Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[lunar]

Finally got around to listening to the Stephen Pair interview.


The interesting stuff starts @28mins

Wants a non contentions hardfork, well duhh don't we all? Unicorns and rainbows Stephen, how do you get from here to there without some controversy? Miner signalling, node signalling, and some fork futures market maybe?

He's concerned about emergent consensus and BU? @Peter R would be interested to know if you've spoken with S.P. when you were at Bitpay and if that was before or after this LTB interview? He is worried about the unbounded expansion of the blockchain and a fee market developing, something most here seem to agree the market will take care of itself. (This is exactly the definition of a free market supply and demand of blockspace will approach an equilibrium) Oh the Irony of cryptoanarchists being scared of the free market.

Concerns on deep re-orgs, this is a little out of my league, but it seems unlikely that BU will be causing regular deep re-orgs. Perhaps we need a good article on this, explaining why miners are unlikely to let big re-orgs situation occur as it's profit damaging?

The really good thing about this interview - Bitpay and Andreas are finally catching up. I'd say wrt this thread they are about a year behind, but grappling with the big philosophical problems of how governance works. They are both arguing for Bitcoin Unlimited philosophy without even knowing it. (from min 38 onward)

 

[Norway]

 

[Richy_T]

Do we still have any gold bugs here?

"I have been hearing from the Austrian economic monetary theorists that the shaky dollar might crash NEXT year since 1971. I can’t find any flaws in their arguments, but after 45 years, I am convinced that our monetary theory is lacking if it can’t be more accurate time-wise."

http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/anthony-wile-bitcoin-the-other-crash/

Not really sure why I'm posting this, so take it as old news from south of Carvajal.

I think what many have missed is exactly how much the dollar is propped up by being the unit of currency for oil exchange. This has allowed unprecedented levels of inflation way past what would have previously been possible. This is why defectors who had previously been in good standing despite many, many unpleasant acts like Hussein and Gadaffi had to be finally taken care of.

 

[Norway]

@Richy_T
I have this armchair economist theory that the only reason we don't have hyper inflation today, is that all the fiat goes into the derivatives market. Check this out:

http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/

 

[Bagatell]

http://blog.magicaltux.net/post/159432743244/bitfinex-v-wells-fargo

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/64oadr/bitfinex_vs_wells_fargo_hearing_4252017_1000_am/

 

[sickpig]

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/64ygpp/samson_mow_joined_blockstream/

 

[AdrianX]

This post is rather shocking if you consider Samson Mow's bitcoin post history. I guess I was wrong in presuming why he left on short notice. Leaving BTCC to take this position seems to be the more credible motive.

It is unsettling considering his post yesterday where he expressed little value in discussing the merits of increasing the bitcoin transaction limit but rather a will to entertain by making a mockery of the debate.
[doublepost=1492027898,1492027021][/doublepost]I have never in my life seen such a long con. So many educated professionals invested in bitcoin adoption and yet so much ambivalence and uncertainty about increasing the transaction limit.

The default method to remove the limit suggested when it was introduced, following 6 years of exploration and when push comes to shove the majority doesn't even want to take responsibility for setting their preference.

Instead opting for centralized decision making by a handful of incumbent developers who have no responsibility for the ramifications of their actions. Their only obligation is to do what they were employed to do by their employers.

 

[Bagatell]

I have never in my life seen such a long con.

"Our" government has been inflating "Our" money since before we were born.

 

[albin]

Guy Corem is makes a really good estimate on medium for what if anything a firm like Bitmain could expect from ASICboost --

https://medium.com/@vcorem/the-real-savings-from-asicboost-to-bitmaintech-ff265c2d305b

The stunning thing to me is that Greg Maxwell's absolutely absurd $100 million/year figure (which is the lynchpin for this even being remotely plausible as a conspiracy theory for blocking segwit, which btw doesn't actually stop ASICBoost because segwit doesn't require the wtxid commitment if you're not doing segwit tx's!), is that this poisonous libel wasn't spread on say a blog or social media, he literally wrote it into a draft BIP.

Can you imagine an IEEE RFC containing slanderous fake numbers to spread a conspiracy theory about some company involved in the standards process?

