Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Bagatell]

@cliff He should know better after his lecture to the brits on brexit.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@cliff It's been amazing to watch America descend into full socialist dystopia mode.

Silicon Valley has dropped every pretence of neutrality. All the major social media platforms are engaging in open electioneering and they don't even bother to hide it.

Less shockingly, traditional media is going into blatant propaganda mode to an extent that would make 1980s Pravda blush.

I guess the marxists are done playing the long march through the institutions game and are now willing to openly make their final violent takeover play.

 

[cliff]

BTC a smidge above 604 - Bitfinex shows a $118K buy-wall at 604.00
EDIT ^ posted before discovering hack, but after it happened. Trading halted. Future updates will come from Tradeblock's XBX Index, which shows a price of $597.4 atm.

ETC at .0048+ - been hovering there all day.

Crude back under $40/barrel.

Gold up $12/oz since my AM post.
[doublepost=1470161469][/doublepost]BITFINEX HACKED - Statement below
https://www.bitfinex.com/

Security breach on Bitfinex
Today we discovered a security breach that requires us to halt all trading on Bitfinex, as well as halt all digital token deposits to and withdrawals from Bitfinex.

We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up.

The theft is being reported to — and we are co-operating with — law enforcement.

As we account for individualized customer losses, we may need to settle open margin positions, associated financing, and/or collateral affected by the breach. Any settlements will be at the current market prices as of 18:00 UTC. We are taking this necessary accounting step to normalize account balances with the objective of resuming operations. We will look at various options to address customer losses later in the investigation. While we are halting all operations at this time, we can confirm that the breach was limited to bitcoin wallets; the other digital tokens traded on Bitfinex are unaffected.

We will post updates as and when appropriate on our status page, bitfinex.statuspage.io. We are deeply concerned about this issue and we are committing every resource to try to resolve it. We ask for the community’s patience as we unravel the causes and consequences of this breach.

bitfinex.statuspage.io, support@bitfinex.com

 

[Tsontar]

I made this comment, based on public comments from the large mining pools

That's interesting, because you told me you know them and based the comment on having spoken to them personally.

I am based in Hong Kong/China and speak to large pool operators.

Oops.

 

[cliff]

I guess this might be where some of the lost Bitfinex funds went :

 

[dwaltrip]

This is hardcore:

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

You disagree? I don't like Hillary at all, but Trump is a delusional, incoherent, woefully incompetent, savagely self-contradictory, divisive, blatantly racist, pandering megalomaniac who gleefully and eagerly abandons all pretense of truth and authenticity. He is dangerous. He's a loose cannon with zero empathy and understanding of others, and a distorted view of reality.

I do understand the frustration of his supporters. The middle class in America has been wrecked in the past 30 years or so. The majority of the gains from globalism have gone to the poor in the developing countries and the rich in the developed worlds, while the middle class in US (and other nations I belive) stagnated hard.

However, Trump is not the answer...

 

[Justus Ranvier]

By the way, all this talk about making hard forks symmetric has a very simple solution:

If fork requires the generation transaction to be in flexible transactions format, and the other fork does not recognize flexible transactions at all, then it's not possible for either forks to reorg the other.
[doublepost=1470165273][/doublepost]@dwaltrip I'm sorry that your Tourette syndrome prevents you from seeing the significance of the first ever instance of a sitting US president attempting to directly influence the election of his successor.

 

[dwaltrip]

@Justus Ranvier That is a worthy point, it's unfortunate you have to undermine it with such childish name calling. Yes, you may get less likes on your post by showing restraint. Fortunately, progress in the world doesn't stem from fake internet points.

I do agree my description of Trump was a bit bombastic. I've been needing to get that out of my system over the past few weeks.

