Those with the resources and wherewithal will not need to _emulate_ terabytes of memory. They will simply _buy_ them. And expend the effort and deploy the ingenuity required to build up large datacenters of 'em.
Not as easy as buying miners or emulating phones. Not as economical. Not as scalable. Of course, if they have resources and want to use them, they're free to. However, cheap electricity, newest generation chips, and other factors that are now unbalancing the game won't be that relevant anymore, and there will be much fairer competition. That's the point - not avoiding concentration, but letting concentration happen with similar ease almost everywhere. So Average David can spend 1000$, and his 1000$ are worth almost exactly as much as Goliath's 1000$. Today, specialized and generic hardware have performances orders of magnitude away. With this equalizing move, the difference would drop to well under a SINGLE factor of 10 - probably a lot less. Any American could put up a mining rig knowing that electricity costs are not the bottleneck anymore. That would be a significant change. |
|
|
|
*Unless a change in POW helps to equalize mining power by making costs harder to scale.
...Your apparent belief that a change in PoW will make any difference in centralization is unpersuasive. No matter the technology, mining power will coalesce to those that possess the financial resources, the BizOps acumen, and most importantly the persistence and pain tolerance needed for entrepreneurship on a grand scale. I don't believe this is true. If somehow PoW can be tied to a smartphone for "one phone one vote", those who have financial resources can screw themselves against the brute force of several billion smartphone users. Just No. Those that have the resources will run hundreds of android emulator VMs on each of hundreds of servers, and we'll be right back with the same centralization problem we have today. We won't, if we switch to to a RAM and RAM-access intensive PoW algo. Let them try to emulate terabytes of RAM in a time efficient way. No eh? Just as I thought. |
|
|
|
Bullshit. It is exactly what happened. Signaling support for segwit was anemic. It was not until the NYA agreement and signaling of S2X that segwit amassed any provable support. That is what occurred, and it is clearly within the record.
NYA signaling helped to stir things up, yes, but only because it became apparent that the miners couldn't stop it and had to swallow - oops, embrace it. Segwit is good, long-term good, but myopic miners can't see beyond their weekly revenue and were herded by selfish Chinese businessmen. Yes, I know, our narratives on this matter differ. This is just incidental, and not my main point. we, the users giving up mining - was more or less unavoidable, given the financial and existential investment in becoming a pro miner.
I don't think that is true. Who here still mines? Show of hands? I know there are some here that mine on a limited scale. But more to the point, there was nothing preventing each of us from jumping in and mining. Sure, it seems an insurmountable expense today (but is it really? what about the small scale miners in existence?) but at the dawn of the pro miner era, there were no pro miners. Or IOW, when the mining gets tough, the tough get pro. Yes, we abdicated. How can you be competitive at mining today? Come on, be honest in your assessments as you are flawless with your math. There maybe a few of us still doing it because of previous commitment or individual mentality, but mining simply isn't for the masses anymore*. Which was instead the point of Nakamoto's original vision. He was right on the math, but predicting the future is for wizards, not for scientists. *Unless a change in POW helps to equalize mining power by making costs harder to scale. One RAM bank, one vote. RAM speed can't grow as CPU speed did. There are several cryptohash algorithms where you can impose a bottleneck on memory size and/or sequential memory operations. I bet this is the way POW is headed to, if any change is going to happen. I want to understand the ultimate reason why you support your claim. What do you expect the normal user could gain from something like S2X?
As I have been saying for literally years, the stupid centrally-planned production quota that limits capacity is stifling adoption. I expect S2X (in comparison to S1X) to allow double the number of transactions per second, per hour, per day. Therefore reenabling use cases that have been obsoleted by Cores insane Raspberry Pi fetish. More use cases = more usability. Pretty simple calculus really. Oh - and lower fees besides. What you call the "insane Raspberry Pi fetish" is the David-against-Goliath guarantee that verifying and keeping the big guys in check has a cost small enough for anyone to be able to afford it! No mining rig required. That's exactly the point of decentralization. You want greater adoption? You're not alone, jbreher. We all do, of course! But if adoption comes at the price of pushing Joe "David" Average out of the loop, it's just Visa-like adoption, not financial freedom-adoption. Can't you see that? That's what I meant when I half-jokingly invoked Jeff Bezos' role as a Deus ex machina savior - "Here's adoption for you my children (in a celestial Amazonesque voice)... now go in peace and stop the silliness about big blocks... (epic THX thunder)." It ain't Bitcoin Cash, but it's double the goodness of S1X.
