Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[awemany]

As Roger Ver has been describing the BTC devs: They treat it as a science project.

In BCH, my lamentation is actually that I don't see enough of that science aspect (in terms of more peer review).

But what I do see a lot is the business aspect being alive and kicking. Incentives driving it forward.

 

[Peter R]

Today I'm depressed about the future of bitcoin.

We have BTC controlled by BS/Core and handicapped at 7 transactions per second.

We have BCH now controlled by ABC and allies and on a mission to alienate more of the community with continued rapid protocol changes.

And we have BSV controlled by CSW/Ayre committed to reverting things back to V0.1.

Bitcoin's game theory is based on competing groups fighting over the same blockchain, thus creating a balance of powers favourable to the community and investors. Instead, power structures form, only to split off by creating their own fiefdoms that they solely control.

If BU made a mistake, it was not by not taking a side, but by not pushing hard enough against a split.

 

[awemany]

@Peter R : An understandable mindset.

OTOH splits are not preventable (at least when considering a change of POW). And it looks like splits are not prevented by miners for various reasons. It seems a "do your own thing if you don't mess with us" pervades the space, which I didn't see coming either but I guess that's the dynamics.

But you still have a set of brands, defined by some kind of network effect and various forms of governance, competing against each other, potentially branching to many, many different coins.

But that still seems to me to mean that some branch or few will be filling the real need for good money. It all seems very unpredictable, though.

The alternative to the BSV/BCH split would be to create yet another coin, as no one (except HP majority, but they don't want to do that) can prevent folks from splitting who are going to do it, no matter what.

 

[AdrianX]

I'm in the same boat as @Peter R, the force that bound cooperation between miners I had conceived was greater than the force to split from the network. This is evidently no longer true.

I had predicted the crash and the inevitable loss in value with the impending "upgrades" but now I can't bring myself to reinvest.

What makes this a bitter pill to swallow is I have had an RnD breakthrough that I think in time would make a huge contribution to adoption as well as decentralizing control away from miners and developers, and into the hands of the market where a feature like BUIP135 would allow miners to activate changes based on diversified consensus following a futures market activating only the BUIP's that create the most value for the networks as a whole reflected as agreed by the majority of all stakeholders that it created value while discouraging splitting.

None of the chains offer the potential for that future at the moment, to my understanding they are all centrally controlled.

I don't think BU made a mistake, BU was dropped like a hot potato by almost 50% of SHA256 miners. Not because we were doing the wrong thing, but because we diversified control away from vested interests. I think our diverse member's opinions are an asset, not a liability. (@cypherdoc makes a good point in that we have just got more polarised by the impulsive sell off of SV)

Anyway, I've come too far and made too much progress to back down now. But I've got to acknowledge this is a probably an all-time low in my Bitcoin optimism.

On the bright side, these massive holders are distributing coins, and I think should one of the 3 chains remain after a big purge there may be hope to build out of the ashes.

My view is one of the three BTC, BCH or BSV potentially has a bright future if they can overcome their demons.

 

[79b79aa8]

If BU made a mistake, it was not by not taking a side, but by not pushing hard enough against a split.

do you mean the first time, the second one, or both? if you only think this about the 2018 split, what are the substantial differences from what happened in 2017? i ask, in the effort to draw some lessons from all this.

 

[cypherdoc]

starting the next move up? i hope so:

 

[Norway]

Just pumping an idea coming out of Bitcoin.no.

The two Bitcoin Cash Split camps have two different reasons to hate our idea.

The Emin Gün Sirer camp (bloXroute), maybe @Peter R is a part of this camp, don't think IBS is relevant because they think it's a mesh where non-mining nodes have an important role to relay both transactions and blocks between miners.

The nChain camp is too busy and sloppy. They browse it and think it's preconsensus! But it's not!

IBS is just this:
A miner choose to build his blocks (block candidate) in an append only fashion. (He may still prioritize transactions through drip feed as explained in our paper, but Replace By Fee becomes very, very expensive.)

The miner share information about the block he is building to nodes where it makes economical sense (mostly mining nodes, but could be others paying for this service).

