Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[rocks]

Most of us who are here have our eyes wide open to the type of tactics being used by the blockstream crew, as many of us have been banned, attacked and kicked out of the main forums.

Many others who have not experienced this still seem to think that engagement and open discussion will be productive. It will be interesting to see how various people react to the attacks.

For example it only took 2 hours for Brian to have to come back out and "qualify" his XT statement on Twitter. It was also sad/interesting to see the attacks on him start.



Brian and other economic leaders of bitcoin will have to realize that bitcoin will only continue if they join together and take a leadership role on the direction for bitcoin. And that it will be ugly and contentious, but the only alternative is for their businesses and users to be slowly priced out.

 

[Erdogan]

Regarding the Fed interest rate hike: I prefer looking on the total debt metric, and it is not changed.

The moment of truth will come when bond holders see the risk in their loans. High yield is good, but yield on a bond moving to infinity while you hold it, is not so good.

 

[VeritasSapere]

My opinion is that the role of Bitcoin Core maintainers is judging whether consensus for a hard fork exists, and is technically necessary and safe. We don't need a hashpower vote to decide whether a hardfork is accepted or not, we need to be sure that full noded will accept it, and adopt it in time. A hashpower vote can still be used to be sure that miners _also_ agree.

In response to what Pieter Wuile said here. I think that the governance of Bitcoin should be based of multiple implementations and the ability to hard fork. So him saying that it is the role of Core to be the judge for what constitutes consensus is beyond ridiclous, as if consensus is even a valid conflict resolution strategy, which it is not. Ignoring the contradictions, this is still completely opposed to my conception of what Bitcoin governance should be, this is clear. At least Core is making their position somewhat more transparent, even if it is just them doubling down on their flawed theories and rhetoric.

 

[Norway]

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3yccw5/im_willing_to_sponsor_booting_up_1000/

 

[albin]

I'm really starting to appreciate that the "settlement layer" meme might actually be more fundamental a villain than the artificial scarcity meme.

If you follow the trajectory of the rhetoric, i.e. Trace Mayer "why do you hire Bitcoin?", the fetishization of "censorship resistance" as a service. Furthermore if you were a state actor trying to infiltrate Bitcoin, wouldn't your first move be to promote this narrative in order to paint a giant unwarranted bullseye on Bitcoin?

All of this is wrong. Censorship resistance is a real emergent thing that comes out of the operation of Bitcoin but it's not the point.

The point of Bitcoin is that it's a reboot of the entire banking paradigm, because human beings never had hard money before that was trivial to physically deliver in essentially any quantity.

The settlement layer paradigm is just trying to reinvent the trappings of the status quo under the auspices of artificially imbuing Bitcoin with gold-esque physical delivery encumbrances. There is no benefit from Bitcoin the settlement layer, we might as well just use some permissioned federated system of rapid bank settlement exchanging fiat/asset-denominated IOU's for underlying held in custody.

On-chain volume of transactions is exactly what makes Bitcoin worthwhile in the first place, because there is no instrument in history that has ever had these properties.

 

[theZerg]

@Roger_Murdock: You've got it exactly.

from my paper:

How short does the competing block need to be? It should be shorter in length than what remains to validate on the large block for each validating miner. If this is the case, then the validating miner will be able to finish validating the small block before the large block and therefore switch to mining its own fee-paying block faster.7

@Taek: Yes I posted a similar question a few weeks ago -- the tradeoff between users (transactions) and full nodes has yet to be formally specified. When is it OK to leave some full nodes behind because filling transaction demand is more valuable than these full nodes?

 

[VeritasSapere]

Your message was deemed inappropriate by one of the moderators. The argument that has been made to you before is that "tracking a big-block consensus" is not compatible with a low-bandwidth network. Your email does not contain an (even an attempt at a) refutation of this. The discussion has never been "whether a client can be modified to accept larger blocks into its local blockstore" (not sure why you brought this up). Generally, the moderators would prefer to not backtrack in discussions and would prefer forward progress rather than reiteration of your already-known disagreements."

@Peter R Essentially what kanzure is saying here is that you where censored because he disagrees with you. This is categorically wrong, I am sorry this happened to you, it does however reveal the weakness of their position.

