Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Richy_T]

A month ago he was quoted on reddit saying the miners were told at the Hong Kong meeting that LN would let them raise on chain fees 100x.

Heck, they could raise them 1000x. No one will be using the blockchain anymore.
[doublepost=1460817339][/doublepost]

The problem isn't that bad actors took an interest in Bitcoin - there will always be bad actors in the world and they will always be attracted to the positions where they can do the most damage - the problem is that it's so easy for them to recruit followers.

I think a lot of the problem is things descend into tribalism so easily.

 

[cypherdoc]

The biggest disappointment for me has been seeing just how many apparently-honest people were willing to become malignant sycophants.

The problem isn't that bad actors took an interest in Bitcoin - there will always be bad actors in the world and they will always be attracted to the positions where they can do the most damage - the problem is that it's so easy for them to recruit followers.

it's enough to shake one's faith in humanity. maybe we all are just a bunch of monkey's.

that's one thing the central banksters got right; there is one helluva lot of ppl who will go for the short term profits of fiat money in an instantaneous gratification type world it appears. even cypherpunks. this, over a long, hard, drawn out battle for sound money that could change humanity.

maybe @Inca is right. if we can cap the price under $500 for the rest of year, maybe we can wipe out alot of large, sycophantic miners who support core dev and take Blockstream with it.
[doublepost=1460818765][/doublepost]totally agree with bolded but would incl, "no sane financial institution" would ever invest:

 

[BldSwtTrs]

The biggest disappointment for me has been seeing just how many apparently-honest people were willing to become malignant sycophants.

The problem isn't that bad actors took an interest in Bitcoin - there will always be bad actors in the world and they will always be attracted to the positions where they can do the most damage - the problem is that it's so easy for them to recruit followers.

Humans are vulnerable to social status. It's easy for someone with high status to recruit followers, regardless of his intentions or cleverness.

 

[bluemoon]

I think a lot of the problem is things descend into tribalism so easily.

It reminds me of the 1961 Milgram experiment, where Milgram instructed volunteer "teachers" to apply increasing electric shocks to "learners" who failed to give the correct matching word when asked after being read a series of word pairs. 65% of teachers administered the maximum electric shock to the learner despite observing the pain and harm caused.

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

So it is that Theymos finds and instructs moderators and trolls to censor, hector, and bully critical posters on his forum, and they do.

And so it is BScore persuades the miners to follow their instructions to run, and keep running, the Core bitcoin client.

Wikipedia describes Milgram's theory of conformism, saying, "A subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral model."

This seems to be borne out by the miners' submission to and psychological capture by BScore. The few miners whose comments I have seen all mention BScore's supposed expertise, their longstanding guidance of the bitcoin project, and Classic's supposed lack of depth and experience.

Their need to project themselves as bitcoin's principal authority also explains BScore's denigration of Satoshi and the idea they put about that his vision has been superseded.

The frightening thing is that people are so open to this manipulation.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@bluemoon There are people who are open to manipulation, and there are people who are intelligent enough to see through the manipulation yet value their own pride and social circle so much that they'd rather stand by and let Bitcoin die rather than accept the consequences of admitting that they backed the wrong horse.

The latter group is the one that really gets my contempt flowing.
[doublepost=1460824149,1460823314][/doublepost]The digital influencers on Reddit are really not happy about the knowledge getting out of how easy it is to bypass the requirement for an on-chain transaction to open a LN channel.

Understandable, since it shows their entire security model to be a scam.
[doublepost=1460825198][/doublepost]The most ironic part is that it's precisely by fixing transaction malleability that the requirement for funding transaction to confirm on the blockchain has been removed.

But you have to fix transaction malleability for micropayment channels to work with any degree of security at all, whether or not LN is involved.

In the classic vision of micropayment channels, either the payer is the one who funds the channel, or else it's jointly funded by both parties.

However, most of the world's population doesn't own any on-chain bitcoins. They'll be purchasing their first bitcoin from their LN hub. That hub has no incentive for the funding transaction to ever confirm, and has every incentive to have their customers user LN clients that will start working immediately and never bother to check if the funding transaction confirms at all. Otherwise, they have to explain the random variations in time needed before their supposedly-instant payments (about once a month we go an hour with no blocks mined) start working.

