Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Roger_Murdock]

@albin Also, "decieve"? Remember the rhyme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_before_E_except_after_C

Plus, "fud"? As an acronym, shouldn't that be written in all capitals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

And "rizun"?

That should be capitalized.

Also, "well funded"? It's being used as a compound adjective there, so it should really be hyphenated.

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/hyphens.asp

I'd also have used a comma after that "At the end of the day" because it's a fairly long introductory phrase and there's a natural pause, but now I feel like I'm just nitpicking...

 

[Justus Ranvier]

It's maddening that the rest of the ecosystem is blithely going on running Bitcoin Core when someone like that is in charge.

They're likely to sunk cost fallacy themselves out of existence.

 

[79b79aa8]

when the dam breaks and big money floods into bitcoin, all of this nonsense will be washed away, like tears in the rain. (OK, that sentence just completed itself- with a shout out to @solex )

 

[sickpig]

Rather interesting conversation on ln-dev mailing list:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2017-January/000652.html

A guy start asking about possible scenario for LN in case SegWit won't activate.

The most interesting reactions:

- Rusty Russell:

"If segwit doesn't activate, something is badly broken in Bitcoin"

- Matt Corallo in response to Rusty:

"Depends on your point of view.... If you want a digital gold and don't care too much about payments, segwit not activating may be a good thing. It is a strong indication of how hard it is to change Bitcoin, and may even be an indication Bitcoin will never change in a major way again - a strong confirmation of exactly what you'd want from Bitcoin."

- Anthony Towns propose a solution to the main problem for LN if SegWit won't activate: i.e. need for 24/7 monitoring of the blockchain to avoing being cheated:

"Anyway my idea on avoiding this scenario: rather than have the funding
transaction just have a single output and a fee, have two outputs and
zero fee, the first being the funding output, and the second just being
a P2PKH to yourself. In a second transaction, pay the entire second
output as a fee, which will allow the unmalleated funding transaction to
be propagated and mined via CPFP. Any malleated version of the first
transaction will then be highly unlikely to get mined (or propagated),
because it won't include any fees, and the second transaction won't be
valid anymore, and nobody else will be able to generate a transaction
that spends either output to help it get propagated."

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

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 .

If we are talking about this paper / idea, I want to rebutt a question I had some time ago and which was on slack not answered in a way that satisfied me: Your paper says that the risk of a block being orphaned is the natural cost a miner has for building bigger blocks which results in a natural fee market in which miners "sell" this risk to users which pay transaction fees. Right? But now we have xthin, which is a great thing, and the size of the blocks being propagated by miners can be reduced to ~10 percent or lower (and, if I get this right, decouples the size of a block to propagate from the real blocksize later in the chain). Doesn't this seriously damage your theory about a natural fee market?

 

[sickpig]

@Christoph Bergmann

Supposing some kind of monotonic relation between block size and propagation time I suppose that the Peter's theory is sound.

Xthin it's just a way to improve the capacity of the network in terms of the amount of information the net is able to deal with keeping the net specification the same (nodeìs avg CPU, RAM, IO storage).

In a Xthin/CompactBlock enabled network that just means that you could deal with bigger block, still your block will continue to be orphaned you're making them too big.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@sickpig can you explain in more details?

If I get this right, with xthin a miner just sends out the blockheader, and the other nodes say: "Ok, I have this transactions, so it is ok", and if they lack a transaction they say "Wait, I need this tx, plz send". So, ideally, no matter how many transactions are in a block, if the peers of the miners are strong, the miner doesn't need to send more than the header. IF I get it right ... this would make the effect of the natural, orphan-based fee market very little, maybe not existent.

 

[sickpig]

@Christoph Bergmann

nope.

After an INV message from a node (A) that is ready to forward the block, the receiving node (B) send a GET_DATA message *and* a bloom filter (BF) containing the txns that node B is guessing will be in the soon-to-be-received block.

