If everybody knows that it is a ponzi and how ponzis work, then it is just gambling, and that is OK.  But that is usually not the case, is it?  Many people enter ponzis because they naively believe that it is a sure win.  Some enter because they know that many will think like that.  The latter are scammers, the former are their victims.

No, I posted the positive trust review.  I mean it.

A "double your bitcoins" scheme cannot create bitcoins out of nothing.  It can only be a ponzi, that takes bitcoins from some players and gives them to other players.  If you enter a ponzi, knowing that it is a ponzi, you intend to defraud someone else and take his coins.  So you are the scammer.

The OP is doing exactly what he said he was going to do.  You did not understand what he was doing, and your attempted scam turned against you.  Your fault.  0.001 BTC is a low fee for a lesson; maybe he should have let people "invest" more.  He is a generous educator.

User @amaclin is the most valuable person in bitcoin space today. 

So it is much better if a minorty of 15% tells the 85% majority that their opinions and interests don't matter?   

Mankind has been struggling with the problem of collective decision-making for several thousand years, if not several million.   While it can be proved mathematically that there is no ideal solution (just as it was proved that there could be no distributed payment system), mankind has found over time that some solutions are worse than others, and identified some that are generally less bad than all the others.

Unfortunately, those solutions are generally based on the idea that it is better to have the majority of people happy and a minority unhappy, than the other way around; and that assumption does not go well with some people.

More explictly: by Greg's argument, the UN should impose a worldwide production limit of 1 million liters of soft drinks per day.  Otherwise, the manufacturers like Coke and Pepsi have to give way their products for free,  they would go broke, and there would not be enough soft drinks for everybody.   

BITCOIN: The world's future global value transmission system, secured by 1000 PH/s of mining power and by a developer team who would bankrupt a homemade lemonade stand on the first day.

There is no need for that ugly kludge -- split transactions and blocks into two records -- to fix transaction malleability.  It would sufflice to skip the signatures when computing the transaction id.

Blockstream's reasons to want that kludge, ignoring all objections, are obscure.  It is not necessary or helpful for fixing malleability, and does not reduce bandwidth or storage costs.  On the contrary, there are alternative solutions to save bandwith from miners to clients that are simpler and more effective.

One possiblility is that they want the freedom to muck around with the signatures withot having to justify or explain to anyone, since they could claim that the "main" record contains the information that other ordinary wallets need, while the contents of the extension block neeed to be understood only by them.

Ot perhaps the LN will require some horrendoulsy complicated signatures; then SegWit would be a way to accomodate such  transactions without impacting the bandwidth or requiring an an increase in the block size limit.  Ans maybe also a way to keep the LN fees down: Pieter suggested that the fee rate (mBTC/kB) for the signature record would be a fraction of that of the main records, ostensibly to encourage use of the SegWit format.

Even worse:

SF Bitcoin Dev Meetup Co-Organizer gives Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik 24 hrs to renounce support for Bitcoin Classic or else face smear campaign

Well, only today I learned that in English the word "socialist" means something quite different than what it means in other languages.  So you are right an I am wrong, sorry.   

I must now go back and translate my posts into italian or something else. 

As a lame of excuse: besides the French wikipedia that I quoted, in several European countries including Italy and France there used to be both a Communist Party and a Socialist Party, who were often bitter rivals.  While the Communist parties AFAIK never got in power, except as part of broader coalition,  and went extinct after the collapse of the USSR, the Socialists were often in power, and are still strong today -- and yet they never tried to "own the methods of production".

Well, that must be the reason why there has never been a significant Socialist Party in the US.

I was aware that a similar thing happens with the word "liberal", which has quite a different meaning in English (in politics) than it has elsewhere.  So much so that King Bush I was fond of saying "the L-word" to refer to leftist things like social security, whereas elsewhere the terms means generally "tolerant" or "supportive of individual freedoms" -- and here in Brazil it even came to mean what "conservative" means in English (so that Reagan and Thatcher were labeled "neo-liberal" down here).


I did not say that it was mistaken. Even in the non-English sense it is correct, since communism is a radical type of socialism.


Who do you think writes those Wikipedia articles, huh? 

Not at all!  Capitalism (as a political term) basically says that whatever you can grab by following the rules of the game, you can keep. In particular, it sees no difference between gains from speculative trading,  monopolistic and abusive pricing, deceitful marketing, exploitation of cheap labor, activities that damage the envirnment or public health, etc.; and the state should not try to hamper such activities.  In Capitalism, poverty and inequality are non-problems.


By taxes, of course.  Socialism generally implies higher taxes, and progressive income taxes -- to counter the "rich get richer" consequence of capitalism.

