Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

molecular

Active Member
Aug 31, 2015
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@cypherdoc
Bitcoin was the best performing currency in 2015. Do you know if any stocks/commodities beat bitcoin in 2015?

Context: Marc Faber in a cool Bloomberg interview mention bitcoin (43 seconds from start, but view from start):
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-01-06/marc-faber-we-have-colossal-credit-bubble-in-china
lol, I have to transcribe the most relevant part since it's hilarious:

Marc Faber said:
You talk about doom and gloom for this year, for 2016. I have to point out that in 2015 with the exception of people that held bitcoins, the performance of all asset classes has been poor.
thanks, Marc!
 

cypherdoc

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2015
5,257
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What do you think on confidential transactions? I think they are the biggest risk bitcoin is facing in 2016. Much bigger than no increase of the blocksize, much bigger than a contentious hardfork to 20 MB.

Confidential Transactions will break the existing KYC/AML procedures on exchanges. It will set Bitcoin out of reach of regulation, and the consequence will be a worldwide ban.
nice discussion with you and Peter Surda on Reddit, Chris.

i have to agree that i think you're over-reacting in the sense that i don't think it's possible for gvts worldwide to summarily ban Bitcoin. there's just too much conflict and warring going on for such unanimity.
 

Aquent

Active Member
Aug 19, 2015
252
667
What do you think on confidential transactions? I think they are the biggest risk bitcoin is facing in 2016. Much bigger than no increase of the blocksize, much bigger than a contentious hardfork to 20 MB.
The ideal situation in my view is to have bitcoin on one side (the good guy) and, preferably, zerocoin on the other (the bad guy). Zerocoin seems to be entangled somewhere though, prob some intervention somewhere, so that could be adapted to confidential transactions on the other side.

That would take a lot of heat from bitcoin, including pr statements like it's only used by criminals etc, as those arguments would move to CTcoin as well as provide bitcoin with a stick against any list suggestion as we can turn around and say, hey, we can just adopt zerocoin or confidential transactions in the protocol. A win-win situation.

Implementing CT into the protocol straight away I think would be a huge mistake because it may be just too much. And I don't think it is even needed. Bitcoin is pseudoanonymous and really with only a bit of effort one can use it fully anonymously. Moreover, technically, CT requires far too much space and according to gmax it uses even more homebrew algo than libsec. Making it a lose -lose situation in my view.
 

cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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Copper? who the hell needs copper?:



might as well quit digging it up:



stuff? who needs stuff?:

 
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Peter R

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Aug 28, 2015
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Core is capitulating:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3zwgye/statement_from_bitcoin_core_20160107/

"We also expect that as the Bitcoin ecosystem grows, the number of alternative Bitcoin protocol implementations may increase, and it is inevitable that other software projects may release radically different software proposals for the ecosystem to consider. At the end of the day, the Bitcoin Core development team does not decide the Bitcoin consensus rules. Instead, users participate in Bitcoin by making their own choice of which Bitcoin software to run."
 

cypherdoc

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2015
5,257
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Escalator up, elevator down, baby:


[doublepost=1452190498][/doublepost]
Core is capitulating:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3zwgye/statement_from_bitcoin_core_20160107/

"We also expect that as the Bitcoin ecosystem grows, the number of alternative Bitcoin protocol implementations may increase, and it is inevitable that other software projects may release radically different software proposals for the ecosystem to consider. At the end of the day, the Bitcoin Core development team does not decide the Bitcoin consensus rules. Instead, users participate in Bitcoin by making their own choice of which Bitcoin software to run."
i'd hardly call that a capitulation.

more like an acknowledgement.
 
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freetrader

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 16, 2015
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Core is capitulating:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3zwgye/statement_from_bitcoin_core_20160107/

"We also expect that as the Bitcoin ecosystem grows, the number of alternative Bitcoin protocol implementations may increase, and it is inevitable that other software projects may release radically different software proposals for the ecosystem to consider. At the end of the day, the Bitcoin Core development team does not decide the Bitcoin consensus rules. Instead, users participate in Bitcoin by making their own choice of which Bitcoin software to run."
Go with the popular sentiment, that can't be evil!

"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from that which ''can't be evil''. Amen."
 
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rocks

Active Member
Sep 24, 2015
586
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What do you think on confidential transactions? I think they are the biggest risk bitcoin is facing in 2016. Much bigger than no increase of the blocksize, much bigger than a contentious hardfork to 20 MB.

Confidential Transactions will break the existing KYC/AML procedures on exchanges. It will set Bitcoin out of reach of regulation, and the consequence will be a worldwide ban.
I'm not sure CT changes much. Today KYC compliant services are required to perform random checks on user activity, for example if a user deposits 100BTC into Coinbase, Coinbase may contact the customer and check where that 100BTC came from, and if the answer is not satisfactory they may either perform a more detailed search into the transaction or deny it.