This information sharing is valuable to miners (and also other participants in the eco-system).

It helps scaling a lot, as you remove spikes from both network connection and processing.

But idiots in both camps can't think rational and straight at the moment.

My fortune and future is in the hands of idiots. Let's see where this goes.

If you are an independent thinker, read here:
https://www.bitcoin.no/IBS.pdf

 

[cypherdoc]

so this is what ABC started with it's Amaury moral hazard. the beginning of the end of PoW as we know it?:

 

[Norway]

I'm thinking about how we will give people the power to buy off the shelf "VISA" cards (JavaCards) and program them with our open source code so they can do bitcoin payments by just a NFC tap at the counter while receiving a receipt on your phone from your purchase.

The infrastructure to build a small Ka-ching card factory will be less than $30, and anybody can do it.

But at the same time, we don't want this to be used at the ABC chain. So we are discussing how to do this.

The reason I don't want Ka-ching to be used on the ABC chain, is that I'm fighting for 1 coin to rule them all. Divided, we are not strong. We have to kill competing chains to compete with fiat.

 

[cypherdoc]

>We have to kill competing chains to compete with fiat.

i fully agree. this is our history. none of this let every shitcoin thrive so we can learn kumbayah bullshit.
[doublepost=1543531549][/doublepost]it's not surprising to me that would come out of the mouth of a dev. fortunately, we have other enlightened devs like unwriter.

where the hell is @Mengerian btw?
[doublepost=1543531976,1543531317][/doublepost]just to show i don't discriminate, why don't we build GROUP into ABC/BU/BCH and let Floyd and D.J. sell their tokens? we could all be groupies.

 

[Norway]

where the hell is @Mengerian btw?

The devs and leaders of BU are very quiet regarding the government issues.

Because they are losing the power to change the consensus rules on both the SV chain and the ABC chain. They should see this lack of power as freedom.

I think @solex has this idea that bitcoin needs to become more advanced and feature rich to compete with other "cryptos". But I think he is under estimating the power of bitcoin script and what it can do with limits removed and bignum re-installed. DSV is not going to be a 1MB native script if bignum is reinstalled.

SV is (re) fixing script, like it was.

 

[solex]

I do think that Bitcoin does need to become more feature rich to compete with other cryptos, however, the pace of that development change needs to be sensible.

We saw a grand experiment in the year from BCH's launch in August 2017, which was a monumental arm-wrestle between two forces, two economic paradigms played out in the real-world. One side was scalability, BCH allowed for up to 8MB sustained blocks, more if necessary, and dirt cheap transactions as low as 1 sat. The other side was BTC's 7 years of network effect, all its merchants/users, brand name, image, a functioning ecosystem, supported by a shrill social media phenomenon, plus a dose of censorship in r/bitcoin and DCG-owned media.

What happened? Well, it proved that network effect won out. BTC was stronger, even when crippled with sky-high txn fees pushing users away. BCH's txn volume for a whole year was nearly static, (excepting during stress tests). By the time of its first anniversary it supported blocks up to 32MB which was 600x the level of organic usage.

Adoption: building merchant acceptance, remittances, users spending, is the challenge all along.

This was predictable, and those at the London meeting in November 2017 generally knew that encouraging adoption was necessary alongside scaling. @theZerg deserves credit for being one of the few developers to actually bring some adoption-enhancing changes to the table earlier this year: op_datasigverify and op_group. Maybe they would have brought in a lot of usage if they went live, maybe not, maybe the protocol would be complex, but at least we would have tried. Struck while the iron was hot. Once that window was missed and development consensus broke down, then then a longer and slower process became necessary. Protocol changes by miner voting is a good alternative.

Further, what is the point of being fixated primarily on scalability when capacity is 600x demand? Would we suddenly get a flood of new users if capacity went to 6000x demand, or even more when capacity is 60,000x demand? Of course not. All this recent talk of terabyte blocks is about technology which is millions of times the level of demand.

Instead, the very thing which hurts adoption most happened. The community split into two, dividing the network effect for BCH, which we have already seen is too small to compete with BTC.
....
@Norway, is there a doc on bignum, and how it permits DSV-type functionality?

