Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Bagatell]

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/a74za8/disgraced_lying_nsa_director_interview_at/

 

[cypherblock]

I'm sure there is more to find in the record. @digitsu described behavior of ABC as some kind of filibustering away from the question how to prevent a split, and said Amaury lied about an attack.

Of course there is more. @digitsu has absolutely no idea what he is talking about (despite being there). Amaury did not lie. There is an issue on large/unbounded blocks :

>from @deadalnix on bu slack "This is correct and not theoretical. It was exploited against bu in 2016, as the xthin code did not check the block size properly cchecked at the end instead of during reconstruction"

as well as just general work that has to be done to make unbounded blocks even close to feasible (improve rpc code, fix issue with compact blocks limiting to 1gb). CSW fucking storms out while Amaury's speaking and you guys can't even see that as a problem.

 

[Norway]

@cypherblock
Is your worst case scenario that a node runs out of memory and a person has to turn the powerswitch off and on?

 

[majamalu]

Understanding this process from within is like trying to imagine a whole landscape without rising above sea level. I'm afraid it will take time for us to notice the true shape, the true role, and the true power of the conflicting parties - in fact, the conflicting parties themselves might discover that over time. But that's fine: did anyone in their right mind think that the depoliticization of money was going to be achieved after a nice walk?

That said, I think there is a fundamental difference between the BTC / BCH fork and the ABC / BSV fork. This one is more similar to ETH / ETC, since both chains allow practically the same functionality. Almost no one is interested in the differences that zealots obsess over. This asymmetry leads to a very unstable situation after the fork, from which the market seeks to get out soon in order to limit the damage of the nerd wars and recover some predictability.

Sound money is what the world needs: not a thousand friendly coins, nor two in perpetual conflict. It doesn't matter if some questionable decisions or big mistakes were made along the way; billions of people will end up using the best available form of money, and that will be the one that has remained usable and has cultivated the network effect until reaching a critical mass of users.

You can argue all day and every day about the wrong attitude of this or that developer; You can criticize what you see as impurities in the code until everyone around you falls asleep, as ETC supporters still do, but none of that will matter. All that the common man will want (and need) is to use the same money that other people use.

Assuming this, I dare to make this prediction:

When one of the two coins (ABC or BSV) begins to distance itself from the other, the gap will grow rapidly until the losing chain is left in a vegetative state, ETC style.

You are free to quote (and mock) me in the future.

 

[8up]

The miners of the North Corean chain, unfortunately. The BSV miners lost majority hashpower on election day, when North Corean hashpower invaded the BCH territory.

So it's like in the real world. You have a conflict between South Corea and North Corea and suddenly you'll find China and USA involved.
[doublepost=1545118113,1545117211][/doublepost]For a long time I come to this thread because it has the brightest minds in regards to crypto economics, game theory, logical thinking and KISS software design.

I noticed that more and more participants distance their arguments from reality and rather dismiss the factual world and logical arguments for their imaginative inner world/dialogue.

I encourage you all, no matter what your stance is in regards to BTC, BCH, BSV or what else to put your (hidden) assumptions on the table and re-think them.

Some questions might help:

On a personal note:
* When I see myself in disagreement, where could I lack information?
* When I argue against/for something, are my motivations based on facts or on emotions?
* How important is it for me to have control over the narrative?
* Where are the (hidden) flaws, if everything goes my way?

On a systemic note:
* Can there be only one form of sound money or can there be different forms of sound money?
* What does permissionless, competitive and decentralized mean when we talk about different perspectives or political agendas?
* How can unity be achieved? Can it be achieved at all (in a permissionless system)? Is it or should it be a goal?
* What different forms of governance rule the space and the minds of the people?

 

[freetrader]

@8up - these are great reminders and for the systemic ones - points to explore in longer form.

My personal opinion is that the world is a complex place and unless there is a giant cataclysm leaving a crater from which a new thing would arise, we'll see a co-existance and trials of many approaches, for a long time. Paper fiat money, cashless (but central bank) fiat money, cryptocurrencies of all flavors.

I'm just looking forward to some economic subsystem (or several) switching to a sound form of money like Bitcoin and seeing how it works out over time. That strong encryption makes it possible for this to occur simply by the will of sovereign individuals across nation state borders is exciting and opens up the door to trying this out which would otherwise be much more difficult or open to chance (waiting until some government decides to try it). On the contrary, it proposes to link people across the world economically in ways that have been obstructed and proven by the existing system to be damaging.

