Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jonny1000]

"There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins!" was the slogan. If it had been the more subtle, "The market will almost certainly never support issuing more than 21 million bitcoins" I don't know if as many people would have bought in

Like you, I do not agree with the "There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins!" slogan. Instead I take an even more nuanced position that you. My view is that "the market will almost certainly never support issuing more than 21 million bitcoins AND there are several other interrelated technical and social factors which make increasing the number of bitcoins difficult". I have tried to explain some of these technical factors earlier on in this thread, such as since this type of hardfork is likely to be asymmetric, even if advocates of the hard fork control 60% of the global hashrate, statistically the hard fork advocates are more than 50% likely to lose and become the shorter chain. This is a purely factual example, there are other examples which you may not agree with (e.g. appreciating that the community will rally behind the existing rules if an attempt to change the rules without consensus occurs, due to the incentives in place), but at least recognize these factual ones. These technical and statistical factors are features which compliment and integrate well with the market factors that you understand well. Combined they make the system quite robust.

Please recognize these other reasons and that these also need to be overcome in doing the HF to 2MB.

I think this really is the key difference in how we view Bitcoin. You seem to have thought, "Well at least this is something different. Hard to change and not easy to change like central banker whim. It might not be better, but at least it is different. At least it is something new that just might work."

Well I kind of agree with this. Traditional monetary and payment systems like the USD, Swift, Credit Cards ect, are extremely popular and successful. Bitcoin is a tiny spec compared to these giants. Both Bitcoin and these older systems have advantages and disadvantages and I do not necessarily think one is objectively better than the other. The evidence currently suggests the USD is more successful. Having said that, obviously I as a person, like many Bitcoin people, am very interested in elliptical curves, Byzantine fault tolerance, game theory, disruptive technologies, change, Austrian business cycle theory, cryptography, open systems, resilient systems, eliminating middle men, uncensorable systems and freedom. In addition to this I am invested in bitcoin. Therefore obviously I have a bias towards these types of systems and hope Bitcoin succeeds. That does not mean I think Bitcoin is "better" than the USD, the key thing to me is that it is different and unique. From a strategic point of view we should focus on maintaining this difference and not try to emulate the USD.

 

[freetrader]

Could this be true - the Relay Network dropping blocks voting for 2MB?

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4pxbvr/the_bitcoin_relay_network_seems_to_intentionally/

Marshall Long on Classic Slack:

Almost nobody runs stock RN

 

[cypherdoc]

/u/jtoomim is a huge proponent of the RN. He should comment.

 

[AdrianX]

Could this be true - the Relay Network dropping blocks voting for 2MB?

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4pxbvr/the_bitcoin_relay_network_seems_to_intentionally/

Marshall Long on Classic Slack:

A centralized server expressing a political preference to penalizes Bitcoin miners who do not follow the guidance of the current centralized authority.

Oh well looks like most people in Bitcoin are blind to the issues related to centralized governance.

 

[freetrader]

 

[cypherdoc]

great talk by Balaji. worth listening to entirety. but listen to his response to a Q re: blocksize debate. i think his answer belies 3 important pts that shows 21co's support for bigger blocks. he says they have multiple "defences" in place to deal with a blockade by kore dev:

1. the self righteous and self interested one where he offers 21co's micropayment channels as effectively a LN hub.which just shows that's where LN in general is headed.
2. implement ethereum support which means diversifying away from Bitcoin.
3. he mentions "rumblings" that there may indeed be a 2MBHF. i doubt he'd mention that if he wasn't supporting it.

[doublepost=1466963212][/doublepost]earlier in the talk when he discusses their micropmt system, he admit that they do have to perform filtering or censoring of bad actors like Iran, N. Korea, etc. they have no choice as a centralized soon to be LN hub.
[doublepost=1466963804,1466962889][/doublepost]this idiot /u/oakpacific aka @proslogion on Slack just doesn't get it. note how he assumes a static condition that can't possibly change (in his small mind) as a result of bigger blocks. bigger blocks would allow non Chinese miners to reverse the centralization we currently have in mining by leveraging their superior BW:

[doublepost=1466964685][/doublepost]note that my impression of @balaji's talk matches that of kore shills like /u/eragmus here seen spamming/attacking the 21co Slack channel hounding @balaji and to push the kore agenda. they attack anyone and everyone not seen to be towing their party line:

https://21co.slack.com/archives/general/p1466958151001304

 

[jbreher]

1. "assuming it has no mysterious bugs". As everyone has concluded, it will take a long time before any such assumption can be made.

