Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Richy_T]

But in this case it doesn't need to be that complicated. He who loses and does not pay simply loses his reputation. That could be good enough.

Could maybe make a bet like someone has to change their profile picture for 6 months.

 

[cypherdoc]

the bear market tends to obscure pearls like this :

One Of The Philippine’s Largest Banks Recently Launched Crypto ATMs

https://coinbeat.com/one-of-the-philippines-largest-banks-recently-launched-crypto-atms/

 

[cypherdoc]

meanwhile, in the more laughable department:

JP Morgan is rolling out the first US bank-backed cryptocurrency to transform payments business

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/13/jp-morgan-is-rolling-out-the-first-us-bank-backed-cryptocurrency-to-transform-payments--.html?__twitter_impression=true

 

[cypherdoc]

geezuz, quite the compilation of credentials :

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Maybe the time is coming for the next fork, away from Bitcoin ABC.

As of now, we have deadalnix pet project, fraudster-I'll-sue-you-coin and cripple300kbcoin..

Is the way to get rid of all those bad influences to just fork away until the original bitcoin is found again?

Why not Bitcoin-BU as a blockchain fork? What is the purpose of BU these days.. Just delivering the pretence of an open development environment?

 

[79b79aa8]

forking is not an olympic sport.

it's not about liking people. it's about the model making economic sense.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

It is also about technical possibilities and empty promises.

BCH is trying to move away from PoW, BSV is aggressively working against (economic) freedom.

Bitcoin has already been forked a few times to change (back to the original) the model.

Why not again? It's not a sport, it's about allowing the damn original idea to exist.

 

[bitsko]

'BSV is aggressively working against (economic) freedom'

Is your argument that by not taking a position with high risk of getting itself banned outright in many jurisdictions that this is somehow contrary to the goal of increasing economic freedom?

 

[79b79aa8]

interesting discussion. can you guys please link to some of what you're reading on the issue?

 

[Richy_T]

Why not again? It's not a sport, it's about allowing the damn original idea to exist.

I agree with your sentiments about the various forks but I don't think another fork will help. It would just be more of the same. Even if you had an ultra-pure fork with all the right people, as soon as it starts to get successful the wrong people will get involved and out-asshole everyone.

It's now been more than two years that I've been skeptical about the future of BTC and my hopes for BCH were short-lived because Amaury's true colors were clear from early on. I find myself caring less every day.

People want strong leaders and leaders are antithetical to what makes Bitcoin work.

 

[lunar]

@79b79aa8

The false lure of anonymity

Is a good starting point for the debate.

The main thesis, is that anonymous money transactions are illegal in almost all jurisdictions. If they are illegal then no laws need to be changed. Investigators can legally track, hunt and shutdown every aspect of the currency. How long do you think it would take to shut down every anonycoin node or identify every user inside the US if the powers that be, decided to REALLY crack down? (remember PoW nodes mine, and they are incentivized toward connectivity.) In other words the coin itself maybe anonymous but nodes cannot be. I suspect this is the reason BCH is moving toward PoS, as it removes the highly connected points of attack.

PoS is evil - fastest way to recreate the current system, with lazy rent seekers sitting at the top.

The alternative is the ORIGINAL Bitcoin blockchain format. (deliberately designed this way) Each transaction is a legally admissible, commodity transfer, and instead of being an outlaw you are protected by all sorts of hard earned rights.

This leaves two paths, round the mountain or through it?

If we agree economic freedom comes from having a global, sound money, P2P cash system, then which path is the fasted to global adoption?

We can argue forever on whether certain laws are good or bad, but this is irrelevant. One path involves rewriting the worlds legal systems before any sizeable company/country will touch it, the other doesn't.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

People want strong leaders and leaders are antithetical to what makes Bitcoin work.

For some weird reason, the only people who should be leaders, the miners, are the weakest in the mix.

 

[Richy_T]

State power really. Without energy subsidized by the misery of its people, Chinese miners would be a much smaller player and a more diverse mining community would (hopefully) be more invested in the concept of the coin rather than just being concerned with plugging ASICs in and becoming rich.

The solution? There may not be one.

 

[cypherdoc]

The network nodes only accept the first version of a transaction they receive to incorporate into the block they're trying to generate. When you broadcast a transaction, if someone else broadcasts a double-spend at the same time, it's a race to propagate to the most nodes first. If one has a slight head start, it'll geometrically spread through the network faster and get most of the nodes.

A rough back-of-the-envelope example:
1 0
4 1
16 4
64 16
80% 20%

So if a double-spend has to wait even a second, it has a huge disadvantage.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819
[doublepost=1550279439][/doublepost]The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

 

[Manfred]

@79b79aa8



Is a good starting point for the debate.

The main thesis, is that anonymous money transactions are illegal in almost all jurisdictions.

Cash payment is a legal anonymous money transfer, also PM's.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@79b79aa8



Is a good starting point for the debate.

The main thesis, is that anonymous money transactions are illegal in almost all jurisdictions. If they are illegal then no laws need to be changed. Investigators can legally track, hunt and shutdown every aspect of the currency. How long do you think it would take to shut down every anonycoin node or identify every user inside the US if the powers that be, decided to REALLY crack down? (remember PoW nodes mine, and they are incentivized toward connectivity.) In other words the coin itself maybe anonymous but nodes cannot be. I suspect this is the reason BCH is moving toward PoS, as it removes the highly connected points of attack.

PoS is evil - fastest way to recreate the current system, with lazy rent seekers sitting at the top.

The alternative is the ORIGINAL Bitcoin blockchain format. (deliberately designed this way) Each transaction is a legally admissible, commodity transfer, and instead of being an outlaw you are protected by all sorts of hard earned rights.

This leaves two paths, round the mountain or through it?

If we agree economic freedom comes from having a global, sound money, P2P cash system, then which path is the fasted to global adoption?

We can argue forever on whether certain laws are good or bad, but this is irrelevant. One path involves rewriting the worlds legal systems before any sizeable company/country will touch it, the other doesn't.

We'll see soon if you are right. Bitcoin enables anonymity with lightning.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@Christoph Bergmann
No, it does not.

In a wild theory, it allows anonymous transactions. In reality it is actually designed to easily trace any transaction in the network.
And it also doesn't scale.

 

[lunar]

Cash payment is a legal anonymous money transfer, also PM's.

IANAL, but i'm not sure this is completely true. It depends on how much. A quick search came up with this.

https://www.howellslegal.co.uk/news/post/The-Legalities-of-Cash-Gifts-How-Much-Money-Can-I-Gift-Tax-Free

"How Much Tax Exempt Money Can I Gift Per Year?
You are able to gift an individual a total of £3,000 a year without incurring inheritance tax. This annual exemption can transfer to the next year if it was not used that year. For example, if you did not gift any money in 2016, in 2017 you may gift £6000 inheritance tax free. However, this can only be transferred through for 1 year.

On top of this, you can give small cash gifts up to the value of £250 to as many people as you want, as long as they have not received a gift of your whole £3,000 annual exemption. "

I assume similar laws exist in the states and europe. So essentially so long as it's only >£250 you are ok to gift, but if it is part of your annual income then you'd need to declare it.

nb this doesn't mention strictly anonymous gifts. If for example you went around the city leaving money everywhere, then extra laws may apply?

More research required.
.......
Actually CSW has just published a new article that goes into more detail. Well worth a read.

https://medium.com/@craig_10243/proof-of-work-1a323e82fd9

Links to http://personal.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/cfp97.htm -
The Unintended Consequences of E-Cash

"Regulators and law enforcement are not going to allow or change the law to remove the legal restrictions and prohibitions on the issuance of anonymous and semi-anonymous cash. What people don’t understand is that it actually ends up restricting rights of speech when you seek an anonymous cash system. The creation of an anonymous rather than pseudonymous system allows for further restrictions as courts can then tie anonymous speech to terrorist money laundering and other nefarious activities."

"anonymous transactions are anything but anonymous. I wrote years ago about web bugs, and the irony in creating an anonymous cash system is that it leads to a profiling system that allows everything you do to be mapped and modelled and opens the regulatory requirements to enact it. If you want privacy, the last thing you want is anonymous money, because anonymous money allows every action to be traced using legally viable methods and law. With anonymous money, government and regulators have methodologies to supplant social media, ISPs, and the entire framework surrounding the system in a manner that allows complete profiling and capturing not only all the use you like to believe is anonymous but in fact everything you do."

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@Christoph Bergmann
No, it does not.

In a wild theory, it allows anonymous transactions. In reality it is actually designed to easily trace any transaction in the network.
And it also doesn't scale.

How so?

LN has the worst privacy weakness possible in Bitcoin: it publicly links your home IP with your Bitcoin funds. Especially when you run Casa the machine promoted by uber-cypherpunk Jameson Lopp, as every new recruted Bitcoin-Maximalist does.

But afaik transactions are untraceable.

 

[Manfred]

Couple of years old but interesting.
https://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-friend-invented-bi-1746958692

From the embedded video
All-Star Panel: Ed Moy, Joseph VaughnPerling, Trace Mayer, Nick Szabo, Dr. Craig Wright
Bitcoin Investor Conference - Las Vegas, NV Oct. 29 - 30, 2015

"One of the most fundamental rights of being human is the ability to own and trade property. Every other thing that we do, other than trade, is done by animals, plants, or combinations of the above. There are tool building animals, there are all sorts of things. But what we do that is really unique is we trade. To do that fairly needs property. We need to be able to control our own freedoms and the only way to do that is to basically have the right to property, to ownership, to transfer -- to decide what we want to do. That also means not telling people what we have. If we don't want to go out there and say I am a billionaire or I am running xyz or this is my life... I shouldn't have to tell people that. I should have the right to live frugally if I want to and to invest in business without telling people I am a billionaire... or that I am whatever -- like some people have to these days because governments try to make us. We should be able to choose how we live and that is the fundamental right of property. That means being able to dispose of property as we want; to be able to share it, to take it -- and that is what it is all about. Once we get things to where we have redeemable contracts and we link them to the blockchain. Where we can link money, and goods, digital rights and ownership into something that can't be changed. A fundamental open, honest, truthful asset -- the blockchain. That's when we are going to see real freedom in the world."

-Dr. Craig Wright (48:18 - 50:01 )

Whether he is Satoshi or not, he is certainly a very passionate and extremely intelligent man.


Dr. Craig Wright:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdvQTwjVmrE&t=2805s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdvQTwjVmrE&t=3403s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdvQTwjVmrE&t=3883s