But hey: I am not trying to convince anyone here that socialsm is good.  Just trying to explain what "socialism" means.


That is a serious distortion of the term "free market"  that Libertarians and Anarchists have invented.  Sorry, a free market is totally not a market that is free from regulation and control.  

Basically, it is a market where consumers are free to chose among suppliers, suppliers are free to set their prices as they like, there are no artificial production quotas, and -- most important -- there is no spurious barrier to the entry of new suppliers.  In a free market, theory says that prices will adjust to be the cost of production plus a profit that is about just enough to make that market as profitable as any other activity.  

The opposite of a free market is an oligopoly (including monopoly), where there are few suppliers and new ones are prevented from entry (even if they have the capital and capability to do so).  Then the suppliers can conspire to raise their prices to the level that maximizes their net revenue, which can be much higher than the free market price.

Left to themselves, markets often degenerate into oligopolies or monopolies, because of the same factors that led to concentration of bitcoin mining.  Many countries have antitrust and competition laws to prevent that from happening and keep the markets free.

Throughout history, societies have found that method much better than the alternative of "who has the biggest guns".  In fact, societies often opted for very stupid divination methods to decide disputes, because even a judicial system with 50% error rate is better than the Far West system.


Well, thanks for the first part, but I would quite dispute the second one.  I admit that, like most computer nerds, my knowledge of economics was actally negative, only two years ago; but I think that I learned quite a bit watching bitcoin.

And I have also lived under a right-wing military dictatorship, various populist presidents, an earnestly neo-con president, a Keynesian-socialist president, not to mention 13 years of neo-con goverments in the US.  I think that those experiences entitle me to have my own opinion on such things...  


I would love to live in a society that gets the good things that governments are supposed to offer, but without a government.  

I just think that it is not a real possibility, and dreaming about it is a waste of time.  So I prefer to think of what we can do to make governments work better.


That is from the English Wikipedia.  Since your quote comes from a bitcoin site, I suppose that both were written by Libertarians, who obviously thought that they knew all about politics and economics.  

Until I get around to fixing that Wikipedia article, let me quote another paragraph from it, that is somewhat less wrong:


But the Frenck Wikipedia has a better explanation:



By the way, in the English Wikipedia it also says that anarchism and Libertarianism are flavors of Socialism!  So Anarchists are in favor of "social democratic ownership and control of the means of production"?


Yes, communism is a sub-species of socialism, like Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's version.  But socialism is a much wider term than those cases.  Sweden, for example, was widely called a socialist country until some decades ago.

(Another socialist idea that capitalists and neocons hate is the progressive income tax, that in Sweden, IIRC, reched 60% or more for the upper brackets.)

Moreover, just because a country puts "Socialist" in its name, it does not mean that they are really socialist. Ditto for "Democratic", "Free", etc.

Gavin (8 years at SGI) and Mike (7 years at Google) were the only core devs with significant experience in professional software development; indeed, in the development of sensitive products and services worth billions of dollars.  

AFAIK, all the other developers are amateur hackers, that do not know what "professional" means, and do not want to know.  Greg's apparently serious discussion of using the PoW self-destruct button if the miners choose Classic is just one of the many incidents that show their total lack of qualifications for the role that they want to have.  

But, thanks to Blockstream and its 21 million DirtyGreenCoins, they managed to oust the two boringly conservative guys, who nixed all their brillian plans to improve the protocol; and now they have the field all to themselves, and can happily hack away...

The thing that should worry you all is that the Classic team is not much better qualified, although it seems to have better goals (like BitcoinXT had).  Fact is, control over the future evolution of your precious coin is being disputed by two bands of amateur hackers.

The Chinese miners perhaps have sided with the Core developers so far only because, from the other side of the planet, it is hard to see how incompetent and misguided that team is.  Maybe Greg's lunatic menace will open their eyes.  Anyway, if they had had any sense, they should assemble their own team of professional software developers, and take control of the protocol -- as it is meant to be.

Dictionary compilers cannot avoid having their political preferences... 


It is a very poor definition, because it looks at only one narrow issue (ownership and control of means of production), ignoring all the other aspects where socialism differs from the right-wing ideologies (capitalism, conservatism, neo-conservatism, whatever you call them), including those that I listed.  And that definition is quite wrong in that point, because socialism does not at all imply "social ownership of the means of the means of production".  Again, that is in fact the feature that defines communism, specifically, as an extreme type of socialism.  In fact, socialism does not imply democracy: nazism and fascism are standard examples of non-democratic socialist regimes, and that is the case of several countries today, including some monachies in the Middle East.  (So much so that the "social democrats" often feel the need to explicitly qualify themselves so.)

