Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[sickpig]

Q_max < Q*

Is it already happening?

Unfortunately it seems so.

Six months ago I showed that 45% of transactions were less than a dollar. In the last six months that has declined to 38%. I previously estimated that we would want larger blocks within two years, and need them within three. That still seems a reasonable estimate.

[doublepost=1450791184][/doublepost]

Guys I know that the articles are long but please skim them.

Code is absolutely unnecessary for a BUIP. One purpose of a passed BUIP is to set direction BEFORE the money (effort) is spent.

A BUIP proposal opens formal discussion on a topic... the results of which are binding in the sense that if a subsequent implementation appears it will basically be "fast-tracked" to commitment. What this means is that the Developer can slow things down if the patch is sh*t but not stop it.

Maybe I felt victim of bitcoin core devs' rhetoric, but I've witnessed more than once people get spanked because their proposed BIP missed a proof of concept implementation, and somewhat I take for granted such rule without thinking critically.

edit:

just to give more contest I found a relevant part of BIP001

Standards Track BIPs consist of two parts, a design document and a reference implementation. The BIP should be reviewed and accepted before a reference implementation is begun, unless a reference implementation will aid people in studying the BIP. Standards Track BIPs must include an implementation -- in the form of code, a patch, or a URL to same -- before it can be considered Final.

bold is mine.

 

[Aquent]

@Windowly That is what I meant by a "BIP101-only" client. A version of BIP101 that locks in the upgrade by block X, meaning only blocks that accept the upgrade are validated as valid blocks. Blocks without the BIP101 version upgrade would be rejected. This would fork the chain into a BIP101 only chain and an older 1MB only chain. Everyone could continue to use the chain they prefer, that is a peaceful democracy.

In this scenario the SPV wallet providers become very powerful. Which way Mycelium and others go could decide it. Does anyone know what the main wallet devs have stated on their thoughts regarding scaling?

The wallet providers are in as good as unanimous agreement:

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114530/bitcoin-wallet-software-providers-express-support-for-block-size-increase

 

[theZerg]

@sickpig LOL at that in regards to BIP 100. Again they don't follow their rules whenever it suits them. Anyway the BUIP process is NOT the BIP process. I designed it to resolve a bunch of issues I perceived with the effective BIP process (I didn't even know that BIP001 laid it out formally).

In particular, you can certainly include an implementation, or include an offer to be the implementer. But you do not have to. Remember, Bitcoin Unlimited is about allowing people who are NOT engineers to have a voice... how does that happen if BUIPs need engineering before submission? Also, personally I never contributed to Core because I'm too busy to go off and implement X only to have it squashed by some core committer who hasn't had his morning coffee.

In fact, submitting a BUIP is how you get the Developer's attention. There's a maximum 2 week period after BUIP submission where the Developer will work (publicly) with the submitter to clarify points and suggest an implementation. The result of that will either be 1 modified BUIP for public discussion, or 2 BUIPs (the Developer's and the original) which then run against each other and then the winner of that runs against "no change".

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Also, personally I never contributed to Core because I'm too busy to go off and implement X only to have it squashed by some core committer who hasn't had his morning coffee.

Great point, I never considered that. This seems to explain a lot of the reason so few new major devs have joined Core in the past few years, and why the long tail of minor devs seem especially willing to go along with the establishment agenda: there's a big survivorship bias because

1) only those who proposed changes the establishment likes get to have "contributor" status

2) everyone whose changes get rebuffed feels like they wasted their time and is reluctant to contribute more unless they are prepared to alter their stances and tow the party line (which encourages sycophantism)

3) presumably the vast majority of devs take a look at the situation before contributing and realize they shouldn't waste their time coding something up in the first place - and we will never know most of their names or even that they ever existed. Even if they are great experts. That shows how farcical it is when the Core devs are called "the" experts. And no /u/eragmus I'm not saying they aren't experts, too

 

[Zarathustra]

Oh disgust, disgust, disgust!

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3xu8kg/hey_core_did_you_realize_it/

 

[theZerg]

@ZB yes if you combine that process with a toxic atmosphere you really end up with only 2 classes of contributors:

1. people who already have clout in that particular field so can move into the project already in a position of authority

2. people who are looking to stuff their resume, or more charitably, learn software engineering.

And actually there's one more class, the one-off, or "drive-by contributor". This is like what I did with traffic shaping. I NEEDED it on my own network, so I wrote it and then thought "hey, maybe others would find it useful" so I proposed it to XT, take it or leave it.

