Oh christ, don't say that without wearing a crash helmet, lol


The "control" of the source code is only temporary, but it is control nonetheless. Only one group can control, but the users can change who that one group is. [/controlarguments]



Ultimate credibility points, for explaining it simply, IMHO

Well, I'm sticking by my well-reasoned prediction

()

Not to mention, USD/BTC price is bucking the trend, so it seems more likely that the very large miners are using this opportunity to stage a hashrate decline, only they would have the slack hashing capacity to take advantage of this situation, and they are conspicuously not doing so.


Is this what they've really got? Drama? No actual tech? I wonder people with actual tech will win this (it's almost as if the interests behind the biggest miners are afraid of blockchain tech )

What a weird situation to be in, where the owners of the physical infrastructure securing the Bitcoin network are acting against the network's best interests. Makes me think they should be replaced with stakeholders that act more responsibly

Thirty seven trillion gazillion! Do I win?

Current difficulty
886,063,684,541

Projected difficulty (in 205 blocks)
886,063,684,541

Problem solved (by Satoshi, about 7 years ago)

---

Also, probably staged BS. What miner can't setup merged mining for 2 coins with the exact same hashing algorithm ?

5. Switch back to 1-CPU 1-hash mining again, miner instigated hard forks become harder, Bitcoin proves it's unassailable again
6. 21st century gold-rush ensues

#imwithpaul ?

Wow, do Bitcoiners still use operating systems and browsers in a way that allow browser cookies to persist like that? It's been several years since I bought anything from a website, with BTC or fiat, when I don't use a fresh browser that I just throw away straight after

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/dispvm/

Thanks cr1776, that's it

I think T-Rex means the extra blocksize space

Actual Segwit activation happens at block 481824, according to achow101 above. From there on, people can start using 4MB of blocksize, but only if they're sending to a Segwit address. That will happen before the end of this week, I think around Wednsday or Thursday.

So, you can expect Bitcoin service providing companies (exchanges and larger retailers) to roll out the ability to send to Segwit addresses pretty quick, both to use business2-business and customer-2-business. But regular users need to start using Segwit addresses too, and that takes as long as it takes, no one can force people to do it (the old addresses still work just fine). Miners may begin to incentivise this by prioritising Segwit transactions more, but they already prioritise on the basis of transaction size, so any Segwit incentive would have to be over and above the existing fee per kB logic. All that will take between weeks and months to play out, possibly longer for the last P2PKH addresses to finally move to P2WPKH (the Segwit address/script type).

In addition, there's another BIP out there (171 i think?) that adds a new Segwit specific address format (current practice will be to use Segwit via P2SH addresses). This will be a whole extra new Segwit rollout of sorts. Hopefully, it will be tested and finalised for 0.15.1 (but I'm not at all sure on the specifics, that's just my ideal scenario). This will only add weeks and months to the overall switchover period, but bech32 (the name for the tech behind this new format) has alot of advantages.


Lightning? I expect we can see some test channels running quickly after activation of Segwit, but I think the software clients are still in development even now. Anyone know some more?

Of course, mining ASIC manufacturers are very interested in this issue, and frequently innovate their chip design and use more advanced lithography process nodes to achieve exactly what you're asking for.

But my question is: why?


They're (miners) are paying for their electricity like anyone else. There are several reasons why Bitcoin mining consuming electricity is both necessary and a good thing, Satoshi's whole original idea is based around the hashcash concept of "proof-of-work".

One could argue that proof of work (PoW) forms the commodity backing for the Bitcoin currency, countering a common criticism that Bitcoin needs a commodity to back it's value (in this way you could say it's backed by either hashpower, or watts/joules). More importantly, the hashing provides a vital part of the Bitcoin network's security, and hence Bitcoin's fundamental value proposition.

Yes, but that's not how it's defined.

"Fiat money" means that it's a monetary system created by laws passed by the government, and any attempt to use something different is enforced by law (aka violence/theft/kidnapping etc)

The fact that the supply is manipulated by the Central Bank to enrich their friends, (not just Government cronies, but more significantly, their corporate crony friends too) is just a byproduct of the fact that government system forces people to use Central Bank created money.

Bitcoin is free market money really (contrary to my earlier assertions in this thread, which played on the article's inability to correctly identify the meaning of the word "fiat"), where the aggregation of people using it in trade and exchanging it against violently dictated fiat money determines it's value, not by some tiny number of rich over-privileged traders on the FX trading exchanges.

We live in a communist system really, folks. Privatised communism, but not capitalistic. Capital doesn't determine prices in this system, a violent uber-class does.

There is a paradox, because it's the uselessness of money goods that bestows them with good money characteristics.

i.e. ultimate uselessness confers ultimate universal value (and that's the definition of what actually money is: an imaginary universal good, the pretense of which is used to facilitate the exchange of goods with non-imaginary/objective value)

This is consensus sorting it out (for the umpteenth time.... zzzz)

How come people are bad when they do something that promotes unity, and good when they promote something that promotes disarray?

