Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[VeritasSapere]

@SysMan I find it hard to understand why you would still support Core after reading all of the things we have discussed here.

It is not about Classic VS Core. It is about on chain scaling VS off chain scaling.

It is the very future and vision of Bitcoin that is at stake, I know many people that are no longer investing in Bitcoin anymore because of this. Some of whom are investing in the alternative cryptocurrencies instead. Core is diverging from the origanol vision of Satoshi, that is not what many people signed up for.

As long as Bitcoin continues to walk this path insisting that "Bitcoin can not scale". The alternative cryptocurrencies that definitely can scale will overtake Bitcoin as it becomes increasingly obsolesced and outcompeted.

Not to mention the development of several genesis forks, which are intentional full hard forks from Bitcoin, splitting the chain, some of which include a PoW algorithm change. Try and read the writing on the wall.

 

[cypherdoc]

@SysMan probably has grown up in a centrally planned environment and doesn't understand fully the ways of the entrepreneurial West. That's not necessarily a bad thing but for something that requires rapid growth at the pace of Silicon Valley and technology, it probably is.

 

[priestc]

I find it hard to understand why you would still support Core after reading all of the things we have discussed here.

There is a narrative going around that Core developers are the seasoned veterans, and the Classic developers are unruly newbies. A lot of people ascribe to this narrative. Bitcoin is a very deep subject, most people can't understand for themselves, so they rely on other people telling them narratives to understand what is going on.

I think something that might very much have a chance to damage this narrative is if segwit gets delayed. Rookie developers delay releasing software, not the veterans. A change as drastic as segwit is bound to get delayed, or worse, being deployed with money-losing bugs. One thing the Classic and +1MB communities must do is hold Core to it's April 2016 segwit release date. April starts in 2 days, and ends in about 32 days.

 

[cypherdoc]

@priestc

Furthermore, seasoned developers, especially in such a complicated area as Bitcoin, understand the importance of simplicity and making changes incrementally. SW is definitely the more risky option as it involves multiple changes at various levels of the protocol that can lose millions if not billions in value.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

"Bitcoin can not scale"

"Bitcoin can not scale" is not a statement of technical reality - it's a political mandate. The properly translated version is, "Bitcoin must not be permitted to scale."

The perpetrators of this scam first set up a strawman of, "it's not possible for every user to verify every other user's transactions, implying that this ever a design goal. Then they say, "Since Bitcoin can't <do this arbitrary thing we just made up>, therefore it must be changed into <not peer-to-peer digital cash>."

Whether the people who repeat that line are doing so because they complicit, mislead, or coerced doesn't really matter - the result is they are all serving the interests which were previously threatened by the existence of P2P digital cash.

 

[AdrianX]

@Justus Ranvier we're lucky to have you in the bitcoin community.

 

[priestc]

@priestc

Furthermore, seasoned developers, especially in such a complicated area as Bitcoin, understand the importance of simplicity and making changes incrementally. SW is definitely the more risky option as it involves multiple changes at various levels of the protocol that can lose millions if not billions in value.

Do you ever watch the show mythbusters? The two guys on that show (Adam and Jamie) represent the two sides of technical abilities. In the early episodes, Jamie was like the Classic team. His builds are super simply, minimalistic and almost always works perfectly. Adam on the other hand, his builds are usually overly complex, very televisual, and fun to watch. Jamie's builds are usually not as fun to watch as Adam's builds. Adam's build style is much like Core's. All of Core's solutions always have a sense of fun to them that appeals to a certain demographic present in the bitcoin community today. Classic's solutions are very boring, much like Jamie's builds on the show.

Whats interesting to note, in later seasons of Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie's styles sort of blend together. Adam learns how to build "minimalisticly", and Jamie learns how to build stuff in a way that is more fun to watch.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

There is a narrative going around that Core developers are the seasoned veterans, and the Classic developers are unruly newbies.

Yes. But who the fuck is so moronic to think of

1. A guy chosen by Satoshi as the Bitcoin maintainer who did the most important work on Bitcoin besides Satoshi and
2. A guy who has been a linux kernel developer for decades who also contributed to Bitcoin very early

as "unruly newbies"???

