Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Not that we needed any more evidence that Core's design is inferior, but the more I look, the more it seems they have absolutely no frickin' idea what they're doing on any front. Except writing bug-free code, perhaps, and is it any wonder? That is the only thing their process checks for. There is after all no test for understanding of incentives, investing, economics, business, or network design in order to become a Core developer. All they can check is that code runs without errors, is compact, readable, etc. What mass delusion that these guys were ever called "Bitcoin experts" in any general sense!

As a key example, every time I revisit Segwit I am more and more alarmed by what I find.

 

[hodl]

 

[rocks]

Am looking forward to seeing Counterparty on BCH.
It will not just be the new ICO platform, but a whole lot more because BCH won't try to block it by shortening OP_Return in the interests of proprietary "Elements" projects from Blockstream, but will let it compete on its own merit.

Is this 5 part post on reddit fairly accurate on the history of BS limiting counterparty? Parts 3 and 4 get into BS's statements on how much counterparty was a threat to their sidechain concept and their crippling OP_RETURN. As @Tomothy asked, is OP_RETURN planned to be restored.

BTW, I came across this great quote today on an investor board I follow. It is from a successful short seller, which is something very few people find success at.

"find the lie a man tells another man, you will discover how he intends to profit from that man. Find the lie a man tells himself, and you will learn how to profit from him."

We know the lies core told us (and Gavin and Hearn and others) and how they planned to profit from those lies. Today we are profiting from core by exploiting the lies they are telling to themselves every time one of us converts more BTC to BCH.
[doublepost=1515743709,1515742525][/doublepost]

yet i don't see the USG mining bitcoin -- it will mine crypto-USD first (though mining may not be required for such an asset at all). russia? hard to see them pouring resources into something they can't control, even if they would be making revenue and revamping their power grid as a result. geopolitically, though, i think it makes more sense for them to back up stateless crypto than to set up a crypto-ruble. anyway, they can do both.

Fully agree it is very unlikely the USG will get into mining. My comments were focused on governments with spare capacity they are currently giving away for free in the form of subsidized electricity. A local government in china that controls 500MW of spare capacity from a hydro plant is representative of the types of situations where this might be possible. Before they could not easily use the extra capacity so it was given away as subsidized electricity, but today they can much more easily convert that spare capacity into cash. When Bitcoin had a market cap of $1B mining revenue wasn't large enough to attract interest, but if crypto grows by another 100x and has a $10T market cap well that is likely to attract interest.

 

[sickpig]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

if you are interested in another pernicious side (or intended?) effect of SegWit, take a look at this email from Russell O'Connor on bitcoin core dev mailing list:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-January/015546.html

p.s. there's no such a thing as "bug-free code". It could have less bugs than others, but still.

 

[hodl]

Is this 5 part post on reddit fairly accurate on the history of BS limiting counterparty? Parts 3 and 4 get into BS's statements on how much counterparty was a threat to their sidechain concept and their crippling OP_RETURN. As @Tomothy asked, is OP_RETURN planned to be restored.

BTW, I came across this great quote today on an investor board I follow. It is from a successful short seller, which is something very few people find success at.


We know the lies core told us (and Gavin and Hearn and others) and how they planned to profit from those lies. Today we are profiting from core by exploiting the lies they are telling to themselves every time one of us converts more BTC to BCH.
[doublepost=1515743709,1515742525][/doublepost]
Fully agree it is very unlikely the USG will get into mining. My comments were focused on governments with spare capacity they are currently giving away for free in the form of subsidized electricity. A local government in china that controls 500MW of spare capacity from a hydro plant is representative of the types of situations where this might be possible. Before they could not easily use the extra capacity so it was given away as subsidized electricity, but today they can much more easily convert that spare capacity into cash. When Bitcoin had a market cap of $1B mining revenue wasn't large enough to attract interest, but if crypto grows by another 100x and has a $10T market cap well that is likely to attract interest.

that's the way i remember it re: Counterparty. but in all fairness, many others in the community including me were against it too. maybe naively so, considering the alternative outcome that came about. i was against it at the time b/c i was afraid of an unseen inflationary mechanism that created new XCP coins atop Bitcoin. yeah, i knew about the proof of burn but that sounded so bizarre to me. anyways, the timing of Blockstream conflicting with the Jan 2014 release of XCP isn't something that i was aware of until now. makes sense that Blockstream was threatened/stimulated/triggered by the XCP concept and release and saw it as a competitor. am not surprised at all. if given the choice today, i'd take CP over Blockstream any day of the week.

