of whales and forks

[mimblewimble]

a lot of folks seem to be speculating about how MP and his gang of whales are going to react to BIP148 in the case of a split

as you know they have their own "reference bitcoin implementation" aka "the real bitcoin".  we all know their goal is to never fork, under any conditions (I assume except due a fatal bug that requires a fork).

to my knowledge, nobody but he and his gang run that implementation, and how can they prevent a hardfork anyway you ask? hashrate dictates if there is a hardfork or not at the end of the day.  unless they have enough money to bribe all miners to mine whatever they want (unlikely since jihan is most likely sponsored by china gov, and china should be able to give jihan an even better deal than the biggest bitcoin whales),  what they can do is to try to influence the outcome of the hardfork after the split.

price follows hashrate, so (in theory) if he and his gang dumped the coins onto the non-legacy chain, the market would crash and hashrate would stick to legacy chain, resolving the fork as the non-legacy chain would die (or become an altcoin with marginal hashrate).

as long as bitcoin remains on the legacy chain, they are ok with it since they can keep running their so called "real bitcoin".  i would argue that even if they don't like segwit, they wouldn't care if it passed as BIP141 since it has no impact on the software they run (even tho, segwit would allow for fully-functional lightning network and I doubt they like lightning network, which brings us back to the valid theory of they bribing at least some miners and other actors to keep a stalemate in order to never achieve full consensus to not even have to reach the post-fork resolution with the dumping of their share).

anyway, BIP148 can potentially split into 2 coins, and we dont want that.

the scenario here supposes that they would go on with their word and proceed to dump to disincentive miners from mining BIP148

mircea_popescu: whoever has enough money to matter is likely to pick one chain for whatever reason
mircea_popescu: since fork means btc can be spent independently on either chain
mircea_popescu: he will sell his btc on one and perhaps buy on the other.
mircea_popescu: as a result prices will rapidly diverge, panicking the mass of users, and the fork is economically resolved.

this would mean that, unless miners are aware of this and continue mining at a loss on purpose in order to keep fighting trying to keep BIP148 relevant, they will take the predictable outcome which is the good ol "money talks" outcome (BIP148 miners give up as price plummets, hashrate goes down as hashrate follows price, any exchanges potentially listing BIP148 remove it and BTC stays as it is)

notice that this a good service they are doing, since they contribute to keeping bitcoin safe from the likes of gavin and hearn's bitcoin xt, classic, or any foolish attempts of bitmain and roger hardforking into BU or god knows what.  in the case that BIP148 menaces the legacy chain reorganizing and they take that hardfork route, again, same principle applies: whales would receive their share of BU coins and they would dump them at no cost, and not only that, but with every failed hardfork attempt, they are filling their BTC wallets by cleaning up sell orderbooks of legacy-chain coins.  richs get richer.

as you see, this is a double edged sword: bitcoin is kept safe from hostile actors, but since they are fundamentalist with their vision of keeping bitcoin "pure", they discard what seem to be sound improvements like segwit, and any chances of having fast, cheap transactions on a second layer without ruining the network with big blocks, since most likely they are against lightning network, since it would in practice raise on-chain fees (and some argue lightning network would eventually need a blocksize increase, even tho I don't know the technical details of this claim, and in principle, the lightning network could operate under 1MB pretty much forever, but on-chain transaction fees would go higher, and even tho ultimately their goal is to kick everyone that isn't rich from bitcoin, I assume they are not willing to pay higher fees due lightning network transactions, only due fee market deriving from on-chain transactions), and since they don't care about anything that isn't the original transaction format, obviously they couldn't care less about transacting in lightning network, segwit, or anything that doesn't begin with an 1.  i presume they don't even care about antbleed, asicboost or any of that, since they seem to be confident about solving it on the market, if a fork actually happens.

