Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

Maybe there's a lesson there. To me, it doesn't feel right. Here's a perfectly good business serving a critically important function, secured email, now wanting to hit a home run in a highly speculative revenue scheme that could draw even more scrutiny and possible regulation which is the last thing they need and heretofore have successfully avoided. Some of you may not have heard but the CEO of Cambridge Analytica was just caught on video recommending Proton Mail to a political candidate to influence a particular election in Sri Lanka (?) I believe. They provided services for Trump during his race against Clinton and have been caught mining data from Facebook. Anyways, ProtonMail offers encrypted email and hides out in Switzerland and is most certainly a favorite topic of the NSA and gvts round the world. So far so good with steady progress in development yet they don't even have yet a functioning Calendar or viable Contacts system. Their interface is clunky and you can't even adjust font sizes in the message body without pinch zooming sentences off the screen. IOW, there is plenty of basic work to do yet now they're introducing a token/altcoin/ICO potential ponzi to hyper drive revenue. Is this a good idea? I don't know. But it seems to me that this craze we're witnessing to facilitate this stuff into BCH is really a first world problem limited to speculators who aren't satisfied with making small amounts of money but need to make large amounts of money. Maybe that's good, or even a fundamental part of Bitcoin, I don't know. But I think it presents, at minimum, a risk model to what is a critically needed service today, secure and private encrypted email communications. Great for the profits of the founders in the short term no doubt. But long term?

Imo, what's going to drive BCH adoption worldwide and sustainably is not only first world but mainly third world adoption. Those little black kids that are willing to crawl down 100 yd holes to dig up grains of gold so they can feed their families for a day. Those are the people who will be willing to fight for a better gold equivalent aka BCH adoption against tremendous oppression. Those are the people who will ensure the decentralization BCH will need to make it robust and secure. Until we get those people to forget about gold as the premier SOV in the world and replace that thinking with Bitcoin, we will not have made it. What those kids need is a real functioning form of Sound Money, not speculation that invites all sorts of regulatory scrutiny because of schemes that take advantage of them. And yet here we are fighting to integrate this stuff directly into BCH. What a world.

 

[cypherdoc]

Suddenly, AsicBoost is A-OK!

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[wrstuv31]

Suddenly, AsicBoost is A-OK!

At this point, anything that can be done to give the central planners more control over BTC will be done. If you get labelled a "threat to Bitcoin" you can be forced to mine in a less competitive way.

 

[jessquit]

mainly third world adoption

I couldn't agree more.

I strongly believe that we're all first world people failing to see the golden opportunity right in front of us because we keep trying to solve first world problems like "how can I issue penny stock tokens" instead of "how can I displace the Venezuelan Bolivar" or other shit currency.

 

[cypherdoc]

it's also way easier to disrupt third world currencies and their weak gvts. they don't have nearly the vast infrastructure designed around them to protect their financial mkts like the US does. look at Venezuela playing around with petrocurrency along with Slovenia, Argentina, Nigeria, etc. good luck getting the SEC, CFTC, FINRA, etc to give up anytime soon.

like i said, everyone panics on pullbacks like this and takes their eyes off the ball due to impatience. calm down.

 

[jessquit]

Instead of thinking disrupt and topple think coopt and strengthen.

Their governments will succeed because they buy in and their citizens become wealthy.

 

[cypherdoc]

>Their governments will succeed because they buy in and their citizens become wealthy.

and these are the places in the world where billions of unbanked people suffer everyday from inflation and oppression. they have everything to gain and nothing to lose while all they want is a stable currency that doesn't even have to go UP in value, only stay stable. yet with BCH, they could indeed become very wealthy thus their motivations are way higher than ours in the developed world. i used to joke that Greg would be the first person to give up to gvt pressure, i have no doubt about that. hell, i don't even trust myself either b/c i have too much fiat wealth to lose. but it's a first world argument that applies to all of us. it's the third world folk in extreme desperation (most of them) who will fight to the death for the financial gains BCH offers. they will provide the true decentralization thru demand that will secure Bitcoin in the long run. let's give them a optimized SOV currency, not a WoW platform.

for the record, i think i will be ok with a @deadalnix May agenda that re-enables pre-existing OPCODES while increasing to 32MB more importantly. but i think anything new like OPGROUP & OPDATASIGVERIFY needs to wait. we need to go slow.

