Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

Justus Ranvier

Active Member
Aug 28, 2015
875
3,746
Greg is a fascinating persona. Instead of saying "looking back, I probably should have created a dummy account to assign the commits to instead of my own," he spins a complex web of half truths that leaves the reader confused about the basic facts.
That's not a fascinating persona - it's aposemitism.

"Warning: I'm a pathological liar, don't let me get close to any project you care about."
 

AdrianX

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
2,097
5,797
bitco.in
limitless block space for free isn't what's most profitable.
Well, it is while everyone is supporting the cartel, it's having the option to break from the cartel and mine more transactions at a lower rate and earn more profit, that keep a free market functioning. BS/Core fundamentalists fear the free market, they think this competition results in a tragedy of the commons.

They are too naive and inexperienced to understand that a market equilibrium will form, and they think their intervention is needed to preserve bitcoin and protect it.
 
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awemany

Well-Known Member
Aug 19, 2015
1,387
5,054
and what if the paper was funded? would that alter whatever results it presents? are those in contention?
It is interesting how (and I think I faintly remember the discussion in this thread) an offer to help out financially that AFAIR was never even taken by @Peter R. is suddenly becoming evidence that the paper is paid for. And as you say: There would be nothing wrong with that.

Yet, we of course have >$70e6 of fiat money and that is not a conflict of interest and a corporation that is akin to an unicorn farting rainbows and pretty much like your average philanthropic non-profit, because that's just how it works in tech.

I have to be careful that the the soup of very appropriate expletives that formed in my head over the last couple years doesn't boil over.
 
Greg projects that image when he was called out for stealing an ID from Git and started making claims that the BS/Core team had made more contributions that the Core team I found an article on CoinDesk where the reporter said Greg had been in bitcoin since 2009 the time of the then claimed ID.

I asked him to contact the reporter and make the correction he shrugged it off as the article was old and out of circulation.

I'm sure given he was interviewed he would have had an opportunity to fact check.
Somewhere in 2013 (on bitcointalk in an argument about Lerner's blockchain-archeology, he also stated he mined Bitcoin on his linux-system some days after the start, but lost them all, since he moved, and just came back in 2011 ... don't know what to think about it ...

Edit: And I recently researched the history of Bitcoinica (good links welcome!). Guess what I found on reddit? nullc being the loudest to complain and bully Zhou Tong. (not that he is not right, but why has he always be on top-front to insult and fight and bully other people?). If you do any research in Bitcoin history, more or less since 2011/2012 Greg Maxwell attributing fame for himself and insulting other people is a common sujet ...
 
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satoshis_sockpuppet

Active Member
Feb 22, 2016
776
3,312
@Christoph Bergmann
Do you have a link to the bitcointalk thread at hand?

About Greg's behavior, you can go back even more and look at the scorched earth he left at Wikipedia. Will be interesting in what light he and 2 or 3 other guys will be seen if/when bitcoin frees itself from it's shackles..
A lesson to be learned: The kind of people who can damage an open source project, can apparently do even more damage when it's about money..
 

Erdogan

Active Member
Aug 30, 2015
476
855
The cost is irrelevant and doesn't factor into things. It would be exactly the same if it was Luke-jr with his 286 mining.

However, just as with gold, you are correct, it is not literally a tax. However, it *is effectively* a tax in that value is taken from holders and given to miners to encourage their activity. One might also call it a fee. With modern government, the difference between the two is often almost nothing.
The fact that you pay the cost to nature, exactly as you pay to the nature when you produce potatoes, is fundamental. Tax is theft, cost is just the normal way of creating value. You sell something for a price, subtract the cost, the difference, the profit, is part of the value creation. This is one of the reasons we want free market money. I don't understand why you want to play down this feature, and conflate cost with seigniorage.
 

Mengerian

Moderator
Staff member
Aug 29, 2015
536
2,597
It's no surprise, but I just noticed some censorship of BU discussion over in @adamstgbit's old Wall Observer thread on Bitcointalk.

@jbreher had a nice informative comment about BU that got removed.

