Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

@VeritasSapere

TBH, i wish it would go thru some extensive outside or academic review. also, an academic paper seems like the minimum to document a new library for a multi-billion dollar new monetary system. the fact that gmax wrote half of it makes it worse. oh Bitcoin.

 

[VeritasSapere]

Agreed, though the explenation was a bit comforting to me at least, it is hard to know what to believe as layman in cryptography and these type of mathematics.

Maybe I was dazzled by the fancy words of the third parties that did review it. I hope not, I would love to hear the views of any resident cryptographers in the house.

 

[Richy_T]

I think it's hard to see that it would introduce security concerns if it's churning out the same results as the old library. There could be bugs and edge cases that lead to loss of funds but hopefully there's not too many risks of that.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Something I've been mulling over lately. Let's say that you were a very early Bitcoin adopter with a huge stash and you were worried that Core's mismanagement is beginning to pose a serious threat to your investment. How could you best use your available war chest to try to steer Bitcoin back on track and how much would it realistically take to have a meaningful impact?

Obviously, you could try buying up a big chunk of hashpower and mining with Classic. But I don't really have any sense for how much it would cost right now to acquire say, a quarter of network hash power. (And would that be enough to trigger a tipping point?)

Another idea would be to try your hand at bribing one or more key pool operators / Core devs. But how many and which ones would you need to bribe? And what's the going rate for something like that?

Another idea would be to throw some money at funding alternative development teams to allow them to hire additional devs / devote themselves full-time to those projects. This might also help these teams to be viewed as "more credible" to the miners who, per my previous comment, imagine that a fork represents some huge change in leadership.

Another thought I had was creating a bounty that would be split among the 750 triggering Classic blocks following a successful hard fork. So if your bounty is 1500 BTC, each of those 750 blocks would get an additional 2 BTC sent to their block reward address. Especially after the upcoming halving, that would be a fairly significant bump, no? But still relatively cheap in the scheme of things (about $620,000 at current prices). As an aside, you might want to set some kind of requirement to make sure that the hard fork has "taken" to reduce the risk of small-block miners attempting to game it (e.g., only award the bounty following the network's creation and acceptance of 1,000 >1-MB blocks).

The last idea I think is pretty interesting. And of course, there's no reason it couldn't be crowd-funded as opposed to sponsored by a single mega-whale. Has anyone else proposed something like this? Could it be "smart-contractified"? Do you guys think it's a plausible idea / have thoughts on how to implement it / how big the bounty would need to be?

No thoughts on this? Particularly the "forking bounty" idea? If people think it's a dumb or unworkable idea, I'd love to hear why. Personally, the more I've thought about it, the more I like it. One objection I anticipate is the claim that "bribing" miners to fork to Classic via such a bounty is somehow "underhanded" or "cheating." But I don't find that claim particularly persuasive. That's kind of just how Bitcoin works. Miners are supposed to be incentivized to act in a manner that maximizes the value of their rewards / fees and thus, we hope, the value of the network as a whole. A bounty for a successful Classic fork is just a way for interested market participants to signal to miners that they value a Bitcoin Classic network more than a Bitcoin Core network.

Another objection is that Core supporters could simply retaliate by "bribing" miners to run Core. And they could (and maybe certain parties already have). But that's fine. Let people put their money where their mouth is. Note that if small blockers want to prevent a Classic fork, they only need to bribe 26% of the network's hash power ... but they need to keep that hash power bought indefinitely, which is a much taller order than influencing the behavior of 1,000 blocks to trigger a fork. On the other hand, small blockers could try to bribe the network to fork back to Core after a successful fork to Classic. But I think that would prove to be very difficult in practice especially if, as I suspect will be the case, the market responds favorably to the initial move to Classic. My guess is that the small blockers' only real asset is inertia. Once they lose that, I think their influence is gone.

