I have to say that the level of rancor that has gone on among those that favor S2X is childish and doesn't give me any confidence in the strength of the team behind it.  The fact that replay protection is purposely (from what I understand) being withheld from the impending S2X fork also does not convey to me a level of professionalism that a team devoted to advancing the best interests of a significant store of wealth should posses and keep in the forefront of decision making.

I am inclined to defer significant judgment to the Core team that has maintained the code base and have been a large part of how Bitcoin got to where it is today.

That being said, while I truly believe that Core is making the right choice, I'm reserving ultimate judgement and keeping an open mind, and I think that's the right choice.

Bitcoin began as an experiment.  It has shown it can be very successful -- maybe, even, to the point of changing paradigms that have existed for most of recorded history.  Forks in the road are part of any growth process.  Instead of throwing insults and sowing FUD, why not put that energy toward solving the problems inherent in scaling BTC?

I say... let the best code win.

I don't want Bitcoin to be centralized to a single company or a small group of them.

I don't want Bitcoin to be centralized to a single mining operation or a small group of them.

I support a vibrant ecosystem of people, businesses, and organizations that promote Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.  I support laws and regulations that protect people but do not stifle innovation.  And I support exploring multiple ideas to achieving the outcomes that better Bitcoin and its resilience. 

The OP mentions Visa... Visa handles on average a few thousand transactions per second but it has a network that is capable of peak capacity of somewhere around 50k transactions/sec.  Monthly billing on the first of the month are their regular peak days, along with black Friday and cyber Monday.  Bitcoin is currently light years from that level of capacity.  Potentially the entire backbone of the internet would need upgrading to handle that level of transaction volume, I'm no expert on that.

As far as Theymos goes, I do not know him at all.  I know he owns this website and that he moderates the /r/bitcoin sub on reddit.  He is free to do so any way he wants, for any reason he wants.  Just as I would kick a person out of my home or business for doing certain things, he is free to express his point of view -- including by moderating or banning anyone or anything he wants.  This is his website, and while I doubt he owns reddit, they have delegated certain authorities to him there in the /r/bitcoin sub.  Every post I have ever read from him on here, in my view, reflects a person that is an enthusiast about Bitcoin and that wants to keep visitors to this website informed with reliable information, such as he did during the Bitcoin cash fork.  He undoubtedly incurs significant expense and time in maintaining this site and we are all his guests when we visit it.  If you don't like that, it's pretty easy to set up your own website.

I agree with this line of thinking.

Global worldwide adoption by 2019 is an unreasonable expectation.  Even the EU's switch to the Euro, which was well publicized and meticulously well planned (despite the obvious problems with their currency model), took some time for "the switch".  Shadow EU was tracking/trading for at least a year prior to the switch and there were periods of overlap with the national currencies.  Also, of course, that was for a subset of Europe, a decent sized population but not all of the planet.

I honestly don't believe that any current/proposed solutions would truly be able to scale in this period of time without a lot of disruptive "growing pains".  Progress on scale and the best approaches to achievement of it should be incremental.  Hopefully in advance of the need, based on reasonable projections, not pipe dreams of global domination virtually overnight.

A few years back, maybe 5-10 years, Visa or Mastercard (forget which) suffered an outage on Black Friday (which for those that are not familiar with the U.S. consumer market, is the day after Thanksgiving when virtually all retail businesses have begun big sales for Christmas -- it is the largest day of year for transaction volumes on payment cards here).  That outage was a BIG DEAL and cost retailers many, many sales.  Since then the card acquiring (merchant transaction) system has undergone significant upgrades including multiple global command centers that are highly secured and fortified installations.  (Which, incidentally, highlights the advantages of distributed ledger blockchains over those centralized legacy payment systems.)

Incremental, careful, well-planned, and highly tested progress is the best way, in my view, to develop a payment system that can truly be resilient for global adoption as that occurs over time.  Problems will happen, approaches that seem like good ideas will end up having blocking problems or unforeseen X-factors.  Going too fast and getting it wrong will damage the reputation of Bitcoin and potentially cryptocurrencies in general, given that BTC is the dominant and incumbent.