They sure are persistent. In the long run, those doing the censoring only hurt themselves though. Their own ideas will become weaker without being subjected to criticism, and they lose their ability to accurately judge the reality of the situation.
 

sickpig

Active Member
Aug 28, 2015
926
2,541
TL/DR: non-upgraded miners are unlikely to have their blocks orphaned should segwit be activated.
Didn't know about that, this is getting crazier and crazier.

I thought that like all previous soft fortk (e.g. BIP 66) once activated the block version would have been changed and that all blocks produced with an old version would be discarded.

At least in before there were a clear cut for miners, now the line has been blurred so that if a miner doesn't upgrade doesn't even know if is extending a valid chain or not.

In my book this is absurd.

For anyone interest in a deeper explanation just have a look at this:

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/27/segwit-upgrade-guide/#not-upgrading
 

AdrianX

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
2,097
5,797
bitco.in
re inflation as a tax free market money the type that was advocated pre bitcoin is also a failed concept, Keynes correctly identified it as the problem propagating economic bubbles. Hayek was also correct in his criticism of Keynes Saying that ultimate a free money market would be more efficient.

The thing about money that make it useful is it's a unit of measure for value. It's enough that value is subjective and constantly changing we don't need the unit used to measure value it's self to constantly change.

Bitcoin is the first money in history to actually provided for the possibility of a unit of measu that doesn't change, what changes is is how we value it.

The cost of inflation when mining gold and its limited supply is a valuable deterrent for inflation. However it's far from perfect. Using goal as a unit of measure is flawed because it's susceptible to inflation and that inflation is a theft from honest economic participants. Gold is also cumbersome and susceptible to money substitutes like fractional reserve notes, the reason it actually failed and the reason we have a central banks and fiat.

Just like gold miners, governments with central banks create money and just like gold miners there is a cost to pay in the form of interest. Unlike gold where there is lots of competition the profit margin on inflation is small, while the profit margin of inflation with governments and central banks is huge. Much of that profit in theory going to running a government.

The system today is only stable because we've seen unprecedented technological innovation and growth, we are nearing the limits, we now have the technology to cut down all the trees, mine all the oil, catch all the fish, etc in other words innovation can not provide much more growth as we have most of the technology needed to exploit the finite nature of our plant. Our economics will shift from more to better and with that shift we'll need to move away from an inflation tax that taxes more and move to a money that doesn't tax with inflation. Better is not as easy to tax with inflation as it's not as quantifiable as more, better is extinguished in the absence of exponentially growth.

Economies are stalling today as Mises and Hayek predicted, but not exactly as they predicted, what's failing is the managed economy is not allowing creative problem solving to emerge it's being drowned out with relative inflation while commodity prices experience relative deflation.
 
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Peter R

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
1,398
5,595


I'm going to take this as a compliment. Maxwell and Blockstream's $70M cannot compete with a guy from Vancouver writing the odd paper in his spare time, for no monetary compensation, while working full-time in (non-bitcoin) industry :D.
 

albin

Active Member
Nov 8, 2015
931
4,008
It's funny how you immediately can know with absolute certainty that he's going to misspell "plagiarism" despite using the word over and over for a long time across different venues. I wonder if brazen Dunning-Kruger-esque boldness in spelling is telling as a personality trait. I suspect it might have some relevance to #2 and #5 in @lunar 's list a few pages back.
 
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chriswilmer

Active Member
Sep 21, 2015
146
431
Greg Maxwell's comments about Peter are so crazy I don't even know where to begin. It's maddening that the rest of the ecosystem is blithely going on running Bitcoin Core when someone like that is in charge.

I think this comment about Peter being "well funded" also reveals another false idea of Greg's, that Peter's arguments are somehow intricate and complicated rather than simple and straightforward. If you don't actually understand someone's ideas, they may seem complex to you, even though they are really simple. This is consistent with a bizarre comment Greg made much longer ago about Peter trying to fool the Bitcoin community with his equations, which is an odd thing to say about high school level calculus.