Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Erdogan]

Regional / Community currencies can make sense. I think I'd rather use an ethereum contract to implement than a sidechain, though.

They don't make sense, have never made sense, other than as a tool for governments to covertly divert resources from producers to themselves.

 

[albin]

Those 55 Millions will be used for the production of permissioned/censored bankster chains, which is their core competence. They must have realized that they are not able to privatize Bitcoin. That coup failed. BlockstR3am.

What I found the most distasteful in this whole affair is that while it's totally fine for a company to try to work in this area, at the same time the principals at Blockstream incessantly demand to be treated like heroes of Bitcoin simply on the basis of their word. Mike Hearn is relentlessly demonized for taking a day job with R3, but at least he's been totally honest that the work R3 does isn't Bitcoin.

 

[Norway]

gavinandresen[2:47 PM]Bitcoin Unlimited has the right idea for users and exchanges. The only people who should care about block size limits are miners

https://bitcoinclassic.slack.com/archives/debate/p1454852849011705

 

[cypherdoc]

Can you imagine what they must've told that $55M's worth of investors?

"oh, we're just here to have you fund us for these offchain products that can be copied by anyone else cuz open source. If you try to make us not do that we want to be able to just leave if we disagree. Oh, and btw, try to ignore the fact that your fiat money is going to be strongly devalued by Bitcoin. We strongly believe Bitcoin is a public good. After all, first tier investor Reid said so. So please give us your money.

NOT.

 

[Norway]

A fork to Classic will be the birth of the protocol.

 

[yrral86]

They don't make sense, have never made sense, other than as a tool for governments to covertly divert resources from producers to themselves.

In the context of a bitcoin-pegged sidechain with no money creation other than BTC conversion, I think they do make sense. When transacting locally, you use the local chain with its lower fees. When you transact outside of your region, you use bitcoin. This will logically shard the blockchain so that your local transactions never have to leave your neighborhood. There are bandwidth, storage, and privacy gains to be had from such a setup. Of course, this assumes that the magic of SC on/off ramps is worked out reasonably. I'm still waiting to be shown how it could possibly work in a trustless fashion.

 

[cypherdoc]

BTW, do we know if the Blockstream core devs were able to extend that "walk away" clause with the new group of $55M investors?

I don't see how that would be possible as its not even remotely credible that all those new people would want to facilitate Bitcoin adoption as a public good with no expectations for a massive return.

 

[albin]

On the other hand, if a group of investors is convinced that Bitcoin has massive potential to disintermediate existing service sectors, $55 million is pretty cheap to get some useful idiots to poison the well and obstruct that from happening.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Richy_T]

The point is to own an asset while it rises, and not own it while it goes down.

That means you should have sold earlier (if you knew...), and you should buy now.

No, that means I am selling now and should have sold earlier as I think we are going lower for the reasons explained.

The miners talk big but have proven fickle before with XT. I think they want Core to bump to 2mb but are unlikely to be willing to switch to a different implementation. If/when we do finally get 2mb, the price will have a long climb ahead so a good time to buy.

 

[theZerg]

you may be right and I may be an optimist but a successful hard fork, the looming halvening, and any more pain in traditional fiat markets could make bitcoin launch so fast you won't be able to get back in...

 

[VeritasSapere]

#1
It's been my belief that we're going to have to see some pain with the price before miners make a meaningful move. As such, I finally got around to divesting some today (still keeping plenty).


#2 Matthew Light
I also divested more today. I'm keeping enough that if Bitcoin "wins" I'll be doing well, but I hedged my bets in case the insanity on full display at r/bitcoin prevails.

Don't know how serious you guys are, but this is irrational. The point is to own an asset while it rises, and not own it while it goes down. That means you should have sold earlier (if you knew...), and you should buy now.

No reason to let the price rise, then buy.

