Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[solex]

3. In the next 3 weeks, we need the Bitcoin Core developers to work with us and clarify the roadmap with respect to a future hard-fork which includes an increase of the block size. Currently we are in discussions to determine the next best steps. We are as a matter of principle against unduly rushed or controversial hard-forks irrespective of the team proposing and we will not run such code on production systems nor mine any block from that hard-fork. We urge everyone to act rationally and hold off on making any decision to run a contentious hard-fork (Classic/XT or any other).

This is where shit gets real. This is extremely strong language, they specify not only the timescale (3 weeks) but also explicitly state the subject matter (with respect to a future hard-fork which includes an increase of the block size). This could not be any clearer. They want a blocksize and they want a concrete commitment from core within 3 weeks of when that is going to happen. The implications here are twofold, that the timescale had better be satisfactory, and that failure to provide a satisfactory timescale carries and unwritten 'or else' clause "We need" is the key phrase here. Very strong language from the east imho.

4. We must ensure that future changes to code relating to consensus rules are done in a safe and balanced way. We also believe that hard-forks should only be activated if they have widespread consensus and long enough deployment timelines. The deployment of hard-forks without widespread consensus is dangerous and has the potential to cause trust and monetary losses.

Reiteration of point 2, speaking directly to core using language that they want to here as a means of demonstrating a desire to remain aligned with them and giving them every opportunity to deliver.

@sgbett Great analysis. (my highlights)
Core are between a rock and a hard place. They just can't give the miners what they are saying here because they do not believe that they will be the majority client afterwards. The window closed when XT was launched. This is probably the reason Wladimir went along with Maxwell's "road-map" so easily, because he knew Core had taken a fork in the road for which there would be no return.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

man, i swear to god, this maxwell is like a nightmare come true.

Hintjens was right in the article @Justus Ranvier linked a few pages when he said the wolves come out when there is unguarded money on the table. Professionals. Career manipulators. In hindsight, we could not have expected anything less.

Bitcoin must overcome this and much worse in the future. I once heard a weightlifter say, "Pain is weakness leaving the body." Well every single weakness in Bitcoin will have a price to be paid for its rectification. That means miners' naivety, too, if indeed that is what we're witnessing (rather than shrewd tactics).

 

[sgbett]

On the subject of coblee. I think it speaks volumes about an organisation where the environment is such that employees are not automatically required to toe the party line. The fact coblee could freely express his own personal views publicly even though they may not align with the CEO demonstrates a maturity and commitment to openness and honesty. I work for myself. There are very few job offers I would accept. If by some strange occurrence (I really don't think I have the right skill set) coinbase offered me a job, I might consider it based on what I saw today.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Actually Pieter Hintjens has agreed to be interviewed to share his experiences with how to form a healthy development community and what steps to take to actively protect it from wolves.

We just need someone with a good platform to perform the interview and spread the word.

 

[Richy_T]

To that end, how would you rather see Classic development play out? Simple Core +2MB forever. Or have classic start implementing real scaling solutions like weak blocks subchains, better relay, pruning etc??

I'd like to see classic, BU and possibly XT (and others) collaborating on things that will add value. Thin blocks, a better, separate wallet, bitcoin running as a service and all the other good things. There a lot of things that could be done to improve the user experience and draw users into these clients. I would imagine a killer-app would be a wallet that could be used immediately (running Bitcoin as a service on Windows would help with this but tricks like running in a semi-trusted mode until caught up, perhaps)

 

[VeritasSapere]

@VeritasSapere

By saying "LEGIT" in the altcoin list I meant no moral judgment, just a shorthand for "mined in the normal way" as an indication of how inflated the market cap can be expected to look. I don't think a presale (even if it could be proven not to be gamed) counts as a non-premine for this purpose, since the inflated market cap comes from tight holding by a tiny group of people (see NXT and Ripple). As for Dash, it has always looked mighty shady to me (see the link in my comment above to a post by @smooth), and I don't think I've ever seen shadiness and innovation go together, though I could be surprised.

I suppose I thought fair was a better word for determining the initial distribution. As opposed to legitimate which somewhat falsely in this case imparts legitimacy to fully mined projects like Bitcoin over other projects which had a pre-sale/pre-mine which I agree are the same thing. However the difference being is that this is not necessarily a good indicator for fairness, which I think we should be more concerned about. Since sometimes these pre-sale/pre-mine's are justified and can be fair, like Ethereum, though I do prefer projects that are not started in this way.

