Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[VeritasSapere]

@awemany mining is very profitable, even buying off the shelf asic's today will ROI in about 6 months and stay re revenue positive for about 2 years. Big mining outfits (small in global economic terms) are likely orders of magnitude more profitable and are sure to invite competition. https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-116#post-4130

I am not sure if you would ROI in six months, I do not think the S7 will even ROI after a year, which is part of the reason why I did not end up buying one. You are forgetting to factor in difficulty adjustments which have been brutal recently, I have been fortunate over the last year with my mining operation in terms of that the difficulty did stagnate somewhat, I predicted this successfully. However I would predict continued increases of the difficulty by adjustments around 5-10% around each change for the next six months, if you factor this in for the S7 the ROI is certainly not as appealing.

Part of the problem here is that Bitmain does not presently have real competition selling to the public, this is why I believe their current generation is overpriced.

I am very hopeful however that the next gen will be more profitable, especially considering the increase in the Bitcoin price. I am hopeful that I will be able to set up a new generation of equipment around the time of the next halving or before. If I do see any mining equipment that I would consider a good buy, I will let you guys know here, and share my insight. I know I will be very exited when that day comes, I will be shouting the model names from the rooftops. lol

EDIT: You know the S7 might be a good buy, it is impossible to know with certainty, the price could surge more after all. The S7 not being a good buy is my own judgement at the time which is an important decision for miners to make, the timing and quality of a purchase can make or break the ROI of a mining operation.

EDIT: Just saw your other post AndrianX, did not realize you had already purchased some S7's. I do hope you see an ROI for those, over the long run you might, might not be spectacular though depending on your electricity cost and Bitcoin price. If I was able to silence the S7 like I could the S5's I probably would have bought one myself actually even though I was doubtful of the ROI. lol

 

[awemany]

@Zangelbert Bingledack: Nice catch, indeed. Meanwhile, /u/gavinandresen, while still controlled and nice as usual, feels a little bit more pushy in his latest posts.
@Impulse: All I can see coming from them is some half-assed up-to 8MB BS or BIP100 with 32MB cap.

 

[bitsko]

 

[VeritasSapere]

If opt-in RBF is a bad change, it is unfortunate that this thread is still going basically unchallenged in any effective way:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3urm8o/optin_rbf_is_misunderstood_ask_questions_about_it/:

Btcdrak and others are loving it, linking to it all over the place because it looks like a massacre of all opposition to opt-in RBF.

I always presumed that thread was being censored. It feels so wrong to me having all these people just agreeing with each other without any dissenting voices, there should at least be a few trolls there if that thread was not being censored.
[doublepost=1448987605][/doublepost]

10months? More like 2+ years. I made my reddit account and went from lurker to active discussion participant solely because of the blocksize issue...

At least LukeJr is quite an interesting character. I almost like him

I can relate to this blocksize issue making people more active participants in discussion, that has also certainly happened to me, something positive to come out of all of this at least, like I said before, it has lead to greater understanding among people what Bitcoin governance actually is and what it is meant to be.

 

[Zarathustra]

Adam is such a nice person ....

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3uzwgs/scaling_bitcoin_2_in_just_5_days/

 

[rocks]

Hijacking may be too strong a term.

There are two groups in Bitcoin pursuing two irreconcilable goals:

* Everybody in the world should be able to transact on the blockchain.
* Everyone in the world should be able to fully and independently validate the blockchain.

No matter what happens, somebody is not going to get all of what they want.

The problem here is Satoshi's paper and vision was clearly focused on the first bullet. This is what many signed up for. It was acknowledged by satoshi and many that this path would lead to some degree of centralization and that was OK as long as any entity could run a full node to validate for others. This was why Satoshi designed the blockchain to enable SPV wallets.

The second bullet was never part of the original vision. It is what a very small number of people who took control are now trying to force on everyone else. So yes, I think hijacking is a valid term here. You have a small number who took control against other's preferences and are trying to force them down a path they don't want.

 

[cypherdoc]

Why is

I can relate to this blocksize issue making people more active participants in discussion, that has also certainly happened to me, something positive to come out of all of this at least, like I said before, it has lead to greater understanding among people what Bitcoin governance actually is and what it is meant to be.

the reason anti-RBF ppl aren't responding to that pro-RBF thread is that most of the ideas are so foreign, as in never before discussed. b/c all the discussion was held behind closed doors about nuances we've never heard before.

bottom line is that RBF destroys 0 conf tx's by encouraging double spending within the 10 min period. and it's not truly opt-in as it is invoked by the sender, and if not caught by the receiver will result in a double spend. even if caught, the receiver has to reject it and then start all over again, which is a pain in the butt. it will be difficult to teach your cash register personnel how to deal with RBF tx's which will strategically be used by an attacker during full blocks with jacked mempools, which only occurs rarely during spam attacks and full blocks.

 

[Mengerian]

It's fun to watch the antifragility play out. I know some are worried about it, and that worry is good as it drives people to action, but it is just this mechanism - coupled with Bitcoin being the first decentralized development project with strong baked in financial incentives to route around centralized control - that will ensure Bitcoin doesn't ossify and that power structures won't remain out of pure inertia for very long.

