Bitcoin Forum

Given Bitcoin's origin revelation in the midst of the financial crisis and its Genesis Block timestamp's pointed reference to 'another round of bank bail-outs' this kind of Krugmanesque Happy Talk (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/?_r=0) from the self-appointed CEO of Bitcoin raises many questions.


How can the financial crisis be over when the BIS and subsidiary TBTF zombie banks still roam the earth, consuming the gains of the living?

How can the financial crisis be over when when Bitcoin has yet to assume its rightful place on the throne next to gold's, as a replacement for the world's various forms of dying fiat trash?

Is it prudent to subordinate Bitcoin's fate to the continued success of petrodollar hegemony in the forms of QE N+1, TARP, TALF, and the FOMC Plunge Protection Team?

It is truly starting to strain credulity that anyone could trust Gavin to having anything to do with Bitcoin period.

I really have to wonder if Gavin is trying to do some sort of a cry for help here.  e.g., 'I want out but my hands are tied.  Run like a motherfucker!'

He talks about the financial crises in bitcoin! -> Translation: Bearmarket is over. He knows a huge pump is coming and this is exactly why he is afraid, the blocksize limit could be too small.

Hardly. Read the quote. He's saying big companies will start making investments into infrastructure which will lead to the improved broadband speeds for the consumer. I doubt that has anything to do with Bitcoin's price.

That said, what's the relevance here, icebreaker?

i don't see it ended yet, there is still problem all over the word regarding unemployment, and countries bankruptcy

i still think that we are in a compromised state, and crypto will help us in some way to exit from this fiat disaster

Our currenct fiat currency system has many inherent issues. Once crisis comes out and we find ways to tame it, but never really fix them! Crypto may resolve some of these issues! Who knows, no one really tries to implement crypto concept to our exising system!   

Predicating larger blocks on a putative economic recovery (and subsequent retail broadband explosion) may not be the safest or wisest strategy.

Of all things to base Bitcoin's [future?] magic numbers on, Krugmanesque happy talk about the miracles of Keynesian statism is one of the most bizzarre.

How is retail broadband coming along in Greece?  Ukraine?  Venezuela?  Argentina?  Larger blocks make Bitcoin nodes harder to operate in some of the places where it is needed the most, and where (for purposes of diversity/diffusion/resiliency/defensibility) Bitcoin most needs its nodes to be.

On a side note, now that we know they operate on entirely contradictory premises/assumptions, it's amusing to watch cypherdoc (who nearly everyday proclaims the financial crisis is *not* over) strenuously cheerlead for gavin@tla.mit.edu on 20MB blocks, XTortion forks, or whatever the latest crackpot of scheme of hearn@google.mil is.   :)

While I agree the financial crisis is not over per-se, in context Gavin's quote is just reasoning that businesses are beginning to invest again and bandwidth will become less of a problem. Don't be disingenuous in order to fit your agenda.

I feel like you're trying a bit to undermine Gavin.
If you take a look at the result, you can see that people are really divided when it comes to this. Gavin isn't the only on thinking that it is over.
https://i.imgur.com/hWbKbls.png

I don't think that it is over, however looking at the big picture it isn't too far from being over. We've had a number of countries that had problems even before that started. We can see various unemployment charts to see that at least that had improved.

Russia has economic problems?
Even though one can't use this as the only measurement, there are other factors telling us otherwise. Unemployment rate in the US is 5.5% and in Russia 5.6% right now. I'm not saying that they don't have any problems, however you can't really put them in the same bag as Greece.


There are not going to be 20 MB blocks. We are going to see 8 MB blocks from 2016 to 2018 which is okay. To download a 8 MB block within 5 minutes (even though blocks should be 10 minutes each) one needs a transfer rate 26.6 KB/s. Are you telling me that those countries don't have such internet speeds? However, bandwidth might be a problem.
Greece has quite decent internet actually, stop talking nonsense (http://www.netindex.com/download/2,22/Greece/).

He is not crazy but mentally retarded.

This Gavin-bashing smear campaign is pretty sad.

Agreed. It's still a gob smacking quote.

Chian wants to be ther world reserve currency and America has more debt than it could ever pay off.. it couldn't even pay the interest payments if it rose interest rates.

It's just about to being.

Oh, so the lead developer of a software project is not necessarily the most competent person alive when it comes to matters of international economics? Who da thunk it?

Come on, are you f***in serious?
He's a software developer, not an economist.
Now close this thread.

The financial crisis is over because FED printed 4 trillion dollars, now these dollars are all in the commercial banks' account and can be used to drive any kind of projects. As long as people believe in USD's value, those added trillion dollars are added wealth since they can drive the production of wealth

But if average house hold believe that dollar's value should drop to 1/5 because of FED printed 5x money, then the money printing will not work any more. Unfortunately, it might take many decades before people have that kind of understanding of fiat currency, maybe never

what's lunacy, and thug-like, is you putting up a poll with all negative choices towards Gavin.  desperation much?

furthermore, you and all the other 1MB'ers are wrong on focusing on the full node as "the" decentralization metric.  spreading Bitcoin usage into just those areas you mention above, Greece, Ukraine, etc, is precisely what Bitcoin needs to decentralize.  i much more trust those ppl to ignore any local gvt decrees to shut down Bitcoin than panzies like you who spout alot of iCEBlow but who would roll over in an instant if Mommy gvt said "boo".

The financial crisis is over^TM

https://i.imgur.com/acEFye3.jpg

what then?
Hillary Clinton is USA's best choice?
Freedom Act is all about freedom?

https://i.imgur.com/Vpxz35G.jpg

This!

