Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Norway]

And if you don't know: Yanis Varoufakis was thrown out by his own party. The only politician in Greece with with a vision and a true hate for banks.

 

[sickpig]

Please answer me this, what mechanism do you think exists in Bitcoin which incentives us to have consensus on RBF policy?

There isn't any.

And you know what's worse? Even for SegWit there's no mechanism to "incentivise" strong consensus.

And you now what's even worse? As you already noted in the latter case we are changing bitcoin protocol consensus rules. But unfortunately only miners have a say on that matter.

edit: typo

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

And if you don't know: Yanis Varoufakis was thrown out by his own party. The only politician in Greece with with a vision and a true hate for banks.

And a socialist who doesn't like peoples monetary freedom.

---

Isn't it funny how Ethereum is the altcoin eating Bitcoin? Why isn't it Monero for example? Certainly, most of it is marketing: Smart contracts, Turing complete scripting (unnecessary imho but it sounds good, right?), a lot of apps with fancy GUI's but nothing more, smooth and professional websites and presentations, the one young Russian genius who knows so much about almost every field possible...

What doesn't get promoted: Unknown plan for the future, unknown inflation rate. It all depends on what Buterin and his guys (and whoever is behind them) decide is best for Ethereum.

Maybe I'm unfair to Buterin etc. (he seems to be extremely intelligent if it isn't all marketing) but a lot of Ethereums "features" sound like the old elite trying to beat Bitcoin on its own playing ground. Giving the control levers of money back to big institutions.
The intersection of Ethereum lovers, post privacy people and bullshit bingo experts seems suspicious as well..

I think it's very possible that Ethereum replaces Bitcoin but I think that's not a good outcome (apart from my personal interest in Bitcoin as a small holder) for the world and monetary freedom. It would be a victory of the old world and bullshitters.
Ethereum has no advantage, everything interesting in Ethereum could already be done with Bitcoin. Everything else is just hokum.

If you have to promote Ethereum this way:
(https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/ethereum-is-the-forefront-of-digital-currency-5300298f6c75#.dqrn3hbf3)

Bad Bitcoin script, very complicated:

OP_DUP OP_HASH160 62e907b15cbf27d5425399ebf6f0fb50ebb88f18 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG

Good Ethereum script, very easy:

contract Simple {
function() {
var two = 1 + 1;
}
}

There apparently isn't much real advantage of Ethereum if you have to promote the scripting syntax.

Developers at Coinbase have written simple Ethereum apps in a day or two.

If you developers can't write simple Bitcoin apps in a day or two you might need to hire more competent people.
And if you think writing apps for your money is the foremost important thing about money you might have had a different understanding what Bitcoin is about as a lot of Bitcoin investors.

What they are promoting is: Replace your real money (which isn't allowed to grow atm) with a new form of play money because your real money is broken.
Doesn't make sense to me. A switch to another coin might be the right thing, Ethereum might be a good investion middle term but it is no replacement for Bitcoin.

 

[Erdogan]

satoshi_sockpuppet:

I don't think so, I think interests of miners and holders are aligned.
Miners are apparently just too stupid to defend their interests.

Maybe. But who are those Chinese Miners? I have zero trust into those idiots. Is so much stupidity probable? To me, the probability that they represent the CPC is at least as high.
Anyway, the community is stupid enough to enable this grotesque situation where Bitcoin (a libertarian project) is produced in a totalitarian territory. And the selfdeclared inventor of Bitcoin (minus inflation) became the de facto president not just of Blockstream but of the Bitcoin project, which he is ruling together with the CTO (who calls him a dipshit now). So there is hope. The 'strong consensus' within the Politburo is getting the first cracks.

I don't think it is stupidity at all, it is cautiousness, conservatism. The business of mining is all about carrying on production, smoothing the sharp corners, minimizing any risk. I think it is sound. The change will come at the right time.

 

[cypherdoc]

You know who coined that name without proper attribution, right?

Not that it matters a whole heck of alot.

