State of Alt. Coins - Post Mike Hearn Announcement?

[Simran]

What is everyone speculating is going to happen to Alt. Coins now that Mike Hearn made his announcement and apparently sold all his BTC(?). Also, this includes speculation now that Cryptsy/Crapsy/Shitsy has formally announced that basically all their shit was stolen.

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[deliveryman]

im just gonna pass out for a bit speak soon

[TPTB_need_war]

http://www.coindesk.com/scalability-debate-bitcoin-xt-proposal-stalls/
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/mike-hearn-says-bitcoin-has-failed-and-sees-a-price-plunge-in-the-future/
http://www.coindesk.com/cryptsy-bankruptcy-millions-bitcoin-stolen/

It opens the door wide open for better altcoin to kill Bitcoin.

However for the short-term this is appears to be the crash to below $150, that I predicted last year. The crash should bottom roughly March. Amazing the crash is coming right on time as gold has also warned it is ready to crash below $1000 (headed to below $850 by March).

This is necessary to reset everything. Then we start anew and look for the technology that can improve upon Bitcoin.

This is fabulous day for me. My diligence has paid off and I could be in the driver's seat.

[TPTB_need_war]

Argumentum ad verecundiam (Hearn) is not a kind of an argument we expect in such thread.

I am not appealing to his authority and I in fact criticized him by quoting the part about he is working for/with 42 big banks, which says something about his motives and biases.

However it is a fact that what he says about China controlling Bitcoin mining and this having potentially very negative impacts. Whether you want the block size to increase or stay the same, you can't argue that is decentralization when miners in China will decide for the rest of the world.

And the "fundamentals are broken" in numerous ways.

It will get very interesting when the block reward halves this year. If the price doesn't move up, the Chinese miners might start extracting high transaction fees. By constraining the protocol block size (by refusing to adopt large block sizes and controlling 51% of the PoW), they can do this without causing the market to think Bitcoin has fallen to an attack. Otherwise they'd need to do an active 51% attack on the longest chain to enforce higher transaction fees. But really it is no distinction and Bitcoin has already fallen to a 51% attack. 

[Zer0Sum]

It opens the door wide open for better altcoin to kill Bitcoin.

And why has this not even come close to happening?

The only road that I see is trading crypto on public, legit exchanges...
Because primitive "decentralized" exchanges have been completely unable to develop significant liquidity.

[kelsey]

http://www.coindesk.com/scalability-debate-bitcoin-xt-proposal-stalls/
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/mike-hearn-says-bitcoin-has-failed-and-sees-a-price-plunge-in-the-future/
http://www.coindesk.com/cryptsy-bankruptcy-millions-bitcoin-stolen/

It opens the door wide open for better altcoin to kill Bitcoin.

However for the short-term this is appears to be the crash to below $150, that I predicted last year. The crash should bottom roughly March. Amazing the crash is coming right on time as gold has also warned it is ready to crash below $1000 (headed to below $850 by March).

This is necessary to reset everything. Then we start anew and look for the technology that can improve upon Bitcoin.

This is fabulous day for me. My diligence has paid off and I could be in the driver's seat.

while i somewhat agree with you on bitcoin i.e. my personal opinion is bitcoin is a distraction on the development of a true p2p currency. reading you and fellow clowns over engineered ideas, i kinda always chuckle at you and your fellow clowns heightened sense of importance.

[ArticMine]

Mike Hearn has an interesting new article on some of the failures of Bitcoin...

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7

He makes some very valid points and he is of course right about the negative impacts of the 1 MB blocksize. He is also correct in saying the "bloat" is not the issue, in fact the small blocksize in Bitcoin may have led to the massive concentration of the Bitcoin hash rate in China effectively allowing the Government of China to control Bitcoin. On the other hand I do not agree at all with the criticism of people such as Gregory Maxwell, who I must say has also made many very valid points on the matter of scaling Bitcoin. The simple reality is that the Bytecoin solution of adaptive blocksize limits without a tail emission is also a prescription for disaster.

The problem with Bitcoin is that nobody has found and it may well be impossible to find a way to develop a fee market, in the, absence of a block subsidy, that does not over time converge to one of two undesirable results: Fixed blocksize and infinite fees or infinite blocksize and zero fees. Mike Hearn has made a very persuasive argument as to why a fixed blocksize and infinite fees is such an undesirable outcome; however I am sure that Gregory Maxwell can make an equally persuasive argument as to why an infinite blocksize and zero fees is an equally undesirable outcome.

