Starting back in 2011, a chimp could have become a millionaire actually before then the IQ around this place was highest anywhere on the web ... so, no chimps and chumps have only came along later. Just like apple and microsoft stocks, you had to have knowledge more than luck at those levels, people whining about unfairness of coin distribution are, almost by definition, stupider than your average bear. There is a reason the devs left bitcointalk years ago for the promise land of listserv and GitHub. They seem to see bitcointalk as nothing but a den of thieves and scammers at this point. I've never understood why but the chimps and chumps (as you call them) never seem to be able to figure out how to use something as simple as a malling list, and so switching over to that medium tends to leave them behind. Its sad but over the years every decent message board or comment section I've found has eventually been taken over by the chimps and lose its value as the original community slowly bleeds out. We might as well go back to usenet. At least you can *plonk* trolls there. edit: I see there is a group for devs. I don't go on dev lists because I don't dev. Troll slaying is my gig. The purpose of dev lists in some sense is they create a balance between open access and a barrier to the public. Due to the interface only people truly interested in a topic participate, and it is very easy to ignore those who distract a discussion (simple per user block). Because of this they tend to not degenerate in the same manner I've seen many forums/comment sections. Regarding "troll slaying", I don't believe this is effective at all. Take JorgeS as an example, he wasn't slayed but improved his trolling. On this forum he was able to test multiple forms of FUD, see which one were easily refuted and he shouldn't use any more, and which were more complicated to refute or that were hard for newcomers to understand. This thread has started to become a troll testing ground which is why I've been less active. |
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Ignore the naysayers. .. it's not their capital on the line.
I just continue to be floored by the growth in the ecosystem. Two years ago our only options to acquire bitcoin were home mining or sending money to a flacky website in Japan through Dwolla which limited transfer sizes. Today there are plenty of professional options integrated directly with my bank accounts. It feels like a night and day difference. And this growth in infrastructure continues to accelerate, IMHO faster than any startup ecosystem I've seen before. The key is to ignore the naysayers who focus on the price. The price in the near-term is immaterial. Ecosystem and infrastructure are all that matter at this stage. If the naysayers start to focus on bashing the ecosystem and infrastructure build-out (or lack of) I'll gladly listen because that is what matters. |
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Starting back in 2011, a chimp could have become a millionaire actually before then the IQ around this place was highest anywhere on the web ... so, no chimps and chumps have only came along later. Just like apple and microsoft stocks, you had to have knowledge more than luck at those levels, people whining about unfairness of coin distribution are, almost by definition, stupider than your average bear. There is a reason the devs left bitcointalk years ago for the promise land of listserv and GitHub. They seem to see bitcointalk as nothing but a den of thieves and scammers at this point. I've never understood why but the chimps and chumps (as you call them) never seem to be able to figure out how to use something as simple as a malling list, and so switching over to that medium tends to leave them behind. Its sad but over the years every decent message board or comment section I've found has eventually been taken over by the chimps and lose its value as the original community slowly bleeds out. |
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Hey tvbcof, we're going back up.
Well hopefully people haven't been taking your advice for the past year. Unfortunately, I'm sure some did, and they have paid dearly. Shame on you. except i haven't been saying buy for the entire year. shame on you for your buy recommendations on gold and silver. they've performed miserably since 2011 and have been flat at best for the last year. you must be frustrated. Cypher, you've been nothing but bullish over the course of the entire thread's life. In fact, you admitted that this is a place for you to troll to bears. When it comes to PMs, I never said buy (to my recollection). I'm not a salesman, unlike you. I called you out on being wrong on gold vs Bitcoin for an entire year. Hell, more than a year. And although you probably do not recall, what I said about PMs was my shift to them from Bitcoin worked in my favor. Furthermore, I have stated many times that gold and Bitcoin solve different problems. Comparing the two from a functional standpoint doesn't make sense. You, on the other hand, would rather preach the ultimate dominance of Bitcoin from your pulpit. And like I said, this I'm sure has resulted in losses from those hapless people who have taken your advice over the past year. It is your unmitigated arrogance that I take exception to. Considering his call was made in 2011 when bitcoin was still nothing more than a curious token that had zero infrastructure around it, then the call has been wildly successful. The fact bitcoin is off from its peak doesn't change that. Today I buy PMs and bitcoin, but PMs have done nothing since 2011 compared next to bitcoin, that is the comparison point, not the latest peak. |
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... and yet here they are.
The Wall Observer thread has been sufficiently ruined so now like a plague of locusts they move to the next most viewed thread ...
A while ago the wall observer thread was demoted to skimming only for memes & animated gifs, of which there were many funny ones. Now it's lacking even that simple value and I can't understand why anyone's there... |
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How about using your energy to offer a solution. Sticking your finger in the eye of the process is counterproductive. It seems that the most productive people in Bitcoin are offering solutions and getting conversations started. Without Gavin coding and testing the very large blocks we would not be talking about it or working toward a solution.
Believe it or not, but seeing a centralized non-community based hard-fork process as a problem and opening up a discussion on a possible method to resist/hold off that centralized change until it is more community driven, is in fact offering solutions to problems. Here the problem is centralized driven hard-forks, not block-size limit increases. If no one likes or is on-board with the proposal, then there is little point spending energy on it. But if it resonates with some people then maybe it is. Oh, and people have been talking about large blocks since before Gavin took on his maintainer role. |
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Regarding the hard fork/scalability issue: I have never seen so much controversy regarding the way to deal with a problem in bitcoin within the bitcoin community.
You guys saying it's a "Solved problem" or one with an obvious solution?
Controversy IMHO is a good thing, it is the messy process of having a diverse set of individuals be responsible for their own destiny, as opposed to one of the many forms of centralized command and control. What I do not like about the hard fork/scalability issue is bitcoin is not going through this messy process to make the change, but instead is having it's future be decided by a single individual by default. Overall I have been very impressed by Gavin. I think his IBLT solution was brilliant, no change to the underlying protocol yet it incentivizes all miners to include all outstanding mem pool transactions. What's more miners are incentivized to switch to IBLT on their own since it lowers block propagation time in all cases. But his hard fork proposal puts bitcoin on a dangerous auto pilot regarding block sizes. The initial 20x jump to 20MB blocks is fine, but automatically having 10 doublings to 20GB blocks is dangerous. What if we find out there is some scale issue at 128MB? It will take a hard fork to stop the ramp. But what I really don't like about it is there hasn't been any real discussion. Gavin thinks everything will be fine, so it is. I work in tech and know processors really well. Compute scaling has slowed down and will further slow down, there are only so many cores that can be feed data to process. But the real issue is network, network does not double every 2 years. I've been so bothered by it that I've started to contemplate building an affordable AWS node configuration that refuses to propagate the hard fork blocks and open that up. If enough people started such nodes then miners would see that the new blocks propagate more slowly and maybe stick to older blocks out of self interest. Gavin's upgrade cycle requires 80% of blocks over 1000 block period to be new blocks, so if you can get a few pools to opt-out you can block the upgrade. |
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Here's one that will blow Varoufakis tiny mind wide open. http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/are-we-ready-for-companies-that-run-themselves/Which vision will win out? That will depend less on the specific capacities of the technology than on the ability of governments and electorates to grasp what it is and what it means. One way or another, it looks like RoboCorp will be able to look out for itself. In the meantime, we need to get our own house in order. sort your shit out, robocorp is coming  That's a great read, thanks. Sometimes I wonder if Satoshi's most impactful and valuable invention might turn out to be the invention of the first DAC. Bitcoin as money is a mechanism to regain what we lost and help return to the principles of sound money that we had under the gold standard (albeit with a much better payment function). But the invention of the first DAC enables entire new concepts that we've never had before, and can help disintermediate functions for society that have always required government or middle men before. This has potential we don't understand yet, and will probably take a long time to develop, but will be revolutionary. |
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Yeah, what a piece of shit, I hope he chokes on a Gyro and I hope Greece goes down in flames. Greece doesn't have the balls work ethic that Iceland or Switzerland have. They will sell out their people and lands elect more corrupt socialists and demand more free shit funded by wealth confiscation. There, I fixed it for you. Median age in Greece is over 43 years old. Every young person with any kind of talent or ability has fled. It's a country full of ageing people who are desperately trying to believe that when they get too old to work they'll be able to pay the younger generation that doesn't exist to take care of them with the money they won't have. One of my college friends of Greece descent moved to Greece several years ago at the age of 33(ish) to work in his wife's father's business. This was after going through law school and working for several years in the US. He said no one in his office would believe him when he told them this was not his first job, because in Greece no one works below 30 and everyone retires by 50/55, and this is so ingrained in Greek society that no one could accept it was possible he had a full career in his 20s. I don't wish ill on anyone, but such a zero work ethic society can never survive. I believe my friend was incorrect though and many Greeks do work in their 20s, its just that all the productive ones leave Greece and apply their productivity in another country. |
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Related to the Greed discussion earlier. Former CEO of Citibank personally invested in Coinbase's latest $75M raise. http://dcmagnates.com/coinbase-secures-record-75-million-investment-led-by-dfj/Slowly but surely Bitcoin is creeping into the halls of those in power. Unlike with most new constructs where most of us are blocked by regulation from participating since we are not "accredited investors", with Bitcoin we can invest directly and in many cases front run wall street. |
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So what makes you so confident in Bitcoin. There are new risks, that could change what I have believed to be the inevitable success of Bitcoin over the last 4 years. That is mainly SideChains could destroy Bitcoin as we know it, and then there is a deluge of coins that could hit the market if a particular ETF is outright rejected.
The serious question being how can you know how the Bitcoin protocol doesn't fall victim to political manipulation? I am not certain Bitcoin will be successful. But if it does ultimately succeed, then I want to own as many of them as possible. Therefore, I like low prices. ok I consider my self an outsider to Bitcoin, and what I see happening isn't all that pity. I hope these cheep coins attract the new investors and coins are distributing, my feeling is most of them are not investing in Bitcoins (as in BTC) but rather technologies to change or manipulate it, in the case of BlockStream, it's more about politics and public relations, even the core developers there are looking to earn a salary without exposure to risk, I doubt they are buying these lows, and suspect they're counting on salaries paid by those who will profits by changing the protocol. Rather than risking it all -burning the ships so to speak and going all in on Bitcoin and building on the existing foundation, they are actively finding ways to exploits it, and calling it a contribution. I still think SCs could have value if done correctly, but agree now that there are issues with the current approach. As a thought experiment, what happens if BlockStream releases and promotes a hard fork to the main bitcoind core? But not everyone agrees with that hard fork? Maybe 50% just go blindly with updates, but a vocal 25% fundamentally disagree. Do we end up with a true fork and two separate bitcoins? Does one side give in and be forced to go with the majority? Does BS decided to hold back until there is super majority support? Does the bitcoin project descend into chaos and for the rest of our lives we have to live with people telling us that bitcoin "didn't work because money can only be defined by the government"? Satoshi's P2P mechanism was designed to require strong majority support for changes, i.e. a true incarnation of the people's money. Can the people truly decide and select their path, or does a small group of insiders continue to make decisions for the majority. |
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...
The tin foil hat reason is central banks like crushing market participants from time to time, it demonstrates their power and keeps everyone in check. Case in point Bear Sterns. In 2008 all the top 5 investment banks required implicit FED backing. The FED selected BS to make an example and told the market that they were no longer going to backstop BS, within minutes the run on the bank caused a default. This could have happened to any of the other IBs, GS was not selected because they have a standing revolving door with the FED. The FED wiped out BS to demonstrate their power. Why do you think everyone now just follows the FED blindly.
I heard that Bear Sterns was selected because they didn't cough up some bucks years earlier during the LTCM derivatives implosion where the others did. Payback is a bitch. For a very brief period early in my career I worked in IT for a major bank and met a lot of bankers at that time. The bankers I met at Bear Sterns always seemed to speak as if they were outsiders to the rest of the financial industry, as if they were the scrappy upstarts to the established elite, while those at Goldman always seemed to speak as if they were part of the inside club. It was subtle but noticeable. Our ruling nobility obviously had to crush them. |
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i should've put up the 1 min chart:
...
That's a fantastic chart. What made SNB take back their decision on continuing 1.20 Cap on EUR/CHF? The non-tin foil hat reason is the CHF/USD pair was no longer a concern. The problem for the SNB was when the EUR was strong plus the CNF being strong on top of that raised the CHF/USD pair to a level that made the Swiss noncompetitive. Now that the EUR has fallen against the Dollar, there was no need to artificially hold down the CHF. The tin foil hat reason is central banks like crushing market participants from time to time, it demonstrates their power and keeps everyone in check. Case in point Bear Sterns. In 2008 all the top 5 investment banks required implicit FED backing. The FED selected BS to make an example and told the market that they were no longer going to backstop BS, within minutes the run on the bank caused a default. This could have happened to any of the other IBs, GS was not selected because they have a standing revolving door with the FED. The FED wiped out BS to demonstrate their power. Why do you think everyone now just follows the FED blindly. |
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The defense outright accused Mark Karpeles of being DPR and presented evidence that the Government believed he was DPR until Mark gave them Ross's name in return for immunity.  What do you think? http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2skgcr/i_was_at_the_ross_ulbricht_silk_road_trial_day_3/http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2sjuvu/defense_in_silk_road_trial_arguing_mark_karpeles/Ulbricht’s lead attorney, Joshua Dratel, said that Karpeles was the man pulling the strings behind Silk Road from 2011 until 2013, and that his associate Ashley Barr, a Canadian computer scientist, became the famously libertarian voice of Dread Pirate Roberts.
“Lots of little things added up to [Karpeles],” Der-Yeghiayan testified.
In a meeting with other Homeland Security agents, Der-Yeghiayan recalled saying that “we have built up quite a large amount of information that leads to this.”
Der-Yeghiayan, however, was convinced that the investigation still had further to go before making an arrest and taking Karpeles to court. He advised other law enforcement agents against speaking to Karpeles about Silk Road, so as to not tip him off.
At the time, there were investigations into several potential crimes that Karpeles had committed.
Instead, other Homeland Security investigations into Karpeles, for separate and related crimes, led investigators to seize $2 million from Karpeles in May 2013, thus tipping Karpeles off that he was on the radar of the United States government.
Although he was “upset” about the premature law enforcement contact, Der-Yeghiayan said he continued his investigation into Karpeles.
“You believed him to be the mastermind behind Silk Road, keeping it secure and operating?” Ulbricht defense attorney Dratel asked Der-Yeghiayan.
“I did,” Der-Yeghiayan testified.
As the argument was unveiled, Ulbricht let out a rare beaming smile and turned to his parents. They nodded at one another, marking the most electric moment in the trial so far.
Der-Yeghiayan testified that his own investigation had found that Mutum Sigilum, a Karpeles holding company, had registered silkroadmarket.org as a means to publicize the site further.
The Homeland Security agent’s theory was that Karpeles, as owner of Mt. Gox, held an enormous amount of Bitcoin. He used Silk Road to leverage that price and raise it, which it did by several hundred times over during the course of Silk Road’s lifespan. Bitcoin was worth around $2 at Silk Road's launch and hit as high as $290 by 2013.
In the summer of 2013, a separate Baltimore-based Homeland Security investigation into Karpeles went to meet with the Karpeles's lawyers, explicitly against Der-Yeghiayan’s wishes. At this meeting, Karpeles’s lawyers brought up Silk Road and said that Karpeles was willing to give up the person he thought to be running Silk Road in order to gain immunity from other charges pending against him.
Der-Yeghiayan said he was “upset” about the contact and says he wrote a lengthy memo about the problems in the investigation.
Dratel says that it was only after this happened that Ulbricht was lured back into Silk Road, an entity he allegedly left behind two years prior, in order to be the “fall guy” who would ultimately take the charges that could leave him in prison for life.
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Cypher (or someone who feels like they can properly explain it): can you please ELI5 why sidechains will break the incentive mechanism? I haven't been able to follow this thread as well as I used to.
I think (cypher can correct me) its because taking transactions off (main)chain reduces fee-based income for miners. When the block reward dwindles after several halving that is their only incentive to mine. If they have no incentive, then they will not mine, the network will become more vulnerable. eh ok, there must be some way to count off chain transactions and then credit the miners appropriately. I'm not saying this would be a trivial change, but this scenario is probably 10 years away minimum and I find it fairly difficult to believe that there is no way to get around this between now and then. How does it work with merge-mining? If a main-chain has 90 petahash, then 2 sidechains are started, both merge-mined with the MC, do they all get 90PH security or 30PH each? If sidechains were forced by design to merge mine with the mainchain then: 1) each sidechain is protected by their own hashing independently and 2) the mainchain would be protected by it's own hashing plus the sum of hashing on every sidechain. I don't know how you implement that, but it seems reasonable. |
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So the world's safe haven currency (CHF) just had a 30% move in minutes. The volatility argument against bitcoin just flew out the window.
If the 'manipulator' stops, that's what you get. The real problem for the SNB now is that in order to create the peg in the first place and hold the CNF at an artificially depressed value (compared to market conditions) the SNB had to purchase significant EUR holdings in order to fight market demand. Now the SNB has to unwind these EUR holdings, but to do so will exacerbate the original condition they were trying to hold back, i.e. they now have to unwind and sell those EUR holdings which will cause further upward pressure on the CNF. This is how all of what I'd call "artificial pegs" end. Not only do they fail, but after they fail all the manipulation now goes in the opposite direction. Same is true for other current currency manipulations (i.e. China). The only method a peg can work is if there is a "fixed" quantity controlled on both sides of the peg and the market can trade back and forth across that freely. A good example was the US gold standard that lasted for a period of time. In it the US fixed an amount of gold per dollar, to do so it had to maintain the gold:dollar reserve ratio by only issuing dollars in relation to the gold it held. i.e. to release a new dollar required acquiring the same amount of gold. Inevitably governments fail at this (such as FDR's massive default), but it is only because governments always end up releasing more dollars than they have reserves for because it is free and easy, but market reality always catches up. The other way pegs fail is when an entity does not control the supply on both sides. A peg where both sides are fixed in quantity or only go up/down in fixed relation to each other can work. |
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In one month or two, Russia will face a huge wave of defaults triggered by low oil price, hyper-inflation and depleting USD reserves. First will be their oil companies, then banks and finally the sovereign debts.
The contagion will drag at least the Euro zone.
I didn't think that anything serves as a better hedge than Gold and bitcoin.
CNBC interview yesterday also mentioned this point of view.
In this big picture, it is temping to use bitcoin not only as an investment tool but also as a hedge towards possible Russian debt crisis.
In history, many notorious Black Fridays were triggered by Russian. Just cannot ignore this risk.
Whether it is this, or something else, the only thing we "know" for sure is in the next crisis the FED will print several trillion dollars to bail everyone out. That is a fact. |
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I've decided that if we $100, give or take $10 bucks, I will capitalize on the opportunity and purchase 20 to 30 bitcoins. In the meantime, I'm just holding. What are other people planning on doing or thinking? This would be a GREAT deal and greatly lower my "break even" number.
i bought bitcoin today to send to trading account. if goes to 100 then i probably buy more then. all my mined coins staying in storage until around .02 then i probably might dump and try shorting. Don't worry, I'll be there to buy at .02 |
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I think deterministic signatures are much more important than constant-time signatures (there's been a non-trivial amount of funds lost due to the repeat k-value problem but I doubt a single satoshi has ever been lost due to a genuine side-channel attack). Someone like gmaxwell could comment better on the practical risks here…
There never has been a single 1e-8 btc lost due to reused/bad K ... in a competent implementation. I am completely shocked that you of all people are making this claim gmaxwell. Reusing a K value is against the DSA signing algorithm's specifications. Reusing a K value is an incompetent implementation by definition. There have been multiple instances where BTC were lost because bitcoin client software reused the same K value for different signatures on the same address. If you do so you're guaranteed to find that address emptied fairly quickly, based on past instances it seems there there network monitors actively watching for this exact situation. |
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