Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[adamstgbit]

@Justus Ranvier

keynesian's would argue that a currency with a fixed supply simply can't be an effective currency, because it leads to price instability. so its not that they want to "plunder savers", they just want price stability.
keynesian's think that a currency with a fixed supply, will lead to prices always going down aka "deflation".

the truth is keynesians take a nonsense position in order to justify taking control of the money supply? maybe, probably...
[doublepost=1487906769,1487905673][/doublepost]

Just for the record the most prominent developer in bitcoin is banned from reddit starts chatting up some noobs and convinces them bitcoin is fiat.



http://pastebin.com/rmm6TPEx

I'm sad he is not familiar with the word origin or the definition as used in economics, but I can take joy in the fact he had his edit privileges revoked from wikipedia, so at least that definition won't be changed - there is hope for Bitcoin the digital Cash.

core appears to be leading some sort of anti-bitcoin campaign...

 

[Justus Ranvier]

the truth is keynesians take a nonsense position in order to justify taking control of the money supply? maybe, probably...

Look at what happened to Freicoin.

 

[adamstgbit]

Congratulation everyone, we are at an new ATH, $1202

 

[lunar]

​

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Hopefully we just broke the "$32" of 2013, en route to "$266" ($9000) momentarily, then settling comfortably over "$100" ($3500).

 

[Zarathustra]

A bunch of important folks met on Feb14th: https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-batsbzx-2016-30/batsbzx201630-1593495-132335.pdf
Insider info leaking into price.

Makes me sick in the stomach to see what the price did post meeting. Big money always wins?

Maybe Bitcoin will turn out to be an exception of this rule, but yes, that's how it goes:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows

 

[Zarathustra]

Just for the record the most prominent developer in bitcoin is banned from reddit starts chatting up some noobs and convinces them bitcoin is fiat.


http://pastebin.com/rmm6TPEx

I'm sad he is not familiar with the word origin or the definition as used in economics, but I can take joy in the fact he had his edit privileges revoked from wikipedia, so at least that definition won't be changed - there is hope for Bitcoin the digital Cash.

Wiki:
Fiat money is a currency established as money by government regulation or law.[1] The term derives from the Latin fiat ("let it become", "it will become")[2] used in the sense of an order or decree.[1] It differs from commodity money and representative money.

Why does that differ from commodity money? Gold became money as soon as the 'Organized Violence' (aka Church and State) declared it to be money (= tax debt).
'Let it become money'.

 

[steffen]

About an hour ago I discovered that my BU node had crashed. It is a BU 1.0.0.1 running on Ubuntu 16.10. I restarted the PC and BU. BU was 18 hours behinds but catched up without any further problems.

I can see on http://xtnodes.com/#bitcoin_unlimited that we have just seen a drop of BU nodes from about 700 to about 620.

If others have experienced similar crashes that might explain the large and sudden drop in the number of BU nodes.

 

[albin]

Hilarious thing w/ Maxwell's Fiatmoneygate.

The guy on reddit copypasta'ing wikipedia coming to his defense....

I actually have a copy of the book cited for the first footnote, it's a very technical overview of monetary theory, and there is literally nowhere in the book that covers the content in the sentence in the wikipedia article using it as a footnote! I actually flipped through as like a double-take, because it initially struck me as weird why that book would even cover what they're claiming it does.

Moral of the story in my opinion is that Wikipedia is a good place to get a quick and dirty set of basic info as a jumping off point, but using it as ammunition for internet arguments is the province of trolls and sophists making semantic arguments, because if you actually have subject-matter expertise on articles, it's not hard to find alot of sourcing problems and misleading information. Very Gell-Mann amnesia like situation in general.

 

[awemany]

Competition on features between cryptos

Given that Altcoins recently had a larger share of the cryptocurrency market (at least for a while), I am wondering about the features Altcoins have vs. the features Bitcoin has. It appears that the following features are advertised as key elements of various alts:

1.) Turing-complete contracts
2.) Privacy and thus better fungibility
3.) Maximum transaction rate

Now, 1.) is embodied by Ethereum, obviously. Given the DAO DOA debacle, the questionable 'return the money HF' and IMO in general a lack of applications of programs running on the chain, the fact that sound money as a feature will overwhelm any other fancy uses at least for quit a while, I am not at all convinced Bitcoin has to fear competition of type 1.) so much. Compared to the hardcore techno-libertarian futurist trans-humanist folks, I am also not at all convinced that technology will dispose off human intuition in definition of words and in contracts anytime soon - and thus dispose off judges and/or juries deciding on the contract terms.

In terms potentially more understandable to that crowd, the entropy needed to give full and sound definitions of the words used in the contracts that are then enforced through program contracts is absolutely huge (and it is philosophically not even settled that it would be possible). But that's exactly what would need to be put 'on-chain' for this feature to be useful.

Furthermore, any Turing-complete contract can be enforced in Bitcoin simply on the edges of the network. The only difference is that it is not 'the network' doing it, and instead just a bunch of designated computers for that purpose. It will also be overall more efficient (off-chain!

