Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

DanielKrawisz

New Member
Jul 11, 2016
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Greetings. I was recently invited in this forum by someone I met on reddit and was advised to introduce myself here, so I hope that's ok! I have written a number of well-known articles on the nakamotoinstitute.org site. The Nakamoto Institute was started by two of my friends an me after we had spent a few months discussing Bitcoin among ourselves at The University of Texas at Austin. We decided to create a website because we were very interested in the original cypherpunks and we thought their ideas were not well enough understood in the Bitcoin world. We also realized that most Austrian economists didn't know anything about the cypherpunks, so there was plenty of opportunity in bridging these two schools of ideas. I have not written much for a long time because I've been working a lot: https://github.com/DanielKrawisz/
 

Zarathustra

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
1,439
3,797
The world only knows "population inflation". Fiat and to a smaller degree gold tracked the population graph. A deflating currency will be a necessity in a world with declining populations. Just no one (wants to) sees this!
Indeed.

Prophecy of Dr. Paul C. Martin 1987, translated from German:

Today is the worldwide day of last-resort lending as described by the English economist Walter Bagehot in the 19th century: All countries will be liable for all countries, all central banks for all central banks, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and many other international institutions. And all countries will stand for all banks, however, all central banks will also face the music for all countries, and all countries for all central banks. All, all, all will be there for all, all, all. And all know, that nothing must happen to anybody, since then it would happen to all of them.

Original quote in German:

"Heute ist weltweit Bagehot total: Alle Staaten werden für alle Staaten, alle Notenbanken für alle Notenbanken haften, einschließlich Währungsfonds und Weltbank und vielen anderen internationalen Institutionen. Und alle Staaten werden für alle Banken geradestehen, aber auch alle Notenbanken für alle Staaten und alle Staaten für alle Notenbanken. Alle, alle, alle werden für alle, alle, alle dasein. Und alle wissen, dass keinem von allen etwas passieren darf, weil dann allen etwas zustößt."
 
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awemany

Well-Known Member
Aug 19, 2015
1,387
5,054
'Do not disturb a complex system' since we do not know the consequences of our actions owing to complicated causal webs. I explicitly explained the need to “leave the planet the way we got it” . Nassim Taleb

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/my-letter-addressing-the_b_270737.html
There is no reason to assume that the natural 'complicated causal webs' are in any sense stable.

It can furthermore be said that we, our (certainly limited) intelligence, attempts at civilization and so forth - are part of this complex system.

With that in mind, and given your complaint about people trying to build civilization, you can actually see that the opposite is the case: The system as a whole is naturally unstable.

Checkmate.
 
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Inca

Moderator
Staff member
Aug 28, 2015
517
1,679
Can anyone in the know say how significant this BATS SEC ruling is going to be in 45 days? Is this a potential green light to the ETF listing on BATS?

If so it may be time to amass a long position :)
 
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awemany

Well-Known Member
Aug 19, 2015
1,387
5,054
Hi and welcome, @DanielKrawisz , I enjoyed your articles on nakamotoinstitute.org.

Here's a completely random suggestion for your website: I think you should maybe zip/tar/whatever all the extracted Satoshi quotes you have on there and time-stamp them into the blockchain - and make the zip available on your page as well - given the recent developments with 'updating the white paper'.
 

steffen

Active Member
Nov 22, 2015
118
163
Imagine a new real bitcoin competitor suddenly emerges.

One of the problems it will encounter is attacks. I previously wrote about some ideas for minimizing DOS attacks. Another category of attacks is miner attacks. Blockchain technology is cleverly designed because it is very difficult to mine powerfully AGAINST anything. You can almost only mine in support of something. An exception occurs if the destructive guys have very large amounts of mining power compared to the constructive guys. The destructive miners can insist on mining only empty blocks which will prevent transactions from being confirmed and thereby make the network unattractive. I don’t know what ratio of constructive miners to destructive miners is necessary to overcome that kind of sabotage well enough but I have an idea to make it more expensive to attack.

In a network like bitcoin the price an attacking miner pays for participating in an attack is
  1. (the lost transaction fees of the transactions he could have included in the mined blocks) minus
  2. (the extra block rewards he receives due to the lower orphaning rates he gets because his blocks are propagated very fast because they are smaller/empty)

My idea is to make ”2” smaller. I think it can be accomplished by setting a MINIMUM block size in the bitcoin competitor. Imagine fx the current bitcoin network with a MINIMUM block size of 1 MB (the limit could be adaptive).

