Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[freetrader]

@shilch I read the article. It suggested some technical means of filtering financial transactions according to some lists which divide into acceptable and unacceptable.

Now where's that related patent? As I said I'd like to give it a look.

produce preimages that hash to a valid difficulty target and then sell that preimage (without actually knowing the block header) thereby digitally signing the fraud. And because it is not cryptographically 100% secure, people consider this idea "unconvincing"

I find it unconvincing for the reasons that people have already stated publicly.

Producing a pre-image seems to serve no economical purpose in Bitcoin -- as long as SHA256 is unbroken the original content of the candidate block cannot be verified by the recipient.

If you're planning to extract more money out of people by censoring transactions, you don't need to sell the pre-image.

If you're planning to extract more money out of people by including certain transactions, you don't need to sell the pre-image.

If you're planning to install a filter which discards certain blocks of which you don't approve (aka a censorship machine), the pre-image may be useful since you save another round of SHA256, although even for that I think the use is limited.

However, I mentioned the censorship application because that's what Craig's article was describing towards the end.

What do you find unconvincing about it?

I have the feeling your question was targeted at the SHA256 claims by Craig, so I only respond to those here.

 

[cbeast]

@cbeast
You did not address my argument, you only provided a list of reasons why you believe in Craig and BSV-Metanet's eventual success.


I found it entirely unconvincing, as in fact I did all of your offered reasons.

Can you point at a patent which makes use of this fact, to convince me there is actual technical merit behind it?

Even then, I don't see how implementing a censorship machinery based on it would be helping peer to peer electronic cash which per whitepaper is here to help us transact without overlord intermediaries...

The "censorship machinery" is voluntary and can be bypassed. Adhering to laws is voluntary if you are willing to risk the consequences.

Another one was the fact that the myth that the decimal point can be moved to accommodate more users at high value. CSW says that won't work so his solution is to recycle old presumably lost coins. Nobody talks about or can refute that.

Anyway, it's fine you don't agree with me. I'm looking at a preponderance of evidence. You can wait for the patents while I wait for Godot and the next pump. While we're waiting, if you watch his videos you can glean a lot of hints at things he seems to be avoiding talking about. His "drunk" sessions hint at them when he talks about seemingly random math theories. He seems evasive, but not lying.

 

[freetrader]

Nobody talks about or can refute that.

The idea of recycling coins which have not been moved for a certain time is (a) old (b) has been raised well before Craig (c) has been discussed ad nauseum and (d) frankly, doesn't have much support in the Bitcoin (Cash) community. While I'm principally fine with BSV implementing something like that, I realize they won't need to ask BSV holders for permission. But it would be good to publish the technical changes well before rolling them out on the network, so people can at least vote with their feet (wallets).

 

[Zarathustra]

We are here for p2p electronic cash, not some NWO / MWO bullshit.
However, it sure does seem like Craig is not here for the same reasons.

So if that's the case, then his backers should invest more in BSV.

He claims to be here for an upgraded capitalism, not for a downgraded one, a soonish banned pseudo-anarchistic-pseudo-POW-dark-market-money-laundering-ancap idiotism.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

"Set in stone" is often stated without specifying agency, probably because English doesn't have a handy way of talking about emergent processes and many people also don't really understand them.

"It's not CSW's fault for expressing his ideas poorly. It's the inadequacy of the English language!" Sorry, couldn't resist. But seriously, here's how I think you could convey a reasonable argument here: "I believe the market should (and predict that it will) place tremendous value on protocol stability. Thus, I predict that the chain that ultimately emerges as the winner will be one whose protocol has already (or at least, in the near future, will have) 'ossified' to the point that it will appear to be effectively 'set in stone.' Future changes will only be made, if ever, in the event of an extremely compelling justification, if not only when absolutely necessary to prevent catastrophe. Of course, this doesn't mean that the 'power to change the protocol' will somehow cease to exist. That power is inherently held collectively by market participants. Rather, the prediction is that rational market actors will increasingly see the tremendous value in not continuing to exercise that power."

"Protocol" is the name one gives to a set of rules intended to function as a base that never changes - where it may one day make sense to start anew, but never to fiddle, because the ruleset was chosen precisely such that the value of keeping the ruleset fixed will trump the value of even very substantial improvements.

Eh... I'd say that having a "protocol" in any meaningful sense implies some degree of stability (at least from one day to the next if not necessarily from year to year). But I don't see that it implies complete stasis. Again, I'm on board with the idea that stability is itself a very important value but I don't think it automatically trumps all other values. I think ossification will increase over time simply because the cost of change increases over time as more infrastructure gets built on top of a particular blockchain.