 

[79b79aa8]

i never followed ethereum because i thought CP (+ bitcoin) was all that was needed for smart contracting. that was until CP was bulldozed by blockstream, securing the way for the ethereum blockchain to take hold.

but who is to say what is good or bad? the ETH/ETC fork was perhaps necessary preparation for the BTC/BCH one.

further, it would seem bitcoin that was simply not ready for the big time three years ago. it had two major issues to solve: governance and scaling. the blockstream roadblock bought time and supplied experience to get both questions definitively ironed out.

the 2017 bubble demonstrated the unworkability of the BS roadmap (technical, economic and political), shook some market exhuberance off, laid bare the fundamentals, and strengthened experienced hands. we are now ready for the realistic way to monetary dominance: via mass adoption.

returning to .2 and not looking back.

 

[awemany]

@hodl : /u/insette on reddit is one of the Counterparty devs., correct? I think I have had many disagreements with him, but he seems to be at least very keen on having a scalable base layer to put their stuff on and we seem to be in full agreement on that front.

I can well imagine that Counterparty will try to torpedo consensus-critical enhancements to the base layer, like reenabling opcodes, because that might eventually call the value that they add into question.

Likely they'll frame it as 'it is dangerous, and you therefore shouldn't do it'. Now, I should also say that my stance on new/re-enabled opcodes is 'let's please be damn careful and rather have a time frame of years to do so'. (And no, I don't have to put a disclaimer here about owning any tokens on top of BCH )

But at least it seems that they want to attach and add value (in their perception) to a working system and then maybe (just from the incentives it would seem like they'd do so, but this is solely my cynical imagination here) try to keep it from evolving.

As I said, I don't quite get the ICO/smart stuff hype anyways, but it indeed looks like the master coiners, counter partyists and so on are far from that danger that regular Altcoins and captured media channels/dev teams pose. Still, it is likely good to be watchful.

Funny, for example, how the stack of lies that came from Charlie Lee unravels lately. Who could see that coming, what a surprise!

 

[79b79aa8]

my knowledge on this has eroded, but the XCP token is not intended to act as a direct monetary instrument. counterparty is not a naive altcoin-get-rich-quick scheme, if money is to be made there it is through the implementation of contracts, which perhaps cannot or should not be deployed using bitcoin script alone. it is not a threat to bitcoin, but symbiotic with it.

in addition, counterparty was developed with full view of the available opcodes, i want to think CP's strategy did not depend on engineering underhanded ways to disable them. that could only have occurred to . . .

but in any case, even if they chose such a devious and uncertain path to success, now they know it is extremely unlikely to work, because forks.

 

[Tomothy]

@hodl : /u/

Funny, for example, how the stack of lies that came from Charlie Lee unravels lately. Who could see that coming, what a surprise!

Can you point me in the right direction for this? Just wondering. And was Mike Hearn's lighthouse also kindof intertwined with XCP op code needs as well? It all blends together.

 

[Dusty]

Can you point me in the right direction for this? Just wondering

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/coinbase-insider-trading-litecoin-edition-be64ead3facc

 

[rocks]

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/coinbase-insider-trading-litecoin-edition-be64ead3facc

The major banks have very strict controls on employee personal accounts to prevent insider trading. Not saying it does happen (it does), but the controls are very difficult to get around.

