Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Aquent]

"from peoplma sent 9 minutes ago

Looks like it was removed by automod for linking to /r/bitcoin without using the np. subdomain. Auotmod should have sent him a PM explaining this, did it not? If not I need to check the code.

I've approved it anyway, thanks for the message."

Ah, our super responsive and very polite mods. Just checked and your comment is now on justin.

As for roger's mea cupa after 24 hours, frankly that place has fully lost my trust. They banned jstolfi early on, supernode or whatever his nick is threatened to ban, biox or whatever wanted congregate in one thread. Frankly I do not trust these guys, I do not know them, and they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Not to fail mentioning that roger seems very keen to promote only his own stuff and naturally one would feel, at the very least, uncomfortable criticisng Roger or anything he is involved in since his space.

There is no reason whatever for us to use r/btc, especially after what just happened. A person like btcdrak does not just become mod. XT is bitcoin, the place has more subscribers, the mods there are well known, and more importantly, resonate intellectual qualities rather than greed nonsense.

So, personally, I am not going back to r/btc. I never liked the atmosphere there anyway and the mods are threatening. I'll stick to the cozy and super friendly r/bitcoinxt. The name of the sub is perfectly fine as far as I can see and far more communicative of the whole situation. r/btc is a cheap copier wannabe and will always be inferior because it is not "bitcoin". With bitcoinxt at least there is something to feel superiour about, the xt philosophy of keeping to satoshi's way of things.

 

[AdrianX]

where's the link to your post on reddit?

@Justus Ranvier who were you responding too? https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3x1f4w/eating_the_bitcoin_cake/

yes its gone.edit found it on r/bitcoinxt:
Was your post a root post? I would like to add your image for Reddit to see.

 

[Peter R]

Here is my supportive response to Jeff Garzik on the mailing list. Unfortunately, it was censored and I'm still black-listed:

Thank you for the great write-up, Jeff.

Indeed, a transition to a forced-fee market would represent an “economic event,” significantly changing Bitcoin’s nature. From the economics perspective, the event can be visualized graphically as the free-market equilibrium block size moving to the right of (greater than) the limit. Rather than serving its original purpose as an anti-spam measure, the limit would begin to serve as a political measure, resulting in a dead-weight loss of economic activity (and elevated “forking pressure”). Here are two diagrams to help illustrate:


Unfortunately, I think this takes us to the very core of the debate: on which side of the free-market equilibrium block size should the limit be placed?

My position, is that I don’t particular care where the limit is or how the limit is adjusted, so long as it is greater than the free-market equilibrium block size. However, under these conditions there would be no economic subsidy for off-chain solutions such as Lightning Network. Hence the dilemma.

***

On this mailing list, developers tend to view Bitcoin as a set of rules encoded by the software. Because of this code-centric viewpoint, words such as “hard fork” enter the community vocabulary and develop mystical powers. The word “hard fork” is now viewed as something drastic, dangerous, and something that necessarily changes Bitcoin’s nature. The truth in this case is the opposite.

An increase to the block size limit is necessary to *preserve* Bitcoin’s nature for the reasons that Jeff mentioned. The fact that it requires a change to a single-line of code that attempts to enforce a rule that hasn’t even been empirically shown to be enforceable, is not a big deal. We will look back on this debate and laugh at how worried some were about changing that line of code.

Here is an animation that shows how Bitcoin empirically enforces the 25 BTC/block inflation limit, yet doesn’t appear to empirically enforce any block size limit at all:


We don’t even know if Bitcoin can enforce a block size limit over the long term. Concern about changing this line of code is misplaced.

Best regards,
Peter

 

[awemany]

@awemany - Sounds to me like he doesn't particularly care *how* blocksize rises, as long as it rises *enough* to keep the current economic model (of cheap blockspace) intact.

That's more or less my position as well. I just consider BU to really be the only thing that lets that happen rationally longterm (ie, via a *natural* fee market). BIP101 is a good multi-year compromise, though.

Jeff seems more willing to go with short-term solutions which keep the current economic model intact, even if it means having this fight every year or two. Maybe he thinks most people will come around if given enough time?

I tend to agree, however I wonder what is mid-term the worse outcome: A small increase by Core that saves us from short-term block saturation might entrench them even more. I am not sure whether it will be seen as 'see, a blocksize hard fork wasn't so bad after all' or will be spun to 'see how awesome we are? we said we're going to increase the blocksize just in time! all hail greg for his hard work...'.

