About the centralised fund. Putting aside that it becomes a magnet for
corruption, I prefer to keep Bitcoin pure, simple and focused. Value
transfer from A ? B. The thing I don't like about MasterCoin is the
tax for developers (in this system, programmers = master race).
Anyway thought experiment: money gets put into a single pot. These
funds are allocated by votes. How are the votes allocated fairly? If I
put 100 BTC in the fund, I should have more say than 0.1 BTC. This
prevents a basic attack of people donating small amounts and having
disproportionate control over the fund. But then what is the purpose
of fronting money to this fund and losing control of the resources.
Especially if coerced then it seems like collective punishment.
I prefer we find better funding models for creating infrastructure
that is more dynamic, less institutional, and voluntary.

About the BIP process. I created it to slow down debasement of the
Bitcoin standard, by leveraging additional bureaucratic requirements
on top of development. It's good now that it's become an expected part
of development, but not enough by itself. More needs to be done.

About mining. I don't know. It's tough, and I haven't devoted too much
energy to the problem because it's a highly visible issue that many
are focused on.


On 27/10/13 09:56, Benjamin Cordes wrote:
> Amir,
>
> we agree on a lot of things, most importantly:
>
> "The power of Bitcoin is being able to build contracts based on
> mathematics, not law between parties."
>
> "But this is the mentality we face:"
>
> What are your views on the BIP process (as the champion of BIP 001)
> and the development process as it has evolved?
>
> What are your views on the size of the mining pools? If there are
> only a few miners, these could be subverted. I thought that perhaps
> couple mining to geographic location to prevent large
> conglomerates.
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Benjamin Cordes
> <benjamin.l.cordes@??? <mailto:benjamin.l.cordes@gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
> Mike,
>
> "all of those paper documents, the ones that are good for human
> beings and the bad, are backed up by unlimited, unaccountable,
> monopolistic deadly force."
>
> I agree. As a German the insanity of history is always around the
> corner. It is a rather strange influence in the collective psyche.
> German politicians often speak about preventing such a
> dictatorship, but they never speak about what this actually means.
> Instead they went forward and trashed the constitution,
> establishing a different autocratic regime, which even carries the
> same name as the Soviet union.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Benjamin Cordes
> <benjamin.l.cordes@??? <mailto:benjamin.l.cordes@gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
> The Bitcoin development process is becoming in my view
> unsustainable. We have to understand that any such network will
> carry in itself a political view of the world. There is no neutral
> view. This relates strongly to the BIP process, which we should
> draw lessons from (as everything else).
>
> This kind of process has a lot of parallels to ICANN/DNS viz-a-viz
> Namecoin. I believe the question is how one can embed rules, i.e.
> laws, which can be layered to various degrees. Git shares some
> features with Bitcoin, as in that all the history is preserved.
> Julian Assange I believe had this idea of creating historically
> preserved URL's via Namecoin. The thing to note here is that ICANN
> is in process of selling the global namespace of ideas to
> corporations. For instance Frank Schilling on the Cayman islands is
> one such person. So we have corporations owning public names and an
> intransparent process. Now also consider this connection. Say every
> company or legal entity automatically gets an assigned URL. For
> example .LTD for limited companies. Then the registrar for the Top
> Level domain is essentially a governing body for these legal
> entities. We could create our own such scheme, but the legal
> entities are built from scratch and not on the absurdity that is
> the international law today.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Benjamin Cordes
> <benjamin.l.cordes@??? <mailto:benjamin.l.cordes@gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
> Imagine we have a Bitcoin like network (say it's identical to the
> current network as of today). The network has a static address
> attached to it. This address is the called the mutual account and
> is known to everybody (the balance and the address). Every
> transaction has a fee which goes to the miner, but also a
> percentage which goes to this mutual account. The mutual account is
> locked securely by mechanism in the network. It can be only
> released given an agreement mechanism. This could be a simple vote
> or any other similar scheme. Every user of the network aggregates
> payments over the network (total BTC volume transfer). Instead of
> having only a fee for proof of work, we have a fee for support of
> the network. The user of the network gets notified via an anonymous
> separate Unique Ressource Location. There he will be able to login
> to a central server. On the central server he can decide how the
> collected fee will be spent. The network developers put up projects
> on the server and work on keeping them safe. This way bootstrapped
> resources can be used to built out the network. Also there would be
> better mechanisms for users to decide on how the network should
> evolve. We can easily cap the fees or invent any scheme we want.
>
> I'm currently reading Law and Revolution by Harold J. Berman. Here
> is one quote of many which is relevant: "the law contains within
> itself a legal science, a meta-law, by which it can be both
> analyzed and evaluated. Money is never just a neutral token. It is
> issued by governments through the banking system. Because the
> banking laws are written by the banks, this system has created the
> monstrosity of modern banking. This is clear as day after 2008, but
> absolutely nothing has been done. Quite the contrary. The central
> banks have printed unbelievable quantities of money (the Fed
> balance sheet trippled under Helicopter Ben). However, it is hard
> to find any economist in the world who really understands this,
> because of political blindness. This is true for breakdown of the
> financial system and government.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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