Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

For all of the analysis that goes on in this thread, I am surprised there isn't more speculation on why the miners are running Core right now. I still haven't seen a compelling explanation for this.

@Zangelbert Bingledack what do you think? Just widespread (and temporary) irrational behavior? Rational short term interest behavior (but even so, how?)? Some kind of law enforcement based arm twisting?

I think there just isn't a hugely compelling reason to switch yet. The candidate reasons, and why I think they aren't compelling to miners yet:

1) Users moving away, investors selling due to higher fees and delayed transactions.

This just hasn't happened (see the dark markets, the capital control evaders, the wealth offshorers - the real uses cases for which cryptocurrency is sine qua non - they almost certainly aren't using ETH, and I see no complaints on the DNM subs).

We could argue that the price would have gone up more, but that is arguing from a hypothetical. Miners are happy with the situation, and unlike many investors, probably would rather the price stayed stable at $450ish than jump around, even if that includes a good possibility of upside.

2) Altcoins rising as Bitcoin falls.

We got the first, but not the second. And even if Bitcoin falls, the possible explanations and rationalizations are myriad. A price drop could help rattle miners out of complacency, as will the halving, but only to an extent since they can blame it on something else, since if there is a major price drop you can be sure Classic will be riding high again so can serve as scapegoat, timing-wise.

Of course here is where I say fork arbitrage is needed, to send an unambiguous signal. But that still seems a bit early for reasons explained in the other sections.

3) Core generally being bitches.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. At least until things get more urgent. Basic conservatism. Sure, Classic is just Core with a tiny change, but there is a sense of not wanting to rock the boat, at least not before it is certainly necessary.

4) Fidelity Effect: the idea that companies will look at Bitcoin and say, "3TPS? No way!"

First of all, the hypothetical company here seems to be committing a fallacy, that Core=Bitcoin, which also would imply that Bitcoin development is centralized and can't be forked to remove the obstruction. 3TPS is a property of Core, but any company that really understands Bitcoin will know that Core can be forked away from - on their own if necessary - and many Bitcoin investors will follow along if it is a ledger-copying/spinoff fork.

If the argument is that they will go to an altcoin instead, they have to justify why that altcoin won't end up in the same position, ostensibly unable to fork away from a captured dev team. The logic doesn't pan out, because forking away should be very easy if there is market demand.

If the argument is that they will avoid cryptocurrency entirely, then OK. But again, it seems an argument arising from misunderstanding. I know a non-comprehending company's money is as green as anyone else's, but in the long run it may not matter, and miners are in it for at least the medium term. Plus there is that basic conservatism.

5) Lack of understanding of economics, investing, how money works, how open source works, how decentralized development would work, fork arbitrage, how companies can make empty promises, etc. on the part of the miners.

There must be quite a bit of that. In the future, miners will likely have to be a lot more savvy in order to avoid any possibility of getting hit by the nuclear option (changed hashing algorithm, to fork away from the miners). In the meantime, this is somewhat comforting, as it serves as a good explanation for the depth of delay we have seen from the miners. They haven't needed much understanding, because Bitcoin hasn't fallen apart at all yet. People are worried it will, but that is a different thing. In fact, people have worried about all sorts of things in Bitcoin; rarely is the community without one or two big worries. The heuristic that has served miners best so far is, "Don't worry. Hash on."

6) Miners can use Classic as leverage.

Some miners seem to be doing this already, but there is value in keeping things up your sleeve. The ASICBoost issue may be an example: "We won't run Classic...as long as you scratch our back, too." And like in the board game Risk, there is nothing stopping players from forming an alliance and then turning around and breaking it later. In fact that's usually the winning strategy. Play along until you're ready to make the killing move. Keep the card up your sleeve, ready to use. That way you get the best of both worlds: free ride on Core's need for your support, then crush Core into the dirt when it's outlived its usefulness.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

That is hilarious. And it's also nice in some ways, in that almost every foe is in some cases a friend. Gmax can be great when it comes to smashing altcoin fantasies. Altcoiners can be helpful in making Core look like fools. Even today we have /r/Bitcoin calling out some of the excesses of /r/btc. This plurality is one silver lining here.

