Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cliff

I read the Wikipedia article and I'm not sure I understand what the key points are and how they relate to Bitcoin, but it's great to have more diverse ideas and backgrounds here.

 

[cliff]

@Zangelbert Bingledack - I'm not totally sure either, was sorta hoping others here were aware of this model. Trying to reconcile my client's discussion with some articles I've skimmed subsequent to that. I'm going to dig more into this and report back in a few days. I have about 20 Ledger article ideas and no time for any of them - . I do appreciate you taking the time to look at the wiki entry.

 

[Inca]

Drak at it again on /r/bitcoin attacking 0 conf.

First opt in RBF noone asked for and now push for full RBF in the upcoming fork.

This must be resisted as a line in the sand which cannot be crossed.

 

[cypherdoc]

let's go, mofo:

very, very bad news. no Santa Claus Rally here. $DJT breaks to new yearly lows. $DJI sure to follow. $DJI catching down to the first little red line which will accelerate the push down thru the second little red line which should cause another plunge similar to August, as the full Dow Theory primary bear trend is re-confirmed:

[doublepost=1450452351][/doublepost]junk bonds giving it up again:

remember that the bond mkt is smarter than the stock jockey's. they usually lead to the downside while stocks do a Wiley Coyote. as @Zarathustra has been saying in a round about way, when the debt goes bad, we all go in the shitter:

finally, why are interest rates dropping in the face of the Fed draining liquidity from the mkt trying to raise rates? is the bond mkt giving them the big middle finger?:

 

[albin]

What's the story with weak blocks?

From what I can understand so far, miners pre-broadcast the unsolved blocks they're working on, in order to make the block message O(1). Doesn't this seem like an artificial non-solution to force a natural tx fee market out of the system? Negligible orphan risk in transmitting solutions, yet at the cost of miners constantly flooding the network with candidate blocks.

 

[cypherdoc]

here's the $DJI 5 day chart going back to Monday. since then, the pumpers took the $DJI up +658 pts into the opening gap just yesterday morning. then, they've sold it off hard in just 24 h and as of now we're almost back to Monday's open. what a bunch of crap.

this is why i for the most part don't trade the stock mkt anymore; until now. it's a high volatility snake pit trying to strip everyone of their money. but here's the thing, speculators like me can't resist getting back in during inflection pts where the odds are stacked more highly in our favor; which is why i staked a position in DXD. this is actually why Maxwell et al are so mistaken. they don't understand the game theory behind speculative thinking. they think they can set this wall up at 1MB and have demand smoothly increase into and spill over to LN & SC's. they expect Bitcoin users to keep their foot on the pedal and accept a smoothly ramping fee mkt and pay more and more while accepting conf delays and disruptions. instead of just saying "forget this" and moving to an altcoin or giving up on crypto altogether. markets can't be forced by artificial caps. speculators/investors won't allow it:

[doublepost=1450453871,1450453023][/doublepost]the red arrow shows that the $DJT hasn't been this low since 4/14. we're goin down:

 

[Melbustus]

Here's a chart I just made. It looks like the two curves are now moving together, but the market cap is still significantly below trend (based on the square of the number of transactions).

Awesome, thanks. And I see that it got some much-deserved attention on Reddit and Twitter too. Good to see.

Related: what do you think about "Briscoe's Law"; eg, the assertion that Metcalfe's Law should really be considered n(log(n)) at least for high-ish n: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is-wrong . Makes sense to me.