 

[Bagatell]

@solex @Mengerian

re Tokyo - you are doing Cthulhus' work. Well done!

 

[Zarathustra]

I couldn't agree more.

I strongly believe that we're all first world people failing to see the golden opportunity right in front of us because we keep trying to solve first world problems like "how can I issue penny stock tokens" instead of "how can I displace the Venezuelan Bolivar" or other shit currency.

Yes, but third world people also prefer smart phones over simple ones. They don't just want to talk as soon as there are additional functions available.

 

[rocks]

It's not a feature it is a bug. Make a small mistake or have bad code, and immediately lose all of your funds. That seems to be a problem for a system designed to never let individuals store funds at the base level.

Hey Andrew @theZerg, what's wrong with the vision of BCH becoming the next free standing world reserve currency, much like the dollar? Where everything is priced in BCH as the unit of account but with assets like stocks and bonds still held in trust with third party institutions?

Is it that it's a flawed system or that it just can't work?

The "flaw" is payments and store of value is not enough to over come the FED dollar. The dollar won because it offers more functionality, and the usefulness of this functionality out weights the loss of SoV.

And even if payments and store of value were enough (which I think it isn't) a new problem now is how do you distinguish Bitcoin (Cash) from any other 1000s of blockchains? Bitcoin (Cash) relied on 1st mover advantage to overcome the first wave of similar blockchains in 2013, but due to core's delays that 1st mover advantage is gone now.

The only saving grace for Bitcoin Cash is the original excitement on the development and applications front that Bitcoin used to have, seems to be restored and focused on Bitcoin Cash. That needs to be nurtured for this chain to win.

For Bitcoin (Cash) to win individuals need to use it without directly adopting it, it needs to just be a component of the services they use. Most individuals are not going to switch over to a crypto currency, even those who bought into the latest bubble most never actually used Bitcoin it was just a speculative investment to them. That's not winning in the long term that's tulips.

Overall, I think the days of just sitting on a stack of early BTC and waiting for it to win are now over, largely do to core. It is a wide open market place and the most useful chain with the most adoption will win. Adoption is driven by services, which are developed by interested entrepreneurs and developers, and no one is interested in a stagnant chain.

 

[cypherdoc]

@rocks

>The "flaw" is payments and store of value is not enough to over come the FED dollar.

again, i've already stated that i think it will be ok that ABC re-enables existing OPCODES come May while primarily lifting the limit to 32MB. having said that...

we simply disagree here about BCH becoming successful as a dumb token. for arguments sake, ignoring things like "it's too late", can you tell me what is exactly wrong with the theory/goal of BCH becoming the unit of account worldwide as a reserve currency while the market prices everything else, including stocks, bonds, etc, in BCH terms? assuming of course that it did become popular with every person on the planet? i seriously don't get why ppl think this can't happen. why i definitely think it can happen is that all the complaints i here about Bitcoin in general are from banks and it's function around money. they certainly seem to be worried. where the disagreement comes is how do we get there? by building all these asset appendages directly into the protocol or by allowing it to gain traction as a dumb token? we're only 7m into this so we should proceed cautiously.

>The dollar won because it offers more functionality

how? it's a free standing system controlled by the Fed. all the Fed ever does is increase or decrease dollar supply by the buying or selling of UST's, with or without printed dollars. the marketplace has built an infrastructure around the dollar that offers stocks, bonds, etc all priced in that dollar. the theoretical BCH i'm talking about does the same thing the only difference being it's issuance being emitted by an algo that tops out in 2140. leading into that and forever after, it's a fixed supply which market participants will compete to use/hold and build financial infrastructure around. just like gold in the old days when it was used as currency.