1) As you allude, no alt coin has exceeded about 15-20% of Bitcoin's market-cap (IIRC), even during manias. So perhaps that means ETH could get to 20-25% while still being in the kinda "normal" alt-mania zone. But given your points above, plus some others (see below), I wouldn't be all that surprised if ETH is the first coin to crack that barrier (also wouldn't be surprised if it crashes).

Yes, and if I understand there is a large kind of premine. The premine both allows the market cap to get much higher (like Ripple) if the founders hold very tightly, and increases the chance of a massive crash (like Ripple) once the founders decide to cash out. That Vitalik comes from a wealthy family is also a major factor here, as probably it is with Theymos. When you've got the safety net, you can hold tighter. But there have to be other major holders.

2) In any event, I think we should acknowledge that there is indeed fundamental merit to what Ethereum is trying to do.

This is the right wording, I think. There is merit in their experimentation, but that doesn't mean Ethereum is workable. In fact, as far as scaling it should be far, far thornier than Bitcoin, so it is doubly ironic to see people moving to it because of Core/1MB, which I have a very hard time imagining will be seen as anything other than a temporary scare/annoyance a year from now.

Sound money to me is still the most powerful (and high-market-cap-generating) permissionless-blockchain application, by far, in my view, but I also think it's folly to straight-up dismiss Ethereum.

My position on Ethereum is that is sure looks unworkable and like just a mish-mash of ideas that the founders may even sincerely see as a good attempt, but I can only outright dismiss ETH for the same reason I dismiss any altcoin aimed at the Bitcoin community, regardless of technical merit. That is of course because it can, and seemingly must, be spun off the Bitcoin ledger if it ends up amounting to anything beyond the usual altcoin pump-and-dump pattern.

I had the same position about Bitshares, NXT, and other smart-contracty attempts in the past.

3) Ethereum has a real developer community around it. I have not seen this with any other coin except Bitcoin. This also makes it a lot harder to dismiss ETH as a temporary phenomenon.

To me it's just the logical next step in altcoin pump-and-dump innovations to get investor money. There are several things needed to make a coin worth money in the long run:

1) Good dev community
2) Solution to a major unsolved problem
3) Solution must actually work technically
4) Sound economic concept (results in sound money, the only possible basis for anything useful)

Many altcoins have had 2 and 4 (if we ignore the fundamental breach of sound money concept by being an altcoin*), and maybe even a few had 3. Ethereum may be the first to have 1, but that means nothing if it doesn't have 3 (and 4, and 2).

1 is merely the hardest social signal to send. It requires getting real devs interested. There are two ways to do that: have 2 and 3, or simply wow enough people with the idea of smart contracts and DAOs, and a famous prodigy and some flashy marketing that really speaks to devs and gives them a nice platform.

No coin had yet had a strong dev community, futuristic stuff that is legitimately a possible innovation, and great marketing all in one combo. It was inevitable that it would arise, because everyone knows how much money there is to be made in altcoin pumps, no matter how they end. The nice thing for Ethereum is that the market for an altcoin with "hodgepodge of great ideas, great devs, still not actually workable implementation" was wide open. Maybe this is the last great altcoin pump, maybe there are more, or maybe Ethereum actually has something legitimately useful or can be turned into such. Though in that last case I think it will just be unceremoniously spun off by Bitcoin

*since this is partly avoidable by marketing to a bran new community, not Bitcoin investors

 

[Roger_Murdock]

The bitcoin network follows the longest chain of blocks. Its validity is determined by the majority of hashing power.

