Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Aquent]

Ah, so that's the infamous Lightsword. Isn't he also a core dev?

No, he is employed to manage some mining operation with around 1% network share.

In regards to midnight magic, he is not a mod of r/bitcoin, but he is somehow a mod of all bitcoin related IRC channels. I don't think many of you guys hang out on IRC, but the banning and censorship on the bitcoin channels, minus #bitcoinxt of course, is worse than on r/bitcoin and has been going on for far longer too. It has created a group think and if anyone starts giving a different view on the ideas they get banned. I can't really reconcile their support for bitcoin with their authoritarian behaviour.

On a side and positive note , I am surprised to hear just how many miners absolutely love Bitcoin Unlimited. You would think they'd want a centralised limit, but they seem to agree with us that signing BU blocks or Classic blocks makes no difference. They all have heard of Gavin's comments though... so we need more testing and we need to prove that BU is perfectly safe.

 

[albin]

I think the BU approach is going to be the only satisfactory long-term solution. It would be amazing to have a Bitcoin where, instead of all this exhausting nonsense, stakeholders running nodes express their opinions about what they find reasonable and non-excessive, and then just set their parameters accordingly. There is still even a place for your Maxwells and Lukes of the world, but it would be that of convincing people that their judgments are correct, instead of over-the-top political machinations.

 

[AdrianX]

https://www.reddit.com/message/messages/4vexd4

What is behind this link I can't see it? @cypherdoc
[doublepost=1454310198,1454309030][/doublepost]

2013-02-04: Remember when a hard fork was so uncontroversial that even Mircea Popescu agreed?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140233.msg1503470#msg1503470

Thanks @Justus Ranvier Loving this, it fits well with my understand that this fork being labeled controversial is a political manipulation.

I remember being firmly in the limited block camp. It. Was a direct question to you that changed my mind, still it took a long time to sink in, and it's funny thinking back, you lost some credibility (you've earned it back 10 fold)

 

[Aquent]

And so it begins: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43ngtx/ant_miner_ceo_wu_jihan_qqagent_classic_beta_is/

 

[Peter R]

On a side and positive note , I am surprised to hear just how many miners absolutely love Bitcoin Unlimited. You would think they'd want a centralised limit, but they seem to agree with us that signing BU blocks or Classic blocks makes no difference. They all have heard of Gavin's comments though... so we need more testing and we need to prove that BU is perfectly safe.

This is good news. Which miners made comments and what exactly did they say?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I think the BU approach is going to be the only satisfactory long-term solution. It would be amazing to have a Bitcoin where, instead of all this exhausting nonsense, stakeholders running nodes express their opinions about what they find reasonable and non-excessive, and then just set their parameters accordingly. There is still even a place for your Maxwells and Lukes of the world, but it would be that of convincing people that their judgments are correct, instead of over-the-top political machinations.

statoshi is on board:

 

[AdrianX]

This post really is worth a second look:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=208200.msg2182597#msg2182597

Today, "decentralization" is apparently an essential core value of Bitcoin.

Just a few short years ago, however, it was merely Gregory Maxwell's personal preference which he felt the need to justify, apparently because it wasn't obviously a core value back then.

What does this actually mean? I'm pretty sure Bitcoin itself is built on top of a fairly centralized last mile ISP network combined with some not-particular-decentralized interconnections, so

Since Bitcoin (apparently) exists as a more-decentralized network built on top of a less-decentralized lower level network, this statement doesn't appear to be true in general.

This argument is still cited today.

Well, other than the monetary properties of a limited currency supply.

Maybe he and his friends don't value hard money economics, but it's premature to say the least to say this his case is proven in terms of larger Bitcoin adoption.

How do we really know that decentralization is more important than hard money? Just because he says so?

Again. this argument is still cited today.
This is basically every project Blockstream is working on today.

Off chain transactions, reversible transactions, private improvements. Nothing intrinsically wrong with these things, but...

Problem with this is that Gregory Maxwell has no clue whether or not the market wants more throughput first, or more privacy and reversible transactions first.

Guess wrong, and people stop using Bitcoin and start using other alternatives. We can only tolerate so much of that before there is no more Bitcoin adoption.

No comment necessary.

This was done, and the results were ignored:

https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of-bitcoin/

http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2015/01/twenty-megabytes-testing-results.html

This so needs to be posted to r/northkorea I think it should have a very thoughtful title one that make nullc seem insightful. (Not derogatory though)

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Very satisfying article by @digitsu, building on @Justus Ranvier's point and apparently responding to Paul Sztorc's revered Measuring Decentralization post.

http://wallstreettechnologist.com/2016/01/31/how-do-you-measure-decentralization/

But if you end the discussion here, then you have fallen prey to the magicians trick. The classic distraction of the audience to mask the true illusion, which is of course, that the REAL thing we care about is censorship resistance, and network security.

