Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[solex]

@lunar
That is a nice and well-researched article.

 

[Dusty]

This post by Andrew should have more visibility:

https://medium.com/@g.andrew.stone/a-short-tour-of-bitcoin-core-4558744bf18b

 

[awemany]

@albin: Indeed. This kind of stuff, repeatedly, also eventually got me into 'they are outright nefarious' camp.

 

[Norway]

So who is this guy? Anybody know company name, hashpower, pool he use or operate. Anything?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5dnmlk/miner_chandler_guo_calls_for_peace/?ref=share&ref_source=link

 

[albin]

@Norway

Chandler Guo is from BW specifically, but he's like an angel investor in general with investments in exchanges and other services.

 

[Norway]

@albin thx.

 

[solex]

Calling for thoughts on what the fate of chaintip means for off-chain solutions.

Chaintip (formerly bitcointip) is a quick and easy way for people on social media to donate or pay small sums to each other. This seems like a promising niche. Sure it might not make profits to begin with, but neither does Twitter or Snapchat and many others.

People aren't using chaintip enough, and as /u/giszmo points out: this type of service should have flourished with on-chain fee pressure. It hasn't and frankly that does not bode well for the Lightning Network either. So "Why should LN attract huge off-chain volume when even a toy example like chaintip fails?" (where trust isn't much of an issue because micropayments).

 

[albin]

I'm skeptical of these off-chain systems that trade trivial vanity amounts, because as of yet it doesn't look like there's any real economic utility to these kinds of transactions. It's a cool idea to tip bitcoin to people over social media / websites, but it's not exactly solving any real economic problem (at least as of yet).

There are so many use-cases on the other hand that make lots of sense right now today, and this is nowhere near exhaustive:

-Store of value / capital flight / portfolio management (i.e. looking for growth assets with high risk / high return to diversify against more low risk / low return assets)

-Remittance (it doesn't need to be reduced to some no-brainer Bitcoin in the background type situation, Chinese people for example in the US can easily purchase bitcoin and immediately send to relatives who will have no trouble getting CNY or whatever they want there)

-International B2B settlement (ability to pay suppliers immediately is amazing in the numerous countries around the world with insane red tape, for instance having to wait for authorization from the central bank)

- Domestic B2B settlement, there are a lot of situations in highly volatile fast-moving businesses such as logistics where organizations suffer from the fact that all business has to be conducted through credit arrangements that take a long time to setup through corporate accounting departments. Many LTL trucking businesses for example are willing to do pickups at the drop of a hat for businesses with whom they have no-pre-existing business arrangements if presented on pickup with a cashier's check. Bitcoin is ideal for these situations that require cash payment (or equivalent) for one-off emergency service, and could facilitate alot of efficiency by allowing buyers and sellers of services to do business without the existing friction. These scenarios are extremely common, for example in vicinity of New York City and Los Angeles, there is literally an entire third party warehousing economy built on the fact that small delays in container schedules can over-burden existing warehousing arrangements for unloading and reloading onto more long-haul roadworthy trailers, so there is constant shopping around of nearby providers to handle overflow.

- Cash-based e-commerce in areas with poor credit card acceptance / availability, or where the seller needs to settle quickly in order to properly provide service with chargeback risk

- International freelancing for any kinds of services that are easily remotely-deliverable (graphic/website design, writing blog/news copy, translation services, coding, etc.)

- and just to keep it real, let's not forget everything black market, which is an immediate no-brainer.

None of these use-cases specifically need any over-engineered off-chain solution at all.

 

[Inca]

Trillion dollar market sounds good

 

[awemany]

@solex: I think we should add the fact that Bitcoin payment channels don't see a lot of use either.

I do like more use of those. But if regular 'off-chain' payment channels do not get a lot of use, why should LN?

And a system very similar to LN can be build by chaining regular, already existing two-party payment channels (+ a small counter party risk per transfer in flight) together!

But that didn't really happen yet, either.

I do expect more of this with a larger Bitcoin ecosystem. Ironically, I think whatever higher level stuff people will come up with is hindered and stalled by the 1MB blocksize, first and foremost. Not transaction malleability, not a 1:4 SegWit discount.

Because you can already do a lot of off-chain stuff (in principle) with the system in place.

 

[freetrader]

So, no proof of life for JA from Wikileaks. It's all "black PR". Uh huh.

So many rabbit holes, so little time.

I wonder if (when?) those insurance file passwords will turn up in the blockchain.
Would be good publicity for Bitcoin.

