Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[kyuupichan]

@cypherdoc why can't I reply to your post? Because it's the most recent?

Anyway it doesn't say 95% anywhere. And I'd be willing to bet they know it's a high bar, probably too high, and so will weasel-word their way to something lower. Let's not forget they criticized the XT choice of 75% for a hard fork.

This soft fork stuff is getting over-the-top; it's only a matter of time until it's exploited.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@all

Reality check: Remember that no matter how bad things get with Core, now - unlike March 12, 2013 - it just takes one mishap at Core caused by their new machinations for users and miners to jump away to XT/BU/btcd waiting in the wings. From then on, once the bleeding has started, the precedent will be set and not even theymos will be able to censor the fact of multiple implementations. The dialog will be had, front and center, and many issues will be corrected in great sweeping swaths.

The fact that we've already come so far with dev and forum decentralization and general awareness *without* any mishap even occurring yet goes to show how fragile Core's grip really is.

You ain't see nothing yet.

 

[sickpig]

@all I would like to underline two things I think are extremely important:

SegWit ~= increasing block size to 1.3MB via hardfork in 1 year from now.

SoftFork = revoke right to vote to actors belonging to the Bitcoin network (modulo miners)

 

[cypherdoc]

@sickpig

i don't think you said that right:

softwork=a revocation of the right for full nodes to not upgrade or express their opinion due to a disagreement with a core dev code change that changes the dynamics of Bitcoin.

 

[sickpig]

@cypherdoc you get precisely what I meant, though

(sorry but as you might have guessed I'm not a native English speaker.)

 

[cypherdoc]

@sickpig

yeah, sorry, i'm just in a bad mood.

 

[Melbustus]

@cypherdoc - Yes....this blocksize/scaling/blockstream/core-dev nonsense is incredibly frustrating. I would be more bullish on bitcoin now than at almost any other time in the past 4.5years, if it weren't for this.

 

[cypherdoc]

well, here's one good thing from maaku. mining is going to decentralize whether the GFW opens up or not:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10776016

 

[luigi1111]

Fucking Blockstream and Mark don't understand Bitcoin's killer app; its fixed supply..

I don't really agree, though I think it's pretty fair to say that's one of the main things that attracted investors/speculators and allowed the market cap to get this high.

For me personally, knowing the supply *schedule* is fixed in advance (and not subject to the whims of "crypto central bankers" is more important than having a strictly capped total amount. It's all in the numbers: I wouldn't want to hold a crypto that massively exponentially increases supply for example, because it'd almost certainly be a horrible SOV, but I'd have no problem with a crypto that stopped reducing the emission rate at some point (in BTC equivalence, let's say it'd stop reducing/halving at 0.78125 reward or something).

BTC of course was *not* set up this way, so the idea of changing it to something like that is a form "crypto central banking" in action.

Also note that the economic majority can do pretty much whatever it wants; the incentive to not change the emission seems rather high though.

Edit: agree with ZB's reply. This choice if made by the economic majority is more like "decentralized central banking". Or something.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Someone tell me I'm crazy, or not:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/easy-resolution-to-the-debate-using-spinoffs.649/

I felt like if this idea could work all these debates would be resolved as Core and XT would basically become wallet software, like Mycellium. It requires an apparently counterintuitive understanding of Bitcoin as a ledger, and it's a huge paradigm shift, so I've tried to introduce it gently.

 

[rocks]

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.

And those are just some of the technical problems. The soft-fork deployment path they've chosen has even worse non-technical problems.

Just imagine the situation where some users and merchants have upgraded to send and receive SW transactions, but other users and merchants have not.

Now imagine a customer who uses SW entering a store and paying a Point-of-Sale terminal that does not use SW. What happens then? Has the customer now made a permanent payment to a merchant who can not receive or verify the payment? Which is what will most likely happen. The other scenario is the two are incompatible and the customer and merchant find they can either not transact because they are using different versions of Bitcoin or the customer has to pay a higher fee than usual to make a non-SW transaction.

This is ugly, it will break all perceptions Bitcoin has of being fast and easy to use.

And it all comes down to the false believe the blockstream devs have that Bitcoin is the core client, which is wrong. Bitcoin is the entire ecosystem of software, systems and users.

The other big worry this brings up is I think it demonstrates very well that the core devs maybe don't test and consider all the angles they should for major changes. When you consider the points I raised before on how careful changes to the encryption functions need to be and combine that how sloppy their thinking is here, it makes me worried.

 

[cypherdoc]

I don't really agree, though I think it's pretty fair to say that's one of the main things that attracted investors/speculators and allowed the market cap to get this high.

For me personally, knowing the supply *schedule* is fixed in advance (and not subject to the whims of "crypto central bankers" is more important than having a strictly capped total amount. It's all in the numbers: I wouldn't want to hold a crypto that massively exponentially increases supply for example, because it'd almost certainly be a horrible SOV, but I'd have no problem with a crypto that stopped reducing the emission rate at some point (in BTC equivalence, let's say it'd stop reducing/halving at 0.78125 reward or something).

BTC of course was *not* set up this way, so the idea of changing it to something like that is a form "crypto central banking" in action.

