Wallets can implement this whenever they like. Several have already started.

In step 2, you generate a 64 byte blinding factor.

In step 4, you xor the x value and chain code portions of the payment code with the blinding factor.

This means the data you put in the OP_RETURN output is only readable by the recipient.

They went wrong because once the product became data, then it became a commodity whose price naturally wanted to collapse to the marginal cost of production (for data, very very low).

There will always be a market for entertainers to produce live performances and bespoke works, and that market doesn't require DRM because the product is intrinsically uncopyable.

Likewise, source code is just data. You can't really sell source code. You have to find something else, something intrinsically uncopyable, and sell that instead.

Any time you think drm is the solution to your problem, you're solving the wrong problem.

Of course businesses only survive by attracting paying customers, so the need of Armory to do so is clear.

I'm not sure you appreciate the way that Armory's value to potential customers changes as a result of being closed source.

I guess Alan sent out a bunch of form letter PMs in September about this change. I got one wherein he mentioned a possible "power user licence", which to me is a complete non-starter.

Even though I have no problem paying for software, I'd never buy a license for a closed-source version of Armory. Once somebody who wants to steal Bitcoins decides they can get the best bang for their buck by going after cold storage users, they are going to make a beeline to Armory to obtain that list of licensed users and/or attempt to compromise your internal source repository and insert a backdoor.

Personally, I will never use a cold storage wallet that I don't compile myself from publicly-available source. A closed-source Bitcoin wallet is a spearphisher's wet dream.

I mentioned this, idk about a hundred pages back, in the form of talking about what mining is actually for.

The only reason we need a P2P network and mining at all is to resolve double spending. Most of the work of validating transactions is stateless, except that two proofs are needed which require a mined blockchain to produce:

• The inputs to the transaction exist
• No transaction exists which spends the same inputs

There are really only two ways that mining can fail:

• A miner can perform a double spend
• A miner can execute a denial of service against valid transactions

The point of proof of work is to raise the cost of both of those attacks. Bitcoin never has made either of those attacks impossible in a mathmatical sense (and doing so is probably impossible) - all Bitcoin ever did was put a defined cost on those two attacks.

If people would stop arguing about undefined terms like "decentralization", then maybe instead we could talk about attacks in terms of ways an attacker might reduce the proof of work cost for performing double spending or DoS attacks.

It should be possible to stop worrying about miners and all the ways they might behave sub-optimally, as long as they don't have any way to avoid paying the specified PoW cost for any attacks they might perform.

View in these terms, having any protocol-mandated block size limit at all is a built-in denial of service attack and so should be removed as soon as possible.

Picked a bad weekend to not check the forums.

If everybody adopts a "do the opposite of anything Mike Hearn suggests" policy, then they've just shut their brain off and given complete control over their decision making to Mike Hearn.

It's a great way to achieve the opposite of the stated goal.

There is certainly a difference between forms of money that work well, and forms of money that don't, that many people have observed throughout history.

The problem is that the explanations for those observations are not correct, because they are tautological. They show up in conversations with goldbugs all the time.

Q: What is a store of value?
A: Anything that has the properties of gold.

Q: Why is gold a store of value?
A: Because it has intrinsic value.

Q: What is value?
A: It's what anything with the properties of gold has.

Q: Can you give reason why I should buy your gold other than that you want to sell it?
A: ...no.

This is exactly what religious people say when you debunk their claims by pointing out contradictions or lack of evidence for their claims.

The "store of value" concept was basically invented by Aristotle two and a half millennia ago, before basically anything was understood about trade, markets, labor specialization, or any of the other factors that we now know make economies work.

I could point out some of the additional work that's been done since the bronze age, like the understanding that money is a ledger that measures delayed reciprocal altruism, but I don't even need to.

All I have to do is point out that if your claim that a store of value exists is true, then you should be able to produce a non-tautological definition for it.

Can you?

PS: I LOL'd when the socialist who's advocating centrally-planned block sizes referred to me as a collectivist. Do you not realize just how transparent that is?

There is no such thing as a store of value.

You've described the religious approach to understanding money.

This is an example of a black box understanding of Bitcoin. There is no principles or methodologies we can apply to the problem of understanding why Bitcoin works, so it's just magic and any potential change is scary because nobody knows how magic works.

A pessimistic explanation would be that maybe nobody actually wants solutions to any of Bitcoin's problems. They just want to have problems to point to as excuses for furthering one agenda or another.

This is a far weaker security model that what is achievable.

If you can point a way to exploit this technique, I'd appreciate having it pointed out:

https://gist.github.com/justusranvier/451616fa4697b5f25f60

You must not understand what proof means.

The problem with your statement is that you've expressed it in terms of an unsolvable problem, which is begging the question.

Processing 24 GB of data in a 10 minute period is possible with technology that exists today. It does not require faster-than-light communication, or violating mass/energy conservation, or solving the halting problem, or anything else that's actually impossible.

Perhaps what you actually mean is that handing a 24 GB every 10 minutes would be expensive using existing technology. Perhaps even so expensive as to cost more than Bitcoin users would be willing to pay.

Expressed in those terms, you have a statement that can actually be rationally evaluated.

You'd need to establish how much it would cost to pay for the hardware and operating expenses to operate a 24 GB/10 minute network, and then estimate how much the users would be willing to pay per-transaction. If the estimated costs exceed the estimated budged, then you'd be correct to say that the network would probably be too expensive to operate.

Of course, once you've phrased the problem in a manner that allows for potential solutions, then it becomes possible to talk about productive things like, "what steps could we take to reduce the cost of operating the network?"

On the other hand, if you phrased your "obvious truth" in a form of an unsolvable problem deliberately because you have a preference for the problem remaining unsolved, then keep doing what you're doing.

That's not what it means to show your work.

Did you notice when you shifted the goal posts, or are you not even conscious of the manipulation?

In what way is your original statement relevant to my computer?

The idea that most transactions could be moved off the chain certainly existed before the public lightning announcement.

Adam Back was talking about sidechains at the 2013 San Jose conference.

Another forum member told me he was investigating micropayment channels for off chain transactions in May of 2014.

The date at which Lightning was publicly announced does not prove anything about what the Blockstream founders told their investors.

it great that you think something is obvious.

If you'd like your thoughts to have any kind of value at all, why not show some work for b and c?

Bring some evidence to the table instead of just your feels.

What you are describing is not a proof. At best, its a suggestion.

If a majority of miners are building an invalid chains accidentally or intentionally, the problem will get sorted out eventually but in principle there's no upper bound on how long that process will require.

On the other hands with some relatively simple new messages and protocol requirements the time required for SPV clients to get back on the valid chain can be reduced to the time needed to propagate a message across the network regardless of the hash power supporting the invalid chain.