Wall Observer

[ChartBuddy]

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[JayJuanGee]

@JayJuanGee

I will clarify, the BS = Blockstream. That was a reference to Core Dev being captured, not that they are no good at what they do.


With respect to the 1MB. I have many years experience in mainstream financial systems and over that time made many executive decisions about increasing software limits like the 1MB, or identifying necessary hardware purchases, all to safely handle real-world increases in transaction volumes which were relentless every year. (Not only tx, but also for different classes of static data to support tx processing).


The general rule of thumb (which varies depending upon the volatility of demand changes) is that limited resources need to be addressed technically when they are 40% utilized. So when the Bitcoin median block size hit 400KB for sustained periods (a day or two) then software changes to deal with this limit should not only have been written, but ready for go-live, an example here is Classic's 75% threshold for the 2MB should be just about activating when the median block size is around 40% of max.

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I cannot disagree with you about probable likelihood about better ways to do things, in the event that a system were centralized.


We all know that bitcoin is not centralized, and therefore, innovations, changes and efficiencies may be lost at a cost of maintaining decentralization. Yes, consensus-based decision making is messy and potentially less efficient – but that does not put bitcoin in some kind of emergency state of being. To the extent that some of those changes are needed, then other centralized coins can incorporate those kinds of changes. If updates cannot achieve consensus with bitcoin, then we just stick with the current system and it does not get updated.. and sometimes lack of a timely update is likely to happen.

@JayJuanGee

The fact that this has not been achieved even though 93% utilization is occurring is clear and present evidence of professional negligence by the devs responsible, The only shield they have against criticism is that Bitcoin is a decentralized system and no-one has control. Nevertheless, the momentum to deal with the block limit existed in early 2013, and even Wuille said that up to 100MiB should be considered. What has happened since then is that technical considerations have been subordinated to political and other background imperatives.

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Yes. You appear to recognize the centrality of decentralization, and it doesn’t matter too much what one person wants or advocates if s/he cannot get others to agree. Furthermore, if one person asserts something in early 2013 does not signify that will still be the position or the understanding of that person or anybody else in mid-2016.

@JayJuanGee

Yes, Bitcoin won't stop like a car does when it runs out of fuel, but at maximum utilization business will be driven away. Prohashing used to pay out primarily in BTC and now they usually pay out in alt-coins. One by one users will be driven away, until the network effect for growth actually becomes arrested. Core Dev are betting on SegWit, yet it is unlikely to provide more than a 30% uplift after one year. This is too little and too late.

It could be true that some people will be driven to various flavors of alts in order to obtain some of the features that they value, and I don’t see any major problem with that. At some point several of the more decent features of alts are likely going to be incorporated in either bitcoin’s protocol or in some other way linked with bitcoin’s ongoing and likely to continue security (and computing power) offerings.

 

[ChartBuddy]

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[JayJuanGee]

Price is negatively affected by core's unwillingness to simply bump the limit

possibly… seems to be more about scare tactics than any kind of technical issue. Recall that prices crashed up from mid-august to early November ($198 to $502).


Then we experienced some attempts at correcting below $300, which were pretty much unsuccessful. Except for the Hearnia rage and the related connected drama FUCD spreading around that, prices have been hovering between $360 and $460 – with seemingly ongoing upward pressures.. and even seemingly ongoing difficulties to get the price to drop below $400. Doesn’t mean that we will not have a price drop below $400, but those kinds of price drops seem to be buying opportunities when they occur.

there promise of segwit coupled with censorship, and there fanboys pushing their ideas onto poeple has kept them in power.


but, I fear price will crash, when segwit is only accepted by 30% of miners after weeks of trying to push everyone into adopting it.


but out of the ashes rises the phoenix, bitcoin Unlimited FTW!

You seem to be talking a lot of fantasy right now.


Surely, I don’t know the future, but it seems that the odds of segwit going through within the next few months is pretty decent, and the odds of your above described scenario seem pretty slim. I don’t deny that either scenario is possible, but your above description seems to give too much credit to a less likely scenario.

