Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[lunar]

The miners generally want to follow the community, but seem rather detached from concerns about the high-fees. The answer to high-fees pushing out users is "price is up!".

That is somewhat disheartening. It's like the eternal crypto twilight zone. Everyone knows what needs to happen, yet nobody is willing to make the first move. We could be in for another 6 months of doldrums development wise? A catalyst is required. I really hope it's not the transaction log jam we've long predicted.

 

[molecular]

Zooming out on Huobi, I just discovered that the CNY exchanges broke their ATH since january 2014 two weeks ago. The USD exchanges will hopefully do the same soon.

In pretty much all currencies we've reached these prices. Only the USD is putting up some resistance.

 

[awemany]

At the risk of offending our target audience: It appears that the stubborn, small-block folks in Bitcoin really need to be screwed over hard a couple times and need to see the real mempool problems appearing more and more before they start to learn.

That's happening now. I still would have liked to avoid this, but it looks like most people are not able to have foresight and even learning for them means needing to get burned badly by their own idiotic decisions, stubbornness and slavish belief in authorities.

There can only be so much cries of 'spam attack! spam attack!' until it gets outworn and even those repeating it start to notice.

But that interestingly also makes me bullish (and I think explains at least part of the market sentiment). It is so idiotic and the fee market so unpredictable and bad that only the nutcases will remain in the other camp eventually. It also makes me bullish because it will clearly show people who was on the wrong side of history and gets the proper damper if not destruction in reputation served.

It might also involve the obsolescence of a couple hundred to thousand bit gold bug nodes, but whatever.

 

[awemany]

I wonder whether there are people / miners holding out on BU adoption because they fear they might lose the good bits of SegWit. As sometimes the question comes up 'is BU going to implement something like SegWit?'

And then I wonder if it would help if we could make and maybe adopt a BUIP that would confirm our commitment to implementing a solution (and offer it for miner voting) in BU to Malleability and O(n ^2) signature hashing, for example (and maybe other parts TBD). Without further specifying the details on that yet (to not constrain the solution space). And maybe putting in a caveat that we can collect proper funding for writing that implementation.

I am quite confident that BUlers so far are a reasonable bunch and will not vote against that, but then maybe a 'pre-commitment' of some sort would help gaining confidence.

Thoughts? @Jihan, @Haiyang, is that a potential worry?

 

[freetrader]

Flexible Transactions (BIP 134) claims to solve these problems:

• Fixes malleability
• Linear scaling of signature checking
• Very flexible future extensibility
• Makes transactions smaller
• Supports the Lightning Network

If tests confirm these claims (bit difficult for LN, but the rest are the more important ones imo), a BUIP could be tabled to commit to implementing BIP 134 in the next planned HF after the blocksize one?

My view is that is way better than trying to pass a BUIP which promises solutions to some of these without a clear commitment to implementation specification + details.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

I guess you are all tired of the /r/bitcoin censorship, but I found that one "funny" again, where they remove "redditor for x days" flair from users who say the right things:

Before: https://archive.fo/M2rrF
Now: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5g3hpd/samson_mows_on_8btcs_ama_bu_are_lowlevel_copycats/


[removed] ...

 

[_mr_e]

its fascinating there isn't more sense of urgency.
the situation is pretty dire and requires immediate attention big fucking time.
yet alot of poeple are like " HA i told you so bitcoin didnt blow up because full blocks "

watching countless posts about TX delays
watching some alts 10X
bitcoin losing significant market share.
having to tell poeple to try and resycn there wallets to get the limbo coins back

this is a disaster.
feels like bitcoin is ran by Mark Karpeles, they even say the same things he said! "TX malleability is a bug"
wtf is going on.

It's ok man. A disaster is EXACTLY what we need. If the network falls into a disaster scenario, guess what is the only solution that exists today that will resolve it? Bitcoin Unlimited. Humans react in fascinatingly quick ways when they are backed into a corner by certain doom. Core will not be able to code, test & deploy a solution fast enough, while only one other solution exists - The network will upgrade so fast your head will spin. (and it will be a great buying opportunity!)

 

[theZerg]

The situation is awkward because the large block effort might be helping cause the rally. The rapid spike in June was triggered by Chinese buying literally hours after a comment by Jihan stating that SW would not be deployed without a 2MB HF. Yes, there was also a Yuan devaluation -- but that was a day or so later IIRC.

And the descent from 650 down to the Aug 15-31 lows of 550 started just after the Core miner meeting. Rumors I heard were that miners were emptying wallets because it became clear after that meeting that 2MB was not going to happen. And before you mention the BitFinex hack -- that happened weeks after the downtrend started, but yes it did cause the price to "blow off" down to about 450 IIRC, but then rapidly pop back up to $550.

To be clear, I think that the world social and political situation is causing people to trend away from fiat currencies, especially in certain countries like India that have currency issues.

But the large block effort may be encouraging existing holders to not sell, and without supply the price goes up.


To the miners who think that their altcoin diversification might help... I would think again.

Failure of Bitcoin could create a crisis in confidence of crypto-currencies that will take the world years to recover from (if it ever does). If one crypto-currency fails or drops dramatically due to an inability to innovate, they all could...