And even that is ultimately a provisional rule. The fact is that "validity" in Bitcoin is always subjective. The overwhelming importance of network effects means that it's generally in your best interest to treat as "valid" the transactions / blocks that you anticipate that others will treat as valid. Now in practice that's almost always going to mean that you should follow the "longest" chain because that's a very powerful / useful Schelling point around which consensus is likely to form. But you can imagine exceptions. If a hostile government suddenly turned on ten times the total network's current hash power in an attempt to fork Bitcoin in a way that was obviously value-destroying (e.g., removing the issuance cap and making the block reward 1,000 BTC), I think clearly in that case the market would view that as an attack on Bitcoin and respond accordingly, i.e., they wouldn't follow the "longest" (highest PoW) chain. On the other hand, if a group of anti-Core investors turned on a huge amount of hash power and started mining blocks up to 2MB, I think the market would converge on that chain. In other words, you'd suddenly have two Schelling points in conflict: (1) the longest chain is the "valid" one; (2) chains with blocks bigger than 1-MB are "invalid". To me, it's obvious that the first Schelling point would trump the second (after all, the 1-MB limit was always explicitly intended to be provisional).

Another hypothetical I was thinking about goes like this. Let's say Satoshi suddenly broadcasts a 1.1 MB transaction that sends 900,000 BTC to the 1BitcoinEaterAddress with a 100,000 BTC miner fee. (I don't actually know if you could artificially inflate the size of a single transaction like that without breaking consensus rules other than the 1-MB block size limit, but let's just assume for the moment that it's possible to make the hypo simpler.) As a miner, what do you do when you see a transaction like that come across the wire? Do you just ignore it because any block you tried to mine it into would be "invalid"? I don't think so. Even if you think that there's a 99.9% chance that if you're the first to mine that transaction, that that block is just going to be orphaned by the rest of the network (because they're going to view it as "invalid"), there's still a big positive expected value in trying. Of course, I don't think the market / other miners would view the block as "invalid." The deflationary effect of destroying that much of Satoshi's stash (and removing what some see as its "looming presence" over the market) would be huge. Plus you'd have the renewed implicit endorsement for larger blocks from someone viewed by most as the ultimate Bitcoin "authority." The real risk of orphaning would likely come from other miners attempting to mine that 100,000 BTC fee for themselves (so in practice you'd probably have lots of side deals among major pools agreeing to split the fee in exchange for working to extend the first chain to find it).

As an aside, if validity is always subjective, then is it not the case that, in some sense, there are no "forks" because there is never any "real" (i.e., objective / hard-and-fast) protocol, only provisional and shifting Schelling points?

EDIT: Note that the Satoshi hypothetical is essentially a very quick-and-dirty way to implement a "forking bounty," an idea I still really like.

 

[Peter R]

I am not inventing this. All full nodes fully validate the blockchain and the rules. That is what they do by design. If the rules are breached the nodes do not follow that chain.

This is empirically not true because there are approximately a hundred Bitcoin Unlimited nodes that do not enforce a 1 MB block size limit today. Furthermore, there are hundreds of old Core nodes that do not enforce certain rules added by the "soft fork" method used by Core. In general, any node can decide to stop enforcing a rule that its operator is not concerned with and still be guaranteed to follow the longest chain.

Epistemologically, how do we even know what the rules are? In 2009 it was easy: the rules were what was defined in the Satoshi client. But today we don't know for sure (for example) what block size limit nodes and miners are actually enforcing; and in the future--as development diversifies across competing implementations--this uncertainty surrounding Category #2 rules will continue to increase.

The result will be (and already is) that "the rules" are the rules obeyed by transactions and blocks that make it into the longest persistent proof-of-work chain. Think about it: there is no other objective point of reference.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

You know a spring is coiled tightly when even the inventor of Bollinger bands himself tweets about it.

[doublepost=1111][/doublepost]
So many parallels between Austin City Council and Core in the Uber/Lyft shutout:

https://austinstartups.com/josh-baer-the-tone-of-your-article-is-awesome-b60209de7d2f

 

[bluemoon]

@Roger_Murdock

I agree. Bitcoin operates on different levels and there are many subtleties, which are hard to gather together and express simply.

For all the talk of consensus and protection of one group or another, bitcoin is ultimately driven by its operating participants and the wider market. The operating participants (miners and node operators) have some latitude to set their own operating criteria and rules, even now (as @Peter R also remarks on in his post after yours). No rule can be inviolable, because if bitcoin does not follow the interests and valuations of its end users, and reasonably promptly, its then current protocol will be superseded by an alternative implementation which does: either that or bitcoin will be superseded entirely.

