Do you think you can provide a link? — Purple Pond

You're right, it wasn't that recent. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Twelve pages worth starting here. Although to be fair, OP's question in this thread is different.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2408/level-iii-multiverse-again-/p1

Didn't we beat this story to death in another recent thread?

In any event, you would be two different people. It's no different than running the Chrome browser on millions of different computers. There's only one Chrome browser, namely the program code. But there are millions of individual instances of the Chrome browser. In computer science it's the difference between program and process.

Just like the Star Trek transporter. Suppose Kirk beams down to the surface of a surprisingly earthlike planet (saves on production costs for all the alien planets to have breathable atmospheres) but the transporter malfunctions and Kirk also stays on the Enterprise. The cloned version is identical to Kirk at that instant. But going forward, they are two distinct people having distinct life experiences.

For a more prosaic and commonplace earthly example, consider identical twins. A fertilized zygote splits into two. You now have two individual human beings developing from the same program code as it were.

Forgive my incoherent question if that is what it seems like. I'm just an amateur interested in some physics and quantum mechanics. — Posty McPostface

Perhaps you can give a specific example of what you mean by your question. What do you mean by every outcome being realized? A traffic light realizes every possibility at different times, namely red, green, and yellow. And it's deterministic, being operated by a centralized computer run by a city's traffic engineers. Is that what you mean?

It's perfectly normal futures are bought and margin is settled in USD but at the end of the contract there's a promise to deliver bitcoin. Just like any other commodities future. — Benkei

"Bitcoin futures are financially-settled and therefore do not involve the exchange of bitcoin."

http://www.cmegroup.com/education/cme-bitcoin-futures-frequently-asked-questions.html

See paragraph #8. I do take your point about normal futures, soybeans and such, but evidently the CME and CBOE bitcoin futures don't work that way.

I'd invest in the Bolivar. — Hanover

Coming soon to a bankrupt empire near you.

My assumption is that the compression theorem can serve as a mathematical foothold to understanding that things like the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle as impossible to achieve. I've been fixated on that principle and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem for a while now. — Posty McPostface

I get that you are interested in this. I just don't follow your reasoning. I don't know enough about the compression theorem to have any opinion at all as to what implications it might have. I should mention that I personally don't believe the universe is computation so that, to the limited extent that I know anything about it at all, I'm not kindly disposed toward CTD. I'm the wrong person to be asking about any of this. My only contribution to this thread was to respond to your speculation that there's a hierarchy of axiomatic theories. In fact it's a tree. But modern set theorists do study the entire structure of axiomatic set theories as the "set-theoretic multiverse." I pointed you to Hamkins. I really can't comment on how this relates to CTD. I just don't know anything about it.

The Wiki article on the compression theorem is less than enlightening to say the least. It offers no clue as to the meaning or application of the theorem.

Here's the exchange I had over at PhysicsForums. Maybe you could see the connection from that exchange. — Posty McPostface

That wasn't much of a thread. In it you said, "I'm probably spouting nonsense." It didn't seem to get any better from there. I'm not being harsh, there's nothing in that thread at all. Nor does the thread mention the compression theorem. You haven't made your point in a way I can understand.

Yeah, so are emergent phenomena by that understanding mystical phenomena or indeterminate? — Posty McPostface

You are saying that emergence has some connection to the compression theorem? I'm afraid I don't understand that. Explanation please?

In any event, emergence is a far murkier idea than people generally realize. Hydrogen's not wet and oxygen's not wet but water is wet. Emergence! Call me unimpressed. The whole often has qualities not evident in the parts. Thats the most natural thing in the world.

buying them again to fulfill his future contracts a — Benkei

The futures are cash-settled. No bitcoins trade hands in the futures market. The futures are simply bets on the price of bitcoin.

To have intrinsic value is to be desirable in and of itself — Mitchell

How about defining intrinsic value as value that's not derived from common agreement. Food, for example. The value of food does not depend on people believing in it, in contrast to things like dollars or bitcoin whose value is a function of society's belief in it.

What are your thoughts about the compactness theorem in logic — Posty McPostface

I'm no specialist in these things. I was pretty good at set theory but logic made my eyes glaze. I recall the compacness theorem says that if every finite subset of a collection of axioms has a model, then the entire collection has a model.

People usually learn about compactness in real analysis or topology class so this connection between topology and logic often comes as a surprise.

That's everything I know about it. What aspect of the compactness theorem is of interest in the present context?

and entailment of smaller sets by larger sets that obey the compression theorem. — Posty McPostface

Well you've got me there. I had to look it up. The compression theorem is a theorem of computational complexity that says:

The theorem states that there exists no largest complexity class, with computable boundary, which contains all computable functions.

I know enough of the buzzwords to see that they are putting some sort of topology on the set of complexity classes. Yet more topology applied to logic.

If I had to hazard a guess it looks like the set of complexity classes is an open set. It does not contain its boundary. So you can't draw a sharp line and say that on one side it's computable and on the other it's not. It's fuzzy in the exact same way that the open unit disk is fuzzy. The open unit disk is the set of points in the plane whose distance from the origin is strictly less than 1. It doesn't include its boundary.

Is that a reasonable interpretation? If so, what aspect of this did you want to ask about?

Would that point to a never ending set of sets that contains all provable theorems? — Posty McPostface

There is no set of all sets. It's a logical impossibility, if by set you mean something that satisfies the usual mathematical notions of sets. Russell proved that in 1901.

It is legitimate to talk about the class of all sets. A class is a collection that's "too big" to be a set. A class is often something we can form with an unrestricted predicate. Take the predicate S(x) which is true just in case x is a set.

Then V = {x : S(x)} is a class that can not possibly be a set. In that case we call it a proper class.

There is no set of sets. Better to find another metaphor for your intuition.

