Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Ivanhoe]

Yes, he understands computers, but he doesn't understand economics and psychology.

 

[rocks]

@rocks - I don't necessarily disagree. Actually, I think we're saying the same thing from our respective knowledge-bases and experiences (which is a great way to confirm/check the general position we seem to share).

Wasn't disagreeing at all. Was just providing additional commentary on how I think Bitcoin aligns with today's financial tools. I think that is important because when people say zero-config is not secure they are really comparing apples to oranges, they are not suppose to be 100% secure, just as good as cash which also isn't 100% secure. Sorry if it came off disagreeing.

 

[cliff]

Nah, it didn't come off as disagreeing to me so much as subtly distinguishing - I wanted to clarify no disagreement for the readers (so, you're all good).

Related note - Double-Spending is absolutely critical with Bitcoin. Satoshi stated in the crytography mailing list that he had been working on bitcoin for a while running tests etc. I think he was more of a double-spending scholar than a digital cash guy (although, I'm not sure how you separate the two concepts in bitcoin - I don't think you can, and that's point) Anyway, I've been holding on to this conference paper abstract for over a year, anyone read it before: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=4268195 (note the date, a few months before the Satoshi paper). Actually, the papers at this conference all seem pretty interesting - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4268147. Anyway, Satoshi could very well be an author of that first paper or have attended that conference. Not trying to out him/her/them, only commenting that bitcoin is about double-spending in a big-way to buttress my earlier point.

Edit-I also book marked this PhD dissertation abstract a while ago - http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/1193/

 

[cypherdoc]

@cliff

it's laughable that for years we've advertised Bitcoin as having solved the double spending problem. and it was true, tx's are pushed and are indeed irreversible under the current regime. but along comes Peter Todd who decides he needs to fix the problem that he and his buddies have created, jacked mempools from the 1MB choke, by introducing double spending via RBF. yes, theoretically the first tx will be not be validated but what the hell happens with all this doubling of tx data now exacerbating the already jacked mempools? why, it makes it worse! and then if the payor does a third or fourth RBF to try and jam it thru? can it get this ridiculous?

 

[cliff]

@cypherdoc - I'm about as far from a coder (except for legal codes of course) or hard scientist as one can get and I totally understand and agree with what you describe. Its telling, Occam's razor and all.

 

[VeritasSapere]

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.

If we fork without the mining majority the possibility exists that we are forking without the economic majority as well. After January if increased momentum is not gained and BIP101 does not fork the network. I believe forking in the manner that you describe should be the preferred strategy. Even if this fork does not gain the support of the economic majority, they can always still move between blockchains as the advantageous of bigger blocks prove themselves on the market. While also solving the age old problem of tyranny of the majority.

This way we can all still have the Bitcoin that we want.

 

[lunar]

if commercial miners do decide to utilize waste heat, who wins in the long term, industrial miners or small, individual miners who do the same?

In this scenario small mining operations aren't mining for profit, they are heating their building and water at a discount. So unless a large farm can collect all waste heat and sell it efficiently they are behind the curve. I'm not saying this is impossible, but a significant downward pressure on mining profits.

 

[cliff]

Shower Thought: From Day 1 in 2008/9 until Nov 5, 2015, bitcoin was promoted approximately as follows: send money worldwide, cheap, anytime, easily and instantly. Since Nov 5, 2015, Bitcoin can only honestly be billed as 'providing an opportunity to win a chance at being able to send money sometime between never and whenever your fee becomes competitive.' Such elegance.

Screenshots of Bitcoin.org throughout the years are stunning RE: Satoshi's vision (if that's something that matters to you):

• March 2009 - https://web.archive.org/web/20090131115053/http://bitcoin.org/ (Fee market only after mining complete)

• July 22, 2010 - https://web.archive.org/web/20100722094110/http://www.bitcoin.org/ ("Bitcoin transactions are practically free, whereas credit cards and online payment systems typically cost 1-5% per transaction plus various other merchant fees up to hundreds of dollars").

