Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[awemany]

What conversation did he "look up and repackage" here:

None. Did I say that is his sole operation mode? I argue that here he screenshotted some old paper for "I've been here before" creds. And, apparently, it works.

@Zangelbert Bingledack :

On Turing-completeness: Well, discussing Turing completeness was definitely an issue in 2014: https://archive.fo/xCeLi

@Peter R. remarked in 2014 regarding Bitcoin Turing completeness that pretty much everything is Turing complete if you really look down into it: https://archive.fo/D0GC5

And IIRC, at TFOB 2017, CSW was showing a supposed Rule 110 running on the blockchain but no one could yet find these transactions.

Then he brings the Alt stack argument. AFAIR, at the time he made the two stack remark, I believe there was a BCT thread a couple months before by Jeff Garzik noticing similarly, though that might have been lost to censorship or the times or I simply remember wrong. Anyone? @hodl maybe?

On network graphs: I saw his talk touching that at TFOB. Color me wholly unimpressed. As I wrote on reddit: Satoshi was clear, well-spoken and to the point. CSW is the complete opposite, though IMO uses tactics of a telemarketer ..

On nodes: I haven't seen that he was the one originally pushing the 'non-mining nodes are useless' narrative.

On Alt-criticisms: git-like cryptos would be a complete joke would the market not be as irrational as it is now (or was soon ago). I must admit I don't know about any of what you think are the deeper criticisms there, but I also feel that I don't want to, if quality of CSW's writing is similar in that area.

Mining dynamics: I don't see novelty either.

I have a hard time believing he's Satoshi and would also think (though with less conviction here) he's likely not connected to any 'Satoshi group'. And if there are connections, he was likely not at all the brain behind the development.

Now, sure, if you take a random person from the planet, I'd assign CSW a much higher probability than the random person to be Satoshi. But there's quite a few folks I'd assign vastly higher probabilities still.

I suspect 'not knowing who Satoshi is' creates an almost unbearable thought vacuum for some and CSW appeared to fill it.

But yeah, we all don't know and I guess we simply have to agree to disagree on the reading of the situation. As a mental exercise, though, I'd argue for all believers to try to get back into the mindset of "Satoshi isn't known" at least once in a while, to be able to see when there's healthy community decision making and when there's a CSW cult.

We had and have a cult around Core, and we all didn't really like the results.

 

[Zarathustra]

None. Did I say that is his sole operation mode? I argue that here he screenshotted some old paper for "I've been here before" creds. And, apparently, it works.

Unnecessary slander.

In my opinion, CSW has a very broad knowledge. He is able to present that broad knowledge in hours long interviews and speeches. Who else? I don't support these BU attacks against CSW. Do we need this in-fight and slander? He could also be harsh with us. But he is not. We all say und do contradicting things.

Should he begin to compete with our accusations and say: „Hey @awemany, while I supported @freetrader's and @deadalnix' Bitcoin Cash since July, you supported that 'Shitwit-RBF-2x' compromise with the compromised ones until November and even agitated against Bitcoin Cash. So, please, just shut up!“ How would it sound in your ears?

 

[Tom Zander]

I never saw anyone else talk about network graph theory before him, not even a trickle, whereas he is a waterfall on that topic

Network graph theory was taught in school, at least at mine.

The fun part of these theories are that they have absolutely zero basis connection with the actual Bitcoin network. First the obvious; miners actually don't use the p2p network to connect to each other. There are a range of 'private' solutions that they use instead.
Why is this relevant? Well, if you or i "drop out of the p2p network", this is provably irrelevant to the rest of the network.

Next to that, if some country were to ban all Bitcoin p2p communication (rather trivial to do today), then the only effect this will have is that after days or hours we'll have a workaround and we'll see lots of people start a lot more nodes. The Streisand effect applies to nodes as much as it does to photos, I'm sure.
Why is that piece of info relevant? Well, the only thing that Craigs network knowledge covers is the ideal state. It is like observing how ants go about their work. Which is fun, but its rather useless as you can't predict disaster scenarios based on that.
Only if you can predict how the system reacts to failure does this network graph become useful. And failure in Bitcoin is only for a small part technical, the majority is people reacting to world-events.