But beyond hope & idealism, this still represents a new experiment with unknown outcome.
One issue is that strong encryption is an enabler of free speech as much as freedom of transacting.
All these are big threats to the powerful, and people don't have a good track record of "letting go" of power (= decentralizing it) gracefully.

 

[Zarathustra]

Assuming this, I dare to make this prediction:

When one of the two coins (ABC or BSV) begins to distance itself from the other, the gap will grow rapidly until the losing chain is left in a vegetative state, ETC style.

BCH already distanced itself rapidly from BTC with this 'upgrade'. Is 'majamalu's law' also valid here and the losing chain will be 'left in a vegetative state'?
[doublepost=1545125137][/doublepost]@8up

Cryptocurrencies are commodities, and CSW is absolutely right when he claims that Bitcoin is a commodity ledger. He is also absolutely right when he claims that Bitcoin (the commodity) is not designed to replace banks and credit. You can't design such thing. An economy is always credit based and has never been barter based. A barter economy is an Austrian utopia that never existed in the real world. It's more science fiction and theology than science.

 

[Zarathustra]

The Amazing Arab Scholar Who Beat Adam Smith by Half a Millennium

“It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments”

Thanks to this self-created gap the most outstanding islamic figure of the Middle Ages, the Andalusian scholar and politician Ibn Khaldun is neglected in mainstream textbooks (Screpanti and Zamagni 2005, Roncaglia 2005, Rothbard 2006, Blaug 1985). Several of these works often misleadingly start to identify the roots of modern theories with discussing the mercantilists or the Scottish Enlightenment.

https://evonomics.com/amazing-north-african-scholar-beat-adam-smith-half-millennium/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Debitismus_Forum/comments/a5ice0/ibn_khaldun_13321406_soziologie/

 

[cypherblock]

Is your worst case scenario that a node runs out of memory and a person has to turn the powerswitch off and on?

Someone asked a question about unbounded blocks and why we can't do that. The devs responded by citing some things that need to be improved before that happens. RPC improvements, Fixing the compact blocks 1GB issue, and handling this kind of attack properly.

Whether adding block size to proof of work to fix the last item (the attack) is a good idea, can be debated (unless people just storm out of the room). Perhaps there are better fixes. Just ignoring it is unlikely to be the best solution. Leaving easily exploitable low cost denial of service vectors out in the wild is not really a great idea.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

At the end of the whitepaper Satoshi shows that it is hard to impossible for an alternative chain to catch up once the mainchain has reached a certain depth. I think this is a good analogy for the human mind: Once an opinion has reached a certain depth, it becomes hard to impossible to reorg it. The deeper the opinion, the more the person tends to select its sources of information so that it confirms instead of questions the opinion, and he accumulates more and more mental proof of work on certain arguments.

We discussed this hard fork issue more than two month, and I think not a single participant in this thread has reorged his opinion. Me included. I promised myself to allow myself to be wrong, which is somehow a survival tactis, as it allows me to voice an opinion without doubling down on it. But yes, I selected my sources of information, and I accumulated proof of mental work for certain arguments, while ignoring others.

So let me try to test out a reorg: Yes, this week saw a lot of interesting developments in the BCH space - atomic swaps, oracles by Bitcoin.com - and yes, BCH is widely accepted via BitPay, widely traded on exchanges, has a strong wallet infrastructure, has several good development teams, has a good developer commited to build on top of Electron, which is something I always wished for Electrum. The community is critical about how the fork went, but most agree to stick with BCH, to let it left behind, and to work for the future.

And yes, SV has its issues. CoinGeeks swinging pledges of action (no split - going on for month - BCH should add replay protection - we add replay protection), CSW's very individual style of providing proofs, the hardly open development of SV, the confusing plan to eliminate P2SH, the low number of nodes, the low number of electrum servers, the centralization around one company and one miner, the love for patents, the barely existent acceptance by merchants, the low adoption by exchanges and wallets ...

And no, I did not switch. I just try myself in reorganizing my opinion. I still stand where I am, having more sympathy for the roadmap of SV, having lost trust in BCH, thinking that there is something, SV gets and BCH doesn't get, thinking that BCH is on verge of cloning the mindset of Core, getting lost in deving for the sake of deving ... But I accept that there are good reasons to prefer BCH over SV - maybe better reasons than the other way - and that there is no chance to reorganize those opinions, and that every attempt will only severe the split and override good relationships with good people. I also accept that what I want is good P2P money, and that I shouldn't allow emotions or subjective preferences / biases to make me close my mind.

