Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

Thinking more on this, it is self-evident to me that there is an issue in the case of a single miner. But as long as the network is sufficiently decentralized, competition for the available transactions should proprely incentize progression.

I too agree regarding the case of a single miner. I am undecided on the case of multiple miners (and no block reward), however.

That said, it is kind of disturbing that your reaction was "In my opinion, potential issues we might (or might not) have to deal with 25 - 50 years from now have nothing to due with increasing the block size limit today." I know you have a horse in the race and have been polarized by all of the BS flying around, but ignoring the long term is a dangerous way to go about things.

I am not suggesting we "ignore the long term." We should (and will) study this and many other properties and emergent phenomenon of the Bitcoin Network over the next decades [unless Bitcoin dies]. In fact, Justus's comments that started this dialog was an example of not ignoring the long term.

However, we shouldn't let some fear about what could happen in the far future (that may turn out to be unfounded) prevented us from addressing a very real issue that exists today. Do you disagree?

 

[cypherdoc]

I don't see how it's even conceivable that there would ever be a single miner. The worst I can ever see would be a single mega miner per nation state. And that is even stretching it as the concept of nation states begins to blur. The stakes and incentives are just too high.

Theoretical extremes are fun however.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I don't see how it's even conceivable that there would ever be a single miner.

It's probably not possible.

However, if Bitcoin still retains useful properties even if there is one, then we don't have to treat the possibility that it might someday as a catastrophe.

 

[yrral86]

I do agree that we should address today's issues. However, we can do that by raising the block limit rather than eliminating it completely. Eliminating it completely may be fine, but as you say there areally many more properties of this system that need to be studied and understood.

 

[cypherdoc]

UPS:

https://longitudes.ups.com/does-global-trade-need-a-global-currency/

 

[Erdogan]

^ Interesting where it comes from. By the way, we need private money, not necessarily onr type, that is up to the market.

 

[cypherdoc]

Looking good...

 

[solex]

One of the best posts I have seen on ZH for a while

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-05/whither-economy

So many good points, but one biggie is the problem of short-term thinking in privately owned companies. This is an artifact of unsound money. It is reason enough by itself why a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is preferable to the current fiat system. Hard money fosters long-term thinking and planning.

This too is a chilling conclusion after 50,000 factory closures since 2000...

By offshoring the production of their products, US corporations transferred technology, physical plant, and business knowhow to China. American corporations are now dependent on China, a country that the idiots in Washington are endeavoring to turn into an enemy.

Further downside comes from the fact that research, development, and innovation are connected to the manufacturing process, because it is difficult for these important functions to be successful in a sterile atmosphere removed from the production process. As time goes by, US companies are transformed from manufacturing enterprises into sales organizations and lose connection to the work process, and these functions relocate abroad with the manufacturing jobs

Same for many other countries.

 

[Peter R]

Cypher, the "little dogs nipping at your heels" from Bitcointalk can't stop talking about you:

Shall we take bets on long it is till Tvbcof, Brg444 and iCEBREAKER pay us a visit?

 

[Stereotype]

If they do, wheres the ignore button? Not sure i can be bothered to read more juvenile and pathetic name calling, coming from seemingly intelligent people.

 

[Erdogan]

One of the best posts I have seen on ZH for a while

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-05/whither-economy

So many good points, but one biggie is the problem of short-term thinking in privately owned companies. This is a artifact of unsound money. It is reason enough by itself why a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is preferable to the current fiat system. Hard money fosters long-term thinking and planning.

This too is a chilling conclusion after 50,000 factory closures since 2000...

By offshoring the production of their products, US corporations transferred technology, physical plant, and business knowhow to China. American corporations are now dependent on China, a country that the idiots in Washington are endeavoring to turn into an enemy.

Further downside comes from the fact that research, development, and innovation are connected to the manufacturing process, because it is difficult for these important functions to be successful in a sterile atmosphere removed from the production process. As time goes by, US companies are transformed from manufacturing enterprises into sales organizations and lose connection to the work process, and these functions relocate abroad with the manufacturing jobs

Same for many other countries.

Good article, but you can not require from an economic actor to take the lofty goals of national macroeconomics into account. A private company would do the same, if it were profitable.

The problem with corporations is that they get special rights which do not really exist, and they are forgiven deeds that private persons are not forgiven. A corporation is an invention of a syntetic individual with some god-like properties. It is the state (in USA meaning the government) that is the culprit again.

Producing tee-shirts in areas where labour is low priced, is rational, and it is the unsound money that prevents the rebalancing.

 

[RenegadeMan]

Cypher, the "little dogs nipping at your heels" from Bitcointalk can't stop talking about you:

Shall we take bets on long it is till Tvbcof, Brg444 and iCEBREAKER pay us a visit?

iCEBREAKER is a prolific and persistent troll in the Dash thread on BCT. Here's someone's latest commentary on him

The link is http://www.coindesk.com/judge-approves-fraud-claims-against-bitcoin-mining-firm-hashfast/

 

[Justus Ranvier]

So many good points, but one biggie is the problem of short-term thinking in privately owned companies. This is a artifact of unsound money.

It might not be only an artefact of unsound money.

One little-known fact about many of the large public sector pension funds is that during the 90s tech boom, some insane state legislatures wrote into a law a mandate for the managers to obtain 8% annual returns.

Anybody with more than 3 brain cells can easily see that this is impossible to sustain for more than a handful of years. If the economy grows at 3% per year and your portfolio grows at 8% per year, you can calculate the year at which your portfolio would be greater than 100% of the economy.

How much influence as a shareholder does CALPERS, for example, have on publicly traded companies in the US?

