Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[freetrader]

I like the activation time signalling proposal for BU that /u/caveden made in this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btcfork/comments/53vlj0/bitcoin_unlimited_seems_to_already_have_the/

Does BU does have plans to implement something like the "Proposed Activation Block Height" signal that is suggested there?

---

@VeritasSapere : thanks for the links, I always enjoy reading your viewpoints.

> However for the reasons already discussed it seems unlikely at this time that BIP109 will be triggered or that Bitcoin Unlimited will gain wider adoption by miners within the next six months.

Well, today (or rather, yesterday) BU's first mainchain block got mined, so the rate of uptake is phenomenal over the short term past ;-)
Who knows what happens with the miners, their minds work in mysterious ways.
Of course, I'd like to see all major clients performing a network upgrade together. It would be nice if BU is leading the way - it seems that public support and understanding of its concepts is growing every day.

 

[adamstgbit]

@adamstgbit @Norway

Regarding sibyl nodes.
...
Emergent consensus operates above the peer-to-peer network. It acts at the social level described above, i.e. the "Bitcoin full-node culture"
...

exactly where/how does this "emergent consensus" acure? and how to measure this, thats the problem.

Gavin said "not 20 but 8MB", and i was like FINALLY we have consensus!
A month later miners started to vote on BIPS one BIP had like 75% of the votes, and i was like FINALLY we have consensus!
Then months later we had the round table agreement that said "segwit + 2mB" , and i was like FINALLY we have consensus!

we still do not have consensus, or any good way to measure this "social level emergent consensus"
thats why i think allowing coins to vote is the best way to go, as of now we have NO CLUE what users investors hodler are thinking / want.

we know core devs want small blocks
we know the hand full of miners will simply follow core devs advice.

but what about everyone else? are we to look at bitcointalk.org inorder to guage emergent consenus?

We need hard data, that can't be faked, all we have is so far is, hashing power.

we need :

coin voting.
registered / verified full nodes ( i'd love to see what bitpay's nodes want / would vote for )
uncensorable social media.

but i think its time to face facts, consensus isn't going to happen...
even if we had all these tools today we'd still be in the same place
some want bigger blocks others want segwit/LN to redefine bitcoin.

...

its time to fork off this chain.

 

[adamstgbit]

 

[cliff]

-------------------------------------
Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP!
-------------------------------------
BTC | XAU (spot) | COMEX CG1
$597.14| $1337.92 | $1340.6
-------------------------------------
BTCswap(BFX) | BTCswap(Polo)
0.0446% | 0.068%
-------------------------------------
HashRate: 1.69 EH/s
MarketCap: $9,492,412,168
-------------------------------------
GBTC | SPDR Gold Trust ETF
$93 | $127.64
-------------------------------------
10YR Treas| Copper | Crude (WTI)
1.69% | $219.10/lb | $46.8/barrel
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

• Op-Ed: Bitcoin’s Journey to Digital Reserve Currency Status [Arthur Hayes, Bitcoin Magazine]
• When a Blockchain Isn’t a Blockchain [Bloomberg]
• Roger EFFFFin’ Ver! (nicework!)
• Look at these BIG BLOCKS being mined on TestNet

-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

• Satoshi’s Vision (Sept 25, 2016)
• Optimizing Bitcoin’s Transaction Generation Code [C.A.Stone]

-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

• Core’s most recent GitHub commit activity
• Bitcoin Unlimited’s most recent GitHub commit activity

-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

• TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT, 2016 - Overview [UN Conference on Trade & Development] (PDF)
  • “While the current situation seems less ominous than in 2008, it is proving more difficult to manage. With the financial system on a firmer footing, politicians and policymakers have recovered their sense of impotence in the face of supposedly insurmountable global forces, and have made “business as usual” their default policy option. Financial markets are chastened but unreformed, debt levels are higher than ever and inequality continues to rise. Most of the upside gains have resulted from asset price rises and increased corporate profits. Meanwhile, most of the downside adjustment has fallen on debtor countries and working families, with wages,employment and welfare provision under constant pressure from a return to austerity measures. [paragraph break - having a formatting issue, this is supposed to be one big quote across two paras - how to fix?] This conjuncture might appropriately be described as a “Polanyi period”, in which the regulatory and normative framework on which healthy markets depend, having already warped, is beginning to buckle as the weight of Greenspan’s mistake is felt in an ever widening swathe of economic and social life – from precarious employment conditions to corporate tax inversions to undrinkable tap water. Trust in political leadership is at an all-time low, just when the need for decisive political action is at an all-time high. This is particularly true for a series of interconnected global challenges, codified in the Sustainable Development Goals, which can only be met through effective international cooperation and action."
  • Full Report
  • [Throwback to June] Have we reached peak trade? (NPR-Marketplace, includes radio segment
• Relevant advertisement from HPE
• [Throwback to June 2014] Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America
  The adventures of Russian agents like The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Gay Turtle, and Ass — exposed for the first time
  • “The internet has become the main threat — a sphere that isn’t controlled by the Kremlin,” said Pavel Chikov, a member of Russia’s presidential human rights council. “That’s why they’re going after it. Its very existence as we know it is being undermined by these measures.”
• Let your imaginations run wild: North Korea accidentally lets world access its internet and it only has 28 websites
  • Reddit brings down North Korea's entire internet after links to country's 28 websites are posted [Reddit post linking to external article]
  • Preparing for North Korea's Inevitable Collapse [CNBC]

