Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[AdrianX]

@Aquent you don't need to do anything it may even be the ideas like this that lead theymos to call XT an alt.

Bitcoin is the blockchain there is no moving to a new chain, if you want you can move to a Sidechain or an independent chain that tech is already out there.

The idea of scaling Bitcoin is to allow the growth in the Bitcoin blockchain, not to change it and have the growth take place elsewhere.

You and the rest of the community vote with your economic and electric energy.

You need to do is choose a BIP like 101 and eventually those fighting for smaller blocks will run out of money.

They the cripplecoiners haven't realized it yet but Bitcoin wins they don't have controlled like they though they had.

 

[Bagatell]

There are more vids available. Which one is Peter in?

 

[sickpig]

@Bagatell unfortunately there were some problems with YouTube during the morning session of the first day, hence @Peter R video is not available at the moment, hopefully they will upload it later.

 

[cypherdoc]

Maybe they are trying to censor it.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Aquent you don't need to do anything it may even be the ideas like this that lead theymos to call XT an alt.

Bitcoin is the blockchain there is no moving to a new chain, if you want you can move to a Sidechain or an independent chain that tech is already out there.

The idea of scaling Bitcoin is to allow the growth in the Bitcoin blockchain, not to change it and have the growth take place elsewhere.

You and the rest of the community vote with your economic and electric energy.

You need to do is choose a BIP like 101 and eventually those fighting for smaller blocks will run out of money.

They the cripplecoiners haven't realized it yet but Bitcoin wins they don't have controlled like they though they had.

This is why I'm not worried we were in a bubble that has permanently popped from a flawed concept.

Remember how I've always said that most investors are going to lose money increasing in crypto currency? What I'm confident we're seeing is just normal cyclical volatility in an enormously promising new form of money. The large 90% retraces we go through are the bull bucking hard. Most weak hands got shaken off once again in this last down cycle.

The value I find in this thread is the clear thinking of many valuable well rounded contributors which helps me see through all the bullshit.

 

[Aquent]

Problem is, they are playing unfair, and it is working. We have this centralised comittee which is deciding and ruling. It's terrible. If we ourselves don't scale bitcoin, the free market will and will wash us away....

"
<Aquentin> are you so deluded as to believe that your censoring actually has any influence (but bad) on the outcome?
<theymos> You must be naive if you think it'll have no effect. I've moderated forums since long before Bitcoin (some quite large), and I know how moderation affects people. Long-term, banning XT from /r/Bitcoin will hurt XT's chances to hijack Bitcoin. There's still a chance, but it's smaller. (This is improved by the simultaneous action on bitcointalk.org, bitcoin.it, and bitcoin.org)"

"<theymos> The risk was that /r/Bitcoin users (and others) would consider XT to be equal to Bitcoin and not really care if Coinbase, etc. supported it."

"<Aquentin> are you seriously that naive
<Aquentin> to think your censoring is somewhat good...
<theymos> They're the market. If a big enough chunk of them are vehemently against XT (or maybe just nervous about the whole thing), this reduces the chance that the businesses that depend up on this market will adopt XT, or at least not so blindly as they might've before."

"
<Aquentin> dude, you are the personiphication of amateur hour
<Aquentin> mark karpeles was the most hated man, but thankfully he is now in prison
<Aquentin> you have taken his title, congrats
<theymos> "Amateur hour" may be appropriate. I do this stuff as a hobby. I don't make much money at all off this, certainly not enough for it to be my job."

"
<Aquentin> dude... bitcoin is decentralised... you have no power here
<Aquentin> and if you think you do.... and you do as you have shown... then that damages bitcoin fundamentally
<Aquentin> take satoshi's example, and leave
<theymos> Not in Bitcoin itself, but I do have power over certain centralized websites"

"<theymos> Nothing I currently control was created by me originally. They were all entrusted to me by different people."

"<theymos> I don't need to be smarter or more effective than the free market or any individual in order for me to recognize that they are very probably wrong and what they're doing is probably very harmful"

"theymos> That's an important point. Bitcoin is *not* "anti-fragile""

We are dealing with a games of throne situation here. I suppose we will have to see what happens in the next 4 months, but, it seems to me that certain authoritarians have taken charge who so happened to be lucky to be at the right place and time and have the ability to misuse their "power". We have to prepare for the worst and I put this assumption to this community.... if we don't provide the supply, the free market will and in the process will wash us away.

