Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

According to Nature (the world's most cited scientific journal), Bitcoin has officially come of age in academia:

"And on 15 September, Bitcoin officially came of age in academia with the launch of Ledger, the first journal dedicated to cryptocurrency research."

 

[solex]

@Peter R
Wow! Fantastic achievement. A serious article about Bitcoin in Nature can be considered an official end to the "laughing" era. (> images of "Buttcoin" tombstones welcome <)

Pretty good article too.

"Another problem is the profligate amount of electricity used in Bitcoin mining."

Still less than the profligate amounts of electricity used to keep the fiat system going, including the likes of the Vampire Squid.

Nicolas Courtois, a cryptographer at University College London, says that the Bitcoin block chain could be “the most important invention of the twenty-first century”

Nice.

 

[Peter R]

@solex

I thought it was a pretty good article too. I like the quote at the end from Arvind Narayanan:

Whatever the future holds for Bitcoin, Narayanan emphasizes that the community of developers and academics behind it is unique. “It's a remarkable body of knowledge, and we're going to be teaching this in computer science classes in 20 years, I'm certain of that.”

 

[rocks]

guys, apparently the forum is on new rules whereby if you post a new reply within 30 min of your last post, it will just be appended onto your last post, as opposed to creating a new post.

Now that forum.bitcoin.com has been setup, what do people think of using that? The bitcoin.com URL makes it seem more "official" and it has a chance to replace the other Thermos' controlled forum. ( And if we've learned anything exiting Thermos controlled properties is necessary.) I personally also like the feel of the site more and seems to load faster.

The #1 feature that both sites are missing is the "new" url link each thread had on bitcointalk. The new link made it very easy to click a bookmark and be taken to that last post you read, it made quickly catching up very easy. Here there is the "go to first unread" button, but it takes two steps and I'm lazy.

 

[Peter R]

@rocks

The only benefit I can see of Roger's forum is the domain name. Other that that, I prefer this forum because:

1. It is run by someone who wants to run a forum (and who is therefore proactive with improvements).

2. It already has a good signal-to-noise ratio and a lot of good posters.

3. Although I like Roger Ver, for some reason I think I prefer the forum to be controlled by someone with a less public personage.

Is there someway we/Bloomie can work with Ver to point forum.bitcoin.com here?

 

[Bloomie]

There is no way Roger will point his precious domain to us. His sole goal in setting up that forum is to monetize the heck out of the bitcon.com domain, as you can already see by the ads and sponsored wallet services stuffed everywhere.

If you don't know the little bit of drama behind this, I wrote to Roger a few weeks ago with that exact request and asked him to help us promote the new forum and to tweet to his followers about us. What he did instead was turn around and launch a separate forum. I do suspect that he has no idea how much work running a forum actually is and figures this is just an easy way to make money.

P.S. @rocks are you talking about this link? https://bitco.in/forum/find-new/posts. Seems a lot more intuitive than on Bitcontalk.

 

[Peter R]

"There is no way Roger will point his precious domain to us. His sole goal in setting up that forum is to monetize the heck out of the bitcon.com domain, as you can already see by the ads and sponsored wallet services stuffed everywhere."

IIRC Roger mentioned publicly that he had no personal desire to run a forum and that he was only doing it as a service to the community (i.e., in response to the censorship). If that was a complete and true statement, I'm surprised that Roger wouldn't be thrilled to point forum.bitcoin.com here (it would solve his stated goal with the least amount of work/responsibility from him).

 

[rocks]

@Bloomie

Thanks for the reply and creating an exit path from bitcointalk. Just putting the question out there, I agree pointing here sounds reasonable.

What I was referring to is bitcointalk has a #new tag available for each thread. This single url would bring you directly to the last post read. Here is an example

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1187555.msg0#new

If you bookmark that url, every time you go there you will automatically go to the next post to read. And if you go to the list of threads to read, you will see a "new" button link for each, this link is bookmarkable. This site has a "go to first unread" button, which is nice, but if its possible to make it a url that is better.

