Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[awemany]

@Christoph Bergmann : At zero cost for a transaction, I can actually believe that demand is infinite. Just look at the folks who wanted to put individual human's DNA onto the blockchain and similar silliness.

But neither read-only nodes nor miners have an interest to forward transactions that are very unlikely to get mined, so the very real orphan cost puts a floor on the transaction fees, in turn limiting the transaction demand to a finite value.

Naturally.

And on the block size, Bitcoin's rule system outside individual transactions is essentially an unavoidable cartel, so with the miners on their toes, I expect that there will never be a time where there is "free" blockspace. This all gets very difficult and lengthy to describe in terms of "full / not-full blocks" and "free transactions" and I think in part the community suffers from too simple explanations being thrown around.

In any case it is a wholly different thing if a 50% miner cartel self-governs Bitcoin rather than Greg Maxwell being the fed chairman.

BIP100 would be a blocksize cartel, and I guess most here would still be fine with it. It all is in an interesting field of tension between order and chaos, the free market and majority-decided structure.

Gladly, we're finally moving towards the model of miners deciding what is best.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

After all that's happened, I still blame Gavin for going with the "everybody means well" line for so many years.

The reason that Greg et al got so entrenched was because not enough people were willing to identify them as malicious.

 

[adamstgbit]

dont forget to vote https://bitco.in/forum/threads/voting-is-open-for-buips-62-63-64-65-66-67.2674/
i think voting closes tomorrow.

the most interesting BUIP is the one about supporting segwit2x
I'm voting to Reject this crap because:

I get the feeling BU doesn't have the manpower to maintain 3 versions that will undoubtedly diverge futher.

I think its better for BU to focus on ONE implementation. BU should be BU, not BU-Cash not BU-Segwit2x, Bitcoin Unlimited, should be dev.ing on the chain known as BITCOIN, period the end.

The point is.... "what is bitcoin?" ( Core or Cash or segwit2x ), there is no good reason for BU to remain neutral in the "what is bitcoin" debate.

I will vote against this BUIP because it has NOTHING to do with Bitcoin the peer to peer electronic Cash system.

hoping some of you join me in properly guiding BU development to focus on improving p2p cash system, and not losing that focus.

vote against BUIP064!

 

[awemany]

@Justus Ranvier : I blame Greg, Adam and the rest of the bunch for being what they are. That they became so successful isn't really Gavin's fault IMO, it is just the typical (likely evolutionary) human behavior of weak, average humans to align with the schoolyard bully. I think part of the reason to have a cultural code a.k.a. civilization is to counter this effect. Sadly, this mechanism appears to even work over the Internet.

I think this is also about what Vitalik Buterin meant that just because math and code are apolitical, there is no reason to stop being polite.

But what can you do. I agree that Gavin was naive (or was really trying to get the rest of us to react) - but I can't blame him for that, either way.

I guess what we can do - and what we have done, collectively, is to get the miners aware. With 2x happening against a kicking and screaming core (oh I love the recent /r/Bitcoin posts - not so much for gloating, but rather to see that they indeed are so brainwashed and hysterical that they lost their minds and need this "but the miners simply stopped your chain" figurative slap in the face to get back to some sort of (half-)sanity .. ), I think we have actually been successful.

I wonder what the plan will be for further blocksize increases. If the market picks up successful 2x as the on-chain scaling roadblock being surpassed (which I think it will) - the question will be what the next steps down the road will be.

@adamstgbit: Although I have no objection nor incentive alignment against BCC surpassing Bitcoin (with the major exception regarding the expected price crash that this will cause!), I operate on the notion that Bitcoin-SW2X is still Bitcoin by any meaningful definition and thus think it is a good idea to support SegWit to play along. (I don't think supporting SegWit itself is much of a pressing issue, though)

SegWit is an ugly toad, yes, but I swallowed that toad.

But in the end, I am glad that we can agree to disagree here and have a structure which allows us to form a collective opinion.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

@awemany Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at too re: the Bitcoin Cash vs. Bitcoin 2X contest. As I said on reddit:

SegWit is garbage, but I tend to share Peter Rizun's assessment that it's a "wart" rather than a cancer. If block size isn't artificially constrained, there's no compelling reason to make SegWit-style transactions. So they potentially become this mostly-irrelevant, little-used, and truly optional transaction type with a slightly worse security guarantee. Plus, it's my understanding that it should be possible to fix at least some of SegWit's crappiness with future forks.
​

But obviously 2X must be only the first, tiny step. My hope is that with the toxic actors who fought tooth and nail to prevent that first increase out of the picture (or at least rendered mostly irrelevant), subsequent changes will prove easier to implement. (I'd like to see a move to something like an algorithmic limit that's set as some multiple of the median block size of the last X blocks.)

