I'm absolutely not convinced that miners showing support for BU actually want BU.  I think they simply don't want segwit, and they need something to block segwit.  BU or any other thing will do.   This is why they weren't affected by the bug in BU.  Because they don't care, it is not what they really want.  Miners want status quo because that's most profitable for them.  So the good old bitcoin protocol with 1MB will be with us forever.

Also, forking at 51% would be extremely risky, because once the two bitcoins are in the market, you give the choice to the market.  You might very well get seriously punished.  Why on earth would a miner want a bigger block and relieve pressure on the fee market ?  What miner is going to do a silly thing like that, and even risk bitcoin over that ?  

No, nothing of all this is going to happen: the bitcoin you know now, is the same bitcoin that will be running 10 years from now in my opinion.  Apart from the fact that there will maybe only be 1 mining pool  That mining pool can also serve as the big, single Lightning network hub if it wants to.  The LN fees will be identical to the block fees then.

This is the official propaganda.  Segwit calls for centralisation through a banking layer on top of bitcoin, the lightning network.  BU implements dynamic block sizes.  

The totally ridiculous argument that BU would centralize, is that non-mining nodes, which have nothing to say in bitcoin, contrary to all the propaganda that tells the opposite, would need somewhat better network connections and bigger hard disks.  But bitcoin is a *proof of work* consensus system, not a *count of node* consensus system, so no matter if there are many, or few, non mining nodes, the only true consensus mechanism in bitcoin is delivered by miners: proof of work.  And that is inevitably centralizing.  

The people making decisions in bitcoin are the mining pools: they decide what blocks to build, according to what protocol, on which other blocks.  They decide of the choice of transactions and on all the rest.  Strictly speaking, if you have 51% of the hash power, you can decide all you want in bitcoin.  Well, here they are:

https://blockchain.info/pools

Count the number of deciders that need to collude to reach 51%.  THIS is bitcoin's centralisation.  Not the poor guys installing nodes in their basement that do not mine.  These are nothing but proxy servers to the chain that these people decide to make.

So at this moment, bitcoin is decentralized over 5 entities for a small majority.  9 entities if you need 75% majority.  Put 5 people in a room, and you decide with small margin.  Put 9 people in a room, and they decide with 75% majority.

That's bitcoin's centralization.

I know the propaganda tells you otherwise, nodes blah blah blah.  It ain't so.  Bitcoin is an oligarchy of less than 10 people.  But they do their jobs correctly.   Because bitcoin is a proof-of-work consensus system, and proof of work is in the hands of less than 10 people.

The miners' hardware aren't in their hands, true.  But the miners' hardware is not deciding upon which blocks to build, according to what protocol.  They only sell hashes to the pools.

My opinion is the opposite.  If bitcoin fails, all of the speculation will leave crypto, and we finally can use it without 100-fold blown up market caps and have competing technologies instead of this old, clunky design of bitcoin.  With no dominant crypto, with dying coins every day, and new coins every other day, with tiny market caps each of them, and small user communities, USING it.

I think the real point is that miners don't want any of this.  They don't want segwit and they don't want BU, because in both cases, the pressure on the fee market diminishes.   So I think they divide their preferences sufficiently so that nothing can happen.  Which is most lucrative for them.

My point was that bitcoin was king because it was here first, and there is/was a belief that because of that, it can only be the only true crypto currency ; all the rest is "scam", "toys", etc...  The "next king" cannot be that.  It wasn't the first.  There's nothing special about it, apart from being *for the moment* the one with highest market cap (also a doubtful notion).  If bitcoin is defeated, then all crypto coins are equal in competition.  There is no "bitcoin vs altcoin" any more.  We won't talk about ethereum and non-ethereum coins, or DASH, and non-DASH coins or whatever will be the new number one.  The number one will just be the market leader for the moment, but there won't be a magical "first mover" any more, and "scammy toy imitations".  The King is gone, and there's only a momentary leader of the market.

But once people have seen that the King didn't last for ever, nobody in his right mind is going to think that his successor is going to last for ever.  That modifies the monetary belief, that always needs an "illusion of eternity" to it.  I hear people holding bitcoin for their grandchildren    Nobody will hold DASH or ETH for their grand children, I suppose.

You are clearly missing the point.  Miners don't need the other nodes to get their blocks and make their chain.  They only need to connect amongst themselves, and they have all reasons to do so for matters of speed.  If miners make one single chain, whether other nodes don't like that chain or not, doesn't matter.  There is only one chain out there.  Nobody's making another one.