Not really, it sounds like he's talking about the economy in the classic sense, nothing to do with BTC.
Im a proposal for a blocksize increase and like his model of 8MB of increase per 2 year schelude, but if this guy thinks the financial crisis is over then he has no idea whatsoever when it comes to actual geopolitics/economics. Let's not forget this guy is a geek/nerd at heart and not a geopolitical analyst.

I disagree. China doesn't want to be the reserve currency but it does want to be part of the big club. The US has the 'advantage' of being the reserve currency and therefore the strongest of a shaky bunch. There will probably be a monetary reset again soon enough, ala Bretton Woods, lets see if it is forced by a panic or pre empts one.

Your fix may or may not be accurate.  With only a few exceptions, everyone I've known from MIT have been terrific engineers and hold their own as scientists.  IIT same.  Gavin is clearly no where near that league.  It is the case that educational institutions serve as laundering facilities to get funding to individuals in order to achieve certain goals.  Their utility and use in this capacity seems to have exploded recently.

A more blatant error is what I've high-lighted which is simply wrong.  Gavin's proposal in question is exponential.  It ends up with blocks being 1000 times the current size after 10 cycles.  Not 8m*10 or 80MB.  As I've said, people need to be careful here and watch the pea.

Judging by the vehemence of some responses here, my tiny effort to draw attention to Gavin's gob smacking quote has apparently touched some raw nerves.   :D

It's remarkable how instead of simply debating the truth/false value of Gavin's "Financial Crisis Is Over" proposition, so many are attacking me for bringing it up, demanding I close the thread, etc.

Of course it's uncomfortable for GavinCoiners who believe the financial crisis is *far* from over to hear their Dear Leader explicitly tie purported feasibility of larger blocks to the supposed current and presumably sustained economic recovery.

It doesn't seem like he's talking about whether the financial crisis actually is over (does that even seem like something Gavin would say??). As I read him, he's merely saying that companies perceive the financial crisis to be over and are making investments, which is true.

That's exactly my point.

Why is a hyper-specialized code-monkey like Gavin (who is obviously "not necessarily the most competent person alive when it comes to matters of international economics") pontificating on matters of which he knows little?

Moreover, why would he presume to tie the fate of a resiliency-based FOSS project to his Pollyanna prognostications and crystal-ball gazing?

Many (probably most) Bitcoiners believe we are operating under multiple cascading financial crises, going back to 1913 (Federal Reserve), 1933 (gold confiscation), 1971 (Nixon Shock), etc.:

https://i.imgur.com/ChNZN7q.jpg

Compounding these ongoing unresolved/unresolvable crises is the Deep Capture of the economy and most social institutions by Deep State operatives like gavin@tla.gov and hearn@google.mil.

The petro(dollar/euro/yen) are dead paper walking.  The "Rollover" scenario (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPYLJoq_40Y) isn't off the table, it's just been kicked down the road like a can.  Of course Gavin thinks putting off difficult work like scaling Bitcoin or abolishing the warfare/welfare state is the is the same thing as solving the crisis...

Gavin isn't even the lead developer (http://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-steps-bitcoins-lead-developer/).

Thank goodness the remaining core devs know better than to expose Bitcoin to an iffy bet on Bernanke and Obama's economic legacy (BECAUSE NETFLIX^tm).

Financial crisis is over?  Ha-ha, very funny - tell us another one!   ::)

I like Gavin.

But is it over, unemployment is at 4% or something like that, the markets are sky high, people are rich and everything is great.
Repeat that over and over until you believe it!

This is the new normal, debt and money print your way into prosperity.  If figures look bad for you, just massage them.  If people are unemployed, don't count them.. See, everything is fine.

Gavin is not exactly Satoshi is he!

The bashers didn't make the guy into the tool he became.  For my part, I've supported the guy in areas where I feel he deserved support over the years.  Probably more than I should have, but hindsight is 20/20.

Exactly. As I've stated this is probably just an attempt to undermine Gavin. I'm pretty sure that a group of people is willing to use just about anything against him.
You can't blame a software developer for not understanding economy, even if that is not the case here.

This.

When that software developer seeks to make a (security-centric, financially-sensitive) project dependent upon his economic proclamations and predictions, he should be blamed for that poor design rationale.

Are you saying that Gavin, who is no longer the lead developer, is changing bitcoin software based upon his view of economics? I would like to understand this better.

Gavin himself announced he is "changing bitcoin software based upon his view of economics."

Specifically, his view that "the financial crisis is over" and that the ensuing period of peace and prosperity will deliver the broadband needed to keep the network diffuse/diverse/defensible/resilient even with much larger blocks.

The irony is that Bitcon was launched in the midst of the (latest, IE 2008) financial crisis and most of its (early) supporters do not think the financial crisis is over (to put it mildly).

In theory, yes the petrodollar's deprecation has been insane, but guess what, the government keeps printing dollars, and the rest of the governments all over the world keep accepting dollar, so in practice, the dollar is as alive as always. The question is, for how long can this go on. And some fear that it might go on longer than we can imagine, maybe for longer than our lifetimes. So for I all know, in practice it's not dead paper walking, because if it keeps walking longer than your lifetime.. it is essentially alive.

its economical/political/intel/digital/social war everywhere out there.
CHINA vs USA vs RUSSIA vs EU.
WEST vs ORIENT vs BRICS
i'm sure i'll witness some pretty fan shitted things during my lifetime.

same goes for people in their old age that have witnessed WWII, coldwar, oil crisis, internet bubble, 2008, etc....

do not underestimate the domino effect: paper currency for a house of a card world.

