Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

Yes - I'm glad my explanation was comprehensible.

We usually extend the x axis out to capture the furthest outlier. I can't tell from your presentation whether or not there are data points beyond that in the chart.

Good point. I'm going to include a chart like this in Part 3 of 5, and I'll be sure to extend the curves to the furthest outlier when I make the pretty version of this chart.

 

[awemany]

@Peter R.: Thanks for the explanation, I remember that discussion as well. It was really one of the parts where Greg was especially weak and his methods of fudging the discussion laid bare. Meanwhile Greg's active:
[doublepost=1464895425][/doublepost]Oh, and @Tom Zander , welcome onboard!

EDIT, Update: Greg admits you are correct, @Peter R. ..

 

[cypherdoc]

seriously, you guys HAVE to read this entire exchange with me and /u/nullc to get a clear view into his delusional mind and how he thinks (or fails to think):

[doublepost=1464896949][/doublepost]Greg is seriously off his rocker. he's so careless with his language.
[doublepost=1464897120,1464896387][/doublepost]

For months the forums were consistently unreachable. Socket time out. Today I tried again when someone linked me to your reply, and it works. Its reachable Maybe just from this (US) tor-exit. But I made an account now. If I stop logging in, it likely stopped working...

In regards to your question of what benefit Tor has for people like me that are not trying to be anonymous. There are plenty of reasons to encrypt all your traffic on the internet. I suggest you talk to the tor developers if that doesn't sound reasonable. It is in essence about basic security and privacy.

Take a look at this post if you are curious. I highly recommend mirroring your site on the darknet (I mirror most of mine there).

http://gizmodo.com/facebook-just-created-a-custom-tor-link-and-thats-aweso-1653274659

i thought the https took care of that?

 

[Roy Badami]

Random question/thought: does the Hong Kong Consensus violate the Sherman Act? It's an agreement by a number of parties (including the main suppliers of blockspace) to limit the supply of blockspace, potentially at least in part motivated by a desire amongst at least some parties to establish a fee market (i.e. to increase the price of blockspace).

Only one of several motivations, of course, and not explicitly stated in the agreement. And largely those parties that are arguing for a fee market are not actually the miners. So perhaps not. But still an interesting question, to my mind...

 

[cypherdoc]

@Roy Badami

well, if Adam Backtrack can make wild threats like lawsuits against anyone offering a different Bitcoin implementation, then i'd think your idea would be equally valid.

 

[AdrianX]

Bitcointalk.org users being exploited to the max.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4m3op0/psa_phishing_attempts_reported_today_kraken_re/

@Kraken, ;-) note: many Bitcoin users are barred from posting on r/bitcoin and reddit in general disruption should happen elsewhere! try https://bitco.in/forum

 

[Roy Badami]

The reason the idea interested me is that if the agreement were to be established to be problematic in terms of antitrust law or competition law in one or more relevant jurisdictions, it could potentially give any miners having second thoughts a free pass to reject the agreement without losing face.

 

[Tomothy]

Roy, this concept is really fun. So theoretically, the question would be whether they're acting in concert to extract profit from users by increased fees? I mean, I'm assuming blockstream would have a US presence since they're located in CA Bay Area. This would be under the assumption that bitcoin is, i guess, a market? So, IRS has deemed that bitcoin is a 'commodity,' but the price of the asset continues to fluctuate so I'm not sure if you can argue about. I dunno, I'll read up if I have time this weekend. Fun stuff.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

I mean honestly, it's nearly spot on. I want to read the terms of the agreement again. In crazy terms, this could be why the agreement was signed as individuals not as representatives of businesses.(president).

https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff#.94iuvbthc

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cypherdoc

I propose the Greg-o-Meter as a bullish indicator. The more desperate Greg is, the higher the chance of an imminent breakout via a breakdown of Blockstream's machinations.

@freetrader

Moreover, if an Altcoin ever triumphed over Bitcoin, by doing so, it would reveal that “cryptocurrency adopters don’t remain loyal to the front-runner”, in which case the question must be asked: why should we expect the new front-runner to last? This is bad for all possible front-runners simultaneously, so instead there’s a gentleman’s tacit agreement never to allow anything to overtake Bitcoin, on which the fate of Bitcoin depends.

In this quote, Paul Sztorc tries to make an otherwise valid point through the distorted extreme-consensus lens. When he invokes "loyalty" and a "gentleman's agreement" he is trying to say "market incentives" and "sound money" but lacks the understanding to do so. He has no concept of the maturity of the ledger, and apparently cannot see that the futility of switching ledgers whenever a protocol upgrade is wanted doesn't arise from a gentleman's agreement, but from the fact that sound money is destroyed from the very first zeroing out of the ledger, and investors know this.

He is right for the wrong reason, because he cannot discern the real source of Bitcoin's consistency. He imagines it to be from something as vague as loyalty or a gentleman's agreement; this kind of language should be a clue. These aren't the kinds of words one as exacting in his language as Paul Sztorc would use unless he had no idea how Bitcoin really pulls off this trick of keeping the coin issuance schedule and other monetary parameters.

That is why he (in his "Measuring Decentralization" post, for instance) assumes all the parameters are subject to ultra-consensus or even no change at all, because he finds keeping the gentleman's agreement to be the source of Bitcoin's value, without which there is none. "Blocks must remain small to avoid rocking the Extreme Consensus, all scaling must be done by soft fork and off-chain, forever and ever, Amen."

This cartoonish view causes him to miss the market intelligence that keeps the valuable parameters but discards the worthless ones, like the 1MB cap. How he fails to see this despite understanding market intelligence in the case of prediction markets is beyond me. Perhaps fork arbitrage is the missing piece, even though that is ironically also a prediction market.

What I'd like to mention at this point is that in this forum, I've mostly seen people debate the merits of approaches from various angles (technical, economical, even political). I think the above rationalization for loyalty-based suppression of other currencies based on gentlemen's agreements should be foreign to honest and integral development of a global electronic currency.

It should really be obvious to someone like Paul that this is a ridiculous thing to rely on. It ignores open source realities, market realities, and the basic nature of what Bitcoin is. It's the naive view, and could only survive if unexamined.

I only fear, for the sake of its adherents, that the market will wash away this position like an elaborate Blockstream-logo sandcastle before they have time to perform such an examination.

 

[Roy Badami]

@Tomothy: We're not talking about the market for bitcoin, but the market for blockspace - i.e. the fees paid for the service of having a transaction included in a block

@79b79aa8: Jurisdiction is a problem; I mentioned the Sherman Act because many of the signatories are in the US, even if most of the miners aren't. Also, I'm not so much interested in whether a US court would actually accept jurisdiction over a hypothetical prosecution (which of course, will never be forthcoming). I'm much more interested in trying to establish whether the entire agreement is sufficiently legally obnoxious that no one would want to continue to be associated with it.

 

[Erdogan]

[doublepost=1464893524][/doublepost]
Such faith I hope I can hang in there.

I am with cypherdoc. Bitcoin was never about gentlemens agreement or strong consensus - only the market.

 

[79b79aa8]

and the market is like the honeybadger: it don't care.

 

[Erdogan]

Jurisdiction is a problem; I mentioned the Sherman Act because many of the signatories are in the US, even if most of the miners aren't. Also, I'm not so much interested in whether a US court would actually accept jurisdiction over a hypothetical prosecution (which of course, will never be forthcoming). I'm much more interested in trying to establish whether the entire agreement is sufficiently legally obnoxious that no one would want to continue to be associated with it.

On the other hand - free market let-it-bloom (laissez faire) economists doesn't give a shit about the sherman act, in fact, we regard it as a destroyer of markets.

Why is there only one Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) (in UK), and why do they use threats of violence, and why do they pay their folks with stolen money?

In the market, a single vendor in a submarket can only achieve that position by superior service, but even without actual competition there will always be potential competition, keeping the monopolist in check. Harmful monopolies can only exist through collusion with the state.

 

[Roy Badami]

I've never heard of the Comptetion and Markets Authority using threats of violence; I'm sure that has never happend (and would be illegal if it had).

 

[Peter R]

I propose the Greg-o-Meter as a bullish indicator. The more desperate Greg is, the higher the chance of an imminent breakout via a breakdown of Blockstream's machinations.

This gave me an idea. (Some people take this sort of thing too seriously, so I apologize ahead of time if this next idea offends anyone.)

There are haterz and fanbois on both sides of the block size debate and personal attacks and idolizations are normal. So I say we use it to our advantage!

You create a site, called something like "Block Size War: Hugs or hand grenades."

There are pictures of well-known small blockers and big blockers along with a "POWER SCORE" like in a video game. There is a QR code to the left and a QR code to the right of each person. The left side QR code is "HUGS" and the right side is "HAND GRENADES."

If someone sends, for example, 100 bits to the "HAND GRENADE" QR code (so as not to pick on anyone I'll be the guinea pig) beside my face, then something funny-bad happens like I get attacked by a honey badger or a boxing glove comes out and punches me in the face. My "power score" also drops.

If someone sends, for example, 100 bits to the "HUGS" QR code beside Gavin's face, something funny-good happens like a pretty girl kisses him. His "power score" increases.

The animations could be dependent on how much you spend, to keep things exciting.

The power scores would also give insight over time into the public perception of the developers. They could be fudged by paying for lots of hugs (or hand grenades) but that just means more donations to bitcoin development.

The site would donate half the money to bitcoin development and keep the other half.

 

[cypherdoc]

yowzer! BFX movin on UP!:

 

[Tomothy]

Well, I can't see how the agreement is enforceable in the first place. There's no basis to follow it except the possibility of being shunned by the community.

"The undersigned support this roadmap." WTF does that mean? It's not saying, agree to be bound. Did they define "support?" That seems like a key term and I don't know what it means. This is just a feel good hippie love statement. There's no clause saying where jurisdiction would be; it's not meant to be enforceable but it can sure be used to show intent.

I think someone with GBTC might be able to bring a claim against them and could maybe have better luck than any sort of an antitrust claim. With regards to the blockspace, so even if they all said block size should be 4mb and there was HF code for 4mb, this doesn't mean there will be 4mb blockspace. The hard fork might never take place. I mean, it's almost more like a claim for tortious economic interference. I mean, Blockstream doesn't want bitcoin to scale, they conspire to limit block size, they buy core developers, competitors plan on space increasing, BS doesn't let it happen. I dunno, I'd go after them if anyone. I think the difficulty would be showing damages, if coinbase and similar continue to be profitable and growing just not as fast as they would have or should be, your kindof out of luck.

 

[cypherdoc]

and the market is like the honeybadger: it don't care.

personally? i can't wait for the market aka Honey Badger to whup Greg's ass.

 

[AdrianX]

I am with cypherdoc. Bitcoin was never about gentlemens agreement or strong consensus - only the market.

Agreed, but it's looking a little degraded at the moment given Blockstream Core and the Wizard head seem to wield their authority effectively to maintain the status quo.
[doublepost=1464908211][/doublepost]

I've never heard of the Comptetion and Markets Authority using threats of violence; I'm sure that has never happend (and would be illegal if it had).

it's called the law. countries go to war to protect there version of the truth and the victors wright the history.

 

[Erdogan]

I've never heard of the Comptetion and Markets Authority using threats of violence; I'm sure that has never happend (and would be illegal if it had).

Well it is hidden. Let's say they start threatening to take some of your belongings, maybe all, then let you willingly walk into a small rectangular room with sparse furniture, if you stop at the threshold, reconsidering, someone will take your arm, if you resist, you are quickly downed.