So if you didn't see anyone else talk about it much, that's probably because those people realised its irrelevant to Bitcoin.

ps. I pointed this out to CSW on slack ages ago and again on reddit slightly shorter ages ago, his response has been completely silence or attacks against me personally.
[doublepost=1516653086][/doublepost]

Besides Satoshi indirectly, I saw exactly two people saying anything along the lines of nodes completely useless for regular users to run before CSW did

I googled a bit, is 2014 early enough?

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2014-June/006125.html

• wallet should be online as little as possible, ideally only when you do transactions or want to check for them.
• A full node should be online 24/7 or it is virtually useless to the network.

 

[Tom Zander]

Sounds good. Yes, my theory is that a base node (or hub, whatever) should do the actual bare minimum in blockchain validation. As I say, I wouldn't even make the network layer a part of it. Just have it as something that feeds data in to the system.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with you there. The validation engine in Flowee is 55 lines of "code" in the public API (and 91 lines of comments). In other words, I think I got a lot closer to abstracting validation into its own little corner that can be separated from the rest a lot easier.

Its a long and slow process, though.

 

[BCH King]

I've made a comparison of the 4 biggest bitcoin bubbles. I've not made any conclusions yet, but thought it might spark some discussion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7s9gp1/a_comparison_of_4_bitcoin_bubbles_from_low_to_low/

 

[79b79aa8]

Hello @BCH King, welcome to the forum.

 

[albin]

Somebody tell manchild Vortex that BCH doesn't only have a CEO, it has a King now too!

 

[awemany]

None. Did I say that is his sole operation mode? I argue that here he screenshotted some old paper for "I've been here before" creds. And, apparently, it works.

Unnecessary slander.

In my perspective, this is the operation mode. And it seems to work.

In my opinion, CSW has a very broad knowledge. He is able to present that broad knowledge in hours long interviews and speeches.

I don't see that. But try to convince me: What is your best example of that deep knowledge in hours-long interviews?

Who else? I don't support these BU attacks against CSW. Do we need this in-fight and slander? He could also be harsh with us. But he is not. We all say und do contradicting things.

My harsh criticism points as much as CSW as it points to your regarding a cult. Needs more than one person to build one. And, yes, I do think contention isn't necessarily bad and can sometimes be a lot better than touchy-feely consensus. We've been there.

Should he begin to compete with our accusations and say: „Hey @awemany, while I supported @freetrader's and @deadalnix' Bitcoin Cash since July, you supported that 'Shitwit-RBF-2x' compromise with the compromised ones until November and even agitated against Bitcoin Cash. So, please, just shut up!“ How would it sound in your ears?

Just go ahead and do so. Bring it forward!

I still think the miners could have nipped this in the bud by not going with Core for how long they did and I am still not convinced the "route-around" path is the best approach. With failure of 2X, I switched over to BCH, or didn't I do that?

As a minor thing aside, I even helped with a couple very minor commits and minor review to bring BitcoinABC to light.

 

[Zarathustra]

Why is that piece of info relevant? Well, the only thing that Craigs network knowledge covers is the ideal state. It is like observing how ants go about their work. Which is fun, but its rather useless as you can't predict disaster scenarios based on that.
Only if you can predict how the system reacts to failure does this network graph become useful. And failure in Bitcoin is only for a small part technical, the majority is people reacting to world-events.

So if you didn't see anyone else talk about it much, that's probably because those people realised its irrelevant to Bitcoin.

When you know how a system and an organism constitutes itself, you will always be in a better position to make predictions than those who don't know it; whether it's an apple stock, the weather, a hurricane, a bitcoin swarm or an ant colony. @Masterluc is a master of making predictions of the behavior of the bitcoin swarm.

http://www.socionomics.net/2011/04/the-elliott-wave-principle/
http://www.socionomics.net/2011/04/socionomic-causality/
http://www.socionomics.net/2012/06/contrasting-models-of-finance/

 

[sickpig]

Addendum to the Greg saga, someone on reddit says more people are removing 'blockstream' from their twitter profiles?

I didn't check the claim regarding excellion, though. Is he still supposed to be at BS?

Just a little bit of context here: Kat Walsh is Maxwell's wife.