If big blocks are what you really think you need, you've got BCH already. What's the point of S2X then? Besides, we've shown that bigger blocks are not a problem. Why the obstinance on the part of Core? I think they're merely afraid of losing face.
Shown where? Bigger blocks are indeed a problem if usage ramps up. Latency, bandwidth and mass memory requirement would skyrocket for simple Joe "David" Average verification, not only for mining. Censorship resistance would be seriously impacted. I refuse to believe you don't see that - you're too smart not to. That's why I was asking for your true motives. I guess you just don't want to tell us. |
|
|
|
And if you want to own a house or land, it would be smarter to only liquidate enough bitcoin for a sizable down payment, and then get a really good low fixed rate 30yr loan for the rest. Bitcoin's yearly returns would handily beat, actually crush any 3-4% yearly interest on the loan. Plus both the house/land AND your left over bitcoin would both be increasing in value relative to fiat while you were still making loan payments.
Spot on. |
|
|
|
The fact people aren't migrating away from Coinbase en masse tells me something about people--they're mostly a bunch of apathetic wankers.
That's why I say a word from Amazon (or a "pay with BTC" button, even better) can close the matter. The inertia of single users is nothing compared to that of organizations. Just imagine what happens with all the merchants when they must switch to a different token, with a different value, that they can convert into fiat or into the other token only at certain exchanges. Of course, Amazon's strength is its mass adoption, which would quickly transfer to the chosen method of payment. Other economic actors, while not that powerful, could sum up to a similar effect over a longer time. |
|
|
|
The point remains that any 'changing of the guard' would be an abdication*. And hence, would not be merely an effort to overthrow the current devs with ones more malleable.
You mean: Core would abdicate by refusing to code for a project (S2X) that they don't subscribe to. *Much as we all abdicated our consensus-determining (i.e., mining) power years ago.
You mean: we abdicated by exiting the arms race for mining. Actually, these are different actions - the first already historical (by user "inaction"), and the second hypothetical, only possible if S2X "wins" and "takes over". The difference is that the first abdication - we, the users giving up mining - was more or less unavoidable, given the financial and existential investment in becoming a pro miner. On the other hand, Core's abdication would be a political-economic switch to one of two sides - voluntary and totally avoidable, therefore closer to the meaning of the verb "abdicate." Not exactly spot on, though: while "abdicating" S2X, the developers would probably continue to code BTC, likely adding some kind of software retaliation to burn bridges. Your rhetoric use of the same verb for the two actions is sophisticated all right, but it feels like by way of this sophisticated rhetoric you're trying to deflect my attention. Come on, please! The reason I like arguing with your "trolling" (not my definition ehehe, I'm only quoting someone else O:-) is that I want to understand the ultimate reason why you support your claim. What do you expect the normal user could gain from something like S2X? Or maybe you're not a normal user? If so, who are you in terms of financial-social goals? |
|
|
|
A word from Jeff Bezos could nail S2X inside its coffin. |
|
|
|
the supposed fork is actually an attack.
It may be worth observing the fact that whether this is an attack or rather a simple upgrade is dependent upon your individual perspective. Right. We differ on that, it's understood. The real goal is replacing Core with more - say - malleable developer(s).
Notion is absurd. IF S2X becomes the hashrate victor the consensus victor... AND
IF the core developers switch to developing an S2X compatible client
... which they said they won't (of course it remains to be seen if they keep their word) THEN
It is highly likely that their implementation will acquire majority status
AND
They would not, in fact, be replaced.
