Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Dusty]

These coins are not equivalent to the other 17,000,000 coins. They are a liability.

I see, but nonetheless they will help to cleanly split coins for whoever wants to do it, isn't?

 

[AdrianX]

Thanks for confirming willingness to break on-chain functionality for the sake of these corporate vested interests.

I now agree with @imaginary_username that this behavior (not yours, but CSW's) is fittingly described as terrorism. Financial terrorism, aided by all manner of legal threats and threat of crashing the market.

The man is a financial terrorist against the existing Bitcoin Cash system, since he does not tolerate the right of others to self-determine the rules of their financial system.

It's not financial terrorism, far from it, it's predictable behaviour and easily understood. When you ignore the noise CSW's actions from a business perspective are very predictable and as a result not threatening.

I don't see how you conclude CSW as threatening (his unsubstantiated inflamed ego threats aside). I don't like P2SH for stated reasons, TL;DR it,s subsidizing risk, moving it from the economy into the money network and distributing it, the ramifications are Bitcoins P2SH is used to secure competing systems at the expense of securing the money network.

Even if it was to be minimized some miners would still mine P2SH transactions, you can minimize their use without locking the funds. Businesses that use it need to evolve. regardless of CSW having a patent that is better than P2SH, you have the option to use nether and other options like Shamir's Secret Sharing exist regardless.
[doublepost=1541797964][/doublepost]

It wasn't obvious back then. If it was obvious to you, great.

There was more than one of us that thought it was obvious in October of 2014. It became blatantly obvious after Peter's talk.

I see a political standoff approaching, soon, where those secretly invested in sidechains seek to limit block size. October 22, 2014

 

[Roy Badami]

I wouldn't support abandoning P2SH until such time as a free to use option was available to the network,

I wouldn't support abandoning P2SH ever. It would involve abandoning a huge amount of important work that has been done over the last 3 years, and be harmful for adoption.

I read your post at the time, and didn't (and don't) understand it . BIP17 does exactly the same thing as BIP16 (and potentialky more, to be fair, but I'm not sure how that's relevant),. You still have script hashes, and you still pay to script hash addresses.

The argument was mainly about whether to make a bigger, potentially more risky change to bitcoin that used a new opcode to enable P2SH - and potentially more - in a way that was very elegant (Luke's BIP17) or to make a smaller, safer, less elegant change that implemented just P2SH (Gavin's BIP16).

Computer scientists care a lot about the beauty of their designs, but good engineers know how to trade off beauty against safety, efficiency and many other things. EDIT: And anyway, beauty is subjective. All other things being equal, of course opt for the design you find most beautiful - but in the real world all other things are rarely equal

I think Gavin made the right call - but to anyone outside the minutiae of bitcoin protocol design the world would be no different* if we'd picked BIP17 to implement P2SH instead of BIP16. We'd still have P2SH addresses and P2SH would still work exactly like it does today. It was all just politics, and a storm in a teacup.

*That not strictly true. BIP17 would have introduced a new opcode, which can be used to implement P2SH but potentially might have other use cases too. Of course, there's nothing to stop us introducing that opcode now if people really want it - the two approaches aren't actually mutually exclusive - but strangely enough I don't see anyone arguing for it. Which, to my mind, just goes to show that P2SH was the only use case of the opcode that anyone actually cared about - and that Gavin made the right engineering decision by implementing P2SH without introducing a new opcode.

 

[Norway]

 

[Norway]

Same. Been watching now for some months. Miners should choose, everything else is bickering (Which is why I mostly lurk!) and potentially divisive.

BU should drive for active choice. Passive default, is implied support imho.

Yes. Protocol freeze removes the ability for devs to build a political powerhouse of "experts".

When that is gone, devs can finally focus on improving the clients, not the protocol.

 

[Norway]

Anyone can can smash an egg into the table and make it stand up-side-down if they have been told to do it.

But nobody does it because they're afraid of breaking rules they assume exist.

IBS is a Columbus' egg.

(And yes, I'm still a little butthurt because Andrew Stone never confirmed and gave me credit for enabling anonymous oracle bets with my hash scheme, the original reason for his proposal to change the protocol.)

