Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[sickpig]

@Christoph Bergmann

I also realized that what is currently going on IS a hardfork. If you have an unupdated wallet, your funds are essentially locked. To use Bitcoin under current conditions you NEED to update. Bitcoin on its current state of affairs is loosing its backward-compatibility.

you nailed it.

let's say that it could be called a de facto hard fork.

Because being able to get a transaction included in the block chain in a reasonable amount of time a user have to be aware of the current status of the network, hence using a proper/up-to-date wallet software or check site like bitcoinfees.21.co while trying to move coins.

 

[freetrader]

I'd also much prefer a small group of users (miners and node operators) needed to be aware and react to what's going with the ledger performance, than the mass of users being treated to poor performance.

The latter is an ideal condition for poorly informed people to cause themselves great financial loss when using Bitcoin.

Clearly the "doing nothing is a viable option" crowd is on the wrong track.

Doing nothing results in a lot of time, effort and money wasted for a huge amount of people.

 

[8up]

What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@8up It's a good idea but it's not worth destroying the network over.

There's a reason I keep bringing up the comparisons with PGP and the collective failure of cypherpunks to encrypt the world's mail: the way they are trying to achieve their goals doesn't work, never has worked, and if they're allowed to try they'll destroy our best chance of establishing an honest money standard in addition to failing to bring about financial privacy.

 

[AdrianX]

http://www.investopedia.com/news/time-be-long-bitcoin-btc/

I can hardly sit still. Gold collapsing Bitcoin up. - Now if the BS/Core developers would get out the way and allow all these new users assess to the blockchain and remover the bottleneck of limited block space we will be going to the moon.

 

[Mengerian]

I was reading Aaron van Wirdum's latest article about the "user activated soft fork", and I noticed a talking point that I've seen cropping up lately:

"Like all soft forks, a UASF would still be an opt-in proposition for regular users, assuming it activates smoothly"

They keep touting this idea that soft forks are "opt-in". But as far as I can figure, this is total non-sequitur.

I think the concepts are orthogonal. You could just as easily have a hard fork that gives an opt-in feature, such as introducing a new transaction format like Flexible Transactions or BUIP037, and also continue allowing the old transaction format to be used on the network.

Segwit happens to be implemented as a soft fork opt-in feature, but it is just as easy for a soft fork not to be an opt-in feature. For example BIP 66 (which Aaron cites in his article!) is not an opt-in proposition. It simply enforces strict DER encoding for signatures, you can't "opt" to use less strict encoding.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Paul Sztorc was right in the slack channel; the terminology around soft and hard forks is FUBAR. He tried to straighten it out in his post by talking about "loud forks" and "rude forks," but I don't think it helped as it was just more complex.

I would focus on a simpler distinction: controversial proposals vs. non-controversial proposals.

If it's not controversial then the question of opt-in or opt-out doesn't really matter. If it's controversial then obviously even if it is *proposed* as a "soft fork" we can expect a counter hardfork to result, so it becomes a soft fork only in theory, and it becomes indefensible to continue to push it as a soft fork. It is naturally then a hard fork, with the only possible reason to continue championing it as a soft fork being to try to maintain the political position of the dominant implementation by shifting the costs of coordinating a hard fork onto the disagreers.

In short, controversial "soft" forks are always political attempts to give a centralized push to a proposed change by leveraging the dominant implementation status to hold those who feel they are "stuck with Core" over a barrel.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1488574800.php

 

[Mengerian]

Pretty reasonable article about "Is Bitcoin in a bubble?" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/column-boom-bitcoin-bubble-thats-burst/

 

[Richy_T]

Sorry, not really fair in this case but I just wanted to use the gif.

 

[Zarathustra]

How on earth do you get from "there must be extreme consensus" to "we need to force segwit via executive order"?

Hyperflexible necks and souls. I always knew it:
The gentle and polite henchman are still the most obnoxious ones.

