Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

SysMan

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Mar 4, 2016
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See? Miners are trying to rely on a halving dependent price increase to justify wild valuations and an unsustainable unreliable business model.. I've been warning @SysMan @Jihan @excelon about this;

But the ASX rejected the findings and said if the company wished to continue trying to list it would have to reopen its offer and raise additional funds to "an amount sufficient to deliver it adequate working capital to carry out its stated objectives and to have a sustainable business model
."

http://m.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/asx-nixes-bitcoin-groups-sharemarket-float-over-capital-concerns-20160308-gne3c7.html
What's wrong. We are not rely - on price increase on halving.
Halving and price increase and far staying events, they are not directly and immediately related.
Economy on this working little bit in different way.
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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@SysMan I guess we'll just have to see what happens. Somebody is going to get hurt for sure as income halves, while you only let maybe 0.6 mb of additional txs come online if users switch to SW. Lots of damage to Bitcoin's reputation going on right now.
 

Richy_T

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Dec 27, 2015
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I take the same view I do with cold callers. If I can keep them tied up wasting their time, it stops them moving on to the next target and hurts their "bottom line"

Why? Because fuck them ;)
Hmm. Perhaps some client code that leaves them connected but sends data v...e...r...y......s...l...o...w...l...y or a honeypot that does so.
 

Richy_T

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Dec 27, 2015
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Quick question: What would be thoughts on going with UDP for forwarding transactions rather than (or optionally to) TCP?

Question 2: Given x-thin blocks, would this be feasible for blocks themselves?
 

dlareg

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Feb 19, 2016
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@Richy_T Jonathan Toomin's block torrent proposal is planned to do just that--UDP transfer on all blocks. That eliminates many issues with packet loss through the great firewall of China. Then in a case of high packet loss you can bypass the TCP/IP stack's retransmission algorithms and potentially include redundant information in the UDP packets themselves, etc. Basically frees up control of retransmission to the application layer instead of having to deal with the TCP/IP stack. I think it would be a great idea. I am not sure if his proposal is meant to be a generic replacement for all peer-to-peer communications or just block transmission.
 

solex

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Aug 22, 2015
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What would the 1MB say if it could speak?

It has only one message which is repeated hundreds of times a week, when a new block appears:
"We don't trust the miners."

How can this be?
In mid-2010 the BTC price was gaining solid market value after Mt Gox started up. Everyone who used Bitcoin had to run a full node, and while there was good decentralization of mining power by way of GPUs and CPUs this was not going to last. The lead dev, Satoshi, was worried about rogue miners because none of them had any skin in the game. FPGAs were first mentioned on bitcointalk. His long project was just taking off, but a rogue miner with a FPGA could make large nuisance blocks putting off the growing user-base at a crucial time. He put in a low block limit and might as well added "Trust me, I'm the dev, we can't trust the miners."

Fast forward over 5.5 years and the situation has completely changed. The miners have enormous skin in the game. They need and want Bitcoin to succeed for return on investment. 90% of the hash-rate is from known miners and pools who want to be good citizens and enjoy a quiet life making money. @SysMan has stats showing 4 or 6MB blocks being problematic for the network. In the case of no block limit, where will these come from? Not the good miners who value the network, perhaps from the 10% we don't know much about. Yet, it is the average block size which is most important to network capacity, the occasional large block won't ramp the average much if most miners are being responsible.

What else has changed? The dev situation. The question of trust has moved from the miners to the devs, but how much skin in the game does the average dev have? Perhaps from a BTC holding like many investors, but we are seeing devs hired into VC-backed companies with their own narrow interests. So, why are we seeing initiatives like Classic? This is an ecosystem response to the changed landscape where Bitcoin users can trust the miners more than the devs.

Question for SysMan "Is the 1MB right that we can't trust the miners? Or do you trust BitFury and agree that the 1MB is now deeply wrong?".
 
