Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

yes, these are incredibly challenging times indeed. to many i'm sure it seems hopeless. what other way to shed bulls off the bull though? can't bring everyone along. only a few of us will make it to the finish line.

as an aside, i sold my last bit of gold today, almost 5y after opening this thread. you see, my journey along this path is far advanced. while others haven't even begun. that's assuming i'm right of course that we're making a fundamental change in money. just before i left the dealer, who's not much younger than me, i decided to ask if he might buy "unique" items. i described to him the Casascius gold bar with a loaded bitcoin. his answer, as he crinkled his nose, was "nah, that sounds like one of those modern things". i smiled and replied, "yes, it is!". i turned around and walked out the door chuckling to myself. no sense arguing.

that's how early we are. and i think we are going to find our way.

 

[Mengerian]

Lately I have been thinking about possible failure modes for Bitcoin. It’s a useful exercise, when trying to assess Bitcoin’s prospects, to try to think of all the ways it could possibly fail, and how likely those failure modes are.

I have noticed that it seems the “big blockers” and “small blockers” have different perceptions of what are the worst risks to Bitcoin success. The small blockers seem concerned with what I would call technical risks, things like selfish miner attacks, miner centralization, etc. The big blockers, on the other hand, are more concerned with economic risks, such as a failure to reach a critical mass of adoption, or being outcompeted by altcoins.

A side effect of seeing things from an economic angle is that many of the technical risks seem less worrisome, since the occurrence of the problem would provide incentives for a solution.

For me, it seems like the economic dynamics require that Bitcoin keep growing in transaction volume and price in order to be secure. That’s why I worry that restricting block size could unnecessarily stunt growth and open the door to alternatives. But yes, if Bitcoin does survive it should be all the stronger for overcoming yet another hurdle.

 

[cypherdoc]

Stratfor is great:

 

[solex]

I have noticed that it seems the “big blockers” and “small blockers” have different perceptions of what are the worst risks to Bitcoin success. The small blockers seem concerned with what I would call technical risks, things like selfish miner attacks, miner centralization, etc. The big blockers, on the other hand, are more concerned with economic risks, such as a failure to reach a critical mass of adoption, or being outcompeted by altcoins.

Can't upvote this enough.
Small-blockers are so worried about technical failure that they greatly magnify the risks of economic failure by taking the mitigation strategy of constraining volumes.

Problem is that they are guessing what the technical limit is (which may be 500% of the current level) , and even if it is approached there is nothing that would unite Bitcoiners more than facing a major externality. Consensus would form on changes to handle volume increases while maintaining decentralization.

In contrast, vast amounts of time and energy have been wasted on an internal struggle which is driving development into alts.

 

[freetrader]

Not saying anyone should be able to read this guy's mind, but do any of you know what he's talking about?

Is neutrality no longer a thing when miners/pools consider two transactions with the same fee?
I mean, I know about BTCC's preferential treatment / prioritisation of its transactions, but that doesn't seem to be what he's talking about here.

That whole thread is just littered (is that the right word) with Luke-jr anti-gems like these:

 

[cypherdoc]

@freetrader

i'm still banned otherwise i'd rip Luke's answer to shreds. he's so filled with his own lies at this point he can't keep track of his inconsistencies.

that first tweet admits that miners can control what tx's enter their blocks, namely spam. so why again does BU result in unlimited blocksizes if they can indeed filter and identify spam?

that second tweet reflects simple corruption. he doesn't want anyone to use wallet alternatives to Core. never mind that Qt is crap and no power user uses it. i haven't touched it for about 4y now. i'll only use bitcoind occasionally as a backend to Armory. Mycelium and other SPV wallets have been essential for Bitcoin adoption to date and are perfectly safe for small amounts and probably even large amounts as one thread indicated a coupla months back by transmitting some huge amount. no one i know has had any problems whatsoever using phone wallets on any sort of routine basis. Luke has been clearly compromised with his ethics and anyone listening to him will lose money in the long run.
[doublepost=1462029539][/doublepost]someone here was pumping Telegram. that was inconsistent with what i had heard from Steve Gibson.

Matt Green just confirmed:

 

[cypherdoc]

this is why we're having trouble keeping Bitcoin down to simple money. all these newbies desperately wanting employment/VC money for putting food on the table for the next two years. not to mention early core devs who missed the boat perverting Bitcoin for their own for-profit companies:

 

[Aquent]

They fucked up! Segwit won't be ready for months. The halving is coming. Banks are marching. What will the miners, the ones upon whom all now depends, decide?

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4h544k/april_closes_with_no_segwit_released_the/

 

[cypherdoc]

nice. it's important to hold them accountable.

don't forget mably's post from Stack Classic. not until July.

 

[johnyj]

I have noticed that it seems the “big blockers” and “small blockers” have different perceptions of what are the worst risks to Bitcoin success. The small blockers seem concerned with what I would call technical risks, things like selfish miner attacks, miner centralization, etc. The big blockers, on the other hand, are more concerned with economic risks, such as a failure to reach a critical mass of adoption, or being outcompeted by altcoins.

There is no evidence that a 2MB block will create centralization, the arguments from core are plainly excuses, if someone still believe that these are technical concerns, then they are missing the big picture. This is an internal conflict, block size debate is just a phenomenon

After 2013 hard fork incident, Gavin lost lots of credit in the dev community, then the other guys took the chance to push their own agenda easily. And they start to use media control, thus almost no one knows about 2015 July fork incident triggered by these guys

From the beginning, Gavin has been actively talk to regulators and showed an intention of cooperation, that also triggered some nerves of the hacker group, so it is a complicated struggle. Even today it is still a question: Should bitcoin cooperate with governments or not?
[doublepost=1462035740][/doublepost]

Unfortunately, in the thick of battle, many people lose sight of the big picture of antifragility and start to imagine that since we are fighting an attempt to take the seat of control of Bitcoin, that Bitcoin therefore has a seat of control. The focus on personalities lets us easily fall back into thinking things like, "If only our guy was in control." At that moment we have lost sight of decentralization. With that trick pulled, Core has successfully created another weak hand, or shown a strong hand to be a weak hand who never really understood Bitcoin.

The big picture is, if you are naive and think everyone has good intention to make the system decentralized, then communist group will take over the control. Even democracy is not possible when large guys start to form an alliance and take coordinated steps to take over the control by censorship, propaganda and bribery. What mechanism do you have against it? There is no laws in bitcoin world. Mike said the mechanism that designed to prevent such thing from happening have all failed

In fact this is a much higher level concern, it means the free market will always lead to centralization and the dream of decentralized society is just an illusion or utopian

From this angle, bitcoin is just another scam by programmers, from the beginning, there is always such possibility and the development recently more and more indicate that it can be a scam by a few forums and programmers, in fact in China many people think that is a scam covered under the name of decentralization

Of course the central bank game is also a scam, maybe all the financial system is a scam in the end

Back to the topic, what is the mechanism to prevent a system from being centralized?

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

this is why we're having trouble keeping Bitcoin down to simple money. all these newbies desperately wanting employment/VC money for putting food on the table for the next two years. not to mention early core devs who missed the boat perverting Bitcoin for their own for-profit companies:

YES!! Bitcoin isn't unfinished business that needs "the next google" to function properly. If you want to be part of it: Buy in, build your company around it as it is, whatever you want. But don't change it b/c you (dis)missed it when it was very small.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Back to the topic, what is the mechanism to prevent a system from being centralized?

"Being centralized" is a meaningless term so there's no answer to your question.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43fs64/how_the_cult_of_decentralization_is_manipulating/

1. Define the expected behavior of the system
   • List the actions which a users should be capable of taking
   • List the actions which the system should prohibit
2. List the ways in which the expected behavior could be violated (attacks)
   • How could an attacker successfully take a prohibited action?
   • How could an attacker successfully prevent a user from taking a legitimate action?
3. Define a set of attackers for each identified attack, and estimate their capabilities.
4. Estimate the cost for the specified attacker to perform each attack
5. Rank the attacks in order from least expensive (most severe) to most expensive (least severe)
6. For every attack identify all available countermeasures
7. Rank countermeasures available for each attack by cost.
8. Starting with the most severe attacks, implement the least expensive countermeasure.
9. Repeat as necessary, updating the list of attacks and countermeasures as new ones are identified.

Nobody has performed steps 1 and 2 yet in any rigorous or comprehensive fashion.

Start there and then you'll actually know what needs to be done.

Nobody can design solutions until they know what the problems are. Anybody implementing solutions without actually knowing the problems are at best firing in random directions.

 

[molecular]

That whole thread is just littered (is that the right word) with Luke-jr anti-gems like these:

wow, I mean when i first encountered luke-jr I thought he was hilarious with his pushing for bitcoin to adopt the tonal system. The tragic thing: In retrospect I think he was dead serious about it.

How can someone be such a hardcore idealist about things that he seriously pushed for adoption even if it's clear as day that it just wont work due to some completely outlandish assumptions about the world and the people living in it having to be made.

Same with the thing about his "serious issues" with mycelium (same thread): turns out he thinks the issue is mainly that it runs on unsecure phone platforms that can be infiltrated by apple/google. His suggestion is to only use bitcoin-core, like that's going to be secure in the hands of average users.... ah, I forgot, bitcoin is only for full-time security experts and cryptographers in his mind... 100 KB block will surely suffice, yes, I agree.

 

[cypherdoc]

@SysMan thank you! now we can all understand you and your motivations!:

 

[Norway]

@cypherdoc Do you know what Kristov Atlas' source is?

 

[Justus Ranvier]

https://medium.com/@valeryvavilov/the-bitfury-group-announces-expansion-to-full-service-digital-asset-technology-company-4ca739fc7712

 

[Erdogan]

Nice way to waste their capital...

 

[cypherdoc]

troll /u/Lejitz reduced to this:

 

[albin]

It sounds to me like Bitfury has no idea where they're going with monetizing verticals, so in that press release they're throwing as much shit at the wall as they can to keep the party going with investment money.

 

[johnyj]

"Being centralized" is a meaningless term so there's no answer to your question.

Nobody can design solutions until they know what the problems are. Anybody implementing solutions without actually knowing the problems are at best firing in random directions.

We know the problem: It is human problem, you can't prevent those people who design the system from being compromised, see my other concern here:
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/bitcoin-unlimited-membership-join-us.208/page-5#post-18786

"Even if you write something in stone like "Limited total money supply of 21 million bitcoins". As long as humans are involved, they would change it sooner or later, just like they abandoned the gold standard, in the name of democracy (I guess that decision also passed vote in senate/house)"

But what is the solution then? Prevent any human from making any change to code? How can you enforce it? Gold still excels, since no human on earth can change its property, bitcoin is just too fragile, it is already being morphed into something else