Bitcoin Forum

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The XT Debate has now gotten enough attention that Zero Hedge has a new article on it (not much detail):

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-23/what-bitcoin-xt-primer-everyone

There are a lot of BTC haterz at ZH...

Economists and finance guys decrying the market virtues of a centrally planned resource? Surely not!

It turns out the Zerohedge editorial policy is in the Bitcoin camp, not XT. Interesting.

Is this email real?
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010238.html

Many tinfoil hatters and doomsday economists visit zerohedge. Half of them believe the grid is going to go down and the only thing that will have value then is gold and ammo.  It's a heavily biased "news" site that writes stories that are overly sensational. They have been yelling financial meltdown, crash, collapse of the dollar, etc every since they launched.

No one knows.

Zero hedge is filled with fucking weirdos. My favourite quote regarding them is that they predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions. There's no denying they've made some good calls but if everything they screamed about came to fruition we'd be splitting skulls open with rocks and eating mud by now.

People are very sensitive to such news. Once they hear about the crisis and they all seemed to go crazy! Many have to learn to distinguish lies from truth.

I don't think their articles are incorrect just a bit hyperbolic. Overall though, it's just been a fairly coordinated intervention by central banks globally that has held off the inevitable for longer than most anticipated.


Regards XT. I'm not a fan.

Since analysing it, most governments view Bitcoin as non threatening because of it's volatility. Businesses can't hold it. Therefore the more businesses that accept Bitcoin and the more it's used for retail purchases the better in their view because businesses sell immediately for fiat thereby creating downward pressure on the BTC price. (Notice how the more widespread and useful Bitcoin gets, the price declines?)

On the other hand without XT, transaction prices would rise to the point BTC would be inconvenient for small online purchases. People would treat it more as a digital gold and store of value & the price of BTC would rise.  

I like how the guy hammers on the exponential growth aspect of the XT blocksize growth scheme.  This is vitally important and seeming almost completely overlooked by those antagonistic to XT and conveniently ignored by those on the pro-XT side who make every effort to focus on a static figure like 8MB as though it were meaningful.  This exponential bloat is, to me, THE most critical aspect of the debate.  Here's why:

Most planning of any consequence looks decades out.  It is standard to compute future-values of money out to these time intervals in deciding what loans to take out to create what infrastructure and so on.

Exponential growth nearly guarantees that Bitcoin infrastructure will consolidate to the point where only a handful of large corporate operators have much influence at some point.  Large corporate actors and the state (or globe if NAFTA/TPP-like agreements gain momentum) work hand in glove.  This would give outfits like CoinValidation (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/sanitizing-bitcoin-coin-validation/), who's business model is predicated on state sponsorship and enforcement, the green-light to move forward on their developments.  When these are in place, Bitcoin can be as useful as the Fed's USD to the current crop of mainstream financial sector players.

I am one of those tinfoil hatters then apparently.


This is symptomatic of the Information Age IMO, there are no authoritative information sources anymore. And when you discover that any previously authoritative sources were actually just very well placed to elude detection of the lies they were telling, you realise it was simply well developed psychological tactics all along.

The Zerohedge editorial is clearly doomsday stuff. But you will not get the truths that are difficult to handle from other sources, they will tell you something soothing that is easy to cope with. Both positions are paradoxical; they are simultaneously true and false, depending on the timeframe you evaluate them over, and your emotional disposition. Zerohedge sum up the former brilliantly with their tagline: "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero". It's incredibly nihilistic, but it's also the truth.

It is beyond question that Zero Hedge has its place as a great financial news site busting through the Financial Happy Talk Paradigm.

Yes, there are many preppers there.  But, preparation is a spectrum of actions.  I too prepare some.  Not much for TEOTWAWKI, but because it is prudent to have some backup in case things turn bad.

But, yeah, there are so many ZH-ers that assume "Lights Out" re their BTC comments that it makes me think they either hate BTC way too much, or that they have little understanding of the probability of such a disaster as the grid going down.

XT's a really insidious way to create Gov. coin isn't it - seems appropriately sneaky

and that horrible little beard - trying to cover his mouth while he speaks... guilt ?