 

[ChartBuddy]

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[JayJuanGee]

Indeed, the post in bct made it. My post in /r/bitcoin and at least of two others I know of, got taken off. Also, a comment of mine that mentioned the link, got deleted. I don't know why this happened, I don't get any message about it. However, I do understand why people who are opposed to increasing the block size limit don't want facts about block size growth to be published in /r/bitcoin. It's the same reason why the facts of the Panama Papers cannot be published in Russia and China.

Well, you are in a better position to potentially know why your posts are deleted than me.


I recall that I had noticed with some of your earlier posts in which you were interacting with me, sometimes you would assert a whole lot of conclusions without facts to back it up, and then after I engaged you for a bit, then you would retroactively assert your sources for the facts. It’s possible that your posts were seeming to be argumentative, and also, as we seem to already realize, there are some threads that r/bitcoin owners/administrators are defining classic/xt argument posts as being off topic, so accordingly, in those kinds of cases, you would either need to craft your post differently or possibly post it in another thread.


Regarding your claim that r/bitcoin is like the censorship of china/Russia, I doubt that the similarity is exactly the same because r/bitcoin is not a government, but instead a private thread.

 

[Dotto]

I have been some weeks without observing the BTC price and focused in my preferred alt... Looking at your charts it really looks like big a movement is brewing. That triangles are quite heavy and look like in 10 days we would know the direction. This time I feel bullish, its just that under 400 seems very improbable to my guts and the support is massive... who knows but I would say 480 minimum. Maybe the halving prophecy plus this triangles blows ups the prices.

Do you know if there is some kind of official ETH wall observer thread? I would love to troll a bit there and read what ETHs bagholders think of his coin. The fundamentals sink so much that I would love to scream it in his faces

 

[JayJuanGee]

Actually I can agree, with most things you said. We are discussing Bitcoin in this forum because it still matters (the most). The whole drama is about power and governance. In the end - who cares if innovation takes place inside or outside the system as long as I have the free choice(!) to be part of it.


If Bitcoin would be change* resistant (including soft forks!), this would have value of its own.


(*) 100% consensus necessary for change

I’m not sure what you mean by 100% consensus necessary because I doubt any credible person is proposing that 100% is achievable or should be a goal… because sometimes there are just destructive people who’s opinion should be completely ignored (if they cannot get a sufficient number of reasonable others to join in).


Accordingly, I doubt that, at this point, there is any kind of exact number regarding what constitutes consensus, but it is going to be a pretty high number that is likely in the 90 percentiles concerning major revisions… yet for practical reasons, there may sometimes be reasons to go below 90% in the event that there is clear and/or convincing evidence of potential sabotagers or purposeful obstructionists who may have infiltrated aspects of the bitcoin system……


Those of us who want bitcoin to succeed (which are likely people on both sides of the current blocksize limit debate) are going to recognize that hard and fast rules may sometimes fail to accomplish the interests of bitcoin and could be used by persons who really want to undermine bitcoin…


In the end, there remains balancing of uncertainties and input of people who, hopefully, are acting with integrity and hopefully the vast majority will be able to recognize and identify the differences between proposed changes that could potentially undermine or cripple central aspects of bitcoin and proposed changes that keep bitcoin sufficiently robust in terms of the original decentralization vision.


To me, it seems to be a fairly bullish sign for bitcoin that a seemingly non-hardfork resolution is in bitcoin’s near future, and it seems pretty likely that bitcoin is going to make it through this recent contentious period, and likely be stronger because of it.

 

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[rebuilder]

JJG: For me the problem isn't the scaling issue in this context. That will need to be solved, and raising blocksize won't help. The idea that all transactions are stored forever is a big problem - storage bloat is IMO a much bigger issue than tx throughput, because the latter is temporary and the former is permanent. So where's that pruning, for example?