Maybe the real reason why there has not been a solution to Bitcoin blocksize debate is that a solution may in fact not be possible, if one keeps the 21,000,000 maximum number of XBT limit in place, rather than because of the personalities involved.

So in all of this where does Monero stand? Well Monero is the highest capitalization coin that has solved this problem in a pure proof of work coin. My philosophy on this is that when one takes care of the long term the short term will take care of itself. On the other hand focus on the short term and expect grief over the long term. Monero has taken care of the long term, unfortunately Bitcoin and for that matter most other crypto currencies have not.

Crosspost of my post from Monero Speculation on Mike Hearn's article.

[hanzac]

I'm afraid both things are possibly (indirectly) sponsored by the US bank group.
It is too much coincidence and it's a sign. The community should be more careful in the future.
These people definitely don't want to see the freedom can grow and do harm their benefit.

[TPTB_need_war]

Mike Hearn has an interesting new article on some of the failures of Bitcoin...

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7

He makes some very valid points and he is of course right about the negative impacts of the 1 MB blocksize. He is also correct in saying the "bloat" is not the issue, in fact the small blocksize in Bitcoin may have led to the massive concentration of the Bitcoin hash rate in China effectively allowing the Government of China to control Bitcoin. On the other hand I do not agree at all with the criticism of people such as Gregory Maxwell, who I must say has also made many very valid points on the matter of scaling Bitcoin. The simple reality is that the Bytecoin solution of adaptive blocksize limits without a tail emission is also a prescription for disaster.

The problem with Bitcoin is that nobody has found and it may well be impossible to find a way to develop a fee market, in the, absence of a block subsidy, that does not over time converge to one of two undesirable results: Fixed blocksize and infinite fees or infinite blocksize and zero fees. Mike Hearn has made a very persuasive argument as to why a fixed blocksize and infinite fees is such an undesirable outcome; however I am sure that Gregory Maxwell can make an equally persuasive argument as to why an infinite blocksize and zero fees is an equally undesirable outcome.

Maybe the real reason why there has not been a solution to Bitcoin blocksize debate is that a solution may in fact not be possible, if one keeps the 21,000,000 maximum number of XBT limit in place, rather than because of the personalities involved.

So in all of this where does Monero stand? Well Monero is the highest capitalization coin that has solved this problem in a pure proof of work coin. My philosophy on this is that when one takes care of the long term the short term will take care of itself. On the other hand focus on the short term and expect grief over the long term. Monero has taken care of the long term, unfortunately Bitcoin and for that matter most other crypto currencies have not.

Crosspost of my post from Monero Speculation on Mike Hearn's article.

ArticMine is correct about the problem and incorrect to claim Monero (or Aeon or any other crypto currency) has a solution. Only my design has a solution. Details at the following link:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569087#msg13569087

reading you and fellow clowns over engineered ideas, i kinda always chuckle at you and your fellow clowns heightened sense of importance.

Facts don't have an ego.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

There are already so many threads about these same things.  I could give a shit about a dev selling his bitcoin and getting out, but the Cryptsy thing pisses me off.  The high level of scuntitude they've displayed and complete disregard for their customers just makes me want to scream.  I did in my car on the way home, but it didn't help.

What a day for bitcoin, eh?

[TPTB_need_war]

I could give a shit about a dev selling his bitcoin and getting out

The reasons Mike Hearn got out is that Bitcoin has just been 51% attacked. As I explained upthread. That is not a minor event. It is the first 51% attack on Bitcoin, and thus likely a death spiral for Bitcoin.

, but the Cryptsy thing pisses me off.  The high level of scuntitude they've displayed and complete disregard for their customers just makes me want to scream.  I did in my car on the way home, but it didn't help.

Why do you scream when you've been incessantly warned that storing your crypto currency with any third party is inherently unsafe and can never be safe.

That is why we need decentralized exchanges, but these have technical challenges that have yet to be overcome.

Spine TINGLING footage of Cryptsy's #Bigvern lying on camera 2 weeks after the 7-million-dollar hack!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJONR_UL1rw

Btw, his mannerism and face/facial expressions remind me so much of another alleged scammer Evan @ Dash in the recent Evolution videos.

