Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[lunar]

looks like GB miners have just joined the resistance.

https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pool/gbminers

Block 443472

 

[Mengerian]

Looks like GB Miners started mining on Bitcoin Unlimited!
https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/block/000000000000000001b0d31625521c442b65fd31cc8f8af0def29f96cc139ab7

EDIT: @lunar you beat me to it!

 

[awemany]

@Mengerian: Nice, they are actually not that small, 3.6% as per blockchain.info!

 

[Norway]

EVERY HASH COUNTS!​

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Excellent!!!

Fudding at /r/Bitcoin has already started.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Does anybody know good books about money, the price of money, sound money, and so on?

 

[Norway]

@Zangelbert Bingledack
Actually, the fud at /r/bitcoin is quite low now. They are probably having a PR strategy meeting right now at Castle Blockstream.

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

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Christoph Bergmann

Easy comic book: How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't by Irwin Schiff (in German but not free).

Medium small book: What has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard

Hard and long book: Human Action (original in German [PDF]). Also The Theory of Money and Credit.

But note that the Austrian story of money isn't completely perfect, especially when it comes to "money as a ledger" vs. "money as a [physical] medium of indirect exchange." For clarification on that, see my thread Deep Bitcoin Scholarship. It also has more books, articles, posts, and videos that I think are crucial for understanding all the "economic"-type aspects of Bitcoin.

 

[albin]

To get a jump on the next Core/BS narrative, any ideas what they will say if we have a big price rally from now, like to $2000+?

I'm starting to really worry about the possibility that Bitcoin is so undervalued right now even with respect to current capacity (with respect to Metcalf value / network effects) due to the extreme hits the ecosystem took in the wake of Gox and the endless FUD in 2014.

Prior to say like 2013ish, there were plenty of people calling Bitcoin a delusion, but this was the first time you could really reliably read these opinions in outlets that normal people actually peruse. Great recent example of FUD reaching the mainstream: I was listening to Joe Rogan interview the filmmaker Kevin Smith, and Rogan just incidentally brought up Bitcoin, and Smith's reaction was along the lines of "is that still going on? I thought somebody hacked it?" confusing Gox with Bitcoin.

My concern is that if we really are substantially underpriced at the moment, what's going on right now politically with respect to capacity is an unfortunate coincidence, because the Core side is so knee-deep in opportunities to hallucinate attribution of that price, which owing to the fragility of a centralized groupthink command structure for making these decisions, could expose the ecosystem to much more significant risk in the future in the form of a much larger economic shock than what we can imagine right this moment.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Does anybody know good books about money, the price of money, sound money, and so on?

I really liked this one:

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

 

[freetrader]

I've opened a poll re: what people think about creating separate transaction capability between old chain and a majority BU fork chain:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/poll-encumbering-tx-replay-between-majority-fork-bu-chain-and-old-chain.1666/

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@albin I've had the same thought. One saving grace is that the next order-of-magnitude growth could bring:

1) a bigger and stronger pool of dev talent, and now there is more than just Core to choose from

2) more capital and infrastructure for things like fork arbitrage

3) more scientists and economists to provide some "adult supervision" to Core's fantasies

4) insane fees and "full blocks" chaos that will kick miners and nodes into gear

5) possibly, depending on how things go, enough economic value for a clear split, since the current ecosystem would only be 10% of the resulting ecosystem

Edit: Of course it will also bring even more power-hungry people than the current Core cabal, but that's a problem for a later time, hopefully after Honey Badger has gained a wealth of experience defeating the current group.

 

[Jonathan Vaage]

Does anybody know good books about money, the price of money, sound money, and so on?

Reciprocal Altruism in the Theory of Money
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/reciprocal-altruism-in-the-theory-of-money/

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles
https://mises.org/library/money-bank-credit-and-economic-cycles

 

[Mengerian]

@Christoph Bergmann Here's a good classic: Carl Menger - On the Origins of Money

 

[adamstgbit]

Excellent!!!
Fudding at /r/Bitcoin has already started.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5ibmqq/warning_if_you_are_mining_at_gbminers_you_may_end/

i up voted this thread because the comments in it are pretty good.

 

[Zarathustra]

@Christoph Bergmann

"Der Kapitalismus - ein System, das funktioniert!" Dr. Paul C. Martin

Everything else is mickey mouse economics.

Summary in english:

http://www.miprox.de/Wirtschaft_allgemein/Martin-Symp.pdf

 

[bracek]

" The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many, or the whole " ​

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.
Had two big horns and a wooly jaw.
Wooly bully, wooly bully.
Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.
Hatty told Matty, "Let's don't take no chance.
Let's not be L-sevens...

 

[molecular]

I really liked this one:

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

Me too. Schlichter was at the first bitcoin conference in Prague, too. Cool guy. Easy to understand, too.

I didn't read it completely, but "Debt - the first 5000 years (David Graeber)" was at least partly insightful, borderline enlightening. But beware, I think one needs to be anthropologically inclined to quite an extent to not find some passages very boring. I didn't make it through, to be honest.

 

[Richy_T]

What do you guys think is reasonable time frame for IOUs to be redeemable on Bitcoin?

I don't really have a strong feeling about whether such transactions should be allowed or not in the first place but if they are allowed, I don't really care much how long they want to hang out as long as miners are willing to process them.

However. They must be tracked (Not quite the right word) so there is an additional cost to miners. Perhaps this should lead to lock times being factored in to priority calculations and/or miner switches on whether to accept them at all. BUIP perhaps.

By the way, I wouldn't mind seeing a good explanation for "Doing X will lead to locked coins being lost" FUD that goes around. I see no reason why new implementations cannot honor these transactions.
[doublepost=1481759027,1481758178][/doublepost]

@Zangelbert Bingledack
Actually, the fud at /r/bitcoin is quite low now. They are probably having a PR strategy meeting right now at Castle Blockstream.

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

[doublepost=1481759401][/doublepost]

1) a bigger and stronger pool of dev talent, and now there is more than just Core to choose from

3) more scientists and economists to provide some "adult supervision" to Core's fantasies

Mixed blessings here. The mindset and understanding needed to really comprehend the nuances of Bitcoin are a lot of work to attain. Besides which, many technical types tend to lean a bit more to the left and are more susceptible to the lure of Keynseianism and central planning. It seems like a lot of resistance to moving forward on increasing/removing the block size limit comes from those newer to the party.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Someone brought to my attention what appears to be major current use for Bitcoin I hadn't heard of: Nitrogen Sports, a Bitcoin sports betting and gambling site. I couldn't find any statistics on number of users or amounts transacted though.