Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Norway]

@Norway
I think most of the blockchain tech solutions are in early PoC/prototype stage, but there is no doubt that we will see them arrive in this year.
For instance Guardtime has deployed a number of solutions across security-critical industries based on their keyless signature infrastructure, and blockchain plays a big role on their system. Other non-financial applications include managing of supply chain, and music industry property managemement (Ujo).

Things are moving in such fast pace that the entire cryptocurrency scene, Bitcoin included, stands in danger of becoming a curious geek ghetto or just a footnote in the relentless emergence and spread of the blockchain tech industry.

Guardtime claim to invent blockchain technology in 2007:
"In 2007 we invented Keyless Signature Infrastructure, the first and only blockchain platform for ensuring the integrity of systems, networks and data at industrial scale."

I don't think cryptography, P2P, network or distributed databases qualify as "Blockchain tech". It's such a buzz word these days. Almost like people just invented computer technology.

Any other examples of Blockchain technology in real use today? The technology has been around for many years now...

 

[Aquent]

The core side is fully satisfied with the agreement, despite whatever they say. They get exactly what they want, full blocks, which is what we have, and the smoke filled room agreement has a time line which ensures that we have full blocks throughout. For any investor in bitcoin, most of whom right now are on edge, the question becomes, if the miners do not wish to follow satoshi's recommendations ( I mean, wtf) then how does this new system work, does it actually work? Can we operate under full blocks, will nodes crash? Will the whole thing crash.

I mean, this is a system shock. Beyond all the silly rhetorics and spells and whatever, reality is here and hitting hard. This whole thing could come crashing down because it is not designed to operate under full blocks. It is not evaluated by investors or companies or anyone based on the premise of full blocks which has never been tried, never been tested, and simply does not work.

Plus, I don't see how Jihan Wu does not feel fully cheated by Adam Back signing his name as blockstream president in the chinese version, while signing it as individual in the english version.

What we need is a finale. The settlement nonsense which has never been tried or tested has almost no support, with a mere tiny amount of people, some 20%, being stupid enough to give a 6 billion dollar system a system shock and put it all at great risk, even existential risk. The miners should just make a decision, run classic, not bend, and declare it is simply right because we know it works while we have no clue whether full blocks work. They should ask core to go and do their tests to prove a full block system can actually function and that anyone can use it first and tell them that once they prove it they'll consider it. I mean, right now all this settlement nonsense, sure arguments are great, but would anyone use bitcoin when txs don't confirm, drop out, nodes crash? Who knows, who on earth would take that reckless risk, and for what reason whatever?

Jihan should just focus on the real issue, continuing as we have, or taking an utterly reckless path and provoke a full panic by giving bitcoin a system shock through creating a fully new, never tested, never proven, system, while in mid flight, with no tests, not even some simple analysis. It's madness. Reckless madness.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Norway
I think most of the blockchain tech solutions are in early PoC/prototype stage, but there is no doubt that we will see them arrive in this year.
For instance Guardtime has deployed a number of solutions across security-critical industries based on their keyless signature infrastructure, and blockchain plays a big role on their system. Other non-financial applications include managing of supply chain, and music industry property managemement (Ujo).

Things are moving in such fast pace that the entire cryptocurrency scene, Bitcoin included, stands in danger of becoming a curious geek ghetto or just a footnote in the relentless emergence and spread of the blockchain tech industry.

this is what TPTB do. stall the original invention (Bitcoin) while they race to beat them at their own game by subverting the original tech.

 

[Norway]

@cypherdoc
That's how I see it too.

I want to be able to claim in public that nobody is using blockchain technology today for anything else than money. Even though the tech has existed for seven years.

But I have to make sure that I am not mistaken. That's why I ask you all to prove me wrong by giving real working useful examples.

It is also useful to me if you say that you don't know any examples.

 

[YarkoL]

this is what TPTB do. stall the original invention (Bitcoin) while they race to beat them at their own game by subverting the original tech.

Maybe but it is happening all the same, and our reproach and disdain is not likely to change anything.

I've heard a similar "subversion" argument a long ago against altcoins, and more recently against alt implementations... But thinking about history of technology, it always follows a similar adoption path. Yes there will be massive closed and permissioned blockchain-based systems, "walled gardens" but still there will also always exist a frontier, a semi-underground culture from which original innovation springs.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Norway

i know of no examples.

 

[Norway]

@cypherdoc Coming from you, that means a lot to me!

 

[Peter R]

Did Kano just throw Blockstream/Core under the bus?

Hmm, couldn't all the pools just go with 2MB and tell the devs who think they control everything to stop trying to make themselves feel important?

Bitcoin is by design controlled by the consensus of the miners, not by centralised control.
It would seem that there are all sorts of parties trying to control bitcoin and I guess they all simply fail to understand the design.

Doesn't really matter how important devs think they are, if they want to be a relevant part of the blockchain decisions then they need to be miners.

...

BlockStream/Sidechains/SegWit all sounds a lot like trying pointlessly to control altcoins and make something like a partial SPV ... to me.

Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg14005202#msg14005202

 

[freetrader]

Initial proposal for Classic roadmap is out:

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/documentation/blob/master/roadmap/roadmap2016.md

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/47kme0/bitcoin_classic_2016_roadmap_announcement/

 

[VeritasSapere]

@cypherdoc
That's how I see it too.

I want to be able to claim in public that nobody is using blockchain technology today for anything else than money. Even though the tech has existed for seven years.

But I have to make sure that I am not mistaken. That's why I ask you all to prove me wrong by giving real working useful examples.

It is also useful to me if you say that you don't know any examples.

Here is an example of a real world use case of Bitcoin beyond money:

-----BEGIN BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hello World
-----BTC ADDRESS----------------------
1PQ1BB819gxUbDZX3aReBXx4r7zGo67jXi
-----BEGIN SIGNATURE------------------
H10zVzGk7ogaprI4bhllANhx67evnEZpKpFqh7eAADh2cDmPHB847aPpgRhiWEEXwO3hv1FPsHKJb4HKxeDZKbc=
-----END BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-------

We even used this in this forum, identity verification using the Bitcoin blockchain is much easier to use compared to PGP.
[doublepost=1456427780][/doublepost]If I am not mistaken some of the notary type stuff Factom and Emercoin are doing has some real world uses cases. So does Namecoin in terms of domain names. Furthermore there are many companies out there with crypto shares, so to speak, some that even automatically pay dividends. Bitshares, NXT, BTCD, BANX, XCP and ARCH are just some examples of this, regardless of what we might think of these projects. It is debatable at which point shares in a company have utility or whether this is just more cryptocurrency speculation.

Bitshares now also has a functional decentralized exchange, which I certainly think does have utility. Ripple is like a type of exchange as well but operates more like a settlement network for banks, but it certainly does have real world use cases as well, in terms of swapping IOU's around for financial institutions at least. lol

I know there are a bunch of things being build on top of Ethereum now, I am not sure if there are actually any real world applications now though, someone might have to correct me on this. Ironic for the second largest cryptocurrency, that I can not think of a real use case today, besides money off course.

Do not get me wrong, I personally do think that currency is the most important aspect of cryptocurrency. It is the aspect that I think is one of the most profound in terms of how much change it can really effect in our civilization. Furthermore it is the path that the cryptocurrency revolution needs to take in order for it be successful in terms of effecting the most positive change. Though there are a lot of other cool things blockchains can do as well, which should not be underestimated or undervalued.

 

[Bagatell]

@Norway Does Factom count? They did a PoC hashing Project Gutenberg.

http://explorer.factom.org/chain/00511c298668bc5032a64b76f8ede6f119add1a64482c8602966152c0b936c77

 

[lunar]

Just leaving this here for discussion. Fantastic development news.


Note: This is our initial roadmap proposal. We will run this by miners, companies and users for feedback, before it is finalized.

Bitcoin Classic 2016 Roadmap
The Bitcoin Classic team will help realize Satoshi’s vision of making Bitcoin scale into a global peer to peer cash system, and not just a settlement network. We believe on-chain scaling is crucial for the long term health of Bitcoin. On-chain scaling maximizes transaction volume, whose fees are needed to replace miner rewards on the medium to long term scale.

Our preferred strategy for on-chain scaling, is to eliminate the need for blocks to be synced within seconds. We will implement solutions that make continuous block syncing possible. Instead of transmitting the data for a new block all at once when it is found, we can significantly optimize current bandwidth by sending data during the full ten-minute interval between blocks. This will enable the Bitcoin network to scale to significant new levels, without endangering decentralization. We will scale using a 3-pronged approach:

Phase 1 (Q1-Q2)
Urgently resolve issue of blocks being almost full

• Implement BIP 109: Raise block size limit from 1MB to 2MB.
• Hard fork with 75% activation threshold (750 of 1000 blocks), 28 day activation grace period.
• Software based on Bitcoin Core implementation 0.11.2 and 0.12.0.

Note: 0.11.2 is already finished and available for download here.

Phase 2 (Q2-Q3)
Eliminate the need for blocks to be sent within seconds

• Reduce the effect of block propagation times on orphan rates (lost miner income)
• De-emphasize block size as an obstacle for scaling and open up potential for on-chain transaction throughput gains using several improvements (listed below).
• Optimizations for bandwidth constrained nodes via improvements to the P2P layer

Note: We intend to discuss various solutions such as the ones listed below and pick the best ones.

• Parallel validation of blocks (theoretically reduces the profitability of excessive-sized block attacks).
• Headers-first mining (largely nullifies excessive-sized block attacks).
• Thin blocks: Blocks refer to transactions that have been well propagated rather than including them, allowing for minimization of bandwidth use.
• Weak blocks: allow miners to pre-announce the blocks they are working on, to minimize the data sent once a block is found.
• Validate Once: Transactions that have been validated when entering a node’s memory pool do not need to be revalidated when included in a block (speeds up block validation).