The saying Classic development team has to earn their spurs first before miners could use Classic is beyond comprehension for me. You have the most experienced devs working for Classic who are acting professionally and reasonable.
The guys representing Core are maniacs like Luke Jr., fools like Peter Todd, power-hungry psychopaths like Greg Maxwell and slimy politicians like Adam Back.

Am I in a bad dream? To what deranged mind can the Core team look professional and wise and the Classic team "inexperienced"?

 

[Aquent]

You have to consider the cultural barriers. A "famous" chinese bitcoiner for example, had no clue who Mike Hearn is. These are miners. Their expertise is in asics and whatever. They have no clue about protocol development. Moreover, most of them are new. Probably came to the scene in November 2013 or later. They have no historical perspective.

The combination of the two, that is cultural barriers, together with very newcomers,creates the environment for people to be easily mislead.

Like, sysman for example of course deeply cares about bitcoin on one hand, but on the other hand his equipment will become useless pretty quickly. Making him care about his own greed first which on balance says not rocking the boat is best. Not rocking the boat means time is the ruler and that in turn means waiting until a course of action is "obvious".

That has valid criticisms however, because it is the behaviour of a slow moving dinosour. In a competitive market, a slow mover slowly dies to begin with, and then dies quickly, but still live on in some way. I suppose as far as miners are concerned, as far as early adopters are concerned, that is fine.

For those who want to change the world though, those who want to create and build stuff, for those with energy, it isn't fine.

But there are so many aspects at this point, while we are in the midst of it, making it all difficult to say, bt things have certainly changed. Perspective has become a bit more dimensial.

Bitcoin can come out stronger out of this, if for example Classic find a loyal hashrate support of preferably around 26%, to decentralie development, giving classic a "veto" power, thus forcing a collaborative and co-operative attitude. It could however come out far weaker by an initiation of a cultlike moniculture.

Edit: Draft all this, no editing, and yeah I can't spell, sorry, .

 

[freetrader]

and slimy politicians

Bitcoin is an existential threat to slimy politicians.

I don't believe that we will see Bitcoin scaling from behind the mirage of the GFC.

People who criticize the leadership of that country get disappeared [1,2,3,4,5].
Bitcoin is an unstoppable, uncensorable financial freedom technology.

If we fool ourselves to think that
(a) the current regime in China can handle criticism
(b) the situation in China w.r.t. emerging freedoms - esp. financial - is stable and will improve in a stable way
(c) Bitcoin will not be used as an anti-censorship medium of exchange
(d) the current regime will tolerate such things through its "Great Firewall" and hesitate to crack down on Bitcoin to protect its political position

Then, we are mistaken.
There are currently signs of a power struggle over there [6] which could end badly for Bitcoin sooner than we expect.

I don't blame the miners over there for acting in what seems to us short-sighted ways. They know what it takes to operate in their country, and they know they are at the mercy of the ruling party w.r.t. towing the national strategic line, local politicians (often slimy) and state corporations for subsidized electricity and permits, a local Bitcoin economy which relies on gambling, capital control circumvention and foreign export instead of a healthy internal commerce. They know their fortunes can change on a dime.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/17/chinese-journalist-disappears-fly-beijing-hong-kong
[2] http://qz.com/570524/a-list-of-chinas-top-bankers-who-disappeared-were-detained-or-died-in-the-past-year/
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-did-china-kidnap-its-provocateurs
[4] http://www.france24.com/en/20160103-hong-kong-china-missing-booksellers-xi-jinping-publisher-causeway-bay-books-mighty-current
[5] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35915056
[6] http://fortune.com/2016/03/28/china-politics-xi-jinping-power-struggle/

 

[solex]

@SysMan
If you really want BitFury's massive investment in SHA256 mining to be successful long-term then you will be wanting Bitcoin volume to grow whether by main-chain scaling, off-chain scaling or BOTH.

