Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[awemany]

@Aquent:

I thought about that, too. A much better alternative might be to do a massive, widely advertised proof of stake vote for the path forward on blocksize, to clearly show the world where support is.

Done correctly, you could go with just one signature per cold-stored address by designating another (empty) address as your proxy for voting. Just what I wrote a couple posts back.

As you can also see in the conversation I had with Greg, he was exceedingly happy about the 4kBTC on bitcoinocracy.com being against BIP101. I think that's because no one sane goes and risks his coins for what is essentially just an elaborate opinion piece. It might also because too many people with too much money truly believe Bitcoin with 3txn/s is something valuable, but I sincerely doubt that.

But maybe we could get Gavin and or Mike onboard with an idea like this, so that it would have the necessary backing of perceived importance. If they would go (+ all the other big players) and pressure Blockstream into agreeing such a vote, we might get somewhere.

I would completely accept such a blocksize vote (and make my further involvement in Bitcoin dependent on that, of course).

Look at my reddit posts from today. It would be funny if it wouldn't be such a serious issue. Greg was very engaged with me, except for exactly one issue: That of giving control away of the 1MB blocksize parameter. He simply doesn't talk about that.

We should collectively pressure the smallblockists to make such a vote, I think.

 

[albin]

The point should be emphasized that the GFC is a restriction on the freedom of information and communication that should be resisted, not accommodated.

Just spitballing here, but surely people in the outside world are able to do videoconferencing with Chinese companies? Perhaps the PRC mining pools should be doing their due dilligence and pursuing avenues involving whatever corruption they need to satisfy to get access to the bandwidth that is clearly there?

 

[79b79aa8]

Indeed, its a shame reddit failed to follow up with Ryan Charles ideas. Datt his offshoot project looks like a great approach, but as with all networks, it's the number of users that gives the strength. A reddit wide implementation would have been an instant winner, but a brand new platform takes a while to develop.

Monetizing karma might be a good idea, but it would certainly be a fundamental change to the dynamics of reddit. I can understand their hesitation to transform the site to something very different from what it has been for 10 years. Of course if it leads to profits they will end up doing it.

 

[cypherdoc]

Just spitballing here, but surely people in the outside world are able to do videoconferencing with Chinese companies? Perhaps the PRC mining pools should be doing their due dilligence and pursuing avenues involving whatever corruption they need to satisfy to get access to the bandwidth that is clearly there?

Marshall Long said that a motivated Chinese miner could find his way through the GFC unimpeded with the proper motivation.
[doublepost=1449595650][/doublepost]@awemany

i would think that some large hodlers literally have thousands of cold wallet addresses?
[doublepost=1449595799][/doublepost]

The abject ignorance of microeconomics I feel is best revealed with this question: if artificial scarcity is necessary for a fee market, then how come transaction fees have existed for years?

yes, Sam Cole clearly elucidated for the ignorant, that they are perfectly capable of not only filtering spam but setting minfees. IOW, full control of block sizes and fees no matter the limit.

hence, no limit.

 

[albin]

@cypherdoc

I love the euphemism "proper motivation"!

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@awemany

Besides the problem of digging out wallets, when the voting question is something like, "YES or NO: Bitcoin should adopt BIP101," there is a tremendous bias for NO. All BUers might vote no or abstain from voting yes, which all XTers might do the same for a BU proposal. Even though they all want much bigger blocks. Meanwhile the small block adherents will vote both down. The status quo is heavily advantaged, which is great for the small blockers.

To counter this you need everyone to vote on everything, which doesn't seem practical unless the number of propositions were very limited (and who would get to choose them?).

You could ask something more careful like, "YES or NO: Bitcoin should not exceed a 2MB blocksize for the next 5 years," but then you'll get fewer people even noticing or bothering to vote. So it becomes largely a game of phrasing the question to appear important and to not split the vote up.

I think the fork futures idea, which is one way of creating a prediction market, is the way to go. It solves the problem of digging out coins in deep storage because people will accept the hassle and risk if they stand to make money on their bet.

