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

[dumbfbrankings]

If he has one redeeming quality... it's that he's honest enough that he won't deny it. He's admitted it before, and doesn't claim otherwise when I remind him. I would stop saying it if he would simply type that he runs a node and doesn't keep all his coins on exchanges.

I don't see how my bitcoin related practices are even relevant to various topics at hand, so in this context I'm not even going to discuss what I do or don't do  within this kind of discussion, because it really does not matter in the context of various points that I have made in my recent posts.  

In this regard, in recent posts, I believe that I was merely asserting general principles regarding how bitcoin is more decentralized, immutable and permissionless than Ethereum...  

We do not really need to get into any major compare and contrast of Ethereum  or discuss how potentially wonderful Ethereum is for some of the Ethereum enthusiasts because this seems to be off-topic within a bitcoin discussion thread, last time I checked... so we seem to have beaten the quasi-potentially relevant comparison/contrast aspects of BTC/ETH to death, no?
 

See, he is honest. I told him how easy it would be to shut me up about about the node/coins on exchange issue... and he didn't. I do respect that.

[gogodr]

Bears and trolls waiting to get back in there but no one is willing to sell.

Bears don't buy, they sell. If no one is selling its because the bears are dead.

[jbreher]

Some people continue to keep bringing up this whole scaling issue and to suggest that there is some kind of obligation to either consider a hard fork or an increase in the blocksize limit prior to seg wit coming out. 

Well, no. Not an _obligation_, but rather a reminder that we see a way forward that we believe to be advantageous to the health of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, and that we remain working to this goal, and that we are not going away.

It tends to be a kind of discussion that presumes that there are technical emergency problems with bitcoin that have to be fixed right away

For the sake of accuracy, we believe it would be _better_ to have fixed this problem _yesterday_.

and also it assumes that governance needs to be fixed in such a way to make bitcoin more easily changed. 

Like the Core solution of making vastly easier to soft fork in the future? Nay - we reject that dimension of 'easily changed'.

I think that those are crap assumptions that are more attempts at creating divisiveness rather than meaningful attempt to discuss what developments are actually positively taking place in bitcoin and continuing to be worked on.

Look - I'm perfectly willing to assert that you are just _wrong_ rather than _malevolent_. Kindly return the courtesy, will you?

Sure maybe at some point there will be a need to actually increase the blocksize limit, but seg wit is coming first,

Except The SegWit Omnibus Changeset is not yet live on the main Bitcoin network, while XT, BU, and Classic are. So no, by the measure of what is running in production, TSWOC is actually second third fourth.

Of course, it is yet to be seen which activates first. But if you listen to the admonitions of one of the largest miners -- with enough hashpower to stall adoption of TSWOC -- you'd be forgiven for doing a spit-take.

and is going to cause a lot of improvements and changes and also there is likely little to no justification for conducting an actual hardfork, unless the situation happens to be noncontroversial.. and at this time, the blocksize increase question seems to be controversial with the vast majority believing that it is not needed at the moment and that seg wit needs to be rolled out first.

As measured by the infallible wet finger in the air of this echo chamber. Riiiight.

[JayJuanGee]

If he has one redeeming quality... it's that he's honest enough that he won't deny it. He's admitted it before, and doesn't claim otherwise when I remind him. I would stop saying it if he would simply type that he runs a node and doesn't keep all his coins on exchanges.

I don't see how my bitcoin related practices are even relevant to various topics at hand, so in this context I'm not even going to discuss what I do or don't do  within this kind of discussion, because it really does not matter in the context of various points that I have made in my recent posts.  

In this regard, in recent posts, I believe that I was merely asserting general principles regarding how bitcoin is more decentralized, immutable and permissionless than Ethereum...  

We do not really need to get into any major compare and contrast of Ethereum  or discuss how potentially wonderful Ethereum is for some of the Ethereum enthusiasts because this seems to be off-topic within a bitcoin discussion thread, last time I checked... so we seem to have beaten the quasi-potentially relevant comparison/contrast aspects of BTC/ETH to death, no?
 

See, he is honest. I told him how easy it would be to shut me up about about the node/coins on exchange issue... and he didn't. I do respect that.

That's ridiculous, dumbfbrankings.  I have neither admitted nor denied anything nor do I need to engage in such.

