Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jonny1000]

To review, no, Classic does not "lock in 25% miner opposition at the time of activation"

Well I just think you are being pedantic here. It is true to say at the time of Classic activation, there is exactly 25% miner opposition as measured over the last 1,000 blocks. It is also true that there will be no significant statistical measure demonstrating actual miner support significantly greater than 75%, although it is possible that more miners switch to Classic in this short period, there will not exist enough evidence to support the claim of the switch at the time.

Now let me just remind you again, in light of the recent ETH/ETC situation, why Classic is such a bad idea.

• ETC survived, despite having only c1% miner support at the time of the hardfork. Bitcoin Core will have c25% miner support, (although in theory there is a remote possibilty it could be lower than 25% due to an uncharecteristic sudden and lucky move, no evidence of this will exists)
• ETC built up a strong market price, despite a lot of uncertainty at the start. With Classic/Core, due to the previous example, speculators will be ready to buy Core coins
• Core has a massive asymmetric advantage over Classic, as soon as it has the lead, Classic coins vanish from people’s wallets. This will put a huge amount of fear into the minds of Classic holders, making Classic very weak in the market

might decide to stay on a 1MB4EVA chain following a hard fork to bigger blocks

There are no significant 1MB4EVA people, please stop spreading these false, misleading rumors designed to cause division in the community.

 

[freetrader]

@jonny1000 :

ETC survived, despite having only c1% miner support at the time of the hardfork.

Citation please. This seems like a false claim to me based on the information I got on Reddit around the time of the ETH/ETC fork. I would gladly be proven wrong in this case (because it also flies in the face of the rest of your own argument for 95% consensus being a requirement in the case of an asymmetric fork).

All your bullet points are obviously nullified by a symmetric fork (which you have admitted), meaning there is essentially no more asymmetry problem to discuss and the ETH/ETC comparisons are a sideshow now.
Coins that are in my wallet stay in my wallet until I send them off - yay crypto and clean forks. All Classic holders will realize they need this security, and jump on the harder forking train. Congratulations, Core, your stalling tactics have ensured that any coming split WILL put you out of control (or rather, as previous posters have pointed out, in 100% control of your 1MB coin or whatever suits your invisible business plan).
Core, you might however have to apologize to your investors for losing control of "the asset", or misleading them about the extent to which you might have claimed you had control in the first place.

The rest of us will hopefully be able to go on with our lives using Bitcoin productively.

@Roger_Murdock , @xhiggy : thanks for continuing to summon the mental energy to lay bare Johnny's faulty logic. I am only barely resisting that "Ignore" button, but posts like yours are so complete that we will be able to refute his further mistaken arguments with much greater ease. It is becoming a path well trodden.

 

[jonny1000]

Citation please. This seems like a false claim to me based on the information I got on Reddit around the time of the ETH/ETC fork. I would gladly be proven wrong in this case (because it also flies in the face of the rest of your own argument for 95% consensus being a requirement in the case of an asymmetric fork).

Ok my mistake, perhaps I read that from enthusiastic pro forkers then. Lets say 85% then, with the source below:

We would like to congratulate the Ethereum community on a successfully completed hard fork.Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the “Dark DAO” and “Whitehat DAO” contracts into the WithdrawDAO recovery contract. The fork itself took place smoothly, with roughly 85% of miners mining on the fork:

Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/20/hard-fork-completed/

Please note 85% > 75%

All your bullet points are obviously nullified by a symmetric fork (which you have admitted), meaning there is essentially no more asymmetry problem to discuss and the ETH/ETC comparisons are a sideshow now.

They are not nullified, the asymmetric nature gives a massive advantage to the Core side compared to the Classic side. ETC did not have this advantage and still did pretty well, that is the point.

 

[freetrader]

---

Me to jonny1000: All your bullet points are obviously nullified by a symmetric fork ...
jonny1000 to me: They are not nullified, the asymmetric nature gives a massive advantage ...

@jonny1000 , we're talking past each other here obviously.

 

[Zarathustra]

But to address your more fundamental point that a Classic-style hard fork with a 75% trigger might result in a persistent (or semi-persistent) chain split -- sure, it might. But so what?

So what? Don't ask this the cheerleaders of those sick rulers. They don't answer. It's their mentality of the soviet politbüro. Construct walls around their empire and shoot on anyone who tries to fork away.

They have already confirmed that they will rather tear bitcoin into the abyss than let the majority allow to fork away from their new rule (full blocks).

