Miner cartel, Bankster cartel, or an altcoin? Your choice?

[jbreher]

I'm a great admirerer of the Austrian school, even if I think that some of their views are outdated.  But I'm also convinced that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with fractional reserve banking.  The reason why people think it is wrong is because they don't really understand what it is about (and everything is done to confuse the issue, true).

What is fractional reserve banking ?   It is issuing a DIFFERENT ASSET that is kept on-par with a base asset through a fund that serves as a form of collateral for individual transactions.  People, however, are made to confuse the new asset with the underlying base asset, and this is where the system looks like cheating.

Well, I am gratified that at least you understand the true nature of the vampire squid. Or at least its underpinnings. But how you can justify being given one asset while being told it is some other asset is somehow 'not cheating' is ludicrous.

If I were to represent that my 1 oz rounds of gold-plated titanium were American Eagles, I would be rightly castigated as a fraud and a charlatan. How is your vaunted FRB -- as you yourself present it -- any different?

When you want to destroy nation-state central banking and start a new world central bank which swallows everything, what better way to start then planting a virus named Bitcoin.

In a world where the IMF -- the NWO's central bank of central banks -- has been working on displacing the USD with the SDR as the reserve currency of the world for over a decade, isn't Bitcoin a mere distraction to them?

If big power-broking dynasties created Bitcoin with decades of research, which is entirely possible, they would create the end-game solution themselves, not mess around creating stages on the road to the end-game.

You're an idiot ...

C'mon now. Carlton has a point here. Which you blew completely past unacknowledged. If TPTB are the creators of (the known faulty) Bitcoin, why would they leave us to stumble upon the 'solution' which delivers us once and for all into their clutches -- an eventuality which might possibly not occur?

(And I'm sure Carlton would corroborate that I'm not jumping in here based merely upon our mutual respect -- more properly characterized as persistent mutual antagonism)

Any IMF basket would not be trusted by people like MP, as they know it is a political clusterfuck.

Even _if_ there were any truth to MP's self-aggrandizing braggadocio ( ::cough:: as if ::cough:: ), even his grandiose exaggerations wold make him an insignificant gnat on a world scale. To the IMF, MP is as insignificant as you or I -- or even a Doge n00b. i.e., lost in the noise.

Something like Bitcoin is required to provide that trusted standard of high-powered settlement money

I'd agree that something is required. The 'like Bitcoin' portion of your claim requires supporting evidence. Especially as there are open plans to employ the SDR in this role.

...<<as does this genesis (block) myth>>...

But the big lie is that Bitcoin is not actually controlled by the globalists when it really is

^^^Speculation predicated upon facts not entered into evidence.

I intend to provide a knowledge age money which has different properties and admits that no perfect standard can ever exist. We in the knowledge age are willing to destroy the fake currency (the fungible bits) with creative destruction from time-to-time to renew the tree of liberty.

But did you not elsewhere 'prove' that all monetary systems devolve into power law distribution? These can't both be true.

Lemme slow you down a little.  "Ideal" means conceptual in nature.  Nash defines Ideal Money as money that doesn't degrade in value over time.  This is a limit, he argues, we will asymptotically approach-a ceiling of perfect. It's not quite addressing what he is saying, to say it can't be brought about.

First and foremost its a useful thought experiment as a conceptual METRIC for comparison.

Run with that...

There is no perfect because humans aren't perfect ...

But we can all picture a perfect circle in our mind's eye.

This much of traincarswreck's thesis* I can agree with: ideal money, while not realizable, is an aspirational goal. If we can get all of humanity to aspire to ideal money, they will be able to recognize in which ways their governmental fiats resemble such an ideal money, and in what ways it diverges. And this will build pressure to bring these gov fiats in line with such an ideal. For those that recognize the characteristics will choose to employ other district's fiats where their somewhat better fidelity to the ideal is useful.

*At least, I think these are elements of traincarswreck's thesis. I'm sure s/he'll loudly and arrogantly correct any misattribution.

Where I diverge is in the insistence that Bitcoin is the bestest closest and most idealist-ist approximation that humanity will ever know. And further, that Bitcoin already is cognizant of this role, so will strive to fulfill it (as it were a conscious entity of some sort).

Finally getting the chance to start into this thread. Interested to learn that I have already been quoted several times. Something downthread may obviate what I am about to state. We shall see.

...aaaannnd with that, I have caught up with the head of this thread as it stood when I entered. Epic so far. First sleep, then re-read my content to see what clarifications and rescinsions may be required. Only then, defense of rebuttals. See you on the flipside....