here you can read their critique of segwit, apparently MP claims it's a "dao for bitcoin" and could taint coins:

thestringpuller: okay. so lets say Segwitz address starts with 'P00'. you send 1 BTC from a standard address as inputs into the segitz address. the segwitz address now spends back to a standard address. but the way it spends is with non-standard opcodes, so called "bastard unspent outputs".  so it spends to a real btc address "1something". When TRB validates it's the chain of tx's it'll encounter the segwit part as NO_OP. Should we just bury these coi
mircea_popescu: "she won't ever shut up. not ever. she talks constantly. so i dropped my pants and stuffed my cock in her mouth.
mircea_popescu: and she continued to talk through the margins."
trinque: lol
thestringpuller: cause there is no way TRB will ever enforce segwit, so there is no way it can ever truly verify a segwit output was spent "legitimately"
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller the derp in question can just spend again normally and his coins will be visible.
mircea_popescu: trb has no notion of "coin history". nor should it. because taint is not a thing.
thestringpuller: gotcha. just never have anyone spend to your from a fake address.
mircea_popescu: moreover, there ISNT, in general, and for very good reasons, a way to verify segwit crapolade.
mircea_popescu: which is what it aims to be, a sort of "let's dao bitcoin"
thestringpuller: TMSR rule of thumb: "Never accept non standard transactions" ?☟
mircea_popescu: pretty much.
thestringpuller: gotcha. thanks for clarity. mod6 ^^^ nvm question has been answered.
mircea_popescu: but this said, yes it is deeply irresponsible for anyone to use prb clients. this doesn't just mean 13, or 12, or 10. ANY of them.
mircea_popescu: they keep adding shit, but it's been shitsoup for years now.
mod6: thestringpuller: np.
mod6: if we needed to add code everytime these gnomes comeup with a new crapolade, that's all we'd ever be doing.☟☟
thestringpuller: i just don't want them to add something in a "fork" that allows TMSR to get scammed.
thestringpuller: but I think at that point BTC is dead
mircea_popescu: mod6 the main concern is that their bullshit will "accidentally" start fabricating coins.
mircea_popescu: nevertheless, we're not making the mistake of introducing coin taint, under any name.
BingoBoingo: thestringpuller: From what I understand Segwit to a normal 1xxx adress requires a signature in the blockchain so when segwit stops being miner enforced the recieved transaction would still be, even though it came from freemoneyshitsoup.
thestringpuller: BingoBoingo: AHA!
mircea_popescu: yeah, except the next stop is for shitsoup to put out more coins than it got in.☟
thestringpuller: elaborate?
mircea_popescu: you been watching the dao thing ?
mod6: <+mircea_popescu> nevertheless, we're not making the mistake of introducing coin taint, under any name. << totally agree.
mircea_popescu: segwit is EXACTLY "dao for bitcoin".
thestringpuller: well yea. and Lightning Network is VISA for bitcoin.

some logs on lightning network:

mircea_popescu: "lightning network"
asciilifeform not familiar
mircea_popescu: basically sometime in 2014 the fake bitcoin dorks discovered that their "technology" doesn't work, and sort-of split it into "the working part" and "the frontend part". they evolved undesignedly sort-of independetly, now there's a shambling abomination and a writhing horror.
mircea_popescu: at that point, the writhing horror (which you think of as prb) had about 10x as many loc as trb does ; by now it's 100x.
mircea_popescu: the shambling abomination started life as this "optimization" by blue mat that others (esp the ones trying to have shit work, rather than engaged in pure github livejournalry) clung on to. but then it got discontinued
mircea_popescu: so various almost working assemblaged got ad-hoced in its place.
mircea_popescu: the poor situation of the shambling abomination is the deep reason for repeated humiliations delivered recently to blockchain.info for instance.
mircea_popescu: it's approaching breaking point, evidently.
mircea_popescu: as the "business" (in the sense of pretending to sv vc, that sorty of thing) portion of the larger prb ecosystem is running into a very marked bitcoin winter (recall, bitpay axed most of the crew a year ago), the ramen support for the "tech" side of prb (various mendacious scumbags like luke-jr, assorted imbeciles like taaki or that idiot who emailed the entire customer base the email addresses of the entire customer base, "p
mircea_popescu: hantomcircuit") find it harder and harder to cling on to their pretense actively.
mircea_popescu: ie, we survived summer of forks, wheel turned, now they hafta survive winter of dorks. dun look so well for them, but we see.
mircea_popescu: i think that about covers it. questions ?

in principle, i understand MP's narrative and im paranoid about any new features added into bitcoin, but I have doubts about the long term viability of MP's plan.  is it really viable long term?