 

[Tomothy]

@Justus Ranvier I didn't think of that. Has a sitting president ever commented on an election like this before? The blatant manipulation of information is disconcerting at the least, I will concede that point. Specifically, how polls have been changed to allegedly better reflect how people will actually vote... Strap on your seatbelt, we are going to have some turbulence.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

I'm not an US citizen, but from Europe, Trump looks a lot less dangerous than Hillary.
He might be a lot of the things you called him and I personally don't like him. But I think he will be 1000x better for the world and the USA than Hillary. If you call him a lose canon, I'd like to know what you would call her. From what I heard about foreign politics he seems to tend more to the traditional US isolationism. Hillary on the other hand...

And personally she creeps me out a lot more than he does.

And most important, I think Justus Ranvier is on point with his text.

I guess the marxists are done playing the long march through the institutions game and are now willing to openly make their final violent takeover play.

Didn't know, that the "march through the institutions" is a worldwide used term.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

What we really have here is are examples of fractal societal insanity.

What does the block size limit debate and the US presidential election have in common?

You'd think nothing, yet in both cases you see examples of complete breakdown of the ability of people to engage in rational thought.

Nobody thinks about what they say, they've all been reduced to passive hosts and carriers of self-replicating memes.

Why is everyone so credulous and willing to repeat whatever they hear without even a basic effort of factual and logical verification? Is signalling that you're willing to propagate the right memes really a higher value than rational thought? Did something in the water turn off everyone's neocortex?

To be clear, I don't believe in political solutions and I don't believe in the validity of government as an institution so I'm not a supporter of any candidate.

Still, it's hard not to notice that this cycle is provoking a great deal more insane behavior than previous ones.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Is signalling that you're willing to propagate the right memes really higher value than rational thought?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

 

[Inca]

Chaps it seems I made a monumental mistake moving my funds to bitfinex to liquidate some of my holdings.

Praying they aren't insolvent now.

:/

 

[Tomothy]

I think the difficulty with both candidates is they are similar in different manners. I think there is a reason there has been no press conference for over 200 days, I think there is a reason all appearances are completely scripted and I find it troubling how both candidates have failed to live up to disclosure policies. Overall, it's like nothing I've ever seen before...
[doublepost=1470166498][/doublepost]@Inca allegedly you can check your address to look for movements. Users hacked showed unauthorized access.

 

[cliff]

You disagree? I don't like Hillary at all, but Trump is a delusional, incoherent, woefully incompetent, savagely self-contradictory, divisive, blatantly racist, pandering megalomaniac who gleefully and eagerly abandons all pretense of truth and authenticity. He is dangerous. He's a loose cannon with zero empathy and understanding of others, and a distorted view of reality.

I do understand the frustration of his supporters. The middle class in America has been wrecked in the past 30 years or so. The majority of the gains from globalism have gone to the poor in the developing countries and the rich in the developed worlds, while the middle class in US (and other nations I belive) stagnated hard.

However, Trump is not the answer...

My political leanings aren't really relevant to the newsworthiness of Obama's statement.

Its wild to see a sitting president comment on a candidate's [un]fitness to be president. During the DNC convention, Obama threw barbs at Trump as well. Compare this behavior to Bush 2 and Clinton's behavior when they were outgoing presidents or even totally out of office. Its different and unique irrespective of the appropriateness. Additionally, I think it might be bad for the DNC when Obama comments like this - it will allow the Trump team make electoral fairness a bigger issue than it probably is - which will sell, but is sort of a distraction from the most important issues of the day IMHO (see Peter Thiele's faux culture war comment during his RNC speech).

 

[Dusty]

I have been fighting along tiring battle against this XT/Classic movement. However at all times I kept trying to point out that:

• I support a larger blocksize limit
• I support a hardfork for larger blocks, it is just that Classic/XT did it in an inappropriate way, such as a weak activation methadology

If you support a larger block size you can't support core because they have repeatedly stated they want to mantain a 1MB block size, no matter what the market or the users wants (and needs), maybe forever. One of blockstream team confirmed this to me personally.

