Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[adamstgBit]

but over 75% of nodes and the economic consensus decides not to which would be very dangerous

No its not - if they choose to follow anything other than the longest, valid chain then they are no longer following bitcoin. If they want their coins, however, they will.

most of the economic will simply do nothing tho, they will have stake in both forks, and watch as one of the forks loses all its value.

so in a way speculators are the deciders.

[adamstgBit]

anyone think we might see another leg up to like 444

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

but over 75% of nodes and the economic consensus decides not to which would be very dangerous

No its not - if they choose to follow anything other than the longest, valid chain then they are no longer following bitcoin. If they want their coins, however, they will.

most of the economic will simply do nothing tho, they will have stake in both forks, and watch as one of the forks loses all its value.

so in a way speculators are the deciders.

Indeed, but as it will only trigger @75%, the tipping point will have been reached and the majority of undecided nodes are unlikely to remain on the lower hashrate chain.

[SnokkomBTC]

anyone think we might see another leg up to like 444

I was thinking about > $32,000 

[RCan06]

Even though I have been here long enough to not get too excited with a quick price rise, it is nice to see Bitcoin up when the World economy is dipping down.

Hows cashing out of bitcoin working for you today Mike Hearn? hehe

[julian071]

anyone think we might see another leg up to like 444

I was thinking about > $32,000 

Yeah well I'm usually wrong about these things (except when I was not a week ago, thank you baby jezus for the free BTC) but I'm shorting this trainwreck.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.

Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.

There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.

[BitUsher]

right and if 75% of miners went to some fork probably 99.9% would come join them shortly after and then who cares about anything else?

[snipity snip]

The Vote is = The longest valid PoW chain, with an emphasis on valid and only nodes deciding what is and isn't valid. The miners can hash all they want on an invalid chain , but they won't be necessarily following the nodes or economic majority.

This matters because when you look at how the hardforks are rolled out they are not polling the nodes but miners for an rough and indirect means of determining node support. There very well could be a dangerous situation where 75% of miners decide to fork , but over 75% of nodes and the economic consensus decides not to which would be very dangerous.  This is why I recommend that all hardforks have at least 95% consensus of blocks within the last 1k to activate a countdown. Luckily Bitcoin classic still has time to change their minds from 75% to 95% as they have yet to release code.

What, exactly, are the nodes going to accept as valid except what the miners create? They (miners) crack the puzzle, then put the block together and publish it - the others then build on this..  Nodes then follow the longest one.

What you are saying makes no sense.

Sighhh..... ok, I will try one last time to explain a very simple concept.

There are at least 4 choices that can be made in the event of a hardfork between competing chains -

1) Quickly move over to the longest chain with the most hashing power out of security fears

2) Stay on their chain with less hashing power and hope the other chain doesn't become hostile and conduct a 51% attack. Notice there are now two chains , each with equal length , and each following the same principle of the logest valid PoW chain. One simply has more hashing power over the other, which can quickly and dynamically adjust as miners move back and forth between chains or one group ramps up ASICs that use their consensus code.

3) Nodes can choose to give up the PoW algo altogether and fork off with one of many PoS / or hybrid algos.

4) Nodes can choose another PoW algo and make the existing miners irrelevant to themselves.(There is already code in place ready for this if needed).


Ultimately it is the nodes controlled by the exchanges / merchants / processors / wallets / and large bag holders (or economic majority) that control the fate of the value of the coin as they can all make a decision to make all the miners obsolete in a moments notice if they so chose to. All that hashing power is merely a very expensive liability if the economic majority doesn't support their version of the consensus rules and taking a 75% miner vote on and assumed direction of the economic majority doesn't necessarily dictate if that reflects upon the opinions and will of the true economic majority. This is why bitcoin classic and core  is reflecting and amassing a list of signatures from wallets, exchanges, merchants , users, ect ...

What is intresting to also restate is that single large whales can have a dramatic impact upon which coins succeeds as there are multiple attacks or ways they can support their own implementation to consider, so one should consider the risk and value of some really early bagholders(luckily Hearn sold his btc already in chunks)

Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.

There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.

I have repeatedly stated that we should design a system to anticipate the worst attacks , even from the core devs themselves... The core devs themselves have been specifically working on this to make bitcoin more modular to support multiple implementations. Have you not been following libbitcoinconsensus?

[julian071]

Even though I have been here long enough to not get too excited with a quick price rise, it is nice to see Bitcoin up when the World economy is dipping down.

