Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Norway]

Nice to see you here @Tirapon !

You are right about that this place has (so far) been a place "where rationality is prevailing". A rare bitcoin forum quality these days.

 

[8up]

@Norway

Bitcoin (Cash) is too powerful a tool not to be influenced by certain parties. Open source, decentralized and permissionless means open to everybody (including other human beings like billionaires, kings, NSA,...). We only win, if each and everybody works on his own self-interests and NOT against other peoples self-interest (status quo). That's the weak spot of the current elite. They don't WORK FOR THEIR SELF and rely on INTEREST.

Our best chance is to open up the discourse as wide as possible. Understanding the world means freedom.

Self-sovereign money is not possible if people do not know how to govern themselves. And they don't know how to govern themselves if they are not able to reflect on their selves.

Either we grow up as adults and take responsibility for our life, learn how to use the tools we were given. Speaking truth to power, conflicting with society or we (as humanity) are not ready for advancement. It's not a shame. In the end we all are fragile human beings.

In a sense we have to become agnostic to certain outcomes of our endeavor. Like a monk observing the world. It's all about mindset and less about doing. Detachment from the very thing we want to bring to the world is a healthy start. Almost like the personal path of growth which benefits from detachment from egoistic and narcissistic attitudes which by the way are very easy to influence, if you know about human weaknesses (read: useful idiot). Especially if money won't bribe/compromise you anymore. You have to understand that all riches are already within yourself. The world is a beautiful reflection of all of that. But nothing material (shining or blinking) nor immaterial (honor, titles) is able to make you (feel) rich. Satoshi started it in the right way. And he gave his tools to us to spread it, decentralize it, protect it, teach it, guide it and evolve it.

Like anonymous code, every human action should stand on it's own. It shouldn't matter if we like the person if he/she is generous, a genius or someone with ulterior motives. Simply judge every human action on its own. It's about your mind. No one control you.

Somewhere on reddit: "The price for sovereign money is eternal vigilance." If Bitcoin Cash becomes subverted we fork again. Life is a never ending redefinition process.

P.S. credits to you for asking her some simple questions.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

If Bitcoin Cash becomes subverted we fork again.

This is the most important aspect of Bitcoin Cash.

First it's necessary to prove that Bitcoin can fork away from malicious developers.

Some day it will likely be necessary to prove that Bitcoin can fork away from malicious miners.

There will probably need to be a fork against every possible category of malicious party sooner or later.

 

[Richy_T]

Good lord, is this what passes for "humor" or "satire" on the core side? Talk about a sad effortpost.

I find the increased flailings from the other side as the inevitability of reality moves against them both amusing and yet strangely sad.

 

[molecular]

lol: I just managed to recover my age-old ripple account. Some XRP on there (yay!), but also some debts. This shows you the problem with ripple: It's an IOU-based system. I actually have negative balance in USD and BTC because people "extended trust" to my account (me?) and started trading my IOUs. So I (my account?) actually owe(s) people units of those currencies.

People don't think that's a problem?

It's one of cryptocurrencies changes I love: they enable the move from debt-based instruments to commodity-based money. With debt-based money you trust individual entities to honor their IOUs, with commodity based money you trust the market-aggregate value of that commodity. Which is better?

Anyway, I'm going to honor the IOUs people have on me on ripple (as soon as I figure out how to use that wallet) and make them whole, maybe after checking wether they still have access to those accounts. If not, I'm going to look for that "default on all debts" button in the ripple wallet ;-)

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@Christoph Bergmann : When/if that becomes a problem (and I suspect the market will rather solve it with branded wallets that then connect to servers owned by whoever runs the branded wallet), paying for full node services with a micropayment channel could be a great option.

There's a long way to go to incentivize non-mining nodes.

Things like CashShuffle could be an option, by taking a fee for mixing services. Also, yes, subscription based models. But, most likely, the easiest way to monetize non-mining-nodes will be to sell data, linking spv user's IP with addresses.

I was thinking about if BU could use some of its funds to built up something like 100 nodes with different bch implementations, with electron servers, with cashshuffle servers, on different hosters, and maybe sell the login incredentials ... but I really have no knowledge about hosting beyond simple http sites. What is the cost to cloudhost an archival bch node with a lot of peers, maybe even as an electron server?