So, if you want Bitcoin not to die you *need* to refute core and join classic or unlimited and stop supporting core and its stupid politics.

Look through this thread, I have repeated that again and again. Please end the Classic campaign, then we can all start a sensible, collaborative, patient and calm discussion about a safe hardfork to increase the blocksize limit.

We had a lot of them already, the only non-collaborative people are the ones of Core: all the people that wanted to raise the block size, calmly and collaboratively decided to settle on a very small block increase, and from the initial exponential-growth of XT they all decided to support a simple 2MB block size. The only unreasonable and uncollaborative people was the ones of Core.

Once the campaign to activate Classic becomes insignificant, I think you will be surprised about how untied everyone is on the desire for large capacity increases.

You are again showing big symptoms of cognitive dissonance: if the people who desire a bigger block would stop advocating for it there would be no need to raise it, by definition.

Of course if you continue to sustain such a stupid and illogical idea don't be surprised people here think that you are stupid and not worth of a thougthful response.

If 20% of the miners stick to the existing rules, they have a c14% chance of overtaking a 1 block lead from Classic

With this nonsense you show all your ignorance in how Bitcoin works: even if we usually say that "the longest chain wins", that's a false statement used only to convey a complex concept to non-technical people.

In reality Bitcoin follows the chain with more accumulated Proof of Work, and whether or not that chain is longer or shorter of all the others it's irrelevant.

A chain with 80% of the hash power produces a chain with 4 times the accumulated proof of work of the other chain, and even if the latter is longer, it's totally irrelevant.

Right after the fork, the low-hashing chain proceeds adding blocks at around 1/4 of the speed, and after the difficulty adjustment the speed become similar, but the accumulated PoW added by time unit remains the same, i.e. a fraction of the dominant chain.

So, a few minutes after the fork there is really no way at all it could lead again, even for a short amount of time.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@dwaltrip I agree that my comment wasn't civil, but sometimes that's what it takes to shock people back into self-awareness before it's too late.

Can you honestly say that you've examined the evidence for Trump being any of the adjectives you used to describe and reached that conclusion independently? Or did you just hear those words used so many times that you decided to accept and repeat them?

I'm not saying you should support or not support any political candidate, just please start thinking for yourself.

 

[dwaltrip]

@Justus Ranvier
Look, I know what you are talking about... I'm quite familiar with the concepts of in-group/out-group (tribalism), virtue signaling, and cultural class (vs economic class). I've watched CGP grey's "this video will make you angry" video a number of times over the years. I generally hold my tongue, as I'm very aware of my own ignorance. In fact, it's one of the reasons I find politics so difficult, as it is filled to the brim with people making confident statements about incredibly complex topics and phenomena that they have little basis for. I am also usually the one who points unidentified assumptions or biases that affect the conclusions of others (not too pedantically =)

Your message is a good reminder, however, I don't think I'm among those most in need of hearing it. But I would also argue that their ignorance is not some cosmic mystery, either. They have little opportunity and incentive to try to tackle the great societal complexities of modern life (that even our best struggle with), when it's hard to enough to make a good life for one's family and or simply find a few moments of enjoyment.

I have read a lot of things about Trump from a variety of sources (I don't generally frequent the big media sites), and I stand by what I said.
[doublepost=1470169313,1470168461][/doublepost]Additionally, I would also endorse you to be a bit more charitable -- it takes a fair bit of arrogance to immediately assume someone is a mindless drone.

 

[Zarathustra]

What we really have here is are examples of fractal societal insanity.

The time will come when you realize that this is a tautology. Most of you still seem to expect societal progress. Despite the history. Society = cancer. Growing rampant and then collapse. Always.
A stateless society is an oxymoron. Self-sufficient communities are stateless. Societies never ever.

 

[cliff]

Interesting Chinese community threads on the recent social meeting:

http://8btc.com/thread-37227-1-1.html
http://8btc.com/thread-37215-1-1.html