>how do you distinguish Bitcoin (Cash) from any other 1000s of blockchains? Bitcoin (Cash) relied on 1st mover advantage to overcome the first wave of similar blockchains in 2013, but due to core's delays that 1st mover advantage is gone now.

it's already distinguished as the only other valid participant with the same genesis block (imo, the other HF's like BTG or BTD are failing miserably). yes, first mover advantage is gone now but BCH is slowly gaining by my estimation. as evidence of this, just look around at the dev of new wallets, xchg adoption, and new merchants coming into the space. slow and measured yes. but it's definitely a trend.

>The only saving grace for Bitcoin Cash is the original excitement on the development and applications front that Bitcoin used to have, seems to be restored and focused on Bitcoin Cash.

such is the power of a revolutionary new form of Sound Money. have faith; if we could do it once, we can do it again. central banks have not gone away so the need is still there.

>For Bitcoin (Cash) to win individuals need to use it without directly adopting it, it needs to just be a component of the services they use. Most individuals are not going to switch over to a crypto currency, even those who bought into the latest bubble most never actually used Bitcoin it was just a speculative investment to them. That's not winning in the long term that's tulips.

the low fees and hi speed will ensure that adoption. it takes time. that doesn't mean betting and speculation has to be built directly into the protocol. just let merchants continue to offer services for BCH and users will come. like it did successfully from 2009-2015 before hi fees hit.

>Overall, I think the days of just sitting on a stack of early BTC and waiting for it to win are now over, largely do to core.

sure, everyone should make an attempt to use BCH as much as possible. but don't underestimate the importance of the speculative hodler's. it's normal for them to move into a space first before ordinary users. they obviously limit the supply as time goes forward increasing the price. they are needed. that is where we are now with the speculators scooping up the unwanted coins when nobody sees their potential. exactly like the early days of BTC.

>It is a wide open market place and the most useful chain with the most adoption will win.

agreed

> Adoption is driven by services

sure, but not necessarily built right into the protocol. money has to stay simple and predictable for investment to have the confidence to come in. the more variables and unknowns you toss into the mix causes uncertainty. and in the case of metacoin/altcoins, dilution. functionality is a different thing altogether and i certainly support that to a limited degree.


>no one is interested in a stagnant chain

do you consider BCH as a dumb token but with continual optimization, like with graphene and limited smart contracing, stagnant?
[doublepost=1522088102][/doublepost]one other key thing i'm seeing is the dying of Core. once the market sees it, the SWCH2BCH should get moving in full force. so be patient.

 

[cypherdoc]

first, the blockchain craze came and died. now, the ICO craze looks to have come and died. no one cared about putting stocks/bonds on a blockchain. and now, regulation definitely cares about ICO's fleecing ordinary ppl (as they should) and will squash that space.

why aren't we focusing on what has always been the killer app; sound money?
[doublepost=1522091479,1522090450][/doublepost]daily tx counts continuing to dive even lower:

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Reporting from Satoshi's Vision, the revolution is back in full swing. The energy is palpable and there is passion in people's eyes. It was a full house but people were skipping some of the talks just so they didn't miss out on the many fascinating talks in the halls. Every evening venue was so loud from people talking about Bitcoin Cash that it was like a club environment.

Several of the talks were groundbreaking, even historic, and privately I heard many ideas that were even more interesting, like Johannes Vermorel saying he had an easy method of doing stocks onchain with no opcode changes. Some of us GCBU guys also had a nice discussion on zero conf security last night over drinks. Overall the conference felt like a smashing success. I literally heard not one single person mention the price. Everyone was focused on making Bitcoin better money.

The BCH is back.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

first, the blockchain craze came and died. now, the ICO craze looks to have come and died. no one cared about putting stocks/bonds on a blockchain. and now, regulation definitely cares about ICO's fleecing ordinary ppl (as they should) and will squash that space.

why aren't we focusing on what has always been the killer app; sound money?
[doublepost=1522091479,1522090450][/doublepost]daily tx counts continuing to dive even lower:

Oh, everybody still cares about putting stocks / bonds on a blockchain. The number of advertising requests for ICOs I receive has not gone down a bit; I heard from several sources that more and more non-crypto companies gone interested in doing an ICO. It gets harder because of regulation, but it still is an extremely powerful, global and trustless method to raise funds, which makes it highly attractive for every Startup and every company in search for funding.

