Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jonny1000]

@Zarathustra I was just going to post that. The comments are priceless. Thanks for the laughs @jonny1000.

Why is this funny? Read through this thread. As I have explained many times, I am a large blocker. I have been asking for a hardfork with basic safety features and oppose dangerous hardforks that would damage the ecosystem (e.g. XT, Classic, BU and SegWit2x are dangerous. With the benefit of hindsight, XT and Classic were almost optimally stupid, locking in 25% miner opposition and giving that 25% the wipeout advantage, you see that now right? Bitcoin Cash started with like 5% of the hashrate (note 25% >> 5%), now its much higher, imagine if Bitcoin Cash had the wipeout advantage, it would probably have won by now, right? When will I get the thanks for contributing to preventing you from doing these destructive suicide hardforks?).

Bitcoin Cash has:

• 2 way replay protection enabled by default

• Wipeout protection

• A modification to the block header, such that all wallets need to upgrade to follow the new chain (it kind of has this)

(Even better would be to include more win win safety mechanisms like a new P2P network and new address format)

Bitcoin Cash finally delivered on these three things, that I spent many painful hours on this forum asking for. Why would I dislike Bitcoin Cash? I think Bitcoin Cash is great! Let the market decide!

Please join me in the safe hardfork camp. I think we should do another hardfork, but include so many safety features that is insanely safe. Just as an example how safe hardforks can be. Why not? What is the disadvantage of these win win safety features?

 

[KoKansei]

@jonny1000 I would love to see what happens when you post this to /r/bitcoin.

 

[jonny1000]

@jonny1000 I would love to see what happens when you post this to /r/bitcoin.

Have I not been doing that almost everyday for the last few years? I have been criticizing the lack of these safety features in XT, Classic, BU and SegWit2x day in day out.

 

[KoKansei]

Why would I dislike Bitcoin Cash? I think Bitcoin Cash is great! Let the market decide!

@jonny1000 Show me where you posted the above string of text to /r/bitcoin and it was not taken down.

 

[Bloomie]

Why is this funny?

I was referring to the reactions from the swamp.

 

[awemany]

@jonny1000: LOL. You are so cute.

What you call 'the right way to do it' is getting eerily close to a 50% attack on what you (and currently, I) deem Bitcoin.

And that this happened - that this very instability that you are witnessing now formed - is due to your and your fellow small blockers tone deaf attitude, ignorance, arrogance and authoritarianism.

Ironically all because you and your peers longed for your stable, no-controversial-changes Bitcoin safe space with padded walls.

And you longed so hard and with such a zeal and corresponding underhanded tactics that you and your masters have caused - and this much is clear already, regardless of outcome - the biggest instability there has ever been in the Bitcoin system.

And this ain't 40% of miners just signalling shit! This is 40% of SHA256 power that is currently not mining your coin!

Maybe S2X will still turn out to be the real thing. But I know one thing for sure: SegWit1X ain't gonna be Bitcoin in November.

That ship has sailed.

And now we witness people - like you - realigning to this new reality. This is so very predictable.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

@jonny1000 For what it's worth, I think a lot of the features you mention (e.g., 2-way replay protection, modifying the block header, changing the address format) are great ideas! (I would also suggest a change to the PoW algorithm.) To the extent that there really are people committed to creating a 1MB4EVA minority hash rate chain if and when the BTC network finally upgrades its capacity, those people should absolutely include at least some of those features. If they don't, I suspect that their chain may be viewed as "hostile" and attacked. (This of course assumes that such a chain would survive long enough to be attacked. That first difficulty adjustment is likely to be a doozy.)

 

[albin]

Bitcoin Cash started with like 5% of the hashrate (note 25% >> 5%), now its much higher, imagine if Bitcoin Cash had the wipeout advantage, it would probably have won by now, right?

