Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

Mengerian

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Aug 29, 2015
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I completely agree that the block transmission process will be smoothed (using coding gain techniques such as weak blocks, thin blocks, IBLT, etc.); however, @awemany and I were working on a proof to show that it's actually impossible to achieve true O(1) block transmission if

(a) the network has a finite size, d,

(b) miners build blocks according to their own volition and act rationally to maximize their profit.

Instead, block transmission remains O(1 + kN) where k becomes very small but never zero.

We haven't really pinned down the proof yet, but I think it's pretty clearly true: imagine a miner at a distant corner of the network receives a new transaction with a big juicy fee. There exists some fee that will entice him to add that new TX to the block he is working on before he is confident that the rest of the network is aware of that TX (since it takes a finite amount of time for the TX to propagate across the network due to the speed of light constraint). If he solves the block quickly, then his block solution announcement will necessarily contain information about this TX in addition to the constant sized header.
Block propagation will eventually cease completely, since it's the worst possible solution to the problem.

The network will move away from block propagation toward block solution propagation.

Block solution propagation means that transactions must be broadcast before the block solution.
To reconcile these points, we can say that block propagation delay will not go away, but the bandwidth used for block propagation will become minuscule compared to the bandwidth used to steadily transmit transactions.

So transaction propagation will dominate bandwidth resource usage, but block solution propagation will still have an orphaning risk that can increase as marginal transactions are included in the block.

It is also impossible to ensure that mempools will be completely uniform across the network, so there is a risk that some transactions included in the block will not be in everyone's mempool. This risk could vary by transaction (for example very recent transactions might not have propagated to all nodes before that block is found).
 

lunar

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Aug 28, 2015
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@Justus Ranvier
Exablock concerns are a red herring, because it assumes that block propagation will continue to exist.

Block propagation will eventually cease completely, since it's the worst possible solution to the problem.

The network will move away from block propagation toward block solution propagation.
gavin pointing this out to vitalik today

 

Mengerian

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Aug 29, 2015
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I also think this means that the results from my fee market paper represent a sort of "extreme limit" where everyone is viciously undercutting one another. In practice, fees (especially for next-block service) will probably be higher than my paper suggests.
Yes, I agree. It is hard to predict how things will play out. Things like fees based on assurance contracts, and time-locked transactions that have to be included above certain block heights will also factor into the fee market.
 

Peter R

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Aug 28, 2015
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To reconcile these points, we can say that block propagation delay will not go away, but the bandwidth used for block propagation will become minuscule compared to the bandwidth used to steadily transmit transactions.

So transaction propagation will dominate bandwidth resource usage, but block solution propagation will still have an orphaning risk that can increase as marginal transactions are included in the block.

It is also impossible to ensure that mempools will be completely uniform across the network, so there is a risk that some transactions included in the block will not be in everyone's mempool. This risk could vary by transaction (for example very recent transactions might not have propagated to all nodes before that block is found).
Yes, I agree with all of that.

Another way to see that orphaning risk must always exists is because the only way to guarantee that their won't be orphans is if the network has already come to consensus on the state of the ledger. But if the state of the ledger is know exactly, then the blocks serve no purpose.

I view the blocks as events that reduce uncertainty as shown below. New information is constantly entering the network in the form of transactions, but not all of the information can be reconciled perfectly (leaving the purple region). The blocks "collapse" this "wave function," as it were. This means that block solution announcements must communicate the block header plus enough additional information to reconcile the remaining uncertainty.



Another interesting thing to consider is the relationship between orphan risk and the block interval target. If there's ever a point in the future when orphan rates become extremely small, then this means that we could use a much faster block times (say 1 minute instead). This would increase the speed of first confirmation at the expense of higher orphan rates.
 
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theZerg

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Aug 28, 2015
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But that periodic collapse is inefficient. In the absence of txn fees and block subsidies it does not make sense to collapse the uncertainty until certainty is needed. For example, if you are a merchant you'd want to collapse the uncertainty before shipping out the goods.

Sort of like QM & Schrodinger's cat.

I therefore conclude that reality must be a distributed trustless merkle tree, and that God doesn't charge txn fees or offer block subsidies!

