Xray Tango

I want XT supporters to 'go away', but send me money for my XTCoins which I obtained pre-fork.

I might even find reason to obtain XTCoins if XT were implemented as a sidechain.  The most likely reason I could see for wanting some is that XT might be what Google Wallet supports.  I don't actually have a Google Wallet, but I might get one if I got 'cash back' for buying shit advertised on one of their properties or something.

I do.  Doesn't matter that much what I want though; separate coins are inevitable if XT forks the blockchain.  Or BIP101 for that matter.  I envision a strong possibility that there will be way more than two as people jumping on the bandwagon and exploit the confusion.

Nice try.  BIP101 is just Gavin's old exponential bloat that guarantees 8GB blocks and bakes in severe centralization which is exactly what his sponsor's demand.  I'd give it maybe a month before they start ramming in Mikes spyware changes from XT anyway.

Here's my BIP idea.  I've suggested to one of the Blockstream guys that they consider it as probably the last golden opportunity to fix the glaring defects in Bitcoin:

 - Shitcan sha256 completely if the miners really are being cocks and don't even throw them a bone (of a form I won't bother to discuss here.)

 - Switch POW over to a random shifting set of algorithms which are ASIC unfriendly.

 - Make not only transfer nodes be rewarded, but have a weighted reward based on distributions of various kinds (geographic, jurisdictional, political, etc.)

These were the goals which I envisioned for the 'paracoin' project (which was spurred in large part by one of the numerous attempts that Hearn has made over the years to make sure Bitcoin gets swallowed by giant corporates.)

I hope that there is a skunk-works project somewhere is going on which would have such a thing ready as an alternate when Hearndresen spring their trap.  I would not only support it, but I would be likely subject my BTC stash to it via proof-of-burn if there is a reason to do so.

Zionist?  Check!

The Dems are supposed to do a woman this time and a queer after that.  So says Greenwald:


I would say that NWO brainwashing will have things set up to run a tranny in 2020.

It's worth note that cryptocurrencies (and cryptography itself) have drifeted in and out of legality in many countries over the years so one should stipulate in which country one is talking about.  I'm talking about the U.S. since I'm a citizen of that country


It seemed eminently plausible to me but...it would be damn difficult to justify since the government themselves auctioned off coins from the Silk Road haul.  It suprised and delighted me that they did so for this reason.

One of the driving forces behind my timings on taking a Bitcoin position back in 2011 was that I anticipated it becoming illegal to do so.  I mis-estimated about this.  I don't get everything right.

The positive treatment that Bitcoin received in the media and even in the judicial system (if one analyzed clearly) was a bit of a surprise to me and I forged a set of plausible explanations.  One of these was that Bitcoin is in fact a marvelously honey-pot to attract various kinds of people and put them in uncomfortable positions.  That has not (yet) happened to me, but I have been somewhat paranoid about it and have bent over backwards to keep my nose clean.

Sweet!  This is pretty much exactly what I've been saying since the flare-up near the beginning of 2015 and I'm happy to see some confirmation (though it's not exactly rocket-science and I'm sure that other's have thought up the same thing.)

Since you are a master at mining tech, could you comment on my thesis about mining:

For simplicity's sake, lets say that there are only two chains (though I expect a possibility of many more when the shit hits the fan...)  'Core' and 'XT'.  Let's also say that neither one takes special actions to substanatively change any protocols or 'monitor and screw' the other.  Let's also stiplate that miners behavior will approximate market driven principles (nobody hires them as mercenaries and they don't have strong political beliefs.)

Say Core market value is $100/coin

Say XT market value is $200/coin

I would expect that difficulty of each chain would adjust to how much mining effort was applied to supporting each.  Thus, a miner would mine twice as many coins on Core as XT for a given total hash input.  I would anticipate then that the mining power would approach a ratio which was represented by the market value of the respective coins.

Since I do not fully understand how difficulties are represented in chains, I don't know if I am off-base in this thesis.  Any thoughts?

The e-mail thing brings up a really good point about why I feel as I do.

To answer your question, no.  After the 20,000 spams/day and I capitulated and just switched my MX over to Google.  Now they spy on everything anyone writes to me, what mailing lists I'm signed up for, etc.  They aggregate it with data they have about my searches, drive contents, etc, then sell this aggregated data to the highest bidder.  And it is a very strong bet that they hand it over to the government at least when they ask and probably when they do not.

I feel so strongly about keeping Bitcoin out of the clutches of the likes of Google because adding financial data to the mix gives them that much more power and me that much less privacy.

This more than anything is why I am so focused on keeping the blockchain small and widely distributed.  Using it as the foundatin of a subordinate chains ecosystem is the only practical way I can see for this to happen.

