Gavin and Mike should be highly respected since they have done lots of work since the beginning, but they are taking the step towards split without reaching full consensus, this is very confusing

IMO, if you can't agree on a change, you should keep the status as current, until you run into a problem and everyone will have much more facts when they are making a decision. Currently everyone is using their imagination to make decisions, like gambling

Stress testing at least proved one thing: Even the blocks are all full, majority of users will not be affected. Blocksize should only be changed when there is a REAL problem, not by fear and imagination

Human are all adaptive, when banks closed during weekends, they don't change bank, but wait for it to open on Monday, and reduce their transaction frequency

Even XT clients have created 90000 spv nodes,  it will still be easily attacked by 1 core node running a large mining pool

And core clients can create another million core spv nodes too

The great thing about this ongoing core vs XT split is that people will have a chance to understand how should they make decision in bitcoin network

Bitcoin is a voluntarily participated monetary system, it is totally up to the user himself to decide if he accept a set of rules or not

This decentralized model is vastly different from today's society, where most of the people used to wait for the authorities to tell them what to do, be it their parents/professor/mayor/president or God. But in bitcoin they have to make a choice based on their own understanding, research and judgement

This is not a easy task, requires lots of understanding about how bitcoin works under the hood. And to make things worse, both sides of the core devs constantly adding exaggerated claims in the debate. But that's the cost of freedom, with increased freedom comes increased responsibility

However, similar to the society, when complexity raised above certain level, it becomes impossible for normal people without enough skill and time to understand what is going on, they have little choice but listen to their trusted authorities, and the decision making is more and more politicized

To avoid falling into such kind of situation, it is important to keep the things simplified and easy to understand, so that majority of participants can still make decision based on their own understanding. People never need to vote for the validity of 1+1=2, since that is enough simple for everyone to reach a consensus

So, any change that increase the complexity of bitcoin network will have a tendency to increase people's decision making difficulty in future, thus politicize it. These kind of change should always be avoided when people are making their decision

If you upgrade to XT, then the risk of fork will become higher

Why does gold suitable as a world currency for thousands of years given its many inconvenient properties? Because it is most widely accepted. Transparency makes bitcoin much easier to be widely accepted by general public

Most of the mined coins are not sold. However, mining bitcoin is almost the same as buying bitcoin, currently daily 3600 coins would take a large part of the daily coin supply of 5000-7000 coins (see my signature for detailed modelling), so the affect is still significant. Maybe after next reward halving the mined coins will have less affection on the market price

What you said is exactly what I meant, when the price shoot up, the demand-supply balance is broken, demand gets lower while supply gets higher, thus will drag the price down back to the starting point, not exactly back to origin, but still can keep a stable level

You have a very good point: It is the price that affect supply and demand, not the other way around. So by manipulating the price you would be able to change supply and demand

$1000 is an overshoot from the MTGOX market manipulation, and $200 is close to the lowest possible cost to mine a bitcoin at that time. It went up more (from 50 to 1000) than went down (from 1000 to 200)

Some kind of manipulation going on? Then how come the arbitraging is not happening? Does anybody have fiat money withdraw problem?

The biggest question is: Why 20MB when you can go with much less risky 4MB or even 8MB?

Are you living in a world of talk and fantasy? Search the hardware sub forum, there are already people using ASIC miners to heat their house, and they are running them even it does not dig out any meaningful coins because they need heat anyway, and most likely they will upgrade to the new miner when they see a more attractive model

On the other hand, unless the big mining farms cooperate with distributed heating companies (which is extremely difficult due to their location), they will face huge loss when bitcoin difficulty is driven up by home miners by another fold

It has been proved that large mining operations are much more risky than distributed home miners, they either make big money or big loss, but their tolerance for a sustained loss is extremely low, many of them went down during the past year. Home miners and garage miners are not profit oriented, they could support the network regardless of bitcoin's price