This video will help you understand:
 
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Peter R

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More insight into the mind of a Thermos:



And another recent quote revealing his point of view:

"... more importantly, there's no technical difference between the 21 million BTC limit and the max block size. If the max block size can be increased with 75% miner agreement and the support of a clueless Reddit mob (or whatever), then so can the currency limit, and then bitcoins have no value." -- theymos

What he's missing is that the only consensus that matters is that formed by the longest persistent chain. If the longest chain includes blocks larger than 1 MB, well that is just Bitcoin's consensus system doing what it's supposed to do. If--in the distant future--there was some important reason to maintain a small perpetual inflation rate, then the longest chain would probably include some small perpetual inflation. But these sorts of events are not to be feared--they are what allows Bitcoin to adapt to challenges as they arise. They would not result in bitcoins having no value as Theymos fears, but are what prevents Bitcoin from losing its value when facing obstacles.

This is what the Bitcoin experiment is all about! If we can't trust the market to make good decisions for the health of Bitcoin--and if we really do need people like Greg and Adam making the decisions for us--then Bitcoin has already failed.
 

cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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Yes, I agree with all of that.

Another way to see that orphaning risk must always exists is because the only way to guarantee that their won't be orphans is if the network has already come to consensus on the state of the ledger. But if the state of the ledger is know exactly, then the blocks serve no purpose.

I view the blocks as events that reduce uncertainty as shown below. New information is constantly entering the network in the form of transactions, but not all of the information can be reconciled perfectly (leaving the purple region). The blocks "collapse" this "wave function," as it were. This means that block solution announcements must communicate the block header plus enough additional information to reconcile the remaining uncertainty.



Another interesting thing to consider is the relationship between orphan risk and the block interval target. If there's ever a point in the future when orphan rates become extremely small, then this means that we could use a much faster block times (say 1 minute instead). This would increase the speed of first confirmation at the expense of higher orphan rates.
nice to visit that troll thread. same 'ol guys, same 'ol insults and ad hominems. honestly, they sound scared, as they should be. @Zarathustra doing a great job sewing fear. they deserve it.

with all the economic majority actors announcing support for XT, miners will follow, esp when nothing becomes of 100 next month. then you'll see all those guys scatter like dogs.



this is gonna be good.
 
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albin

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Nov 8, 2015
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More insight into the mind of a Thermos
His sheltered and sophomoric worldview is downright hilarious.

Not to be pompous about political bona fides, but I was a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party and the president of a college libertarian club when Theymos was wetting the bed. I know what "ancap" and "statist" means not because of the internet, but because of Murray Rothbard! Not only that, but I have never in my entire life voted for any national candidate whatsoever who has not overtly been in favor of ending the war on drugs. Not to imply that any of these libertarian/ancap/liberty/Austrian/whatever positions are litmus tests of any kind with respect to participation in Bitcoin, but it's just humorous that these children with no real life experience in any kind of relevant political action are so quick to pejoratively label folks statists.

My advice to Theymos is to take his hands off his hips, because he ain't grown.
 
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Zangelbert Bingledack

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It's the height of irony that Muyuu and Theymos find their central planning position to be the libertarian one.

They fail to discern that the constancy of Bitcoin is not a result of rules laid down by Satoshi, nor of rules guarded by wise Core devs, but of the market's ongoing favorable view of those rules. Should the market's view ever change, which would take nothing short of a miracle if we're talking about the 21M cap, those rules will indeed change. Carefully and conservatively, of course, as that is what the market views as maintaining value. Bitcoin is in all aspects a creature of the market.

Here we run into the semantic blur I mentioned earlier, where someone like LukeJr would get stuck on the fact that "we can always keep something named Bitcoin that maintains all the rules." You can, but in this case the market will render it nearly worthless, taking away the whole reason why you cared about it at all. The market wouldn't call that Bitcoin anymore, so no one else would. What even counts as "Bitcoin" is defined by the market, for all practical purposes.

It's similar to a misjudgment I think Murray Rothbard made in his libertarian works, which was a tendency to conceptualize libertarian laws prescriptively (i.e., the Non-Aggression Principle) rather than as emergent phenomena. Contrast this with another libertarian, John Hasnas, writing in The Obviousness of Anarchy:

Supporters of government claim that government is necessary to ensure that there is
one law for all and that the law applies equally to all citizens. If the government does
not make the law, they contend, there would be no uniform code of laws. People in
different locations or with different cultural backgrounds or levels of wealth would
be subject to different rules of law.

The proper response to this is probably the one Woody Allen made to Diane
Keaton in Annie Hall when she complained that her apartment had bad plumbing
and bugs, which was: “You say that as though it is a negative thing.” How persuasive
is the following argument? Government is necessary to ensure that there is one style
of dress for all and that all citizens are equally clothed. If the government does
not provide clothes, there would be no uniform mode of dress. People in different
locations or with different cultural backgrounds or levels of wealth would be clothed
in garments of different styles and quality.

