Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

Thank you @VeritasSapere & @Zarathustra for yeoman's work in that despicable thread. Until my encumbrance with this HF clawback is complete, there isn't much I can do in assisting with those types of debates. It's like fighting with one hand tied behind your back. One day the truth will come out in that affair.

Thanks again for your efforts.

 

[cypherdoc]

The #rekt thread reminds me of the old gold thread in reverse. In fact, iCE originated the term there. Many of us recall the highly contentious nature of that debate and the attention it brought to the issue of XT and personal freedoms. brgtroll444 was personally responsible for a 300 page ramp starting October 2014 when he showed his ugly face following release of the SC WP. I still think he's associated with Blockstream in some way. All of us remember the half dozen or so trolls who pounded the Core manifesto. But it was balanced. At least until we started talking about BU that is. Then theymos and his henchmen had to intervene and shut it down as page views skyrocketed to 7000 per day. In contrast, I never felt a need to shut it down myself.

 

[cypherdoc]

Carmen Reinhart Warns "Serious Sovereign Debt Defaults" Are Looming

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-01/carmen-reinhart-warns-serious-sovereign-debt-defaults-are-looming

 

[Peter R]

I think this comment from /r/bitcoin moderator /u/bashco reveals some of the insidious effects of censorship. The good people leave and the people who remain are those who feed off the censorship, viewing it as a legitimate tool to silence those with whom they disagree.

 

[Erdogan]

Deflation spices from Caixin:

China Railway Corporation: Loans exceed the five last years of investments, increases by 10% in a year, sales going down:

http://english.caixin.com/2015-12-31/100895042.html

Shipbuilder bancruptcy. Orders for bulk carriers in the industry down 90% year on year, some remaining orders taken yield little to no profit.

http://english.caixin.com/2015-12-31/100895039.html

 

[Roger_Murdock]

The rules are defined by the users in the form of which blocks/chains they accept as valid. Miners have to operate within those rules, or no one accepts the blocks they produce. Miners are completely constrained by what rules users decide to accept as valid rules.

For example, even if 90% of miners started to issue blocks with 50BTC coinbase rewards, they still could not change Bitcoin's reward schedule simply because users would reject those blocks, no matter how long of a chain the miners produce. A 51% attack can ONLY change transaction ordering, it can not change anything else.

If users tomorrow decided to only accept BIP101 blocks, then miners have zero say over that decision. Even if 90% of the hash power stayed with non-BIP101 blocks it wouldn't matter, the users would follow the shorter chain produced by the 10% supporting miners because the other blocks would be rejected as invalid.

I was just thinking about this issue of who's in control of Bitcoin -- the "economic majority" or the "mining majority." Now I think it's ultimately the former, but that doesn't mean that a mining majority can't exert tremendous influence. Imagine that there's a hard fork of Bitcoin that adds feature X and that the economic majority values a Bitcoin network with feature X more than a Bitcoin network without feature X. That doesn't mean that the fork with X would win out over the no-X chain if most of the hash power didn't quickly go along. Why? Because what almost everyone values infinitely more than any one individual feature is the network effect. And when you're conducting "fork arbitrage" and attempting to guess which fork will win (i.e., what everyone else will value more in the future), the fork with the most hash power behind it is a very strong Schelling point for the market to converge on -- even if that's the fork that doesn't include the desired feature. (Note that the majority hash power / no-X fork obviously still retains the latent ability to add feature X at some point in the future, which is something the market can price in.)

On the other hand, if the mining majority attempted to get behind a fork that fundamentally destroyed some aspect of Bitcoin's value proposition (e.g., changing the reward schedule), the market would not simply go along and would instead sharply discount the fork with the change. That discounting would tend to drive economically rational miners back to mining the version of Bitcoin the market valued.

So, in short, while it's true that "miners will tend to follow the market," it's also true that "the market will tend to follow miners" (at least to a point).

 

[Zarathustra]

How come nobody ever asks brg444 any of these questions?

• Who are you?
• How long have you been involved in Bitcoin?
• Why do you think an account registered in 2014 can get away with making shill accusations against people who've been involved since 2010 or earlier?

I never asked him those questions. I highlighted those facts that he is just a late adopter who is fulltime working for the stream blockers.

 

[albin]

@Peter R

I think this kind of chilling effect is inherent to the censorship regime, because they're incrementally inching toward branding everything that isn't shameless Core dev fanboyism as trolling. Apparently being cheeky and playful about expressing the most civil point of view possible (i.e. "agreeing to disagree") encroaches on that incessantly growing definition... and not even having the balls to outright censor the post, but mere snarkiness and leaving the post up as some kind of example.