For many this is far more threatening than an alternative hard money currency. Money by itself doesn't significantly touch the business of banks; their key competences, like lending or financing, is still untouched. The same goes for traditional exchanges, they still are the hubs for trading securities and if Bitcoin gets big enough, they create a future / ETN.

ICOs however threaten the core business of banks and traditional exchanges. They make it possible that Bittrex and Binance will eat every major stock exchange of the world. With ICO token you can outsource Frankfurt, Stockholm, Paris, Stuttgart, Milano stock exchange on a good server at somewhere.

Don't underestimate this. What we have seen by now was just a showcase of the power of ICOs. This was what a couple of "blockchain"-projects mixed with scammers can do. What do you think will happen if it becomes common for regular companies to ICO their business? What do you think will happen if real estate / renting goes on token? It will be an extreme disruption of the property markets, and I am really, really worried about the renting prices in my small town when real estate gets ICO'd to chinese crypto billionairs.

China and the world's regulatory bodies have been quite ok with Bitcoin. Some KYC here and there, but after all, you train the cops and financial authorities and talk to exchanges, and as long as it does not threaten central banks monetary policy, it is all ok. But when the ICO hype started, China outright banned it, South Korea too, and China was even of with banning Bitcoin trading too as a prize to ban ICOs.

This said, I'm skeptical of Bitcoin Cash caring too much about tokenization. It only adds surplus to the value of the native token of a blockchain, if they have a similar function as cash on exchanges. With Ethereum this partly is the case - and I missed this when initially thinking about Ethereum - as having Ether is the easiest way to buy ICO-token created by Ethereum smart contracts, or to exchange them on Ethereum based decentralized markets, whenever available. This gives Ether a unique kind of purchasing power - the cash sitting on the world's stock exchanges. A huge value to eat by Ethereum's native token.

But I doubt Bitcoin Cash will or wants or should or can focus that much on smart contracts required for this. If this is planned, it is extremely important that tokens become part of consensus rules, like OP_Group supposes. Otherwise it will probably fail to add value to BCH while eating a lot of blockchain resources.

Edit: Daily Tx number is indeed a tragedy. It's completely as we expected: Once you hit the limit, you'll never need to enforce it again. No sense in building highly scalable money application in such a system.

 

[BCH King]

Must be "cause" I am stupid.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Christoph Bergmann

Oh, everybody still cares about putting stocks / bonds on a blockchain. The number of advertising requests for ICOs I receive has not gone down a bit; I heard from several sources that more and more non-crypto companies gone interested in doing an ICO.

that's not what i am hearing. last night i talked directly to an insider of one of the spaces largest hedge funds who's ICO fund is experiencing increasing redemptions out of fear of a crackdown. and rightly so; the SEC has been signaling this for months now and it's finally happening, not soon enough. the ICO funds performance is abysmal since Jan 1 and much worse than BTC itself, of course.

For many this is far more threatening than an alternative hard money currency.

i totally disagree with this. the business of money is the ultimate in network effects. esp one that threatens to unseat the dollar as the world's reserve currency. this is why when you hear banks complain about this stuff, it is usually only about the monetary aspects of the disruption. ICO's are nothing more than the old scam to "buy unregulated shares in my company" without any business plan or functioning product. there's nothing innovative or even interesting here. they merely use buzzwords like "the law is code", "AI", "smart contracts", etc etc to suck in the investments. they're gonna get smacked and rightfully so. this is what you get when you let the original vision of sound money go astray; a bunch of ponzi schemes. if BTC had been allowed to scale as money, we wouldn't be having all this peripheral speculation. that's b/c BTC would be well on it's way to disrupting the Forex currency markets which dwarf every other market on the planet. this prospect is why the price went to $20K before collapsing to where it is. you've never seen any price appreciation of that magnitude in 9y for any other asset ever. correct me if i'm wrong.