Why would anyone think that uniformity in law is any more desirable than
uniformity in dress? The quest for uniformity leads us to treat the loving husband
who kills his terminally ill wife to relieve her suffering the same way we treat Charles
Manson, to apply the same rules of contracting to sophisticated business executives
purchasing corporations and semi-literate consumers entering into installment
contracts, and to act as though the slum lord in the Bronx and the family letting their
spare room in Utica should be governed by the same rules of property law.
There are, of course, certain rules that must apply to all people; those that provide
the basic conditions that make cooperative behavior possible. Thus, rules prohibiting
murder, assault, theft, and other forms of coercion must be equally binding on all
members of a society. But we hardly need government to ensure that this is the
case.
These rules always evolve first in any community; you would not even have a
community if this were not the case.


The idea that we need government to ensure a uniform rule of law is especially
crazy in the United States, in which the federal structure of the state and national
governments is designed to permit legal diversity. To the extent that the law of the
United States can claim any superiority to that produced by other nations, it is at
least partially due the fact that it was generated by the common law process in the
“laboratory of the states.” Allowing the development of different rules in different
states teaches us which rules most effectively resolve disputes. To the extent that the
conditions that give rise to disputes are the same across the country, the successful
rules tend to be copied by other jurisdictions and spread. This creates a fairly uniform
body of law.* To the extent that the conditions that give rise to disputes are peculiar
to a particular location or milieu, they do not spread. This creates a patchwork of
rules that are useful where applied, but would be irrelevant or disruptive if applied
in other settings.

One of the beauties of the common law process is that it creates a body of law
that is uniform where uniformity is useful and diverse where it is not. This is the
optimal outcome.

Government legislation, in contrast, creates uniformity by imposing ill-fitting,
one-size-fits-all rules upon a geographically and ethnically diverse population. Once
again, not only is government not necessary to the creation of a well-functioning
body of law, it is a significant impediment to it. Please consider this the next time
you find yourself wondering why all businesses must be closed on Sunday in the
Orthodox Jewish sections of Brooklyn.

*Fairly, but not fetishistically. The law against homicide functions quite effectively despite the fact that the definitions of first and second degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter differ from state to state.
The part I bolded seems analogous to how the 21M coin limit is supported by the market, and is not something that will just be "left to chance" if forking is easy (easy forking is loosely analogous here to small or no central government).

Like Theymos and Muyuu, state apologists tend to see the uniformity in laws prohibiting things like murder as products of government wise men, thinking that if left to the market or left to the natural order of emergent societal rules, there would be some places where murder was fine (or perhaps merely subject to a fine ;)).

Like Theymos and Muyuu, they think that if the rules of contracting applied to "sophisticated business executives purchasing corporations and semi-literate consumers entering into installment contracts" were left to the market where these two situations were treated quite differently (here akin to leaving blocksize to the market and allowing it to adjust), soon we'd have redheads going to jail for murdering blonds while blonds only received a fine for murdering redheads (akin to, say, grossly increasing the 21M coin limit).

When Hasnas says, "You would not even have a community if this were not the case," it is akin to saying, "Bitcoin would never have been valuable if this were not the case." Theymos and Muyuu imagine the market value of Bitcoin derives from the jealous guardianship of the permanence of its rules by Core wise men, but actually the permanence of the rules of Bitcoin derives from its jealous guardianship by the market in the form of financial support, and rejection of all imitators and all errant forks.

Bitcoin's permanence is subject to change if the market no longer values a certain rule, but that should not be scary in the slightest, because it is already the case that if the market were to suddenly decide to value massive inflation it would sell Bitcoin into the irrelevance anyway. Easy forking isn't what would place Bitcoin in the market's hands. Bitcoin has always been completely in the market's hands. Easy forking merely allows the market to make its control more granular.

Rather than selling off Bitcoin and leaving it "a smoking hole in the ground" (to quote Gmax out of context :D) because of some easy-to-fix issue, it can just sell the value-damaging fork off and buy the value-enhancing one. The lack of easy forking just forces the market to make an all-or-nothing decision. It forces the market to swat flies on Bitcoin with a bazooka; easy forking instead lets the market use a fly swatter. It means nimble adaptation in response to threats. If anything should be scary, it's a situation where hard forks are difficult. That would leave Bitcoin truly vulnerable.
 
