The same thing was said many times about Bitcoin itself by most of the people who had even heard of it.  Ultimately they mis-judged and it was their loss.  Shrugs.

Ach!  You're making me have to think a little.

Basically the same thing as agreeing not to punch on the break during a boxing match.  I'm thinking mostly of deferring from egregious attempts to mess up the other party like the NoBitcoinXT mock-nodes (which is an idea that I take some (potentially undeserved) credit for, BTW)

It is to be expected that there would be plenty of independent operators who would throw various sticks into the works for one reason or another.  If the primary movers and shakers at least did not advocate and promote such behavior, that would go some distance toward muting such attacks I would suppose.  To re-visit the boxing analogy, the basic rule would be to protect yourself at all times.


The BSD split after 386BSD went dark was slightly before my time but from what I know of it it was extraordinarily acrimonious.  Ultimately three main forks emerged.  FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.  The currently all live on working on their areas of focus.  They all borrow code from one another when they can.  Many users choose some combination of them depending on the needs of the day.  Probably the world is better off for this split at the time it happened.

One of my all-time favorites.  Apologies if it's been posted here before.

I think probably you are not right, but at the end of the day there is a lot of hand-waving and speculation involved in a lot of this stuff.

For values, I believe it very unlikely that reality would prove a split to be a zero-sum game.  In other words, that the value would 'half'.  I personally feel that the future of Bitcoin is most bright as a backing store (or reserve currency or source-of-truth or whatever one wants to call it) providing a foundation for subordinate chains.  A split would cause me to consider my own stash more dear because I believe that the other group is a detriment at this point and we could move forward more easily without them.

On the flip side, as has been stated, the investor class wants a more nimble management team among other things.  They might value the solution more if it could move more quickly to the roles that they envision.

So, a split might result in a significant increase in total net value.  Conversely, people might think that such a split could be repeated time and time again and it makes blockchain technology as expressed by Bitcoin families of crypto-currency less valuable.

---

To your question about 'two wallets', I would say no.  What you would need is a wallet which could evaluate each UTXO that you control and decide how to optimally structure spends so you don't get burnt.  I would anticipate such things being commonplace by the time they are needed...which, unfortunately, doesn't necessarily mean that everyone will use them so some people who are not paying attention or who choose to trust the wrong people will probably get burnt.

From his writings it doesn't sound like he'd take the job.

I also remember Maxwell mentioning that he thought it would be unwise for any American (or USian I guess) to have formal leading role in Bitcoin.  It was either stated or implied that this nationality status could result in unhealthy and unwelcome political pressure.

Cypherdoc antagonizes marcus_of_agustus who does a little research and responds with this thread.  cypherdoc loses mojo as high-powered-shill; flees trolltalk.

I think someone captured what marcus_of_agustus said the cypherdoc here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spOvMHBz69k

Cypherdoc antagonizes marcus_of_agustus who does a little research and responds with this thread.  cypherdoc loses mojo as high-powered-shill; flees trolltalk.

I think someone captured what marcus_of_agustus said the cypherdoc here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spOvMHBz69k

Edit:  Opps.  Wrong thread.  I mean to post it on the PSA one.  Sorry about that.

This echo's Hearn's experience that investors want a 'benevolent dictator' management structure so that shit can get done.  Another reason to fork the thing already and give this segment what they want.  Then we can all just move forward.

I'm fully expecting this to be the trajectory for XT/BIP101/whatever in the case of a fork.  We'll have our work cut out for us to avoid having it be the trajectory for Core one way or another.  Part of why I would like to see a fork is that I think the pressure to integrate crypto into mainstreamland will be relieved by having XT(-like) systems to escape through.

My dirty little secret is that I could see XT being quite successful as it moves through it's evolution and I probably will not completely split and liquidate my entire stash of them.  I myself even have use for a solution which has all the bells and whistles that the large corporates can tack on, and I have no philosophical or operational problem with paying my taxes...and my BTC are demonstrably clean.

