Your second phrase doesn't follow as conclusion from the first. Why do you claim it has a central point of failure?


AFAIU it was like MasterCoin, an IPO-like thing. All coins were created in the genesis and distributed proportionally to initial investors. There's no inflation.

IIRC, once the malleability issue was revealed, some assholes started a DoS with it. They were mutating every transaction that went through them, only to fuck the network. That's probably what accounts for these +300kBTC. They were not stolen.

Watch out.
Ok, Bitcoin being defined as "foreign currency" in Switzerland might be interesting, because Switzerland enjoys a good deal of financial freedom (relatively to the rest of the world, at least). AFAIK, people there are free to have bank accounts in foreign currencies, use them as they want etc. But in many (most?) places of the world, such definition would be very negative. In many jurisdictions, foreign currency is something "common folk" can barely touch, and when they're allowed to, regulations are strict. Just take Argentina as an example. Bitcoin being defined as foreign currency there would be almost the equivalent of banning it.

Why would you need to be connected to that many full nodes? I don't see the need for so many connections. And SPV nodes only care about the transactions that concern them, which are always a very small set compared to the total that passes by on the network.


Aren't you mixing bytes and bits there? Bps normally means bits per second, not bytes. And 8 bits only for the hashes seems too low. You only get 256 different values, with 200tps you'd have lots of collisions. 8 bytes on the other hand is even more than the poster you replied to was talking about (he mentioned 32 bits, so 4 bytes).

Wow... This presumption of knowledge of yours reminded me of this brilliant quote, perfectly applicable here:


The subjective reasoning of millions can't involve "lots of math", and can't be modeled by it. You can only reach meaningful conclusions through praxeology. And, if you were to actually try that, you'd probably recognize one day that you should not try to impose top-down rulings instead of organic bottom-up organizations, as if people were peons on a chessboard to be manipulated by enlightened "planners". Anyways... that's not the topic here, I don't want to derail this very interesting thread, so I'll stop here. It would be nice if you could also try not to let insults on the air like this every time you can...

Inflation is evil because it takes purchasing power away from currency holders (and, in general, the poorer you are, the higher the percentage of your savings is based on currency), and gives it to the firsts to receive the newly printed money, namely governments, banks and those well connected to them. But even worse than that, inflation is evil because it creates capital destructive business cycles. All this crisis the world is living now would not have happened if central banks did not have the power to inflate their currencies in order to manipulate interest rates.

Oh, and BTW, the 2% rate you talk about, it's the official estimation on price inflation. The actual monetary inflation is much higher. What means that, if money supply was stable, average prices would decrease. It's not just 2% of purchasing power you lose per year, it's much more, since you'd have to consider how lower would prices be if there was no inflation.

• Multiple roads.
• Tunnels.
• Bridges.
• Passing around
• Using secondary identities to buy the land secretly.
• Buy more than the strictly necessary land and profit from the valuation of adjacent land now better connected.
• Railroads.
• Free-market collective transports (cheaper, more frequent).
• Free-market airports, perhaps built by airlines themselves - there would be many of them.
• No cumbersome airport regulations nor TSA, speeding up boarding time and bringing the price down. Perhaps planes would become more practical than buses/trains even for not so long distances like 200km or so.
• Etc etc etc.

As you can see, there are many solutions to the "problem" you raise. And I'm just an ordinary guy, with no particular experience in the field. Imagine what millions of people competing freely would be able to build.

And important to note: they do happen to have a monopoly in charge of building roads, which was simply not doing its job. They handled the situation as they could. Considering it was a poor region when all this started, it's quite impressive!

Very interesting article this one. Thank you for the link, herzmeister.

BTW, Wenzhouneses should be informed about Bitcoin. Something tells me they'll love it!

For the "last mile" aspect of most network services - not only roads, but also water supply, sewage, electric wiring etc - probably the easiest way is through contractually shared property, like condos. The condo I live in already owns the "streets" to its parking lots. It could also share the property of adjacent streets. This would not be financed though taxation based on demagogic criteria, but by fees according to your stake in the shared property. I bet condominiums would also look for alternative means of earning money, like charging for parking spots, or eventually the ideas you raised.

Obviously, that's not the only possible solution. Nobody can actually predict what would be the ideal solution. The only thing that is certain is that free-markets will come up with a better arrangement (cost-benefit-wise) than monopolies.

Professor Walter Block has already written an entire book on this subject. Its digital version is available for free. Here: https://mises.org/document/4084/

Please don't replicate the same silly attacks people tend to use to discredit Bitcoin. The financial incentive behind the technology is what brings lots of the manpower, business and infrastructure it has today. Not to acknowledge that is to be willingly blind.