What would a constructive miner do if a minimum block size limit existed?

  • Whenever the mempool transactions he would like to put into a new block is bigger than 1 MB the rules does not affect him. He mines as usual. This would be the normal blocks for a constructive miner.
  • Whenever the mempool transactions he would like to put in a new block is smaller than 1 MB he will either try to include additional transactions with a smaller transaction fee than he would normally accept or he would include some ”fill” transaction like pay-to-myself transactions to reach the 1 MB minimum block size limit. These kind of blocks with ”fill” transactions will be rare or the attacking miners would have already lost because if the ordinary transactions in mempools go below 1 MB it obviously creates a minimum of confirmation delay for users.

What would a destructive miner do if a minimum block size limit existed?

The attacker don’t want to help the network so he will not include ordinary user transactions in any blocks but since there is a minimum block size limit he will have to make some attacker-pays-attacker transactions in every block he tries to solve. When the block is solved it will need to be propagated fast like any other block to reduce orphaning risk. Since the block is 1 MB in size it will not be as fast as it would if the block was empty.

In contrast to constructive miners the attackers cannot make use of techniques like xthin. If the attacker tries to use xthin by sending out his attacker-pays-attacker transactions before he has found a block he will constantly be paying for his spam. His transactions might be included in another miner's block and the attacking miner will have lost the transaction fees he paid. So Xthin works for the constructive miners but not for the the destructive miners!

I hope some of you constructive people who read this might find some of it useful.
 
Nov 27, 2015
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http://www.konradsgraf.com/blog1/2016/7/8/block-size-political-economy-follow-up-2-market-intervention-through-voluntary-community-rules

Peter Sudra and I have an interesting discussion in the comment section of Konrad Graf's follow-up to his excellent interview on the block size debate. Peter's command of the economic jargon is impressive. His arguments on the other hand... I'll let you be the judge.
[doublepost=1468282476,1468281602][/doublepost]Teaser (Peter Sudra in greentext)

>There are yet other examples of goods where inelastic supply is the typical state, for example positional goods. So clearly, the argument that media of exchange are the only good where inelastic supply is beneficial is inadequate.

Money itself is a positional good. The purpose of all positional goods is to signal some form of information to others in the context of mistrust. The inelasticity of the money supply simply determines the extent to which the protocol serves the purposes of facilitating monetary behavior (delayed reciprocal altruism). Positional goods aren't necessarily inelastic - they're just more effective and accurate in facilitating their signaling purpose to the extent that they are inelastic.

Economics is the study of human action. This implies choice. Goods that have an inelastic supply by their nature provide man no opportunities to affect a change in the supply. To deny this is a contradiction. Naturally inelastic goods are not relevant to this discussion. What is relevant is the imposition of supply inelasticity by human actors on a good with an otherwise elastic supply (with the exception of media of exchange - or perhaps all positional goods, MoE being just one).
 

lunar

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
1,001
4,290
@albin That is a fantastic interview from @Justus Ranvier achievement 'legend' unlocked.

It's thoroughly refreshing to hear such sane logical and clearly honest arguments. An essential for anyone interested in development within this space especially miners out there. @Jihan @SysMan if you gentlemen have a spare moment I highly recommend a listen.

Justus starts from ~1hr mark and the conversation gets increasingly better as the show goes on.


so many quotes but this one stuck out most.

"I think it's the case that outside forces are going to be continually attacking Bitcoin. Right now the attackers won, and have completely neutralised the English speaking Bitcoin world. Our last chance now is that they won't get to the Chinese in time, and that the Chinese will break us out of that situation."
 

cliff

Active Member
Dec 15, 2015
345
854
@DanielKrawisz :eek:

Trudys is an extremely solid Tex-Mex restaurant that I always end up at when I'm in Austin for work or just visiting - although its been a while since I was last there. There are three locations - I've only ever been to the original downtown toward campus.
 

cypherdoc

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2015
5,257
12,998
@DanielKrawisz

Welcome.

You've been suspiciously silent on the blocksize debate. Is it because you've been too busy, no opinion, too complex, or too dangerous?
 
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cypherdoc

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2015
5,257
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Not really. I've pretty much had diarrhea mouth about it. Question is, am i right or wrong?
 
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