Yes... I know. And what would be the problem with that? If you say it's because some miners will decide to pull out, I will pull out my own hair, because that's exactly what my post was addressing.
Sorry, by "inflation" I meant "increase in money supply". It would be really easy to have constant inflation - just set the block reward such that every 52600 blocks mined (~1 year) would increase the amount of bitcoins in circulation by 2%. This would also be predictable. However it would constantly devalue everybody's bitcoins, just like with fiat money, so I don't know if it'd be ideal. It would incentivize mining though.
[...] otherwise a surprise 51% attack from a botnet could steal all of your bitcoins.
This is patently false. A 51% attack cannot steal anybody's bitcoins. Stealing coins requires knowing somebody's private key, which amounts to cracking ECDSA, and if somebody can do that they don't need 51% of the computing power to mount it.
An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions. This allows him to:
* Reverse transactions that he sends while he's in control. This has the potential to double-spend transactions that previously had already been seen in the block chain.
* Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations
* Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks
The attacker can't:
* Reverse other people's transactions
* Prevent transactions from being sent at all (they'll show as 0/unconfirmed)
* Change the number of coins generated per block
* Create coins out of thin air
* Send coins that never belonged to him
As to:
If you own bitcoin, it's in your interest to invest heavily in mining even after the gold rush is over [...]
Right. Everyone who actually uses bitcoin will have an interest in making sure there's enough computing power out there to prevent even those weaknesses that remain. Plus, note that a 51% attacker doesn't gain that much, financially, from exploiting those weaknesses. They can't really steal very many coins. The most they can do is double-spend, but for large transactions, people will want to wait for at least a few confirmations, which makes the double-spending almost impossible. What a 51% attacker can really do is screw over the network and attempt to destroy it, but if they're investing that much in the computing power, they're financially better off just legitimately mining for the fees. Then they too have a vested interest in perpetuating the integrity of the network.
They're saying that the fee wont be enough to keep people in. Really, but bother to read their counter argument before you spout off about it.
I RTFA. I countered this point in each of my replies. Here it is again. I'll even bold the important parts:
As miners pull out, it will get easier to mine blocks. There will never be a shortage of computation power to run the network, because if half the miners pull out, it'll get twice as easy to mine blocks. If 75% of the miners pull out, it'll be 4x easier to mine blocks. If 90% of the miners pull out, it'll become 10x easier to mine blocks.
Get it? Whatever the number of miners, transactions will continue to be verified at exactly the same rate. Look at the hashrate chart. The network was chugging along just fine in July when there were < 1,000 terahashes/second. Now there are over 40,000 terahashes/second. So if 97.5% of the miners drop out, the network will run just as well as it did in July, that is, perfectly fine.
So when you reply, tell me again why it is a problem if some miners decide to pull out? Please don't just repeat once again that the article says that the fees will be too low and thus the miners will pull out. I get that that's what the article says. Why is this an issue, given the above?
Miners can simply choose to never include transactions below a certain fee. If enough miners do this then people can keep trying to freeload by posting free transactions, but they're going to take a really long time to get into the blockchain. Miners can and will choose to only mine blocks where the total fees are worth it to try to mine. So high-fee transactions will get in quicker, and low-fee transactions will take longer.
Besides, if miners do start to drop out, the difficulty will decrease (built-in network rule), and it'll become easier (and thus cheaper) to mine. Miners will drop out until the difficulty is such that it's worth it to mine the blocks, whatever the fees are. There's no danger of not having enough computation power to run the network.
This was evident to those of us 3 years ago, who casually downloaded the bitcoin client, left it run for a week or so, and saw not one coin in return. We (by which of course I mean "I") subsequently lost interest and uninstalled the client.
Yep, bitcoin has been doing really poorly over the past 3 years.
You might like to take a look at blockchain.info and note that just about every single transaction that's being posted right now includes a (non-mandatory) fee. It looks like your entire argument is founded upon a fallacy!
The security of people who don't spend isn't at stake. Their coins can't be stolen even if there's a 51% attack. Plus the security of people who make transactions isn't at stake - their transaction can't be altered even with a 51% attack. What's at stake is people who perform a 51% attack doing some double-spending. Even so, I don't see why people wouldn't just increase transaction fees up to the point where that is infeasible.
OTOH it doesn't seem like the worst thing if there was a low level of constant inflation. As far as I understand, that's still an option, if everybody agrees to update their client so the network doesn't fork.
It's like you didn't even read what I wrote at all!
Really, what is the difficulty of mining when all coins are mined?
"The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks." So if it takes 14 days (2016 * 10 minutes) to mine 2016 blocks, the difficulty is exactly the same. If it takes more than 14 days, the difficulty is lowered. If it takes less than 14 days, the difficulty is raised. The difficulty has nothing to do with how many new coins are being generated.