I worked at a major bank years ago, even though I was not on the "banker" side but the "IT" side I had significant restrictions including: 1) Could only use one of 2 or 3 approved brokers for any stocks, options, funds, etc., 2) Was not allowed to trade stocks below $1 or their derivatives, 3) Had to receive explicit approval for any trading on stocks below $5, which meant you basically couldn't, 4) anything that was remotely connected to a sector you had access to was barred, for example if you did support for an energy trading desk you couldn't trade energy stocks, etc.

If the statements in that article are true, both Charlie and likely Brian are going to jail. They are employed by a firm that trades a commodity and have early access to information that will move the market. Think that's extreme, for example if you are a reporter at the NYTimes and cover bitcoin, you are not even allowed to own crypto currencies. Firms with access to market moving information have very strict employee policies for a reason. I've heard of people going to jail for much much less than is stated here.

 

[molecular]

Actually some kind of auto-convert during purchase would be great for payment services linked to big web wallet providers that already support BTC and BCH.

Similar to how wallets converted BCH into BTC after the fork, but in reverse. Saving BTC fees by doing the conversion internally on their systems at market rates, with settlement on the BCH chain.

I don't quite follow... you mean for example a coinbase (or other custodial wallet (keys managed by provider)) user making a payment (in BTC) to a bitpay invoice could (unbeknowst to the user) be settled in some other currency (or maybe even through a payment channel or LN)?

Well, that'll only work for custodial wallets (user doesn't own bitcoin, just an IOU) and it doesn't need to make use of BCH. Two points that make me not like the idea. Another point that could make the custodial wallet provider not like the idea is that he'll still have to pay the BTC on-chain fee resulting from spending the BTC the user had depostied.

 

[throwaway]

Bitcoin Unlimited Cash 1.2.0.0 doesn't support pasting unprefixed cashaddresses ("Pay To:" field remains blank after trying to paste). Manually typing the prefix (and separator) and pasting the unprefixed address next to it does work.

Weird: pasting the last address I paid to does work without prefix, even after restarting the client. Tried several other ones from the tx history and none could be pasted unprefixed, either before or after a client restart.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

"satoshi" field added to all places where there is an "amount" field in our 1.2.0.0 release...

This is the first time since bitcoind existed that the API has been capable of representing exact amounts.

 

[Dusty]

This is the first time since bitcoind existed that the API has been capable of representing exact amounts.

A decimal value is exact anyway if you are able to work with arbitrary precision decimals: it's an implementation issue, not a representation issue.
[doublepost=1515956009][/doublepost]Some kind of spam attack is being done on the network right now: there are a nice sequence of 2-8MB blocks.

It will be interesting to see if miners decide to raise the minimum satoshi per byte fees to make it more expensive.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

A decimal value is exact anyway if you are able to work with arbitrary precision decimals

Yes, if an API designer decides to use JSON-RPC, and then also decides to intentionally introduce compatibility problems by ignoring the recommendation in RFC 7159 about how to handle decimals, then it's possible to represent exact base 10 values.

Said API designer should be burned at the stake in case his brain damage is contagious.

 

[Dusty]

Well, since they are using numbers instead of strings for value representations I guess you are technically right.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

A string would have been fine.

 

[rocks]

Some kind of spam attack is being done on the network right now: there are a nice sequence of 2-8MB blocks.

It will be interesting to see if miners decide to raise the minimum satoshi per byte fees to make it more expensive.

In a permissionless ledger the concept of spam does not exist. Each of these transactions paid a fee that miners accepted, so they were valid transactions to both sender and miner alike.

I am confused though, we have been assured for years that Bitcoin would break at over 1MB and the 1MB limit was "carefully balanced". But for some reason BCH was able to just eat through that mempool with no degradation of service and the earth is still rotating around the sun.

 

[Dusty]

I am confused though, we have been assured for years that Bitcoin would break at over 1MB and the 1MB limit was "carefully balanced". But for some reason BCH was able to just eat through that mempool with no degradation of service and the earth is still rotating around the sun.

LOL, earlier, I've posted on an italian facebook group about this thing, using almost exactly those same words