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[dinofelis]

I think you are relatively new here. At least having arrived after the 1MB production quota started having a real effect upon the system. But to at least a subset of the participants, it was a given that the abolition of this limitation would be enacted before it became significant. To many, this assumption was indeed part of our 'contract'.

I was here before, and I followed the discussion, but it is only recently that I understood the full implications of "immutability" ; something that Satoshi himself a) didn't understand fully or b) was lying about.  If it is not part of "at block X we do Y" (like block halving) *from the start* and if it is not a "regular HF coin" (like monero or ethereum) or a centralized one like DASH where the central dev can decide anything at any moment, then in a truly decentralized system no "future change that has not taken a precise form for how, when, where" is not part of the contract, even if they made you to believe so.  Because of the immutability dynamics that antagonists will never find a consensus over their different opinions on the matter if ever it gives the slightest financial/political/ego-tripping/.... advantage to the winner.

I guess it is our own fault for not having believed 'what it said on the tin'. However, whether it was this particular change, or the widespread notion that Bitcoin could adopt any innovation cooke up in the lab of altcoins, pretty much nobody thought Bitcoin immutable. At the time. I guess we've all got egg on our faces.

Bingo.  This immutability dynamics, even in the face of diminishing decentralization, is fascinating.
It is like Turkeys having to vote for Xmas, even if all of them know that this is their demise, but they cannot agree upon anything else: escape, kill the farmer, pretend to be sick, beg for mercy.... in the end, they only vote for Xmas !

And indeed, I used to be of the opinion that the long difficulty retargeting was a stupid hack only used to make the code implementation easier than a smoother curve. I now at least understand that it has important implications related to changing the system. If this be intentional, this has me even more in awe of Satoshi's prescience.

Well, awe, I don't know.  Forks are healthy if the only option is to vote for Xmas if not !

You misunderstand XThin. In XThin, all transactions are individually validated by validating nodes before the block they are contained in is solved. Upon solution, the only thing requiring propagation is the list of transactions within the block (and the solution of course).

Ah, but *with the list of transactions*.  That's just a small factor smaller than the full block.  I was thinking one was specifying to transmit the block header only.  If you make 50 GB blocks, that list of transactions won't be 80 bytes but several GB too.
So it is just a small factor (the ratio of the full transaction size over the empty size).

Moreover, this doesn't allow for consensus resolution.  After all, nodes receiving the list of transaction hashes, have not necessarily received the transactions themselves at that moment.  If you have to wait to have received the transactions themselves, 1) you needed to be sufficiently online and not have had any network failures to be sure to have received the old ones in the mem pool already 2) there's no point, because apparently you WERE capable of receiving those transactions through the network, so (up to a factor of 2, which is negligible) that doesn't play a role.

[traincarswreck]

Where I diverge is in the insistence that Bitcoin is the bestest closest and most idealist-ist approximation that humanity will ever know. And further, that Bitcoin already is cognizant of this role, so will strive to fulfill it (as it were a conscious entity of some sort).

But do you believe bitcoin is as good as or better than gold in the hoardable sense?

To be quite respectable, in a Gresham-advised sense, money needs only to be AS GOOD as other material commod-ities that might be hoarded.

Keep in mind also, the suggestion is that eventually, as bitcoin's value is discovered and it stabilizes more in relation to each respective fiat, more people will wake up to the idea that the most important thing in the world is to guard bitcoin's value proposition.

[dinofelis]

I'm a great admirerer of the Austrian school, even if I think that some of their views are outdated.  But I'm also convinced that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with fractional reserve banking.  The reason why people think it is wrong is because they don't really understand what it is about (and everything is done to confuse the issue, true).

What is fractional reserve banking ?   It is issuing a DIFFERENT ASSET that is kept on-par with a base asset through a fund that serves as a form of collateral for individual transactions.  People, however, are made to confuse the new asset with the underlying base asset, and this is where the system looks like cheating.

Well, I am gratified that at least you understand the true nature of the vampire squid. Or at least its underpinnings. But how you can justify being given one asset while being told it is some other asset is somehow 'not cheating' is ludicrous.

If I were to represent that my 1 oz rounds of gold-plated titanium were American Eagles, I would be rightly castigated as a fraud and a charlatan. How is your vaunted FRB -- as you yourself present it -- any different?

First of all, the art of doing business successfully and becoming rich is based upon building an illusion in the head of the gullible while not being explicit about it, because "selling illusion" is a business with high demand by the gullible, and of which the offer can be extremely lucrative.  In other words, selling illusions is the art of human profitable interaction.  That is not different than the car salesman who makes you think you are a "real man" if you buy this sports car "with character".