 

[Bloomie]

@Peter R I interpreted that statement to mean that Roger would welcome someone to run the forum on his domain so he could still make the money on the traffic. But I am a terrible skeptic.

@rocks I can't imagine that not being possible here since our software is a lot more advanced. I'll poke around.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Bloomie

to be fair, i think it was Roger's plan all along to start up a forum even before you contacted him. it probably even goes back to when he first bought bitcoin.com

also, i just went thru about an hour of getting a 404 error to this website. did anyone else get this? also the https is greyed out.

and my phone is getting the red lock again. @Bloomie can we get that "Post merged" indicator activated?

Now that forum.bitcoin.com has been setup, what do people think of using that? The bitcoin.com URL makes it seem more "official" and it has a chance to replace the other Thermos' controlled forum. ( And if we've learned anything exiting Thermos controlled properties is necessary.) I personally also like the feel of the site more and seems to load faster.

The #1 feature that both sites are missing is the "new" url link each thread had on bitcointalk. The new link made it very easy to click a bookmark and be taken to that last post you read, it made quickly catching up very easy. Here there is the "go to first unread" button, but it takes two steps and I'm lazy.

i think we should keep all our options open.

 

[AdrianX]

@Peter R
Wow! Fantastic achievement. A serious article about Bitcoin in Nature can be considered an official end to the "laughing" era. (> images of "Buttcoin" tombstones welcome <)

Pretty good article too.


Still less than the profligate amounts of electricity used to keep the fiat system going, including the likes of the Vampire Squid.


Nice.

@Peter R digital high five! You're making waves. Way to go. I knew you were going to be famous after I read your first post on bitcointalk. I think I said as much! You close the missing link for me with your metcalfe's law correlation.

On the note "energy consumption via PoW being a problem " I discovered I know know 1 people in my social media circle who have an interest in bitcoin.

They wrote an article thinking that exact features as a problem. For the first time I got a glimpse at why the likes of LukeJr feel transaction are being subsidized and energy usage is a problem and why limiting the block size is a solution.

It's actually the exact opposite Bitcoin moves us close to solving our energy and pollution problems.

@solex the malinvestment caused by fiat is probably enough to justify Bitcoin mining. I think the energy used in PoW is a lot more elegant though in my mind it's as elegant a solutions as Peter_Rs paper on market imposed block size limit.

That's been discussed to death over on that dead BCT so im not going to rehash it instead I'm going to make a video. It's the next hurdle to overcome I think.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

The only reason that proof of work proves anything is exactly nobody likes throwing away electricity.

The degree to which PoW is undesirable is precisely the degree to which is is useful.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

 

[AdrianX]

Now that forum.bitcoin.com has been setup, what do people think of using that? The bitcoin.com URL makes it seem more "official"

you must be new here

 

[Bloomie]

@rocks OK, all you need to do is append unread to a thread's URL. For example, you can bookmark this: https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/unread

 

[Peter R]

@Peter R digital high five! You're making waves. Way to go.

It was a group effort and I only played a small part, but thank you! Also, I had nothing to do with the mention in Nature [but I have a feeling I know who did ]

 

[Bloomie]

to be fair, i think it was Roger's plan all along to start up a forum even before you contacted him. it probably even goes back to when he first bought bitcoin.com

Feel free to share a link, but I've been following that saga for a while and am pretty sure Roger's plan was to rent the domain to OKcoin for 10K a month, not start a forum.

