Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jonny1000]

which is exactly why we don't want to see them siphoned off to LN hub operators

LN is likely to increase demand for space in blocks and therefore increase miner revenue. By this logic any additional feature or layer of Bitcoin that costs money is bad because it means less money for miners. Obviously the opposite is true, any additional feature which people find useful, will increase demand for Bitcoin and transaction space.

hint: we don't have any COI)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_interest_(computer_security)?

this is why more debate and negotiation with ppl like you is hopeless

Despite your comment here, I will always try to be polite, open minded, honest, thoughtful, rational and diligent in discussing this important issue with anyone that is interested, including you.

I am really sorry for perhaps sounding rude, but this partial admission of being so bad at politics is exactly why you are losing. (with only 10.8% of nodes, compared to Core on c84.3%)

 

[yrral86]

COI = Conflict of Interest

 

[freetrader]

Despite your comment here, I will always try to be polite, open minded, honest, thoughtful, rational and diligent in discussing this important issue with anyone that is interested, including you.

I am really sorry for perhaps sounding rude, but this partial admission of being so bad at politics is exactly why you are losing. (with only 10.8% of nodes, compared to Core on c84.3%)

@cypherdoc is not being impolite, just stating a reasonable conclusion (one that I share).

respecting the rights and ability of others to veto any increase if these people are significant in number and they cannot be persuaded.

I respect your right to keep the 1MB limit in a fork of your design.

But what does this mean? Let me explain to you what it means to respect that right.
It means not attacking those who run suitable clients using DDOS attacks, censorship, personal diffamatory attacks, intimidatory legal posturing or anti-competitive back-room agreements.

When I see those things no longer being applied to those who wish for a bigger block size limit, I will believe that you have managed to persuade those who do this to respect the rights and ability of others. Then I will praise your political abilities.

 

[priestc]

I hope this explains to you why a fee market and fees are so important to many in the community. It is one of the key characteristics which provides inherent value to Bitcoin.

This is simply not true, and is easy to prove. Take Dogecoin for example. I can make a Dogecoin transaction that has no fee, and it'll confirm in the next block every single time. The same size transaction moving bitcoin would require a 20 cent fee and may not even confirm until 30 or more minutes later. Dogecoin is 99% the same code as bitcoin. Why are fees so important to BTC, but apparently are not so important in Dogecoin? Dogecoin gives you a better experience for less cost than Bitcoin.

You can replace "Dogecoin" in the above paragraph with literally any other cryptocurrency and it would still be completely true.

 

[jonny1000]

@cypherdoc not being impolite, just stating a reasonable conclusion (one that I share).

Do you at least see how its not pragmatic and not working?

It means not attacking those who run suitable clients using DDOS attacks, censorship, personal diffamatory attacks, intimidatory legal posturing or anti-competitive back-room agreements.

I have not done any DDOS attacks, censorship, deformation or legal posturing, to my knowledge. As for the "anti-competitive back-room agreements", what about this anti-competitive back-room agreement:

We support the implementation of BIP101. We have found Gavin’s arguments on both the need for larger blocks and the feasibility of their implementation — while safeguarding Bitcoin’s decentralization to be convincing. BIP101 and 8MB blocks are already supported by a majority of the miners and we feel it is time for the industry to unite behind this proposal. Our companies will be ready for larger blocks by December 2015 and we will run code that supports this

Source: https://bitcoinxt.software/industry-letter.pdf

We will only run Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems, eventually containing both SegWit and the hard-fork, in production, for the foreseeable future.

Source: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff#.thhyciny9

How is the August 2015 agreement any better than the February 2016 agreement? Apart from possibly that you agreed with locking in 8GB blocks now and didn't agree with the later agreement. Please can you try to see the other sides point of view. Do you not see many like me felt the same way about the August 2015 agreement as many of you here felt about the HK one? The August 2015 agreement even said that a majority of miners already supported BIP101, which I thought was a malicious, manipulative and deliberate falsehood. The miners did not support BIP101 and the 8GB limit.
[doublepost=1468566766,1468565945][/doublepost]

Why are fees so important to BTC, but apparently are not so important in Dogecoin?

What is the inherent non-monetary non-speculative use of Dogecoin? If it is space on the Dogecoin blockchain and there are no fees, then any Dogecoin output can be used for that, even with a low to zero balance, therefore that is not an inherent value of the doge unit.

 

[freetrader]

@jonny1000

The BIP101 agreement was not based on stifling competition. That little word 'only' makes a big difference.