But FRB is not about selling snake oil.  The bank that is issuing bank money will do everything in its power (that is, at the height of its reserves) to honour the 1-1 exchange relationship with OTHER bank dollars of other banks.  It has a certain amount of collateral doing so ; and even, the modern fiat system allows the central bank to issue always enough EXTRA collateral to do so, *on the condition that a genuine bank has a 1-1 coverage by non-fluid assets that can be taken over by the FED*.

However, the extend of coverage of the bank is finite.  In normal cases, it will always be sufficient to keep the exchange ratio with other bank-dollars on-par.  But in exceptional circumstances, it can go broke.  

If your bank goes broke, in principle, you shouldn't be surprised that you've lost all the money in that bank.  So deep down, you KNOW that this is "bank money" and not "FED money".

The REAL LIARS are the states, who *guarantee* bank deposits without having any means to do so.  THEY are the ones making people believe bank money is FED money.

In the modern banking system, the fractional reserve is not an issue, really.   The real issue, as I said, is elsewhere.  Even a FRB bank needs to have FULL ASSET COVERAGE.  A bank cannot issue money without having a "backing asset" ; not even the FED is allowed to do so.  The whole question is, what is a backing asset ?  Normally, it is something of economical value.  Real estate, land are primary examples.  Gold.  But also promises from the future that are credible: mortgages.  Business stock.  This is, however a slippery slope.  The real problem, the fundamental problem with our current fiat system is that we have *self-referential* assets: the whole big giant bobbal of derivatives, referencing other derivatives referencing wallets of derivatives maybe including themselves, orders of magnitude BIGGER than earth's economy.

When you use self-referential backing, of course, you kill the system.

It is quite ironic that this infinite recursion that blows the derivatives bobble comes about because of a de facto Turing completeness of the specification of derivatives, which is very similar to the hack of the DAO !

[iamnotback]

@jbreher I am just very exhausted of this thread (sleepless, sleep deprived, trying to do too much), that is all. Relieved to see @dinofelis has energy for some continued high quality discussion.

@dinofelis I agree it is fascinating that miners may be turning away from BU after they read this thread and figured out they are stuck between pet rock ASICs and gouging for fees ("between a rock and a hard place"). Your initial opinion of an immutable stalemate may end up being correct.

My diversification opinion:

Re: Reminder: Monero can fall 70% or more, and that's ok

Anyways, I wanted to write a small post here to encourage new fans not to bail on this wonderful currency just because the price drops. As in, the price dropping by 70%. What was the latest new high we experienced earlier this month? $25/xmr? It could very well drop to $7 in 2017.
I say this because it has done that in the past. I was there during the last big drop, and it was pretty rough. In August of 2016 Monero was accepted on Alphabay, the first coin besides Bitcoin on the DNM. It shot up from $2.50 to $15 in under two weeks. That's 600% gains in 13 days. Boom:


...a lot of us began to calculate our winnings more seriously, and began to assume that $15/xmr was the new normal.

Our coins, once worth a glorious $15, were now worth a pathetic $4.38. A drop of over 70%. Oof.

I am eyeing an entry point between $7 and $15. First time I will diversify into XMR. It is just time to start giving up on Bitcoin. The Scalepocalypse will not be rectified soon. I am in ETH right now, whose chart looks more bullish to me short-term. None of this guaranteed of course. Although if BU fades away, Bitcoin may get a significant recovery bounce, but then I think it would come back down again as reality sets in that LN is a long ways from reality and miners are going to gouge for fees if they lose the war about block size. I might be misreading XMR's chart and it may be poised to move higher now.

Note recently it was mentioned that ETH will soon be added to Alphabay and several other significant news stories with Raiden and Metro coming soon as well. And many ICO apps coming out for Ethereum such as MobileGo and including the very rapidly appreciating First Blood.

[iamnotback]

It is quite ironic that this infinite recursion that blows the derivatives bobble comes about because of a de facto Turing completeness of the specification of derivatives, which is very similar to the hack of the DAO !

I explained that unbounded nondeterminism is the nature of our universe. I had mentioned this upthread also.

[iamnotback]

@dinofelis I agree it is fascinating that miners may be turning away from BU after they read this thread and figured out they are stuck between pet rock ASICs and gouging for fees ("between a rock and a hard place"). Your initial opinion of an immutable stalemate may end up being correct.

