Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[VeritasSapere]

Theymos, keeping it classy.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1318519.msg13533555#msg13533555

As a firm supporter of Bitcoin Classic, I am honored to be a moderator of the official Bitcoin Classic subreddit.

I am however disappointed that smartfbrankings changed my original sidebar text.

The point isn't larger blocks will save Bitcoin from certain dooom, it's to undermine the socioeconomic majority's diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient system. It's about sending a message, that Bitcoin's engineering decisions can be controlled by manufacturing dissent.

LOL, very true. "Oops, I guess we would've destroyed Bitcoin if the last coup attempt had suceeded. But we definitely have it right this time, promise!"

I hope that they get 75% miner support right away so that I can watch their miners saying, "Oh shit, we just mined a ton of worthless altcoins!".

 

[_mr_e]

What does he mean "firm supporter"? Is this for real?

 

[VeritasSapere]

He is being sarcastic, since he is squatting on the r/BitcoinClassic subreddit. So that it can not be used by the real Bitcoin Classic community. All round not a very nice thing to do.

I question how certain his conviction for Bitcoin really is, or question his understanding of it. Considering that he thinks he must resort to censorship and other unethical practices in order to keep his conception of Bitcoin alive. Since if he did not consider what we where doing here a threat he would not have given it so much effort.

I think that anything that requires censorship for its continued existence is not worth saving.

 

[Zarathustra]

Deflation: Oil prices below zero ?

Gail Tverberg:
"We know that for natural gas and electricity, prices often fall below zero when the ability of the system to absorb more supply disappears. It is not clear the oil prices can fall below zero, but they can certainly fall very low."

http://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/01/07/2016-oil-limits-and-the-end-of-the-debt-supercycle/

 

[Mengerian]

The thing that's most encouraging to me about Bitcoin Classic is seeing miners directly involved in its development. I believe the path towards long term improvement and evolution of Bitcoin is for all the different stakeholders to spur development of features that further their individual interests. It would be nice to see Bitcoin Classic incorporate, over time, more miner-centric features like better block assembly, and improved block propagation.

Hopefully, in future, other stakeholders like merchant processors and exchanges will also become more involved in developing features that help their businesses. This could potentially play out as multiple competing node implementations as @Gavin Andresen has suggested. Or, alternatively, the various stakeholders could also coalesce around a common code base with modular features that can be activated depending on the use case (sort of like how Linux runs on everything from phones to supercomputers to data centers).

Core's big mistake was to neglect the desires of its users, and instead focus on features the developers wanted to push. This opened the door for others, so it's nice to see them taking the opportunity to build towards a system that better serves their interests.

 

[cypherdoc]

$DJT reaching lower:

[doublepost=1452702991,1452702391][/doublepost]

The thing that's most encouraging to me about Bitcoin Classic is seeing miners directly involved in its development. I believe the path towards long term improvement and evolution of Bitcoin is for all the different stakeholders to spur development of features that further their individual interests. It would be nice to see Bitcoin Classic incorporate, over time, more miner-centric features like better block assembly, and improved block propagation.

Hopefully, in future, other stakeholders like merchant processors and exchanges will also become more involved in developing features that help their businesses. This could potentially play out as multiple competing node implementations as @Gavin Andresen has suggested. Or, alternatively, the various stakeholders could also coalesce around a common code base with modular features that can be activated depending on the use case (sort of like how Linux runs on everything from phones to supercomputers to data centers).

Core's big mistake was to neglect the desires of its users, and instead focus on features the developers wanted to push. This opened the door for others, so it's nice to see them taking the opportunity to build towards a system that better serves their interests.

a lesson to be learned from this going forward is that no matter how great an alternative implementation may be out of the box, the blocksize debate has always been a "political" or ideological battle, not a technical one. in that sense, /u/jtoomim and Olivier have done the right thing by mobilizing political support for their idea and efforts ahead of time. i mean c'mon; 2MB is nothing great and isn't even sufficient. but by demonstrating support from several large miners, @Gavin Andresen, payment processors, and important users, it looks to be the most likely implementation to snatch power away from Core. and that is a good thing. i personally would've liked to see a once and for all solution but now see that the changing of governance with a view towards future upgrades, like adaptive blocksizes, is now worth my support and is now more important than getting everything i want or deem important in one fell swoop. baby steps for now.
[doublepost=1452703231][/doublepost]reverse infiltration? not bad:

PayPal Appoints Wences Casares to its Board of Directors

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160113005322/en/PayPal-Appoints-Wences-Casares-Board-Directors

 

[YarkoL]

Hopefully, in future, other stakeholders like merchant processors and exchanges will also become more involved in developing features that help their businesses.