2.) It appears that e.g. Monero has an advantage to Bitcoin on this front. However, this might very well just be skilled marketing by them. Because it appears that with TumbleBit, there is a scheme existing now on top of Bitcoin that can be just as private as any Monero transaction (TumbleBit removes the special knowledge of the tumbler and thus - AFAICS - replaces Monero's ring signature advantage).
If I understand it correctly, TumbleBit can only make coins of a common denomination private. However, there's nothing preventing folks from splitting up transactions of odd denomination into multiple TumbleBit ones.

This can obviously also be automated, including finding the TumbleBit 'hubs'. So it appears that, given just the right kind of front-end software for all this, the same Monero-like privacy can be implemented on top of Bitcoin right now.

(For anyone using this, it would also have the disadvantage of much higher entropy per transaction made, like Monero - raising fees)

Given that some folks already want to avoid the mafia-/thug- stench that more privacy would bring to Bitcoin, I think this is the best of all worlds, and I don't see - if you go down to the nitty gritty elements involved - that Monero has any advantage left along these lines regarding Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin has an advantage vs. Monero here: The extra privacy is optional!

This is also - by the way - a good point when considering Adam's and Greg's confidential transaction ideas. Because we already have all the features in place allowing confidential transactions to be made - albeit with more work on higher layers and maybe not as elegant - but with essentially the same privacy results(!) - it makes CT a questionable addition to Bitcoin.
It makes it an especially questionable addition in its current form, where it would remove the ability to do a sum of the money supply across the UTXO set, thus removing the ability to do a simple check for inflation, and instead having to rely upon fancy crypto math (and transitively so!) to ensure this. ZCash and similar also have this problem as far as I understand, and I also do not see any added practical privacy there.

Regarding 3.): We are all painfully aware of the details here, everything is well known by now and has been discussed to death.
For completeness, both Ethereum and Monero (as well as likely other Alts) have the advantage of no hard enforced limit vs. Bitcoin. However Monero has a lower (on-chain-bits)/(transactions-made) density consensus-enforced, that should it ever run into physical limits, will make Monero less efficient than Bitcoin.

To me, it appears that Bitcoin without the artificial problem of 3.) has no disadvantage to any other cryptocurrency and given this and no further breakthrough on any new fancy front, I expect (with some extra time for Monero-like user-interfaces to appear on top of Bitcoin, and maybe some 'Turing-contract edge node software') the coin dominance index of Bitcoin to basically squash out all other coins again. Even if it would completely ossify in all regards after the blocksize limit is removed or made dynamic.

But only if we can finally get 3.) addressed.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Note that privacy is also optional in Monero. It's just on by default instead of off by default. And since the more other people remain anonymous, the more you do, this can still be called an advantage for the privacy-conscious (though perhaps easily equalized by changes in default behavior of popular Bitcoin wallets and popular Monero wallets).

In any case, in a scenario where some people want to switch to a new protocol, I don't see why Monero would be any easier to switch to than a Bitcoin-ledger spinoff of the Monero protocol. There is never a reason to damage store of value by switching ledgers and disenfranchising current BTC holders or forcing them to be good investors in order to preserve their wealth.

 

[Norway]

Seems Bitmain sold Canoe the mega mining farm they recently built: at least, I assume Canoe bought all of it.


I wonder how rapidly Canoe will ramp up their hashpower?

I wonder whether Bitmain invited offers from Blockstream Core or their friends?

Anti-Blockstream have some deep pockets.

This is very exciting news. If someone is putting preassure on Jihan to not mine BU, he now has a way out. The 130 MW mining farm was supposed to be finished in december. It looks like it's not yet operational since Canoe still has just a small amount of hashpower.

 

[sgbett]

One aspect of the "fee market" paradigm I think is interesting --

If you just crudely look at charts of Blockchain info for total tx fees as time series, denominated in both USD and bitcoin, you can very clearly see that tx fees are pretty damn sticky to their BTC denomination.

What we can infer from this is probably that a substantial portion of Bitcoin transactions are being done by tx fee payers experiencing an income effect from holding BTC, it isn't the Bitcoin Uncensored fantasy of people going in and out to facilitate their illicit transactions, because these people would have preference curves that track w/ the fiat-equivalent tx fees.

Consequently, it would follow that Core's resounding claims of fee market success are significantly and unsustainably propped up by price appreciation.

Indeed I've always thought it curious that a lot of the hubbub is about fees in terms of dollar value. Thought experiments about the endgame where reward is mostly fees, and BTC doeasnt need to be 'cashed out' anymore, inevitably lead to considering block reward as a % of total bitcoin in circulation and at that point it's obvious that fee per transaction would have to be much smaller in BTC terms or you end up with an insane transfer of wealth to miners in short order.

for the sake of example current cheapest fee (21.co) is 0.0004 BTC

At ~4400 transactions a block that's 1.76 bitcoin. So in 227 years all 21M bitcoin has been spent on fees.
At 10x throughput, 22 years
At 100x throughput 2.2 years

This is just another reason why the current fee level is unsustainable. As the number of on chain transactions scales, fee per transaction *has* to reduce, to find some equilibrium.

