Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Norway]

@Dusty
You are pointing to the first famous blog of Craig as an explanation/relevant data to your theory of how Gavin was tricked in the hotel. You don't make any sense.

@Justus Ranvier please help me out with this guy.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@albin
Nobody is really going to come out and say that ethical or professional standards shouldn't be universal.

What they're afraid of is a very real fact: when you confront bad actors on their bad behaviour they respond by unleashing verbal abuse at you, and potentially other social and financial consequences based on their capabilities.

Everybody is afraid of that but doesn't want to admit it.

So they invent a series of diversions to mischaracterize the request into a strawman form which they can pat themselves on the back for refuting.

Examples of this include:

• pretending that the post calls for anything to happen to Wladimir.
• pretending that the post calls for anyone who commits a single mistake to be ostracised.
• pretending that it calls for some kind of collective action (it won't work unless everybody agrees)

I'd have some respect for anyone who'd come out and say, "I'm afraid of the people who are causing this toxicity, so I'm not going to speak out against them specifically or take any action against them at all." At least that would be honest.

Obviously there's nothing I can do which will make cowards stop being cowards. All I can do is make sure history remembers that they had an opportunity to do the right thing and turned it down.
[doublepost=1462655407][/doublepost]@Norway I'm not sure what you're looking for.

 

[Bagatell]

@Justus Ranvier It's way past time we stopped confronting the bad actors and just route round them.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I'm not sure why you'd posit a distinction between confronting bad actors and routing around them.

In order to know who the bad actors are, you have to confront them when they violate a standard to see if they self-correct or not.

Confrontation is part of the identification process.

What you do after you've identified them is a separate question.

 

[Norway]

@Justus Ranvier
It's just a long story here in GCBU last hours where @Dusty claim to have experience on how messages are signed and verified in Electrum. And he thinks Gavin got both a hash of the agreed upon sentence and the signature on a stick. Which is bullshit. I posted pics of the Electrum GUI, but Dusty doesn't care. Maybe it was wrong to call for your attention, but I don't want the idea that Gavin was tricked to stick, unless there is a good theory how it was done.

 

[awemany]

@albin: Who is that Kat Walsh? What is the Wikimedia context, was she active there, too?

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Aren't you arguing about something for which the conclusive evidence isn't available though?

Gavin could have been fooled, or he could have been shown a legitimate demonstration. Both outcomes are plausible and it can't be proved either way.

 

[Norway]

@Justus Ranvier
I'm trying to establish the fact that it's very unlikely that Gavin was tricked. Nothing is 100%. But we have to cut the crap & keep it real.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Personally I lean toward Gavin not being tricked because Ian Grigg and JVP are vouching for Wright.

It's pretty a tenuous basis and I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong about that because there are also plausible explanations for why Ian Grigg and JVP might not be telling the truth.
[doublepost=1462659167,1462658509][/doublepost]Really we can apply the same fundamentals of proof of work to the question of social proofs.

When someone like Ian Grigg stakes his reputation and legacy on a public statement, that's a substantial price to pay if it turns out that he's lying. This is analogous to the electricity price a miner has to pay if they mine one block which they deliberately orphan in order to perform a double spend attack.

What we can say about that is: if he's lying, then he's receiving some benefit for lying that exceeds the cost.

Benefits might include direct payments, or it might mean the removal of threats which as those which could be part of a blackmail/extortion scheme (make this statement or we kill your cat / make this statement or we put you in jail for one of the three felonies you committed today).

What are the odds that Ian Grigg is being paid enough to forfeit his accumulated reputation?

 

[Norway]

My epic and lonely quest against @Dusty is not giving me more likes.
I have 986 likes right now, and I guess that number will be stable for a while. (was hoping for 1000)

I just don't like pussy staining of people. "Gavin was duped", "Everyone could be a victime of a con man" etc.

People making Gavin a victim are very rude. It's not about showing care. Just lack of respect.

Personally, I'm most concerned about big blocker motherfucker Craig (Satoshi Nakamoto) and his family. I think he is pushed hard at the moment.
[doublepost=1462659949,1462659316][/doublepost]@Justus Ranvier
I guess Ian Grigg is to you the same that Gavin is to me. When your hero puts his reputation on the line on a single, verifyable fact. Well, you go for it. No reason not to.