I think it is rational to diversify our investments, I have been invested in alternative cryptocurrencies since I started, it has served me well as a hedge against Bitcoin. I am certain that the technology will do well, realistically however we can not be sure that Bitcoin will become the dominant currency of the future. I think that it is wise to recognize that we can not be certain about predicting the future, with great insight we can attempt to project and predict the future, but we can not be certain.

I do think that Bitcoin will most likely become the world currency of the future, especially now that this existential crisis within Bitcoin is starting to resolve itself.

It is a comforting thought for me to know however that no matter what happens to Bitcoin the cryptocurrency revolution will succeed. Though if this test of Bitcoins governance does not succeed, for me that would be the case if the blocksize is not raised, I would also be satisfied with a split in a worse case scenario I suppose. If that did happen however I suspect that mass adoption would most likely be delayed by at least a decade, which I think would be a shame considering all of the good Bitcoin could have done in the world in that time. Fortunately I really do think that the winds are changing and the tide is turning, I am feeling more and more confident that we will see the blocksize raised this year.

Out of the top ten cryptocurrencies based on market capitalization I think that Ethereum, Dash, MaidSafe and Bitshares are all great projects which I am personally invested in as well.

 

[lunar]

Petrodollar is looking very fragile these days. Reuters

Exclusive: Iran wants euro payment for new and outstanding oil sales

Iran wants to recover tens of billions of dollars it is owed by India and other buyers of its oil in euros and is billing new crude sales in euros, too, looking to reduce its dependence on the U.S. dollar following last month's sanctions relief.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Richy_T]

you may be right and I may be an optimist but a successful hard fork, the looming halvening, and any more pain in traditional fiat markets could make bitcoin launch so fast you won't be able to get back in...

A successful hard fork changes the story completely. If that happens, we're off to the races. However, the halvening without an increasing price and without a capacity increase could turn into a disaster as we lose tps capacity as we need it more and more.

 

[Matthew Light]

Don't know how serious you guys are, but this is irrational. The point is to own an asset while it rises, and not own it while it goes down. That means you should have sold earlier (if you knew...), and you should buy now.

I only investigated ETH seriously in mid-January. At that point I took a position of about 1/3 of my total crypto allotment. Have been adding to it though the more (IMO nutjob) stuff I hear from people (some of them large HODLers) in the small block camp. I still hold a significant BTC position, and my ETH position is up around 40% on a total cost basis.

I suspect we will know in a couple years if my decision to migrate some of my BTC holdings to ETH was irrational or not. If the hard fork succeeds and significant small-block hodlers drive the BTC price way down, I win. If the small blockers actually win, it's clear to me that BTC will definitely not be the future of crypto. The scenario where I don't do as well is where the hard fork succeeds, BTC price goes through the roof, and ETH price doesn't go up much (or even gets dumped). But I still hold a large (for me) BTC position, so I'll still win in that scenario, just not as much as others.

I'm confident that I'm pretty early on the hedge BTC with ETH trade though. I suspect we'll see a lot more of that before the hard fork vote.

 

[dwaltrip]

I'd love to run a Classic node or two on a cheap VPS. Are there any guides that could walk me through this? I'm comfortable with a command line, however I haven't touched any bitcoin client in a while.. (My primary use case the past few years has been to simply buy and immediately send to an offline address).

 

[albin]

Possibly dumb random question:

couldn't Bitcoin itself have an onion routing network for broadcasting spends built-in as part of the p2p wire protocol?

 

[yrral86]

@albin, sure but why would it? Bitcoin can already run on top of TOR of you want that. You don't gain anything by pulling that functionality into the bitcoin protocol and you add a lot of complexity.

 

[albin]

I think I'm probably using the wrong terminology, routing I imagine implies point-to-point, I think what I mean is more like a hidden service. The reason I'm wondering is that I think it would make a lot of sense for full nodes to just obscure the tx's they produce, and everything else can be in the clear with no privacy issues. It seems like that would be way preferable to running the entire node on top of Tor.