I think the fear is that people have fixated on a block reward of 50, 25 even 12.5 bitcoins as being something that has to be matched for transaction fees to be sufficient incentive.

What they don't realise is that those numbers are about initial distribution, and not ongoing incentive.

In the end game where you don't need to "cash out", then total block reward fees as a percentage of coins in circulation is the important metric. And if we are in a 'no cash out' situation then total coins in circulation represents significant value, such that only a very small percentage is a very big reward.

 

[freetrader]

About an hour ago I discovered that my BU node had crashed. It is a BU 1.0.0.1 running on Ubuntu 16.10. I restarted the PC and BU. BU was 18 hours behinds but catched up without any further problems.

I can see on http://xtnodes.com/#bitcoin_unlimited that we have just seen a drop of BU nodes from about 700 to about 620.

If others have experienced similar crashes that might explain the large and sudden drop in the number of BU nodes.

Possibly related speculation thread?

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5vw72u/node_count_for_all_protocols_drops_suddenly/

 

[molecular]

Hopefully we just broke the "$32" of 2013, en route to "$266" ($9000) momentarily, then settling comfortably over "$100" ($3500).

no, please... It need to go "OVER 9000"!

 

[sickpig]

Furthermore, any Turing-complete contract can be enforced in Bitcoin simply on the edges of the network. The only difference is that it is not 'the network' doing it, and instead just a bunch of designated computers for that purpose. It will also be overall more efficient (off-chain!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w65q6/wrights_proposal_to_make_bitcoin_turing/

 

[steffen]

Possibly related speculation thread?

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5vw72u/node_count_for_all_protocols_drops_suddenly/

Okay, Core nodes were also affected. Makes sense since BU is based on Core.

Here is part of my debug.log where I think the problem happened:

2017-02-23 11:41:40 BLOCK_DOWNLOAD_WINDOW is 8 MAX_BLOCKS_IN_TRANSIT_PER_PEER is 1
2017-02-23 11:41:41 UpdateTip: new best=0000000000000000018a2b535e479cd6bd697a7081daf2f419a31823c4129ea0  height=454308  log2_work=86.023679  tx=198938627  date=2017-02-23 11:40:53 progress=1.000000  cache=185.1MiB(134691tx)
2017-02-23 11:41:41 UpdateTip: 33 of last 100 blocks have unexpected version. One example: 0x20000002
2017-02-23 11:45:43 Corruption: block checksum mismatch
2017-02-23 11:45:43 *** System error while flushing: Database corrupted
2017-02-24 05:50:32 Banning 136.243.139.96:6164 for 4 hours: Too many connection attempts - connection dropped
2017-02-24 05:50:32 Banning 139.162.96.165:55673 for 4 hours: Too many connection attempts - connection dropped
2017-02-24 05:50:32 PROCESSMESSAGE: INVALID MESSAGESTART version peer=4086
2017-02-24 05:50:32 Banning 46.101.246.115:35168 for 4 hours: Too many connection attempts - connection dropped
2017-02-24 05:50:32 Banning 129.13.252.47:60501 for 4 hours: Too many connection attempts - connection dropped
2017-02-24 05:50:32 Banning 129.13.252.36:36838 for 4 hours: Too many connection attempts - connection dropped
2017-02-24 05:50:33 tor: Thread interrupt
2017-02-24 05:50:33 torcontrol thread exit
2017-02-24 05:50:33 addcon thread interrupt
2017-02-24 05:50:33 scheduler thread interrupt
2017-02-24 05:50:33 net thread interrupt
2017-02-24 05:50:33 msghand thread interrupt
2017-02-24 05:50:37 opencon thread interrupt
2017-02-24 05:50:37 Shutdown: In progress...
2017-02-24 05:50:37 StopNode()
2017-02-24 05:50:38 Corruption: block checksum mismatch
2017-02-24 05:50:38 *** System error while flushing: Database corrupted
2017-02-24 05:50:43 Shutdown: done
2017-02-24 05:51:18

For some reason the database corrupted, I guess. This was not supposed to happen:

2017-02-23 11:45:43 *** System error while flushing: Database corrupted

 

[Richy_T]

I'm still hoping we'll pass the Gox high soon. I know it's not directly comparable and it wasn't even really real but it will just close the door on that for me.

 

[Mengerian]

I have posted a BUIP for funding "The Future of Bitcoin" Conference, follow on to Satoshi's Vision:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip047-the-future-of-bitcoin-development-scaling-conference.1848/

 

[awemany]

Note that privacy is also optional in Monero. It's just on by default instead of off by default. And since the more other people remain anonymous, the more you do, this can still be called an advantage for the privacy-conscious (though perhaps easily equalized by changes in default behavior of popular Bitcoin wallets and popular Monero wallets).

But that's about what I am saying, or isn't it? Make a 'Monero-like Bitcoin wallet' and you gain all the features of Monero PLUS likely extra privacy because your outputs are in addition part of a much larger user base. Monero is selling privacy like it is a special part of their ledger, but it is rather part of the wallet or other 'higher level' functionality - and Bitcoin is in essence equally capable.

Except for the current disadvantage of exorbitant fees, of course.