Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

My IMHO its about Core vs "Bitcoin control" ...
Mike Harn... BitcoinXT, BIP101, Classic... continue by yourself.

BTW. SegWit4 released.
btcm.ag/segnet4
https://petertodd.org/2016/btcc-funding

You guys definitely have too much hashing power.
I know a lot of guys are still trying to convince you but you don't answer posts directed to you and just keep repeating the same bullshit fed to you by very late adopters so I don't see any reason to keep going this way. You certainly aren't here to broaden your horizon.

You obviously bought into the "consensus"->higher value->more profit crap and it isn't working out. So you thought maybe we should visit "the other side" but instead of listening and reflecting on your position you just try to convince people of your complete and utter bullshit which isn't working anywhere outside /r/bitcoin. And guess what, maybe there is no halving magic going to happen! Oh noes! What about all the precious investments into "digital gold", the "settlement layer of the future", "Ethereum 0.1".. Sucks to be a miner these days!

The whole Sha256 Mining industry will have a very hard awakening. Just having access to ASIC development and cheap energy doesn't make you a reasonable guardian of the bitcoin blockchain. You guys will crash and eat dirt b/c you are just to illiterate and ignorant. And guess what, we can keep the existing blockchain, we don't need any of the retarded miners. Holders can hold their coins on either chain, the miners are the only ones dependent on the current mining algorithm. (btw. the same applies to blockstream evil motherfuckers inc., they can work on any blockchain with their centralized solutions. They don't need bitcoin at all.)

Honestly I have to restrain myself here and stop before I start throwing insults at your head but I just can't stand the stupidity by at least two big mining cooperations anymore. You guys are going to have a bad year 2017.

P.S. If you use an android phone, it is using code written by one of the Classic devs. Someone who is developing stable and safe software for decades. Get in touch with reality someday or you will get fucked.

P.P.S.: Did you ever have a look at the threads about the bullshit development/LOC statistics I sent you? No of course not. If so you had retracted your public statement and corrected it. But you guys just keep repeating the same lies over and over again.


So let's get ready for @rocks fork.

 

[cypherdoc]

Is there literally anything at all that Adam Back is not looking to immediately stick his nose in?

Remember how often be would lament and blame Gavin when be simply made comments last year about how he hadn't yet talked to miners? As if Gavin was flying all around the world soliciting votes? His ability to project his own devious suspicions and tactics onto others is appalling.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@cypherdoc 90% of Core dev's concerns etc. are just projection.

 

[cypherdoc]

My IMHO its about Core vs "Bitcoin control" ...
Mike Harn... BitcoinXT, BIP101, Classic... continue by yourself.

BTW. SegWit4 released.
btcm.ag/segnet4
https://petertodd.org/2016/btcc-funding

When are you going to get around to truly understanding the reality of the situation? If you were an honest intuitive miner, you wouldn't want the core dev of your choice to have any "control" over the code. you would want a broad group of independent devs, without a Blockstream involved, who were contributing minimalistic code while keeping their hands off for most of the time because Satoshi's original concepts and ideas are what got us here in the first place. Not maxwell and not wuille. The other people who got us here are early adopters, like us, who put hard earned dollars on the table to support the price when things looked like they were going to fail back in the early days. None of the Classic core devs have any COI, unlike the Blockstream folks who happens to be 9 of the top contributors to the code. It seems to be flying over your head that this is a problem that was noticed a long time ago before the blocksize debate even began.

Get your head out of your ass before it's too late.
[doublepost=1459603365,1459602213][/doublepost]@SysMan

The other thing here is that you don't seem to understand how folks think in the West. Part of the reason this thread is so popular is that it involves early adopters who got it right because of their ability to understand human action and behavior at larger scales. I happen to believe that's because we tend to be older, have more assets, have income outside the sphere of tech (thus not dependent on politics of the situation) , have more experience in investing and personal interactions (through our training or professions). There was a study on this released over on BCT just the other week that showed just this demographic split between r/Bitcoin & r/BTC, so I'm not hallucinating.

You also have this rather arrogant attitude that those like us aren't capable of understanding Bitcoin. If that were so then why are the most wealthy ppl in the space those like Roger Ver & Erik Voorhees & Olivier? You haven't been around in Bitcoin very long but as a close observer of the space I can assure you it is the non tech entrepreneurs who got it right in the biggest way.

 

[albin]

I had a few thoughts relevant to Mike Hearn as a figure in the space with respect to personal recollection and some ideas about groupthink. As a caveat I've never directly interacted with Mike Hearn in any meaningful way, so for all I know he very well could be the most horrible person in the world, but I have no idea. In general I've found alot of what he's had to say on technical and project management type matters very high quality, and I respect alot of what he has to say about common sense big-picture stuff.

