Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

@hodl

When I posted the twitter poll, I was leaning towards "just remove bottlenecks to scaling" (and of course keep 0-conf and the other stuff that's important for p2p e-cash). I expected the poll to confirm my bias that "all we really needed to do with BTC was remove the block size limit so that's all we really need to do with BCH." So I was surprised by the results.

Today, I'm softening up to the idea of at least beginning to slowly and careful re-enable old op-codes. (Subchains is neither a soft or a hard fork -- it's just an efficient way to propagate blocks that may also improve 0-conf security. I've always been supportive of things like this if they prove to be useful). The first thing that made me soften up was when @solex pointed out that we only really see two scripts actually being used (P2PkH and P2SH multisig), and solex said that that's really a failure for something designed to be a scripting language. The second thing that made me soften up was reading @shadders article: he convinced me that obviously Satoshi wanted bitcoins to be highly-programmable money. The design could have been so much simpler if he envisioned only simple multisig.

I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on the matter. I think you have great intuition for when trouble might be brewing, and a good eye for where exactly the target is that we should be aiming for.

 

[hodl]

if such schemes generate paying on-chain txns and under the assumption the security model is not affected, what exactly is the grave sin? what do you mean by 'dilution'?

i said it in an earlier post. imo, the singular goal of these metacoins is to drive their price per metacoin denominated in fiat. we know this to be true b/c every one of them markets themselves as a cryptocurrency. they present themselves as a form of money which gets everyone excited. this is how the devs profit, either thru a pre-mine or an ongoing payout. every fiat dollar invested into a metacoin could have been invested into a BCH coin instead. this is the dilution i speak of. b/c of the 21M BCH limit, we need it's price in fiat terms to be much much higher ($hundreds of thousands) than it is to provide enough liquidity to service a worldwide population; if you want to be able to buy a house or car with BCH w/o causing a plunge in the price. the only reason any metacoin would want to insert itself into the BCH ecosystem is to leech off the security provided by it's miners and to tap it's $billions in value. sure, miners might make some money from the tx's enabled by all these metacoins but in the long run they will suffer from an underperforming price, imo. @solex mentioned Ethereum and all the value it unlocked with the ether price benefitting. i say another way to look at it is how abysmal the ether price is given all the speculation/dilution going into the ICO coins.
[doublepost=1521170643,1521169530][/doublepost]

A backhanded accusation of inflationary policy, which has no relation to the discussion at hand?

i think that if you advocate BCH supporting metacoins/tokens with their own fiat denominated price, then you are advocating a form of inflation knowingly or not. some of us in this thread have accused LN of being inflationary (i haven't). if you believe that then it's even worse supporting metacoins.

my vision is that BCH becomes the world reserve currency in which prices of all things (stocks, bonds, insurance, cars, housed) are denominated. that's it. just like the USD functions right now (ignoring fiat conversion across borders). you don't see any appendages attached to the USD system. it's freestanding. it's drawback is it's inflationary. this vision works, imo, b/c stock brokerages, insurance peddlers, bond traders will all want to sell their products for BCH since it will be the ultimate SOV and most liquid currency. thus, you can trust them to be honest similar to how we trust the same financial incentives that drive miner honesty today (they all want BCH to succeed b/c of the possible tremendous appreciation). they don't have to be insinuated into the BCH blockchain. all that's required is that BCH become popular enough, ie, achieve the unit of account status. i also thinks this works b/c we saw it playing out in BTC up until 2015, when blocks became full and high fees and delays became more commonplace. merchants were wanting BTC and were coming onboard and ppl were using BTC to buy things, not just hodl. Greg and Blockstream stopped all that adoption dead in it's tracks. it had nothing to do with Ethereum siphoning value out of the BTC system b/c it was offering smart contracts or ICO tokens. or that Counterparty wasn't allowed to have 80bytes of OP_RETURN (they did get 40bytes). for years Eth stagnated. they only finally took off after full blocks diverted everyone out of BTC. IOW, we've never given Bitcoin a full shot at fulfilling it's utmost potential according to the original vision of p2p ecash+SOV. it was prematurely aborted. we have a second chance with BCH; if we don't screw it up.
[doublepost=1521171585][/doublepost]

@hodl

When I posted the twitter poll, I was leaning towards "just remove bottlenecks to scaling" (and of course keep 0-conf and the other stuff that's important for p2p e-cash). I expected the poll to confirm my bias that "all we really needed to do with BTC was remove the block size limit so that's all we really need to do with BCH." So I was surprised by the results.