If tomorrow, there is consensus between all miners and they ONLY make the segwit chain, then that's it, and whether users like it or not, they have no choice.   If tomorrow, there is consensus about BU between all miners, and they only make the BU chain, then that's it, and users have no choice.  And if tomorrow (like today) miners have consensus and only make the standard chain, that's it, users have no choice.

You are talking about the case when there is no consensus between pools, and when pools make different chains.  Then nodes can pick one of the two (or three or four) chains that are available.  

But non-mining nodes have nothing to say to the blocks that miners put on the chain they build.  They can simply download them, and accept them or not.  That's all non-mining nodes do: download blocks from miners.  They can't stop miners from building chains.

And now we come to users: if miners only make one chain, users have no choice: that's the chain they have to use, there isn't any other.  But of course, users can decide to sell their coins and leave the thing, which is bad for miners, who need users to buy their coins.  So with one chain, users HAVE TO use it, but they can set the absolute market cap.

If there are more chains, users can use the different chains to buy and sell, and DETERMINE THE RELATIVE MARKET CAPS.  But in order for users to be able to do so, miners have to make different chains in the first place (with hard forks).  When  users set different relative market caps, miners will follow these ratios.

So again: miners make block chains, which nodes can download if they like it.  Users can only use the chains that miners make.  But they set the market cap of these chains, which is the ultimate thing miners are after.  If miners are in disagreement, and make hard forks, they leave the choice to the user.  If miners are in consensus and make only one chain, the user has only the choice to stay or to leave.

But, apart from the case of a hard fork and setting the relative market caps, users have nothing to say about WHICH chain(s) miners can make.  And nodes in all this story don't matter AT ALL.

But the same is true for bitcoin, Spoetnik.  If your naive idea that "cracking a computer" is the same as cracking cryptography would hold any water, then the FBI can already find all the secret keys of all bitcoin addresses out there, and are making transactions in your name.  After all, reversing the algorithm mustn't be that hard, is it ?  And if you don't see that in your wallet, that is because they also cracked the proof of work scheme (just one single cryptographic function to crack, SHA256, not difficult, they crack it or they brute force it, don't they, it is the result that counts) and they are sneaking in regularly a block to reverse their actions so that you aren't even aware.

There.  All crypto is already cracked by the FBI, because Spoetnik is always right, and tells the world that everything is cracked.

Cracking a simple hash function must be peanuts for boys and girls of the FBI, if they can crack much more involved crypto systems, right ?  Why do you even use bitcoin, dude ?  The FBI has all the secret keys since long, and can produce by tomorrow a 10 times longer block list if they want.  Because everything can be cracked if the FBI wants.  Cracking a crypto system is like exploiting a buffer overflow, isn't it ?

In fact, they already have Satoshi's secret keys, derived from the addresses in the block chain, since years.  Sometimes they move these funds, and then, they put back the blocks as they were so that people don't realize.  That's what causes pumps and dumps in the bitcoin price.  Recently, they put back the blocks, that's why the bitcoin price dumped somewhat.  Right ?  Because everything will be cracked and compromised.  Certainly an 8 year old and relatively simple crypto scheme like bitcoin's, right ?

I don't believe that.  I think bitcoin will be long gone by that time.  Like all crypto currencies that exist today.   It is simply too clunky.  Block chain based crypto was a great idea to get started, but way way too naive in its approach. 

Of course you can.  It is sufficient that you change the parameters. Like block size in bitcoin.  The only thing you need for that is an agreement between miners, when it is sufficiently centralized.  And it is unavoidable that it will centralize because of economies of scale, regulation, and I don't know what.  Look, Evan, all by himself, has divided the supply of DASH by 4 once he had made his premine.  If you can lower it, you can increase it as well.  

But that is not the real inflation of crypto.  The real inflation is the creation of extra crypto currencies out of the blue.  New coins.  For instance, all the application tokens on top of ETH are inflationary tokens.  If you allow second tier layers on top of a crypto (the only way to scale a block chain crypto) you will get forms of fractional reserve banking.  

Don't think that there is a finite amount of crypto.  There may be, for the time that it is sufficiently decentralized and immutable, a finite amount of COIN X on its chain.  That doesn't mean that coin X proxies are not created, that the market cap of X is not diminishing (comes down to inflation) and so on.


Exactly.


Of course, but that didn't stop Germany to have the strong German fiat Deutch mark after WW2 until the end of the 20th century, and now it has the Euro, and maybe in the future another fiat.  

Again, I don't see fiat as a store of value.  That's crazy.  But as a payment system.  I think that state fiat will always be a superior payment system than a clunky crypto currency, simply because the state will put everything into work to make it work well.  The centralisation makes that it is easy to deal with.  No crypto hassle.  No block chains.  No shit.

