The art of pumping, of course.  Actually, limiting the pump is a great time: you dump slowly on fresh blood streaming in  The best part of the game !  When you have a big reserve of cash and a big reserve of coins, you can steer this perfectly.  When you see people start to cash out, you buy with cash and pump the price, so that their FOMO stops them from cashing out.  When you see that there's a buying frenzy by FOMO that would pump too hard and make people take benefit, crumbling the pyramid, you dump on them.
People need to have the feeling that now and then, the market stabilizes, but that "the moon" is near.

If you do it right, you end up converting your stash of coins, by dumping on FOMO newcomers, into a huge pile of cash, which you need to use partially some times, to counter the feeling of crashing.  Small "corrections" you can allow for, that gives confidence to analysts that the price is "consolidating" ; you need enough cash to be able to counter any attempt at "taking benefits".

I think they are doing it like true masters.

When do you stop ?  When your stash of coins is exhausted

Yes, I agree, but I'm convinced that they do have greater fools flooding in now.  Much, much less than the numbers would let you believe (that is the centralized market manipulation), but they are flooding in nevertheless.  Otherwise, their game would be useless.  These games are never useless.  The first players always make a lot of money, and the mass of fools, well, gets fooled.

Why don't you stick to fiat ?  Much better as a currency.
And, BTW, bitcoin has been the market leader as for now in ransomware.  And in dark markets.  So if this is bad publicity for monero, it is even more bad publicity for  bitcoin, no ?  Except that bitcoin is dangerous to be used that way, you need to trust tumblers...

Monero is one of the only coins having a closed form of economy.  Make ransomware, force people to pay in monero, buy drugs on dark market with it ; dark markets selling it to people needing it to pay ransomware.  

Note how close this is to fiat: states force people to pay taxes in fiat, people needing to obtain fiat, states buying "drugs and prostitutes" with it.  Real currency value.

This is a typical niche application of crypto.  Fiat can not do that.  I'm not saying it is the only niche.  I'm not saying it is a "moral" niche (haha, morality and trustlessness, big joke).  This KIND of niche is the true economic value of crypto.


*I* 'm the one pointing out that crypto is useless where fiat can go, and can only serve niche applications such as the one I'm pointing at.  YOU're the one shouting for "legal crypto adoption" which is totally crazy: as you say yourself, fiat proved itself, crypto not.

All non-niche crypto is just a greater-fool game.

Yes.  But if the only brand you care about is Toyota, you'll buy the car with the digital speedometer.  

If tomorrow, segwit is activated, do you really think that people are going to dump all their bitcoin in the market because they preferred BU, and run to the nearest altcoin ?  Nope.  They'll cope with it, because there's nothing else that's called "bitcoin".

So if miners, and miners only, decide to switch to segwit, and they do this with 60% of hash rate, then segwit will be.  And all BU nodes will upgrade to segwit, or they will be useless.  And people will continue using "bitcoin" as it is now.

Because there's no other bitcoin.

Even if 80% of non-mining nodes is running BU.  They'll switch quickly.  Or have disfunctional wallets.

You mean, the people with nodes, like me

I weight for 1/4000 in the "voting", but I can really assure you that my weight is NOT 1/4000 of the market cap
Even if you square that number, you're far off.  I only have bitcoin if I need something to buy with it.  Rarely.

Yes, I think you need to find some excuse why bitcoin is wasting 400 million dollars a year

Even ETC wasn't attacked seriously when it split off ETH as a small minority chain.  No major altcoin ever suffered a serious block chain break down.  Not more than bitcoin in the past, when it was much smaller than those altcoins are right now.

And no, nodes don't count for shit in "maintaining the security of the network" in a proof of work system (PoS is different...)

Keep telling yourself that only bitcoin is secure, and that you need to waste 400 million dollars a year to maintain essentially 10 miners serving the bitcoin block chain, because it is the nodes on the PC of amateurs like me that "maintain the security".  And then ponder why proof of work would actually be needed, if nodes maintain the security of the network.  And then ponder why altcoins, much bigger than bitcoin a few years ago, would fail when bitcoin didn't.

And then ask yourself honestly if the story makes sense.

Look, the users will value it if it is called bitcoin.  You see, if you ABSOLUTELY want to ride a Toyota, and the ONLY car Toyota is making, is one with a digital speedometer, while you really want an analogue speedometer, you have the choice between not buying a Toyota, or buying their car with a digital speedometer.  But as long as there is no competition, Toyota will force the digital speedometer onto you.  There's no way you can force them to make cars with analogue speedometers, if digital speedometers are much more lucrative to Toyota.

These empty arguments don't bring in anything.  Whether I think 2 dimensional, fractal, super-real or on a differential manifold doesn't matter I would think

I think you are blind to what bitcoin really is or became, and still live in the dream of many, many small mining nodes.

Right now, bitcoin is an affair of 5 majority miners, and 10 miners if you want very large majority.  There are 5 "facebook servers" on bitcoin, essentially.

The number of proxy servers for these 5 facebook servers doesn't matter for the content they put at disposal, that's my point.

So they are miners then.  Not non-mining nodes.  You start to get it.  And BTW, they just introduced an altcoin with a hard fork.

And nobody NEEDS that node to forward it.  You can get it directly from one of the miners.

Of course, if nobody is needing the bloc all together, the coin is worthless.  But there is no alternative chain where the coin isn't worthless.   So a USER can decide that he doesn't want this bloc chain, that he doesn't want these coins (and lose everything he has on it).  Or he can decide that he will use the only chain in existence.  But no non-mining node can stop a USER from having that block chain, use his wallet and send out transactions: directly to a miner node if necessary.   A crypto currency is a relationship between miners, making block chain and selling it to users, paying for it in the market.  What non mining nodes may say about this block chain, doesn't really matter.  Of course, what users are wanting to pay for it, does, but they can only use the chain or the chains made by the miners, or decide not to use the coin at all. 

If no user values the coins in the market, the miners are making a worthless chain.  But they make this one and no other one in any case.  And if users want to value coins in the market, they don't need your node forwarding the blocs, they get them directly from the factory (the miners).

So what is your non-forwarding node going to do about that ?

Taxes are also there being fuck heads to strong arm your money.

That's kind of ridiculous, indeed.  Fees drop like a stone when you relieve market pressure, much much earlier than when orphaning rate through network propagation becomes a worry for miners.  It can only happen when network propagation times start to be of the order of the bloc times, at which point, the network becomes totally useless, because if you saturate the HIGH SPEED links between miner pools with blocs, no normal user can ever hope to download the bloc chain.

If you get orphaning because propagation delays between miners is of the order of 10 minutes to get ONE BLOC through, you can forget downloading the whole chain on your PC with a lesser link through a P2P network.

Simply ridiculous.  By the time his equilibrium is reached, nobody has a copy of the bloc chain any more except for the miners with their 100 GB/s links between them.  And they won't have any transactions to put in their blocs.

This is not a PoW system any more, but a Proof of network link.

Well, if everybody is using the default strategy to start mining on the longest chain from the moment of reception, then the systemic orphaning rate IS proportional to the propagation delay, because it is ONLY during this time that a miner might not be aware of a new bloc, finding an old bloc, and propagate it too, making his bloc an orphaned one.

This can be different if people have different strategies, such as selfish mining.

I personally don't believe that the selfish mining strategy makes sense.  It makes sense if you also have influence over network propagation delay, and if there is a race condition between your selfish mined bloc and the public bloc, but if every miner is directly connected with a link with EVERY other miner of significance (which is, I think, a mutually optimal design: full mesh between miners of significance), then the selfish mining strategy can't work: you ONLY know that you have to publish your secret chain when you *received* a good bloc from the others, but at that point, ALL OTHERS received it too, and you will be too late with your chain.

"flooding other nodes" doesn't make sense, because of course, you have parallel equipment to each of your co miners' links and the only thing you do is flooding your own gateway, not impeding other gateways from other miners to your peer.

Selfish mining only makes sense in a node network with variable propagation, but that is not the mutually optimal mining configuration, which is direct links between all pools of significance (say, 10, that makes 90 links).

BTW, of course, within the group of 10, they could collude and decide to keep the bloc chain they've made, secret for half an hour or so.  Which is the principle of selfish mining.   But I don't see the point.   They could just systematically orphan all blocks they receive from the outside network too, much easier.

 

My point is: in this world, only very few understand the kind of subtleties you are addressing.  And those that understand it, knew already that BU was not going to happen - maybe not for the same reasons than your analysis, but there are many reasons why BU is not going to happen as long as bitcoin has its brand name of first mover.  There are hundreds of reasons.  So your sophisticated extra reason, only comprehensible for a very small fraction of people, and a still smaller fraction of influencial people voting in the market, could not have any significant market influence.

BU is not going to happen, but not because it is erroneous.  Your debunking of DASH didn't stop the market from appreciating it.  Markets don't follow rational arguments full of maths, but cheap propaganda.  Your propaganda is of bad quality, sorry 

Monero has no block limits.  Yes, the transactions are bigger in bytes ( I think 3 or 4 times bigger), but there's no hard limit. Blocks adapt.  Only limited by network capacity and disk size, so following Moore's law.

Problem with monero is that it is not very user friendly.  But it doesn't have built-in capacity limits.

How can that be if all blocs are now 1 MB ?  How can there be strategies in place with orphaning blocs with sizes you do not like if they are all equal to the maximum size ?

You *really* believe that ?  
First of all, nobody believes really that BU will activate, no ?  Of course 1 MB blocs are with us for ever, and BU only serves to keep Segwit away.  No miner in his right mind would push BU for real.  So I don't see how your analysis of why BU would be bad for miners, would have the slightest bit of influence, as BU won't happen.  Miners never intended that. They always knew it was bad for them. The god-given present of 1MB blocks, put in for reason or by clumsy mistake, is not going to be wasted.

You also see this, BTW, because in your examples you talk about network delay effects.  But as I pointed out, these only start making an effect on mining if the network delays become not negligible to the mining time taken to obtain a bloc.  We are talking about hundreds of GB blocs here, because we are talking about average bloc finding times of ten minutes.  If you have several GB/s links (which, as a miner, is perfectly affordable), you'd need to make spam blocs of tens or hundreds of GB before your network delay effects start playing a role.  That's not reasonable. 

So before unlimited blocs start making the slightest bit of advantage for a cartel of miners, they would have lost out because of the low fees that a relaxed fee market would bring. 

No, miners like small blocs with hard limits.  They are not going to throw away that great gift from Satoshi.

No, if there is a BU fork, there won't be any orphaning, because you then have two chains.  Non-BU miners will not mine upon BU blocks, and BU miners having majority will build more and more on the stronger BU chain, if they keep this majority.  You simply have two chains, with different miners (the BU miners on one chain, and the non-BU miners on the other one: two coins).

There is no more orphaning between Bitcoin-BU and Bitcoin-SW than there is orphaning between, say, namecoin and bitcoin.