Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[lunar]

Panel Discussion-DevCore Draper University 2015
Andreas Antonopoulos, Matt Corallo, Greg Maxwell, Michael Perklin, Gavin Andresen

 

[Inca]

Some of you may know that like cypherdoc I am a medical doctor.

I am interested in writing a paper for a health journal about patient identity management and health 'passports' with particular reference to cryptography, blockchain technology and multi-signature signing solutions.

Anyone interested in brainstorming or collaborating?

Message me privately if interested!

 

[luigi1111]

I would imagine the ASIC-resistance is more to do with indifference than necessarily any fundamental technical reason.

Right, I do not expect X11 to actually provide much resistance if any real demand arises for one.

 

[Melbustus]

...
I have to admit admiring the audacity of someone who can act like hyperlinks, screenshots, and other forms of keeping track of what people said in the past don't exist in 2015.

I'm tempted to write a script which immediately tosses a hash of every post these guys say into the blockchain... Of course, that'd get expensive...cuz, you know, there's limited blockspace and all...

 

[cypherdoc]

the bitterness is quite pronounced. stackers continue to invoke the price suppression cabal. it almost feels as bad as the miniblockers screaming about sockpuppets:

http://thewealthwatchman.com/bitcoin-explodes-again-the-encouraging-takeaways-for-stackers/

 

[solex]

Info coming together on the final US Marshal's auction:

https://blockchain.info/address/1DjbMDAsHfmwbwYA9xqhEF1gkKWQY7rR5a - 26,000 https://blockchain.info/address/3MTFNQLQ6X7yjMHkbWLnHhgcUw9HJdEjUR - 10,000 https://blockchain.info/address/18BmC9k36GBTfu1LT9N9snZJnp89YoLhng - 8,341

The 10k bought by the exchange itBit.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/09/usa-bitcoin-auction-idUSL1N1342RP20151109

 

[megadeth]

Cumberland got 18k,
ItBit's syndicate got 5 blocks
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/09/usa-bitcoin-auction-idUSL1N1342RP20151109

The bankster induced shakeout continues.

 

[cypherdoc]

great article whose author thoroughly debunks crazy lady Isabella Kaminska:

The question that should be asked is: should we prefer to give our governments, and central banks the power to manipulate the value of our currency or should we prefer the separation of state and money?

http://notesonliberty.com/2015/11/08/the-bitcoin-gospel-and-its-critiques/?utm_content=buffer21a1d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Rehashed talking points, they're what's for dinner:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3s54h3/eli5_if_miners_can_set_their_own_block_size_limit/

(The comments section, of course)

 

[albin]

Panel Discussion-DevCore Draper University 2015

Right out the gate, the girl with the blue hair loses me, by accusing folks on reddit for assuming bad faith, while flagrantly assuming bad faith by branding anybody disagreeing online as "trolls".

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Right out the gate, the girl with the blue hair loses me

You're not the first person on the Internet to observe a connection between blue hair and aposematism.

 

[cypherdoc]

this is big news:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3s6zud/github_bitpays_test_branch_for_bitcoin_core_111/

 

[cypherdoc]

Right out the gate, the girl with the blue hair loses me, by accusing folks on reddit for assuming bad faith, while flagrantly assuming bad faith by branding anybody disagreeing online as "trolls".

that doesn't bother me nearly as much as he and gmax trying to scare everyone as to how fragile mining is. gmax is being ridiculous yet again by claiming Bitcoin is controlled by 3 ppl; the pool operators of the 3 largest Chinese miners. those 3 aren't vertically integrated afaik; those would be KNC & Bitfury. thus, hashers could leave them at the first sign of trouble. plus, we've never had a bonafide 51% on the network despite much worse centralization in mining. they won't do it. probably the best indicator that a large pool like f2pool won't attack is the fact they consist of 60% of the namecoin network for many months now, yet they don't attack. of course, that's not a good situation but that's not the point.

the whole reason for their FUD is that they want to push BS products.

 

[cypherdoc]

BHP-largest miner in the world. not doing so well, as i've documented many times before. just keeps going down. i smell deflation:

 

[Peter R]

this is big news:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3s6zud/github_bitpays_test_branch_for_bitcoin_core_111/

Awesome!!

