Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[albin]

@cypherdoc

I think it's fairly non-controversial that Gavin has an inhuman, borderline saintly level of patience, so for him to even say that is like the Gavin equivalent of blowing his top!

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Found this post today by btcd lead dev @davecgh on consensus:

https://blog.conformal.com/the-bitcoin-consensus-red-herring/

 

[Impulse]

what did i say about Bitcoin Bears? gmax, back, corrallo, todd, & luke-dialup-jr:

These guys are so toxic. I don't even know what to say anymore.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I'm glad we have guys like Luke, Greg, Adam, and Peter Todd in Bitcoin. The problem is that they enjoy magnified power at the moment due to Core "reference implementation" status.

Gavin didn't like the dark power that the One Ring was giving him, so he tossed it aside. Some were of course more eager than Gavin to scoop it up. It's time to cast it into the fires of Mt. Doom and let it melt into a smooth distribition of implementations to afford Bitcoin the necessary antifragility to rocket to the quadruple and quintuple digits.

 

[albin]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3v22ix/bitcoin_mining_pool_f2pool_discus_fish_maintains/

From what I understand, Adam Back has some kind of relationship with F2pool?

 

[_mr_e]

 

[AdrianX]

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

@VeritasSapere I was seriously considering a few S7's I think they will be viable or they were in USD before Bitcoin jumped, my projections was on a 3% exponential growth estimate. I agree difficulty is hard to calculate. Difficulty ultimately is a function of energy efficiency and bitcoin price.

Mining will always look unprofitable if one uses a fixed formula of exponential growth of 5-10%. Simplistically growth in difficulty will continue until the profit is a marginal cost of the energy input. The growth is largly limited by infrastructure cost, and that cost is asymmetric for consumers like us, but not those in electronic equipment production.

 

[cypherdoc]

what a dummy.

i keep telling him and the other miniblockists FUD'sters that their scare tactics of the large miner, large block attack against small miners have been ridiculous:

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Chinese miners have no requirement whatsoever to run their nodes behind the GFC.

They can use some of their Bitcoins to pay for a VPS somewhere outside the GFC and use that node to construct their blocks, greatly reducing the amount of traffic they need to pass through the GFC.

Nobody is talking about this obvious solution, which leads me to be sceptical about whether they actually prefer that problem to exist, over actually solving it.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Justus Ranvier

yeah, /u/jtoomin and i have discussed this a couple of times and it appears that the Chinese don't do this according to what Wang Chun and others have told us. i wonder how practical of a strategy it really is though.
[doublepost=1449030769,1449029878][/doublepost]@Justus Ranvier

here's Pindar Wong's response to what Mike Hearn wrote about setting up a node in Taiwan. i tend to agree that what he says makes sense although i'm not an expert on the technicals of Pindar's response:

Hearn:
But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a
node
on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so.

Wong:
Let's agree to disagree on this point.

Note how that VPN, and likely VPS it's connected too, immediately adds
another one or two points of failure to the whole system. Not only does
this decrease reliability, it also decreases security by making attacks
significantly easier - VPS security is orders of magnitude worse than
the security of physical hardware.
[doublepost=1449031081][/doublepost]

 

[chriswilmer]

I'm glad we have guys like Luke, Greg, Adam, and Peter Todd in Bitcoin. The problem is that they enjoy magnified power at the moment due to Core "reference implementation" status.

Gavin didn't like the dark power that the One Ring was giving him, so he tossed it aside. Some were of course more eager than Gavin to scoop it up. It's time to cast it into the fires of Mt. Doom and let it melt into a smooth distribition of implementations to afford Bitcoin the necessary antifragility to rocket to the quadruple and quintuple digits.

Hah, @Zangelbert Bingledack ... you never disappoint with your writing!

 

[cypherdoc]

@Justus Ranvier

i also think that Wang Chun and all the other China apologists forget one major game theory point in his response:

Wang:
Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We
suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your
turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or
if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China,
or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not
us. Because we have 50%+.

if 101 or BU gets implemented, there will probably be an explosion of mining pools outside of China who could now compensate via superior bandwidth greatly reducing China's >50% current market share. the 1MB cap, cheap electricity, cheap labor, cheap manufacturing, & cheap commodities are precisely what has made it possible for China pools to gain the share that they have. that would all change.

that redistribution of mining would be a great thing for decentralization.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@Justus Ranvier

yeah, /u/jtoomin and i have discussed this a couple of times and it appears that the Chinese don't do this according to what Wang Chun and others have told us. i wonder how practical of a strategy it really is though.