It's not just about Gavin's expertise in international economics.

It's about betting Bitcoin's future on Gavin's dubious assumption that "we're about to see an explosion of bandwidth to the home."

Hoping for the best is fine, but we must also plan for the worst.

It's OK, The real bitcoin foundation is hard at work cleaning up the bitcoin code --> http://thebitcoin.foundation/

V 0.5.4 should be coming soon!

He's right that there will be a large increase in home internet speeds soon in the US. A lot of companies are starting to roll out gigabit plans.

The original post is not really a shock considering most people on Freenode are socially dysfunctional, compartmentalized retard savants in some tiny category like Java programming, then aren't too great at doing other things.  If you asked him the best way to make fried chicken, he might not be able to tell you that either.

Gavin didn't specify or even imply anything about "the US."  You've altered his incorrect statement by limiting its scope to overemphasize what little truth it originally contained.

Those gigabit plans are being rolled out in densely populated areas which can and do already support full nodes. 

The bandwidth rich get bandwidth richer, but that does little to improve Bitcoin's diversity/diffusiveness/defensibility/resilience.

As the Petrodollar Empire wanes and threatens implosion, we need a far-flug scattering (http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Scattering) of full nodes outside the US and its subsidiary satellites/paper statelets/garrisons/unsinkable aircraft carriers.

Gavin, the Chief Economist of Bitcoin, in his office:

https://i.imgur.com/yq4NBjz.jpg

Crazy.The world economy is going crazy. Like we're facing the extremes here. Look at the 2003 meltdown , then 2008, now Greece crisis. Then the chinese economy has reached its best yet. 10$ trillion. Global economy is expanding at a wild pace. Things are calm and being compromised as well. The economists are following different concepts to study today's economy.

The concept to understand economy has widely changed, you gotta accept that. So much of activity is constantly taking place in various markets draining money and pumping at the same time, guess that's how it all seems to be balanced somehow. The factors to study economy are changing, so to determine if the financial crisis is over is complicated. But honestly, I don't think crisis ever ends, just the markets change.

I didn't read all of this thread but he's correct that we are seeing an explosion of bandwidth to the home, it's already underway.

It's going to be like going from 56k dial up straight to 10 Mbps 'broadband' but this time it's for real.

This is a prefect example of someone pulling casual, quickly written stuff from a public figure and using it to pump their own agenda.  

I mean we all argue about almost everything, but do you seriously think that any Bitcoin early adopter thinks that the overall long term global financial situation is peachy?

If Gavin wanted to waste his time, he'd probably go back and edit this comment to say "since the first chapter of the financial crisis is over..."

Of course, given Greece and China it looks like chapter 2 is just starting...  :)

I'd like to necromance this thread to ask the "economy is fine" people if they have changed their minds, or have yet to wake up and smell the brewing economic crisis.

If you guys don't read zerohedge, now is a good time to start.

All the Gavinistas clamoring for larger blocks are failing to plan for the worst case scenario, in which Gavin's supposed broadband rollout fails to materialize and global interconnectivity fragments in the fog of World War 3 and/or Cold War 2.

So drole.

http://images.thehollywoodgossip.com/iu/s--NvjP-lQZ--/t_full/f_auto,fl_lossy,q_75/v1420665315/nic-cage-lena-dunham-mash-up.gif

I have become convinced that iCEBREAKER and tvbcof are shell accounts for either Maxwell or Adam Back.

They both appeared out of nowhere in mid 2014 when blockstream started pushing LN and side chains, and they both have been on a complete, nonstop and full time smear campaign.

You guys are just pathetic

We know for a fact that iCEBREAKER is just a disappointment of a human being, not a shill for Greg or Adam.

If you're so inclined you can dig through the Hashfast thread and find out his real name.  IIRC there is also a picture of him from his time as a representative of HF.

I can't say the same for tvbconf.


Truer words have never been spoken.

I'm almost embarrassed by modesty that you consider my humble posts on par with genuine geniuses like Maxwell and Back.   :-[

Flattery aside, do you have any input on the topic of the thread, or are you just here to troll and deflect via personal attacks?

BTW, I've been here since mid-2011.  But I don't expect a noob like you to know that.   :D

And weren't you going to fork off (Because Sensor Ships) to greener lolcow pastures like Frap.doc's and BTC Judas's malcontent venues?

So much for your demonstration of the supposed Gavinista socioeconomic majority's ability to deprecate Evil Thermos's Hitlerforum!   ;D

Mr. iCEblow is a professional corporate consultant employed on contract by Blockstream^{TM (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1305286.msg13480699#msg13480699)}. We pay him in Moneros.  ;)

I can only wish that I had the skills and accomplishments that either of these two have in their little finger.


Really?  So you think that I spent the time to create all of my posts going back to 2011 and Thermos gave me access to insert the body of work into the database?  OK.

BTW, I remember being so worried about Hearn achieving his long-term dream of killing Bitcoin through unlimited growth that I thought up some way to deal with the threat and bought a domain name in...whois...04/2013.  One of my first posts on this board back in 2011 proposed subordinate chains as a the most tangible and workable solution to the obvious scaling issues.


Oh that hurts.  I think I might start to cry.

The funny thing is that you and your apparent clone 'smooth' showed up in a timeframe when a lot of likely shills did pushing for Hearndresen style growth which is certain to push Bitcoin fully into corporate datacenter hands.  And maybe even shilling for the new protocol implementation 'btcd' if I remember right (and I may not but it's not important enough for me to look back.)

The good news is that there do seem to be some people who started out chumped by you folk's propaganda but wised up when your true colors came to the fore.  CIYAM and lauda-whatever come to mind.