BIP101 would take away power from these people in a much more brutal (though fully warranted) and thus long-lasting fashion.

I think this latter is the most important issue for the long term success of Bitcoin. I would, personally, favor BIP101 + short suffering vs. 2MB plus a long slow blockstreamed death of Bitcoin.

But again, I don't know how a 'can kick' would be interpreted - but I am absolutely sure Greg and Adam will try to spin it their way. If I think about it, I really don't have a very definite gut feeling about what would happen yet.

 

[rocks]

Great points @Peter R

It is also interesting to me that the current devs often claim they understand bitcoin better because they are cryptography experts.

Satoshi was not an expert in cryptography at all (he would ask basic questions sometimes) yet he invented bitcoin. That says something that is lost every time Maxwell claims that bitcoin is complex and only he and other crypto experts are qualified.

Bitcoin is an economic system, we need to put the economic players back in charge and setting direction. Developers who want to can follow and implement that direction.

 

[cypherdoc]

heads up guys. big tweet coming from jgarzik.
[doublepost=1450288101][/doublepost][doublepost=1450288139][/doublepost]"Implies BIP 100 on ice."

just to clarify:

Miners! BIP100 is no longer an option. take down your block versioning preference for 100. @jgarzik will not be coding it.

 

[awemany]

@rocks:
Very interesting, this was completely lost on me. And I actually agree here, I am not a cryptographer either, but the primitives and datastructures that are in Bitcoin, I fully understand how they apply and how to use them. I also familarized myself with ECC, though have to say I am fully content with seeing it as well as SHA256/RIPEMD160 as a black box in day to day use

I think a major part of Bitcoin's success is that it is using relatively simple techniques and can be understood in a single day (in principle) by an informed STEM guy/gal - and the economic/social aspects and perspective on Bitcoin can be grasped to quite a degree by anyone with half a brain.

That is quite the value in itself!

Hashing and public-key cryptography/signatures are two things existing since a long while and Satoshi synthesized them to the genius idea that is Bitcoin.

I like to say that there is a lot of value in keeping things structurally and mathematically simple. Not only for making bugs shallow (of which the importance cannot be understated) - but also to make it understandable, able to grasp by a large number of people.

There is a reason why e.g. ZK SNARKs were called moon math (I think someone called them like that on BCT). I believe I saw somewhere that there have also been results that have been fully retracted in that area, simply because the complexity grew so much that even the researchers made mistakes.

Greg seems to sometimes go at Bitcoin as if it is his university's crypto learning project.

I rather think we do not want too much complexity, unless it is well-tested and gives us a large benefit.

 

[sickpig]

Jeff "on fire" Garzik strikes again:

Segregated Witness in the context of Scaling Bitcoin

Segregated Witness (SegWitness, SW) is being presented in the context of Scaling Bitcoin. It has useful attributes, notably addressing a major malleability vector, but is not a short term scaling solution.

 

[cypherdoc]

@sickpig

gmax can't possibly be happy with these recommendations:

"6. Conclusions and recommendations

It seems unlikely that SW provides scaling in the short term, and SW
introduces new economics complexities.

A "short term bump" hard fork block size increase addresses economic and
ecosystem risks that SW does not.

Bump + SW should proceed in parallel, independent tracks, as orthogonal
issues.


7. Appendix - Other SW comments

Hard forks provide much stronger validation, and ensure the network
operates at a fully trustless level.

SW hard fork is preferred, versus soft fork. Soft forking SW places a huge
amount of trust on miners to validate transaction signatures, versus the
rest of the network, as the network slowly upgrades to newer clients.

An SW hard fork could also add several zero-filled placeholders in a merkle
tree for future use."

 

[awemany]

I have to say I do like cleanups of data structures, so I do like SW. In principle.

However, that beast is quite the change to Bitcoin. That certainly needs more testing than BIP101.
After at least 6 mo of thorough testing, it might be where it should be.

As a miner, I would definitely veto a rushed SW soft-fork now.

 

[sickpig]

@cypherdoc

I've to say that I'm curious to see gmax response.

 

[rocks]

Greg seems to sometimes go at Bitcoin as if it is his university's crypto learning project.

In the context of segwit this is exactly true.

Jeff, Gavin and many others are now pointing out that it is not a short term solution. The more Maxwell presents it as such, the more people realize he is not capable of seeing the larger pictures. I personally used to think Maxwell was just selfishly manipulating a situation for blockstream gain, I now am beginning to think he's just not that capable based on his recent posts.

I still maintain segwit is a noose Maxwell is going to hang himself with. It may be elegent from a CS perspective, but it is the wrong solution for today's problems.

Today's problems are block propagation times and blocksize. Segwit is a solution to a storage problem no one had right now.....
[doublepost=1450300381][/doublepost]

Jeff "on fire" Garzik strikes again:

Segregated Witness in the context of Scaling Bitcoin

Maybe we are seeing people jockeying for position in a new upcoming order?

Edit: Matt just responded saying Segwit is faster because a fee market will push users to upgrade, while a hard fork is slower because it takes 2 years to roll out. (Never mind that satoshi's hard fork to add the cap took one day).

Pieter responded by saying nothing with many words, essentially say that Jeff is wrong.

Screw these guys, they have no idea what they are talking about.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I think it's the same dynamic as in physics and some other fields. A century ago, Hilbert and others from the math department were able to work their way into and sort of take over the physics department largely with the aid of intimidating math. There is also the example of Keynes in economics. The overfocus on math arguably resulted in a lot of tail-wagging-the-dog type dynamics as well as overcomplexity with too many hidden variables within which to hide fudges.

Cryptography and I assume to some extent code complexity performs that same function of intimidation and obfuscation, very useful for power grabs. I don't think Greg has leveraged crypto to the extent that people like Hilbert or Heisenberg or Keynes leveraged math, but his immense technical knowledge certainly doesn't hurt in silencing opposition. It's more complex here, of course, because that technical knowledge is legitimately useful and needed, but equally so is economic understanding and practical/business sense, two areas where I doubt Gmax is particularly competent - to put it gently. Ditto for Adam.

 

[awemany]

@rocks: I like your 'assume good faith approach' but have to say I grew much more cynical over the years. I have worked with characters exactly like him.

I am certain Greg knows exactly what he is doing. He's playing the ignorant nerd.
[doublepost=1450301031][/doublepost]Ok, it looks like Jeff is inching closer and closer to just BIP101.


OT Rant: It might be showing that I am not a 'millenial'. But twitter has IMO the worst interface of all popular web sites that are out there. Cluttered and hard to navigate. Buttons that are not intuitive. Argh.

 

[cypherdoc]

just sent pm's to BTCC, Solo CKPool, and 21co to take down their BIP100 flag support broadcasts. if anyone knows how to get a hold of KNC and Bitfury, let them know too.

we should make an effort to clear the deck of the blockexplorers and start fresh. it will look very good to just have the "8MB" supporters viewable.

https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/blocks/1

 

[rocks]

Question, does Gavin still have the keys to send warnings over the network of full nodes, and who else has this ability? He did before, but not sure if that changed since he gave up commit control.

The reason is if large players try to hard fork the issue, there needs to be a mechanism to warn users globally of the new chain. Today clients will just ignore the large block chain and that confusion would very negatively impact people's view of bitcoin's security.

Also, do common spv wallets such as mycelium have the ability to warn users of a split and even force users to upgrade before sending transactions?

Edit: thanks @solex

 

[Erdogan]

0.25% rate raise.

stock dump incoming (i hope)

But then there is the subjective unreality...

 

[solex]

@rocks
He still has the alert key, along with Thermos and Satoshi.
This occurred to me when Thermos went full retard and started censoring r/bitcoin. Soon after that he came up with a list of alert codes to try and blunt the utility of it.

It is not unreasonable that Satoshi is keeping his powder dry so that if Gavin alerts everyone to upgrade for BIP101 (or any other solution he offers) and Thermos puts out some noise countermanding it, then Satoshi can step in and say "Yep. Gavin is right, follow his advice".

Don't know about other wallets though.

 

[rocks]

@solex thanks for the information. That's somewhat good to hear.

What do you mean by this though?
"Soon after that he came up with a list of alert codes to try and blunt the utility of it."

 

[solex]

The list here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Theymos/Alert_codes

Nothing about recommending an upgrade in a necessary hard-fork situation, just the "consensus_flux" mentioning "unanimity"

Some more info here:
https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#alert

Hmm. Looks like there is a "self-destruct" where the alert key can be declared as "compromised" preventing subsequent use until users upgrade, presumably from a trusted source (bitcoin.org )