More evidence that @dinofelis may be correct in his prediction:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1847448.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1847125.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1847331.0

Bitcoin is analogous to ObamaCare or Hotel California, once you check in then you can never check out:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-politics/trumpcare-ryancare-obamacare-is-dead-for-now-who-killedit-trump-paul-ryan/article34428768/

[iamnotback]

Re: What cryptocurrency is solving the scaling problem?

your beloved "domains, and dapps" will come to Bitcoin in summer 2017 via Rootstock.

Sidechains are insolubly insecure and can never work. @ArticMine and I debated it a month ago.

How likely is it that Bitcoin will be overtaken in the event of a contentious hard fork? I think this is an example of things to come. Bitcoin will be attacked through its mining, the network, legally, and every other possible way. If you don't think Bitcoin is going to be attacked, you've misunderstood what this is about. You don't go and poke a $20 trillion industry and go, "Hey, we're going to disrupt you!" You can't just wait for it to roll over. This is offensive to a lot of governments, rich institutions, and a lot of people who don't want to see Bitcoin succeed. If a fork happens, we get to learn what happens when a fork attack occurs. Anyone who thinks a fork will be unopposed is quickly going to discover that this will be a battle on all fronts. Inevitably the two sides are going to attack each other on the network, with denial-of-service attacks, with hash rate; they're going to attack each other publicly, privately, anonymously and not. Every bug in the software will get poked and poked again, so they better fix them well. The battle becomes "who has the best software development team? How quickly can they maintain that code and keep uptime?" That race is only 7 blocks wide. I don't think the people who are threatening to do a hard fork have thought clearly about the implications. This will allow Bitcoin to test all the attack vectors (nodes, relays, hashing, replay transactions, etc). And the result will be a Bitcoin that's battle-hardened, because it will have survived a fork attack and we will better understand what happens under such highly contentious conditions. It's very important to not mistake smooth sailing for good sailors. If any altcoin somehow overtakes bitcoin and gets to this scale, they will have to deal with the same scaling and governance controversies. Many of them will end up centralised or with failures in architecture. These are the rites of passage; you first have to grow up to face them. How many of the other blockchains are preparing for this? Not many, because they aren't paying attention. This is a fantastic experiment but it's not easy. This is a game with $20 billion at stake.

Re: What cryptocurrency is solving the scaling problem?

I've always wondered this about certain coins. For example, I pretty much never see congestion on DOGE, LTC, and ETH/ETC. Is it a function of being underused, or have they actually solved the traffic issue?

Most of those coins never leave the exchanges.

In other words, they have no adoption use case at all. They can be destroyed overnight by an attack on exchanges (by an inside attack, hacker, or regulatory crackdown such as from the SEC for those which sold ICOs).

[iamnotback]

Clarification of my stance on Ethereum:

That is why we can kick ass versus Bitcoin in terms of onboarding, because we can offer dozens of apps which interest users in different ways and then the buzz will spread that all these apps are based on the BitNet: a new form of Internet that even powers mobile apps. We're building a new high-level, decentralized protocol for the Internet.

Hollywool-over-their-eyes (aka Hollywhores) is making a movie about us, but note the projector slide in the background is an Ethereum roadmap; which exemplifies that the whales behind ETH are very well connected with the mafia media aka USG.MIT.

The DAO attacker is a Bitcoin $billionaire and he (and @r0ach) claim that Ethereum is backed by an R3 consortium of banksters who also have connections with the USA govt DEEP STATE and the DEEP STATE's academic institutions such as MIT, Cornell, etc..

My stance on this is that it appears to be true that Ethereum's backers are able to pull strings at the United Nations, and mass media. I am not invested in Ethereum long-term. I don't believe in it as a long-term viable project. I invested as a diversification, in case that corrupt group that backs Ethereum is able to succeed.

I believe TPTB in our world planted Bitcoin as Nash Ideal Money virus to help bring about their NWO with a world central bank. I think they also helped created Ethereum through one of the factions of their network of control, for several reasons:

1. To provide a playground for the fools so they can separate them from their money.
2. To stress test challenges to Bitcoin.
3. To stress test other sub-blockchains or networks that could be master controlled by settlement to the Bitcoin chain in the future.

My view is that both Bitcoin and Ethereum are corrupt shit. And I intend to challenge those. But until I do, I am diversified currently with some holdings of both BTC and ETH (in addition to some minor holdings of a couple other very speculative altcoins).

That doesn't necessarily mean that Vitalik or Gmaxwell are corrupt. I really don't know those guys well. Those devs aren't the whales who are controlling those blockchains.