 

[Justus Ranvier]

The stunning thing to me is that Greg Maxwell's absolutely absurd $100 million/year figure (which is the lynchpin for this even being remotely plausible as a conspiracy theory for blocking segwit, which btw doesn't actually stop ASICBoost because segwit doesn't require the wtxid commitment if you're not doing segwit tx's!), is that this poisonous libel wasn't spread on say a blog or social media, he literally wrote it into a draft BIP.

If you're still surprised by his behavior then you haven't lowered your expectations far enough.

 

[JVWVU]

I have continued to ask Core supporters hat is Blockstream's Business Model to repay the initial $74Million let alone 10x expected ROR by a VC backer. Nothing Nada. Until I get the answer I will remain anti Core even thought I don't think BU may be best option, it's an option.

Let's Fork this shit

 

[freetrader]

I genuinely think this may actually be true. If Dilley is worth his keep, then setting someone up to take the fall for near-term catastrophic strategy could be a smart move.

No way Dilley isn't in on this, being replaced as Chief of Strategy. Hats off, and sympathies for poor Samson, his prospects of coming out of this in a good position are not stellar.

---

I detect a little tension here from Cobra:

@slush Will UASF coin initially be presented as an alt coin and clearly marked as such on your service and not as "BTC"? Or will it be presented as a flavour of Bitcoin?

https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/1564#issuecomment-293667566

The good news I take away from this is that he recognizes that UASF could easily result in an altcoin.

 

[Norway]

Is Johnny1000 Johnny Dilley?
I think somebody here said they had met Jonny1000 in real life.

 

[albin]

@Norway

No, they're different people.

 

[BldSwtTrs]

I know that the argument to explain why the blocks will not have an infinite size without a blocksize limit is that bigger blocks will be slower to propagate, so the orphan risk would increase.

But with IBLT the propagation time would be constant indepently of the blocksize. So what would stop miners from making arbitraly large blocks with IBLT ?

 

[Mengerian]

Two points:

1) I don't think there are any major proposals to eliminate the block size limit. Most proposals out there propose still having a limit but raising it to some higher value. The proposals do not depend on orphan risk as a mechanism to limit block sizes.

Bitcoin Unlimited is not a specific block size limit increase proposal, it just provides tools for network participants to control their block size limit settings in a more decentralized manner.

2) Even with schemes like IBLT, there will be an incentive for miners to include very recently broadcast transactions in the blocks they mine. So there will always be an incentive to transmit more information, to be balanced against the cost of increased orphan risk.

 

[freetrader]

I've proposed BUIP051 to add CompactBlocks support to BU - providing a link here because the 'New Posts' window has been spammed.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip051-add-compactblocks-support.2017/

I'd welcome any comments / improvements on the proposal.

 

[Norway]

I find these Craig Wright news very exiting. And I think it's a good probability that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/13/reuters-america-exclusive-company-behind-bitcoin-creator-sold-to-private-investors.html

 

[molecular]

I know that the argument to explain why the blocks will not have an infinite size without a blocksize limit is that bigger blocks will be slower to propagate, so the orphan risk would increase.

But with IBLT the propagation time would be constant indepently of the blocksize. So what would stop miners from making arbitraly large blocks with IBLT ?

There's another thing increasing orphan risk with block size: verification time. But here also, I think it's possible to get this way down using pre-verification of transactions (done anyway before they get into the mempool) and such. Still the merkle tree has to be checked, I think. So maybe this is an issue, maybe not a big one.

Next thing opposing mining of huge blocks: the node networks propagation rules and the other miners blocksize config. This is the main "obstacle", I guess. That kind of orphan risk imposed by other miners not building on your block because they say it's excessive absolutely dwarfs the one imposed by propagation / verification latencies. That's how BU works if I'm not mistaken.

Anyhow: I think the "blocksize" is way less relevant than the UTXO set size regarding node resource needs.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

There are no technical issues that need to be solved in order to increase the block size.

Proof:

1) Ask everybody who opposes a block size limit increase on supposed technical grounds to list the technical problems.
2) Ask them if they'll commit to supporting a block size limit increase if those problems are solved.
3) When they answer "no" to 2, then you'll know the technical problems they just told you are lies and distractions.
4) Since they have to raise lies and distractions instead of real issues, there must not be any real issues for them to raise.