 

[BldSwtTrs]

So it appears coingeek has lied about Maxwell's email:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5065996.msg47722245#msg47722245

What SV's supporters here have to say about that?

I have troubles understanding how people can support guys who are so blatantly, shamelessly and constantly lying.

 

[bitsko]

BldSwtTrs, you just linked greg maxwell about his opinion on an opinion piece and are expressing outrage over 'whole cloth fabric' against him. lol.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@sickpig It's about what the law deems to be specific design to enable something versus a generic set of building blocks. General purpose computers can also do malicious things, but only a rig judged to be purpose-built for malicious activity is targeted. A CNC machine can be used to make a gun, but only one deemed to specifically facilitate gun-making is outlawed. A chemistry set may allow a bomb to be made, but ones that allow it to be a thousand times easier are much more likely to attract regulatory attention.

I have been surprised to find, contrary to my initial ideas that Bitcoin was built with the expectation that it would always live in the crosshairs, that Bitcoin and script as a system seem carefully designed to avoid a host of pretty specific legal pitfalls, either coincidentally or by design. This assumption of basic incompatibility with government from the start, although never stated by Satoshi except as incompatibility with big government ("attractive to the libertarian point of view"), has informed many design ideas and may need to be reconsidered.

--

@Zangelbert Bingledack, I'm curious about your stance on BSV's threats to 51% any other fork of BCH, and their campaign to keep people from splitting their coins.

You were one of the most eloquent writers about the wonders of market competition between forks, and how this would result in the best coin winning. You were also a huge supporter of user choice. BSV warnings about the dangers of splitting seem like a desperate attempt to keep the battle out of the market and to make it harder for users to choose the fork that they prefer. Any thoughts on that?

A position I've held since before BCH forked away from BTC is that it would be in the best interests of any diehard BTC miners to try to kill BCH.

In general, a minority chain is an existential threat as it could come back to attack the current majority chain, so arguably miners would be remiss to let it live. I don't think that alters the benefits of fork arbitrage, but it does seem to limit its application to situations where either the PoW is changed or the majority miners are merciful. (If the miner-disfavored chain can be rendered nonfunctional whether by malicious reorgs, continual empty blocks, or transaction poisoning like nChain threatens, there can be no arbitrage trade other than of notional coins. Naturally some or all these squelching measures could backfire if they are deemed immoral or damaging to the money system or usability - poisoning transactions is an especially radical move that I intend to cover subsequently.)

That should answer the immediate question, but to give broader context on my views around market governance, the biggest factors I have updated on are:

1) As markets can be irrational in the short term, the fork arbitrage process can take years to play out (not mere minutes/hours as I had thought) as BCH, assuming it eventually succeeds, would demonstrate.

2) Miners, having large sunk costs into a specific hashing algorithm, seem to have more incentive to steward the chain over the long term than investors who can jump in and out.

Taken together, I weight miners a lot more heavily as a specific type of investor than I did before, especially miners that are willing to take heavy short-term losses in pursuit of long-term gains.

This implies miners and broader investors may be at odds and in fact often are. For example, today most BCH holders probably still consider Bitcoin Cash just another altcoin, worth somewhere between EOS and Ripple, while most BCH miners probably hold a radically different view.

Ideally miners, having skin in the game that cannot be easily removed for a few years, serve as a safeguard against the vicissitudes of the investing public until a future time when the investment markets have matured to such a degree that they are rational even on shorter timescales (though even in the most mature markets, like stocks, this still isn't the case - "in the short term the market is a popularity contest, in the long term it is a weighing machine").

To bring this back to SV miners specifically, if they are convinced they know better than the market in the short term and they either have hash majority/supermajority or are willing to take a lot of pain, it is in their interests to thwart any split attempt, even though that is arguably at odds with the interests of investors in the near term seeking fork arbitrage.

Calvin certainly understands the dynamic. Whether it is a bluff or a real commitment remains to be seen:

 

[BldSwtTrs]

BldSwtTrs, you just linked greg maxwell about his opinion on an opinion piece and are expressing outrage over 'whole cloth fabric' against him. lol.

What? I have linked Maxwell saying he never said what Coingeek tells he said.

 

[Mengerian]

IBS?

 

[Norway]

@Mengerian
Yeah, IBS. It's on, like Donkey Kong.

