Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

cypherdoc

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of course; he was probably just parroting what satoshi said. but that was certainly what he believed at the time. when you think about it, it is amazing just how early theymos was involved and just how much real estate he scooped up. there are still aspects of blockexplorer.com that i miss. in fact, there was a point there where i thought he might be satoshi. but that type of naivete happened to every newbie back then who came across their first truly knowledgeable person in Bitcoin. "because you seem so smart about this stuff, you must be satoshi!".
[doublepost=1446916877,1446916010][/doublepost]
first, the concept of using an incrementing nonce to progressively guess at the targeted hash when trying to solve for a block along with the concept of how a hash creates a random output.
if i had to distill down to one reason why i believe in Bitcoin it would be this "guessing" part. it's the familiar "one CPU, one vote" quote from satoshi. if you're willing to put up your hard earned money to buy a hashing unit, you can get in there and mine. everyone's individual guess is equal and your chance of winning the newly issued coins is dependent not on external printing factors, like a Fed, but on probabilities which you can control depending on how much money you're willing to put up. this fairness, along with the over time issuance curve out to 2140, is what motivates freely interacting ppl to mine and drive this whole thing forward.
 

Zangelbert Bingledack

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Aug 29, 2015
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Roger Ver is succeeding with /r/btc

Lots of people moving over, including Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, and even the "To the Moon" guy :), 100 people active. Once it gets critical mass /r/bitcoin should be reduced to a rump of thermos sycophants and BS shills.
Ooh, there's a great opportunity today and for the next few weeks to post quality content there so that the current crop of visitors get in the habit of checking it daily. Preferably non-censorship-related content. Just good solid posts of general interest. Post them on the alternative subreddits and *don't* post them on /r/Bitcoin. Then people will have to check the alt-subs daily, kicking off a cycle that should lead to one or more of them eventually eclipsing Theymos's sub.

The problem with these alternative Bitcoin subreddits has been that mostly only discussion about /r/Bitcoin/ censorship happens there. Everything of general interest happens on /r/Bitcoin itself. It becomes self-reinforcing as people only bother to check the alternative subs when they want an update on topics that Theymos might censor. Simply reposting general interest content to the altsubs doesn't work well, unless there are interesting comments (but so far usually there aren't; this is another opportunity).

Since many here are effective content creators in their own right, and since there is plenty of juicy content in this thread alone that could even be lazily rehashed for self-posts on /r/BTC, /r/BitcoinXT, or /r/bitcoin_uncensored, and indeed content and concepts that many of us would like to see spilled into the meme-o-sphere, it could be easy for us to give these altsubs a boost at this critical time.

Just one to three decent posts per day should do the trick.
 

cypherdoc

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@Zangelbert Bingledack

that's a great point.

so many of you guys have made this thread great over many years with great posts. just for the sake of yanking control away from r/bitcoin and BCT, all you would have to do is copy/paste some of your many insightul posts from here or back from the old thread as a New Thread in these new alternative forums. i'm sure you would get plenty of comments and good feedback.

i actually seem to notice an effect of a comment i made to /u/singularity87 the other day. i told him i was appreciative of the fact that he glommed onto an old post by sipa in early 2013 stating he was in favor of 10-100MB blocks. i told singularity that many of us just let damning contradictions like that go unchallenged b/c of weariness in the blocksize debate. since then, and probably unrelatedly, i seem to detect an increase of new threads digging stuff like that up being posted in the alternative subreddits.

we need to stay on it. i feel the tide is turning.
[doublepost=1446918084][/doublepost]i think @chmod755 is right. i need to stop posting on r/bitcoin when at all possible.

i don't think i'd pass up an opportunity to state my views on BS, SC's, or LN if given a compelling opportunity though.
[doublepost=1446918596,1446917881][/doublepost]interesting post on SC's by MIke:

WRT side chains - the main problem I see with side chains is that they create a complexity explosion inside wallets, and side chains don't compose. That doesn't mean they're useless, they might be a kind of better testnet, but they aren't a replacement for putting their features directly into the Bitcoin block chain. By "don't compose" I mean consider what happens if you want to use features X and Y together but they exist only on separate side chains. You can't do it. With the features in the same block chain you can compose them, e.g. use a crowdfunding/assurance contract together with multisig.
 
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Zangelbert Bingledack

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For a little while whatever interesting content gets posted to /r/BTC may have Coinbase's ear even if it isn't about them. What would we want them to know or understand?

Also, one of the first things people might try doing is posting negative things about Coinbase (or Roger Ver) on the sub to see whether they get censored. Hopefully any frivolous accusations will just be downvoted, but likely something fairly damning will be upvoted at some point. Might be good to anticipate this.
 

cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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Bitcoin Unlimited as an option.
[doublepost=1446921618][/doublepost]theymos is a somewhat social deviant which would help explain to Brian perhaps why theymos would take such a stupid, extreme stance towards CB.
 
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Zangelbert Bingledack

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you know those situations where you're stuck having to talk to someone who is anti-social and you struggle to fill in their words for them? well, there you have it. i found myself having to fill in the answers to my questions b/c he was almost mute.
A hopelessly asocial guy in his early 20s? Sounds like someone who could easily be convinced into changing his position if it gets him social validation from his intellectual heroes. I'm not saying this was a conscious process, at least not on his part.
 

solex

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Aug 22, 2015
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There is a battle going on of which the whole censorship situation is weaponry being unleashed. The battle is for control of the reference client.