 

[adamstgbit]

I'm skeptical of these off-chain systems that trade trivial vanity amounts, because as of yet it doesn't look like there's any real economic utility to these kinds of transactions. It's a cool idea to tip bitcoin to people over social media / websites, but it's not exactly solving any real economic problem (at least as of yet).

There are so many use-cases on the other hand that make lots of sense right now today, and this is nowhere near exhaustive:

-Store of value / capital flight / portfolio management (i.e. looking for growth assets with high risk / high return to diversify against more low risk / low return assets)

-Remittance (it doesn't need to be reduced to some no-brainer Bitcoin in the background type situation, Chinese people for example in the US can easily purchase bitcoin and immediately send to relatives who will have no trouble getting CNY or whatever they want there)

-International B2B settlement (ability to pay suppliers immediately is amazing in the numerous countries around the world with insane red tape, for instance having to wait for authorization from the central bank)

- Domestic B2B settlement, there are a lot of situations in highly volatile fast-moving businesses such as logistics where organizations suffer from the fact that all business has to be conducted through credit arrangements that take a long time to setup through corporate accounting departments. Many LTL trucking businesses for example are willing to do pickups at the drop of a hat for businesses with whom they have no-pre-existing business arrangements if presented on pickup with a cashier's check. Bitcoin is ideal for these situations that require cash payment (or equivalent) for one-off emergency service, and could facilitate alot of efficiency by allowing buyers and sellers of services to do business without the existing friction. These scenarios are extremely common, for example in vicinity of New York City and Los Angeles, there is literally an entire third party warehousing economy built on the fact that small delays in container schedules can over-burden existing warehousing arrangements for unloading and reloading onto more long-haul roadworthy trailers, so there is constant shopping around of nearby providers to handle overflow.

- Cash-based e-commerce in areas with poor credit card acceptance / availability, or where the seller needs to settle quickly in order to properly provide service with chargeback risk

- International freelancing for any kinds of services that are easily remotely-deliverable (graphic/website design, writing blog/news copy, translation services, coding, etc.)

- and just to keep it real, let's not forget everything black market, which is an immediate no-brainer.

None of these use-cases specifically need any over-engineered off-chain solution at all.

i disagree,
changetip and the (yet to be proven viable)LightingNetwork, do offer real economic utility.
and that is micropayments!

ChangeTip is probably the best way to go for individual micro payments, sure its not as technically elegant as LN, and it means trusting a 3rd party and thereby lose a lot of neat properties Blockchain offers... But for all Particle purposes, the centralization is not a problem when it comes to tipping and other micro payment. holding 50$ to a trusted 3rd party is not a big deal...asking users to learn to use a complex system in order to tip or receive tips IS a big deal...

LN makes sense is for accounting purposes, ex. bitstamps and TheRockTaradingPost want to allow users to move funds back and forth, but dont trust each other.... LN makes sense when you want to make a High volume of small TXs to the same channel over and over.

Nothing beats the Blockchain for easy of use and extreme security but there is the fee & 10min wait time....

IMO both LN and ChangeTip are very very important, and we NEED these things, and we needed them yesterday. and yes there is sizeable demand for these these techs TODAY, and that deamnd will most certainly grow.

Calling for thoughts on what the fate of chaintip means for off-chain solutions.

Chaintip (formerly bitcointip) is a quick and easy way for people on social media to donate or pay small sums to each other. This seems like a promising niche. Sure it might not make profits to begin with, but neither does Twitter or Snapchat and many others.

People aren't using chaintip enough, and as /u/giszmo points out: this type of service should have flourished with on-chain fee pressure. It hasn't and frankly that does not bode well for the Lightning Network either. So "Why should LN attract huge off-chain volume when even a toy example like chaintip fails?" (where trust isn't much of an issue because micropayments).

Again, disagree...

ChangeTip didnt shut down because it failed, "over 100,000 people have signed up for ChangeTip" ( and its not like ChangeTip didn't have any competitors... ) sure these arnt huge numbers, but IMO 100,000users in alot in bitcoinland (lets face it there only about 2-10million of us in total... most of which to not actively participate in the underlying economy.) to me 100,000users proves that this is a very good bitcoin biz idea.

its more the idea that the devs are to busy since the have been hired by AirBnB... someone else will remake ChangeTip because there is profit to be had here...



Conclusion, Blockchain, ChangeTip and LN none of these offer the "be all end all" solution to payments. But properly synergized the do offer they ultimate payments solution! Its very very, very important to scale on all fronts.

 

[awemany]

@adamstgbit : Good point. But I disagree on the Changetip part. I think what you see now (with Streamium.io and 21.co being the only two uses of payment channels I can name off the top of my head) and changetip shutting down is that priority for people now is using the regular, on-chain blockchain.