 

[molecular]

@Christoph Bergmann, "What is the cost to cloudhost an archival bch node with a lot of peers, maybe even as an electron server?"

Most of the cost is probably in setup/maintenance manhours, depending on scale of course.

Hardware-wise even a 0.5 TB storage would suffice for a while (currently an abc node of mine takes up 165GB, the associated electrumx instance uses 23GB for it's utxo db.)

Just checked hetzner for pricing. The virtual stuff gets expensive with storage (€36/month for 0.5TB), so one might as well go for a dedicated machine (€46/month). Offering 8 TB storage and 32 GB of RAM, it should be sufficient at 8 MB blocks for many years (> 10 years even assuming full 8 MB blocks if I calculated correctly). 1 GBit/s guaranteed bandwidth is included, which should allow serving quite a few peers and SPV wallets.

 

[torusJKL]

Hetzner has sometimes great prices on the server market.

A few months ago I grabbed an Intel Core i7-3770 with 2x 3TB and 16GB RAM for EUR 30/month.
This server is now running my ElectrumX instance.

I'm thinking about adding Coinshuffle but I'm a bit hesitant as it is very new software.

 

[solex]

@molecular, I recall some Ripple giveway when they were offering 30,000 XRPs for free in order to get people to start using their network. At the time I thought "Nope. BTC is all I need. Go away."

Thinking about the surge in Ripple valuation. It could be confidential central bank / regulatory guidance that green-lights XRP for participation by retail banks; who are otherwise screaming for some footprint in the cryptocurrency space. Of course, XRP is only pretending to be a crypto, which is good enough for bankster involvement.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010?=1

Bitcoin BTC has a brand identity crisis. Cobra makes some good points:

The entire brand of "Bitcoin" has always been about being able to spend it. It's in the name itself, a "coin", you use coins as money to pay for things. Nobody would use coins if they somehow had high fees.

 

[torusJKL]

@molecular, I recall some Ripple giveway when they were offering 30,000 XRPs for free in order to get people to start using their network. At the time I thought "Nope. BTC is all I need. Go away."

I was one of those who received 30'000 XRP.
I held it until a few months ago when I sold them for USD 8'000 to buy more BTC.
I should have held on a little bit longer but I don't complain, USD 8'000 was very nice as well.

I also acquired some other coins but they all went to 0.

 

[torusJKL]

https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010?=1

Bitcoin BTC has a brand identity crisis. Cobra makes some good points:

Cobra makes many good points lately.
I wonder what happened.

 

[Richy_T]

@molecular, I recall some Ripple giveway when they were offering 30,000 XRPs for free in order to get people to start using their network. At the time I thought "Nope. BTC is all I need. Go away."

I got some of those. I don't think it was the 30,000 one but a smaller one they gave away later. I still can't be arsed to try and track down the details.

 

[79b79aa8]

https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010?=1

Cobra:

Since we don't have any off chain solutions out there yet, it makes more sense the community build a consensus to change the network in such a way as to reduce the fees while these off chain solutions like Lightning are fully fleshed out and adopted over the next few years.

it seems clear that in the absence of LN working like a charm by end of Q1 2018, major capital will start losing its appetite for BTC -- and quickly start courting other suitors. it also seems clear no such network will be in place. so the author of this quote can be read as looking for ways to stay positive and buy some time in the face of grave danger.

but i have never understood the fixation with tackling existential threats via a "community" that "builds consensus". a new monetary is being built from scratch. it threatens to render obsolete vast areas of finance, that implicate millions of jobs. it will have monumental fiscal implications. it will alter the global macro-economy. and yet somehow the people in control of some software implementation think that major decisions that shape this revolution depend on what some keyboard warriors / mom and pop investors argue about on social media?

i guess it's just some talking head doing what he's there to do. the miscalculation behind it is striking, though.

 

[Richy_T]

Yes, this is a stupid, dangerous and above all, stupid idea of what the kind of consensus in action here actually is.

Some people just can't stop trying to shape this into some kind of demented democracy.