Now regarding this controversy in the past of Dash which I thoroughly investigated before I invested into the project myself. I can agree that its origins are as you put it, shady. However the facts of the matter is this, there was over 2 million Dash mined in the first forty eight hours. This represents ten percent of the total supply, and one third of today's supply. This is not good, to say the least.

However I would argue that anyone could mine these coins. Early coins are a bit strange in this regard especially if people are unaware of them, since people often do not know what a small obscure coin might become in the future, this was definitely the case with Dash or XCoin at the time, the release was a mess but it was publicly announced when the genesis block began.

To be honest if the developers did mine their own coin, as long as this glitch in the difficulty adjustments was not intentional I do not see anything wrong with it. Since XCoin at the time did have a new type of difficulty adjustment that was being tested out for the first time, Evan Duffield the founder of Dash claims that the unexpected large hashrate caused the glitch. Ironically I do think that if some of the developers did mine large amounts in the early period that this has actually helped its development compared to its competitors. We can argue the fairness of this past event, personally it feels like ancient history and I do not have an issue with this considering the cryptocurrency that Dash is today.

Dash has gone through massive price movements since then, I do think that these early coins have already been dumped so to speak and the present distribution is good, I do not think there are any early miners that are still holding on to large amounts of those coins, the same can not be said about Bitcoin. It can be argued that both Dash and Ethereum have a better distribution of currency compared to Bitcoin.

 

[Richy_T]

Maybe we should also pull out the good old idea of a divorce. Make two incompatible chains, Classic and Core.

If one were to hard-fork this way, could one not write in an immediate difficulty change to encourage miners to jump on? Not that this would be enough in itself but if it had solid support (possibly of a large miner) *and* the incentive of a raised block size limit?

 

[VeritasSapere]

@Richy_T I still think it is to early to play this card, however it is a card that definitely should be on the table.

 

[rocks]

The consensus here seems to be that POS does not work. Just learned today that ETH uses POS after 2017. Does ETH have a real solution to POS or will it suffer the same as other current solutions?

 

[Richy_T]

@Richy_T I still think it is to early to play this card, however it is a card that definitely should be on the table.

Indeed, I would hope to never see it. Though it would be kind-of interesting to run as an experiment.

I think we have been expecting too much of the miners that they would lead, to be honest. They follow the money.

 

[VeritasSapere]

@rocks That is the funny thing about consensus, even when we supposedly have consensus people still disagree.

I do not have anything against Proof of Stake myself necessarily, I see the value in Proof of Work, however I am not convinced that Proof of Stake is somehow fundamentally flawed.

 

[lunar]

@sgbett great post. I think you are right, this is a posturing ultimatum. It has trapped Core between a block and the mine face

In terms of mitigating the 'contention' factor would be for core to just cherry pick the 2MB increase from classic and have done with it.

they want core to accept classic's blocksize increase, and classic to accept core's segwit and roadmap (as revised per the demands in 3 to contain a concrete BSHF timeline)

What would everyone do if an 80% cabal of miners announced that they had forked Core and added the Classic 2MB code, and that they would be mining a >1MB block in exactly 60 days?

@Justus Ranvier
i'd guess Adam or Stephanie over @ LTB would probably jump at this?

 

[VeritasSapere]

@Richy_T It certainly would be interesting! Well lets hope that will not happen this time around this we will all be going along for the ride, since we are a part of this grand experiment.

I personally think that Bitcoin splitting over the long term is inevitable, even a political necessity. That might not be a popular opinion around here but that is what I believe.

I would not want to see that happen over what I would consider such a trivial issue such as the blocksize, however I am prepared to take it to that point if our ideological opponents refuse to see reason or compromise. But like I said before we are not at that point yet and I am still feeling increasingly optimistic, today much thanks to @sgbett for putting a positive spin on that letter signed by some of the miners.

 

[solex]

@lunar

...forked Core and added the Classic 2MB code

But that IS Classic anyway. The miners just need to run it and make the calculated prediction that most of the Core Devs will join Classic and submit patches for it going forward. This whole fight amounts to taking executive powers away from Wuille, van Der Laan and Maxwell so that they can just do the coding work they are good at while the direction of Bitcoin is determined by the ecosystem as whole. Only the latter can bring their centrally-planned economic illiteracy to an end.

 

[lunar]

@solex I know, I'm just trying to highlight the ridiculousness of the whole my implementation is better than your implementation crap.

