asciilifeform: actually, Stalin ramped up industry, the war machine, etc. by saving on the men in the leather jackets. (Most of the purging was of the old purging apparatus.) Resources are, unfortunately, finite.
asciilifeform: I think Rome could learn; "BitDenarius..."
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: seems like you were born a few 1000 years too late...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: fast-forward a decade. you run a kingdom. do you care to spend all of your time personally quashing revolts?
asciilifeform: yes, but presumably the cost of administering more of a beating than is necessary for a full education is a net waste.
asciilifeform: well yes, but all else being equal, you want the peasants to submit willingly, rather than hire people to pummel them (with gold that you could otherwise buy a second golden helicopter with.)
asciilifeform: (AFAIK there's nothing "red" about the concept of guard labour. it is just the banal fact that you have to hire rat-catchers if your planet has rats, and this costs you something.)
asciilifeform: so why is the herd of morons pumping MtGox full of dollars such a bad thing?
asciilifeform: stolen is the wrong word, when people are shoving money at you voluntarily
asciilifeform: to continue with the analogy, virtually all of the serious BTC people are "rat catchers." In that much of their winnings derive from the "stupid money" at the table - MtGox, people who buy BTC there because the TV said to, etc.
asciilifeform: if it doesn't matter what the rats do or think, why would MtGox's effect on the rat media matter?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: so why is the life (and death) of MtGox a subject of interest to you?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: to run with the analogy, you should wonder why most of the non-rats are ignoring the Italian restaurant in favour of the garbage dump.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: no alternative, if you're a rat. and right now most BTC users are more or less that.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what, exactly, is the practical alternative to Gox right now? OTC, where one has to actually deal with humans? BTC-e, where BTC consistently traces <50USD vs. gox?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nah, the worst reputation is just some random address you can send BTC or wire USD to from which nothing comes out again. MtGox is still a league above the rest, considering that this is what the rest is by default.
asciilifeform: (esp. if you include the cost of establishing reputation in said cost. otherwise my front door could be a top BTC exchange.)
asciilifeform: the prize goes to whoever can suck in and spit out fiat with the smallest transaction cost.
asciilifeform: BTC-fiat trading might be a "winner take all" game, like cocaine cartels.
asciilifeform: any lackey of the traditional banking system can trade USD for EUR, so it is unremarkable. but there appears to be a limited number of people with the balls and connections to run automated BTC/fiat exchanges.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: at any rate, why are we burying MtGox again? who exactly is a serious contender for its throne?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is more like, you do the 100,000th girl and your cock falls off from exceeding its MTBF.
asciilifeform: if the real purpose of MtGox is to bring in tons of chump money for the owner, then it is working great, even if it will soon be done serving its purpose.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the damn thing is still online and trading, for one
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: as far as I can tell, its shirt is still on. and the operator is laughing all the way to the (fiat) bank.
asciilifeform: I suspect, but cannot prove, that the people making the real money on BTC regardless of ups/downs are front-running exchanges.
asciilifeform: ok, maybe lag only works to Dr. Evil's advantage if he uses it as a nice padded box in which to hide front-running.
asciilifeform: the guy who has deterministic+fast access (say, Dr. Evil who runs Gox and controls the Lag Generator) presumably wins over those who are stuck talking to the business end of MtLag
asciilifeform: (whenever I read the word "goxlag" I can't help but imagine a future Gulag for BTC users...)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if speed doesn't matter, why does anyone complain about "goxlag" ?
asciilifeform: because what they're ultimately whining about is "the race being to the swift."
asciilifeform: even if all trades had to "fill or kill" immediately, people will still whine about HFT and bots.
asciilifeform: that only kills one type of robotic trading (fake orders to move the market)
asciilifeform: everybody says that bots/HFT are a fact of life, but what if you have to solve a Sokoban (or other AI-complete nonsense) to move a coin...
