Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

Christoph Bergmann · Sep 13, 2016

Yes, I did know that study too. But i don't know how good they are to find black market transactions and if the trend to "sinless" activities is just an indicator for better privacy enhancing instruments.

What I find fascinating is how Bitcoin is the transparent posterboy for cryptocurrency, but now that more private forms exist - the boundary is not easily discernible, value can move quite easily from one to the other and back, stifling blockchain analysis. Thus, Bitcoin sort of gains privacy without having to directly implement the features itself - as long as markets exist between it and the altcoins

Yes, this is important and true. If you do something like

Bitcoin - Shapeshift - Monero - Monero - Shapeshift - Bitcoin

it becomes nearly - or completely? - impossible to track your payment flows. And if it is not enough, you have a lot of options to enhance your privacy.

I don't think governments will ever accept it. Currently they tend to ignore it or believe that they will be able to track payments and catch criminals on the crypto:fiat-interfaces - what is currently true to some degree and will most probably result in extremely tight regulation of this interfaces. In the EU the upcoming integration of bitcoin in the fourth amendment of anti-money-laundering-laws e. G. will force every exchange to track payment flows of its customers. But since no aml/kyc procedure will be enough to track payments if someone really wants to hide, and since increasing bitcoin acceptance in retail will make interfaces between fiat and crypto more and more irrelevant, I think "they" will have no other choice than to ban bitcoin globally.

Than I'll need a new job

Edit: The event of the banning of bitcoin could become the final fork between crypto anarchy and digital totalitarism.

.

cliff · Sep 13, 2016

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Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP!
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BTC | XAU (spot) | COMEX CG1
$608.62| $1323.8 | $1329.3
-------------------------------------
BTCswap(BFX) | BTCswap(Polo)
0.035 % | 0.0667 %
-------------------------------------
HashRate: 1.68 EH/s
MarketCap: $9,651,364,715
-------------------------------------
GBTC | SPDR Gold Trust ETF
$87 | $126.32
-------------------------------------
10YR Treas| Copper | Crude (WTI)
1.67% | $211.2/lb | $45.64/barrel
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

Optimizing Bitcoin’s Transaction Generation Code [C.A.Stone]
The bizarre world of bitcoin ‘mining’ finds a new home in Tibet [Wash.Post.]
Bitcoin Technology Harnessed to Push Electricity Revolution [Bloomberg]
Virtual Currency: New Step in Monetary Development [Procedia -Behavioral & Social Sciences]
Exploiting Trust in Deterministic Builds [Abstract]
The Currency of History: Money and the idea of progress [Abstract]
Segregated Witness's soft fork and a vote of no confidence [#ProHashing blog]

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Satoshi’s Vision (Sept 25, 2016)

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UBS tests using face-reading technology to help clients [Reuters]
Dollar Gains as Falling Oil Damps Demand for Riskier Currencies [Bloomberg]
- IEA Cuts Global Oil Demand Forecast Amid ‘Wobbling’ Asian Demand [WSJ]
- Saudi Arabia Ousts U.S. as Biggest Oil Producer, IEA Says [Bloomberg]
LinkedIn cofounder pledges to donate up to $5 million if Trump releases tax returns [CNN]
Three Fed Officials Say No Hurry to Raise Short-Term Interest Rates [WSJ]
How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat [NYT]
Manufacturing discontent: India's workers in crisis [Al Jazeera]
How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel [The Atlantic]
- "Memetracking is still in its infancy." <-- LOL, awesome

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Yo

Richy_T · Sep 13, 2016

Christoph Bergmann said:
will force every exchange to track payment flows of its customers.

This is one of the big unmentioned downside of mining centralization. It used to be possible to obtain a reasonable supply of Bitcoin simply by mining. That is no longer a realistic option without some up-front spending (and, even then, you're still putting money into the pockets of the big miners).

This might actually mean that a POW change would be doubly healthy for a fork (although likely only temporarily).

freetrader · Sep 13, 2016

Segregated Witness's soft fork and a vote of no confidence

A good article from @Steve Sokolowski . I don't think the cartel of developers and miners, who have re-affirmed their pact in California, will be impressed by any demands at this stage.

A SegWit HF should be accompanied by the option of a removal of the economic discounts which have been introduced to incentivize SegWit as a stepping stone for the LN.