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Richy_T

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Dec 27, 2015
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@Richy_T Jonathan Toomin's block torrent proposal is planned to do just that--UDP transfer on all blocks. That eliminates many issues with packet loss through the great firewall of China. Then in a case of high packet loss you can bypass the TCP/IP stack's retransmission algorithms and potentially include redundant information in the UDP packets themselves, etc. Basically frees up control of retransmission to the application layer instead of having to deal with the TCP/IP stack. I think it would be a great idea. I am not sure if his proposal is meant to be a generic replacement for all peer-to-peer communications or just block transmission.
Hmm, I wonder if rar style parity files would work for that also? Any m of n parts will get you the data you need. Or maybe that is already in his plan. Could send the parts of the block first then throttle back and send parity parts until the receiver says "enough"
 
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dlareg

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Feb 19, 2016
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@Richy_T That is an excellent idea and I had been asking Jonathan the same thing in one of the various Slack rooms. He went into great detail about the particular issues with the Great Firewall and I had brought up sending redundant data as you just suggested. He was saying the biggest problem was the actual TCP/IP stack since it handles the retransmissions below the application level, which is why he was doing block torrent with UDP. So I would imagine if the UDP-based block torrent protocol was made robust enough it could dynamically adjust to packet loss and simply start sending more and more redundant data, keeping the stream flowing.

Jonathan was saying you can actually get decent bandwidth through the firewall, but the packet loss is so disruptive to a TCP session--everything goes to hell when there is loss. Basically transmission stops and round trips are then required to re-establish. With 50-100 ms round trip delay that all adds up considerably, and there is nothing you can do to work around it when using TCP.

I think it's a really great approach, but would require some sophisticated code since the complexity would be bumped up the stack. But perhaps code like this already exists in other projects that could be somehow repurposed for use in Bitcoin.

It is great that there are so many places to optimize Bitcoin. Just with what BU has already done is fantastic and it seems people are just getting started. This whole "Bitcoin won't scale, go home everybody" attitude from certain groups seems so antithetical to the project they are involved in--it is really strange. I am really inspired by the great work the BU folks have already done to release these great optimizations in production with more on the way. And the Classic folks for getting some great traction in node counts.

With the current situation it seems we have given control of highway construction to the horse industry. I think part of taking control back will be working on these many areas for optimization while simultaneously doing the educational / political / consensus building work. BU + XT + Classic seem to be manifesting different aspects of this important work, while simultaneously cooperating and sharing. We must code more, speak more, write more, and keep pushing!
 

molecular

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Aug 31, 2015
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Theres this idea that the classic node count is a cannibalisation of XT and not really indicative of people converting core nodes. This has been bugging me for a while. Tonight I though I'm just going to do a quick check on the figures.

This idea has been based on the node counts. I thought what would happen if you looked at the relative distribution?

It just so happens that 21.co already put things in percentages and strip out the trash!

What you are looking at here *is* cannibalisation of core.

Jan 28th: 64% Core / 36% other
Today: 54% Core / 25% Classic / 21% Other

I don't quite follow.

What exactly you mean by "classic node count is a cannibalisation of XT" and "What you are looking at here *is* cannibalisation of core"?

The Core percentage going down is simply an effect of a higher total number of nodes. The absolute number of core nodes is up 250 (using numbers from your screenshot)

If the question is wether or not node core nodes are being converted to classic (and being replaced by fresh ones), I don't think we can answer that just from those aggregate numbers.

I would certainly think people are capable of adequately replacing core nodes with new ones as needed to give the impression of a stable core node community, but there's no proof. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding or missing the point?
 

Inca

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Aug 28, 2015
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I think the number of Core and Classic nodes are difficult to interpret.

James Hilliard spun up lots of Core nodes in a test a while back. We are being naive if we don't expect a dirty tricks campaign from that side. They have form after all!
 