Hows cashing out of bitcoin working for you today Mike Hearn? hehe

He's still comfortably up if he converted to fiat, and if he switched to XMR, ETH, DASH he's up considerably more. I'd wait if I were you with comments like this until they make sense.

[jertsy]

Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.

Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.

There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.

Satoshi obviously understands human nature and planned Bitcoin accordingly. One of the mistakes he admitted was offering no reward for running a full node. People still do it with the best interests of the network in mind, but there are decreasing numbers of people prepared to do it for nothing. There would be an order of magnitude more nodes if people were rewarded for running one.

[tomothy]

Assuming there will be at least two competing chains/forks, how would you best take advantage of such a scenario?

You have registered exchanges that allow you to sell bitcoin.

So, you first would have to own bitcoin and actually be holding your private keys, correct?

Then, you need fungibility of coins on both forks?

You would then export your wallet/private key and open it in Fork#1 wallet

You would also open that same wallet/private key in Fork#2 Wallet


As of this point, is it safe to say that you have the same keys in two separate wallets? I'm assuming one of these wallets would be the bitcoinqt(core) and then bitcoin classic wallet?

So this is great, you almost have double the coins. However, I am now faced with the issue of where I would be selling these coins, correct? Currently, my understanding, is that bitstamp,coinbase,okcoin will accept classic

so I can trade core possibly on kraken, circle, gemini?

I guess my concern is who is going to support core after the fork and how could I essentially sell the same coins twice?
So far I have yet to see any exchange say they will continue to support core post fork.

Thanks for any help that can be provided. I'm trying to wrap me head around the market implications and how to properly proceed with coin storage. Or should I just convert to fiat with money ready to be wired to exchanges to buy? The delay concerns me, as markets move fast. If only there was a more expedient option.

[CuntChocula]

When you say "valuable," valuable to what/whom? All nodes validate & relay transactions, so how does the network know (and why should it care) about how much BTC the node's creator has? A node is a node, it validates according to its ruleset, no more no less?

How does the network know how to value a node? I must be missing something very basic.

When there are human beings on the other end of the nodes , those human beings have agency to value one node over another. They can value a full node or a SPV node differently because one offers better security and the other requires less resources(Fraud proofs and pruned full nodes will offer a greater variety.) Nodes that are controlled by merchants/exchanges ect have more value because the users and businesses value them.

The Code doesn't have any AI in it that makes a conscious assessment as to its relative value. The humans at the other end of the nodes are merely an extension of the network that place value on the nodes and the rules behind the code.

What you are missing is that Humans are part of the Bitcoin network.

We're discussing the impact of nodes on Bitcoin network, not value of full nodes vs. SPV wallets to you.
The "humans at the other end of the nodes" are irrelevant to this topic, beyond their choice of which node to run.
They have nothing to do with securing Bitcoin.
This is getting too silly.

[julian071]

Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.

Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.

There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.

Satoshi obviously understands human nature and planned Bitcoin accordingly. One of the mistakes he admitted was offering no reward for running a full node. People still do it with the best interests of the network in mind, but there are decreasing numbers of people prepared to do it for nothing. There would be an order of magnitude more nodes if people were rewarded for running one.

Having a decent wallet would help too. Switched to Electrum today, I really got sick of of the QT-wallet fucking up the block-index, verifying stuff for no apparent reason and for looking fugly while doing it. I never could wrap my head around why not more energy was put into a more sexy looking and properly working wallet... Except I understand a lot of ppl think the end user is not that important, BTC was designed purely for either tech nerds or speculators, buying a cup of coffee and running a cool wallet at home is supposed to be done with other crypto's like DASH?

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.

Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.

There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.

Satoshi obviously understands human nature and planned Bitcoin accordingly. One of the mistakes he admitted was offering no reward for running a full node. People still do it with the best interests of the network in mind, but there are decreasing numbers of people prepared to do it for nothing. There would be an order of magnitude more nodes if people were rewarded for running one.

I reckon a good number of the transient nodes are run as curiosities, and a larger number to support their owners wallets. Everyone else is running them more consistently as part of their business ( exchanges, miners, etc.) so are being recompensed either directly or indirectly.

But, yeah, it would be nice if casual nodes could get some recompense for their service. Satoshi should have designed some sort of a faucet funded out of the coinbase tx's.

[wachtwoord]

Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.

Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.

There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.

Satoshi obviously understands human nature and planned Bitcoin accordingly. One of the mistakes he admitted was offering no reward for running a full node. People still do it with the best interests of the network in mind, but there are decreasing numbers of people prepared to do it for nothing. There would be an order of magnitude more nodes if people were rewarded for running one.

