Daniel P. Barron

The mega-problem of bitcoin.

Saturday, March 5, 2016 

Contrary to what most of “the bitcoin community” goes on about, Stanislav “asciilifeform” Datskovskiy has postulated:

~nobody wants to admit, but ~the~ mega-problem of bitcoin is… that it is FAR too accessible.

Of course this is nothing new to avid readers of the log; we’ve seen Mircea Popescu make this claim plenty of times. Even leading up to the quote above, he proposed an example as an alternative to how bitcoin functions:

(yes i’m aware that the above example allows no payments other than in multiples of 50 btc for a while, then multiples of 25, and EVENTUALLY in satoshi. i MIND YOU that this is a feature and what you are using now a bug – da **** do you do when the coinbase is split up in all the satoshi it could be ? ha ? oh, “works for you as it is” ? ty.)

The idea being: restrict transactions to one input and one output, effectively making denominations out of the progressively decreasing block rewards. It would be hard to imagine a less “common man”-friendly alteration, but it’s just the natural follow up to Stanislav’s previous speculation: ii

Perhaps I had everything backwards.. possibly, being able to transact ~without~ mining, is the bug. not mining…

He is of course referring to his often repeated mantra: “mining is a bug.” In the latter idea, miners are a necessary evil we must rely on in order to transact, and in the former, one must be a miner in order to transact. In either case, the likely future of bitcoin is one in which the lords run the banks, servicing the needs of civilized men everywhere. The next morning, Mircea drops this bomb on the channel:

For the record, I’ve been divesting, if slowly. Bitcoin as it currently stands is a very iffy proposition. It ~absolutely~ requires the bricking of current miners to have a chance, and major protocol rewrites.

This is in response to a query from gribble bot for the latest price which returned 394 USD, down 10% since the last time someone bothered to check. At that time, Shane had just finished his break from the mega-stress that is hacking on bitcoin code; I wonder how he’ll take the latest news:

I suppose IF the July many-fork time comes and trb iii has nothing to offer then it might as well close.

So there’s the ultimatum. July 2016. And right on cue, the difficulty drops 3.1%. Just a coincidence I’m sure; all of today’s revelations are the obvious continuation of a day’s old thread. Anyway, I gotta get back to Eulora; iv these ordinary flotsam claims won’t build themselves.. Oh wait, they kinda do!

  1. The plural of satoshi is like the plural of sheep. ‘Satoshis’ does’t look or sound right. But feel free to correct me. ^
  2. The two propositions go hand-in-hand, seeing as how it shouldn’t be possible to pay transaction fees after such a change. ^
  3. The Real Bitcoin ^
  4. speaking of which, just last night I was running the numbers for the latest noob, informing him that he could probably turn a 0.1 BTC loan into a whole coin. ^

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