It also solves the problem of fragmentation, because money will actively chase any overlooked bets. It doesn't matter if only 100BTC are stake-voting for a particular thing; you still want to get in there to gain profits if the weighting is different than you believe is the true likelihood. The payoff makes the hassle and risk mostly irrelevant. People who think they have insight greater than the sum of the existing market participants really will want to vote on everything (well, starting with the most lopsided trades in their eyes, but working on up to cover everything), because it's all a chance to make money.
[doublepost=1449597199,1449596562][/doublepost]@Aquent

Yes, just the threat of a change in mining algo is an emormous Sword of Damocles over miners' heads, and sometimes they may need a little reminding of who they work for.

The whole balance of power in Bitcoin reminds me of the game of Go. Much of professional play is about implied threats and projecting influence, which is relatively rarely backed up by a fight and decisive victory over a given territory. But overstep against a pro and they *will* destroy you in a fight on the spot. It's just more efficient to usually play light and loose until the issue is forced by circumstances.

 

[awemany]

@Zangelbert Bingledack :

Those are indeed good points. What do you think about a variant of implementing proof-of-stake voting on blocksize?

 

[cypherdoc]

The $DJT is just clearly not cooperating. waddaya expect when the PPT can only afford to pump the index with only 30 stocks ($DJI)?

 

[albin]

The whole balance of power in Bitcoin reminds me of the game of Go. Much of professional play is about implied threats and projecting influence, which is relatively rarely backed up by a fight and decisive victory over a given territory. But overstep against a pro and they *will* destroy you in a fight on the spot. It's just more efficient to usually play light and loose until the issue is forced by circumstances.

This is exactly the sort of insight that made me start understanding chess beyond like the entry-level stuff. Years ago I was reading through the Spassky-Karpov world championship games, and it clicked to me how every seemingly quiet positional move was informed by a backdrop of wild tactics that were constrained by high-level play.

 

[cypherdoc]

this ANYONE_CAN_SPEND in SW allows core dev to make all future script changes into soft forks. is this a problem? according to Mike Hearn it is b/c as an old node, you are giving up your right to be notified of this change and to reject it:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7#.ly5hy9s7x

 

[Justus Ranvier]

The problem of proof of stake voting is it doesn't measure the relevant parameter.

Maybe somebody has a cold wallet with tens of thousands of coins they've been sitting on since 2009.

What is their contribution to the daily btc absorption?

Zero.

At the present time (while the block subsidy is still so high), the economic majority is measured in terms of income, not in terms of holdings.

The miners must actively court buyers of new coins each and every day. Those buyers are the network's customers right now.

Holders of old coins merely need to be convinced to continue doing nothing.
[doublepost=1449599536][/doublepost]

ANYONE_CAN_SPEND in SW allows core dev to make all future script changes into soft forks. is this a problem?

How could there possibly be a problem with signing all your transactions as ANYONE_CAN_SPEND?

Don't you trust the Bitcoin Core developers to not change the meaning of your signature after you've committed to ANYONE_CAN_SPEND?

 

[cypherdoc]

this ANYONE_CAN_SPEND in SW allows core dev to make all future script changes into soft forks. is this a problem? according to Mike Hearn it is b/c as an old node, you are giving up your right to be notified of this change and to reject it:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7#.ly5hy9s7x

Mike:

"The idea is simple: nobody, not even a miner with majority hash power, can trick you into accepting money that violated these rules.

Or ……. can they?

And here’s the problem with soft forks.

In a soft fork, a protocol change is carefully constructed to essentially trick old nodes into believing that something is valid when it actually might not be."

 

[rocks]

TLDR: Where the developers are unable to reach an agreement, the miners are unwilling to be the jury and the economic majority has consensus for a certain action, the economic majority's only choice of acting upon it's decision, and thus enforcing it's will, may be the nuclear option of forking with a changed algo. Such option may only need to be used once for it forever to suffice as a credible threat to anyone who wishes to centrally control bitcoin.