If it is possible to avoid periodic crises, I am sure it will be by adopting and refining an implementation such as Bitcoin Unlimited, something designed to evolve and be responsive enough to allow new properties (rules) to emerge when needed as a result of the interactions of the operating participants, but without as much drama as we face today.

 

[Inca]

Worried about bitcoin. I'm hedged which just means I will do less well either way than I should really.

I think it's time to not watch the charts for a couple of weeks. Let's see how far I get

 

[chriswilmer]

@Zangelbert Bingledack First of all, I just wanted to say thank you for the response. You have a wonderful gift for both thinking and articulating clearly.

I wrote something below that had been brewing in my mind for sometime with regards to various posts of yours (not just the one you wrote in response to my question about why the miners are running Core). It's exactly opposite to your kind of writing: rambling and unclear. Enjoy

In my field of chemistry/chemical engineering, we frequently talk about the difference between kinetics and thermodynamics. In this context, kinetics is the study of chemical phenomena as a function of time (i.e., how long does it take an ice cube to melt), and it's usually very complicated, poorly understood, and not very accurate. Meanwhile, thermodynamics, which describes chemical phenomena after a "long" time (i.e., will the ice cube melt or not?) is simple, elegant, and so accurate that it is today considered unquestionably true. A parallel exists in economics/finance when we think about the workings of a free market in the short vs. long term (e.g., "the stock market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term"). But there's an important difference: in chemistry it's pretty obvious when thermodynamics is relevant and when it isn't. Some reactions occur in a few milliseconds and are perfectly described by thermodynamics, whereas others take longer than the age of the universe and so the laws of thermodynamics are useless... (whether a soup of molecules can spontaneously self-organize into a living cell is not a question thermodynamics can answer).

All of the above is a rambling preamble to say that your thinking about Bitcoin seems very much of the thermodynamics variety - equilibrium thinking. Your arguments help describe how Bitcoin behaves in the "long run"... but how long is long? It may be thousands of years before the free market really values and understands the single ledger concept... the coming hundred years may be completely unaffected by what one would expect from rational free market forces.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Worried about bitcoin. I'm hedged which just means I will do less well either way than I should really.

I think it's time to not watch the charts for a couple of weeks. Let's see how far I get

For some reason I have a bad feeling about BTC the last days as well.

The people advising to get Bitcoins these days are usually complete idiots while people saying it's broken beyond repair are intelligent and reasonable. I don't thinks it's smart to have to much value invested in an economy full of idiots. The morons, who are sneaking around /r/bitcoin and praising their Core overlords while celebrating that Pizza place XY accepts Bitcoin, are smelling suspiciously like typical bagholders.

Coinbase adding Ethereum imho is a huge step against Bitcoins predominance.
We probably will see a bloodbath around the halving with mining operations shutting down and headless chickens running around. A few month ago I was sure Bitcoin would recover from such a crash and make people come to their senses. These days I'm not so sure and I see a very realistic chance for Bitcoin to become No. 2 this year or worse.

Ethereum has no advantages over Bitcoin that are relevant to praxis, imho only disadvantages. It is just profiting from Bitcoins slow and painful death.
[doublepost=1463691663,1463690856][/doublepost]https://twitter.com/JihanWu

So he is exciting about smart contracts.
Are they just to fucking stupid to see that Ethereum isn't beating Bitcoin by offering better technology better but by Bitcoin being heavily misguided?

Fucking retards. You can fill Bitcoin up with fancy smart contracts as much as you want, if you keep mining anti-bitcoin blocks you won't change bitcoin failing.
IT IS ALL ABOUT CHANGING A FUCKING CONSTANT. Literally changing a 1 to a 2 as a first step.
And they are getting messy with all this smart ass bullshit.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Jihan continuing to spam:

 

[cypherdoc]

So he is exciting about smart contracts.

i think it's a warning from @Jihan to core devs that simply putting up SW github code isn't the same thing as a release. he also probably means the same for the 2MBHF code.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Your arguments help describe how Bitcoin behaves in the "long run"... but how long is long? It may be thousands of years before the free market really values and understands the single ledger concept... the coming hundred years may be completely unaffected by what one would expect from rational free market forces.