  When a topic is largely irrelevant (my bitcoin practices) to the topic at hand (bitcoin walls), a refusal to address such irrelevant topic, and to play into your little game to distract this thread topic into further irrelevant topics does not amount to an admission nor permission to assert that we are good buddies - in which you are attempting to play nice guy in order to bait me into further irrelevant discussions. 

I'm not going there. 

So, in essence i continue to decline elaboration regarding this irrelevancy, which your self-proclamation as a form of license to categorize as permissioned admission remains non-supported.     

[dumbfbrankings]

2. Miners agree to any change Vitalik makes. Doesn't matter if it will end up breaking or making ethereum. Also rolling out huge changes to the protocol isn't something to be proud of. It shows the lack of immutability.

And currently... miners of BTC run whatever core puts out. Users run whatever is listed on bitcoin.org. If they run and activate segwit... we will see that Bitcoin is quite mutable. I guess you will be quite ashamed when the rewrite of Bitcoin that is segwit, activates.

However, when ethereum gets stuck in anything, they'll just ask their godess Vitalik. What if Vitalik unknowingly kills his project. At what point does "I didn't know it would do that" come into play?

While Vitalik is very important to the project, rightly so IMO, he isn’t a god. There are some very smart people involved with a lot of value on the line with the incentive to vet what he says and does. You are aware that there are 7 different client implementations in 7 different languages: Go, C++, Python, Javascript, Java, Rust and Ruby? That the inflation schedule by % outstanding is infinitely decaying?

Your concern applies equally to Bitcoin Core, at what point does “I didn’t know segwit would do that” come into play?

I agree that Ethereum seems willing to take on more risk than Bitcoin, that can be a good and/or bad thing. It’s important not to get too religious or tribal about this stuff… it’s software. To be honest… I wouldn’t have diversified at all into ETH this year if it wasn’t for the 1MB4EVA crowd. Network effect is a powerful thing, not an all-powerful thing. Granted it’s played out fantastically for me financially, but I would have rather seen BTC grow gracefully without centrally planned production quotas. I'm more philosophically and emotionally tied to BTC. The small blockists forced my hand here. After playing around with ETH I realized it had some very real advantages… 15 second confirmations, ASIC proof mining, natively more capable with contracts and scripting. Pretending that it doesn’t exist as a competitor is a fool’s errand.

3. How do we measure the level of centralization or decentralization in anything. If LN is going to be harmful for the scaling of bitcoin then people aren't going to use it.

I agree it's not a measurable variable, nor even really relevant when a small number of megawatt burning warehouses provide the "decentralized" security.

There's a reason Blockstream/Core wants to make on-chain transactions expensive and uncompetitive... they're going to be selling you the medicine for your "disease".

In their arrogance they discount/ignore the fact that there are competitors to the Bitcoin network that will be gleefully sweeping up the transactions and investment that won't fit in an artificially crippled Bitcoin.

Cheers  

The work that these warehouses do is the same everywhere. I don't think that these warehouses are the source of decentralization.

These warehouses create new blocks. Without them, Bitcoin doesn’t work. With control of them, Bitcoin can be effectively censored. The majority of them are located in China, under a government that has a fairly dim view of intellectual and financial freedom. You can stick your head in the sand about it, but that doesn’t make the issue go away. The only reason I raise it is because the Blockstream crowd likes to drape themselves in honorable cloak of decentralization, when the reality of the situation is in stark contrast. 

You're talking about crippling bitcoin by keeping the blocksize at 1mb? if so, isn't it good thing to keep spam out as long as we can? I mean bitcoin isn't even competitive with major institutions with its tiny fees.

Bitcoin isn’t competing with major financial institutions (yet). It’s competing with other cryptographic value transfer protocols. Keeping 1MB max is a competitive disadvantage, it also gives undue economic power to the devs with their hand on the maxblocksize lever. We now have a central bank of Bitcoin, and it’s called Core. Maxwell is the chairman of the board, not by election, but by social standing on IRC.

Also blockchain.info was developing thunder network, which will be competing with LN. So users have a choice of blueberry or orange flavored medicine for their problems.

This is all well and good. My only problem with payment channels is that they are having the playing field (intentionally) tilted in their favor. I support their competition with on-chain transactions in a free market scenario (miners choose their own block sizes and min fees).