We shouldn't dismiss a new coin, especially if it could account for the current bitcoin balances. If the economic majority starts accepting it... the evolution would have created bitcoin 2.0/ This amateur hour must end... or we will be ended.

 

[Jose Perez]

Governments will always be unwilling to make the changes which will make their currencies competitive with Bitcoin.

Governments were always unwilling to make the changes that would make their services competitive with those of the free market -- until they made them. "Competitiveness" understood as having good enough services not to scare people off. If the current financial system is electronic, I don't see how it cannot be crypto as well, should the need arise.

They'd have to adopt a fixed money supply and repeal all laws that involve forced wealth distribution and which control who can hold or transact in how much money under what circumstances.

No they wouldn't. They only need a money supply system that is good enough for most people, as the current one is. And they don't need to repel any such laws. Everything is fully customizable, especially when you have a working political system (they don't have a clue about economics, but at least everybody obeys).

A government will never do this, because those restrictions on its capabilities are equivalent to non-existence.

No, those restrictions on its capabilities are equivalent to competing with the free market and earning the trust of a majority of citizens who oppose and mistrust the free market.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Aquent

Be patient. XT is the alternative you're speaking about. And who knows, something better might come along. Theymos is an out of control kid but don't let him get to you. There are just as many powerful people on your side with XT that you're not aware of.

 

[Peter R]

Maybe they are trying to censor it.

Apparently, it was posted earlier but then removed. I hope it goes up again.

 

[solex]

A better fee market:

All the talk of a fee market is flawed if some Bitcoin transactions can be sent and processed for free. Hard-bitten 1MBer Mark Friendenbach makes a good point in asking "why increase the block limit when free tx are supported?" However, free tx are based upon the days destroyed, so (correct me if this is incomplete) a tx for 1 BTC can be sent for free if those coins have not moved for 1 day. Wasn't this fine to encourage dissemination of coins from hoards in the past but is a luxury that can't be afforded in terms of network overhead now?

Jeff is on top of this and has a pull request to change it to a simple fee per byte. Although Core Dev seem to have left it languishing:
Remove TX priority and free transaction area from mempool, block creator. #6405
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6405

It was noted on #bitcoin-dev that many simplifications arise from removing the complex, dual-policy aspects of priority-based low fee transactions on policy estimation, block template creation and mempool code. This change updates Bitcoin Core to relay purely based on fee/kb rate, removing the concepts of priority and free transactions from the codebase.

This seems much more useful for driving a fee market and helping the market determine the optimal Q* in Peter R's model.
What do people think?

 

[cypherdoc]

@solex

All the talk of a fee market is flawed if some Bitcoin transactions can be sent and processed for free.

i assume you're talking about in a bigger block or no limit situation.

is it really flawed? it's such a small space in the block. why can't the rest of the tx's in the block still be subject to a fee mkt negotiation btwn users and miners?

also, doesn't the encouragement to dishoard one's coins in the current situation still exist?

 

[AdrianX]

I did think about this a while back when all the debate over weather or not free transaction should be allowed. I found my self on the side of the "free shit army "for no other reason than it had always been.

It turns out there are economic consequences relating to money velocity and money value.

So while there is infinite demand for free transactions they should be possible. The time (as in days destroyed) should not be trivial.

First it has potential to prevents spamming.

And second there is a benefit to miners to have an influence on money velocity. At least in part to maintain the value of the fees they charge.

The result is free transaction may not be optimal for many applications but they can be a social good that encourage old coins to move increasing money velocity to the benefit of miners.

Tl;Dr free transactions have an impact on the value of Bitcoin and should be allowed, the age of coins that qualify should be set my miners.

As a default value I'd leave it at 1days destroyed and have it increase with transaction volume.

 

[Peter R]

@solex

What do you think is wrong with miner's including 0-fee TXs if they coindays-destroyed is great enough? I don't believe they're forced to do this, anyways; they could freely decide not too, could they not?

 

[cypherdoc]

@Peter R

yeah, iirc, alot of the miners aren't including any free tx's anymore? correct me if i'm wrong.

