Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[torusJKL]

hey @theZerg . if you believe so strongly in your vision about how BCH should proceed, why don't you release an OPGROUP/OPDATASIGVERIFY hard fork and let the market of free opinions decide? we don't need to sit here all day debating:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/88yhgn/bitcoin_cash_must_work_even_if_people_dont_all/

I don't think bitcoin being permissionless means that everyone should go ahead with every HF at any given time.
HFs are expensive to the ecosystem and people/business might not go along even though the feature introduced is a good one.

 

[sickpig]

Forking inflates the supply because we now have 2 coins and a total of 42 million units rather than one.

You'll have 42 mil of units rather than 21, but since you're going to clone of BCH ledger (UTXO) in the new fork, there will be no dilution. After the fork anybody will maintain the same proportion of value they have before the fork.

I'm not worried about dilution, what I'm worried about is the effects that a schism like the one proposed by @cypherdoc would bring to the value of the 2 chains. In other words I think the market will stop seeing BCH as a credible long term alternative to BTC due to the fracturing of BCH community, hence a decrease in BCH value will follow.

 

[go1111111]

Suppose I'm not in the position to determine what is 'pseudoscience' and what is 'real science' so I have to defer to those who are.

Who are the actual technical people who agree with CSW about selfish mining? I don't see why this is still difficult even for non-technical people.

Here's a fresh video of Vitalik calling out CSW for technobabble and calling him a fraud: .

Not sure how many obviously smart people need to say the same thing before the non-technical CSW followers start having doubts.

Forking inflates the supply because we now have 2 coins and a total of 42 million units rather than one.

Increasing the amount of total tokens has no real effect if everyone's holdings increase proportionally. All that matters is a person's % ownership of the total supply, which forks don't affect at all.

 

[jessquit]

If we have to inflate the money supply every time we add a nontrivial feature, what does that imply about crypto WRT sound money?

That sounds like something Adam Back would say. I can't believe I'm hearing this from a BCH dev.

If you think that BCH inflated the money supply of BTC that represents a strange misunderstanding. BTC still only has 21M possible coins. BCH likewise will only ever have 21M coins.

If Russia prints up a zillion rubles and airdrops them into the USA does that inflate the dollar. No.

This is fundamental. If you think your idea is clearly the best idea, then you should simply fork as @cypherdoc suggests.

It seems to me that you learned absolutely nothing from the two year long failed attempt to fork BTC. You're still repeating the same FUD that Core used against us.
[doublepost=1522757267][/doublepost]

because nobody wants another fork.

Speak for yourself Andrew.

I could just as easily say, "nobody wants ICOs on BCH"
[doublepost=1522757546][/doublepost]

You'll have 42 mil of units rather than 21

They aren't the same unit. They are not fungible. There are only ever 21M units of BTC. There are only ever 21M units of BCH. No matter how many forks. Making a new currency doesn't dilute the old currency any more than Bitcoin dilutes the dollar.

 

[8up]

Reminder: Most people get involved in a certain project/subject (e.g. Bitcoin development) out of curiosity. Over time they build expertise. On the down side the bigger picture gets lost easily. Impartiality (one field of expertise vs all others) is another victim on the road. Finally they find themselves within a small tribe bugged by group think.

Try to think of your investment into the development of one branch (be it BTC, BCH, ETH, XMR,...) as an investment into all of them (the whole ecosystem). There are so many problems out there looking for a solution. Sound money is one of them. An there are many more.

BCH doesn't need to be everything to everybody in order to succeed.

Bitcoin (the idea) didn't start as a settlement system (BTC). It didn't start as a platform for "smart things" (ETH). It also didn't start with built-in privacy* (XMR).

Focus is everything. Energy follows focus. Let's focus on sound (base) money. The rest will come.

(*)It's debatable if lack of privacy/fungability is the biggest challenge for BCH as sound money and should be highest priority!

Principals of BCH:

• sound money (lack of privacy/fungability?)
  
• cash equivalent
• no/low fees
  
• on-chain scaling
• different implementations/competing development teams
  
• hard-forking (elections) as governance model?

P.S. welcome back @cypherdoc

 

[jessquit]

what I'm worried about is the effects that a schism like the one proposed by @cypherdoc would bring to the value of the 2 chains

Guys it's like we learned nothing in the last three years.

The schism isn't caused by the fork. The fork is caused by the schism.

Look around you. The schism is real. Some of us are pretty annoyed that instead of building high volume sound money to be used as Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash, a gaggle of devs are trying to sell the idea that really, we need to shift gears, change focus, and redirect energies into nonmonetary tokens.