So... someone convince me that this couldn't work. On the other hand, If people think it is worth trying, I'll be happy to kick things off by committing 2 BTC to the bounty once the logistics are worked out.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Roger_Murdock

i think ppl are just burned out on this debate. nothing against the idea. it's as good as the many that have been advanced. maybe even better. certainly more practical. sure, i'd donate 2BTC as well if someone could put together a solid secure way of doing it.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

@cypherdoc

Woohoo, now we're cooking with gas! Thanks! But yeah, I'm burned out on the debate too which is why I'm increasingly inclined to try something other than more debate to effect a change. And let me tell you, I'm both lazy and extremely cheap, so I wonder if I might not be an indicator that stakeholders who have mostly sat on the sidelines up until now may finally be feeling spurred to action to defend Bitcoin against the threat posed by BS-Core. I was very encouraged to see Brian Armstrong hinting the other day in that "What Happened at the Satoshi Roundtable" post that Coinbase was going to get involved in supporting a new development team. ("Long term, we need to form a new team to work on the bitcoin protocol. A team that is welcoming of new developers to the community, willing to make reasonable trade offs, and a team that will help the protocol continue to scale. You’ll be hearing more about this over the next month or two.")

I'm part of the "Bitcoin Class of 2012" so while I might not be a true old-timer, I'm not exactly a noob. I think a lot of old-hodlers have taken a pretty Zen attitude toward this whole debate, i.e., "The market will sort it out in time." Now that attitude is what's allowed hodlers to ride the Bitcoin bull as long as they have. And I still think that "the market will sort it out" but ... let's not forget that major / longtime hodlers are non-trivial market participants. In other words, we are the market, so ... yeah, let's sort this shit out.

LOTR analogies seem pretty popular around here, right? Well, to put what I'm saying another way, I think it might be time for the Ents to go to war.


(Oh man, I was planning to use that Ents analogy and link an appropriate video before I remembered the part of the video that starts around 3:26. Tell me that's not too perfect.)

 

[Norway]

@Roger_Murdock Great analogy.

 

[sickpig]

the 2nd guy was Paul Sztorc.

what an arrogant attitude. all of them. but Peter is arrogant while being flat out wrong.

limit was introduced by satoshi based on inputs by Hal Finney and others.

The plan was since the very first moment to remove the block size limit in the future. I.e. it has conceived as a temporary measure. Relevant btctalk link from saroshi (Oct the 4th, 2010)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366

so no, Satoshi does not change is mind.

Paul should knew better than this.

I'm going to ping him on twitter and let him know that he badly failed bitcoin hitstory 101 exam.

Who's the first guy, Cory Fields?


edit:

add other links to proof Paul's wrong:

- satoshi added the clock size limit on July the 15th, 2010
https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/103/tree//trunk/main.h?diff=515630145fcbc978e39dbaa5:102

- link above from BTC is dated October the 4th, 2010.

edit2:

- anecdotal info by Ray Dillinger (aka Bear aka Cryddit) on block size limit story:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.msg10388435#msg10388435

 

[Norway]

@sickpig
I don't think he looks like Cory Fields, which I have only seen on this video:

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

we are almost there:

It's a bit disapointing that ~50% of classic nodes are on aws and that nearly no core node has switched.

Overall the refusement of the community to adopt classic / unlimited is frustrating.

 

[freetrader]

Let's not get frustration get the better of us though!

(image courtesy of user 'y12' on openclipart.org/detail/221767/keep-calm-and-plan-bitcoin-on)

---

I like your bounty idea too, @Roger_Murdock .

I believe people would rally behind it if it was

- simple to contribute (ok, Bitcoin makes that quite easy)
- simple to understand how the money would be securely moved to the deserving recipients

I am thinking this is the sort of thing that needs a smart contract or extremely trusted public figure to administrate.

People are fallible though, and other people need to be able to trust that the mechanism is fail-safe, i.e. return their money securely after some deadline if nothing came to pass.
Preferably executed by reviewable code

I hear Rootstock and Ethereum do smart contracts already. Can't this be leveraged in some way?