Money by itself doesn't significantly touch the business of banks; their key competences, like lending or financing, is still untouched.

i don't know how you can say this. Sound Money would surely disrupt everything they do; they DEPEND on bailouts via printed money. this is precisely what has happened over and over since the Savings & Loan crisis over decades. Sound Money would surely end all business as they know it and profits would be cut down massively.

ICOs however threaten the core business of banks and traditional exchanges.

no, the Monetary Base is called a base for a reason. everything, esp stocks, is built on top of or around the dollar which gets propped by the Fed. this is why we're here; we're trying to disrupt the business of money.

as having Ether is the easiest way to buy ICO-token created by Ethereum smart contracts, or to exchange them on Ethereum based decentralized markets, whenever available. This gives Ether a unique kind of purchasing power - the cash sitting on the world's stock exchanges.

what is happening when traders give up their ether to attain ICO tokens? they're increasing the supply of ether hence driving down it's price. i say the price of ether has done miserably compared to the price of the tokens the Eth platform has facilitated. that's called dilution.

 

[Richy_T]

I feel like all this ICO frenzy is a distraction. It's a fad and it needs an enema. I feel like we might end up like a guy who bought six tons of fidget spinners at the beginning of January. When it all goes tits-up, it would do well for BCH to be well away from it. And when it's all over, there would still be all that legacy code which will need to be maintained forever.

I'm definitely on-board with the other opcodes though. I think they'll bring so much value that it could bring on the next wave of crypto adoption. If people want to implement the token stuff as second layer, I think that's just fine. I just don't think it's within central Bitcoin's scope.

Let's not jump on bandwagons that are rolling past but try and build a cryptocurrency for the future instead.

 

[awemany]

@Zangelbert Bingledack : Seconded.

@cypherdoc:

ICO's are nothing more than the old scam to "buy unregulated shares in my company" without any business plan or functioning product. there's nothing innovative or even interesting here. they merely use buzzwords like "the law is code", "AI", "smart contracts", etc etc to suck in the investments. they're gonna get smacked and rightfully so. this is what you get when you let the original vision of sound money go astray; a bunch of ponzi schemes.

Excellent observation. I think this is still interesting because in principle these ICOs can be set up outside the jurisdictions who'd want to crack down on these scams and this is thus, like gambling, another test of the soundness of the BTC incentive system and censorship resistance. I still think BCH should stay clear, though.

On the conference and related to that:

I talked a bit with @theZerg about OP_GROUP. One of the arguments he made (@theZerg, please correct me if I am wrong) is that there is value in getting stock handling out of the hands of third parties and into the hands of the actual stock holders. While it sounded convincing to me initially, upon further thought, I can imagine a lot of schemes that would give you this while still not having to rely on a blockchain to do this for you.

On this and in general, I think the talk by the yours.org cofounder on "Turing completeness" was very important. I think he got the history wrong (the idea is older than 2015) and that CSW somehow provided original thought here (also: his approach to Turing completeness is a different one to the one in the talk).

However, what was absolutely valuable is the reminder that rather than thinking about Script as Turing complete in itself, you achieve Turing completeness by a sequence of interlinked scripts, with the boolean predicate evaluation that Script is just as the anchoring to link multiple scripts together and keep all involved parties honest!

Running the Turing machine, running the CPU clock if you want happens by the parties to a smart contract being incentivized to feed the program tape to the CPU, not by having the loops on chain. Reduces complexity for the chain and makes it the simplest model that can do anything.

By the way, this argument has been made before, I am pretty sure even right here in the GCBU thread.

This clearly shows that Ethereum's gas and looping is in many ways superfluous, both as a CPU clocking mechanism as well as in a more general sense, as things like an unstoppable DAO doing crazy stuff cannot happen anymore because no one would like that on Bitcoin so no one would continue execution of the particular smart contract.

What is new and also valuable is the details and ideas on how to map the operation of a Turing machine to a series of transactions.

Now, he said in his talk that you cannot do tokens with the Bitcoin chain, but I think that needs to be maybe refined to "cannot easily do tokens on Bitcoin". Because if it is Turing complete in this sense, it can do anything ...