Under all these assumptions (whose plausibility could be debated, but we know better than to engage in that right now, or at least I do)that's right, they wouldn't be. |
|
|
|
Take a look at current Japanese culture for example. Basically in a nutshell, the land is maxed out, they have entered a deflationary spiral of sorts, the Socialism experiment has failed, (But has it ever begun?) the central Bank of Japan owns something like 65% of all corporate debt, and the people work at corporations that exist basically just to pay off the interest on their corporate debt --- so basically "zombie" banks and corporations. So the young people, overburdened with an old world social structure that's no longer working, and overburdened with personal/corporate debt, lack of advancement opportunities, etc. are no longer dating, marrying, reproducing and having families. The majority of guys aren't even interested in the girls, just interested in themselves (preening, socializing, hanging with their guy friends, etc.). Sounds pretty depressing, huh? There used to be a social pact of sorts until the 70's-early 80's whereby a big corporation, after sucking the parent's blood for a lifetime, would employ the child on the elder's retirement. This pact has been broken with the crisis of the 80's, and never resumed thereafter. So the frail socio-economic cohesion of Japan is going to the dogs. Socio-cultural cohesion is still quite strong, though. Maybe it's an island thing. This made me think of something I had read a while back about a mice experiment conducted in the 1960's by John B. Calhoun. I didn't know about that. I read up a bit. Very interesting. Half way down the Wikipedia page you can read about it, especially about the male mice that came to be known as "the beautiful ones". The similarities between his experiment conclusion and what is happening now in Japan is uncanny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._CalhounYes! The grass eating kids, or "vegetarian men" as it gets translated into English. And as Ibian points out further down, this at least is not an "island thing." |
|
|
|
pardon my ignorance (I've been out of the loop for a few years) but what are these bitcoins you are talking about?
Digital stuff for nerds. Basically useless. Don't worry, exit the loop immediately. let me rephrase that. I read a bit about the hard fork a while back, I just don't know what happened with that. Sorry gwoplock, I thought you were fishing for sarcasm. The attack is officially meant to double the blocksize (hence the 2x part of the name) while keeping SegWit, unlike the altcoin BCH, aka BitcoinCash (hence the ticker S2X). On paper, the motivation and the supporters are the same as the NY cartel. However, no proper replay protection has been implemented by the attackers. This is intentional, so the supposed fork is actually an attack. There has been open talk about "attacking" and "strategies" on some well-known Reddit subs. The real goal is replacing Core with more - say - malleable developer(s). Some kind of replay protection can be attempted post-fork at the user's risk. The token for the replay-protected resulting altcoin S2X is available for trade on a few selected exchanges, and is valued at a small fraction of the BTC price. In the meantime, several original signers from the infamous NY coven have retracted their support. A couple of major exchanges are trying to keep a foot in two shoes. |
|
|
|
pardon my ignorance (I've been out of the loop for a few years) but what are these bitcoins you are talking about?
Digital stuff for nerds. Basically useless. Don't worry, exit the loop immediately. |
|
|
|
So they are now on the same page as Satoshi is in his whitepaper. And in line with the Gemini exchange.
Nothing wrong with revising your view when you figure out there is only one measurement in the end: hashrate.
Consensus too was mentioned in the whitepaper, if I'm not mistaken. If there's any truth to the recent news, imagine how happy Gemini and Coinbase customers will be when the "bitcoins" they bought (at a significant discount, I bet) get turned down by Amazon's cart checkout. I sense lawsuits incoming. |
|
|
|
I think its all about setting a direction and the others will follow! right now we use workarounds...
That's wonderful for the people that know about bitcoin and this workaround. To bring BTC to the masses you need Amazon and the like to adopt it.
Definitely. Imagine a "Pay with Bitcoin" button on Amazon's checkout page and what it will do for general adoption. That could be the true tipping point to the mythical S-curve. |
|
|
|
This is strictly OT, but very interesting for me. Not sure how to do research on this without it being hopelessly tainted by ideology. Exactly the problem, yes. One often used option is to study animals first. Here's my take:
In a symbol-manipulating and culture-producing species, homosexuals fulfill the function of outliers not bound by responsibilities of family and to a certain degree free from regular societal norms and expectations. As such they are in a position to dedicate themselves to niche endeavors which may have no immediate useful function for society, but contribute to the experimentation and innovation which keep human culture evolving and adapting. They are often able to take bigger risks and pursue less profitable career-paths compared to heterosexual people with a family. Having children/spouses be dependent on your income makes you more conservative in taking risks and experimenting with your perceived role in society. Thus you can find many homosexuals in fields which demand extreme immersion and individuality of thinking in order to produce results: art and science.