Conjecture on what lies ahead:

I don't know what happens now. Perhaps fireworks. MPeX promised to wreck havoc if ever miners attempt to create 20 MB blocks. I don't know if he still thinks he can keep that threat.

If you have any evidence that MP is anything but a bloviating paper tiger, I'd be interested to see it.

MP tends to pop up from time to time, promising to annihilate anyone who does X. Then X occurs, and no ill effects are unleashed upon the perpetrator of X.

So which is the lie? Is the claim if heartlessness and irregard for 'lesser humans' a lie? Or is the claim of power a lie?

He was the $150 million DAO hacker. He is the central public spokesman of the The Most Serene Republic (TMSR). He had or has a million+ bitcoins ($1+ billion) and he sold 250,000 of them after Aug 2016. He claims he ended Hillary Clinton's election on July 16, 2016 when a hack reveal she intended to attack the TMSR. These and more James Bond intrigue are documented upthread.

Is MP the foul-mouthed, sperm whale, Socrates version of 007?  

I don't believe that. Usually the simplest explanation is also corect. Now, i believe that these institutions / corporations may try to influence EF to steer the project to fit their own needs, but that's all.

That's also a possibility, but ICOs are very easy to manipulate, you just buy your token from yourself with borrowed BTC (then pay back the BTC to the lender) so you own most the tokens at $0 cost.

The same about bitcoin, yes a power war is the likely scenario. But you're probably overestimating them. It is not likely for any of these sides to risk their wealth to win this war, aka to go into a fork war and dump & buy the other chain. Too risky. The common thing that links everyone in this space is arguably greed. Nobody will risk wealth out of principles.

That is @dinofelis' stance and I have been leaning towards it lately as I have stated publicly.

[GreenBits]

Clarification of my stance on Ethereum:

That is why we can kick ass versus Bitcoin in terms of onboarding, because we can offer dozens of apps which interest users in different ways and then the buzz will spread that all these apps are based on the BitNet: a new form of Internet that even powers mobile apps. We're building a new high-level, decentralized protocol for the Internet.

Hollywool-over-their-eyes (aka Hollywhores) is making a movie about us, but note the projector slide in the background is an Ethereum roadmap; which exemplifies that the whales behind ETH are very well connected with the mafia media aka USG.MIT.

The DAO attacker is a Bitcoin $billionaire and he (and @r0ach) claim that Ethereum is backed by an R3 consortium of banksters who also have connections with the USA govt DEEP STATE and the DEEP STATE's academic institutions such as MIT, Cornell, etc..

My stance on this is that it appears to be true that Ethereum's backers are able to pull strings at the United Nations, and mass media. I am not invested in Ethereum long-term. I don't believe in it as a long-term viable project. I invested as a diversification, in case that corrupt group that backs Ethereum is able to succeed.

I believe TPTB in our world planted Bitcoin as Nash Ideal Money virus to help bring about their NWO with a world central bank. I think they also helped created Ethereum through one of the factions of their network of control, for several reasons:

1. To provide a playground for the fools so they can separate them from their money.
2. To stress test challenges to Bitcoin.
3. To stress test other sub-blockchains or networks that could be master controlled by settlement to the Bitcoin chain in the future.

My view is that both Bitcoin and Ethereum are corrupt shit. And I intend to challenge those. But until I do, I am diversified currently with some holdings of both BTC and ETH (in addition to some minor holdings of a couple other very speculative altcoins).

That doesn't necessarily mean that Vitalik or Gmaxwell are corrupt. I really don't know those guys well. Those devs aren't the whales who are controlling those blockchains.

Conjecture on what lies ahead:

I don't know what happens now. Perhaps fireworks. MPeX promised to wreck havoc if ever miners attempt to create 20 MB blocks. I don't know if he still thinks he can keep that threat.

If you have any evidence that MP is anything but a bloviating paper tiger, I'd be interested to see it.

MP tends to pop up from time to time, promising to annihilate anyone who does X. Then X occurs, and no ill effects are unleashed upon the perpetrator of X.

So which is the lie? Is the claim if heartlessness and irregard for 'lesser humans' a lie? Or is the claim of power a lie?

He was the $150 million DAO hacker. He is the central public spokesman of the The Most Serene Republic (TMSR). He had or has a million+ bitcoins ($1+ billion) and he sold 250,000 of them after Aug 2016. He claims he ended Hillary Clinton's election on July 16, 2016 when a hack reveal she intended to attack the TMSR. These and more James Bond intrigue are documented upthread.

Is MP the foul-mouthed, sperm whale, Socrates version of 007?  