The problem with this kind of contribution is that that contributor is not around to fix bugs and work on the less-cool stuff. Really a FOSS project can't survive with only drive-by contributors. Lots of the listed contributors in the Blockstream Core project fall into this category which is why they aren't ACKing or NACKing yesterday's statement -- they are not involved.

 

[cypherdoc]

@sickpig LOL at that in regards to BIP 100. Again they don't follow their rules whenever it suits them. Anyway the BUIP process is NOT the BIP process. I designed it to resolve a bunch of issues I perceived with the effective BIP process (I didn't even know that BIP001 laid it out formally).

In particular, you can certainly include an implementation, or include an offer to be the implementer. But you do not have to. Remember, Bitcoin Unlimited is about allowing people who are NOT engineers to have a voice... how does that happen if BUIPs need engineering before submission? Also, personally I never contributed to Core because I'm too busy to go off and implement X only to have it squashed by some core committer who hasn't had his morning coffee.

In fact, submitting a BUIP is how you get the Developer's attention. There's a maximum 2 week period after BUIP submission where the Developer will work (publicly) with the submitter to clarify points and suggest an implementation. The result of that will either be 1 modified BUIP for public discussion, or 2 BUIPs (the Developer's and the original) which then run against each other and then the winner of that runs against "no change".

well done @theZerg .

your approach is affirmation of what i've claimed for years; the idea comes before the coding.

i used to be terrified to get into, not only technical debates, but economic debates surrounding technical Bitcoin with devs out of fear i didn't understand something related to the code that uni-directionally affected the economics. afterall, these geeks (like Peter Todd) sounded so definitive and confident of the game theory and economic incentives involved. that is until around the end of 2011, after about 6 months worth of bullshitting received on very basic economic concepts, like how "bad" speculators were for Bitcoin. or how "bad" hodling was as a SOV b/c it slowed down monetary velocity. and after watching several altcoins crop up that popped up with one slight variation or another that attempted to advertise themselves by pointing to and "idea" that supposedly gave their coin some superiority to Bitcoin. like "low inflation" (Doge), faster confirms (LTC), enhanced privacy (Darkwhatever). these were all appeals to either better economics or some sort of social enhancement (privacy) that then were coded up to enforce those ideas. IOW, code simply enforces an idea. it's not the other way around which the core devs would like you to think. now i don't hesitate when i think core dev is doing something wrong from an incentive or game theory perspective b/c i believe my abilities and experiences in those areas are better than theirs in many, many cases.

long story short, @theZerg is doing it right. allow *anyone* to submit a BUIP who has a good idea. defend the merits of it on an economic or game theory standpoint and you just might get it added in. way to go.
[doublepost=1450800180][/doublepost]

The problem with this kind of contribution is that that contributor is not around to fix bugs and work on the less-cool stuff.

isn't this a problem for the home brew crypto that Maxwell has come up with for libsec if he's not going to be around to commit bug fixes?
[doublepost=1450800528,1450799911][/doublepost]

@ZB yes if you combine that process with a toxic atmosphere you really end up with only 2 classes of contributors:

1. people who already have clout in that particular field so can move into the project already in a position of authority

2. people who are looking to stuff their resume, or more charitably, learn software engineering.

And actually there's one more class, the one-off, or "drive-by contributor". This is like what I did with traffic shaping. I NEEDED it on my own network, so I wrote it and then thought "hey, maybe others would find it useful" so I proposed it to XT, take it or leave it.

The problem with this kind of contribution is that that contributor is not around to fix bugs and work on the less-cool stuff. Really a FOSS project can't survive with only drive-by contributors. Lots of the listed contributors in the Blockstream Core project fall into this category which is why they aren't ACKing or NACKing yesterday's statement -- they are not involved.

there's a 4th class.

guys like the Blockstream folk who need to have access to soft forking the code to benefit their for profit companies. but not just them. guys like Ben Davenport, who works for BitGo, who needs to be in a position to influence the code less directly or less strongly as he is only one, whereas Blockstream is 9.
[doublepost=1450800721][/doublepost]

The problem with XT is that it premises on the fact that 75% of the miners are on board. I think we should put out a different version (or maybe BU) that doesn't depend on miner majority but on economic majority.

Perhaps set a certain date in the future when all exchanges, merchants and miners who want to join will accept big blocks and stick to that date regardless.

you do realize that BU acts this way.

once @theZerg turns it on in a few weeks, it can be mined upon immediately.

 

[JVWVU]

Honestly this is probably where I would fall right now with this and more debate in the future possibly 2 or 4 years.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

The fact that Core could get very broad consensus on Segwit+4MB yet seem to have signed on to Greg's vague proposal is perverse. It's getting hard to deny that someone has an agenda. Good on Jeff, Luke, and dare I say Peter Todd for not falling in line like so many others did.

 

[humanitee]

What's the plan to get Chinese miners on board with any of this (unlimited, XT, anything NOT sanctified by holier-than-thou Core)?

Bitcoin looks dead to me at this juncture. I was pessimistic months ago and now I'm that tenfold. No offence meant to any of you working hard on this, but without the miners' support you are pissing into the wind. Bitcoin is now held hostage by Core and the great firewall of China. Sweet. Double plus good amounts of freedom.

There's too much wrong with Bitcoin now. Lack of anonymity, lack of transparency, pretty soon lack of low fees, increasing confirmation times (RBF), lack of decentralization in the form of individuals owning huge chunks of private hashing power (BitFury et. al). I honestly can't think of too much Bitcoin has going for it other than network effect.

Bitcoin is becoming the very thing I sought to escape. Congrats to everyone involved who drove this in to the ground.

Time to divest into alts (except Litecoin, fuck you Lee) and look at the competition. I'm watching the bull closely, when it falters I'm most likely 95% out of the game.

What is the plan for miners, really? Without them you guys are just an awesome echo chamber that I enjoy reading.

I also don't get why, when testing said BitcoinXT could handle around 8 MB blocks, we don't fork to at least 6 MB. This shit is a joke bitbrothers. I love you all for the record, this whole situation is just crazy.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

No offence meant to any of you working hard on this, but without the miners' support you are pissing into the wind. Bitcoin is now held hostage by Core and the great firewall of China. Sweet. Double plus good amounts of freedom.

Have you ever noticed how frequently the mining landscape changes in Bitcoin? Just because the majority of mining happens in China today, does not mean it will happen in China tomorrow.

 

[sickpig]

@Zangelbert Bingledack there's no +4MB in gmax's propsed roadmap

There's only SegWit. Period.

SegWit under average conditions can provide a "virtual" block size between 1.6 to 2 MB.

More to the point this gain could be achieved only if 100% of the network switch to the new fork as soon as it triggers, i.e. iif SegWit will be deployed via an hard-fork.

As we already known SegWit will probably be released through a soft-fork, hence you won't have the aforementioned gain for a very long time.

edit: you could have virtual 4MB block iif all included txs are 3-3 multisig. As we all known the probability that such a block would be appended to the blockchain is extremely low.

 

[humanitee]

Have you ever noticed how frequently the mining landscape changes in Bitcoin? Just because the majority of mining happens in China today, does not mean it will happen in China tomorrow.

Point taken but it's not a good one. There isn't support ANYWHERE for XT as far as miners hashing power is concerned.

Miners want a core solution for some reason. I swear they either:
1) Can't do basic math
2) Are shit at economics
3) Think Core is the end all, be all of Bitcoin
4) All the above

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Notice how they never answered the question about fraud proofs?

Until I see evidence that their proposal includes the necessary components to actually deploy those, I'm calling it a scam. They are advertising features they never intend to implement in order to push through the changes that enable them to profit at the expense of all other Bitcoin users.
[doublepost=1450804774][/doublepost]

Point taken but it's not a good one. There isn't support ANYWHERE for XT as far as miners hashing power is concerned.

I agree that nobody is publicly announcing such support.

 

[rocks]

Great point, I never considered that. This seems to explain a lot of the reason so few new major devs have joined Core in the past few years, and why the long tail of minor devs seem especially willing to go along with the establishment agenda

A lot of this seems to have started after the devs moved off of bitcointalk and onto the mailing list. The entire tone of the move always felt to me as a way to exclude others from participating.

I understand the stated reasons were to improve the signal to noise ratio, but the real effect seemed to be to separate core development from the broader community. Pretty quickly after that separation the two seemed to go off in a separate direction.

It was also when the people who consisted of "the core devs" seemed to become fixed and static. I've complained here about the lack of coinbase/bitpay/bitstamp/etc contribution to the code base, but the avenues to do so are very limited to them. And I agree that it feels that a newcomer who spends energy developing a solution will most likely face stiff resistance, which in open source means people won't bother. That is really the main outcome of Greg's nit picking on every proposal that didn't come from "core dev", people see that it is not worthwhile to contribute, so most don't, and the result is the same people maintain control.