 

[cypherdoc]

we're dropping so low so fast now that i'm having to zoom out the charts to identify the past years when individual stocks have gotten so low.

here's JWN. that would be 7/12:

here's Macy's. also 7/12:

Tiffany's. 6/13:

Sotheby's 10/11:

there's lots more where those came from.
[doublepost=1450456341,1450455403][/doublepost]GBTC up today. that's good. remember, i think Bitcoin does well in a deflationary period like we've been seeing in the general economy and are likely to further see. that's b/c for Bitcoin to do well, the general fiat based Fed driven mal-economy needs to be perceived as failing to a degree. which it should be, given the stupidity of a rate hike in a weak economy by Yellen on Wednesday which penalizes those dependent on debt. which is everybody.

if we end the day down in stocks, i think Bitcoin should have a pretty good weekend. maybe not a ramp, but an increase, as the realization that the economy is going in the shitter becomes more focused:

this is a bullish chart:

 

[Aquent]

As you all are probably reading right now Garzick is proposing 2mb in May 2016, then around 1mb thereafter, making it 2mb in 2016, 4 in 2018, 6 in 2020. Add SW to it doubling all numbers, 4 in 2016-ish, 8 in 2018 and 12 in 2020. Fair enough, I suppose, if the majority is cool with it then it isn't much different than 2-4-8, it isn't hugely different than BIP101 starting at 2mb and if the growth is too slow, after we have done it once with nothing breaking, it should be far easier to get consensus to increase it next time.

So... what you think:

https://github.com/jgarzik/bips/blob/87aacb6a58d3c63a5dd2082a566b763dd22f919e/bip-0202.mediawiki

 

[Mengerian]

I find the proliferation of different proposals a bit frustrating.

BIP101 is a good middle-of-the-road compromise. Why not just stick with it?

 

[cypherdoc]

@Mengerian

i agree. every dev seems to want to be the one to claim fame to the final solution.

maybe that's too cynical; i'm sure Jeff thinks it's the best way. i just think it's a misjudgment on the fastest way to a solution. yes, take what's already out there and go with it; 101. it'll work.
[doublepost=1450457629][/doublepost]amazingly bad. that's 36 mo in a row.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-18/caterpillar-depression-just-turned-three-cat-hasnt-had-sales-increase-36-consecutive:

[doublepost=1450457843][/doublepost]for Bitcoin fans, WU hasn't been doing so great for a while now:

 

[lunar]

Ironically, this is also a strength. Divide-and-conquer attacks on Bitcoin might well make it a lot stronger. External powers can only attack internal powers in Bitcoin, and Bitcoin works well without them - in the long term even best without any. What happened now might be a case of exactly that.

So good it needs repeating.

@Zarathustra

Do you or someone else know the ETP Model? What's your opinion?

The price of petroleum is controlled by two factors:

1) The cost of production.
2) The $ amount that the end consumer (the NEGs) can afford to pay for it.

Not sure i'm really capable of more than a cursory opinion. What I will say is that on first impression it seems the model is flawed simply becasue it fails to take into account the current economic paradigm.

Money is free to those who own the press. When money is free it can be used as a weapon. (so long as the masses don't realise this). When it is used as a weapon any commodity (oil in this case) can also be considered a weapon against those that produce and require it for their economy.

The result is lack of free market. Simply nobody knows the real price of oil (blockspace ) becasue it's artificially controlled at the wellhead and used as an economic garotte.

 

[rocks]

I find the proliferation of different proposals a bit frustrating.

BIP101 is a good middle-of-the-road compromise. Why not just stick with it?

What I don't like about all of the proposals, is each one is yet another compromise downward. Jeff's proposal is 2MB this year, then +1MB each following year. Bitcoin scales exponentially, this is effectively a cap.

Instead the default should be unlimited, and if you want to put an artificial cap in then they keep compromising with a higher cap.

Any solution that does not effectively remove the economic cap (although maintaining a spam cap is fine) is not a solution IMHO.

 

[Windowly]

I find the proliferation of different proposals a bit frustrating.

BIP101 is a good middle-of-the-road compromise. Why not just stick with it?

I agree. One megabyte a year is much less than percentage increase in transactions the last year (from 80,000 to 200,000). Transactions have more than doubled. If we want it to just act as a spam cap there has to be a decent buffer between the cap and the biggest blocks on heavy days.

 

[Aquent]

It does however set the principle that whenever we are near hitting the limit, the cap will be increased. I think that is what the whole schism was about. If we all can establish that once the limit is hit, it will be increased, as some sort of fundamental principle, then the parameters don't really matter.

