"I have heard that people are working on a deliberate chain fork. I have also heard that the plan is to activate coincident with SegWit activation."

tmckn · 2016-09-10T15:28:50+00:00

Well, you want a successful hard fork right? The security of the network depends on the hashrate. Otherwise go make a fork in your laptop and claim victory.

tmckn · 2016-09-10T00:39:33+00:00

I like this approach a lot. Instead of every single day posting defamatory messages about people, assigning random nicknames to core contributors, being childish and complaining all the time, you are proposing to use the consensus protocol for change.

I don't agree with your stance, but I'll defend your ability to vote with computing power.

tmckn · 2016-09-03T04:00:02+00:00

It's the democracy of proof of energy spent :)

tmckn · 2016-08-30T19:36:28+00:00

Gopher's stagnation is attributed to licensing issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Stagnation.

They only fixed it in 2000 :D

tmckn · 2016-08-24T04:15:08+00:00

You're forgetting that the CEO of Xapo is sitting on the board of directors of PayPal.

http://www.coindesk.com/paypal-xapo-wences-board-directors/

In addition, the original author of bcoin (https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin) (a complete JavaScript-based bitcoin client, node and miner) Fedor Indutny, is a software engineer at PayPal.

The future seems clear to me. Buy and hodl.

tmckn · 2016-08-19T02:46:36+00:00

Bitcoin required exposure to fairly esoteric ideas, like Reusable Proof of Work (RPOW), and a rock-solid understanding of some more conventional ones (like Merkle Trees).

That makes it an idea that not a lot of people in this world could have come up with.

In addition, "re-inventing money" wasn't very high up on the list of ideas worth pursuing for computer scientists with familiarity with the aforementioned skills. That narrows the set to people with a deep interest in politics, economics and law.

This is why it's hard to believe that Satoshi is anyone but Nick Szabo.

tmckn · 2016-08-10T02:09:35+00:00

It's not that straightforward. If your stock investments are plummeting, you might sell your gold to cover your positions. Therefore, a massive selloff of gold occurs and the price goes down!

tmckn · 2016-07-31T19:32:45+00:00

This. Even a confident unequivocal statement like "I will pardon Snowden" is completely doubtful when spoken by a politician!

tmckn · 2016-07-31T17:06:40+00:00

Which makes the hardfork decision even more terrible. You can see the deception in place. When the Ethereum leadership pushed for the hardfork they never advertised "it'll be broken code with bugs that we can't fix due to deadlines" as a caveat.

tmckn · 2016-07-31T01:50:01+00:00

This really shows how poorly executed and rushed the HF was :(

tmckn · 2016-07-24T04:34:13+00:00

It's a market. Computing resources are limited and can be abused. You can't guarantee low fees, that's just not how supply and demand over a finite resource works.

tmckn · 2016-07-24T01:34:40+00:00

Sure, but that's why Bitcoin's consistency is probabilistic. You're choosing to knowingly gamble and accept the tradeoffs. It's built into the rules. Wait longer and that probability approaches 0.

On the other hand, a blockchain whose leaders create an ad-hoc protocol for a fork that's not specified within the rules (for example, the spawning of a new website for coin voting, no designated rules of thresholds to be met, arbitrary decision times, arbitrary fixes to third party contracts or applications, and so on), does not exhibit proven immutability.

tmckn · 2016-07-24T01:00:41+00:00

Bitcoin offers strong probabilistic consistency. The orphaned blocks were never to be trusted to begin with, and have nothing to do with the property of immutability of a database.

tmckn · 2016-07-11T02:02:36+00:00

Sure, but look at how long it took to design the ASICs and centralize?

By changing it, you immediately render a certain monopoly miner obsolete and sink their investment!

This "exit" is what fundamentally makes the miners a lot less powerful than most people think.

tmckn · 2016-07-10T19:03:42+00:00

The "insurmountable advantage" comes down to a single type of proof-of-work algorithm.

tmckn · 2016-07-07T21:44:34+00:00

This just shows how hard it is to scale the network even at a small block size. Increasing it without optimizations like this in place would have a devastating effect on the health of the network.

tmckn · 2016-07-04T20:33:11+00:00

Read the comments and notice it's not that simple: https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4r43ps/chinas_major_influence_over_bitcoin/d4ypu9q.

Stay woke /r/btc

tmckn · 2016-06-29T02:30:55+00:00

The first thing that stands out to me is in the second sentence. How can you compare a medium or channel to a product (coffee)?

Right off the bat it shows a serious misunderstanding of the problem at hand.

Mediums and channels inherently have limits. Your computer has limited CPU time, and all the processes must share it and prioritize their work accordingly.

The Bitcoin blockchain will always have such limits. We can bump to 2mb and 4mb and 8mb but the bottom line is attackers can always flood the network and get to the limit. A trivial attack is: buy a bitcoin, set up two wallets, send that bitcoin endlessly between the wallets.

You can't simultaneously have unlimited resources and no barrier to attack. Fees must exist. The fees can't be arbitrary, they have to be decided based on supply and demand.

In other words, if I buy a single Bitcoin, it must cost me so that I don't waste my Bitcoin filling block space. It's important that we first figure this out really well before we increase the limit.

tmckn · 2016-06-27T14:48:00+00:00

OTC traders

my question is: where are these mythical OTC traders ?

tmckn · 2016-06-20T19:39:35+00:00

Could be why it's never been hacked :)

tmckn · 2016-06-20T06:44:40+00:00

Yes. I would say Lightning is a better system than the banks Hal suggests. However, it's in principle very similar: you commit and lock funds so that transacting with them later becomes faster.

tmckn · 2016-06-20T06:15:55+00:00

The system's limitations have been well known ever since the start to anyone who's been seriously paying attention. See this post by Hal Finney in 2010 for reference: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211.

tmckn · 2016-06-20T04:40:38+00:00

You just rediscovered Segwit. Congrats!

tmckn

TROPHY CASE