Today, I'm softening up to the idea of at least beginning to slowly and careful re-enable old op-codes. (Subchains is neither a soft or a hard fork -- it's just an efficient way to propagate blocks that may also improve 0-conf security. I've always been supportive of things like this if they prove to be useful). The first thing that made me soften up was when @solex pointed out that we only really see two scripts actually being used (P2PkH and P2SH multisig), and solex said that that's really a failure for something designed to be a scripting language. The second thing that made me soften up was reading @shadders article: he convinced me that obviously Satoshi wanted bitcoins to be highly-programmable money. The design could have been so much simpler if he envisioned only simple multisig.

I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on the matter. I think you have great intuition for when trouble might be brewing, and a good eye for where exactly the target is that we should be aiming for.

there's a big part of me that understands where you're coming from. and i have to admit i'm being a little hypocritical here in that i've always said that i don't have any problems exploring offchain solutions like LN (in our case inchain metacoins) as long as the blocksize is lifted allowing onchain growth to compete. so that part of me doesn't fear re-enabling old OP CODES that might enable metacoins since by my estimation those will just fail from lack of demand anyway; thus i should have nothing to worry about. the fear that i have is this new OP_GROUP code forces miners and nodes to secure new functionality that's been centrally planned, if i understand it correctly (@rocks?). how is this any different than forcing Segwit with it's discount?
[doublepost=1521172423][/doublepost]these types of big proposals always come up during a big pullback in the price. i've seen it multiple times in the past with BTC and now with BCH. everyone gets impatient; some even panic and wonder what we are doing wrong. they immediately demand a change. do something! but what happened every single time? the demand for BTC skyrocketed. this is why i declared a couple of times here in this thread since the recovery to $700 that we as big blockists (gold minded SOV folks) had won. the demand for the coin was paramount. this happened w/o metacoins insinuated into BTC. this is b/c the market wanted what appears to be a rock solid SOV. does it want a p2p ecash? i think so as we are now seeing BTC crumble w/o it, but we don't know yet, and we should try to find out by allowing BCH to be as pure a form of money as possible.

 

[hodl]

the idea goes like this. i'm a new investor to the BCH system looking for maximum potential gain for my fiat money. i see a BCH price of $925 per coin versus metacoin XCP at $0.10. which do i choose? i would (seriously) choose XCP b/c it has all the same advantages as BCH in terms of security and it's new with much more upside. everybody loves the stock trading XCP enables, right? and it's BCH endorsed and secured, right? plus, in this scenario, i don't see BCH achieving world reserve currency status. instead, i see a speculative platform that already has $billions in value upon which i can just make/leech more fiat dollars.

that's called dilution. we see it everyday in the cryptocurrency space in the form of amazingly performing altcoins/ICO's only b/c Blockstream killed onchain scaling. but if BCH seriously had a chance to become the next world reserve currency in an unfettered/blocksize unlimited manner, all bets would go into BCH.

 

[awemany]

@hodl: I hear you. As Peter R., my stance on opcodes softened a small bit after reading shadder's article making the case of some of the constructs. I still don't think we need any of them and would urge a lot of caution and wait until Nov at least. The downside for a fuckup is huge!

But up to and including OP_DATASIGVERIFY, I see not a huge potential for creating bottlenecks of the "unknown unknowns" variant down the road. The simpler opcodes are self-contained (whereas e.g. OP_GROUP isn't). But there is still the danger of crippling bugs!

Regarding the metacoins, I think I am not too worried. They can use BCH as a storage device right now and with more OP_RETURN space, they could use it more, or with less contortions on how to fit the data into transactions.

And regarding dilution: I think they already dilute the value of a single, dominant coin much like all other coins do that.

BCH could be included in that list, with the very special and very unique situation that BCH and BTC rely on the same mining resource and BTC is crippled due to the incentive system, so arguably, BCH is in a very special spot: It inherits the mindshare and backing of the most developed mining system and large parts of the ecosystem and its success creates economic incentives to keep BTC crippled, thus being the true upgrade to the still dominant coin. A very messy and convoluted and slow upgrade, but an upgrade indeed. Hopefully and likely the last one that will be necessary and of this nature.

Disregarding the potential for bugs at the moment: If you enable more opcodes, you enable more ways to put stuff onto BCH. But that will not only enable more to be put on top of BCH (whereas now, they can simply live on whatever else, be it Ethereum or their own chain, POS, POW or whatever), it will also make BCH itself usurp more of the metacoin use cases. (Which I think is @Zangelbert Bingledack's argument)

And all metacoin transactions still pay miner fees. In BCH.