We are simply seeing a delay because...

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that [governance structures] long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience [has shown], that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Delaying on blocksize, opt-in RBF, etc. are evils that are still sufferable.

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute [authoritarian control], it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such [governance system], and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of [the Bitcoin investors and other stakeholders]; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former [system of governance]. The history of the present [Core dev team] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over [Bitcoin]. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world... [List of Greivances with Core/BS]"

Eventually the train of abuses and usurpations gets too damn long. Fortunately, unlike going to war, forking away from tyranny is relatively easy.

Yes, it is fascinating to observe this all play out in real time.

Bitcoin has many parallels to previous technological developments like Linux or the early Internet. But the layering of a whole new monetary system on top of the technology creates new dynamics that no-one has seen before.

With all the current drama, I just try to keep in mind that the incentives are so strongly aligned to make people want Bitcoin to succeed that things should work out somehow. I wonder if things are almost to the point where Coinbase, Bitpay, Bitstamp, and maybe some miners could get together to fund a few developers to maintain a Bitcoin Core fork that implements block-size limit increases and other appropriate scaling improvements.

 

[sickpig]

to me the truly and really disturbing thing about opt-in RBF is that a few days after the PR was merged, another Peter Todd's PR was proposed to set that "opt-in" as the default for Bitcoin wallet.

see this post of mine for more info:

https://bitco.in/forum/posts/4501/

Gmax comment linked was quite telling IMHO.

 

[Mengerian]

Adam is such a nice person ....

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3uzwgs/scaling_bitcoin_2_in_just_5_days/

Yeah, his whole demeanor comes across as a sort of aww-shucks, can't we all get along act where he feigns ignorance of the 'trail of abuses and usurpations' (ht @Zangelbert Bingledack) and attempts to place himself in the role of wise and benevolent peacemaker (on his own terms of course).

It seems like there is a significant effort to create a controlled narrative for this whole 'debate'. Everything has to framed in the 'correct' terms, and all discussion has to pass through approved channels, like BIPs and the Scaling Bitcoin conferences.

It also strikes me what an incredible amount Adam Back posts on Reddit and other social media. You would think that as CEO of a multi-million dollar company he would have more important activities to keep him busy.

Anyhow, this too shall pass. Bitcoin will survive and eventually thrive in spite of these short-term distractions.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Gmax responds to @VeritasSapere in the #REKT thread:

For me it is not even a question of greater expertise since it has also become about ideology relating to economics and politics, these are questions that most technical experts are not specifically trained to answer. I think that some of these more fundamental questions like the blocksize for instance are more concerned with politics and economics then computer science,

You are making a strong and unjustified assumption about the skills and background of people maintaining Bitcoin Core. I think you may be making the fallacy of assuming that a group excellent in a particular area must necessarily be weak in another specific area. The community, even the most active segment, is fairly large and diverse in many ways-- much more so then, for example, the persons working on XT*. Beyond the expected CS and distributed systems PHDs, the community includes people with expertise in mathematics, economics, financial markets, ... Peter Todd has a fine arts degree. Skepticism about the viability of the Bitcoin system absent effective meaningful block size limits can be found in peer reviewed academic publications in economics venues. Negative effects on mining fairness are both predicted by simulation, and borne out in field trials on test networks.

What a weak answer! He doesn't even understand that people criticize Core devs for the lack of economic understanding they demonstrate over and over again, and for the pervasive silence on things like BTC price and other economic considerations in their incentive design discussions. Not for assumptions, but because those conversant in economics see that lack of understanding very clearly.

Gavin and Mike, although not exactly economics powerhouses, have each individually shown more economic understanding than I've ever seen from Greg, Adam, Mark, Luke, and Pieter put together. Jeff Garzik is the only active Core committer I would say has any real understanding of economics, and even his seems only passable.

I am as always impressed by Gmax's ability to make his arguments sound authoritative while piling on the misdirection. (Of course mentioning something waffly like politics is an invitation to obfuscate, and one which he doesn't fail to take up later in his response.)
[doublepost=1448994714,1448993800][/doublepost]

Adam is such a nice person ....

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3uzwgs/scaling_bitcoin_2_in_just_5_days/

He really likes platitudes, veiling an insidious control over the debate by pushing for consensus. A requirement for consensus is all Blockstream needs to block any change that would hurt their business model. Further, by being the ones to define "consensus" they can avoid the gridlock that would seem to prevent their own needed changes.

 

[cypherdoc]

Erik Voohees wants to preserve 0 conf tx's. i agree:

"On the surface, it may not seem like a big deal. 10 minutes isn't that long. But it is. Ten minutes is the difference between, “wow this is awesome” and “okay let's go do something else,” especially when 10 minutes turns into 30. For better or worse, people online have extremely short attention spans. If you're actually reading this post, instead of just the headline and reddit comments, you have a longer attention span than many.