The first order of business of the HK agreement was to make sure that Classic support, which was seen as threatening to the status quo, did not increase.
You've admitted as much on this forum. AFAIR early leaked drafts of the wording even said something along those lines, which was later amended into the more opaque 'Core-compatible' phraseology.
Didn't change the fact that everyone could see right through what was happening, including Mr Back changing his signature to 'individual' to extricate his company from direct responsibility.

I do see the other side's point of view. I do see that there are those among you who are offended by 'malicious, manipulative and deliberate falsehood'. This gives me some hope that they may yet see through the wool that is being pulled over their eyes by skilled manipulators.

I have not done any DDOS attacks, censorship, deformation or legal posturing, to my knowledge.

I did not claim you have done these personally, only that these are the acts visited upon supporters of bigger blocks from the days of XT onwards. Ask yourself perhaps: "in which way has the 1MB (or less) faction benefited from these occurrences?"
If you (small blockers) cannot be seen to benefit from these, then you will not be called on to ensure they cease.

P.S. Diffamation, not deformation, and nice of you to add "to my knowledge", though it's weird that you cannot confirm it without more conviction. Oh well, I hope you expand your knowledge to arrive at more conviction.

being so bad at politics is exactly why you are losing

Well, I feel that the impacts of Core/Blockstream's work speak for themselves, anyone is free to modify and improve the code, and Bitcoin not only competes with improved versions of itself, but with a wider young community of cryptocurrencies.
The Bitcoin whitepaper does not mention politics except for voting with one's CPU (read: processing power). It speaks about technology. Inefficient (or unworkable) technologies lose out over time against fitter counterparts. Why should money be any different?

 

[Zarathustra]

You got it ass backwards. Why do you think you have to pay off your credit card each month with cash? Why do you think when you apply for a loan, cash is part of your assets evaluated to qualify you for the loan? Why do you think banks themselves evaluate their risk based on how much debt they have relative to liquid assets of which cash is one? Why do you think when a debt default occurs you have to cough up cash to make good? And on and on and on.

why do you think cash is listed as an asset and debts as a liability on standard balance sheets? Why do you think cash is listed as a liability (unique) on the Fed's balance sheet? it's because it's the only game in town that can print.

No cash without credit. No 'moneyness' without credit. Credit is the foundation of the economy and all kind of money.

"ass backwards"

“Our standard account of monetary history is precisely backward,” writes David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. “We did not begin with barter, discover money and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.”

"Why do you think you have to pay off your credit card each month with cash?"

I never pay credit card each month with cash. I pay with bank transfer. The money on all bank accounts represents the credit that someone got from a bank. If you seem creditworthy to them, they will create (give you) money. If not, than not. Banks dont create money out of thin air.

"why do you think cash is listed as an asset and debts as a liability on standard balance sheets?"

The asset that someone books as an asset is booked as a liability on another balance sheet.
Net debt in the world is exactly zero .

 

[jonny1000]

The BIP101 agreement was not based on stifling competition. That little word 'only' makes a big difference.

Well in my view that is not what the BIP101 agreement meant. Are you now claiming that the signatories were saying they were going to run some BIP101 clients and some clients following the existing rules, such that their own clients were incompatible with each other? That is clearly not what they meant and it would have been ridiculous! What the signatories were trying to do was impose the 8GB blocks on the network. They were trying to build momentum by claiming the miners already backed BIP101, when they did not.

Many saw this as a vitriolic move, after Gavin failed to get 10MB merged in Core, he could have started trying to build consensus around 10MB without Core, but instead he went with what to me felt like a vindictive 8GB strategy, driven by ego. I even told him I may support 10MB. This proved to be a fatal error. Nevertheless, he can still earn back respect, if he starts to adopt a more reasonable policy again. In my view the withdrawal of the XT proposal was some progress towards this.

The first order of business of the HK agreement was to make sure that Classic support, which was seen as threatening to the status quo, did not increase.

I agree, one of the main aims of the meeting, for many of the participants, was to ensure Classic was defeated.

Didn't change the fact that everyone could see right through what was happening, including Mr Back changing his signature to 'individual' to extricate his company from direct responsibility.

I would assume the reason he did that is because many from his company were messaging him saying they did not agree with the agreement. Many of these messages were public.

I do see that there are those among you who are offended by 'malicious, manipulative and deliberate falsehood'.

Do you now accept that the claim in the BIP101 agreement that miners supported BIP101 was false? Do you think this may have been a deliberate attempt to get momentum behind Classic on a false pretense?