[kelsey]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569087#msg13569087

reading you and fellow clowns over engineered ideas, i kinda always chuckle at you and your fellow clowns heightened sense of importance.

Facts don't have an ego.

Q.E.D.

[rdnkjdi]

There are two interesting coins.  Ethereum and Monero.  I've found nothing else.

Mike Hearn announcement just put an exclamation point on everything everyone knew.  Bitcoin can't innovate and can barely scale enough to keep up with a very laxidasical demand.  

You know what happens if I let this happen to my network - wait for it to slow things down before doing anything about it?  I get fired.

Bitcoin's approach of squabbling for years on end over a trivial 1mb increase (to anyone who's paying attention and realizes that bitcoins value comes from the innovation of the blockchain) is proof that bitcoin isn't in the future far enough.  Maybe it's two years or fifteen - I don't pretend to know.  But whatever "blockchain" is in the future for the general ledger - bitcoin isn't it.

[TPTB_need_war]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569087#msg13569087

reading you and fellow clowns over engineered ideas, i kinda always chuckle at you and your fellow clowns heightened sense of importance.

Facts don't have an ego.

Q.E.D.

I know what you are implying. Be careful you don't conflate the person (and his health struggles) with the facts.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg13569775#msg13569775
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=753252.msg13569312#msg13569312

[TPTB_need_war]

There are two interesting coins.  Ethereum and Monero.  I've found nothing else.

Both are fundamentally broken.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1323408.msg13518156#msg13518156 (Ethereum)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569087#msg13569087 (Block chain scaling Tragedy of the Commons applies to Monero also)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569178#msg13569178 (Monero's anonymity is unreliable/unprovable and thus useless for fungibility or other important use cases)

[BitcoinNational]

bigger question

Are the Hearn, BigVern, and the BTC market down turn all related?

The bitcoin whales are becoming more and more a collective of hacker/thieves.  Eventually about $6B in market capital is going to try to squeeze into the alt market.  The Cryptsy chaos seems an effective event to muddy the ALT waters.

[rdnkjdi]

Both are fundamentally broken.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1323408.msg13518156#msg13518156 (Ethereum)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569087#msg13569087 (Block chain scaling Tragedy of the Commons applies to Monero also)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569178#msg13569178 (Monero's anonymity is unreliable/unprovable and thus useless for fungibility or other important use cases)

"Broken" and "Success" are relative terms.  Both are broken less than bitcoin and bring attributes to the table that fiat does not.  

If you have any suggestions that are less broken ... I'm all ears.

An absolutist uses words like broken.  A realist uses terms like "best alternative".  Opening myself up to all available options those are the two answering the big questions.  Privacy, programmable blockchain and both more scalable than bitcoin.

What alternatives are less broken than these two I mentioned?

[TPTB_need_war]

Both are fundamentally broken.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1323408.msg13518156#msg13518156 (Ethereum)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569087#msg13569087 (Block chain scaling Tragedy of the Commons applies to Monero also)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569178#msg13569178 (Monero's anonymity is unreliable/unprovable and thus useless for fungibility or other important use cases)

"Broken" and "Success" are relative terms.  Both are broken less than bitcoin and bring attributes to the table that fiat does not.  

If you have any suggestions that are less broken ... I'm all ears.

An absolutist uses words like broken.  A realist uses terms like "best alternative".  Opening myself up to all available options those are the two answering the big questions.  Privacy, programmable blockchain and both more scalable than bitcoin.

What alternatives are less broken than these two I mentioned?

Don't you understand that "fundamentally broken" means they don't work for the features they claim that are an improvement over Bitcoin.

The link I provided to you for Ethereum explains that afaik they never solved the primary economic issue facing scaling programmable block chains, which is that every full node has to verify the block chain, thus every full node has to run the programmable script. But the problem is who to pay the gas (ether) to so that all full nodes are paid for verification? This has DDoS implications as well. In short, they never solved the core economic problem and thus Ethereum is just a fucking toy that can't actually work.

Ditto Monero as explained below (the arguments were in the links I provided to you before but again I am always forced to repeat myself because readers are so clueless about technology that they can't even understand what I write).

I think Monero is the best money to stay anonymous. It uses the ring signature. The mixing is built into the protocol.