 

[digitsu]

I am generally skeptical of coin voting. It could degenerate into a PoS system.
If you are a holder and you don't like what the miners are voting for, then you should sell your holdings for a crypto coin that does. It seems harsh, but it is the market response that will eventually get miners attention.

 

[cliff]

Apparently the ETH network is under DDoS attack:

https://ethstats.net/

Reminds me of this from yesterday:
KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Record DDoS (not suggesting this is connected to ETH)

On Tuesday evening, KrebsOnSecurity.com was the target of an extremely large and unusual distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack designed to knock the site offline. The attack did not succeed thanks to the hard work of the engineers at Akamai, the company that protects my site from such digital sieges. But according to Akamai, it was nearly double the size of the largest attack they’d seen previously, and was among the biggest assaults the Internet has ever witnessed.

The attack began around 8 p.m. ET on Sept. 20, and initial reports put it at approximately 665 Gigabits of traffic per second. Additional analysis on the attack traffic suggests the assault was closer to 620 Gbps in size, but in any case this is many orders of magnitude more traffic than is typically needed to knock most sites offline.

 

[freetrader]

First signs that "Bitcoin experts" are abandoning a flawed notion of "consensus" which is becoming increasingly hard for the non-"wizards" to accept?

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/53za2k/whats_a_hard_fork_ad_on_bitcointalk_spoiler_lulz/

Ah, political expediency...

 

[Mengerian]

Anyone here going to the conference in San Francisco this weekend?

I will be arriving mid day Saturday, if anyone wants to meet up before the conference starts, send me a message!

 

[Dusty]

Anyone here going to Scaling Bitcoin 2016 in Milan?

 

[cliff]

-------------------------------------
Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP!
-------------------------------------
BTC | XAU (spot) | COMEX CG1
$595.9| $1337.52 | $1341
-------------------------------------
BTCswap(BFX) | BTCswap(Polo)
0.0442% | 0.0596%
-------------------------------------
HashRate: 1.68 EH/s
MarketCap: $9,472,962,048
-------------------------------------
GBTC | SPDR Gold Trust ETF
$92.5 | $127.60
-------------------------------------
10YR Treas| Copper | Crude (WTI)
1.69% | $219.05/lb | $46.22/barrel
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

• Zoning: The hidden trillion dollar tax

• Some interesting academic-ish works on decentralization I’ve been reading*:
• Ottoman Decline

Gradually, the elaborate system of central appointments, based on merit and competence, was reduced to something of a fiction. Unqualified men would now be appointed on the basis of their wealth and connections. These appointees, on the local level, did not represent the central power directly; they were often of local origin and soon turned to local notables for support, forming new landowning classes that had arisen from among local civilian urban elite. These elites began to gather the local administration in their own hand and fueled decentralization. With central administration left with little control, this new land owning class was left with uncontrolled exploitation of the land.

To sum up: with a halt to expansion less revenue was generated to maintain the costly standing army and administration based on slave\military system.; incompetent Sultans added to the problem; corruption in both the military and the administration added to the problem; The center began to rely on local administrators and landowners to provide the Sepahi force to defend the empire (a force which had already proven worthless in modern warfare and which failed against modern European armies); Local leaders were gradually able to divert some of the revenues from the center and for their own use.
​

EDIT - The pics below aren't fully viewable unless you visit imgur's site - also, sorry about the ordering in the first set.

• Tale of Two Factions, A: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen
  

• Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse
  

• THE POLITICS OF DECENTRALIZATION IN AFRICA A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS (Ndegwa, World Bank - PDF)

*I’m not opposed to decentralization, I just think it requires balance and that an all-or-nothing approach to it may be risky.