Ask yourself perhaps: "in which way has the 1MB (or less) faction benefited from these occurrences?"

In my view many of the tactics used by both sides in this "blocksize war" have been counterproductive. Many of the occurrences you mentioned fall into this counterproductive strategy list, in my view. Therefore the large blockers have benefited from some of these occurrences. However, the large blockers have more than offset the benefits of these (from their point of view), with there own counterproductive strategies. There many even be Agent Provocateur type characters on both sides. Please see the list of potentially counterproductive strategies (on both sides) below:

Examples of small block side counterproductive approaches:

• A moderation policy on some forums which was too aggressive, resulting in the Streisand effect
• DDoS attacks on XT/Classic nodes, which made the Classic/XT network more resilient and helped educate the Classic side on the need for robust systems
• Inappropriately conflating errors Gavin made in the CWS incident with his credibility (everyone makes some mistakes)
• Being overconfident and dismissive of the threat from the XT/Classic side
• Questioning the motivation of the large blockers

Examples of large blocker side counterproductive approaches:

• Issuing an excessive plan to lock in increases to 8GB, moving most moderate reasonable people against XT
• Lacking confidence by being too scared for a 95% activation threshold (the normal threshold Core uses), demonstrating weakness
• Aggressive and rude language, turning people away from the large blocker side. e.g. saying a limit is "retarded", "Borgstream" or whatever the latest offensive meme is
• Questioning the motivation of the small blockers
• Engaging in ridiculous conspiracy theories, such as AXA [CS FP] and its chairman Henri De Casties are encouraging Blockstream to limit the blocksize or claims "Blockstream has directed the crippling of Bitcoin in order to provide the solution, for their own future, financial gain", making large blockers look like fools
• Paying one entity to run Classic nodes, which made the node count centralized and volatile
• A mining rewards fund
• Spreading falsehoods such as the Core team are not scaling Bitcoin or have no intention of doing so.
• Conflating the issue of removing the development team with eliminating a network rule

and nice of you to add "to my knowledge", though it's weird that you cannot confirm it without more conviction. Oh well, I hope you expand your knowledge to arrive at more conviction.

The reason I said that is because some of you may accuse me of something based on my comments in this forum, like attacks.

Inefficient (or unworkable) technologies lose out over time against fitter counterparts. Why should money be any different?

I do not know that it should be any different, over the long term.

 

[awemany]

[...]
I have not done any DDOS attacks, censorship, deformation or legal posturing, to my knowledge.
[...]

[...]
P.S. Diffamation, not deformation, and nice of you to add "to my knowledge", though it's weird that you cannot confirm it without more conviction. Oh well, I hope you expand your knowledge to arrive at more conviction.
[...]

Not to nitpick, and with the risk of being wrong as a non-native English speaker: You are both talking about defamation, correct?

 

[jonny1000]

@awemany
I am not sure what diffamation means. When I first read the comment I thought @freetrader meant defamation. Sorry about my spelling

 

[freetrader]

Let's all converge on that spelling ;-) I believe we have consensus, thanks @awemany.

 

[Phlip]

All the video's of the OnChainScaling conference are now added to the new www.onchainscaling.com website.

I am pleased with the fact that as we intended their is a diverse collection of opinions amongst the presenters even though core refused to participate. (They were explicitly invited to contribute!)
It is sad that some core supporters and devs were of the opinion that sharing information and discussing on chain scaling was not wanted and a negative thing. As Bitcoin is permissionless we did it anyway and will most likely do a second event in the near future.

Idea's for future speakers and feedback are always welcome. Just dm me and I will pass it on.

Btw Meni Rosenfeld's ideas about hard forks are very interesting even though he seems a bit misinformed about XT and Classic

 

[solex]

I think Stolfi is fair to contrast Bitcoin with a ponzi scheme as Bitcoin does appear to share some characteristics with them, depending on how you look at Bitcoin. For example you could argue that if nobody used Bitcoin, then there would be no miner fees and no demand for bitcoin to pay the miner fees, then miner incentives would fall to low levels and the system would collapse. Therefore one could argue Bitcoin falls to zero if people do not use it, which is kind of like a ponzi scheme, but I guess you could argue it is the same for almost all businesses.

I think its fair to contrast Facebook with a ponzi scheme as Facebook does appear to share some characteristics with them, depending on how you look at Facebook. For example you could argue that if nobody used Facebook, then there would be no likes and no demand for corporations to pay the advertisers, then the share price would fall to low levels and the system would collapse. Therefore one could argue Facebook falls to zero if people do not use it, which is kind of like a ponzi scheme, but I guess you could argue it is the same for almost all businesses, except for currencies which is a separate case depending upon the known properties required for exchanging value.

