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

[QuestionAuthority]

Your amazon example is a marginal situation. Sure you might enjoy the benefits of jumping through these hoops but please don't pretend it is in anyway convenient for anyone other than determined Bitcoiners.

There is a very large group of people who waste a bit of time comparison shopping and cutting out coupons as well. The amount of effort to use foldapp and purse isn't any more.

But the PayPal of the underworld won't push the price through the roof.

I only use bitcoin on the whitemarket so am not the biggest expert on the blackmarket, but crunching some numbers can quickly reflect that even if bitcoin was used in a reasonable 5% of blackmarket txs with 0 greymarket and whitemarket use cases it would still grow to over 100k in value per btc in price. It is sometimes difficult to appreciate how large the blackmarket is. In many countries, the black and grey markets are necessarily larger than the "white market"

Funny, Silk Road was the largest online contraband market in the world and I don't remember $100k coins.

[RoadTrain]

I can give you a 10 pages proposal written in ancient chinese + arabic, and tell you this one can solve all the problems for bitcoin, would you accept my proposal? You need to first go into some university for 10 years before you understand what I'm talking about, or you simply ignore it?
-snip-

In other words, you are saying that you lack experience/knowledge in the field. This does not make the proposal that complex. There are simpler solutions, however this one is not as complex as people are saying that it is.

It is not about expertise here, it is about time. Given two developers commanding same level of skill, A write a code and B want to make sure it is bug free and secure, the time it takes for B to validate the code will be much longer than the time that A spent on writing codes. Of course you can validate all the security holes of SW given enough time, but that will be months/years and we have not seen the code yet

You can make a poll to see how many people understand BIP101 and how many people understand SW

Actually I don't understand why Gavin showed so much positive attitude for SW and even push it as a hard fork, maybe because he knows it will fail, then people will run into his XT as he planned

Judging by your posts, it's certainly about expertise. And Gavin's attitude is likely also the result of his expertise allowing him to grasp the concept.

[Zarathustra]

Good to know that a BIP is in the works, though obviously I disagree with your assertion that we are not presently approaching network capacity, it is becoming quite clear that we are nearing that point now.

As you can see from this chart the growth in transaction volume is consistent, almost even exponential.

I would suggest the tipping point where we can start to consider a fee market developing and rasing tx fee prices would be a day of full blocks(whichever the limits miners impose as ultimately they can lower the limit or reject tx's)

https://www.quandl.com/data/BCHAIN/AVBLS-Bitcoin-Average-Block-Size

We are still not there yet but it is also perfectly reasonable to take Gavin's suggestion that we should prepare for capacity limits beforehand. I take a middle view and suggest we should be prepared to implement a hard fork to raise the limit as a temporary bump (perhaps 2-4-8 ) if we have a day of full blocks and the fee market starts to raise prices unreasonably with negative effects on our ecosystem.

Paypal and Visa sometimes have outages , and it wouldn't be the end of the world if bitcoin had a brief hiccup and I like the pressure to incentivize more creative solutions (segwit/ln/relay network/ect...) that the fear is creating.

People who need it will still be using Bitcoin even if fees a 100x larger than what they are today. This is really a non-issue.

The fee-market science fiction that those kids@core intend to enforce is ridiculous. RBF means DBF: Destroy By Fee.


The entire RBF-fee-market plan is the result of your complete misunderstanding of basic economics. Bitcoin is in the "move money around" market. There are plenty of competitors who will happily move money around better than Bitcoin is doing, for lower fees, now you got the outcome you wanted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3wgm20/why_payouts_didnt_execute_today/cxzln2q?context=3

[Zarathustra]

They also don't understand what politics is and how everything human is also political.

Hint: It isn't what you see on CNBC and Fox News

Now, now Veritas, no need to create suckpuppet accounts to spam the thread 

Yeah, an account created 33 months ago with an obviously different writing style and 600 posts is definitely a sock puppet of Veritas. Such an astute observation, nice one =)

brg444 late adopter jumped the train a year later at all time high prices. That's what makes him angry and aggressive.