@JJG just type it and it's over, I won't bring it up again. You won't... For the same reason you admitted to buying $1200. You're too GD honest. 

[DaRude]

5,4,3,2,... and

[JayJuanGee]

Some people continue to keep bringing up this whole scaling issue and to suggest that there is some kind of obligation to either consider a hard fork or an increase in the blocksize limit prior to seg wit coming out. 

Well, no. Not an _obligation_, but rather a reminder that we see a way forward that we believe to be advantageous to the health of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, and that we remain working to this goal, and that we are not going away.

Is anyone not responsible over the whole bitcoin ecosystem merely because the status quo remains until a change is achieved.  Therefore, if there is no emergency, then there is no need to change the status quo.  There are a large number of developments going on in the bitcoin space, so it would not be fair to imply that anyone is neglecting the bitcoin ecosystem merely because there has been a failure of consensus regarding increasing the blocksize limit and lack of consensus regarding any hardfork, too.

It tends to be a kind of discussion that presumes that there are technical emergency problems with bitcoin that have to be fixed right away

For the sake of accuracy, we believe it would be _better_ to have fixed this problem _yesterday_.

Who's "we"? you got a rock in your pocket.  You know that you keep asserting a kind of we believe it would have been better and asserting a problem... lot's of assumptions in the statement regarding the actual existence of a problem. without meaningful evidence of such.  Repeating to say it does not make it an actual problem.

and also it assumes that governance needs to be fixed in such a way to make bitcoin more easily changed. 

Like the Core solution of making vastly easier to soft fork in the future? Nay - we reject that dimension of 'easily changed'.

If there is a future change, then that bridge can be crossed at that time, no?  And, there you go with "we" again.

I think that those are crap assumptions that are more attempts at creating divisiveness rather than meaningful attempt to discuss what developments are actually positively taking place in bitcoin and continuing to be worked on.

Look - I'm perfectly willing to assert that you are just _wrong_ rather than _malevolent_. Kindly return the courtesy, will you?

I have no problem giving the benefit of the doubt in a lot of regards when there are differences of opinion.  In this case, there is actual evidence of attempts to undermine bitcoin, which rises to the level of malevolence.

Sure maybe at some point there will be a need to actually increase the blocksize limit, but seg wit is coming first,

Except The SegWit Omnibus Changeset is not yet live on the main Bitcoin network, while XT, BU, and Classic are. So no, by the measure of what is running in production, TSWOC is actually second third fourth.

My understanding is that XT, BU and classic are largely unsupported (and only by a very small minority at this point).  I thought that seg wit was being tested, so your technical awareness may be more in touch with what is going on in what location... whether your knowledge is material or not, may be another question, though.  I have my sceptisms based on my already experiencing your tendencies to exaggerate and misstate things, so I don't really have confidence to rely on some of your factual representations.

Of course, it is yet to be seen which activates first. But if you listen to the admonitions of one of the largest miners -- with enough hashpower to stall adoption of TSWOC -- you'd be forgiven for doing a spit-take.

Yeah.. antpool is probably going to lose a lot of its support if it sticks with such a ridiculous threatening position.. Let's see how it plays out once seg wit goes live and who adopts and who supports and how much mining power they retain, etc, etc.  In other words, I will believe it when I see it if antpool decides to continue with such a potentially destructive threat when rubber is about to hit the road.

and is going to cause a lot of improvements and changes and also there is likely little to no justification for conducting an actual hardfork, unless the situation happens to be noncontroversial.. and at this time, the blocksize increase question seems to be controversial with the vast majority believing that it is not needed at the moment and that seg wit needs to be rolled out first.

As measured by the infallible wet finger in the air of this echo chamber. Riiiight.

We still need to see how it is going to play out.  I don't claim to be any kind of technical expert, but it seems pretty decent to me, and from what I understand it is mostly uncontroverted by the devs and by the major players even though there are some hold out loud mouths and antpool jihun that is engaging in threats not to support it.. but in the end, my understanding is that it is not really controversial in terms of being an improvement to the protocol.

[dumbfbrankings]

Who's "we"? you got a rock in your pocket. 

He can count me... so there's a we. (Though I suspect there are more of us.)