it assumes that the bitcoin price would keep going up along with the transaction fees.  for the bitcoin price to keep going up you need new speculators.  since you are ruling out more and more chunks of the population as you will never allow for any chances that would lower the fees, eventually only millionaires would be able to pay the fees.

from those millionaires, what % are going to find an incentive to use bitcoin at such huge fees? wouldn't it reach a point where it is ironically more economical to use the legacy banking system taxes included?

in the case you wanted to keep privacy, since you are rich, it wouldn't be cheaper to move physical gold around? (im assuming some other alternative to bitcoin doesn't exist at that point)

will the huge fees be worth it for enough rich people to transact often enough for the miners to find profit?  since you are kicking people out of bitcoin, the transaction rate goes down.  can an equilibrium of less amount of transactions happening counteracted with increasing fee be sustainable for it to be viable for miners to keep mining in a chain that is populated by less and less actors?

i would assume less and less exchanges would even bother listing BTC. exchanges make money from fees.  i doubt any relevant amount of transactions would be happening for exchanges to bother.  what exchanges would list BTC in that situation? other than probably an exchange run by MP.


since all groups of people eventually end up with internal problems, specially when there's a figure of a guy with a messianic complex, isn't it just a matter of time that the whole scheme collapses anyway? pretty sure i've seen that before.
but for the time being... they seem to be a part of bitcoin you can't overlook.

of course, all of this assumes that they are as rich as i've heard and they aren't just bluffing.  allegedly, MP managed to stack up to 1,000,000 BTC, but i haven't seen any signed evidence of such numbers, it's all just rumors.
what i've seen tho, is devs such as gavin andresen or lukejr, going into IRC and asking their opinion about a fork, so i assume their opinion matters.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5dth6w/who_is_mircea/da7ijp8/ (check the log luke posts)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=942404.msg10324985#msg10324985 (the log for gavin)


it also assumes they would actually dump all of their coins to defeat anything that challenges the legacy chain.

it also assumes there aren't groups of unknown whales out there that could challenge them and have different visions about bitcoin. (example, an unknown group of whales pushing BIP148 out of nowhere)

anyway, this is it for now.  i hope this sparks an interesting discussion.  even tho I only have a few BTC (which I will have to sell or move to some alt before fees go higher than 1 BTC...) I have always been interested in the governance model of bitcoin and its so called decentralization, how whales gather to push their agendas and so on.  i find it somewhat fascinating that groups gather with their own implementations and whatnot.

if you have no idea about what any of this is:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=941331.msg10322069#msg10322069
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5dth6w/who_is_mircea/ (bitusher and luke's posts)

if you are not a shill or a troll, feel free to point at any mistakes, im just here to gain knowledge.

[Last of the V8s]

It's generally accepted that bitcoin brought back how we view trust and reputation, right to the core of importance when we interact.

Eg: 'Oh that Last of the V8s, he beats his wife, you know, but I did lend him 5 bits once and he paid it back as agreed. I might lend him 20 or so bits, but I don't want to take tea with him.'

That kind of thing matters now that money is real again. When your coin is gone, it's really gone.

So let's look at this from Mr.P's point of view inasmuch as we can. He made a ton of bitcoin, he published his accounts, he didn't rip people off.

No one else did. Not theymos, not knighmb, not pirate, not silbert, not Jihan Wu. Not satoshi or asciilifeform.

Maybe a very few made, or perhaps mined or scammed, a few hundreds of thousands, or just bought that much from eg the us marshalls. Maybe there is one other millionaire.

But, still from his point of view, he is beyond compare and worthy of the very utmost respect, trust and deference. He has saved bitcoin many times and warned against more scams than anyone ever imagined.

So why should he sign some thing we want him to? Does the Chinese govt reveal all their nukes or Putin his wealth? Mr.P actually signs things all day, every day and is outstandingly open.

What we now believe about him is irrelevant. The threat in the game of brinkmanship is enough for rational actors not to want to play.

tl;dr no hard forks

[mimblewimble]

It's generally accepted that bitcoin brought back how we view trust and reputation, right to the core of importance when we interact.

Eg: 'Oh that Last of the V8s, he beats his wife, you know, but I did lend him 5 bits once and he paid it back as agreed. I might lend him 20 or so bits, but I don't want to take tea with him.'