Even if a new large block code base becomes the next standard, it needs to not follow the same path of walling all development the way core has.
[doublepost=1450805177][/doublepost]

The wallet providers are in as good as unanimous agreement:

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114530/bitcoin-wallet-software-providers-express-support-for-block-size-increase

That is good to see, a couple observations:

1) The wallet support for larger blocks probably covers more than 99% of all bitcoin users. If you assume there are 1 million bitcoin users in the world, and only 10K of them run full nodes from time to time, then even if everyone who runs a full node favor blockstream core you still have 99% who's preferred wallet will follow large blocks.

2) With the exception of GreenAddress there seems to be full consensus among wallet developers for larger blocks. This is the segment that is most knowledgeable about bitcoin, they write the software that interacts with the protocol after all. It really takes the thunder out of the supposed "experts" IMHO.
[doublepost=1450805531,1450804837][/doublepost]

Honestly this is probably where I would fall right now with this and more debate in the future possibly 2 or 4 years.

At this point I think the debate is over, either you are in favor of continuously scaling bitcoin up to the point the market will allow, or you want an artificial cap set at some level, whether it is 1MB or 100MB doesn't matter a cap is a cap.

Personally I think it is better to settle this now rather than wait longer till it becomes even harder to change things. The problem with the small increase approach is it kicks the can till tomorrow, but likely makes fixing the situation not possible.

 

[cypherdoc]

@rocks

yeah, i say settle the debate now with either 101 or BU. i can take the pain. it would be worth it for a long term solution and to get rid of Core dev.

i can attest to the change in dynamic when core dev moved to the mailing list and IRC. that's when i first got negative feelings towards Greg when he chased me off the channel for not being a dev. ridiculous really as i was trying to point out a game theory dynamic at the time which they didn't want to listen to.

 

[Aquent]

Maybe this space would benefit from having this post copied here too. It is a bit long, but the title itself is the tldr: Let us Focus on Building the Freedom Loving Future We All Want

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3xurxz/let_us_build_the_freedom_loving_future_we_all_want/

Following the latest proclamation by the usurpers of the social contract who, without principle nor legitimacy claim to hold authority over our will, it has become clear to all that what once could proudly be called core now stands as only a shell of its former self.

Despite what Sauron, Saruman, Gollum, Grima and all their orcs claim, with no regards to truth, the facts speak for themself.

The small blockers have censored all communication channels - from /r/bitcoin[1] [1] to bitcoin.org to #bitcoin irc - all of which are by any principled analysis outright gifts to the community as a whole by that genius Satoshi, thus belong to all in freedom.

No person of principle holds any legitimate right to engage in such vile and immoral outright censorship as well as blatant manipulation by hiding scores and arbitrary changing sorting to controversial, especially when our community is formed on the high principles of decentralisation and freedom and even more so when all these communication channels were given as a gift.

They have abused Satoshi's name without shame to try and appeal to some authority while at all times have refrained in any way to engage in rational discourse, to use analysis, to provide logics, to engage maths or science.

At all time they have appealed solely to emotion by dehumanising through baseless accusations of trolling, by raising the specter of NSA, kyc, thus terrify the manipulable into submission and once so terrified sell them centralised, non proof of work, non bitcoin and not secure, unproven, untested and non existent snake oil.

They have engaged in criminal acts of DDosing pools and nodes and I, unashamedly and polemically accuse Peter Todd and btcdrak of being the instigators of these direct attacks for no one else has a motive to do so and because:

"The SPV attack is a good idea! Lets do it, and lets do it anonymously."

http://pastebin.com/4BcycXUu[2][2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=335658.0[3][3]

They have publicly considered changing the open source license of bitcoin, taking out lawsuits, attacking XT nodes with such suggestions not by some junior dev, but el presidente:

"Maybe there should be a campaign to run "noXT" nodes... [m]aybe I should go run one and put my miners behind it. Or a pool offer it?

Maybe one could upgrade bitcoin SPV nodes to automatically recognise and ignore XT nodes... [o]r someone suggested bitcoin nodes could refuse connections from XT. (Or maybe teergrube them to increase their orphan rate)."

https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3hb63g/bip_suggestion_lock_the_blockchain_to_only/cu5v2u2[4][4]

Above all, they have shown complete disregard for the entire economy, for it's users, for Satoshi's ideas/suggestions and for bitcoin itself by engaging in unprincipled, unethical, illegitimate and at times even outright criminal acts.

That much has been made clear. We need not therefore any longer begg them, reason with them, try and engage or persuade them, for they have brought their intentions to light.