Which do you think is cheaper, to bribe one or more developers to mislead 51% of miners into installing malicious code, or to have 51% of the miners collude amongst themselves to create and install malicious code*?

 

[AdrianX]

The fundamental breakdown in Maxwell's thinking stems from this:


As has been pointed out numerous times since, when the subsidy "goes down" is a problem for 20+ years in the future. The immediate concern is Bitcoin remaining the world's No.1 crypto for its first 20 years. Maxwell is so worried about the remote future that by crippling the current block-size he actually makes the remote future an irrelevance to Bitcoin.

Greg Maxwell is ignorant of the economics at play. He overlooks the fact that the security subsidy is only decreasing in terms of a limited money supply, the empirical evidence shows it's increasing in value.

It's the increasing value and increasing number of small transaction fees, a result of the growing network that secures the money. If the network reaches a cretin size the subsidy will not be needed. "Bitcoin will either be worth very little or a lot in 20 years" (or when the subsidy of 1.5625 BTC will either reached that velocity or it will have shrunk to a hobbyist toy.)

March 2011 - 50 BTC= $50 the subsidy was reduce by 50% just over 3 years ago and today 1 block 25BTC is worth about $10,000 . (a side note transaction fees are still insignificant but have increased form 0 to well over 200% per block of the March 2011 subsidy.)

It's done the exact opposite of what he thought would happen. (I use $ to represent value)

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

You're absolutely right. Translation isn't a machine like process at all. Ideally anybody we pay we would pay enough that he or she would take the time to thoroughly understand the bitcoin space and BU before attempting to translate anything.

We'd also want to thoroughly test any translations to make sure there are no errors or misunderstandings.

Perhaps we can ask BTCC if they have any recommendations? Or one of the other Chinese exchanges? They should know people (either someone on their staff or someone else who is a good translator and also knows the Bitcoin space). Or they could recommend a PR agent who is willing to get up to speed on BU before helping us market this implementation.

Coming back to this, we now know of at least two China correspondents that seem up to the task: /u/KoKansei and /u/nextblast, provided they could get up to speed on BU.

 

[AdrianX]

[

Something that's good to not overlook:


When Satoshi added MAX_BLOCK_SIZE in 2010, not only was the 1 MB limit far higher than actual transaction demand, it was also a value higher than the network was physically capable of reaching.

For years, perfectly legal blocks were capable of breaking the network.

How did we avoid disaster? The miners simply did not produce them. They limited the sizes of the blocks they made to avoid breaking the network in order to make sure the coins they were mining stayed valuable.

another piece of gold for Reddit.

(what's the saying going to be when gold collapses ?) How about that's good enough to be written to the blockchain.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

The top post on //Bitcoin right now: "ITT: Prescient comments by Greg Maxwell"

 

[Bagatell]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-31/comex-registered-gold-inventories-plummet-73-one-day#comment-7124398

 

[lunar]

Slush itching to make a sprint out of the starting gate.


and whilst am at it, here's Antpool too.

 

[Norway]

Is P2Pool mostly a solo-miner/a few hashing whales, or composed of many independent parties?

 

[cypherdoc]

i never read Buttcoin but this interaction re: LN routing is a gem:

[doublepost=1454347553,1454346676][/doublepost]this guy is brilliant, not to mention hilarious!:

 

[awemany]

Greg is adept at psychological manipulation. He successfully demotivated people from implementing working improvements to scalability for years. And I am not talking about the hard limit, I am talking about the bandwidth reduction of more efficient block transmission. (Of course, he quite likely did that for the sake of his hard blocksize limit argument...)

Yet, his tactic becomes quite ridiculous and funny since people started to ignore him and actually implement these solutions:

As I said before: I have worked with characters like him. My level of disgust is pretty high.

 

[YarkoL]

this guy is brilliant, not to mention hilarious!:

http://www.geek.com/news/reddit-bot-goes-through-your-comment-history-and-comments-as-you-1629932/

 

[cypherdoc]

@YarkoL

now i see one for Adam as well.

actually, i don't like them cuz it clutters the comment threads and i need to pay extra attention to the name just to make sure it's who i think it is. but it is hilarious. sometimes i can't tell the difference!

you can imagine the chaos if we get hundreds of these things.

 

[cypherdoc]