You are a n00b and you don't do enough research to know what you are writing about. Why should anyone believe you?

Monero is not anonymous when your metadata can be correlated. One example of metadata which unmasks your anonymity is your IP address. And no, Tor and I2P mixnets do not hide your IP address from the government, in fact they are thought to be Sybil attacked honeypots that not only tell the government your IP address but also alert the NSA et al that you should come under extra scrutiny.

And IP address is not the only metadata that can destroy your anonymity in ring signatures. Other examples can include cookies in your browser and other activity you did on the web. Other examples also include telephone calls and other activity you did around that time, which have statistical significance.

I wrote about that in the link in the post I made upthread which is quoted below.

None of them will surely keep you anonymous.

Zerocash is the only design which might be very reliable, but it does not exist in any altcoin yet.

Period.

Some elaboration is at the following post (and also in the archives of my posts):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13569178#msg13569178

Ring signatures do not obscure everything. Only Zerocash can obscure everything so that then metadata is no longer a problem. I see Vitalik @ Ethereum has been reading my Bitcointalk posts, because now he has written a blog post to copy most of the points I have been making for the past months.

Additionally I have been making the point since the BCX incident that ring signatures can theoretically be unmasked by combinatorial analysis of the block chain. In the recent debate I had with Monero's cryptographer Shen-noether at Reddit about his white papers, I pointed out that his proposed solution to combinatorial unmasking was flawed. He and smooth did the usual ad hominem attack on my person, and then I rebutted them with logical facts and they were forced to finally put their tail between their legs.

Bullshit. So much bullshit in these discussions of cryptocurrency technology. Especially coming from all the Monero pumpers who haven't done their homework, because they are retarded, closed-minded, and boastfully so.

TPTB_need_war, what about ShadowCash?

Just a (arguably plagiarized) copy of Cryptonote technology, so same conclusions as for Monero.

https://z.cash/ is the only potential solution for making metadata correlation irrelevant, but all I know about it is here:

http://zerocash-project.org/

Seems the project died or stalled? Afaik they've been quiet past months or most of 2015?

Also scaling issues will probably still apply thus it is possible that Zerocash doesn't scale to world wide use, or other problems such as DDoS. I won't know until I dig deeper into it. Perhaps they discovered such issues and stopped working on it.

Anonymity is very difficult to achieve. I would guess maybe impossible once all the technical factors are considered. But I am still willing to try. I personally will come back to Zerocash's technology later, after I finish fixing block chain scaling and decentralization (which is more important priority and more realistic).

[TPTB_need_war]

And so the n00bs moved their delusion over to Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5

Hi, I am AnonyMint. The drama queen allegation is a perception that is mostly irrelevant. Everyone on BCT who posts significantly is a drama queen bcz crypto is dramatic. Your labeling me a drama queen makes you a drama queen, lol. On to the substantive issue...

The OP didn't quote my clarifying statement:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13575212#msg13575212

"The link I provided to you for Ethereum explains that afaik they never solved the primary economic issue facing scaling programmable block chains, which is that every full node has to verify the block chain, thus every full node has to run the programmable script. But the problem is who to pay the gas (ether) to so that all full nodes are paid for verification? This has DDoS implications as well. In short, they never solved the core economic problem and thus Ethereum is just a fucking toy that can't actually work."

A probabilistic argument that says miners who win block rewards get paid fees and it will balance out, is dumb as shit. Just think it out. Unless hashrate is uniformly distributed amongst miners, then some miners get paid less for doing the same verification work. It is also DDoS amplication attack vector.

Also there are variants of attacks, and Vitalik was incorrect to argue that the attacks are unlikely due to cost, because the attacker can profit from shorting the coin:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=448923.msg4995521#msg4995521

Come on n00bs, you don't have a clue. Give up. You need an expert. Respect when one is trying to help you understand. Stop labeling him a drama queen. That is B-lister attitude.

I think when people try to be perfectly politically correct, they become so anal that they enter another form of insanity. I didn't think you were being a dick. I just chalk it up to the nature of life. It is no big deal, that is why I put "lol".

