Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Bagatell]

@Inca You should have bought Monero or FCT with those Litecoin.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Bagatell]

@cypherdoc Do we call you god or will sir do?

 

[cypherdoc]

@Bagatell

Cosmically Super Awesome Invincible Badass Smart Alert Handsome as Fuck Pirate King Who Is Better Than You in Every Way shall suffice.

 

[awemany]

On coinmarketcap.com, ETH has already ~33% of the daily trading volume of BTC. This is worrying.

 

[VeritasSapere]

You are correct in stating that only a fundamental change could cause a permanent split. The coin quantum is fundamental. The keynesians, who occupy the economist space for the time being, thinks, erroneously, that the money quantum needs to rise continuously.

You are also right that the transactional capacity of the system is not a fundamentally economic parameter. The reason is that the value of money comes from the holding, large or small amounts, for short or long time. The aggregate want, need, and act of holding. For that, transactions are fundamentally only necessary when someone wants to change their holding. Of course, the easier, the better, because with low transaction capacity, such as we have in gold now, someone has to plan some time in advance to adjust his holding. Because of the difficulty to transact, you have to be quite sure that you don't need the resources you can exchange the gold coins for, the next couple of months. So transaction capacity is not a fundamental economic property, but indirect, in that it enables holding more, for a shorter time, and thus enable use for a larger part of the public.

So @VeritasSapereI do not understand why you have such a negative outlook.

We agree then, I also think transactional capacity increases utility and utility increases value which increases security, which in turn again increases utility and so forth, a virtuous cycle.

I am intrigued, why do you think that I have a negative outlook? Is it because of my recent altcoin evangelism, or because I emphasize Bitcoins ability to split? I have been interested in alternative currencies and had these views on the governance of Bitcoin before this existential crisis began. The ability to split like this has always been one of the things that really drew me to Bitcoin in the first place, because it solves the problem of tyranny of the majority, my thinking is even leading towards putting entire governments onto blockchains. The idea of non geographically bound decentralized and voluntary governments is very fascinating to me.

Though I really am curious, why do you think I have a negative outlook? Since I have always perceived myself as having a rather positive outlook on what is happening here, I still think that the blocksize will be increased and that the governance mechanism will prove itself to work. Though I do have to entertain the possibility that it might not, this is the empirical test of Bitcoin after all, I can not be sure of the result of this experiment, though if I was not as confident of this outcome I would not be holding the amount of Bitcoin that I am, it still represents my largest cryptocurrency holding.

I am not an extremely early adopter though like I suspect many other people on this forum are, so I need to hedge my investments, so that I can continue making a living off cryptocurrency and spend more time on this great forum among other things. I still consider all of us to be early adopters in the grand scheme of things, the sky is the limit.

 

[lunar]

Sorry if someone has already linked, but Brian has pretty much nailed this.

rest of the presentation can be found here.

 

[Erdogan]

We agree then, I also think transactional capacity increases utility and utility increases value which increases security, which in turn again increases utility and so forth, a virtuous cycle.

I am intrigued, why do you think that I have a negative outlook? Is it because of my recent altcoin evangelism, or because I emphasize Bitcoins ability to split? I have been interested in alternative currencies and had these views on the governance of Bitcoin before this existential crisis began. The ability to split like this has always been one of the things that really drew me to Bitcoin in the first place, because it solves the problem of tyranny of the majority, my thinking is even leading towards putting entire governments onto blockchains. The idea of non geographically bound decentralized and voluntary governments is very fascinating to me.

Though I really am curious, why do you think I have a negative outlook? Since I have always perceived myself as having a rather positive outlook on what is happening here, I still think that the blocksize will be increased and that the governance mechanism will prove itself to work. Though I do have to entertain the possibility that it might not, this is the empirical test of Bitcoin after all, I can not be sure of the result of this experiment, though if I was not as confident of this outcome I would not be holding the amount of Bitcoin that I am, it still represents my largest cryptocurrency holding.

I am not an extremely early adopter though like I suspect many other people on this forum are, so I need to hedge my investments, so that I can continue making a living off cryptocurrency and spend more time on this great forum among other things. I still consider all of us to be early adopters in the grand scheme of things, the sky is the limit.

Because you think that a split is realistic. I don't think it is even a remote possibility. We either will continue with small blocks for a while, or we get large blocks rather quickly. I think segregated withness is a distraction, I do not think it will do serious harm to the system, I think it will not be used much, maybe removed later. Anyway, in my opinion, there is only one possibility, and that is success.

 

[awemany]

Thinking about John Ratcliff's LN article a bit. I think it is a pretty good article, however I think LN itself is still somewhat thin on certain details (for example, I am not yet sure that the various time-locked enforcement that are proposed are going to work without significantly increasing full node complexity).
In addition to the routing part and potential Gov-Interference.

Along those lines, if you imagine a future with LN as the scaling booster on top of Bitcoin, it is hard to imagine a success scenario where Bitcoin would need to at least support block sizes according to the good old BIP101. It probably needs more near-term growth to accomodate the time needed for a partial transition to more payment-channel-based fund transfers.