If working @ AirBNB is more profitable than your own start up, it can't be that much money.

Ironically, I think payment channels and the like will only see more use when people get more familiar with regular, on-chain Bitcoin.

 

[adamstgbit]

LN is not a payment tool, its a complex accounting tool. useful for large entities not individual users.

ChangeTip a is not a payment tool, it is an simple/tiny on ramp, a cheap and dirty solution for moving tiny bits to friends, never to be used for anything remotely serious.

Blockchain, is the defacto way to move money for anyone and everyone to use freely.

Not scaling on chain, while banking on either of these 2 techs to pick up the slack, is beyond foolish... the idea of FORCING users off chain is wrong. and doing it in the name of decentralization is ridiculous. Core is literally crippling Bitcoin, in order to incress LN's use cases.

The community at large needs to fucking wake up. bitcoin will not survive in an competitive environment by self imposing SILLY rules.

pisses me off thinking about this shit....

 

[Norway]

Sad to see ChangeTip go. I think it's a great idea to have a centralized service for micro payments. Weired what happened. The entire dev team hired for a booking service? WTF? Wearing my tinfoil hat, I would say that ChangeTip had so much potential, it had to be stopped, he he.

 

[Richy_T]

So, no proof of life for JA from Wikileaks. It's all "black PR". Uh huh.

So many rabbit holes, so little time.

I wonder if (when?) those insurance file passwords will turn up in the blockchain.
Would be good publicity for Bitcoin.

Might have to look in mempool. If the fee isn't large enough at the time, they might not make it in.

It's entirely possible the transactions themselves were crafted months ago.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

This article is fantastic. Some of my favorite excerpts below, but definitely read the whole thing.

Artificially Limiting the Blocksize to Create a "Fee Market" = Another Variety of Lifting the 21 Million Bitcoin Cap

...

But even if the reader is unfamiliar with economics to the point that there seems a way for this to somehow be more profitable for the miners, exorbitantly over-free-market-rate fees nevertheless violate the original sound-money aspects of Bitcoin equally as much as raising the 21 million coin cap. Many will object here: losing your purchasing power only when you spend it is different than losing it when you are just holding it. Yes, it is different, and that difference does create a change in user behavior; they will tend to consolidate transactions more, spend less often, etc.

However, these differences in incentivized behavior must never be allowed to obscure the fact that there is no principled distinction, as far as sound money is concerned, between (1) unsoundness by arbitrary additional payment to miners via extra block rewards (>21M) and (2) unsoundness by arbitrary additional per-tx payment to miners via fees that are many times higher than the free-market clearing rate. Either way, users are leached of a great deal of purchasing power they invested believing they would not be leached of. This undermines the entire point of holding BTC in the first place.

...

Bitcoin is not competing only against fiat money and gold. Bitcoin is competing against the most powerful, fastest, most optimized, most cost-efficient version of itself that can be created.

That means Bitcoin of today competes against every altcoin, albeit with a massive advantage in network effect. However, massively overpriced fees due to developer-knows-best economic intervention are just the trick to open a great big gash in that network effect advantage.

...

No person or group is qualified to dictate consensus settings, even should we dare allow one to, and I find it in bad taste for developers to cajole people into adopting such settings — as has been the practice heretofore — by bundling them up in a package with the rest of their code offerings in a “love it or leave it” gesture that forces users to choose their controversial consensus settings and their dev teams as a tightly bound set. Gratitude only goes so far. This is like the landlord who demands to be part of every important decision, such as who you date, because they are letting you stay for free.

This is why I like Bitcoin Unlimited. The dev team is all from the big block school, but they don’t try to force you into any controversial consensus settings just because you prefer their team or their implementation. Bitcoin Unlimited is the “no strings attached” implementation. In that way, they have opened up a market process among miners, which is a major step. Whereas — for better or worse — Bitcoin Core has so far been the “clingy ex-girlfriend” implementation.

Whichever team or philosophy you like best, I hope everyone in Bitcoin — being a free-marketeer — realizes that only the market can effectively aggregate and distill the knowledge of diverse persons across the community, anonymous and well-known, by putting their money where their mouth is. This process of opening the Bitcoin ledger to market decision-making has a name in the world of blockchains. It is called a “hard fork.” A controversial hard fork, to be precise, because without controversy there is no need to bring the matter to the market — in such mundane cases it is merely a protocol upgrade.

