Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Norway]

@cliff
A numismatist is a currency expert with good knowledge of history and working in a museum, an academic institution, a pawnshop or hobby/collecting coins and bills etc as far as I know.

What is your relation to this person, what do you want to do? (Hard to give advice of problems you should be looking for if we don't have a little context).

 

[cliff]

@Norway - good question. I'm probating the estate of a deceased person who collected precious metals/coins for decades. Decedent has an uncanny number of old coins - may require a professional to render a written opinion on the value of the coins if things get ugly. Also, may need to liquidate some or all of them at some point to be able to distribute proceeds to heirs.

 

[AdrianX]

Interesting, so I have not been the only one seeing the parallels between Borgstream/Corium and the undemocratic 'experts' (without a clue, one might add..) in the context of the EU/USA.

I feel a bit uneasy that it is seemingly again only a single person who can and is willing stop Borgstream Corium from melting through Bitcoin by blocking SegWit w/o accompanying HF. (And I hope he has further tests for SegWit in mind)

I hope Jihan cares enough about his personal safety and security.

Awesome post @awemany "Borgstream/Corium" sounded only too poetic so I had to look up "Corium"

LOLed as I added a new word to my vocabulary and a vivid metaphor to what Blockstream/Core developers are doing to Bitcoin.

Corium, is a lava-like molten mixture of portions of nuclear reactor core, formed during a nuclear meltdown, the most severe class of a nuclear reactor accident.

[doublepost=1466799769,1466799051][/doublepost]

@Norway - good question. I'm probating the estate of a deceased person who collected precious metals/coins for decades. Decedent has an uncanny number of old coins - may require a professional to render a written opinion on the value of the coins if things get ugly. Also, may need to liquidate some or all of them at some point to be able to distribute proceeds to heirs.

Get 3 different opinions, if the heirs all get along and don't need to sell them consider putting them into a trust they control.

 

[cliff]

@AdrianX - thanks. It will be something like that, probably a lot more simple. Mainly looking for guidance on how I know whether I've found someone who knows what they're talking about - like a legit certification or something

 

[Norway]

@Norway - good question. I'm probating the estate of a deceased person who collected precious metals/coins for decades. Decedent has an uncanny number of old coins - may require a professional to render a written opinion on the value of the coins if things get ugly. Also, may need to liquidate some or all of them at some point to be able to distribute proceeds to heirs.

Wow, ok!
I would recomend you to pay an expert to explain the value of the coins and why. Before you make a deal with him, you must make it absolutely clear that you will not sell any coins to him under any conditions. You only pay him for his time and expertise.

If you are not very clear about this, he will try to rip you off. He will pretend that the coin that is the most valuable one, is not important.

EDIT: You could also go around to shops/pawnshops and ask for a price. Just be absolutely clear that you are not making a deal there and then, and that you are checking multiple places. Show and tell them that you are on a tour to find the value!

 

[pekatete]

@cliff , If you live in or near a cultural city with museums, that would be the first port of call to authenticate (and probably value), then seek further valuation opinion(s) from a commercial undertaking.

 

[awemany]

Nullc and others finding no good reason to not test SegWit on Litecoin first.

I like SegWit, thoroughly tested and very preferably as a HF. But not rushed please.

 

[Norway]

@cliff
@pekatete has a good point! Use museums and academic institutions. Find the numismatic nerds. They think about money every day, yet they don't think about profit. (Weired, right?)

 

[cliff]

@Norway and @pekatete

Yeah, pekatete made a great suggestion. One correction though RE: order of folks to consult: step 1 - consult the geeks at bitco.in first.

 

[Inca]

Pleasantly surprised to see my fellow countrymen agree with me and voted for Brexit.

Amazing that democracy prevailed over the consensus of the major political parties and a concerted effort by the mainstream media to openly campaign for the remain in the EU vote.

