Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

great catch. seems to explain the mindset.
[doublepost=1448305580][/doublepost]ok, looks like we might get a daily swing high in the $DJT which could generate a short term sell signal which could be the beginning of the reversal of what i still think is a countertrend bounce in light of the Dow Theory Primary Bear Trend currently in force. yes, we have a non-confirmation going back up the other way (bullish) but until that is confirmed i still remain bearish overall. esp with this possible impending reversal and the weak market internals:

[doublepost=1448305773][/doublepost]remember that i very much see a selloff in stocks as bullish for Bitcoin. esp in light of the bear mkt in gold and silver.

the only safe havens that the market will consider is the dollar and UST's. given i think that at least one of those won't do well in the next downturn (i pick dollars) then that means there is that much more that can be diverted into Bitcoin (the only money in the world that can't be debased).
[doublepost=1448306161,1448305271][/doublepost]

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Great example of "the Internet never forgets."

I'm not sure why, but apparently over the years people joined Bitcoin forums and participated in discussions without the awareness that they are writing for the history books.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[cypherdoc]

what a great argument going to the heart of the matter.

just where are all those ISIS dudes getting their weapons? why, the US, of course! but at least the stocks of the weapon makers have been going up, right?:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-23/new-video-grateful-al-qaeda-thanks-us-supplying-anti-tank-missiles

 

[albin]

Joiners care about image.

Way back in the day during my ill-spent youth, I played on the reg at this college town coffee shop. It was in between gigs playing with groups, so I was doing stuff as this folk/punk singer who (looking back) was pretty legit but trying way too hard to be cool.

One day this cryptic, unsettling aging hippie who ran the music booking at the place and did their open mic came to me out of nowhere with an exaggerated sense of seriousness and told me, "You have to earn respect, you can't extract it". And I was taken aback, but to be honest I really did immediately kind of understand exactly what he was saying, because I did have some sense that I was an unsure kid way too concerned about image, and I wasn't some amazing superstar but I did feel like the stuff I was doing was good enough to interest an audience without a bunch of bullshit.

Adam Back needed to have played that coffeehouse!

 

[chriswilmer]

@chriswilmer
Have you seen some of the comments on reddit and bitcointalk? There are a sizable number of people on both platforms that just attack Gavin and Mike in the most aggressive manner possible. This is after they have worked hard for months to present sensible views in a polite and engaging way. I would get tired of engaging also.

Their disengagement is worrisome. They might be seeing the writing on the wall where the blockstream core devs have taken over the project and are taking it in a direction contrary to what makes sense. The BS devs have basically banned Mike and Gavin, they want no outside influence and are working on a model of complete control, enabled by Thermos' actions. I would start to disengage also.

This is such a frustrating response to my question (and I mean that in the nicest way possible!). It would never have even occurred to me to think that the opposite of "Mike and Gavin are quiet" is to "engage the Blockstream folks or post on Theymos controlled forums." It's also frustrating, because it seems like Mike wastes a lot of energy talking to them (so in a sense, he thinks like you).

What I want is for them to talk to *us* and to other, friendly people! It's a big world out there with a lot of Mike/Gavin supporters!

 

[cypherdoc]

I like this:

BIS: Digital Currencies Could Disrupt Central Banking Model

http://www.coindesk.com/bis-digital-currencies-could-disrupt-central-banking-model/

 

[cypherdoc]

this letter went out to Swiss clients mid October. hmmm, the arrow points at Oct 15. was it really just the Chinese?:

"Well this can only go on for so long and sure enough, as AFP reports, "a tiny Swiss bank specialised in financing social and environmental projects will on January 1 go where no retail lender has gone before, applying negative interest rates on individual clients."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-23/swiss-bank-goes-there-applies-negative-rates-retail-deposits

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cypherdoc

Beautiful damped oscillation on the BTC chart.

That familiar pattern usually portends some more sideways movement as the spring coils tightly . . . then BOING! Perhaps January?

 

[cypherdoc]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

yeah, maybe December and timed with some major blocksize announcement. Bitpay & CB making their move?

 

[cypherdoc]

was forced to look back at this thread. have never seen Andreas get so mad:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181168.msg1973084#msg1973084

 

[Peter R]

Interesting thread, @cypherdoc. It looks like Greg's pattern of having certain discussions censored and "reversing" the results of democratic processes that come out "wrong" is a longstanding one:

You can't even handle a public discussion without getting some sycophant to shut it down when you're losing.
...
The only thing that mattered in this debate was the opinion of the 3-4 developers who did not want any process that actually resulted in anything but what they had already decided. They twisted, turned and rationalized, but in the end did exactly what they intended from the beginning: censorship of particular opinions by exclusion and decree.
...
All hail our new overlords. They're not just coders, they are press directors and OWN bitcoin. As they often say, if you don't like it... fork.

 

[Mengerian]

Adam's latest. He writes like he's talking to himself.

"Decentralising development is something everyone agrees with. Peter R says illogical things though about how to decentralise it. Like well everyone can run random competing consensus algorithms and see which win. (Err, no, consensus algorithms dont work like that)." - Adam Back

I'm seriously trying to understand Adam Back's thinking here. Is he suggesting that allowing "everyone" to "run random competing consensus algorithms" can seriously damage or destroy Bitcoin? If so it would be a glaring weakness in the whole system!

The question needs to be turned around. If allowing this is such a danger, how do you propose to disallow it? What mechanism can enforce this prohibition?

