The old US voting machines did produce a material record of the vote, but in a form (punched card) that the voter could not check.  Thus votes with incompetely punched cards were miscounted, and it may be that even the manual recounters could not easily decide what the voter intended.    Who knows how many errors went undetected in other elections or other states.

The Brazilian e-voting machine is made by ETS, a US company which used to be the Diebold e-voting division until Diebold decided that it was splattering too much fertilizer on its brand.   There seem to be ob$cure rea$on$ why the all-powerful Supreme Electoral Court defends it with nails and teeth, against the better understanding of all experts and even of the majority of Congress.  But that is already way too off this threads topic...

No, please read more carefully.   I used last year Bitpay figures with LAST YEAR total E-volume, eyeballed from the plot.

The whole point is whether increased "adoption" by e-businesses translates into more people using bitcoin.  The City report says "no evidence of that".  The E-plot (mostly flat in 2014) does not show that.

So, how much bitcoin is really being used for e-payment (excluding deposit and withdrawal on echanges)?  Where is the evidence that this amount is increasing? 


I don't recall, did Coinbase exist in 2013?

Coinbase and Bitpay are competitors, no reason to believe that having two choices will mean twice as much e-payment volume.  To a large extent, they will simply split the bitcoin-payment market.

I bet that you bought those ~150 BTC well before those purchases, not for paying for those purchases but for investment/speculation.  If so, your example only confirms the report's claim: those services are mostly being used byexisting bitcoin owners.

Heh heh.  But I did not dismiss it as bullshit, quite the opposite.  It main points are that businesses adopting bitcoin through Bitpay/Coinbase is not real adoption, and that Bitpay/Coinbase encourage sale of old bitcoins more than adoption by non-users.  These observations are fairly trivial an have been made here by several bitcoiners, not just by me.


I discussed that topic on reddit a couple of months ago:
Danish political party, Liberal Alliance, will be the first party to use the blockchain for voting internally!

Basically, the main problem of any totally-digital e-voting system is that at some point the voter's choice is stored only inside some piece of equipment, and there is no effective way to make sure that said equipment will not change the vote.   One may think of issuing a receipt that allows the voter to check whether his vote was counted, but there seems to be no practical way of (a) preventing the misuse of that receipt to coerce the voter, and (b) preventing the voter from falsely claiming that his vote was miscounted.

By the way, point (a) rules out voting-from-home right away, no matter how sophisticated the counting system.  Voting must be done in a special location, that is carefully designed and monitored to ensure that no one can see the voter's choice, not even if he wants to reveal it.   EDIT: For the same reason,  the voter must not be allowed to use his own equipment when voting. The equipment must be shared by many voters and must be such that it cannot know who is voting, and cannot leak any information other than the total,  not even the order in which votes were cast.

There may be fairly complicated ways of doing that [ secure paperless e-voting ] using cruptography.   If they can be proven to work, that would be great news.  However, I doubt that they will be better in practice than the proven medium-tech solution: besides the electronic counting, ensure a paper record of the vote, that the voter can check and the system cannot change afterwards; store that in a conventional ballot box; and count the paper ballots at the voting place, manually, at the end of voting day.  That is a solution that everybody understands and anyone can help to implement.  Cannot get more decentralized and voter-centric than that...

Moreover, I don't see why it would be a good idea to use the bitcoin protocol and blockchain, rather than a separate special-purpose protocol.   Using the bitcoin blockchain for voting sound like "how can we use a jet engine to make popcorn".  

My first comment is that some consultant must have earned a big check by copying some trivial observations, already made many times in this forum, and pasting them into a neatly formatted report with a nice plastic cover. 

The "flat transaction profile" that they mention must be this graph, of the total daily output volume E extracted from the blockchain (according to the site, excluding the outputs that appear to be back-change).

But I have a different explanation for why the E plot is basically "flat". (I don't recall whether I posted this already, sorry if I did).  Its current value, about 100'000 BTC/day (50 million USD/day), seems way too big to be actual payments (bitcoins changing hands).  Consider that Bitpay claims to have processed only 100 million USD in 2013, when the total E volume, eyeballing from that plot, was at least 3000 million USD.  While there must be a lot of BTC payment that does not use Bitpay, the
ratio >30:1 seems excessive.

My theory is that a large fraction  of the E volume -- maybe 90% or more -- is "fake", that is, bitcoins moving between addresses that belong to the same person.  These could be mixing, hotwallet/coldwallet movements, deposits and withdrawals from exchanges, software testing, etc..

This explanation for the flatness of the E plot may be good news, because it does not exclude the possibility that actual use may be indeed increasing.   If 90% of the E volume is fake,  even a 100% increase in real usage would be quite hard to see on the E plot.

On the other hand, this theory means that the current cost of the Bitcoin Network, in proportion to actual use, is quite large.   If the E volume were 100% actual payments, each payment would have a hidden 4% fee, currently paid by bitcoin holders (as inflation tax) rather than by the actual users.   If 90% of the E-volume is fake, that hidden processing fee is 40%.

Clearly, radical adjustments in the network and the nature of the blockchain traffic will have to occur while the protocol switches from block rewards to transaction fees, if bitcoin is to remain competitive with bank transfers and credit cards.

Medicare (and Obamacare, afaik) did not revoke that premise that health care should be left to private (profit-seeking, self-regulated) enterprise.  It merely helped private health care companies to charge even more from the public, by spreading out their inflated bills over all citizens and collecting them before the salary got to the employee.

