AnonyMint has laid out a logical set of plans that would seem to unfold in a series of events, leading to a particular outcome. You both seem to  be in agreement that there will be an end in which everything will work out (after a series of events occur) . . which would be the logical end to any scenario in particular not just this one.

Your presented flow of events is, "people will wake up and we'll all be better off" . . which seems quite non-descriptive. Could you provide a basis for your argument? Perhaps one rooted in facts in the past, rather than one rooted in your own personal faith in humanity? I'm not trying to say that you're wrong, or that you have a baseless argument . . as faith itself is something fundamental that I can't really argue against or for . .

It's more that you haven't given much of a foundation for anyone to build off of. I'm just looking to you to provide an example(s), similar to perhaps the Bundy case, in which I can logically conclude that this wouldn't escalate toward MAD.

The issuance could be moved to a side-chain.  The attraction is that block rewards could then be issued more frequently, in smaller size.  This would reduce the pressure for pool consolidation, and reduce that vulnerability proportionately.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, perhaps.  Bitcoin may or may not be incrementally perfectible -- it is difficult to see a lilypad path of local pareto optima which takes us all the way from here to there -- but bitcoin could be improved and made more robust against these threats.  Re-decentralizing mining would be a very constructive step, and seems like an achievable one.

The very desirable step which does not seem achievable yet is changing the hashing algorithm.  Miners obviously would not co-operate.  But that may not be strictly necessary in order to prevent bitcoin from being seized through control of mining:  If the granularity of block rewards is small enough, pools will be obsoleted.  It is increasingly difficult to mine profitably.  Large pools may collapse in bankruptcy, leaving only fully distributed amateur nodes minting blocks, operating at a nominal loss, in order to keep the network strong.  After that occurs, a consensus among miners might be achievable, allowing a change of the hash function.

Are you sure? How would they insure the 21 million total supply isn't increased? That was the entire point of Adam's proposal and why it must be merged-mined.

I had no idea what this gibberish is supposed to mean, but if a side-chain is awarding new coins, then 21 million will increased. Merged-mining means the side-chain does not issue its own new coins.

Please study your Bitcoin 101.

Dear @AnonyMint, we could hardly be further apart in our political views, especially the value and role of government.  Therefore I would rather not discuss that topic, but would like to comment on a few peripheral points:

* It is debatable whether Europe went into 600 years of darkness after the fall of Rome.  Our view of History is biased towards recorded History, and the end of the Empire meant the end of the largest and most punctillious record keeping organization of that Millenium.  The centralized administration collapsed, and with it the supply network that sustained the large population in Rome; but it seems hard to evaluate whether the life of the Europeans as a whole regressed in the following centuries, or continued to improve.  Many cities throughout Europe surely kept growing and became more "civilized".   Perhaps the "total degree of civilization" kept increasing, but in a quantitative rather than qualitative sense --- that is, a lot of people improved, while a few regressed.   To tell whether this happened or not, one would need statistics that seem largely unavailable.

Moreover, if one looks a bit beyond Europe, one can say that the center of civilization simply moved elsewhere, to the Caliphate -- that built an Empire about as large as the Roman one, and was just as civilized and progressive as the Romans had been. 

* You are right that knowledge may be 1000x more valuable than matter, in terms of the results it may produce; but value does not equate to price (that is, how much one can obtain in exchange for it).  Just consider that air is infinitely more valuable than caviar, for example.

In a free market, the price of a product eventually settles to the cost of production plus a few percent.  But the cost of duplicating knowledge is almost nil now.  Threfore, if/when knowledge will be traded in a few market, it will cost almost nil.  We are seeing it happen now: newspaper paywalls, copyright, and DRM are only a nuisance, since people can get most of the news and entertainment they want from free sources.   

Copyright and patent royalties can be collected only when and where the government is corrupted by the "intellectual property owners" to forcefully prevent the development of a free market of information.   If that free market existed, "knowledge makers" would be paid only for producing new knowledge, and only while they are producing it; not for selling or renting knowledge that they "own" -- just as a mason only gets paid while he works, not for rent in perpetuity of the houses that he built.

* I am very skeptical of anonimity as a "weapon of freedom".  On one hand, one cannot build a functional society only with anonymous interactions.  What makes society work it is the network of person-to-person interactions, where the parties know and trust each other.  In anonymous interactions, outside the reach of government, there is no incentive to honor deals or build a reputation.