And what was it all about? In the heat of the battle, it's easy to forget.
A song that I love is this. And from 1st of january 2016, bail in for banks is legal in EU and Norway. From Zhou Tonged and Cyprus with love, a classic:

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Other things that flow from the Core/BS/Theymos Strongius Consensius position:

● The "5% can veto" argument doesn't fly for them: "The way Bitcoin survives at trillion-dollar market caps is that we stick with the vision. Nothing to veto, because what Satoshi created was good - except the lack of cap, but I came in after the cap was in place and we know better now. Still the code must be ossified solidly soon in order to prepare for the future of attack. Soon we will require 99% consensus. Then we'll be really hard to attack."

● "Softforks are cool because they preserve the all-important strong consensus, hardforks are tragic and must be minimized. We cannot use hardforks just to explore a larger blocksize then fork back down like some want."

● "African children digging for gold? Bitcoin is too fragile to have such high hopes. Maybe some day through LN, not this clown car trebuchet."

● "You say XT and Classic aren't an attack on Bitcoin, just an attack on Core? That makes no sense. Core has no power, they just rubberstamp the consensus. XT and Classic, however, can destroy the consensus."

● "Incongruous status quo bias on blocksize? Status quo bias in the only thing preventing Bitcoin from being taken over by central bankers and populists!"​

 

[awemany]

Hey guys,

if you have the motivation, here's a good place to stop one of the Anonobreads from trying to rewrite history while presenting Bitcoin to the outsiders on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766285

EDIT: I also just submitted that to /r/btc: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4kzbra/a_bit_of_an_outside_perspective_on_bitcoin/

 

[Mengerian]

Synthesizing what I'm hearing publicly in media from Lombrozo and other apparatchiks my suspicion is that Core (if it doesn't implode by then) will increase blocksize by imposing Flexcap on a soft-fork extension blocks maximum-cruft scheme, where they centrally will control tx fees by a roundabout mechanism put in place under the auspices of "fixing incentives".

Yeah, this is important. The promised hard fork block size increase from Core will likely not be a simple increase in the limit. They have been bandying about various "Flexcap" schemes that force the miners to trade difficulty or block reward for increased block size.

They have been telegraphing these "Flexcap" schemes for quite a while, since the Core "roadmap" came out and prior.

 

[awemany]

While pondering about this Borgstream evil and how to effectively counter it, I am really convinced now that another key piece holding up urgently needed progress on Classic's front are the packaging defaults pointing to Core in the big Linux distributions.

I am also quite certain that most Distributions would want to stay out of our little war over here and create a 'bitcoin' equivalent package dependency that can then either be fulfilled with Bitcoin Classic or Bitcoin Core.

I do not know any distribution maintainers personally, but anyone who does should maybe think about convincing them to reflect the choice in Bitcoin software to run in the packaging software as well.

As both derive from the same codebase, it should also be a relatively low-effort thing to do?

 

[cypherdoc]

Gold Collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

 

[Richy_T]

Isn't it funny how Ethereum is the altcoin eating Bitcoin? Why isn't it Monero for example? Certainly, most of it is marketing: Smart contracts, Turing complete scripting (unnecessary imho but it sounds good, right?), a lot of apps with fancy GUI's but nothing more, smooth and professional websites and presentations, the one young Russian genius who knows so much about almost every field possible...

Ethereum has the advantage of having been around for a while and isn't just a copycat (like Light coin). It has brand recognition. It is also rue that it's being quite heavily pumped at the moment though.

Monero is associated with a bit of a nutcase (I do like him though)

 

[cypherdoc]

When eth first came out, Vitalik said publicly be thought Bitcoins coin distribution mechanism through mining was unfair to later adopters. That was ridiculous then and is ridiculous now.

He then proceeded to do a premine in which he presumably received a truck load of ether. How does he reconcile that?

I've always thought that his understanding of economics was weak as a result. How will that effect his decision making for eth going forward especially since the security mechanism still needs to be resolved.

 

[VeritasSapere]

@satoshis_sockpuppet @cypherdoc I have heard it said on this forum that Ethereum is not sound money, I do not see any reason why it should not be considered sound money. The Inflation rate is known and it is highly deflationary like Bitcoin. Over the long term the inflation rate will be very low, since only a fixed amount of ether is created every year which means that over the long term the inflation rate of ether does decrease perpetually. The extra functions that Ethereum provides does not diminish its potential role as sound money. It can be used as money using mobile wallets, just like Bitcoin. It is sound money just like Bitcoin, only with more utility with build in demand which could further drive its value.

Setting up the Mist Ethereum wallet I was pleasantly surprised how incredibly easy it was to set up a wallet contract, which allowed me to do multi signature with daily withdraw limits, all within an easy to use GUI. It was very simple, intuitive and functional. It has never been this easy within Bitcoin to do this. Ethereum and several other alternative cryptocurrencies are truly ahead compared to Bitcoin in terms of their ease of use, utility and functionality.

In regards to the crowd funding campaign and the resulting pre-mine, I do not think it was carried out unfairly, how to fund development teams has also certainly been a dilemma within Bitcoin, at least some remarkable technology has come out of the Ethereum team since the crowd funding campaign happened. I like the solution that Dash and Bitshares have to this problem the most, which is a self funding blockchain. Where part of the block reward is used for development voted upon through voting mechanisms on the protocol level. I do think that many of the alternative cryptocurrencies have a real head start compared to Bitcoin in terms of their technological sophistication. After all there is no Bitcoin wallet that can presently match the functionality combined with the ease of use of the Mist Ethereum wallet.

@cypherdoc one of your argument against ETH is POS, but we are seeing right in front of our eyes with the blocksize nonsense that incentives of POW are probably not good to favor long term network value.

Big holders are mostly in favor of bigger blocks but they have no leverage. If Bitcoin were POS I think blocks would be bigger since a long time.

I think that @BldSwtTrs makes a good point here. Ethereum might indeed have a solution to some of these governance problems, because of proof of stake. The ability for stake holders to vote directly instead of the miners is very different to Bitcoin. We do not know if this would actually solve the governance problems Bitcoin is experiencing, but it is very different, I would argue that this is definitely an experiment worth trying.

 

[cypherdoc]

http://www.caitlin-long.com/is-bitcoin-the-new-blockchain-.html
[doublepost=1464189781][/doublepost]volumes need to increase substantially (and, of course, bitcoin needs to scale over time)
[doublepost=1464190168,1464189537][/doublepost]The great advantage of Bitcoin over Eth is that Satoshi set the rules ahead of time when the price was zero before billions poured in.

With Eth, the millions (billions?) have poured in before the rules have been set.

 

[Inca]

I am looking forward to the gigantic relief rally that will occur when Maxwell finally bows out in the face of an overwhelming groundswell of support for on chain scaling. We probably have not hit maximum pain yet because the fear of missing a Halving bubble is preventing further selling.

/r/bitcoin is virtually devoid of any actual real conversation now.

--

Eth isn't quite as rock solid in terms of sound money principles as bitcoin. But if it captures network effect and bubbles up from here whilst being supported in a mass pivot from major bitcoin companies then it will function extremely well and could easily rise 100 fold from here. The market cap is somewhat illusory for ethereum because only a small number of coins are in play thus far. Even so, I think it makes sense having a stake in ETH just in case this blocksize drama gets really nasty.

 

[Aquent]

I feel for miners. They are looking at a board which seems like a checkmate and at this point they only have one move with perhaps a week or two window, but any move can lead to instant checkmate.

At this point it is very difficult to see how capacity can be increased. They could get together, publish a post whatever, and at the same time move to classic or some patched core. It would take everyone by surprise, but it would be followed by vitriol and credible pow fork threats. Price may fall. No exchange would support the pow hardfork though. R/bitcoin can shout and tweet, but no one would care. Price may fall, but how much, $20, $50? It fell $100 when Hearn left and recovered finely.

Then the second wave, Gmax will cry about omg bitcorn suicide. Todd would do some drama, I'ma quit. So what. R/btc would be euphoric. Ethereum's price would fall. Coinbase would return. Then halving fomo. No tx cap anymore, buy buy buy aaaaauuuuuuuu (phonetically pronounced, a as in apple an u as in book). Plenty of developers would stay, Gavin can return as a hero, coinbase can return to focusing on bitcoin, bitcoin can grow, positivity would return, and we can all get back to moon talk.

Of course, all of that is very risky, but if miners wish they do have a move to make. Coinbase seems to have decided miners won't. I, personally, am starting to suspect that miners say one thing while secretly wanting 1MB forever because perhaps they think higher fees or whatever. They might be just trying to verbally appease both sides, making no decision and in so not making a decision in fact making a decision - 1mb forever - while fully knowing it so.

