Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[theZerg]

Yesterday I was thinking about the impossible irony of the BS position. So I think I'll share and maybe someone can tighten and meme-ify it:

The strategy is to "fail their way to success". I mean, if they can make using Bitcoin so unpalatable that users are driven away then all the remaining users will be happy with 1MB blocks.

Ok here's my /. attempt:

The Blockstream master plan to fail Bitcoin to success!

1. Employ lost txs and tx delays to drive away people who use BTC as money.
2. Use high fees and tx supply space limits to destroy use cases and deter companies from deploying new services.
3. ????
4. Profit?

 

[cliff]

@theZerg

 

[cypherdoc]

Yesterday I was thinking about the impossible irony of the BS position. So I think I'll share and maybe someone can tighten and meme-ify it:

The strategy is to "fail their way to success". I mean, if they can make using Bitcoin so unpalatable that users are driven away then all the remaining users will be happy with 1MB blocks.

Ok here's my /. attempt:

The Blockstream master plan to fail Bitcoin to success!

1. Employ lost txs and tx delays to drive away people who use BTC as money.
2. Use high fees and tx supply space limits to destroy use cases and deter companies from deploying new services.
3. ????
4. Profit?

this is why in my wildest hopes Blockstream shorted BTC. and i mean for real on an exchange somewhere. b/c we already know they've shorted it from a conceptual and philosophical viewpoint by insisting it won't scale and spending all this time, effort, and money to dev LN & SC's.

how fitting if one day we could fit Blockstream into my meme of "most ppl investing in cryptocurrencies will lose money"?

 

[bluemoon]

The Blockstream master plan to fail Bitcoin to success!

1. Employ lost txs and tx delays to drive away people who use BTC as money.
2. Use high fees and tx supply space limits to destroy use cases and deter companies from deploying new services.
3. ????
4. Profit?

Megalomaniacs that they are, I wonder if they are simply using the Bitcoin war to train an army of trolls and censors capable of dominating the world's internet hive mind.

 

[freetrader]

@theZerg: there is no question mark on that "Profit". They are earning fat stacks. How much does Peter Todd estimate the time of 4 of their developers is worth for 2 months? That's right, $320K.

I'm not saying that "master plan" corresponds to reality. Only that it needs to be taken seriously as a theory, and that we should work on alternatives to prevent its realization (steps 1 and 2).

 

[cliff]

I don't think Blockstream is evil - but i think their priorities or interests are way different than a lot of users atm.

I think they're either a front org for a three-letter-type agency or they're trying to keep bitcoin outside that purview. Either way, their interests aren't necessarily direct, appreciable, easily align-able with the mass adoption, or evil. Consider that Lightening channels/hubs are a great way to monitor the lines and block the stream from a lot of p2p comms/txs. Agents and operatives don't commit felonies usually - hence why GM may have released jstor articles that are so old that they were already in the public domain. Consider time at juniper and other curious working experience; timing of community entrance vis-a-vis cia visit and silk road collapse; etc.

There are clues both ways - quite the brain teaser. Its fun just to watch and speculate.

Edit - this twitter account has been curious to me - what is the purpose?

https://twitter.com/petertoddeth

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

you/we have to take these types of arguments seriously. isn't open source itself plus the idea of global anonymous contribution supposed to take care of patent trolling by itself?:

http://techrights.org/2016/07/22/blockstream-swpats/

The blogpost seems to be down atm but I think I already saw it earlier without reading.
But afaik Blockstream develops open source as well as closed source. And for the letter it would be bad, if they patented some methods, that other companies couldn't use later on.

As for bitcoin itself: Here I don't think patents matter that much anyhow. It is more about the ecosystem imho.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Aquent]

"With hindsight, we can say that the primary mistake of the development team in favor of scaling bitcoin onchain was the requirement of 75% of miners prior to activation. This requirement distorted the balance of power and led to a complete breakdown in governance as well as a protracted and never ending debate as a decision was actually never made. Exchanges and businesses, despite being overwhelmingly in favor of scaling and being a pillar of their own, were reduced to a mere media platform while miners were turned into mini-celebrities and forced to identify themselves.

Had it been a flag day, whatever the decision, there would have at least been a decision and the division that currently exists within bitcoin would have long ceased, with the losing side having no choice but to accept the decision or create their own blockchain."

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ethereum-hardfork-advances-blockchain-governance-technology/

 

[solex]

Sound economic sense:

Since no amount of price signal will increase supply, price will go as high as required to cause demand-destruction.
That seems obvious but the "just pay a higher fee" crowd don't seem to get that if paying a higher fee is all it takes to get a spot on the blockchain then the fee will climb even higher than that - as high as it needs to go to stop you using Bitcoin and go back to the banking system.

sockpuppet2001

Unsound economic nonsense:

If fees rise high enough, and people pay them, that sounds like a fantastic problem to have...

Pieter Wuille

Wuille is clearly a genius blockchain programmer but a babe in the woods when it comes to economics. Demand destruction is rampant right now as he tinkers with SegWit which will do little to alleviate the capacity bottleneck. I'm not convinced about the Blockstream NWO/Dr Evil theory, just about them being greedy to the point of stupidity.

 

[freetrader]

"With hindsight, we can say that the primary mistake of the development team in favor of scaling bitcoin onchain was the requirement of 75% of miners prior to activation. This requirement distorted the balance of power and led to a complete breakdown in governance as well as a protracted and never ending debate as a decision was actually never made. /

I realize this is your opinion, but I vehemently disagree.

To attribute a "breakdown in governance" on this choice of parameter is just insane.

Ethereum's hardfork was - according to the vote figures I read, and I'm quoting them from memory - about 80/20 in favor prior to the fork, measured roughly the same in various polling mechanisms. It was in the ballpark.