At the moment you are showing the world that you prefer Bitcoin to be a crippled 3 TPS obscure payment network - forever.

The smart move is for BitFury to mine Classic blocks right now, because this solution exists right now. When and if SegWit is launched, take a look, and if you decide you like what you see switch to mining with that software instead.

But, please stop evidencing that you want Bitcoin crippled while alt-coins rise and the NY Times tells the world that Bitcoin 2.0 has arrived.

 

[freetrader]

It's been pointed out to me that the original Bitcoin9000.pdf link has vanished as the author(s) account has been removed from GitHub. Sadly, this breaks quite a few links on the web, including at BCT, reddit, and the link in consider.it proposals for discussion of topics therein at the On-chain Scaling conference.

In what I perceive to be public interest, I have created a mirror of the paper here:
https://github.com/ftrader/bitcoin9000-mirror

It includes a GPG key fingerprint in case the original author(s) want to approach me to remove this material.

 

[Inca]

I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume. [Feb 14, 2010]

Or exactly the transaction volume which fits into 1mb every block.

I am sure when blocks were 5 kilobytes in size and the 1 megabyte temporary cap was introduced he never would have dreamed a governance attack like we are seeing from Core and Gregory Maxwell would have been possible. Incredible.

 

[albin]

@Inca

I'm sure I'm not alone feeling the fool now, because looking back the signs were all there definitely in 2013 that this coup was underway, but probably like the vast majority of people, I didn't take it seriously.

 

[cypherdoc]

Enough to block SW:

https://coin.dance/blocks/classicZ

 

[sickpig]

@cypherdoc

yes it *could* be enough to block SegWit.

A safe chunk of network hash rate to block Core's soft-forks[1] would be something like 10% rather than 6-7% IMHO (remember that variance could be cruel).

That said you need to have quite loyal miners on your side. If memory serves f2pool is mining classic blocks using a plain Core node with a patched to change only block ver. If you ask me this doesn't seem enough to guarantee any sufficient level of "loyality".

[1] they could lower enforcing threshold from 95% to 75%, and they will in case classic will gain a loyal 10% hashrate. So I'd say that to be successful in blocking Core soft-forks a 30% of network hashrate is needed.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Enough to block SW:

https://coin.dance/blocks/classicZ

Didn't the miner's say in hongkong that they will not activa segwit untill Core did merge in the code for a hardfork with bigger blocks in june?

 

[freetrader]

@Christoph Bergmann :

Didn't the miner's say in hongkong that they will not activa segwit untill Core did merge in the code for a hardfork with bigger blocks in june?

That was never my reading of the agreement.

It is important to remember that Core never promised to merge in any code. They made it very clear that any merges would require "consensus" within Core, something that one or two prominent Core developer could easily block:

18:27 zveda and it will be merged into core ?
18:27 Luke-Jr tbd

Did you forget:
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/47hzlh/lukejr_admits_that_core_wanted_zero_blocksize/

They only promised to deliver some code to those miners.
AFAIC this means that if the miners want a hard fork, they have to merge the code themselves.

The whole HK agreement was just a dog and pony show to buy more time for SegWit / LN. Well done to Blockstream.

 

[bluemoon]

@Christoph Bergmann: The miners said they would run a SW release "in production" by the time a hard fork increase in non-witness data blocksize was released by Core, which would be by July 2016 with possible activation of the blocksize increase a year later.

The dates mentioned are based on SW being 2 months away from the roundtable date, and the HF release being 3 months after the SW release.

https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff

I assume if the miners want SW it is because it makes possible the Lightning Network? But there is no mention of LN or of making progress on LN a pre-requisite of buggering up the code with SW.
[doublepost=1459242877][/doublepost]@freetrader: yes, they talk about having code "... available as a recommendation to Bitcoin Core ..."

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@freetrader @bluemoon

When I read the agreement first, I thought "Ouch, core played the miners", but when I read it a second time, I thought about this passage:

"We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core."

I understand it that they demand that core releases a version with a hardfork built in for running segwit. It's not entirely clear, but other interpretations doesn't make sense.