Is POW systematically doomed to get a huge monster in its midst?

[cellard]

Why did TPTB allow segwit at all if they don't like it? I assume that they could have stopped it, but trying to fit this in your theory... it was to:

1) Set an example: Attempts at modifying Bitcoin, even if through soft-forks, will not be tolerated.
2) To accumulate more BTC: By means of expropriation (the so called "segwit booty") and profiting through US government based futures (CME) shorts in the process.

They also think they can get away with it and pump it back to ATH even after such a disaster happening and regaining confidence on it being a global store of value. This is where we differ, as some pointed out, I think the damage would be too much. By 2019 there will be more segwit activity than legacy. It could end up being an inside job that ends up not being profitable. It may be more profitable to simply keep milking transaction fees through LN becoming mainstream (without segwit LN doesn't reach it's full potential), and assuming TPTB controls mining, their funds would be safe while still having the power of stealing coins at will if needed. In any case, we will find soon, since the longer it takes for them to execute that theoretical attack the bigger the disaster would be and therefore it may not even be worth it for them anymore, so these expecting it to happen may sell and lose their position as nothing happens and price keeps going higher (again, this is also assuming it happens around the time you are proposing, that's somewhere next year, and it cannot take longer than that).

[HeRetiK]

[...]

I hope the SegWit attack doesn’t start now. I am highly exposed to it. What a major fuckup if I predicted it but happened sooner than I expected. That is why I’m diversifying out of BTC now some into altcoins on this selloff this week (cost averaging until we hit the low below $6k I expect). But it is too late to sell BTC for fiat. Should have done that at $15+k (which I did take some profits at that time).

[...]

Slightly OT, but seeing how you described the weaknesses of various alts rather well -- what hedges within crypto are left in an adversarial environment such as this? Or are you simply trying to spread your risk as widely as possible without having to resort to fiat?

[cellard]

I assume you mean off-chain fees?

There you go Core trying to find some way to take revenue away from the miners. I read something recently about some leverage they expect to have on LN hubs. And you think the miners will not fight back?

Note AFAIK, LN can be reformulated without the P2SH feature of SegWit.

If you mean on-chain fees, those will continue to rise regardless of SegWit. Why would the miners not take profits of the booty, the shorting, and the increased marketshare (meaning more BTC mined for them and more txn fees for them)? It is a zero-sum game regardless of the dip in price, because the price eventually goes up again.

I mean on-chain fees. With LN it's still settled on chain every 10 minutes, and if mainstream use goes up I can see filled blocks worth of LN transactions settling and no one complaining about fees. I see many cool LN applications coming in the future that will drive usage, simple stuff like this is an example:

https://satoshis.place/

That's a lot of money already on these pixels. Imagination is the limit with 0 fee instant transactions.

LN can work without SegWit, but it's sort of a crippled version. With LN you can also make passive income, kind of like "PoS for Bitcoin", so it's another reason for them to just let things develop and enjoy the free money. But still, in case something wrong happens, moving your SegWit addresses into legacy addresses (before it happens) should be enough.

[HeRetiK]

I mean on-chain fees. With LN it's still settled on chain every 10 minutes, and if mainstream use goes up I can see filled blocks worth of LN transactions settling and no one complaining about fees. [...]

Maybe I misunderstand your post, but LN does not settle on-chain every 10 minutes. Otherwise, what would be the point?

Making transactions on LN only requires 2 on-chain transactions: Opening the channel and closing the channel. Everything inbetween takes place off-chain, no matter whether the channel is upheld for 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 weeks. You might require additional on-chain transactions to "refill" your LN channel, but for the most part you don't need to hit the blockchain until the final settlement (ie. closing) transaction.

LN can work without SegWit, but it's sort of a crippled version. With LN you can also make passive income, kind of like "PoS for Bitcoin", so it's another reason for them to just let things develop and enjoy the free money. But still, in case something wrong happens, moving your SegWit addresses into legacy addresses (before it happens) should be enough.

LN requires a transaction malleability fix, SegWit being one possible solution. LN is possible without SegWit as long as you implement an alternative transaction malleability fix.

[fabiorem]

I hope the SegWit attack doesn’t start now.

What kind of attack are you talking about?

I know that SegWit addresses dont have a private equivalent. A SegWit address is based on a public address, but you cant recover the private equivalent from it. This gave me the impression this address is a third type of address in the same family (public, private and SegWit). Because of the lack of clarification from both the developers and the community, most of my stash is currently in standard adresses.

Are you saying there is a risk in keeping bitcoins in SegWit addresses? What kind of risk would that be?

[Wind_FURY]

Actually Nakamoto proof-of-work MUST become centralized by an oligarchy otherwise it will no longer converge on a longest chain.

This research proven game theory and economic fact becomes true as the revenues from transaction fees become much greater than the revenue from the repeated halving of the block reward.

The article cited in the OP does not give you this

Would having a "tail emission" like Monero help fix that problem? Not that it will happen in Bitcoin, just asking.

