Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Norway]

Ether is not a money, let alone a form of Sound Money.

Phone minutes was not money either, but it became money with mPesa...

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I don't see why the logic of switching ledgers every time a dev team doesn't give the market what it wants will be any less repulsive to Coinbase and 21.co than it is to most of us.

 

[cypherdoc]

FIAT too, but it turns out a lot of people still uses it as money...

The problem is that the majority of people does not understand sound money, they just follow the leaders.

i think MOST ppl understand sound money. the public awareness has been enhanced several fold since the bailouts of 2008 with subsequent QE. the only question is, do they favor it? lotsa ppl like bailouts, welfare programs, loan subsidies, etc. we're all part of the game.
[doublepost=1463084964][/doublepost]

I don't see why the logic of switching ledgers every time a dev team doesn't give the market what it wants will be any less repulsive to Coinbase and 21.co than it is to most of us.

don't worry, it's coming. once we get into June, the pressure is going to build quickly on miners. it's already happening.

as far as AsicBoost is concerned, i think the miners are trying to get core dev to insert protections into the code and explains why they have been so supportive:

 

[Norway]

@cypherdoc
"i think MOST ppl understand sound money."

In my experience, most people are sceptical on many aspects the first time they hear about bitcoin. But the one thing they really like and understand is the limit at 21 million. Just look at their faces when you tell them that.

Do the rest of you have the same experience?

 

[cypherdoc]

speaking of BFX, nice little bid wall of $1.6M there @449 for the taking:

[doublepost=1463085579][/doublepost]

@cypherdoc
"i think MOST ppl understand sound money."

In my experience, most people are sceptical on many aspects the first time they hear about bitcoin. But the one thing they really like and understand is the limit at 21 million. Just look at their faces when you tell them that.

Do the rest of you have the same experience?

absolutely. and i've talked to alot of wealthy ppl about Bitcoin and they get it immediately. the only sticking part is usually it's challenge to the State aka "patriotism".
[doublepost=1463085696][/doublepost]the other sticking part is that these same ppl have already staked their claims in either real estate or stocks and they know that a critical part in forcing those markets upwards is bailouts and money printing. so any misunderstanding you might be feeling is really based on getting paid to misunderstand.

 

[cypherdoc]

this is a particularly good example of how "most ppl will lose money investing in cryptocurrencies":

http://www.coindesk.com/the-dao-just-raised-50-million-but-what-is-it/

also, here is where Bitfury and @SysMan is going:

 

[Richy_T]

@Dusty

I kind of hope that's the case. One by one Core is alienating all the useful Bitcoin startups. Eventually these companies are going to realize they need to help develop alternatives to Core to protect their own interests.

Blockrosoft?
[doublepost=1463087486][/doublepost]

Sadly these companies might turn (or already are turning) to Ethereum as an alternative instead of another Bitcoin implementation...

I have to say, the news of brave new companies breaking into the Bitcoin world has dried up over the last year. In many cases, it seems it's companies that were already well down the path that are making announcements. I myself have back-burnered a couple of projects (though admittedly they would probably not have made any big impact).

One could say it's the controversy itself and it takes two to tango. I think that's just a rationalization though. If Bitcoin isn't going to be allowed to scale and have a widespread adoption, what's the point?
[doublepost=1463087690][/doublepost]

@cypherdoc
Do the rest of you have the same experience?

Unfortunately, a lot of people have bought the inflation lie.

 

[Norway]

@cypherdoc
OMG that video is horrible!
I find myself as the biggest blockchain sceptic in Norway at the moment. I wrote a newspaper article about how blockchain technology is useless to banks a few weeks ago, and this tuesday, I was on national radio talking with a bank woman about the same issue. Even many of the guys at my bitcoin meetups are hooked on blockchain tech! AAArghhh!

I think a lot can be done with creative use of cryptography. Trezor is an example of that, and I see a huge potential in this area.

But it's old technology, and not blockchain related!!!
[doublepost=1463088599][/doublepost]@Richy_T
"Unfortunately, a lot of people have bought the inflation lie."
Do you mean like Donald Trump?

 

[_mr_e]

Seems more and more to me that the DAO is nothing but a clever mechanism to raise crowd funds, get paid out those funds, and do so while skirting any securities regulations that may get them in trouble. Genius really.

 

[cypherdoc]

anything to put a meal on the table for two moar years.
[doublepost=1463090244][/doublepost]continuing to elevate:

 

[freetrader]

this is a particularly good example of how "most ppl will lose money investing in cryptocurrencies"

Ouch - $72K ETH lost to hacker bots:
https://forum.daohub.org/t/urgent-buying-dao-using-mist-has-hacked/1742

 

[cypherdoc]

whoops, another $2M bid wall pops up. i just watched >1000 BTC get wiped out on the ask side by a buy:

[doublepost=1463091082][/doublepost]actually, does AsicBoost stand to hurt Bitfury @SysMan the most as they are chip manufacturers who've also invested in 3 large mining datacenters in Georgia?
[doublepost=1463091281][/doublepost]someone wants IN

GMI vs GMO!
[doublepost=1463091835,1463090687][/doublepost]latest from the St. Louis Fed thru 2016-03-01:

 

[Melbustus]

...
i promise you, this is NOT good:

Did you see the after-hours move today? Heh... One of my shorts too.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Melbustus

lol, you mean this? thanks for the heads up! "you (they) never had a chance!!!":

 

[Richy_T]

"Unfortunately, a lot of people have bought the inflation lie."
Do you mean like Donald Trump?

Nah, I mean the other lie, "It's a good thing".

 

[johnyj]

FIAT too, but it turns out a lot of people still uses it as money...

The problem is that the majority of people does not understand sound money, they just follow the leaders.