First, on groupthink:

We all know what it is, but I want to draw attention to the salient characteristic that allows it to exist. Groupthink only seems to typically exist in an abusive environment where it becomes socially acceptable to attack someone for asking certain questions, completely independently of any overt advocacy. In fact if anything, it becomes socially acceptable to exhibit blanket paranoia that raising certain questions is a bad faith attempt of hidden advocacy (you all know you've seen this in Bitcoin, if not personally experienced it!).

A fairly realistic real-world example: Suppose you're a minor raised in a super-religious but mentally and/or physically-abusive household. One day you decide to ask your parents "how do we know that God really exists?", and instead of an answer, your father takes you out to the shed and beats you until you learn not to ask that again. The real theologians from history are on your side, because they were powerful intellectuals who would welcome your inquisitiveness and struggled with those questions themselves. But that's not what groupthink is about.

Now why this relates to Mike Hearn.

Admittedly I might be remembering this inaccurately, so please feel free to correct what I'm saying, but I remember first becoming aware of "Mike Hearn the villain" (outside of just general baseless paranoia about Google employment) in like 2013 to early 2014. The context was that he started raising questions in fora, etc. about the prospect of redlisting/blacklisting/whateverlisting coins by authorities in response to theft or crime in general. From what I recall, he never actually explicitly advocated any of this.

I remember it then being blown out of proportion, definitely I remember in early 2014 Peter Todd explicitly said on a bitcointalk thread that if you're against this agenda (which suddenly Mike Hearn was now allegedly advocating??), then just to boycott all his commits.

Is this starting to look like what I'm talking about?

As a postscript, we know ever since the John Dillon email leaks that Peter Todd was very consciously plotting to undermine Gavin publicly for all of this time, and there's even something Todd says that strongly suggests plotting w/ Maxwell (although to be fair that might just be Peter Todd's own delusional interpretation of private conversations), and looking back in hindsight, Mike Hearn's general agreement with Gavin on the direction of the project was pretty well-known all thoughout this time period.

Again, for all I know Mike Hearn might be Satan's right hand here on Earth, because I don't personally know the guy, but it's pretty apparent that we've been dealing with a very toxic abusive environment for quite some time now due to the influence of certain developers in establishing a groupthink spectacle, so frankly anybody who is buying any of the obvious top-level narratives is getting played like a fiddle.

 

[cypherdoc]

@SysMan

I know you've personally met Luke & Adam. Do you honestly think people like us are going to lay down all our personal values to entrust our billions of dollars in Bitcoin to mindlessly follow those guys? After the way they've conducted themselves over the last year? As opposed to Gavin & Jeff who've conducted themselves like gentlemen ? Who should you trust more with this code "control" you speak of? Like someone on reddit said: I wouldn't trust core dev to mow my lawn. I'm sure you'll roll out the tripe that we shouldn't judge the person; just read their code. But that doesn't represent reality for most people who can't read code. Their decisions hinge on others reading the code and that boils down to trusting someone else with the skills. The fact of the matter is that Luke, Adam, et al don't engender alot of confidence or trust. I think all the people who do follow them are doing so because Blockstream is presenting them with a financial opportunity to subvert bitcoin that they can take advantage of through newer and different visions of what it should be. those of us who invested in Satoshi's original vision will fight this to the death.

For instance we know Adam got in in mid 2013, the absolute worst time at the top and is probably so far under water with his investment or more likely has already booked massive losses because he couldn't take the latest push down to $150. He sees Blockstream as his last chance ticket to the big time. Luke has probably done well given Eligius. Maxwell I'd bet dollars to donuts missed it terribly given all his bearish posts since 2011 when he got in after me.

Those are the guys you are blindly following out of idolatry.
[doublepost=1459607071,1459606338][/doublepost]@albin Both liLuke & Todd have anyways been thorns under Gavin's ass since 2011 when I got in. They've been out spoken rebels with all sorts of armchair FUD, Todd being even worse than Luke or maxwell (who were pretty bad). So it's not surprising they'd be on the other side of this debate with Gavin.

 

[freetrader]

you wouldn't want the core dev of your choice to have any "control" over the code. you would want a broad group of independent devs, without a Blockstream involved, who were contributing minimalistic code while keeping their hands off for most of the time

Spot on. This expresses it perfectly. Hell, even with some elements of corporate sponsorship, which are pretty much unavoidable - there is NO good reason to not want more independent development teams.

Core is abusing their position as the dominant player, but this cannot last.

 

[freetrader]

Best Reddit post headline I came across today, in an unrelated subreddit:

"If you perceive verifiable facts about your record to be attacks, you are admitting your actions are indefensible."

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Aquent]

@SysMan do you speak on behalf of bitfury or are your statements solely your opinion? I understand your title is Communications Officer, so hardly someone who calls the shots.