Good day to be holding bitcoin. Risk off for a few days. I wonder how much lower the major bourses would have been without open central bank interventions today..Just wait until our housing market finally cools off from the 2007 bubble which has still not deflated because of ZIRP and a deliberate policy of allowing net uncontrolled EU immigration and failure to build sufficient national housing.

The UK cost of living might actually not be exorbitant for a change. I do wonder how people on 'normal' wages cope here to be honest.

 

[theZerg]

Inca can you eli5 both sides and why you voted?

 

[albin]

Intuitively I'm not buying the fluffypony presentation.

Just stepping back and looking at the big picture, if you can measure conop, then why are you simply not setting the cap that targets the upper bound on conop you've judged safe in the first place?

And if you can't measure conop, then how are these complex systems of mathematical functions and parameters to create miner incentive targeting constraining something you don't even know to begin with?

Also unless the economic utility of running a node is also addressed, then the conop concept is completely useless as far as any potential empirically-predictive value.

I think we need alot more evidence that miner attacks to intentionally inflate the block size are actually a threat in the real world, and in the presentation I feel like these issues are addressed too cavalierly, rapidly jumping around and conflating completely different attack scenarios.

I'm no software engineer, but this sounds like a dead end to me. He even kind of indirectly admits it, when describing how a successful solution would raise the capacity at an adequate enough rate while avoiding dangerous results of allowing unnecessary headroom that can be attacked, yet that criteria is does not follow from the framework of the conop model, that's an attribute of every possible solution.

 

[agilewalker]

SegWit merged hours ago still went with a+b/4 discount.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/search?utf8=✓&q=WITNESS_SCALE_FACTOR

 

[cypherdoc]

@freetrader - MP may be DBP's sock-puppet; that or he's DBP's cum guzzler fluffer-buddy. (that french wasn't for y'all, btw - hi, mp )

A lot of BTCers from florida - including mssrs king, dashjr and maxwell - could be at the bottom of this rabbit hole (or close by) - satoshi's forest is a perfect way to mix some coin.

Edit:
http://trilema.com/2014/in-defense-of-the-troll/
http://trilema.com/2013/the-trolling-something-awful-competition/
http://trilema.com/2014/a-compendium-of-basic-points-about-bitcoin-for-the-benefit-of-various-confused-noobs/

lol, who is DBP?
[doublepost=1466818496][/doublepost]

Intuitively I'm not buying the fluffypony presentation.

Just stepping back and looking at the big picture, if you can measure conop, then why are you simply not setting the cap that targets the upper bound on conop you've judged safe in the first place?

And if you can't measure conop, then how are these complex systems of mathematical functions and parameters to create miner incentive targeting constraining something you don't even know to begin with?

Also unless the economic utility of running a node is also addressed, then the conop concept is completely useless as far as any potential empirically-predictive value.

I think we need alot more evidence that miner attacks to intentionally inflate the block size are actually a threat in the real world, and in the presentation I feel like these issues are addressed too cavalierly, rapidly jumping around and conflating completely different attack scenarios.

I'm no software engineer, but this sounds like a dead end to me. He even kind of indirectly admits it, when describing how a successful solution would raise the capacity at an adequate enough rate while avoiding dangerous results of allowing unnecessary headroom that can be attacked, yet that criteria is does not follow from the framework of the conop model, that's an attribute of every possible solution.

wow, i'm doing bad with acronyms/abbrevs today. what is conop?
[doublepost=1466818612][/doublepost]we should have a good weekend:

 

[solex]

Anyone here have experience working w/ a numismatist? Any particular credentials or problems I should be looking for?

This is an area of my expertise, but in banknotes, not coins. The best step is to take the collection to the nearest major auction house. They will have a resident expert who knows the market. Most of what collectors hold is typically low value, but there will often be a few items worth more than the rest put together. Museum staff typically won't have a clue about market values.
I have dealt with Spink for a very long time and they are super-reputable.

