Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

New @rocks If that was true it might even be the case that proof of work governance is fundamentally flawed I do not think that is the case yet. Which is why I do not see the point in repeating the same experiment. The outcome of the social experiment might be different considering this history and the divide in the community but like I said I am not so quick to give up on the governance of Bitcoin just yet.

Actually that was the first think I thought, after I saw this ugly "consensus decision" from Hong Kong:
1. Hm. Maybe bitcoin is broken.
2. So should I start investing in altcoins instead?
3. If Bitcoin is broken, why should any of the altcoins not get into the same mess at same point, meaning the idea of cryptocurrencies as of today is flawed and not working.

But: The threat of using another POW on a blockchain fork is the weapon we need here. If we actually need a change in POW has yet to be shown, but the option for it should be existing.
Imho it would be great to have a working Fork of bitcoin with a new POW ready to start from Block X. Thus the governance of Bitcoin isn't broken, we are just not using all available tools.

Besides the current mess, I really love the option of "altcoins" who are forking the existing blockchain. It is some kind of "risk free" competition to the existing currency. As a bitcoin user/holder you can comfortably watch the new currency and evaluate it neutrally.

 

[lunar]

Interesting meetup this evening at the institute for cryptoanarchy Paralelní Polis Prague.

Hangout with Roger Ver. He covered quite a few topics, mainly around his latest projects and motivations on decentralised prediction markets. Most of the questions however were on the block size issue. Like many of us, Its clear he's very frustrated with the 1MB Core cock block. Nevertheless I got the distinct impression that Roger is still in the 'can't quite believe it stage'. Praising Core for their great and work, and not offering much criticism. All the while there was a nervous sense of urgency in his voice as he highlighted the average blocksize chart and talked about how we need to raise the limit NOW.

Perhaps it's just the libertarian good nature of many of the early adopters (there are a few more that seem to be in the same camp Eric V for one), but to my mind they are in denial that once trusted developers, have done exactly what for the last 7 years they have been saying was impossible. 'Bitcoin can't be controlled it's censorship resistant'.

Well it's time to wake up. No matter if its due to failure to understand basic economics, hubris or financial capture. Core are forcibly censoring transactions from the main chain and Blockstream appear to be leading it, for their own self serving agenda.

 

[lunar]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg13993733#msg13993733
F2Pool macbook-air

Announcement: We will withdraw support from February 21’s roundtable consensus, unless Adam Back gives us a reasonable explanation why he quietly changed his title from Blockstream President to Individual at the very last moment — without anybody noticed. We feel we’ve been cheated. I don’t know how we can trust Blockstream anymore in the future.

Flip flop flip flop

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@lunar
ROFL...

This looks like a pretense to get out of this mess without loss of face.

 

[sickpig]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg13993733#msg13993733
F2Pool macbook-air


Flip flop flip flop

This is funny.

I can't even imagine what they will do once they realize that Gregory Maxwell dropped his commit bit just to silent people who were complaining about BlockStream conflict of interest.

 

[kyuupichan]

also, after talking with Mow, it's clear to me that he coerced this latest Roundtable agreement in HK by locking everyone in the room until he achieved "forced harmony". there was extreme urgency to his chat when talking to him just prior to the meeting and i'm sure it was present at the meeting. hence the pics of Luke and the other guy sleeping in the room. to him, the argument is now over and the "price can go UP". this is his business model; profit from price rises while neglecting the longer term biz model of growing users and thus fees. he claims he is in it for the long run but his actions speak otherwise.

so bottom line, i expect a culling of the miners due to a static price to hurt the larger miners preferentially as they will have been found to be the most irresponsible, short sighted, speculative, and highly leveraged of the bunch. we could get more decentralization out of this than we realize. this could be a very good thing.

BTCC is a pool. Do they also have substantial mining investments?

 

[Norway]

The round table paper was also signed by:
Han Solo
CEO
Blockcloud

Does anybody know who this is? Sounds bogus...

EDIT: @bitcartel asked the same question a couple of days ago, but no serious answers. (But a few funny ones, lol)

EDIT2: Nothing shows up on google...

 

[cypherdoc]

what's Wang Chun's Twitter handle?

i'm glad he finally sees the light around Blockstream's tactics. why hasn't Corallo signed as an employee of Blockstream likewise? every single one of these "Letters" in the past has been signed by ppl who include their company name or affiliation right below so as to lend legitimacy and weight to the signature. that's why they're called "industry letters". remember how i complained a couple of weeks ago about how this letter https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/a-call-for-consensus-d96d5560d8d6#.ndivg4el4 was over-represented by 5 double sigs from guys from the same company? 23 --> 18 (22% reduction in sigs)? IOW, no one signs one of these things as an individual, when they're a member of a company, unless they're planning to obfuscate later.

so now that Adam's back tracked his backtrack, let's get Corallo to sign as a representating Blockstream & maybe Peter Todd representing Viacoin.

finally, they need to get maaku7 to retract his statements against this agreement b/c afterall, we know they can NEVER implement 2MB HF w/o core dev consensus.

 

[kyuupichan]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg13993733#msg13993733
F2Pool macbook-air


Flip flop flip flop

The "consensus" is cracking already. Talk is cheap. I bet they all ultimately bow to market pressure.