You know just as well as anybody else here that a hard fork cannot wipe out any original chain literally by definition.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

@albin - yeah, this whole "wipeout advantage" thing is just painfully stupid. If Bitcoin Cash had been done as a minority hash rate fork in a manner that only added new rules, it likely wouldn't have survived to its first difficulty adjustment. And no, it wouldn't have wiped out the main chain as its cumulative PoW has not yet come close to that of the BTC chain. (And if it ever came close in such a scenario and those supporting the BTC chain didn't want to be wiped out, they could soft fork in some kind of checkpoint requirement to avoid it.) I could start solo mining my very own "user-activated soft fork" right now to reduce the block size limit down to 1 kb starting at the next block. And my chain would enjoy an "asymmetrical wipeout advantage" over the existing chain. Pretty scary, right? Obviously, all the hash rate would immediately switch over to my chain. Well, no. Because the "advantage" is a stupid, theoretical and (should the need arise and the desire to do so exist) easily-neutralized one. If a majority of the hash rate on the BTC chain follows through with 2x they will enjoy a much, much more potent advantage -- that of being the most-PoW chain and thus the stronger Schelling point for the market to converge on.

 

[AdrianX]

right now to reduce the block size limit down to 1 kb starting at the next block.

this is so hot right now LOL, those UASF lemmings have no idea, @jonny1000, I am sure knows this, he just doesn't want the minority 1MB forever chain to be wiped out. He just gives lip service to the notion and support for a native on chain transaction capacity increase.

The UASF'ers would be wiped out in the same way.

 

[awemany]

Assuming BCC will replace BTC (for the sake of argument):

Is it just me, or could Gresham's law paradoxically and funnily lead to a situation where we have quite empty blocks on BCC until the time when BTC is abandoned?

 

[freetrader]

For the sake of argument, I do believe that users who have been put off by high fees from transacting on the legacy chain will start moving to Bitcoin Cash and we will see bursty, but steady increase in volume.

Beginning soon with traffic from Ryan X. Charles' Yours.
Linking to copy of his tweet storm made by a redditor:

 

[AdrianX]

@awemany I was thinking about this, fundamentally it's the network of users that give the currency value and I think Gresham's law is very pertinent to BCC adoption.

Looking at the situation it seems to me that BCC is considered bad money in the context of Gresham's law as it has less value for some arbitrary reasons (propaganda) and one legitimate one, mainly it not as widely accepted by large merchants. It is not inferior in reality as it has all the same fundamental values as BTC and I think it is better as it's cheaper to transact with.

Large merchant adoption is arbitrary to me, most merchants just convert BTC to fiat so they exists to extract economic energy from the bitcoin economy, merchants like OverStock are the exception, they are a net contributor, saving in BTC and paying for goods and services in BTC, Overstock sets the bar for what it means to be a BTC merchant, they benefit from network growth with appreciation of their savings, not true of most BTC accepting businesses .

When I think about the quantity of money theory MV=PT I've come to believe it's not the total quantity of money issued but the total quantity of money available to the economy.

So the value of money is the available supply M * Velocity.

BTC is being horded, I think the jump in price after the fork and the dumping of BCC was a result of a contraction of the BTC money supply. Savers hording the money they feel is better. Gresham's law in practice.

Today I did something that confused my previous understanding outlined above, your comment giving me pause for thought. I set up My mining rigs and mining contracts to mine the most profitable chain, and pay out to a Shapshift.io address that converts all BTC mining payouts to BCC. I figured I should leave about 30% of my Hashrate mining BCC to keep the chain alive while mine BTC to buy BCC at a market price. (the fun thing is this is now all automated it just happens - inflate BTC - deflate BCC)

Just looking ad r/bitcoin sentiments today users telling people to use altcoins or PayPal if they don't like the high fees. In short they are saying use BCC it's cheaper, BTC is for hording (i.e. not growing the network).

I'm thinking BCC will grow the network of users much faster because it is wrongly confused with being bad money in the context of Bitcoin holders and Gresham's law. We are seeing in South Korea the largest trading volume happening in Fiat, this is encouraging to me, it implies network growth and not just people like @Norway and me buying BCC with BTC (i do cringe for many on r/btc going all in).