The way BU is selecting the txns to put in the bloom filter is aimed to make BF size independent from the mempool size but not from the block size. Meaning: the bigger the block the bigger the bloom size the more information nodes need to rely across the network.

for more info about txns selection process see: https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited/blob/0.12.1bu/doc/bu-xthin-protocol.md#bloom-filter-targeting-bu-v121-and-above
https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited/blob/0.12.1bu/doc/bu-xthin-protocol.md#bloom-filter-targeting-bu-v121-and-above

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@sickpig

thank you, this is helpful. The bloom filter grows with the size of the block. So Peter_R's modell still works. Good to know.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Supposed it isn't all politics and games on the dev list and everybody just plays it part:

- Rusty Russell:

"If segwit doesn't activate, something is badly broken in Bitcoin"

No shit, Sherlock. Who is saying that since years now? Whose voice is silenced on the dev list, the bitcointalk forum, the core irc, reddit?

Again, supposed he doesn't just say it to play it's part in some psycho games by BS:
Segwit shouldn't activate just for the reason that you fuckheads didn't even try to listen to critics.

I guess there might be room for a malleability fix (although the LN proponents should work for it. Show some calculations before the miners allow you to have 2nd layer network..) after the blocksize limit is raised.

Really, what's wrong with him? A network at it's capacity limits for months, censorship and manipulation, rise of the altcoins, a suppressed price, but when SW doesn't activate, that's when Bitcoin is broken?

Do they really live in their bubble? Do they actually believe the "everybody not following Greg is a sockpuppet by Roger Ver" bullshit?

 

[AdrianX]

@Christoph Bergmann yes you are correct, there has been a lot of discussion in this forum on that exact issue. There will always be a cost to propagate a blocks and transactions. Information needs to travel and so long as it is not instant there will always be a cost.

One obvious solution is transaction fees related to how fast transactions can propagate through the network, transactions with a small size that can be validated quickly will be low risk and a miner can include such transactions in an Xthin block with confidence as they are well propagated - such transactions could demand a lower fee.

With regards to orphan risk miners will need to identify transactions that take a long time to validate or are large in size these transactions won't have propagated through the network as deeply and effectively so miners will not include these transactions unless they compensate for the added risk or have been delayed long enough to ensure they have propagated through the network. Nodes will need a rule set that dictates their tolerance for propagating complicated transactions - in much the same way as with BU block size today.

Gavin has another solution for the concern you bring up with Xthin. His header first proposal solved this problem and provides a limit to the block size that is constrained by the technology deployed on the network. I can't recall how it worked exactly but the gist of it is, he used a time limit of 30 seconds to validating a block, so while you get the header very fast and can mine on top of it, a miner then has 30 seconds to confirm and validate the block. Blocks that could not be validated withing 30 seconds of receiving the header are orphaned. The clever thing is as technology improves bigger and more complicated blocks become viable, so while his proposal maintains a limit based on a magic number, the limit is governed by technology and the block size grows as technology improves, unlike our existing 1MB limit that becomes outdated as technology improves.

 

[Norway]

@Christoph Bergmann
This excellent video by Chronos Crypto explains Xthin in a simple way:

 

[sickpig]

weird indeed

 

[solex]

@sickpig Could that be an effect of the fee-filtering?

@79b79aa8 Ah yes, but memories nothing as glorious as the C-beams at Tannhauser Gate.

 

[79b79aa8]

- Matt Corallo:
" If you want a digital gold and don't care too much about payments, segwit not activating may be a good thing. It is a strong indication of how hard it is to change Bitcoin, and may even be an indication Bitcoin will never change in a major way again - a strong confirmation of exactly what you'd want from Bitcoin."

If you want a digital gold, you must also care about payments. On-chain payments on a non-contorted protocol that has not been altered to favor private third party solutions while changing the basic economic parameters of the coin.

But if you censor or filter out criticism, simple things become just too difficult to see.
[doublepost=1484565005,1484563944][/doublepost]The mentality of Core dev seems to be this: if the direction we propose is not being accepted by the network, there is a serious problem with Bitcoin.