I have asked everyone involved for the best possible defense of how "nonmonetary tokens will improve BCH's adoption as money" and the only person to attempt an answer was Andrew @theZerg. But his answer was wholly unsatisfactory, relying on a pseudoeconomic argument that "BCH is currently only a medium of purchase, tokenization will allow it to become a medium of exchange." This is ecobabble. "Medium of purchase" isn't a thing. A medium of exchange is a "medium of purchase."

From where I sit these devs are moving in a direction that is entirely orthogonal to Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash. Every single calorie of energy spent working on and debating nonmonetary uses of BCH is a calorie not spent on zero-conf, gigablocks, or graphene. Furthermore the fact that our community is instantly divided over nonmonetary uses is a giant red warning flag.

While I remain flexible in my beliefs, the inability of pro-tokenization factions to clearly articulate their strategy for how tokenization will improve monetary, Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash usage drives me strongly to support these features only as a chainsplit fork.

If the proponents of tokenization do not feel sufficiently strongly about their beliefs to be willing to split the chain, then these beliefs must not be very strongly held.

 

[wrstuv31]

Seems like OP_Group would benefit from a fork future.

Not sure how many obviously smart people need to say the same thing before the non-technical CSW followers start having doubts.

Non-technical =/= not able to tell what is good science. Many highly technical people in this space have never been exposed to rigorous science, just software. The result of people equating code expertise with being able to figure out the truth through a scientific process has been quite devastating to this community.

 

[cypherdoc]

>Non-technical =/= not able to tell what is good science. Many highly technical people in this space have never been exposed to rigorous science, just software. The result of people equating code expertise with being able to figure out the truth through a scientific process has been quite devastating to this community.

Thank you

@8up Thank you​

 

[cypherdoc]

Seems like OP_Group would benefit from a fork future.



Non-technical =/= not able to tell what is good science. Many highly technical people in this space have never been exposed to rigorous science, just software. The result of people equating code expertise with being able to figure out the truth through a scientific process has been quite devastating to this community.

Code merely reflects the biases of the coder.

 

[sickpig]

Guys it's like we learned nothing in the last three years.

The schism isn't caused by the fork. The fork is caused by the schism.

I think we meant the same, I could have used schism and fork interchangeably. But you have a point a fork is a symptom of a community split.

That said I have no strong opinion about OP_GROUP and other proposed tokenization systems.

Look around you. The schism is real. Some of us are pretty annoyed that instead of building high volume sound money to be used as Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash, a gaggle of devs are trying to sell the idea that really, we need to shift gears, change focus, and redirect energies into nonmonetary tokens.

I dare saying that characterizing @theZerg, and those in favor of a tokenization system implemented at layer 1, as a "gaggle of devs" "trying to sell" something is to say the least unfair.

Why unfair? 2 order of reasons:

- work done by @theZerg to achieve 500 txn per second on the gigablock test net is simply invaluable.

- he really does think that to have BCH able to reach a critical mass and hence adoption so that he was able to catch all the time wasted "in the last three year" (I'd say 4 by the way).

You're entitled to be pissed off by @theZerg attempt to promote his idea, but this does not mean that he has to stop pursuing what he thinks is right, and more to the point nobody is stopping you from "building high volume sound money to be used as Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash"

[snip]

From where I sit these devs are moving in a direction that is entirely orthogonal to Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash. Every single calorie of energy spent working on and debating nonmonetary uses of BCH is a calorie not spent on zero-conf, gigablocks, or graphene. Furthermore the fact that our community is instantly divided over nonmonetary uses is a giant red warning flag.

BU related efforts on the topics you mentioned:

- graphene: https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited/pull/973
- gigablocks: see @Peter R and @theZerg at Scaling Bitcoin Stanford (it illustrates what we have done so far, TL;DR 500 TPS, plus start working on subchains)
- zero-conf: https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited/pull/1018

so as you can see BU did not stop working on on-chain transactions scaling while waiting for OP_GROUP, on the contrary.

Same applies to ABC dev process, just search for @Tomas van der Wansem work on UTXO commitment at reviews.bitcoinabc.org

While I remain flexible in my beliefs, the inability of pro-tokenization factions to clearly articulate their strategy for how tokenization will improve monetary, Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash usage drives me strongly to support these features only as a chainsplit fork.

I think that what need to be proved would be the absence of any detrimental effects on monetary usage of BCH.
[doublepost=1522768275,1522767522][/doublepost]

They aren't the same unit. They are not fungible. There are only ever 21M units of BTC. There are only ever 21M units of BCH. No matter how many forks. Making a new currency doesn't dilute the old currency any more than Bitcoin dilutes the dollar.