I see the downside really in the potential for bugs. And I absolutely agree with you that I see most of what happens with Ethereum etc. as basically a fad that is already decaying again.

I also disagree on the centralized nature of enabling them (modulo worries about ABC's dominance): They'd be presented as an option to the miners, and will only go forward with >50% support (I prefer 75%). At least I hope that this the common understanding on how to move forward on this.

This is why I, should I find the couple hours to make a simple mock-up, would rather solve the problem of the weatherman oracle that was brought up with the things we already have on chain. As I think we have all we need in place to have such oracles already. I think having working (though likely crude) code for that will make the case to be more careful on what we really need, going forward.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@hodl

I'd like to draw a clear distinction between metatokens and conditional transactions (transactions whose execution is contingent on certain conditions).

I tend to be opposed to metatokens as well, though I don't think it's possible to prevent them since proof of burn is always available. The opcodes proposed for May (besides op_group) are to me more about obviating the need for metatokens and altcoins than enabling them.

Ethereum's ICO craze has muddied the waters here, making the value appear to be elsewhere than it is, so I will try to clarify them:

Consider a stock. Why have a stock as a metatoken or ICO anyway? It makes no sense, because the reason to do something onchain is for it to be trustless, whereas owning a stock inevitably involves trusting the company issuing it. If I own Facebook cryptotokens, these grant me no more legal rights to vote in Facebook shareholder meetings or benefit from Facebook's growth than simply buying Facebook stock with BCH. If Facebook decides not to honor the cryptotokens, I have no additional recourse over holding their stock bought with BCH. If Facebook sells their shares/cryptotokens to fund lavish trips for their directors and drains the company dry, I have no additional recourse. Assuming shareholder rights are still enforced only by the existing legal system, which they are, I don't see how making the shares an ICO instead of an IPO makes a difference. (A cryptographically issued stock certificate, via some kind of permissioned ledger, may be better than paper certificates but that is beside the point.)

Thus the whole Ethereum ICO craze seems like a flash in the pan, a mere tacking on of "blockchain" to what is inherently a trust- and legality-based issuance. It is not something I think we should be chasing after in BCH. I think it is a mistake to look at Ethereum's "success" in that regard (ICO mania specifically) as something enviable. It's not a long-term driver of value in my estimation, and I share the concern that it could compete for the money function with the base-layer BCH token.

Nevertheless, all that implies nothing about the opcodes proposed for May (besides op_group, which seems a different animal as it appears purpose-built for metatokens and some argue it isn't an opcode in the original sense). Those basic script operations, which specify conditions to be placed upon the execution of transactions, enable many things that to my mind simply make BCH better money, insofar as they actually allow for removal of trust in aspects that don't inherently involve trust, thereby reducing friction for BCH to operate as money in a greater and greater scope.

Contrast the stock example with an onchain bet on the weather. While indeed @awemany this may not actually require new opcodes, it still illustrates the point that money is in a sense more than just simple payments and saving. If the execution logic of the bet can be made more trustless than before (only need to trust that at least one of the oracles is not corrupt, rather than trusting the oracles AND the counterparty to the bet), that is a reduction in friction that will allow BCH to permeate into more use cases as money.

In other words, for money to succeed qua money, it needs to be made as trustless and frictionless as possible in as many use cases as possible. ICO mania is a distraction as it tries to make trustless and extra-legal what is inherently about trust and legality. Being able to specify and guarantee the conditions under which a payment executes (without relying on third parties for that guarantee) is, to me, a key function of sound money - albeit one heretofore not recognized as such, because it was taken for granted that third parties (courts) would have to be relied upon anyway to ensure the conditions were adhered to. Note, still, that the concept of "smart contracts" tends to take this too far: it again tries to make trustless and beyond human judgment those aspects that inherently involve trust and that are best left to human judgment, as illustrated in @Roger_Murdock's presentation at TFoB last year.

The key to dominating the monetary network effect is to be the oil that seeps into every use case of money by removing friction where friction can be removed, no more and no less. Those use cases aren't all simple payments, but I suggest that they all may be covered under the idea of complex payments - payments with more complicated conditions determining whether the payment goes through, who it goes to, and in what amounts.

If payment is communication, these opcodes are the grammar.

 

[hodl]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

I don't have a problem with enabling more functionality and I think you have articulated it well. We just need to be sure all the potential bugs are covered .

