Does using Bitcoin require one to join the libertarian hivemind?
I suggest playing with Dogecoins. It is beginning to become serious, and their community prefers to stay out of this political nonsense.
Dogecoins took some practical things and made them better. No ASICs exist yet for Dogecoin, so its still possible to mine them on normal computers. 1-minute block times means they're much faster than Bitcoins, and its refreshingly silly that people are sending each other thousands of DOGE at a time. (current exchange: $10 == 5,680 DOGE)
So it is ridiculously easy to get yourself thousands of DOGEs to play with.
Q
Remember, SHA256 was designed for speed... and easily made into a hardware implementation. SCRYPT however, was designed to be slow and explicitly designed to be difficult to implement on ASICs (its possible of course, just harder).
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As for the 1 minute box, if you want security, just wait for 10 confirmations in DOGE. If you want speed, you can wait for 1 confirmation. Faster confirmations are strictly more flexible than slower confirmations.
https://alpha-t.net/product/scrypt-asic-miner/
In comparison, your typical R9 290X is hitting 0.8 Litecoin MH/s in 300 Watts.
Your typical Litecoin ASIC Miner is ~26x more power efficient than a GPU.
The 290x hits ~850 MH/s with Bitcoin at 300 Watts. But ASICs will soon hit 600,000 MH/s at 300 Watts. http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/
Basically, BTC ASICs are 700x more efficient than GPUs. LTC (and other SCrypt ASICs) are expected to only be ~20x more efficient.
By making ASICs less efficient, it keeps more of the control of network in the hands of the individuals. SCrypt is the better hashing algorithm for ANY self-proclaimed libertarian, who wishes to remove power from the ASICs that have taken over the BTC network.
So we've got a system that allows for greater ease by having the potential for a 1-minute confirmation, vs a system that FORCES you to always wait 10-minutes.
The system with 1-minute confirmations can always wait for multiple confirmations to increase security. But the system with 10-minute confirmations is forced. Instead, you have tons of sites that wait for 0-confirmations!!
One system is more flexible than the other and solves a pressing need in the core system. Whether you like it or not, DOGE has learned from BTC's mistakes and is improving upon the status quo.
I don't think DOGE is perfect quite yet though, maybe a few more "fun" currencies will come and go before we stick with a winner. But it is clear to me that BTC has too many core issues at hand for it to be the cryptocoin of the future.
The thing with bitcoin is that it is a software protocol, you don't have to apply politics to it. That is like saying TCP/I has a leftwing bias.
Anyone who has studied ethics understands that technology can have political leanings. Robert Moses's Bridges for example, were designed so that African American's would be unlikely to enter certain parts of New York City.
A Bridge in of itself is not pro-segregation or anti-segregation. But when Robert Moses used bridges to block bus traffic to certain areas of New York City, they were being used as pro-segregationist tools.
Technology is NOT politically agnostic. Only the naive or uneducated can believe that.
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DOGECOIN's politics have been explicitly stated. It wants to be a fun and easy coin for people to get into. It is unlikely to last very long (the 100 Billion DOGE soft-cap will be hit rather quickly), but they hope to learn a lot about coins in the meantime.
Bitcoin's politics have been decided as well. Libertarians are beginning to wield BTC as a way to push their values.
I'm simply stating that one of these communities is much funner to work with. Keeping coins "fun" and "easy" resonates with me a lot more than the typical libertarian I hear about BTC.
I agree that would certainly be nonsense.
But any technology project most definitely can implement the ideological beliefs of its creators, if it's designed to do so and succeeds in achieving that design objective.
For example, the World Wide Web was developed to facilitate sharing, exchange and collaboration.[1]. You might say Tim Berners-Lee did have certain belief system and that he did implement those in his design.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#...
Who would disdain to subscribe under this flowing banner?