-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

 

[AdrianX]

*I’m not opposed to decentralization, I just think it requires balance and that an all-or-nothing approach to it may be risky.

It's funny because decentralisation gets branded around a lot without a definition, it's not specifically decentralisation people what, it's the effects of the system being decentralised that people strive to preserve.

It's not without great irony that the ill-defined term of decentralised is enforced through centralised control.

Most small block proponents attempt to prevent bitcoin growth at great expense to keep it decentralised and accessible so that an army of raspberry pi's can decentralise and expand the network. What's also overlooked is defining this hobbling of bitcoin as Layer 1 and the impeded blockchain as the small block proponents motivation to grow new networks on top of it, calling the new network Bitcoin Layer 2.

 

[adamstgbit]

I am generally skeptical of coin voting. It could degenerate into a PoS system.
If you are a holder and you don't like what the miners are voting for, then you should sell your holdings for a crypto coin that does. It seems harsh, but it is the market response that will eventually get miners attention.

i like coin voting because it gives the holders and investors a voice.
and it gives an incentive to Hold more!
and it also gives an incentive NOT to give your coins to MtGox for safe keeping, you can't vote with coins you don't hold yourself.
I dont disagree with your idea, if you dont like it sell it and move on.
which i might just go ahead and do, once a 2MB fork is created...
but still, going forward, i would like to be able to use my PoS as a means to communicate my prefered BIP.
[doublepost=1474586466,1474585315][/doublepost]

It's funny because decentralisation gets branded around a lot without a definition, it's not specifically decentralisation people what, it's the effects of the system being decentralised that people strive to preserve.

It's not without great irony that the ill-defined term of decentralised is enforced through centralised control.

Most small block proponents attempt to prevent bitcoin growth at great expense to keep it decentralised and accessible so that an army of raspberry pi's can decentralise and expand the network. What's also overlooked is defining this hobbling of bitcoin as Layer 1 and the impeded blockchain as the small block proponents motivation to grow new networks on top of it, calling the new network Bitcoin Layer 2.

layers on top of bitcoin i like.
the idea that poeple will willingly run nodes on a network that they themselves can't afford to use, is nutty.
IF bitcoin does become the "world's settlement layer AKA the holy ledger" like the small blocker expect it to be.
then we are talking 5-40$ pre TX ( maybe more maybe ALOT MORE ) because of the high demand for very high value TXs.
so who's going to run a node on bitcoinLayer1 when they actually use Layer 2 ?!

Like it or not, full nodes will not be ran by hobbiest out of there homes...
surprised?!?
i think not....
we all saw this coming we all understood where this was going, UNTIL some lunatic decided that what made bitcoin "decentralized" was that hobbiest ran full nodes out of there HOMES!

lol retards....
retards everywhere.

 

[AdrianX]

@adamstgbit I like layers too, I just can't justify inhibiting and possibly corrupting layer 1 to facilitate layer 2 by redesigning the protocol that makes layer 1 viable. Simplified I'm for a laissez-faire approach in the hopes that the fundamentals are not corrupted.

some on reddit posted this gem when reviewing Core's IRC meeting summary for 2016-09-15. https://bitcoincore.org/en/meetings/2016/09/15/

The end-of-life “EOL” date for version 0.11 on the lifecycle page should be set. The maintenance date doesn’t reflect reality as backports to previous versions see no usage

WTF are they trying so hard to only soft fork claiming it's necessary to keep old nodes viable when they are talking end of life for the reference bitcoin implementation that was the latest and greatest at the beginning of this year.

They make it sound like it's a threat to the changes they're implementing, probably 0.11 reflects a point in time where they hadn't yet implement the fundamental changes necessary for their master roadmap.

 

[cliff]

It's funny because decentralisation gets branded around a lot without a definition, it's not specifically decentralisation people what, it's the effects of the system being decentralised that people strive to preserve.

I mostly agree . . . I think. My very casual observation-based opinion is that there is little shared understanding of what "decentralization" means or looks like in the wild. There's not even much agreement on who is allowed to have a meaningful opinion. I always liked the Nakamoto Consensus POV - it is easy to understand and doesn't require knowing the meaning of a bunch of weird phrases that look made up on the fly, its seems fairly drama-free. Unfortunately, evidence of a honest, fair, and transparent deliberative process on "decentralization" or "consensus" etc. is difficult to find - especially the last 3 to 4 years or so (maybe it needs to be that way for some security reason I'm not trusted enough/too civilian to know about?). Maybe that's a sign of a diversifying ecosystem; conflicting loyalties; seriousness of risk; and/or the selfish use of resources. Or, maybe its by design. Satoshi clearly thought about checks, balances, and competing factions, on a deep level; his writings suggest maturity and wisdom on his part. There can be a lot of truth, beauty, and novelty in an elegantly controlled and/or cantilevered ecosystem.* That being said, Satoshi appears very practical - ambition and idealism in some writings are tempered with measured realism and perspective in others.**