Much of the technology and resultant efficiencies can still be captured by Bank-coin, or Gov-coin -- and those will be permissionned, not mined. At least the efficiencies that don't make banks money can be captured. I'm sure that things like currency conversion, which is a nice fat moneymaker, will remain as inefficient as ever.

 

[Norway]

I'm trying to learn the faces of the people involved.

From left to right:
- Who's the handsome guy with the hat?
- Who's hiding behind him?
- Then it's Emil Oldenburg, the swedish programmer working on the Bitcoin.com pool. He likes tight leather jackets.
- Then Andrea "sickpig" Suisani. My local food & Prosecco guide in Milan and BU dev.
- But who is that merry silver fox? I know I've seen his pic before, but I don't know where.
- Then it's David "digitsu" Jerry, BU member, organizer of OnChain Scaling Conference.
- Andrew "Solex" Clifford. Didn't know it was him until the last OnChain Scaling Conference.EDIT: I have always thought of Solex as the hot chick from Blade Runner. He isn't
- Jake. The first guy to do a brick-and-mortar bitcoin transaction in China. Speaks chinese, always nice & happy, the perfect ambassador.
- Chandler Guo. Big bitcoin investor in China.

Can you help me fill in the blanks? (I met @dgenr8 in Milan, and didn't make the connection. I'm still embarrassed, lol!)

 

[solex]

@Norway
There are so many interesting people involved in cryptocurrency

On the left is Virgilio Lizardo, head of International at the Shenzhen-based Bitbank. He has his finger on the pulse of the global Bitcoin scene and strongly supports onchain scaling.
Behind him is Roman Mandeleil who is the CEO of Ether.camp and was lead developer of their java client.
Merry Silver Fox is one of the key brains behind Bitcoin Unlimited.
My avatar was originally meant to be anonymous cover then eventually fading away. It is only the BS hijacking of the Bitcoin train, taking it off the rails and cross-country to their promised land, that made it necessary to get involved publicly. Succeed or fail - remains to be seen.

 

[Norway]

@solex
"Merry Silver Fox is one of the key brains behind Bitcoin Unlimited."

So who is it? It's not the Zerg. Well, ok, privacy & stuff. If you're not telling, you don't want to tell.

Anyway, thanks for the details. Just trying to get "who is who".

 

[solex]

Ha. Was just seeing whether you would guess... Peter Tschipper!

 

[Norway]

@solex
Aha! Peter Tschipper, mr. Xthin! He was in china? Great! Too bad Greg Maxwell invented Compact Blocks before Peter T was born

EDIT: He's been shoving data through his bloom filters for months. When does his achivements go through the Bloomberg filter? Matt Miller (lived on BTC for 10 days) should make a tribute report!

 

[Windowly]

@solex Rather discouraging update, specially when we hear of people trying to schedule their transactions on off hours of the weekend to get it through the congestion, and fee prices are exorbitant . . I do agree with @theZerg though about price reflecting optimism (or sometimes pessimism) about scaling.

 

[Norway]

@Windowly
I have all my hard earned savings in BTC. I want a price crash, if that's what it takes to make miners consider the software data computer program code they run at their computers

 

[Windowly]

@Norway Me too -- all my savings are in BTC but I'm very much up for a crash if that's what it takes.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Fork. Then Core prong can crash independently of non-Core prong.

Until then, the crash's meaning is ambiguous. They will say it's because Segwit was not adopted, or some other BS excuse. And they still control the most valuable media properties, so they have the advantage on anything that is ambiguous in its implications. They can spin things better than we can. Nothing less than an unmistakable message will do.

 

[awemany]

Everyone, here's the best example I came across so far of an /r/btc false flag troll operating. (Archive link:
https://archive.fo/vcZT8)

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

There are many more bad reddit posters on both sides than there are false flags, so a witch hunt is probably going to be counterproductive with many false positives, but I have in fact mildly suspected several new posters who popped up in the past week or so of being false-flag trolls (backed by upvote teams), because they post really weak/incorrect anti-Core stuff then get upvoted to around 5 on /r/btc. I know a lot of incorrect stuff and bad arguments gets upvoted at times, but I'm saying this is at a level where it would usually not be in terms of arguments and upvotes. And it's the same set of posters. Could just be more fools coming in, but it feels a little fishy somehow.

Also, thinking about how Greg would ramp up attacks, I can't help but wonder if his little ban from /r/btc was a deliberate provocation in an effort to either get the mods kicked out or turn sentiment against the sub. He knew the doxxing was going to get mod attention, because he had done it before. "Heads I win: mods get removed by the admins for allowing doxing, tails you lose: I get to say you censored me, and if I can also manage to provoke a mod by calling him a coward maybe I can get banned as well, which would be amazing."

Segwit's S-shaped adoption curve has to be killing him, so we are waiting for him to flip over the table. Resorting to dirty tricks on reddit seems like a good start.

 

[lunar]

All this is part of the bigger picture. Divide and conquer. It's just a distraction to keep the healthy minds occupied and not productive. While governments and banks play catchup on regulation and backdooring software. How many of the Core devs have come out and called for peace with compromise in support for the greater good, I expected more intellectual honesty?

From that cringy meme - we are definitely in the 'Then they fight you' stage.

The UK is going FULL Orwell.

UK's new Snoopers' Charter just passed an encryption backdoor law by the backdoor