Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[solex]

The situation is awkward because the large block effort might be helping cause the rally.

Absolutely. The market spiked up when ViABTC switched to BU. Obviously there is loads of other news, but the market is pricing in a block size increase already.

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

I agree with you. And this is from Chandler where he sums up the average miner viewpoint:

“Even the miners in this today, they don’t want a war because if there should be a war and they can’t mine, it would take them a year to make their money. Miners just want to stay there: $700 is a good price; $800 is a good price. If there is a war and the price crashes down, everybody will lose money. Mining pools don’t care actually because the transaction fee is good - 5 percent of the reward. Right now, I think a lot of Bitcoin companies and Bitcoin shareholders want the price of Bitcoin to keep growing. For example, the mining equipment companies want the price to go to $10,000 so they can sell more equipment; for shareholders who have a lot of Bitcoins, they want the price of Bitcoin to go up; to normal Bitcoin people, they say it’s (the price) already three times in a year.”

Everyone wants $10k a coin, but it is a dream if real scaling is not achieved, and SegWit's deck-chair shuffling does not cut it.

 

[albin]

I just read something mind-boggling on Rusty Russell's medium (from the springtime, emphasis added):

This week I gave up, and switched to polling bitcoind for chaintips (getchaintips), then simply asking bitcoind for the full block (getblock <hash> false: thanks to Pieter Wuille’s clue!) and sorting through them myself. This works because lightning only really cares about transactions which are in blocks (though it’d be nice to see commitment transactions as soon as bitcoind does, it’s not critical).

Ummm, enforcing channels? Like literally the entire game theory behind how this supposedly works??

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Interesting theory:

 

[Richy_T]

Here's another perspective on that: Bitcoin is very good for *certain things*. Having it easily exchangeable for fiat currencies has meant that Bitcoin has not rapidly grown outside of those things. Destroying the on and off ramps (which could not be done completely) would potentially force the Bitcoin economy to grow to facilitate its liquidity.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Rusty claims every dev who has looked closely at Segwit thinks there are no concerns with it. Is this true?

 

[Dusty]

Rusty claims every dev who has looked closely at Segwit thinks there are no concerns with it. Is this true?

As a developer myself (and a big blocker) I can't speak for others, but segwit is certainly a big step ahead for Bitcoin because it opens an awesome range of possibilities, the more important ones I find are:
* aggregated signatures (Schnorr) that are good for better privacy (and occupy way less space)
* confidential transactions (complete privacy, similar to zcash but without his drawbacks)
* MAST: awesome way to not reveal P2SH scripts and thus gaining even more privacy

The thing is that they are still not ready, they simply can be integrated once segwit is deployed.

What I don't like about segwit is:
* an hard fork would eliminate technical debt and permit to implement segwit features without hacks in a more clean way (for example with a structure similar to flexible transactions)
* segwit is an excuse to not augment the block size and leave the power of developing bitcoin in the hand of core developers. I want bigger blocks.

I find that the last issue (a political one) the most problematic one.

 

[molecular]

When a group of us gathered in China, on Nov 23rd, it was in my mind to post some updates here. Wow, the Great Firewall bites hard. Anything google is blocked, and this includes the authenticator which I use on this site for login.

Google authenticator doesn't need a network connection, does it? Maybe you're talking about something else.

 

[lunar]

Interesting theory:

Aligns almost perfectly with my line of thinking this past year.

Occam's razor is a powerful tool.

 

[Richy_T]

If Bitcoin were only about its technical quality, it would have failed almost immediately.

But even still, even if it were coded perfectly, anyone who doesn't see that segwit is a hack that incurs severe technical debt is deluding themselves. Core Segwit treats Bitcoin as adversarial and exploits a flaw that developers *for* the networks should sooner be seeking to fix.

 

[Richy_T]

So last night. I got to thinking about Gresham's law (bad money is used in preference to good). This is, perhaps, why gold tends to be hoarded as a store of value and we use depreciating fiat to pay for things in the day to day. If this were to eventually apply to Bitcoin, it would end up mostly being hoarded and other currencies used.

This would seem to be in line with what the small blockers are hoping for. If you have mostly hoarders, you don't need many transactions. So we just leave the max block size small and it's gold 2.0, right? Wrong.

I assume everyone has heard of the cargo cults? A somewhat naive people who built fake airports in the hope that airplanes would land and provide them with the fabulous goods that the people who build real airports would receive. Well, this is cargo cult economics. These people think that if you make something that looks like gold, you will get the same thing as gold. This totally misses that there is a path to be traveled before this can happen. If we want to get there, Bitcoin *must* have much wider adoption and acceptance. it *must* build a legitimate economy. It *must* be able to support a much higher transaction rate. In short, it *must* accept bigger blocks.