Edit: Ehrm... is my alcohol showing?

 

[Justus Ranvier]

As far as I can tell, of all the people involved he has the most to lose and least to gain from lying.

Ceteris paribus, that makes his actions the most reliable signal.

But even that doesn't go very far in terms of proof - the most reliable signal is still pretty weak.

 

[Norway]

@Justus Ranvier
Who is he, who has the most to lose? Ian Grigg?
[doublepost=1462660789][/doublepost]I think Craig and Gavin are the most possible drone bomb victimes.

 

[albin]

@albin: Who is that Kat Walsh? What is the Wikimedia context, was she active there, too?

She's Greg Maxwell's partner, who was elected to the Wikimedia board a little after the drama w/ Maxwell going on a vandalizing spree of user pages, and until a few years ago. In the Administrators Noticeboard link that ydtm cited a couple months ago on /r/btc in his big writeup, she's the "Mindspillage" person that somebody is referring to in observing that IP blocking Maxwell from editing would also block.

Kind of hard to sift through as an outsider due to jargon and reference to personalities, but shocking parallels to exactly the stuff @Justus Ranvier is talking about, especially with respect to discussion about how to deal with Maxwell further down the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=36639732#User:Gmaxwell

[doublepost=1462661365][/doublepost]Here's some encouraging info about what Blockstream thinks about Bitcoin:

 

[freetrader]

> building an overlay atop a broken system to fix some of the brokenness)

Could she be referring to the licensing side of things?

<no, i do get what she's referring to, just speculating what a patent lawyer might be hired for>

 

[albin]

@freetrader

Most likely, as she's an IP lawyer. Perhaps helping Strateman (the serial exchange exit scammer) realize his dream of not allowing Gavin to fork an open source project!

 

[freetrader]

If we look back (ahead?) at the parallels with Linux and SCO, I think it hints sharply at getting our i's dotted and t's crossed when it comes to provenance of contributions to the Bitcoin source code.

That means, like some have said, less could be more.

 

[sickpig]

> building an overlay atop a broken system to fix some of the brokenness)

Could she be referring to the licensing side of things?

<no, i do get what she's referring to, just speculating what a patent lawyer might be hired for>

Basing your work on top of a broken system doesn't seem to be very wise. Just fix what's broken before building on top of it.

That said if she's referring to bitcoin.. well it will be broke (pun intended) for sure if gmax continues to be in charge of Core development.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Do they really have enough resources to pull off a patent troll pivot?
[doublepost=1462663764][/doublepost]Another point of interest:

At no point in the Reddit thread did anyone provide the links which would easily prove Wladimir's assertions if they were true or even suggest that such evidence exists at all.

Sometimes what people don't say contains as much information as what they do say.

 

[freetrader]

@Justus Ranvier : Do you remember the dollar amounts that MS funneled into conducting the campaign against Linux via SCO? IIRC it wasn't all that much (couple of tens of $M), certainly not orders of magnitude more (at least in the beginning) than some of the fatter VC fundings in the Bitcoin space.
Some extra caution on the IP side is probably advisable, especially with things that come from Blockstream.

Basing your work on top of a broken system doesn't seem to be very wise. Just fix what's broken before building on top of it.

When the only thing remaining in the way of your plan is the brokenness of scaling, and you control that and the other risks, then I guess you could try to skip that logic.

 

[solex]

Voting is closed on the recent BU Improvement Proposals and four are passed.

Congratulations to the new BU members: @jbreher @sgbett @jl777 @Roger_Murdock @AdrianX

The following technical improvements can be developed for a future BU release:

BUIP016: Consensus with Classic on txn size limit
BUIP017: Datastream Compression
BUIP018: Bitnodes Seeding and User-Configurable DNS Seeds

It is disappointing that the take-up of BU v0.12.0 has not been significant, leaving the node count at about 100. If things were different, an uncensored environment and an atmosphere of widespread co-operation and community enthusiasm such as what existed in 2013, then we would probably be seeing more like 500 BU nodes.

Momentum is not lost. The project (BUIP014) using Xthin to create a BU-based alternative to the Corallo Relay Network for miner's fast block propagation is well advanced. A lot more about this will be reported in the near future.