I tend to think of the bottom in terms of mining costs. But even mining costs are relative since they differ depending the density of the mined ground and the nature of the mining operation. In other words, a mining operation that only extracts gold as a byproduct from its main silver or copper ore, will not be drastically affected - as the other ores "subsidize" gold's extraction. Gold miners though could be out of business.

From the numbers I've seen in terms of cash costs, as these are often published by respective companies, at 400 USD/oz, the current production model doesn't cut it for a long list of companies and mining sites. And from what I'm seeing, the price levels weren't very good for increasing production compared to 2014 either (production fell).


Well, it doesn't take too much to send the price skyrocketing in case of a systemic crisis. After all, the major gold exchanges are overleveraged "fractional reserves". Physical shortages appear quickly when there is a run on gold.

Gold pumpers, like zerohedge, schiff, etc, are not such a large factor because the west is not that big of a player regarding gold. With a global ming production of 3165 tons, China got 985 tons and India another 849.

India kind of ensures gold demand at any price. It's a cultural thing. It's not speculative. Gold is considered money-equivalent by everyone. They are not thinking that buying gold is wasting or spending money. Gold IS money and ...a superior one because it also gives social status. That's how they see it. Thus they are dumping their fiat to gold, every day, like clockwork. They also know, just as sure as the sun will rise, that in the long run the INR will fall compared to gold. They can't go wrong. They seemingly can't go wrong even on serious gold price corrections after major pumping (unlike USD/gold buyers), because the INR will drop, unlike the USD which is the currency benchmark - in a sense.

Even if gold price went /2 tomorrow morning, India would buy all of it. People there would be like "ohh, instead of 10 grams, now I can buy 20 grams with my money - wooohooo!". That's what they were doing even with small drops like 10-20%, flooding the jewelry shops, creating physical shortages.


Bitcoin has a short, but good track record of beating devaluation in multiple currencies with poor performance while also being able to bypass capital controls. And, typically, where devaluation exists, there are also capital controls in terms of access in foreign currency. So bitcoin would definitely be more useful in such a scenario. There are probably hundreds of millions of people who need bitcoin way more than westerners do, and who would appreciate it more than westerners.

Acquiring bitcoins would be tricky through official routes (exchanges), but if I can burn local currency in power costs and convert it to altcoins / bitcoins (I'm mentioning altcoins because most of the time they can be mined with no specialized ASICs), then it's like bypassing capital controls for foreign currencies.


The only way that a bottom scenario can be experienced is due to some catastrophic failure that would be impossible to fix. Catastrophic but fixable failures could result in serious dumps and confidence issues, but non-fixable issues are another issue altogether.

Capacity upgrades are not a serious market concern. At least the market says so. Price went from 200 to 400-500 in a few months, while the scaling debate was ongoing. As soon as the XT issue seemed to get buried, price rose quickly. The only thing negatively affecting price in all this period has been the orchestrated FUD and attempts to fork the currency into two - which would admittedly be very bad for the fundamentals. XT made price go down and as the risk evaporated price rose. Hearn's stunt and Classic returning with more FUD, and an attempt at contentiously forking that seemed to have a greater possibility of success, had a very negative impact. When this was put behind, price rose again.

I doubt large market players don't know what's FUD in terms of bitcoin's actual scaling capabilities, where it's strengths are (scaling value transacted), the spam issue, what's the case with full blocks and the extremely low fees allowing abuse, etc etc. I also doubt they will "buy" the FUD that core devs who are actually invested in btc (hearn isn't - he sold his) are acting against their own interests or that they will prevent bitcoin from scaling, when they are actually the only people doing scaling work.


In theory, gold is highly replaceable even in jewelry. There is no actual need for, say, a cross to be 18k or 22k gold in 100% of its weight. Not visually / not aesthetically, not practically. It could be gold-filled tungsten or lead and the owner would never tell the difference, or experience serious wear (gold filled are much better compared to gold plated which wear out). The only reason why gold is required is to give "value" for the item, yet most of the value (in western jewelry*) goes to the jeweler, not the metal. So you are buying the idea of something being expensive, not even the metal (!). The metal might cost 200$ and the jeweler may be asking for 900$ because, well, "it's jewelry, it's expensive, so since you came here to pay for something expensive, just pay it".