Yes that is true. I'm not sure about 100 years, but certainly there are short-term and long-term considerations. Investors also chase profits over various timescales.

Here's a much more rambly answer

The overriding consideration to me is whether sound money can be preserved, meaning whether we can have one ledger where one can store purchasing power for later use without having to keep abreast of new developments in technology, governance changes, etc. - at least not very often. Infrequently enough for business planning and such to be conducted.

If sound money cannot be effectively preserved because we are always reliant on centralized dev teams or have to keep migrating to new ledgers, I don't think much can really be done in the cryptocurrency space and I would probably lose interest in it.

With that in mind, many of my statements about "how things should play out" can be qualified with "or else cryptocurrency is D.O.A." I'm interested only in the case where crypto doesn't end up dead, so I tend to focus on that. I still hold out the possibility that Bitcoin/crypto may fail, or never succeed in my lifetime.

Take my favorite topic, fork arbitrage. Will the market ever figure out that this is an easy way to create an effective prediction market for forks? Will exchanges offer it in time to save Bitcoin, or will people just find it easier to switch to altcoins? And which people? Do those people matter as much as the ones who see the importance of sticking with a single ledger? Over how long of a term do the leavers matter? What about untapped markets of investors?

These are questions often on my mind. Reading /r/btc, it looks like a lot of people find it easier to switch ledgers. But clearly that is exaggerated, since Ethereum is simply not even a proven concept at all, least of all as a store of purchasing power. I find it pretty hard to believe people will rather dive into the unknown than simply fork a simple blocksize increase. I don't think it will take years for people to figure that out, either.

In fact, I might reject the premise that the market hasn't yet reached the point of really valuing and understanding the single ledger concept, because let's suppose a strong segment of the market already does. There will still always be money to be made in pump and dumps (to be charitable, I can call them "outside investment possibilities"), and we know the general timescale over which those happen: usually months, sometimes a year or two. It is either limited by dev ossification, or we get forks happening - in which case Bitcoin can fork as well so the problem is solved. That interest in pumping will create a lot of noise in the price of altcoins (magnified if they are premined) and on the forums, even assuming this strong segment of like-minded "Gold 2.0" investors exists and will carry Bitcoin to victory within the next decade.

Meanwhile a stakeholder in the universal ledger should be able to sit back and wait. How long? Well, BTC never dropped below $100 since 2013, despite tons of new coin coming into the system every day. That to me gives little reason to be overmuch doubtful that things will eventually work out, and remain in the right direction. Always there is a chance I am wrong and everything collapses, but within the premise that crypto works as a concept in reasonable time, I feel pretty confident the issues in Bitcoin will resolve one way or another without Core bringing on an altcoinpocalypse. Also, though I don't like to mention it, I'm mildly open to the remote possibility that we will go through several ledger iterations before settling on one finally. (I don't think Ethereum would be it, in any case. Since we're talking about ledger maturity, it might more likely be something boring like Litecoin, which has the next most mature ledger to Bitcoin, or a future coin focusing on "doing money right" that happens to win the gold people over for just long enough to get the ledger merry-go-round to stop and solidify there, with fork arbitrage finally instituted to prevent further switching.)

Here's a bit more elaboration from reddit, written in my less conservative reddit-style, if you're interested:


On hedging into altcoins:

 

[Inca]

:/

Anyone surprised by the price given the narrative?

Well played core developers.

 

[79b79aa8]

Anyone know what is happening with @rocks ' fork? He's been away from the forum since early April.

 

[jonny1000]

The bitcoin network follows the longest chain of blocks. Its validity is determined by the majority of hashing power. No supermajorities are involved. Far from going to the core of what bitcoin is, the white paper does not envisage minorities having any veto.

It is clear this is how you want the system to work, please stop confusing the system you like with reality.