Once Bitcoin is there, then is time to think about second layer solutions, fewer on chain transactions and maybe, *maybe* gold 2.0. The bad can't push out the good until the good actually *is* good. With small block sizes, you can't get there from here.

Of course, that's assuming one *wants* gold 2.0. Personally, I don't want to try and steer Bitcoin in any particular direction. I think that's just foolish. I suspect where Bitcoin goes is likely to surprise most of us.

I also have some objections to Gresham's law. Mostly that at first glance, it seems it would have a bunch of exceptions (people eventually stop taking really bad money, what gives good money value etc)

 

[solex]

Google authenticator doesn't need a network connection, does it? Maybe you're talking about something else.

You are right. So this is puzzling. The authenticator worked, but the forum screen froze accepting the number. Maybe there is a google analytics call embedded when sites use this authentication.

 

[Windowly]

@solex Yes, I've used google authenticator often behind the firewall without a vpn with no problem. Curious it was giving issues.

On a slightly related note -- it would be great if the forum supported fido u2f -- then we could all login with our trezors or whatever else we're using as a u2f token.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Richy_T

It's even more of a cargo cult than that, as Gresham's Law doesn't even apply at first base. Gresham's Law applies only when there are legal tender laws forcing the monetary instruments to be accepted at full face value. Hence if you have an old worn/dirty $2 coin the merchant must accept it anyway, so you are not going to give him your mint-condition $2 coin. However, if there are no legal tender laws, the merchant may well refuse the subpar coin (or value it less toward your purchase). Bad money doesn't drive out good unless there is a reason why people have to accept the bad money at full value.

In Bitcoin there are no legal tender laws, so Gresham's Law is irrelevant and cannot help the "settlement layer" case. For example, sidechain coins or LN coins that are *supposed* to be equivalent to 1 BTC may well trade at a lower price since they are encumbered with extra risk or time burden on their redemption. Only a government law forcing everyone to accept sidechain coins or LN coins as equivalent to BTC (so that same amount of each coin is required to be redeemable for the same amount of goods/services) could change this, and that's obviously not going to work.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Did we reach peak newspeak yet?

Isn't Bitcoin exactly designed to provide consensus? Do they really want to remove the one thing Bitcoin actually (ingeniously) solved and replace it with their social consensus?

(Granted, the second part is correct and the problem of backdoor hardware is a real issue.)

edit: Ok, in the context it makes some sense. I just have the feeling, that it will be cited out of context a lot. (Like I did )

 

[awemany]

So with my arch-enemy gone from reddit, there is time to be productive again!

Gonna look into writing BU's voting platform soon!

 

[MoonShot]

I just read something mind-boggling on Rusty Russell's medium (from the springtime, emphasis added): Ummm, enforcing channels? Like literally the entire game theory behind how this supposedly works??

sorry, could you elaborate a little on your comments?

 

[theZerg]

@awemany, where are we talking/speccing out the voting platform?

 

[albin]

@MoonShot

The blog basically details how he was having trouble in general building on top of bitcoind trying to use wallet RPC calls to look up transactions that he's interested in, so he switched to just polling bitcoind for the raw new block itself.

The statement about only caring about tx's that are in a block is extremely bizarre, because this would only ever apply to just the commitment tx's you create when starting a channel, but for the security model of Lightning to work, you would still have to stand guard in real time looking for attempts to unilaterally close channels fraudulently.

Not to mention that this was only about half a year ago. We were jackhammered by folks like Adam Back making outrageous claims back in 2015 about how soon Lightning would be ready for deployment (in order to justify Lightning as a political football), yet here at around the time they claimed segwit would've been deployed, his own employee doesn't even have the most rudimentary details of how the software stack would function in place.

Followup point: how will claims about decentralized Lightning hold up if you end up having to also run a full-on indexing server as part of the stack to support the kind of real-time queries it needs?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Paul Sztorc is back from his hiatus:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/protocol-upgrade-terminology/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5gp1ms/better_fork_terminology_truthcoin_making_cheap/

This at least shows how much of a farce the whole "soft forks are OK" thing is, but he continues to breezily misunderstand hard forks and therefore dismiss them.

 

[Dusty]

Followup point: how will claims about decentralized Lightning hold up if you end up having to also run a full-on indexing server as part of the stack to support the kind of real-time queries it needs?

Actually, that need would favour the smalblockers band, since having a full node would be less demanding with a small block, and having more full nodes results in a more "decentralized network".