Meanwhile, thanks to Hearn et al. and now 21inc we have multiple 1-to-1 payment channel systemsworking already (and with some routing centralization and minor trust requirements) that can already realistically fulfill a large fraction of what LN would be used for - at least initially.

Miners have also been proven now to not be particularly interested in producing gigablocks - quite the contrary. Being scared of a runaway blocksize is fully in the irrational realm.

In this context and from a what-is-good-for-Bitcoin POV,, the whole blocksize fiasco appears as a gross misallocation of development resources and focus. From a what-is-good-for-Borgstream POV, this is different, of course.

But we all know we're preaching to the choir. Miners, it is time to fork.

 

[VeritasSapere]

@Erdogan I agree, I suppose I would not go so far as to say it is the only possibility, being completely unprecedented in history I suppose I can not get myself to be that certain. I also think it is very unlikely that there would be any type of meaningfull split over this blocksize debate. However it is good to keep in mind that even a small group of people, lets say twenty people for example could choose not to upgrade and you would have a split, not a meaningful one since its economic value would be very low and for most people it would be very clear what the real Bitcoin is.

I suppose for me the ability to split represents the right to self determination, it is one of the mechanisms that ensures the continued freedom and decentralization of the protocol, it is a concept that I have embraced and I would not be such an ardent supporter of Bitcoin if that capability did not exist. I suppose you can say that I consider the ability for Bitcoin to split as a positive and necessary feature of Bitcoin. However that is not the same as thinking that Bitcoin will split over this blocksize debate, which I do think is very unlikely. If that did happen however which I do not think it would, it would however imply that there was a large enough ideological division in Bitcoin, in that case a split would have been justified. So in reality I see both situations as being positive, reflecting the will of the economic majority is exactly what the governance mechanism of Bitcoin is supposed to do after all.

 

[lunar]

Meanwhile, thanks to Hearn et al. and now 21inc we have multiple 1-to-1 payment channel systems working already (and with some routing centralization and minor trust requirements) that can already realistically fulfill a large fraction of what LN would be used for - at least initially.

Made me wonder if there will eventually be a system of payment channel escrow? One channel could effectively underwrite another channel to mutually assure trust. (some sort of multisig channel checkpointing?

 

[Inca]

@Inca You should have bought Monero or FCT with those Litecoin.

I don't own any litecoin!

 

[awemany]

@lunar, indeed, good point, that is probably something you could - as far as I can see - do without any LN and the current infrastructure already.

But instead of doing interesting things in a decentralized dev and open environment, we have to prevent psychopaths from taking over our coin.

 

[Bagatell]

@Inca I misinterpretted your post. Carry on.

 

[Inca]

If ever you had doubts about how low these creatures will stoop to try and steer the media debate:

http://reddit.com/r/bitcoinclassic

It's like a roll call of the socks from blockstream..

EDIT: With the halving only a few months away and a resolution in the blocksize coming either with a HF and majority miner support, or Core giving up and admitting to a definitive 2mb blocksize increase I have a feeling we could have an extremely impressive relief rally around the corner.

Let's not forget that the price was in the doldrums at ~200 USD last year and it has rallied up to 350-500 USD with minimal media coverage. As the halving gets some publicity we could see alts getting pumped then bitcoin going on a tear. A perfect storm would be the ETF finally making some progress around that time. But perhaps that is taking wishful thinking too far

 

[VeritasSapere]

I suppose to expand a bit on what I said earlier. A split in Bitcoin is comparable to a bloody civil war or a revolution in a modern democratic state. It might be very messy and detrimental, something that is very unlikely and in most cases unnecessary, in part because of the costs involved for everyone, while possibly not solving the problems it was first started for to begin with. However sometimes it might be justified and necessary from some peoples perspective, especially when it becomes ideological. So in the same sense that we can say revolution and civil war is a necessary part of the political process of human beings, the same is true for Bitcoin and its ability to split in the case of a massive ideological divergence. What can I say, politics in not pretty.

 

[freetrader]

This was said a little while back by mod /u/smartfbrankings in defense of squatting that sub:

"Currently Bitcoin Classic's code is identical to Bitcoin Core. In the even that Bitcoin Core promotes a contentious hard fork, the source code will be forked to preserve the classic mode of Bitcoin."

Someone should ask him if he still considers Bitcoin Classic source code to be identical to Core ;-)

 

[cypherdoc]

@freetrader

How does ardent core supporter /u/smartassbanking become mod of Classic reddit?

 

[freetrader]

@cypherdoc, he squatted that sub name 7 months before Classic was announced. Due to that, Classic had to use /r/bitcoin_classic as their sub.

I think he created the squat sub, but in the early days theymos was also a mod there.

Anyway, they could provide enough material for many episodes of http://sockpuppettheatre.com .

 

[Inca]

well my perma banned reddit account yeeha4 has /r/hardfork