[Zarathustra]

Everyone wants the blocksize to increase. The mini-blockers are a loud, vocal minority that are already on the wrong side of history.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-for-and-against-expanding-the-block-size-reasonably-soon.119/

Talks about loud, vocal minority.

Links to forum with almost 300 members!

Did you read the list in the post that I linked to? Those people are not part of that forum... they are the major players in the bitcoin ecosystem.

They're major banking parasites freeloaders indeed.

Coinbase. Banking puppets
Xapo. Wences IMO is one of the few legit bloke in the industry. Most likely was lied to by Gavin and Mike and urged to show "unity" with the "industry"
BitGo. Web Wallet, has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
Circle. Goldman Sachs puppets
Blockchain.info Broken Web wallet, has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
ItBit. Banking puppets

Miners are rallying behind Core.

I guess that sums it up.

So which side are you on? The zionist banking incumbents or the cypherpunks?

I know where my allegiance lies.

Yes, we know: Front National. But Bitcoin is Capitalism, not National Socialism/Socialist Nationalism.

[Zarathustra]

Bitcoin does not scale efficiently, but it certainly can scale. We just need to increase the blocksize. To answer your question, this does require a hard fork, hard forks are the only way to increase the blocksize.

Hard forks are also an important governance mechanism within Bitcoin which allow us to resolve fundamental differences and disagreements, even if that might mean splitting Bitcoin, at least that is better then tyranny of the majority.

Go invent your own altcoin if you hate the Core developers with such venom.

Not necessary. Core is creating the Altcoin. Or do you think Blockstream can win against Coinbase?

[valiz]

What's up with the sudden surge of BIP101 fraud / XT diehards? 

Chill out dudes, XT is dead, BIP101 is dead. These are happy times 

Fork off already 

[MbccompanyX]

What's up with the sudden surge of BIP101 fraud / XT diehards? 

Chill out dudes, XT is dead, BIP101 is dead. These are happy times 

Fork off already 

if they fork the word dead will be bigger for xt and bip101, they just want to make more chaos at the end and i hope the thread will be locked because seriously is getting offhand and there is the risk that this thread will never die at the end

[BitUsher]

Funny, Silk Road was the largest online contraband market in the world and I don't remember $100k coins.

Silk road represented a small and largely unknown marketplace on the deep web. Most drug dealers and traffickers are still money laundering USD and other fiat through existing channels like HSBC. We have to step outside our bubble and realize how big the blackmarket is and how small bitcoin is.

Most guns/drugs are still sold through existing channels and not online.

[BitUsher]

I think BIP101 is too dangerous. As shown by the castle analogy, BIP101 is valuing cheap and unlimited over secure and decentralized. (BIP101 has no effect on fast, but as one can see from the Replace-by-fee proposals, fast won’t last long.) BIP 101 increases the block size too quickly. This will destroy any chance of a fee pressure due to supply constraint. So in order to keep high throughput and low fees, security and decentralization will be destroyed eventually.

P.S. I’m currently in favor of scaling Bitcoin via 2–4–8, SegWit, LN, and Validation Cost Metric.

https://medium.com/@SatoshiLite/eating-the-bitcoin-cake-fc2b4ebfb85e#.6byi5dh3g

[RoadTrain]

I think BIP101 is too dangerous. As shown by the castle analogy, BIP101 is valuing cheap and unlimited over secure and decentralized. (BIP101 has no effect on fast, but as one can see from the Replace-by-fee proposals, fast won’t last long.) BIP 101 increases the block size too quickly. This will destroy any chance of a fee pressure due to supply constraint. So in order to keep high throughput and low fees, security and decentralization will be destroyed eventually.

P.S. I’m currently in favor of scaling Bitcoin via 2–4–8, SegWit, LN, and Validation Cost Metric.

https://medium.com/@SatoshiLite/eating-the-bitcoin-cake-fc2b4ebfb85e#.6byi5dh3g

https://medium.com/@gubatron/this-will-destroy-any-chance-of-a-fee-pressure-due-to-supply-constraint-c5af40140318#.a2eet4t9n

“This will destroy any chance of a fee pressure due to supply constraint.”

If anything this is good, you want transactions to be cheap, otherwise there’s no point to using Bitcoin and people will move on to the next best (cheap or free) option.

Bigger blocks, harder to mine, avg block time starts to drop, difficulty goes down, more miners with cheaper hardware can come in, more decentralization.

[QuestionAuthority]

Funny, Silk Road was the largest online contraband market in the world and I don't remember $100k coins.

Silk road represented a small and largely unknown marketplace on the deep web. Most drug dealers and traffickers are still money laundering USD and other fiat through existing channels like HSBC. We have to step outside our bubble and realize how big the blackmarket is and how small bitcoin is.

Most guns/drugs are still sold through existing channels and not online.

You're just talking about other fiat sales. Donuts are still sold primarily with fiat too. If everyone in the US decided to buy their breakfast with Bitcoin it would be crushed. It can't even handle these little spam attacks that single individuals are throwing at it. Bitcoin couldn't handle drug cartel laundering any more than it can replace Visa. It's not simply blocksize that's holding it back. What I was originally talking about is Bitcoin's best destiny, providing individuals with the ability to buy contraband online without using an easily traceable payment method. It doesn't need to be more than that right now.

Bitcoin has a purpose that can't be duplicated by any other payment method. The problem is investors and early adopters want it to be used for everything so the price will hike up and they can sell out for fiat and buy a Lamborghini and a new house. Bitcoin is decades or generations away from being capable of replacing Credit Cards. It doesn't need to fill that roll right now. Currently, it only needs to be best at one thing, buying contraband anonymously online. But the PayPal of the underworld won't push the price through the roof.

[BitUsher]

You're just talking about other fiat sales. Donuts are still sold primarily with fiat too. If everyone in the US decided to buy their breakfast with Bitcoin it would be crushed. It can't even handle these little spam attacks that single individuals are throwing at it. Bitcoin couldn't handle drug cartel laundering any more than it can replace Visa. It's not simply blocksize that's holding it back. What I was originally talking about is Bitcoin's best destiny, providing individuals with the ability to buy contraband online without using an easily traceable payment method. It doesn't need to be more than that right now.

Agree. I am suggesting that if in 20-40 years time in the extremely unlikely event painted by our detractors if bitcoin is outlawed by every state (thus eliminating white market use) and heavily criminalized with severe penalties (thus outlawing the grey market use) , all bitcoin would need is 5% total blackmarket share to be extremely valuable. Thus one can and should be very bullish towards our future.

Bitcoin is still young , immature , and weak for all practical purposes, which puts into perspective how vulnerable every other alt is.

If anything this is good, you want transactions to be cheap, otherwise there’s no point to using Bitcoin and people will move on to the next best (cheap or free) option.

We can have both. It is simply about acknowledging the technical limitations of the bitcoin blockchain and how we need to scaffold other layers like the LN to provide cheap and plentiful txs.

[QuestionAuthority]

You're just talking about other fiat sales. Donuts are still sold primarily with fiat too. If everyone in the US decided to buy their breakfast with Bitcoin it would be crushed. It can't even handle these little spam attacks that single individuals are throwing at it. Bitcoin couldn't handle drug cartel laundering any more than it can replace Visa. It's not simply blocksize that's holding it back. What I was originally talking about is Bitcoin's best destiny, providing individuals with the ability to buy contraband online without using an easily traceable payment method. It doesn't need to be more than that right now.

Agree. I am suggesting that if in 20-40 years time in the extremely unlikely event painted by our detractors if bitcoin is outlawed by every state (thus eliminating white market use) and heavily criminalized with severe penalties (thus outlawing the grey market use) , all bitcoin would need is 5% total blackmarket share to be extremely valuable. Thus one can and should be very bullish towards our future.

Bitcoin is still young , immature , and weak for all practical purposes, which puts into perspective how vulnerable every other alt is.