 

[agilewalker]

Tom Zander's Flexible Transaction Proposal (http://zander.github.io/posts/Flexible_Transactions/) should be seriously considered if HF is happening. Beside many great beneficial points the article mentions, it could make the wire protocol much more cleaner and easier for other alternative Bitcoin clients to implement which is a step forward for decentralization of Bitcoin development.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@cliff Announcement soon ?

Well, if they already start with the handshaking we can guess, that curren PoW Bitcoin is done.

Just wait for the "we have consensus" declaration and white smoke.

Anyway I'm leaving for vacation for about a week, after that I'm happy to help with the PoW fork where ever I can.
[doublepost=1470125376][/doublepost]btw, anybody knows what's up with @VeritasSapere ?
Haven't seen him here for quite a while.

edit: Never mind, he is active.

 

[freetrader]

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4vqb07/transcript_of_conversation_with_dan_boneh_at_sv/

It's unclear from exactly which meeting this was, I'm guessing Dan Boneh was not necessarily an invitee of the "Core devs + miners" meeting, but that this was a follow-up "unplanned discussion with other interesting parties" meeting.

Anyhow, it looks like a useful transcript and a location where more meeting transcripts might appear.

~~~{~{@ X @}~}~~~​

ThePiachu with his take on the necessity of strong consensus and justification of 51% attacks as part of an "upgrade process" (lol):

Kill it with fire

So when all is said and done, it looks like the only way to ensure only one version of Bitcoin is around, one would need to reach an overwhelming consensus with the developers, the miners and the exchanges to support only one part of the fork. Anything short of that will create a split network with duplicate tokens being created on both tines of the fork.

To ensure the rest of the network follows suit, someone should put aside some funds and mining power to be able to execute 51% attacks on any un-fork that would start being traded at an exchange. While a 51% attack in normal cases might be in the legal murky territory, perhaps using it to enforce a hard fork might not be seen as an attack on the currency, but as a part of the upgrade process. The law might not catch up to this conundrum for years still.

https://tpbit.blogspot.ca/2016/08/contentious-bitcoin-fork-will-create.html

Wow, respect pb1x (I'm referring to the last paragraph):

Even in that case I'd suggest not assuming you can be a jerk just because you're on the Internet and everyone is an asshole on the Internet whatevs. I'd give people plenty of time and heads up to switch their PoW and continue separately, amicably

~~~{~{@ X @}~}~~~​

Is this close to 85%, @jonny1000 ?
Didn't you claim that around that figure OPPOSE a Bitcoin hard fork, based on number of people running nodes?

Source: https://coin.dance/poli/hardforkforblocksizelimit

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

 

[Tsontar]

Y'all, I had my run-in with jonny1000 on rbtc many months ago. He's both exhausting and dedicated, as you can see from his circular arguments in that thread.

His argument at the time was: there was overwhelming consensus for 2MB blocks, but strong consensus *against* Classic's 75% threshold & 28-day activation. He claimed to know plenty of miners who would support 95% / 6-mo activation (which is bullshit but let's move forward).

So I called him out. I explained that since he claimed that he knew that there was overwhelming miner consensus for 2MB blocks, he should just submit a pull request to Pieter for a 2MB hardfork with 95% consensus threshold and 6 month activation; or submit it to Thomas / jtoomim on the Classic team. Either way, with such strong consensus behind him (his claim), miners would immediately embrace his brilliant solution that brought an end to the impasse and reunited the community, making him "The Hero That Saved Bitcoin."

Characteristically, he refused to acknowledge any suggestion that his brilliant idea which already had 95% support and which would save Bitcoin ought to be encoded, even though the changes would be utterly trivial to code.

I even offered to code it for him.

So...

 

[jonny1000]

Is this close to 85%, @jonny1000 ?
Didn't you claim that around that figure OPPOSE a Bitcoin hard fork, based on number of people running nodes?

Source: https://coin.dance/poli/hardforkforblocksizelimit

That 82% figure is close to 85% yes. If a suitable sybil defense mechanism was used that may be interesting.

If you look at the following website, you can see that around 85% of the nodes are running Core:
http://xtnodes.com/#nodes_pie_graph

To repeat again, I do want a hardfork to increase the blocksize limit, if I were to vote on that poll I would vote yes. However, I strongly oppose Classic. Classic was implemented poorly, such that even if there was 85% consensus across the community for Classic, after a destructive and long battle lasting several moths, Classic is still likely to be the losing fork. After the defeat people who purchased Classic coins would see their funds vanish.