If 2mb +1 is too slow, then we can just increase it again, etc. Obviously it isn't some perfect solution, but, hopefully, we finally have some sort of not great but can go along with it consensus. And, looking at the players, Sipa proposed an even more aggressive growth of 20% per year, so he can't nack it. Gavin said he won't nack it. The lead maintainer has said he will merge whatever everyone else agrees with, so effectively he won't nack it either. Gmax is gone so he can't nack or ack. The miners seemed to have consensus for 2-4-8 so they'll be cool with 2+1 and looking around places, there does not seem to be any opposition. I mean, how can there, it's 2mb and then 1mb per year, lol.

Obviously it ain't great, but, if it ends this debate then I'm for it. Once the principle is established, we can see how it goes. If growth too slow and everything else seems fine we can just increase it, etc.

Frankly it seems to me that Christmas has come early, so I really hope Jeff pulls this off and by so doing defeat the attack and by so defeating the attack re-instate the fundamental principles of lifting limit when hit, giving priority to usability, etc.

 

[cypherdoc]

So good it needs repeating.

@Zarathustra



Not sure i'm really capable of more than a cursory opinion. What I will say is that on first impression it seems the model is flawed simply becasue it fails to take into account the current economic paradigm.

Money is free to those who own the press. When money is free it can be used as a weapon. (so long as the masses don't realise this). When it is used as a weapon any commodity (oil in this case) can also be considered a weapon against those that produce and require it for their economy.

The result is lack of free market. Simply nobody knows the real price of oil (blockspace ) becasue it's artificially controlled at the wellhead and used as an economic garotte.

@solarboy , i'm wondering if and when your thesis of solar taking over what that means for Bitcoin mining. a huge improvement in decentralization, i'd think.
[doublepost=1450463135][/doublepost]$DJI thru the first little red line. look the hell out:

[doublepost=1450463488][/doublepost]i still think the USD will roll over with the $DJI. that would be very good for Bitcoin:

 

[Inca]

Completely agree with this.

What I don't like about all of the proposals, is each one is yet another compromise downward. Jeff's proposal is 2MB this year, then +1MB each following year. Bitcoin scales exponentially, this is effectively a cap.

Instead the default should be unlimited, and if you want to put an artificial cap in then they keep compromising with a higher cap.

Any solution that does not effectively remove the economic cap (although maintaining a spam cap is fine) is not a solution IMHO.

I agree with you entirely.

But sometimes we have to grind out political solutions to move the debate forward.

Once the clowns in Core accept a scaling solution then they have demonstrated that

1) hard forking is no longer the FUD disaster we were sold by blockstream/maxwell
2) for a year or two we will likely push the economic cap above Peter R's magic number allowing bitcoin to grow organically and fight another day.

Furthermore it actually moves bitcoin onto the path of scaling again and it will be far, far easier to hard fork again in the future. Plus it gives time to 'clean house' at Core of some of the conflicts of interest and philosophy disabling an honest development process and allows alternate implementations a chance to grow and become influential to solidify the protocol in areas that are still open to attack such as RBF.

Next challenge is to get this hard fork to happen as soon as possible. The usual crowd will be calling for 'late 2016, early 2017' and delaying as hard as possible.

 

[solex]

I find the proliferation of different proposals a bit frustrating.

BIP101 is a good middle-of-the-road compromise. Why not just stick with it?

Yes, BIP101 simply keeps the block limit pacing the rate of increase in global bandwidth, the slowest improving computing technology which Bitcoin needs. However, the problem is that Core Dev are scared of "breaking" Bitcoin, and they need to be pandered to (in the short-term) because their software is running on >90% of nodes. A lot of this fear is from Maxwell's multi-year behind-the-scenes FUD campaign which has reversed previously healthy views on main-chain scaling.

Pieter is giving opposition to Jeff on the ECE, and yet in February 2013 he said on BCT that a block limit of 10 to 100MB should be debated. (My emphasis in bold).