I've been dinged twice now with immediate perma-bans which I mod messaged in response to and both were overturned. Both notifications I received from modmail were riddled with profanity, and the second contained incredible trolling allegations and my response was met with the most insane multiparagraph rant from the trollmod making personal accusations against my character on the basis of complete hallucination.

One was merely crossposting as "np" Adam Back's outstanding reddit comment blaming the blocksize debate for stalling Blockstream projects, with the most neutral possible headline in /r/bitcoinxt, in no way soliciting vote manipulation of any kind (this way a monumentally significant statement made by Back of interest to folks no matter what their beliefs). The second time was criticizing the stickied scaling thread by posting a link to an imgur photo of a segregation-south era drinking fountain, which genuinely reflects what I believe about the situation. In the second case, I figured meta discussion like that was legitimate because the trollmod himself brought it up.

In both cases I considered just evading the situation, because if you're a generally decent person getting dinged like that, you get kind of a sick feeling in your stomach that maybe this whole thing isn't for you anymore. I think that's the point of this regime: if some mentally unstable random internet weirdo can jump in and summarily punish you for nothing on no grounds whatsoever, constructive posters tend to just stop.

 

[Fatman3002]

This forum is really developing quite well. Congratulations and A Happy New Year!

 

[Roger_Murdock]

This post makes a great point.

"It's human psychology. XT is critiqued because it provides specific numbers and schedules for people to grab onto. BU doesn't provide that distraction."

XT, BIP 101, 2-4-8, and other increase-speed-based proposals cause too many people to miss the point. The conversation inevitably devolves into micromanagement over something that should be decentralized.

BU doesn't provide those numbers, so the conversation is healthier. I don't hear people saying things like, "BU is too aggressive".

The anti-Core movement would be more successful if we focused on broader topics like "freedom", "decentralization", and less on alternative ways to micro-manage things.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that it's going to be REALLY difficult to attack Bitcoin Unlimited (or a BU-like approach) in a convincing manner. Seriously, how does that conversation go?

BU Critic: "Big blocks are dangerous because they promote mining centralization as a result of the self-propagation advantage of..."

BU Supporter: "Whoa, whoah, whoah. BU isn't a 'big block' proposal. Nor is it a 'small block' proposal. It's not a block size proposal at all. It's simply a tool for letting the market flexibly decide the appropriate size of blocks in a decentralized fashion. In fact, there's no reason BU couldn't be used to enforce a smaller block size limit than the one suggested by Core."

BU Critic: "Ok, but we can't just allow miners and nodes to decide for themselves what size blocks they'll mine / accept! That's madness."

BU Supporter: "What do you mean 'allow'? There's no way to stop them. Bitcoin has always been defined by the code that people choose to run and the version of the ledger that people choose to value. All BU does is remind us who was really in control of Bitcoin all along (i.e., the market) by removing an unsustainable 'inconvenience barrier' that artificially strengthened the Schelling point defined by Core's recommendations."

BU Critic: "But hard forks are dangerous! BU might break consensus!"

BU Supporter: "There are overwhelming game-theoretic incentives favoring uniformity. The network WILL converge on a single version of the ledger as an emergent block size limit is discovered and enforced."

BU Critic: "But the Core devs are like, super smart. We all just need to trust that they know what's best when it comes to the block size limit."

BU Supporter: "So, in a system designed to be trustless and decentralized, we're supposed to blindly trust the decisions of a centralized entity?"

BU Critic: "Um... yes?"

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Peter R

I've neglected mentioning this because of the potential for self-deception and self-congratulation (and just didn't want to jinx it), but the theymos-controlled forum censorship has served as a wonderful filter. The resulting subreddits are quite a bit more distilled with a lower SNR, while this forum here is concentrated nitro-glycerin. The unthinking and the authoritarians are conveniently penned in in Bubble Boy land. This is also a fruit of censorship and a miracle of antifragility.

The situation seems more bullish than ever.