Miners simply cannot steal coins belonging to you. Nodes reject these invalid blocks. Do you want miners to have the power to steal your coins?
[doublepost=1463707366][/doublepost]

If Classic succeeds, there is nothing stopping Core supporters from continuing to run Core

Why do you insists on calling this new system bitcoin to create confusion? Why not change the signature types and avoid the mess of conflicting and non conflicting transactions across the two networks? Please also consider changing the hashing algorithm. Stop trying to convince the solid majority* behind Core to adopt your changes. Do this and I would be totally fine with you creating a new alt, but with the existing holders. Hopefully I could make some money by selling my new coins, so it would be good news for me.

Note: * 85% of nodes, 95% of miners, 85% of developers and 85% of coin holders support core.

Do you guys acknowledge that a strong majority of the network supports the existing rules and opposes Classic/XT and BU?

[doublepost=1463707500][/doublepost]

have you ever even mined?

I have solo mined actually yes, I never found a block though...
[doublepost=1463707726,1463706988][/doublepost]

This is empirically not true because there are approximately a hundred Bitcoin Unlimited nodes that do not enforce a 1 MB block size limit today. Furthermore, there are hundreds of old Core nodes that do not enforce certain rules added by the "soft fork" method used by Core. In general, any node can decide to stop enforcing a rule that its operator is not concerned with and still be guaranteed to follow the longest chain.

Epistemologically, how do we even know what the rules are? In 2009 it was easy: the rules were what was defined in the Satoshi client. But today we don't know for sure (for example) what block size limit nodes and miners are actually enforcing; and in the future--as development diversifies across competing implementations--this uncertainty surrounding Category #2 rules will continue to increase.

Sure, you can try to be difficult by being all abstract and philosophical about what a rule is. The fact is the majority of nodes people run right now enforce this rule. If Classic activates c85% of the nodes will split onto a different chain.

I do not understand why we do not all work together in a calm, sensible and collaborative way to get these people to upgrade there nodes and increase the limit. Please stop with these counterproductive and confrontational attacks which are damaging the system.

 

[go1111111]

3) Ethereum has a real developer community around it. I have not seen this with any other coin except Bitcoin. This also makes it a lot harder to dismiss ETH as a temporary phenomenon.

One thing it will be interesting to see is: how much of that dev community stays around when the money from the ETH crowdsale dries up?

It looks like a lot of initial dev activity was paid for with that money. Also, ConsenSys seems to be the main group who is now doing a lot of ethereum development, they somehow have a lot of money, and it's unclear how they got that money (anyone know?). I wouldn't be too surprised if it came from the ETH crowdsale.
[doublepost=1463712389][/doublepost]

Why do you insists on calling this new system bitcoin to create confusion?

....

Note: * 85% of nodes, 95% of miners, 85% of developers and 85% of coin holders support core.

The idea is that if/when small blocks start causing real pain and Core still resists increasing the block size, Classic will then have the economic majority behind it. In that case, it is far better for the Classic fork to be called Bitcoin since the brand is valuable, it minimizes confusion for users, and Classic is no less a continuation of the Bitcoin project than Core is.

 

[jonny1000]

The idea is that if/when small blocks start causing real pain and Core still resists increasing the block size, Classic will then have the economic majority behind it.

The level of political ineptness from the Classic side never ceases to amaze me. Do you not get it? The users and the miners want large blocks now, they will not support Classic in any circumstances because it is correctly seen as an attack. Miners keep saying they do not want to lock in 25% opposition at the time of activation. Miners said they wanted a 90% threshold, but Classic totally ignored this.

Can you guys please withdraw the attack, negotiate and collaborate and then get behind a hardfork to 2MB with a 95% activation threshold and 6 month grace period. Then you can finally be successful and fork away the small block extremists like Luke and Gregg who you do not like. Rather than this constant counterproductive failure.