P.S. Occasionally I come across articles whose headline I completely agree with, but whose contents I entirely disagree with - like a wolf in sheep's clothing or a Trojan horse.
This time it's unfortunately the turn of Valery Vavilov, BitFury co-founder, to make it onto my todays-miner-hall-of-shame list:

https://medium.com/@BitFuryGroup/keep-calm-and-bitcoin-on-4f29d581276#.4b67kgkdv

Everone is entitled to their opinion - and sometimes it's good to know what opinions others hold.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Why I don't want to use Lightning

There seems to be a consensus in the herd that bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency, but a settlement network for second layers like lightning or sidechains.

Even if lightning networks works and doesn't lead to wallet complexity explosion, but is trustless, secure, cheap and fast - I don't want to use it. Why? Because it's not bitcoin. I want to send Bitcoin from one adress to another and see it in the blockchain. I want to have my private keys and use them for doing a transaction, wherever I am, whatever hardware and system I have, no matter what time it is. I don't want to need to put my bitcoin in some payment hub to start using them, I don't want to open a payment channel and multisig with some hub to accept Bitcoin. I just want to use the wonderful simplicity of the system by accepting bitcoins on an adress, saving them with a private key and transaction them on other adresses. Lightning can't do this.

With sidechains it is the same / worse. More than one year ago I mailed with a technician from blockstream. I asked how they plan to secure the sidechain and if they want to integrate a native token to incentivice miners. He answered they don't know by now. Now they seem to know - they do the same like the banks are planning: make a fedoration of private nodes that trust each other. Same thing like ripple, same thing like paypal. That's not bitcoin, that's a private system.

But even if they succeed in making a public sidechain (I can't imagine how), it would be NOT bitcoin. It would be another chain, with no comparable security as bitcoin, while it stucks on some strange adress on the real blockchain. And like lightning it would mean that, when I buy bitcoin, I first have to bring it to the sidechain before I can use it. In the sidechain-whitepaper is written that you need 24 hours to have the coin on the sidechain. After I asked, the technician explained that it can be faster depending on the needed security. Great.

And so many node-maintainers and miners and community members and developers believe that this is the only possible and correct future for bitcoin the currency. This IS frustrating.

More frustrating is the REASON why all this people believe this: because core said bitcoin can't scale. Yes. This is an overwhelming mass of authoritarism I never expected to find in a community around free money.

 

[freetrader]

Bitcoin.org, but with ∞ more ads:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1382493

https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues/1139

---

@Christoph Bergmann :

re: Lighning - I find myself agreeing with you.
To those who say Bitcoin cannot scale and make quick transactions possible as well: let's see.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

posting in r/bitcoin, getting many upvotes in minutes and gilded:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/49c7ij/so_consens_here_seems_to_be_that_bitcoin_is_no/

Hey, how can I quote reddit?

 

[Norway]

@Christoph Bergmann
I can't believe that your post on /r/bitcoin has survived 50 minutes and is the second most popular post!

Good post, btw.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

hehe, I get all the rage from the usual hardcore small blockists. Thinking bitcoin to be a payment system has to be incredibly stupid.

I'm really disgusted with our new consensus what bitcoin is. I did only need one year to turn around everything ...

 

[Inca]

Theymos has been got to..

EDIT: and like flies to shit the socks and shills are out in force brigading the thread. Hilarious how desperate they are, it is almost palpable

 

[Norway]

@Christoph Bergmann
1 hour and top post! This is insane, lol!

 

[freetrader]

Theymos is just laying low.

Or maybe he is too busy making other plans (e.g. how to make money off ads)

 

[Norway]

Looking at several post on /r/bitcoin front page. And something is happening. Posts are not sorted by "controversial" but "best". Bigblockers getting upvoted and dominating the post. Sure, some socks and trolls are present, but they are called out and downvoted.

What's happening? Did we just get /r/bitcoin back?