Is there a transcendental-logical or arithmetic system that could account for everything or is this just stating the set of all sets that is also a self-containing set paradox? — Posty McPostface

It's a tree. To pick a familiar example, take set theory ZF. This is Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, the standard basic set theory used in modern math. The Axiom of Choice is independent of ZF. So we may form the new theory ZFC, ZF with choice. And we may also form the new theory ZF-C, which is ZF plus the negation of choice. These two set theories are each individually consistent, but they are mutually inconsistent.

Then we can keep on adding new axioms to each system to get more and more variants of set theory. You get an ever-expanding tree of theories.

Modern set theorists like to contemplate the entire structure at once. They study the set theoretic multiverse. Joel David Hamkins is one of the world's big time set theorists and he's also a blogger who tries to bring some of this heady stuff to the masses.

If I'm understanding your question, modern set theorists are attempting to figure out what is mathematical truth, even in a sea of incompleteness. After all ‎Gödel himself was a Platonist. I think the point of incompleteness isn't that we can never know truth. It's just that axiomatic systems have their limitations. But even so we can still strive to know the truth.

And of course if we can know the truth but not by means of logical deduction ... what does that mean, exactly? This gets very philosophical.

More blockchain philosophy.

While bitcoin is not by any means a traditional corporate entity with earning statements and a board of directors, it could be seen as an equity in its own ecosystem whose value derives from the size and health of that community. What is clear is that if bitcoin is equity, it represents a radically different corporate form than has ever created before. It appears to be one of the first examples of what sociologist and organizational development specialist Frederic Laloux describes as a "teal organization": an organization with fluid hierarchy that is adaptive and rules-based where authority is decentralized and distributed among members. That such an organizational form would arise around a distributed ledger is perhaps not surprising but it does, nevertheless, represent a radical new experiment in human organization.

(My emphasis).

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4133095-bitcoin-birth-worlds-first-teal-equity

Laloux's book is called Reinventing Organizations: A Guide for Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.

Not tulips. The dawn of a revolution in human affairs that goes far, far beyond the daily price action of bitcoin.

On the one hand, the luckiest people are those who love their work.

On the other hand, why make work out of the thing you love? I'm always reminded of Wallace Stevens. He was an insurance executive and a poet. As Wiki puts it:

After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford..

Makes you think. Many people have a job they enjoy and a passion they pursue. It's ok to keep those things separate.

Read some Jung. Collective unconscious perhaps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious . Or maybe not. Not sure how Jung relates to the consciousness of the universe. Just tossing out an idea.

This will make getting out of line more difficult than ever, especially if we ever move over completely to crypto. You may be able to trick and get around people, but you cannot get around machines. — Agustino

Yes I agree with your dystopian vision. This reminds me of the Chinese social credit system. Just like you have a credit score, Chinese citizens will have a social score. Everything you ever did, what your neighbors say about you and so forth. Pretty scary. The blockchain is the perfect technology for such a system. It wouldn't even have to be imposed by the government. We'll impose it on ourselves.

The future will either be a techno-libertarian paradise or the cryptofascist prison of our nightmares. The eternal struggle between good and evil ... on the blockchain. I think you're right. It's dystopian and it's more likely to happen than not.

What do you mean by BitCoin isn't instant? The acquisition of the coin, the use of the coin or the cash out of the coin?
I thought the use of the coin is instant and the value of the coin is time stamped locking in the value of the coin, the moment it was used. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Even in the best of times it can take at least ten minutes to confirm a transaction because the system creates a new block of transactions only once every ten minutes or so. And the more subsequent blocks that are validated, the more statistically likely it is that an earlier block is valid. For a large transaction it's recommended to wait for at least six more blocks. So the actual transaction time is about an hour.

But the recent huge increase in transactions is overwhelming the network, and the miners can't keep up. In order for the miners to even bother to put your transaction into the next block, you have to bribe them with a transaction fee. I've seen it reported that it costs $20 to spend $100 lately, and the settlement times can be several hours or more. Bitcoin has totally failed as a currency. Its enthusiasts don't care, they say it's not a currency, it's a "store of value." I don't believe that either but that's what some people think.

And what's the marker here? This exact thread. Now I've known a lot of people here from the old PF times, and I know that they are interested in philosophy and perhaps current topics. But not investing or currencies. The whole existence of this thread on a Philosophy Forum tells me that the hype is on. And reading the views here just reassures me. — ssu

I'll take the other side of that proposition. What's going on is deep, important, and philosophical.

When Descartes receives a letter from his friend, he might well ask: How do I know an evil demon working at the French post office hasn't altered the contents of this letter?

Today we have an answer: The contents of the letter are cryptographically secure.

There is a revolution in human affairs about to take place. The revolution is about trust. End-to-end trust between and among strangers on the Internet, without the need for intermediaries.

Crypto is about certainty. About what is, and how we can know what is. Crypto-ontology and crypto-epistemology if you like. I hope some of the younger philosophers are looking at this.

As an example of what I mean, there are proposals for prediction markets on the blockchain. That's like a gambling parlor on political events. Will Trump make it through his first term? Will Brexit actually happen? There are prediction markets right now run by companies, but on the blockchain you don't need a company, just a decentralized blockchain network.

Now, how does a prediction market pay off? That is, how do they know for sure whether Trump is still president or whether Brexit has happened? In a centralized system, the people running the betting pool determine what's true. On a blockchain-based prediction market, the users say what's true and the system determines crypto-consensus. The blockchain determines truth.

There's a crytpo already doing this, called Auger. Great name for this concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur

This is why I say the blockchain revolution is philosophically deep. Social revolutions are always the subject of philosophy. And this particular revolution is about trust and disintermediation. That's philosophy.

What do you think?