I don't believe that. Usually the simplest explanation is also corect. Now, i believe that these institutions / corporations may try to influence EF to steer the project to fit their own needs, but that's all.

That's also a possibility, but ICOs are very easy to manipulate, you just buy your token from yourself with borrowed BTC (then pay back the BTC to the lender) so you own most the tokens at $0 cost.

The same about bitcoin, yes a power war is the likely scenario. But you're probably overestimating them. It is not likely for any of these sides to risk their wealth to win this war, aka to go into a fork war and dump & buy the other chain. Too risky. The common thing that links everyone in this space is arguably greed. Nobody will risk wealth out of principles.

That is @dinofelis' stance and I have been leaning towards it lately as I have stated publicly.

This is why I think ETH and Ripple have it long term. Eth has the blessing of the banks, something bitcoin doesn't have, and largely the reason why it hasn't gone mainstream this whole time. All the major players are backing ETH, Microsoft, R3, and a lot of the bitcoin ecosphere (Coinbase for example, they are enthusiastic about ETH). I love bitcoin like the rest of us, but I'm putting my money on the mechanical horse.

The ETH camp is laughing its ass off right now

[jbreher]

the whales have issued a digitally signed threat (standing since 2014) to change the PoW hash and leave all those miners with ASICs which have no use case. And I showed that the whales absolutely can win without any doubt, unless the whales fight each other (which I showed they would not do without some externality because otherwise it means they have destroyed themselves in any case).

All right - I've caught up. And I stand by my expression of skepticism.

Your above claim is equivalent to a claim that:
a) you know exactly who each of 'the whales' are;
b) you know the rough holdings of each said 'whale'; and
c) you know the intent of each such 'whale' with respect to changing the PoW.
My short retort is 'I call bullshit'.

He was the $150 million DAO hacker.

I've seen his oblique 'claim' of such. Do we have any other evidence?

He is the central public spokesman of the The Most Serene Republic (TMSR).

Granted.

He had or has a million+ bitcoins ($1+ billion)

What proof of this exists?

He claims he ended Hillary Clinton's election on July 16, 2016 when a hack reveal she intended to attack the TMSR.

So he claims. Riiight. Evidence?

I dunno. Maybe he does have the resources implied. Yes, he did run an early exchange, and facilitated the purchase of Eric's SatoshiDice. And he is certainly an intelligent enough fellow. Albeit a likely sociopath. But I wouldn't be astonished to learn that his (seemingly unverified) position, and his (seemingly unverified) exploits are nothing but fabrications.

In other words, once some whales defect, they defect from ever (then or in the future) preventing a mining cartel from fucking them over. Thus they will have destroyed the perceived value of Bitcoin which is its immutability (remember Bitcoin is modeled on Nash's Ideal Money).

Satoshi deflected the request for larger blocks by saying that the limit could be raised in the future but then he purposefully never brought it up again and thus obviously knew it will be impossible to change it later. And it is impossible to increase the block size as you are now finding out.

I see you have swallowed traincarswreck's thesis hook, line, and fisherman's forearm. While plausible, I'm not yet convinced that there is any there, there.

Where I diverge is in the insistence that Bitcoin is the bestest closest and most idealist-ist approximation that humanity will ever know. And further, that Bitcoin already is cognizant of this role, so will strive to fulfill it (as it were a conscious entity of some sort).

But do you believe bitcoin is as good as or better than gold in the hoardable sense?

Well, I think so. However, I am cognizant of the ephemeral nature of new technologies. We're not even a decade in on this one. It makes for a hard comparison against another measure that has stood for millennia.

I'm a great admirerer of the Austrian school, even if I think that some of their views are outdated.  But I'm also convinced that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with fractional reserve banking.  The reason why people think it is wrong is because they don't really understand what it is about (and everything is done to confuse the issue, true).

What is fractional reserve banking ?   It is issuing a DIFFERENT ASSET that is kept on-par with a base asset through a fund that serves as a form of collateral for individual transactions.  People, however, are made to confuse the new asset with the underlying base asset, and this is where the system looks like cheating.

Well, I am gratified that at least you understand the true nature of the vampire squid. Or at least its underpinnings. But how you can justify being given one asset while being told it is some other asset is somehow 'not cheating' is ludicrous.

If I were to represent that my 1 oz rounds of gold-plated titanium were American Eagles, I would be rightly castigated as a fraud and a charlatan. How is your vaunted FRB -- as you yourself present it -- any different?

