What is centralized about Bitcoin or the mini-blockchain design? The mini-blockchain design is sort of centralized in the sense that new nodes can rely on older nodes who have stored a lot of history, but there is no absolute requirement for any node to store anything more than the few days of history that the mini-blockchain requires and there are ways for the network to defend its self against attacks even if none of the nodes choose to store long term history.

I want to be very careful how I word my reply to this (which is why I didn't reply immediately because I am often not as careful in my forum posts as I am with programming code), because I really want to convince you to be as objective as possible without being condescending or otherwise using force. My goal should be to try to explain to you what I think is objective and why. Also to try to catch myself where I am not balancing objectivity of money against objectivity of realities of attaining consensus. And let's see where it takes us.

My long-winded way of saying let's both take a deep breath and try our best to discuss this objectively.


Can I be very matter-of-fact without sounding like a jerk or unfriendly?

Richard Branson is already talking about mining asteroids. Malthusians have always been wrong since the dawn of civilization. I explained why in this blog:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#2nd_Law_of_Thermo

Do you remember the peak oil lunatics (apologies to any who haven't read the latest news)? We are now finding more oil and natural gas than we can consume in Australia and other places. Cars already run on natural gas (Honda has one for sale in the USA). When I was ridiculing them years ago, I did it by showing the entire world uses as much oil as would be produced by a medium size river flowing in oil. It is insane to think we are any where near tapping out the resources on earth. People will believe anything they read in the mass media even when it is complete nonsense from any scientific calculation.

Even if that was a true statement, it is objectively irrelevant because gold mining will continue on earth until long after we are dead.

And so if the point was to say Bitcoin won't be stricter than gold, it is objectively false.


But inherent in your subjectivity is that you deeply believe it is better have a strictly limited money supply. And this sort of belief is irrational but it seems very difficult to get believers to study it objectively. Note I used to think the way you do back in 2006, just drill down the link in the following quote and you will find my writings promoting silver and gold (luckily I wised up and never sent that email to Cool Page users):


Thus having suffered from that delusion       (and lost a lot of money and time away from programming too!) and now having emerged from it and seen the rational truth, I don't want to go backwards. I'd rather try to educate others, or let them explain to me why my logic is not objective (then I could go backwards, but they won't be able to, because I've thought about this for years).

I still own silver, but this is because I expect a wipeout and reset of the global financial system, not because I expect a strict monetary system to ever have any practical use. It has never been the case throughout all of history that there is existed a strict money. Never! Some people try to cite the 1800s in the USA, but they forget the private banks were printing fractional reserve gold receipts, because society can't run without debasement. Either you get it officially or you get it by cheating and bank runs every few years as we had in the tumultuous 1800s which is why we eventually ended up with a central bank system. Others cite Byzantine Empire of Eastern Rome but they don't realize that gold was being imported continuously, thus the money supply was always expanding. As that reversed, the empire collapsed.

If we do a coin where debasement ends, then it will not live long.


We can surely create two coins, one with and one without. That is like a one line change in the source code.

Moldbug's point is that there can only be one blockchain that wins. This is the nature of money.

We have very low chance of winning against Bitcoin (you underestimated how many developers would want to develop this and you are underestimating how much power the mini-blockchain has by itself against Bitcoin, because first-to-market is nearly everything in cases where there can only be one, e.g. MS Windoze). We will need to be different to have any chance.

And not just a little bit different. We need to be different in every critical way.

And this is critical not just because of the monetary theory and PROVEN HISTORY, but also because we need debasement to make certain things work correctly as we are discussing in the other thread for the implementation.

A few percent per year debasement isn't going to hurt any savers in the coin as it is exploding in value 1000%, and it bringing more into mining economy means the coin has more users and thus will grow adoption faster.

While I don't want to get into a debate about monetary policies, I want to post a link to this article I wrote because it explains exactly why I think the way I think when it comes to economics: True Money. But I also want to point out that there is a limit to how much gold can be mined from other planets or asteroids, and that is because if we increase the mass of the Earth too much it will cause our orbit to become unstable. The people who inevitably always prove to be wrong are the ones who believe in perpetual anything. Everything has its limits and if you don't respect those natural limits the whole thing will come crashing down.

Yeah well the last of the bitcoins probably wont be mined until after we are dead so I don't quite see your point.

What will happen as it does after every debt crisis and reset is interest rates will be skyhigh.