And it seems that he's willingly play the part of the cypherpunk tired of being a CTO that resigned to head back to coding and research
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-January/015614.html

edit: s/CEO/CTO

 

[Zarathustra]

@awemany
„I don't see that. But try to convince me: What is your best example of that deep knowledge in hours-long interviews?“

I cannot convince you. That's not my goal. My goal is more to show that not all BU activists support the CSW bashing.

It was not possible to convince you of the obvious fact, that an Inna Shevchenko has double the courage of you an me combined. How could I convince you of the obvious fact, that CSW has very broad knowledge? Some people are able to see it (JVP, Zangelbert Bingledack, me and many more), while some people are suffering from Heinz von Foerster's principle of the double blind; or even the triple blind: 'Wir sehen nicht, dass wir nicht sehen, was wir nicht sehen.'

„My harsh criticism points as much as CSW as it points to your regarding a cult. Needs more than one person to build one"

I'm a polytheist with uncountable gods:

KoKansei, Albert Einstein, Cypherdoc, Nietzsche, The Zerg, Solex, YDTM, Sickpig, Schopenhauer, Norway, awemany, majamalu, Diodoros Kronos, Zangelbert Bingledack, Roger Waters, Peter Rizun, Craig Wright, freetrader, Paul C. Martin, AdrianX, Mengerian, Leonard Cohen, 79b79aa8, Ennio Morricone, Albin, Inna Shevchenko, Tom Zander, NewLiberty, Shane McGovan, Justus Ranvier, Capt_Roger_Murdock, Jiang Zhuo'er, Lunar, Carl Orff, torusJKL, Haipo Yang, Richy_T, Dostojewski, rocks, Jihan Wu,, molecular, Christoph Bergmann, Roger Ver, Dusty, throwaway, Satoshi Nakamoto, satoshi's_sockpuppet and every single Unlimited fighter who fights the good fight:

WAR TO DEATH AGAINST VICE: THE VICE IS STREAMBLOCKISM

Article. I. — Vicious is every sort of anti-nature. The most vicious sort of human is the STREAMBLOCKER: he teaches anti-nature. Streamblockers are not to be reasoned with, they are to be ridiculed.

Article II. — Any participation in stream blocking services is an attack on public decency. The criminality of being Streamblocker increases with your proximity to science. The criminal of criminals is consequently the PhD within that church.

Article III. — The execrable forums where streamblockism brooded over its eggs should be razed to the ground and, being the depraved spot on earth, it should be the horror of all posterity. Poisonous snakes should be bred on top of it.

Article IV. — Eating at the same table as a streamblocker priest ostracizes: one is excommunicated from honest society by doing so. He is our Chandala, — he should be quarantined, starved, driven into every sort of desert.

Article V. — The rest follows from this.


„And, yes, I do think contention isn't necessarily bad and can sometimes be a lot better than touchy-feely consensus. We've been there.“

Fight with him directly, as you do with me here. We should prefer direct fights. CSW is not hiding in censored shitholes like Antonopoulos and Pieter Wuille.

„I still think the miners could have nipped this in the bud by not going with Core for how long they did and I am still not convinced the "route-around" path is the best approach. With failure of 2X, I switched over to BCH, or didn't I do that?“

Yes. With failure. CSW and many others switched to BCH before the fork. Without those people there won't exist a „Bitcoin Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System“ anymore.

„As a minor thing aside, I even helped with a couple very minor commits and minor review to bring BitcoinABC to light.“

Great. This and other activities are the reason why you are still one of my gods.

Cash is Cult (and King) ...

Thus greeted Zarathustra

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I would say "not impressed" is an acceptable position to have on someone who is as roundabout and teasy as CSW can be, if one has no time or inclination for investigation that goes deeper than a mere faultfinding mission. But to make specific claims about his very extensive body of work without such investigation, other than as comments about his public relations ability, is an overstep. While he does invite such oversteps with his at-times intellectually rude communication style, two wrongs don't make a right.

He seems to have turned to a radically non-approval-seeking style, which may be alien to most people to the point that even what he is trying to accomplish with his writing can be opaque.

He has a casual disregard for whether the pieces add up immediately to the audience. He seems to care about his image on one level in some abstract way, but not in the usual way that would provide the usual safeguards, the social box people keep themselves in so as to avoid painful disapproval from their fellows. The one that causes them to write out their ideas in full, in a way where they are careful to obviate any misinterpretations that could make people think they are insane or making a basic error.