I agree, OP GROUP appears to be designed specifically to facilitate metacoins by making nodes and miners validate them, which I don't think is a good idea. Didn't we go through this with Satoshi back in the day already? Iirc, he specifically pushed what eventually became Namecoin to an altcoin so as to not muddy Bitcoin. Any dev endorsing OP Group also needs to avoid getting into a potential legal mess, like with the DAO. if enough $hundreds of millions get wrapped up into a metacoin that gets hacked, there will be an avalanche of threats for a hard fork roll back of the BCH chain which is in essence a bailout. To me it won't matter that there are multiple dev teams involved. Sue them all since they are identifiable.

Now, it also appears to me that there is more to ABC's intent than just re enabling old OP codes. The DeRose podcast interview of the XCP dev revealed that there is some sort of tie in/endorsement with CounterpartyCash which will facilitate the XCP metacoin in some way. I disagree with that too.

 

[hodl]

Mind you, we all owe counterparty folk like /u/insette a nod for his tireless efforts to push through the big block initiative on reddit. But does that mean we owe them a BCH protected metacoin like XCP? No. I put forth even more effort to the big block effort and all im asking is for my BCH distribution to Moon

 

[Bagatell]

snip

So instead, a new mechanism of pre-consensus can be used so that the old op_codes can be enabled over time without breaking all the in place equipment each time there is a hard fork.

The way it works is that if there is a script function that the node doesn't recognize, it can set it aside and wait for it to be included in a block and that other blocks are built upon it. It doesn't reject it, or accept it, it waits to see what all the miners do.

Implementing this means that PoS systems can be mass produced and we can finally get on the road to mass adoption..

Any updates on this?

 

[Tomothy]

Mind you, we all owe counterparty folk like /u/insette a nod for his tireless efforts to push through the big block initiative on reddit. But does that mean we owe them a BCH protected metacoin like XCP? No. I put forth even more effort to the big block effort and all im asking is for my BCH distribution to Moon

So, doesn't XCP already work on BTC and therefore will also continue to work on BCH? Are you simply taking issue with increasing op_return? And if I'm correct, this is a separate and distinct issue from any continuing concerns regarding op_group and also separate from those op_codes discussed in the article by shadders?

I guess i'm confused since I think the water just got muddied and it seems for the most part everyone seems to be agreeing?

 

[hodl]

Could be. That podcast with Derose implied to me that CounterpartyCash wanted something more, maybe through the OP codes, I don't know. BTW, isn't OP return still 40 bytes?

 

[Tomothy]

If they were looking for anything, I assume its Op return to 80 bytes instead of 40 which I think is on the table. Sufficient but not necessary or something?

 

[freetrader]

@Tomothy, @hodl: 220 bytes

https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/rABCcbf4410912f6512e481f15270329683d4d4378d4

But see discussion about larger sizes:

https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/pull/41

 

[hodl]

If they were looking for anything, I assume its Op return to 80 bytes instead of 40 which I think is on the table. Sufficient but not necessary or something?

apparently, not enough
[doublepost=1521220438][/doublepost]booyah, BCH.

 

[theZerg]

@Zangelbert Bingledack said:
> The key to dominating the monetary network effect is to be the oil that seeps into every use case of money by removing friction where friction can be removed, no more and no less.

This is exactly the point of OP_GROUP. There is friction and trust in exchanges. Having tokens on the BCH blockchain removes both the friction and trust because P2P trustless, remote, and pseudo-anonymous exchange is now possible.

And no when you own shares of XYZ you don't trust the XYZ company to track your ownership of those shares. You don't even trust them to honor those shares. You can legally force them to do so. That's the point of owning stock. The management can't pay out to themselves without paying out to all shareholders. The only "trust" you are putting into XYZ company is that they are self-interested to increase the value of their own shares, and competent enough to do so. But this is the same economic argument as we use for mining...

But today, you don't own shares. Technically, your broker actually owns them and holds them on your behalf. This was done for settlement convenience, but all sorts of things can go wrong with this arrangement, the most common being your broker lending your shares to shorts without your knowledge (which could drive down the price of your long).

Moving back to a system where you can actually own shares in a company is huge. Read about overstock and t0.

 

[hodl]

@Tomothy, @hodl: 220 bytes

https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/rABCcbf4410912f6512e481f15270329683d4d4378d4

But see discussion about larger sizes:

https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/pull/41

OP_RETURN-->"Class C transactions are most preferred due to the Provably Prune-able Outputs avoiding issues of "bloat" and "pollution" of the block chain."