 

[solex]

Looks like the consensus is to leave the fee structure alone

@cypherdoc I am thinking of fair access to blockspace. While it is good that old coins move (ideally into more hands) the old coin holders are likely better off and can afford a small tx fee just like anyone else e.g. the African buying something at a market, unlikely to cost as much as 1 BTC, why should he pay more than Loaded does?

@AdrianX You are right, although the "free shit army" meme is strong psychological hammer to hit those of us who prefer to see main-chain scaling before off-chain solutions are pushed onto users.

@Peter R Yes, miners will always be able to include unusual tx (until and if we ever get to Greg's zero-info block end-point!). It is the general policy for tx propagation which this affects, and the idea of a fee per byte is a nice simplification. One thing that markets are very bad at is standards. Generally good standards (like universal weights and measures) develop externally to markets but do make them work better.

edit: if free tx are rare then might as well move to a fee per byte anyway...

 

[cypherdoc]

@solex

i'm not necessarily objecting to the concept. just trying to clarify if it's worth making a change. it might be.

if it simplifies the code and makes it easier and more efficient for miners to construct blocks, i'd be for it, despite the fact that as a hodler, this would disadvantage me and make it more expensive for me to transact in the future.

i'm all for whatever it takes to make Bitcoin better and more valued by ordinary ppl worldwide, which imo is the ultimate in decentralization.

 

[Peter R]

@cypherdoc : yes, I think you're correct.

This conference has really opened my eyes to what I see as a huge divide in ideology between the small-block camp and the large-block camp.

The small-block camp seem to want to create rules to micromanage every aspect of the system; the large-block camp want the consensus rules to be as simple as possible and allow the market to sort out the details.

Here's a perfect example from maaku:

Here he's arguing with Gavin that propagation time is too long to support 8 MB blocks. However, just last night he was arguing with me that propagation time is too short to support a fee market.

At first I couldn't understand how they could argue from both sides of most topics: how can they honestly think that there are too many orphans AND not enough orphans? Well, it's simply that they can't see how the market will come to an equilibrium. They actually think they need to micromanage everything in order for the system not to break. This is why orphans can be too high (for safety) but too low (for a fee market) in their minds.

 

[Peter R]

@Peter R Yes, miners will always be able to include unusual tx (until and if we ever get to Greg's zero-info block end-point!). It is the general policy for tx propagation which this affects, and the idea of a fee per byte is a nice simplification. One thing that markets are very bad at is standards. Generally good standards (like universal weights and measures) develop externally to markets but do make them work better.

edit: if free tx are rare then might as well move to a fee per byte anyway...

I think this is another example of Core Dev wanting to micromanage everything. Instead, let's just make it easier for users to adjust the rules for what TXs they forward and what they don't. Or encourage multiple implementations like Core, XT, and many more. Each implementation could have its own rules for what constitutes a "standard" TX and forward it accordingly. This way the market can make the decision rather than the devs.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Peter R

i assume you're talking about this post of mine:

http://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-24#post-771

this has been obvious to me for months now and i've been repeatedly making the argument on Reddit but getting down voted on r/bitcoin for unrelated reasons. your presentation has now allowed me to personalize it using you as an example and it's now starting to get through.

they are going to lose this argument. i've also long argued that Bitcoin's greatest use case is as Sound Money. it doesn't need all these other use cases like smart contracts, layer 2 functions, SC's, LN, even colored coins, etc. we should all want that as BTC holders as when it becomes apparent that Bitcoin is primarily a currency and is the real killer app, that's when the $5T Forex market will have to give up a fraction of itself to Bitcoin as a currency. this will send the price skyrocketing as a result.

the reason the small blockist are fighting this so bad is that they think it leaves them out as developers. remember, "devs gotta dev"? that may be so, but the smart ones will position themselves with companies that use and deal with Bitcoin as money primarily b/c this is what the free market wants.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Peter R

I think the appropriate response to the perceived need to micromanage is, "If that were necessary, Bitcoin would already be doomed." Somehow these guys have some steet cred with some Austrians/ancaps for being "cypherpunks" and decentralists; this deep-seated mistrust of the market, with the centralization of development that implies, really strips away that facade.