Outages that ground our air traffic system, such as one last week, are damaging to commerce but do not grind it to a halt.  They are manageable though perhaps alarming from a human safety perspective.  Outages that affect commerce as a whole, due to either bugs or limitations that did not seem apparent on the drawing board, would kill Bitcoin or any other technology that was deemed to be the cause of such outage.

Slow and steady wins the race.  Resilience requires deliberation and careful execution.  Progress may be slower than many would like, but there's a very good reason to be careful when you are dealing with a store of value.  There is little more in our societies that have to be trusted more than a means of exchange.  Bitcoin enables "trustless" commerce, but only if Bitcoin itself is highly trusted, with the track record to truly earn and keep that trust.

If the fork occurs, what is the safest way to extract these coins for dumping?  Similar to the BCH situation, or how would one go about it, considering the lack of replay protection?  If one were to leave the S2X coins alone on the forked chain, would there still be a danger?  I'm going to see if I can find a good explanation of transaction replay because I want to make sure I am understanding the issue correctly.

Keeping privacy on the internet is a mixed bag.  On one hand, it can be easy to blend in.  But someone that is determined can very likely ID a significant percentage of people.

I'm betting that some people know his or her true identity.  People that were around at the time.

I think I read that people have studied Satoshi's writings in comparison to known people that were in the Cypherpunk community and potentially could build a circumstantial case to identify the person.  Personally, I consider that an invasion of privacy.  If someone chooses to remain anonymous, I respect that choice.

I do sincerely hope that he or she has been able to enjoy some measure of success from Bitcoin.

And who knows, maybe one day he or she will reveal themselves to the world.  Legitimately (I believe there have been impostors).  That's entirely up to them.

There's plenty of opportunity but also many people who don't have their stuff together enough yet.  Build your resume, keep your eyes open, and look in other places besides here you can sometimes find easy integration work on like freelancer.com and sites like that.  If you're already experienced with blockchain technologies then I am pretty sure you can find work in other places as well.

Don't give up -- if you have talent this is an emerging field with sooo much growth potential!  Even if you aren't that experienced yet, there's plenty of opportunity to build your skills.

Excerpt:

Source:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-02/goldman-shuns-jpmorgans-dimon-plans-bitcoin-trading-operation

Referenced article (WSJ paywall, unfortunately):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/goldman-sachs-explores-a-new-world-trading-bitcoin-1506959128

The only good to come of that is in exposing crypto to a wider population, IMO.  ICOs can buy celebrity endorsements if they choose to waste money in that way.  Speaks to me regarding the competencies and funding priorities of those behind the ICOs.



He's entitled to his opinion, but yeah I found the ceremony a little unusual to be honest.  Theater.

He's entitled to his opinion, and we're entitled to disregard it.  I haven't researched zcash to form any opinion on it or its cryptographic attributes.  Not sure at all who the team is behind it, but I am cautious of "professional and academic cryptographers" without a code review and audit by multiple completely disinterested parties.  Those types are only employed by a limited number of organizations and/or dependent on grant funding from same organizations and there's clear evidence of some of those organizations planting back doors, RNG weaknesses, etc., into everything they can.

Thanks for this.  As someone that wasn't around in the early years, these are very interesting transactions.  I've scanned that BIP but I'm going to read it closer now.

Much appreciated.

Blockchain is all a-buzz in some of the government contracting circles I haunt.  Honestly, some of the concepts I see pitched for distributed ledger applications are missing the mark as far as I'm concerned.  Just throwing in the buzzword to try to get an edge on funding.

Like achow101 said, "blockchain" mostly provides a solution to data sharing without trust.  Besides the actual data being shared among parties without trust, metadata that is often just as important to data transactions (such as the timestamp) is often part of a distributed ledger.  In addition, there is some recognition that when properly implemented, blockchains "just work" -- there's no need to have layers of high availability and clustering, something that sadly many systems that run critically important parts of at least the U.S. government are sorely lacking.  Other, centralized or "more conventional" technology exists that can do many of these things.