I think we will see relatively low transaction volume in BCC, but only because the new users removing liquidity reducing available supply. For argument sake I don't expect BTC to be abandoned, I expect it to be repurposed as a settlement layer whether it succeeds or now is debatable.

Once the BCC network has grown and available supply has been absorbed I expect velocity to increase as holders look to liquidate savings, I expect value to rocket past that of BTC and merchant to start accepting BCC only once it grows in value.
[doublepost=1503476500][/doublepost]@freetrader I was going to mention Yours but though i was going on a little long. Yours is what i think is the ideal application to maximize adoption. I was even thinking of creating a faucet to give people free coins to use the service at no cost to begin with just to introduce the concept.

That application is so brilliant it brings in mainstream adoption, grows the network and increases money velocity. It does the 3 things the BS/Core developers are preventing by maintaining a transaction limit.

 

[awemany]

@AdrianX: Good points. I guess it is going to be a superposition of different effects: The Gresham's law for those who already believe Cash is better money, and the transactions that come from Yours etc.

By the way, if there's something that I am very bullish on, it is Ryan X. Charles' Yours and similar ideas.

Not that I think all his different monetization schemes make sense (such as the more elaborate/constructed/remote ones he talked about at TFOB).

But I do think the Core idea is right. Replace things like Blendle with Bitcoin micropayments.

This is absolutely going to work, and I think the time is going to be right now or soon for that. I wish him the best and I am quite certain that he'll succeed.

It is one of those ideas I might have pursued if I hadn't been discouraged and distracted by the blocksize limit and the resulting dark clouds over the concept of cryptocurrency (as a Bitcoin maximalist). Which are still there, but maybe the dark ages will end.

Which might be an apt way to say it: With the reign of Greg and Adam and Core, we entered the Bitcoin dark ages.

 

[AdrianX]

With the reign of Greg and Adam and Core, we entered the Bitcoin dark ages.

This is classic. give that technology has been accelerating at an exponential pace it's only fitting that such a situation be short lived in our current time. yes they were the dark ages indeed.

 

[freetrader]

Today's "the blocks are the tiniest, the devs are the whiniest" award goes to Peter Todd for his contributions in the following thread:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-August/000271.html

Worth reading that thread from its beginning post at
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-August/000265.html

Although he makes some confused mistakes here and there, he may be right in other instances.
For example:

we're already in a situation where it's plausible that the the most-work
SHA256^2 chain may become BCH rather than Bitcoin [ed: legacy] at some point in the near
future

 

[adamstgbit]

todd says:

what BCH shows is that miners are happy to redirect hashing power to the
most profitable chain to mine, even if it causes problems (like higher block
intervals) on the prvious chain.

that statement is only 40% correct...
if it proves anything its that most miners are NOT guided by short term profits.
[doublepost=1503537790][/doublepost]

the agreement was mainly signed by *pools*, not actual hashing
power. What prevents that actual hashing power from quitting those pools in
favour of different pools?

Not a damn thing, expect the fact that, they hate you!

 

[adamstgbit]

 

[rocks]

It looks that many people from the original GCBU thread are still here which is great, I missed you guys, hope everyone is doing well.

After trying to start a fork earlier and seeing there was not enough user interest in one then (even here), imagine my surprise to a year later receive an email from Coinbase stating “we will not support the user led hard fork and you need to move your coins by July 31st”. To anyone here that was involved congratulations on a great launch. The challenges I saw earlier were not the technical aspects which were straightforward and worked, but ecosystem development and gaining the buy in from exchanges, web tools, wallets, users, miners, etc. Those are all difficult lifts and it was a flawless launch looking at it from the outside. Since receiving that email I have slowly been trying to catch up.

It has been over a year since leaving, below are some thoughts on the current situation having taken a lengthy break and only starting to catch up the past few weeks. This note became much longer than I intended (it passed the character limit), but it has been awhile.