But that is actually an example of what I was referring to.  After a decade of fighting black rights movements, the white majority eventually decided to improve the right of minorities with anti-discrimination laws, equal opportunity and affirmative action, financial support, etc.. The same happened half a century before with labor disputes, that eventually resulted in the US having a surprisingly worker-friendly labor legislation.


Even knowing that one's own vote will not decide the election, a "socially intelligent" person will take the time to vote according to his desires; because democracy has a chance of working if, and only if, everybody does that.   (And that is why votes must be secret, and even the voter himself must be prevented to provide proof that he voted in a certain way: so that the election can measures the actual wishes of the citizens, without the distortions of peer pressure).

My experience is that even the poorly educated people can vote much better than the elites claim.  When democracy fails, it is often because it is not given a fair chance, or not used often enough.  (Here in Brazil the main Executive and Legislative posts are elected, but the Judiciary is totally self-selected and indepednent. As a result, while the first two branches barely work, and are highly corrupt, the latter does not work at all, and is totally corrupt...)


What matters in the Constitution are its articles . The reference to "self-evident rights" is only a pretense of justification for them, without any legal relevance -- because each one has his own opinion about what is "self-evident". 

While there are important differences in specific areas, the legal systems of most Western countries are pretty much the same pastiche of constituional articles, laws voted by elected representatives, laws enacted by public referendums, more or less arbitrary decrees of various authorities, judiciary precedents, etc.. There is very little space for "natural laws" or 'self-evident principles" in those legal systems, except in the nooks and gaps where the written laws don't quite reach.


That is true, but the alternative is, inevitably, domination of the majority by some minority.  Methinks that, by and large, the latter is much worse.

But in that case the laws and contracts are useless, because the dispute will be decided by the expected costs and benefits of each action (e.g., the party with the machine guns gets his way), and not by any laws or contracts.


Today I learned a new name for "government": "Dispute Resolution Organization". 
 
I suppose that the difference is that there will be several DROs that the parties can choose from.  But suppose that they both agree on DRO A when they sign te contract, but when the dispute arises one party asks his buddies from DRO B to persuade the other party, while the latter brings his nuke-launching Abrams tank out of the cellar...   

Those multiple DROs sound very much like big city gangs...


That would be wonderful!  But does anyone have any idea on how we can get that rule to apply?


Well, I think that bitcoin will in the future be a textbook example of (among other things) why loss of reputation is hardly an effective deterrent.  See Josh Garza, Patrick Strateman, Zhou Tong, ...  While a scammer or defaulter may lose a fraction of his market, there will always be whose who take his side.  Why, even Danny "Neo&Bee" Brewster seems to still have friends in the community...

And, according to the P. T. Barnum Law, there is a sucker born every 12 seconds...

That is more like the definition of "communism".  

To me, socialism is more general term that contrasts to "capitalism", in the sense of bein more society-oriented rather than individual-oriented.  Among other things:

(1) each individual should be rewarded by society in proportion to what he does for society, rather than by his possestions, descent, titles, intelligence, shrewdness, etc.;  

(2) property and economical rights of the individual are not absolute but are subordinate to the interests of society as a whole,

(3) the state is supposed to provide public services like health care, education, social security, transportation infrastructure, emergency and security services, etc.;

(4) the state should try to ensure equal opportunities to everybody and ensure that everybody has a decent minimal living conditions.

Socialism definitely does not imply state ownership of the means of production; but it implies state regulation, e.g. to force companies who provide vital services like water or electricity to charge reasonable prices, respect quality standards, provide basic service even to unprofitable areas, etc..  It admits, but does not require, that such services be provided directly by the state, by civil servants or through state-owned companies.

Socialism implies protection of consumer rights and mandatory product quality and safety standards; but is quite compatible with free market economy.  In fact, as part of protecting consumer rights, socialism implies state intervention when needed to keep markets free, by preventing the formation of monopolies and cartels.

That is true, and it is one of the reasons why "democracy is the worst form of government there is".  But other methods of reching "consensus"  are not any better in that regard, often much worse; hence the other half of the saying.

While democracy does not directly account for intensity of desire, it has some indirect ways. For example, if the majority chooses laws that are too unfair to some minority, the latter may resort to crime to make ends meet, or to terrorism and other anti-social behavior, in spite of the penal deterrents against such acts.  Then the majority, if it is not too stupid, will usually ease the plight of that minority, enough to keep those reactions down to a tolerable level.

Democracy, like anything else, will function better if most of its citizens have more knowledge (especially of other societies, past and present) and more intelligence (especially the social intelligence I mentioned: awareness of the reactions that other people may have to one's own actions, and to the actions of the government.  The fair treatment of minorities, above, is an example of decision that a majority will take if it has a minimum of those qualities.  