[adamstgBit]

Who's "we"? you got a rock in your pocket. 

He can count me... so there's a we. (Though I suspect there are more of us.)

jbreher has my support aswell, when it comes to the scaling debate.

[thebigtalk]

Where's that guy posting graphs? I kinda miss that.

[adamstgBit]

Where's that guy posting graphs? I kinda miss that.

chart buddy moved away from bitcointalk.org because of political reasons

you can find him here.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/wall-observer.27/page-109#post-22470

[JayJuanGee]

Who's "we"? you got a rock in your pocket. 

He can count me... so there's a we. (Though I suspect there are more of us.)

jbreher has my support aswell, when it comes to the scaling debate.

Yeah, jbreher can get a thousand of you folks or even 10 thousand chiming in this thread, but such voting doesn't really cause a meaningful "we" in the context of his earlier statement. 

You don't achieve consensus and start to talk about "we" want this or "we" want that on a topic by surveying the bitcoin talk threads.. and then saying that what you say represent some kind of meaningful "we."  it seems like a big waste of time to attempt to establish consensus in that kind of manner.

I'm sure adam could do a poll, but there are also other threads on that topic, too, no?

   Further, there are a few bips out there on the topic of hard fork and blocksize limit increase that have been drafted including XT/Classic, and they have largely been rejected or at least not yet passed and/or received any meaningful support...   The topic seems mostly dead or dying, except folks keep bringing it up in order to  continue to argue the point with the wrong folks, including what the fuck good does it do on this particular thread to talk about dead proposals and keep trying to bring them up and suggest that "we" want this and that.. blah blah blah?

[USB-S]

2. Miners agree to any change Vitalik makes. Doesn't matter if it will end up breaking or making ethereum. Also rolling out huge changes to the protocol isn't something to be proud of. It shows the lack of immutability.

And currently... miners of BTC run whatever core puts out. Users run whatever is listed on bitcoin.org. If they run and activate segwit... we will see that Bitcoin is quite mutable. I guess you will be quite ashamed when the rewrite of Bitcoin that is segwit, activates.

However, when ethereum gets stuck in anything, they'll just ask their godess Vitalik. What if Vitalik unknowingly kills his project. At what point does "I didn't know it would do that" come into play?

While Vitalik is very important to the project, rightly so IMO, he isn’t a god. There are some very smart people involved with a lot of value on the line with the incentive to vet what he says and does. You are aware that there are 7 different client implementations in 7 different languages: Go, C++, Python, Javascript, Java, Rust and Ruby? That the inflation schedule by % outstanding is infinitely decaying?

Your concern applies equally to Bitcoin Core, at what point does “I didn’t know segwit would do that” come into play?

I agree that Ethereum seems willing to take on more risk than Bitcoin, that can be a good and/or bad thing. It’s important not to get too religious or tribal about this stuff… it’s software. To be honest… I wouldn’t have diversified at all into ETH this year if it wasn’t for the 1MB4EVA crowd. Network effect is a powerful thing, not an all-powerful thing. Granted it’s played out fantastically for me financially, but I would have rather seen BTC grow gracefully without centrally planned production quotas. I'm more philosophically and emotionally tied to BTC. The small blockists forced my hand here. After playing around with ETH I realized it had some very real advantages… 15 second confirmations, ASIC proof mining, natively more capable with contracts and scripting. Pretending that it doesn’t exist as a competitor is a fool’s errand.

What's the orphan rate on 15 second confirmation times?
Can you trust 15 second confirmations?
Do people need contracts to be on the ledger?
How efficient are the "decentralized" contracts compared to "centralized" contracts offered by rootstock/conterparty?
Can Vitalik leave as the CEO of ethereum or is he stuck with it until he kills it?

3. How do we measure the level of centralization or decentralization in anything. If LN is going to be harmful for the scaling of bitcoin then people aren't going to use it.

I agree it's not a measurable variable, nor even really relevant when a small number of megawatt burning warehouses provide the "decentralized" security.

There's a reason Blockstream/Core wants to make on-chain transactions expensive and uncompetitive... they're going to be selling you the medicine for your "disease".

In their arrogance they discount/ignore the fact that there are competitors to the Bitcoin network that will be gleefully sweeping up the transactions and investment that won't fit in an artificially crippled Bitcoin.