I ask because I randomly came across bitfury's research section and apparently bitfury has a research paper (which I have not read) concluding in it's summary that: "We believe that in order for Bitcoin ecosystem to prosper, the maximum block size must be increased." http://bitfury.com/white-papers-research

So it would be helpful to know whether you have any say, power, or authorisation within bitfury to make such ridiculous statements as Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik trying to control bitcoin. It would have been laughable, if you did not actually mean your statement, but with that sentence seemingly actually intended one must think that you are absolutely nutts.

Therefore please do reply to my question at your earliest convenience. Do you speak, with authorization, on behalf of bitfury, or are your statements merely your personal opinion?

Thanks.

 

[cypherdoc]

my attack outlined above will work.

we already know that blocks are easily jammed up by spam in today's tx volume environment. fast forward 5y when there are $100B worth of pmt channels with a significant proportion of those trying to close at any given time and are time dependent. according to core dev, full blks (whatever the size), fee pressure, and jacked mempools should be the norm today and 5y from now. therefore, a major spam attack can be envisioned to royally fuck with LN functioning and will have maximum attack incentive and motivation when huge values are at risk on LN. now you might say, "but core dev plans on increasing the blk size for LN to compensate so let us continue to mortgage our future on their promises". i'd answer, "we don't know that for sure b/c Blockstream could be a gvt sponsored entity whose real motivation is to destroy Bitcoin altogether". if that's the case, then we should be demanding a blk size increase first as a good faith measure and then fold in LN if it's deemed worthy (which i don't think it is).

furthermore, if you agree with my above reasoning, then you need to take another step back and ask why we need SW since it's main and primary motivation is to facilitate/subsidize the LN? answer is, we don't.

again, it's a logical fallacy to run a small settlement network at full capacity while trying to bolt on top a huge value tx dependent system.
[doublepost=1459616912,1459615920][/doublepost]this was probably a major data source in pwuille & gmax establishing the "75%" discount:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4d0ok5/research_90_bitcoin_nodes_can_operate_with_4mb/

edit: again, WTF was Johnson Lau talking about?

 

[freetrader]

@Aquent: "absolutely nutts" is my favorite term of the day.

Fun fact: squirrels also like coconuts - they do need help cracking them though

 

[Dusty]

I'm going to refute some points on your post, but not for defending LN, just to point out some factual inaccuracies.

I'm on the opposite side, the more I understand it, the more I dislike it, especially as a soft fork, since it violated many fundamental rules in both bitcoin and software engineering

I agree that the changes should be done as a hard fork, and after a big maximum block increase

2. The transaction malleability is not a real problem, since unconfirmed transactions are not safe in bitcoin, it can be orphaned, this is a limitation of POW, not transaction format.

I was told that the problem is not orphanation (segwit does nothing on that, of course), but the fact that tx malleability enables more efficient smart contracts. I don't know the details though, and I would like to know more, if someone knows them.

[...]What if an LN transaction is orphaned or doublespended?

You wait your usual 6 confirmations, or more, or less depending from other details, as any other normal bitcoin transactions.

3. LN is prepaid card model, and it has been abandoned by telecom operators years ago, because majority of people don't do transaction that way (only travelers do): If you repeatedly pay to some merchant, what do you usually do? You buy a large volume at a discount rate, that's one transaction, you don't need LN to do that

There are a couple of enormous differences from prepaid cards:

1) With LN, if you spend only a fraction of the credit you bought, you can have the rest back. With a prepaid card, you can't. If you need to make a phone call that costs 1$ and you only can purchase 10$ cards, you can't have the other 9$ back.

2) The LN aims to be an hub connecting different actors of the market, so, in the example above, if you buy a 10$ prepaid card from AT&T you could spend it on another merchant, for example waltmart or starbucks.

5. It is a complex change thus need extremely long time to test and deploy, if ever reaching consensus. In fact the biggest difficulty for segwit to reach consensus is its complexity, so far I have never seen anyone expect Pieter fully understand what segwit is

While I agree it's a big change, It's not so difficult (if you can understand the inner Bitcoin workings you can understand it fine). Also it's from the very early moments of bitcoin development that a way to extend its scripting capabilities is being discussed.

6. Centralization of knowledge to Pieter would make him the single point of failure, if he disappear then bitcoin is screwed, that's just too large risk

The code is open source, and while it's complicated (MUCH more complicated than simply augment block size, of course), it's nothing extreme. Implementation in client libraries like bitcoinjs and bitcoinj has been made with a few lines of code.

7. Bitcoin works well without segwit, why bother?

Because we have competition, and we will have always more in the future, and we want Bitcoin to remain relevant and not to lose value against some toy like ethereum, right?