<<description of cheating, consequences of said cheating, and even more cheating>>

Sorry for condensing your post down to a single statement of what I got out of it. I don't disagree with anything in it, except for the characterization of all the above as somehow 'not cheating'.

miners may be turning away from BU

Hmm. I'm not seeing that. Here's an eight minute old snapshot of solved blocks:



Of course, the miners may be playing games as well. No real way to know.

Your initial opinion of an immutable stalemate may end up being correct.

Perhaps. I've not yet thrown in the towel.

[iamnotback]

Stalemate = higher fees and no scaling...

Re: Will Bitcoin’s High Transaction Fees Open the Door for Altcoin Adoption?

the only thing that's worth discussing is the symptoms that caused said fees to become 'unaffordable'.

i'd buy more stuff if fees went back to previous levels but there's no way i'd be storing any value in any alt. if there was a way i could seamlessly convert btc into whatever in a few seconds then i'd do it but that would mean leaving it with a third party.

That's okay. Billions of people don't have large balances any way. But they are important to the global economy.

And I'll be holding some of which ever token is appreciating the most.

Re: What will happen with Bitcoin if it never scales?

If Satoshi's prediction is correct, there are only two possible outcome: (1) zero volume (death) of bitcoin and (2) large volume (mainstream), in 20 years' time (by 2028?). If bitcoin never scales and the volume can't go up, it will die.

Re: What will happen with Bitcoin if it never scales?

What do you think that might happen with Bitcoin if no scalable solution becomes accepted?

Will it remain as a store of value, while other altcoins take the lead for everyday transactions? Or will another cryptocurrency take its place as the top in marketcap?

-> Probably bitcoin will no longer be used for micro transactions but it can remain as valuable assets. Actually most of the people are buying bitcoin as investment rather than to use in their daily life, so new money may keep on pouring causing pump on price in future too.

How much of this is true, and how much of it is "greater fool game" ?   By this, I mean: suppose that bitcoin has reached its "full scale", whatever that is.  Suppose that bitcoin's use is more or less stable for 10 years and that there is no real hope for greater adoption (because everyone has already adopted it, or because it found its niche, or whatever).  How many people do you think are willing to KEEP bitcoin as an investment, that is, as a secure store of value in the long term ?  And how many people were simply in bitcoin because they were hoping for "moon" and ended up not finding a greater fool to pay them 10 times the price they bought it for ?

For instance, suppose that one would know that in 2025, bitcoin's price is still in the $1000 - $1500.  How many people in bitcoin right now, would think that that is great as a store of value, that they can keep their value unharmed for 8 years (investment) ; how many would sell their coins immediately if they would know that bitcoin was still in the same ballpark 8 years from now ?

If the former, you are right, many people consider bitcoin as a long-term store of value.  If the latter, bitcoin's market cap is nothing else but a bobbal of hot air driven by a greater fool game that collapses from the moment that there's no more moon in sight.

(altcoins are even worse, BTW).

[dinofelis]

In other words, once some whales defect, they defect from ever (then or in the future) preventing a mining cartel from fucking them over. Thus they will have destroyed the perceived value of Bitcoin which is its immutability (remember Bitcoin is modeled on Nash's Ideal Money).

Satoshi deflected the request for larger blocks by saying that the limit could be raised in the future but then he purposefully never brought it up again and thus obviously knew it will be impossible to change it later. And it is impossible to increase the block size as you are now finding out.

==> The question is: was Satoshi not understanding his own system ?  Or was he lying and knew damn well what he was implying ?

I tend to think the former / conspiracy theorists will think the latter.  But Satoshi made sufficient errors to make me think that he simply didn't understand the implications.  I do respect Satoshi for the great leap forwards that he made, but contrary to others on the board here, I don't think he is a kind of God, or the incarnation of economic and cryptographic wisdom.  He's a guy who had some great ideas but also fucked up several things - which is normal if you have no experience or back sight.

You regularly read on this board that people distinguish the "immutability of the block chain data" and the "protocol". It seems that Satoshi was thinking that too. This was also the little war over that word when ethereum split in ETH/ETC.  "no, ETH is immutable, we didn't modify the block chain data" was the claim.  Satoshi was maybe thinking the same.

-->  that is fundamentally misguided.

The reason is that "binary data" by themselves don't mean anything.  The rules of their interpretation are just as important as the "binary data".  Information is an OBJECT and is not "binary data", an object with attributes (the binary data if you wish) and METHODS (the INTERPRETATION of those data).

