Analysis

[wpalczynski]

Somehow I doubt that very much, do you have any numbers to prove your claim?  100 million is a lot of money they can throw at this war.

100 millions to seize a 20 billions' toy sounds like cheap.
And then you cannot concentrate large fractions of the total hashrate in the same place with GPUs.

Its a small price to pay for gaining control of Bitcoin, especially considering its potential MCAP in the future.  Many people don't seem to realize that or suffer from cognitive dissonance.

[Miz4r]

Somehow I doubt that very much, do you have any numbers to prove your claim?  100 million is a lot of money they can throw at this war.

Bitcoin is almost a 20 billion market, almost every Bitcoin user has a GPU ready to mine with. Many of us have multiple GPUs from mining altcoins or bitcoins in the old days. 100 million is peanuts, I would love to see them pissing those 100 million away to try and kill Bitcoin. But they're probably bluffing anyway just trying to sound really tough and mean lol.

[wpalczynski]

Lets assume for the sake of argument that those GPUs are mining ETH being highly profitable at the moment and likely rising in price if the HF drama intensifies in an inversely correlated price relationship with Bitcoin.  If the HF happens Bitcoin price will tank hard, that is almost a certainty.  So ETH shoots up, BTC drops down why would those GPU miners jump on a BTC pool if they make more money mining ETH?
 

[conspirosphere.tk]

Lets assume for the sake of argument that those GPUs are mining ETH being highly profitable at the moment and likely rising in price if the HF drama intensifies in an inversely correlated price relationship with Bitcoin.  If the HF happens Bitcoin price will tank hard, that is almost a certainty.  So ETH shoots up, BTC drops down why would those GPU miners jump on a BTC pool if they make more money mining ETH?
 

it depends: if the PoW of BTC gets changed in order to be GPU-only, then it may be profitable.
Without changing PoW no one will even try to mine btc with a GPU.

[wpalczynski]

You think it would be more profitable than mining ETH?  We have to assume that ETH will continue going up as BTC goes down due to this HF as has been the case.

[conspirosphere.tk]

You think it would be more profitable than mining ETH?  We have to assume that ETH will continue going up as BTC goes down due to this HF as has been the case.

Likely so: there not so many more gpu miners globally than ethereum miners. Maybe 3-4X. And even at half price btc is still 10X the eth price.
Problem is that it would last some months only, until new asics get produced for the new PoW, and then we would be back at step 1.

[wpalczynski]

You think it would be more profitable than mining ETH?  We have to assume that ETH will continue going up as BTC goes down due to this HF as has been the case.

Likely so: there not so many more gpu miners globally than ethereum miners. Maybe 3-4X. And even at half price btc is still 10X the eth price.
Problem is that it would last some months only, until new asics get produced for the new PoW, and then we would be back at step 1.

Yeah, Jihan leading the BU charge is a ASIC manufacturer, the biggest I believe.  It would likely not take him long to ramp up production of such devices.

[Rakete4]

So what? Segwit would already be active by then.
And the whole world would have witnessed that the protocol can be changed by the economic majority, without miner-consensus.

[wpalczynski]

How are you so sure?

[notme]

So what? Segwit would already be active by then.
And the whole world would have witnessed that the protocol can be changed by the economic majority, without miner-consensus.

How is that a good thing?  That's exactly what we have with government fiat.

Have you seen the message in Bitcoin's genesis block?

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Bitcoin was supposed to save us from the rule of the economic majority.

Like it or not, miner-consensus is the definition of Bitcoin.  Read the whitepaper (it's in my sig for your convenience).

[STT]

We dont have that with FIAT.    That system is centrally controlled where as an economic majority would resemble capitalism which is equal to all elements being fungible.   In the message you state, 2nd bailout for banks; determined by central authority and imposed as a cost on all users.   FIAT isnt under a majority of people or money even, its top down control.

Current national currencies are not tied to any fixed standard of worth, more notes are produced for selected parties friendly to government and/or part of government.   That equates to a depreciation of currency held by common people and who earn away from government in private enterprise.

50% of GDP is government, hopefully we can agree economies now are not driven by flow of capital but in large part by political bias.  I dont think thats sucessful or positive.  
   I would expect bitcoin to increasingly respect its future earnings potential which comes from customers who have their own uses for the protocol, hopefully crypto currency is closer to capitalism and able to prove itself and adapt to whatever needs occur.

[RoadTrain]

Bitcoin was supposed to save us from the rule of the economic majority.

Like it or not, miner-consensus is the definition of Bitcoin.  Read the whitepaper (it's in my sig for your convenience).

It matters what it currently does.

It saves us from the minority making systemic monetary decisions on our behalf. It achieves this by making monetary rules predefined and practically immutable.
It also gives us the monetary sovereignty - practical inability to censor our transactions;
It also allows for a decrease in systemic risks by eliminating some 3rd parties. Achieves that with the help of decentralized consensus. Decentralized consensus also makes it very hard to change the protocol without achieving near-unanimity, as shown with 3 hard-fork attempts and SegWit. In fact, this decentralized consensus is the thing that "saves us from the rule of the economic majority".

