bachback

Failing is too strong a word. It is and will be on the decline versus newer tech. A lot has been learned since 2008 and it seems very likely its better to apply that in a new and fresh system. Ironically Bitcoiners aren't necessarily up to date with all that new research.

The problem is solvable. Yes, Bitcoin is supported by subsidies, but it can also be based on fees per transactions. Inflation doesn't help - that just means old coin holders get diluted. The appeal of Bitcoin is precisely the limited supply.

Bitcoin or Altcoins are not a get rich quick scheme. They provide value for users by making transfer of wealth globally possible. The traditional infrastructure cost for this is many trillions of dollars (you pay it with taxes and inflation).

"World computer" => marketing hyperbole. Vitalik currently spends 0 time coding https://github.com/vbuterin/ I know the people who started this and they are mostly not very technical actually.

if you would like to sell me ETH put options, let me know how we can arrange that deal.

The problem with Bitcoin development is and was its not related to the economic underpinnings. Maxwell, Back, et. al. have zero understanding of economics. Not a surprise they would invent side-chains which removes incentives from blockchains. Big blocks are however likewise not an answer. Bitcoin is failing because it is limited, not (just) decisions by Core-dev. But it likely will be around for many years as a platform to fund other chains.

"they really have solved the problem of creating a generic blockchain which can have anything else built on top of it."

No, actually they haven't. Try and explain how a distributed system should be Turing complete in a scientific paper and you'd notice its not possible. Eventually this will be discovered and this blockchain will implode. The centralised team doesn't even claim that the chain will last - they want to migrate to PoS.

AngelList is likely trying to determine whether this is a real company. How is that felony or fraud?

AngelList lists startups, so why are you registering there if you are employed? That's likely a violation of your contract in the first place, and their ToS, and it's public info anyway. AngelList is for companies, not projects. You do realise this info is meant to be public? AngelList is a public register of startups showing the people behind them. If you don't want that info public, don't register there.

the tooling is way superior to common LISP, since it can leverage the huge Java ecosystem. Clojure tooling - it's basically a jar, so if you know how to use Java, you can always fall back to that. ayes, if you want a fully integrated stack with Clojurescript it takes considerable time. I spent that time and it beats everything I know hands down. if you want to code like everyone else, use something else. if you want to 10-100x productivity gains long-term then spend the time. http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

Can someone explain how Google makes so much money with their ad system and how its related to these kinds of ads? Google originally planned never to do ads. They changed course I think 2002 or so, and are now worth 500B$.

Interesting. Do you have details on the 10M$ spend?

Unfortunately I have to agree - Blockstream is a mess. Adam Back and Austin Hill have 0 commits to the project and established them as power brokers.

certainly don't disagree. An acquaintance of mine has trying to get him work on Cryptocurrencies where Merkle trees are all around. he showed some interest and was very open to new ideas. he has a nice website http://www.merkle.com/

http://www.merkle.com/1974/RejectionLetter.pdf

"I had failed to provide any references to the prior work on public key cryptography, and the reasons previous workers in the field had rejected it as impossible. I should have looked up "public key cryptography" on Google before submitting my paper. My defense is feeble: there was no Google, the term "public key cryptography" did not yet exist, and there were no previous workers in the field. There were no words for what I had done, and looking up a concept to show that no one had previously thought of it is difficult. This is not a unique problem: it illustrates a problem faced by anyone trying to explain a new idea to an "expert" who expects a properly referenced article anytime anyone tries to explain something to them. The more a new idea is unrelated to any prior idea or concept the more it must appear as a squawling bastard, naked and alone, appearing de novo and lacking any respectable pedigree or family to vouch for its acceptability."

Both gave speeches about the history of their research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTGqP0nxX08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BJuuUxCaaY

Merkle had a huge influence also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Merkle

interesting. contact details?

"The axioms don't have to be true."

No, not at all. Axioms are better thought of as universally accepted truths which everything else depends on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_atomism

Have you followed Gödel's proof in detail? I know Fields medalists who like to speculate about Gödel, but haven't read Russell and Whiteheads Principia Mathematica (PM). Gödel's system is PM, but PM is quite an impossible read. Most of this discussed has been discussed over 30 years between 1900-1930. By the way Turing also builds on PM in his on computable numbers paper. PM is like a compiler before there were compilers. Today it would look more like metamath.org or https://github.com/vladimirias/Foundations

> Formal mathematics has no concept of absolute truth; this is left for philosophy.

No, it is called logic which is the intersection of both. And most mathematicians haven't done any logic whatsoever. They avoid it, because it means you actually have to think about things. You have to think about why greek symbols have special meanings. And as computer scientists/hackers know, computer code is an alternative medium.

I remember when I asked a math professor about the "=" sign and how things can be equal at all, since if they are either the same (A=A is trivial), it is trivial, or if they are different they are not the same (A=B is false). About 10 years later I discovered this is why physics has the notion of symmetries, which is a statement of the form A - B = 0. Two things are equal iff their transformation leads to the origin. But I should have known this all along, because in computer programs "=" can stand for various kinds of operations. It is just that the language of mathematics in general is so inaccurate that one gets lost on the way.