No, the issue is that the Core dev team have taken a stance where they are willing to alter economic incentives. Basically their argument, as far as I can tell, is that theirs is the conservative position - don't go around changing code in a rush. That's understandable, but which is more conservative - keeping a piece of code that was put in as a temporary fix, or allowing Bitcoin to run into an economic situation it has never been in before - actually hitting the TX cap?

I'll admit I've lost track of who advocates controlling the blockspace for what reason - I'm probably letting the 1MB-forever-gentlemen's-settlement-crowd influence my view of the Core team as a whole. That sentiment is the biggest sticking point for me, personally.

The thing is, though - it doesn't matter what the rationale is for forcing blocks to fill up. The end result is central economic planning.

 

[ChartBuddy]

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[ladoga]

So where's that pruning, for example?

$ bitcoind -prune=1000

$ bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo | grep pruned
  "pruned": true.

 

[JayJuanGee]

JJG: For me the problem isn't the scaling issue in this context. That will need to be solved, and raising blocksize won't help. The idea that all transactions are stored forever is a big problem - storage bloat is IMO a much bigger issue than tx throughput, because the latter is temporary and the former is permanent. So where's that pruning, for example?

No, the issue is that the Core dev team have taken a stance where they are willing to alter economic incentives. Basically their argument, as far as I can tell, is that theirs is the conservative position - don't go around changing code in a rush. That's understandable, but which is more conservative - keeping a piece of code that was put in as a temporary fix, or allowing Bitcoin to run into an economic situation it has never been in before - actually hitting the TX cap?

I'll admit I've lost track of who advocates controlling the blockspace for what reason - I'm probably letting the 1MB-forever-gentlemen's-settlement-crowd influence my view of the Core team as a whole. That sentiment is the biggest sticking point for me, personally.

The thing is, though - it doesn't matter what the rationale is for forcing blocks to fill up. The end result is central economic planning.

For all the ideas you presented in your above post, isn't there going to be continued dialogue amongst bitcoin stakeholders, and we are not stuck in some kind of set and immutable system... .even though sometimes it seems as if changes are difficult to achieve?

In essence, if a sufficient number of people (stake holders) begin to believe that "storage bloat," for example is a problem, then there will likely be increased discussion of such issues, and then likely proposed solutions for such, and I have already heard various discussions about "storage bloat," so it is not a concept that is really lost upon people. Maybe storage bloat is one of those subjects that is used as a core team talking point because it seems that keeping blocksize limits lower helps to partly address the bloat issue.

Regarding bitcoin governance and/or the perception that the status quo is leading down a kind of centralized planning path, I guess that part of what I had been trying to say is that even though there continue to be claims and assertions that small groups have taken over blockchain decision-making, to me it seems that keeping the governance as is, and making changes to bitcoin fairly difficult to achieve remain decent tools that allow for less centralized planning in the long term, more likelihood that people will just develop their ideas around existing bitcoin systems and ruling of the ideas rather than people...

It seems considerably likely that there would be more predictability for markets with the whole bitcoin system if it remains more difficult to change, and if for example, there were a 75% consensus mechanism, bitcoin could be changed fairly easily and even possibly took over by some persuasive yet stealthily nefarious forces... .. accordingly, since bitcoin does not seem to be anywhere near broken technologically, it seems good that governance is difficult to change and consensus is also difficult to change to make it easy to make changes to our currently seemingly decentralized and disruptive investment.

So for example, if people come up with really good ideas regarding how to technologically improve bitcoin, then it is really likely to reach consensus because the idea is good and people are convinced that it is a good change (which seems to be the case with seg wit).

I think that part of the problems with both XT and Classic were that each of them attempted to accomplish too much (meaning including attempts at changing governance rather than focusing narrowly on technology). If each of those proposed changes had merely focused on technical fixes without attempting to change consensus (or governance), then there would have likely been a lot less resistance from a variety of current stake holders (frequently referred to as Core supporters).... Accordingly, the multi-faceted approach of both XT and Classic ended up removing credibility from their claims about bitcoin technological problems (if such problems actually really do exist to any degree near the level of voices shouting such "technological problems").

 

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