Thus, if there are fewer miners, it will take longer to mine the blocks at the current difficulty, so when the next 2016 blocks have been mined, the difficulty will decrease.
Also note that as the difficulty decreases, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine. So the difficulty will adjust to whatever it has to be so it's economically feasible based on the amount of fees gotten from the transaction volume.
The difficulty of mining scales with the amount of miners. If the amount of miners drops, the difficulty will drop, such that you still get a block every ten minutes or so. Then the only danger is that it is easier to mount a 51% attack, since there's less total mining power. Everyone who transacts in bitcoins will have an incentive to keep the difficulty high enough such that this is unfeasible. Plus, all the transaction fees are optional - you can put out a zero-fee transaction, or a 5 BTC-fee transaction, if you like. If the recommended fees that Bitcoin Core suggests are not sufficient then everybody can just offer more fees.
Check out potholer54's series on climate change. He seems to do a good job covering what the climate scientists actually say vs. what the media reports, which is usually inaccurate (on both sides of the issue). In particular you should watch the one titled "The evidence for climate change WITHOUT computer models or the IPCC". Most of climate science doesn't rely on computer models.
Also note the IPCC doesn't do any research, rather they "[assess] the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change."
There's a difference between treating somebody differently because they are factually different (e.g. it is silly to try to get a man pregnant, but makes sense to make the same attempt with a woman; it makes sense to separate men and women in sports) vs treating them differently because of a belief that has no basis in reality (e.g. dark-skinned people are less intelligent, women are less intelligent, women can't learn how to do X, etc.). Let's keep the former while getting rid of the latter. "isms" fall into the latter category, but people sometimes go too far and slot something that'd fit into the first category as an "ism", which is equally silly (it'd be the opposite belief, treating them the same because of a belief that they're the same when in reality they're not).
There is no physical process which starts off with X matter and ends with more or less than X matter. That equation just points out the energy (aka potential for work) that a certain amount of mass has. Energy isn't a thing, it is a property of matter.
However, he pretends that the problem with "hide the decline" is about something other than tree rings...
Where does he say that? He says at 4:12: "But in fact, Jones was talking about something completely different [than the decline in the global temperature]: the apparent decline in temperatures shown by tree ring data since the 1950s." He is exactly stating that "hide the decline" has something to do with tree rings.
Basically, the guys "hiding the decline" desperately needed to hide the decline in temperatures for that part of their reconstruction in order for that reconstruction to be used as a metric for past temperatures versus CO2.
Yes, exactly as potholer says at 4:27: "The argument is whether tree rings should be used when reconstructing pre-industrial climates." You make this out to be something sneaky and hidden from public, especially combined with your closing statement:
The thing you also missed about the Climategate problem for AGW fans: a lot of what they said would be fine, in a publication, or in an answer to a paper. It was, however, stuff they never told anyone, because it poked huge holes in the foundation of their work.
However, at least in this case, you are simply wrong. It's been openly discussed since at least 1998 when a paper called "Trees tell of past climates: but are they
speaking less clearly today?" was published. A quote from the paper: "This is illustrated in figure 6, which shows that decadal trends in both large-scale-average [Tree-Ring Width] and [MaXimum latewood Density] increasingly diverge from the course of decadal temperature variation after about 1950 or 1960." The lead author, Keith Briffa, even works at the CRU! Clearly this was openly talked about, and before the "hide the decline" email (which was in 1999).
1) It works both ways. A rise in temperature does cause increased CO2 levels. Increased CO2 levels also contribute to further rises in temperature. It is a feedback loop.
2) Yes the greenhouse effect is a bit of a misnomer. It is a different effect than what causes greenhouses to work. This video has an explanation.
Agreed about the alarmists. Note that it's never climate scientists who make ridiculous claims like the ones you listed. The first one was claimed by Al Gore, who is certainly not a climate scientist, while the second was Ted Turner. It is certainly a good idea to not take what they say as being scientifically valid. Even the IPCC report doesn't do any research of its own - it just takes existing research, compiles it, and makes recommendations. To really figure out what's happening you have to look at the science, which means the scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals themselves, not what media sites or public figures or the IPCC says about the science.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... I know. And what would be the problem with that? If you say it's because some miners will decide to pull out, I will pull out my own hair, because that's exactly what my post was addressing.
Sorry, by "inflation" I meant "increase in money supply". It would be really easy to have constant inflation - just set the block reward such that every 52600 blocks mined (~1 year) would increase the amount of bitcoins in circulation by 2%. This would also be predictable. However it would constantly devalue everybody's bitcoins, just like with fiat money, so I don't know if it'd be ideal. It would incentivize mining though.