Yes, I'm sure that Google would run a sidechain if/when that ecosystem is developed, and yes, I'm sure I would use it for much or most of my activity.  But not all.  It would be at _my_ digression.  I would use other sidechains for other purposes when they are more suitable for the task at hand, and some sidechains would be purposely designed to be a black-hole to those who are nosy about my business and want to monetize my being.

Hahaha.  Ya, everybody and their brother is trying to stick their snout into the climate change trough.  Yet more evidence that the whole thing is a massive rent-seeking and control grid sham.

If I can contribute to the preservation of the robustness of Bitcoin and get you to pay a fair rate for using it as a system with these properties, I perfectly happy to have you stick around.

If you are part of the 'Free Shit Nation' who demands some sort of entitlement on the basis of your having primate features, I'm happy to see you led away because you are one of the biggest problems Bitcoin has at the moment.

I absolutely want the 'peasants' to have good solutions which isolate them from abuse by the established financial sector and their hired gun enforcers in the government.  I'm a peasant myself after all and only hold some BTC by happenstance (and because I've been studying the mainstream financial scam for years.)

I see distributed autonomous sidechains as the best way to both protect Bitcoin from subversion of various types AND to provide the peasants with robust solutions which are tuned to their needs.

I am completely practicing what I preach here by the way.  I use Bitcoin for only high value transactions which I've not done for over a year, and I pay currently 0.01 BTC as a fee since that was worth it for the service I get.  I am greatly looking forward to using various sidechains for various purposes in real-world-land.

Since this thread has been (approrirately) moved to meta, let me just add:


Hopefully the edits and previews are captured and stored if the software supports it.  There might be some very interesting information to be had if one takes an interest in analysis.  There are many unethical reasons for doing so, but I could see instance where the risks outweigh the rewards.

Ideally, if edit and preview data is retained, it could be immediately transferred out of control of the website maintainer to complicate potential legal requests for such data.

One way or another, forum users should be advised that it is at least technically possible that anything submitted as an preview is subject to capture.  Edits also of course.  Whether it is actually happening or not is probably best to have remain an unknown.

I am pretty sure that if anyone has received what are known as 'national security letter' or similar legal instruments, it would be theymos and his team.  It is probably a fair guess that the administration of this forum has no choice but to tell straight up lies about certain things.

When Hearn gets his XT forked, and especially if he is constantly communicating 'checkpoints' to multibitch clients on his mindless drone minion's cell phones, he'll have a ready made botnet to DDOS any core nodes he chooses using legal bloom filter methods to do it.  My guess is that this is proactive defense against such an attack.

I've posted this: Forum Shill gets Busted: ATS and GLP Censor to Cover his Tracks or it's corresponding youtube coverage which is nicely done on various threads here lately because I think it is important information (and probably 'true'.)

We know from the HB Gary Federal e-mail hack that the U.S. govt is interested in and from other research that they have purchased sock-puppet software so it would not be surprising to find evidence of it.  That's why I believe that the 'forum shill busted' story is probably not a hoax.

As for accounts here, note that people do sell their mature accounts.  Not sure how much they bring, but I can imagine it being a fair sum.  Probably more than a dime/dozen at this point.  I've seen people who have undergone what seem to me to be eyebrow-raising chainges in the 4 years I've been around.

Also, the password database has been stolen multiple times.  A funded attacker could have probably extracted passwords for many dormant accounts.  If Theymos is legally obligated to gather and retain certain meta-data, he might as well go the extra mile and hand it over to interested parties for analysis of the (supposed) social media manipulation methods.  I hope he is doing so or will at some point in the future.

I'm beginning to entertain the hypothesis that although there are a lot of political and economic forces driving the 'virtual' climate change, one of them might be being widely under-considered.  Geo-engineering.

If one wanted to, say, be 'Owning the weather by 2025' and had outlined the technical details for doing so back in the 1990's, there is a thorny problem in how to convince one's own domestic population and the populations around the world that it is an appropriate thing to be doing.  I submit that 'saving the world from catastrophe in the form of global warming' would be one way to do this.

Are you implying that Burt is working with them as part of a plea bargain or something and is privy to their internal strategies?

That would only 'be useful' if people were ready to double-spend the shit out of inputs to the doomed block.

Someone who cares enough might set up a system which keeps an eye out for XT fork double-spend opportunities and gives those who can capitalize a timely informational saying that their opportunity had arrived.

Previous similar situations (like the BDB fork) resulted in only a few screw-jobs which people were willing to absorb.  If there were many more of these and they were undertaken deliberately, it might creates such a cluster-fuck that Hearn would feel justified in just forking XT (with his 'checkpointing' if necessary) rather than to try to clean up the mess.

To understand why I would welcome such a thing, one needs to understand that I see a fair amount of utility in having an XT fork which siphoned off a sizable number of 'bitcoiners' who are deeply ignorant about the principles of the system and are mostly MultiBitch-class users who add no value.  They'd stop even being users if their transactions were not deeply subsidized anyway, and the only way that is sustainable is if large corporates took over infrastructure operation.  I say let Hearn have them...their loss would only strengthen Bitcoin.