@VeritasSapere

I personally think that Bitcoin splitting over the long term is inevitable, even a political necessity.

I don't even see how this could be possible? Assuming PoW was the same, the only way the chain could permanently fork like this would be on fundamentally Ideological differences. One chain would always trend towards decreased usefulness or value. This chain would have to be supported at a financial loss to keep it competitive.?

What scenario are you envisaging?

 

[Richy_T]

bifurcation

Probably a better term than "hard-fork"

 

[Melbustus]

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. I looked at DarkCoin quite a bit a couple years ago when it was still in beta and changing a lot from each version. It sounds that the project has come a long way since then, many of the details you listed are different from just a couple years ago. For one the funding for master nodes is much lower (I remember it being 10K but could be wrong). The 10% automatic funding mechanism is new also. I really like that idea of a certain percentage of funds going towards development. Has the mixing improved? I played with it but thought it needed more work.

Early on I decided that truly anonymous coins were a niche that might gain some value eventually. So I looked into some of them a bit. Darkcoin's 50% or so instamine seems terrible, and the privacy seems inelegant (effectively just coinjoin across a layer-2). Cryptonote coins seem *far* more elegant, and it looks like ZCash will finally launch this summer. So I think this niche is going to be filled, and I doubt Dark/dash is it. Unlike bitcoin, alts do not have the luxury of gaining long-lasting network effect just by being first in their domain.

FWIW - I think the existence of strong-privacy coins is probably bullish for Bitcoin; if govs play strategically, they should *promote* bitcoin in response.

I still am concerned that if Bitcoin fails that it will be difficult for another crypto to take over and grow. Right now Bitcoin is new so there is nothing specific people can point to for why it will fail. If it does fail then when people look at better versions such as Dash the common view will be "oh that is another Bitcoin, which was shown to not work". That is a problem for the whole alt space.

Yup. If Bitcoin is no longer the #1 coin by a huge margin, I think the idea of crypto-scarcity/store-of-value will be set back by a decade or more.
[doublepost=1455240745][/doublepost]

...
All that said, I sold 10% of my stake for the first time ever today. Partially it is because of this nonsense, but also because there are massive buying opportunities in the energy sector now. I figured I'm getting more stock selling BTC at $375 today than I would have gotten selling BTC at $1000 last year.

Sad to sell coins, but I hear ya on the energy opportunity. I'll be doubling down on my energy positions at some point soonish. There's a lot, especially in solar, that's approaching 10-15yr lows (and at a time when the tech and biz-models themselves are at an inflection point of *finally* being viable).

 

[VeritasSapere]

@solex I know, I'm just trying to highlight the ridiculousness of the whole my implementation is better than your implementation crap.

@VeritasSapere

I don't even see how this could be possible? Assuming PoW was the same, the only way the chain could permanently fork like this would be on fundamentally Ideological differences. One chain would always trend towards decreased usefulness or value. This chain would have to be supported at a financial loss to keep it competitive.?

What scenario are you envisaging?

You already said it, this could only happen when there are significant fundamental ideological differences. This would be a requirement for a more long term split.

Increasing the supply of Bitcoin might be an example of something that could cause a split. If hypothetically Bitcoin grows and more people come into the fold so do more mainstream theories on economics which would favor a more inflationary currency. I would side with not changing the supply schedule at all of course.

In the case of the blocksize debate I do not think there are enough people that truly hold the small blockists philosophy with conviction compared to the people that just want to see the limit increased, to cause such a split this time around.

We do need to test this "consensus" and we need to do it through proof of work, it really is the only way. This is in part why the small blockists are so scared of any hardfork block size increase, since it partially invalidates some of their theories.

 

[cypherdoc]

However the facts of the matter is this, there was over 2 million Dash mined in the first forty eight hours. This represents ten percent of the total supply, and one third of today's supply. This is not good, to say the least.

yeah, now it's coming back to me.

this is the problem with alot of these altcoins claiming no pre-mine. they just change the distribution to be front-loaded when no one else is looking so that they can claim later there was no pre-mine. that's why Bitcoin is so fair. 4yr worth of 50BTC/block got alot of ppl excited.

 

[Richy_T]

What would everyone do if an 80% cabal of miners announced that they had forked Core and added the Classic 2MB code, and that they would be mining a >1MB block in exactly 60 days?

What would they do if 60% announced they forked Core and added the Satoshi code?