Lots of the U.S. government systems are stone age and held together with patches and hacks.  Blockchain, on the other hand, inherently has redundancy and clustering built into its model, which enables related technologies such as consensus and resiliency.

Plus I think there is a bit of a "what is blockchain" factor, followed by a "lightbulb" when they understand the technology.  For some time, they can believe it is the answer to every problem, even though that is not so.  It does have enormous potential to decentralize many things that go beyond currencies, however.

When you think about "trust" in a macro sense, much about our world has evolved to low trust models.  The world is an extremely complicated system, and technology adds exponentially to its complexity -- for better and worse.  Many biologists believe that our brains were not evolved to absorb the volume of information we now must to exist as a competent member of society.  In such a society, trust can often be hard to establish.  To say nothing of "trust in capitalism", hah.

Millions of addresses?  Now that's some vanity, lol.

The odds of an address collision are somewhere up there with the odds of you being teleported to Mars and back.

Hey there,

If someone could please quote and verify my Bitcoin stake address, I'd appreciate it very much.

Bitcoin Address:

Message:

Signature:

Thank you!

I have an idea to disrupt the way society has organized and structured around central power for thousands of years.

I admit, that's a pretty big idea.  It's going to take a lot of work, and a reasonably long time frame.  So I'm breaking it up into manageable chunks.  Lots of them.  Fortunately, there are many others also working on some of these chunks -- better than I could in some cases -- so, I can focus on other areas that need attention and integrate those in later.

But for now, I sleep.  Tomorrow is Friday, after all.

This URL indicates that the Mist wallet supports ERC 20 tokens: https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Wallet_Support

I downloaded it and confirmed the hash the other day but haven't installed it yet.  Have to build a VM for it.

I don't know enough about PoS to have an opinion on the technology.  One of these days I'll take a look at some of those coins.

One thing about it that I do find appealing, at least as far as I understand it, is that it has the potential to be more energy efficient.  Proof of Work, while certainly representing the value of electricity as part of its "intrinsic value", per se, does generate enormous sums for electric utilities.

Personally, I'd rather see that value remain in the currency as much as possible.  Either that or have the "work product" represent something that has wider use than just representing a certain amount of essentially useless mathematics.  Something such as a unit of work in a distributed computing system.  I know there's altcoins out there that have gone that route.  I'm not sure how well they've done, etc.

I do believe that something that overcomes large mining operations from holding policy decisions "hostage" needs to be devised for the common good of the community as a whole.  Observing the has effort shift to the BCH chain when it was more profitable to mine drove home for me the lesson that the relationship between miners and the larger user base is very interdependent and has real potential to lead into some rather unpleasant feedback loops given certain conditions.  Something I've been thinking about quite a bit.

These forks are generally not based on a date, but rather a block number where the change in specification begins to be applied.

I am reading the block number that has been coded for the fork is 494,784.  So it would then be the first divergent block (that would be accepted as valid by SegWit2x nodes but rejected by non-SegWit2x nodes) added to the blockchain on or after that block.  Block number as of the time I'm writing this post is 487,281 and there are on average 6 blocks created per hour.  So, about 52 days from now, which would be November 18-19.

One thing about this upcoming fork that people need to clearly understand is that one of the parties that is forking the code off from the Core bitcoin code is not taking steps to implement "replay protection".  Simply put, this could cause any value stored on the split chain (the side that is forked away from Core) to be able to be spent by others.  I do not believe there is a danger to the value on the Core blockchain, but if I am mistaken please correct me.

Any time a split like this happens, it's probably a good idea to move any funds you have into fresh wallets on both chains.  This must be done after the split has been completed -- doing it before will not protect your funds.