It is very revealing that he is actually arguing against your paper, in this moderation letter, while not allowing it to actually be discussed in the developer mailing list like it should. If it where justified to censor this piece he could have simply just stated that it was disrespectful, spam, hostile or even not academically rigorous enough for the developer mailing list, he did not argue based on any of these points because that was not the case, this is one of the worst kinds of censorship. Where you are censored because the authority figure does not "agree" with you, while not actually qualifying their position.

When people feel it is necessary to censor all opposing points of view, it is often because their own theories can not stand the light of day. It seems like we are gaining more momentum now, which makes me very happy. In an environment like the internet where the free exchange of ideas and information exists, the truth will rise and there is nothing Core can do to stop this no matter how hard they might try. The original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto will reign supreme.

 

[Erdogan]

I'm really starting to appreciate that the "settlement layer" meme might actually be more fundamental a villain than the artificial scarcity meme.

If you follow the trajectory of the rhetoric, i.e. Trace Mayer "why do you hire Bitcoin?", the fetishization of "censorship resistance" as a service. Furthermore if you were a state actor trying to infiltrate Bitcoin, wouldn't your first move be to promote this narrative in order to paint a giant unwarranted bullseye on Bitcoin?

All of this is wrong. Censorship resistance is a real emergent thing that comes out of the operation of Bitcoin but it's not the point.

The point of Bitcoin is that it's a reboot of the entire banking paradigm, because human beings never had hard money before that was trivial to physically deliver in essentially any quantity.

The settlement layer paradigm is just trying to reinvent the trappings of the status quo under the auspices of artificially imbuing Bitcoin with gold-esque physical delivery encumbrances. There is no benefit from Bitcoin the settlement layer, we might as well just use some permissioned federated system of rapid bank settlement exchanging fiat/asset-denominated IOU's for underlying held in custody.

On-chain volume of transactions is exactly what makes Bitcoin worthwhile in the first place, because there is no instrument in history that has ever had these properties.

I am actually happy with the function of settlement layer, as a temporary fix / eabler of more distributed banking. As of now, small banks have to rely on large banks and central banks for international transfers, may be 10 banks are involved all in all. With bitcoin, a small bank (or any business who wants to enter) can do it with only the two businesses involved. And it makes possible an international money transfer business to operate in one country only.

Of course, when all fiats are gone, this will be superfluous.

 

[VeritasSapere]

I think it is important to realize that Bitcoin the currency and Bitcoin the settlement layer are not mutually exclusive, quite the opposite actually they reinforce each other in a synergistic fashion. Since Bitcoin the currency adds utility and therefore more value to Bitcoin. More value in turn increases the security which makes Bitcoin more suitable as a settlement layer. Core and some of their supporters want us to believe that we need to choose between these two options. This is a false dichotomy, Bitcoin can do many things simultaneously very well and it can mean different things to different people, Bitcoin is freedom.

 

[Peter R]

Luke-jr is claiming that users are in control and there is no censorship (there is just a problem with altcoiners). I wonder what his position on Bitcoin Unlimited is:

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Peter R

Since BU defaults to accepting 16MB blocks (and higher if 4 blocks deep), wouldn't that fork with respect to Core (in the event that someone mined a >1MB block and the BU node accepted it)?

 

[lunar]

Gavin

@theZerg

Interesting ideas from @Gavin Andresen there back in feb 2013. Such a legend.

Would something like this fit as a BUIP? Some sort of rejection of blocks on a time to verify mode . This might be a nice fine tuning feature for the node where you have max blocksize set large but some blocks are taking too long to verify?

Really just interested in your opinion of gavin's idea?

 

[Peter R]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

Right, I just changed what I wrote to "track consensus" instead. It will track Core as long as Core has > 50% hash power support. But it will track something else if Core loses support.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

/u/theymos (who is not a dev)

So why is he on the signatories list, Luke??
[doublepost=1451187836][/doublepost]@Peter R

If a miner were using BU right now, shouldn't they be setting their max accepted blocksize to 1MB? Otherwise they might get forked off for the reason I mentioned above (until a later time when miners actually are preparing to mine >1MB blocks).

 

[Peter R]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

No, there are two separate settings: the max size of the block you'll accept and the max size of the block you'll produce. BU defaults to producing blocks no larger than 1 MB.

Interestingly, what this means is that if another miner produced a > 1 MB block, the BU miners would begin to mine on top of it.

 

[rocks]

I'm really starting to appreciate that the "settlement layer" meme might actually be more fundamental a villain than the artificial scarcity meme.