Just like Craig said, humans are not ready for bitcoin yet. Most of the people are better to be scammed
because they never think independently

 

[bluemoon]

also, here is where Bitfury and @SysMan is going:

Bitfury are pitching for much wider use of the 'public' blockchain, i.e. the Bitcoin blockchain, especially in asset transactions: secure, paperless, p2p, and cheap, by anyone with a suitably enabled smartphone.

In the end that is at odds with restricting the blocksize.

They don't say anything much about bitcoin as money; their interest seems to be administration.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I did like how the video said, "The Bitcoin blockchain, otherwise known as the public blockchain." At least these are not altcoiners.

I suspect BitFury wants to play longball and will drop Core like a bad habit the moment it becomes clear to BitFury that Core is failing to deliver scaling in good time. There will always be a hoard of clueless socialists with money to burn on pump-and-dumps, but to anyone with their eye on the ball the blockchain applications clearly rely entirely on sound money, which - in this competitive environment of altcoins - is predicated on providing utility for the many. Staying small and ultraconservative is not an option, because altcoins won't.

While Core maintains the radical position that it would be better to stay small if LN can't work, I doubt BitFury and other companies of significance think this way. Rather, they have been convinced, for now, that Core will deliver the scaling and that Core's way is safer. Unlike Core, I doubt BitFury and these other miners and startups will hesitate to jump to much bigger blocksizes if the other methods fail to pan out.

They're Marty McFly hitching a ride on the back of a truck as long as it looks like it's going their direction. They're not going to continue following it off a cliff. Let's just hope they take a look around once in a while.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

As @Peter R already pointed out your assumptions shouldn't be correct for a p2p participant.
But even if they were (and the magnitude might be ok):
I don't think a future where there are 1 or 2 datacenter bitcoin nodes in big cities only (for example Gothenburg and Stockholm in Sweden, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne in Germany and so on..) is something to be afraid of, rather something to hope for long term. Because that's the point when Bitcoin became a success and grew without restrictions to it's full potential.
We just need good enough distribution worldwide in different jurisdictions to hinder censorship and surveillance.

The way to this point will take some time and we won't have 1000 tx/s tomorrow but I (still..) hope in a few months/years.
Imho that's the way how Bitcoin will become the most important currency and how one will prevent government issued full traceable E-cash. If we ever reach this point we are past the point of no return, that's when governments have to think how to keep Bitcoin in their country instead of how to prevent their people to use it.

Although I've always been more of a sceptic in regards to Bitcoin becoming the next world reserve currency etc. in comparison to other Bitcoiners, I miss the optimism and what Bitcoin really is about these days.
It's all about smart contracts, new fancy offchain solutions and blockchain technology (tm) today. Imho it foremost should be about Bitcoin as MONEY. And how it (still) has the potential to have a huge fucking impact on economies and how we look at money.
Not all this Silicon Valley start up smart solution crap.
Look where it went all the while people saw it as money, as transferable value: We've seen it go from zero to more than 1000 $ in a few years. All without lightning, all without thousands of extra fancy use cases.

*Disclaimer: I'm not against smart contracts (although overrated atm imho) or all the fancy stuff people build with Bitcoin, I think most of it is great.

Sorry for the rant but I really can't believe how pessimistic and narrow-minded Bitcoiners became. Really unbelievable what kind of damage just a few psychopaths can do.

About the Future with 1-2 datacenter bitcoin nodes in big cities: I don't have a problem with such a solution, because I think it's better than the current system and better than crippling bitcoin with small blocks for every raspberry.
But
- do you know how the nodes are financed? Selling APIs to let people broadcast their (locally created and signed) transactions may be enough for a couple of nodes, but not for 1-2 in every big city.
And do you know how to prevent that we see regulation in the sense that this limited number of nodes needs to do KYC?
The thing is: bitcoin is about financial independency. If you can't run a node, you are not really independent but need a middle men.

This may be better than the current system (at least, you have controll over your keys and we have a limited supply), but it's not the whole vision of bitcoin.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

The thing is, we can never reach total independence while participating in an economy. Unless you live on a farm, you are always dependent on supermarket shelves being stocked. The supermarket is a middleman. Without such middlemen there would be no way to keep everyone alive in the current population sizes, at least with current technology.

Complete self-sufficiency is not necessary, and as we have argued here, chasing that ideal (everyone everywhere can cheaply run a full node) would result in being taken over by an altcoin (or more likely a Bitcoin fork/spinoff) that strikes a market-favored compromise between the two extremes of "minimum node spec = Raspberry Pi on dialup connection" and "only a few huge data center nodes per jurisdiction."

Fortunately, the way open source and ledger-copying works, we can try them all, all at once. And with no risk for current investors (people who invest after a fork/spinoff will have to make a choice, but whatever they choose, current investors get all the rewards for any and all wins - by default). That is, unless we for some reason don't create forks/spinoffs in time when viable altcoins appear (in which case I would nearly have to conclude cryptocurrency is a dead concept).

Core refuses to define a minimum node spec, like Jameson Lopp suggests, because that would lead to complaints on both sides: certain people wouldn't be able to run a full node, and the blocksize would still have to be small. Any increase or decrease would irritate one or the other side.

They strive for inclusion via ambiguity. What we need, and what the market will eventually demand, is clarity. Inclusion isn't necessary for Bitcoin, because the ledger can split with no harm to current investors. It's only necessary for Blockstream profits.

Core/BS reminds me of the CEO of a company trying to build a perpetual motion machine, who is constantly saying, "We may not have all the details on how we will do it, but we have a roadmap that gets us there and we will take things one step at a time." This doesn't make any sense since the goal is unachievable... unless the real goal is to maximize venture capital and personal gain.