I am not saying that a *specific given fiat* currency is for ever, but neither I think that a specific, given crypto currency is for ever.  It doesn't need to be.  It just needs to be the right payment system for its application, at its time. 

Fiat has been ruling payment systems since at least 2000 years if not more.   Of course we don't use the Roman fiat.  But fiat nevertheless.  Crypto has its place where fiat cannot go. 

Depends.  I think certain exchanges recently declared they would list both coins, but I don't know how they would handle this.  Best is indeed to have the coins, and not exchange IOU.

But don't worry, there won't be a hard fork soon (or ever).

https://blockchain.info/fr/charts/bitcoin-unlimited-share

Technically, they cannot fork before reaching 51%, but they declared not doing so before reaching 75%.

You can't do that with bitcoin any more either.  Transactions don't get confirmed in time.  And once, you couldn't buy stuff with bitcoin either.  Merchants are dropping bitcoin because it is too much hassle.  Honestly, switching to an alt coin is not such a problem. 

Bitcoin's arrogance of thinking it could be the only one is bringing it down. Bitcoin has nothing for it apart from its name.

DASH is near 1 billion.  Close to where ETH was not so long ago.  Spoetnik, where  are you when you need to shill ?

I think so too.  But not immediately.  It will still last.  It may even last for a very long time, if it finds its niche as reserve currency for big players. 

Fiat is not meant to be a long term store of value, but a fluid means of payment.  
But if you think crypto is going to be a long term store of value, "for future generations", you are out of your mind.  
If you buy crypto so that it rises, it means you're counting on someone paying MORE for it than you did: a greater fool.  If most of the people buying crypto do this for that reason, this is a greater fool game, that stops when you run out of greater fools.  No expectation of greater fool any more, no incentive to buy.  No incentive to buy, no more price rise.  Big crash.  

Crypto is still new, there's a lot of greater fools to get to the game before you run out of it. So you can still hope not to be in the last layer.  But hoping that your grand children will still find greater fools, is crazy.

My only interest in crypto resides in the fact that it can serve as subversive payment system, hidden from state to give economic liberty to those wanting it (from exchanging goods and labor without the state stealing taxes on it, over dark markets to financing activities the state wants to avoid).

Nope.  Bitcoin market share in crypto is at all time low and bitcoin has, for the first time in its history, serious TECHNICAL problems, in the sense that it is full, and that the only outlook is a split in two coins, or status quo (most probable).  This has never been the case before.

http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#btc-percentage

Honestly ?  Yes.   Crypto has much higher inflation rates (if you count all new alt coins) ; politics will not let the financial system crash - they will steal people of all their assets (including bitcoin) before they allow that to happen.  Suppose that the financial system crashes.  What are you going to do with your bitcoin in the supermarket ?  Blocs are full.  Your transactions will need weeks to get through if you think that bitcoin is going to be a hedge.  By the time everything is back to normal (7 years later or so), you starved to death with your private keys on your USB stick.
What you need in those times are simple goods.  They cannot be obtained against bitcoin, ethereum or dash.  The guy selling food doesn't know these things exist, and if he would those systems would be entirely saturated.  

Indeed.  Once bitcoin is gone as king, there will finally be open competition between crypto ; and hopefully this greater fool game is then over, and crypto is only valued by Fisher's formula with its real usage.  That might be a shock, as the total market cap will be divided by 100 or more or so.  But that's the real economic value of crypto.   All the rest is a HUGE bubble full of greater-fool hot air.

Also, the demise of bitcoin as digital gold will cure people for at least one generation to play greater fool games with these things, and think that what they bought for $1 will make them a millionaire.  But we'll see.  I'm not sure that this is the time yet.

I can assure you that as long as bitcoin is leading, there will not be a hard fork.  BU has only one goal: keep segwit impossible, and keep status quo.

I agree with you, though I don't think the fear is about the hard fork, but rather about the lack of hard fork.  And I think that status quo is what is designed to happen, and which is the cause of the fall.

Personally, I thought that status quo (which is in my opinion the only outcome of this thing for fundamental dynamical reasons) was not going to affect price much, but would push away normal people from bitcoin and only leave big money.  But maybe it were normal people greater fools on which bitcoin was still thriving.  Them away and it crumbles.

Interesting times !

I do not dare hope that this is finally the end to the greater fool game all of crypto is involved since many years...  It would be great, but I have difficulties believing it is already today...

Lack of unity is exactly what bitcoin was designed for.  Lack of unity is what decentralisation means.  It means that there are too many different antagonists to agree over change, so by default, they can only agree (find consensus) over NO change, which is called immutability.