Cheers  

The work that these warehouses do is the same everywhere. I don't think that these warehouses are the source of decentralization.

These warehouses create new blocks. Without them, Bitcoin doesn’t work. With control of them, Bitcoin can be effectively censored. The majority of them are located in China, under a government that has a fairly dim view of intellectual and financial freedom. You can stick your head in the sand about it, but that doesn’t make the issue go away. The only reason I raise it is because the Blockstream crowd likes to drape themselves in honorable cloak of decentralization, when the reality of the situation is in stark contrast.  

The fact that there aren't that many warehouses that mine bitcoin, tells us that the word of someone trying to destroy bitcoin would be out in hours. Also this would be only possible if the chinese government actually had any knowledge on how to do harm to bitcoin with all of that hashing power. I bet the most that they can do is shut the miners down.

You're talking about crippling bitcoin by keeping the blocksize at 1mb? if so, isn't it good thing to keep spam out as long as we can? I mean bitcoin isn't even competitive with major institutions with its tiny fees.

Bitcoin isn’t competing with major financial institutions (yet). It’s competing with other cryptographic value transfer protocols. Keeping 1MB max is a competitive disadvantage, it also gives undue economic power to the devs with their hand on the maxblocksize lever. We now have a central bank of Bitcoin, and it’s called Core. Maxwell is the chairman of the board, not by election, but by social standing on IRC.

Also blockchain.info was developing thunder network, which will be competing with LN. So users have a choice of blueberry or orange flavored medicine for their problems.

This is all well and good. My only problem with payment channels is that they are having the playing field (intentionally) tilted in their favor. I support their competition with on-chain transactions in a free market scenario (miners choose their own block sizes and min fees).

You can't scale bitcoin by just increasing the blocksize. Wasn't bitcoin unlimited something similar to what you're proposing?

[adamstgBit]

Who's "we"? you got a rock in your pocket. 

He can count me... so there's a we. (Though I suspect there are more of us.)

jbreher has my support aswell, when it comes to the scaling debate.

Yeah, jbreher can get a thousand of you folks or even 10 thousand chiming in this thread, but such voting doesn't really cause a meaningful "we" in the context of his earlier statement. 

You don't achieve consensus and start to talk about "we" want this or "we" want that on a topic by surveying the bitcoin talk threads.. and then saying that what you say represent some kind of meaningful "we."  it seems like a big waste of time to attempt to establish consensus in that kind of manner.

I'm sure adam could do a poll, but there are also other threads on that topic, too, no?

   Further, there are a few bips out there on the topic of hard fork and blocksize limit increase that have been drafted including XT/Classic, and they have largely been rejected or at least not yet passed and/or received any meaningful support...   The topic seems mostly dead or dying, except folks keep bringing it up in order to  continue to argue the point with the wrong folks, including what the fuck good does it do on this particular thread to talk about dead proposals and keep trying to bring them up and suggest that "we" want this and that.. blah blah blah?

you're being to anal  about his use of "we". but wtv

the topic has died down a bit, but trust me it will surface again
this topic has been talk about at gr8 length since ... well ... forever!
the release and soon to be adoption of segwit's trollishous "effective block size incress" has allow the community to sorta mark the scaling debate as "Resolved" but its really not and it never will be, and the block size limit MUST change,  its not optional, sooner or later as bitcoin grows and grows even with LN blocksize limit will need to be bumped up.

[dumbfbrankings]

   Further, there are a few bips out there on the topic of hard fork and blocksize limit increase that have been drafted including XT/Classic, and they have largely been rejected or at least not yet passed and/or received any meaningful support...   The topic seems mostly dead or dying, except folks keep bringing it up in order to  continue to argue the point with the wrong folks, including what the fuck good does it do on this particular thread to talk about dead proposals and keep trying to bring them up and suggest that "we" want this and that.. blah blah blah?

Wow, BIP’s not in the roadmap of Gregory’s email to the mailing list… And they haven’t found support among Gregory, his employees, and his IRC buddies, imagine that.

If you recall, there was a meeting in Hong Kong to stop miners from running and activating Classic? Blockstream sent several team members there to give the illusion of authority? Remember?