 

[cypherdoc]

@Dusty

2) The LN aims to be an hub connecting different actors of the market, so, in the example above, if you buy a 10$ prepaid card from AT&T you could spend it on another merchant, for example waltmart or starbucks.

can you explain how this happens? my understanding of a LN pmt channel is that you open it with one other counterparty for the duration of the time period and that counterparty only. each tx within the channel is updated by both parties using the same privkeys that were used to open the channel so i don't see how another unrelated party can take over.
[doublepost=1459634264][/doublepost]

 

[Dusty]

can you explain how this happens? my understanding of a LN pmt channel is that you open it with one other counterparty for the duration of the time period and that counterparty only. each tx within the channel is updated by both parties using the same privkeys that were used to open the channel so i don't see how another unrelated party can take over.

A payment channel between two parties is not a novelty: satoshi himself envisaged them and for that reason that we have a "sequence" field on every transaction. Mike Hearn implemented it in bitcoinj two years ago (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=244656.0) so this is not new.

What LN should bring is the network. That means that while payment channels are always from one peer A to one peer B, both A and B may have other channels opens with other partners.

Let's say that A has a channel open with C and B has a channel open with D. Now, if C and D have to do a (micro) transaction, instead of opening a channel between them (that would be expensive), they can route their payment between A and B.

The more the network of channels grows, the more it's probable that two distant parties can be reached indirectly using existing channels. If a path is not found and the cost of opening a new one is affordable then it can be opened and kept open to help the network grow.

That's the theory, at least.

 

[JVWVU]

I love me some bitcoin and honestly against Core but trying to read here sometimes and R/BTC pretty much makes me hate fighting Core.

Hopefully over the next few weeks coding and math will win out.

 

[johnyj]

I was told that the problem is not orphanation (segwit does nothing on that, of course), but the fact that tx malleability enables more efficient smart contracts. I don't know the details though, and I would like to know more, if someone knows them.

LN mostly rely on unconfirmed transactions in memory pool, if those unconfirmed transactions can be replaced at ease(malleability), then LN will never work

IMO, smart contract is a concept ahead of its time. In principle, a string of numbers on blockchain can be used to represent any physical/virtual objects, the problem is that how do you enforce this relationship?

A smart contract says that if you get bitcoins at this xxx address then you own this house, but if the house owner refuse to give you the key, what can you do when that contract has no law enforcement (centralized authority) backing? So it requires an enforcement mechanism, for example a digital lock. But then the lock maker is the centralized authority, they don't really need to use bitcoin blockchain, they would use their own blockchain

There are a couple of enormous differences from prepaid cards:
1) With LN, if you spend only a fraction of the credit you bought, you can have the rest back. With a prepaid card, you can't. If you need to make a phone call that costs 1$ and you only can purchase 10$ cards, you can't have the other 9$ back.

2) The LN aims to be an hub connecting different actors of the market, so, in the example above, if you buy a 10$ prepaid card from AT&T you could spend it on another merchant, for example waltmart or starbucks.

Prepaid cards have many different types, if you have ever been to China, you know it is very common to purchase this kind of card in a large food court, you charge the card and eat whatever you want at each small shop, and at the end of the meal you return the card and get the rest of your money back. In fact I doubt the LN idea is originated from this model

Expanding from this model, you get a card that is accepted at many more places, not only restaurant. There is a well known Octopus card in Hong Kong, works exactly the same way that LN is supposed to work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card
And Hong Kong government is the biggest owner of Octopus card. In fact, I also heard that those Hong Kong meetings were organized by a company owned by Hong Kong government, is it a coincidence that they support this idea?

While I agree it's a big change, It's not so difficult (if you can understand the inner Bitcoin workings you can understand it fine). Also it's from the very early moments of bitcoin development that a way to extend its scripting capabilities is being discussed.

Of course you can implement an improvement of the script function but that would require major consensus. If changing 1-2 takes 2 years then how long would it take to change the scripting system

Because we have competition, and we will have always more in the future, and we want Bitcoin to remain relevant and not to lose value against some toy like ethereum, right?

The bitcoin script system is intentionally made to be very limited in function, just to focus on its main function as money. Of course you can expand the script system and let this network run all kinds of things, but as I described above, smart contract requires a centralized authority to enforce its rules, and this centralized authority will most possibly use their own blockchain tech to remain full control

 

[Lee Adams]

Something to get your teeth into:

http://www.achow101.com/2016/04/Segwit-FUD-Clearup

 

[albin]

@Lee Adams

I think the author of that should really be paying attention to actual arguments really being made in the wild, like for example that he could see prolifically from cypherdoc in this very thread, instead of patronizing everybody with those milquetoast softballs.
[doublepost=1459652545][/doublepost]

I
FUCKING
HATE
PEOPLE
WHO
THINK
BLOCKCHAIN
IS
JUST
A
DATABASE!

I wish I had more than one like to give! This is like people who think gold as money is just the element, and not the cultural context and practices that surround using it.

 

[cypherdoc]

the siren song deviation from sound money has extended pretty far up the chain of believers when i can't even get a response to this: