Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Well 1 is a huge problem, that goes well beyond this futures market idea in terms of challenges.

In most cases, the idea is that the forked split never happens; either the fork is ignored or everyone and their mother moves across. The exchange then doesn't have to be concerned about any of the cross-chain issues; trading continues until one coin reaches ~$0. I imagine that might even happen in 5-10 minutes of violent trading. Because as I think you agree, there is - for the current environment at least - overwhelming desire to stay as one chain. This may not be true at some future time when it actually would be worth it to split into two persistent chains for some reason, but for right now yeah.

I think the policy decision here is key, greatly advantaging or disadvantaging either side, I think.

Actually, I think I had it wrong. It is easier. There is no unwinding; the exchange just gives traders their coins in their purchased forks after the flag day, even if half of them are worthless (or even unsendable due to no miners at all). Some scenarios (assume Classic with no threshold, just flag day; let me know if I made any errors as this is off the top of my head):

1) CoreBTC $570, ClassicBTC ~$0. Exchange gives all the CoreBTC to those who bet on Core, on the flag day. (Maybe they also agree to send the ClassicBTC scraps to the Classic holdouts, in the case where mining infrastructure even works on the flag day. This is just to cover the eventuality where there is a big reversal in the meantime and they regain value. Hopefully, though, the trading can be allowed to continue right up until just before the flag day, so that Classic could conceivably be resuscitated if circumstances change drastically, even if it once flatlines for a while (allowing quite reliable planning by infrastructure during the flatline).)

2) CoreBTC ~$0, ClassicBTC $570. Same thing but reversed. Infrastructure prepares for the bigger blocks and other small changes.

3) Some kind of split where both has more than a few percent. Should never happen unless the market sees great value in two chains. Definitely should not be happening for blocksize 1MB vs. 2MB, as those two chains wouldn't be more valuable split (I assume...unless that functions as some kind of bastard-scaling...but I'm fine not going there for now as the complication does seem to outweigh the potential confusion in that case). Overwhelming incentive toward consensus, which Extreme Consensus supporters want, but without the "gentleman's agreement." Just the market goes crazy and mauls whichever coin is at 45% while exulting the one with 55%. 45%→0%, 55%→100%.

In almost every case. Even if some people are really pissed off about it, they have to go with it or play on Chain Nowheresville. If they are extremely passionate, they may break away, but the market will almost certainly ensure that there is a clear winner. I can't think of a scenario where they wouldn't be beaten back to single digits or so, at least.

The overriding principle, is that if there is any significant dispute over the rules, the existing rules must prevail.

Can't tell whether we still disagree here. Does the market forcing every minority toward 0% and every majority toward 100% satisfy this for you? Because from your wording here it sounds like this situation might be upsetting to you:

Core and Classic trade neck and neck, floating around $285 and $285, sometimes Classic ahead by a few tens of dollars, sometimes Core, then at one point when Classic is ahead, the gap widens and then Classic makes a beeline for ~$570 while Core goes to ~$0.​

In this case we could say there was "significant dispute over the rules" in one sense, since obviously a lot of people were against Classic, but in another sense there is no "significant dispute over the rules" by the time the flag day comes.

It's a little subtle, because you could say the disputers simply gave up because they didn't want to play on a worthless fork, or that the price came into their view of what the rules should be, which might seem iffy (I think it seems natural). What do you think?

 

[cypherdoc]

so, the flipside of TLT is TNX, aka, interest rates crashing:

which is confirmed in Germany. that's not good. smell that?:

 

[chriswilmer]

@cypherdoc : Why is Kyle Bass eating it? What was his bet on USD?

 

[cypherdoc]

wow, continued innovation from SatoshiLabs:

https://medium.com/@satoshilabs/satoshilabs-launches-trezor-password-manager-the-ultimately-secure-no-master-password-cloud-1b260e5fbe6b#.27jhsd2qu
[doublepost=1464974605][/doublepost]

@cypherdoc : Why is Kyle Bass eating it? What was his bet on USD?

he went long the USD near the stock mkt top last year while i said the USD would drop near it's top in November.

 

[chriswilmer]

@cypherdoc : you are our very own Kyle Bass (or would you prefer Jesse Livermore?)

 

[AdrianX]

FTFY

Bang on! It's hard to assume good faith when contributions are deleted, moved and contributors are banned form participating. In fact when the people holding the opposing views insist on having the convention where censorship is rife, one has a motive to amuse the opposing argument is not happening in good faith. It's telling how the sponsors pay to have the voices they want at a conference and shun the voices they don't want.

And if you disagree with the authority. "you're just wrong, no explanation needed you're just wrong, go away and come back when you agree with us" - I joke not, that's almost a verbatim quote.

 

[AdrianX]

Because its all I can find... Do you have any other sybil resistant indications of support for either side? Like a futures market for example?

Also wouldn't you also need to expose you public keys for the collateral in this futures market?

Also I seem to remember most of these polls were started by Classic/XT people, had pro Classic biases in the questions and were linked to from /r/btc quite a lot. Then the investors found out about it and suddenly the Classic people complain about the site.

These points in the quote above are mute, deleting and censoring discussion around Bitcoin XT, Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited, is the mechanism by which Blockstream Core are maintaining the status Quo.

Stop calling attempts to fork the code and blocking the education of people on the need to increase the block size. Aligning your position with that misguided notion that these attempts are Altcoins creates FUD, it is ignorant! I don't see any Core rationalists condemning the ignorant Core Fundamentalists for saying, functioning implementations of Bitcoin are actual Altcoins, if an alternate implementation writes transactions to a block and a block to the Bitcoin blockchain that's accepted by the Bitcoin Network it's Bitcoin.

There is no Altcoin attempt, there is only bitcoin if the will to increase on chain scaling isn't there the need for on chain scaling wont manifest.

Any polls are manipulated by public opinion, and Blockstream are spending a lot of money enforcing a particular public opinion one the author of the quoted text has been the beneficiary of.

When the author of that post spends as much energy fighting the censorship and the misguided notions that attempts to educate people in the benefits of on chain scaling (which he has admitted he supports) and works to undermine the fundamentalists who incorrectly have ladled competing Bitcoin implementations as Altcoins, than he does supporting the Blockstream agenda I'll re-evaluate my judgment.

 

[Kupsi]

I believe it's a new volume record in Brazil the last 24 hours. Trading around $565.

That record didn't last long. They seem desperate with around 10% inflation there. Trading at $620 now. Today's high at $679.

http://exchangewar.info/coinprice?BTC_BRL

 

[chriswilmer]

Isn't it peculiar that the fee/tx-size hasn't gone up much? I guess it has in USD terms... still seems like the fees are too small for people to really care about them (although if that was the case, I would have expected the wallets out there to be bidding up the fee price much higher than where it is today).

Put another way... where are those thousands of transactions in the mempool (that are not getting mined) coming from? Are they not paying the fee? Could there be some kind of not-talked-about-yet blacklist that miners are using (which would explain the large numbers of txns in the mempool without causing a rise in the fees)?

 

[AdrianX]

Good questions. I was imagining the process just occurs on exchanges, with their own products that are off-chain, like all trading on exchanges is. That should address 1 and 2. If not, let me know. I think I already mentioned that PoW and signing would have to be tweaked if there is a persistent minority chain.

As for when they settle, the exchanges could decide but I'd imagine - perhaps naively - that there is a preset settlement date after which the exchange says, "OK, everyone is entitled to this many ClassicCoins and this many CoreCoins if and when the fork happens." If the fork never occurs, it seems that would either be handled by ClassicCoin (the non-incumbent) investors losing their shirts, or by all trades being unwound and returned (if you deposited 10 BTC to trade with, you get 10 BTC back). I'd of course prefer exchanges to adopt the later policy, and think that would attract more volume.

I may have messed up some of the terminology. My background for Bitcoin purposes is in economics not trading/investing itself, so I'm not up on all the technicals. In fact, the addition of the futures trading aspect was someone else's idea in this thread.



That is great. Just what I wanted to hear. We both - from our points of view - will be the winners. It'd be wonderful to take this thing to the market so we can stop bickering and hating on the Gregs and Adams (and Gavins and Mikes) of the Bitcoin world.



Although I think these are highly flawed metrics, they are a step in the right direction. Can we get away from some of the details and agree that, if in principle it were possible to just put the forking outcome to a prediction market, where CoreBTC and ClassicBTC each end up with a percentage of the total as their price ("CoreBTC $540, ClassicBTC $20" or whatever), that that would be an ideal way to settle the matter?

Note again I'm assuming if trading ever got to the above prices, ClassicBTC would almost certainly soon be trading at $0 anyway.

It's not entirely necessary to go to such lengths, the only justification to do it would be if the owners of that infrastructure that supports the network of users actually believed there was no demand for bigger blocks and were prepared to invest in it. Just accepting bigger blocks has 0 risk using Bitcoin Unlimited and miners want to mine coins that the majority of users accept. the risk is small blocks become irrelevant very quickly and a business would only try support that if there was a chance that that's the most viable solution.
[doublepost=1464979341][/doublepost]

GBTC now up 10.46% and climbing.
[doublepost=1464972443,1464971598][/doublepost]GBTC now up 12.05% and climbing.

Wow, I can't imagine that ends well for everyone, but hopefully it's a lead indicator of what's to come in Bitcoin land.

 

[AdrianX]

Isn't it peculiar that the fee/tx-size hasn't gone up much? I guess it has in USD terms... still seems like the fees are too small for people to really care about them (although if that was the case, I would have expected the wallets out there to be bidding up the fee price much higher than where it is today).

Put another way... where are those thousands of transactions in the mempool (that are not getting mined) coming from? Are they not paying the fee? Could there be some kind of not-talked-about-yet blacklist that miners are using (which would explain the large numbers of txns in the mempool without causing a rise in the fees)?

I submitted a simple no fee transaction last week, yesterday it appeared to have been drooped from the mempool, so i did my firs double spend (the double spend was processed in 2 hrs)

along with RBF and the relative implementation came a new method for managing transactions in the mempool, I presume some old nodes even miners are using the old method that is incomparable with the pre RBF mempool management rules. They will fill up and become unmanageable unless the block size is increased or they are manually dropped from the mempool. this is another way Core are strong arming miners and other services to upgrade to the latest Core in order to manage the mempool according to there new rules. I suspect old miners may even be at risk of orphaning if they process my old transaction before it is cleared from the mempool.