Sorry but this is wrong, see:

Increasing the amount of total tokens has no real effect if everyone's holdings increase proportionally. All that matters is a person's % ownership of the total supply, which forks don't affect at all.

... as long as the fork cloned also UTXO set.

in the past @Zangelbert Bingledack, @Peter R and others explained in a more in dept way.

 

[cypherdoc]

tx's continuing to plummet. be patient guys; doing nothing will still amount to success as BTC self destructs:

 

[theZerg]

I have to admit I'm totally shocked at how quickly the trajectory has started to mirror what happened in BTC, and I wrote a whole diatribe going point by point through all of your similarities with core and your logical fallacies but eh... its a waste of my breath... deleted it...

WRT forking off, having 2 SPV capable chains with cross-chain atomic swaps is a very viable technical solution because one could make light clients that efficiently SPV communicate with both and move value transparently between the two chains. This seems more viable to me than a non-SPV full node only solution, like anything sitting in OP_RETURN.

But it may not be a very palatable solution to holders of BCH -- you assume that "token chain" will be a fork of BCH, but it could as easily be a fork of BTC. Or a new genesis block. And while we dither, ETH's ERC20 tokens are being added to Coinbase so they are way ahead. So it becomes much more likely you'll be shapeshifting your BCH to ETH to buy TSLA...


Its a simple equation, if we put tokens on the BCH chain we are basically making a trade:

We are offering the token issuers a "native crypto" that is already traded on major exchanges with significant value. This provides liquid on and off ramps, a less-volatile native crypto, and some legitimacy.

We are receiving the privilege of BCH being the sound money with the tightest coupling to these tokens (effectively the USD in the international oil market). This will increase the use and consequently the value of BCH. And we are gaining the ability to control what those tokens look like (will they respect property rights, etc).


Doing a BCH token fork undermines what's on offer, and so you should expect to receive less, or more likely token underwriters go elsewhere.

This will be my last posting for awhile at least on this subject since we are just rehashing. Its meant to be more a warning than anything else. Tokens are coming and with your attitudes they will be enhancing the value of some other crypto.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

I don't get why this issue has to be so dramatic.

As far as I remember, BU voted on integrating the OP_CODE's in question.. I don't see why BU shouldn't release a client that includes these updates (as long as the BU development team is sure that the features are bug-free). If people care, they could create a fork of the BU client that doesn't include these new features. Miners should decide, which update they mine and imho they should communicate that much more clearly.
If ABC devs knew, that only 0,1 % of the mining power cared for token-related OP_CODES they could use their time better than arguing against it because it won't happen anyway.
If 99 % of the miners want the new op_codes.. ABC devs better integrate them or they produce an unused client.

I have been very conservative about this stuff and I tend to be more on the "Bitcoin is fine as it is" side. But after hearing and reading more about the current topic.. I fail to see the huge issue. I don't know if tokens are really that big a deal but they certainly won't hurt the blockchain they exist on. (And again, I would have been fine with big blocks and no script at all).

The only question to me is, if the code in question is safe. I agree with theZerg, that sound money and token issuance is no contradiction, not in the slightest.

I honestly fail to see a problem with all proposed updates to BCH. None of the new features will hurt BCH and some might help BCH to conquer new markets. Just be really, really careful about the code quality. And don't throw stuff into the mix just because altcoin XY does it and it sounds fancy and new.

And maybe, BCH needs some training wheels before it becomes the world currency. Who knows.

 

[go1111111]

Non-technical =/= not able to tell what is good science. Many highly technical people in this space have never been exposed to rigorous science, just software. The result of people equating code expertise with being able to figure out the truth through a scientific process has been quite devastating to this community.

I agree with your last sentence. When I say "technical" I don't mean "programming experience" or "computer science experience." It refers to a general analytical ability. The only real requirement is math knowledge/skill.

Peter R is a good example. He's a technical person but (as far as I know) had a background mostly in physics, not programming (although I bet he can program somewhat -- it's not that hard to pick up for technical people). Just because Peter has an analytical mind and knows math, he can clearly see that CSW's selfish mining claims don't make sense.

Instead of referring to "non-technical" people, I should perhaps refer to people who don't try to evaluate the relevant technical arguments on their own merit. CSW appears to have a lot of followers who haven't proven to themselves that he's right by actually evaluating his technical arguments, but who instead admit that they don't understand the technical details and rely on social signals and intuition to determine who is right about technical debates.

Back to my original point. My impression is that many people here regard Vitalik highly. IMO Vitalik is possibly the smartest person in crypto. He's also one of the only computer science folks who actually understands economics. I'm curious what CSW fans think of Vitalik adding his voice to the chorus of people who claim CSW doesn't know what he's talking about. How do you explain it?

