Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

 

[cypherdoc]

they love me. they cannot stay away.

 

[frankenmint]

...

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/the-blockchain-scalability-survey/

I see the data, and to me, it looks like people don't know what they want - we want an adjusting block size as soon as possible - to scale as soon as possible. I think about terracoin - is that fud?

 

[lunar]

The last talk on part 3 by Miles Carlsten was well worth a listen. Some interesting points I've not seen discussed before. Namely the commoditisation of mining hardware wrt the chip fabrication.

Seems there is some strong incentives at play here that, affect decentralisation and future attack vectors.

I wonder if mining chips will eventually become a common commodity that will be in all personal devices?

21inc might be onto something.? I'd like to see how a low cost, high density mining chips designed for personal use might interact with treechains and partial chain verification. Now that WOULD decentralise the network.

 

[majamalu]

@Peter R

What a great presentation. A breath of fresh air in an atmosphere vitiated by techno-interventionism.

I think the Blockstream guys will feel more comfortable in the Zeitgeist movement (aka "marxism with robots") than in Bitcoin.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Peter R

I must add my own congratulations on the talk.

It made it starkly obvious what is going on, and I could hear a thousand economically fallacious small-blocker posts on reddit and BCT dying in swaths as you laid out the supply and demand curve points like Sauron with that giant sword taking out warriors by the dozen with each swing at the start of Lord of the Rings.

Someone on BCT actually made fun of you for being too athletic-looking for a scholar. That's kind of the joke, isn't it? People who are well-rounded in terms of both fields of study and overall life competence, not narrowly focused on their tiny sliver of reality in autistic fashion, actually tend to be more capable of making meaningful contributions in general. The Ledger journal makes partial reference to this reality as well, tying together these two landmark achievements in my mind.

"Who the hell is Peter R?" indeed

 

[cypherdoc]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

You know I like simplifying complex subjects when I can and Bitcoin is no different.

I often liken big blockists as optimists while small blockists as pessimists,which fits the descriptions quite well if you compare Gavin vs Adam & gmax.

Likewise, remember when Peter_R described Bitcoin as Hope? I thought that was extremely appropo. Sometimes I don't think the small blockists have hope and are just trying to shape Bitcoin into another inflation scheme or WoW trading platform as they can't believe satoshi has done what he has and pessimism is all they've ever known.

I think that's sad.

 

[cypherdoc]

here's a fun one.

speculative traders have their favorite entry point patterns when it comes down to technical trading. we're at one right now, if you believe we're starting to go back up for good after this long over 1.5 yr pullback. IOW, after a long term double bottom, one waits for the first significant retrace to make his or her entry at a higher low from the bottom; like right now.

remember when i made this post a few days ago?:

cypherdoc:

i predict that one day we will look back at the Scaling conference and realize that Peter_R's paper will have been the most important presented allowing a break through in Bitcoin fundamental understanding.

well, that one is already looking pretty good

so marry that prediction with this chart. wouldn't it be cool to joke years from now that Peter_R single handedly halted the decline and marked the last chance to get in? mind you, i am not making a prediction here. just illustrating what could be a fun call for years to come:


edit: of course, this could be irrelevant in less than 24-48 hrs

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cypherdoc

The free market position fundamentally involves hope. This might seem like a weak position, but it is actually the more epistemically sound one: it's merely an acknowledgement of the limits of our abilities to understand everything about natural orders, of which the market is a premier example. It is the antidote to the hubris of the central planner. A quote from F.A. Hayek, who covered this more cogently than perhaps anyone else in history:

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

The code optimizer is always looking for tragically unsolvable problems, and because of said limits in human knowledge and understanding, they will always seem to find them. The market solution is too complex for them to ever conceive, or at least the proof of its viability is.

A little awareness of economics and its counterintuitive insights goes a long way toward removing this pessimism.

 

[Peter R]

wouldn't it be cool to joke years from now that Peter_R single handedly halted the decline and marked the last chance to get in?

Haha come on guys, cut it out; you're going to make my head swell.

People who are well-rounded in terms of both fields of study and overall life competence, not narrowly focused on their tiny sliver of reality in autistic fashion, actually tend to be more capable of making meaningful contributions in general.

And--like you said in the Wall Observer thread a year or so ago--have drinks with friends three nights a week.

 

[Melbustus]

@Peter R

I think the appropriate response to the perceived need to micromanage is, "If that were necessary, Bitcoin would already be doomed." Somehow these guys have some steet cred with some Austrians/ancaps for being "cypherpunks" and decentralists; this deep-seated mistrust of the market, with the centralization of development that implies, really strips away that facade.