Zero-conf was crucial in the user experience of SatoshiDICE at its founding. The same is true with ShapeShift today, which enables zero-conf for certain transactions. The same is true for a BitPay invoice, or a digital content delivery service, or tokenized access, or any of the myriad blockchain business models yet to be born. And while we (as ShapeShift, or SatoshiDICE before it) have constantly struggled to balance the risk of zero-conf with the value of user experience, it is a challenge worth our time and money. Sometimes we've been double-spent. We've lost money because we accepted zero-conf deposits."

https://shapeshift.io/site/blog/2015/12/01/note-ceo-erik-voorhees-appeal-zero-conf

and this from a guy who was running an online business, who is at even more risk than a brick & mortar face to face tx.
[doublepost=1448994964][/doublepost]again, it is about understanding probabilitisitic security in using Bitcoin vs insisting on hard solutions, a real world outlook.

 

[lunar]

@cypherdoc

Just reading that when you posted. Devs would be wise to listen to him on this, he's been on the front line long enough to know where the value comes from.

there is some hypocrisy in a Bitcoiner who vilifies zero-conf because it “carries significant risk” while also holding Bitcoin as an asset (which is one of the riskiest financial assets to hold, period). Owning Bitcoin as an asset, and receiving zero-conf deposits, are both risky propositions... shall we do neither? I advocate both, when done responsibly.

Perhaps one of the pre requisites of being a 'Core Dev' whatever that means these days should be having to hold 10%+ of your assets as BTC. I bet there are some that don't??

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Te-heh.

 

[Melbustus]

The zero-conf thing is yet another issue highlighting a free-market approach vs a deliberate economic-engineering approach. Personally, I think it should be up to users to decide if and how they want to deal with zero-conf risk.

Everything that can possibly be left to the free-market should be, and I'd like *less* econo-engineering of my money, not more. This is the obvious argument against much of the Blockstream-Core devs' approach, and one which I think resonates with the vast majority of the Bitcoin community.

 

[cypherdoc]

@lunarboy

he joined BCT a month after me, so i consider him an equal.

personally, i think he was too kind. like i said, SatoshiDice was taking even more risk running an online business accepting 0 conf since the attacker is already sitting behind the privacy of their computer executing the double spend immediately after the initial tx. but yet we see, on balance, it wasn't a game breaker at all for him and he was exceedingly profitable. so yes, you're right, core dev should be listening to him.

i used to accept 0 conf myself for my newsletter subs also. it was important enough to me to send my first newsletters to online payers within seconds to give the impression of promptness and professionalism. i got alot of kudos for that and i was never double spent. it takes a particularly shady, motivated, highly technical person to want to do a double spend. like i always say, core dev & Peter Todd project their own value systems onto to everybody else as they can't believe the majority of ppl in the world just want to do their best to do the right thing. it is the negativist, pessimistic view of the world and also demonstrates a total lack of understanding of game theory.

quite frankly, i'm totally sick of those guys.

 

[awemany]

Erik Voohees wants to preserve 0 conf tx's. i agree:

"On the surface, it may not seem like a big deal. 10 minutes isn't that long. But it is. Ten minutes is the difference between, “wow this is awesome” and “okay let's go do something else,” especially when 10 minutes turns into 30. For better or worse, people online have extremely short attention spans. If you're actually reading this post, instead of just the headline and reddit comments, you have a longer attention span than many.


Zero-conf was crucial in the user experience of SatoshiDICE at its founding. The same is true with ShapeShift today, which enables zero-conf for certain transactions. The same is true for a BitPay invoice, or a digital content delivery service, or tokenized access, or any of the myriad blockchain business models yet to be born. And while we (as ShapeShift, or SatoshiDICE before it) have constantly struggled to balance the risk of zero-conf with the value of user experience, it is a challenge worth our time and money. Sometimes we've been double-spent. We've lost money because we accepted zero-conf deposits."

https://shapeshift.io/site/blog/2015/12/01/note-ceo-erik-voorhees-appeal-zero-conf

and this from a guy who was running an online business, who is at even more risk than a brick & mortar face to face tx.
[doublepost=1448994964][/doublepost]again, it is about understanding probabilitisitic security in using Bitcoin vs insisting on hard solutions, a real world outlook.

He's simply doing what a sane real-life person would do.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

It seems a little suspicious how much damage control Gmax is doing on opt-in RBF. Anyone else suspect their plan is to push through a meager blocksize increase coupled with default RBF? Then people would be like, "Thank God, finally. Oh well, I guess that is fine, at least we have bigger blocks now." Any pushback on opt-in RBF would need to be squelched for that to work. Breaking zero-conf of course would be a key help to Blockstream. It also turns the full blocks situation from a liability into an asset for them.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

 

[awemany]

It seems a little suspicious how much damage control is doing on opt-in RBF. Anyone else suspect their plan is to push through a meager blocksize increase coupled with default RBF? Then people would be like, "Thank God, finally. Oh well, I guess that is fine, at least we have bigger blocks now." Any pushback on opt-in RBF would need to be squelched for that to work. Breaking zero-conf of course would be a key help to Blockstream. It also turns the full blocks situation from a liability into an asset for them.

I just wondered and am not familiar with the specifics yet: Is it actually possible to replace a transaction for full RBF with one that is not flagged for replacement?