Having a decent wallet would help too. Switched to Electrum today, I really got sick of of the QT-wallet fucking up the block-index, verifying stuff for no apparent reason and for looking fugly while doing it. I never could wrap my head around why not more energy was put into a more sexy looking and properly working wallet... Except I understand a lot of ppl think the end user is not that important, BTC was designed purely for either tech nerds or speculators, buying a cup of coffee and running a cool wallet at home is supposed to be done with other crypto's like DASH?

Electrum is not a full node ....

[CuntChocula]

...
There are at least 4 choices that can be made in the event of a hardfork between competing chains -

1) Quickly move over to the longest chain with the most hashing power out of security fears

2) Stay on their chain with less hashing power and hope the other chain doesn't become hostile and conduct a 51% attack. Notice there are now two chains , each with equal length , and each following the same principle of the logest valid PoW chain. One simply has more hashing power over the other, which can quickly and dynamically adjust as miners move back and forth between chains or one group ramps up ASICs that use their consensus code.

3) Nodes can choose to give up the PoW algo altogether and fork off with one of many PoS / or hybrid algos.

4) Nodes can choose another PoW algo and make the existing miners irrelevant to themselves.(There is already code in place ready for this if needed).

5) Miners on the new fork chose to spend 1/999999 of the $$$$ they've invested in mining gear to deploy "hundreds thousands of nodes with multiple amazon Ec2 instances without users actively securing them and using them."

[julian071]

Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.

Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.

There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.

Satoshi obviously understands human nature and planned Bitcoin accordingly. One of the mistakes he admitted was offering no reward for running a full node. People still do it with the best interests of the network in mind, but there are decreasing numbers of people prepared to do it for nothing. There would be an order of magnitude more nodes if people were rewarded for running one.

Having a decent wallet would help too. Switched to Electrum today, I really got sick of of the QT-wallet fucking up the block-index, verifying stuff for no apparent reason and for looking fugly while doing it. I never could wrap my head around why not more energy was put into a more sexy looking and properly working wallet... Except I understand a lot of ppl think the end user is not that important, BTC was designed purely for either tech nerds or speculators, buying a cup of coffee and running a cool wallet at home is supposed to be done with other crypto's like DASH?

Electrum is not a full node ....

Exactly. I'd love to run a full node and did for a while, but Bitcoin QT just sucks ass. More energy should be put into developing a wallet that is also a full node, which would make it nice to run instad of a pain.

[BitUsher]

Indeed, but as it will only trigger @75%, the tipping point will have been reached and the majority of undecided nodes are unlikely to remain on the lower hashrate chain.

I don't believe you have really thought things through with regards to the possible attack vectors that large btc holders can have. First of all a 51% attack created by 75% of the hashing fork cannot steal individuals coins that are not being spent on the minority chain and the hashing majority has no idea which wallets are friend or foe. Large bagholders (almost all the core team and early crypto-anarchists who tend to prefer conservative implementations that prioritize security and privacy above mainstream adoption) can carry out some pretty nasty attacks where they can quickly devalue the chain with the most hashing power scaring all the miners to support their chain or they can simply quickly and secretly buy up mining farms and ASIC's and attack the main chain without risking any of their investments.

In fact, this course is a much more likely course that could occur over them changing the PoW algo.

Do I want any of this to occur?... of course not, I am not bitter and believe that our values are more similar than different and we will indeed find consensus soon. Our priorities are probably slightly different as all and there can be eventual reconciliation. It would be better to insure for everyone's sake that their isn't a civil war, which is why the 95% threshold is so important as it almost guarantees consensus will follow.

[AlexGR]

I guess my concern is who is going to support core after the fork and how could I essentially sell the same coins twice?
So far I have yet to see any exchange say they will continue to support core post fork.

Thanks for any help that can be provided. I'm trying to wrap me head around the market implications and how to properly proceed with coin storage. Or should I just convert to fiat with money ready to be wired to exchanges to buy? The delay concerns me, as markets move fast. If only there was a more expedient option.

1. There's plenty of incentive for an exchange to support btc, btcc or both - as these will have tremendous volume post fork, if the fork materializes. It will definitely be an order of magnitude greater compared to any altcoin action.

2. That's up to you. Just make sure, prior to the fork, to take custody of your coins from any exchange, pool, etc.

[brg444]

Why are we still discussing Classic like it's not a failed project already?

Didn't you get the news?