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: maybe Satoshi should have waxed his car instead of dealing in weird hypotheticals, too.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: this would have to be an alt-chain.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: AFAIK, anything where coins can move programmatically is incompatible with Bitcoin as we know it.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: the wronged party needs to be able to deal damage to a scammer without benefiting himself.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: a Shitcoin that can result in moving coins is a terrible idea. Moral hazard for bond-holders.
asciilifeform: Scrat: see "CAPTCHA" as a (somewhat flawed) example.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: exactly that. this system would ride on top of Bitcoin proper. non-Shitcoin-enabled clients would function exactly as they do now.
asciilifeform: jurov: the idea is that you need to pick a work function which remains hard even when a million people (some of whom with arbitrary pull) want it to be easy.
asciilifeform: jurov: this just guarantees that every peer-reviewed journal will be subverted by SlaveCoiners eventually.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: the idea is that a user has to sign a message with his key: "This coin can be shat on in the future, by anyone who can provide x such that F(x) = somenumber." He gives x to the bond holder(s).
asciilifeform: at the time I wrote that, I was not yet 100% clear on how the block chain works. But now I know that Shitcoin could ride entirely on top of Bitcoin proper. You would store the necessary data as custom transactions (the way some people encode prayers into the blockchain.)
asciilifeform: but the idea is that "clean" coins would be worth more.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: the only coins you can shit on are those for which a Shitcoin bond has been issued to you. but it is true that you could do so maliciously. hence a certain amount of dirt would be seen as commonplace.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: more or less. but note that their signatures only count if you deliberately offered your coins for the process (to build trust.)
asciilifeform: the only long-term solution is a work function that is "AI-complete." Hence SlaveCoin.
asciilifeform: the fun part in all of this is that "for every wily arse, somewhere there is a cock with threads." Eventually someone builds an optical computer operating on standing-wave physics, that pwns every new hashing function you come up with the day it comes out.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: all you need is a high-speed interconnect that lets you connect arbitrarily more of whatever the necessary resource is (RAM, hashing power, etc.)
asciilifeform: right now you can put the BTC world in your pocket for less than the cost of a jumbo jet.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: but raising the cost of attack is a loser's game. eventually someone will pony up the cost, and rule.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: fine, the ASIC will have RAM on-die, running at the same clock.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: a PC with 1TB of RAM will still be beaten by an ASIC connected to the same 1TB of RAM.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: any scheme that claims to be resistant to hardware brute-forcing which doesn't change complexity class is hollow - it just hasn't met the right hardware yet.
asciilifeform: SlaveCoin, on the other hand, evens the playing field somewhat.
asciilifeform: think about the endgame in the ASIC trend. eventually, only powerful industrial nations will matter in the BTC game, because they can afford to build fabs. Just a handful each, even. And we're back to the central-baking clusterfuck we see with fiat.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the slaves need a certain minimum IQ, for Sokoban.
asciilifeform: all of the Bitcoin-like altchains are doomed, because the first serious guy with a semiconductor fab will own the world. SlaveCoin is the future!
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: Satoshi's use of gnarly C++ is one of the best pieces of evidence for the "Bitcoin is an NSA black project" crackpot hypothesis.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I'm rather surprised you have not built SlaveCoin yet.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: exactly. slavegirls don't scale quite as well as ASICs.
asciilifeform: now, consider an alt-chain where mining can only be done with human labour. say, solving PSPACE-complete puzzles like Sokoban.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: people will always assume that whoever the early miners turn out to be, are in cahoots with whoever proposes the alt-chain.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: and ASICs will always win in the end.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: at this point, an alt-chain is guilty until proven innocent of being a clever pre-mining scheme.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: sorry, had the denominations reversed. but still.
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: LTC ~= 1.3 USD, as of a few seconds ago. Not exactly gum wrappers yet.
asciilifeform: a scenario where there are multiple blockchains, but automated exchanges connect at least the well-behaved ones, is in some ways equivalent to having one blockchain.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the scenario I envision has BTC playing the role of gold bullion, that is relevant despite only being used in relatively few places.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: without ionosphere bounce (shortwave, <30MHz) or something like MBC you will have a very short usable distance.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I think the quoted bandwidth takes the frequency of usable ion trails into account.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: a few kb/sec. will suffice in the hypothetical Dark Internet-less Future and its transaction volume
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: one thought: this could even be done for profit. Say, transmit the normal blockchain with a few hours of lag, but those who paid a transaction fee get broadcast in real time.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: like satellite comms, but without having to launch satellites.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that's the kind of thing I mean by "X can also have problems."
asciilifeform: Insaneatyou: read about Pirate, GLBSE, etc.
asciilifeform: Insaneatyou: stop talking to us and go read. Start with Satoshi's paper and go on to the discussions of great scams in the fora, and the various practical details of BTC dealings
asciilifeform: Insaneatyou: you can do pretty much what you want with BTC without being made to answer for it, if you have half a brain. plenty of people are.
asciilifeform: Insaneatyou: empty your penny jar, and buy one bitcoin. write a trading bot and see if you can turn it into two.
