Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Richy_T]

@Richy_T: I'm not sure I'm following.

Well, I'm sure Dusty wasn't suggesting this but if you supplied the pubkey along with the signed message, that would be a potential opportunity for some tomfoolery but I'm not sure where I was really going with that anyway so don't spend time thinking about it

 

[cypherdoc]

What is apparently important is building up bitcoin as an asset class and store of value first, with usefulness as a medium of exchange coming distant second. Thoughts from the floor on this? My view would be that bitcoin is a perfect digital sound money substitute for gold and actually one of the great strengths of bitcoin is that it can be both a frictionless payment system and a concomitant store of value.

It seems completely obvious to me that, after an initial bootstrapping phase, for a digital token to retain a store of value it must have utility. The more people who use bitcoin as a medium of exchange the more it will function as a store of value.

Taking this to extremes if we have 1 billion people transacting with bitcoin then by necessity it will take on a vastly larger market capitalisation and store of value. In contrast if bitcoin is used by 100,000 people as a digital gold then that doesn't necessarily follow. Lejitz is basically saying that we don't need to focus on usage of bitcoin as a payment network (and by extension, user numbers and scaling is unimportant) because SoV is the only thing that matters.

It seems like the small block brigade of which the OP is a rabid member fail spectacularly at logic because currency utility and store of value are entwined and inseparable components to bitcoin. We would still be using gold if it allowed a frictionless medium of exchange - the fact it doesn't allowed governments to steal with inflation via central banking with fiat currency.

that guy /u/Lejitz is a troll. i'm almost sure he lied about himself being a previous big blocker that defected. and his arguments never make sense.

 

[Inca]

'We are just mountain people' LOL

 

[Dusty]

I can vouch for those people: everybody is certainly aware that if those goat-herder would shut down their massive 9600-baud powered server the bitcoin network would suddenly crash due to extreme lack of decentralization.

Also, I would propose to reduce the block size to 100Kb because my cousin living in a cave in pakistan and using a bicycle to power his Amiga500 is currently unable to further decentralize the bitcoin network.

 

[Peter R]

I hiked the Annapurna circuit through the Himalayas perhaps 5 years ago now. I stayed in tiny villages where everyone cooks their food with fire stoves, electricity was often generated by solar panels (used only for the odd light), and--since there are no roads--supplies were delivered by mule trains.

The crazy thing is that many villages had a computer I could rent for an hour with a powerful enough Internet connection to Skype to Vancouver. The villagers that would volunteer to porter your bags for a few dollars a day all have cell phones that seemed to work even at 15,000 ft in the mountains while surrounded by yak.

 

[bitsko]

Hey, lol, anybody want this account?

https://mobile.twitter.com/ExceIlion

the password is bitcoinpassword

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Reallyy? What's his Reddit username?

"Buttcoiner" was meant in a broader sense. He doesn't believe in bitcoin. he seems smart, but I don't know anything about him.
[doublepost=1462781797][/doublepost]

It depends if you're talking about a Bitcoin-signed message or the signature included in Bitcoin transaction. The latter includes the pubkey while the former does not.

As pointed in on p. 47 of this document from Certicom (http://www.secg.org/sec1-v2.pdf), it is possible to recover the pubkey from the signature alone (actually, it is ambiguous to one of two pubkeys). The Bitcoin-signed message protocol takes advantages of this, which is why the resulting signatures are so short. It appears that Satoshi did not know this when he designed Bitcoin, and thus bitcoin transactions unnecessarily include the pubkey as part of the signature.

It's funny, I had exactly the same discussion with a friend some days ago. I was absolutely sure you can't encrypt with a Bitcoin pubkey, but it seems I was wrong. Why is this not used? You could easily build a webpage where wallets catch up encrypted messages. It would easily solve the problem of the missing message to transactions. I never heard it was used. Is it just because the pubkey is not equal to the adress?

 

[Inca]

@Christoph Bergmann: you can encrypt with ECC public keys, but you have to use a scheme like ECIES.

There are ECIES python libraries and I have used them to construct the backend of a whatsapp messaging clone which used end to end ECC encryption (stopped dev when whatsapp turned on encryption).

http://www.nominet.uk/researchblog/how-elliptic-curve-cryptography-encryption-works/

Also pubkeys aren't bitcoin addresses as seen here:https://github.com/surg0r/parse/blob/master/PubKeyToAddr.png

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@Inca

Thank you! I did know that aresses aren't pubkeys, but hashes of pubkeys.