This will be true for both standard BTC and CT BTC transactions. In both cases it may be up to the customer to demonstrate that their BTC source was legitimate, and in both cases the customer can provide evidence that the funds are clean (if they are). If their BTC source is clean then that should be all that matters.

In many ways this is similar to cash. Cash is the perfect Confidential Transaction so to speak. If you walk into a bank and try to deposit $15K in cash, you will be asked to prove that you had a legitimate source for $15K in cash. Now you might have swapped some of that legitimate cash with illegal cash you received selling X, but that does not matter, all that matters is that you had legitimate input sources of cash and reporting that to the IRS. It will be the same with CT transactions, all that is cared about are if there are legitimate input sources and the IRS gets their cut.
 

cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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yeah, CT won't change the fact that ALL merchants will be under significant regulatory pressure to KYC.
 

rocks

Active Member
Sep 24, 2015
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Agreed. I think this needs to exist. FWIW, I own blockspace.io, and was thinking of using that to put up a site where people could "sign" to support, or oppose, larger block sizes. Core/BS keeps making statements about how they think the community is on their side, which seems like quite a delusion to me, so why not put it up for a public vote?

There's also http://bitcoin.consider.it, which is pretty nice, though it doesn't force you to "verify" your ID from what I can tell.

So if we go ahead with a new site (or on BU.info), I think it'd be important to go the PGP and/or social "verification" route, perhaps where signatories must sign with *some* account (twitter, reddit, facebook, github, etc) that was created before Dec 31st 2015 or something... So then we can pretty confidently say we have real-user representation. Granted, I'm sure people will sign with existing sock-poppet accounts, but that's gonna happen on both sides (and they'd have to *already* exist), so I count that as a wash.

Thoughts? I could do the web-dev.
Those are great points on how to verify and the issue with sock-poppet accounts. Maxwell's scaling plan was easy because they only had 40 signatories and it was just done manually. If you have more than 100 signatories (which we would hope to have) then verification becomes harder.

One option is to structure it as a petition for simplicity. The only verification petitions have that I've seen is they can't submit duplicates and need to remove duplicate signatures. The reason is petitions are not used for binding things, just statements on if there is enough support to have a proper vote (for example petitions to recall a politician and vote on a new one, the petition is not binding but the vote is).

I think a more important item is to show support from companies, and this would need to be verified. If there are 100 major companies that support scaling and 2 that don't that will say a lot.

So we could structure it as an open petition for individuals to sign, and use verification for corporate support. People could directly sign so with their real identities or accounts. And then have a verification mechanism for company support, this part could probably be done manually and link to the verification. For example if Brian tweets that Coinbase is committed to the scaling statement, then Coinbase would be listed as a signatory with a link to the tweet as proof.

One reason I think showing corporate support is important is it was not influenced by thermos' censorship. Thermos' censorship might have influenced a small number of people on reddit or BTC who casually follow Bitcoin, but it had zero effect on people that closely follow Bitcoin or are deeply involved.
 
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cypherdoc

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2015
5,257
12,995
oh my.

stock losses accelerating. -400 incoming.
 
I'm not sure CT changes much. Today KYC compliant services are required to perform random checks on user activity, for example if a user deposits 100BTC into Coinbase, Coinbase may contact the customer and check where that 100BTC came from, and if the answer is not satisfactory they may either perform a more detailed search into the transaction or deny it.

This will be true for both standard BTC and CT BTC transactions. In both cases it may be up to the customer to demonstrate that their BTC source was legitimate, and in both cases the customer can provide evidence that the funds are clean (if they are). If their BTC source is clean then that should be all that matters.

In many ways this is similar to cash. Cash is the perfect Confidential Transaction so to speak. If you walk into a bank and try to deposit $15K in cash, you will be asked to prove that you had a legitimate source for $15K in cash. Now you might have swapped some of that legitimate cash with illegal cash you received selling X, but that does not matter, all that matters is that you had legitimate input sources of cash and reporting that to the IRS. It will be the same with CT transactions, all that is cared about are if there are legitimate input sources and the IRS gets their cut.
Yes, you can compare it with cash.

But if you do so, you'll notice that bitcoin is (and must be) not as heavy regulated as cash in some jurisdictions, e. G. france, spain, italy, greece ...

If bitcoin is handled like cash, exchanges must have to set daily limits for customers regarding their nationality.

If bitcoin is handled like cash, you are not allowed to transact large amount over the border.

Also bitcoin lacks the physical restrictions of cash. From the position of a regulator, it is much more dangerous.

Currently Bitcoin is not as anonymous as cash, which could be the reason, it is still allowed after kyc/aml has been installed on exchanges that connects transactions with identity. But if CT breaks that connection after the first transaction out of the exchanges, the "deal" with regulators can be broken also.
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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Dollar following stocks down.