* In india, its waaaay closer to the price of the metal, and the metal used is typically very high purity, like 22-23K+.



Again I'll have to use the India example of how citizens buy gold over there. Certainly not "speculators", fools, or criminals.

For westerners, betting against fiat is usually not for beating inflation, as we have more stable currencies, but it can be a political statement against the central banking scheme: "I dump my fiat and buy gold, silver or bitcoins because I don't like the fiat system and its practices". And if one can profit due to the fiat-scheme collapsing on itself due to the debt-bubble requiring a bubble in money issuance to service it, why not.


I live in Greece. Note that in the 80s we were running at inflation levels like 25% (now we are experiencing 0 to -1%).

The stock's market index is currently in the 80's level.
The real estate market is bust. It's oversold and people are "killing" their property for fractional prices of what they'd get a few years ago.
Shops are bust / unemployment hitting 30% etc.

As for tools... well... In the 80's and 90's most tools we bought in the family, like drills, spinning cutters, pressure-cement-breakers, arc welding equipment, and more mechanical stuff for manipulating metals, pipes, etc, were very expensive. Most of them were Black & Decker, Philips, Peugeot, etc. My father, being very handy with them, used them all the time and he really considered them an investment that would never depreciate. And then came the Chinese invasion, in terms of "affordable tools for everybody"...

I can now buy a drill or a rotating cutter for less than 20 euros, even with a ...German label but "made in china". There is no piece of equipment that we have from back then that has not become ridiculously cheap to buy (in its chinese equivalent version). And I can't sell my used tools for nowhere near the prices I bought them - no matter whether they are branded or not.

There are assumptions for all these things (real estate, shops, tools, stocks) which have to be TRUE in the long run, for your money to be safe. Assumptions about the rate of inflation and possible trend reversal. Assumption about the state of the stock market. Assumptions about the general well-being of the economy. Assumptions regarding the global supply of tools. Assumptions about the real estate market. In my case all these assumptions went out the window when the country switched from Drachma to the Euro - which was a political decision. Now, if a fellow Greek had bought gold 10-20-30 years ago, his money would be multiplied right now. Stocks? He could be looking at even having his capital zero'ed out, if he had a lot of stocks that went bust. Real estate? Prices rose in the 90's and early 00's but have now crashed down hard. Shops are more like a liability, etc etc. Even if he held country-issued bonds (a "safe" investment) he would have experienced a 50% haircut and the rest would be paid up to 2042 in steps. Some pensioners argue they'll be dead by then.



You can argue that bitcoin rose from 10$ to 1200$ within a year so it had to catch a breath, correct and consolidate to a much higher level than its starting position. Which is how markets function.

I think intelligence, at its core, is about having a process to become increasingly more efficient. Whether by acquiring knowledge, and using it, or observing and extracting lessons that can then be used, or by personal trial and error, or by not being complacent and trying to improve continuously, even when something is apparently "good enough".

As we are born, we don't really know much about anything. You could be digging dirt with your hands and then you see someone digging with a shovel. At that point you know that there is a superior way to do the same task. If you insist on doing it by hand => you are an idiot.

All skillsets are kind of learned from the environment or built with experience. Maths, which are often associated with intelligence, are no different.

AI will clearly redefine our concept of intelligence and what ..."smart" is. A neural network can do pattern recognition on seemingly unrelated data sets, finding connections that our mind has been trained to ignore. A neural network might find patterns in moon activity, the weather, bird movement, road traffic, stock market indexes etc etc in order to predict ...an athletes performance, for betting reasons.

A guy which our culture would deem "smart" would be quick to dismiss these connections, and fail miserably to predict the performance of the athlete based on the same data. Meaning that our "smart" guy has a socially conditioned intelligence on what he is even allowed to contemplate (before being criticized by others as being ridiculous).

This is normal, because the basic algorithm is that "Love feels good" => "I want love" => "I want social acceptance" (whether conventionally by aligning with social norms, or trying to prove your worth in society by demonstrating superior ways of thinking compared to normal people). Yet this chain leads one to the safe harbor of "love", which is equated with "acceptance", by ignoring all those aspects that could potentially ridicule him in the social arena.