At the latest, after reading @theZerg's analysis of how the wallet code and input selection could be improved, Blockstream / Core's argument that it's there to clean up the UTXO set is exposed as a non-essential, a pretense, and deal sweetener for the SegWit omnibus.

cliff · Sep 14, 2016

-------------------------------------
Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP!
-------------------------------------
BTC | XAU (spot) | COMEX CG1
$606.82| $1319.98 | $1323.2
-------------------------------------
BTCswap(BFX) | BTCswap(Polo)
0.0349 % | 0.0510 %
-------------------------------------
HashRate: 1.72 EH/s (+.04 since last post)
MarketCap: $9,633,408,618
-------------------------------------
GBTC | SPDR Gold Trust ETF
$91 | $125.75
-------------------------------------
10YR Treas| Copper | Crude (WTI)
1.68% | $211.05/lb | $45.14/barrel
-------------------------------------
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U.S. House Resolution 835 - “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States should adopt a national policy for technology to promote consumers’ access to financial tools and online commerce to promote economic growth and consumer empowerment”
Goldman Sachs wants to put foreign exchange trades on the blockchain

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New York issues cyber regulations for banks, insurers (Reuters)
More on the European Supreme Court’s hyperlink ruling and why reactions are all over the map (R. Falkvinge)
Propaganda, American style: A Khrushchev's perspective (Public Radio International - PRI)
AgLetter: August 2016 (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)
- “Seventh District farmland values in the second quarter of 2016 were 1 percent lower than a year ago. However, values for “good” agricultural land in the second quarter of 2016 were 1 percent higher than in the first quarter.”
Why does Thailand keep changing its constitution? (The Economist)

freetrader · Sep 14, 2016

@HelloGuy : don't know if you saw my earlier post , but you've been on here since so please take time to respond and let me know...

There is a hello_guy on BU Slack who claim he's the same person as you.
If this person is falsely claiming to be you, please let me know.

This person is making some strange statements, such as

There is no censorship in China.

Harvard University published several studies about Chinese censorship in journals such as Science and American Political Science Review .

http://gking.harvard.edu/publications/randomized-experimental-study-censorship-china
http://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-Allows-Government-Criticism-Silences-Collective-Expression

The United Nations Human Rights Council formally condemned countries that block or limit citizens’ internet access in a passed resolution.

Everyone who can should read this 2015 report on Freedom on the Net:
https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FOTN_2015Report.pdf

China was the year’s worst abuser of internet freedom.
As President Xi Jinping made “cyber sovereignty” one of the priorities of his tenure as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, internet users endured crackdowns on “rumors,” greater enforcement of rules against anonymity, and disruptions to the circumvention tools that are commonly used to bypass censorship. Though not entirely new, these measures were implemented with unprecedented intensity. Google, whose services were frequently interrupted in the past, was almost completely blocked. Veteran human rights defenders were jailed for online expression, including lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who faces charges of “picking quarrels” in connection with 28 social media posts, and 70-year-old journalist Gao Yu, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for sending “state secrets” to a foreign website. Official censorship directives during the year suppressed online commentary on issues ranging from Hong Kong prodemocracy protests to stock-market volatility.

In September 2015, the Chinese government censored images of the cartoon character Winnie the Pooh, which internet users on the microblogging site Sina Weibo posted in an allusion to the image of President Xi Jinping in a military parade. The image was shared over 65,000 times before it was removed and became the most censored image on Sina Weibo that month.

Just so we know what cartoon image was censored in China, it was this one:

Maybe it's time to remind that Bitcoin works best over a free and open Internet.
Sure, it's possible to carry around and exchange BTCC's physical bitcoins, but that's also not how Bitcoin was intended to function (hint: no mention of physical bitcoins in Satoshi's whitepaper).

solex · Sep 14, 2016

All flex-cap block limiting proposals assume that non-mining nodes have less capacity (on average) than mining nodes, hence miners get penalised for large blocks. The logic being that if miners can create arbitrarily large blocks (assuming txn demand exists) then low capacity full nodes will be pushed off the network. I think the debate is moot because emergent consensus handles this by giving non-miners influence on the prevailing block limit.