 

[VeritasSapere]

@Norway There was no backroom deal about OP_GROUP. The meeting I referred to discussed it in depth. The bottom line is that it is not killed off forever. There is a window for further discussion. That is all. @VeritasSapere spoke 1-to-1 with many people about it and got an understanding to keep the concept of native tokens on the table for re-evaluation next year or even later. That is as far as it went. This may please a lot of people, and that's fair enough.
[doublepost=1522395585,1522394666][/doublepost]So, we are going to have a lot more time to discuss and think about the pros and cons to native tokens.

@theZerg mentions some use cases such as tickets.
Let's consider an example in more detail. A rock concert by Spinal Tap is planned for Sin City with a maximum of 5,000 tickets to be sold. The promoter is a forward thinker and wants to do it on a crypto with native token capability. So, he chooses "crypto-units" (CU) and mints 5,000 ST-SC tokens and offers them for sale online at 0.5 CU each. People use a website or app to pay crypto-units for the ticket tokens. The purchases happen as atomic swaps. Optionally, the promoter may request some personal info to prevent on-selling, such as email and phone number which may be verified at entry time.

Has the amount of crypto-units been inflated by 5000 * 0.5 ?
No, the payments in CU aggregate in the promoter's CU wallet. The ticket tokens, however, then have a value which will only last until the event is over. Concert-goers use their hand-held device to transfer back their ticket-token to gain admittance to the event.

What happens to the ticket tokens afterwards?
Because the event is finished the tokens have no value and can be melted by the promoter.

This is a valued-added use case for a future global cryptocurrency. Exchanges are dis-intermediated. Users find it a very convenient process. There is no risk to the CU currency, in fact there is a boost to it from the additional network effect of this commercial activity.

Would BCH be better off in future if this type of activity took place on something like ETH?

Thanks @solex.

Maybe the room wasn't a "back room", and maybe it wasn't an "agreement", but an "understanding" that OP_GROUP should be postponed to next year.

You make a good case for/example of how OP_GROUP can be used.

So why is it opposed? Who are stalling BUIP077? I'm more interested in knowing "who" than "why". And if you can't say who it is, it's certainly a back room agreement.

EDIT: Typo
EDIT2: I understand that BU have limited influence, and that BUIP077 still being on the table may be considered a victory. I just want to know who is opposing it. Miners? (The only big miner/pool I recognised in Tokyo was Haipo Yang). nChain? ABC? XT?

I should explain what occurred here. Specifically, Bitcoin ABC opposed BUIP077 in its current form. My motivation for getting everyone on the same page was to avoid a escalation from occurring that might have been disruptive to Bitcoin Cash. I simply spoke to different people involved to get everyone on the same page and compromise.

I heard out the concerns from Bitcoin ABC and simply acted as a mediator between Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin Unlimited. As it stands currently we agreed to delay the implementation of OP_GROUP till the may hardfork. There are not that many developers for Bitcoin Cash currently so if just a few of these developers raise concerns this should be taken seriously.

However it is also worth stating here that Bitcoin ABC was open to a more limited version of OP_GROUP for November with a clear roadmap of extensibility for May, also as long as Bitcoin Unlimited provides proper documentation. This seemed reasonable to me and achievable for Bitcoin Unlimited if we really wanted to see a version of OP_GROUP for the November hard fork.

My company Cyber Capital will also carry out a independent review of OP_GROUP which should be finished in a few weeks. We happen to have some very brilliant computer scientists and coders that can take a look at OP_GROUP and hopefully ease some of the concerns people have for this opcode.

To Answer your question @Norway, of who. It was me, Justin Bons. I spoke with Nchain, Bitcoin ABC, BCH Fund and several BU members about this, including @solex, @awemany, @Rogerver, @Peter R, @Tom Zander, @Zangelbert Bingledack, @sickpig, @Norway and more. I am a open book here and this was certainly not a backroom deal. Ultimately consensus will decide the future of Bitcoin Cash.

 

[go1111111]

Regarding OP_GROUP: Note the similarity between this disagreement and the disagreement that lead to ABC/BCH succeeding where BU failed.

Back when BU had the most momentum of any big block group, there were several of us who thought that BU should focus on just a simple block size increase on top of Core first, instead of trying to get the entire community to adopt a complicated block size algorithm ("Emergent Consensus"). We also wanted BU to stop trying to implement their own version of weak blocks for the time being. The critical issue was increasing block size and forking away from Core with as few distractions as possible.