I'm kind of inclined towards the idea of BU serving this niche, just as Classic seems to be for the miners.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

A Story

Five guys are driving along in a car and arguing over where they should stop for lunch. They're approaching an intersection, a "fork" in the road if you will. (Spoiler: this is going to be a metaphor.) If they turn right, there's a great Mexican place a few miles down that way. Two people want to go there. A few miles to the left, there's a really good Italian place. Two other people want to go there. And if they go straight for a few more miles, there's this really crappy tapas place with tiny blocks and high fees, oops I mean tiny portions and high prices. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the last guy, sitting way in the back, actually wants to go there. Anyway, this last guy, a fellow by the name of Corey Devon (subtle, right?) says:

"Well, sadly, it looks like we're not going to be able to achieve 'overwhelming consensus' on a 'hard turn' to the left or the right. And we obviously don't want to make a 'contentious turn' and risk a 'catastrophic consensus failure.' I mean, if we all tried to go to different restaurants we might get lost or murdered or something. So... best just to stay on the current road and go where I want go."

The guy in the driver seat, a fellow by the name of Economic Majority (I know, really subtle) puts on his blinker and says "Shut up, Corey. I'm getting Mexican and that's where I'll be driving the Network Effect [it's a weird name for a car, I know, but that what he calls it]. If any of you clowns feel like walking somewhere else, I'm happy to pull over right here and let you out." No one takes him up on this offer. As they're leaving the Mexican restaurant and heading back to the car, Corey asks if he can pick the radio station. Everyone tells him to shut up.

 

[Mengerian]

@cypherdoc

a lesson to be learned from this going forward is that no matter how great an alternative implementation may be out of the box, the blocksize debate has always been a "political" or ideological battle, not a technical one.

Yes, agreed. Another way of phrasing this is the recognition that Bitcoin, at its most fundamental level, is a social construct. Satoshi’s genius was to devise a social arrangement in which individual incentives align to allow stable consensus to form among parties with no central authority. The software that encodes this social construct is simply a tool to make the agreement more explicit (or objective), and more efficient to verify.

It's similar to a regular legal contract. The contract is not really the paper with words written on it, it is the agreement between people. The written contract is just a mechanism that makes it easier for both parties to be clear on what they are agreeing to, and provides better evidence for what that agreement was in case of a dispute.

Similarly, Bitcoin is fundamentally an agreement between us. We agree that only transactions signed with a private key are valid. We agree that transactions outputs cannot be double spent. We agree that transactions cannot create coins out of thin air. We agree that miners can create coins according to the inflation schedule. Do we agree that blocks must be less than 1MB?

At this point, the answer to that question is unclear. So we are going through a process of clarifying what we are all agreeing to. This process, currently, is a bit messy because we have not developed good mechanisms for it (Perhaps in future having multiple competing implementations, or @Zangelbert Bingledack's fork arbitrage will facilitate with this process).

Viewing Bitcoin as simply a technical system is a mistake, and Core feel into this trap.

 

[cypherdoc]

having to zoom further and further back now to find prior lows. $DJT at new 3yr low today not seen since 10/2013:

[doublepost=1452709152,1452708541][/doublepost]randomly ran across this on Twitter. thought it was funny as hell:

[doublepost=1452709493][/doublepost]all i see is a bullish flag pattern being setup by all the small blocker and ignorant selling. only a few of us will make it to the finish line:

[doublepost=1452709841][/doublepost]trouble everywhere you turn:

[doublepost=1452710066][/doublepost]

 

[rocks]

Core's big mistake was to neglect the desires of its users, and instead focus on features the developers wanted to push.

Fully agree, the biggest mistake along these lines was to neglect the needs of miners, they are arguably the most important user.

Since Gavin passed control, core has not only made zero improvements that help miners, but has actively blocked anyone else trying to make improvements that help them. Miners need solutions that reduce or eliminate the propagation delay risk of issuing blocks. Even 10MB blocks over 10 minutes is a ridiculously low bandwidth spec, but the problem is the bandwidth profile appears as 0 bandwidth for ten minutes followed by an infinite bandwidth spike for a fraction of a second.

Real scaling solutions need to take that infinite bandwidth spike and smooth it over the 10 minute period. That is what sub-chains or weak blocks do and why I thought they were a good idea (and Peter wrote an excellent paper on them)

But core is not interested in helping miners with this, their only offering is to tell miners we are giving up and then force everything off chain.

Even SW as a scaling solution should be viewed as a slap in the face to miners. SW helps reduce storage requirements a very little bit, but storage is not an issue today, bandwidth is. But SW makes bandwidth worse. 4MB of SW only provide 1.x MB of transaction space, that is the wrong direction considering bandwidth is the problem.

For 2 years now core has only developed things needed by blockstream, and blocked all other improvements. That is no way to run a business or build an ecosystem.

The path that I think we will see play out now, is there will be a 2MB fork to Bitcoin Classic. After that Bitcoin Classic will develop solutions that help with scaling and then roll those out. These improvements then pave the way to make further blocksize increases easy and noncontroversial to miners.