Bitcoiners claim that their contraption removes the need for mutual trust or a trusted intermediary in commercial transactions, but that is not true.  A commercial transaction involves two transfers, money in one direction and goods or services in the other direction.  Bitcoin only handles the former; but one still needs trust (or a trusted intermediary with teeth), in order to ensure that the customer will pay for the goods that have been sent, or that the merchan will ship the goods that have been paid.  I don't see how to get that with anonymous transactions and without a government to enforce honest dealing.

Anonimity would be important in times when democracy has failed and citizens need to conspire underground in order to remove an illegitimate, undemocratic  government.  Unfortunately, such governments can and will easily prevent anonimity.  Even technically sophisticated citizens will have little chance against a determined ditactorial government. 

If you want anonymity use paper cash, gold etc, and stay off the internet.

The NSA revelations have merely proven what many have warned for ages. The internet is far from anonymous nor private.

Anonymint, I don't get what you are trying to convey here. You want a 100% anonymous internet based crypto coin that is fundamentally based on government approved and pioneered cryptography? And you want the world using it before your projected 2015-2016 debt apocalypse. Sorry to tell you, but that scenario involves rolling power blackouts(see Greece), kind of nips your idea in the bud. Crypto currencies require sophisticated infrastructure RUNNING in order to work.

Choice is freedom.
If you aren't anonymous in a transaction since you trust the other party that should be your choice. But on the other hand it should be my choice to stay anonymous if I prefer so. In other words the choice and option to stay anonymous is what drives freedom. In a society were you have no choice and are instead forced to stay un-anonymous there is no freedom. Anyone who doesn't aggree with this should re-read Orwell's 1984.

Also we have come to a time and place were you can't compare a transaction from a 100 years ago to a transaction to today. 100 years ago you could make a non anonymous transaction with someone you knew and be certain no one elese saw this transaction. Today in a non anonymous currency you have the fear of the whole world witnessing the same transaction. So it's not solely the question of a trusted person to person interaction being anonymous or un-anonymous but a question of the network being trusted in the first place and that trust will greatly increase if you are certain the network is anonymous.

It's too bad that there's no legitimate way to automatically measure whether or not someone's new here, a lot of people recycle their identities into new profiles. The repetitive bashing that results is fantastic though.


This logic is pretty fuzzy. When I go to an ATM and deposit cash . . and then use those funds to purchase something online . . it's effectively an anonymous transaction as far as the merchant is concerned. They don't have any way of knowing that it was my own cash from my own wallet that ended up in their account. They never have. They take the bank's word, on trust, that I paid for what I purchased and that the money is in their account. In this situation, the bank(s) are acting as a type of escrow.

You said that the parties trust each other. That is wrong. The parties trust the bank when a debit or credit card is involved. This has become pretty much every single time. It's now increasingly rare for people to use cash. Even people that have trust in cash have even more trust in their cards: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/newly-wary-shoppers-trust-cash.html?_r=0

Also, I feel like you're severely limiting the interpretation of anonymous transations, and using that to try and justify your main point. You have every ability to make the tx's non-anonymous by exchanging them in person or using a trusted escrow system(where trust takes the place of mistrust in anonymity). This system can be manifested through an actual person or group, or automated like the paypal or now bitstamp bitpay system.

This institution has already been built on anonymous transactions. This can easily be carried over and repeated with anonymous internet money.


Afterthought: Actually this is one of my major focuses that I'd like to work on. If anonymous currencies were to exist, and someone were to develop a banking system on that foundation . . what types of parallels would we expect to see with the current system of exchanging money through a bank?

Does bitcoin, with a traceable blockchain history, negate the need for banking because of the lack of trust necessary? Does an anonymous solution invite them? If we were to fit this into our present solution to inspire trust amongst consumers and merchants by using banks, would creating them again be the only way an anonymous coin would work?

Apart from those questions, the need for anonymous transactions would still be fulfilled in a world where banks built trust in anonymous currency . . because you'd still have the ability to find someone in the world who accepts your cash that trusts you personally to not screw them on the deal (without it being able to be recorded back to you). In this sense, there is quite a bit of anonymity and you only give it up to develop trust in situations where there can be none (for whatever reason).

Also, by saying 'trust' I only mean for the particular transaction. Not that you'd be comfortable sharing details of murder with the person. Just one simple instance of trust.