Zarathustra

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Aug 28, 2015
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@molecular

With governments exit is hard since you have to move, so they can continue abusing people for quite a long time, but with Bitcoin it is very easy to exit Core. You don't even need to get out of your chair.
Yes, since 10'000 years abused by organized violence, when anarchist homo sapiens in nuclear communities got sick and organized himself as a patronized collectivist and formed a society (patriarchy), in a symbiosis of sadists and masochists. At the moment, the Bitcoin community is on the same sad path. Just a tiny fraction of humanity (in the rain forests and the arctic tundra) refused getting patronized and collectivized via henchmen of church and state. They are still homines sapientes, while we are just 'living' cartoons of it - destroyers of the planet - for the purpose of producing surplus (tribute); like the majority of the Bitcoiners seem to become destroyers of the former anarchist Bitcoin community. The community seems to transform itself into a society, which per se means destruction.

Hundred thousand Bitcoiners are dumber than one hundred Bitcoiners. A German writer: "Zehn Deutsche sind dümmer als fünf Deutsche" (Ten Germans are dumber than five Germans).

But I still think it's possible to defeat the centralists and sadists who are trying everything to block the stream.
 
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YarkoL

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Dec 18, 2015
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Good post @Zarathustra.
There is a strain of libertarianism that I don't particularly like - the idea that wealth correlates with excellency as a human being, and then it follows that those that have less are scum, and deserve to be treated as such. In Bitcoin scene Mircea P. is the most clear exponent of this "school of thought" and it seems to have overtaken smallblockism as its ideological underpinning: the Bitcoin is not a payment network for everyone but means of escaping the capital controls for the elite.

While I have no objection to meritocracy, I believe in equal opportunity to all. That's why I don't call myself anarcho-capitalist, but market anarchist plain and simple.
 

Zarathustra

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@YarkoL
Exactly. Those people are pseudo libertarians. They celebrate narcissism, egoism and individualism and believe it's anarchism. Which is bullshit. Individualism is not possible in an anarchist environment. Anarchism is where self-sufficient communities live.
 
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sgbett

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Aug 25, 2015
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I don't quite follow.

What exactly you mean by "classic node count is a cannibalisation of XT" and "What you are looking at here *is* cannibalisation of core"?

The Core percentage going down is simply an effect of a higher total number of nodes. The absolute number of core nodes is up 250 (using numbers from your screenshot)

If the question is wether or not node core nodes are being converted to classic (and being replaced by fresh ones), I don't think we can answer that just from those aggregate numbers.

I would certainly think people are capable of adequately replacing core nodes with new ones as needed to give the impression of a stable core node community, but there's no proof. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding or missing the point?
All things being equal the relative number of nodes is important. The only way that it doesn't matter is if you accept the rumour that all the new nodes are fake and that they are all fake classic nodes.

One could just as easily say all the new nodes are fake core nodes! It's all just speculation.

The most likely explanation is that there is just as much "faking" on for both clients. In which case I think the relative numbers are a good metric.

Personally I like to think all the talk of faking is just sensationalist nonsense. Just like the talk of spam transactions.

Nodes are nodes, transactions are transactions. Honey badger doesn't care.

The node count is just a proxy for support. I agree it's hard to say anything concrete, but neither is it possible for people to credibly say that the core client is in the same position it always has been in terms of popularity. 25% classic nodes says something very loudly imho.
 

YarkoL

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Dec 18, 2015
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. Individualism is not possible in an anarchist environment.
Hmm, in "anarchist community" I might then need to be either a hermit or a bandit :p. To me anarchy is not something that needs to be instituted, the Universe is an anarchist environment out of the box. Collectivism/authoritarianism/socialism/X-ism are just spectacle. Dig a little deeper and everywhere you see people doing their own thing and micro-level social experiments mushrooming spontaneously. The only thing that differs is the extent of repression from above.
 

Zarathustra

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I mean, egoist and narcissist individualism is only possible in a society. In a natural environment the homines sapientes can't survive as individualists. The fox and the lynx can, humans and ants cannot.
 