 

[Matthew Light]

Yes, agreed. Another way of phrasing this is the recognition that Bitcoin, at its most fundamental level, is a social construct. ...

Viewing Bitcoin as simply a technical system is a mistake, and Core feel into this trap.

Bingo!

 

[awemany]

This might mean they are quietly blocking all of the latest core "improvements" blockstream has been planning to force the market to adopt (RBF etc.)

Have a look at the voting on http://bitcoinclassic.consider.it. Opt-in RBF has a strong opposition, including Gavin.


Which reminds me I should work on the data structures for BU voting now

 

[Mengerian]

Fully agree, the biggest mistake along these lines was to neglect the needs of miners, they are arguably the most important user.

....

But core is not interested in helping miners with this, their only offering is to tell miners we are giving up and then force everything off chain.

Yes. Even worse than just neglecting miners, they are actively pushing a path forward that is contrary to miners' long term interests.

Miners should want to maximize the number of on-chain transactions, since that is where their fees come from. Pushing transactions off chain is bad for miners, so it makes sense that miners should be behind efforts to increase on-chain throughput capacity.

 

[Peter R]

Some publicity for Bitcoin Unlimited in the media:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/40t3dg/unlimited_classic_and_bitpay_core_bitcoins_new/

Direct link:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/unlimited-classic-and-bitpay-core-bitcoin-s-new-kids-on-the-blockchain-1452705977

 

[cypherdoc]

oh Lordy! straight down the chute. almost fully caught down now:

[doublepost=1452714387][/doublepost]

....


Yes. Even worse than just neglecting miners, they are actively pushing a path forward that is contrary to miners' long term interests.

Miners should want to maximize the number of on-chain transactions, since that is where their fees come from. Pushing transactions off chain is bad for miners, so it makes sense that miners should be behind efforts to increase on-chain throughput capacity.

yeah, this.

i can't believe miners haven't indicated a concern for this. esp since i've been railing on that specific point for the last year.

 

[Aquent]

"I’ll be contributing my advice and experience (and code review and code) to Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin Core"

http://gavinandresen.ninja/classic-unlimited-xt-core

I've been thinking about a comment @Gavin Andresen made some time ago which I found ridiculous at the time, but now seems to make sense, about the market we targeting.

It may well be that the miners - so being very conservative - wish to use a client with a hard limit and no fail safe mechanisms etc, such as Bitcoin Classic, but the users, the businesses, etc, might prefer the power that Bitcoin Unlimited gives them, if nothing else but to express their voice in the user agent field.

So Bitcoin unlimited might perhaps want to focus on the business or user nodes etc, while obviously fully welcoming the miners and letting them know it's fully safe. On the other hand classic might want to focus on miners (as indeed it does with so having two miners as devs). With both thus complementing each other and integrating each others features etc.

In practice, miners adopting a 2mb hard limit ala bitcoin classic or changing the bitcoin unlimited gui menu and signing their blocks with 2mb makes no difference as suggested by @Peter R some time ago which I fully agree with.

Bitcoin unlimited does make a difference for businesses and users however because it gives them a voice in a way which is difficult (although of course not impossible) to game as running a node does take resources, therefore making sybil less likely, therefore making the communicating parameters of the node, especially important nodes such as coinbase/bitpay/bitgo etc empowering for non mining nodes and communicative in a decentralised manner.

 

[cypherdoc]

if the SPX gets down below that little red line, it's lights out:

[doublepost=1452714779][/doublepost]the Russell has broke down to levels not seen since July 2013. that's not good:

[doublepost=1452714985][/doublepost]

In practice, miners adopting a 2mb hard limit ala bitcoin classic or changing the bitcoin unlimited gui menu and signing their blocks with 2mb makes no difference as suggested by Peter_r some time ago which I fully agree with.

there's a huge difference.

b/c with BU, no one will know with perfect certainty how many nodes or miners out there will have their limit set at 2MB unless we have developed "perfect" signalling and agreement, which assumes for the moment that there won't be gaming of the situation. and both of those are impossible.

thus miners will be skiddish about inc blocksize.

 

[rocks]

"I’ll be contributing my advice and experience (and code review and code) to Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin Core"

http://gavinandresen.ninja/classic-unlimited-xt-core

BU has successfully become one of the few recognized clients at this point and a leading option for people. Thanks @theZerg for doing such a great job both putting this out there and effectively promoting it. The website and everything else was done very professionally, to the point that Gavin feels comfortable listing it before core

 

[solex]

if all of the above are satisfied SegWit will bring max block size to 1.35 on Jun/Jul 2017.

Which is Pieter Wuille being generous as his informal BIP103 has the block limit at 1.09 MB in mid-2017.

When looking at @Peter R's average block size projection it just goes to show how much Pieter is betting the farm on LN-type off-chain solutions.

Edit: Jeff mentions the 50BTC forever fork. I have not found written info on it. I recall that Gavin mentioned it in an audio interview, about 6 months ago.