Yes, spot-on. That's kinda what's blown my mind about this whole thing - the guys who are supposedly the most free-market oriented are the ones thinking that they need to add specifically engineered complexity in lieu of the market finding an equilibrium!

Anyway - hopefully Peter's paper and presentation (really enjoyed both) will help convince people that the market can most efficiently find a way.

Funny, I often think about how insanely simple bitcoin's supply curve is: start at 50 and cut it half every 210,000 blocks. Done - tell everyone; supply dynamics and transparency solved. Present that solution to virtually any monetary academic (or core dev pre-bitcoin) and they'd tell you that supply cliffs like that would break the market, that the curve should be smoothed via this or that complication, etc, etc...

Much of bitcoin's genius is in keeping the engineering as simple as possible, eliminating magic numbers, and leaving the market to work out the details.

 

[Melbustus]

@Peter R

Forgive me if this has been discussed here (I'm a few days behind), but where did you land on the tail-emission issue? Your paper suggests that R/T (inflation) needs to be positive in order for blockspace to have a cost to the supplier. I don't have an intuitive of understanding of why that would be true.... Seems to me that orphan risk should apply regardless of whether the payoff from winning a race comes from new coin, fees, or both...

 

[cypherdoc]

Haha come on guys, cut it out; you're going to make my head swell.

of course, that's not my intent.

as you know, i'm a big believer in technical analysis and trading. lots of times, i'll even ignore the news. but it is occasionally surprising to me how a chart seems to magically carve out a pattern consistent with a particular news event, even though we know that market movements are an aggregation of many known and unknown events over time most of which we can't even begin to know about, let alone understand.

but make no mistake, i would LOVE to be able to look back years from now and blame you and say, "see, Peter_R did it!!!", lol. it would be so fitting.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

R/T (inflation) needs to be positive in order for blockspace to have a cost to the supplier.

I think R needs to be replaced with a more precise definition than "block reward": it's miner income which can only be obtained by producing a block at a specific chain height.

Right now, the only example of income matching that criteria is the newly issued coins, but adding other sources is reasonably straightforward (as straightforward as adding any other opcode).

 

[molecular]

@Peter R

1.) congrats on a great talk

2.) is your paper discussed somewhere? I have some questions that have surely been discussed before.

 

[sickpig]

Just to confirm, that's per day?

no, it isn't.

it's a flat solution, i.e. no bandwidth limit.

The parameter was related to the "velocity" and it was expressed mega bits per seconds.

 

[sickpig]

@Peter R

is it me or Greg Maxwell does not belong to the Ledger editorial board any more?

edit: if memory serves it was listed on this page http://ledgerjournal.org/ojs/index.php/ledger/about/editorialTeam#group

 

[elehal]

I shouldn't have really posted any of it, but I had just been banned from #bitcoin-workshop for asking whether "theymos the censor should be censored from [#bitcoin-workshop]" so that sort of tripped me.

Your comments in the channel were consistently inappropriate and often constituted attacking users of the channel. Scaling Bitcoin has very clear set rules about what constitutes a safe and comfortable environment for all participants. You are invited again to read and absorb them here https://scalingbitcoin.org/montreal2015/#CoC, as they are vital to conferences like this being attractive to attendees.

After being kicked from the channel for attacking a core contributor you contacted me privately.

You then attacked another member of the channel directly, which caused you to be muted for exactly the same reason. Muted because this did not impede your ability to absorb and reflect on what was being presented at the conference as a ban would.

12:54 < Aquentin> shouldn't theymos be censored from here for his censorship?
12:54 -!- mode/#bitcoin-workshops [+q Aquentin!*@*] by elehal

After filling my inbox with inane crap, you received a ban from the channel.

-!- mode/#bitcoin-workshops [+b Aquentin!*@*] by elehal

You should note that your often unpopular views were tolerated, your bad behavior was not.

 

[awemany]

I have repeatedly said I like the idea of Lightning Networks. So here's a worry that came to mind after rereading the LN paper:

What if changes, even soft-forking ones to the protocol, new opcodes and the like, will make it harder for Bitcoin layer-0 to scale by making the block structure, transaction dependency linking and so forth more complex and preventing possible future optimizations on that front?

This does worry me as I think right now layer-0 can be optimized quite a bit and I think we should be VERY CAREFUL to not silently accept changes there that would make it harder to scale Bitcoin layer-0.

 

[cypherdoc]

In his latest series of podcasts, Adam doesn't even hide the fact that if LN were in place now, he wouldn't even need to be debating block size increases.

To me, this clearly shows he sees them as mutually exclusive, even though we're told block size needs to dramatically increase to facilitate their implementation.

The huge problem I see with LN is how will miners make fees when they've all been siphoned away by Hub operators?