If the defect was only on the betacoin, then the damages would be restrained to those who willingly converted stable coins into beta coins. That's not an issue to me. When you do so, you accept the risks.

Hey, this very feature (allowing the redemption of arbitrary betaCoins built on top of it) could actually be the among the firsts betaCoins. If it works well, it will set up a great platform for experimentation!


Thank you. I've just watched this video following a recommendation of jron, and what I could get from it was the following:


Am I getting closer?
Your explanations kind of hinted me in that direction too.

Thank you!

The betaCoin model is interesting, but I'd just make one import remark though: in this model, there's no financial incentive for people to migrate from bitcoin stable to bitcoin beta, since stable coins will always be more valuable than beta coins. This means that, from a monetary point of view, this beta risks being just a testnet++. Not many people will transfer their coins into it (it is not a reasonable investment strategy), and without much aggregated value, would it really have enough manpower behind it? If Gavin and Garzik are being fully employed to work on Bitcoin right now, it's precisely because bitcoins are valuable to lots of people. If there was a technical way to ensure people can get their beta coins converted back into stable coins at the same rate (i.e., pegging), then things could be different. But I don't see how could that be possible.

Anyways, I came here for another reason. I'm really interested in Zerocoin and I'd like to understand how it works. I can understand the basics of public key cryptography, and blind signature - although the math behind these algorithms are things I simply "trust to be true". But Zerocoin... damn, is that complicated! I tried reading the paper once it got out, and I couldn't understand a thing.

Is there an easier explanation somewhere, that could help technical people without a background in cryptography research to grasp the concept?

Thanks

Uma bitcoin.
Duas bitcoins.
Quantas bitcoins você gastou?

Nesse uso o feminino soa normal pra mim...

Normalmente eu digo uma/duas bitcoins. Mas quando falo do sistema uso o masculino, e se me lembrar, letra maiúscula, pois é um nome próprio: o [sistema] Bitcoin.


É... tem razão. Um dólar, um euro, um real, um cruzeiro etc... praticamente todas as unidades de moedas são masculinas. A não ser coisas como uma coroa sueca/tcheca etc.

I wouldn't be that sure. I don't think there's any entity practicing fractional reserves with bitcoin right now. You can't even have serious loans quoted in bitcoins, due to the volatility. But well, who knows...

It doesn't matter because the whole comparison is just for fun anyway.

But the metric that is being used on the bitcoin side (all bitcoins issued) is its monetary base, its M0. And the metric that's being used on the other side is the M1 of fiat currencies. IMHO it would be more accurate to use M0 on both sides, since there's no M1 for Bitcoin.

"Bad" emergency hospitals would eventually be blacklisted by medical insurances. Your ambulance would probably work to/with your medical insurance, and would not take you to the blacklisted hospitals. Or at least avoid it if possible. That would of course create a strong incentive for hospitals not to be blacklisted, since being blacklisted by most insurances could drive them to bankruptcy. And that would ensure "bad hospitals" to be rare and of quick living.

By the way, the assumption that you always have to go to the nearest hospital is exaggerated.


He, it's funny how fast people conclude what they want to conclude. It took me only a couple minutes to come up with the answer above. And I'm just one random guy. How dare you say millions of people working freely wouldn't be able to come up with a much better solution that we cannot even imagine today?
It really looks like what people against slavery abolition in the 19th century would say: "But who would do the hard work? Agriculture would collapse! We would all starve! Do you want to live in a society where people starve to death?"

Do you know what exactly are they appealing for?
It is to be able to tax commissions earned by exchanges as if it was a taxable service, or is it because they want bitcoins units themselves to be subject to VAT like a consumption good?
The former would be bad, but well, it's just the same think for every kind of service. But the latter is much more catastrophic.

Hey, that's an interesting question, not really related to Trezor but to the payment protocol itself.

If you request a https page and receive a http one, your browser can clearly detect something's not right.

But how does that work with PaymentRequests? AFAIK they're pushed by the payee, not requested by the payer, right? What if a malware sees that an authenticated payment request is passing by, and simply replace it by an non-authenticated one? If you know the merchant is supposed to send you an authenticated payment request, you'll realize there's something wrong. But can we really expect people to understand this?

No, they don't. It's only a free market if property rights are respected. Assassination - and governments - by definition does not respect them, so it's an antithesis to free markets. Regardless of supply and demand. Do no confuse "free markets" with just "markets" or even "economic laws" (like the fact that supply and demand determine prices). Economic laws are inexorable and thus, of course, apply to all sort human actions, including those which do not respect property rights, like assassination, slavery. theft and everything else government/mafias do.


It's just that....




Sorry for the off-topic.