So the US merely adopted one feature of public health care (healthy people are forced to share the cost of taking care of the sick) without adopting its goal (keeping the public healthy rather than maximizing the HMO owners' income).  With the wrong goal, that feature only made things worse, much worse.

We don't need to make hypotheses about the merits of private vs. (truly) public health care, there are plenty of examples of the latter around the world.


I understand that libertarians do not like to be told that  their new fantastic Non-Inflationary Currency is currently supported entirely by inflation tax, in the strict sense of the term.  But, unless you can point out some factual inaccuracy in what I wrote, I must assume that by FUD you mean "Facts U Dislike".

Good question, why did I?

Indeed, it was the creation of a government who traditionally considered health care not to be its concern, and therefore left it entirely to private enterprise.  As it always happens, left to its "self-regulation"  the health care market degenerated into an oligopoly, whose only concern is to maximize the revenue of their owners; who that maintains their dominance of the market by buying out the government. 

To keep the post within the topic: that is the way that the bitcoin mining network is going now.

By the way, I hope you are aware that the Government of the Distributed Libertopian Republic of Bitcoin, aka the Bitcoin Network, is currently supported entirely by the printing of new money, to the tune of ~4000 BTC/day; which means 10%/year inflation rate (in the strict sense).  As with any inflation tax, this one is taken from all those who own bitcoins.

And, by the way, it was with  those fiat bitcoins that KnC bought their Platinum membership in The Shrem Karpelès & Friends Foundation.  Can you see the pattern forming?

Hey, weren't you in the past too, a few moments ago?

I am paid by the taxpayers of the State of São Paulo, to be more precise.

You are payed by those who buy the bitcoins that you sell.  That of course determines the opinion that you pretend to have about its future.

You mean Jersey perhaps?  They want businesses on their island.  As long as it is not an outright scam, they won't care much about whether the fund is a good investment or not.  Especially if the customers are expected to come from Continental Europe, Middle East, ...

And why did GABI register there, rather than in the UK?

I hope you all are aware that bitcoin news sites like Coindesk are not supported by traders or individual bitcoiners, but by enterprises such as SMBIT, GABI, Bitpay, Bitstamp, etc..  Ditto for "advertorials" in newspapers.

Have you ever seen those media print anything negative bout those enterprises?  (They even defended Danny Brewster after he ran away...)  You cannot take what they print as the Gospel.  They will only print the pros; for the cons, you are on your own.

Thanks for that link. Quoting from that second article:

... and then you discover that your bitcoins did not go to the car dealer's address, but to some other address that no one knows who it belongs to, and there is no way to get them back...

I note that GABI were having trouble finding insurance against theft of their funds.

Well, I don't expect it to create demand *on the exchanges*  initially, but on the other hand it may do so at a later time.

By the way, SMBIT had no net sales since July 1st.  I wonder how the other funds (PBP, Matonis's, ...) are doing...


Aren't bulls the official producers of said stuff? 

Creating a bitcoin fund is a way to sell a large stash of bitcoin without immediately depressing the price, and without making it seem that the holders have lost faith.  GABI will probably buy the coins initially OTC from the GABI creators.  It may even remove buying pressure from the markets, if some people who would have bought raw bitcoins will choose to buy GABI shares instead.

I wonder if GABI will have a lock-in period, like SMBIT (i.e. the client can liquidate only after N months).

And point to the weight on the DHL label as proof that the miner was delivered WITH a PSU...

I wonder if that piece of rusty iron weighs as much as a PSU.  (I have a theory; it is stupid, but reality seems to be much "stupidier" than anything I could imagine...)

Bah, I won't bother, I don't trust @JorgeStolfi's brain. 

I see that BTC-China eliminated fees in September 2013.  Presumably by competition from Huobi and OKCoin, who had opened a couple of months earlier and did not charge fees from the start. 

But the drastic loss of volume around Dec/19 coincided with the Deecember decree, and I recall that they were left without bank deposit channels while Huobi kept it open (using the CEO's personal account) and OKCoin soon restored theirs.   I don't recall whether they restored fees on that date too.

At some point earlier this year, Bobby Lee was at odds with the other two CEOs on that matter: he wanted fees, they did not.

I think BTC-China always had fees until recently perhaps.  What happened in Dec/19 is that they lost the deposit channel via bank transfer. They came up with a voucher system that apparently was not popular, while Huobi and OKCoin found a way to continue using banks for deposit.  I don't know exactly what is the reason for their recent revival: they accept USD and HKD deposits, they have a mobile trading app, they may have eliminated the trading fees...

The boicoin network now has 180'000 TH/s, so, by my arithmetic, a 1.2 TH/s machine is expected to yield about 12 US$ worth of bitcoins per day, on the average.  (is my math correct?) How much electricity does it consume per day?

It would take 480 days for it to repay a 6000 US$ investment, if nothing changed.  But of course difficulty will increase, and the BTC price may not increase.

That is not the trendline that people were posting until six months ago.  It has been modified to make it look like the current price is still within the historic channel, when in fact is has strayed below it.

Even if the price were to fall to 300$ for the next six months, we can be sure that someone would redraw the channel to say that bitcoin is "undervalued", rather than stopped following the exponential trend.

What could one ask in response to such a question?