 

[rocks]

@rocks OK, all you need to do is append unread to a thread's URL. For example, you can bookmark this: https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/unread

That was fast! You are amazing. Thanks! I fully take back my question now

 

[Peter R]

Regarding the Nature News article's mention of PoW's wastefulness, I think it was a reasonable comment. To many observers, PoW does seem wasteful. In fact, to the Ethereum guys and the PoS guys, it is wasteful. Even David Andolfatto (VP Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis) fails to comprehend the breakthrough that Satoshi made with the PoW security model:

Is there a cheaper way? The current protocol uses what is called "Proof of Work" and there is very much something like a common resource problem here, with "overinvestment" in computing power (relative to first-best). But the community is working on alternatives, like Proof-of-Stake. But at present, there appear to be trade-offs. Cheaper protocols are also less secure, at least for now. But I expect a big break through in the not to distant future.

From: http://andolfatto.blogspot.ca/2014/11/bitcoiners-surely-we-can-do-buiter-than.html?showComment=1417191644448

I don't think it has been proven that "the thing that PoW does" [whatever that is exactly] is not possible by some other method. Andrew Poelstra makes strides in Distributed Consensus from Proof of Stake is Impossible and the newer version "On Stake and Consensus". I really like his interpretation that mining translates a "fact of physics to a fact of mathematics" and I appreciate the accessible language that the paper is written in, but I don't find the paper fully convincing. Andrew Miller and Joseph J. LaViola, Jr. work towards formalizing the trustless consensus problem here, and in perilous mathematically detail, conclude that Bitcoin's PoW mining "achieves consensus...except for a negligible probability, when Byzantine faults make up less than half the network." But their presentation is quite abstract and it doesn't attempt to prove that resource consumption is strictly necessary [afaik].

I personally think PoW is the only possible solution to decentralized consensus but obviously the world is not yet convinced. Until the world is convinced, they will likely question whether the energy consumption of PoW is justified.

 

[rocks]

The only reason that proof of work proves anything is exactly nobody likes throwing away electricity.

The degree to which PoW is undesirable is precisely the degree to which is is useful.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

Satoshi's PoW plus coinbase mechanism was a brilliant method to start currency distribution and ensure decentralization with no central point of failure. I have spent four years brainstorming if another mechanism could have done the same and have come up with nothing, the insight he brought here was just brilliant.

That said PoW mining on a large scale is wasteful, and sometime after the currency is mostly mined (i.e. fees have taken over rewards) and has had time to distribute throughout the economy, alternatives may be valid to look at.

The entire point of PoW is to fairly distribute votes among individuals in manner that is entirely within the system with no external dependences. For example if everyone mined on their personal computer (and only their personal computer), then what PoW does is it randomly selects an individual to create the next block. This distributed block construction ensures decentralization.

There are other mechanisms to achieve the same effect after coins are mostly mined, and if alternatives can do so without wasting a ton of energy they should be considered at some point (not today).

For example bitcoin could switch to a voting mechanism based on btc held. This only makes sense after wide distribution, but it would achieve the same decentralized block creation mechanism where individuals are randomly selected to create the next block, and bitcoin exits entirely within itself.

It might actually help decentralization since individuals would have less reasons to use a pool. Today since mining electricity costs are close to revenues, miners have to use pools to stabilize revenue. If there are no costs (other than saving you money) then it is easier to solo mine and risk it.

These are questions for another day, but I think it is important to see PoW as a fairer bootstrap mechanism with other mechanisms that could achieve the same ends

 

[Justus Ranvier]

The entire point of PoW is to fairly distribute votes among individuals. For example if everyone mined on their personal computer (and only their personal computer), then what PoW does is it randomly selects an individual to create the next block. This distributed block construction ensures decentralization.

"Distributing the votes fairly" is nether necessary nor sufficient to solve the problem of ordering transactions without a trusted oracle, so that can't be the point of proof of work.

All proof of work does is attach an irrecoverable cost to asserting multiple versions of the same claim.

The existence of these irrecoverable costs enables nodes in the network to choose which claim to respect via a very simple heuristic: pick the claim that would be most expensive to retract.

What proof of work does is very simple (deceptively simple). Trying to ascribe a bunch of extra properties to it is an exercise in chasing ghosts.