My humble POV is that "decentralization" realistically cannot and probably should not mean total "deregulation"/"anarchy" unless the goal is only an abstract ideal or value/value system. In Bitcointopia, "decentralization" tends to get conflated with kinda-sorta analogous concepts (like deregulation or anarchy) - maybe unintentionally but also maybe not. From everything that I've read over the years, "decentralization" often simply means common sense local decision-making /local control ('think global, act local" type movements). It often refers to public-private partnerships and delegations of roles/duties/projects to and from smaller/local govt units and citizen groups (like local recycling programs, home owner associations, school choice and funding, local taxation, wildlife and conversation management, etc). I suppose cyber/digital/virtual "deregulation" and "anarchy"/"unregulation" might be considered more pure/correct/etc forms of decentralization by some folks (as opposed to a subset or flavor) ... but that's where the politics and idealism creep in. One interesting behavior/tactic that I've observed is that many folks act as if technology or a technocracy escapes/avoids politics. That is funny stuff.
--

*Anybody familiar with that tiny house movement? Ex1, Ex2, Ex3, Ex4a, Ex4b, Ex4c, **Ex5** (mirror)
**Satoshi doesn't really strike me as someone that considers him/her/itself a revolutionary so much as someone cautiously engaged in an experiment that could be revolutionary for commerce and possibly disruptive to established commercial players and the oversight thereof. Commerce means massive amounts of buying and selling (not hoarding).

 

[cliff]

-------------------------------------
Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP!
-------------------------------------
BTC | XAU (spot) | COMEX CG1
$598.63| $1339.05 | $1343.2
-------------------------------------
BTCswap(BFX) | BTCswap(Polo)
0.0439% | 0.0686%
-------------------------------------
HashRate: 1.65 EH/s
MarketCap: $9,471,764,619
-------------------------------------
GBTC | SPDR Gold Trust ETF
$92.5 | $127.73
-------------------------------------
10YR Treas| Copper | Crude (WTI)
1.66% | $219.65/lb | $46.24/barrel
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

• Billionaire goofballs - and known Dogecoiner - engaged in propaganda campaigns designed to manipulate elections.
• Shocker, Wells Fargo CEO was on the FED’s Advisory Council … until today. So resignation, Very ethics… [Bloomberg]
• Yep.
  • Ditto.

-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------


Songs about San Francisco

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@Christoph Bergmann

Which part of P2P do they not understand?

Sorry - which post of mine do you address with this?

 

[adamstgbit]

 

[cliff]

/u/ydtm writes another interesting one: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/54cv0h/preventing_doublespends_is_an_embarrassingly/.
I was dancing around the same sort of points in a very tongue-in-cheek and indirect way here: https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-801#post-28539.
---
Earlier today I was planning my trip from my hotel near the airport to the Westin in downtown SF. The SF Transit service's trip planner site recommended taking a cable car for three stops following a bus ride. During the planning process, I got to reading about the cable cars here (I'm very, very experienced w/ public transit (mbta has taken so much $ from me over the years - good thing for monthly passes, eh?):

https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/transit/how-ride/how-to-cable-cars

This particular instruction caught my eye:


Then I checked out the fare:


Yep, $7 for three stops! Obviously, the crazy price is dictated by rider congestion - but also tourist price-gouging:


I'd rather bite off my own arm than pay $7 for three stops - that's idiotic IMHO. I'll happily walk the last .4 miles tomorrow. Sure, I'd take the cable car if I had my family with me - it would be fun for the novelty or for a party/wedding; but a cable car in SF is not practical for modern public transit. In fact, BART (trains) and SamTrans (busses) move tons more people than the MUNI cable cars do, and they do so more efficiently and more reliably. Frankly, I can imagine that the cable cars are a nuisance for more than a few SF locals.

The MUNI cablecar/trolly system probably didn't have to develop that way either. For example, in Boston, the Greenline scaled-up. Its cablecar/trolly system engages in "on-chain scaling" and is still moving tons of people today:


SF's annoying, over-priced, impractical-for-just-about-everything-cablecar system is a good reminder of why the Satoshi's Vision conference is happening tomorrow.

 

[Zarathustra]

The zerg are coming ...

I knew it.

 

[Bagatell]

We are the zerg. Seddition is viral.