He claimed to know plenty of miners who would support 95%

I made this comment, based on public comments from the large mining pools saying they would vote for Classic if it had a 90% threshold and then a further discussion with other large pools (excluding Bitmain, who would have obviously gone along with this)

Since then, new evidence emerged to support this claim. Apparently miners had this weird plan to choose the strongest Classic supporter who had 15% of the hashrate or more, with a condition not to vote for Classic until it reached 75%. This would push Classic up to 90%. Therefore miners were clearly very keen on 90% or more they were even discussing playing these weird games. Why Classic was not just drooped and a new 95% version released I do not know. Perhaps all the Classic supporters thought 95% was a weird small block conspiracy?

Luckily, I think opinion has moved a bit since the ETC/ETH situation. I think a majority of hashrate now agrees that at least 95% miner consensus may be required. I think the miners are likely to support SegWit now.

 

[cliff]

Gold is up around $7 since this time yesterday.
BTC is down around $16 since this time yesterday.
Shares of GBTC are way off their highs, trading at around $87/share
Health insurer Aetna thinking about scaling down or exiting ObamaCare market.
Oil is up a bit this morning, after dipping below $40/barrel yesterday due to supply glut concerns.

------------
In memoriam.

------------
@lunar - Not sure, just sharing a tweet I saw. Would be nice to get a position or summary statement from someone RE: the meeting.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Greg Maxwell is happy with course of the meeting, I think we can now say that the fight is pretty much over then.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1570965.msg15786122#msg15786122

Join the ranks at /r/btcfork, too many good people wasted their time to help idiots, whose only qualification is powering up electric heaters.

 

[freetrader]

Wow, if that thread is representative of BCT nowadays, I sure am glad to be here.

P.S. I detect no happiness in GM's summary. What's the giveaway?

 

[theZerg]

anyone know where to get an up-to-date days destroyed chart?

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@freetrader

I thought it was really positive-- and good to meet up with people face to face that I'd only talked with in email before.[...]
Improved communication will lead to fewer potential avenues for miscommunication and better cooperation in the future.

Does sound pretty confident and happy to me.

 

[pekatete]

The market clearly likes the thus far known / perceived outcome of that meeting. Neckbeard has every reason to be happy.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Well I just think you are being pedantic here.

Well, suffice it to say that I vehemently disagree that it's "pedantic" to call out what I see as a fairly-egregious and hugely-misleading misuse of two commonly-used English terms, namely "opposition" and "locked in."

Now let me just remind you again, in light of the recent ETH/ETC situation, why Classic is such a bad idea.

• ETC survived, despite having only c1% miner support at the time of the hardfork. Bitcoin Core will have c25% miner support, (although in theory there is a remote possibilty it could be lower than 25% due to an uncharecteristic sudden and lucky move, no evidence of this will exists.

Again, there's nothing wrong with ETC's survival! The people that value its characteristics get to have the chain they want. "Minority rights" are respected. I haven't seen any evidence that only "1%" of miners supported the ETC chain at the time of the hardfork, but assuming that's true, so what? That would just mean that miners initially badly misjudged investor sentiment, but that the market still prevailed! That's great news! We want investors to be in control. Miners are just a proxy for investors. And no, (and again) Classic's activation does not imply that Core will have 25% miner support.

• ETC built up a strong market price, despite a lot of uncertainty at the start.

I know, it's great isn't it?

• With Classic/Core, due to the previous example, speculators will be ready to buy Core coins

Well, maybe, and if so, bless their hearts. Good for them! The important point is that investors will be able to have their say. If a fork happens, it tells us that a lot of people highly valued the characteristics offered by the fork. If a rump chain persists, that tells us that a lot of other people highly valued the characteristics offered by the original chain.

• Core has a massive asymmetric advantage over Classic, as soon as it has the lead, Classic coins vanish from people’s wallets. This will put a huge amount of fear into the minds of Classic holders, making Classic very weak in the market

No, it has a tiny, theoretical and (if necessary) easily-neutralized advantage.

There are no significant 1MB4EVA people, please stop spreading these false, misleading rumors designed to cause division in the community.

Well, that's great news. That should make the "risk" of a persistent split even less likely. If Core supporters don't really oppose on-chain scaling but just have a different preference with respect to the timing, that seems to be a much smaller philosophical difference. In that case, they should be much less willing to suffer the loss in network effect that would result from a persistent split just to get their way.

 

[MoonShot]

BTC price is dropping? or you are referring to ETC/BTC market?

 

[cliff]

This is hardcore:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/barack-obama-calls-on-gop-leaders-to-stop-endorsing-donald-trump-1470154797