Let's not also forget how legality plays into this. A protocol that continues to change will be seen by governments for what Core has proven that it is: a vehicle for control by developers.

Obviously I agree that the effective influence / control that developers have exercised has been a huge problem. But ultimately it's the investors (of which miners are one hugely-important class) who are really in charge. So I tend to remain optimistic that developers' influence will wane if and when crypto successfully exits its adolescence.

"You do not make a system that will change the world by finding the big, bad gorilla and kicking him in the fucking nuts!" -CSW

See? There's no problem with the English language. The man can express himself beautifully with it. But seriously, I don't buy this argument. Bitcoin, by its very nature, is a kick in the nuts to the big bad gorillas of central banking and tyrannical governments. And if its nature changes to the point where that's no longer true, it's probably not something that I'd be terribly interested in.

Even if there were no other reason, having a protocol in the true sense is valuable because it takes the One Ring and casts it into the lava.

Ok, but again I don't think the power can disappear. It's just distributed to everyone in proportion to their economic significance. Wielding the power (at least in any kind of significant way) requires substantial coordination among lots of actors. And maybe you're convinced that market actors will increasingly recognize the value in not wielding it (or wielding it only in the most extreme circumstances). And that's an argument I can at least partially buy.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

CSW says that won't work so his solution is to recycle old presumably lost coins.

I don't think that's accurate. Where did you hear this?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Roger_Murdock

I've always said CSW is atrocious at explaining, though getting better, but it was Satoshi who originally said it, and he said it in a way that made it seem like he didn't even expect it to be a question.

"Set in stone" is actually quite a complicated matter, at least as complicated as the question of who controls Bitcoin, on which the idea is based. (It's not just investors/miners, especially at this early stage, and the block reward is part of the issue.)

Essentially you have the right idea, but several things I mentioned in the post add nuances that make anything other than complete stasis more and more prohibitive. The more I've thought about what would actually be entailed for companies to deal with protocol changes (or more tellingly, to deal with a situation where there's very little that can be relied upon not to change in Bitcoin), the more I've moved to Craig Wright's view on this.

Imagine Fidelity Investments comes looking to build a whole platform on top of Bitcoin, a project that would take years to complete and that they'd expect to run without fundamental changes for a decade or more. Perhaps even a platform on which many other things are built by other firms (perhaps a protocol itself!), maybe with patents filed on some of their methods, and regulatory approval based on assumptions about "how Bitcoin works." The timescales involved for things like this, for money and contracting in a corporate environment, especially with many companies building on top, just don't allow for changes at the base level to be made, barring catastrophe.

There's also a Fidelity-like effect in that it won't do to just keep changing the protocol "until big companies start using it"; before they'll build they need to see stability being taken seriously just like they need to see capacity being taken seriously.

Even if the term "protocol" wasn't the one used to describe having a set of rules that everyone can count on not to change, I would then just say there should be such a term. Call it a schlotocol instead, but I think it needs to exist if Bitcoin wants to succeed, and 0.1 is the only nothing-up-my-sleeve Schelling point for that.

Bitcoin, by its very nature, is a kick in the nuts to the big bad gorillas of central banking and tyrannical governments.

This is a separate can of worms, but I'd call Bitcoin a kick in the nuts to the most tyrannical aspects of governments and central banks, maybe even to their very existence, but not to centuries-old tenets of common law - which is what I think CSW had in mind there.

I'm no legal expert, but in what I've looked at, Bitcoin seems to thread the eye of a needle regarding money law. It seems designed to permeate as deeply as possible into the fabric of business and society before governments decide to turn on it, at which point hopefully - like with the Internet itself - they'll have become too addicted to the revenue streams it produces to ban it. Moreover, designed properly to use longstanding legal tradition to its advantage, such a system can actually be quite difficult to ban.

 

[cypherdoc]

"set in stone" is just a metaphor for reliable, dependable, and immutable functionality for a new system that radically changes the existing monetary assumptions. if you want buy in from the top on down, on a what amounts to a calculated gamble based on what appears to be sound game theory, no one can be seen to be in power or control to change the underlying monetary assumptions. since the current regime deals in essentially unlimited inflation within a dollar system whose rules are well known and exploited, the alternative (Bitcoin) must allow unlimited scaling along with unlimited profits, esp for large institutions. since onchain has been the only proven strategy that has satisfied the above requirements to date and was only seen to be stymied by a congested 1MB blocksize in Dec 2017, unlimited blocksize alone should be fully tested until it fails. or not.

of course we'll change things, like sha256, when QC comes around. or some other such threat.

 

[Norway]

There's also a Fidelity-like effect in that it won't do to just keep changing the protocol "until big companies start using it"; before they'll build they need to see stability being taken seriously just like they need to see capacity being taken seriously.