When a human sees that a neural network can find the "recipe" for catchy melodies, by simply studying the pattern of famous songs, or that it can find the "recipe" for thousands of very highly sought-after hard alloys for the industry, by simply being fed the molecular bonds of a few hard alloys, or predict financial or sport performance, then there is a lamp going off in his head. He is like "what the fuck does a program that emulates neurons has over me, that I don't, and it gets the results when I can't? How can both of us see the same data and yet it clearly "sees" the connections that my mind doesn't even spot".

The answer is usually of the kind:

-social conditioning on how to think (or what is even allowed to cross our minds as "plausible")
-complacency on finding a sub-optimal model that works (and thinking its optimal) and staying with that (the mind does a L1 "caching" of the "prior known solution" and avoids finding better solutions)

Once this type of failure in human thinking is understood, intelligence can accelerate for a human being and new findings about how intelligence works will uncover intelligence-acceleration techniques. Eventually the smartest people are those who have dissected intelligence and understood what it is, how it can increase, what are the obstacles to this, how can one bypass the obstacles, and applied their method to become smarter. All this is not a formal process. It's more like a scientific approach to being, related to one's way of thinking. Monitoring one's though process for defective or suboptimal ways of thinking and replacing them with superior ones.

I have something better:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

Claim the 1 million USD with a proper proof or it didn't happen

"Domain names engaging in network access within the borders shall have services provided by domestic domain name registration service bodies, and domestic domain name registration management bodies shall carry out operational management.
For domain names engaging in network access within the borders, but which are not managed by domestic domain name registration service bodies, Internet access service providers may not provide network access services."

....it doesn't ban accessing directly through IP addresses though

What I wrote is an analogy.

TCP's efficiency rises with increase in payload, as does bitcoin's (its payload being the value transacted).

You don't need 1000 packets of 60 bytes if you can send 1 packet with 60000 bytes. Doing it so in 1000x60 is problematic.

Likewise, you can send 1000 bitcoin txs of 0.0001 that are inefficient, or you can aggregate them and send them as a 0.1 BTC tx.

There is no reason sitting there complaining why the system won't process 1000 dust/spam txs of 0.0001 and saying "gimpedcoin  "

The internet is not a failure because it scaled by aggregating data in less data "txs".

From what I read in the 11-part piece, you obviously have bitcoin related issues all around. You don't have problem with scaling. You have problem with pretty much everything bitcoin-related.

Things on the list were stuff like

"What if people don't have phones and PCs"
"Why only 21mn coins if people constantly lose coins, we'll have to issue more >21mn to compensate"
"It's unsafe because people lose coins and get hacked"
"Bitcoin is unconstitutional because of no privacy"

...so, pardon me if I can't really take your interest in scaling tx/s as genuine.

The equivalent is that a 100 Mbps fiber link would be useless without a large TCP window*.

Nobody said the internet won't scale because it can't do proper scaling with many "transactions" of small packets (there are serious problems with round-trip delay) and only scales due to less "transactions" of much bigger packets. They just raised the value of the payload and that was it. If you try to manually set it to something like 100 bytes, you'll see some funny speeds of a few mbps at most - because your capacity is wasted through inefficiency.

Bitcoin can currently do around 100mn transactions per year (~270k per day x 365).

Bitcoin can move around 100mn $ per year if its every transaction has an average value / payload of 1$.
Bitcoin can move around 100bn $ per year if its every transaction has an average value / payload of 1000$.
Bitcoin can move around 1 trn $ per year if its every transaction has an average value / payload of 10000$.

How you use the network counts greatly in how much money you can move around.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_window_scale_option

(I haven't yet read the 11-part post), will get back to you on that.

edit: Just read it. Well you have fundamental issues with bitcoin. Your problem is not scaling. Your problem is everything bitcoin-related. Oh it's unsafe for the noob. Oh it's capped at 21mn coins. Oh it doesn't have much privacy... oh this, oh that. Well, no reason to argue about all these.

1. The PM indexes barely move with the amount of money involved in crypto. They are in the multi-trillion marketcap category. Crypto isn't getting any serious money from PMs. Bitcoin's marketcap is like one thousand of what Gold's marketcap is.

2. PMs do not really overlap the online transactions sector. They are just store of value. You can't pay someone over the internet if you have gold in your pocket. You can pay him with bitcoins though. That means that PMs and crypto are complimentary in this sense. Things might have been different with a decentralized e-gold equivalent, but physical ownership and physical transfer is not something that an algorithm can rule.

3. In terms of manipulation, owning Bitcoins is actually a hedge against the ongoing PM manipulation as the mechanisms existing in the gold manipulation 'industry' are not found in bitcoin.

4. Bitcoins are far more scarce than gold and silver. There are ~6 billion ounces of above ground gold and only 15.4 million bitcoins. That's one bitcoin for every 390 ounces. That's now. The future is actually in favor of bitcoin:gold ratio.

5. Gold and silver production is increasing continuously as the methods to extract it are improved and become increasingly mechanized. 100 years ago you had people shoveling ground and now you have excavators and D10's moving ground and ...ripping permafrost. Or people dredging ...the ocean's bottom (soon with robots). Even the places that have been previously "mined" are full of gold. And even the places that are mined today are still left with tons of fine gold that they can't really catch due to most mining operations going for more volume at the expense of recovery rates. The 180ktons of above ground gold will probably double or triple in the next 30-40 years. And when AI comes online to track underground deposits, vein flows, etc etc, or even assume the running of mechanical recovery tasks, you're looking at full blown gold inflation. And I haven't mentioned that most "non-gold bearing grounds" are ....gold bearing with invisible gold. You might pan nothing, but the gold is attached to lower-specific gravity rocks, which, when crushed, will release the gold (typically by resorting to chemicals). When people say "there is no gold here", what they really mean is "I don't see any", or "I'll probably spend more to get it" - both of which are circumstances that change continuously.

6. Even if above ground gold doubles or triples in the mid-term future, it will still preserve its value due to fiat inflating at a much faster pace. However bitcoin will be inflating at a much lower pace than both, hence being an adequate store of value, which also has good upside potential (gold's marketcap can't go 10x to 70+ trillion range with ease, unlike bitcoin which can hit 4k usd and do a 10x).

7. What PMs have in their favor is that they are much safer than crypto (excluding scam PM purchases). Nobody will fork, hack or 51% one's gold. And they are good for countries with high devaluation rates where the average man can convert local currency to PMs to prevent erosion to his savings.

I had a dream*, around 2 years ago...  actually the dream was 18k, but I lowered it a bit for the contest to 12k since the contest date was for april 2016 (still many months to the end of the year / and many months post-halving).

* https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=400235.msg7965071#msg7965071

If I'm running bitcoin-qt in my laptop, which is simultaneously my p2p wallet and a node, am I running a service?

Certainly not more than running a p2p torrent app.

Lol...



FUD of the form: "The FUD is true", lol...

"The network is abysmally slow"  

Yeah I mean waiting a few minutes to transfer, say, a million or even a billion bucks for a 0.05$ fee, anywhere around the globe, without being anal probed by the financial and state authorities is a problem... obviously he wasn't used banks to do the same task.

As for visa, visa is unidirectional. It can never compete with bitcoin. Visa = you paying someone else. If you want to get paid it's a whole different story.

Bitcoin = paypal, not visa. But without the middleman, the fixed fees, the currency fees, the 3% fees on the amount transferred, the reversibility of transactions (paypal confirmation time = 180 days), the possible freezing of your account, the random "checks" and delays on wiring money to your bank etc etc.

It's just a theoretic example of how scaling in USD-volume can occur even with limited tps capabilities. It's what been objected to as a future of a high value settlement network that will not be affordable for the small guy.

So on one hand you have criticism that bitcoin is a useless "hobby coin" and then you have criticism that it's been intended to be a high value settlement network. Obviously these two criticisms are so contradictory that it's not even funny. Yet they come from the same camp.

Let's see the capabilities of the "hobby network" right now:

300.000 tx/day x 1000$ per tx on average =109.5 billion USD per year, exceeding western union customer department and around half of paypal.

At 300k tx/day and 10.000$ per tx = 1.09 TRILLION usd per year, surpassing paypal and western union combined x3.


At around 3.3mb effective capacity:

1mn txs per day x1000$ per tx on average = 365bn USD per year, exceeding paypal and western union combined.

1mn txs per day x10.000$ per tx on average = 3.65 trillion USD per year

"Hobby coin"  

We already have mainstream/datacenter coin. It's called paypal.

The left chart is bullshit.

Run your bitcoin-qt...

Click help, debug window.

Click peers.

Wait a bit until the 8 peers fill.

Tell us how many of the 8 peers are "classic".

I never get more than 2 "classic". Usually it's either zero or one.

Obviously it can't be tested on all possible attack scenarios or problems that may appear on the main chain. Stated another way, no amount of testing in testnet is enough for it to be considered "safe".

As for classic and contentious hard fork solutions, it's junk - we don't need to argue about that.

The worst enemy of core devs right now is a problematic segwit deployment. They can lose the game pretty fast if they fuck this up.

There is quite a big and obvious con: Segwit is untested code, meaning it could open up new attack vectors if the devs aren't EXTREMELY THOROUGH in its design and deployment. They need to think like attackers, trying to figure out all the possible attack or disruption vectors and then make sure it all works ok.

The task of deploying a bug-free system is not a small one, and it rarely gets done, yet this is precisely what is required in this case.

Παμε ξανα: Το bitcoin δεν φτιαχτηκε για να γινεται fork μεταξυ αντιπαλων αποψεων. Το αποτελεσμα ενος τετοιου forking ειναι το σπασιμο σε 2 currencies, η απωλεια εμπιστοσυνης σαν νομισματικο μεσο, η δημιουργια προηγουμενου που υποσκαπτει την εμπιστοσυνη (αφου μπορει να ξανασπασει σε αλλα 2 ή αλλα 800 παρακλαδια) κτλ κτλ.

Ειναι τελειως διαφορετικο ενα hard fork με ομοφωνια, ας πουμε ποσοστα >90%, με ενα fork το οποιο επιχειρειται ως contentious hard fork.

Το θεμα του block size και το ποιος φλομωσε στο ψεμα ποιον, ειδικα οσον αφορα το FUD, θα το καταλαβεις απ'το οτι περυσι τετοια εποχη μας ελεγαν οτι χρειαζομαστε επειγοντως 20αρια blocks, και ο gavin "συμβιβαζονταν" με τα ...8. Ο δε hearn ελεγε οτι το bitcoin φετος θα εχει κανει crash ως δικτυο λογω του 1mb... πραγματα που τα διαβαζεις και γελας οταν ξερεις οτι γραφτηκαν απο σοβαρους προγραμματιστες.

Οι τυποι αυτα που εγραφαν δε τα εγραφαν για να πεισουν ατομα που ξερουν. Τα εγραφαν για να επηρεασουν ανιδεους. Δεν υπαρχουν δλδ τεχνολογικα επιχειρηματα σοβαρα γιατι χρειαζομαστε πχ επειγοντως 20mb blocks ή 8mb blocks (που, παρεπιπτοντως, αμα τα ειχε εφαρμοσει ο gavin, θα ειχε σπασει το δικτυο γιατι στο xt δεν επελυε το security hole με τα blocks που εχουν παρα πολλα signatures για validation). Δεν υπαρχουν τεχνολογικα επιχειρηματα γιατι το δικτυο θα εκανε ...crash. Και γιατι δεν εγινε crash δλδ οταν εγιναν τα stress test με τα 1mb blocks τερματισμενα και volume πολλαπλασιο απ'αυτο που σηκωνει υπο κανονικες συνθηκες το δικτυο? Γιατι ο τυπος ελεγε παπαριες^2.

Τι παθαμε επι 1 χρονο που το bitcoin εχει 1mb blocks, ως δικτυο? Η απαντηση ειναι τιποτα, παρα το ασυλληπτο FUD. Τα δε fees παραμενουν γελοια (0.01-0.05$) εν συγκριση με οποιοδηποτε legacy συστημα πληρωμων (πιστωτικες, paypal, τραπεζες, εμβασματα, western union κτλ χρεωνουν τ'αντερα τους).

To contentious hard forking, ειναι εξ'ορισμου επιβλαβες.

...including troll devs.