Plus I believe Bitcoin will anyway need to increase the blocksize in 10 years. That can also help in driving down the fees, right? There must be something.

[Wind_FURY]

Actually Nakamoto proof-of-work MUST become centralized by an oligarchy otherwise it will no longer converge on a longest chain.

This research proven game theory and economic fact becomes true as the revenues from transaction fees become much greater than the revenue from the repeated halving of the block reward.

The article cited in the OP does not give you this

Would having a "tail emission" like Monero help fix that problem? Not that it will happen in Bitcoin, just asking.

No.

Plus I believe Bitcoin will anyway need to increase the blocksize in 10 years. That can also help in driving down the fees, right? There must be something.

No block size choice will ever resolve the tragedy-of-the-commons in Bitcoin.

All of this is far too complex for you to understand. You are trying to grasp at strings piece-meal and you do not have a good understanding. Sorry. This is above your pay grade.

All I can say is do not trust yourself and certainly do not trust Carlton Banks to have the correct understanding.

The block size will not increase. Transaction fees will go to $50,000. This is the correct design of Bitcoin as it was intended to be a reserve currency asset for the wealthy. I am not going to recapitulate. You keep your fantasies and observe what happens over the next 10 years.

I will admit that I may not be as smart as most of the people who visit the forum. But if you think you are then how do you plan to fix it if the Bitcoin community were to ask and to depend on you?

[Wind_FURY]

Plus I believe Bitcoin will anyway need to increase the blocksize in 10 years. That can also help in driving down the fees, right? There must be something.

No block size choice will ever resolve the tragedy-of-the-commons in Bitcoin.

All of this is far too complex for you to understand. You are trying to grasp at strings piece-meal and you do not have a good understanding. Sorry. This is above your pay grade.

All I can say is do not trust yourself and certainly do not trust Carlton Banks to have the correct understanding.

The block size will not increase. Transaction fees will go to $50,000. This is the correct design of Bitcoin as it was intended to be a reserve currency asset for the wealthy. I am not going to recapitulate. You keep your fantasies and observe what happens over the next 10 years.

Going back to this, I believe even the smartest developers in Bitcoin does not have the correct solution to the problem. No one does. What you are posting are all your "theories", and how do we know that they will work in practice?

Plus there are some developers that "theorized" that low fees will centralize mining more because there will be less incentive to do it leaving mining to only a few.

But if you think you are then how do you plan to fix it if the Bitcoin community were to ask and to depend on you?

I do not want to talk about vaporware.

I am working on something, but I don’t talk it now. Thank you for asking. It does not help to talk about things which are not ready. It will just create animosity.

I will just say that I think I have eliminated the 50+% attack entirely. If that is correct and there is no flaw, then it will be incredibly important.

In theory or in practice?

[CoinCube]

I would rephase #1 as demonstrating that the wealthy have only one choice, which is to defend immutability. Those former wealthy who defect will end up not wealthy anymore. Roger Ver (and his 300,000 BTC) is leading the flock astray by making them think the wealthy want a transaction scalability system. Either he is intentionally deceiving (which I highly doubt and I see he’s not the smartest tool in the shed although not retarded), or he is going to be a sacrificial lamb (in the long-term).

Yes on #2, I maybe forgot to state explicitly that all wealthy can join in the shorting, not just the miners. They can possibly also short at that juncture by selling their Core fork tokens and buy the Satoshi fork tokens, if some miners fork off and continue the Core fork and if there’s some means of exchanging. Also in theory the miners could offer to buy the Core fork tokens from wealthy people (i.e. those that can sell over a certain threshold) at a premium over market price so as to share some of the SegWit booty profits and then dump that SegWit on the market to drive the price down. They can buy only UTXO that was before the attack so as to not put premium into the pockets of those who want to repurchase Core fork. Those who think the attack is not realistic I think ignore the economic momentum created by the booty.

And also:

3) The SegWit and LN scalability to create the hype for a nosebleed ATH.
4) To create the illusion that Bitcoin failed, so the nation-states will continue to be very slow at getting organized to stop it. Another form of deception. The Art of War. Recently a Chinese emissary stood up at a recent meeting about cryptocurrency regulations in the USA and declared that USA and Canada (and by implication West in general) “are confused.” Very interesting that China already realized that Bitcoin is a trojan horse but the West is so fooled. But China can’t defeat Bitcoin. Their people will route around the government edicts.
5) To cause many greater fools to dump their crypto holdings at fire sale prices at the bottom of the next crypto winter. This is what the elite always do pump the economy with debt to eventually crash the economy so the middle-class has to sell and they can buy cheap. SegWit is a form of debt because they are all fractional reserves. Everyone who accepts a Core SegWit transaction has already lost the Satoshi BTC.
6) To increase their marketshare of the mining because marginal miners can be bankrupted by lower prices but the lowest cost miners with the highest economies-of-scale remain operational.
7) The ECB NIRP sovereign debt crisis (c.f. also and also) in Europe should be starting right about the time of the next crypto winter so this will prevent Europeans from buying Bitcoin to avoid being raped by the banksters.

I guess perhaps instead of going bankrupt maybe what exchanges would do is instead issue only Core fork BTC for those who want to withdraw existing BTC held before the fork. That presumes the Core fork would continue to have sufficient mining such that it is not attacked with continuous orphaning by the major miners.

They also think they can get away with it and pump it back to ATH even after such a disaster happening and regaining confidence on it being a global store of value. This is where we differ, as some pointed out, I think the damage would be too much.

Too much for what? Are you seriously claiming you would not buy an immutable Satoshi BTC at firesale prices at the crypto winter bottom? I will be buying with both hands, all three of my feet, and I’ll even swing my two dicks into that action (promise no photos this time).

Bitcoin will have a much higher stature as a dependable reserve asset once immutability has been secured. No more fear about Core increasing the 21 million tokens limit, otherwise injecting ways for them to parasite on the wealthy, or being compelled by the masses to redistribute the wealth.

IOW, a Bitcoin devoid of politics. John Nash’s Ideal Money must not be manipulable by politics.

By 2019 there will be more segwit activity than legacy. It could end up being an inside job that ends up not being profitable. It may be more profitable to simply keep milking transaction fees through LN becoming mainstream (without segwit LN doesn't reach it's full potential),

I assume you mean off-chain fees?

There you go Core trying to find some way to take revenue away from the miners. I read something recently about some leverage they expect to have on LN hubs. And you think the miners will not fight back?

Note AFAIK, LN can be reformulated without the P2SH feature of SegWit.

If you mean on-chain fees, those will continue to rise regardless of SegWit. Why would the miners not take profits of the booty, the shorting, and the increased marketshare (meaning more BTC mined for them and more txn fees for them)? It is a zero-sum game regardless of the dip in price, because the price eventually goes up again.

and assuming TPTB controls mining, their funds would be safe while still having the power of stealing coins at will if needed. In any case, we will find soon, since the longer it takes for them to execute that theoretical attack the bigger the disaster would be and therefore it may not even be worth it for them anymore, so these expecting it to happen may sell and lose their position as nothing happens and price keeps going higher (again, this is also assuming it happens around the time you are proposing, that's somewhere next year, and it cannot take longer than that).

I hope you realize I have stated numerous times that I am not selling until at least $30k. I expect a new ATH early next year perhaps as high as $50k (maybe $70k on a spike). I will be taking profits regardless of SegWit risk. So even if SegWit attack does not occur, I will not feel like I lost. Even if BTC somehow keeps going to $1 million without any intervening crypto winter, I will not feel bad about taking profits. It’s been a nice run and I see too many systemic scale risks (i.e. on the level of a Mt.Gox event):

* Tether
* ICO crackdown
* SegWit booty
* ICO bubble burst

I hope all of the above happen in 2019 or 2020. Then I can buy back in below $10k.

I hope the SegWit attack doesn’t start now. I am highly exposed to it. What a major fuckup if I predicted it but happened sooner than I expected. That is why I’m diversifying out of BTC now some into altcoins on this selloff this week (cost averaging until we hit the low below $6k I expect). But it is too late to sell BTC for fiat. Should have done that at $15+k (which I did take some profits at that time).

I have seen many in the Wall Observer thread state they will take profits at $50k.

I’m expecting the euphoria about LN and SegWit reaching some critical mass will be pumped up in the mass media to drive the price to a new ATH nosebleed.

A very interesting post. Here are my thoughts on your analysis. To start let me summarize your argument as I understand it.

You feel that the role of Bitcoin in the future is to be an immutable reserve asset. Thus you reject the approach of Bitcoin Cash and their attempts to reduce transnational costs by rapid block size increases as a failure path. You also feel that the approach of Core is misguided in that their attempts to develop and scale bitcoin especially via SegWit is also a failure path. You argue that the correct path is to embrace immutability of bitcoin. As this is not a dominant theme in any current implementation of Bitcoin you believe there is a high risk of it emerging in the form of a future fork. You also highlight the ever increasing amount of BTC in Segregated Witness addressed as a constantly growing economic incentive for a future contentious rollback of SegWit as these funds could be captured via a fork that revoked SegWit.

I agree with much of your argument. I think the BCH approach of rapid and massive increases in transaction volume is flawed. I also agree that their is a genuine and growing risk of a future rejection of Core and SegWit in favor of Bitcoin originalism especially as the economic incentive grows and especially if Lightening Network does not deliver as anticipated. The immutability portion of your argument is similar to that that put forward by traincarswreck here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1809999.0 I found his back and forth with AgentofCoin especially interesting.

I agree that there is a real risk here. There is no powerful originalist movement currently and I could easily see one developing in the future especially if Core is felt to be compromising the immutability of the protocol via unnecessary changes and especially as the economic incentive for a rollback grows. However, there are also mitigating factors.

The SegWit booty is an asymmetrical advantage for the Satoshi fork. It can be shared with all those wealthy who sell Core as I explained. Core has no equivalent economic weapon. Core can’t steal Satoshi tokens and bribe wealthy to sell Satoshi tokens so as to dump them on the market.

Let's examine the scenario you describe. Lets hypothesize that the miners wait until some critical mass of BTC are in SegWit addresses and then create a suprise fork where SegWit is rolled back with 60% of the hashpower it leaving 40% for Core. In the originalist fork the miners take all the thousands of BTC that are residing in SegWit addresses and make the argument that they are restoring security and immutability to Bitcoin. We could play with the numbers a bit but these are as good as any the survival of BCH indicates that any combination of numbers would not likely lead to the immediate cessation of either the Core or the new originalist chain.  

There are at least two powerful economic factors that could counter this scenario. The success of the originalist chain would be dependent on the acceptances of this chain as a return to originalism. It requires individuals or at least wealthy individuals to see it as the premiere immutable form of BTC. This outcome is not at all certain in such a fork and can be challenged by two powerful tools that would likely come into play.

1) The theft/taking of the SegWit transaction in a surprise minor fork could be challenged on its own terms by a later fork that was also originalist but more objectively fair. Faced with the surprise theft of all of the SegWit BTC by the miners in their fork it is highly probably that a follow up second originalist fork would occur but in a more transparent and fair manner with advance notice to individuals to move their funds to non SegWit addresses and only those who did not do so prior to the fork losing their originalist fork BTC. Ultimately what would drive value is not the miners but the wealthy. The wealthy may indeed favor an originalist fork if they feel immutability is not being sufficiently protected by Core but their primary reason for it would be a fear of oppression and theft. Given the choice between two equally immutable bitcoin forks where one has a giant theft built into its inception they will avoid the one that is widely perceived as grounded in theft and fraud. Value and hashpower would ultimately follow their choice.

2) Bitcoin Core could slowly become immutable. The incentive for a rollback is predicated on the wealthy losing confidence in the immutability of BTC Core due to excessive "updates". If this scenario does not come to pass. If BTC Core ossifies over time it could become immutable in which case the concept of massive wealth from a miner hardfork would be just an illusion.

I agree, however, that the risk is real and should be taken seriously. If it comes to fruition, however, I think it would go down much like the BCH fork did. A public schism followed by an announced split. Anything more underhanded would simply set the fork up for failure as it could be easily supplanted by a more transparent fork that accomplished similar aims. The primary concern of the wealthy is protection of property rights and protection from theft. They are not going to want their wealth enshrined in a system that has massive theft built into its foundation not if similar security could be obtained without that baggage.

[cellard]

I would like if you can address my post here related to how fiat overlords can manipulate the market as will as long as:

1) The dollar is accepted in any market
2) Millions of people are under constant threat to accept the dollar to pay taxes
3) The dollar is backed by 1) 2) and an huge army

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4416188.msg40113852#msg40113852

My point is, they can fork Bitcoin and pump it above BTC's the fool the public into thinking their fork has more market confidence than BTC, and assuming BTC whales already sold BCash , they have no longer influence on BCash and therefore BCash could be pumped to any value for as long as fiat overlords can keep printing money at will and people accept it (change BCash with any other fork they would decide to support, but BCash seems the most relevant one)

The allegation of theft is a lack of technological understanding of the FLP impossibility theorem which states that Bitcoin can never have finality, only probabilitistic finality. Thus the Satoshi protocol is never dead and never died. Those who accept tokens with SegWit lineage have hard forked off from Satoshi’s Bitcoin and are now on a Core fork altcoin. They chose to fork off. Thus they already do not own Satoshi protocol tokens. Because any P2SH SegWit transaction is ANYONECANSPEND in the Satoshi protocol. Thus if the miners of the Satoshi protocol accept these ANYONECANSPEND donations, they are not stealing.

So your response distills down to that whether the wealthy should be concerned about idiots who conflate theft with their own free-will to fork off.

In case SegWit actually gets destroyed, you would just need to be holding your keys on legacy addresses before it happens. Just move your coins to legacy addresses, wait a safe amount of blocks and you are set, so it's not that big of a deal in this regard, price wise it will probably be a disaster.

[HeRetiK]

In case SegWit actually gets destroyed, you would just need to be holding your keys on legacy addresses before it happens. Just move your coins to legacy addresses, wait a safe amount of blocks and you are set, so it's not that big of a deal in this regard, price wise it will probably be a disaster.

Why are you repeating this (what I believe to be) incorrect information after I already responded to it before as quoted below?

But still, in case something wrong happens, moving your SegWit addresses into legacy addresses (before it happens) should be enough.

I don’t understand why you think that will secure against potential SegWit theft?

If the lineage of your BTC had SegWit in it, then the hard fork can steal[accept as a donation to the protection of immunity] the lineage and thus your recent spend to a new address will be invalidated.

Why though? If you move coins from a SegWit address to a legacy address, those coins have already been spent. Any attempts to "harvest" anyone-can-spend transactions after they've been moved to a legacy address would result in an invalid transaction.

[DooMAD]

I would also appreciate if you would not erroneously call Satoshi’s protocol a fork. It never forked off. Core and BCH forked off. Satoshi has continued running unabated and there are uber wealthy million BTC hodlers using Satoshi’s protocol every day.

Translation:  Some hardline traditionalists are running some outdated code because groupthink.  Now they talk shit about hypothetical SegWit theft whilst further isolating themselves from the rest of the community because they're too butthurt to accept reality for what it is.  While it would be more fruitful to make constructive contributions, they instead opt to spit venom in the face of the wider community.  They can keep believing the rest of the world will come around to their way of thinking eventually, but if their prognostications of mass-theft were to come true, their delight would be short-lived when it transpired that their vast holdings suddenly lost a noticeably large proportion of its functionality and value.  What purchasing power do you think you'll have when no one wants to use Bitcoin anymore?

SegWit is optional, so feel free not to make use of it.  But don't wish upon it to lead to a major security breach unless you want this little cryptocurrency experiment of ours to end.  No one will take crypto seriously for the next 100 years if Bitcoin were to fail in such a spectacular fashion.  Your riches won't be much use to you when you're dead, so it seems pretty self-destructive to want to make them worthless while you're alive.  As I stated in the other thread, you can't simultaneously have Bitcoin as a global reserve currency and have SegWit balances being stolen, causing everyone to think the network is insecure.  That's a clear logical fallacy.  You can root for one outcome or the other.  Not both.

[cellard]

In case SegWit actually gets destroyed, you would just need to be holding your keys on legacy addresses before it happens. Just move your coins to legacy addresses, wait a safe amount of blocks and you are set, so it's not that big of a deal in this regard, price wise it will probably be a disaster.

Why are you repeating this (what I believe to be) incorrect information after I already responded to it before as quoted below?

But still, in case something wrong happens, moving your SegWit addresses into legacy addresses (before it happens) should be enough.

I don’t understand why you think that will secure against potential SegWit theft?

If the lineage of your BTC had SegWit in it, then the hard fork can steal[accept as a donation to the protection of immunity] the lineage and thus your recent spend to a new address will be invalidated.

Because it doesn't make sense that the entire lineage of transactions would be at risk if it contains a single SegWit transaction on it, no one would be safe from that at this point, unless you haven't touched your coins since august 2017. As a matter of fact, I looked at the chat logs in which the guy you mentioned hangs out and looked for SegWit stuff, I haven't seen any mentions of an address being at risk if the coins are sitting on a legacy format address whose private keys you control and said tx being matured by a reasonable number of blocks, even if it has a previous lineage of SegWit transactions:

mircea_popescu: now, if this is the plan it's not a very good one (you can bury a segwit tx into legitimate spending which is deep enough to not be practically reorg-able) but anyway
ben_vulpes: isn't the practicality of reorg a function of segwitolade sum?
mircea_popescu: but then again usg fronts don't need a good plan, they just need A PLAN. something, at all. idiots don't read.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes and block depth. if you make segwit tx a to me at height 1 and i put it into a normal tx at block 2, i can spend it from block 3 as my bitcoin, the segwitnmess is gone out of it. to steal it from me, one has to rewind all the way to block 1 again. which is possible, but expensive as the chain builds.

Also apparently disabling SegWit wouldn't require rolling blocks back:

steel: That would be bad for the real Bitcoin, no?  Why wouldn't I wait to buy MUCH much more real Bitcoin after revert with same fiat paper
BingoBoingo: steel: The way weird brokenshit like segwit and other turds that live in addresses that start with 3 work is that real nodes see them as "spend to any"
BingoBoingo: Thusly segwit rollback does not mean rewinding blocks
BingoBoingo: It means the miners that had been enforcing rules beyond those real Bitcoin nodes care about simply stop enforcing the extra rules
BingoBoingo: As long as your coins sit in an address that starts with the number 1 and you control the keys your are safe
BingoBoingo: Related, some people take the difference between Llamas and Alpacas VERY seriously

Correct me if im wrong but from what I understand, if for some reason someone pays you in a SegWit address, you move the coins into a legacy format address, wait X blocks and then it would be pretty much impossible to steal, something I have been doing anyway, so I wouldn't be affected if/when it happens. This doesn't look as bad as entire lineages being compromised even if sitting on legacy addresses as you suggested, that would be insane, as well as the massive rollback. Bitcoin would survive, but still, price wise it will be a disaster.

There are whales holding tons of coins in segwit addresses:

https://blockchain.info/tx/92785a57f6e9e9eb9d37a00e6e8be7f888376f65fa2b8f868db261cbf6cca7b0

Losses would be massive.

Do you realize that the same banksters (at least at the highest levels such as the Rothschild) who control the USD also are the same wealthy in Bitcoin. Why do you think they are putting Bitcoin all over their mass media?

They funded Core. Not because they want Core to destroy Ideal Money. Because they’re playing a deception and theft game as they always do.

Assange works for Rothschild. Look at who he was staying with in the UK before having to go into the Ecuador embassy. Look at who was funding his legal defense.

Those are some big claims which would require further proof for me to believe. Where are you getting from that the Rothchilds have massive BTC stacks, exactly? And where are you getting from Core is Rothchilds funded? It's a valid theory but I don't see enough proof to confirm.

[CoinCube]

...
In summary, the Schelling point threshold for starting the SegWit theft is very high and only a sufficiently powerful mining cartel will launch it.
...
the wealthy hate the masses, because the masses always want to steal via their non-meritorious concept of fairness. The masses take on too much debt, expect everything for free from the society/government, and then want to fleece the wealthy when their economic mismanagement ends up in economic collapse.
...
The entire thesis of Bitcoin as a world reserve asset is that the nation-states are powerless to interfere with it because of jurisdictional arbitrage. So the wealthy have absolutely no fear of the governments nor the useful leftist idiots.
...
Thus it is a necessary prerequisite that Bitcoin publicly demonstrate and boldly slap-down any fear of retribution from Marxists (i.e. the masses) before it will be fully respected as a form of Ideal Money.

The allegation of theft is a lack of technological understanding... if the miners of the Satoshi protocol accept these ANYONECANSPEND donations, they are not stealing.

I think it would be useful to summarize and highlight our areas of disagreement.

1) Schelling point threshold for a SegWit rollback.

I take the position that this will not be reached if Core slowly solidifies towards immutability over time which remains a probable outcome. You have stated that you view reaching such a Schelling point as a risk not a guaranteed outcome so we may agree here.

2) Powerlessness of nation-states due to jurisdictional arbitrage.

I think your analysis overestimates the power of bitcoin and underestimates the resiliency of human error. The fiat system may be slapped down as you predict but that process will likely give rise to something much worse. Jurisdictional arbitrage offers only partial and incomplete protection.

I don't believe Bitcoin is going to be boldly slapping down anyone. Instead it will succeed by failing to die. Any person who is wealthy and has no fear of governments is taking an unwise position.

I highlighted how I believe this will play out here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3341237.msg35427611#msg35427611

3) The definition of theft.

Failure to secure ones money or failure to anticipate a theft vector does not mean the taking is not a theft. If I leave a pile of money unguarded on my front porch it may indeed be stolen and I may have no recourse but my failure to secure it does not mean the taking would not be theft.

Theft is and will be the primary concern of the wealthy which is why they would never support a transition to a system grounded in theft when superior solutions/transitions are possible. To borrow your language the Schelling point for such a transition would never be reached as there are other lower energy Schelling points that would be hit first and transition the system.

[aliashraf]

Despite minor disagreements between people who are discussing more actively (belonging to a sect or somewhat?) here they share some common ideologically biased opinions that I don't think fit to development and technical discussion at all. Is bitcointalk under attack  

One common claim which is made and repeated is about bitcoin to be some kind of a treasure and not a monetary system. I believe the way bitcoin has been treated after Satoshi by Core and practiced by gamblers and speculative investors is just what you do with a digital asset but it is frustrating when I see people dare to officially announce bitcoin not being a monetary system.

Taking advantage of current limitations and shortcomings of bitcoin that is failing to fulfil its mission as an alternative monetary system is opportunistic and hypocritical and the most disgusting semi-technical gesture ever.

It is opportunistic because instead of taking the responsibility and thinking about their obligations and duties, this people are just trying to take advantage of the situation. It is hypocritical because, they pretend to be part of an ecosystem while they aren't.

Another vague, ugly claim that has been made here is about bitcoin being doomed to centralization. A truly bold claim. Current situation with pools and ASICs is not an inherent and inevitable property of bitcoin it can be fixed and treated properly and a responsible fateful person, instead of playing such a dirty game in public sphere, should spend more time on possible technical and socio-economical steps and strategies to be taken for fixing the flaws and improving the ecosystem.

Disclaimer:
I know, it is time for the sect to come, insulting and accusing me of being this or that kind of person, deceived by media , n00b, ... I just have to warn them:
Don't expect any tolerance from my side for any brutal/trolling act. If you got something to say, just say it, don't try to fool people by your trolling skills.

[cellard]

mircea_popescu: now, if this is the plan it's not a very good one (you can bury a segwit tx into legitimate spending which is deep enough to not be practically reorg-able) but anyway
ben_vulpes: isn't the practicality of reorg a function of segwitolade sum?
mircea_popescu: but then again usg fronts don't need a good plan, they just need A PLAN. something, at all. idiots don't read.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes and block depth. if you make segwit tx a to me at height 1 and i put it into a normal tx at block 2, i can spend it from block 3 as my bitcoin, the segwitnmess is gone out of it. to steal it from me, one has to rewind all the way to block 1 again. which is possible, but expensive as the chain builds.

AFAICT, Mircea Popescu made an egregious error in that statement. He is ostensibly a literary genius but AFAICT his technological accuracy is occasionally lacking (ostensibly because he is distracted/preoccupied by porn, philosophy, boredom, and what not).