[...] otherwise a surprise 51% attack from a botnet could steal all of your bitcoins.
This is patently false. A 51% attack cannot steal anybody's bitcoins. Stealing coins requires knowing somebody's private key, which amounts to cracking ECDSA, and if somebody can do that they don't need 51% of the computing power to mount it.
Here is what a 51% attacker can and cannot do:
An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions. This allows him to:
* Reverse transactions that he sends while he's in control. This has the potential to double-spend transactions that previously had already been seen in the block chain.
* Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations
* Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks
The attacker can't:
* Reverse other people's transactions
* Prevent transactions from being sent at all (they'll show as 0/unconfirmed)
* Change the number of coins generated per block
* Create coins out of thin air
* Send coins that never belonged to him
As to:
If you own bitcoin, it's in your interest to invest heavily in mining even after the gold rush is over [...]
Right. Everyone who actually uses bitcoin will have an interest in making sure there's enough computing power out there to prevent even those weaknesses that remain. Plus, note that a 51% attacker doesn't gain that much, financially, from exploiting those weaknesses. They can't really steal very many coins. The most they can do is double-spend, but for large transactions, people will want to wait for at least a few confirmations, which makes the double-spending almost impossible. What a 51% attacker can really do is screw over the network and attempt to destroy it, but if they're investing that much in the computing power, they're financially better off just legitimately mining for the fees. Then they too have a vested interest in perpetuating the integrity of the network.
They're saying that the fee wont be enough to keep people in. Really, but bother to read their counter argument before you spout off about it.
I RTFA. I countered this point in each of my replies. Here it is again. I'll even bold the important parts:
As miners pull out, it will get easier to mine blocks. There will never be a shortage of computation power to run the network, because if half the miners pull out, it'll get twice as easy to mine blocks. If 75% of the miners pull out, it'll be 4x easier to mine blocks. If 90% of the miners pull out, it'll become 10x easier to mine blocks.
Get it? Whatever the number of miners, transactions will continue to be verified at exactly the same rate. Look at the hashrate chart. The network was chugging along just fine in July when there were < 1,000 terahashes/second. Now there are over 40,000 terahashes/second. So if 97.5% of the miners drop out, the network will run just as well as it did in July, that is, perfectly fine.
So when you reply, tell me again why it is a problem if some miners decide to pull out? Please don't just repeat once again that the article says that the fees will be too low and thus the miners will pull out. I get that that's what the article says. Why is this an issue, given the above?
Miners can simply choose to never include transactions below a certain fee. If enough miners do this then people can keep trying to freeload by posting free transactions, but they're going to take a really long time to get into the blockchain. Miners can and will choose to only mine blocks where the total fees are worth it to try to mine. So high-fee transactions will get in quicker, and low-fee transactions will take longer.
Besides, if miners do start to drop out, the difficulty will decrease (built-in network rule), and it'll become easier (and thus cheaper) to mine. Miners will drop out until the difficulty is such that it's worth it to mine the blocks, whatever the fees are. There's no danger of not having enough computation power to run the network.
This was evident to those of us 3 years ago, who casually downloaded the bitcoin client, left it run for a week or so, and saw not one coin in return. We (by which of course I mean "I") subsequently lost interest and uninstalled the client.
Yep, bitcoin has been doing really poorly over the past 3 years.
You might like to take a look at blockchain.info and note that just about every single transaction that's being posted right now includes a (non-mandatory) fee. It looks like your entire argument is founded upon a fallacy!
gameable how?
The security of people who don't spend isn't at stake. Their coins can't be stolen even if there's a 51% attack. Plus the security of people who make transactions isn't at stake - their transaction can't be altered even with a 51% attack. What's at stake is people who perform a 51% attack doing some double-spending. Even so, I don't see why people wouldn't just increase transaction fees up to the point where that is infeasible.
OTOH it doesn't seem like the worst thing if there was a low level of constant inflation. As far as I understand, that's still an option, if everybody agrees to update their client so the network doesn't fork.
Really, what is the difficulty of mining when all coins are mined?
"The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks." So if it takes 14 days (2016 * 10 minutes) to mine 2016 blocks, the difficulty is exactly the same. If it takes more than 14 days, the difficulty is lowered. If it takes less than 14 days, the difficulty is raised. The difficulty has nothing to do with how many new coins are being generated.
Thus, if there are fewer miners, it will take longer to mine the blocks at the current difficulty, so when the next 2016 blocks have been mined, the difficulty will decrease.
Also note that as the difficulty decreases, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine. So the difficulty will adjust to whatever it has to be so it's economically feasible based on the amount of fees gotten from the transaction volume.
The difficulty of mining scales with the amount of miners. If the amount of miners drops, the difficulty will drop, such that you still get a block every ten minutes or so. Then the only danger is that it is easier to mount a 51% attack, since there's less total mining power. Everyone who transacts in bitcoins will have an incentive to keep the difficulty high enough such that this is unfeasible. Plus, all the transaction fees are optional - you can put out a zero-fee transaction, or a 5 BTC-fee transaction, if you like. If the recommended fees that Bitcoin Core suggests are not sufficient then everybody can just offer more fees.
Check out potholer54's series on climate change. He seems to do a good job covering what the climate scientists actually say vs. what the media reports, which is usually inaccurate (on both sides of the issue). In particular you should watch the one titled "The evidence for climate change WITHOUT computer models or the IPCC". Most of climate science doesn't rely on computer models.
Also note the IPCC doesn't do any research, rather they "[assess] the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change."
There's a difference between treating somebody differently because they are factually different (e.g. it is silly to try to get a man pregnant, but makes sense to make the same attempt with a woman; it makes sense to separate men and women in sports) vs treating them differently because of a belief that has no basis in reality (e.g. dark-skinned people are less intelligent, women are less intelligent, women can't learn how to do X, etc.). Let's keep the former while getting rid of the latter. "isms" fall into the latter category, but people sometimes go too far and slot something that'd fit into the first category as an "ism", which is equally silly (it'd be the opposite belief, treating them the same because of a belief that they're the same when in reality they're not).
But women are more valuable. Kill 90% of the men and the population will continue on quite well. Kill 90% of the women and you've got a problem.
True, that's mass though. Mass isn't the same thing as matter. I'm considering the electrons, positrons, photons, etc. to all be matter.
There is no physical process which starts off with X matter and ends with more or less than X matter. That equation just points out the energy (aka potential for work) that a certain amount of mass has. Energy isn't a thing, it is a property of matter.
Since matter is neither created nor destroyed - it merely changes shape - everything is as old as the universe. We are all stardust.
Yes, finally Java added features that other languages have had for years and years.
Or you could just have banks that operate using bitcoins instead of dollars...
Have people robbing brick-and-mortar banks ever decreased the value of the USD? It seems it more decreases the value of that particular bank, non?
Why "nope"? Stackexchange seems like a great (crowdsourced) medium for exactly this. Already a patent application has been struck down thanks to prior art discovered via that site.
You mean something like patents.stackexchange.com?
However, he pretends that the problem with "hide the decline" is about something other than tree rings...
Where does he say that? He says at 4:12: "But in fact, Jones was talking about something completely different [than the decline in the global temperature]: the apparent decline in temperatures shown by tree ring data since the 1950s." He is exactly stating that "hide the decline" has something to do with tree rings.
Basically, the guys "hiding the decline" desperately needed to hide the decline in temperatures for that part of their reconstruction in order for that reconstruction to be used as a metric for past temperatures versus CO2.
Yes, exactly as potholer says at 4:27: "The argument is whether tree rings should be used when reconstructing pre-industrial climates." You make this out to be something sneaky and hidden from public, especially combined with your closing statement:
The thing you also missed about the Climategate problem for AGW fans: a lot of what they said would be fine, in a publication, or in an answer to a paper. It was, however, stuff they never told anyone, because it poked huge holes in the foundation of their work.
However, at least in this case, you are simply wrong. It's been openly discussed since at least 1998 when a paper called "Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today?" was published. A quote from the paper: "This is illustrated in figure 6, which shows that decadal trends in both large-scale-average [Tree-Ring Width] and [MaXimum latewood Density] increasingly diverge from the course of decadal temperature variation after about 1950 or 1960." The lead author, Keith Briffa, even works at the CRU! Clearly this was openly talked about, and before the "hide the decline" email (which was in 1999).
What else ya got?
1) It works both ways. A rise in temperature does cause increased CO2 levels. Increased CO2 levels also contribute to further rises in temperature. It is a feedback loop.
2) Yes the greenhouse effect is a bit of a misnomer. It is a different effect than what causes greenhouses to work. This video has an explanation.
Agreed about the alarmists. Note that it's never climate scientists who make ridiculous claims like the ones you listed. The first one was claimed by Al Gore, who is certainly not a climate scientist, while the second was Ted Turner. It is certainly a good idea to not take what they say as being scientifically valid. Even the IPCC report doesn't do any research of its own - it just takes existing research, compiles it, and makes recommendations. To really figure out what's happening you have to look at the science, which means the scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals themselves, not what media sites or public figures or the IPCC says about the science.