--- Log opened Fri Apr 05 00:00:12 2013
04:03 < warren> sipa: I lucked out, I bought one only hours before the price change.
04:03 < warren> I have no idea what I will receive or when.
04:03 < warren> whatever happens happens
04:04 < sipa> well, you know
04:04 < sipa> perhaps you receive it before the subsidy runs out in 2140 :p
04:04 < gmaxwell> lol
04:05 < gmaxwell> sipa: when you're in town you can look at my avalons. :P
04:09 < warren> I bought it because I figured out that Paypal's Bill Me Later would let me borrow the entire purchase price for 6 months with zero interest, zero payments.
04:11 < warren> (I'm aware those promos are meant to ensnare people who can't pay it off.)
04:14 < gmaxwell> there is often a lot of fine print too.
04:17 < warren> I had friends who borrowed $200k on credit card 0% 1-year promos and collected 4-5% bank interest during the year.  Seemed like too much effort for the risk of screwing up.
04:18 < gmaxwell> it's usually also the case that they only offer those promos on purchases and not cash advances, so there is no (easy) way to convert the credit to interest.
04:19 < warren> oh, back then they allowed it, it was the credit bubble
04:19 < gmaxwell> yea, as explained by "4-5% bank interest"
04:19 < warren> only way to get 4-5% interest was a CD
04:20 < warren> who knew at the time none of those CD's were at risk because the taxpayer would bail them all out ...
04:21 < sipa> gmaxwell: will do!
04:28 < warren> gmaxwell: I was most amused when I realized that, that Paypal would let me money to help defend its greatest long-term threat.
17:54 < warren> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168251.0  Looks like one of the alt coins had an accidental hardfork
18:01 < nanotube> what's with all these altchains coming out of the woodwork.... heh
18:02 < warren> dunno
19:03 < gmaxwell> nanotube: I am hans and this is franz and we are here ...
20:33 < gmaxwell> People are buying $coin right now under the "what if" basis, so there is a ton of incentive to spin up and endless series of additional coins.
20:42 < nanotube> so, seems like a problem that will solve itself. :P
20:42 < nanotube> in fact, why don't we just come up with 100-some different coins, so people will see the ridiculousness of the enterprise. :P
21:04 < warren> gmaxwell: it is unfortunate that mtgox is getting in on the act
21:04 < gmaxwell> I was told that was an april fools day thing and not actually serious.
21:07 < nanotube> i was told it wasn't....
21:09 < nanotube> in response to "are you considering ltc trading or is that just a cooked rumor?" mtux said "eventually"
21:26 < amiller> bitcoin is pure network effect
21:27 < amiller> normally you see things that are network effect + lock in mechanisms
21:28 < amiller> so it's refreshing to have something that's just network effect alone
21:30 < amiller> but still it's _just_ network effect
21:30 < amiller> the scarcity isn't "enforced by a mathematical algorithm"
21:31 < amiller> it's maintained just as long as everyone's swarm behavior is to prefer to stick to one big clump and struggle in the biggest one
21:38 < warren> nanotube: ah, one avalon owner caused the difficulty to escalate, he then bailed out so the remaining miners would take 2-3 hours to the next block.
21:38  * warren wonders why all of the sha256 alt's aren't killed that way, if you want to discourage scams
21:39 < gmaxwell> because almost no one who actually cares about scams thinks that it's right to attack thinks like that to discourage them.
21:39 < gmaxwell> The closest you got was luke shutting down CLC at block .. ~3.  (Someone took a prerelease of bitcoin's p2sh functionality and released it as AMAZING-NEW-CRYPTOCOIN with a premine and an exchange support on the first block)
21:39 < gmaxwell> But it was mergedmined so it was easy for luke to just mine it and exclude all other mining.
21:39 < gmaxwell> until people gave up on it.
21:39 < gmaxwell> But this was _highly_ controversial and basically earned him months of DOS attacks.
21:39 < warren> I was wondering why Eligius is so small.
21:39 < warren> Some of the recent coins use sha256 but are not merge mineable (by design?).  So instead of allowing merge miners to contribute to its protection, they can be obliterated by a single Avalon owner who opts out of Bitcoin for a short while.  People who want the alt coin to survive can't, or would need to divert lucrative ASIC's away from Bitcoin to do so.
21:39 < warren> Doing so however excludes all the other miners, then people quit.
21:39 < gmaxwell> eligius is something like 3% of the network hashrate, not that small— but it has an interface only a developer could love— and a lot of people think that the low fees are a signal that its bad.
21:39 < warren> "but it has an interface only a developer could love" and p2pool manages to be even less friendly =)
21:40 < gmaxwell> they're generally pretty similar wrt other than p2pool taking more effort to setup. Eligius lots most of it's biggest miners to p2pool when p2pool really took off.
21:40 < gmaxwell> (e.g. myself, midnightmagic, uukgoblin)
21:40 < gmaxwell> s/lots/lost/
21:40 < warren> I see.
21:42 < warren> oh boy.  btc-e just added two more alts.