Miners are an important, but not a defining part of Bitcoin. Miners merely produce proof of work, give security to the chain, and can be substituted with another group of miners if deemed necessary. But if that has to happen, Bitcoin is not as anti-fragile as I thought.

PS. It's quite ironical that you think Bitcoin is supposed to "save us from the rule of the economic majority", and at the same time seem OK with BU, which is by all means an attempt to force the minority rule on the Bitcoin. Which actually threates the pillars I mentioned above.

[notme]

Miners are the arbiters of consensus because they extend the blockchain.  They are the group who's interests are most closely aligned with the success of bitcoin.  They are the only people with a commitment.  Hodlers can dump whenever they lose faith.  Miners have to fight to preserve their investment.  If they do not do what is best for bitcoin, they lose BIG.  Who do you want in charge, fickle hodlers who can jump ship to a different coin if they screw this one up, or miners who have huge amounts of capital invested in hardware that is useless without bitcoin?  Every governance system in the world is minority rule.  Pure democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner and nobody is dumb enough to use it as a governance model for anything of value.  It would be even dumber to cast votes based on who has the most money.

[azguard]

Lets assume for the sake of argument that those GPUs are mining ETH being highly profitable at the moment and likely rising in price if the HF drama intensifies in an inversely correlated price relationship with Bitcoin.  If the HF happens Bitcoin price will tank hard, that is almost a certainty.  So ETH shoots up, BTC drops down why would those GPU miners jump on a BTC pool if they make more money mining ETH?
 

it depends: if the PoW of BTC gets changed in order to be GPU-only, then it may be profitable.
Without changing PoW no one will even try to mine btc with a GPU.

No it not. Reason is simple only farms with mining equipment do the btc mining but solo miners with 2 or more rigs are sticking for gpu only mining in hopping to get more when convert to btc. Solo miners are for that making most proffit from this situation.

[conspirosphere.tk]

Miners have to fight to preserve their investment.  

Unless the BU camp is fighting for something else (like to seize the control of btc or drive it to a dead end), in the interest of someone behind the scene.
edit:

[Miz4r]

Miners are the arbiters of consensus because they extend the blockchain.  They are the group who's interests are most closely aligned with the success of bitcoin.  They are the only people with a commitment.  Hodlers can dump whenever they lose faith.  Miners have to fight to preserve their investment.  If they do not do what is best for bitcoin, they lose BIG.  Who do you want in charge, fickle hodlers who can jump ship to a different coin if they screw this one up, or miners who have huge amounts of capital invested in hardware that is useless without bitcoin?  Every governance system in the world is minority rule.  Pure democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner and nobody is dumb enough to use it as a governance model for anything of value.  It would be even dumber to cast votes based on who has the most money.

Miners can not unilaterally change consensus rules. Well they can try but that's called a 51% attack which is what Satoshi warned us about. The economic majority also can not unilaterally change consensus rules by the way, it requires the support from the entire community. This is what makes Bitcoin resistant to change and thus also attacks to force through changes that benefit certain groups. Giving miners all the power to change things would be incredibly stupid, especially when mining is centralized like it is now. I don't want to trust miners to do the right thing for us all, Bitcoin was invented so it wouldn't require trusting humans to do the right thing.

[RoadTrain]

Miners are the arbiters of consensus because they extend the blockchain.  They are the group who's interests are most closely aligned with the success of bitcoin.  They are the only people with a commitment.  Hodlers can dump whenever they lose faith.  Miners have to fight to preserve their investment.  If they do not do what is best for bitcoin, they lose BIG.  Who do you want in charge, fickle hodlers who can jump ship to a different coin if they screw this one up, or miners who have huge amounts of capital invested in hardware that is useless without bitcoin?  Every governance system in the world is minority rule.  Pure democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner and nobody is dumb enough to use it as a governance model for anything of value.  It would be even dumber to cast votes based on who has the most money.

Miners are the arbiters, but they are not the government. Heck, I don't even think the arbiters fits here. They have kinda limited decision scope: they decide on which chain, among valid ones, to build upon. They also decide which transactions to include in their blocks. This results in a side effect of them being able to do things like blacklisting transactions. This ability I'd like to strip them down of.  Governance is a much wider term, and for better or for worse, there seem to be no such working thing in Bitcoin.

[notme]

12. Conclusion
We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with
the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we
proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions
that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes
control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes
work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are
not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can
leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what
happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

I don't know what you guys want, but it isn't Satoshi's Bitcoin.

[york780]

12. Conclusion
We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with
the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we
proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions
that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes
control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes
work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are
not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can
leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what
happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

I don't know what you guys want, but it isn't Satoshi's Bitcoin.

There's a reason why 'Satoshi' dissapeared.
I am Satoshi. You are Satoshi. We are all Satoshi. Thats the whole idea about bitcoin right? decentralisation. If there is/was one founder, and one founder only and he would reveal himself it would harm the decentralisation process. Nobody rules bitcoin.

[Okurkabinladin]

Any new information on bitcoin price development from Masterluc? Even in russian, if possible.

This thread just turned into mining debate, that has little to do with weekly price analysis. Not that it is not important, but more long term, than what we came for here originally. Technical analysis.

Thanks guys.