 

[albin]

There is literally no imaginable business model for ChangeTip that does not involve in some way monetizing the personal information or at least aggregated analytics of its users, and the fact that BashCo has been flagrantly in a position of conflict-of-interest being a toxic /r/bitcoin mod and having extraordinary means to target the personal information of reddit users who might've linked to platforms with more personally-identifiable information is fucking bonkers.

 

[adamstgbit]

Great write up of the Haipo Yang's, - ViaBTC AMA today on reddit.

You have to like this quote


https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/majority-miners-planning-shift-bitcoin-unlimited-says-viabtcs-founder/
don't forget to vote

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5ddiqw/im_haipo_yang_founder_and_ceo_of_viabtc_ask_me/

I'm all caught up, this was an epic AMA! i'm sorry i missed it live...

it hard to disagree with anything ViaBTC posted there.

the quote you pointed out was so spot on. and then you look at the FUD adam posted and its just Utter Shit.

that was a really fun read.
[doublepost=1479623147][/doublepost]

There is literally no imaginable business model for ChangeTip that does not involve in some way monetizing the personal information or at least aggregated analytics of its users, and the fact that BashCo has been flagrantly in a position of conflict-of-interest being a toxic /r/bitcoin mod and having extraordinary means to target the personal information of reddit users who might've linked to platforms with more personally-identifiable information is fucking bonkers.

how about this, when users want to withdraw all their tip jar money they have to pay a 1% fee.
the privacy concern is odd, since the only piece of info changetip should need is your username?
[doublepost=1479623218][/doublepost]

This article is fantastic. Some of my favorite excerpts below, but definitely read the whole thing.

Artificially Limiting the Blocksize to Create a "Fee Market" = Another Variety of Lifting the 21 Million Bitcoin Cap

...

But even if the reader is unfamiliar with economics to the point that there seems a way for this to somehow be more profitable for the miners, exorbitantly over-free-market-rate fees nevertheless violate the original sound-money aspects of Bitcoin equally as much as raising the 21 million coin cap. Many will object here: losing your purchasing power only when you spend it is different than losing it when you are just holding it. Yes, it is different, and that difference does create a change in user behavior; they will tend to consolidate transactions more, spend less often, etc.

However, these differences in incentivized behavior must never be allowed to obscure the fact that there is no principled distinction, as far as sound money is concerned, between (1) unsoundness by arbitrary additional payment to miners via extra block rewards (>21M) and (2) unsoundness by arbitrary additional per-tx payment to miners via fees that are many times higher than the free-market clearing rate. Either way, users are leached of a great deal of purchasing power they invested believing they would not be leached of. This undermines the entire point of holding BTC in the first place.

...

Bitcoin is not competing only against fiat money and gold. Bitcoin is competing against the most powerful, fastest, most optimized, most cost-efficient version of itself that can be created.

That means Bitcoin of today competes against every altcoin, albeit with a massive advantage in network effect. However, massively overpriced fees due to developer-knows-best economic intervention are just the trick to open a great big gash in that network effect advantage.

...

No person or group is qualified to dictate consensus settings, even should we dare allow one to, and I find it in bad taste for developers to cajole people into adopting such settings — as has been the practice heretofore — by bundling them up in a package with the rest of their code offerings in a “love it or leave it” gesture that forces users to choose their controversial consensus settings and their dev teams as a tightly bound set. Gratitude only goes so far. This is like the landlord who demands to be part of every important decision, such as who you date, because they are letting you stay for free.

This is why I like Bitcoin Unlimited. The dev team is all from the big block school, but they don’t try to force you into any controversial consensus settings just because you prefer their team or their implementation. Bitcoin Unlimited is the “no strings attached” implementation. In that way, they have opened up a market process among miners, which is a major step. Whereas — for better or worse — Bitcoin Core has so far been the “clingy ex-girlfriend” implementation.

Whichever team or philosophy you like best, I hope everyone in Bitcoin — being a free-marketeer — realizes that only the market can effectively aggregate and distill the knowledge of diverse persons across the community, anonymous and well-known, by putting their money where their mouth is. This process of opening the Bitcoin ledger to market decision-making has a name in the world of blockchains. It is called a “hard fork.” A controversial hard fork, to be precise, because without controversy there is no need to bring the matter to the market — in such mundane cases it is merely a protocol upgrade.

more fun things to read, ill save this for tomorrow

 

[albin]

@adamstgbit

They don't just connect to reddit. If you want to use the same account across multiple social networks (twitter, facebook, tumblr, etc.) they read a treasure-trove of personally-identifiable information.

There is no imaginable scenario where the 1% withdrawl fee is any remotely viable amount of money.