I can't say what it is yet. But if it works, it changes everything.

EDIT: And I try really hard to find the reason why it's a bad idea. But I still can't find it. Maybe you can help me finding the error after we publish

 

[AdrianX]

I read your post at the time, and didn't (and don't) understand it . BIP17 does exactly the same thing as BIP16 (and potentialky more, to be fair, but I'm not sure how that's relevant),. You still have script hashes, and you still pay to script hash addresses.

The point is nether BIP16 or 17 were good ideas. Gavin couldn't answer the first question he was asked because he did not know but went ahead anyway.
The long-term impacts of such changes are devistating. The developers at the time did not understand the economic conquests of making the change. They were just concerned that the code did what it was programmed to do.
This to me is a clear indication that economic externalities should be the first and foremost consideration, not how well the code works or how well tested the changes are. P2SH can't be removed so no worries there. But building a company on a P2SH is taking advantage of the miners who are doing work and taking risk that would otherwise be managed in the economy.

If nether BIP16 or 17 were added, we would not have had Blockstream, a scaling war, or a devastating chan split where we literally have to start again. The companies that use P2SH are not worth the cost.

 

[Norway]

@Mengerian
We played around with a much funnier word for it, but ended up with a TLA.

 

[AdrianX]

So it appears coingeek has lied about Maxwell's email:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5065996.msg47722245#msg47722245

What SV's supporters here have to say about that?

I have troubles understanding how people can supporting guys who are so blatantly, shamelessly and constantly lying.

That's bad reporting, for not validating the source, not dishonest behaviour, unprofessional yes, reputation diminishing, yes. I found it almost comical and absolutely bizarre and I'm glad to learn the truth.

 

[Norway]

@Mengerian
You could implement it today. No protocol change needed.

As a miner, you would make more money if there is at least one other miner doing it. So, it will be very popular among miners if it works.
[doublepost=1541814461,1541813520][/doublepost]CTOR has an effect. I think the cons will be larger than the pro's. But it's hard to say. It's about economics.

IBS works with CTOR and without it.

I could be full of shit. But I'm not.
[doublepost=1541814782][/doublepost]Just like CSW, I talk about something in the future that may or may not come.

 

[digitsu]

Personally I think P2SH elimination is a good idea. Goes towards more transparency in the unlock scripts. Multisig can be done other ways. Such as raw multisig (if fixed) or threshold signatures which don’t suffer from the security vulnerabilities of the 160bit hash birthday attack. It’s expected P2SH only has about 10 more years to it before it is broken anyhow due to the lack of random bits used vs SHA256

 

[majamalu]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

Do you really think they didn't blow away Bitcoin because of some legal technicality?

Come on!

They just didn't find a way to do what they did to e-gold and so many other centralized digital currencies (that is, completely destroy it without any chance of resurgence). I thought this was obvious to everyone here.

But they did try new approaches, like buying or blackmailing a bunch of nerds to deliberately introduce friction into the system, and maybe promoting division due to trivial differences.

 

[chriswilmer]

@majamalu The Zangelbert I knew back in the day was a different person. There's no way such an eloquent and thoughtful writer could possibly believe that Craig is Satoshi. Maybe his account was purchased (along with his BU signing key?). Who knows -- everything is so crazy these days.

 

[79b79aa8]

@chriswilmer i would stop trying to interpret the nChain/Coingeek actions on the academic model, and start trying to interpret them on the poker model.

it is part and parcel of poker to bluff, lie, and divert the attention of your opponents with obfuscactig tactics.

in poker, someone may sometimes win a hand on a bluff -- that is to play well. conversely, if you have the stronger hand, to lose to a bluff is to play poorly. majority hash lost BTC to a bluff.

so who has majority hash on the BCH chain? nChain/Coingeek have paid in petahashes for the privilege of forcing others to show their hand. if those others are bluffing, they lose. to show they are not bluffing, they will need to bring over their hashpower, and maintain it. in this case BCH wins. the content of the upgrades is of secondary importance.

it is a misunderstanding to judge the situation by academic standards (i.e. from discovering that someone is being less than truthful, to infer that their work is discredited or useless). bitcoin does not come from an academic mindset.