What I didn't know was if it is possible to encrypt messages with it.

And what I wonder: why did nobody use this? I know, it's maybe not possible with adresses, but what are the advantages of addesses against pubkeys that it is worth to destroy the possibility to send encrypted messages to a pubkey? I think this could have been a strong feature ...

 

[yrral86]

If there is ever a weakness found (or quantum computing develops far enough), pubkeys will be easier to break. The hash gives you an extra layer of protection. However, if you reuse an address that has been spent from, the pubkey is already out there.

 

[cypherdoc]

I was under the impression that signing with your ECC Bitcoin privkey reveals your pubkey, no? That's what /u/murbul said once.

 

[Inca]

I was under the impression that signing with your ECC Bitcoin privkey reveals your pubkey, no? That's what /u/murbul said once.

Correct. If you sign a message with your ECC private key, then the ECC public key can be derived from the message and signature. It is a public key after all

 

[tynwald]

@tynwald

thanks for verifying something I've anyways suspected from the video Q&A when pieter dodged the 4 Mb question. Why do small blockists always say that "everyone loves SW" when its obviously not true?

I was close enough to see the "rabbit in the headlights" look on Pieters face when the question was raised, and relief when discussion was rapidly moved on by BS employee holding the Mic.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@tynwald
Pieters reaction to the question made me lose tons of respect for him.
As far as I can judge that he seems to be a highly productive, excellent developer.
But if you won't evaluate your work and listen to critics, and in this case even lie, imho you shouldn't work on Bitcoin. He who pays the piper calls the tune sadly fits his behavior exactly.

A few years ago he argued for 100MB blocks...

 

[Dusty]

I was close enough to see the "rabbit in the headlights" look on Pieters face when the question was raised, and relief when discussion was rapidly moved on by BS employee holding the Mic.

Can you please point me at a recording of the video? Very interested to that reaction

 

[albin]

The Wuille video was glorious and profoundly baffling, because he was caught dead in his tracks by literally the most obvious question that everyone imaginable on the face of the earth would think to ask after hearing his presentation!

 

[cypherdoc]

I was close enough to see the "rabbit in the headlights" look on Pieters face when the question was raised, and relief when discussion was rapidly moved on by BS employee holding the Mic.

i assume the mic person was Corallo?
[doublepost=1462808479][/doublepost]

@tynwald
Pieters reaction to the question made me lose tons of respect for him.
As far as I can judge that he seems to be a highly productive, excellent developer.
But if you won't evaluate your work and listen to critics, and in this case even lie, imho you shouldn't work on Bitcoin. He who pays the piper calls the tune sadly fits his behavior exactly.

A few years ago he argued for 100MB blocks...

which is why we know my simple math post of how the discount is calculated applies; as opposed to Johnson Lau's handwavy libsecp256k1 5-7x performance enhancement explanation doesn't:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-410#post-14176
[doublepost=1462808628,1462807897][/doublepost]ok, c'mon, c'mon:

 

[albin]

Can somebody please let Peter Todd know that this is just an open source project, and not f*cking Star Wars?

Now it is true that I've done a lot of the public facing PR: I go to more
conferences and give more talks than any other Bitcoin Core contributor, I
spend a lot more time than others talking to journalists, and I write articles
for the public more than most contributors. But the irony of that "job" is that
it wouldn't exist to anywhere near the same degree without disagreement: I need
to do those things precisely because people like Gavin exist! And they will
probably always exist: we're never going to have total consensus in the
community on how to move Bitcoin forward.

Pinging @JosephCambell to elaborate on Peter Todd's hero story mythos as the eternal struggle of good against evil!

 

[freetrader]

Can you please point me at a recording of the video? Very interested to that reaction

https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/segregated-witness-and-its-impact-on-scalability/

See video on linked page.

I haven't watched to see if it includes the complete Q&A session, but there's another video at the bottom on the page too. (nope - scratch that one, that's a different session)

 

[albin]

The Wuille incident was in the /r/bitcoinxt days, I was able to find it surprisingly fast b/c it was very memorable to me that the poster characterized him as a deer caught in headlights:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3vxv92/peter_wuille_deer_caught_in_the_headlights/

Remember these naive days when there was still hope that reasoning with small blockery was going to happen?