On the other hand they're between a rock and a hardplace. They move one way - - - - dooom shouts everyone, they move another - - - doom. Hence why I think the analogy of they are looking at a board that seems like a checkmate is so apt.

Some may say now it is too late, and that seems to be what Coinbase stated. I think there is still a very short window for a decision to be made which can turn things around, but I find it difficult to believe they would act.

If Bitcoin is maintained at 1mb forever, I personally would cheer on ethereum, as well as bitcoin of course. Bitcoin has its own special place, perhaps always. I know monetary considerations may come in, oh but I have bitcoins, but for me it is not primarily about money. If this issue has managed to divide our community so considerably to the point where miners stand by 1mb forever, then there might be something to it. So the two can take their own approaches, LN bitcoin or sharded Ethereum, and we can see which one was right in the end, if, perhaps, both, neither, bitcoin or Ethereum.

The stuff about POS and no fixed supply, for me, are minute details and considerations. Any rate of inflation, if it is fixed, eventually reaches almost 0%. At 2% inflation, for example, if it is fixed, in the first year it may be 2%, but second year it would be 2% minus the previous years 2% and so on until it reaches as good as 0. As for POS, rather than spending all this money on energy, it could have gone into Bitcoin directly. However, POW secures through resource use etc, but I think this stuff is just detail when scalability/usability etc is concerned.

So, I don't know. I'm just glad I don't have to make this monumental decision under what may be a very small window time period and as I've stated before if miners find it fit to stay at 1mb forever then fine, if they do make their move then well guess we'll see how that plays out. Either way, as far as the world and the invention is concerned, it is as good as irrelevant, because Ethereum is explicitly following Satoshi's vision. So if bitcoin doesn't, then I guess we'll see how it all plays out.

I'll support both.

 

[cypherdoc]

anybody know how much Ether Vitalik was awarded during the premine?

 

[Peter R]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

It would be interesting if your theory about strongius consensius is correct, because it would mean that the underlying disagreement between the two sides of the debate isn't technical. Instead, it's philosophical, perhaps approaching religion.

I can add two pieces of corroborating evidence:

1. I've attempted to submit emails (e.g., see here) to the dev-list about the idea that a hard-fork is a soft-fork in reverse. That for the same reason nodes can upgrade asynchronously after the miners start enforcing a new rule for a soft-forking change, nodes can upgrade asynchronously before the miners stop enforcing an old rule for a hard-forking change.

The emails don't go through [1] and if I get any explanation at all it's that "we've already explained to you that this is wrong" (which is not true). However, anyone can clearly see that a node can unilaterally increase its block size limit today and still track the longest chain! For some reason BS/Core half-denies this fact. According to your theory, ZB, fully acknowledging the truth of this idea (that nodes can act unilaterally in certain cases) would threaten the strong-consensus doctrine.

2. The talk I had proposed for Hong Kong spoke, in part, to the philosophy of Bitcoin Unlimited (that nodes could act unilaterally ahead of the miners). I know from reliable sources that Blockstream/Core people on the selection committee were arguing vigorously that these ideas were "wrong" yet couldn't explain how they were wrong. The committee decided to accept my talk, but then later Blockstream pulled strings to have it removed. Perhaps what worried BS/Core the most was that my talk would have been attacking the myth of strong consensus.

[1] Thinking more about this now, there was one time when we were discussing the ideas behind BU on the dev list: the time when Gmax threw a fit and unsubscribed. The timing of this also corresponds exactly to the decision to veto my talk and banish me from the dev list (the latter being a decision they seemed to have recently overturned as my emails are now going through).

So my take away from all this is that perhaps the most dangerous idea to BS/Core is actually the philosophy behind Bitcoin Unlimited.

 

[lunar]

It's lies all the way down to back up hypothesis myopia.

http://gavinandresen.ninja/bitcoin-protocol-role-models

 

[cypherdoc]

@lunar

my takeaway from that Gavin blogpost was this as it applies to miners (bolded mine):

There are limits on routing table sizes, but they are not top-down-specified-in-a-standards-document protocol limits. They are organic (block) limits that arise from whatever hardware is available and from the (sometimes very contentious!) interaction of the engineers keeping the Internet backbone up and running.