I remember hearing story after story about profitable tech companies in the US being effectively strip mined (stop all R&D, full power to marketing, offshore to China) in the early to mid 2000s.

Everybody said it was because CEOs only cared about the next quarterly report, but no one ever speculated as to why this had suddenly become the case.

Large public sector pension funds with their legally-mandated, yet mathematically-impossible, desire for yield would appear to be a huge smoking gun that should be investigated but I've never heard of anyone looking under that rock and reporting back what they found.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

If they do, wheres the ignore button? Not sure i can be bothered to read more juvenile and pathetic name calling, coming from seemingly intelligent people.

Or we can make a concerted effort to ignore (both automatically through an ignore function and also making a pact to shun useless content completely - not even responding to point out its uselessness) any very low signal:noise ratio poster right now, so that they won't have any fun when they come.

There won't even be any ostensible benefit from bumping the thread for visibility because there is so little noise.

 

[lunar]

@solex

Somehow I missed that article, thanks for the link.

As a consequence of the short-sightedness of reformers and Congress, the annual salaries of top executives were capped at $1 million.
The result is that the major part of executive pay comes in the form of performance bonuses. Performance means a rise in the price of the company’s shares.
However, there are a number of ways in which performance bonuses can be less legitimately obtained,
Replacing American workers with foreign workers is one way.

I find it fascinating and sublimely ironic how such a seemingly well intentioned idea can have devastating chain effects. It highlights the dangers of tinkering with economic incentives.

The other point, I liked, is one I wish more companies would be mindful of.

Publicly owned capitalism’s short-term time horizon is also apparent with regard to nature’s resources and the environment. Ecological economists, such as Herman Daly, have established the fact that environmental destruction is the consequence of corporations moving many of the waste costs associated with their activities off their profit and loss statements and onto the environment.

This issue will be one of the biggest of the next century. It seems to me the problem lies with the fact we have only very vague concepts of what constitutes environmental damage. Until a system is devised for quantifying and analytically valuing micro and macro fundamentals of 'the environment', there is no real way to pass this onto the companies that cause the damage. Most corporations function under the premise we live in a limitless system, whereas its obviously a sealed goldfish bowl.

A basis of economic theory is the absurd assumption that man-made capital is a perfect substitute for nature’s capital. This means that if the environment is used up and ruined, not to worry. Innovation and technology will substitute for nature. This absurd foundation of economic theory is why there are so few ecological economists. Economics teaches not to worry about the environment.

 

[Emperor Bob]

Right now, the block reward is the only form of revenue that can requires the chain to be continually extended to obtain, but there could easily exist other forms. New opcodes that allow users to create transaction fees that can only be claimed at a particular block height would achieve the same thing.

This is in fact already in the works: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2340 and https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6216 use nLockTime to make sure that the transaction can only be included in the block after the highest one the current client knows about. This means that once a block is out in the open, new transactions created by bitcoin-core don't ever make transactions that can be included in a lower block. Other wallets can also adopt this pretty easily.

This means most transaction fees won't be claimable by a double spender.

 

[cypherdoc]

Coming off a classic double bottom.

 

[cypherdoc]

@solex

Somehow I missed that article, thanks for the link.



I find it fascinating and sublimely ironic how such a seemingly well intentioned idea can have devastating chain effects. It highlights the dangers of tinkering with economic incentives.

The other point, I liked, is one I wish more companies would be mindful of.



This issue will be one of the biggest of the next century. It seems to me the problem lies with the fact we have only very vague concepts of what constitutes environmental damage. Until a system is devised for quantifying and analytically valuing micro and macro fundamentals of 'the environment', there is no real way to pass this onto the companies that cause the damage. Most corporations function under the premise we live in a limitless system, whereas its obviously a sealed goldfish bowl.

Seems to me that for a system like Bitcoin to be able to compete with a system (fiat) that at least perceptually allows unconstrained growth, it itself has to be unconstrained.

 

[cypherdoc]

One of the best posts I have seen on ZH for a while

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-05/whither-economy

So many good points, but one biggie is the problem of short-term thinking in privately owned companies. This is a artifact of unsound money. It is reason enough by itself why a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is preferable to the current fiat system. Hard money fosters long-term thinking and planning.

This too is a chilling conclusion after 50,000 factory closures since 2000...

By offshoring the production of their products, US corporations transferred technology, physical plant, and business knowhow to China. American corporations are now dependent on China, a country that the idiots in Washington are endeavoring to turn into an enemy.

Further downside comes from the fact that research, development, and innovation are connected to the manufacturing process, because it is difficult for these important functions to be successful in a sterile atmosphere removed from the production process. As time goes by, US companies are transformed from manufacturing enterprises into sales organizations and lose connection to the work process, and these functions relocate abroad with the manufacturing jobs

Same for many other countries.

Of course you are familiar with the concept of how the US has had the luxury of "exporting it's inflation" over the last several decades.

On the surface,it sounds like a great deal. We use the dollar's reserve currency status to take advantage of its strength to issue limitless debt and print to encourage speculation here and mostly abroad. Companies are encouraged to head to places like Asia to set up shops. Apparently there are consequences.

The world is evening out.

 

[lunar]

@cypherdoc I'd argue that as the current fiat system is fractional reserve and debt based, it is constrained, by the weight of repayments. Hence governmental fear of deflation.... but then you knew that already

wrt the icebreaker nonsense, he's a bitter troll just consider it flattery and put him on ignore. I had a similar problem. Particularly childish are the "quotes" that are not actually quotes; whereby mosaics of words are pasted together out of context and used as a school yard style attack.