In fact I explain near the end of this post in my reply to @CoinCube, that the miners must take all the donations back to block 1, else security will never be restored.

Have you debated Mircea Popescu on this matter on IRC if you think he is wrong? This is urgent because you now got me worried as I thought lineage of coins was irrelevant as long as your coins are sitting on legacy addresses whose tx's have matured for a couple of blocks (otherwise to my understanding Bitcoin would be broken if you would be able to steal these funds).

If you are correct and lineage is relevant, then pretty much 99% of people will have losses except basically those who haven't done anything since August 2017. Around the 80% of my coins have been sitting since August 2017 and earlier, but the rest I've transacted and received some other funds (some legacy, some SegWit, but those people that paid me in SegWit I sent back to legacy thinking it was safe).

Im not going to send my coins into some shitcoin as an hedge of you being correct on lineages mattering unless it's absolutely clear that that is the case. As far as selling for fiat goes in order to buy later... im not looking forward to it. Just thinking about all the paperwork and taxes makes me an infallible hodler. You have to report every coin you've received, every transaction to exchanges (some of them collapsed and I lost trading records so im not sure how that would work), even trades from BTC into shitcoins would need to be reported, it's insane, it would take me years to get all the paperwork done and still it would be a risk that they find a small error or missing bits and they confiscate your funds.

Probably an exchange’s transaction.

I have stated that I think exchanges can possibly be bankrupted by the hard fork coming. To recapitulate again what I had already written, the exchanges may give you only Core fork tokens when you cash out of the exchange. You will not receive Satoshi fork tokens when you cash out.

No, that address is actually from a guy that has an account here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=73652

It just shows that there are whales supporting SegWit too. Btw that is only one address, he has more.

[Marlo Stanfield]

Bitcoin is not intended to be a transactional currency, as supported by the fact that Satoshi intentionally left the block size fixed at 1MB (c.f. the Decentralized section of my linked blog).

It's not clear to me that satoshi willingly set 1 MB as something that was part of a bigger plan involving a dead end which would force a settlement network to take place, I believe the official statement (that is, that he lowered the 32 MB limit to 1 MB to avoid spam, temporarily). This doesn't mean I buy into the "blocks-as-big-as-needed" approach by altcoin scammers, neither im saying we need a blocksize increase.

Basically, it was set to 1MB, and by the time one wanted to increase it, it was too late, as attempts would result in ugly uncoordinated splits generating altcoins as a result. Once he set 1MB it was set in stone, the question is if he was aware of this or not back then. I believe people often overrate satoshi's long term thinking on his own creation, he was discovering what it would become along the way, with the rest of the people involved since the early days, or maybe you are right and it was part of the plan, but im not willing to clam I knew his intentions with 100% certainty.

It's worth noting that Hal Finney was aware of the "settlement network fate" back in 2010, I don't know if any other big names saw that as well. It very well could be that Hal was satoshi and he knew, but didn't want to claim that as satoshi; then again that's all speculation.

I'm certainly no 'big blocker' and I support Core, but I agree and I very much think that Satoshi's general idea was not to keep it at 1MB, but exceed it eventually. The thing is that he had no way of knowing the reality and conditions of the future to really have an informed opinion. So either way it's totally useless to try to extrapolate whatever we think his opinions or gut feelings were back in 2009/2010. Satoshi deserves all the respect in the world, but people treating him as some sort of divine power and his writings as gospel are off their rocker so to speak.

[DooMAD]

Bitcoin is not intended to be a transactional currency, as supported by the fact that Satoshi intentionally left the block size fixed at 1MB (c.f. the Decentralized section of my linked blog).

It's not clear to me that satoshi willingly set 1 MB as something that was part of a bigger plan involving a dead end which would force a settlement network to take place, I believe the official statement (that is, that he lowered the 32 MB limit to 1 MB to avoid spam, temporarily). This doesn't mean I buy into the "blocks-as-big-as-needed" approach by altcoin scammers, neither im saying we need a blocksize increase.

Basically, it was set to 1MB, and by the time one wanted to increase it, it was too late, as attempts would result in ugly uncoordinated splits generating altcoins as a result. Once he set 1MB it was set in stone, the question is if he was aware of this or not back then. I believe people often overrate satoshi's long term thinking on his own creation, he was discovering what it would become along the way, with the rest of the people involved since the early days, or maybe you are right and it was part of the plan, but im not willing to clam I knew his intentions with 100% certainty.

It's worth noting that Hal Finney was aware of the "settlement network fate" back in 2010, I don't know if any other big names saw that as well. It very well could be that Hal was satoshi and he knew, but didn't want to claim that as satoshi; then again that's all speculation.

My understanding was that Hal Finney was pretty much the driving force behind the implementation of the 1MB cap.  Contrary to what anonymong is saying, Satoshi was quite reluctant to even consider the idea at first.  It was Finney's original idea to implement a limit and he had lengthy debates about it with Satoshi and Cryddit.  Finney eventually got his way and the cap was introduced.  If Satoshi and Finney were the same person, he was either a brilliant actor or a bona fide schizophrenic.  Neither seem plausible to me.  Particularly with that level of healthy discourse between them. 