 

[Zarathustra]

The stream blocking N. Corean devs (devaluators) enforce the Bitcoiners to hedge with Dash/Monero/Ethereum. Disgusting.

Those 3 altcoins are already at over 10% market share. A majority of the miners are still supporting this suicidal, My Space inspired idiocy by running an old or a new N. Corean implementation.

It's amazing how stupid and/or corrupt the so called market actually is. Of course there is a wide range between N. Korea and Switzerland, but even the market place within the most democratic society on the planet is a disgrace to human beings.

 

[molecular]

Anyone have data to make a stacked bar chart of transaction counts in BTC, dash, xmr, eth and as many additional alts that make sense to include? I think that would nicely show the "unseen" consequence of usage being driven to altcoins. No more "this is fine, it's just spam anyway". Spam doesn't run to altcoins.

Not sure tx counts are increasing in alt, though. But they should be. Maybe bitcoin mempool size could be overlayed and even make bumps in altcoin tx volume visible in congestion periods.

I've been trying to use multicoin explorer apis for this, but not much luck this far. Any suggestions?

 

[albin]

Any idea why the dog whistles have suddenly been blown to attack Antpool? Torpey and all the usual twitter trolls, and new wanna-be twitter trolls (the Charlie Lees of the world) apparently picked up on the marching orders.

 

[chriswilmer]

Jihan is talking actively against usaf

 

[AdrianX]

Any idea why the dog whistles have suddenly been blown to attack Antpool? Torpey and all the usual twitter trolls, and new wanna-be twitter trolls (the Charlie Lees of the world) apparently picked up on the marching orders.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/something-odd-is-happening-at-bitcoins-largest-mining-pool-cm756139

AntPool mines 16 empty blocks last month. - The mood out there is the empty blocks are the reason we have a transaction back log. The hypocrisy is the lynch mob should be paying higher fees to attract miners to include their transactions. Mining is its own reward, AntPool are contributing to the fee market in a positive way with empty blocks if the goal is higher fees, less spam (whatever spam is).
[doublepost=1488647976,1488647093][/doublepost]If you ask me it's probably because Antpool are getting the headers but not the blocks - another pool like Bitfury could be attacking the network.

Bitfury have apparently done something that ensures they never mine empty blocks or partially full blocks, anyone have an idea what that could be, or how that would be possible - are they cheating on a relay network used to agree transactions used by Antpool?

Oh just figured it out. - Antpool and Bitfury probably share a relay network of some type where they agree transactions, Bitfury then mine a different set of transactions leaving Antpool in the position where they need to validate very block and pick new transactions from scratch.

This article expanses what they are doing. http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/02/27/smallest-first-bad-for-bitcoin/

the strategy can only be successful so long as you are the only ones doing it.
[doublepost=1488648628][/doublepost]Oh the political posturing

Look bitcoin, Bitfury is making a positive impact on the transaction backlog - Bitfury is friend -
Look bitcoin, Antpool is creating a negative impact on the transaction backlog - Antpool is enemy:
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/something-odd-is-happening-at-bitcoins-largest-mining-pool-cm756139

 

[lunar]

In the perverse world of a 1MB, quota enforced, fee market, Bitcoin users pay with credit card, in dollars, to get a transaction reliably confirmed. Gregonomics creates a thousand problems where a free market peace used to be.

 

[albin]

So much for their absolute confidence in fee estimation heuristics, when people are driven to out-of-band fees!

 

[awemany]

Jihan's valid concern regarding UASF is met by saber-rattling of Core supporters:


However, right now "In the event of a fork, I will sell RBF BlockStream Core Coins and buy Classic Bitcoins" is backed with a comfortable 67kBTC margin.

And if UASF gains traction in Core (hard to say, I don't know the mood, Luke doesn't seem to be too happy with it, for example), they'd be the ones forking themselves off.

 

[Norway]

... the perverse world of a 1MB, quota enforced, fee market ...

Indeed.