Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

freetrader

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 16, 2015
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It couldn't be more obvious that he does not have any conviction in Bitcoin's fundamentals.
Another good reason to fork Bitcoin away from the control of this developer group.

From the POV of an incumbent large miner like BTCC, a "security tax" would no doubt be very welcome.
Given that this tax would be earmarked for miners in particular, could this be an attempt at an election promise to secure that particular segment's vote?
 

Richy_T

Well-Known Member
Dec 27, 2015
1,085
2,741
I'm shocked, I really didn't know that Todd was so ignorant and dangerous.
Well if Bitcoin is just hashcash with inflation control, guess we're going back to hashcash.

How did we get here? Even just two years ago, everything seemed to be going fine.

Dusty, I said a while back I believed Todd was possibly the most dangerous person to Bitcoin. He's close to Core and has no humility.
 

Erdogan

Active Member
Aug 30, 2015
476
856
That is generally the beautiful thing with the markets. You can operate in the market your whole life without understanding anything, and still create value for yourself and others. And if you do stupid things, you lose your capital and are denied the role as the one who takes the whole thing forward.
 

albin

Active Member
Nov 8, 2015
931
4,008
Peter Todd in my opinion since day one has been on a mission to never make a single claim that's well-defined enough to be empirically-falsifiable!

I think there's a hidden assumption behind his position here that Bitcoin will never succeed anyway, because the numbers don't jive.

Assuming I'm right with a little napkin math, 1% inflation against the 21 million is about 4 BTC / block. If we're in just the Winklevoss small-bull scenario that's gonna be in the neighborhood of $150-200,000 / 10 min emitted. If valuations in the small 6-figures materialize, we're talking like a half million dollars / 10 min.

I can't help but think that's probably overkill unless Todd is assuming those valuations never happen.

Assuming that once the block reward is completely gone, either the issue of not having pressure to advance the chain turns out to be wrong, or some mechanism to prevent big re-orgs to try to collect all the fees yourself aren't there, then the foundational idea that fees should pick it up is extremely plausible.
 
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albin

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Nov 8, 2015
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Here's an alternate theory to explain the promises of 100x miner revenue:

What if the expected configuration is that miners themselves become the big LN settlement hubs?

In an environment where you're redlining blocksize capacity, the only entities that have reasonable assurances of being able to enforce channels are miners of a certain threshhold size (based on the length of timelocks in question). So either the large hubs have business relationships directly with certain miners, paying out-of-band, or the actual hub itself is a miner, either way it probably doesn't matter, pretty much the same result.

If this is the case, then all of Peter Todd's uniquely schizoid FUD stories about what regulators have supposedly told him and only him suddenly start to become plausible, because if miners become the new banks, then that's a very clear entry-point where regulators can start asking for AML/KYC on the mining itself. Or even worse, because they can just start censoring every transaction that isn't known to be part of their little settlement club, and then AML/KYC at the endpoints takes care of the whole thing. Legendary Internet Idiot Professor Bitcorn literally submitted hand-written notes on the first Bitlicense draft suggesting requiring licensure for miners. If alot of big miners end up being custodial off-chain wallets that settle over LN between each other, then agree or disagree, but Prof Bitcorn isn't exactly a total idiot anymore. BTCC in particular looks like it's setting up the infrastructure to do something very much like this.
 
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albin

Active Member
Nov 8, 2015
931
4,008
If there's anybody who's a Fed it's Peter Todd.

- Charges low fees to get his fingers in every consulting project possible (per Strateman's chiding criticism a couple years ago and Garzik's hillarious joke about Peter Todd's employment being a quantum mechanical wave function).

- Goes out of his way to promote an image as anti-establishment in a "the lady doth protest too much" manner. I mean seriously, his twitter pic is borderline comedy, he's laying it on thick like he's the next Snowden.

- Weird pattern of association / funding by anonymous divisive Svengali benefactors (jdillon, btcdrak).

- Every single position he takes on anything ever is that of the concern troll.

It's import to note however, as the proverbial grain of salt, every single bullet point here is also very explainable simply by a delusional sense of self-importance.