I believe that, in each other, Satoshi and Finney found someone they could bounce ideas off and get the other person's perspective.  Something that isn't all that effective if you're talking to yourself.

Perma-bans are badges we wear with great pride, because they indicate we were resisting the idiocy.

a)  That's the exact opposite of what it indicates
b)  You should demonstrate your great pride by not registering 25613146 alts to flout it

[cellard]

Bitcoin is not intended to be a transactional currency, as supported by the fact that Satoshi intentionally left the block size fixed at 1MB (c.f. the Decentralized section of my linked blog).

It's not clear to me that satoshi willingly set 1 MB as something that was part of a bigger plan involving a dead end which would force a settlement network to take place, I believe the official statement (that is, that he lowered the 32 MB limit to 1 MB to avoid spam, temporarily). This doesn't mean I buy into the "blocks-as-big-as-needed" approach by altcoin scammers, neither im saying we need a blocksize increase.

Basically, it was set to 1MB, and by the time one wanted to increase it, it was too late, as attempts would result in ugly uncoordinated splits generating altcoins as a result. Once he set 1MB it was set in stone, the question is if he was aware of this or not back then. I believe people often overrate satoshi's long term thinking on his own creation, he was discovering what it would become along the way, with the rest of the people involved since the early days, or maybe you are right and it was part of the plan, but im not willing to clam I knew his intentions with 100% certainty.

It's worth noting that Hal Finney was aware of the "settlement network fate" back in 2010, I don't know if any other big names saw that as well. It very well could be that Hal was satoshi and he knew, but didn't want to claim that as satoshi; then again that's all speculation.

My understanding was that Hal Finney was pretty much the driving force behind the implementation of the 1MB cap.  Contrary to what anonymong is saying, Satoshi was quite reluctant to even consider the idea at first.  It was Finney's original idea to implement a limit and he had lengthy debates about it with Satoshi and Cryddit.  Finney eventually got his way and the cap was introduced.  If Satoshi and Finney were the same person, he was either a brilliant actor or a bona fide schizophrenic.  Neither seem plausible to me.  Particularly with that level of healthy discourse between them.  

I believe that, in each other, Satoshi and Finney found someone they could bounce ideas off and get the other person's perspective.  Something that isn't all that effective if you're talking to yourself.

Perma-bans are badges we wear with great pride, because they indicate we were resisting the idiocy.

a)  That's the exact opposite of what it indicates
b)  You should demonstrate your great pride by not registering 25613146 alts to flout it

I believe both arguments are equally valid:

1) Satoshi was unaware of some of the ramifications of taking certain decisions long term, he was not certain that the 1MB cap would be set in stone, but he did certainly predict people being against it:

Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.

Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.  Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other.  BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.

The networks need to have separate fates.  BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.

Fears about securely buying domains with Bitcoins are a red herring.  It's easy to trade Bitcoins for other non-repudiable commodities.

If you're still worried about it, it's cryptographically possible to make a risk free trade.  The two parties would set up transactions on both sides such that when they both sign the transactions, the second signer's signature triggers the release of both.  The second signer can't release one without releasing the other.

Satoshi was/were clearly very smart, but im not sure if he had absolute knowledge of every possible outcome on a 10+ year timeline, or at least being able to predict that whatever his/their goal was would be reached.

2) Satoshi was/were absolutely aware of everything and it's all part of a big plan.

Both scenarios are possible, but we can only speculate about it.

Rothchild-grade fortunes and whatnot being involved, it could or it couldn't be. I haven't seen enough evidence personally other than speculation.

I also think anunymin shouldn't be banned again, he brings interesting points of view not often discussed. I would like to see gmaxwell, LukeJr, Adam Back, Peter Wiulle, Matt Corallo... posting here more often and less often on Reddit. As far as I remember, their stance was that the "anyonecanspend" attack would never happen due basically lack of miner incentive to do so, they consider it as an impossible out of theory.

[spartacusrex]

.. snip ..

Aaahhhh.. AnonyMint. Your ability to reincarnate has activated again I see.. (I count 5 lives left) In all honesty, I cannot deny I've missed some aspects of the intellectual brutality of your posts. Still as batshit-cray-in-your-face as ever though. 

.. but if their prognostications of mass-theft were to come true

Best word!
 
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Back to the original topic
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I think not. The problem is not POW. Pow as an objective un-fakeable work unit is genius. The problem is that we PAY people to accumulate POW. Centralisation is pernicious. It creeps in, slowly at first.. until it's too late.

The DAG coins have flaws, sure, but in this respect they have removed the elephant in the room.

I believe 1 Billion users could outpace a cartel, if they were mobilised in the correct way. 

Someone just needs to come up with a way of doing it (that doesn't involve some other centralised entity stitching the disparate parts together).