Anyway it's probably best to ask some gay people what they think about all this.
That's not an unreasonable hypothesis, but humans evolved in tribes where no one man is indispensable. That's why women have the hypergamous instinct, in the event that one man dies (or they simply tire of him) they can move in with another. The christian missionaries in the new world did not like this part of native culture at all but it is how things work in tribal life. And it doesn't explain why homosexuality exists in animals. Sexual promiscuity and relative freedom, communal raising of the young, polygamy etc., are believed to be frequent behaviors (common in >50% of communities) in pre-agricultural human societies. The few remaining human communities that are in a pre-agricultural stage (hunters-gatherers) do follow this pattern, as do other social non-human primates (with exceptions). The percentage of communities with such communal sexual behaviour is species-specific. For example, bonobos and common chimpanzees are like this, but other large ape species have different behavior distribution (I'm thinking of mountain gorillas, baboons etc). The theory which is more popular among ethologists and anthropologists is that when agriculture sets in, there is literal and metaphorical fence-building: My land, my harvest, my woman. Don't touch or I'll kill you. Besides, not only the "landlord"'s role (male head of family), but also the female's, becomes harder to replace if it's just the basic couple, rather than the whole village, who must work the crops and the house. So the poetic image that goes along with this theory is that agriculture is the "loss of innocence" landmark for mankind. The pre-agricultural state can then be mythically transfigured into a lost paradise. My personal experience, while not significant statistically, reinforces this myth. I used to have a business in a distant part of the world. There, I befriended many people that have a nomadic (pre-agricultural) history and were forced into "civilization" only a few generations ago. They are different, indeed. The women react very differently. The men react quite differently. The sense of possession is much weaker indeed. The sense of impermanence is palpable. I like that general feeling very much. Of course, with the Internet and globalization reaching every "civilized" human, the dominant mentality quickly takes over. Things are changing fast and even trace amounts of that innocent paradise are being lost and will vanish soon. |
|
|
|
So true my friend. "If you don't hold your private keys, it's not your bitcoin."Sad though, I have a feeling that ten years from now, the banks that want to survive will be offering to store customers' bitcoin for them as a service.... and the public will be too scared of their own incompetence and just use it.  The MSM will probably even have weekly fake news stories about how this person or that person got robbed of all their bitcoin.. to scare people even more into using the banks. It will only take half a bank run to falsify that kind of MSM narrative. Or real interest (denominated in bitcoin) to persuade old bitcoiners. |
|
|
|
Decent dip in the last 24 or so hours. Large enough to make even Jimbo happy, probably. We'll know soon enough!  I managed to buy some more around $5600 (avg). Good enough for me. Still got some fiat for a pretty little accumulation. |
|
|
|
Can someone explain the hate towards btg?
I don't know much about it, but making it mineable with gpu's should make it more decentralized, or no?
What's so wrong with it?
Thanks!
The way it was described to me recently here is this: GPU would work for a short period of time until someone manufactures and monopolizes on ASIC machines to control the hash power. In short, that is what we already have. Anyone Feel free to correct me if I've got that wrong. It's correct - GPU would work for a while, then we'd have GPU farms instead of ASIC farms: no big difference. However, from what I've read, this particular algorithm is memory-hungry. Now I don't know exactly how hungry it is, but in principle an algorithm that requires, say, 8GB to compute one hash would be very hard to farm. It would equalize hash power in a significant way, at least until RAM prices go down one or more orders of magnitude. Difficulty with such an algorithm may involve adjusting both computing power (as it is now with SHA256) and memory requirements. By tweaking the "memory-hunger" parameter, it could be made so that adding more GPUs to a farm won't yield significant results. You'd have to upgrade all your GPU chips with more RAM, or configure your farm to make a chip borrow RAM from its neighbor, which would then be made useless. Rather than "one CPU, one vote" it would be "one memory bank, one vote." Same concept basically, but economically more sensible with the current state of hardware progress. ..and something about a premine (only designed to make the initial devs rich)
On the other hand, premine is the unmistakable hallmark of a scam. So this particular altcoin is a joke/scam/useless anyway. |
|
|
|
It is better for the attack to come from within rather than from the governments.
