax that dies from hemorrhaging in his blugerplex* (Bummer.). You're actually me when I'm experiencing you. So maybe saving life is even more doubly pointless, and the important thing is just to be goodly to one another so when I will have had been you my life won't be so bad.

Who the hell knows? I'd have done this whole universe differently given the chance, so I guess that just proves I'm not God, at least in this meat-sack, whatever I/we/He/They are.

Greg Maxwell talks about creativity, but come on. We cure diseases all the time, because diseases feel bad. Aging is no different. Maybe instead of saving lives and reducing pain, we should all just liquidate the planet in radioactive hellfire as a kind of vote of no confidence since human life sucks ass through a straw 9 times out of 10, throughout human history so far, and force whatever created the universe to start over with something hopefully less sadistic. Maybe we should stop beating around the bush and get this whole "dying" thing over with.

The cool thing is we have the technology today to wipe out all life on this planet. We'll probably never have the technology to live forever (You know, since the universe appears to be dying and all.).

*I know, shut up.

You're underestimating social-engineering attacks, which include political maneuvering. If you think governments won't kill a billion dollar industry through their own good intentions, I encourage you to check out Detroit sometime.
But it's not only social-engineering attacks. DDOS, physical attacks (even natural disasters), and viral attacks become much more effective when you're only dealing with a handful of nodes.

It's not nodes that need to be incentivized, that's really easy to do. It's also not latency we're looking for either. What we really want is a way to decentrally, and trustlessly, prove that nodes are geographically distant (as a proxy for node anarchy), and incentivize it. It's pretty easy to prove that any two nodes are closer than or equal to a certain distance, but I don't see how to do any better than that.
We could have 3 trusted centers, which would triangulate a node and mining rewards could then be adjusted based on how geographically separated they are, but that's neither trustless nor decentralized.

Like I've said before that seems like a paradox in Bitcoin. We want Work that is nontrivial, to prevent attacks, while also wanting nodes to be trivial to start and operate, to prevent other sorts of attacks. Seems to me as long as mining is profitable it will always struggle toward centralization, and Work minimization, which is always economically optimal. The only way for Bitcoin to remain secure is by being economically unoptimal, which would require charitable node operation, which has become more and more unfeasible as operation has gotten more expensive and tedious.

I expect we'll see even more centralization when we hit the next reward halving, which isn't exactly prescient, that's been the norm. Unless someone can find a clever way to incentivize node distance (node anarchy), which seems like a pretty hard problem, or we start pouring wine on the ground for the Bitcoin gods, we're going to see the slow death of Bitcoin as a decentralized trustless currency, though it may survive as some other sort of abomination.

Such logic, much amaze, wow.

So you're saying if I have the target of decimal 10 in binary, 00001010, I could find a collision just by finding A in hexadecimal ?

That's easy; mine your own block.