I do think a BTC collapse / "Cashening" event would likely cause an overall price crash for people like me whose holdings are still (mostly) neutral between the two chains. But I'm not entirely convinced that this would actually be a bad thing. As I've written before, the path that's more disruptive and painful in the short-term here may be the one that leads to a better long-term outcome per the idea of "anti-fragility." So I have a hard time rooting too hard for one outcome vs. the other. As long as the BSCore 1-MB cult is destroyed (figuratively of course), I'm a happy man.

 

[freetrader]

I swallowed the same toad. There is no indication that miners are backing down from SW2X in significant way, and if it gets the majority hashpower as seems very likely, it will be considered Bitcoin by most people until something about the big picture changes.

Looking back, without the improvements brought by BU, we would have had even more stagnation in the Bitcoin network until now.
I think BU should continue to play that role to the fullest even in the "new reality" field of SW2X.
I've no doubt that Core will try to be there, despite what they say now. They have a track record of backtracking and shifting goalposts.

 

[awemany]

I've no doubt that Core will try to be there, despite what they say now. They have a track record of backtracking and shifting goalposts.

The corner that they have put themselves in is tiny now, however.

 

[adamstgbit]

Although I have no objection nor incentive alignment against BCC surpassing Bitcoin (with the major exception regarding the expected price crash that this will cause!), I operate on the notion that Bitcoin-SW2X is still Bitcoin by any meaningful definition and thus think it is a good idea to support SegWit to play along. (I don't think supporting SegWit itself is much of a pressing issue, though)

had it taken 1 week for Bitcoin-Cash to become "the longest valid chain" would you still think that Bitcoin-Segwit "is bitcoin"?? probably not... how about 1 month? 1 year?

the bitcoin we have today, has fundamentally changed, the name remains but the original vision has moved on, into bitcoincash. and it still remains to be seen which is the "true bitcoin"

if BU starts supporting Segwit, it validates the idea that Bitcoin-Segwit is the "true bitcoin". and increases the chances of that Staying true.

When hell freezes over, BU can admit defeat and stop supporting Bitcoin Cash exclusively, untill then I want everyone to see that BU is of the opinion that Segwit-Coin is NOT p2p cash and by extension Not bitcoin.

SegWit is an ugly toad, yes, but I swallowed that toad.

But in the end, I am glad that we can agree to disagree here and have a structure which allows us to form a collective opinion.

Yup its really amazing "we" get to choose what BU does next.

 

[AdrianX]

I can't help myself, I just have to smile at this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/71b4i0/we_are_badly_dropping_the_ball_regarding_the/

Market forces finally at work. Phew.

LOLed at this @jonny1000 comment:

"I kindly ask all members of the community to join the fight against 2x. We must do whatever it takes to make sure the hardfork is safe."

He is achieving the exacts opposite with his actions. He claims to supports bigger blocks but not when there is 95.14% support, it probably needs to be 98% support.

if he said:

"I kindly ask all members of the community to join the fight against 2x. We must do whatever it takes to make sure the hardfork is safe."

Like appealing to the remaining 4.86% of the full nodes to join in and prevent any confusion but no, now he is just stirring the pot. Making it unsafe for some ignorant followers by being a small block fundamentalist, who supports bigger blocks but not when there is only 95% support.

Sorry but he's being a dick.

 

[AdrianX]

But I will not follow the new chain [2X], as it doesn't share my philosophy, of never relaxing the rules on block validity unless there is widespread support across the entire community. The same is true with many people.

I have the right not to follow that chain

Despite never actually defining how one measures support PoW being the most practical way you can't cheat and having previously been agreed in past discussions (it doesn't help his position knowing he is pro censorship of decenting voices to prevent fracturing of agreement) This is where the economic ignorance of small block supporters get it very wrong.

I am sure he sold his BCH, by doing that he was supporting the chain, he had to give it credit he had to use it because he wanted his BCH to change ownership.

Now what @jonny1000 does not understand is his keys are forwards and backwards comparable, the network will preserve the coins assigned to his keys despite him being a dick regardless of the 2X upgrade or his support. When the network removes the 1MB limit the users who remain will be 100% in agrement - regardless if the minority fork survives which it looks like it won't.

He can exercise his wright to not follow the 2X chain and abandon his keys on the 2X chain, I hope he does but I know he's a lying hypocrite so he won't, he'll support it by paying miners to extend the blocks. I am sure of it.

He could most likely decides to sell the coins of the chain he claims he won't support and in doing so he will then be 100% in support of the network to validate the transfer of ownership and by doing so he agrees to the rules he claims he doesn't agree with and wont support.