 

[molecular]

Cryptocurrencies are commodities, and CSW is absolutely right when he claims that Bitcoin is a commodity ledger. He is also absolutely right when he claims that Bitcoin (the commodity) is not designed to replace banks and credit. You can't design such thing. An economy is always credit based and has never been barter based. A barter economy is an Austrian utopia that never existed in the real world. It's more science fiction and theology than science.

Interesting view. I don't quite follow the bolded part: I agree barter economies probably never existed (after reading Gerber? Greber? "Debt: 3000 years" or something), but isn't there a third option? Using commodity money (gold is a good example) is neither credit based nor would I categorize it as barter. So economies being "always credit based" doesn't seem to follow. Can you clear this up?

 

[cypherdoc]

At the end of the whitepaper Satoshi shows that it is hard to impossible for an alternative chain to catch up once the mainchain has reached a certain depth. I think this is a good analogy for the human mind: Once an opinion has reached a certain depth, it becomes hard to impossible to reorg it. The deeper the opinion, the more the person tends to select its sources of information so that it confirms instead of questions the opinion, and he accumulates more and more mental proof of work on certain arguments.

We discussed this hard fork issue more than two month, and I think not a single participant in this thread has reorged his opinion. Me included. I promised myself to allow myself to be wrong, which is somehow a survival tactis, as it allows me to voice an opinion without doubling down on it. But yes, I selected my sources of information, and I accumulated proof of mental work for certain arguments, while ignoring others.

So let me try to test out a reorg: Yes, this week saw a lot of interesting developments in the BCH space - atomic swaps, oracles by Bitcoin.com - and yes, BCH is widely accepted via BitPay, widely traded on exchanges, has a strong wallet infrastructure, has several good development teams, has a good developer commited to build on top of Electron, which is something I always wished for Electrum. The community is critical about how the fork went, but most agree to stick with BCH, to let it left behind, and to work for the future.

And yes, SV has its issues. CoinGeeks swinging pledges of action (no split - going on for month - BCH should add replay protection - we add replay protection), CSW's very individual style of providing proofs, the hardly open development of SV, the confusing plan to eliminate P2SH, the low number of nodes, the low number of electrum servers, the centralization around one company and one miner, the love for patents, the barely existent acceptance by merchants, the low adoption by exchanges and wallets ...

And no, I did not switch. I just try myself in reorganizing my opinion. I still stand where I am, having more sympathy for the roadmap of SV, having lost trust in BCH, thinking that there is something, SV gets and BCH doesn't get, thinking that BCH is on verge of cloning the mindset of Core, getting lost in deving for the sake of deving ... But I accept that there are good reasons to prefer BCH over SV - maybe better reasons than the other way - and that there is no chance to reorganize those opinions, and that every attempt will only severe the split and override good relationships with good people. I also accept that what I want is good P2P money, and that I shouldn't allow emotions or subjective preferences / biases to make me close my mind.

amazing what a price move will do to one's thinking, eh? but hey, ultimately price reflects the market long term and this split continues to be a mind twister. which is why I stay 1:1.

 

[Zarathustra]

@molecular

> I agree barter economies probably never existed (after reading Gerber? Greber? "Debt: 3000 years" or something), but isn't there a third option? Using commodity money (gold is a good example) is neither credit based nor would I categorize it as barter.

Graeber - Debt, the first 5'000 years

Gold ist just the medium that has been declared as the thing that the tribute slaves (citizen) have to deliver to the war lords (church and state). The foundation of the economy is not gold, silver, bronze, grain or whatever the state demands. Debt is the foundation, and the first debt is the tax to the war lords.That started the whole thing.

Dr. Paul C. Martin, even better than Graeber:

http://www.miprox.de/Wirtschaft_allgemein/Martin-Symp.pdf

https://www.goldseiten.de/content/kolumnen/download/pcm-17.pdf

https://www.goldseiten.de/artikel/18--Das-1x1-der-Wirtschaft.html?seite=1

 

[majamalu]

BCH already distanced itself rapidly from BTC with this 'upgrade'. Is 'majamalu's law' also valid here and the losing chain will be 'left in a vegetative state'?

Majamalu's law only applies to chains that have been born from a fork that the market deems unjustified.