BU's insistence on adding a bunch of complex code instead of focusing on simplicity backfired, as the BU code had several bugs causing nodes to crash. This gave the overall Bitcoin community the impression that BU devs couldn't really be trusted to write solid code or to appropriately scale their ambitions to their coding/testing skill.

Now that BCH is its own network, bugs in consensus code would be much more serious.

My own opinion as a dev is that BU devs fall prey to a common pitfall among devs: devs want to work on grand, complex, cool things. It's more fun, and you feel more important as a dev if you're working on some big awesome vision. This can cause bias and make devs not judge risk/tradeoffs accurately.

 

[VeritasSapere]

@jessquit I do support having native tokens over BCH. The benefit is clear, to put it simply. Having native tokens over BCH would give it more utility. More Utility would increase market capitalization, which in turn would increase security. More security would in turn give BCH more utility again. This is the virtues cycle

This positive feedback loop would also make BCH a better peer to peer cash. With increased security, adoption and infrastructure. Bitcoin Cash has to compete, more features allows us to do that better.

@go1111111 We also need to be careful, but not too careful. This discussion has been usefull, through finding a compromise, a middle ground between multiple implementations we have a higher degree of safety. While at the same time developing amazing features, we should see this as a positive development. Let's move forward and truly fulfil satoshi's vision.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

IMO Vitalik is possibly the smartest person in crypto.

These dick measurement contests "who is the smartest x in y" are really stupid.. Apart from that, Vitalik is right about CSW. But Vitalik also liked to bullshit a bit in the past about Ethereums capabilities... (That being said, he seems to be a reasonable person that is able to discuss stuff.. Something CSW seems to lack completely.. maybe because he doesn't understand what he is saying.)

instead of trying to get the entire community to adopt a complicated block size algorithm ("Emergent Consensus").

BU's insistence on adding a bunch of complex code instead of focusing on simplicity backfired, as the BU code had several bugs causing nodes to crash.

AFAIR there hasn't been a connection between the node crashes and EC. I wasn't a fan of EC and imho EC has been a massive mistake in hindsight. But the node crashes were due to thinblocks iirc. (and core's stupid documentation and code style..)
EC isn't comparable to OP_GROUP imho.

My own opinion as a dev is that BU devs fall prey to a common pitfall among devs: devs want to work on grand, complex, cool things. It's more fun, and you feel more important as a dev if you're working on some big awesome vision. This can cause bias and make devs not judge risk/tradeoffs accurately.

Agreed.

 

[sickpig]

We also wanted BU to stop trying to implement their own version of weak blocks for the time being.

I'm not aware of any developments of weak blocks in the past, @awemany only very recently started to work on it while implementing @Peter R's subchains in the context of the gigablock test initiative, hence a lot after the Aug 1st fork.

BU's insistence on adding a bunch of complex code instead of focusing on simplicity backfired, as the BU code had several bugs causing nodes to crash.

The bugs we had were related to Xthin code not EC. Xthin was the reason why BU was able to build momentum, it helped to demolish the narrative that big blocks would have brought the net to an halt. We shown how Xthin can go through the GFC and it could propagate a block using a small fraction of the actual size.

BU code had several bugs causing nodes to crash. This gave the overall Bitcoin community the impression that BU devs couldn't really be trusted to write solid code or to appropriately scale their ambitions to their coding/testing skill.

You do have a point thou, w/o bugs the story could have been different.

That said I'm convinced that even w/o bugs the only viable way to get bigger blocks in would have been a fork, and this the actual innovative point that @deadalnix brought to the table.

edit: fix grammar

 

[Zarathustra]

That sounds like something Adam Back would say. I can't believe I'm hearing this from a BCH dev.

If you think that BCH inflated the money supply of BTC that represents a strange misunderstanding. BTC still only has 21M possible coins. BCH likewise will only ever have 21M coins.

If Russia prints up a zillion rubles and airdrops them into the USA does that inflate the dollar. No.

I think @theZerg is right. It inflates money. The dollar would be used less if 10% of the GDP gets paid with rubles next year.
[doublepost=1522824641,1522823810][/doublepost]

From where I sit these devs are moving in a direction that is entirely orthogonal to Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash. Every single calorie of energy spent working on and debating nonmonetary uses of BCH is a calorie not spent on zero-conf, gigablocks, or graphene. Furthermore the fact that our community is instantly divided over nonmonetary uses is a giant red warning flag.

Is the simple phone without 'fancy features' the sound phone/smart phone that dominates the market?
[doublepost=1522825267][/doublepost]Infight tribalism in full force now. Our charismatic leaders (kings) lead their pack.
@Zangelbert Bingledack is one of the few charismatic leaders who lead a minority that is more interested in the opinions and ideas than in the person.