It is, therefore, far better for us to focus on building the freedom loving future we all signed up for. Bitcoin has a certain design which can be deducted from the statements of Satoshi, especially the statements he made when it was first published and he was defending his invention against pugnant criticisms by very smart men. Of importance, he stated bitcoin can scale to Visa levels, 0conf transactions can be pretty safe and there will be either no transactions or a lot of transactions. Diverging from his design outright breaks bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not meant to be tor. Tor is a fringe niche used by some tiny amount of people in the grand scheme of thing and if you go to Times Square I would be surprised if even one person has heard of it.

Zerocash is tor. Bitcoin is firefox. Agile, smart, quick, user friendly, privacy conscious, an all round good, wholesome, usable and convenient.

Bitcoin is not meant to be 100% decentralised. 1000 datacentres across jurisdictions, universities, businesses (think of it as it becoming a necessary component of business life like the internet or nowadays even skype), researchers, hobbyists, even governments is sufficiently decentralised for the goal of non government issued, non inflatable, money.

Bitcoin is not just gold. It's gold 2.0. It is money, it is gold, it is programmable record keeping, it is a million of things we can not even imagine just as no one could imagine google, facebook, youtube, skype, reddit.

Bitcoin is freedom. We alone offer it. And we have the backing of the entire economy and people:

"Bitcoin Wallet Software Providers Express Support for Block Size Increase:"

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114530/bitcoin-wallet-software-providers-express-support-for-block-size-increase[5][5]

"Chinese Bitcoin Miners Support Increasing Blockchain Limit:"

http://www.newsbtc.com/2015/06/17/chinese-bitcoin-miners-support-increasing-blockchain-limit/[6][6]

"7 Leading Bitcoin Companies Pledge Support for BIP101 and Bigger Blocks"

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/7-leading-bitcoin-companies-pledge-support-bip101-bigger-blocks-1440450931[7][7]

So let us work towards building the freedom loving future we all want. If you are a developer then contribute to XT, if you have the resources then run an XT node, if you are a miner then join an XT mining pool, if you are a researcher then provide evidence and analysis and if you are a contributor then educate others with analysis and facts.

There is nothing one can do against what is self evidently true for a decentralised bitcoin is an idea whose time has come.

 

[rocks]

i can attest to the change in dynamic when core dev moved to the mailing list and IRC. that's when i first got negative feelings towards Greg when he chased me off the channel for not being a dev. ridiculous really as i was trying to point out a game theory dynamic at the time which they didn't want to listen to.

I think a lot of smart people have had the same experience with Greg and those forums.

When leaders of an open source project do this the project always either gets forked or abandoned into irrelevancy.

Bitcoin is different from most open source projects in that there is a network effect that pulls people to stay on the current project, even if they disagree with it. There is a point though that the thread breaks and people either leave or fork, seems we are close.

 

[JVWVU]

Bitcoin looks dead to me at this juncture. I was pessimistic months ago and now I'm that tenfold. No offence meant to any of you working hard on this, but without the miners' support you are pissing into the wind. Bitcoin is now held hostage by Core and the great firewall of China. Sweet. Double plus good amounts of freedom.

There's too much wrong with Bitcoin now. Lack of anonymity, lack of transparency, pretty soon lack of low fees, increasing confirmation times (RBF), lack of decentralization in the form of individuals owning huge chunks of private hashing power (BitFury et. al). I honestly can't think of too much Bitcoin has going for it other than network effect.

A lot of this is personal choices right now too, I got a Coinbase Swift card, I use it and don't care as much about anonymity as most here. So I make a transfer pay the fees and then I get to buy coffee using bitcoins without clustering up the block with my transaction. I think this is the way you will see Americans use bitcoins in transactions through a 3rd party provider or Gyft cards.

The issue is for the unbanked and how they use bitcoins as a daily currency but the 1MB advocates like MP don't care about them because he is already rich and can afford dealing with a higher fee.

Monero appears to be the only option of what you want in a coin at this point.

 

[theZerg]

That is really the main outcome of Greg's nit picking on every proposal that didn't come from "core dev", people see that it is not worthwhile to contribute, so most don't, and the result is the same people maintain control.

Even if a new large block code base becomes the next standard, it needs to not follow the same path of walling all development the way core has.

Under the BU system, if you (the proposer) thinks that the Developer is nitpicking and stalling, you can (after a minimum time) bring the issue back to the members and they can vote to accept a BUIP+patch "as is".

The purpose of that is to limit the power of the Developer to act against the wishes of the constituency