Why it is similar to Tulip mania and not the "ordinary" housing-bubble is that there is no reason why Bitcoin would have touched $20k, or go to $40k or $100k. It's a huge disadvantage for any currency to rise so much in price. Actual currencies ought to be somewhat stable. What kind of currency would cost nearly $20k? It's an awfull currency to use, if it would be an actual currency. — ssu

Of course, but look past bitcoin.

Bitcoin's a proof-of-concept engineering experiment that's taught us a lot about how to build these kinds of networks. It's a tragedy that the public is allowed to bet on early-stage engineering experiments. That introduces distortion and inefficiency into the design process. If bitcoin was a project in an engineering lab it would be shut down and the designers would get to work on the next iteration of the idea.

But that's how the world is so we have to accept it.

The price rise of bitcoin makes no rational sense. But it's not tulips, because tulips were not the leading edge of a huge social revolution. Bitcoin is. That's my belief. Of course if one doesn't believe blockchain is going to profoundly change the world, then my thesis makes no sense and bitcoin is tulips. But I don't think so. Bitcoin stands in for the revolution to come. The public senses that. Or they're a bunch of greedy fools. Bit of both.

EDIT: VISA doesn't transfer a bitcoin, it immediately enters into a bitcoin-USD trade and settles the USD in the account of the vendor. So it actually doesn't run any risk on price fluctuations of the bitcoin. It does run a settlement risk should the bubble burst, in which case their bitcoin-USD trade might not settle successfully. — Benkei

Yes and it's worth noting that the businesses that claim to "accept bitcoin" actually don't. Their customers want to pay in bitcoin so businesses accept bitcoin as a service. They immediately exchange bitcoin for the local legal currency and write off the transaction costs. Nobody actually accepts bitcoin for anything. As a currency the idea has already failed. But my thesis is that the failure of bitcoin is irrelevant to the coming blockchain revolution. Am I drinking too much blockchain Kool-Aid? I don't think so. Global trust without intermediaries. This is going to be big.

Do you think it is every worth considering the moral content of taking wealth out of the economy without working for it? — charleton

Interesting point of view.

If you buy a house and a few years later it's worth more money because the central bank blew up a housing bubble, and you happen to sell your house for a profit, do you give the money to charity or what? It's the same house, four walls and a roof. Provides shelter for a family. Its value hasn't changed at all. Is it immoral to pocket your profit?

How about stocks, bonds, jewelry? Are they morally compromised too? If you see the Fed about to print money so you buy stocks and the price of the stocks goes up, is that a problem? I am not clear about your moral orientation in asking this question but I'm curious to know. It's not like dealing weapons or dope. You're just buying low and selling high by paying attention to the world. Is that immoral?

Even in the case of a speculative frenzy you are definitely "working for it." If you buy in you are making a judgment about mass psychology. You base your judgment on following the news, reading history, thinking, studying. If you are right AND you are smart enough to get out in time, you make money. How is that different than making money by being good at your day job?

These are good questions, I'd agree! Not sure I know the answers myself. Marx predicted the conditions of late-stage capitalism and he was right about a lot of things But Marxist governments have been a disaster for the people forced to live under them.

The idea that cryptocurrencies will replace government-backed currencies is laughable. In fact, unless I am mistaken, that was the raison d'être of bitcoins creation. — Maw

Yes that was the techno-libertarian reason for bitcoin, but it's the wrong reason! The crypto revolution is about much more. Cryptos-as-money can fail yet cryptos can still transform society. The crypto revolution is not primarily about money. IMO of course. The banks might still control the money. They are thousand-year incumbents after all, not that easy to dethrone. The disintermediation revolution is still huge. It's not necessarily about destroying the bankers. They're doing a pretty good job of that by themselves.

The part time mining of Ethereum at college on one GPU is up to about $20.00, — ArguingWAristotleTiff

I read that people are putting mining rigs in their cars and parking them at electric vehicle charging stations! Anywhere there's free or cheap electricity, mining is a win. Bootleg mining may be the biggest social trend of 2018. There are coins you can mine on your laptop. Why not plug in at work? Of course colleges are perfect. Free electricity and smart kids. Well there are plenty worse things kids could be doing at college.

The paradox is that you have to be stupid enough to buy, and clever enough to sell before the balloon bursts, as it inevitably will. — charleton

When everyone else is being irrational, it's irrational to be rational. You have to balance what you know is true, against the money to be made simply by joining the crowd. In fact this type of "investing" psychology has been promoted by the world's central banks, which have been printing money and inflating bubbles in every asset class. Every few years there's another bubble, a lot of people make a lot of money, some get out in time, the rest lose their money in the crash. Then a few years later it happens again. And this is not an accident, this is the deliberate policy of the central banks. Or worse, it's a consequence of the central banks and they don't even know it. These great banking geniuses keep blowing up the world.

Is it rational to stand aside and feel superior? Or is it perfectly rational, depending on your situation, to plunge in and hope to be just smart enough to get out in time?

That reminds me of the great story about Isaac Newton and the South Sea bubble. He was eminent and rich by then, and everyone in London was making tons of money. Newton (according to one article I read) got in early, made money, and got out. Then it kept going up so he got back in, eventually losing today's equivalent of millions of dollars in the crash.

He said, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."

If I would be a conspiracy theorist, I would think that the whole Bitcoin bubble has been produced by the banks to get rid of this new payment system that partly comes to compete with them. — ssu

Oh yes there is no question that there are credible theories. The NSA published a paper in 1996 describing electronic money that predicted many of bitcoin's features. The SHA-256 encryption algorithm used in bitcoin was invented and released by the NSA. Now what are the odds the NSA would release a crypto algorithm to the public without already having a backdoor? After all the NSA owns the state of the art in cryptographic number theory. What they know is probably decades ahead of the academic cryptographers.

I'd say it's around 30% likely that Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA.

Another very plausible theory is that it's the Chinese. The top few Chinese miners already control well over half the hashing power of the bitcoin network. That means they can get together and mount a 51% attack and double-spend bitcoins at will. Maybe one day China will collect everyone's money then just take it.