That kind of thing matters now that money is real again. When your coin is gone, it's really gone.

So let's look at this from Mr.P's point of view inasmuch as we can. He made a ton of bitcoin, he published his accounts, he didn't rip people off.

No one else did. Not theymos, not knighmb, not pirate, not silbert, not Jihan Wu. Not satoshi or asciilifeform.

Maybe a very few made, or perhaps mined or scammed, a few hundreds of thousands, or just bought that much from eg the us marshalls. Maybe there is one other millionaire.

But, still from his point of view, he is beyond compare and worthy of the very utmost respect, trust and deference. He has saved bitcoin many times and warned against more scams than anyone ever imagined.

So why should he sign some thing we want him to? Does the Chinese govt reveal all their nukes or Putin his wealth? Mr.P actually signs things all day, every day and is outstandingly open.

What we now believe about him is irrelevant. The threat in the game of brinkmanship is enough for rational actors not to want to play.

tl;dr no hard forks

the argument of MP not revealing his wealth is valid since other countries dont reveal their power and so on, but it's also reasonable to presume all countries constantly bluff about their power and intentions, so ultimately as long as one doesn't see proof of X person having X BTC then it's a game of bluffing as usual from all parts involved.

we have never actually reached the point of hard forking, so until we reach that point, MP and other whales with his same agenda don't have to fire them nukes.

if it actually happens... then we will see if they are the real deal because the split coin attempting to fork should end quickly.


my questions on this matter remain: in the "no hard forks" vision, it seems "no soft forks" is also included since they don't like segwit, so I guess they will not let BIP148 happen

so this basically means no scaling ever.  in practice this means that we'll have 1MB blocks basically forever, with no other forms of scaling.  inevitably most people except rich people will find it economically viable to make transactions on the blockchain.  eventually only a handful of billionaires would find it worth it.



can you explain how miners are going to find profit in a chain where barely no transactions happen?

can you explain how the network will have a healthy amount of nodes spread across the globe? (even tho thanks to the blocksize remaining small so people will still be able to run nodes, who is going to bother running a node for a network where you are irrelevant since only billionaires are allowed to use it? it would be safe to assume that, at that distant point in time, only billionaires that find utility in bitcoin are running nodes.  anyone running a node then is basically a target because if you are bothering to run a node, at that point in time it means you are incredibly rich, whereas by allowing non-rich people to transact, the rich would be able to mask themselves in between a larger array of people)

can you explain (in detail) how this "billionaires only" blockchain model is sustainable in the long term?

can you explain how MP has more wealth than bitmain if the conspiracy of bitmain being backed by the potential trillions of dollars of the PBoC is real?

[mining1]

mimblewimble, it will just die. But the whales don't care that much because:

1. They already cashed out large portions and are fiat rich.
2. They are diversified in eth already.

[mimblewimble]

mimblewimble, it will just die. But the whales don't care that much because:

1. They already cashed out large portions and are fiat rich.
2. They are diversified in eth already.

please dont pump altcoins, this is a serious thread.

[European Central Bank]

op, can you point to one existing demonstration of the 'incredible' power of these people?

all i see are screeds of text from one maniac.

[mindrust]

He basically says bitcoin will stay as what it is forever and we will never ever get an upgrade.

Personally I am also disturbed by the core devs' confidence. They are painting everywhere with "everything is awesome!" "nothing to worry about!" Yet it is far from the truth. Bitcoin is losing juice and i don't want to switch to eth.

How can i trust a coin which gained all of its market cap in one month?