• Nov 1, 2011 - https://web.archive.org/web/20111101023250/http://bitcoin.org/
  • "Instant"
  • Linked Page 1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20111102212805/http://www.weusecoins.com/ ("very low fees")
  • Linked Page 2 - https://web.archive.org/web/20111013072829/https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees (Transaction fees voluntary)

• Nov 1, 2013 - https://web.archive.org/web/20131115221550/http://bitcoin.org/en/
  • "Instant"
  • "Worldwide Payments"
  • "Zero or low processing fees"

• Nov 1, 2014 - https://web.archive.org/web/20141031103011/https://bitcoin.org/ (same as 2013)

• Nov 5, 2015 - https://web.archive.org/web/20151105113540/https://bitcoin.org/en/
  • "Fast"
  • "Low Processing Fees"
  • Linked Page- https://web.archive.org/web/20150905080537/https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-for-individuals
    • "Sending bitcoins across borders is as easy as sending them across the street. There are no banks to make you wait three business days, no extra fees for making an international transfer, and no special limitations on the minimum or maximum amount you can send." (hello, mixed-messages)
    • "There is no fee to receive bitcoins, and many wallets let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. Most wallets have reasonable default fees, and higher fees can encourage faster confirmation of your transactions. Fees are unrelated to the amount transferred, so it's possible to send 100,000 bitcoins for the same fee it costs to send 1 bitcoin." (higher fees, what?)

 

[Justus Ranvier]

This segregated witness proposal is turning into a complete train wreck. What else have they overlooked?

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/012103.html

The way you'd know that the Blockstream Core developers were approaching this problem in a responsible way is if they started with a robust fraud proof system first before taking on anything else.

It would be very similar to the concept of test-driven development. Build a system of making easily-verifiable proofs that a block is invalid, and all the infrastructure that's needed to propagate the proofs. Require blocks to include the information that's needed for the proofs to operate.

Heavily test that system for 6-12 months to make sure all the corner cases have been exercised.

Then, after we're absolutely sure we have the ability for light clients to reject invalid blocks based on well-documented and well-understood proofs, maybe then it would be time to do something like separate out the cryptographic witnesses from the transaction data to produce storage and malleability gains.

Throwing that into the protocol right away as a last minute faux scalability improvement is unimaginably reckless.

 

[Windowly]

Now the Bitcoin Core Capacity Increases FAQ are up.

 

[throwaway]

Congrats, theZerg and everyone else for the new BU binaries!
Can we get hashes/signatures for the files?

 

[theZerg]

Bitcoin Unlimited is released! Thanks to all who helped and provided inspiration!

@awemany and I (@theZerg) have independently built the source code and verified that the output is the same. You can see our Bitcoin-client signatures and file hashes if you click on the fingerprint.

http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/software

If anyone wants to encourage this, feel free to donate at the same address (1zerg12nRXZ41Pw4tfCTqgtdiJx6D1We3). These donations will pay for the hosting and an obsolete miner (its 65 Ghash) I bought so I could test mining and get some testnet coins without begging.

But more important than donations: RUN A BITCOIN UNLIMITED NODE! Do it NOW! We need to show core how their strategy is not working.

You CAN run it on your home PC/network, use the traffic shaping in the unlimited options dialog box to dial back the bandwidth used during the day...
[doublepost=1450837281][/doublepost]@throwaway lol, wow that was fast! Click the fingerprint!

 

[Melbustus]

This segregated witness proposal is turning into a complete train wreck. What else have they overlooked?

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/012103.html

The way you'd know that the Blockstream Core developers were approaching this problem in a responsible way is if they started with a robust fraud proof system first before taking on anything else.

It would be very similar to the concept of test-driven development. Build a system of making easily-verifiable proofs that a block is invalid, and all the infrastructure that's needed to propagate the proofs. Require blocks to include the information that's needed for the proofs to operate.

Heavily test that system for 6-12 months to make sure all the corner cases have been exercised.

Then, after we're absolutely sure we have the ability for light clients to reject invalid blocks based on well-documented and well-understood proofs, maybe then it would be time to do something like separate out the cryptographic witnesses from the transaction data to produce storage and malleability gains.

Throwing that into the protocol right away as a last minute faux scalability improvement is unimaginably reckless.