This is what I was trying to get at a while back in the thread when discussing miner behavior, and how today's problem is that success in mining has nothing to do with understanding Bitcoin or being able run scalable systems, and instead simply depends on access to cheap electricity. This means that today's miners are not willing or able to follow an economic majority. As you describe this a serious problem.

Without miner movement, an economic majority can only set direction by voting with it's feet.

I'm beginning to believe it will take not a hard fork, but a hard exit and economic split by participants to remove the artificial 1MB cap. Here everyone who wants to remove the 1MB cap needs to take an active action to only follow a chain with larger blocks, and to reject chains/blocks still under the 1MB limit. For example Coinbase, bitstamp, merchants and users could say "by block X we will only accept blocks with the BIP101 version, and will reject blocks without the BIP101 version".

This would create an economic split, with one set to companies and people following the old chain and another set of companies and people following a new BIP101. A clear winner would emerge within days or less. If a majority of exchanges and merchants committed to this path and coordinated on the switch date I am confident it would work.

It also would set a precedence for users to take control by voting with their feet, and shift check-in control to a new client managed by merchants and not devs blocking the stream of transactions.

Basically BIP101 was being too nice by putting the vote to miners only. I say BIP101 should simply set a hard switch over by block X, this makes everyone running the SW (including merchants and exchanges) committed to the date and communicates to everyone else "either join us or accept that we won't transact with you".

People seem to be afraid of this type of hard approach. I don't know why though. This is exactly how everything in life works in open societies, people vote with their feet towards products, services, towns, states and even countries that fit them better. This approach is Adam Smith's invisible hand in action.

 

[cypherdoc]

up 4.73%:

 

[solex]

"Sounds good to me."
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011872.html

Wladimir lets his tummy get tickled and rubber-stamps Greg's "State of the Nation" speech finding himself unable to voice a single criticism or correction. Not even to mention waiting for any consensus on a short-term change for the block limit from the HK conference. It is already assumed to be irrelevant after Pieter walked from the podium.

 

[cypherdoc]

emerging mkts down:

largest miner in the world, new lows:

largest copper mine in the world. new lows:

and we're supposed to believe that the US stock mkt will soar in this environment? a consumer and services economy trillions in debt? good luck with that.

right now, it's just Bitcoin and UST's up, a dynamic i've been calling for for years now. we'll see if it continues.
[doublepost=1449601162][/doublepost]Sotheby's:

 

[awemany]

@Aquent :

A further point to add might be that we might simply need more mining power in the hands of those who want BIP101.

I am pondering about going into mining a little bit (for heating) after I check that you could indeed still make a (small) profit.

If Coinbase starts to do serious large scale mining, I think the issue will be settled soon. They might also take a bet on a price increase when they can show that the reasonable people can fork away from Core using just raw hash power. I am personally absolutely sure that this bet will work out, but then I don't have to make that decision about lots of investor money

-----
Let me also add that the more the initial goodwill and enthusiasm about SW wears off, the more it appears (in its soft fork form) to simply sneakily turn Bitcoin into something that is almost solely controlled by Blockstream. As someone else (here? @cypherdoc?) said: They are moving fast now. Call me cynical, but it looks like they want to actually do the soft fork (as a gentle miner vote) and then go and basically add/remove anything else they want from Bitcoin, because they hope they can ride on a wave of 'we solved the blocksize problem'.
I can personally write only a couple of reddit/bitcoin posts but I hope the other players with a larger voice still have a sense of what is going on here!

 

[albin]

I'm having difficulty finding the reddit post, but back I think around the time of maximum ghash controversy, Brian Armstrong posted to reddit asking for opinions about making a Coinbase mining pool.

 

[awemany]

@albin that is interesting. I hope they are seriously considering this.

 

[awemany]

Reminder: my AMA starts in an hour... can somebody pls remind reddit?

Great answers, by the way!