 

[cypherdoc]

aand Eth should help:

[doublepost=1466818724][/doublepost]

This is an area of my expertise, but in banknotes, not coins. The best step is to take the collection to the nearest major auction house. They will have a resident expert who knows the market. Most of what collectors hold is typically low value, but there will often be a few items worth more than the rest put together. Museum staff typically won't have a clue about market values.
I have dealt with Spink for a very long time and they are super-reputable.

how would one value Casacius error coins?
[doublepost=1466819039][/doublepost]

 

[albin]

wow, i'm doing bad with acronyms/abbrevs today. what is conop?

It's "cost of node-option", basically what gmax/friedenbach are using cost-based metrics to mean.
[doublepost=1466819499][/doublepost]This is a very uncharitable claim admittedly, but the impression that I get is that Flexcap/conop/cost-based-metrics/whatever is not actually a scientific approach to blocksize interacting with economic incentives, because it simply does not follow logically that the way they're accomplishing this actually addresses the metric that they're concerned about.

I think it's really a way for people with a certain ideological perspective to increase the blocksize and feel okay about it not contradicting their pre-existing beliefs, by deluding themselves that they're protecting decentralization by creating a complex system that does not actually provably do anything to preserve a decentralization that they can't even measure, and even crazier by changing the incentives of participants who are not the participants you're even trying to optimize for, with parameters that have no feedback to what you're trying to optimize in the first place.

 

[Peter R]

Intuitively I'm not buying the fluffypony presentation.

I know the small block crowd reads this thread, so let me begin be saying that I thought his presentation was very well done. His slides were effective, he articulated his ideas clearly, and the presentation had a nice flow to it. I still disagreed with most of it

The impression I got was the fluffypony thought that "ideal" scaling would be to dynamically increase or decrease the size of blocks such that CONOP was held constant. If you know feedback control, you could imagine a circuit like this (if the set point > measurement, the block size is increased; if the set point is less than the measurement, the block size is decreased):

Now let's completely ignore the problem @albin addressed of how one would actually measure CONOP in the first place. Let's assume for the moment that we can measure it accurately. Would we actually want the system to behave like this?

The big problem I would have is that it requires a magic number in order to run: namely the "CONOP target" that we're using as the feedback controller's set point.

We could say: "Well, just target whatever the CONOP happens to be today and then it's not a magic number!" OK sort of, but we have no evidence to believe that the value that CONOP happens to be today is somehow ideal. Sure it works right now, but maybe it won't work at all in the future.

For example, the CONOP of today permits Raspberry-pi's on slow internet connections to "keep up." If we target today's CONOP going forward, then we're implicitly saying that we want the equivalent of tomorrow's Raspberry-Pis to also be able to keep up. Is that really practical for something that could become a new global monetary system?

I think we need a lot more evidence that miner attacks to intentionally inflate the block size are actually a threat in the real world, and in the presentation I feel like these issues are addressed too cavalierly, rapidly jumping around and conflating completely different attack scenarios.

Me too. I wish they would at least try to estimate the cost of these attacks and describe the models they are using. I feel that if they actually took the time to associate reasonable numbers with all the "attacks" they imagine, that they'd see most of them are pretty weak.

 

[solex]

how would one value Casacius error coins?

That depends upon the number of them as a proportion of the total made. I did a quick search and found that it is a spelling error in the hologram. I am guessing that there will be a whole batch like that. This makes the price difference to ordinary coins smaller, so the condition of the coin would be just as important. Try leaving them as unfingered and unscratched as possible . The error will always have some premium though.
[doublepost=1466822556][/doublepost]@Peter R
What we see with the conop concept is another level of control freakery. Core Dev simply do not trust market forces to stabilize the average block size at a sensible level. They ignore that the whole $10bn value of Bitcoin is the result of free-market action. They are trying to put a steering wheel on it because they think it should head in the direction they want. Maxwell is still worried about node counts but he just can't see that crippling Bitcoin's network effect is probably the single biggest missile one could aim at the node count.

 

[theZerg]

Its like the drake eqn. All ideas you can't put a concrete number into a single term.