If anything this is good, you want transactions to be cheap, otherwise there’s no point to using Bitcoin and people will move on to the next best (cheap or free) option.

We can have both. It is simply about acknowledging the technical limitations of the bitcoin blockchain and how we need to scaffold other layers like the LN to provide cheap and plentiful txs.

Yeah, 20-40 years from now Bitcoin can be a powerful economic force. I put 5btc on a paper wallet with instructions in a safety deposit box for each of my kids. I mined them so my cost per coin was virtually nothing. 20-40 years from now I'll be long dead but my kids could be set for the rest of their lives.

That's why making the correct development choices right now is so important. It's laughable that Andresen and others are running around screaming "the sky is falling - we must fix the blocksize right now!" What a load of crap. What must happen is a correct, bug proof, tamper proof solution be found before any change is made regardless of whether that change happens in 2016 or 2020. Fixing it only to have a worse problem arise isn't going to help. Letting certain developers make changes to satisfy their own egos or pocketbooks won't help either. Let Bitcoin continue to be a small boutique value transfer system for the black market or whoever wants to use it until it's ready for prime time. That's not going to make early adopters rich but could lead to a more survivable Bitcoin for the future.

[Blawpaw]

is there already an agreement regarding this issue? What will be the chosen solution?

[BitUsher]

is there already an agreement regarding this issue? What will be the chosen solution?

Segwit has 100% consensus among devs already and wide miner approval... everything else is being worked upon.

[VeritasSapere]

is there already an agreement regarding this issue? What will be the chosen solution?

There is not, this could lead to a split, at least then the market will be able to choose the superior chain, which I believe will be big blocks.

"developer consensus" is not real Bitcoin consensus and the majority of miners do support an increase in the blocksize.

[VeritasSapere]

http://konradsgraf.com/blog1/tag/block-size-debate

Disagreements appear rooted more in differing opinions on economics, a specialized field entirely distinct from engineering, programming, and network design.

The block size limit has for the most part not ever been, and should not now be, used to determine the actual size of average blocks under normal network operating conditions. Real average block size ought to emerge from factors of supply and demand for what I will term “transaction-inclusion services.” Beginning to use the protocol block size limit to restrict the provision of transaction-inclusion services would be a radical change to Bitcoin. The burden of proof is therefore on persons advocating using the protocol limit in this novel way.

The idea of using the limit in this new way—not the idea of raising it now by some degree to keep it from beginning to interfere with normal operations—is what constitutes an attempt to change something important about the Bitcoin protocol. And there rests the burden of proof.

Transaction-fee levels are not in any general need of being artificially pushed upward. A 130-year transition phase was planned into Bitcoin during which the full transition from block reward revenue to transaction-fee revenue was to take place.

The protocol block size limit was added as a temporary anti-spam measure, not a technocratic market-manipulation measure.

[BitUsher]

is there already an agreement regarding this issue? What will be the chosen solution?

There is not, this could lead to a split, at least then the market will be able to choose the superior chain, which I believe will be big blocks.

"developer consensus" is not real Bitcoin consensus and the majority of miners do support an increase in the blocksize.

This is a false dichotomy. Almost all developers support and have always supported bigger blocks and a majority of the miners support the developers and will go along with their proposals. You are creating a false wedge where none exists.

[VeritasSapere]

is there already an agreement regarding this issue? What will be the chosen solution?

There is not, this could lead to a split, at least then the market will be able to choose the superior chain, which I believe will be big blocks.

"developer consensus" is not real Bitcoin consensus and the majority of miners do support an increase in the blocksize.

This is a false dichotomy. Almost all developers support and have always supported bigger blocks and a majority of the miners support the developers and will go along with their proposals. You are creating a false wedge where none exists.

It is not, these are irreconcilable differences that can not be resolved another way, otherwise it would just be tyranny of the majority or minority. "Forcing" a fee market early as opposed to allowing the fee market to develop organically through supply and demand over a longer period of time are incompatible concepts, we can not have it both ways, at least not on the same chain.

I also do not consider "Core" an authority on Bitcoin. The differences in vision have become ideological not technical.