 

[rocks]

I see the OP codes enabling scripting features which will generate market-share growth in directions we can't fully predict, except for the one constant being that users who are making use of sophisticated scripting features will do more p2p transactions onchain.

Couldn't agree more. In the earlier days bitcoin was always discussed as programmable money, which directly implies more than a simple payment system. By implementing Bitcoin using script I think it is clear this was Satoshi's original intent as well, if the only intention was P2PKH payments the original implementation could have been drastically simplified.

my vision is that BCH becomes the world reserve currency in which prices of all things (stocks, bonds, insurance, cars, housed) are denominated. that's it.

@hodl This is the right end objective, but for BCH to achieve this it is necessary to understand what functionality the dollar provided to achieve this vision and to offer at least the same functionality and likely more.

The Federal Reserve's invention of ledger-based money integrated into a government backed legal framework created the concept of smart contracts for money. With the dollar's introduction, money was now protected by signed contracts because the federal reserve could restore ledger entries based on the outcome of court decisions. Bad actors could no longer run off run off with money as the legal system protected ledger entries and would restore ledger entries (which were now money) based on signed contracts that could be anything.

Gold lost to the dollar because gold only offered a payment system and store of value properties. The usefulness of the Federal Reserves dollar with smart contracts beat gold in adoption and usage, simply because the usefulness of money with smart contracts provides significantly more value to society than a simple payment system.

BCH has the opportunity to provide both the full usefulness of the federal reserve's dollar, plus restore the store-of-value guarantees of gold. This is a winning combination, and IMHO a necessary combination to have any meaningful impact.

So, with BitPay and Coinbase onboard, and many other companies, where is the adoption effort headed in the next 6 months? The conference will provide some boost, but what is the overall trend of p2p adoption? This chart shows that BCH is not making much of a gain compared to LTC's market-share (for example).
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-ltc-bch.html#6m

Expand that chart to 1 year and add ETH and look at what just ICO functionality has done for Ethereum.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-eth-ltc-bch.html#1y

Now imagine what adding conditional contracts, as @Zangelbert Bingledack describes them could do for BCH.

 

[hodl]

@Tomothy, @hodl: 220 bytes

https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/rABCcbf4410912f6512e481f15270329683d4d4378d4

But see discussion about larger sizes:

https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/pull/41

those are great links. illuminating how they are working around the system by manipulating outputs and scriptsigs. clever. i can see why CP wants the 220 for more space. it would also be more efficient for the base layer in that OP_RETURN's get discarded w/o expanding the UTXO set or bloating storage. the way they're doing it now with p2sh does bloat storage.

question: is the 220 part of BCH now or is it slated for May?
[doublepost=1521225834][/doublepost]i was thinking this descending wedge could take us down to 0.09 but we've now broken the upper half of the wedge. i wasn't taking any chances by loading up some BCH for BTC in the mid 0.11 range. hope it continues:

 

[theZerg]

The problem with op_return is it doesn't work with spv clients, but spv clients are fundamental to our reasoning as to why it's ok to increase the block size. Otherwise we end up with everyone trusting a full node -- exactly the lightning architecture we rejected.

 

[Richy_T]

@Richy_T fair enough. I guess my concern remains that this makes network improvements very difficult to impossible because you need a super majority of miners to opt into something but by default they do nothing.

The thing is, this is already the case. For the BCH fork, Amaury had some momentum or political capital. He has already a good part of that, some of it on things that he could have paid less for. The harder and faster things continue to be pushed from the dev position, the more and stronger the push-back from the miners will eventually be. It's probably time for less stick and more carrot.
[doublepost=1521247925][/doublepost]

It places BCH squarely in the "conventional" grouping. Well, that is a fair assessment, but is it where the maximum value will remain?

I think the primary value of cryptos is sound money. That is, to be in control of one's own wealth. The privacy aspect is part of that. The programmable aspect may well be important as well but to a large extent, that can be handled by existing structures for existing money and it's the sound money aspect that makes it ineresting.
[doublepost=1521248484,1521247437][/doublepost]

If for no other reason as that it is not the same technology by the same name from years ago. And, yeah, calling it "weak"-anything is not good marketing.

I's like to suggest Tachyon cause you get to see things before they're real.

 

[Tom Zander]

But how would you feel if everyone went with the competition in the time you have no product on the market?

oh c'mon. you think BCH with it's big block philosophy for onchain scaling isn't a product unto itself?

You misread what I wrote. Hint, payment is a product that BCH has on the market today. The topic was about the other opcodes. Smart contracts which BCH currently doesn't allow (or only extremely limited).