Their mentality should be: if the direction we propose is not being accepted by the network, there is a serious problem with us.

Segwit not activating does not mean there is a problem with Bitcoin. It means the market has fired Core dev.

Core dev: you are not Bitcoin. Get out of your own echo chamber, in order to begin taking in the full dimension of this open source peer to peer digital cryptocurrency and payment system. It will change the world.

 

[sickpig]

@sickpig Could that be an effect of the fee-filtering?

fair point. Core changed a lot lately on the fee size side. Maybe 0.13.2 bring to the table something new to justify this. If it is case I'll be quite scared cause that means that we are willingly moving users away....

I've quickly glanced 0.13.1 and 0.13.2 for fee policy changes but I didn't find anything significant
(https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/0.13.1 https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/0.13.2).

Last important changes on fee policies have been made on 0.13.0 and it has been released a few months ago (26 Aug 2016)...

@79b79aa8 Ah yes, but memories nothing as glorious as the C-beams at Tannhauser Gate.

ROTFL

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Rusties Statement "if SegWit is rejected there is something seriously wrong with Bitcoin" is unbelievable. The Miners rejected Classic after a couple of core devs promised to release a core version with a hardfork in exchange for the activation of SegWit. If Rusty and his friends - one of them participating in the meeting - think that Bitcoin is broken because miners want devs to stand to their written agreement - I don't have words for this. Maybe something with the devs trustworthiness is seriously broken?

--

mempool: I started my node (BU 0.13) ~1.5 hours ago. Have more than 5,000 tx in the mempool, which might be an indicator that it has something to do with core 0.13.2.

 

[freetrader]

@Christoph Bergmann :

Maybe something with the devs trustworthiness is seriously broken?

"Rethink Trust."

"Yes we did."

But seriously, I'm going to copy the image here so that we can think about what they mean.

That doesn't sound like the slogan of a company that is set to introduce disruptive technology that might compete with today's financial systems (TFS - a nice acronym - feel free to come up with alternative expansions).

Could it be that Bitcoin undermines trust in TFS?

Proof that this is not photoshopped (yeah, it's so ridiculous to believe this is an actual BS front page that I'd rather provide an archive link as proof): http://archive.fo/coJr3

 

[freetrader]

Show of hands - what are the "problems that undermine trust in today's financial systems"?

I can think of some:

• inflation in various forms and disguises ("quantitative easing")
  
• transactional surveillance to the nth degree (KYCCC...)
  
• financial censorship at the hands of corporations and states
  
• lack of personal control / ownership (being unable to really "own" your money when it's digits in a centralized bank account, just like data in a cloud isn't really yours)
• threat of asset forfeiture, confiscations (think Cyprus etc)
• financial institutions enabling widening wealth gaps (privatizing profits, socializing losses)

This list is probably far from complete, but I think proponents of various "wars on cash" are currently making sure the general public understands some of them very well.

Which ones of these is Blockstream addressing in a novel way (i.e. something that Bitcoin doesn't already do)?

Maybe I'm missing something.

Oh, and here's what I think of when I hear "today's financial systems":
SWIFT, VISA, BIS, the World Bank, the Fed and BOE, PBOC, other central banks, Libor, HSBC and other multinational banking conglomerates, local banks, ATMs, VISA, debit cards, chip cards, Paypal, KYC, AML. In no particular order. Am I out of the loop?

 

[bluemoon]

The underlying problem undermining trust in today's financial system is the attempt by government to live beyond its means and to manipulate the economy to conform to political ideas rather than to serve the values of individual people freely cooperating.

Governments have a symbiotic relationship with the banks which are used to create the additional credit money which enables this, not only creating unsustainable distortions in the economy and channelling resources away from the ends chosen by individuals, but in the process undermining the stability of the money, savings, and freedom of society generally.

The oppressive controls and confiscations are simply signs of the ever more extreme expedients governments are resorting to to keep their increasingly threadbare and rickety show on the road.