This is what makes the Blockstream conflict of interest situation so interesting. Everyone involved legitimately believed this was a good idea long before they had a corporate bias and a logo.

I'm at least as sensitive as most people to organizational structures.  When I heard of Blockstream organized under a corporate structure I had to put a little thought into how I felt about it.  After doing so, I concluded that it probably would be the most workable and effective way to achieve a result.

When I heard about Blockstream and their focus,  and especially to who the participants were,  I was overcome with delight.  I would not give a shit if it were organized under any structure as long as there was good transparency.  When Linked-in was a new thing I was somewhat negative about it due to the potential for abuse.  Social media generally was in a much less well developed state but the threats were obvious and troubling.  Having the participation of whats-his-name Linked-in guy was a mild pinkish flag to me, but I will always be watching them with a wary eye no matter what.  I cannot say that I am keenly aware of any gross negligence on the part of Linked-in observed over the last decade and a half.

For historical reference, I put the same level of thought into the Bitcoin Foundation when it was under consideration.  I concluded that the risks were greater than the potential rewards (and said so.)  I made a point of calling transparency into the picture and that is one of the areas where TBF failed miserably in actual practice.

Back to Blockstream and it's corporate structure, I would note that it might have some potential benefits.  Under TPP (and surely the upcoming TAP) corporate structures have access to adjudication in international cases and Bitcoin is certainly international.  Of course the judicial tribunals report under the U.N. security council so it is unlikely that a monetary solution which competes with whatever the bankster class favors will get much of a fair shake, but a corporate structure might provide some relief from certain kinds of action-packed nation-state abuse (of the type which Kim Dotcom got bothered by.)

I can tell you've put some serious thought into this. But I couldn't disagree more with the spirit of what I've bolded. It sounds like something that upside-down Ripple guy would have said. It's a horrible thing to say about Bitcoin.

Just horrible.  :'(

Agree with the above entirely.

But I don't think rocks is smooth.  rocks's IQ (and frothy, intemperate personality) seems at least two standard deviations below wise, phlegmatic smooth's.

I'm genuinely interested in your 'just horrible' interpretation if you care to elaborate.

From probably back in my early time on this board I'd advocated for simply having as little interaction as possible with any official governing body.  I think that was part of my argument against TBF...they had the potential to become a point of attack, and boy was that prescient (IMHO.)

I did not use the term 'ignore' since I've felt from day one that keeping a close eye on the attack modes possible from governments was critical.  And, of course, a development focus on not allowing the system to fall into traps which they could set.  I don't even mind cooperating with government bodies when it makes sense and does not pose a threat since governments do plenty of OK things, but always with a very wary eye toward attacks which I've felt are certain to come eventually (assuming Bitcoin didn't self-destruct on it's own.)

From day one (of mine) I've felt that Gavin wished to bend over backward to mollify TPTB and hope that they were nice to us as a result.  This has always struck me as complete folly.  This is the basis for my repeated assertions that Gavin is (at least) a foolish and nieve guy who to his core 'loves big brother.'  At this point I think there is an argument to be made that he is likely worse than that, or has at least evolved to such a state.

No matter what I've always considered it simple common sense and good strategy to understand the enemy and at least set up to leverage his weaknesses if it comes to hot warfare that cannot be avoided.  It's good engineering as well.  If that means organizing under a particular structure which has some meaning in the real world, that is fine with me.  I live in the real world and don't ask anyone else to do otherwise.

You don't mind cooperating with government bodies when it makes sense to do so, but you accuse Gavin of being prepared to bend over backwards for them? How exactly? By giving the CIA a pittance because they asked nicely? By working at MIT instead of a for-profit Bitcoin^TM company?

Fantasy: "The Financial Crisis Is Over"

Reality: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-07/china-leaves-yuan-little-changed-after-folding-circuit-breaker-rules-offshore-yuan-u

https://i.imgur.com/47VXDJL.png



#R3KT

Is that like a spasm?

Hmmm...OK, here's a quick-n-dirty example of working with a govt.  Suppose I have a server and an analysis technique which can do some blockchain analysis.  Suppose the FBI comes and asks me nice if I could grind some data to help them find tradefortress so they could crush his balls.  I'd be happy to help.

WRT Gavin, he's been the highest salaried contributor to Bitcoin (through TBF) for some time as best I can tell (though it's hardly something I've looked into a whole bunch...and many of the contributors probably have done much better on their hodlings than on salary anyway.)  I never pitched a bitch about Hearn and Wuille being at Google, or Garzik being at BitPay.  In fact, I think it is a lot of times more healthy for a person to draw a decent salary so they are not as prone to pay the bills by cooperating with covert interests.  OTOH, everyone who is slipping code into Bitcoin should be watched like a hawk and called out when there is any potential for conflict of interest or other red-flags no mater who, if anyone, they work for.  I myself have worked for large entities and not felt that it impacted negatively my other interests so I believe that it can happen.  Garzik's work with BitPay is a huge potential red-flag since they seem to have bet on the wrong horse vis-a-vis scaling but I've not seen it really impact his work until perhaps recently (but probably not even then.)

(I was disappointed when Wuille went to Google and delighted when he left BTW.  I considered him to be the most critical contributor and something of a 'principle architect' before he went to Google and feared that his work on Bitcoin would be retarded at best and compromised at worst.  I never saw a real indication of either issue which made me breath a sigh of relief.)

I guess I can get behind most of this. There really is no unbiased position here. To be continued...