Now, the rug has been pulled from under the miners at that meeting by luke-jr (a blockstream contractor):



After being made to look like fools… what do you suppose the miners are thinking right now?



Wake the hell up, friends.

[JayJuanGee]

[edited out]

you're being to anal  about his use of "we". but wtv

I agree that the topic has become a kind of irrelevant side-tangent, and probably my only point is that such way of expressing yourself brings a false and unnecessary appeal to authority.  There are probably better ways to substantively make assertions, but I agree with you that it seems to be leading everyone including myself into irrelevant weeds.

the topic has died down a bit, but trust me it will surface again

It seems more relevant in threads that are created for such, but I suppose it comes up in this thread so much because there tends to be a bit of a larger audience and potential to spark some discussion.

I mean even you asserted in op that your intention was to attempt to keep this thread topically related to walls and price and those kinds of matters.. but whatever, we all recognize that this thread goes all over the place as well as the relevant wall and price watching discussions, which also can be part of it's excitement and proliferation.

this topic has been talk about at gr8 length since ... well ... forever!

I think you are exaggerating a bit when you assert "forever."

I don't know the exact history because I am sure it was discussed quite a bit longer than I realized it, but the topic really seemed to get a lot more attention after Gavin began pushing XT in about August or so.  During that time we got a spike up to $502 in early November.. and then it began to get a lot more vocalization in December and then February with Hearnia rage quit.. and then there seemed to also bring some removal of credibility to all of this with the connection of the Wright Satoshi claim and Gavin, which brought some discrediting to Gavin and the issues he was pushing.  So I think that the extensive discussions were only recent.

the release and soon to be adoption of segwit's trollishous "effective block size incress" has allow the community to sorta mark the scaling debate as "Resolved"

I think that it is more discrediting of Gavin and the community is kind of coming around to seeing that XT/Classic and some of the related proposals were really sabotage attempts rather than technically necessary. 

I doubt that seg wit and lightning network or thunder or any of these variations are going to resolve these kinds of issues, but we may come to realize that bitcoin is not broken, which seems to had been part of the assumptions of XT and classic and their attempts to change bitcoin governance.

but its really not and it never will be, and the block size limit MUST change,  its not optional, sooner or later as bitcoin grows and grows even with LN blocksize limit will need to be bumped up.

Maybe, we don't really know that.  I mean maybe you are smarter than me, but it seems like we gotta see how things play out with seg wit.  In essence, I think that there is quite a bit of consensus that some day the blockchain limit will need to increase, so no one is really precluding that from being considered, but I seem to have more issues with the presumption that there is something broken in bitcoin and there is some kind of emergency needs to make changes for the sake of change...   That kind of thing does not seem to be good for bitcoin to be able to easily change it... And, anyhow, a lot of the agreed to changes such as seg wit seem to be bringing a lot of increased capacity too... so shouldn't we be looking forward and positive rather than focusing on the negative that is not even an actual issue at the moment?

[dumbfbrankings]

What's the orphan rate on 15 second confirmation times?

There's a scheme called "uncle" blocks where orphaned blocks get compensated for their effort.

Can you trust 15 second confirmations?

Obviously less than one 10 min BTC confirmation, but it's nice to have a continuum vs waiting 30 min for an unlucky Bitcoin block.

Do people need contracts to be on the ledger?
How efficient are the "decentralized" contracts compared to "centralized" contracts offered by rootstock/conterparty?

I'm not sure, but if they want to, they'll pay the gas costs.

Can Vitalik leave as the CEO of ethereum or is he stuck with it until he kills it?

I think he'll probably stay pretty heavily involved, but like satoshi, the system doesn't stop if he does. I think that there would be a massive sell-off if he left, but that just means he is valued highly, and an asset to the future of the project.

3. How do we measure the level of centralization or decentralization in anything. If LN is going to be harmful for the scaling of bitcoin then people aren't going to use it.

I agree it's not a measurable variable, nor even really relevant when a small number of megawatt burning warehouses provide the "decentralized" security.

There's a reason Blockstream/Core wants to make on-chain transactions expensive and uncompetitive... they're going to be selling you the medicine for your "disease".

In their arrogance they discount/ignore the fact that there are competitors to the Bitcoin network that will be gleefully sweeping up the transactions and investment that won't fit in an artificially crippled Bitcoin.