Anyway, I am hoping to try and quantify a bit better what is considered the difference in capacity,

If you have an opinion please select an option on this poll:

"Poll - Consider Bitcoin mining-pool operators and solo-miners. Compare their full-nodes to all other (non-mining or hasher) full-nodes. What ratio is the average specification: (disk, bandwidth, RAM, cpu, sysadmin, connectivity) between "miner : other" ?"
https://goo.gl/YWLsmg

lunar · Sep 14, 2016

ALL TIME HIGH

bucktotal · Sep 14, 2016

congrats to the bitcoin unlimited crew. i gave up on running classic client a while ago when the movement lost steam.

i just fired up a BU client and i'll run that for the time being. happy to propagate any reasonable sized block.

AdrianX · Sep 14, 2016

AdrianX said:
@Peter R I'd love to attend I won't be able to give an answer until the 12th.

@Peter R I'm disappointed I won't be able to make it. I've got to do some family / life balancing as I've been rather unbalanced of late. At first I though I wouldn't go as I may not have much to offer but just prior to the reply above I felt It'd be a great exsperiance. Unfortunately, the timing isn't good.

I'm very excited to see the energy behind BU and while I started out a little sceptical I've got a good feeling it's going to make waves given all the passionate backing here and in the general bitcoin community.

cliff · Sep 15, 2016

-------------------------------------
Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP!
-------------------------------------
BTC | XAU (spot) | COMEX CG1
$609.12| $1311.95 | $1315.2
-------------------------------------
BTCswap(BFX) | BTCswap(Polo)
0.0394 % | 0.0468 %
-------------------------------------
HashRate: 1.73 EH/s
MarketCap: $9,756,843,020
-------------------------------------
GBTC | SPDR Gold Trust ETF
$91 | $125.10
-------------------------------------
10YR Treas| Copper | Crude (WTI)
1.73% | $215.7/lb | $44.13/barrel
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

HashRate continues to grow.
-------------------------------------

Still In Chicago? Peter Thiel Doesn't Think You're 'Very Talented.' Why That's A Problem
Political Paralysis Is the Biggest Threat to U.S. Competitiveness
San Francisco Tech Pulse (Fed Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

-------------------------------------
This seems like progress maybe (I hope). Perhaps there's an opportunity here to bridge some gaps:

albin · Sep 15, 2016

I'm not particularly impressed with Lombrozo's stance there, he's giving lip service to ending grudges, but when you look at the substance, he's blaming the lack of productivity of himself and his peers on people simply voicing different opinions, launches into one of their classic hyperbolic analogies (nuclear reactor this time instead of airliner in flight) to discredit dissenting opinions, portrays his position as based on "sound science" when his faction are the most relentless least science-based social media campaigners out there, and basically ends with the remarkably charitable proposition that they'll stop attacking their opposition as long as the opposition acquiesces to their self-proclaimed expert position.

If that's what moving past grudges is about, then fuck that guy! The substance of his comments is relationship abuser rationalization nonsense.

cliff · Sep 15, 2016

From Reuters
EXCLUSIVE: Central banks seek global standards in wake of Bangladesh heist

steffen · Sep 15, 2016

Maybe KNC has stopped mining. Their last block was found over three days ago according to https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pool/kncminer

freetrader · Sep 15, 2016

Facepalm image: CC-BY-NC Alex E. Proimos

"This is not how you fix copyright"

https://edri.org/press-release-new-copyright-directive-fails-every-level/

https://www.laquadrature.net/en/copyright_reform_could_EU_commission_do_worse

http://www.communia-association.org/2016/09/14/europeans-deserve-better-copyright-reform/

adamstgbit · Sep 15, 2016

solex said:
All flex-cap block limiting proposals assume that non-mining nodes have less capacity (on average) than mining nodes, hence miners get penalised for large blocks. The logic being that if miners can create arbitrarily large blocks (assuming txn demand exists) then low capacity full nodes will be pushed off the network. I think the debate is moot because emergent consensus handles this by giving non-miners influence on the prevailing block limit.

2 questions

1) emergent consensus ??

2) "giving non-miners influence" how ?

in what way does non-minning node have any direct influence over "consensus".

solex · Sep 16, 2016

@adamstgbit

Welcome to the wonderful world of emergence which is high-level order arising from simple rules observed or inherent in low-level discrete components or entities which are connected in some fashion. This is a fundamental property of nature seen in both organic and inorganic systems.