How will this all play out? Will Core cave, implement an increase, and retain majority node share? Will some other implementation become dominant? Or will we start to see multiple competing implementations?
[doublepost=1447133494][/doublepost]

that doesn't bother me nearly as much as he and gmax trying to scare everyone as to how fragile mining is. gmax is being ridiculous yet again by claiming Bitcoin is controlled by 3 ppl; the pool operators of the 3 largest Chinese miners. those 3 aren't vertically integrated afaik; those would be KNC & Bitfury. thus, hashers could leave them at the first sign of trouble. plus, we've never had a bonafide 51% on the network despite much worse centralization in mining. they won't do it. probably the best indicator that a large pool like f2pool won't attack is the fact they consist of 60% of the namecoin network for many months now, yet they don't attack. of course, that's not a good situation but that's not the point.

the whole reason for their FUD is that they want to push BS products.

Haha so Greg is trying to centralize more power around himself to fight centralization by the evil miners!

This is why Bitcoin works: everyone is worried about everyone else gaining too much power over the network, that it becomes an endless tug o' war between opposing forces.

 

[albin]

The body language is so fascinating I don't even know where to start. Greg is all inappropriately smiley and bro-down, I half expect him to throw somebody the Shooter McGavin, then the moment anything comes up that remotely challenges him, the tone completely changes and he attempts to monopolize the speaking time. Even his co-worker Corallo couldn't get out a closing statement without interruption.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

It's telling, yes. He certainly likes his position and the influence and respect he enjoys, and guards it with fervor.

 

[cypherdoc]

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3sa50p/the_fight_btwn_the_bitcoin_haves_vs_the_bitcoin/

 

[albin]

My apologies if this point rehashes something already well-discussed of which I'm unaware, but for a while now I've been occasionally introspecting on why selfish mining and Peter Todd's related block withholding type attacks rub me the wrong way intuitively, and perhaps why there is no evidence that they're actually even happening on the live network at all.

None of these ideas take any notion of time preference into account.

This entire class of attack vectors are variations on the idea that the attack is going to withhold (or interfere with) the ability of other mining nodes to receive their solved block information. The only reason this can be a theoretical concern is because of the existence of propagation delay (where the solver gets some amount of monopoly time working his own block). In the extreme theoretical case where all propagation delays are exactly 0, it's trivial to demonstrate that there is no long-term profitability in any of these strategies.

The claim is often made that these strategies are at best marginally effective, but within the assumptions of the threat model in which they're expressed, it's deductively provable that they have some profitability advantage statistically over sufficiently large sample sizes. This point has been made almost exactly over and over by Todd to justify concern.

The problem I want to throw out there is that this analysis is based on the assumption of equivalent preference between getting the mining reward now versus risking losing it for statistically marginally-higher revenues in the future. The inherent nature of time preference itself dictates that future revenues must be discounted in terms of current revenues, so if one is to make the claim that some toxic mining strategy results in say 3% additional revenue over a longer time horizon, it's entirely plausible that such a strategy actually operates at a loss.

There are lot of factors that we obviously know about that contribute today to influence the magnitude of that discount. For example, as long as technological progress is ASICs exists, we know that the revenue per unit time of any given capital expenditure is going to generally decay over time. Also there are risk/reward concerns inherent to not frontloading your revenues as much as possible, due to market and competitive uncertainties.

Even worse, this gets potentially orders of magnitude more complicated once we consider the possibility of financial hedging strategies from miners, such as entering into futures contracts. If a given miner operates at a certain amount of marginal profitability versus spot price, then there is a cost inherent to the risk of potentially having to buy at spot in order to settle.

I feel like there's a whole world of real economic considerations relating to time preference and risk aversion that might actually turn out to be way more involved than any of these theoretical attack scenarios being presented.

 

[cypherdoc]

@albin

I feel like there's a whole world of real economic considerations relating to time preference and risk aversion that might actually turn out to be way more involved than any of these theoretical attack scenarios being presented.

i couldn't agree more.

in a face to face conversation with the SM author, Emin Sirer, he admits his strategy is extremely risky; that being the risk of loss of the block reward during the withholding time or $8900 at current pricing. he then supplemented the attack scenario by invoking a Sybil attack to facilitate propagation of the withheld block and the attacking miners next block. which adds another cost and complexity. his theory also assumes the attacker completely dismisses the consequences of SM through market loss of confidence and risk of loss of hardware investment. in his latest Epicenter Bitcoin on NG, he says that a patch has been added to Core code to prevent SM altho i'm not sure what exactly that is.