Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Christoph Bergmann]

@satoshis_sockpuppet

I don't think I lost my mind, but who can say that for sure? I always had the suspicion that bitcoin has stange effects on my mental / social health ---

You paid 7 and 20 cent for transactions you see that as a success??
Bitcoin went from cheap, nearly instant transactions to slow and expensive in a few weeks. The design was built on a lot of cheap transactions.

Little correction: bitcoin currently is cheap OR fast. If you pay 7 cent for a standard transaction you get your confirmation in one block. Fast like 2013.

But yes, I'm not happy that bitcoin has become more expensive and I'm completely with you that I think we should have prepared a hardfork one year ago and that bitcoin could easily work with way bigger limits / without limits at all. The result of what we see now is that promises are broken. No micropayment, not cheaper than credit cards.

But since what I think is far away from being consensus, and the consensus-dependency of bitcoin is part of what makes bitcoin bitcoin, I try to analyze the current situation unbiasedly. I don't want one eye because I tend to one side of the discussion.

And what I see is: The world seems to be willing to pay some cent for a bitcoin transaction. (Hurray?)

Have you been following? We lost so much fucking growth. Altcoins are eating Bitcoins lunch and investments in bitcoin are stagnating.

That is possibly speculation. You can't determine what did not happen.

We don't know why investors lost interest in Bitcoin startups. Maybe because Ethereum looks more interesting with smart contracts and less crime, maybe because nearly no btc-startup has roid? And if fidelity doesn't use bitcoin as a cheap and fast and secure vehicel to load up Asset-tokens on Nanobitcoins - I don't care.

Do you have data about altcoins share of cryptocurrencies market cap? Would be interesting to know.

To be honest I have no problem with the raise of an altcoin. If dogecoin eats micropayment, and ethereum smart contracts, I'm totally fine with it and would consider it a perfect solution.

Why on earth do you think, people will continue to use Bitcoin?

That's paradox. If people stop using bitcoin fees will fall and mempool will stop to pop up. The problem is not that people don't use bitcoin, but that people use bitcoin.

By the way, didn't Peter R made a beautiful graphic where Bitcoin price was plotted over number of transactions?

Yes, I know that graph and I admire it. As I said - I'm all for raising the blocksize and scaling onchain as much as is possible. I don't see any upcoming adoption that exceeds the possible capacity of an onchain scaling.

But that doesn't mean that I think the current situation kills bitcoin. Actually it tells us how much the world is willing to pay for onchain-transactions ... and that's really interesting in my view.

Edit: to summarize things up: I'm sure we get bigger blocks, but not this week, so the best we can do is to watch and study the state of full blocks and what people are willing to pay to get a transaction included in blocks.

Edit Edit: to clear things up: I like unlimited the most and think classics roadmap is the most reasonable altenative. I'm sure that we will go classic if the current state holds on. But that is no reason to misinterprete the current situation.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I don't think that was smart by Adam.
Touching the halving process is psychologically close to the 21 limit. And he is admitting, what a lot of people already knew, you can change nearly everything with a "soft" fork. Thus it isn't inherently more harmless than a "hard" fork like he and his buddies are trying to suggest all the time.

It's a shame that their mishandling of this block size issue is starting to poison the well of other useful changes.

Changing the block reward schedule so that it reduces a little bit each block rather than a large change every four years is a nice to have change, if it was done in a way that produced an identical currency supply.

Because it is so sensitive though, it'd have to be done very cleanly and transparently, instead of via the soft "we can silently take away the ability of your node to validate the blockchain at any time" fork process.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

and half an hour later a reader comments:

"Why needs anybody to buy a packerl tschick with bitcoin"? Packerl tschick is austrianish for packet of cigaretts. And I find myself answering "This is the same as asking, why needs anybody to smoke zigarrettes at all. "

This discussion is terrible. Whenever you think you find a truth, you jump on one side and close your eyes for the other side. And whenever you try to be objective, you realize that you are not.

 

[sickpig]

It's a shame that their mishandling of this block size issue is starting to poison the well of other useful changes.

Changing the block reward schedule so that it reduces a little bit each block rather than a large change every four years is a nice to have change, if it was done in a way that produced an identical currency supply.

Because it is so sensitive though, it'd have to be done very cleanly and transparently, instead of via the soft "we can silently take away the ability of your node to validate the blockchain at any time" fork process.

in my humble opinion softforks should be forbidden.

edit: I could be wrong of course.

 

[VeritasSapere]

 

[yrral86]

in my humble opinion softforks should be forbidden.

edit: I could be wrong of course.

A large class of softforks could be eliminated by hardforking to change the remaining OP_NOOP to OP_HALT. Other classes would still exist. For example, it is impossible to eliminate the ability to softforks to a lower blocksize limit unless you add a minimum blocksize.

 

[sickpig]

please could someone wake me up?

edit:

a little bit of context here macbook-air is an official representative of f2pool, alex is Alex Petrov BitFury CIO (@sysman on reddit)

 

[sickpig]

I'm still sleeping right?

 

[cypherdoc]

A large class of softforks could be eliminated by hardforking to change the remaining OP_NOOP to OP_HALT. Other classes would still exist. For example, it is impossible to eliminate the ability to softforks to a lower blocksize limit unless you add a minimum blocksize.

Yep, the SWSF wide open script versioning is an invitation to whatever core dev wants to insert.