Pieter Wuille:
First of all, my opinion: I'm in favor of increasing the block size limit in a hard fork, but very much against removing the limit entirely. Bitcoin is a consensus of its users, who all agreed (or will need to agree) to a very strict set of rules that would allow people to build global decentralized payment system. I think very few people understand a forever-limited block size to be part of these rules.

However, with no limit on block size, it effectively becomes miners who are in control of _everyone_'s block size. As a non-miner, this is not something I want them to decide for me. Perhaps the tragedy of the commons can be avoided, and long-term rational thinking will kick in, and miners can be trusted with choosing an appropriate block size. But maybe not, and if just one miner starts creating gigabyte blocks, while all the rest agrees on 10 MiB blocks, ugly block-shunning rules will be necessary to avoid such blocks from filling everyone's hard drive (yes, larger block's slower relay will make them unlikely to be accepted, but it just requires one lucky fool to succeed...).

I think retep raises very good points here: the block size (whether voluntarily or enforced) needs to result in a system that remains verifiable for many. What those many are will probably change gradually. Over time, more and more users will probably move to SPV nodes (or more centralized things like e-wallet sites), and that is fine. But if we give up the ability for non-megacorp entities to be able to verify the chain, we might as well be using those a central clearinghouse. There is of course wide spectrum between "I can download the entire chain on my phone" and "Only 5 bank companies in the world can run a fully verifying node", but I think it's important that we choose what point in between there is acceptable.

My suggestion would be a one-time increase to perhaps 10 MiB or 100 MiB blocks (to be debated), and after that an at-most slow exponential further growth. This would mean no for-eternity limited size, but also no way for miners to push up block sizes to the point where they are in sole control of the network. I realize that some people will consider this an arbitrary and unnecessary limit, but others will probably consider it dangerous already. In any case, it's a compromise and I believe one will be necessary.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144895.msg1537737#msg1537737

Edit: Anyone with a lot of followers may wish to tweet that bolded quote
Note: MiB is slightly larger than MB

 

[Melbustus]

@solarboy , i'm wondering if and when your thesis of solar taking over what that means for Bitcoin mining. a huge improvement in decentralization, i'd think.

Count me in that camp. Coal, nat-gas, nuclear (some exceptions) are all mature tech that aren't gonna get much cheaper. Photovoltaic solar (as opposed to thermal) is just linearly getting cheaper, with no sign of stopping, and it's *right now* at the inflection point where it's cost-competitive on an unsubsidized basis with current grid power in some markets.

Telsa's powerwall tech and others are only going to accelerate the cost competitiveness, and *starting now*, more and more markets are coming on-line in terms of being viable for solar.

What happens if the world saves a few trillion dollars directly on energy over the next couple decades, plus the follow-on benefits, both economic, environmental, and possibly political? It's one of the things that makes me think that maybe we really can grow ourselves out of the current global debt overhang (which would be bittersweet, as we'd avoid more nasty financial stuff for a while, but at the same time, not have to fundamentally fix broken tax-and-spend political behavior).

Anyways... @ramez is worth wording for anyone interested in solar/wind: http://rameznaam.com/2014/10/05/solar-wind-plunging-below-fossil-fuel-prices/

And related, how to make $5m on solar in 30 days, Elon Musk style:

Also related and worth watching, Tim Draper interviewing the CEO of SolarCity (Elon Musk's cousin, btw):
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3588

 

[cliff]

@Melbustus - To buttress your point, I do think ff-based energy is on a perpetual decline as far as use goes b/c renewable tech is getting cheaper. After the Paris climate conference, this trend has a good chance of accelerating due to governmental regulation. For example, in the 70s, regs on the car industry RE: smog led to catalytic converter beings installed in every car and which ultimately made them better (see here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter - for some quick background material to skim). Here, I think new envt'l regs to come will likely drive the market further towards solar (and other renewables) until clean energy is the norm. This will happen by making dirty energy more expensive via penalties/taxes and offering other incentives or credits to consumers and businesses that adopt renewables. Consequently, investment in solar and other renewable energy seems likes a no-brainer to me. Ordinarily, I'm against governments influencing the markets too much, but here is some precedent for it.