Well it is mostly getting exhausted because it is very difficult to write so much and repeat oneself so many times. And also I am not really in a position in life where I can just sit back and relax. I have serious problems in my life and I am under a lot of stress. So I am stressed about consuming so much time writing (instead of for example coding). I also run into the problem that when I am less forceful, then the discussions get overrun with noise by emboldened n00bs. I don't know what the correct balance should be. As I said, it is just life. I laugh it away. No worries mate.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0rgdv

You entirely miss the point. The cost of verification in Bitcoin is rather small because the transaction rate is so low, and the block rewards are so high. So the inequality I explained my other post above, isn't such a big deal. But eventually this same issue could plague Bitcoin as well.

The problem is more immediately egregious in Ethereum, because scripts can consume a lot of resources, unlike verification of Bitcoin transactions which is a constant resource cost per transaction.

Again you n00bs should stop trusting your own analysis, because in my excrutiatingly vast experience of reading n00b posts at BCT, you are nearly always wrong.

In Bitcoin I think so, although there was a recent block chain fork because some miners were not doing complete verification, so perhaps the costs of verification are already borderline in Bitcoin and the transaction rate is highly corralled in Bitcoin to a 1MB block size which can't scale world wide.

Also $9 - $16 in electricity cost per transaction isn't going to scale. So eventually PoW must be redesigned to lower the cost. (I have designed that solution)

And Ethereum MUST allow a much greater use of verification resources, simply because scripts consume more resources than highly optimized code for doing one thing of verifying transactions. Ethereum could place global limits on the amount of gas a script can consume, but this is no longer a fully programmable block chain (no longer Turing complete because it requires unbounded tapes) and it is also not a free market, but rather a hard-coded, centralized decision. Just like Bitcoin's block size constant, this will become a political hellhole.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg13577344#msg13577344

"Bottom line is any global constant in the protocol is not decentralization. Period. End of story.

The protocol must be able to function in a free market dynamic.

All the arguments about consensus is moving forward from 1MB slowly are irrelevant, because if constants are not decided by the protocol, then the protocol is by definition under a 51% attack always."

Afaics, none of these directions Ethereum is headed deal with the economic issue I outlined in my first post in this Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5

As for their scalability ideas (which again do not address the economic problem of inequality of gas fees I outlined), they are going down the same throught process that I went through in my analysis of how to scale a consensus system. My thought process is far ahead of theirs, and they will later realize that what they have designed is a total failure. The reason is because the CAP theorem is violated by Proof of Evidence aka Proof of Cheating (which is also one of the reasons why Bitcoin's proposed Segregated Witness will fail). Refer to my decentralization thread in the Altcoin Discussion forum at Bitcointalk for more details of the relevance of the CAP theorem. I am not eager to drill down and convince them of this, because I don't want to give then my design.

In short, scalability requires centralization. I ultimately realized it is how the centralization is structured that allows for decentralized control. That was my key epiphany.

[TPTB_need_war]

The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs:

Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?

Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.

There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.)

We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges.  Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges.  

There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there.  Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized.

So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors.

On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin:

The problem is that the cost [ of validating a transaction ] grows like N^2 for N inputs.

By the way, there is no excuse for the cost to be quadratic.  That is one of the many crocks in the BitcoinCore implementation, that will take more crocks to work around.  Like the Segregated Witnesses proposal,  malleability and its partial patches, blockchain voting to increase the limit, etc..

There you have another possible failure mode for Bitcoin: runaway code crockification (RCC).  As the code gets more complicated and ugly, fewer competent people will be willing to work on it.  Their place will be taken by incompetent pople, who will add even more crocks -- and so on until the code will fail and there will be no one capable of fixing it in time.

Just a possibility; but after seeing the malleability problems,  the Fork of July fiasco, the "fee merket" plans and the RBF hack, the Seg Wit proposal -- I fear that the RCC may be already underway...

If we understand the reasoning that led to certain details of the design (like the 1 MB limit and the abrupt halvings of the reward) we have a better chance of predicting what would happen if we changed them. 

Those who want to reform bitcoin so that it replaces VISA or ACH should put bitcoin aside and start the design such a system from scratch, choosing at each step the gears and rivets that are better suited to those goals.  But, first, they should justify why the world needs a better option for those goals and why they think that they can design one.

(That said: in fact, I believe that, as a software engineer, Satoshi, was much better than Gavin and Mike, who are much better than all the Blockstream developers -- who are totally incompetent and irresponsible in that regard.)