 

[Inca]

@Roger_Murdock

I was just thinking about this issue of who's in control of Bitcoin -- the "economic majority" or the "mining majority." Now I think it's ultimately the former, but that doesn't mean that a mining majority can't exert tremendous influence. Imagine that there's a hard fork of Bitcoin that adds feature X and that the economic majority values a Bitcoin network with feature X more than a Bitcoin network without feature X. That doesn't mean that the fork with X would win out over the no-X chain if most of the hash power didn't quickly go along. Why? Because what almost everyone values infinitely more than any one individual feature is the network effect. And when you're conducting "fork arbitrage" and attempting to guess which fork will win (i.e., what everyone else will value more in the future), the fork with the most hash power behind it is a very strong Schelling point for the market to converge on -- even if that's the fork that doesn't include the desired feature. (Note that the majority hash power / no-X fork obviously still retains the latent ability to add feature X at some point in the future, which is something the market can price in.)

On the other hand, if the mining majority attempted to get behind a fork that fundamentally destroyed some aspect of Bitcoin's value proposition (e.g., changing the reward schedule), the market would not simply go along and would instead sharply discount the fork with the change. That discounting would tend to drive economically rational miners back to mining the version of Bitcoin the market valued.

So, in short, while it's true that "miners will tend to follow the market," it's also true that "the market will tend to follow miners" (at least to a point).

You rightly identify that ultimately the economic majority decide absolute control of bitcoin. But the mechanism is in fact what you later alluded to - bitcoin will be sold by investors hurting the exchange value if the network is harmed.

A second point which is easy to forget because fiat:bitcoin exchange occurs above the protocol is that companies which interface bitcoin with fiat or exchange for fiat such as wallets, payment processors or bitcoin exchanges are mightily important in deciding the outcome of a fork.

Let us say that a fork triggers but then hypothetically 51% of the network hashing power reverts to support a fork to stay at 1mb with Core and 49% of the network hashing power moves to 101 or BU with mined blocks > 1mb persistently but the lesser fork is supported by the economic majority (who give it exchange value) and is then vocally collectively supported by payment processors/exchanges then actually the lesser fork 'is bitcoin' for all intents and purposes.

Hashing power would be incentivised to move back to that chain no matter the length of the chain - purely to be able to sell their mined coins in the future.

What I am saying is that bitcoin:fiat interfaces are a supply line of fiat to miners without which they go bankrupt. If this knowledge is public prior to a fork then this gives huge advantage to the >1mb chain even if the fork starts off being extremely close in terms of hash power and node count which is why Core will do anything, even censor discussion of other clients entirely to prevent this fork from occurring.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Hei, more than 100 BU nodes. Cool thing

If people get what Roger_Murdock outlined and if some prominent developer / some well-known company gets on board it will be unstoppable

Very great work from all of you who spend their time to make this running. Thank you.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I guess the takeaway is that even though investors have a kind of ultimate power, all the other parties - devs, miners, nodes, exchanges, merchants, pundits, forum operators - all have a measure of short-term power that can throw a monkey wrench into the timing of strategic moves. However, unlike investors, the other parties' power fades with use. The more they attempt to use any ephemeral power they have due to inertia and the nascency of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the more they get decentralized.

 

[Aquent]

Hei, more than 100 BU nodes. Cool thing

That's some great milestone to reach without even a news article or company publicising BU. Now off to 1000.

 

[79b79aa8]

Are there any plans for an OSX distro of BU?

 

[cypherdoc]

@Peter R

I've neglected mentioning this because of the potential for self-deception and self-congratulation (and just didn't want to jinx it), but the theymos-controlled forum censorship has served as a wonderful filter. The resulting subreddits are quite a bit more distilled with a lower SNR, while this forum here is concentrated nitro-glycerin. The unthinking and the authoritarians are conveniently penned in in Bubble Boy land. This is also a fruit of censorship and a miracle of antifragility.

The situation seems more bullish than ever.

I agree and it's truly remarkable, isn't it? I wonder why. I also wonder how long it will last.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cypherdoc

All roads lead to Rome.

 

[Fatman3002]

I was sitting reading this:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/i-really-want-to-like-bitcoin-unlimited.684/

And was wondering: has it been made clear that Bitcoin XT is welcome to use this forum freely for discussions on their project?

 

[Richy_T]

Unfortunately, this is how that conversation looks in the major Bitcoin arenas

This post makes a great point.

BU Critic: "Big blocks are dangerous because they promote mining centralization as a result of the self-propagation advantage of..."

BU Critic: "Ok, but we can't just allow miners and nodes to decide for themselves what size blocks they'll mine / accept! That's madness."

BU Critic: "But hard forks are dangerous! BU might break consensus!"

BU Critic: "But the Core devs are like, super smart. We all just need to trust that they know what's best when it comes to the block size limit."

BU Critic: "Um... banned!"