I will also mention again that it's mostly us freaks who even consider KYC/AML/Taint/etc to be a bad thing.  Back in the real world, and even in significant pockets of the crypto-enthusiast space, these ideas are fairly obvious and fairly good.  That was my take-away from the San Jose conference a few years ago.


Could be.  I would only recommend it to those who are highly clever...but then that's the only group I mentioned Bitcoin to in the first place.

Nobody has provided anything more than an assertion that a slightly stronger fork would kill off a slightly weaker one, much less do so 'fast'.  If you wish to try to justify that hypothesis, please do.

WRT MySpace, different situation entirely.  The two extremes on the philosophical spectrum ('rock solid distributed security' vs. 'be everything to everyone') offer vastly different capabilities to serve vastly different use-cases.  The world is expansive enough to support multiple of these forks.

The Swiss get to vote on whether to be subjects of Brussels or vassals of the U.S. and not much more from the looks of things.  Peg you currency to the EU?  OK (for a while at least.)  Absorb whatever foreigners Brussels tells you to?  OK.  Cough up confidential customer bank records to the U.S.? OK.  Pathetic.

The business intelligence value of knowing who made what transactions alone is easily enough to pay for operating the network.  Especially when one has access to 'big data' processing facilities and a big network footprint already.  Much higher value than knowing something about people's search terms or scanning their e-mail and cloud storage contents.  I would expect to see users (to use a more kind descriptor) get 'cash back' when things are ramped up.

I have little doubt that Mike is keenly aware of this principle, and I suppose that he didn't really want to use it as a sales pitch so he cobbled together some fairly questionable 'mining assurance contract' scheme or whatever it was.

Transplant from another thread:

I'm tvbcof and I approve of this message because it is amusing.

Works for me.  Ultimately I think that people using native Bitcoin ought to be largely capable and invested enough to have other information channels.  A tip-off might be handy, but not worth the various risks.

Those who are using insta-upgrade SPV clients need to develop the trust in whoever authors and supports them.  If that trust is mis-placed, sad day.

I just mean agreed to and transparently communicated to the userbase.

 - Mike and Gavin state their case and their vision and their plans.

 - Other players (esp, so-called 'core') do likewise.

 - All sides agree not to attack one another, at least during a choreographed disengagement.

This would allow a framework upon which tertiary players (on-line wallets, miners, vendors, etc) could formulate and communicate their own strategies with minimal harm done to the userbases.  It would also lesson the problem we will certainly be having with scammers and others trying to exploit a messy situation.  Such attacks will target innocent end-users since they are the least able to defend themselves.

I could see an alert key being abused in a time of crisis.  Say, for instance, that XT forked.  An alert could dampen down use to the advantage of one strategy or another.  Probably the biggest risk of abuse would be to induce upgrades of Multibitch-class clients to a version which would split a users coins between forks in such a way that was not to the user's advantage (by formulating spends in a certain way.)

Alert keys seem like a likely place for a broad range of participants to exercise some control.  I could imagine, say, half a dozen of them chosen from a pool of core contributors as well as other actors.  Some by user vote even.  When an alert is issues, each key would be represented as being pro, con, abstaining, or absent.  This could be represented compactly in a GUI as a little color widget or some such.  In this way users could see at a glance if there were universal consensus about the nature of any alert.

I've heard it said that this is a non-problem because alerts have not been abused to date.  To this I would say that certain very possible attacks have also not been seen to date so it is not a totally valid argument.

I considered creating a new sock-puppet name "Leonid Trolstoy" the other day.  Ultimately I almost never use the sock puppets I have so it was not worth the bother.

Let it be known that I do not like Mike and Gavin.  Signed: ~tvbcof

I'm not talking about on a personal level since I don't know them.  Given their attitudes about certain things as reflected in their actions and activities, I probably would not like them on a variety of personal levels either though.

Why looky here; Cypherdoc (Generalissimo of the Free Shit Nation) is back from the dead!  ...and reincarnated as YAWLC [yet another whiny little cunt.]  Lulz lovers everywhere rejoice!