If you keep the data constant, but you allow to modify the methods (which is what ETH did) you are just as well "modifying history".  History, in crypto sense, is not about historians reconstructing the past ; it is about RIGHTS AND ENGAGEMENTS THAT FOLLOW FROM THAT PAST.   Nobody cares about the "history for historians" on the block chain (apart maybe law enforcement) ; the only thing the block chain is needed for, is to grant rights and to recall engagements (if smart contracts).

Immutability means of course: immutability of the GRANTED RIGHTS, not of the historical verification of past happenings.  As such, the granted rights are the object that combines RULES and DATA.

Immutability hence implies just as well "not changing the rules" as "not changing the data".  We don't care about the data alone if you can change the rules at will.  That changes JUST AS MUCH the granted rights than changing the data.

This is why, if you think that there is a mechanism at work that results in immutability, it results automatically in immutability both of the data (the binary block chain data) and the right-granting rules of the protocol.  Immutability of just the former doesn't mean anything.  You can keep the binary data, and triple, in the protocol, all *my specific* spending rights of *my addresses* while denying yours.  No iota changed to the block chain, but our rights fundamentally modified.

This is why I think that a truly decentralized immutable crypto cannot "evolve" and is to follow the protocol from the moment you lay down the genesis block until the moment the system dies.  And if it can "evolve", it is simply centralized, and you have to put trust in those people that can change the protocol.  Which can be a thing to do.  You also trust Facebook.  At least, many do.

[traincarswreck]

Satoshi deflected the request for larger blocks by saying that the limit could be raised in the future but then he purposefully never brought it up again and thus obviously knew it will be impossible to change it later. And it is impossible to increase the block size as you are now finding out.

==> The question is: was Satoshi not understanding his own system ?  Or was he lying and knew damn well what he was implying ?

This is what I have come to believe...it didn't matter.  Satoshi knew the limit had to go on, he couldn't change that.  And the system had to evolve to a point where it was relevant in the world. If the limit was to be stuck in place, he couldn't use that foresight as an excuse not to put the limit on.  And so I thought the meditation on the subject could have started there. But in the meantime, it didn't matter.

Other's complained immediately though, so its obvious he knew.

[iamnotback]

Satoshi was so brilliant because he removed the ability of the whales do malfeasance to the protocol and profitably short the token on markets, because it requires sunk costs plus ongoing electricity to mine in order to have control over the protocol (with 51% of the hashrate).

Whereas with consensus algorithms (PoS, Byzantine agreement such as TenderMint) which don't burn a resource there is nothing-at-stake, so the whales can profitably attack their own protocol while shorting their own token. Confiscating deposits doesn't work because there is no electricity burned so the whales can rewind history without any cost. Notwithstanding that nothing-at-stake can't prevent the rewinding of history, the deposits wouldn't be any cheaper than PoW. Edit: but thinking about this some more, if the whale has enough stake to attack PoS then he has enough to short while dumping his stake, thus security is really dependent on having a plurality of whales (who arbitrage each other, because it is an opportunity cost not to do it) even with PoW.

Satoshi wasn't likely one person. He was likely a group of brilliant people hired by a wealthy globalist such as Rothschild, so it is quite probable that every decision they made was deliberate and thoroughly researched.

Thus we know Satoshi understood immutability meant no one can change the protocol without the agreement of 51% of the miners and the economic majority (i.e. 51% of the economic control). Otherwise stalemate.

[traincarswreck]

I still make the conjecture we are headed into an equilibrium where each special interest gets veto against change, giving the system ultra stability versus change.

[iamnotback]

I still make the conjecture we are headed into an equilibrium where each special interest gets veto against change, giving the system ultra stability versus change.

I am leaning this way. So that means no SegWit and no LN no Rootstock no sidechains no Blockstream.

It means fees skyrocket. Bitcoin becomes power money and the n00bs (minnows) exchange markets for BTC disappear. Massive exodus of minnows into altcoins.

The altcoins become the "sidechains". Besides, Blockstream's Sidechains are insolubly insecure anyway.

The power money can still control the altcoins using high finance and other methodologies, which means the exchange price of BTC will continue to increase because it remains the reserve currency of the anti-fiat ecosystem.

It is necessary to remove the minnows from the power money so that the volatility of its exchange value becomes minimized. The money with the lowest relative volatility is senior to other monies because it is more liquid (requires less be deposited in unleveraged reserves throughout the economy).

[traincarswreck]

yup. a scenario satoshi would have never admitted to.

[rpietila]

What makes you unable to see what is happening with Crypto Kingdom now?

[traincarswreck]

Yes lowest relative volatility, and in the future as this changes, we will collective understand that its relative to a conceptual perfectly stable units money. What should we call this unit? The Watt, Celcius, A Newton...?