 

[Norway]

I think this sequence would atually be good for bitcoin:
Stuck transactions -> Significant BTC price drop -> Desperate miners -> Classic hardfork

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

But since what I think is far away from being consensus, and the consensus-dependency of bitcoin is part of what makes bitcoin bitcoin, I try to analyze the current situation unbiasedly. I don't want one eye because I tend to one side of the discussion.

And what I see is: The world seems to be willing to pay some cent for a bitcoin transaction. (Hurray?)

Bitcoin is not consensus dependent. All that matters (technologically) is miner consensus and the mining companies are replaceable. There will never be a "consensus" containing the whole bitcoin community and there is no need for that. What I see unbiasedly, is that Bitcoin is losing market share and isn't growing.

"The World" still means very few. And Bitcoin won't survive with these few alone.

I'm absolutely certain, that one of Satoshis smartest decisions was to release a working software that was operable and that the concept could promise cheap transactions around the globe at a large scale. If he had released a whitepaper called "Decentralized Gold" and a half-assed ugly not really working "proof of concept" software it wouldn't had such an impact.
If you want to have a working, uncensored, decentralized currency, you have to make John and Jane Doe use your currency in some way. And John and Jane Doe mostly give a shit about decentralized. They want cheap and fast transactions and usable user interfaces.

And btw people are talking about "Bitcoin best performing currency in \arbitrary date\" but the should compare bitcoin to other assets, not to inflationary fiat currencies.
If you look at the bitcoin price today, bitcoin price is much lower than it should be for the underlying concept. The people (at least in europe) are looking everywhere to invest money b/c money is cheap. Real estate is booming for years, stock is booming for years with a minor setback in the beginning of this year, even gold is climbing up atm Nobody wants to hold fiat money these days. It should be the perfect situation for bitcoin. But there is very little money flowing towards bitcoin.

 

[YarkoL]

I think this sequence would atually be good for bitcoin:
Stuck transactions -> Significant BTC price drop -> Desperate miners -> Classic hardfork

That is very realistic. Or even:
Stuck transactions -> Significant BTC price drop -> Core raises the limit to 2MB in a flash

 

[Norway]

@YarkoL
I would prefer a fork to Classic, not Core raising the limit to 2MB in a flash.

Because the whole eco system needs competing dev teams. Core need a time out. I don't trust their motives (based on their behaviour). Core should have to fight their way back onto the playing field.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

I don't think it were a huge loss if Core left completely.

 

[VeritasSapere]

This is part of the division in the blocksize debate. I think that we should scale Bitcoin directly as was always intended. Others think that most should use off chain solutions instead, and that by restricting the blocksize they can make that happen. I strongly disagree, I do not consider off chain solutions as a way to scale Bitcoin at all. I am not against off chain solutions but people should be free to use them as an alternative to using the Bitcoin blockchain directly, not because it is the only viable way to transact on the Bitcoin network because transacting directly has been made to expensive and unreliable because of this arbitrary restriction. Core supporters call this a "fee market", I consider this as a form of centralized economic planning and fundamentally flawed. I favor a free market for blockspace instead, which means that the blocksize limit should be above the average transaction volume, and miners can make their own decisions in terms of what transactions to include and not to include based on their own unique situation and parameters of profitability, which the miners do know best for themselves, which is why free markets do work better then planned economies.

It also seems ridiculous to restrict the blocksize now when these good off chain solutions have not even been build yet, just increase the blocksize now to two megabytes and if people choose to use off chain solutions then we will not need to increase it that much again, just give people the choice of what path Bitcoin takes. Restricting the blocksize now is wiping out the original vision of Bitcoin when both opposing visions can still co exists under a two megabyte blocksize limit.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381391.msg14061806#msg14061806

 

[YarkoL]

@YarkoL
I would prefer a fork to Classic, not Core raising the limit to 2MB in a flash.

I wouldn't certainly shed any tears on that occasion either..

But if money talks, we'll see if Core walks.

 

[79b79aa8]

@YarkoL
I would prefer a fork to Classic, not Core raising the limit to 2MB in a flash.

Agreed. The block limit issue will be solved one way or the other, and the damage done here is containable and perhaps even debatable. But Blockstream taking over Bitcoin is an existential threat. This faction demonstrably:

1) prioritize their business model over independent growth of the coin
2) have expressed doubts about the viability of the coin, they intend to fix the perceived shortcomings with their own solutions
3) resort to continuous social media and real world manipulation
4) have taken control of the protocol and are attempting to embrace, extend and extinguish it
5) have a large budget to fund all the above activities.

 

[VeritasSapere]

On the plus side it is nice seeing all those transaction fees in the mempool, certainly does lend credence to the theory of a high volume low cost network.

https://blockchain.info/en/unconfirmed-transactions

I have mixed feelings about the transaction volume, on the one hand it increases the pressure for change on the other hand this is really hurting the Bitcoin we all love. We are at 37k unconfirmed transactions at the time of writing this, gulp.

 

[Bagatell]

Do Core have all the github commit keys (or whatever they're called ) ?

 

[Richy_T]

I believe Gavin has the master.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3zplz6/does_gavin_still_have_any_control_of_the_bitcoin/

This is always the answer to anyone who slings mud at him about wanting to take over Bitcoin. I actually kind-of wish he would but I also understand why he doesn't want to.