If you follow the trajectory of the rhetoric, i.e. Trace Mayer "why do you hire Bitcoin?", the fetishization of "censorship resistance" as a service. Furthermore if you were a state actor trying to infiltrate Bitcoin, wouldn't your first move be to promote this narrative in order to paint a giant unwarranted bullseye on Bitcoin?

All of this is wrong. Censorship resistance is a real emergent thing that comes out of the operation of Bitcoin but it's not the point.

The point of Bitcoin is that it's a reboot of the entire banking paradigm, becausehuman beings never had hard money before that was trivial to physically deliver in essentially any quantity.

The settlement layer paradigm is just trying to reinvent the trappings of the status quo under the auspices of artificially imbuing Bitcoin with gold-esque physical delivery encumbrances. There is no benefit from Bitcoin the settlement layer, we might as well just use some permissioned federated system of rapid bank settlement exchanging fiat/asset-denominated IOU's for underlying held in custody.

On-chain volume of transactions is exactly what makes Bitcoin worthwhile in the first place, because there is no instrument in historythat has ever had these properties.

Gold throughout history was most commonly used directly and not as a settlement layer.

It used to be common knowledge to never except "paper gold", even if issued by a government, because eventually paper was always eventually priced at its true value (zero). This knowledge was so ingrained that FDR had to ban the possession of gold for 2-3 generations to break the public's distrust of paper.

Gold worked when used directly, but immediately started to fail after the public was forced to use it as a settlement layer. FDR defaulted on US debts after the gold ban in gold terms. They acknowledged that the economy owed 10x more gold than there existed in the country and itd debts were unpayable. Instead of defaulting honestly, they defaulted though devaluation.

So I largely agree, bitcoin as a settlement layer is a larger attack than the 21M cap.

Gold worked fine when used directly, even with 1-2% annual inflation due to mining. But gold failed once it became a settlement layer. Bitcoin too will fail as a settlement layer while it would function even with 1%ish inflation. Not that I want that, it just shows how much of an attack the settlement layer concept is.

 

[theZerg]

@theZerg

Interesting ideas from @Gavin Andresen there back in feb 2013. Such a legend.

Would something like this fit as a BUIP? Some sort of rejection of blocks on a time to verify mode . This might be a nice fine tuning feature for the node where you have max blocksize set large but some blocks are taking too long to verify?

Really just interested in your opinion of gavin's idea?

@lunarboy ZB posted that because Gavin's intuitive idea is what I independently derived and formally proved here: http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/1txn (search for "Effect on Block Size", it really gets into it in para 3 and 4). However, his constants are off -- ofc they might have been OK back then.

The ability to intuitively grasp the network dynamics and suggest the correct behaviour does Gavin tremendous credit. This somewhat "magical" ability to come to the correct conclusion is a very important leadership skill... Steve Jobs for example...
[doublepost=1451191661][/doublepost]@Zangelbert Bingledack The first few testnet blocks I mined were < 1MB on the > 1MB chain exactly because of the separation of these settings.

 

[Peter R]

This is from the comment section of the GitHub pull request to delist Coinbase from bitcoin.org. I can't tell if this is satire or serious:

 

[Justus Ranvier]

The settlement layer paradigm is just trying to reinvent the trappings of the status quo under the auspices of artificially imbuing Bitcoin with gold-esque physical delivery encumbrances. There is no benefit from Bitcoin the settlement layer, we might as well just use some permissioned federated system of rapid bank settlement exchanging fiat/asset-denominated IOU's for underlying held in custody.

On-chain volume of transactions is exactly what makes Bitcoin worthwhile in the first place, because there is no instrument in history that has ever had these properties.

This is exactly true.

Unfortunately, the settlement layer misconception has been metastasising for almost four years so it's not going to dislodge easily.

It didn't take much to encourage this fallacy because so many people came into Bitcoin with latecomer's remorse. They aren't invested in Bitcoin's success, so it doesn't take much to convince them that they still have a chance to become 2008 early adopter rich if only they can invent the "layer 2" solution.

And for that, they have to convince everybody that their layer 2 is essential, using any argument that gets results. If one gets debunked, they just move on and keep flinging more out in the hopes that one of them will stick.
[doublepost=1451195107][/doublepost]

I can't tell if this is satire or serious:

That account and one other appear to be trolling to deliberately stir up strife.

People posting under their real identities are staying things sufficiently outrageous on their own to disregard anything posted by zero day / dormant accounts.

 

[Peter R]