Do you not get basic politics, there are extremists on both sides and in order to win you need to capture the middle ground? You guys have been totally politically outplayed by the small block extremists, by having ludicrous ideas like locking in increases to 8GB, which put the economic majority firmly behind Core. Or having a 75% threshold demonstrating a total lack of confidence that the miners would support it, of course miners will choose the confident and positive 95% side. Please can you adopt some basic political pragmatism. Stop trying to scrape a narrow victory against the small block extremists and do not risk defeat, you need to totally and resoundingly annihilate them by getting as many people on your side as possible. If there is any significant risk of another defeat like XT, I will support Core. Do you get it now?

 

[albin]

@jonny1000

With all due respect, your concept of the middle ground is absurd.

A 95% activation threshhold ends in absolute unmitigated disaster, because the 5% either trivially hands the keys to Blockstream and their ongoing, longstanding miner corruption efforts, or invites the prospect of 51% attacking in desperation to enforce activation over a hostile adversary.

An 8GB blocksize decades from now is not ludicrous whatsoever, and in the event of some big technical revelation requiring a contraction, dropping the limit is a softfork. Or a lower acceptable blocksize can be enforced by miners achieving emergent consensus in a manner like BU.

I'm not sure what universe you live in frankly to consider simply releasing a client with BIP 109 implemented as some kind of attack, when we have been facing an entire year plus (and arguably over three years at this point) of lies, misinformation, and coordinated smear campaigns from the small block faction. We have been concern trolled into oblivion by laughably fake IETF and process control advocates merely keyboard warrior'ing on a censored mailing list, goal-post shifted between completely contradictory kettle-logic arguments, gaslighted by disingenuous conferences that wasted everyone's time to only act as a de facto press conference for completely pre-conceived conclusions, all the while pandering to community by soliciting proposals that never would've been looked at in the first place anyway. Miners are being terrorized with Cassandra-level apocalypse stories of hardforking, yet somehow releasing a client is an attack?

 

[go1111111]

The level of political ineptness from the Classic side never ceases to amaze me.

Yes -- Gavin, Oliver, and the Toomim's are bad at politics. I thought XT did a bad job at capturing moderates, as did Gavin's 75%/28 days parameters.

There is some value in having the current Classic patch out there just to provide an emergency option if demand suddenly spikes, but it should have been released as the 'emergency patch', and Gavin should have released another one with more conservative parameters and focused on getting support for that one.

 

[jonny1000]

An 8GB blocksize decades from now is not ludicrous whatsoever

Locking in 8GB itself it not ludicrous to you, it is ludicrous to the majority of people in the middle like me, who are totally fine with any limit below 10MB. We can argue about the merits of locking in 8GB all we like, but you need to face up to the fact that from a political point of of view, the 8GB plan was counterproductive, ludicrous and stupid.

Or a lower acceptable blocksize can be enforced by miners achieving emergent consensus in a manner like BU.

BU is outside the scope of consensus systems.

we have been facing an entire year plus (and arguably over three years at this point) of lies, misinformation, and coordinated smear campaigns from the small block faction. We have been concern trolled into oblivion by laughably fake IETF and process control advocates merely keyboard warrior'ing on a censored mailing list, goal-post shifted between completely contradictory kettle-logic arguments, gaslighted by disingenuous conferences that wasted everyone's time to only act as a de facto press conference for completely pre-conceived conclusions, all the while pandering to community by soliciting proposals that never would've been looked at in the first place anyway.

You appear totally convinced by the unbalanced large block extremist narrative. Please try to listen to the other side of the debate and try to understand what they really want.

Yes -- Gavin, Oliver, and the Toomim's are bad at politics. I thought XT did a bad job at capturing moderates, as did Gavin's 75%/28 days parameters.

Thank you, I totally agree. Whether Gavin did this due to ignorance or a plan to humiliate his enemies I do not know. What we need to do now is put these destructive 75%/28 days parameters behind us and move forward in a positive way.

There is some value in having the current Classic patch out there just to provide an emergency option if demand suddenly spikes

Having Classic out there is seen as a huge negative by many people. It makes people reluctant to support an increase in the blocksize as they feel the network is under attack. Please respect others who do not agree with Classic and regard the 75%/28 days parameters as an attack. Then lets work together for a responsible HF.