So investors will want to buy bonds. But Bitcoin won't be able to back bonds, because it doesn't debase. So fractional reserves will be built on top of Bitcoin or more likely it will be forsaken (cartels will likely control it by then, we can see it already headed that way now) and the new digital fiat currencies will be preferred by investors.

Actually it doesn't really matter. If end the debasement just to appease goldbugs (assuming that is the main audience now), then who cares when we end up with the NWO digital fiat currency.

Just make our money now and we will be old then any way. Maybe I can consider to hold my nose and just nevermind what is long-term correct.

Are we sure we want to be exactly the same as Bitcoin? The survey says there is a market for perpetual debasement. We will give that market away while reducing our differences from Bitcoin. Wise?

Readers please make your opinions known by at least voting on the polls at following links:

Features:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/279340.0

Rate of debasement:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/311668.0

To be pedantic, technically the term "51%" is incorrect. From Satoshi's whitepaper, it only takes infinitesimally more than 50%, which is why I write 50+%.

If I am not mistaken this secret chain attack is still a 50+% attack, because the attacker must be able to generate new PoW solutions (at same or greater difficulty) faster than the cooperating, honest peers.

The centralizing aspect is we depend on those super nodes (peers) to provide the historical evidence to help resolve the attack, or we wait for checkpoint to come from community. Both are not perfectly decentralized methods of resolution, but I don't think this presents a major problem, as I argued to Etlase2.  As far as I can see, Bitcoin has the analogous centralized resolution to a 50+% attack, because light clients can't resolve these issues without trusting the full nodes. Bitcoin must trust the full nodes for mining, verifying transactions, etc, so it is much more centralizing in real-time in normal scenarios. Thus conceptually the mini-blockchain is superior (we have to prove it in real world though).

P.S. my argumentative style is intended to make sure the effort succeeds in the market place. I am not disrespecting you. I appreciate of course what you have designed.

That is true, yes.

It's very similar to a 50+% attack but a little bit different because it can only be pulled off by generating the fake chain in secret. A 50+% attack is not as drastic, it would only allow the attacker to alter recent transactions, and the older a block was, the harder it would be to alter. Pretty much like a 50+% attack with Bitcoin, which has yet to happen btw. But the main point is that historic "super nodes" are not absolutely necessary, even without any such super nodes there is still a very minute chance that a secret chain attack could be pulled off successfully if the attacker is unable to recruit new nodes.

No need to worry, I am a very thick skinned person and I can appreciate a bit of healthy criticism and debate. Life would be boring if we all agreed with each other. I can also respect your desire for increased anonymity, I'm just saying that it's a very complicated thing to do and perhaps best left to future efforts. I just really want to see some of these concepts implemented and if we wait around trying to develop the perfect system we might not ever get anything done.

To be very pedantic, u can do the attack even with 42%. Depends on luck.

That is some what true, but I would argue that gold is still used a currency in some places even to this day and the only reason we got rid of the gold standard in the past was to replace it with a fiat system, not necessarily because a gold standard wasn't working.

Even if you are correct it's still an impossibly difficult task to algorithmically implement the correct level of debasement over long periods of time. The only logical reason for perpetual debasement is to keep the value of the coins stable, but it is extremely difficult to achieve this because the value of the coin isn't just a function of the total money supply.

I would like to know who has 600 years to sit on idle savings for a start. There is nothing selfish about deflation, it is the natural consequence of a currency which experiences increased demand and no one should have the ability to steal that extra value from the currency. What you are basically saying is that people shouldn't be allowed to save their money and hope it goes up in value, which is obviously not the spirit of cryptocurrency.

Just because the limit is large doesn't change the fact there is a limit. Plus if you calculate the cost of recovering gold even from the nearest planet in our solar system, it works out the the cost of the transportation is more than the value of the gold.

Yes, but by 2033 when it becomes extremely hard to mine even small amounts of bitcoin, the value of each bitcoin will be much higher. The creation of new bitcoins drops off exponentially for a reason, Satoshi wasn't an idiot. He designed it that way for a reason and it seems to be working well thus far.

The whole concept of a "reasonable level of debasement" is completely subjective in the first place, thus impossible to implement algorithmically in a fair and consistent manner. Being able to re-mine lost coins doesn't offer any level of debasement, it simply ensures that the money supply wont get perpetually smaller and cause perpetual inflation in that way. If the value of the coin goes up it will be purely due to an increase in demand and other natural economic forces.

You still haven't addressed how to stop cartelization of mining if you remove debasement?

You want a cartelized coin?


Currency is what you can trade for goods & services in society. Don't conflate with assets which are what you can trade to investors.

No where in any normally functioning country can gold be directly traded for goods & services.

Gold standard failed in the USA due to very frequent bank runs and depressions due to private banks running fractional reserves of loans in gold receipts. Strict money systems fail because society will not agree to not use loans. And mathematically loans require more money supply every year due to the interest rate. So if you only have gold, then you have no choice but to cheat and debase it with fractional reserves.

How was it working?

Goldbugs have elaborate illusions that sustain their delusion. Breaking them out of the dream-like state is not easy. I was quite ashamed with myself (having thought I was rational) when I fell out of it finally and returned to rationality. It caused me to doubt whether I will always be rational. My excuse is I was going through some severe personal issues at the time (e.g. sister was murder by her husband, loss of my marriage, got influenced by a guy named Jason Hommel, etc). I also went off on a God delusion during that period too   All of that caused me to change from a worldclass productive entrepreneur and programmer into a loser. But I should blame it on myself only (take responsibility).


One reason (see bold text below for other reason) perpetual debasement exists is because society will always use loans and loans pay an interest rate, thus the demand for money increases compounded every year. If you don't have the money to pay the interest rates, then society will create it somehow which means for example creating fractional receipts (IOUs) for Bitcoins.

There is no such thing as a stable value of anything in the universe. Everything is measured relative to everything else. Please study my The Universe blog article. Do you realize that even measurements change depending on relative speeds?

http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html

Nothing the in universe is at a fixed position. You have a layman's incorrect comprehension of what it means "to exist".


Rothschild family for example.


Currencies don't have exchange price demand, you are talking about an asset, e.g. Bitcoin is not primarily a currency.

Currencies have a demand based on the velocity of trade (money) in the economy but since they are the unit-of-account for all gooods and services, they don't have an exchange demand. In other words, most Americans don't care what the fluctuations in the exchange value of the dollar to other currencies or gold is, because everything they spend on it is priced in dollars. Now the relatively large influence of foreign exchange ingress and egress is why small countries are beholden to the dollar, they don't really have independent currencies.

Persistent monetary deflation in a true currency (not an asset) only occurs either in a dark age where hoarders thus destroy all the production (by failing to invest in production due to hoarding currency or assets) or in situation where the gold standard is being fractionally debased but hasn't defaulted yet, so there is an illusion that gold's value is rising persistently. Yet as we saw in the 1800s, the fractional reserves of gold certificates by the private banks in the 1800s eventually lead to total collapse where JP Morgan had to bailout the USA and in turn probably obtained the control to implement the Federal Reserve system in 1913, as documented in The creature from Jekyll Island and Bill Still's video The Money Masters.

So you can have an illusion about asset being a currency and pretend to yourself that persistent deflation is a demand for a currency (which is actually demand for that asset not a true currency), but that is not reality.


No I specifically said the debasement rate should not be too high (sometimes not higher than the prevailing bond rates), because saving for lean times is important, as is the concept of delaying gratification to save. Yet we want that savings to be invested in productive activities. What is savings? It is society saying that you generated excess production in the past and it now trusts you to continue to do that, thus it allows you to decide which investments to do.

It is not a license to sit on that talent, and expect to leech off the others who are increasing production. Society won't tolerate that. The Bible (taken as a book of knowledge about realities of life) specifically talks about this in the Parable of the Talents.

Debasement also exists to force you to invest, and not allow you to cheat the implicit contract society has made with you.


Please if you are not going to admit when you are wrong, then that is disingenuous. I always do when I am wrong. A 20 foot basketball rim is a limit too, yet you will never dunk on it.


Moving the goal posts in a soccer game is not allowed. Many people have said things were impossible, that later become very possible. Seems to happen regularly. That is what technology is all about.

I said Branson was talking about mining asteroids as they pass nearby earth.


Wow the greed. Getting something for nothing. Great virtues of every boom and bust.

And yeah he made sure he got most of the coins in the first years. Yet you are concerned about a small premine for this coin.


The data I have (it is buried on one of my threads), is the average debasement for society is consistently about 5% for normalcy. This goes back to the 1800s in the USA.

You can't change what is normal, just because you think it would be neat. Society will route around you as if you are parasite that needs to be eradicated.