Once hubs are the ones providing the bitcoins which open the channels, and once users are on clients which don't care if the transaction ever confirms, now hubs are free to operate on whatever leverage ratio they want.

 

[freetrader]

Coincidence much, or deja vu?

"Hit By Lightning is a 2014 Canadian-American black comedy film"

---

Also, there's gold in them thar troll posts. Arrrr!

 

[dooglus]

Beats me how BS-Core has any traction with serious bitcoiners when they are so clearly self-serving and rely so heavily on deceit and sleight of hand, manipulation, bullying, and censorship.

Is there somewhere I can read a concise summary of this deceit and sleight of hand, manipulation, bullying, and censorship by core developers?

I currently find myself mostly supporting most of the core developers but am quite willing to change my mind in the face of compelling evidence.

 

[Aquent]

The world is complex. Every Ying has a Yang. What is good is also, by some measures, bad. Our act is one of balancing.

We are hardly 1 million or maybe 5 million users, in a world of seven billion people. Our market cap is less than what the British government gives as charity in international development aid. The world is beginning to realize the benefits of this new invention. Soon, unless current players rightly position themselves, they will become insignificant.

We'll have a maxblocksize increase. We'll have segwit too and lightning. Which comes first is irrelevant. Whether they are used or fail is irrelevant too.

When a fourth industrial revolution is announced we stand here discussing what we have discussed for a whole year. As far as I am concerned, the debate is over. Both sides have gained what they want. My only worry is r/bitcoin's north korean censorship. Which is why it would be nice if r/btc was made more welcoming and neutral.

 

[freetrader]

@Aquent, of what relevance is censorship in /r/bitcoin in a world where 1 billion people in a single country [1,2] are sitting behind a government-mandated "great firewall"?

I hardly ever lurk in /r/bitcoin anymore - the top posts there often seem to be about things entirely unrelated to Bitcoin. Actually, I have suggested they do an exchange of that sub with /r/lightning ...

I do fully agree that we should focus on creating better spaces, like /r/btc.
That's what's great about the virtual world

[1] http://andrewmcafee.org/2013/11/mcafee-gary-king-chinese-censorship/
[2] http://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-allows-government-criticism-silences-collective-expression

 

[cypherdoc]

Is there somewhere I can read a concise summary of this deceit and sleight of hand, manipulation, bullying, and censorship by core developers?

I currently find myself mostly supporting most of the core developers but am quite willing to change my mind in the face of compelling evidence.

@Peter R's HK paper by presentation screeners Austin Hill and Adam Back. Along with Corrallo's strenuous objections the week before. @Peter R should substantiate.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

LN supporters have now been reduced to arguing that their "absolutely just as good a real Bitcoin transactions" security model is fine because isn't any worse than Mt Gox.

 

[Lee Adams]

We'll have a maxblocksize increase.

In one respect this is what keeps me hodling. I just don't know how long it will take to get there given the statements from gmax and ptodd. There is a powerful force keeping the bsl small. It looks like this bsl increase (if it happens) will me a minuscule 2mb... and then the shit storm happens again.
[doublepost=1460835281][/doublepost][doublepost=1460835332][/doublepost]

Bitcoin is centrally planned

You do not understand bitcoin. Can you put me through to someone that does.

 

[albin]

I just went and bought Horace and Pete on Louis CK's website. Tremendous tremendous UX, all you do is enter an email address for the site to send your login credentials, and click "Pay with Bitcoin", straight to Bitpay, back. Literally seconds in total.

On-chain Bitcoin is a winner as-is, this beats every other way to pay for anything online ever. Just in terms of basic common sense, let's hypothetically concede in principle Lightning/Sidechains/whatevervapor is amazing and will take over the normal transactional use-case. Why let on-chain that works amazing now go to shit over the short term?

 

[go1111111]

Beats me how BS-Core has any traction with serious bitcoiners when they are so clearly self-serving and rely so heavily on deceit and sleight of hand, manipulation, bullying, and censorship.

Probably it has a lot to do with the huge number of conspiracy theorists and 'unhinged' seeming Classic supporters out there. It makes the large-block cause look bad.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

That Mentor77 comment played with the semantics of the term "central planning." Probably a clearer term could be used, but everyone knows "central" is the operative word, not planning, right? Trivially, every code update is going to be planned, after all. Hayek rolls in his grave.

 

[bluemoon]

Is there somewhere I can read a concise summary of this deceit and sleight of hand, manipulation, bullying, and censorship by core developers?

I currently find myself mostly supporting most of the core developers but am quite willing to change my mind in the face of compelling evidence.

The block size saga is a story of BScore deceits and misrepresentations. An endless stream of excuses and delays to avoid scaling bitcoin, all so bitcoin can be hacked, crippled, and reduced to a secondary role in a BScore controlled and inspired replacement system. If they do not intend bitcoin's demise they may well cause it. Theirs is a prospectus based on vapourware, of more interest to the banks than the unbanked.

The miners, apparently shut in a room for hours until they signed the HK agreement, have been made promises of future riches based on an increasingly fanciful vision of an as yet imaginary Lightning Network, the description of which mutates each day.

Aggressive trolling, 'moderation', censorship, and banning is endemic on BScore controlled forums. Many here have been subject to it. It is why this forum exists. The purpose is to silence public criticism of BScore, prevent awareness of alternatives spreading, to buttress BScore's authority, and to avoid BScore being called to account.

 

[freetrader]

That Mentor77 comment played with the semantics of the term "central planning."

It's right up there with the new conflation "open source intelligence" which refers to gathering intelligence from "open" sources i.e. corporations which can be put under gag orders. The fact that most of this surveillance is completely antithetical to the notion of "open source" as the term was initially coined is of course deliberate.

--

Something to bear in mind when contemplating Medium posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4f1z18/medium_is_now_blocked_in_china/

 

[bluemoon]

Probably it has a lot to do with the huge number of conspiracy theorists and 'unhinged' seeming Classic supporters out there. It makes the large-block cause look bad.

I think I might be joining them.

 

[go1111111]

I was asked to give a more thorough explanation about how LN could lead to fractional reserve hubs.

<snip a bunch of stuff>

In fact, once a channel is full it become uneconomical to send any more transactions in that direction whose value is less than the cost of an on-chain transaction.

There is a solution for this - LN wallets just need the ability to add and remove new inputs to a refund transaction.

As you point out later, these 'new inputs' can be double spent by Coinbase and don't actually offer the customer any significant security. The system you describe LN evolving into isn't really LN to the extent that it uses these non-anchored inputs. It's just "Coinbase promises to send you some extra coins when you close the channel."

If Coinbase actually did this, then they wouldn't bother with specifying inputs explicitly. They'd just credit your Coinbase account with some extra coins. At this point they could either tell you that you were trusting Coinbase for some of your balance, or they could just not bother telling you. IMO there would be enough technically savvy users out there who would call Coinbase out if they didn't tell users about this that Coinbase would make it apparent in the UI how much of your funds they were spotting you.

So the scenario you describe is basically "it's a hassle when LN channels fill up, so people will start keeping some of their coins outside of LN instead of adjusting their filled-channels, essentially using Coinbase the same way they do now (trusting them as a custodian), and once Coinbase is holding lots of people's coins they can do fractional reserve if they want to."

I don't think this scenario is something we should worry much about because it relies on on-chain transactions getting very high. This might be Core's vision, but as many posters here have pointed out, Bitcoin will fork if the pain of on-chain fees becomes significant over some sustained period. A big reason we haven't forked yet is because 5 cent fees are not causing that much pain.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I don't think this scenario is something we should worry much about because it relies on on-chain transactions getting very high. This might be Core's vision

Not only is it BS/Core's vision, it's also the exact conditions under which they are advertising Lightning Network being beneficial, and Lightning Network is what they are selling everybody on to justify crippling Bitcoin.

If the conditions arise that make LN beneficial, those are also the same conditions that will make it unsafe.