When this historical bubble bursts, the trust in cryptocurrencies will be shaken. Also, when you have basically bubbles in many markets, some Bitcoin bubble bursting would be the perfect culprit to blame first a market downturn and then for an economic downturn. People want culprits. — ssu

Yes yes! This is part two of the above conspiracy theories. There's a humongous bubble, the public loses a fortune. Everyone's angry and "the government must do something." People will demand strong government regulation and control of cryptocurrencies ... which is the government's evil plan all along.

I view this as a likely scenario. If bitcoin goes to $40k or $100k amid a massive public hysteria, the crash will be terrible. The exchanges will lock up, nobody will be able to get their money out. The public will demand government regulation. And the government will be only too happy to oblige.

So many theories.

The crypto world is full of surprises and delights. I just ran across Primecoin, trading symbol XPM.

Their mining operation involves finding new Cunningham chains, which are particular sequences of prime numbers about which there are many open questions. In other words they're putting their consensus algorithm to mathematical use, rather than wasting their computing power on brute-force attacks on meaningless cryptographic puzzles like bitcoin does.

Primecoins are an answer to one of the criticisms of bitcoin, which is that mining is a huge waste of electricity and computing power. But if you can have the miners do useful computations as their "proof of work," as it's called, then the economics make more sense.

I can see how this might evolve. Perhaps we can use that computing power on SETI, or protein folding, or some kind of distributed AI. That latter is a little speculative but the blockchain is actually a distributed programming environment so in principle there's no reason you couldn't make the Internet into a giant AI using a blockchain.

Maybe the singularity is closer than I thought. This might be it.

Alright, I'm calling that one. ;) 2026 or possibly sooner. Remember, it's only an engineering problem now so it's pretty close. — Benkei

I'll be watching. Actually everything I know about the subject I learned from Scott Aronson's blog and his periodic debunkings of D-Wave. My understanding is that qbits are hopelessly unstable. I'll keep an eye out for news.

I am watching what my two Indians are doing with BitCoin and Ethereum how the systems will work with a little skin in the game. My eldest Indian has invested $100.00 in BitCoin while my younger Indian has been mining and nothing but "mining" in Ethereum. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

May I ask, who are these Indians? Is this part of a conversation I missed? I understand that you can mine Etherium with GPUs and that ASICs don't give an advantage, making GPUs the only practical choice for hobbyist miners.

I think it's a clear fact already that digital currency of the crypto kind is superior to our paper fiat currency though. It does make all transactions easier and significantly cheaper. So perhaps in the future, we'll be approaching a situation where everything is exchanged in crypto, not in fiat currencies - so this exchange of Bitcoin/USD becomes irrelevant. — Agustino

I have no doubt that future money will be based on blockchain or some distributed ledger technology. The question is, will it be issued by government(s) or will it live outside government?

Miners are being arrested in Venuzuela for "terrorism," the theory being that since bitcoin can be used for terrorism, if you mine bitcoin you're aiding and abetting terrorism. It's nonsense but that's how politicians work. They don't subscribe to notions of sound argument. They subscribe to notions of raw power. They're the government and whatever it is that's new and revolutionary, they'll control it.

I think what may happen is that blockchain services not associated with money -- blockchain discussion forums, blockchain Amazon, blockchain games, etc. -- will be fine. But governments the world over take a dim view of people trying to replace government-controlled money, and that's where they'll bring down the hammer.

The United States isn't the only government, and not everywhere has something like the First Amendment. — Michael

Right, that's another point for the government side. Can a government outlaw certain computer programs? Probably. And they certainly have the technical means to know who's connecting to which Internet services.

How will they manage that? The only way they'll succeed is if they become the miners. Or in collaboration with the government, they change the USD to a blockchain system of their own making. Either way, I think the blockchain technology will win. — Agustino

Mining and exchanges are the two points of contact where the blockchain meets the real world. That's how the government will move to suppress and control cryptos. It's already happening. The IRS got a court ruling that Coinbase has to give up the names and info of 14,000 of its largest customers. The SEC has ruled that some ICOs are securities. Venezuela's going after the miners.

Why would the banks be toast?

And don't forget that nation states and governments have had the monopoly on legal tender for quite a while now. And then there is the interest the tax office has on any kind of transactions. Hence if you would have a widely accepted "cryptocurrency", then likely it's watered down so that it's easy for the authorities to check the transfers. Because what will regulators see with cryptocurrencies? Money laundering and tax evasion. — ssu

Couldn't agree more. That is the counterargument. The evil banksters who have run the world since the beginning of civilization will continue to do so. I tend to agree with that side of the question.

But the crypto argument is strong too. A crypto is just a computer program and some people who are willing to run it. The government can't outlaw that. Programs are speech in the sense of the first amendment. I believe [not really up on this] that there have been court rulings to that effect.

Of course governments can bust the miners and the exchanges. Those are the weak points in the system where the cryptos meet the real world.

The battle between the cryptos and the governments/banks is just beginning. Anything could happen.

Coinbase, Gemini, Cex, Kraken haven't worked for me. I do have an acc with Bitstamp (and an external wallet) though I haven't bought yet. I might invest some after the fall. — Agustino

Try Coinbase again. If they finally let me in perhaps they have their technical problems fixed.

I agree with the strategy of waiting for the big crash to get into phase two. Right now I'm just trying to learn the mechanics. It's all fairly mysterious actually.

So if I understand this correctly, instead of appealing to individual investors, Sirin issued these virtual token coins in exchange for cash. Unlike shares of stock, these coins can be purchased or sold by anyone interested by using a Blockchain network as a means of conveyance. The attractive part is that you can potentially trade these coins at any time, or you can hold on to the originals, and if company is successful the value of the coins could rise significantly. — Cavacava

Yes, the venture capitalists are another industry about to get disintermediated. ICO's are how you fund your company now. Put up a white paper, grab a copy of some crypto code (it's all open source), send out a press release and you can collect millions through your ICO.

Of course scams abound in the ICO space. You can just take the money and run, and some ICOs have done that.

Here's another ICO I just heard about. Overstock is going to issue an ICO to raise some revenue. The author of this article thinks it's going to fail.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4124362-overstock-tzero-ico-destined-fail

Also, I don't see how people could cash out easily with market caps at levels we're currently seeing. — Benkei

There are no actual bitcoin millionaires, unless they sold a million dollars worth of bitcoin and got their million USD back from the exchange. On Reddit there are hundreds of complaints about the difficulty of actually getting your money out of an exchange. I think a lot of the "millionaires" holding bitcoin are in for a big surprise.

On the day everyone tries to get out, the exchanges will crash. Many people will never get their money back. It's going to be really bad.

It isn't. — Benkei

[Referring to whether IOTA is quantum-safe].

I believe you. That makes sense. On the other hand I'm not sure I believe real world implementations of quantum computers will be around any time soon. I'm a skeptic on that front.

I still like the fact that IOTA has no blockchain and no miners. Blockchains don't scale and miners inevitably centralize. I'm drawn to non-blockchain cryptos. Another really cool one is Hashgraph. They claim to be able to potentially handle millions of transactions a second. Fairly complex design I haven't been able to understand yet. https://hashgraph.com/

If you plan to transfer the Bitcoin to something like Bittrex so that you can buy more than just the three currencies on Coinbase, don't send them directly from Coinbase (big transfer fees). Use gdax.com (if you're signed into Coinbase you'll automatically sign into GDAX). Transfers from Coinbase to GDAX and from GDAX to anywhere else are free. — Michael

Michael, Thanks for that info and inspiration. Your experience of getting approved at cex motivated me to keep at it. The exchanges are overwhelmed these days. Makes you wonder what it will be like when everyone tries to get out ...

My next step as you say is to move the coins to gdax and learn how to transfer them to another exchange. I want some IOTA. I really like the non-blockchain solutions.

OMG I finally got approved at Coinbase. I gave up on them last week when they told me they could not possibly verify my account. I've spent about a week trying to get approved at Gemini. They told me repeatedly they could not verify my account and that I'd have to send in a wire transfer. And the Gemini subreddit is full of complaints about Gemeni losing people's wire transfers.

For the hell of it I went back to Coinbase today and re-uploaded my documents. They wanted the front and back of my driver's license. I uploaded photos and they said they could not verify me. I did this about three times, each time without success.

Just now I got an email that I'm approved at Coinbase. I went to the site, successfully added my credit card, and bought ten bucks worth of bitcoin. I'm not trying to get rich or ride the frenzy. I'm only trying to learn the mechanics of wallets and using cryptos. Buy a little, sell a little, see if I can actually get my USD out of the system, learn how it all works.

I started this process a few days before Thanksgiving. So it took me three weeks to get US dollars into the bitcoin system. And bitcoin is complicated. Even an educated consumer is going to find themselves in a thicket of technical jargon. This thing is in no way ready for prime time.

So if the public can't get in and the price keeps going up, who's making the price go up? I saw a Youtube video that said that the top 96% of the entire wealth of the bitcoin blockchain is held by 3% of the wallet addresses. That's striking if true. It means that this truly is a massive pump-and-dump, an artificial inflation of the price by insiders. Basically two guys in a room selling each other the same pencil back and forth to push up the price of pencils. Old stock market trick.

Can you explain what value the distributed ledger technologies have in clear terms? I've been asking many people this, and so far nobody has given a very clear and satisfying answer. — Agustino

The key concept is distributed trust. Consider our conversation. How do you know that I'm me from day to day, and how do I know that you're you? We both store a public handle and a secret password in a centralized database managed by the operators of this website. In other words we rely on a trusted third-party intermediary.

Using blockchain technology, we would not need a trusted third party. I could cryptographically sign my post and publish it to the blockchain. Everyone on the network gets a copy and verifies that my signature is valid. The network's consensus protocol allows the network to collectively decide that my post is valid. There is no need for a centralized database. There go web forums, Craigslist, and Reddit. You don't need them because you no longer need third-party centralized databases.

This is why some people think cryptocurrencies are a threat to the banks. If I want to send you money over the Internet I have to do it via an electronic exchange through my bank. We need a trusted intermediary. But I can send you a bitcoin directly, with no need for a bank. The entire network sees that (1) I own sufficient bitcoins to be able to send you one; and (2) I'm the one sending it; and (3) I'm not sending the same coin to two different people. Everyone on the network comes to consensus that I have transferred ownership of one bitcoin from me to you.

Of course the problem comes when we want to exchange bitcoin for dollars. The banks control that aspect of it. But in the future, perhaps some cryptocurrency (most likely not bitcoin) is accepted worldwide as an actual currency. Then the banks are toast. And the banks are not happy about this prospect.

Some other use cases. In a real estate transaction we must pay a title company to verify that we own the asset that we are claiming to sell. On the blockchain, the ownership history of a piece of land is certified without the need for title companies. Likewise escrow. Two or more parties can put assets into escrow and the funds can be released automatically when certain criteria are met. This is the concepty of smart contracts. Each blockchain transaction consists not only of an asset, but also a little computer program that can be executed by the network. The cryptocurrency Etherium (#2 in market cap after bitcoin) is the underlying network for many such experimental ventures. Title companies and escrow agencies are toast. No longer needed.

Corporations. There's an idea called the distributed autonomous organization, or DAO. You could run a company in which assets and decision making are on the blockchain. There's no need for central authority.

How about starving artists? If you're a kid with a guitar and a voice and some songs you wrote, you can languish in obscurity or you can sign with a mega music label. Using blockchain, you can distribute your music and receive micropayments from your fans. Goodbye music industry.

Micropayments may well be the solution to the problem of how to compensate content providers. Traditional newspapers are dying because we can all read them for free. Yet professional reporting costs money. The ecosystem of bloggers in their pajamas depends on actual professional journalists going out and digging up stories. How can the journalists get paid? Blockchain might be the answer. The newspapers will die yet journalism will thrive.

Voting. Someone's doing it. https://followmyvote.com/

Sports gambling. XWIN is doing it. https://cointelegraph.com/news/ico-explores-completely-uncharted-waters-of-sports-betting

What is Amazon? They're a centralized database of buyers and sellers. Same as eBay. With blockchain, why do we need a centralized database? We don't. I don't think Amazon's going out of business anytime soon, but long term we have to ask ourselves why we need centralized databases anymore.

In short, everywhere modern society requires a trusted intermediary to maintain a centralized authoritative database, the blockchain can replace that intermediary. The blockchain lets you prove who you are and what you own without the need for any central authority. That's disintermediation on a massive scale.

Also, I'm not investing a dime until these things are secure against quantum computer brute force attacks. — Benkei

Interesting point. A crypto called IOTA claims to be quantum safe. Meaning that even if there are practical quantum computers, IOTA's cryptographic protocol is still secure. IOTA is a very interesting example of a crypto that's not a blockchain. They use a data structure called a directed acyclic graph. They are targeted to the application of the Internet of Things (your lightbulbs will talk to your refrigerator while the CIA and the Chinese hackers listen in. Awful idea but it's inevitable). They can scale to high transaction volumes. They don't have miners, which is a big improvement over bitcoin.

There are a lot of other interesting experiments going on. As I say, the price movement in bitcoin is a distraction. If someone made millions, good for them. Meanwhile the really important developments in the distributed ledger space are going on elsewhere.

I ask you to consider a world with absolutely no change - no physics, no chemistry, nothing - and then try to insert the concept of time into it. — TheMadFool

What do you say to my example of a car staying in the same place overnight?

In your quote above, you ask me to consider a closed system. No change in temperature, position, acceleration, etc. Fine. But how many variables do I have to name? Maybe there's a universe with no change and there's some other universe where things change. Isn't the world of no change simply a list of variables you care about? My parked car is a world without change. Sure, if you toss in night versus day, then there's change. There is always some variable you can add in to introduce change. Closed systems are artificial. I don't think you're addressing my point.

Change is essential for time. In a world without change time is meaningless. — TheMadFool

Interesting point in the light of physics and math. Imagine a particle that moves according to the rule f(t) = 0. At every instant of time, it's at position 0. It never moves. Yet time exists as the independent variable.

What does this mean in real life? You park your car in the evening and note its position. The next morning, unless you are unlucky, your car is in the same position. In this situation it is meaningful that that time passed but your car's position did not change. It means your car did not get stolen. You have a positive emotional response to this lack of change. This shows that the lack of change over time is significant and meaningful in the world.

So I would dispute that change is essential to time. We often have the passage of time unaccompanied by change.

Now you might try to patch up your idea by saying that in my example, other variables changed. When you parked it was dark out but in the morning it was bright. That idea is problematic and needs to be fleshed out. Is it what you have in mind? Suppose we have a closed system and nothing changes. Can we say that time is meaningless inside this closed system? Perhaps. But outside the system, time is passing. So exactly how many variables to i need to ignore before I can say there's no change? Just because you can define a closed system doesn't mean that time stops. It just means that there was no change over a period of time. And that lack of change might be a source of comfort to you when you go out the next morning and find your car's still where you parked it.

I find the entire space hugely interesting. The price action of bitcoin is all the public knows about. It's a tremendous distraction. Distributed ledger technologies -- that includes blockchain and some non-blockchain solutions that are out there -- are going to be the greatest force for disintermediation since the Gutenberg Bible.

Or do you think the Powers that Be will simply co-opt and crush it, like they've done with everything else?

i do in fact believe that many of the reports of unidentified flying objects are of alien origin) — David Solman

The reports are of alien origin? You mean the aliens send us reports that there are aliens, but there aren't really aliens? Exactly what I suspected. Alien fake news! They probably run Twitter bots. The fiends!

the zoo hypothesis is what is happening to our race. — David Solman

Old Twilight Zone episode.

What this means is that our fate is in the hands of a civilization that we know nothing about and that is a scary thought. — David Solman

You mean the politicians? The Illuminati? The banks?

I opine that existential time is not a mathematical continuum. If it were, then the present would have 'measure zero.' But then how could you read this sentence? — ff0

Back to Zeno. At any particular instant the arrow is at rest. How then can it move?

I agree with you that the mathematical continuum is not an accurate model of the nature of the real world. What's interesting is that physicists are trained to think of an instant of time as a real number t. What's the acceleration at time t, what's the temperature?

The math helps them to craft interesting theories. But the world is definitely not the same as the mathematical real line. The world is not a set of dimensionless points of space and instants of time.

↪fishfry Finally got approved. CoinBase sucks. £11 transfer fee sending £39 worth of Bitcoin to Bittrex (currently I have a £50 weekly limit). Ugh. Hopefully one of the other ones are much cheaper (when I'm finally approved). — Michael

I gave up on Coinbase and I'm stuck for days in Gemini's approval process. I'm going to try Cex next. So in the end I'll have to give my personal info to all the exchanges out there and see who finally accepts me. And the exchanges are so insecure that it's just a matter of time till everyone's personal info is hacked.

This system is totally not ready for prime time. The bitcoin bulls say the "herd" is about to show up and boost the price, but there is no way Jill and Joe Public are getting into this thing any time soon. Learning how to use bitcoin and secure your wallet is seriously complicated right now.

So if the public can't get in and can't figure it out, who is moving the prices? Is it two guys in a room trading back and forth before they dump? It's not completely out of the question.

In other news ...

CBOE Bitcoin Futures Site Immediately Crashes.

To be accurate, that headline's a little over the top. They basically had some standard hiccups for a new popular website but they seem to be up and running. The world hasn't ended yet.

I thought I heard that BitCoin was going to be traded on Chicago's Mercantile Exchange starting tomorrow 12.11.17 but I read now it is set for next Monday.
Does that mean that if we are going to invest in BitCoin as opposed to Ethereum we should do it by next 12.18.17? — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Bitcoin FUTURES will be traded. These will be "cash-settled" futures, meaning that no bitcoin are harmed in the making of this motion picture. No bitcoin are ever bought or sold. Rather, you're placing bets on what the price will be. The futures are not backed by bitcoin. The CME and CBOE will decide on their official reference price for the day and the futures contracts will settle with respect to that price.

Nobody has any idea what the futures trading will do to the price of bitcoin. Some say the influence of big money and professional traders will stabilize the price of bitcoin. Others say that the wild fluctuations in bitcoin may bring down some of the smaller futures trading companies and crash the economy. Nobody has any idea what's going to happen.

One of the interesting factors is that the CME and CBOE trade during business hours five days a week, while bitcoin trades 24/7/365. If bitcoin has a big price move over a given weekend, there would in theory be huge arbitrage opportunities on Monday morning.

I'd say just wait it out for a week and see what happens. Or jump in and enjoy the ride.

introduction of a futures market — Cavacava

I saw a video where they pointed out that shorting bitcoin futures is a perfectly sensible hedging tactic for bitcoin miners. It costs a lot in electricity to mine bitcoin, and if the price drops you're essentially losing money just running the computers. By buying short contracts (bets the price will go down) they can stabilize their mining business by protecting it against drops in the price of bitcoin. I thought that was interesting. It's basically what the wheat and soybean farmers have been doing for decades.

I also read about Lightning Network — Cavacava

This actually concerns me. If you have a communication protocol that is so slow and clunky that it needs an auxiliary protocol for it to work, there's something wrong with the design. If the Lightning network is secure, why do we need the underlying bitcoin layer at all? Maybe it makes sense to scrap bitcoin and build the next generation cryptocurrency directly on some variant of the Lightning network.

I'm trying to learn more about the Lightning network to see if my impression is correct. On the other hand if Lightning actually works and scales up, it could solve a lot of the bitcoin scalability issues.

So, something plainly has to give. — Wayfarer

Bitcoin's already dead IMO. It may go to a million US first, but it's going to zero. It has unsolvable scaling problem, electricity usage being one of them. The centralization of miners is another. Their network's already congested and inefficient. Transaction costs are rising and settlement times are lengthening. Their protocol is designed to get worse the more people use it.

To put bitcoin's performance in perspective, the bitcoin network can handle up to 7 transactions per second. By comparison, Visa handles a constant stream of several thousand transactions per second and up to 50K/sec at peak, using orders of magnitude less electricity per transaction. Many delusional bitcoin enthusiasts think bitcoin's going to replace the world's financial system. This is not going to happen.

Some other crypto might. And there is a technical revolution based on blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies that may end up being bigger than the Internet. But bitcoin itself is already over. If someone gets in at $15k and out at $20k more power to them. But someone's gong to be that last fool.

Actually the date of the first moon walk was July 20, 1969. Following that, there was a massive party of celebration at Woodstock, New York, from Aug15-18 1969. — Metaphysician Undercover

They say memory is the second thing to go.

We walked on the moon in 1967. In 1968 MLK and RFK were assassinated, the cities burned, and in the following years the country realized the government was lying to us about the war in Vietnam. US society has never been the same. Vietnam was the beginning of a long slide. People think this was a long time ago but Nixon's henchmen Cheney and Rumsfeld were key players in the Iraq war. In retrospect the 1967 moon walk was the high water mark of American power.

The only case where it makes sense really is for illegal activities. Drugs, arms trading, etc. — Agustino

This is actually not true. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as people think Every transaction is tracked forever. For example that NiceHash $62M theft, those bitcoin are sitting in a wallet whose ID everyone knows. If the thief tried to convert it to cash, they'd be found out. You need to give your real-world identification to the exchanges in order to open an account.

It turns out that there are cryptos that are completely anonymous. The biggest one is called Monero. It's built on a version of the blockchain that's designed for true anonymity. They mix up each transaction with others so that you can't trace the coins back to any particular account. As I understand it, discerning criminals use Monero now, not bitcoin.

Gonna try again with CodeBase tonight. Had an issue yesterday where the photos of my ID weren't high enough quality so they were rejected, and that placed a 24 hour block before I could try again. Hopefully I'll have more luck this time. — Michael

That's the crazy thing. How is the price going up if nobody can actually manage to buy it? It's possible that there's a lot of price manipulation by the insiders at the exchanges. Nobody knows. It's a mystery though. Every exchange is collapsing under the weight of the transaction volume, yet the price keeps going up.

... has been washed clean by an initial thermal equilbration — apokrisis

Heat is a measure of average energy over a region. Thermal equilibration is a statistical process. My remarks stand.

However no one wants to talk about the real combinatorial issues here — apokrisis

I'm perfectly happy to talk about combinatorics. Although I'm ignorant of the specific physics, I gather that the argument takes the form of modeling the number of particles in a region, and all the states they can be in, and figuring out how many possible configurations of all the particles there are.

But it doesn't matter. The number, whatever it is, is finite. As far as the mathematics, the situation is best modeled by assuming there are exactly two states, heads and tails. Many here are making detailed technical points of physics. But if you had a "zillion" possible states -- Tom objected to that earlier, a zillion is just whatever big finite number of states you like -- then you could code each state in binary and combine them by some rule and you'd map your entire state space into the set of all possible binary sequences.

Coin flips are exactly the same as fancy physics-y states for purposes of this discussion. Because you could express all the states in binary and have the same conversation.

Now Tom has claimed in one post that there are infinitely many states. THAT I do NOT believe. There must be finitely many states in order for this particular argument to go through at all. The argument is that there are infinitely many Hubble volumes, and each one can take on one of a bounded set of finitely many states. In other words there's some number S and that's the most states you can have. [In other words you can't have 1 state in Hubble 1, 2 states in Hubble 2, and so forth. There is a max number of states ANY region can have].

Otherwise this entire argument does not work. There are finitely many states. And when you're making statistical arguments, coin flips work just as well as huge numbers because you can always code any huge number in binary. The specific details of the physics and the calculation of the possible number of states is a huge distraction that's causing people to miss the fact that they are making statistical arguments. Statistics only tell you about populations, and never individuals.

So the cosmological principle says absolutely nothing about microphenomena such as whether a particular teensy-weensy arrangement of molecules like the Earth recurs. — andrewk

I suspected that, but didn't want to complicate my point.The Wiki article on the cosmo principle does note that the sun is different from the earth, so that the cosmo principle doesn't apply at such small scales. But if there are two Hubble volumes that are identical, that must (might?) mean that those volumes are particle-by-particle identical, which would imply a duplicate earth. Is that true? If there are two identical Hubble volumes, what does identical mean? Are they quark-by-quark the same? Ih which case they have duplicate earths.

I must say that I don't really believe there are duplicate earths, duplicate people, or for that matter an actual infinity of anything. I'm with Lee Smolin, who coined the phrase, "the trouble with physics." He was talking about string theory, but multiverse theory strikes me as suffering from the same type of problem. We are at the limit of our ability to do experiments, so the theorists are running amok and no longer doing science.

https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science/dp/061891868X

I think the cosmological principle allows such exceptions, but just says that the probability of us being that exception is sufficiently infinitesimal to preclude explanations that require us to be that exception. — noAxioms

Well the probability is zero. But that is not the same as guaranteeing with absolute certainty that there is another earth. That's the claim on the table. The difference between absolutely certain or almost certain. If someone wants to claim that the multiverse theory says that it's almost certain [in the technical sense] that there's a duplicate earth, I'll accept that this conclusion follows from the premises. But @Tom is claiming absolute certainty, and I don't see it.

No it doesn't. You can't count your clones. Physics tells us that the cardinality of your clones is Aleph_0. — tom

This is something that troubles me deeply. You are claiming that physicists assume that Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory applies to the physical universe.

If that were true, wouldn't their be clever physics postdocs applying for grants to see if the axiom of choice or the continuum hypothesis or any of the large cardinal axioms are true?

If you claim that the collection of clones may be placed into bijection with the set of positive integers, then how large does physics say is the collection of the set of subsets of the clones? Is it Aleph-1, as the continuum hypothesis would imply? Or do you think it might be Aleph-2, as ‎Gödel suspected? Or perhaps far larger than that, as Paul Cohen believed?

It seems to me that these questions are utter nonsense. Nobody knows whether ZF applies to the real world. Perhaps category theory or homotopy type theory, two modern alternatives to set theory, better describe the mathematical foundations of the world.

You have a reference for the claim that physicists believe there are countably many clones? Or that Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory has relevance to physics? This I would really like to see.

Along the same lines, if you claim there are uncountably many indistinguishable Hubble volumes, what is the cardinality of this uncountable quantity? Is it one of the Alephs? Or perhaps the axiom of choice false and the uncountable cardinality is not an Aleph at all. Could that be the case?

I don't think physics has given any credence to these questions at all. In which case any claim about the cardinality of clones is nonsense.

I think I found the smoking multiverse.

I went to the Wiki article on the multiverse. I searched for "ergodic," and found this:

A prediction of chaotic inflation is the existence of an infinite ergodic universe, which, being infinite, must contain Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions.

Now we see a couple of things. First, here is the popularized explanation of the ergodic business. But note the imprecision and inaccuracy:

... which, being infinite, must contain Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions.

The language here clearly shows that the author thinks that the mere fact that there are infinitely many Hubble volumes implies that all initial states must be instantiated. But of course we have seen that this is not true.

I do realize that the fault here is not with Tegmark or with any other serious multiverse theorists, but rather with the Wiki author. But this is a good example of the type of loose thinking and careless use of infinity that seems to be a big part of this subject.

Now two paragraphs later, we find this beautiful resolution to our entire problem.

Given infinite space, there would, in fact, be an infinite number of Hubble volumes identical to ours in the universe. This follows directly from the cosmological principle, wherein it is assumed that our Hubble volume is not special or unique.

AHA!!!! Mere infinity is not sufficient, we all agree on that. And as I've pointed out, ergodicity is not sufficient, because a distribution could be ergodic yet still behave badly on a set of measure zero.

We need another assumption. the cosmological principle, which says in effect that there are no measure zero misbehaviors!

So ergodicity says that the large scale behavior is statistically well-behaved; and the cosmological principle says that there are no measure zero exceptions. Ergodicity allows that for all we know, our own earth is a statistical exception. The cosmological principle says that there are no statistical exceptions.

None of us know (though some claim to know) how the world got started, if was really a big bang multiverse or whether it's just turtles all the way down.

But as philosophers we can at least point out which arguments correctly follow from which assumptions.

As far as I can determine, the fact that there must be a duplicate earth does not follow from ergodicity; but rather from the additional assumption of the cosmological principle. It's the cosmological principle that rules out measure zero exceptions. And of course the cosmological principle is an assumption not directly supported by evidence. It's simple an assumption whose purpose is to make the duplicate earth theory true. Without that extra assumption you haven't got certainty that there's a duplicate earth.