So what did I see from the outside while not involved? As far as I could tell Bitcoin seemed to have lost all of the momentum it had built.

The reason I say this is the value of a monetary system is driven by how much that system is used, and Bitcoin usage is trending in the wrong direction with the initial usage gained slowly being lost. This is more important than price movement. Remember the excitement over merchant adoption? Most retailers who tried accepting Bitcoin have stopped (Dell gone, so are many others). Same for ATMs and the myriad of other services that either had been introduced or were planned. The few times I did hear about a new crypto currency use case it was usually related to another chain, not Bitcoin.

And the reason for this loss in usage is not only the 1MB limit core is forcing, but the complete lack of development in Bitcoin’s block chain for years plus the active destruction of existing functionality such as RBF over FSS. On top of this the dev team for Bitcoin has actively communicated to the world to NOT use Bitcoin.

Compare this to the promotional work Vitalik or other dev teams perform for competing chains, and then look at the market cap gains these chains have made against Bitcoin. I remember arguing before that ethereum was much better positioned to build usage and we would see real gains against Bitcoin, that direction seems to have continued. This is also the destruction that core’s censorship caused, so many people who believed in Satoshi’s paper of a peer to peer currency were either not allowed to contribute or pushed out. Look at the ideas discussed in this thread on how to build on Satoshi’s direction, they were only seen by a small number of people since the thread was censored from bitcointalk. Same for new user education, remember the arguments with jstolfi on the original thread, I started reading /r/btc again recently and he is a prolific poster today. That new user growth was killed/hijacked by the censorship.

We discussed usage quite a bit in the original thread. Usage is what creates demand and increased demand builds value. There are two relatively recent historical examples of this effect. The first is FDR’s ban on gold possession. The vast majority of people rejected the ban, refused to turn over their gold and held onto it in secret, and everyone who did so thought they were winning. But the purpose of the gold ban was not to force people to turn over their gold, but to stop them from using gold as money since you could no longer have it in public. After two generations of not being able to USE gold, people were left with a shinny rock that had lost significant purchasing power. The second example is the petro dollar that forces countries to buy oil with dollars. In theory countries do not need to hold dollars, they can convert their own currency to dollars at the same time they buy oil since the dollar is liquid, but in practice every country holds dollars to ensure a supply of oil. Usage drives demand, and demand drives value.

Another thing I observed while unplugged is for most people Bitcoin is the only crypto currency. We saw the 1000 alts, but to the rest of the world crypto currency only meant Bitcoin. However, the up and coming alts are starting to gain recognition and mindshare outside of the community, this coupled with continuous development by competing dev teams interested in promoting usage offers Bitcoin real competition for the first time.

This is also why the name Bitcoin Cash is so important and the bcash name is a real attack. The name Bitcoin carries tremendous value. A lot of great decisions were made in Bitcoin Cash’s design to legitimize the Bitcoin name (which Satoshi’s Bitcoin lacked). At the top is successfully keeping the mining algorithm and using EDA to enable that, this legitimizes Bitcoin Cash’s claim to be Bitcoin in a way it wouldn’t if the algorithm was altered.

For Bitcoin (and by Bitcoin I mean Bitcoin Cash) to succeed it needs to refocus on development that enables more usage, and to communicate this vision so others feel comfortable to build on the chain once again. This should be 100% of the focus. Core will continue their chain no matter what (they will fork algorithms if a death spiral starts), hash rate will fluctuate, the attacks, character assassinations and censorship will continue, but in the end the chain that builds the most usage wins.

I am not sure who is in charge of Bitcoin Cash, if they are on this board or what the roadmap is. I am sure there is a solid roadmap, but here are my 2 cents on things that I would love to see and I hope are there:

1) Sub-blocks - the concept of miners building a chain of weaker difficulty blocks prior to the next real block being found in order to pre-send transactions to include in the next block. This not only speeds block propagation and smoothes transmission, but also improves zero-confirmation reliability (no it is not 100% but good enough for many use cases). I remember writing a rambling post on this and PeterR expanded on the concept and wrote a great paper.

2) UTXO catch-up – enabling nodes to start from a header chain and current UTXO set. We discussed some of the problems with this before, but it is worth trying to do right and I think there are solutions where miners have to validate the complete chain while non-mining nodes can utilize UTXO catch-up.

3) Improving the scalability of the reference client – Core should be embarrassed, the reference client is simply not scalable as is. There are global locks all over the place creating contention in multiple areas. Maybe BU improved on this. If not my own personal view is the right place to start with are the data structures and to convert them to a lockless design (multiple concurrent writers that atomically update without locking and readers that see a stable read-only snapshots). From there global locks throughout can slowly be backed out. Lockless data structures are a black art and easy to get wrong though.

4) Adopting other chain improvements – I am still catching up but it seems that other chains are starting to adopt functionality from other chains that prove popular, for example I think I heard of zcash’s blinding is being adopted by others. Bitcoin should definitely do this for functionality that is aligned to Satoshi’s direction and I think if it is to succeed it will have to in the end.

(continued next post....)

 

[rocks]

A couple more thoughts in no particular order:

To me the #1 best part of the successful fork is it demonstrates end-users control bitcoin, not miners, which is something I argued for before. End-users control bitcoin by determining the rules they will accept and only accepting blocks that conform to those rules. This is exactly what happened with Bitcoin Cash. The job of miners is ONLY to order transactions within a given set of rules end-users decide and agree on, but that is it. This notion that miners determine the rules everyone has to follow, or centralized development teams have lock in control, has been proven wrong. End-users have the FINAL ability to set direction. This needs to be remembered the next time it is needed. BTW, Core was not a strong adversary and look at what they were able to do, just wait till governments try to capture exchanges, miners, wallets, developers, etc.

Segwit2x is in an interesting place and is now being attacked by all sides. Many big blockers have already invested in Bitcoin Cash and are incentivized against it while core views Segwit2x as more of a threat to claiming their Bitcoin legitimacy and are not only attacking it but threatening it with their “defensive” patents. My (limited) understanding is the real battle is for developer check in control and Jeff would be in charge of Segwit2x, which if true means core will stop at nothing to prevent it, even if it means driving every big blocker to Bitcoin Cash. The problem with Segwit2x are: 1) it has segwit plus RBF and other nonsense and 2) it is only 2x with no future roadmap. Personally, I am hedging a bit and have only made small BTC->BCH conversions in order to lock in segwit2x coins in case it wins out. Once that fork happens though, the rest of my bscore coins will quickly convert to ETH, BCH and a few others.

Whichever chain wins I hope the current core team members are remembered for their absurd, evil and inexcusable censorship, attacks and character assignations, and are shunned from future development. Just look at what they did to Gavin and any others who got in their way. Two years ago I got into an argument with Greg on /r/btc over the /r/bitcoin bans and he flat out stated if there was something important to discuss it could always be done by him visiting /r/btc when convenient, but otherwise no go. What type of person thinks this way? Not someone any future Bitcoin dev team should want to work with.

In case you are wondering, the reason I went MIA so suddenly was largely for personal reasons. I had left my day job to try and start a project (non-Bitcoin related). I then started satoshi’s bitcoin because I was so fed up with core and felt a need to do something, but the reality is I did not have any spare time and the effort was negatively impacting my work by quite a bit. At first I planned to only step back for a short time, but then found it was the best thing to do and weeks turned into months.

One final comment is Cypherdoc (is he still here?) was the first person to raise the warning on core back in 2013/14. I remember discussing side chains with him and how some devs were forming a company. He saw the conflict of interests first well before anyone else or any of this played out and was the first to warn something was wrong.

So how is everyone? Did I miss anything? Congratulations again to anyone involved in the fork! It must have been a significant amount of work and I am very impressed & very thankful we have Bitcoin Cash now.