[Last of the V8s]

my questions on this matter remain: in the "no hard forks" vision, it seems "no soft forks" is also included since they don't like segwit, so I guess they will not let BIP148 happen

so this basically means no scaling ever.  in practice this means that we'll have 1MB blocks basically forever, with no other forms of scaling.  inevitably most people except rich people will find it economically viable to make transactions on the blockchain.  eventually only a handful of billionaires would find it worth it.



can you explain how miners are going to find profit in a chain where barely no transactions happen?

can you explain how the network will have a healthy amount of nodes spread across the globe? (even tho thanks to the blocksize remaining small so people will still be able to run nodes, who is going to bother running a node for a network where you are irrelevant since only billionaires are allowed to use it? it would be safe to assume that, at that distant point in time, only billionaires that find utility in bitcoin are running nodes.  anyone running a node then is basically a target because if you are bothering to run a node, at that point in time it means you are incredibly rich, whereas by allowing non-rich people to transact, the rich would be able to mask themselves in between a larger array of people)

can you explain (in detail) how this "billionaires only" blockchain model is sustainable in the long term?

can you explain how MP has more wealth than bitmain if the conspiracy of bitmain being backed by the potential trillions of dollars of the PBoC is real?

thebitcoin.foundation has its own team of developers and they can deal with scaling should it become an issue.
they don't like all the stuff already added to versions 0.6 or so onwards (roughly), or the proposed stuff like segwit, and they don't use it.
there's room in bitcoin like there's room in the world for more than a handful of 'billionaires'. we only accounted for a few million coins upthread. there'll be many people with 10,000 or 1,000 or 100.
rich people can afford to run nodes.
miners will be mining for healthy rewards for a long time to come.
lots of dollars will help PBoC / ICBC naught if they want to buy a million bitcoins. look what just 25 billion did to the price last month.

[2112]

thebitcoin.foundation has its own team of developers and they can deal with scaling should it become an issue.
they don't like all the stuff already added to versions 0.6 or so onwards (roughly), or the proposed stuff like segwit, and they don't use it.

This is very questionable statement. They are more of "software museum curators" than "developers".

They already tried to deal with scaling and failed badly when working on the "low-end pre-configured node" using some ARM development board. The type of mistakes they made shows that their skill level is at most baccalaureate, certainly not someone who had master's degree at anything related to modern computing and information retrieval. Seriously, I've seen more knowledgeable people among high school graduates that studied and got certified for some proprietary database administration courses. I mean, if you continue to use Berkeley DB for bulk data at least read the fine manual!

[Last of the V8s]

they've dealt with the db locks issue
the pogoplug experiment had nothing to do with scaling

[mimblewimble]

thebitcoin.foundation has its own team of developers and they can deal with scaling should it become an issue.
they don't like all the stuff already added to versions 0.6 or so onwards (roughly), or the proposed stuff like segwit, and they don't use it.

assuming that there will be no blocksize increase and given that they rejected heavily tested solutions like segwit for whatever reason, could you please explain (in detail) how they plan to scale bitcoin?

there's room in bitcoin like there's room in the world for more than a handful of 'billionaires'. we only accounted for a few million coins upthread. there'll be many people with 10,000 or 1,000 or 100.

so people with say, 10 BTC, will find themselves kicked out of the economy because the fees will be bigger than 10 BTC? how do you estimate this?

rich people can afford to run nodes.

my point was that, everyone running a node at that point is rich

if poor people could still somehow participate in the ecosystem (thanks to lightning network for instance), those nodes wouldn't be walking targets whose owners are granted to be rich people, because poor people still have an incentive to run full nodes to strengthen the network even if they can't make on-chain transactions

also, nobody runs their implementation but they.  they are profiting from 95% of the network running core which is compatible with their implementation.  if you kick common folk off the chain nodes will go down, ultimately they will be forced to run tons of nodes themselves, which is useless because a strong network requires different unattached parties spread across the globe to avoid single point of failure.

miners will be mining for healthy rewards for a long time to come.

what happens when they don't? how is this estimated and what is the long term planning?

lots of dollars will help PBoC / ICBC naught if they want to buy a million bitcoins. look what just 25 billion did to the price last month.

i see how if PBoC or whatever other trillion worth institution wanted to become a big player in bitcoin, would result in making existing whales even richer

but what they can do is, after a hardfork happens, they could buy all the coins that the MP and the rest of whales dump into the market to try to kill the fork, and not only that, but they could pump it even higher by simply printing more money and pumping the price of "gavincoin" above legacy chain.  what then?

[Last of the V8s]

does it need to scale?
will fees be that much?
maybe they intend to incentivize non-mining nodes. think i read that 'somewhere'.
afaiu bitcoin is a capital phenomenon with certain social consequences, and not the other way round.

[Thenoticer]

Popcorn time soon.