It's at least slightly horrible how some of you resorted to immediately attacking Gavin's character and motives, then "sensorships", then ddos. He'd been a pretty forthright shepherd of the repo for quite a while, handed the keys from satoshi himself, and it was right off to the woodchipper when he had an honest philosophical difference of opinion with the blockstream guys.

jtoomim's survey pretty much told you all you need to know. It's only a matter of time until miners realize that their competition for fees is centrally planning their future profits away.

It's also silly that you accuse gavin and others of being compromised and pushing ulterior motives... while letting the question of blockstream's motives flow gracefully over your mind like a calm sea. Why? because gmaxwell dazzles with technical delight? He certainly does do that. Because adam just comes across as a nice guy? (he really does, and probably is :))

61% or so nodes are not running the latest core release. Segwit through softfork will leave how much of the node network in a sort of SPV+ mode? Controversial? sure. Hard fork? no, so safety.

And as we have decided to dispense with the pleasantries... I'll finish with a quote from the appreciation thread:

I'm attacking Gavin's ridiculous "The Financial Crisis Is Over" premise and his ridiculous 'broadband rollout coming Because NFLX' conclusion.

It's not "horrible" to explore the most likely reasons for that perfect shitstorm of demonstrated economic illiteracy and technical incompetence.

Your appreciation is important to us. On behalf of the Blockstream corporation please accept this gift of (George Forman Grill).

Don't forget to vote in our latest poll (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1305286.msg13415575#msg13415575)!

You know I'm not lock step with BIP101, never have been, but to meet a bad proposal with a similarly bad one on the other end of the spectrum isn't fantastic either.

And as you've stated before, this is the crucible of internet nerd drama, we shall see how it all shakes out. 

Give him a break, lots of people thought things were slowly getting better.
He didn't tell everyone to buy bank stocks did he now?

I honestly don't know what the global economy is doing, there is so much noise and confusion. We will know when its done.

Are you talking about BIP000?  If so, I disagee the 'don't fix what isn't broken' proposal is a "similarly bad one."

And we've already seen how 101 shook out, IE completely failed at everything except crashing the price for a few months.

I won't "give him a break" because the civil war Gavin intentionally instigated turned into a distraction that set Bitcoin development back at least 6 months.

Stupid, gullible, clueless, borderline brain dead, very-low-information people "thought things were slowly getting better."  Those of us with IQs over 80 knew better.

Since you still haven been hit hard enough with the clue stick to realize the 2008 crisis never ended, I presume that excludes present company.

Message repeats:

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq  :)

Dear (Cconvert2G36),

We at Blockstream are commited to offering you our continued commitment to Core.

Should you have any questions or concerns regarding the Core Capacity Increase FAQ, please feel free to discuss them with one of our customer care client services specialists (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1305286.0).

Thank you for supporting Blockstream^TM.

It sure is easier to make sophomoric digs at a private company than defend Gavin's indefensible "economic crisis is over" conclusion/prediction, isn't it?

Your Gavin-like Debby Denial economic illiteracy is duly noted.   ;)

https://i.imgur.com/Y63jXYa.jpg

Core is making great progress with RBF, segwit, etc.

If you bratty children could STFU and stop asking Are We There Yet, that would be great.

I guess we all know how you voted (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1305286.0).   ::)

^You're hired!

Deflect and distract with your silly false dichotomies all you wish.  You only embarrass yourself more (not that you have any honor or esteem left to lose).

The economic crisis is obviously not over and Gavin obviously looks like a retard for saying it was.

I'm not surprised you studiously avoid those glaring facts.

XT/BU lost.  And Bitcoin Ultra is here to heal the rift caused by you Gavinista assclowns.   :)

How's the food in the GCHQ basement?  I hope it's fekkin' awful.   :-*

Look, Eisenstein! He was obviously referring to a specifc financial crisis. Not the on-going struggle against statists that you ZH lot are on about.









@CConvert2G36 Blockstream reserves the right to discuss, alter its conflict of interest policy (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1305286.msg13480699#msg13480699).

And how does the world economy diving into the shitter have anything to do with not adding a tad extra capacity for our  superior alternative right when it matters?

Maybe when you stop being a childish shill we'll talk about it, hmmm?

Not tonight, dear.

Well that might be true, but meanwhile my kids' stocks are giving good returns, there are lots of jobs and the company I work for keeps hiring new people.
SpaceX made history, Tesla electric cars are here to save the day and my country has 50% of electricity from renewable sources.

Even Greece is still here. And if it wasn't what do I care if some banks and Greece go under? Things are honestly not looking so bad to me.

Yeah world banks and governments are still super corrupt and stupid and spending too much on bombing random middle eastern countries, but I will forgive people thinking things are pretty cool right now.
I don't know why things are so good considering above stupidity, but at the moment they are.

Now in the future with devastating climate change and peak oil and war triggered by USA and Russia stupidity maybe the story changes.

I hedged my bets on all sides. I have Bitcoin, I have cash, I have savings, I have stocks, I have a little gold, I have my own small business and a full time job - the world can do whatever it damn well pleases.


And on topic: We need bigger blocks, go go go. Lets try 2mb and see if the world ends eh?

"devastating climate change and peak oil?"

ManBearPig aside, do you even read the news?

EG https://twitter.com/Melt_Dem/status/685202184720396288

Wow, I don't know how do deal with someone suffering with such dullest-spoon-in-the-dishwasher worthy delusions.

But your Gavin-like Debby Denial economic illiteracy is duly noted.   ;)

https://i.imgur.com/Y63jXYa.jpg

You have made it to Stage 3.  Good job!

Enjoy your green shoots of fake growth and false recovery while you can.  Don't forget to get some silver while it's cheap.