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cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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@Zangelbert Bingledack

i just finished listening to Daniel's excellent talk. everyone here should do so. i pretty much agree with his viewpoint. that hasn't changed

it occurred to me while listening that a great way to test the market's acceptance of XT vs Core would be to set up a future's trading instrument representing XT sometime soon before the fork takes place. we touched on this before. by doing so and if XT's value exceeded that of Core BTC then we could get a peek into the future of it's potential success. i have no idea of how to do this or if it's even possible but i think it's worth investigating.

i wonder if Coinbase could come up with something like that or would be interested.
 

albin

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Nov 8, 2015
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@cypherdoc

That would probably have to be done by someone like a Shapeshift. Trying to do something like that in the US probably requires years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions in compliance costs to even start.
 
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cypherdoc

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i know what Vinny has said about the fundamental value being btwn 250-300. but to me, as a chart technician and as someone who believes that the market often prices in a speculative premium, right here is a good time to buy your first tranche of this major dip as we are sitting right on top of support from what was resistance ie the breakout point of around 300. in other words, the dip could stop right here. i say first tranche if you want to save some for a possible further drop:

 

cypherdoc

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Aug 26, 2015
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@Zangelbert Bingledack

but that would be additive to the current supply and future mined XT coins.
[doublepost=1447301903,1447301196][/doublepost]
 

albin

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Nov 8, 2015
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@Zangelbert Bingledack

I think it would have to be a straight prediction market. There is no way to create a futures contract specifically on XT coins that would trade at a premium, because anyone can take delivery of XT coins whenever they want right now merely by transacting directly in bitcoin.
 

Zangelbert Bingledack

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Aug 29, 2015
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@cypherdoc @albin

I was imagining you give 1BTC to the exchange (which of course gives up your future access to 1XTBTC and 1CoreBTC), and when the fork happens the exchange gives you back 2XTBTC and no CoreBTC, or whatever your chosen ratio, priced by how other people choose their ratio. But I guess that is a kind of futures contract for SEC purposes? It certainly would function as a prediction market anyway. It would also mean the exchange itself would have to enter the XTBTC/CoreBTC market directly as a trader all at once when the fork hit in order to make payouts, which may not be practical.
 
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Zarathustra

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Aug 28, 2015
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More insight into the mind of a Thermos:



And another recent quote revealing his point of view:

"... more importantly, there's no technical difference between the 21 million BTC limit and the max block size. If the max block size can be increased with 75% miner agreement and the support of a clueless Reddit mob (or whatever), then so can the currency limit, and then bitcoins have no value." -- theymos

What he's missing is that the only consensus that matters is that formed by the longest persistent chain. If the longest chain includes blocks larger than 1 MB, well that is just Bitcoin's consensus system doing what it's supposed to do. If--in the distant future--there was some important reason to maintain a small perpetual inflation rate, then the longest chain would probably include some small perpetual inflation. But these sorts of events are not to be feared--they are what allows Bitcoin to adapt to challenges as they arise. They would not result in bitcoins having no value as Theymos fears, but are what prevents Bitcoin from losing its value when facing obstacles.

This is what the Bitcoin experiment is all about! If we can't trust the market to make good decisions for the health of Bitcoin--and if we really do need people like Greg and Adam making the decisions for us--then Bitcoin has already failed.

They behave like communists and it seems that they are communists. That's the reason why they like those totalitarian 'moderation' tactics.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1162684.msg12954516#msg12954516
 
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cypherdoc

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oh yes, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon:


[doublepost=1447340846,1447340243][/doublepost]remember how i claimed the USD and $DJI are moving together? take a look at this comparison chart btwn the two; sorry it's kinda hard to see but the point is they've both rallied hard over the last couple of months and they both seem to be topping out below their previous highs back in the Spring. as a reminder, this theory follows what we've seen in Japan over the last several decades of deflation; dropping stock mkt, and devaluing Yen, with a huge rally in JGB's:



as well, here is TLT compared to the $DJI. the jaws are beginning to close:


[doublepost=1447341253][/doublepost]obviously, and why we're all here, my other contra-indicator is Bitcoin. moving up nicely and imo probably bottoming off the top of support. don't let the volatility scare you. in fact, it's a great sign of the bull trying hard to buck you off as we careen higher. remember, only a few of us are destined to make it to the finish line. note how the 200DMA has turned up nicely:


[doublepost=1447341603][/doublepost]actually, we're well overdue for a bounce in gold and silver which is why i took down my ZSL short last week. ignore my whimpering:

 
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