In short, unlike most people - especially a typical academic, he isn't afraid to sound crazy or wrong as long as he knows that others who understand will agree with him immediately or that sincere investigators will come to agree with him in time.

 

[BldSwtTrs]

Fwiw, I am more and more convinced that CSW is Satoshi.

My domain of expertise is economics and every time he talks about economics he makes a lot of sense. I have never catch him once making nonsensical argument.
Moreoever, he speaks about subjects with a sort of lateral thinking that I think is characteristic of genius. When he talks about something, he usually do it in an unusual way. At first, you need to think about it to determine whether he is bullshiting or not, but then you realize that he is correct.

Plus there are body language stuff in some interviews that are very hard to fake and that makes me think he is honest.

 

[sickpig]

Addendum to the Greg saga, someone on reddit says more people are removing 'blockstream' from their twitter profiles?

I didn't check the claim regarding excellion, though. Is he still supposed to be at BS?

Even the infamous @brg444 removed any reference to blockstream from his twitter bio.

This is a snapshot of his twitter account from June 2017 taken by the internet archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20170603205820/https:/twitter.com/bergealex4
http://archive.is/OFAVJ

(the latter link is an archive.is of a internet wayback machine snapshot )

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

I don't care and I don't know if CSW knew anything about Bitcoin before it's inception. And I don't care if someone likes him or dislikes him, thinks he's a great mind or an idiot.

But people, who won't accept the fact, that he makes (grave) mistakes from time to time (Peter R. bet) and is obviously and factually wrong sometimes, are following a cult leader and don't think for themselves. You can have the opinion, that he and nChain is doing good stuff, but if you defend wrong arguments so your leader isn't tainted is sheeple behavior.

Plus there are body language stuff in some interviews that are very hard to fake and that makes me think he is honest.

Body language is actually the one thing, that is easy to fake.

 

[Richy_T]

Con men wouldn't be able to be con men if they couldn't bring people into their confidence (it's kind-of in the name). They are excellent manipulators and work very hard to tell people what they want to hear.

All other things being equal, I would probably give CSW the benefit of the doubt for now but there is no getting around the fact that the way he entered the scene was in a flurry of lies and deception and throwing a valued member of the community under the bus. Not to mention many other questions surround the veracity of other statements he made. In this light, I can only say people should be wary of extending their trust.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

he makes (grave) mistakes from time to time (Peter R. bet)

As I recall, @Peter R even admitted the purpose of the bet to was get CSW to clarify what he meant, because none of us could figure out the context of a certain diagram in a paper he wrote. Think about that: you have a context where two people are talking past each other before the bet even starts. Not like the usual Internet bet where it devolves to semantics about the context later on, mind you, but beforehand.

This is not how you go about testing whether someone you are having difficulties communicating with really knows something.

 

[awemany]

@Zarathustra: I have talked with him a while ago on the btcchat slack. He gave me a reason for the double hashing that sounded intriguing at first, and I was like "Whoa, nice!" Only to then notice after some further pondering that it was complete BS. When I then asked him about that, he didn't answer yet was still very active in the chat. Like immediate silence. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details, but maybe that convo is still archived and someone call pull it out.

I don't care so much for him as I care about the deja vu of seeing yet another cult forming around some persona. This time on the big blocker's side.

But oh well. Time to agree to disagree.
We both probably agree to our readings of:

He's excellent in what he does ...

 

[Zarathustra]

@awemany
"I don't care so much for him as I care about the deja vu of seeing yet another cult forming around some persona. This time on the big blocker's side."

Ironically, Peter Rizun, Roger Ver and Craig Wright became cult because of the thousand bashers and haters. The few users who follow and praise them blindly are not the reason.

We all make (grave) mistakes. Can we claim that Segwit is just a wart, when we at the same time claim that segwit coins are not Bitcoins? I don't think so.

A genius makes mistakes too. u/ydtm's posts are unequaled and unbeatable, despite his mistakes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5pcpec/the_debate_is_not_should_the_blocksize_be_1mb/

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Now that Maxwell is freed from his day job he's able to display just how disconnected he is from real world Bitcoin usage on the mailing list.

Apparently most Bitcoin wallets have so many utxos available that change outputs will be rare because improved coin selection algorithms.