Spot on. It's downright infuriating that a fundamental change to the blockchain data-structure is being put forth as the safe and prudent "solution" to scaling, versus changing *a single constant*, soft-fork or not.

 

[sickpig]

This is priceless in terms of intentional misinformation:

Some ideas are easy to explain but hard to execute. Other ideas are easy to execute but hard to explain. Segregated witness (segwit) seems to be the latter.

one last thing on this: have you noticed how they've carefully chosen words to use in the FAQ page? You can find the first example in the FAQ title: i.e. "Capacity" rather than "Scalability.

In addition to being #bitcoin-wizards they sure are also linguistic-wizards

 

[awemany]

@cypherdoc

You like to describe the Blockstreamers as Bitcoin Bears, here's another one, from maaku:

Yes, like precious metals. The history of precious metal economies is pretty bad -- decades-long recessions and wars triggered by fluctuations in the commodity markets. Deflationary currency is not a good thing, and bitcoiners will eventually realize this.

(Note I work on Bitcoin Core and co-founded Blockstream, a prominant bitcoin company. The value of Bitcoin is not the currency, but rather what censorship-resistant, distributed global consensus gives us.)

So Blockstream being ridiculous/dangerous is starting to become widely known, part of the answer by CyberDildonics:

So what you are talking about is a problem with certain systems, not with money that doesn't lose value. Then again it doesn't come as a surprise that a co founder of a company so misguided and desperate doesn't really understand systems, accountability, or even bitcoin/cryptocurrencies.

That is like saying 'the value of the discrete cosine transform isn't JPEG but what it lossy compression gives us'. They are separate things, and denying the impact of one is a simple, easy, and wrong answer.

EDIT: Oh and maaku is mentioning his Altcoin, too:

Or Freicoin, which I co-authored with another Blockstream founder. But neither has the network buy-in and security of Bitcoin.

 

[freetrader]

Did they change the policy in r/bitcoin? [...] That policy was an extremely effective disinformation/confusion tactic.

They wouldn't be changing it if it was.

It was obvious to anyone that public opinion was being manipulated on /r/bitcoin to a severe extent.

Apparently Theymos and his cronies couldn't figure out a more effective way than "Controversial" of sorting threads according to their own desires.

A mass exodus of active accounts to other subreddits and uncensored forums occurred without them being able to stop it.

And the censorship and vested interested links point straight back at Core and Blockstream.

It doesn't look good at all from a PR point of view, and no doubt their masters have now taken the advice of someone more skilled at manipulation who has berated them for their lack of subtlety.

Perhaps this will result in Theymos "taking a break for personal reasons" too. Let's hope so.

 

[sickpig]

Bitcoin Unlimited is released! Thanks to all who helped and provided inspiration!

@awemany and I (@theZerg) have independently built the source code and verified that the output is the same. You can see our Bitcoin-client signatures and file hashes if you click on the fingerprint.

http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/software

fwiw I've also built and signed BU binaries. (edit: this is the btc pub key I've used 1LwvkQTWmotqTosgBcK8kFPCKzW2BPiE1G)

@theZerg don't you think it could be worthy to publish binaries sha256sum on the download page?

 

[awemany]

@sickpig: Yes, and you have the windows builds already, they're still brewing for me...

 

[BldSwtTrs]

@cypherdoc

You like to describe the Blockstreamers as Bitcoin Bears, here's another one, from maaku:


So Blockstream being ridiculous/dangerous is starting to become widely known, part of the answer by CyberDildonics:


EDIT: Oh and maaku is mentioning his Altcoin, too:

I am shocked to learn that the guys behind freicoin work at Blockstream.

What's funny is that one of them thinks he is qualified to give economics lessons to bitcoiners. He is so deluded about his understanding of economics (and probably about everything concerning himself) that he thinks if his altcoin failed it's only because of a lack of "network buy-in and security".

It's sad to see that such guys have become powerful regarding Bitcoin. They failed with their crappy altcoins so now they are trying to make Bitcoin an altcoin. Blockstream is a fucking Trojan horse.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

http://konradsgraf.com/blog1/2015/6/20/preview-the-market-for-bitcoin-transaction-inclusion-and-the.html