That is one reason, by the way, why even the richest classes should want a good public universal education: because their welfare never depends only on their own qualities and actions, but always depends on the state of the society around them.  


As I said in another post, "right" is a meaningless word if there is no government to decide who has it.  Property is not a "natural right": you property is what your government thinks it is.  There is no other useful way to define it.  

You grow a crop on the land that is property of someone else: who owns the harvest?  You may have signed a contract giving 90% of the harvest to the landowner, but if the alternative was to sign the contract or die of hunger, is that any different than him taking your harvest by force?  You buy a stolen car without knowing that it was stolen; is it your property, or still the property of the victim? If you trace the history of a land plot back in time, you will almost always find that it was originally taken by force from the previous owner; so, is the present holder really the rightful owner?

In those and many other examples, there is no "natural" answer to the question.  In each case, if the property right is disputed, the laws of the country will give general rules that say who has the property rights; a court would have to decide how to apply those laws to the specific case; and a government will have to forcibly enforce the court's decision, if the affected party refuses to accept it.

Laws and contracts are useless if there is no third party with power to enforce them and settle disputes. 

See for example the Ver x OKcoin caper over the domain bitcoin.com.  Apart from the forged signature, the contract that they agred to was useless because it did not specify the jurisdiction, and did not even specify the legal entity involved (OKCoin China, or its Singapore subsidiary?).  So, when they disagreed over its terms, all they could do was to exchange insults on reddit. 

For contracts, the two parties could still use arbitrators by mutua agreement; but if one party refuses to do what the arbitrator determiens, what then?  For that, and for disputes or acts between random people not covered by contracts, there has to be a government of some sort, that defines the laws and has the power to apply them.

Now, those laws are either approved by the majority, or they are approved by a minority (maybe empty) and disapproved by the majority.  The latter situation is unstable, unless the minority has somehow more power than the majority (e.g. they have the bigger guns, or they are the only ones who can read the stars and predict the time to sow the maize).  Anyway, if you are part of that minority, you may like it; but chances are that you will not be, and anyway the society as a whole will be unhappy.


That is a nice idea, but don't expect me to take it seriously until you can point out one example of a society, anywhere and anytime, that managed to function for any reasonable length of time without the members creating some sort of government with power to determine the fate of individuals in spite of their wishes...

I don't think so...

When a fork is proposed, like XT or Classic (with 75% trigger and a few weeks of grace period between the trigger and the switch to new rules), I think that:

* Before the fork, holders should pray that it resolves neatly and quickly as a non-event, and keep quiet or voice their preferences quietly, so that it does not upset the price;

* If the proposal gains some support, but neither reaches 75% nor drops back to zero, and it looks like the impasse may continue for a while, they may want to speak out for one outcome, to help break the impasse -- but that may make things worse if they themselves cant agree on which side to support.   They may want to sell while the price is still OK, justin case; but that may cause the price to crash.  Or they may choose to bet on the price recovering later, and keep holding.

* If the proposal gets little suport and seems to be a sure fail, the holders shoul shout it down.

* If the proposal gets 51% and keeps increasing, the holders should cheer it along.

* If the proposal gets the required support and triggers, the holders should upgrade their clients accept it, and do what they can to convince the remaining miners and players to accept it too.

* If the change has triggered, but at the end of the grace period there is still a non-negligible fraction of the miners that refuse to accep it, then the holders should try to convince the exchanges and other services to boycott the minority chain and refuse its coins, and convince the miners to sabotage the minority chain.

With the first alternative in the second paragraph I meant "fail to gather any suport BEFORE the change is activated, so that the fork never happens and no one seriously thinks that it will happen". 

The first paragraph applies if the fork happens, but is not a clean non-event (i.e., if there is a significant fraction of the hashpower still mining the old chain after the change is activated, in spite of the alerts and grace period).

Sorry for the confusion.

Even for libertarian and anarchists, a switch to classic should be indifferent or better.  Even if the LN works at all, it will be impractical to use it without going through a big hub; and hubs are going to be totally AML/KNC compliant, which means no anonymous payments, govenment blockades, temporary and even permanent freezing of funds, etc..

Moreover, most coin holdings are not in the hands of ideoologically motivated libertarians and ancaps, but in the hands of profit-motivated investors,
big or small.


I know that it is difficult to understand why democracy is "the worst system of government, excluding all the others".  It takes the ability to think socially: "Whatever I can think, do, want, or get, others can think, do, want, or get too".

Libertarians and anarchists are notoriously unable to think that way.  So, when they conclude that the choices of a minority should prevail over those of the majority, they always assume implicitly that it will be their minority, not some other minority.