If setting up a block assembling node outside the GFC becomes the difference between losing 1800 BTC/day and earning 1800 BTC/day, they'll figure out how to make it work.

 

[cypherdoc]

playing with this 21 computer for the last few days.

this is gonna be a game changer.

 

[rocks]

Wang:
Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We
suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your
turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or
if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China,
or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not
us. Because we have 50%+.

Any country having greater than 50% mining share is just as bad as any pool having majority share. When ghash.io started to reach the 50% mark there was a big movement to encourage miners to switch to another pool, and it worked.

There really should be the same thing going on now to better distribute pools. I suspect if china's limitations become a problem for the network we will see the same move to redistribute miners to pools in other countries.

 

[sickpig]

what did i say about Bitcoin Bears? gmax, back, corrallo, todd, & luke-dialup-jr:

everyone just gon reading a few post below you could find a lot of insight on Luke and his world.


where is he living? 100 BTC to set up a proper internet connection? he's joking right?

 

[albin]

How does lifting the blocksize cap affect F2pool whatsoever in the first place?

The can make their own blocks as small as they want.

They're already mining off headers by spying on block hashes from other public pools via stratum.

Also why does development have to coddle the rent-seeking behavior of Chinese pools/farms, when there is essentially zero addressable market in China for Bitcoin the payment system?

 

[awemany]

Chinese miners have no requirement whatsoever to run their nodes behind the GFC.

They can use some of their Bitcoins to pay for a VPS somewhere outside the GFC and use that node to construct their blocks, greatly reducing the amount of traffic they need to pass through the GFC.

Nobody is talking about this obvious solution, which leads me to be sceptical about whether they actually prefer that problem to exist, over actually solving it.

I don't know and I am not saying there's a big conspiracy here, but maybe the Chinese goverment steps in when someone, especially a business, so blatantly ignores their censorship^Wconsensus system?

 

[sickpig]

How does lifting the blocksize cap affect F2pool whatsoever in the first place?

The can make their own blocks as small as they want.

They're already mining off headers by spying on block hashes from other public pools via stratum.

Also why does development have to coddle the rent-seeking behavior of Chinese pools/farms, when there is essentially zero addressable market in China for Bitcoin the payment system?

If I could click the "Like" button more than once I would click it 1milion times.

This is the most succinct and effective way to debunk all the hand waving and straw man arguments I've see from gmax.

You have upload bandwith problem? No prob, mine small blocks as you see fit. Subsidy will be on your side for another few years, in the meantime restructure your infrastructure to fix your upload bandwidth issue. Frankly, you should have done that already if you ask me.

Download is not much of a problem, isn't it? You could always SPV mining like you already did. And as soon as you have al the needed info to reconstruct the previous block just mine a block with a few txs in it just to rise your returns.

Sure you have to put a little bit of extra care whenever a new block version will be deprecated via the beautiful soft-forks mechanism that we all love and praise. After all the soft-fork trigged probably because you (chinese miner) have already voted for it. So at least it shouldn't be a surprise to you.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Also why does development have to coddle the rent-seeking behavior of Chinese pools/farms, when there is essentially zero addressable market in China for Bitcoin the payment system?

Seems Core might try to take this to its ultimate end, meaning they might do everything possible to maintain their grip on development, forcing investors to fork away even from the miners. Still I can't see F2Pool and other Chinese miners liking Adam so much that they are willing to jeopardize their block reward subsidy. I wonder how long until they figure out they're being used as pawns in a political fight by Core/BS to maintain control.

It makes sense why they chose to have Scaling Conference #2 in Hong Kong. If they can propagandize the miners, they can really force investors to take that ultimate step. It seems they want a high stakes game of chicken and they don't see that they lose in the end. Either that or they think it can buy them enough time for SC/LN.

Hey why not risk it, with $20 million in venture capital on the line that will be lost anyway if SC/LN fail or come too late to funnel away most of the main chain's flow. That starts to make Blockstream's funding look a lot like a $20 million missile launched directly at Bitcoin.