It honestly depends how you interpret his statement.  "Financial crisis is over" could just mean not in free fall anymore since there were talks of tanks in the streets when it occurred.  So, if the requirement of tanks is over, at least for a brief period of time, then you have still not solved any problem, but you're not in the middle of a crisis.

It depends what the definition of is is.

Haha manbearbig? Really you don't think the drought in California is scary at all?

Temporary cheap oil prices do not mean that peak oil is debunked.
Peak means "most ever" that is where we are at. So yes we have a lot now.

Oil has been drilled for 100-200 years so the down slope will be about as long.

Like I said I don't know if the consequences will be horrific or the down slope gently enough that new technology just steps in.

Why do you believe in economic trouble if A you don't believe in resource limits and B you don't consider climate change a threat/real?

Why in your mind is the world in trouble exactly?

Silver will not help. No one would accept it in an emergency. Maybe I will get some coins but I don't really see it as something serious.

If I'm just hedging against inflation stocks, Bitcoin and other stuff is better.

I had a laugh at reading myself right now. I have learned a lot for the past months, and im no longer pro-BIP 101. I can't believe I was drinking the koolaid of the big blocks back then. I understand clueless people dreaming with huge blocks now, that don't get we need LN and not a risky big block schelude that may or not may be sustainable in the long term. The more you know.

Have you been using Luminosity? Cool, me too.  :)

I've decided that it's better to have 2.7tx per second globally while coders whip up a lightning network. It's really a sure thing, gonna be easier than using Bitcoin itself, people just don't have any patience. They drink the wrong koolaid and the next thing you know they're talking about competitive advantage, adoption rates, and stifled use cases... weirdos.

What people don't understand is that Bitcoin is ours... to have, to HODL. Poors can spend their dogecoins and fiat, I'll be sitting here getting rich through sweet, sweet, stagnation.

Feels good man.  8)

https://i.imgur.com/ORkg08S.png

Hehe.  That's up into the same quality category that iCEBREAKER is famous for dishing out.  For general amusement purposes I can only hope that it spurs him to even greater heights.

Yes, let's all stop focusing on Gavin's idiotic 20MB --> 8GB block "Because economic crisis is over and NFLX will fiber to the screen" proposal and shoot the messenger using horrific shocking imagery.

The insight into the throwaway account's disturbing unconscious thought processes, which involved boys getting savagely raped, is most unwelcome.  More useful is the discovery tvbcof is of the type of weak mind easily impressed with such atrocity-trivializing rhetoric.

Were I to use such an uncouth, disgusting metaphor I would explain why it is apt, not simply steal it to get a cheap laugh from implied emasculation via sexual violence.  I wonder why the noob is so eager to portray me as utterly powerless and intimately violated...  :-\

Actually, I don't.  That's for a therapist (and/or law enforcement) to deal with.

Not that the tu quoque ad hom deserves a response, but I traded most of my iD shares for hardware, which I mined with until selling at a most opportune time.

And I don't need to reach "even greater heights" to hand Realpra his ass on a platter.  Hold muh beer and watch this...   ;)

Please endeavor to understand you are operating on a fairly low level of information.  Any somewhat successful high school policy debater could easily make the same corrective points which follow.  This isn't a fair fight anymore than a pro hockey team vs the peewee league.

1.  The California drought has nothing to do with ManBearPig.  Please learn the difference between weather and climate.  And google "Climategate" (hint: the models represent nothing more than the anti-scientific corruption of academia by government grants).

2.  Peak oil is bunk because of the substitution effect.  You are obviously too poorly read to know Simon won the bet with Ehrlich.

3.  The "economic trouble" stems not from limited resources but rather from central planning/banking and the malinvestment (resource mal-allocation) created thereby.  TBTF banks are emblematic of this, which is why the Genesis Text pointedly refers to their second round of bailouts, with a heavy implication of the entailed systemic risk the created by prevention/delay of creative destruction.  That was actually a good question, BTW.   ;)


It is a certainty silver will be useful in an emergency involving a lack of potable water and antiseptics.  You do at least know why that is, I hope.

In an emergency, silver may or may not be accepted as a medium of exchange.  It Depends^®.  Please don't pretend you know the future, when your superficial knowledge/understanding of the past and present is at a Basic Bitch level of paltry.

As for inflation hedges, note gold, silver, and Bitcoin (ie hard liquid assets) all rise together on days when the fiat trash bleeds red.

I do believe that anti-science anti climate change movements have had much more funding from oil companies than anyone got from the government. Do you realize how small budgets scientist operate on and how underfunded they and NASA are?
If they were in it for the money and corruption they would get more in almost any other job.

That is exactly why oil companies can so easily lobby against common sense in the first place.

When every month is a new heat record it is not just weather.

Substitution only happens if there IS a substitute.

International shipping and planes are not going to run on batteries with our current level of technology nor the next decades level of technology.

These problems affect mainly governments and fiat holders. If you are a sensible person dealing with sensible companies and you don't hold all your wealth at a bank as a pension or fiat you should be pretty okay.

The anti septic properties of silver hardly justifies hording all that much of it.
You can get the same effect with 2 drops of bleach or you know boiling stuff.

History shows that people value food, medicine and cigarettes in emergencies.

Except silver and gold don't rise, they just don't fall. You can never earn long time holding gold or silver.
Bitcoin and property can rise and are just as hard.

For gold or silver to shine you would need an emergency bad enough to knock out the internet+Bitcoin+fiat, but not so bad that only food mattered - a very theoretical scenario honestly.