 

[79b79aa8]

>We have to kill competing chains to compete with fiat.

i would like to see (a working version of) satoshi's shotgun directed at the BTC chain.

 

[Norway]

Young people trying to figure out crypto currencies are walking into a candyshop with currencies in many different colors. It's very, very hard for them to make sense of anything unless they are cracy nerds like us.


This is why we have to kill the weak chains. No mercy.

 

[cypherdoc]

>This is why we have to kill the weak chains. No mercy.

ABC supporters scoff at this like it's amoral and whether it's wise. but i can tell you for a fact that in 2011, when BCX & Artforz were most active in killing off altcoins, it made everyone else sit up on the edge of their seats and pay close attention (learn about the merits or demerits of said altcoin) to whether and which altcoins they might throw their fiat at. they were dangerous times the intention meant to help BTC bootstrap. which every BTC hodler benefited from whether they want to admit it or not.

 

[Golarz Filip]

HODLGANG...

LOL, love the publish date.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

I do think that Bitcoin does need to become more feature rich to compete with other cryptos, however, the pace of that development change needs to be sensible.

We saw a grand experiment in the year from BCH's launch in August 2017, which was a monumental arm-wrestle between two forces, two economic paradigms played out in the real-world. One side was scalability, BCH allowed for up to 8MB sustained blocks, more if necessary, and dirt cheap transactions as low as 1 sat. The other side was BTC's 7 years of network effect, all its merchants/users, brand name, image, a functioning ecosystem, supported by a shrill social media phenomenon, plus a dose of censorship in r/bitcoin and DCG-owned media.

What happened? Well, it proved that network effect won out. BTC was stronger, even when crippled with sky-high txn fees pushing users away. BCH's txn volume for a whole year was nearly static, (excepting during stress tests). By the time of its first anniversary it supported blocks up to 32MB which was 600x the level of organic usage.

Adoption: building merchant acceptance, remittances, users spending, is the challenge all along.

This was predictable, and those at the London meeting in November 2017 generally knew that encouraging adoption was necessary alongside scaling. @theZerg deserves credit for being one of the few developers to actually bring some adoption-enhancing changes to the table earlier this year: op_datasigverify and op_group. Maybe they would have brought in a lot of usage if they went live, maybe not, maybe the protocol would be complex, but at least we would have tried. Struck while the iron was hot. Once that window was missed and development consensus broke down, then then a longer and slower process became necessary. Protocol changes by miner voting is a good alternative.

Further, what is the point of being fixated primarily on scalability when capacity is 600x demand? Would we suddenly get a flood of new users if capacity went to 6000x demand, or even more when capacity is 60,000x demand? Of course not. All this recent talk of terabyte blocks is about technology which is millions of times the level of demand.

Instead, the very thing which hurts adoption most happened. The community split into two, dividing the network effect for BCH, which we have already seen is too small to compete with BTC.
....
@Norway, is there a doc on bignum, and how it permits DSV-type functionality?

It's hard to tell how much I agree with you. Unfortunately.

All this was the reason,why I welcomed the hash war that did never happen and was highly alienated by team ABC, which became immediately pro split.

I think it's best to just take one side. Imho this should be SV, because they have better parties, better dramas, better visions, better maximalists and so on - all good for adoption.

 

[Norway]

@Norway, is there a doc on bignum, and how it permits DSV-type functionality?

If twitter is documentation, there is this:


And maybe consult @sickpig on this topic as well.

The fact that I - the idiot - could find a simple way to do the usecase @theZerg pushed as a reason for dsv, but without changing the consensus rules should be a wakeup call.

 

[solex]

OK then, so the existing opcode set would require super-large txns to do ECC, with thousands of opcodes. DSV is a simple change to enable the validation of signed data in the current software.
Implementing bignum enables more sophisticated opcodes, but is a big technical change in itself, even if not a consensus rule change.
I am sure that BU can collaborate on bignum development.

 

[cypherdoc]

continuing the climb; i like it:

[doublepost=1543541567][/doublepost][doublepost=1543541948][/doublepost]uh oh, back over 100