How come you, DooMAD, are always using the latest argument in favour of the latest hard fork that promotes disarray or chaos? Because you want Bitcoin to be so great, right? 






Yeah, and they forgot to mention:

• Segwit2x head developer (Garzik) is a known authoritarian
• The Segwit2x new fork actually needs to be worth something like the same price as Bitcoin for actual people to be interested in using the new chain
• Segwit2x are refusing to change important parts of the code that will make the split technically super disruptive

This is basically an attack against the Bitcoin blockchain, it's highly likely that if miners continue to push for absolute control like this, they will force the Bitcoin developers to ditch the mining hash function, as it will be the only way to stop their intentionally reckless & destructive behaviour. Cue the 21st century gold rush (yes ladies and gents, you will be able to mine BTC with your regular PC again, thank Bitpay and Jeff Garzik, lol)

Climate change can't be stopped, it's about 99.999999% natural, and has been taking place since the dawn of time. Climate change FUDsters frequently know zero about actual climate science.

It's based on the (subjective) opinion of the entity that performs the valutation, always.

Clothes are not valuable to a camel. Homes are not valuable to snails or tortoises. Food is not valuable to supernatural beings

---

Money is a paradox. It's all fiat really, the value of tax levied backing (aka "the protection racket") or precious metal's chemical stability is all subjectively decided as valuable by the observer.

It is useless. It's only useful purpose, as it is totally useless for any other purpose, is to be used as money. Anything that gets used for something real is useless money, because people will use the ostensible "money" for that useful real purpose instead. So the more useless some object is the better it is as money. For this reason, gold has been declining in it's usefulness as money since electricity and modern chemistry were discovered. Paper money fulfills this quality admirably; it's pretty much useless for just about anything else, really. Digital money even more so, it has only one possible purpose (at least cocaine users get one extra dubious use-case out of paper bills, lol, and no, plastic cards aren't actually digital money, smartasses! )

Bitcoin takes this to a whole other level. It takes the uselessness and fetishises it. Digital central banking money is just so unimaginative in it's uselessness, they believed they could just create a networked database of counting tokens and the job was over! How hubristic can you get, they deserve to get their asses kicked by the king of focused uselessness: cryptographic counting networks. Which is all this Bitcoin thing really is, a huge counting machine, that's really really good at counting these usefully useless nothings we call BTC.

Ah, very simply.

It's not the longest chain that wins fork resolution, it's actually the chain with most hashes.


And reducing the difficulty by 92% will result in the ABC chain having fewer hashes, and the resulting lower security. Bitcoin miners could use their mining equipment to play havoc with the ABC chain, if they chose to do so.

The ABC chain will be inherently insecure against attacks, until it's hashrate and commensurate difficulty reaches that of Bitcoin's. And they'll need to convince a huge majority of miners to switch to catch up, it will be much more than 50%.

And they still need to convince the users, even after all that electricity and arm-twisting. If someone can pwn the Bitcoin Network that way, get ready for the PoW change 21st Century CPU mining goldrush, bitches

Yep.

Lightning layer transactions will be the real "Bitcoin cash", as they will be settled instantly (unlike the blockchain running beneath the Lightning network, which will probably always take minutes for confirms to act as settlement).

And Rusty's main point is the real one: Lightning is a scaling solution that actually scales the Bitcoin network, lol.

+ 21 million

An ounce of Bitcoin is worth 3 times 1 ounce of gold? Or is it 100 million satoshis of gold that's worth 0.333 BTC? Oh no, that's right, these things are both totally impossible and non-sensical :/

Will this "gold parity" nonsense ever end? The only parity that could exist would be when the BTC market is the size of the gold market. With Bitcoin at ~ $55 billion, and gold at ~ $7 trillion, it could take a while. Never say never, but I imagine fiat currency market values are more likely to fail against Bitcoin before the value of the gold market ever does (Elon Musk mining massive golden asteroids notwithstanding )

Lol, what about consensus of the users? Your argument means the miners talk, and us users can only listen


You're basically saying everything that favours the argument of the corporate hard fork coup mobs, and always have done. You'll say anything except that you're in favour of this 2x nonsense, despite reality proving it's not needed, and clearly serves the purpose of making it more difficult for regular Bitcoin users to have their say in choosing the rules to enforce (because the 2x blocksize wil be even harder for regular folks to download and store, which is clearly the idea). But we must protect the users' right to choose though, huh!

But you're just a concerned man of principles, protecting the greater good! Right? Strange how you're subtly representing a direction that always suggests that Core should listen to your direction for Bitcoin, or that the latest hard fork "scaling" idea is a good idea? But it's all about technical ideas, nothing about changing who's in control, which doesn't exist! lol