This space is going to be carved out by those with vision and those with the capability to recognize those visions, not committeeism (is that a word? It is now [it was already]).

 

[molecular]

I got some of those. I don't think it was the 30,000 one but a smaller one they gave away later. I still can't be arsed to try and track down the details.

The first giveaway was 50k. There were later ones, yes.

Back then you had to register an account but on setup you were pressed to store the "secret key" to your ripple account, which can be imported into for example a weballet (gatehub.net).

I'm startig to grow disappointed in the crypto crowd. It has changed a lot. It's only about valuation for most. The shills (especially in ripple) are so blatant, it's shocking. They're like fucking lemmings jumping to their deaths.

I'm not saying ripple is necessarily bad per se, but the token is shit (huge premine) and there are grave dangers should it get widely used. Mainly dangers to censorship resistance and privacy, also some more nebulous ones about money supply management.

Here's an interesting tidbit from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145896.msg27226067#msg27226067 by user sukrim:

They are moving away from that paradigm for 3-4 years now by the way, the new hot shit that Ripple Inc pushes is https://interledger.org as the upcoming W3C payment standard (Current slide deck: https://www.slideshare.net/Interledger/34c3-interledger-presentation-background-streaming-payments-and-implications). It would allow you to always hold BTC, but to pay someone who only accepts e.g. PayPal at current market prices. That's also the technology that they sell to banks, not the XRP ledger itself (banks don't like to have their payments public apparently).

and 2 posts later:

Ripple is the first protocol of its kind and the first wave of many that will, in the years ahead, lower to nearly zero the cost and time required for institutional money transfers. There is nothing scammy about Ripple. And a formal part of its protocol is a 'Bitcoin Bridge' is that will, like Ethereum, expand Bitcoin's reach into daily life. So Ether and Ripple are not 'competitors' and 'rivals' of Bitcoin. They will all complement each other, as will the token-based protocols that come after Ripple (like IOTA).

Still, my above-mentioned fears still apply. People might get suckered in by low fees, ease of use, insurance of funds, flexibility, features and whatnot and we'll end up simply with "banking 2.0", controlled and overseen by authorities.

continuation of above post by Uberse

It amuses me how all the warnings people have sounded about bitcoin apply more to Ripple as something to HODL -- and even, for that matter, as a short-term speculation. You are going to get burnt. They are tokens. And lots more of them are waiting in the wings. That doesn't necessarily mean they won't serve a legitimate purpose. Ripple surely does serve a legitimate purpose. But as an investment strategy . . . no.

 

[albin]

I think Cobra is basically demonstrating that he wasn't following things closely for a few years (and just kind of trusted personalities), and now finally is digging into what's going's on, because he's making these obvious cute conclusions that we all sophisticated ourselves beyond years ago, and you can kind of trace how his conclusions are quickly evolving as he absorbs more comprehension. It's like looking at a child figure things out for itself.

 

[Richy_T]

Back then you had to register an account but on setup you were pressed to store the "secret key" to your ripple account, which can be imported into for example a weballet (gatehub.net).

Did it have a default filename? I'm fairly conscientious about maintaining my files through upgrades (I still have browser cache from the mid 90s somewhere).

Looks like I was in on the 1000 giveaway so not so exciting.

 

[awemany]

@Christoph Bergmann : Good points.

Lately, I feel that the 'low to no fees' rhetoric on /r/btc is a bit over the top. I find fees in the 1..5ct range per transaction to be quite reasonable. And at some point, likely only a a decade or so out, miners need to get paid mainly through transactions.

I can see that there might always be free transactions also in the long term (especially with preconsensus schemes - which would mean basically (almost) no differential overhead for adding sufficiently aged transactions).

But the bulk won't be truly free. And I think we should refrain from overselling stuff.

I can see optimistic scenarios where the growth on BCH becomes quickly so large that current orphan risk rates (limited by the state of the art of propagation modes in the current implementations) might increase fees into the double-digit cent range again.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

It's like looking at a child figure things out for itself.

It's more like that moment in Dr Strangelove when the other characters realize for the first time that General Jack D. Ripper is insane.