Thu Dec 17, 2015 10:24 pm

even been proposed

> Hello Paul, love reading your blog posts! Please keep them coming.Thank you!> Do you mind to tell us which percentage of your personal net worth and/or liquid assets you hold in Bitcoins ?There is, of course, a reason *not* to do this. Financial privacy is a thing...wealthy people are often disproportionately harassed. However, it is significant, between 25% and 75%, certainly more than is wise. The thing is...I have already sold so much, to bring it down, and now I'm just letting it ride. If it all goes to zero, no regrets. I will be selling, however, if more developers follow Greg's recent example.The other thing is, while Taleb's principle is quite correct, I have a lot of "personal assets" in the form of 'youth' and 'degrees/credentials' that other people don't have. So it is easier for me to take certain risks, but other risks are harder...I have a different "porfolio", you could say, no matter what I invest in.> Your opinion on the block size and the block size debate in two sentences ?Sentence 1: Limit should stay at 1MB, frankly, on the grounds that no one has proposed anything remotely acceptable.No good decisions have been made, by definition, because no good criteria for making decisions have, with the notable exception of Jeff Garzik, moments ago (in his email about ECE's). One can't calculate the optimal blocksize unless one knows what the blocksize is for.Sentence 2: Blocksize debate has revealed Bitcoin's weakest link as the developers, and alternative communication channels are outright required (my preference being prediction markets, of course: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/win-win-blocksize/ ).The fact that so many people could disagree on the Blocksize, without realizing that [1] they also disagree on what the blocksize is for, and [2] they don't see that the obvious way forward is to state "Here's what I think the blocksize is for. What do you think?" is distressing. It is downright embarassing. I'm sorry to say it, but, were I Satoshi Nakamoto, I would think something like: "All that hard work I did, and mankind is too stupid to just keep it alive...what a shame. Oh well, I guess I'll work on something else."> Can you ELI5 what's wrong with smart contracts as described by Nick Szabo?First, there's a definition problem.Smart contracts, in the sense of Szabo, are great. We already have them, with Bitcoin. Bitcoin can do just about every contract you could want. With Hivemind's trustless escrow, Bitcoin will be able to do even more. With individual sidechains smart contracts might be everywhere.However, Szabo has accidentally (or purposefully, to become famous or something) gone further, and endorsed Ethereum and "general smart contract creation platforms". These are fundamentally nonsense.To try to make an ELI5 for why they are fundamentally nonsense would be tough. By allowing anyone to defect, and create their own laws, one has essentially created anarchy. My view is something like Anarchy < Theocracy < Despotism < Monarchy < Limited Government , in the Jan Helfeld club, and I try to explain why people can be more free living inside a restrictive contract, than outside of one here: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/contract ... in-extreme The whole point of a contract is that it enforces rules, ie restrictions on what you would've normally done.However, the fundamental nonsense runs into other, regular, engineering nonsense, which I go into later in the post. The real point is that Bitcoin can already do all these things: Szabo's Ethereum is in the Permissioned Ledger category (all the more so now that "they" have "partnered" with Microsoft...whatever on earth that is supposed to mean, in a P2P world).