Also note that the economic majority can do pretty much whatever it wants; the incentive to not change the emission seems rather high though.

the fixed supply schedule is meant to resonate with the gold bugs; which it does very well. i should know. i was big one. that's b/c it was real money for thousands of years. so in my view, it's not *only* about predictability. i'd posit that instead of an asymptotic supply curve like Bitcoin, a linear issuance curve would not be as successful. and that's b/c of a principle i was trying to get across the other day. initial movers or early adopteers need to have the dream of huge, unlimited growth potential in order to make the conceptual and actionable leap to a new, revolutionary, *unbacked*, apolitical form of money that continually runs the risk of regulation/attack by gvts worldwide. this whole potential to convert to a new world reserve monetary system based on freedom is extremely compellling, yet risky, given the problems in the corrupt fiat world of finance and it's propensity to crush any opposition. Bitcoin appeals to the greed of the current financial elite, the poor, and everyone in between. b/c we have a problem that is becoming more apparent the larger the deficits get.

there has to be enormous incentive to embark on the Bitcoin journey.

 

[Peter R]

@cliff made a great post yesterday about the shift in promoting bitcoin as 'fast and free p2p payments' into the Blockstream settlement-layer nonsense we have today. I posted a link in North Korea to see if it could get some love:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3xzalw/a_history_of_quotes_showing_the_shift_from_fast/

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@luigi1111

Yeah that is one of those "third rail" issues where people have to have a very deep understanding indeed before they can see the truth, and until then they will find it horrifying. Because of that it's almost not worth bringing up unless you can do so in a context where you have a lot of ability to communicate subtle concepts clearly, as well as enough time and attention from the audience to work through all the misunderstandings.

This reddit post is largely about that very thing. Key section:

It is neither by the power of consensus, nor by the authority of Satoshi nor the sagacity and idealism of some incorruptible Core devs, that the 21M coin limit is preserved. It is by the wisdom and basic conservatism of the market itself, dead set on maximizing the value of the ledger as an investment vehicle.

Note: By "basic conservatism" I mean that the market is conservative when conservatism is value-enhancing, but is perfectly capable of supporting a change if that change is value-enhancing.

If it seems scary that Bitcoin is controlled finally by the profit motive of the swarm, consider that you already knew this to be so, in the case of a 51% attack. In addressing this, Satoshi mentioned that miners "ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules." The market and incentives are the fabric that holds Bitcoin together. Bitcoin is a creature of the market, with its will expressed through forking. The constancy Bitcoin shows isn't due to the constancy of a particular dev team (and certainly not due to there being one monolithic "reference" implementation), but due to the fact that the market likes basic constancy. A lot. Forking is therefore not something to be feared, but to be embraced. Any messiness it entails should be smoothed through practice and mastery rather than through skittish avoidance.

Consider this next time you hear someone make the claim that "raising the 1MB blocksize limit would be the same as raising the 21M coin limit." Though this canard has mostly died by now, the fundamental misconception lives on in almost every argument from the small block side of the debate. The misconception that it is somehow the governance structure and wisdom of Core dev that reins in the market, ensuring it doesn't do something foolish. This is backwards. It is rather the market that ensures Core dev cannot get away with anything foolish, and that if they try they will be demoted from "reference" implementation status to just another variant.

Suppress investor value with the conceited notion that you know better than the market, and your power over Bitcoin will be shown to be illusory. If the market likes bigger blocks, the market will get bigger blocks, whether by Core capitulation or by forking away from Core. The market won't then move on to destroy the 21M coin limit, because the market isn't foolish. Markets and the profit motive work. If you think they don't, you should be worrying about a 51% attack instead.

Not mentioned there, because of the can of worms it opens would be distracting in an already long post, is that it is perfectly possible that the market changes its mind, under now unforeseen extenuating circumstances (like Bitcoin is otherwise broken), and decides a small amount of continuing inflation is more value-additive than not. It would never choose a large, central-banking level of inflation because that would be value-subtractive.

TL;DR: Changing the 21M coin limit is not "crypto central banking" if it is done through a decentralized market process. It's just that the market is highly unlikely to do that except in the most extreme cases, and the amount of inflation would be tiny. The market's preference for hard money is what ensures Bitcoin remains hard money, not the 21M limit being "set in stone."

Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to convince people to trust "setting in stone" than to trust the market (even though they do this with the 51% attack anyway, as well as more fundamental things like whether they will have access to food next week...).

 

[lunar]

r/bitcoin officially wrecked ( keeping it old skool )

notice anything different about the stats between 90 and 30 day average? ;-)
only 271 subs on the whole of reddit performed so poorly yesterday. Better start registering sockpuppets theymos your game is up.

 

[cypherdoc]

12 up guys. keep it rolling:

https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=bitcoinunlimited

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@lunarboy

But the last 90 days includes the price ramp (most new users join during the price ramps), whereas the past 30 days doesn't [EDIT: actually it partly does, so maybe nevermind]. Still, it's true /r/Bitcoin is going down, because the other subs are way up.

 

[cypherdoc]

[doublepost=1450892614,1450891891][/doublepost]hey lookie here. the bear market can't handle the 1-2 punch of @Peter R & @theZerg:

 

[cliff]

@cliff made a great post yesterday about the shift in promoting bitcoin as 'fast and free p2p payments' into the Blockstream settlement-layer nonsense we have today. I posted a link in North Korea to see if it could get some love:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3xzalw/a_history_of_quotes_showing_the_shift_from_fast/

Is there a way to see the moderated comments on Reddit?

 

[awemany]

Regarding the 95%: I was under the impression that this is an agreed upon general threshold for softforks. I can't find anything about that right now, so maybe I am wrong on that.


However, there were other, less drastic softforks with 95% activation threshold.

So if they do less than 95% for SW, they'd have to explain that very well.