Agreed. But I am discussing the principle here.

2. Someone owns these self-dispatching cabs, correct?

Not necessarily. The cab may 'own' itself. It calls into question the motivation of the party who initially expended funds to bring this autonomous entity into existence, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility.

 

[jbreher]

The more I think about it, the more "smart contract" seems like a terribly misleading name that is distorting everything going on with the Ethereum situation right now. I'll call them transaction machines (TMs) for now.

This seems like a useful distinction.

 

[awemany]

Could this be true - the Relay Network dropping blocks voting for 2MB?

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4pxbvr/the_bitcoin_relay_network_seems_to_intentionally/

Marshall Long on Classic Slack:

Anyone having a connection to the relay network and those logs available should save and timestamp them ASAP. This is indeed quite interesting, if true.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[lunar]

Medium post with Insights into the OTC market from Vinny Lingham

The 1% don’t use Bitcoin Exchanges

In summary, until we have a marketplace where OTC brokers are not needed to fulfill large orders, Bitcoin will be volatile. There is a significant amount of money from the global financial elite that is still sitting on the sidelines and now looking to get in, given the Brexit and other unfolding global politicol events and once it does there will be a short squeeze on traders currently shorting Bitcoin because the exchange volumes do not accurately reflect the demand side of the equation and the upcoming halving day is going to choke the supply of new coins.

 

[cypherdoc]

This sounds exactly like what I was saying the other day. From Wei Dei:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/npy/are_smart_contracts_aicomplete/dcap

 

[cypherdoc]

arching lower:

 

[albin]

Anybody remember the prevalent /r/bitcoinmarkets narrative during the bear market that OTC trades were somehow immune from affecting price discovery? That was really strange!

 

[lunar]

This from Peak prosperity. Some simple economics 101 for 2016


Painfully illustrates the ignorance and/or deliberate hindrance to scaling tactics used by BS and Gregonomists. Let me shout it out to those in the back seats.

There is a monster Fcuk tonne of money out there DESPERATELY looking for shelter. Open the floodgates now and protect decentralisation and Bitcoin using the best method possible. Spread bitcoin everywhere and massively increase user adoption.

This distraction about running nodes on a raspberry pi is meaningless if every bitcoin owner and company can afford a nice home server.

 

[cypherdoc]

@lunar

long time Bitcoiner /u/ferritinjapan puts it right:

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/npy/are_smart_contracts_aicomplete/dcap

Without an AI that can live on the blockchain and replace human judgments, smart contracts are restricted to applications where such judgement are not required, and there doesn't seem to be many of these.

This really underscores the motivation behind undoing TheDAO: the Ethereum community doesn't want to admit that smart contracts (transaction machines) have much more limited scope of usefulness that was envisioned, so they are between a rock and a hard place. They have to either

(a) double down on their position that transaction machines have broad utility by turning them into Care Bear contracts sometimes arbitrated by a community court of miners/stakers - a radical redesign that should take a year or more to implement and doesn't seem very promising - or

(b) abandon their position that transaction machines have broad utility and accept a much lower market cap commensurate with such a limited system.

EDIT: This comment on LessWrong sounds uncannily similar to mine above:

If we want to talk about it intelligently it helps to taboo the term "contract" or else people get terribly terribly confused like in some of the existing comments.

I'm going to say "independent program" instead of "smart contract" for clarity

Ethereum allows for the existence of independent programs which can hold and transfer money. The rules have to be hardcoded into them when you create them. They cannot be changed once launched.

 

[Norway]

Wang Chun, co-owner and chief administrator of F2Pool (macbook-air on reddit) must really be dreaming of a moon moment for bitcoin. He brought his family to watch this in China:

 

[Peter R]

Interesting comment from TheBlueMatt:

"...the relay network is not beating the p2p network by very much at all anymore. Thanks to a combination of several factors (people upgrading to 0.12, a reduction in number of nodes, a significant reduction in budget VPS-based nodes, etc), the P2P network is often relaying blocks in 1 or 2 seconds for a random node on the network, while the relay network has gotten slower over time to the point that it, also, takes a second more often than not."

This seems like a positive shift in Core's narrative.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@Peter R I wonder how that comes.. *cough* XThin *cough*


Btw, Bitcoins dominance is still just above 80 %.....