If XT gains 75% threshold and big blocks are allowed, then XT determines the majority chain, and it also becomes the default reference client because it is installed on the majority of node instances.
Control of the reference client is needed to implement OP codes for LN, SC and other off-chain implementations. No surprise that Mike Hearn wants a hard-fork as the price of "consensus" on CLTV.

@cypherdoc mentions 1MBers talking about BIP102 (the weakest of all block limit solutions). It shows that they are cracking under pressure.

Core Dev need to make a decision: Allow >1MB blocks or give up control of the reference client, before the market makes this decision for them.

They know which is most important.
 
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Zangelbert Bingledack

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Brainstorm of topics for self-posts of general interest (preferably not direct debate points on blocksize caps, forum censorship, or Blockstream*) on the alternative Bitcoin subreddits:
  • What do we really mean by decentralization and what does it do for Bitcoin? How much decentralization is enough? Topics in decentralization of implementations, nodes, miners, infrastructure, and discussion forums.
  • Transport layer vs. consensus layer
  • Fork arbitrage and how the market ultimately controls Bitcoin at every level
  • How competing implementations will work
  • How altcoins play into this, and what we mean by "altcoin"
  • Spin-offs
  • Node incentivization (as per Justus Ranvier's article)
  • Market-determined blocksize limits in the absence of a hard limit (Peter R's paper and beyond; I think this will work as a general interest topic if presented as a scientific finding about a hypothetical scenario rather than a salvo in the debate)
Note how all these cover important matters related to blocksize caps and Core dominance but without coming across as direct in-your-face debate points. Let the readers drive home the implications in the comment section.

Of course anything of general interest, including news scoops not yet posted on /r/Bitcoin, would help.

*Because that is what those subs already consist of. The idea is to create more content of general interest so that it doesn't feel like just a place to rag on /r/Bitcoin mods and the rest of the small block team, so that most /r/Bitcoin readers will start feeling like they have to check the altsubs daily and want to participate in the exclusive content offered and talked about.
 

Peter R

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Justus Ranvier

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Now I'm starting to regret bringing up the "carpetbagger" term the other day.

I think it's worth considering the possibility that the pro- and anti-BIP101 sides are being played against each other by outside instigators in order to generate artificially high levels of disagreement and gridlock:

 
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cypherdoc

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cypherdoc

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despite me debunking the "large miner, large block attack vs small miner" FUD from small blockists, we continue to see it brought forth by them to this day:


note that Todd couldn't respond to my challenge question.

i first objected to this theory here when pwuille brought it up b/c it was inconsistent from what they had been lamenting about before (it never ends) which was consistently too small of blocks and what we all had been seeing on the network:


evidence that i am right about this issue first came when we got the fork caused by BIP66. the fork came about not from a bug in the BIP. it came about b/c miners did not actually upgrade their software despite indicating that they would and thus f2pool lost about 4-5 blocks in a row that they had SPV mined when the network had to revert the fork back into consensus. turns out a large % of large miners from China were defensively SPV mining esp when we started getting full blocks back in July. i've mentioned how gmax expressed surprise when finding out to what extent the Chinese were doing this (i still can't find where i read that quote so if anyone knows where it is please post it here). they had/are been using SPV mining b/c of their bandwidth restrictions. so it turns out in essence that the largest of all miners, the Chinese, cannot execute a large block attack against small miners. however, today while re-listening to the Gavin/Adam podcast, i came across this gem where Adam admits they had misjudged the degree of SPV mining but also admits that he now realizes that miner's first priority is to prevent orphaning:

listen at 6:35: http://www.bitcoin.kn/2015/09/adam-back-gavin-andresen-block-size-increase/

i bring this up b/c it supports the findings of @Peter R's paper where miner's have a huge incentive to create small enough blocks to maximize propagation for the block reward b/c latency is indeed a problem. this incentive should still apply in the absence of a limit.

it also highlights the fact that core dev is quite capable of misjudging incentives across the network and in Bitcoin in general. despite producing code that technically was correct, they misjudged what miners were economically doing and why. thus, Pieter also caused a fork in Bitcoin, just like Mike. but not from technical ignorance but from economic ignorance.
 
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Justus Ranvier

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Aug 28, 2015
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I don't remember how I found this link, but this seems to be the primary point of contention:


The slow-scaling side is worried that Bitcoin is vulnerable to malicious or compelled data center operators, while the counterargument is that if that threat ever manifested, then Bitcoin users would respond in a way that bypasses or neutralizes the attack.

From that point of view, their pessimism is justified if the BIP101 filibuster by Bitcoin Core developers is successful. If the network can't route around an obstruction produced by a handful of programmers operating without nation-state resources, then why would anyone assume it can route around national security letters?
 

theZerg

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So should we post the Articles to /r/btc a little early to try to attract coinbase attention?
 
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solex

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@bitsko

This is really important because it neutralises the dependency of Core miners on the relay network. It also gets a lot of the benefit of IBLT but at smaller block sizes. I hope the XT devs run with it and get it into a release soon.
 

Justus Ranvier

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Since many here are effective content creators in their own right, and since there is plenty of juicy content in this thread alone that could even be lazily rehashed for self-posts on /r/BTC, /r/BitcoinXT, or /r/bitcoin_uncensored, and indeed content and concepts that many of us would like to see spilled into the meme-o-sphere, it could be easy for us to give these altsubs a boost at this critical time.
What if I just make my longer posts over on Reddit rather than here?

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3ryfoi/why_bitcoin_must_demonstrate_the_ability_to/
 

cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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