 

[freetrader]

@jonny1000 :

I do agree that the statement "BIP101 and 8MB blocks are already supported by a majority of the miners" in the industry letter was not based on fact.

deliberate attempt to get momentum behind Classic

I would agree that it was a deliberate attempt to get momentum behind XT.

I disagree with your assessment of the consequences of their support - they do not mention exclusivity in that letter. And I think that is a crucial difference between the approaches taken by XT/Classic and Core.
One is a competitive proposition, the other feels it has to use anti-competitive means to achieve its ends.

In the interests of balancing your lopsided list of counterproductive approaches out a bit, based on reality, I present to you:

Further examples of small blocker side counterproductive approaches:

• Issuing a restrictive SegWit omnibus plan which denies simple block size increases past at 1MB, moving significant on-chain scaling into an undefined future and introducing dubious economic distortions
  
• Pushing unwanted changes such as RBF on the community against consensus and without 95% activation when it suits Core
  
• Accusing others of being blockers when a 95% activation (e.g. SegWit) seems unlikely, even though Core would not hesitate to exercise a 5% veto
  
• Aggressive and rude language, turning developers away from the small blocker side. e.g. saying Bitcoin is not a "coffee money", terms such as "Hearnia", "Gavincoin", "Toomimcoin", "Gavinistas"
  
• Questioning the motivation of the large blockers (!)
  
• Engaging in ridiculous conspiracy theories, such as bigger blocks are a CIA initiative pushed by Gavin/Hearn etc., will lead to immediate decentralization, overturning of the 21M coin limit, doomsday collapse of coin value due to HF, ...
  
• Turning a blind eye to your own centralized node count (have a look at the sudden Core node collapse in the pic below - tell me what you think!)
  
• Miners rewarding their own customers with priority service
• Spreading falsehoods such as the Classic team are not competent and capable of scaling Bitcoin in a safe way.
• Conflating the issue of removing the development team with eliminating a network rule (!)

The more I think about it the longer I can make this list too. But I do agree it's counterproductive. We already know this is unnecessary and just delays the implementation of better solutions and growth of Bitcoin.

O lookey here, a roughly ~750 node drop in Core 0.12 nodes. Centralized much?

(About Gavin)

Nevertheless, he can still earn back respect, if he starts to adopt a more reasonable policy again.

He still has my full respect, and I believe many others feel the same. He's someone who can apologize and correct himself when he's wrong, and he's shown that on multiple occasions. I'll take that anyday over those who lie repeatedly and unabashedly. That's too reminiscent of today's style of politics.

And I wanted to say, that if you're looking for reasonable policy, the conservative 2MB change with SegWit on the roadmap is about as reasonable (read: conciliatory) as I can imagine. You're not going to get a better deal (although as I've said to you before, you're always welcome to take Classic and change the 75/28 parameters to something you think the community would get behind sooner). But somehow that hasn't happened.

 

[jonny1000]

Btw Meni Rosenfeld's ideas about hard forks are very interesting even though he seems a bit misinformed about XT and Classic

I think Meni's presentation was excellent. I have tremendous respect for the guy. As for his misconception about XT, is that because he said governance was based on a dictator idea? I think his view on that may be due to the following:

Decisions are made through agreement between Mike and Gavin, with Mike making the final call if a serious dispute were to arise.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160107175337/https://bitcoinxt.software/faq.html

Interestingly this has now been changed to the following, making it less of a dictator model:

Decisions are made by the current maintainer with input from the Bitcoin XT development team. When there is a disagreement the current maintainer will have the final say.

Source: https://bitcoinxt.software/faq.html

Maybe this is not fair, but if Core did something like this, I imagine some large blockers would freak out a bit.

 

[Phlip]

With only one implementation/piece of software to choose from I guess one person having final say might be a worry. With multiple versions to choose from it is certainly not a problem as a version of the protocol is not what bitcoin is. It is something stakeholders can choose to run. The ultimate decision lies with them and not with any dev-team. Or so it should be for Bitcoin to be truly decentralized

 

[jonny1000]

Further examples of small blocker side counterproductive approaches:

Lets make a table that compares both sides, line by line! I think you will find the tactics and methods used are very similar, almost identical. Perhaps the table will help people more objectively see both sides of the argument and have a more balanced neutral view.

Ill start off:

• HK agreement = XT letter of support
• /r/bitcoin moderation = people with multiple Reddit accounts down-voting small block comments
• Claims Greg is crippling Bitcoin on purpose to help AXA = Claims Gavin is trying to take over Bitcoin for the CIA
• Using stupid language like Borgstream = Using stupid language like Toomincoin

Pushing unwanted changes such as RBF on the community against consensus and without 95% activation when it suits Core

I am sorry, but this one is just ridiculous. RBF is a local decision about how miners construct their blocks from the mempool data, it has nothing to do with the protocol rules on block validity. There is no consensus on RBF and we cant even measure if there is consensus. How on earth could there be 95% miner consensus for this!! that makes no sense! Please stop brining this up, all it does is reduces the credibility of those saying this.

In my view bringing RBF up demonstrates a total lack of understanding about the small block point of view. It seems we are discussing things on a totally different wavelength. It illustrates the need for more discussion and debate.

Does anyone else here understand why RBF is totally different to a fork of the rules, where we need consensus?

 

[cypherdoc]

Yes, it may be counter productive but, i have to add the unscrupulous threat of lawsuits against Classic devs and the unrealistic threat that all current kore devs will quit.

@jonny1000 :

I do agree that the statement "BIP101 and 8MB blocks are already supported by a majority of the miners" in the industry letter was not based on fact.


I would agree that it was a deliberate attempt to get momentum behind XT.

I disagree with your assessment of the consequences of their support - they do not mention exclusivity in that letter. And I think that is a crucial difference between the approaches taken by XT/Classic and Core.
One is a competitive proposition, the other feels it has to use anti-competitive means to achieve its ends.

In the interests of balancing your lopsided list of counterproductive approaches out a bit, based on reality, I present to you:

Further examples of small blocker side counterproductive approaches:

• Issuing a restrictive SegWit omnibus plan which denies simple block size increases past at 1MB, moving significant on-chain scaling into an undefined future and introducing dubious economic distortions
  
• Pushing unwanted changes such as RBF on the community against consensus and without 95% activation when it suits Core
  
• Accusing others of being blockers when a 95% activation (e.g. SegWit) seems unlikely, even though Core would not hesitate to exercise a 5% veto
  
• Aggressive and rude language, turning developers away from the small blocker side. e.g. saying Bitcoin is not a "coffee money", terms such as "Hearnia", "Gavincoin", "Toomimcoin", "Gavinistas"
  
• Questioning the motivation of the large blockers (!)
  
• Engaging in ridiculous conspiracy theories, such as bigger blocks are a CIA initiative pushed by Gavin/Hearn etc., will lead to immediate decentralization, overturning of the 21M coin limit, doomsday collapse of coin value due to HF, ...
  
• Turning a blind eye to your own centralized node count (have a look at the sudden Core node collapse in the pic below - tell me what you think!)
  
• Miners rewarding their own customers with priority service
• Spreading falsehoods such as the Classic team are not competent and capable of scaling Bitcoin in a safe way.
• Conflating the issue of removing the development team with eliminating a network rule (!)

The more I think about it the longer I can make this list too. But I do agree it's counterproductive. We already know this is unnecessary and just delays the implementation of better solutions and growth of Bitcoin.

O lookey here, a roughly ~750 node drop in Core 0.12 nodes. Centralized much?

(About Gavin)

He still has my full respect, and I believe many others feel the same. He's someone who can apologize and correct himself when he's wrong, and he's shown that on multiple occasions. I'll take that anyday over those who lie repeatedly and unabashedly. That's too reminiscent of today's style of politics.

And I wanted to say, that if you're looking for reasonable policy, the conservative 2MB change with SegWit on the roadmap is about as reasonable (read: conciliatory) as I can imagine. You're not going to get a better deal (although as I've said to you before, you're always welcome to take Classic and change the 75/28 parameters to something you think the community would get behind sooner). But somehow that hasn't happened.

 

[cliff]

LN is likely to increase demand for space in blocks and therefore increase miner revenue.

@jonny1000 - Can you talk more about this? Was there a study done or something? If so, I would be interested to know what variables were looked at, how data was collected, and how the future was projected (i.e. what model was used for this projection). I'd also be interested in knowing how far into the future the projection went. I've always assumed no such analysis has been done since nothing in that regard seems to have been discussed - IIRC. I would love to spend the weekend dorking-out on stats and so forth if you could push them our way.

Gracias,

 

[Erdogan]

@cypherdoc

careful about this. thing is, there's only a small slice of ppl like us who understand the blocksize debate

Fair enough.