Which suggests to me that the 75% choice was a perfectly reasonable one for a smooth transition. With or without a flag day, if miners are not in support the Classic fork doesn't happen. In fact, the flag day for classic is the expiry date minus whatever grace period is still needed for it to activate. (roughly, I may be technically off here but you get the picture)

 

[Aquent]

Those vote figures are based on a decision that had to be made in light of a flag day. Absent the flag day, as we have seen, in my opinion, governance fully breaks down and with it too incentives as actors open themself to direct influence and even worse, a decision is never actually made.

Having a threshold, in my view, was a clear and obvious mistake, but of course that can only be said with hindsight.

 

[freetrader]

If anything, I would say then the flag day (expiry) for Classic was put too far in the future. Perhaps June this year might have been appropriate, since the filling-up of blocks was predictable, the predictions made turned out to be quite accurate and waiting until 2018 to get a 2MB if we knew blocks were full already would make little sense because of the growth stop and loss to other cryptocurrencies in the meantime.
It was predictable that if the situation went on as long as it had until now, that eventually the 2MB choice would also be outdated (as can be seen by miners and people like @jonny1000 talking about how a 4MB or 8MB size would also be acceptable now).

But I agree, hindsight is 20/20.

 

[solex]

I am thinking that the 2MB was a mistake as it is a short-term band-aid. Lots of people could see that. BIP100 was massively liked by the miners, about 75%, and is a permanent solution. Classic would have done better to offer that in the first place.

 

[Bloomie]

sorry guys; the extent of my mod privileges only extends to "warning" spammers and "moving" spam threads out of the Economics Forum. if i could delete or simply move spam posts like the above, and in the other 2 spammed threads, i'd be all over it. but @Bloomie reserves that privilege for himself.

@cypherdoc, we have covered this issue via PM dozens of times. Spam accounts are banned from the backend. No, I will not give you access to the server or the forum's backend. Merely deleting spam posts is counter-productive because it doesn't give people the ability to flag the post as spam.

Spam is a natural occurrence on the internet. The absolute best way to handle spam is to flag it via the Report button in order to give me the ability to review the alleged spammer's account.

Lastly, I do not reserve any "privileges" for myself. Maintaining this forum is tedious work that has to be done on the daily basis, and I do it for the good of the Bitcoin community, for free. I don't appreciate inflammatory language directed toward me or aggressive demands coming from you. If you continue this, like you have over the past few months, then we should reconsider your moderatorship, which is mostly a vanity title anyway, as there is almost no moderating that needs to be done in this sub-forum.

 

[albin]

@solex

In retrospect I feel like BIP100 would've been way better than the direction things seem to be going Core-side now. Even with the 20th percentile vote (which if I remember correctly was simply Maxwell's advice), this idea beats the Flexcap scam.

 

[freetrader]

‘Wolf of Wall Street’ ironically financed by $3B web of Malaysian money-laundering malfeasance, Justice Department says
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/wolf-wall-street-financed-3b-malaysian-fraud-web-u-s-article-1.2720234

Federal officials, in their California court filing, indicated they were hoping to seize proceeds from the 2013 movie, along with luxury properties in New York and California, artwork by Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, and a $35 million private jet.

Yeah, that *was* a pretty luxurious property

 

[theZerg]

I think that classic looked for the smallest compromise possible. But since no compromise is possible with core, I hope that Classic devs reassess and choose the scaling model that they find most appropriate.

If I thought block size should be part of consensus, I'd be an advocate for short term supply-side flexibility combined with something long term like Bitpay's N*median proposal.

Gmax once suggested a "flexcap" that increases difficulty when block size increases. While this is interesting technically, it makes the economic modelling very unclear. That is, its hard to decide whether the txn's extra fee makes the large block worthwhile.

Instead I still like my original proposal, which was simply to calculate the average fee/byte of the last N blocks' "normal space" and allow txns that pay exponentially more than that average to increase the block size linearly.

Its interesting to combine both of these algorithms, because a period of tremendous uptake would drive the short term block size higher which then drives the long-term "bitpay" block size faster then it would normally rise. This is what we want...

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

11 days without newly positive sentiment from @Zangelbert Bingledack
Very worrying ...

On vacation in the states...

For some positive sentiment in the face of altcoin encroachment, just remember that Eth is royally screwed as it doesn't even have a clear vision anymore, the market caps of Eth and Steem (and Dash) are vastly inflated by premines (a realistic reckoning should have them near Monero), and Bitcoin is in the process of digesting the huge meal of dealing with Blockstream now, rather than later as it would have been if Gavin had raised the cap before leaving. We get the pain now and the benefits later.

Some scariness is to be expected, and some friction from miners and hardforking fear is par for the course, but the problem is its own solution. Let those who don't understand flee Bitcoin now for altcoins, only to come back later at vastly higher prices. That just means more money for those that do understand, though patience is required.

One thing we know won't work is to switch around between ledgers. Either forking friction is so high that cryptocurrency is doomed, or it isn't that high. I am pretty sure it isn't that high. All it takes is a sizable group of investors to be *sure* they want to break away and raise the blocksize cap even if it means changing PoW. Even most of *us* aren't quite there yet, so again it's a self-solving problem.

 

[priestc]

BIP100 was massively liked by the miners, about 75%, and is a permanent solution. Classic would have done better to offer that in the first place.

Classic "failed" because it was contentious. If BIP100 had been presented to the miners as an official core release with full blockstream support, 100% of the miners would have supported it. Sort of like how 100% of the country accepts a new president even if 100% of the population did not vote for that candidate. The 75% in that vote does not correlate to the adoption rate.

The only way any blocksize increase can happen is if it comes from core. I predict another "contentious hard forks", no matter the deployment scheme, will lead to the same fate as XT and Classic.