The case we are interested in here is emergent consensus arising from special software, BUIP001, used by Bitcoin Unlimited full-nodes, which are discrete components of a connected substrate (the Bitcoin network).

For context we can assume that all full-nodes together are a representative subset of the economic majority, and that mining nodes have on average more capacity than non-mining nodes.

All BU nodes (whether mining or non-mining) have an excessive block size and acceptance depth settings which can be manually set by users. The default values are EB=16MB and AD=4. Actual values can be seen on bitnodes. This means that when an excessive block is received, say 17MB, then all the nodes with a lower EB (present majority) will delay acceptance of the large block, waiting until a miner produces a smaller one and that fork extends by AD gaining most PoW. If another is quickly produced, say 2.7MB, then the smaller block is preferred by those nodes with the EB<17MB. If we have a scenario where most of the miners are mining <17MB then the large block will be orphaned by the network and the full nodes will converge to the chain-tip with the smaller block. BU nodes always track the chain-tip with the most PoW and will always switch to it when their AD is reached. Equilibrium results where the prevailing block limit is optimum for all full nodes in the network via top-down causality of the adaptive information type.

Another explanation is here on BU's home page.

In the less likely and extreme scenario where the majority of the miners decide to mine blocks larger than the majority of non-mining EB sizes then economic stresses will result and the BTC price will fall until the miners stop producing oversize blocks, or node owners of non-mining nodes will spend money to upgrade to handle larger blocks. Equilibrium will re-assert.

Emergence is lacking today because critical mass has not been achieved. If most Core, Classic, XT and other nodes used BUIP001 then the network would converge holistically to an optimum block limit which would then change only slowly as some node owners upgrade and set their EBs higher, while other node owners decide that blocks are too big and set their EBs lower.

All other block limiting solutions are sub-optimal because they are either centrally planned (e.g. the 1MB, BIP101, BIP109), or miner-only controlled (BIP100, BitPay Adaptive, "no limit").

freetrader · Sep 16, 2016

adamstgbit said:
2 questions

1) emergent consensus ??

2) "giving non-miners influence" how ?

in what way does non-minning node have any direct influence over "consensus".

OK, I'll try to explain how I understand it, but if I'm wrong I hope @solex or others will correct me.

1) "emergent consensus" means the consensus that is reached is not hard-coded in by some specific limits, but emerges as a result of the most-common selection of configuration choices by the full node operators. e.g. if most decide that they will easily accept up to a certain block size, then the network will make it possible for that block size to be relayed without a problem. That will be the "emergent consensus" of the network. No-one dictates, it happens by whatever the majority decide on.

2) if a large enough proportion of the relay network run BU, then the "emergent consensus" of the relay nodes will become that >1MB blocks are ok. It will, in effect, become possible for a miner (running BU or another >1MB capable client) to produce a bigger block and have it successfully relayed, and since the majority will accept it, it will become part of a valid chain in the eyes of the BU subnet. I think it still requires >51% of the miners to produce larger blocks to produce a long term effect - a change in the longest valid chain, - I think the only form of "direct influence" that a relaying node has is to relay one block in preference over another. i.e BU relay nodes can have influence by eventually switching to a bigger-block chain and relaying blocks from it.

EDIT: intersected @solex's response, but I'm going to leave mine up as well, I aimed for a less technical explanation so maybe it's still helpful.

freetrader · Sep 16, 2016

If I heard correctly, the Milan conference organizers haven't approved @theZerg 's proposed talk ?

Beastie disapproves. And Beastie knows about forking processes.

freetrader · Sep 16, 2016

Wow, WSJ blog article candidly addresses some issues (blocksize cap, mining centralization in China):

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2016/09/15/mr-robot-drags-bitcoin-into-its-dystopian-nightmare/

Would be cool if they mentioned the ongoing national e-currency programmes, like that of PBOC [1].
It's not only Western governments / banks not trusting a China-dominated Bitcoin to remain financially neutral - the problems of political control and mutual mistrust attract nations globally, including China, to set up their own e-currencies.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/21/technology/china-digital-currency/
Archive of WSJ blog article: http://archive.is/Jww3H

Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

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