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freetrader

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Dec 16, 2015
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I didn't sleep well yesterday night, mulling over whether a POW fork is the right way to go or not. So I decided to read up on what others have written throughout this ordeal.
Naturally you can't do that without including Mike Hearn's painful post, "The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment".

And I find myself agreeing with him in nearly all points - I must say he had a comprehensive view of the situation that is useful to study again when one's own head becomes muddled with the goings-on.

Particularly the following point he made has now become very clear to me:
Right now, the Chinese miners are able to — just about — maintain their connection to the global internet and claim the 25 BTC reward that each block they create gives them. But if the Bitcoin network got more popular, they fear taking part would get too difficult and they’d lose their income stream. This gives them a perverse financial incentive to actually try and stop Bitcoin becoming popular.

The Chinese miners are most certainly afraid of Bitcoin's success.

They say they want the blockchain limit to increase, but their actions are indeed the opposite.

There is little doubt in my mind that have been told in no uncertain terms by Chinese government regulators: 'we'll allow Bitcoin to operate as long as it stays small'.

The Chinese government and central bank is not ignoring Bitcoin - no government and central bank is. [1,2,3]

They have allowed Bitcoin to play in the sandbox, to observe it for a while, knowing they can extinguish it at any time when it becomes too successful and too real a threat to their authoritarian regime. It is, after all, very instructive to watch while developing your own centralized version [4].

The dangers of having an uncensorable information infrastructure permeating the Great Firewall of China have surely not gone unnoticed while the trend towards censorship shows no sign of abating [5].

Lightning is a welcome distraction to them, a little futuristic payment network on top of Bitcoin that isn't going to affect their local economy much. Who cares? As long as Bitcoin remains in their control and LN wants to build on top of it - let them! Making more money for doing less (increasing fees while offloading transactions i.e. energy costs) sounds like win-win for East & West.
So, it doesn't matter to them how long this supposed "payment layer" takes to roll out. They are not going to be sad if it never happens - saves them some political work later on anyway.

LN as a payment layer is DOA in China anyway - firstly through competition that's already ahead of the game [6], and you always have the misty haze of regulation in which you can smother any inconvenient threats.

They have Blockstream (and it's VCs) by the balls. Merely suggesting that they might abandon BS/Core for the prospect of bigger blocks is bound to make Hill, Back, Maxwell, Corallo, Todd and Luke-jr (to name just a few) shit their pants as they reflect on the consequences.

The possibility of being handed effective control of "Bitcoin the settlement network" - even if it is only an initial one while other centralized replacements are being prepared around the globe - must be making some Chinese politicians smile. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I am slowly arriving at the conclusion that we need to do the Chinese regime a favor, and rid them of Bitcoin. Or the other way round. There is no point letting the Bully play with your Legos.

This pains me. I know it is not the will of the Chinese people, who have no say in this. I deeply respect their culture, and I have good Chinese friends. But this is an undemocratic government that is running the show, and aiding other undemocratic powers to destroy Bitcoin. Giving them any more power - least of all over all our own financial destiny - is an intolerable thought.

[1] http://bitcoinblog.de/2014/06/12/a-global-trend-of-stricter-regulation-towards-bitcoin/
[2] http://www.coindesk.com/report-russia-to-propose-7-year-prison-sentences-for-digital-currency-issuers/
[3] http://www.econotimes.com/Bank-Of-England-Shows-Interest-In-Centralized-Digital-Currency-176355
[4] http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/chinese-central-bank-goes-full-steam-ahead-with-its-own-cryptocurrency/
[5] http://sonder.news/article/da345ca0-78cd-4516-9011-079c2771cd4f ("Great firewall of China reinforced as foreign media banned from publishing online")
[6] "Merchant fees in China are low compared to the West and platforms like Alipay and WeChat/Tenpay have the mobile and non-bank payment market here wrapped up" - http://www.coindesk.com/chinas-role-bitcoins-future/
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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c'mon guys, don't get stingy now. we are the Economic Majority. if only everyone considered adding one more node. you can afford it: