so true

In my scan of this morning's 'gold collapsing, bitcoin up.' thread, I sense that, true to form, the anticipated contingent feels that maybe Summers thinks he can make a ton off Bitcoin and there is a hope from some that they can ride his coat-tails as he surfs the wave.  My 'conspiracy theory' is that Summers has had ample opportunity over his career to amass as much wealth as he desires and he has no need of Bitcoin to help him in this (likely long ago achieved) endeavor.  Summer's track record seems to be one of engineering methods of financial control over the masses (and other lesser states) which is typical off many of those among us who have 'made it' and are interested mostly in moving on-ward and up-ward.  To the run-of-the-mill Bitcoin hodler:  Good luck riding Summer's coat-tails.

On a different topic which is only related to the quoted text, here's one amusing conspiracy 'theories' that I thought of recently:

Say someone finally figured out a mildly workable distributed crypto-currency solution and it passed some bar needed to partially prove it's mettle.  Helping fund Wikilieaks in the face of a block by the mainstream financial system, for instance.

Say this raised Bitcoin to the attention of those who engineered this mainstream financial block and they considered it a viable threat.

Say that the early participants in Bitcoin were a conglomeration of what were mainly losers and it included one unemployed engineer who was bored enough to set up a faucet and thus garner some attention in the community but who clearly loved big brother.

Say TPTB realized that they could easily take out the originator who was something of a lone-wolf and had been fairly careful to preserve his identity to the extent needed to throw off the masses investigative efforts, and install their more more favored 'leader'.  If said 'more appropriate' leader claimed this happened just because 'Satoshi' changed an e-mail address, most of the Bitcoin fanatics would buy the story hook, line, and sinker.

Although well below the bar of 'theory', this hypothesis has some explanatory power.  In particular, if Satoshi is simply no longer among the living it would explain why he's not been heard from and why his quasi-pre-mine have remained static.  More than anything it would explain why Gavin is intent on destroying the solution but in a careful way which seems to exceed his native abilities.

tptb driven...asunder

This is not true, and people keep repeating it at a concerning rate. The reality isn't quite so snappily summed up, but it's wildly different from this presentation, and that makes it very dangerous misinformation.

There is counter party risk

There is permission

There is trust

And all three are vested in the mining network, and everyone happily sweeps this under the rug at every opportunity. Until someone comes up with a way to decentralise mining (or remove the miners ability to choose which transactions to include), I will not allow people to repeat this misinformation unchallenged.

I agree but not in the senstionalist sense that you like to put it.

What counter party risk?

I agree.  However, I would use the terms 'trust-minimized' and 'permission-minimized' instead of trustless and permissionless.  

Nothing is completely trustless.  If we used a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being completely trustless and 100 needing full trust, then bitcoin is much closer to 0 and fiat currencies are much closer to 100.  

When considering the general deflation, don't underestimate the different ages of the capital. Low interest skews projects towards long time projects, which happen to be oil, iron and other metals. Oil is 30 years from start of investment (surveying) to finished consumer goods. That is now why the products from oil and other long time, capital intensive industries are too plentiful compared to actual demand. When capitcal cost is zero, any project is profitable, as long as sales pay for daily expenses.

Still I don't get it, why bitcoin is risky put with all movements and effort that are put into ?

So, bitcoin is permissionless? I don't see how it's possible to sensationalise such a basic fact. Bitcoin holders can be prevented from spending their bitcoin by a majority of miners: that's just plain statement of facts. Another would be that, currently, no organised scheme exists to politicise the validity of bitcoins. And a further dispassionate fact would be that there always remains a risk that miners will end up in such a scheme while the system still permits it.


The risk that a counter party represents to your assets (not the same way the expression is applied with physical commodities, but I don't see that as a technical let-off). Bitcoin holders can be prevented from spending their bitcoin by a majority of miners.




None of that is a practical way around transaction censorship, and certainly not as a solution for all users of bitcoin. The block solution difficulty is just too high for that, and will remain out of reach to all but professional miners until that dynamic can be changed. Someone in the development forum just today came up with "Helical blockchains" as a solution to mining centralisation, more thought needs to go towards that side of things IMO.

This is a good point really, this question raised a flay in my mind, what option would you go with ?

Me, myself, will go with the adaption of the bitcoin rules.