Most of the worlds capital flows through off-shore finance (Cayman Islands, Isle-of-man, etc), see http://treasureislands.org . For finance, biotech, etc. jurisdiction arbitrage is pretty standard. It's what the big corporations and billionaires do to avoid taxes, and more generally the law. OFC's are strongly tied to the financial centers of NY and London. I doubt that this product is all that useful for entrepreneurs outside developed countries, who have access to legal infrastructure anyway. The real breakthroughs will come from borderless settlement of contracts on the blockchain, i.e. situations where one doesn't rely on lawyers, but computers. One can think about the cost to do an IPO (millions), versus issuing an asset on the blockchain (cents). With Stripe one can really see the hypocrisy of the financial system: they have sponsored an Altcoin called Stellar, but they ban businesses who are dealing with Cryptocurrencies.

the name in itself shows this is not a viable concept at all: a global filesystem? the web was all about getting rid of file abstractions and introducing hypertext. the world (and the net) isn't about just data. its about code, security mechanisms, etc. etc. filesystems are not part of the puzzle, they are just old abstractions the computing world hasn't get rid of yet.

Bitcoin + consensus + smart contracts

Bitcoin already enforces practical law in some sense. If you dig into this it all comes down to property rights, which now can be implemented on the net with blockchains. Ethereum attempts to go a step further along these lines, but its not practical yet IMO. You're right, this is a very fertile ground.

absolutely right. how do you translate from the strings "excitations of quantum fields" to "math with a lot of greek symbols"? Very illuminating is the attempt to convert higher math into computer programs (Bertrand Russell tried this 100 years ago). What is mathematics not reducable to programs, and why isn't physics written in a logic language? It would look like this: http://us.metamath.org/nfegif/mmnf.html

Ultimately you end with set theoretic axioms. But what about functions over time? Category theory is more philosophic than one would think. The true mystery to me is why unconventional thought is so rare. I guess it doesn't pay well to think about things from scratch, certainly in business and also not in science driven by peer-review.

yes. and what about the Github after Github? If open code runs everything its going to a pretty important public utility.

> researchers work on open source projects for free.

There is 6B$ in Bitcoin wealth floating around, surely there are means for funding a few salaries. And that's what is going to happen in the future. Funding will take place through on-blockchain methods, some Cryptocurrency projects do this already. Money and opensource is now tightly connected, but Bitcoiners generally haven't figured this out yet. For more innovative ways checkout Ethereum, Bitshares, Nxt, etc.

Core/blockstream's position is not consistent and logical. Should users be able to make decisions? Should core developers be able to over-ride those decisions? Bitcoin is a system with majority decision making. Making Side-chains the major cornerstone of the Bitcoin ecosystem will turn out to be a mistake. Side-chains don't make much sense if you understand incentives and risk. The same applies to Lightning which will equally be a failure. Unfortunately in the Bitcoin core dev bubble there isn't much actual discussion of these things. Talking about FUD, when Core/Blockstream has very massive leverage I find misleading. There are better ways to handle governance in OSS and cryptocurrency then founding a private enterprise.

Mike, thanks for your work, in particular on contracts. I believe you're drawing the wrong conclusion. Yes, Bitcoin is very imperfect, but developer power was never a problem addressed in the system. The crux of the matter has to do with imperfections in PoW itself. There is no reason whatsoever why a better system should not exist, which gives users more control (again) and also has more use cases. And there is no law which says Bitcoin has to succeed at massive scale. It is high time for a realistic assessment of the amazing invention of Bitcoin, and then start working on better systems which address its short-comings. Let's face it - CPU power as a proxy for users is just not functional anymore. And yes, solutions for stopping developer coups will be need to be found also, but those should be actual protocols.

Well, Maxwell is wrong in the sense that it is the fault of the system of favouring expert rule against user will. Due to mining centralisation users have lost their power, although really never exercised it in full. They only exercise it in the sense that they can stop inflation, but not much else. The far more interesting question is what better consensus systems will be capable of. In the first article on blockchains the system was described as a "constitutional microdemocracy".

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html

If one follows Core's line the question becomes: who if not nodes make decision in Bitcoin? Their answer - the core developers. A future system will have to address this corruption of power.

Look at the balance sheets of all central-banks: they show hockey-stick growth and correlate with government debt. We're in the last stages of the self-destruction of a fiat money regime. Rates themselves don't reflect anything about the time-value of money, but much more about the banking system. Anyone who doubt this can ask himself what is going to happen when banks and governments need more trillion dollar bailouts.

What is a "domain"? Its a name attached to some organization and an entry in a database. The problem is you have middle-men controlling that database, which means its structure can't change.

".com" forever? There is no reason we can have better naming systems. Consider ".io". It's often used by startups and signals quite a lot about a domain.

Names on the blockchain for the win. The process is obviously broken and corrupted - we need protocols at the root.

good point. wikileaks was a small organization which managed to create an uncensorable system, AFAIK among other things by using a wide net of ISP's relations. one can solve some of these problems based on votes. currently google and ICANN largely defines where the boundaries are (who-is policy of domains, what constitutes trademark, etc.)