TBH, the term 'boy' in this context did not, in my mind, map to 'juvenile' in a chronological sense.  It was a standard insult effective only because it was applied to an adult in fact.  To that extent the humor itself was indeed 'juvenile', and I readily admit that such humor is effective on me from time to time.

Remember that time when I posted a standard picture of a sheep being sheep-like and Cypherdoc's mind mysteriously and immediately conjured up a sexual connotation?  Weird, but then the world is full of weirdness.


I'll gladly hold your beer, and will pull an ice cold one from the cooler for you when you get done.

---

BTW, I actually never understood the 'icedrill' context.  I only basically figured that this 'newb' was making fun of your experience with HashFast, but never cared enough to try to understand what went on there.  All I know is that you had some involvement as did cypherdoc and that it seems that there was a desperate outcome between you two...monetarily speaking.

Relatetedy, the 'iceblow' insult never seemed at all funny to me.  Doesn't rhyme or seem to have any connotation other than a random assertion of oral sexual behavior as best I can tell.  Perhaps it has some connotation associated with the Hashfast goings-on, but that is a black-box to me...mostly because it isn't interesting enough for me to bother to open the top.

Quality wise, "Boy ain't been right since..." and "you're a fag" are on different ends of the 'juvenile' humor scale.  But that's a matter of taste.

Can we get back on topic please? This thread is about Gavin's naïve impression that internet bandwidth worldwide is improving over time.

Watching iCE gag and sputter when given a dollop of his own medicine is not gratifying at all, and is a grave insult to the great number of bitcoiners who have suffered brutal and occasionally undeserved surprise secs.

Sure.  We all know (or think we know) that 'disk' is not really a factor in Bitcoin scaling...as useful as it may be for propaganda purposes...but here's an observation which goes to the subject of 'Moore's law':

About the time that Satoshi was birthing Bitcoin, I was building a new workstation.  2008-ish IIRC which is within spitting distance of a decade.  I decided to finally 'do it right' and throw costs out the window.  What I ended up with was an i-family chipset, and for bulk storage a couple of 1.5TB drives (which I built a mirror an encryption on top of.)

Now, in 2016, after a bunch of years and a possible disk anomaly in my mirror, I decided to do a bit of work on the system.  I replaced the disks with another set of WD 'green' drives of a whopping 2TB capacity.  A full 25% increase.  OK, I might have decided to go with 6TB drives if I were feeling the same about spending money as I was back then.  That would make roughly a 400% increase.  Impressive, but vastly out of touch with the Moore's Law mythology.  I might have decided to upgrade the motherboard as well...if the technology had advanced significantly beyond the i-class base that I already owned.

I actually don't doubt that 'Moore's law' has held up better than my 'consumer grade' experience of the decade or so, but it is fairly clear that the friuits of this phenomenon are realized by a wholly different class of beneficiaries.  And I don't trust this class to serve my interests when it comes to protecting my assets against attack.

I've always said that market forces will not distribute technological advancements evenly, and the reasons for this are fairly obvious (to me at least.)  At this point it probably is the case that the likes of Google, Facebook, etc, could run Bitcoin as the global monetary system for everything and everyone.  If not now, they will be able to within a few years while it is completely unlikely that lesser class infrastructure providers will.  Bitcoin could 'evolve' to take advantage of this support base, but in doing so it will lose any advantage it may have over established fiat systems.

From a market perspective, once the bandwidth capacity reaches a point when 'hive-mind consciousness' can be streamed directly into the brains of a household, there is really no more demand which makes it unlikely that further increases will be forthcoming.  The actually bandwidth required for this, after sufficient optimization of the protocols, may not even be all that great.  Basically, as long as a sufficiently strong message to spend all of one's debt limit on new shit is downloaded there is not a lot more that needs to be done.  That is within the reach of what is possible for a lot of people living in appropriately structured 'human habitats' today.

https://i.imgur.com/QuWGqt4.png :-\


We're not in violent disagreement here. Although, I don't think miners moving to software with a 2-4MB max makes this inevitable or even likely. My greater concern is that a company, with the involvement of none other than Eric Schmidt, is steering and molding our current (potentially former) first mover advantage to their own ends. I think a diversified array of software choices hardens Bitcoin even further from outside control. Hiring a majority of the devs of the inertia driven "reference" client has proven much cheaper than a 51% attack, highlighting a fragile facet of our antifragile currency.

 

I've been aware of Cypherdoc's sales commission for longer than you have.  Your low-information straw-grasping amuses me.

My Sierras ran like champs once the firmware was stable.  And they kept running for the guys who bought them.   :)

Your entire post is off-topic, and your icky fixation on sexual violence explains why you are using a throwaway account.

But we understand you want to distract everyone from the point of the OP, which is Gavin's "economic crisis is over and NFLX will fiber to the screen ASAP" thesis becomes increasingly invalid with each passing day.

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Here's (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37vg8y/is_the_blockstream_company_the_reason_why_4_core/) Gmax's take on it:

I second this motion.

Bandwidth will continue to improve in best case scenarios, but Gavin is a unwise to risk destroying Bitcoin if something worse happens instead.

Gavin has to know Nielsen's (like Moore's) "Law" is merely a cutesy figure of speech based on backward-looking observation, not a guarantee the future will be exactly (or even remotely) like the past.

How did you vote in the poll, compromised or crazy?

Sounds like you risked more than you could afford to lose.  Seek help for your compulsive gambling problem.

I will not be persuaded by your appeals to jealousy and 20/20 hindsight.

If you can't post on-topic, please leave the thread.

