Yeah, but China has ~75% hashpower, not 50%.  winning three bets in a row with 75% odds is a 42% chance, a heluva lot higher than 6.25% and I'm pretty sure the miners who get nationalized keep a good size pile of coins that could be double spent.  Even if they don't, The Chicoms could nationalize the Chinese exchanges too and then they have coins up the wazzu to dump. 

freshly mined coins can't be spent right away. I get that. What I'm saying is that doesn't matter in a well-executed 51% attack, because you can also verify bogus transactions.  If I was an evil Chinese Official, I could execute this attack with no more expertise than I now currently hold just by pointing guns at the right people. 

I like the way Adam Back runs the miners meeting, then avoids his name appearing in the press releases.

Makes me think he has an agenda. You know, that open secret to ensure Blockstream road map gets fully implemented into Core.

billyjoeallen is high on fiat. ( oh wait he shorted not sold )

"You could be right. I may be a dumbass. If I am, someone please tell me why."

I see that, but that's not my concern. Someone with >50% hashpower can double spend. or tripple spend, or senf the same BTC to 12 different exchanges and sell it, crashing the price to pennies while still mining NEW bitcoins which they spend twelve times keeping the price there.

You can only double-spend your own coins (second time I told you this) exchanges typically require ass'y least 3 confirmations,  which means at 50% you'd essentially need to win 4 coin flips in a row  (3 to trick the exchange and the 4th to double-spend the coins) - which means you would only succeed in this attack 6.25 % of the time. Also, if this type of attack became common, exchanges would start to simply wait for 4,5,6 transactions or more...

We can always pick a point in the past where there is concensus that a double spend hasn't happened yet and freeze the blockchain there until we fix the double spending problem.  I agree with that. What I don't think you are considering is that the fix may take months to get everyone to agree on the same fix and implement it IF it can be done at all.  In the mean time, your "store of value" plummets to the purchasing power of bellybutton lint. 

We would need:
Protocol change
hardware
code
agreement

You could be right. I may be a dumbass. If I am, someone please tell me why.

So your response is to call me a dumbass? That doesn't seem like a real answer. Do you have a logical answer to my concerns?  Does anybody?

There is a difference between Bitcoin being uncensored and being censorship resistant. We are currently uncensored, but at the mercy of a government that will not allow banks in that country to even hold bitcoin accounts or allow their citizens to do anything with this currency except speculate on it.  This is not exactly a huge selling point.  

The network is secured by HASHPOWER! is this not obvious?  Does someone have a warehouse full of SHA512 ASICs laying around to secure the new fork if our hashpower gets compromised?

Even if it is, we can write the code for this new fork in 10 minutes? Convince everyone to use it (because convincing people of the need to upgrade is so damn easy).  I feel like the only sane guy in a loony bin!

or Inigo Montoya.

What is this term "censorship resistance?" I do not think it means what you think it means.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye, hmm?

Bitcoin: distributed decentralized money secured by cowardly miners concentrated in China.  There is no plan or code to switch security measures if they get compromised.

Awesome. This is where I keep my life savings.  I'm a fucking genius.

Maybe you can help me understand. So we fork, but we would have to fork away from SHA256 or they could just point to the new fork and doublespend again, right?

Forking seems to be a last resort thing, and there is no code or plan in place to make that kind of switch, to say nothing of no hashpower to secure the new fork, so it could take weeks or months and in the meantime, no Bitcoin.  During that time, could not the Chinese easily discover our new hashing algorithm and swamp the hashpools with more doublespending?

So please, explain this censorship resistance. How is this not a vulnerability?

Damn, the more the time passes, the less I understand this thread xD

TL;DR: A brick could land on my head tomorrow, and yet I trust teh fates & walk around with my head bare. I'm also not investing in a system of underground tunnels to protect myself from bricks which might fall out of the sky. Call me a risk-taker, call me a daredevil.

So if someone started a purely classic/xt pool and got more than 5% hashing power...

Again, you can verify your bitcoin on the blockchain all you want, but
Bitcoin is solving only one half of the trust equation, the half I never had trouble with in fiat. My bank never stole any of my money, and, what's more, my CC *lends me money at zero interest, to use, for free Does Bitcoin lend you money?
Oh, and my parents' money was also never stolen by their bank. We're a lucky bunch

As far as auditing federal reserve, I never even audited Bitcoin software, and shit's open source. And BTC goes missing all the time, think Gox. If my bank runs away with my money, gets haxxored, or loses $$$ due to malleability, my account is FDIC insured, so I'm good

With Bitcoin you only have to trust the government and central bank of China.  Chinese miners caved to core. You think they wouldn't cave to their own government? 

Let's look at Adam's poll: 79 percent support the compromise. Totally too small of a samples size, but just for shits and giggles, let's assume that is representative. 75% is NOT consensus, but 79% is?

You gotta trust somebody

If a [trustless] distributed ledger was as useful as some would have you believe, it *wouldn't* be a useful analogy.
The point being, is it really *useful* to burn $1 of electricity & buy a dollar's worth of gear to make a $2 bill? And I don't mean "earn $2," literally make $2 bill, to go into circulation, which you could have printed for pennies.

am i the only one that thinks it won't be contentious?

There's a Russian book about NEP (1920s, after the revolution -- corrupt Soviet privatization program), and, just like today, there were shell corporations which served as facades for whatever_was_really_making_money. Anyhow, in this book they ran a firm called "Horns & Hooves," which had nothing to do with horns or hooves. In the back room, there were two barrels, a length of hose, and a hired boy. The boy's job was to put a full barrel up on the table, connect it with the length of a hose to the empty barrel below, and let the water gravity-siphon into the empty barrel. Once that was done, he simply moved the full barrel onto the table, the [now] empty one to the floor, and repeat the process ad infinitum.
Work.