Again, if I am incorrect in anything I just stated about the consequences for stored value due to a completed fork, please correct me as I am just trying to explain things as I understand them and do not want to contribute to FUD if I am mistaken.

I agree with this.  The prospect of uninformed users losing their BTC because of the lack of replay protection is very real.  A strong communications campaign needs to take place to inform users, in plain and simple terms, about this fork, the reason that S2x should not be implemented in core, the fact that Lightning can already be implemented because of SegWit activation, and the dangers of failing to take appropriate steps to protect value stored on the blockchain in the event that this fork does in fact occur.

Well written information should be made available on all the major forums and websites, industry news sites either with articles or interviews with informed people that can explain it in simple terms for a wide and largely nontechnical audience, etc.

I agree.  The best press release is one that is not too long, gets the main message out in a way that a wide audience can understand, and has contact information where people can refer to the website, etc. if they want more details.

Look for examples in other businesses.  The ones that you think are most readable to you are probably the best ones.  When I write a press release, I usually start with two or three bullet points and then expand those into short, succinct paragraphs.  Wrap it in a quote from someone involved, contact info, and a bio paragraph at the end, and that's a pretty good formula for a winner.

Best of luck!

I am most decidedly an outsider in these discussions, but I wanted to share my thoughts having read through this thread and some of the other discussions regarding this somewhat imminent issue.

I strongly believe that the Bitcoin Core team should do what it feels is best to advance its software.  Their track record speaks for itself, Bitcoin is the de facto standard in crypto for a reason -- sound decisions made by those in control of the code.  I think it's apparent that the user base has supported their vision for the currency as can be seen in the outcome of the recent BCC fork.

The idea to introduce added resilience to the standard by variable PoW algos is certainly a bold change.  From what I gather, part of the reason for doing so is because of a minority of actors, that represent a majority of the hash rate, being intent on forking over the 2x proposal.  It seems clear to me that they are only interested in their self-interest from a financial perspective.  While I can certainly understand that, I do not support decisions that solely take their own self-interest into account.  As a member of the Board of Directors of a few organizations, I often have had to make decisions that disadvantaged me from a personal/business perspective, but were the best decisions to make for the entity I was asked to make the decision for.  Not everyone can be selfless in this way, but it is part of the job when you accept a fiduciary duty to another organization.

I think if a change in algo is inevitable due to the circumstances, by all means make it as resilient as possible.  A programmatic approach to swapping algos, or a random use of multiple as is being discussed here, is a great idea in ensuring that a wider pool of users can practically participate in mining.  Of course, nothing is "ASIC-proof", but Carltons comments about the ASIC producers gouging prices for their own benefit is certainly the case if you look at the costs involved in producing the devices and the R&D resources, etc.  In some ways, the large concentration of mining power in so few hands, especially when those hands, in essence, control the means of production of the currency could be looked at as a form of "counterfeiting".  Not that their blocks aren't valid, but control over the most efficient means of production of the currency is a single point of failure/control over what is supposed to be a freer system.  The current system gives disproportionate control to a minority of entity.  As can be seen by this threat to fork the currency.

Whatever is decided should be done so transparently as possible and should be communicated to the user base as widely and as early as possible.  The impact of a decision of this magnitude has over the ecosystem is quite large.  From my perspective, it feels like it might be necessary to go this route.  If that is what the Core developers decide, its very important to communicate this clearly to users that are not as "tuned in" as others.  Without that, others will attempt to control the message and that will cause FUD.

For Bitcoin to remain the standard, it must sometimes make bold decisions that are in the best interest of long-term resilience.  I believe that this may be one of those times, and from reading what I've been able to about this issue, I am confident that the right things are being discussed and considered.

Thank you for putting those interests first.  I think it speaks volumes as to the integrity of your team.

Excerpt:

http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article175311331.html

More volatility = good opportunity to stack.

1. China exchanges.
2. Upcoming fork that could be considerably more serious of an issue than the BCC/BCH fork.

Those are the things that are on my mind, anyway.