I could be.

I hypothesis that if the blockchain itself forks, each branch will have it's own difficulty.  Therefore the mining effort on each chain will form a ratio which approaches the ratio of the market value of the coins from said chain.

To attack a chain in a primitive 51% mode, an attacker needs to overcome the honest mining effort on a chain, then attack for long enough to cause a problem.  AND hope that the management of the chain is caught flat-footed and cannot take evasive action.

I noticed with delight that Blockstream was smart enough to set expectations of reliable peg operations at something like 24 to 48 hours.  What this mean is that a successfully 'primitive' attack would necessitate giving away any proceeds which could be obtained mining honestly for a fair amount of time. 

Unless, of course, the attack was externally funded which is entirely possible.  If a sha256 miner is already in a idle mode due to unprofitably, it is entirely possible that a sponsor could retain them as mercenary to carry out attacks for not a lot of money.  The long operations cycle means that there is a fair amount of time to mount a defense.

Most importantly, if sidechains were developed under and expectation of the long reliable peg operation cycle, they would be designed to operate autonomously with only a limitation to elements associated with their peg operations.  This means that end-users on various sidechains would probably not even know that an attack on the backing store were underway.  Contrast this with the grief which would be felt by XT users who demand real-time operation of their system with no downtime.  Much more brittle.

In short, mining could become interesting again, and especially if there was a transaction fee reward to those who find valid blocks in a sea of invalid blocks during an attack.  I never found mining to make much sense from an economic standpoint.  Warfare on the mining front could change that, and if transaction fees alternate hash algorithms came into the picture it could become both very interesting and potentially profitable.

Last I heard, Todd has nothing to do with Blockstream other than he throws rocks at them as is his nature.  Philosophically, I like his treechains idea better but I see it as at best impractical and maybe impossible.  As I see it, what I had in 2011 called 'subordinate chains' have a wide and diverse set of advantages.  You've quasi-listed a few.


As I see it, the 'chain' part of 'sidechains' would be a bit of a misnomer.  I'd imagine all sidecoins to have a chain to use as an interface layer but not necessarily as a back-end.  I would hope that it is close to true to say that there is not much which 'cannot' be a sidecoin.  I've argued (sort of) to Adam that a token back-end makes more sense for a lot of use-cases than a '(now)classic' chain-based system.  Of course I'm limited in what I can 'teach' Dr. Back about...well...almost anything.

As for Blockstream's 'design, implementation, and management', I've seen nothing which indicates that it will differ from any other open-source project and nothing to be threatened by (unless you have a burning need to feel threatened of course.)  If that changes, so will my stance toward Blockstream.  And, I expect, so will many of those who are currently organized under that tent.

Blockstream either said straight-out or I inferred that that intend to produce an open-source reference implementation for sidechains.  In that case, anyone could pick up the ball and run with it.


The thing about LN that really impressed me was the 'slack'.  Once in a while I pull the keys out of my pocket and a quarter comes with them and falls in a gutter.  That does not stop me from using coins and having pocket change.  From an engineering perspective there is a huge amount to be gained by having a little room for error.  That the designers were cognizant of this impressed me...although it is rather obvious to anyone who has done systems work.

I'll not speak for the LN developers, but as a general design goal a fraud-proofing perspective, the most critical thing is to not allow an operator to profit from fraud.  This will almost completely evaporate many forms of fraud from even being attempted.  A distant second priority would be how long it takes me to get my value back in the event of a failure (which I would expect to be an uncommon event and one I may never see.)


Blatant and bogus propaganda on several levels:

 - Open source means that they not only welcome competition but foster it.  So down goes the 'one company' BS.  Blockstream only need to do it better, and that is highly likely given the makeup of the entity.

 - Nothing about sidechains in any way detracts from the ability for individuals to use native Bitcoin except perhaps that they won't be subsidized and will thus have to pay transaction fees proportional to the cost of operating a secure system.

 - Given the level of talent who were induced to work on this project, you should think a little bit about who looks like a clown when you label it as 'nonsensical'.

I do sense that you are deeply hopeful that Bitcoin will collapse.  Again, I suspect that this is why Blockstream and sidechains bothers you so much.

You didn't know this going in?  I mean, what are the alternatives?  Guessing which way the know-nothing sheep will go when a well funded psyop campaign to ruin Bitcoin (e.g., XT) is undertaken?

I proposed exactly that this was coming and stated it in the thread where Gavin was proposing the Bitcoin Foundation in the first place and I was dissenting.  My call was for transparency which would allow me, as a user, to accurately gauge the direction 'core' was likely to go.  I also posited that a problem with TBF was that there would be limited transparency which would make it harder to understand the dispositions of the participants.  When Hearn's call for a discussion of his 'redlisting' was leaked to the public I had total vindication.