 

[cypherdoc]

Big move for ABC. could be a great Christmas for all of us:

 

[molecular]

@cypherdoc, coinex fucked our favorite chart. By renaming ticker BCHSV to BSV the trading history got lost :-(

EDIT: just saw your last post... maybe you switched your favorite to BCH/USD?

EDIT2: oh godamnit, the book also got lost. That's a bit shady of coinex I have to say. Right in the ballpark with enabling trading but not deposits (yes, I'm looking at MOST exchanges). But that's how they make money, I guess: easy to make deposit for *them* in the backend.

 

[molecular]

...I promised myself to allow myself to be wrong...

tremendous post (the whole thing, just quoting a part for reference).

We should all do this. I'm trying myself from time to time to "argue for the other side". There are 2 main issues that are often getting in the way: 1.) emotions come up (CSW) 2.) my wallet BSV/BCH ratio (we all know the saying: "hard to convince someone if his wallet is threatened"). So yeah: I'm entrenched pretty deeply myself. It would be quite painful to switch sides for me. But as I said earlier: there *are* circumstances in which I would do it.

side-note: I had actually considered buying back some BSV to reduce the 2.) problem and be less biased by my wallet. But when I'm honest with myself, it would be a fear-driven move. That's usually not good to act upon.

So yeah, we've dug some very deep trenches on both sides.

 

[molecular]

Dr. Paul C. Martin, even better than Graeber:

http://www.miprox.de/Wirtschaft_allgemein/Martin-Symp.pdf

https://www.goldseiten.de/content/kolumnen/download/pcm-17.pdf

https://www.goldseiten.de/artikel/18--Das-1x1-der-Wirtschaft.html?seite=1

read the last link (Begrifferklärungen): awesome insights and writing style. Will share this around. Thanks.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

tremendous post (the whole thing, just quoting a part for reference).

We should all do this. I'm trying myself from time to time to "argue for the other side". There are 2 main issues that are often getting in the way: 1.) emotions come up (CSW) 2.) my wallet BSV/BCH ratio (we all know the saying: "hard to convince someone if his wallet is threatened"). So yeah: I'm entrenched pretty deeply myself. It would be quite painful to switch sides for me. But as I said earlier: there *are* circumstances in which I would do it.

side-note: I had actually considered buying back some BSV to reduce the 2.) problem and be less biased by my wallet. But when I'm honest with myself, it would be a fear-driven move. That's usually not good to act upon.

So yeah, we've dug some very deep trenches on both sides.

Yes, the wallet balance is a factor too ... As Cypherdoc said:

amazing what a price move will do to one's thinking, eh? but hey, ultimately price reflects the market long term and this split continues to be a mind twister. which is why I stay 1:1.

I like the term mind twist. And yeah, wallet balance is a massive proof of work for an opinion chain. When I trade crypto - I rarely do, and if, not so much successfull - I often oberve myself doing trades just for the peace of mind. Settling a loss, reducing a potential win, being driven by fear (of losing or of missing). It's a bit of sheeple trading, buying high, selling low. But often it helps to keep the mind sane when being in a risky position anyway with crypto.

For example, I bought BCH directly before the fork, because I was so confident that there will be no split, as the financial situation of Bitmain can't afford one, and that this will be a very important and big moment for Bitcoin Cash, settling into stability and proof of work governance for Big Block Bitcoin. The moment of it being grown up, leaving the painful process of technically splitting away from Bitcoin (BTC) behind, finally going for what really counts: Adoption ...

 

[cypherdoc]

staying 1:1 helps prevent me from having to rejigger my thought processes after every significant short term price move. tomorrow we could get a huge BSV up move relative to ABC. so yeah, i still think BSV is the way forward as i think development would keep more in line with the WP if it was more closely tied with miners. note that i don't equate small world mining with gvt or big corporate regulation over Bitcoin. and i don't think CSW control over the BSV repo would prevent another hard fork away from him if necessary. miners best interests lie in decentralization too.

i will say that all this talk from CSW lately about staying in compliance with gvt regulations and the law was taken too far and may have contributed to the BSV loss in the price ratio. imo, Silk Road helped Bitcoin adoption in that any news is good news and tx throughput important when a struggling new digital currency is trying to gain mind awareness. whether we like it or not, criminals and shady activity help bootstrap innovative technologies at the beginning prior to more widespread adoption. i'm pretty sure BSV being used as a tracking device worries alot of potential adopters: