Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud)

[VeritasSapere]

50% of the hashrate strongly against BIP101. It is time to give up. This is not happening.

More then seventy five percent of the hashrate supports a blocksize increase, read the writing on the wall.

I do hope that some of you will realize one day that these ad hominem attacks are irrelevant, unless you can prove these accusations you are not doing your self any favors by focusing your energy on such silly attacks. I think that increasing the blocksize is what will lead to the most decentralization and financial freedom over the long run compared to other alternatives, I will continue to believe this as long as this remains the conclusion of my own independent reasoning, regardless of what the majority or the technical authority believes, I will vote and speak according to my own conscience.

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[VeritasSapere]

In your view, do you think it's possible/probable that Gavin and Hearn have been compromised in some way, working for a different agenda than that which they started out with?

Andresen hasn't changed at all. It's been obvious from the beginning that his primary motivation is power, money, control and then some more power. Everything he's done from the media spotlight to centralizing control of Bitcoin in the hands of the foundation has been aimed at that. Refuse to agree with him and prepare to be attacked. I guess no one can remember his behavior during the BIP16/17 arguments. He's a sad little man that controlled Bitcoin's direction for too long.

That's my impression too, that he has some serious daddy issues (strong belief in authority, overwhelming desire for approval from perceived authority/father figures). Yet, when Satoshi left, he said that "it's in good hands with Gavin and the others". A severe error in judgment, or subsequent co-opting by perceived authority figures (e.g. CIA)?

The same question (of agenda/motivation) applies to Mike Hearn, who obviously is also a very strong believer in "authority", and seems to have no problem whatsoever with the banksters and their centralized debt-based money mega-scam.

I think tvbcof has a fascinating hypothesis about this:

There is a major hole in your ad hominem and conspiracy theory. Gavin willfully gave up his power in Core out of principle to further distribute development.

Great leaders do not desire power. He gave up his leadership position in Core out of principle only to have Core turn against him to disallow the changes he wanted to implement. This reminds me of the story of Cincinatius, who was a roman dictator who also freely laid down his power, this should be considered admirable.

I should not have even responded to such a silly post, however that was to glaring of a fault in your reasoning not to point out.

[Carlton Banks]

Gavin Andresen gave up his role as lead dev at Bitcoin Core to take a role as Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which had nothing to do with decentralising development at all, and everything to do with centralising Bitcoin public relations. So, you're wrong Veritas Sapere.

[QuestionAuthority]

In your view, do you think it's possible/probable that Gavin and Hearn have been compromised in some way, working for a different agenda than that which they started out with?

Andresen hasn't changed at all. It's been obvious from the beginning that his primary motivation is power, money, control and then some more power. Everything he's done from the media spotlight to centralizing control of Bitcoin in the hands of the foundation has been aimed at that. Refuse to agree with him and prepare to be attacked. I guess no one can remember his behavior during the BIP16/17 arguments. He's a sad little man that controlled Bitcoin's direction for too long.

That's my impression too, that he has some serious daddy issues (strong belief in authority, overwhelming desire for approval from perceived authority/father figures). Yet, when Satoshi left, he said that "it's in good hands with Gavin and the others". A severe error in judgment, or subsequent co-opting by perceived authority figures (e.g. CIA)?

The same question (of agenda/motivation) applies to Mike Hearn, who obviously is also a very strong believer in "authority", and seems to have no problem whatsoever with the banksters and their centralized debt-based money mega-scam.

I think tvbcof has a fascinating hypothesis about this:

I actively entertain the hypothesis that Hearn (and now Andresen to some extent) are associated with the shadowy Conformal entity who has their own clean-slate implementation of the Bitcoin protocol 'btcd'.  For a few months they were pushing pretty hard to have Bitcoin shift over to their implementation with the argument that it is 'better' in some ways (and I personally don't doubt that it is.)  'justusranvier' was most active in pushing it, but he seems to have disappeared from this forum.

If this hypothesis is basically valid then it would make a lot of sense for someone in Hearn's position to try to do as much damage to the 'satoshi-based' protocol support structures as possible on his way out the door.

Interesting... You may have noticed how, of the early/core developers, the most brown-nosing of perceived authority appear to be Hearn and Gavin... i.e. they are the most "conformal". These people cannot get their heads (or noses) out of the fatherly figure of the state, which cryptographic decentralization protocols like Bitcoin have emerged precisely to render technologically obsolete and irrelevant. Do you have a more developed theory or theoretical scenario of your hypothesis?

tvbcof is right of course. I said years ago that Andresen was being controlled and controlling Bitcoin for a private parties interest and to further his own career. I was attacked back then because everyone on this forum considered Andresen to be the reincarnation of the Christ child. If you look at the founding membership of TBF you can easily see the actors attempting to control Bitcoin and the associated windfall of this new technology. I said so many things against Andresen, Pirate@40, Clipse, Goat, LukeJr, Tycho, Nefario and others that I eventually ditched my nick and came back as QA. Bitcoin is about money. Most people can rationalize supporting the devil himself if the devil is making them money. Morality and what's true and right take second place to lining ones pocket. All of the people I slammed, at some point, were either perceived as making the group money or actually making the group money.

[VeritasSapere]

Gavin Andresen gave up his role as lead dev at Bitcoin Core to take a role as Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which had nothing to do with decentralising development at all, and everything to do with centralising Bitcoin public relations. So, you're wrong Veritas Sapere.

He gave up control over the Bitcoin Core code, I am not wrong about this.

I am not even going to debate such accusations like Gavin and Mike are working for the CIA, even if that was true. You do not have the evidence, so even discussing this is ad hominem and not productive for constructive discussion, you are attacking these people without proper grounds instead of actually countering their arguments. I could have easily started attacking Core on the same grounds but I have not because I realized that this would not have achieved anything.

[Most]

Maybe he doesn't have that much money or risk tolerance.

Still, you should bet at least .01 BTC if you are that confident
you are right.  Think of it as a gentlemen's multisig bet

[babo]

Maybe he doesn't have that much money or risk tolerance.

Still, you should bet at least .01 BTC if you are that confident
you are right.  Think of it as a gentlemen's multisig bet

agree

[brg444]

Gavin Andresen gave up his role as lead dev at Bitcoin Core to take a role as Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which had nothing to do with decentralising development at all, and everything to do with centralising Bitcoin public relations. So, you're wrong Veritas Sapere.

He gave up control over the Bitcoin Core code, I am not wrong about this.

I am not even going to debate such accusations like Gavin and Mike are working for the CIA, even if that was true. You do not have the evidence, so even discussing this is ad hominem and not productive for constructive discussion, you are attacking these people without proper grounds instead of actually countering their arguments. I could have easily started attacking Core on the same grounds but I have not because I realized that this would not have achieved anything.

[brg444]

There is a major hole in your ad hominem and conspiracy theory. Gavin willfully gave up his power in Core out of principle to further distribute development.

Great leaders do not desire power. He gave up his leadership position in Core out of principle only to have Core turn against him to disallow the changes he wanted to implement. This reminds me of the story of Cincinatius, who was a roman dictator who also freely laid down his power, this should be considered admirable.

I should not have even responded to such a silly post, however that was to glaring of a fault in your reasoning not to point out.

He didn't give up anything, he never had "control" over the Bitcoin Core code. No one does.

In practice Wladimir had been the actual maintainer of the repo even before Gavin's announcement.

The announcement stemmed from Gavin's inactivity in terms of contributing code & ideas, nothing more. He more or less realized the project & state of the technology was now out of his league.

[VeritasSapere]

There is a major hole in your ad hominem and conspiracy theory. Gavin willfully gave up his power in Core out of principle to further distribute development.

Great leaders do not desire power. He gave up his leadership position in Core out of principle only to have Core turn against him to disallow the changes he wanted to implement. This reminds me of the story of Cincinatius, who was a roman dictator who also freely laid down his power, this should be considered admirable.

I should not have even responded to such a silly post, however that was to glaring of a fault in your reasoning not to point out.

He didn't give up anything, he never had "control" over the Bitcoin Core code. No one does.

In practice Wladimir had been the actual maintainer of the repo even before Gavin's announcement.

The announcement stemmed from Gavin's inactivity in terms of contributing code & ideas, nothing more. He more or less realized the project & state of the technology was now out of his league.

He gave control over to Wladimir, who is now the maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repo, before that Gavin was the maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repository. I can agree that ideally and theoretically no one can or should be able to control Bitcoin the protocol. However the Bitcoin Core repository can be controlled by a single person, presently Wladimir is the person who has the final say over what is merged into the code of Bitcoin Core. This gives him a position of great influence considering that Core is still considered to be the "reference client" for many people. In political thought influence is a definite form of power, this is the power that I think should become more distributed and decentralized, I also think that this is inline with the original ethos of Bitcoin.

[brg444]

There is a major hole in your ad hominem and conspiracy theory. Gavin willfully gave up his power in Core out of principle to further distribute development.

Great leaders do not desire power. He gave up his leadership position in Core out of principle only to have Core turn against him to disallow the changes he wanted to implement. This reminds me of the story of Cincinatius, who was a roman dictator who also freely laid down his power, this should be considered admirable.

I should not have even responded to such a silly post, however that was to glaring of a fault in your reasoning not to point out.

He didn't give up anything, he never had "control" over the Bitcoin Core code. No one does.

In practice Wladimir had been the actual maintainer of the repo even before Gavin's announcement.

The announcement stemmed from Gavin's inactivity in terms of contributing code & ideas, nothing more. He more or less realized the project & state of the technology was now out of his league.

He gave control over to Wladimir, who is now the maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repo, before that Gavin was the maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repository. I can agree that ideally and theoretically no one can or should be able to control Bitcoin the protocol. However the Bitcoin Core repository can be controlled by a single person, presently Wladimir is the person who has the final say over what is merged into the code of Bitcoin Core. This gives him a position of great influence considering that Core is still considered to be the "reference client" for many people. In political thought influence is a definite form of power, this is the power that I think should become more distributed and decentralized, I also think that this is inline with the original ethos of Bitcoin.

Every time your choose to ignore facts to support your biased position you reinforce your status as disingenuous shill.

UPDATE (8th April 15:18 GMT): Bitcoin's new lead developer Wladimir van der Laan tells CoinDesk via email he was "surprised" to be offered the role and hadn't expected Gavin Andresen to step down:

"I had noticed that Gavin had been much less active in the Github project lately, but I did not expect him to step down as lead developer. But it makes sense, there is a lot more theoretical work with regard to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general making it a full-time job just to keep up with that (and giving talks, travelling, and such). On the other hand, I have been effectively the maintainer of the code for quite a while. In practice nothing changes."

http://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-steps-bitcoins-lead-developer/

As for the notion of repo maintainer and its role in open-source development once again you are oblivious to reality given your outright ignorance of technical aspects in general.

[Zarathustra]

I'm curious why Charlie Lee has not been able to knock some sense into Brian Armstrong.

Pointy Headed CEOs do not listen to their Dilberts and Wallys (IE coders/engineers).

awsedrr

He wants coffee buyers to use... litecoin?


freetrade

Yep. I'd say that is exactly what he wants.

Litecoin is essentially a bet that Bitcoin won't scale.

If Bitcoin fails to scale, Litecoin use rockets. I'm assuming CL has a big chunk of LTC, and even if not, I'm sure he'd like to see his baby grow. Not judging, just seems like the obvious rationale.


Zaromet

We did see that last time we had price spike and we had full blocks and even fees of 0,4$ didn't work to get you in a block for hours. LTC blocks got big... Imagen what happens when that process takes even longer...

[brg444]

I'm curious why Charlie Lee has not been able to knock some sense into Brian Armstrong.

Pointy Headed CEOs do not listen to their Dilberts and Wallys (IE coders/engineers).

derp

Indeed, using Litecoin for coffee purchases sounds like a fantastic solution to me until we get LN. 

[tvbcof]

...
Litecoin is essentially a bet that Bitcoin won't scale.

If Bitcoin fails to scale, Litecoin use rockets. I'm assuming CL has a big chunk of LTC, and even if not, I'm sure he'd like to see his baby grow. Not judging, just seems like the obvious rationale.
...

Litecoin has basically nothing to do with scaling.  The chain structure is nearly identical.  Seems that Litecoin was more focused on dealing with centralization problems since it's initial focus was to (try to) employ a CPU-friendly POW algo.  By the time Litecoin was started, the 'arms race' for mining had moved to GPU and the ill-effects were already making themselves known.  Other than that and a tweak to the cycle frequency it seemed to me that Litecoin was a pretty close knock-off.

I've little reason to believe other than that C. Lee was being truthful when he claimed that he did Litecoin mainly as an exercise to teach himself how Bitcoin worked.  (Some guys have more rigorous definitions of the term 'understand' than do others.)

It seemed Litecoin tried to 'get serious' about scaling, but that happened mainly under Toganami's management and after Lee moved on.

*Note:  I never owned any Litecoin and never studied it closely.  I liked the algo ideas, at least, but not enough to capture my attention in part because I found the cycle time increase to be a regression.  My statements above are not to be taken as 'fact'.  Just my interpretation based on tid-bits I ran across over the years.

[Carlton Banks]

Gavin Andresen gave up his role as lead dev at Bitcoin Core to take a role as Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which had nothing to do with decentralising development at all, and everything to do with centralising Bitcoin public relations. So, you're wrong Veritas Sapere.

He gave up control over the Bitcoin Core code, I am not wrong about this.

I am not even going to debate such accusations like Gavin and Mike are working for the CIA, even if that was true. You do not have the evidence, so even discussing this is ad hominem and not productive for constructive discussion, you are attacking these people without proper grounds instead of actually countering their arguments. I could have easily started attacking Core on the same grounds but I have not because I realized that this would not have achieved anything.

What on earth are you talking about? Your reply needs to make sense in context in order for it to qualify as a reply

[Zarathustra]

The Great Zerg nailed it:

One response to the idea of a "star blockchain, with sidechains and overlays around it?" is yes but Bitcoin does not have to be and should not be the smallest, slowest chain. What bitcoin HAS going for it is adoption. What it doesn't have is fancy features.

So some other sidechain can be the 1MB or 100KB setttlement network between banks.

[hdbuck]

Gavin Andresen gave up his role as lead dev at Bitcoin Core to take a role as Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which had nothing to do with decentralising development at all, and everything to do with centralising Bitcoin public relations. So, you're wrong Veritas Sapere.

Imho the whole problem lies in the belief that bitcoin (itself and as is) is somehow dependent of a dev community to sustain it (patch it).

To me bitcoin works perfectly as expected, as a The Trust Index, and regardless of pocket money attributes.

I think the bitcoin project really lift off with satoshi's "hornet's nest" declaration and do not need any further 'improvement', beside bug adjustments. (He then brightly disappeared, removing himself as the only point of failure, and gavin meets with CIA.)

All the previous BIPs attempts failed, and they were not about such a controversial (and there is a reason for that) parameter as the block size.

So I am open to 'on-top' innovations, that do not curb bitcoin's technology to fit their agenda. Gifted devs have an avenue to come up with awesome stuff, getting rightfully rewarded for that, and build a better world based on the most secured and transparent network. What pisses me off is the braindead shortcuts comparing bitcoin to dumb payment processors such as visa or paypal.

The true power (ie. value) of Bitcoin lies within its inalienable, ungovernable protocol.

[brg444]

Gavin Andresen gave up his role as lead dev at Bitcoin Core to take a role as Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, which had nothing to do with decentralising development at all, and everything to do with centralising Bitcoin public relations. So, you're wrong Veritas Sapere.

Imho the whole problem lies in the belief that bitcoin (itself and as is) is somehow dependent of a dev community to sustain it (patch it).

To me bitcoin works perfectly as expected, as a The Trust Index, and regardless of pocket money attributes.

I think the bitcoin project really lift off with satoshi's "hornet's nest" declaration and do not need any further 'improvement', beside bug adjustments. (He then brightly disappeared, removing himself as the only point of failure, and gavin meets with CIA.)

All the previous BIPs attempts failed, and they were not about such a controversial (and there is a reason for that) parameter as the block size.

So I am open to 'on-top' innovations, that do not curb bitcoin's technology to fit their agenda. Gifted devs have an avenue to come up with awesome stuff, getting rightfully rewarded for that, and build a better world based on the most secured and transparent network. What pisses me off is the braindead shortcuts comparing bitcoin to dumb payment processors such as visa or paypal.

The true power (ie. value) of Bitcoin lies within its inalienable, ungovernable protocol.

[gmaxwell]

It's good that instrumentation and controls are coming.  IMO they are a couple years late.

I must have missed your contributions...  Less snarkily, they required upgrades to the commonly deployed p2p behavior before they could be deployed.

If done right, controls would not slow down getting current blocks.

Right now they don't; though later resource limits will also be able to limit at the tip (as a last ditch option-- we'd rather have a slow node than no node.)

It would be entirely reasonable to charge newbies a fee to offset these real costs.

And guarantee a loss of decentralization. No thanks. But the costs of bringing up new peers should rest on those who have plenty of resources and don't mind spending them on that... and it's much closer to that now in 0.12.

As to constant factors.  They are easily dismissed by theoreticians. Practical people who design, deploy, manage and operate businesses that provide cloud computing services live or die by small percentage changes in constant factors.

Agreed.  One of the most regrettable things about this block-size snafu in my view is this characterization of 800% or 2000% increases as "modest" or a _doubling_ as being too small to consider. Some people talk in terms of "plan for success", but can't seem to accept the possibility that the system will successfully respond to demand and capacity without removing resource limits in advance. 

In this case, it appears that there are tremendous opportunities for two types of improvements here.  First, in reducing the amount of data that an operational node needs to transmit and receive, and second in tuning the nodes and their networking environment to effectively utilize the available resources.

Absolutely, and that's what being done; more help is always welcome.

Is there more data behind the plot?  It would be useful to look at the distribution and the performance for specific pools vs. the topology involved, including machines and link rates. (I can appreciate that some of this data may be proprietary or otherwise unavailable.)

I have detailed per pool data; but I would prefer to not publish information that could be used for competitive comparison because there are various ways to cook the results, including ones which are bad for the network (in particular always perform verification free / SPV mining). E.g. if bar pool feels pressure because it's slower than foo pool, it'll switch to spv mining.  The information broken down by pool is pretty noisy, because many find fairly few blocks.   There are performance differences, though the spread isn't huge over most of them; there is one or two that reliably perform quite poorly-- and these end up always excluded by that "time to reach half pools" metric.

I did all manner of multifactor analysis; including checking an IsChina effect and considering all pairwise pairs.  IsChina in aggregate didn't have a statistically significant effect when also considering the individual pool performance. Likewise, none of the pairwise parameters rose to significance. A couple of the pools have a statistically significant this-pool-sucks effect; but per pool bandwidth numbers didn't differ significantly from the mean overall (I assume more due to not having enough data, and because the impact depends both on block sources and destinations, rather than no effect).

I can speak from personal experience as a small scale miner.  Last summer I was solo mining with two S3s that I was still running despite the heat and managed to score a block on solo.ckpool.org.  The 0.5% fee was well worth it for use of a high bandwidth connection, because the orphan risk out of my DSL based home office would have been unacceptable.  (You might ask, why was I solo mining?  That's a another question, but it certainly looked like some of the pools had a consistent run of bad luck indicating that something was seriously wrong.)

FWIW, P2pool integrates an efficient relay mechanism similar to the relay network client protocol. In spite running on all manner of home equipment; it had the lowest orphan rate of any pool back when it had enough hashrate to measure it; you can quasi solo on it by turning your share difficulty all the way up to 1/10th the block difficulty.

[iCEBREAKER]

I'm curious what will happen when miners will not be able to pay for their bills.

This doesn't make any sense. I'm also curious what will happen when pigs will battle sheep for domination of the skies.

Don't pay ChoadStress any mind.

He's the Gavinista LOLcow that gives sour milk.