I suspect the problem you have identifies is only with older nodes.

 

[Trolfi]

That record didn't last long. They seem desperate with around 10% inflation there. Trading at $620 now. Today's high at $679.
http://exchangewar.info/coinprice?BTC_BRL

Darn, it appears the good professor's noble attempts to shield the unsuspecting Brazilian public from the Bitcoin scam have gone to waste.

 

[freetrader]

Maybe someone here can tell me if I'm wrong on this one.

Nearly all the altcoins are negatively correlated with Bitcoin price rises. But Litecoin. This pattern has persisted longtime.

Are the Chinese Bitcoin miners (looking at BTCC) moving some of their profit into boosting Litecoin?

 

[Norway]

@freetrader
Litecoin is used for arbitrage between exchanges. When big things happens with bitcoin, and there is big differences between exchanges, people need Litecoin to arb.

 

[solex]

@freetrader
Interesting observation. In "pairs trading" speculators look for historically correlated instruments and when one has a price move the other is likely to follow in the same direction. An old classic is BP/Shell. What we are seeing with LTC is that it is the closest cryptocurrency in look-and-feel and proven age, and significant hashing-power to Bitcoin. Yet it has effectively 4x the capacity. So the market is pairs-trading this, and probably also as a proxy for Bitcoin while it fails to scale. It is therefore a ship to jump to.
displaimer: I don't have any LTC to talk up.

 

[cypherdoc]

this looks good:

 

[Norway]

@cypherdoc
I bet Barry is enjoying it too, lol!

 

[albin]

This bout of Maxwell maximalism on Reddit is scaring the shit out of me. It really is just a clique of guys talking on irc, there's literally nothing that he's advocating that has been documented in a way that anybody can even attempt to peer review. It's like engineering is being done via oral tradition!

 

[Norway]

@albin Or is the engineering being done by anal tradition?

 

[Mengerian]

@Mengerian you're on the right track with not being concerned or too concerned about bandwidth for the miner relay. A low latency solution is being working on right now by @theZerg called Xpedited and it would be more geared toward the miners. Xthins is more a p2p solution, fast but not the fastest and low bandwidth. Requirements are what matters here, it doesn't get talked about enough...what are the real requirements for p2p vs miners. The debate gets a bit confused IMO without understanding the difference between them.

https://github.com/gandrewstone/BitcoinUnlimited/tree/XpeditedBlocks

@Peter Tschipper, @theZerg,

Thanks for the feedback. I have been looking through to code on github, trying to understand
the details of how Expedited blocks works.

I still have a few questions on exactly how it currently works. For example, when the expedited thin block is constructed, does it include any full transactions? Or does it just send a thin block without any full transactions assuming mempools are synchronized, and rely on a round trip communication if the recipient is missing transactions? Is there somewhere I can look to find more information, documentation, or a thread on the forum or something where this is discussed?

I have also been reading up on Matt Corallo's Relay Network. The more I research and think about it, the more excited I get. I think that building on the framework you guys have created, there is a good incremental path to building a peer-to-peer block relaying capability with performance better than Corallo's Relay Network.

The way I envision it working is with miners manually configuring their nodes to connect to the nodes they want to. Most miners would likely connect directly to each other, with perhaps some dedicated relay nodes also. So most of the time blocks would get transmitted between miners in one hop.

Speeding up block transmission by pre-communicating information before a block is solved can be implemented incrementally in stages:

Stage 1: Assume mempools are synchronized and send expedited thin block without any full transactions. Missing transactions would have to be requested in a round-trip communication. The miner can at least start head-first mining while the missing transactions are fetched.

Stage 2: Use some sort of heuristic to guess at what transactions the recipient has so they can be included along with the thin block. The code would keep track, for each connection, of which transactions it thinks its peers have. For example, it could keep track of INVs like @Dusty suggested:

Since every new transaction hash is broadcasted to every peer in the form of INV bitcoin message, a node should be able to update the bloom filter of a peer autonomously by checking the INVs that peer is sending him: if a peer INVites a certain tx hash it means that he knows it, and hence he should be able to update his bloom filter consequently.

Stage 3: Nodes explicitly communicate with each other which transactions they have. This could build upon the Bloom filter method from Xthin. The primary difference is that it would do this communication before blocks are found, not after. Then when it sends the thin block, it can include transactions that the other node likely doesn't have.

Stage 4: Nodes pre-transmits transactions that it thinks its peer is missing that are in the block it is working on before the block is found. Then when the block is found, it can transmit a thin block without needing to add any missing transactions.

Stage 5: Nodes communicate a data structure that refers to a set of transactions that it expects to include in a block. This way, when it constructs the thin block, instead of including all the transactions hashes, most of them can be replaced with a single hash that refers to the pre-communicated set of transactions. (If combined with weak blocks, this becomes very conceptually similar to @Peter R's subchains)