 

[79b79aa8]

i think we can quit worrying about jonny and the fantasy of widespread agreement across the entire community. as has long been obvious, this is either a facetious requirement in support of the status quo, or desperately jejune politics. who cares which.

crypto evolves by forking. the marketplace selects winners. too much time, energy and good will have been wasted already by lack of recognition of this ultimate fact. the debate is over: pick your horse(s) and move on.

 

[adamstgbit]

my BU 1.1.0 node was stuck on "activating best chain..." splash screen for about 30mins, but just letting it run it eventually gets in. and i got to Vote!
https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/voting/
It's my first time using this new voting system, its very nice, i like the RAW html look to it, it feels serious
We need to reach out to companies that favor BCC like Ryan X. Charles's "Yours" and have them join BU and vote too. a few big names voting, that would be cool...

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@Christoph Bergmann : At zero cost for a transaction, I can actually believe that demand is infinite. Just look at the folks who wanted to put individual human's DNA onto the blockchain and similar silliness.

But neither read-only nodes nor miners have an interest to forward transactions that are very unlikely to get mined, so the very real orphan cost puts a floor on the transaction fees, in turn limiting the transaction demand to a finite value.

Naturally.

And on the block size, Bitcoin's rule system outside individual transactions is essentially an unavoidable cartel, so with the miners on their toes, I expect that there will never be a time where there is "free" blockspace. This all gets very difficult and lengthy to describe in terms of "full / not-full blocks" and "free transactions" and I think in part the community suffers from too simple explanations being thrown around.

In any case it is a wholly different thing if a 50% miner cartel self-governs Bitcoin rather than Greg Maxwell being the fed chairman.

BIP100 would be a blocksize cartel, and I guess most here would still be fine with it. It all is in an interesting field of tension between order and chaos, the free market and majority-decided structure.

Gladly, we're finally moving towards the model of miners deciding what is best.

TBH, I like the idea of storing the human DNA in the Bitcoin blockchain. Human DNA is about 600MB, which should be ok ... ideally it is done in a way that it can be pruned ... Think about it, one money for the whole world, and the history of transactions contains the most important documents of humankind, like the Bitcoin Whitepaper or the human DNA. I love this idea.

Since uploading data to the blockchain is never free, and if you pay 1 Sat / byte, and if the information is 50 percent of the transaction storage[*], you'll need 1,200,000,000 Satoshi, which are roughly $50k.

The idea, that suddenly everbody uses the blockchain as a cloud sever - which means when you say "demand is infinite" - is ridiculous. The blockchain is hard to use, hard to query and expensive. You only use it as a cloud server if you really want immutable data and are not satisfied with using Git / several popular cloud servers. Providing space for such informational transactions can be a nice business model for miners when block rewards runs out. BitFury already does it by uploading governmental data on the Bitcoin blockchain.

I agree, however, that such models would form some kind of miner cartel. Miners will explicitly or implicitly agree on prices for non-transactional data.

[*] There are several methods to upload data on the blockchain:
- as op_return, adding 80byte (40bytes?) to the transaction, so it could be something like 80 of 300 bytes
- as some kind of special output. I don't have the numbers, but I think it is even worse
- the ideal method to store data would be to do it in two steps: 1. transaction a little bit Satoshi to an anyone-can-spent address, 2. do an op_return transaction from the anyone can spent. This should optimize the share of information data in the UTXO set

 

[awemany]

@Christoph Bergmann : Sure you can do that - but what for? The OP_RETURNs are prunable, so except for a bunch of archive nodes (which you likely have to eventually pay for to query and I suspect it might be cheaper to directly pay for such distributed archival!), your data ends up no where - but costing you $50k.

If you split it up and store it solely in the UTXO set - that likely becomes a lot more expensive (more data needed) - and you'd need some very fancy scheme to reassemble from that.

If transaction fees get so low that such a thing is possible, I expect full nodes might react with 'eh, I don't want all your UTXO shit, from here on, I require you to submit a merkle branch in some to-be-defined UTXO commitment scheme to your particular UTXOs if you want to spend them from here on.".

Which would shift the storage burden squarely back to you as the user - and in that scenario, you'd again have spent lots of money (>>$50k) to cause some network traffic and some tree reorgs - but also have not truly stored your DNA anywhere.

(That kind of 'spam protection' is what Core supposedly tries to do with their paternalistic attitude at this ridiculous 1MB level - but which can also happen in a free market, where full nodes simply say 'nope' to you storing data on them, and where bandwidth will be traded for storage as per a full nodes needs - also the bandwidth you want, just connecting and submitting data to the node/miner might start to be metered and cost you additional money (maybe through a upayment channel?) eventually)

I think the idea of 'the blockchain' as any kind of storage device will likely disappear in the long term - if Bitcoin becomes really successful.

It will likely just be the headers as real history to be kept - and maybe extended by extra tree roots / commitments, such as for the UTXO set. Less than a DVD full of data per century.

Just the stuff that's needed to tie everything together and prove who owns what - but nothing else.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Why would anybody store DNA in the blockchain?

 

[79b79aa8]

i don't know, but the day will come when we'll see an add from BullShit Bank: 'Blockchain is in our DNA'.

 

[awemany]

@satoshis_sockpuppet :

Because what could be less wrong, more rationalist than storing your
DNA on the blockchain to await the singularity which is our transhumanist
future and will deliver you from your meager existence to the heaven that
is the almighty AI?

/s

Any buzzword missing?

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

The reason, somebody will want to store the DNA in the blockchain (and why I like the idea) is the same, as the reason the Pioneer space probe has a picture of man and woman as well as a symbol of hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Or why old pharaos created pyramides and set the schematical description of battles in stones: Because we want to preserve important information for the future or for aliens.

The human DNA seems to be a good candidate for important information. Also it is funny, because they human dna is replicated in every human, like the blockchain is replicated on every node ...

It is the idea to make the blockchain the most important database of humanity.

@awemany Didn't you answer "somehow will archie the dna on the blockchain" to me arguing that it is a myth of small blockers, disproofen by evidence and reality, that there is an unlimited demand for blockchain space? Now you say it is no problem when somebody stores all his data on the blockchain, so it seems in the end we agree

I think it can be possible that the blockchain will continue to be used for important data. If the nodes accept this, or react with pruning of OP_return (is this possible today?) and UTXO-commitments to reduce wasting space for output-based data, will depend on if this is aborted, misused, and so on. I personally will not start with that things because my blockchain stores the human DNA or something like a video how Chinese governmental officers violate human rights. However, I will if it stores the DNA of a lot of individual humans or if it stores the holiday video of Kurt Kleinmeier.

My point is, that storing data on the bitcoin blockchain can be a great tool to preserve important data of humanity, and it can be a good tools for miners to develop further income models beside the block reward. Maybe there will even be reward models for nodes, as you said, by selling blockchain-queries. However, there are a lot of solutions when this options gets misused. There is not much to fear, like Core and friends do, but much to win.

 

[awemany]

The reason, somebody will want to store the DNA in the blockchain (and why I like the idea) is the same, as the reason the Pioneer space probe has a picture of man and woman as well as a symbol of hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Or why old pharaos created pyramides and set the schematical description of battles in stones: Because we want to preserve important information for the future or for aliens.

To be fair, there is a point you have here of course (same as why libraries exist). I just suspect the blockchain will be a particularly bad place for that. What can be coalesced/hashed/summarized will likely be summarized in the long term, due to economic forces.

@awemany Didn't you answer "somehow will archive the dna on the blockchain" to me arguing that it is a myth of small blockers, disproven by evidence and reality, that there is an unlimited demand for blockchain space? Now you say it is no problem when somebody stores all his data on the blockchain, so it seems in the end we agree

Kind of. I just don't think the blockchain will become/stay a database, as I tried to explain above. At a txn cost of zero, demand is infinite. Txn space supply at zero cost was and never will be infinite, so that's why the nice, steady, accelerating increase in transaction count (before Core fucked it up %$#1!!) was a nice display of Bitcoin working its way into the minds of the people on this planet.

Now, very cheap, fast storage (a couple atoms are a bit, and you can buy such storage in bulk for a couple bucks per gram or so and access it with good bandwidth) might change the picture for the foreseeable future. I don't know what will come faster, though - demand or supply for storage.

In any case, and for the above reasons, and as gigabit bandwidth to support Bitcoin as a sound money system (which is still the base of all this) is widespread, I am not worried about future technological growth or lack thereof, at least as it pertains to Bitcoin. And I am solely interested in the sound money aspects, with maybe acknowledging some of the simpler 'smart contracts' (such as LN - but that feeds back into the money aspect anyways).

As long as the incentives are not corrupted, I am sure that we'll find a way for our space bucks to take over the planet

 

[albin]

Also it is funny, because they human dna is replicated in every human, like the blockchain is replicated on every node

It's not really, because there are different allele versions, there is no canonical consensus human at the DNA level. Even the idea that there are at least distinct loci for specific identified genes is not exactly correct, because there are situations where specific alleles are copied redundantly in series, apparently because this impacts gene expression. This whole subject gets even crazier when you consider that many of our eukaryotic organelles are originally free-standing organisms that got incorporated through symbiosis, with their own genetic lineage that is not inherently human the way that our somatic DNA is.