And how would you know that these patsies and muppets aren't being coerced or paid by govt or big corp aligned interests? The logic behind what they are constantly trying to do only makes sense in light of such. Absent of that, it really makes zero sense. Yes, there probably is a certain government sponsoring the whole operation, but the point remains that this is a technical stress test performed with technical means - not a full-fledged open government campaign with electric power monitoring, localbitcoins infiltration and similar non-crypto means. |
|
|
|
Your post makes lots of sense. But maybe there's an alternative explanation?
Couldn't it be just an attempt to revive the vanishing BCH price, rather than to reduce the S1X/S2X price gap?
I mean, a way to repay back the "faithful" miners who mined BCH at a loss for a long time.
In any case, I'm waiting at the window with the bucket of my residual BCH ready to dump.
The point is that while the act itself may be self-interested, the date chosen is deliberate, since they can do the algo change at any time and ease the suffering of "mysterious miner" even today. But they had to chose a date right before S2X fork and hence it is a scheme to help the S2X succeed. Whether the scheme will succeed or not, who knows, but these kind of attacks are good in that it tests whether bitcoin can resist centralization. It is better for the attack to come from within rather than from the governments. Of course the date is deliberate, but what I meant is that the chosen date is likely to maximize the impact of the action, whether it is support to the S2X attack or a simple attempt at pumping BCH. The date choice alone does not necessarily point to an attack (other considerations could indeed reinforce the hypothesis of a coordinated attack). |
|
|
|
Since we are discussing politics, we might as well discussing Bitcoin politics. As people may know already, BCH is set to hard fork on Nov. 13, 2017 to change their EDA/DAA. https://bitsonline.com/bitcoin-cash-hard-fork/Now while people may laugh it off as just another joke from an ALT. I believe the date is chosen to deliberately cause max disruption. As we know, the S2X fork is set to happen around Nov 14, 2017 and that the next BTC difficulty adjustment will likely increase difficulty by at least 10%. So with another difficulty adjustment around Nov 10, we would likely see difficulty rise to at least 15~20% higher than the current level. As we discussed before, S2X coin is now trading far below the S1X/Core at the current rate (6:1). So the NYA miners are looking at 80%~90% mining loss right off gate if they choose to follow the S2X chain. There is no EDA either, so as more miners bail, the remaining miners would face an impossible task in getting to 100 blocks to collect their pay at the current projected difficulty. We also know that at least 30% of current hashrate is "mercenary" in that they are profit seeking and will jump to the currently most profitable chain, based on BCH experience. So by changing the BCH algorithm on Nov 13, it seeks to draw in the most opportunistic miners right before the S2X fork, so that remaining miners would have a better chance of enforcing a NYA outcome and make S2X succeed. We already know that F2Pool pulled out of NYA and that ViaBTC would offer its miners the option to mine either S1X or S2X chain. By making BCH profitable to mine on Nov. 13, miners who would have bailed on NYA on Nov 14 because S2X price is so unprofitable, would be unavailable on S1X/Core chain. By trying to draw as much of profit-seeking hashrate to BCH instead of having them jump over to S1X chain right from the start, I presume the purpose is to try to crash the S1X price, or at least try to narrow the huge price difference between S1X and S2X so that people like Roger Ver, who make the 1000 BTC swap bet, can at least cover their ass and not look as bad. It could also make the forking debacle more drawn out than expected, as its ultimately a power struggle between miners and hodlers. Miners have to pay for electricity and depreciation, while it's free for hodler to hodl and not making any tx. So narrowing the price difference between S1X and S2X would make miners' struggle easier. Your post makes lots of sense. But maybe there's an alternative explanation? Couldn't it be just an attempt to revive the vanishing BCH price, rather than to reduce the S1X/S2X price gap? I mean, a way to repay back the "faithful" miners who mined BCH at a loss for a long time. In any case, I'm waiting at the window with the bucket of my residual BCH ready to dump. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