We should give Classic a decent shot at succeeding. However, if it's clearly going nowhere in a month or two, then I think the POW fork is worthy serious consideration. I'm the 2nd most active contributor to Electrum. Unfortunately the lead is a big fan of Maxwell and Core. But I could maintain an Electrum fork that would support a POW fork.

A serious and credible (that's important) threat to move to a POW fork as of a given block number would really force miners (and others) to test their beliefs that the value will stick with a small-block chain in the long run. It would be the most effective pressure I believe. And if nothing happens, then we fork and the market can decide. I'd certainly be willing to buy unlimited bitcoins at 1% the price of limited ones, in large size. I'm sure others would too. So where would the value split settle? I'd guess initially at 90-10 in favour of the old limited chain. But I also believe this would gradually, or perhaps not so gradually, begin to change. We would need support from at least one decent block explorer, pool and exchange to support the new fork. Given the frustration with limited blocks I don't think that would be hard to find. Perhaps pools wouldn't be needed as difficulty would be reset to 1 for a while I imagine.

Private key maintenance would become complex, including figuring out if what you're receiving would be valid on both chains. But hard decisions ultimately need to be made and not avoided.

 

[cypherdoc]

Yay! "price goes UP" as Wang Chun saves the day!

 

[lunar]

Rollover time.

 

[AdrianX]

There are "big bucks" and there are "real fucking huge bucks" to make with bitcoin. I see a possibility to make big bucks in the next 1-2 years where bitcoin degenerates to another failed ecash while it is hyped by blockstream etc. After that it's going to be dead. I think a lot of miners would be ok with that. Longtime holders and bitcoin enthusiasts not so much.
Another possibility would be the original vision of bitcoin which I am certain would be x times more valuable than any blockstream share will ever be. At the moment everything points to direction A, sadly.

One positive observation: I thought we would see a much higher price after the "consensus" promulgation. It appears there aren't to many idiots left to buy company owned bitcoins.

I like this, it starts with the vision gets a little pessimistic and ends with optimism. All in all if Blockstream succeed Bitcoin may not evolve to be a viable reserve currency, I wouldn't call it company owned bitcoin yet though.

The political control of miners may not be a viable control strategy

 

[lunar]

@Norway @bitcartel
this might explain

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[sickpig]

@cypherdoc

in the last test session to evaluate BUIP010, I've gathered data for all xthin blocks minted received by my node from 2016-02-19 14:33:49 UTC to 2016-02-24 13:13:32 UTC.

The size distribution of those 345 xthin blocks is the following:

Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
46690 934300 979200 928600 998200 1000000

so it seems that blocks are full, unfortunately.

Now guess what would happen if users instead of paying higher fees just decide to move to some other medium of exchange.

 

[Norway]

@Norway @bitcartel
this might explain

A Litecoin miner. Jeez!
I guess Han is a solo miner

 

[freetrader]

Odd, no mention of a Litecoin miner attending in the official news.
This is more than suspicious, it is actually outrageous.

Is it just being buddies or a plant by Litecoin to help with their strategic planning?

 

[rocks]

A serious and credible (that's important) threat to move to a POW fork as of a given block number would really force miners (and others) to test their beliefs that the value will stick with a small-block chain in the long run. It would be the most effective pressure I believe. And if nothing happens, then we fork and the market can decide. I'd certainly be willing to buy unlimited bitcoins at 1% the price of limited ones, in large size. I'm sure others would too. So where would the value split settle? I'd guess initially at 90-10 in favour of the old limited chain. But I also believe this would gradually, or perhaps not so gradually, begin to change. We would need support from at least one decent block explorer, pool and exchange to support the new fork. Given the frustration with limited blocks I don't think that would be hard to find. Perhaps pools wouldn't be needed as difficulty would be reset to 1 for a while I imagine.

This is exactly the point. And by setting the activation date some number of months in the future the chain fork "Satoshi's Bitcoin" clients will participate on the current Bitcoin network and be very visible for all to see. Imagine 500 nodes out of 6000 on the P2P network tagged as following a full fork by x date unless the network upgrades to 2MB, then imagine several prominent exchanges and businesses saying they will also support the new branch when it starts. That should put real fear into miners.

At that point if if they are still unwilling to upgrade then it is obvious they are not following user preferences and should be abandoned, if they cave and upgrade then everyone can stay on the main chain, but the alternative client should remain out there to serve as a viable option if the next upgrade does not happen.

Users cannot be passive in this and just hope moneyed interests do what users want them to do. Users need to take proactive stances to ensure their views are followed and create alternative backups. It has at least come to that.

 

[cypherdoc]

don't get me wrong, i like Trace & consider him a friend.

however, his overuse of the term "hire Bitcoin" is driving me crazy. it typifies the avg small blockist's mentality that they should have the right to interject themselves in btwn Bitcoin tx's to extract fees. in this sense, it should all become clear why they favor a fee mkt to force all tx's offchain so they can capitalize on things like effortless, free LN hubs which can get in the middle of every tx at the expense of miner tx fee income onchain which will decrease the security and value of the network and thus the value of our coins (price goes DOWN). when will miners get it?

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

New Odd, no mention of a Litecoin miner attending in the official news.
This is more than suspicious, it is actually outrageous.

Is it just being buddies or a plant by Litecoin to help with their strategic planning?

Didn't you get the memo, that altcoiners are now making Bitcoin policies. I never understood why I should listen to people with heavy investments in altcoins what is best for bitcoin...

@rocks 100%