Cheers  

The work that these warehouses do is the same everywhere. I don't think that these warehouses are the source of decentralization.

These warehouses create new blocks. Without them, Bitcoin doesn’t work. With control of them, Bitcoin can be effectively censored. The majority of them are located in China, under a government that has a fairly dim view of intellectual and financial freedom. You can stick your head in the sand about it, but that doesn’t make the issue go away. The only reason I raise it is because the Blockstream crowd likes to drape themselves in honorable cloak of decentralization, when the reality of the situation is in stark contrast.  

The fact that there aren't that many warehouses that mine bitcoin, tells us that the word of someone trying to destroy bitcoin would be out in hours. Also this would be only possible if the chinese government actually had any knowledge on how to do harm to bitcoin with all of that hashing power. I bet the most that they can do is shut the miners down.

Which would be pretty damn bad. Something that isn't so easy with a couple hundred thousand GPU's scattered across the world.

You're talking about crippling bitcoin by keeping the blocksize at 1mb? if so, isn't it good thing to keep spam out as long as we can? I mean bitcoin isn't even competitive with major institutions with its tiny fees.

Bitcoin isn’t competing with major financial institutions (yet). It’s competing with other cryptographic value transfer protocols. Keeping 1MB max is a competitive disadvantage, it also gives undue economic power to the devs with their hand on the maxblocksize lever. We now have a central bank of Bitcoin, and it’s called Core. Maxwell is the chairman of the board, not by election, but by social standing on IRC.

Also blockchain.info was developing thunder network, which will be competing with LN. So users have a choice of blueberry or orange flavored medicine for their problems.

This is all well and good. My only problem with payment channels is that they are having the playing field (intentionally) tilted in their favor. I support their competition with on-chain transactions in a free market scenario (miners choose their own block sizes and min fees).

You can't scale bitcoin by just increasing the blocksize. Wasn't bitcoin unlimited something similar to what you're proposing?

Obviously there are technological and practical limits but I'm pretty sure that 1MB isn't the magic number. I like the concept of Bitcoin Unlimited, a decentralized method of arriving at a schelling point for maxblocksize. It doesn't just mean "Accepts Unlimited Block Size" if that's what you think/have been told.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

When's ETH make the switch to POS? There should be a moment of popcorn.

Edit: this was powerfully unhelpful.

[r0ach]

When's ETH make the switch to POS? There should be a moment of popcorn.

Vitalik scamming live on camera

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1496403.0

[USB-S]

Can you trust 15 second confirmations?

Obviously less than one 10 min BTC confirmation, but it's nice to have a continuum vs waiting 30 min for an unlucky Bitcoin block.

But there has got to be a lot of issues caused by the 15 second block times. It just sounds so unstable for me. Also doesn't that cause a lot of bloat?
Didn't lighting network promise instant off chain confirmations? Wouldn't that make eths 15 sec block timer even more stupid?

Do people need contracts to be on the ledger?
How efficient are the "decentralized" contracts compared to "centralized" contracts offered by rootstock/conterparty?

I'm not sure, but if they want to, they'll pay the gas costs.

But how cost efficient is ethereums contract platform compared to its competitors? Wouldn't it be better for a business to run its contracts on the cheapest platform to keep costs to a minimum?

Which would be pretty damn bad. Something that isn't so easy with a couple hundred thousand GPU's scattered across the world.

Because people don't start warehouses full of GPU's for a business.
I know mining is more accessible to home miners with GPU mining. But that doesn't change the fact that people are going to try to scale their operations. Does it matter if people have warehouses full of bitcoin asics or Graphics cards (bob who has one gpu hashing at ether can vote, but his vote still isn't as important as wing-wang-wongs warehouse)

Obviously there are technological and practical limits but I'm pretty sure that 1MB isn't the magic number. I like the concept of Bitcoin Unlimited, a decentralized method of arriving at a schelling point for maxblocksize. It doesn't just mean "Accepts Unlimited Block Size" if that's what you think/have been told.

I bet it isn't going to stay at 1mb forever.
The thing is no one knows what the magic number is.

Also why isn't there any support behind Bitcoin unlimted? It seems like a solid proposal, yet no miner is willing to get behind it. What's wrong with it?