Don't appreciate the racial stereotyping. Uncharacteristic for a forward thinker such as yourself.

It was written with the same dripping disdain that I'm arguing against to make a point. Probably not a good idea.

To all those who I offended with my "conspiratorial" perspective, I do not dislike any of you (as far I can see so far). Your world view is not the same as mine at this juncture in history (e.g. we might have been more aligned had we met in the 1990s when I was about high tech and there weren't these dark totalitarian clouds on the horizon). I believe you are deluded and you think the same of me. The future will prove who was correct. Good luck.

This might be my last post...


Alternatively readers may send me your Bitmessage address in a private message. I can't promise which day I might contact any specific person via Bitmessage, so you would need to run it every other day indefinitely. It is unfortunate, but this is the best there for anonymous communication at this time. And I am very rushed, so my communications need to be prioritized.

Please read my recent posts and ask yourself if you agree with my stance on reality. If so and you want to encourage me to work on a solution (as I contemplate the decision), then feel free to offer to communicate with me in Bitmessage.

Note I am not lacking people interested in encouraging me, so perhaps readers should only request to communicate with me ongoing if they feel they can help.

Wouldn't the definition of "Bitcoin proper" be the one which has the most capital committed to it?

How could the coin of a few hobbiest have more capital than the VCs, Peter Thiel, Winkelvosses, Larry Summer's club of financial elites, the masses in Paypal, Coinbase, the merchants using Peter Thiel's Bitpay, 21 Inc + Samsung, etc?

I just can't fathom how you can rationalize in your mind (what appears to me to be a delusion) that some hobbiests and some fraction of the goldbugs can defy all that inertia?

What would differentiate your fork causing it to attract a significant capital base? If you claim no inflation, then Gavincoin will claim it too. Etc..

Capital is actually the productive capacity of the people, but in this case you don't have millions (nor even 1000s) of users independently working on programming Bitcoin, but rather mostly speculators boarding the wealth effect (soon to become greater fool theory) freight train. The VCs are paying most of the developers involved in Bitcoin projects.

Okay time for me to step away and watch the outcome.

The Internet is essentially the mass of masses. Extrapolate the audience averaging effect in the popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire:

"But there’s a third option: You can use your “Ask-the-Audience" life line. You can poll the entire studio audience on the four possible answers, and their responses are instantaneously assembled into a bar graph. Invariably, this graph shows one overwhelming choice, and with rare exceptions the audience is right. “I’ll trust the audience,” you tell Regis. “Final answer.”

Good move. But why? No person in the audience is any more likely than you to know where grapes come from, yet the collective intelligence of the group is almost always a better bet than your best guess. Psychologists are very interested in this perplexing statistical phenomenon. If the crowd is always wiser than any individual, what does that say about the way knowledge is stored and arranged in our minds? And can it help us make better choices, even beyond game shows?

...

That’s actually what Vul and Pashler found when they ran the experiment. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the average of two guesses for any individual participant was better than either guess alone, regardless of the time between guesses. So polling the “crowd within” does indeed yield a statistically more accurate answer. What’s more, this internal crowd gets more independent-minded with time: Contestants who were asked to second-guess themselves three weeks later benefited even more by averaging their two guesses than did those who second-guessed themselves immediately. The psychologists speculate that the cognitive pull of the original answer loses its power and allows more mental flexibility over time."
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/06/polling-crowd-within.cfm

This reminded me of Intrade. What a loss.

This point is crucial, as others also have said. Bitcoin can compete now, with this low penetration, and for every new user the liquidity increases. That is in my view, a guarantee of success.

Compare this to just about any investment project that have a threshold of sales to be a success. Some succeed, but most don't.

it's called Metcalfe's Law.  "value" of the network is squared by every new user.  iCE would rather keep it strangled down to him and his Myrcea buddies.

lol, the network is STILL choked off after all this time.  i don't blame the short sightedness of the guy who just sold us off down to $232 given how strident iCE and his buddies have been about making any progress whatsoever on this block size issue.  i think it's a big mistake as it just gives the rest of us cheaper coins to accumulate as i think a block size increase is inevitable and soon as a result of the stress test:

the problem with core devs deciding any block size limit is that they essentially become central bankers, ie, unilaterally determining everyone's cost of accessing the network. by what metric can they ever determine what size is appropriate given most of Bitcoin's incentives are economically and game theoretically driven? better to let the free mkt of miners and users work that out via mutually determined fees.