Phase 3 (Q3-Q4)
Make the block size limit dynamic
Note: This phase will only happen when miners & companies confirm Phase 2 successfully addressed their blocksize concerns.

• Use a variation of Steven Pair’s/BitPay proposal. Validation cost of a block must be less than a small multiple of the average cost over the last difficulty adjustment period
• Simplified version of Segregated Witness from Core, when it is available

Technical details
A more technical version of the roadmap can be found here

Conference
We plan to hold an on-chain scaling conference soon, where these and future scaling solutions & concerns can be discussed among the community.

 

[Melbustus]

This might have put it over the edge for me, these guys are not engaging in a reasonable manner.

Nakamoto consensus takes on various forms. One form is POW mining to determine transaction ordering, it is probably time to explore the other forms related to rule making.

I feel ya. Mow, Petrov, and others, have gotten to me lately. It's profoundly disappointing who's at the hashpower-helm right now. My remaining "faith", is two-fold:

1) The current set of miners will perhaps come around, after industry starts engaging more directly. Hopefully Brian Armstrong's participation in this latest mini-roundtable thing is a start. Alternatively, rising fees may create conditions that make it more obvious to even thick-headed miners that Classic is that better path. Stagnant price in the face of rising alt-coins, and other distasteful events, etc.

2) Hashpower should eventually migrate away from the current early players and professionalize as margins inevitably get squeezed. I think this would result in much more sophisticated and long-term-thinking hashpower management. And assuming bitcoin's network effect survives, I think this is inevitable. Just a question of how much pain first.

In any event, I'm going to try and not read what these guys say for a while. It makes me far too angry and probably more bearish than is actually appropriate for the current reality (depressing though it may be).

 

[VeritasSapere]

Trying to fork with the same POW is clearly suicide. Look at the cat-vs-mouse games Luke-Jr played with silly altcoins 3 or 4 years ago, destroying them completely.

I have already countered the idea that these events with those altcoins apply to a proper genesis fork of Bitcoin. First of all the market cap and relative interest towards those coins was very low, and blockchains become more secure with scale. Secondly BBQCoin was a scrypt coin before ASICs where even developed and CoilCoin was a merged mined coin, which have notoriously weak game theory security. Unless there was a third altcoin that Luke-Jr attacked that I am not aware off I did not think that these two examples would apply to a proper genesis fork of Bitcoin since its security and support would be much higher.

In the case of multiple SHA256 chains the security will actually just be reflected by the block reward, just like it is today with alternative cryptocurrencies that also use SHA256. I think miners would rather profit from being in a multipool equalizing the hashrate between the two chains then waste resources futilely attacking one of the chains.

Here are the two post where I discuss these two incidents:
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-358#post-12696
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-358#post-12699

 

[Norway]

@VeritasSapere @Bagatell
Thanks for your responses. I'll check out your examples in detail later.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@Norway
What do you mean by "using blockchain technology for anything else than money"? The Bitcoin blockchain for example is used for other things, like VeritasSapere wrote already. There a a lot of uses for this technology. But they all depend on the primary use case as money.

Maybe I'm out of the loop in regards to "blockchain technology" but I don't know how you could design a real "blockchain" without monetary incentives involved. Could someone enlighten me about that? Everything I've seen so far called "blockchain technology" besides cryptocurrencies emerged to be some kind of bullshit. But I'm open minded and not up to date about this topic.

edit:

With @VeritasSapere we alreday found the first miner afraid of a PoW Hardfork. We just have to get to the rest of them.

 

[_mr_e]

 

[Norway]

@satoshis_sockpuppet
Bitcoin is programmable money, no doubt. And it's beautiful. I'm just sceptical to the "Forget about bitcoin, the real invention is the blockchain. It can be used for almost everything!"
[doublepost=1456431196][/doublepost]I am happy to see Classic is going for the Bitpay-approach to blocksize limit. It was always my favourite!

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

It seems the gabfest and yawnfest continues as miners and devs front while the fronting's good.

Nice to see people are starting to ignore this and continue building, confident any threatened roadblocks will take care of themselves. I'm no longer actually sure the Fidelity Effect matters much. It was the same in 2012 in that companies didn't move forward because they didn't know if Bitcoin would be a thing. In both cases it's due to a lack of understanding of how Bitcoin works, only this time it's a deeper understanding that's required...but could that have been any different? How amusing will it be when Bitcoin tramples right over BS's plans as if they were never there? (Even if this requires unprecedented governance steps.)

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@Norway Yes, so far I have only seen this wording to discredit Bitcoin and push yet another centralized solution draped with some crypto here and some consensus there. And it's certainly a fancy buzzword without the dubious sound of *shudder* "Bitcoin". And additionally it's a chance for people who discredited Bitocin in the beginning to jump on the bandwagon without admitting a mistake.

So I think I'm looking for the same answer you are looking for:

Is it possible to have something similar to the Bitcoin blockchain without the monetary incentives? Is there any working example out there?

I don't know how that should work but I'm honestly interested.