Now I think another mistake would be to argue to put whatever smart contract you have on top of his Turing machine implementation. That is not the way you do that and he also briefly mentioned how you'd go about this: You want some sort of compiler to compile down from a high level smart contract language down to a series of Bitcoin scripts with predicates, but of course without going the cumbersome way of expression yourself so that you can put it as a tape into the simulated Turing machine, but rather by using the expressive power of Bitcoin Script directly, as well as using the related UTXO subset in a free way to express program (smart contract) state.

So in regards to opcodes, IMO we want to go this route of implementing such a high level compiler (or multiple ones) and then see how tokens or bets could be implemented and how an opcode could help us to make the implementations simpler.
This goes both for OP_DATASIGVERIFY and OP_GROUP, though I have a lot less issues with the former.

if BTC had been allowed to scale as money, we wouldn't be having all this peripheral speculation. that's b/c BTC would be well on it's way to disrupting the Forex currency markets which dwarf every other market on the planet. this prospect is why the price went to $20K before collapsing to where it is. you've never seen any price appreciation of that magnitude in 9y for any other asset ever. correct me if i'm wrong.

Absolutely agreed.

On CSW, I am both a bit worried by the mass of seemingly blind followers as well as a bit delighted by the number of people who have expressed sentiment similar to mine (and sometimes even stronger) to me in private. I had people react with wide open eyes and disbelief to me saying "I do not think he is Satoshi". All I can say is, again: Folks, be careful to not form a CSW cult in response to avoiding a Gmax cult.

That all said and to conclude, it was absolutely a pleasure to see many of you guys and watch the talks and to echo @Zangelbert Bingledack once more, the amount of interest in BCH is clearly increasing, contrary to current market sentiment even. It was ~150 people at TFOB and now 400+ (and the conference overbooked) at SV.

 

[Tom Zander]

can you tell me what is exactly wrong with the theory/goal of BCH becoming the unit of account worldwide as a reserve currency while the market prices everything else, including stocks, bonds, etc, in BCH terms? assuming of course that it did become popular with every person on the planet? i seriously don't get why ppl think this can't happen.

I completely agree with that. It can happen. I think it will happen.

sure, but not necessarily built right into the protocol. money has to stay simple and predictable for investment to have the confidence to come in. the more variables and unknowns you toss into the mix causes uncertainty.

I have seen zero evidence to support the idea that enabling op_group and others take even one iota away from the simplicity and the predictability of BCH as a money.

I don't even see any evidence of that in the Euro/Dollar etc. Your ability to buy stock/bonds with Euros does not take anything away from the simplicity of me to be able to pay my beer with it.

why aren't we focusing on what has always been the killer app; sound money?

I am focusing on that. Many many others are to. What is your point?

If your point is that adding op_group and friends stops me from working on making BCH a rock solid money, you are wrong. There is no focus lost.


I immesely dislike the implied thought that you somehow think you can tell some people what problems deserve their attention. I hope that is not what you are trying to do. Especially in the context where there are literally thousands of people (I'm being conservative) working on Bitcoin Cash related solutions. The vast majority of them on BCH as money. And you feel that the 3 people working on something else should stop doing that...

I'm afraid you will lose this fight, this is not how open source works. This is not how open innovation works, it is the anti-thesis of permissionless-innovation.

ICO's are nothing more than the old scam

Its not that black/white, but I do agree that 90% of them are used that way currently.
It is important to realize that NOBODY is saying that the intention of the new opcodes is to get all those ICOs on top of BCH. That is misunderstanding the technology. Most importantly it is missing the many opportunities that the technology brings, advantages that are NOT ICOs. Most blog posts talking about op_group (including mine) include ideas on usage. Ideas that are far more elegant and useful than ICOs.

Moreover, ICOs are themselves not an evil thing. It is unfortunately being given a completely out-of-proportionate amount of attention and money. But this is a people-problem. People investing in things BECAUSE they don't understand it is not something you can fix at the technical level.