Schmidt taking a share of Blockstream doesn't surprise or bother me that much.  I'm sure he has some hope of guiding the company's trajectory, or at least keeping informed on it, but I'm also fairly confident that the important players (esp, Back, Maxwell and Wuille) are well aware of and wary of this, and I think it probable that they would bail if it became a problem.  In the mean time, the work made possible by the availability of resources is open-source to a reasonable degree and if they split what (if any) is not open would probably go along with them.

My confidence in Back-n-co is not infinite, but they are by far the best bet as far as I'm concerned. I feel this way because of their documented history and the quality of their work.  It would have been really interesting to know how Finney would have felt or acted wrt to Blockstream.  I do have points of dispute with at least Back and Maxwell but they are minor and I feel that the overall objective for Bitcoin is similar to what I would like to see happen.

I might add that I don't care much about the 'client' (reference or not.)  It's the protocol which is key as far as I'm concerned.  Ya, having some control over 'the reference client' at this point in Bitcoin's evolution does probably translate into having some significant input into what is practical to do at the protocol level, but it is not a significant concern to me.  To me it's just kind of an organic reality and less risky than the alternate.  I didn't feel that way earlier in Bitcoin's evolution, and I probably won't feel that way half a decade from now (if Bitcoin is still around) but that's my stance at this point.

Ok on thread: Maybe Gavin is wrong, stupid and evil, but I do not think that one sentence tells you much of anything. Also the poll is pretty bad.

Case closed?

As for scaling I believe something like 2mb and 20% growth would definitely be safe.

I also believe that even larger blocks would be safe if we developed swarm nodes:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1314482.0

I'll preface by saying that the Blockstream guys are highly competent coders and cryptographers, they were before they formed Blockstream, and they are today. Your placement of trust in them thus far is not alien to me. However, a conflict of interest is an insidious thing, it may start out benign, but under the pressure of investors, deadlines, and runway... may begin to allow a form of self delusion... a self reinforcing mentality that what is best for the company is best for the protocol.

The investors that deposited $21 mil didn't do so out of charity, they were sold an eventual ROI. I'm not satisfied with the thesis that it was "we're going to altruistically contribute open source code to better Bitcoin, which will probably make us massive amounts of money somehow, and we'll dissolve the company while stiffing the investors if we have second thoughts about it." I want to know how they plan to make money, and if artificially crippling the main chain could incubate that plan.

It seems that more distribution of available software is the only way to allow miners, who issue the votes that count, to fully exercise their built in right of voting with hashes. If the miners continue to choose core's direction, so be it, I'll convert my node to a segwit node so it actually continues to fully verify. I got interested in Bitcoin because it felt like there wasn't a central point of control, that it natively resisted control by centralized influence. I have confidence that the market will settle the blocksize just as efficiently as it sets the price and the difficulty, a market with production quotas is not a market. Mining valid blocks is not a trivial thing, and those doing it have an interest in seeing the system they manage be as successful as possible.

Maybe?  Just stop the fucking prevarication and admit it, the financial crisis is not over.

The longer you hem and haw, the more evasive, intensely dishonest, and economically illiterate you look.

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Well that narrows it down.  "Correct" is no longer a viable option.  That leaves "compromised" and "crazy."

Given Gavin's "Classic" alliance with the Cryptsy scammer, I'm leaning towards the former.

hehe, one more gavinerie: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1325375.msg13531754#msg13531754

If Back, Maxwell, Wuille, etc don't say exactly the same thing you did and encourage people to watch for it, I will be disappointed in them.


At some point for most people, money in USD terms probably becomes secondary to other goals and mostly just a tool.  Most people will never know what that point is for themselves.  A guy like Schmidt is probably at least as interested in things like his role in guiding the world through the technotronic revolution than he is in increasing his net worth by {n} million more dollars.

Back into a more typical scale, when I threw some fairly minor portion of my excess USD into Bitcoin I of course hoped that I would win in monetary terms, but I think it is fair to say that I was at least as interested in Bitcoin for it's potentially semi-revolutionary role in the future.  I considered the possibility that anything would come out of my speculation to be low, and that anything which I considered 'good' would be lower yet.  I have no trouble imagining Schmidt's calculations vis-a-vis his stake in Blockstream being similar.


I have been agitated since day one that the blockchain could be 'crippled'.  By bloat, be it by organic means or a strategic attack.  Once that happens it would be impossible to undo without some unpleasant and probably devastating compromises.

This concern about bloat has informed my own utilization of Bitcoin and my feelings about development direction.  It is exactly why I am so positive about moving forward on ways to address the problem, and as I've said before, 'subordinate chains' was the thing that hit me back when I finished reading the whitepaper in 2011.

I think it very probable that certain of the named names we are discussing here have the same set of concerns about the health of the blockchain as I do, and that it is a very good explanation for their work and ideas vis-a-vis structure of the blockchain.  In other words, I think that they probably organized under Blockstream in order to address blockchain issues more than they address blockchain issues because they organized under Blockstream.


I've had a strong sense that it is desirable for everyone who uses Bitcoin to also support it in some tangible way from an infrastructure perspective.  If this ever was a theoretically possible scenario, it died in the early days and I have to be practical about this.  I've only briefly skimmed segwit, but it seems like a practical 'engineering' realization that the real world structure that I (and I suspect others) would would like to see is untenable.  Seems to me a way of addressing the real-world flexibility problems while not necessarily permanently damaging the blockchain from a bloat perspective.  At least not right this moment.  My main concern about segwit is that the flexibility enhancements could make it more practical and likely to get stuck in the Chinese-finger-trap of bloat at some point in the future, but such concerns do not outweigh the benefits of potential progress on other fronts.  But I digress.