21:45 < gmaxwell> amiller: well thats true of anything, I mean, I can start printing out bits of green paper that say $1 Gmaxllors and say that my alternative reduced the scarcity of the dollar, but the distinction matters because of 'clumping' on the one.
21:46 < gmaxwell> the irony here is that something like an LTC eclipsing btc would be its own doing, since the logical next question is "well, when is ltc going to get eclipsed by a very similar clone" :P
21:46 < amiller> there's more to the solution space, once this line of reasoning opens up though
21:48 < amiller> merged mining and validate-other-blockchain-scripts and other puzzle variants can affect the relations between competing groups
21:48 < amiller> those are like the 'plus extra lock-in mechanisms'
21:49 < warren> I've come to the conclusion that Litecoin is redundant and they need to change their hash in the future.  I will push code there, stuff like experimental fee calculation.
21:50 < amiller> ripple is still the only financial model that makes any sense in the super long term
21:53 < warren> The alts are absolutely insane.  Litecoin's website is mysteriously down now.  There isn't any actual non-speculation activity, and yet it is over $3/coin.  This makes no sense.
21:54 < gmaxwell> $3? lol.
21:55 < warren> gmaxwell: it was $5 on April 1st.  NVC is $3.71.  PPC $2.39
21:55 < gmaxwell> warren: I think I made about 40 BTC selling oodlegazillion ltc about 9 months ago. Was quite happy with that.
21:55 < gmaxwell> warren: well whats the actual volume of the orderbook on these things? ... last trade isn't the best metric of that.
21:55 < nanotube> hehe shoulda held on...
21:56 < amiller> do we have a better way of estimating real market cap rather than just multiplying last price
21:56 < warren> gmaxwell: PPC trading began only like an hour ago
21:56 < amiller> like just adding up the public order books aren't that compelling either
21:56 < gmaxwell> warren: ppc has been trading for a long time — maybe not on that exchange.
21:56 < warren> oh
21:57 < gmaxwell> I had 250,000 PPC at one point. I mined something like 80% of the initial three days. :P
21:57 < warren> amiller: you could do a vwap maybe
21:57 < gmaxwell> warren: if its one coin bouncing back and forth... what does that mean? I trade 1 coin with myself a million times at $10000/coin... :P
21:57 < warren> hah
21:58 < gmaxwell> I think I sold 200,000 PPC for like 10BTC. ... and I probably have a few thousand left, in fact.
21:58 < warren> gmaxwell: I suppose if the exchange fees are negligible compared to the value you are trying to establish as a psychological anchor
21:58 < gmaxwell> Guess I should go find it.
21:59 < warren> Litecoin has had no releases in 10 months, its website is down, speculators don't care.
22:00 < gmaxwell> PPC has every block cryptographically signed by its mysterous developer— which is the only thing that has saved it from a bunch of attack. Speculators don't care.
22:01 < warren> signed for what purpose?
22:01 < gmaxwell> Considering that you could probably create a cryptocoin which was powered by security provided from cat pictures and hope ... plus signed blocks. :P
22:01 < gmaxwell> warren: basically they added a transaction type that just inserts a checkpoint into the checkpoint list. And they checkpoint every block... so there can be no consensus failure: the consensus is whatever dear-leader says it is. :P
22:02 < warren> HAHAHA
22:03 < gmaxwell> "sudoku cents"
22:03 < warren> Bitcoin's mysterious leader can only scare people with alerts, not choose which chain is real.
22:04 < gmaxwell> The alerts can even be disabled with an alert.
22:04 < warren> gmaxwell: oh, that litecoin "obsolete" please upgrade error message has been going on ever since.  Official response is "ignore it, wait for 0.8.1"
22:04 < gmaxwell> LOL
22:05 < gmaxwell> "URGENT: Alert key compromised, upgrade required"
22:05 < gmaxwell> so even if the alert key is compromised anyone with it can trigger that instead.
22:05 < nanotube> "warning, bitcoin being superceded by $newcoin. advise to switch asap"
22:05 < warren> "URGENT: Ignore alert key compromised messages.  It is an error because we didn't do any releases for 9 months.  Everything is fine."
22:06 < gmaxwell> lol
22:06 < gmaxwell> nanotube: the compromised message is hardcoded and supercedes any other message.
22:06 < nanotube> heh ic
22:07 < warren> Then the new release is to have an entirely new alert key?
22:07 < gmaxwell> Thats the idea.
22:08 < warren> hah, PPC dropped 80% from that moment I looked at it
22:08 < gmaxwell> heisencoin
22:08 < gmaxwell> the price can not be both observed and traded at
22:09 < warren> well, that paid for the BFL at least ...
22:09  * warren wanders off.
22:13 < warren> gmaxwell: http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=1-year&resolution=day&pair=ppc-btc&market=vircurex
22:13 < gmaxwell> warren: it's not profit until its in your wallet...
22:39 < warren> Perhaps Terracoin should add testnet's difficulty failsafe.
22:39 < warren> (They can't screw up more than they are now.)
--- Log closed Sat Apr 06 00:00:14 2013