 

[cypherdoc]

interesting perspectives on the anonymity, or lack thereof, in Bitcoin:

Law Enforcement and Regulators Agree: Bitcoin Not Useful for Terrorists, Already Regulated Appropriately

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/law-enforcement-and-regulators-agree-bitcoin-not-useful-for-terrorists-already-regulated-appropriately-1448316076
[doublepost=1448322384][/doublepost]

"Decentralising development is something everyone agrees with. Peter R says illogical things though about how to decentralise it. Like well everyone can run random competing consensus algorithms and see which win. (Err, no, consensus algorithms dont work like that)." - Adam Back

I'm seriously trying to understand Adam Back's thinking here. Is he suggesting that allowing "everyone" to "run random competing consensus algorithms" can seriously damage or destroy Bitcoin? If so it would be a glaring weakness in the whole system!

The question needs to be turned around. If allowing this is such a danger, how do you propose to disallow it? What mechanism can enforce this prohibition?

that's easy.

1. character assasination
2. downvote brigading
3. massive ddos
4. ad hominems
5. "buy" core dev
6. sockpuppets
7. technical obfuscation
8. appeals to authority
9. link oneself to cypherpunks
10. censor dissenting opinion

did i miss any?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

OK, I finally found a clear explication of the small block adherents' fundamental reasoning. Note that this view *requires* blocks to remain small enough to run a full node in TOR or Bitcoin is unequivocally destroyed. The logic absolutely demands it to be so (or so it would seem ).

It's a long and viciously detailed post but worth it to understand the arguments, why many people are so uncompromising about blocksize, and to practice being able to refute them:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/measuring-decentralization/

This is like the beastmaster's lair of small blocker posts. Note that he correctly points out that the typical small blockist fear of mining centralization is a complete paper tiger, and his argument on that is something large blockers can probably use profitably in debate.

 

[AdrianX]

@cypherdoc LOL, @Mengerian he is obviously talking about future development, deviation from the consensus of what's already agreed is not a concern or a threat. One can't deviate from consensus and still be a part of the consensus herd. He is saying you can't herd the herd if you have decentralized consensus. Adam could only be talking about maintaining consensus by having centralized control to facilitate "positive" development of the protocol.

 

[albin]

run a full node in TOR

A thought occurred to me the other day that probably falls into the "not perfect so worthless" category.

Suppose the reference client supported a service type where in a super-lightweight fashion, nodes accepted inbound connections from Tor, and these Tor connections were other reference client wallets doing nothing other than broadcasting their own originating transactions.

This wouldn't solve say a government actor tracking down and punishing Bitcoin node operators (but there are better techniques for that, like connecting encrypted to VPNs), but that seems pretty sensible to confound any hope of network analytics as a deanonymizing attack. Instead of the misery of running the entire node over Tor, it doesn't matter, just run everything over the clear, but broadcast your own tx's over Tor so that the only thing you see in the clear are subsequent hops.

 

[Mengerian]

Yeah, It seems to me that if you accept Bitcoin as a decentralized permissionless system, then you have to accept the possibility that people will have different ideas and opinions, and may choose to run different software. In this situation, the only way to prevent people from running "random competing consensus algorithms" is through the means @cypherdoc listed! Is this what they really believe? That these tactics are necessary to save Bitcoin? If so it wouldn't give one much optimism for Bitcoin's future!

If, however, one sees Bitcoin as a system with strong built-in incentives toward consensus, and resilience to disruption, then we can be more hopeful. This is how I see things. Just look at the incentives of node operators and miners:

Node operators: The primary purpose of running a Bitcoin node is to track consensus. This is the whole point! Bitcoin businesses, or anyone transacting in bitcoin will not just stupidly follow some minority fork of the blockchain. Doing so would lose them money! In fact, one of the primary selling point of Bitcoin Unlimited should be that it is more robust at tracking consensus than its competitors, not less (or at least better at alerting the user to possible consensus failures and blockchain forks).

Miners: Miners have an overwhelming incentive to produce blocks that will be accepted by the economic majority. The spend over a million dollars per day, in aggregate, on proof of work. Of course they are not going to want to throw that away carelessly by producing blocks that have a good chance of being rejected!

This is how Bitcoin becomes anti-fragile, through decentralized development competing to win market share based on the individual incentives of those running the software. This will build in resilience from the bottom up. Attempting to engineer changes to the system in a top down manner by clinging to centralized control and vilifying anyone who falls out of line is futile and doomed to failure.

 

[AdrianX]

@albin am I understanding what you are saying is, in order to remain anonymous you don't need to run a full node behind TOR. But rather than limit block size so some nodes can run behind TOR you could have the same anonymity if all nodes are public but to obfuscate a transaction brawdcast IP someone could brawdcast an anonymous transactions over TOR to a public node. Obviously not all transactions would be brawdcast this way as the network is already rather pseudo anonymous. One could still follow the money, just not the the transactions node's original transmitting IP?

 

[albin]

@AdrianX

There's probably a lot of different variations on this idea possible, but basically yes. The thought I had was to confound network surveillance (as opposed to blockchain analytics itself). I'm not remotely qualified to speak to the particulars technically, but I'm even wondering if we could be talking about nothing at all about a node happening behind Tor here, just a really simple parallel network service just to push originating raw transactions as tiny messages, that end up transmitted to actual nodes in the clear.

Just spitballing here but maybe a prototype that could be run right now is imagine you have two nodes. One is a totally normal full node. The other is a full node that you run on your own network through Tor (or maybe another instance on the same pc if that's possible?) that only makes one outbound connection to your own node in the clear (to receive blocks, mempool, etc.). You then make a small number of inbound connections from that Tor node (ideally you would want this to only do this tx push service, but I imagine trying to tweak a node would have bad results as far as being considered a good peer in the normal network). When it comes time to send a transaction, you have the full node wallet produce the raw transaction via RPC, and likewise tell the node behind Tor to broadcast it.

Basically I'm speculating about how to put the minimum possible amount of data onto the Tor network, out of respect for other users of Tor.