At the end of 2011, when price had reached a level that mining is no longer profitable even for the most efficient GPU miners, many home miners and garage miners were still carrying on, because what they are interested is bitcoin, cost is irrelevant. But now, if the mining is no longer profitable even for the most efficient miners, I'm afraid that mining farms will shut down at large scale. A bitcoin network supported by speculative mining operations are extremely unstable, when there is no fiat money to make, those speculators will quit

Imagine a new type of heater, with built in ASIC chips 2000W, only generate heat when connected with wifi network, downloadable app get your a wallet address for payout, plug in and auto connect to a p2pool to start mining. I guess you will have no problem selling more than 1 million units, because it is a heater that does not cost you electricity to run

Actually 21 inc is doing something similar right now, but their plan is a little bit less clear

Random walk theory indicated that most daily buyer and seller actions cancel each other on the market, so long term wise the price would be stable without major change in market condition, e.g. price have inertia

Another explanation: Most of the people have no idea if an exchange rate is right or wrong: Why should gold cost 35.5K dollar per 1000g? No one knows, it is just a price they get from the exchanges, and they suppose this is the right price decided by market supply and demand

However, once they have this price information, when price rise fast, they will see it is more expensive now, they profited quickly, they will sell some. And when price dropped, they will think it is cheaper now, and buy some. Those actions will keep the price balance at a stable level


Bitcoins exchange rate can rise dramatically during a major rally. However, when the rally is over, it will usually stay at a much higher level, even without all the capital inflow support from the rally

This is because: When exchange rate is rising, mining margin is getting bigger, miners will add more hash power, that will raise the difficulty, and raise the cost of the coin, and the price become more reasonable

However, when rally is done, exchange rate is falling, there won't be same amount of mining power going offline, simply because they have already ROIed, or not everyone will sell their coin immediately for profit/loss. As a result, the network difficulty and the cost of mining now stays at a much higher level than before, which created a "it cost much more to mine now" feeling for every one, so people are less willing to sell

I found out that most of the people's market decision is based on their psychology, and cost is no doubt the most strong psychology support for valuation. This is not saying that the difficult and cost would never go down, it is just they don't go down as fast as they go up

I vote for 1 million, maybe for a brief amount of time, since the sell pressure will be very high at that level

1. hyperinflation is coming
2. 3D technology in semi-conductor efficiency raise
3. wide spread of bitcoin knowledge
4. Fork-tested robustness

It's fake, he won't mention his own name together with Obama

Anyway that post made some good points

Buying and selling bitcoin between private person is legal in China (mostly because there is no way to stop it from happening), that's how Chinese exchanges managed to operate legally: They use many private accounts to receive deposits and send out withdraw

Remember that many home miners have free electricity, and garage miners could use the heat to heat their home/water, which will also make the cost of mining close to zero. Industrial miners must make a profit, that's their weakness, they won't hold long if difficulty keeps going up

Mike and Gavin exaggerate things to an unnecessary level. No one said that we should never raise the block size, and the difference between 8MB and 20MB is not that big. However, insisting on a private fork without reaching full consensus does make them more isolated to the rest of the community. I think their pride is hurt when they see the project won't go the way they want, as they are one of the oldest core developers. But a perfect life is just wishful thinking for most of us, sometimes we must make compromise

Surprisingly, the answer by "Satoshi" is very convincing, we should focus on how to make the mining as distributed as possible, the block size is a much less problem. Home miner and garage miner should command over 60% of hash power, that will require lots of change. And when that is done, the bitcoin network will become invincible

The previous dust spam test already proved that even every block is more than full, bitcoin network would still work if you put a higher transaction fee, so even the blocks were full, we still have some time to react

Actually this fork is a good test for the total decision making intelligence of bitcoin community, if majority of community members are just blind followers, then XT fork might receive enough support and become a hard fork, but if majority of the members can think independently, they are very unlikely to go with XT, which is a much higher risk road. Why take a higher risk decision when you can take a lower one??

I will buy 10K and get into top 100 

There were many such "$1" posts during past several years, just search them out and browse

What will happen if USD reach 1 satoshi exchange rate?