This.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Lol, I am reading a book about historic examples of adventurers pretending to be a king who died before.

Title is 'ungekrönte könige' , don't know if it has ever been translated into English.

It's a universal phenomena ... Kings like Nero or Friedrich II even had two reincarnation. They all ended dead by the sword.

Given the context about Satoshi it would be crazy if there was no wannabe Satoshi ...
[doublepost=1557098140,1557097175][/doublepost]At the same time, there are examples in which it is not clear if it was a pseudo king or the real one. History is written by the winner ...

 

[cbeast]

I don't think that's accurate. Where did you hear this?

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-1340#post-86112

 

[cbeast]

Lol, I am reading a book about historic examples of adventurers pretending to be a king who died before.

Title is 'ungekrönte könige' , don't know if it has ever been translated into English.

It's a universal phenomena ... Kings like Nero or Friedrich II even had two reincarnation. They all ended dead by the sword.

Given the context about Satoshi it would be crazy if there was no wannabe Satoshi ...
[doublepost=1557098140,1557097175][/doublepost]At the same time, there are examples in which it is not clear if it was a pseudo king or the real one. History is written by the winner ...

I wouldn't use that metaphor. Satoshi wanted to be anonymous, not a king CSW was forced out because it's impossible to be anonymous anymore and he was called to action because Bitcoin is disintegrating from the inside. A better metaphor might be "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." - William Shakespeare

 

[bitsko]

Early votes are in,

BSV to have a client, 6 reject 2 accept

BSV to drop param support in BUCash, 5 accept 2 reject

all BSV support may well be voted out of BU

though the norway purge is failing 4 to 1.

 

[cbeast]

That's a shame to delist BSV, but not unexpected. Bitcoin was always headed to data centers, not Raspberry PIs.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cbeast I know he said there can't be fractional satoshis (they break script), but I don't think he said his solution was to reclaim old coins. That was just an observation about the inevitable insecurity of old coins many decades (centuries?) from now.

 

[cypherdoc]

Early votes are in,

BSV to have a client, 6 reject 2 accept

BSV to drop param support in BUCash, 5 accept 2 reject

all BSV support may well be voted out of BU

though the norway purge is failing 4 to 1.

pitiful turnout. are there that few members?

 

[cbeast]

@cbeast I know he said there can't be fractional satoshis (they break script), but I don't think he said his solution was to reclaim old coins. That was just an observation about the inevitable insecurity of old coins many decades (centuries?) from now.

I'm talking about CSW. He mentioned it in a talk and perhaps a in a blog. He mentioned 5 years, which seems an awfully short time, but I think it's in regard to "burnt" coins in unspendable addresses. Not sure how he determines that, but it's probably not hard to estimate a reasonable difficulty threshold. It would certainly be welcome by miners that might get an additional block reward.

 

[kostialevin]

@cbeast
This is the post:
https://medium.com/@craig_10243/fixing-op-fals-fd157899d2b7

"In having an end capacity of just under 21 million bitcoin (BCH), some bitcoin will be “lost”, but this is analogous to bullion money being lost. In time, it can be found, and returned into circulation. I cover some of the differences in a prior article. When a private key is lost, it is merely out of circulation. It may be many years, but all old addresses eventually become mine-able and can be recovered.
Returning “lost” money into circulation is a future means of miner revenue and analogous to salvage firms who seek lost bullion on ships that have sunk in the sea."

Every key can be eventually discovered, he is not talking about implementing some strange way to get "lost" coins from sleeping addresses..

 

[shilch]

@shilch I read the article. It suggested some technical means of filtering financial transactions according to some lists which divide into acceptable and unacceptable.

Now where's that related patent? As I said I'd like to give it a look.


I find it unconvincing for the reasons that people have already stated publicly.

Producing a pre-image seems to serve no economical purpose in Bitcoin -- as long as SHA256 is unbroken the original content of the candidate block cannot be verified by the recipient.

If you're planning to extract more money out of people by censoring transactions, you don't need to sell the pre-image.

If you're planning to extract more money out of people by including certain transactions, you don't need to sell the pre-image.

If you're planning to install a filter which discards certain blocks of which you don't approve (aka a censorship machine), the pre-image may be useful since you save another round of SHA256, although even for that I think the use is limited.

However, I mentioned the censorship application because that's what Craig's article was describing towards the end.


I have the feeling your question was targeted at the SHA256 claims by Craig, so I only respond to those here.

You can ensure that the correct data was used for the block header by perfoming an atomic swap of data<->money using blind signatures and a short script that checks for the correctness of the merkle root hash.

 

[Norway]