Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

On the 3 buckets theory, I was toying with some kind of comparison graph showing price, difficulty, and VC investment, but I couldn't find a log chart for VC investment (nor an up-to-date one). Here's all I've got so far. Someone who can make graphs and has the VC investment data could probably make something nice and polished, like three line graphs on the same chart. We already see the mining/price jaws having opened a long time ago, and similar with VC topping out.

 

[cypherdoc]

visuals are indeed a great way to convey complex concepts; as long as they are produced with thought and care. i got honors in Organic Chem back in the day as i found it easy to spin 3 dimensional molecular models around in my head which also hopefully translates to looking at problems from different angles. i also think that chess is a great game to play for kids b/c it forces you to think as far ahead as your capability allows and involves the element of predicting what the other player will do which is also dependent on the level of player you play.

 

[Peter R]

Word that Gmax quite the Bitcoin Dev Mailing List after our debate last night is spreading:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3sx9k7/mikecoin_fans_succeed_in_chasing_gmaxwell_away/

 

[cypherdoc]

i was talking yesterday about how Nordstrom's was an example of one of the earliest stocks i can identify to have topped during the financial crisis of 2008. i've selected a 10 year weekly chart comparing JWN to $DJI. everything is compressed so the intervals of time separating the two sets of red arrows is tight and the depth of the drop is obscured during that crisis. JWN topped in 2/2007, eight months before the $DJI in 10/2007. currently, it appear that JWN has topped two months before the $DJI. whether we continue down into another financial crisis is yet to be determined but there is plenty on this chart and others to be concerned about:

[doublepost=1447628998][/doublepost]"uh, Houston, we may have a problem."

1 min chart of Dow Futures that just opened up 9 min ago:

 

[sickpig]

@sickpig

so what does his withdrawal from dev mail mean for the assignment of BIP #'s to new submitters? any other side effects?

the more i think about it, this move has big implications, not least from a perceptual standpoint.

the point I was trying to make is that per BIP 001 a BIP editor "must be subscribed" to btc dev ml, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0001#BIP_Editors

regardless the process is pretty screwed already, hindering the amount of proposals that could be translated in useful software features, in fact to my knowledge gmax is the only BIP editor. a proverbial bottleneck if you ask me.

the worst thing about the status quo is that a good chunck of the initial part of the process happens behind the scene, I.e. private emails between gmax and the BIP proponent.

 

[cypherdoc]

note on that JWN to $DJI comparison chart, JWN has already achieved about half the drop it did in 2008 from an absolute magnitude point of view.

 

[Peter R]

@sickpig: nice catch. It looks like Gmax is in breach of his duties. I suppose someone could ping the dev-list and motion for his removal as BIP editor:

 

[sickpig]

h brother. Are they realizing the blocksize may be a lost cause and trying to guarantee they have a different ace in the hole to incentivize sidechains/LN?

They'll be routed around in any case

sure thing, they will. they're simply playing whack-a-mole with users demand.

 

[cypherdoc]

@sickpig: nice catch. It looks like Gmax is in breach of his duties. I suppose someone could ping the dev-list and motion for his removal as BIP editor:

how would that be any different than how they've gone after Gavin and Mike's commit access privileges?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3sx9k7/mikecoin_fans_succeed_in_chasing_gmaxwell_away/

Top comment in the thread now:

Apparently, all publicity is good publicity

I bet the mods are thinking, "Should we censor this thread or not?"
[doublepost=1447636084,1447635432][/doublepost]What the...?

 

[cypherdoc]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

/u/muyuu is a hyped version of brg444

 

[cypherdoc]

@Peter R

huh. does everyone need to do the same thing? i'd find that out first.
[doublepost=1447640156,1447639336][/doublepost]i think @Peter R is making progress:

 

[Peter R]

"huh. does everyone need to do the same thing? i'd find that out first." -- @cypherdoc

Issue resolved.

 

[Mengerian]

Here is the start of the discussion:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-November/011759.html

If you click "next message" after following the above link then you can read through the entire conversation, if anyone is interested.

"I am not convinced that Bitcoin even *has* a block size limit, let alone that it can enforce one against the invisible hand of the market." -Peter R

Bitcoin has no block size limit. The current restriction on block size is a software bug that will be corrected by the market.

 

[sickpig]

@sickpig: nice catch. It looks like Gmax is in breach of his duties. I suppose someone could ping the dev-list and motion for his removal as BIP editor:

yes, he has definitely breached his duties, and yes it could be worthy to make the community aware of this via btc ml or some other means (e.g. irc, r/b, etc. etc.). Nevertheless, taking into account @Zangelbert Bingledack words about dealing with bruised egos, I don't know what would be the less harmful way to do it, though.

 

[sickpig]

Interesting, it looks like he unsubscribed right after our debate on the mailing list:

Here is the start of the discussion:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-November/011759.html

If you click "next message" after following the above link then you can read through the entire conversation, if anyone is interested.

Jorge Timón revamped the thread here:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-November/011779.html

with a new subject: "BIP99 and Schism hardforks lifecycle".

I sincerely can't parse one key part of his email, maybe it's just we same words with different meaning:

Those were unintentional hardforks. There's an example of a failed
schism hardfork: when some people changed the subsidy/issuance rules
to maintain the 50 btc block subsidy constant.
It didn't failed because of "tremendous pressure": it failed because
the users and miners of the alternative ruleset abandoned it. If they
hadn't, the two incompatible chains would still grow in parallel.

In particular I can't wrap my mind around the part in bold. isn't the reason why they abandoned the fork a "tremendous [economic] pressure" ?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

There's no technical argument that lets you predict whether eliminating one rule or the other will be more or less acceptable to users. There's no technical difference that I can see in that reward. I think these two examples strike people as "obviously different" just because they are morally different, but I want to avoid moral judgments in BIP99.

He avoided using the more correct term *economically different* because it would have sounded ridiculous to say, "I want to avoid economic judgments in BIP99."

BIP99 attempts to make a taxonomy of forks. I wonder if Timon would really commit to saying he wants to avoid economic judgments in considering all the kinds of forks.

 

[cypherdoc]

oh yeah, right. the divergence widening. $DJT breaking down:

[doublepost=1447694196,1447693052][/doublepost]retailers continuing to drop, many at yearly lows. just scroll thru your favorites:

 

[Zarathustra]

Gavin 2013:

We can speculate all we want about what is going to happen in the future, but we don't really know.

So, what should we do if we don't know? My default answer is "do the simplest thing that could possibly work, but make sure there is a Plan B just in case it doesn't work."

In the case of the block size debate, what is the simplest thing that just might possibly work?

That's easy! Eliminate the block size limit as a network rule entirely, and trust that miners and merchants and users will reject blocks that are "obviously too big." Where what is "obviously too big" will change over time as technology changes.

What is Plan B if just trusting miners/merchants/users to do the right thing doesn't work?

Big-picture it is easy: Schedule a soft-fork that imposes some network-rule-upper-limit, with whatever formula seems right to correct whatever problem crops up.
Small-picture: hard to see what the "right" formula would be, but I think it will be much easier to define after we run into some actual practical problem rather than guessing where problems might crop up.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.msg1758131#msg1758131

 

[cypherdoc]

@Zarathustra

i liked this one too:

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

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit