Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

awemany

Well-Known Member
Aug 19, 2015
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@VeritasSapere:

This one stuck out from your linked article:

Finally, discussions of whether bitcoin should or should not be used for “buying coffee” sound embarrassingly like Politburo debates.
I think many people draw that parallel or similar ones. For me, it always sounded like those guys in a 'feminist'/'communist'/'anarchist'/something-ist university clubs where consensus rules (by the selected few, of course). And with lots of drama, of course!
 

VeritasSapere

Active Member
Nov 16, 2015
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Their conception of consensus I indeed find ludicrous, consensus among large groups of people is impossible especially around contentious issues. Thinking that we need a very high degree of consensus on contentious issues seems to be at odds with most rational political theory, after all I suspect that most of our history would not have been so problematic if that was the case.

I actually think that the way Bitcoin solves part of this problem is brilliant. The ability to fork ultimately avoids the possibility of tyranny of the majority, as long as people realize that they have this choice. People can only lose their freedom of choice by being convinced to give it up. This is where part of the problem lies, not dissimilar to state democracies. However our beautiful Bitcoin is throwing in another parameter, positive incentive, aligning peoples incentives towards the greater good, unlike state democracies which often have perverted incentives to do harm.

I have also come to realize that part of what is going on here is group think, and a predominantly false narrative, which does play on peoples fears in the most fundamental ways. We are often portrayed as the people that are out to destroy the very thing they love, that they are also most likely invested in. Demonize us, even dehumanize us by calling us shills and other names. This is worrisome however my hope is that this is part of the necessary process for Bitcoin to evolve, growing pains if you will.

My hope is that ultimately the truth will rise, in this environment of the free exchange of information and ideas. It is this premise that my enlightenment philosophy relies on after all.

This is still a grand experiment with no historical precedent whatsoever so nobody really knows where this is going to end, my hope and theory is that Bitcoin will fulfill our greatest dreams, solving many of the worlds greatest problems while introducing some new ones. Overall however doing much more good then harm, profoundly so.
 
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Mengerian

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Aug 29, 2015
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Every once in a while I like to stare at this chart:

This is the context we are operating in. Unrelenting growth in transaction volume. Spikes around price bubbles and spam attacks are noticeable, but the underlying organic growth dominates. It grows relentlessly, undeterred by two years of bear market. The 'baseline' transaction volume right now is about double that at the peak of the last bubble.

This all makes me think two things:
1) I am bullish
2) impediments to transaction growth need to removed so that this trend can continue
 

sickpig

Active Member
Aug 28, 2015
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@Aquent thanks for the link.

So it seems that BCT still carry some good content. the thing is even more puzzling if you think that jstolfi is involved.

Anyway f2pool has a very childish attitude. luckily for us children are quite greed, and miners' greed is an essential characteristic to keep the network secure.
 

cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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Rare admission from Blockstream's Mark Friedenbach (end of first paragraph).

it's quite refreshing to see that many of the same arguments i've brought up against the SC concept a_year_and_a_half_ago are now coming to the fore. sheesh, /u/theymos is actually doing yeoman's work over there in that thread.

furthermore, it's hilarious to me to watch SC Apologist /u/brg444 desperately trying to defend the SC concept w/o having the luxury to resort to ad homs like #CuzHashfastClawback or #FrapDoc. i'm sure at some level he's convinced himself that all those normal accts pointing out flaws in SC's must be my sockpuppets.
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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look at this tortured circular argument and the reasoned backhanded slap answer it received:

[doublepost=1449331310][/doublepost]i'm loving it. should be so obvious:

[doublepost=1449331565][/doublepost]looks to me like Blockstream forgot to hire Sergio Lerner :)
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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yes, Friedenbach admits to a strong point i made last year; the whole point of SC's is to relax security below (well below imo) that of the MC. and that is to encourage speculation siphoned from the value of MC on things like psztorc's casino, predicition mkt, etc. well, if they're less secure, for sure some rogue miner playing the long con, someone like idiot Wang Chun from f2pool, will eventually swipe all the scBTC not to cash it out (b/c he couldn't on an honest exchange) but to destroy the SC with it's scBTC and enhance the value of his BTC by permanently preventing scBTC from returning to MC. he wouldn't devalue his hardware by doing this. and it wouldn't destroy Bitcoin MC. he could just make the responsible argument that he is protecting the MC from all this speculation and dilution, an argument i'd actually accept.
[doublepost=1449332865,1449332238][/doublepost]yep, there is absolutely no reason at all to protect irresponsible miners like Wang Chun f2pool by maintaining small blocks. increasing block size will allow ROW pools to spontaneously arise leveraging the advantages of their superior bandwidth which would set off a wave of greater decentralization in mining which we definitely need as a community:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1274066.msg13152764#msg13152764
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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@Aquent thanks for the link.

So it seems that BCT still carry some good content. the thing is even more puzzling if you think that jstolfi is involved.

Anyway f2pool has a very childish attitude. luckily for us children are quite greed, and miners' greed is an essential characteristic to keep the network secure.
what i like best is that kano excluded their ip addresses and is encouraging others to do so as well. that's the type of counter-greed that hopefully will stop spv mining.
[doublepost=1449334685][/doublepost]Congratulations @theZerg!. AMA time:

https://forum.bitcoin.com/topic3420.html
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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you know what they say, don't fight the tape:



also, this is called a bullish flag:

 
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theZerg

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Aug 28, 2015
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what i like best is that kano excluded their ip addresses and is encouraging others to do so as well. that's the type of counter-greed that hopefully will stop spv mining.
[doublepost=1449334685][/doublepost]Congratulations @theZerg!. AMA time:

https://forum.bitcoin.com/topic3420.html

It is clear that the actual AMA starts on tuesday? Because the thread seems to be taking off without any help from me :)

EDIT: BTW, they suggested I create the thread early.
 

cypherdoc

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2015
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@theZerg

start time is not clear at all. maybe state that in the first sentence of your introduction.

also, you might want to respond to this:

 

lunar

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Aug 28, 2015
1,001
4,290
Taringa, onto a winning idea

Just over six months after the launch of its Creadores program, Latin America’s biggest social network Taringa! has distributed 195 BTC — or $76,000 USD — to its top content creating users in what may be one of the best use-cases for the cryptocurrency to date.

Communication at Taringa!, Agustina Fourquet. Moreover, she notes that participating users have increased their content production by 30%
Essentially they are redistributing ad revenue, and with 75million unique users this is a perfect storm. Facebook may well have to do the same one day?

In addition, Taringa! has also launched another program that’s open to all of the platform’s users called Bits. This platform translates each point received by a post in Taringa!, automatically converting it to a bit (a fraction of a bitcoin) that’s then deposited into a Xapo account.
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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@Norway

China bulls are gettin' impatient.
 
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awemany

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Aug 19, 2015
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yes, Friedenbach admits to a strong point i made last year; the whole point of SC's is to relax security below (well below imo) that of the MC.
Yup. There's nothing stronger in Bitcoin than every full node saying once: I have seen this transaction, and yes, it matches the rules. The point is that this is cheap enough nowadays to do for billions of transactions a day and hundreds to thousands of nodes.

I also had another exchange today with gmax and again tried to press him on numbers. Of course, he didn't deliver any. But I feel he was pretty weak in his responses.

Note that he edited his post - the explanation for him choosing plutonium in parenthesis, he put in afterwards.

This seems to be generally the weak link in their arguments: By putting out (somewhat diffuse) scares that Bitcoin could run into an extreme, they're creating a scare, and then they're using that scare to lead the scared users to their 'solutions': LN/SC.

But all their arguments fail utterly when they are actually about concrete numbers.
 

Peter R

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Aug 28, 2015
1,398
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@awemany : I was travelling all last week and didn't have time to comment, but I wanted to mention that I really liked your work trying to quantify the cost of writing transactions to the Blockchain. It didn't get the attention it deserved on Reddit, but I think it could with the right presentation. I hope you continue to develop these ideas!

On that note, we were talking about a related idea in the old gold thread about how it is actually cheaper for the network to write a backlog of spam to the network than to reject it: