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

[cellard]

40,000 BTC is not a whale. It is a dolphin. M.P. has 500,000+ BTC for example and he isn’t even the top whale BTC whale. And apparently a dolphin that is going to get slaughtered, although it is possible the miners may decide not to accept P2SH donations from known dolphins, because it is in their interest to bring this dolphin over to the Satoshi fork if they feel they need his economic weight (he may be issued an ultimatum if he is lucky and his politics isn’t going to keep mucking with immutability otherwise he needs to be fleeced and kicked out). Also we don’t know this user is planted as a deception wherein the wealthy will simply donate their coins back to themselves:

Interesting. So who do you think is the top BTC whale nowadays? Someone made some sort of list but it was very outdated:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321265.0

Have you PM’ed him a link to this thread?

I don't think he browses this forum anymore or at least he doesn't log in too often, last time he logged in was to do the bet with Roger Ver, but I will send him a PM.

In some countries apparently trades to altcoins is still like-kind and not a taxable event. But in the USA that is no longer the case as of this year.

Yeah it is a mess. Most people have lost their trading records, due exchanges shutting down, or just exchanges not saving all-time records. For instance Livecoin which is an exchange used to trade smaller alts without any KYC, doesn't save records for more than 30 days, so I've lost some trades. That is a problem if you ever want to cash out into fiat whose gains were made in said lost trades.

Maybe you can ask M.P. if his TMSR is offering any solution for Bitcoin maximalists like yourself to protect themselves. Presumably a whale could mix your SegWit lineage into a huge amount of non-SegWit so miners would not accept the donation. But I think they will probably view it as not their responsibility for the mistakes of others, i.e. meritocracy.

Im not going to get involved in that personally, I think they hang out in IRC, I don't even know how to use IRC anymore, last time I used IRC it was 10 years ago, all the channels I used to visit are now dead, most people hang out in slack and discord these days, I miss the simplicity of IRC tho. Maybe someone sees the thread and asks, I don't see the problem if you are polite.
For the time being I will just keep holding my coins on legacy addresses and if someone finds out any further information on this please let us know.

[goddog]

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.

I'm lost with this answer, please, if you have some time eli5 this.
Because it seems to me that you are not talking about a segwit theft using anyonecanspend. You are talking about a 51% attack to rollback at august 2017. If miners are able to perform such big attack, why they can't rollback from block 1 or the height they want to doublespend all their old transactions?

[infofront]

Some more good info from the logs:

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.
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
mircea_popescu: exactly the same play. oh, we "buy" bitcoin crash. if it takes, it's good. if it doesn't take, guess what, segwit unroll later.

[Wind_FURY]

This is off topic but how do the Bitcoin Core developers react to Mircea Popescu's statements? Do they take him seriously? Are there old topics or logs on them?

Plus what kind of node does he run if his belief is that the Bitcoin Core software today is "not Bitcoin"?

[Last of the V8s]

This is off topic but how do the Bitcoin Core developers react to Mircea Popescu's statements? Do they take him seriously? Are there old topics or logs on them?

Plus what kind of node does he run if his belief is that the Bitcoin Core software today is "not Bitcoin"?

Carefully and rarely. Yes. Yes.

http://thebitcoin.foundation/ http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=trb

[Last of the V8s]

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#2,24h

[Carlton Banks]

Core has some guys with reasonably high IQs. Maybe up in the 145 range or so. But I would roughly guess that Mircea Popescu is in the 160 - 180 IQ range.

FYI everyone (and OT..... or is this bang on-topic? )

Mircea Popescu has a confirmed penchant for swarming this board with bizarre alt accounts that he controls, and is noticeably eccentric even when performing in his own persona on his website. Very eccentric. And very, very self-absorbed, using multiple alt-accounts to control the narrative about himself seems very important to Popescu.

Anonymint is, curiously, the only person who's ever said anything positive about Mircea Popescu, except Popsecu's more obvious alt accounts. Interestingly enough.

[Wind_FURY]

This is off topic but how do the Bitcoin Core developers react to Mircea Popescu's statements? Do they take him seriously? Are there old topics or logs on them?

Plus what kind of node does he run if his belief is that the Bitcoin Core software today is "not Bitcoin"?

Carefully and rarely. Yes. Yes.

http://thebitcoin.foundation/ http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=trb

Wind_FURY, I read that you have a high degree of confidence in Core. Did you see where I explained that Gregory Maxwell was incorrect about the Ogg sound protocol he was supposed to be an expert in since he was a core developer on one of the popular codecs?

Yes I do. They have been maintaining a decentralized multibillion network and protocol, and I believe they have been doing fine in their decisions so far, apart from the critics saying that "they might break the network" in theory.

Plus you said you make mistakes. Gmaxwell also did, if he did. I would not know.

Core has some guys with reasonably high IQs. Maybe up in the 145 range or so. But I would roughly guess that Mircea Popescu is in the 160 - 180 IQ range. There was some brief attempt by Gregory Maxwell to grandstand in a discussion thread and Mircea Popescu wiped him with the floor. It wasn’t even close. Gregory then proceeded to STFU. He had actually banned M.P. from some discussion or something (back when M.P. was still willing to communicate outside his own IRC freenode), I forgot the details. I don’t have time to go searching for that specific discussion. The difference is akin to the digitization of flowers example I showed you (see quote below). We can presume that Mircea Popescu has surrounded himself with other such geniuses and it is unlikely they are mistaken. Note rpietila has an IQ of 167, and I have no idea what happened to my friend. I’ve been too overloaded to apply the effort into researching whether he is faking losing all his wealth or if he has mental stability problems. So by that I mean genius IQ is not the sole factor. Another issue is the socialization of the Core developers who have ostensibly adopted progressive, social justice philosophy (i.e. irrational belief in democracy and other psychosis) which thus blinds them to new objectivity of John Nash’s Ideal Money.

With your high IQs, do you believe that you, Mircea and rpietila would make a good replacement for the Core developers?

Are you confident that you can "make Bitcoin great again"?

[Carlton Banks]

You mean there are allegations, but no proof of him employing sockpuppets.

There was an MP PR (i.e. public relations for Mircea Popescu) account hanging around a long time after Popescu was banned from bitcointalk.org. Come on now.


And you change your account every month. And sometimes create other accounts that use the exact same posting style, argument style and opinions in general.

Geniuses are eccentric. Yet his logic is impeccable. And apparently he had designed a Bitcoin finance/speculation system that netted him at least 0.5 million Bitcoin. That is efficient. Whilst Core developers were busy spinning their hamster wheels and trying to make Bitcoin a TPS scalable transaction coin which AFAICT is alien to the invariants of proof-of-work.

So you're both very stable geniuses? Interesting.


Some observations

There are a lot of parallels between Mircea Popescu and Anonymint. Both use alot of alt accounts. Both are full of talk and little action. Both obsessed with their intellect. Both troll as if it's an Olympic sport (it proves how smart they are, despite achieving very little of any substance).


If Mircea Popescu were to lose his life (presumably for annoying some Eastern European gangsters or something like that), I wonder what would happen to Anonymint (and his many alt accounts)?

[Last of the V8s]

2012 called and wants its lies and its stupidity back.


iiuc (unlikely) he was just being modest to provoke a reaction

mircea_popescu: does it seem to you a maybe-isp, a mmorpg, some we don't have REs and some novel length fiction warrants a 100bn valuation for the republic ?

[infofront]

Core has some guys with reasonably high IQs. Maybe up in the 145 range or so. But I would roughly guess that Mircea Popescu is in the 160 - 180 IQ range. There was some brief attempt by Gregory Maxwell to grandstand in a discussion thread and Mircea Popescu wiped him with the floor. It wasn’t even close. Gregory then proceeded to STFU. He had actually banned M.P. from some discussion or something (back when M.P. was still willing to communicate outside his own IRC freenode), I forgot the details. I don’t have time to go searching for that specific discussion. The difference is akin to the digitization of flowers example I showed you (see quote below). We can presume that Mircea Popescu has surrounded himself with other such geniuses and it is unlikely they are mistaken. Note rpietila has an IQ of 167, and I have no idea what happened to my friend. I’ve been too overloaded to apply the effort into researching whether he is faking losing all his wealth or if he has mental stability problems. So by that I mean genius IQ is not the sole factor. Another issue is the socialization of the Core developers who have ostensibly adopted progressive, social justice philosophy (i.e. irrational belief in democracy and other psychosis) which thus blinds them to new objectivity of John Nash’s Ideal Money.

I would note that some geniuses and high IQ individuals have trouble communicating well verbally. Also, some don't have the debate skills, or ordered, logical thinking skills necessary. There are very few people above that ~145 IQ level who are well-rounded individuals.

Perhaps Risto is a good example of that. The last I heard, he was in a group home of some sort (a lite loony bin). It was well known that he was manic depressive. He had started his online RPG world (Crypto Kingdom), which had developed a fairly large economy (millions of real life dollars in value). For some reason, he went off his meds and everything went downhill. He lost all of his Monero, and his wife divorced him. Running Crypto Kingdom while he was in a state of mania, he began to see himself as a god. I think he was still accepting Monero, but for withdrawals, he was sending people his imaginary Crypto Kingdom fiat.

[infofront]

By 2015, my ex had depleted my remaining $100k and I was destitute and becoming more ill stuck in poverty in Mindanao with no health insurance, no options to leave, and backwater provincial third world health care system. No family members at all who can help me with anything.

Are you still there?
My wife is from Davao. I visited once with her about 4 years ago. It was a pleasant experience. She wants to move back, but I'm quite wary. It seems the Muslim situation in Mindanao has deteriorated. She thinks Davao is insulated from that, but I'm not so sure.

Also even if they are thinking logically their communication range can be too high for the person more than two standard deviations below them to understand. Because they’re building abstract models that are incomprehensible to those 2 or 3 standard deviations below them. So if their behavior or communication appears to be gibberish, it may actually not be.

That's true

[infofront]

Sounds like you really went through the wringer. Glad to hear things are getting better.
And yeah, I've got a kid. I don't know if I'd want to subject her to Dengue, bad schools, etc.
It would be a good place to be single though. Lots of pretty girls who love fetishize white men.  

[Wind_FURY]

Wind_FURY, I read that you have a high degree of confidence in Core. Did you see where I explained that Gregory Maxwell was incorrect about the Ogg sound protocol he was supposed to be an expert in since he was a core developer on one of the popular codecs?

Yes I do. They have been maintaining a decentralized multibillion network and protocol, and I believe they have been doing fine in their decisions so far, apart from the critics saying that "they might break the network" in theory.

There wasn’t much they needed to do. They added cruft on top which is going to be burnt to a crisp eventually.

I would assume you mean Bitcoin's soft fork to Segwit. I have begun reading your post history to pick up some information and reach out to other smart people to find a "second opinion".

With your high IQs, do you believe that you, Mircea and rpietila would make a good replacement for the Core developers?

@rpietila ostensibly can’t even maintain his security on his laptop. He doesn’t take any interest in programming. He has a very fast, sharp mind and can for example win at casino games. He can compute complex probabilities in his head instantly.

Mircea is too wealthy to expend his time as an engineer. He can contract others to do that for him. He is capable of programming if he wants to. He has even for example written an attempted proof on an open computational NP not equal to P complexity problem:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0411033.pdf

Yes Trilema has been running and providing the Satoshi protocol full node for years. Last of the V8s already provided the link for you. It is purposely designed to look like a site with nothing on it, so that bunny rabbits will stay on Core so they lose all their Bitcoin.

Multibillion bunny rabbits you mean. If true then they will take the whole system with them.

Are you confident that you can "make Bitcoin great again"?

Me? Not me. You mean can the Trilema (aka TMSR) Satoshi protocol full node continue to grow the Bitcoin market cap to $21 trillion by 2032 as it has been doing and never stopped doing. The Core market cap will fall away to the proximity of 0 BTC eventually. Because social justice retards.

Answer is yes.

(click that link. Bitcoin is not intended to be a transactional currency. The invariants of proof-of-work make it impossible. You are free to disagree and throw your lot with Core. I will not recapitulate again.)


Note they’re probably laughing at me for expending my time to reply to you. This is embarrassing. Let’s stop.

Them? The Core developers? If they are then I believe they might be laughing at you because they disagree with your theories. But sharing knowledge to the newbies like me is always good for the growth of the community.

[Last of the V8s]

That pdf about p versus np won't be his, surely. It's a common name. Sorry I missed it earlier.

[Wind_FURY]

I would assume you mean Bitcoin's soft fork to Segwit. I have begun reading your post history to pick up some information and reach out to other smart people to find a "second opinion".

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one. If someone can’t discern the facts, then all they have is an asshole.

I found this when I was browsing the internet, https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/57275/could-miners-possibly-steal-segwit-transactions-on-the-real-bitcoin

The Shelby Moore person has the same arguments as yours about the Segwit soft fork. But achow made a practical reply.

If segwit activates, any attempt to steal anyone's Bitcoin by stealing segwit outputs will be considered invalid and any blocks that contain said transactions will be invalid and thus will be a hard fork. With a hard fork, anything goes. Anyone can make a hard fork and confiscate anyone's coins on that fork, it is, after all, a change in consensus rules where you can make the consensus rules whatever you want. "The Real Bitcoin" is no different. In fact several forks have been made from Bitcoin which no one really cares about, and "The Real Bitcoin" will just be another one of those. If there is no economic activity and no users actually use a coin, it is worthless and no one will care about it. Currently ALL miners are signaling for segwit per the BIP 91 rules. No miners are using "The Real Bitcoin" and no major businesses, exchanges, or users are using it. In fact, the vast majority of users (including businesses and exchanges) and miners are supporting segwit.

So sure, you could hard fork and steal coins spent in Segwit transactions, but no one would care because it would be a hard fork and it would just become another altcoin that no one ever thinks about.

Also, you could just steal all P2SH coins now. P2SH was released after "The Real Bitcoin" made their fork. And it would get you more coins much sooner. But no one would care if you did.

Miners are also incentivized to not hard fork and steal coins. Besides the fact that stealing coins means that they will be damaging the value of the chain they forked from, miners are also then taking the risk that the fork that they switched to will be completely worthless. It is far more profitable to continue to mine the chain which the majority of the community backs and will be using than it is to mine some fork which will likely be worthless with no users on that fork. There will be more transactions on that chain and more value with it as people are actually using it. Furthermore, any miner who did choose steal anyone's coins would come under significant criticism from everyone in the community and that would be terrible for their reputation.

If talking about "game theory" would it not be against the self interest of the miners to "steal" Segwit outputs if they can do it?

[Carlton Banks]

Anonymint and Shelby Moore are the same ("he" also in the past was behind Bitcointalk usernames TPTB_need_war, iamnotback, dinofelis, trainscarwreck, + many many more)

But it's highly likely that the whole "Shelby" thing is simply a theatrical version of Mircea Popescu (this entire line of reasoning originated with him), a rich early adopter of Bitcoin who became crazed with trying to control the discourse on Bitcointalk about 5 years ago, and was subsequently banned. It would make alot of sense if so, as it would be unusual for someone like that to lose their motivation in a puff of smoke.

Creating dozens of alt accounts to push the conversation/positon in a direction for which the only public adherent is Mircea Popescu would be exactly the slightly deranged behaiour you would expect of someone who has been perma-banned like that.



achow101 doesn't mention in the above that there are over 4 million BTC in P2SH addresses, and probably were a year ago when he wrote that reply. If 4 million BTC isn't enough to trigger P2SH booty, I don't know what would be (and the irony is that the more BTC stolen in a hardfork, the more disgruntled opponents, and the less likely it is that anyone will follow the fork).

[goddog]

Miners could use this logic for re-appropriating (stealing, "donating to self", whatever) BTC 11 million in P2PKH addresses + BTC 4.3 million in P2SH addresses + BTC 150 thousand segwit addresses.

Can you explain why the attack isn't happening now? Why not, it's only 15 million BTC! They could take it all, couldn't they?

probably they are waiting some very fail from Core. As soon as core fail a single commit they can take the momentum to discredit all work done by all core developers and by all people trying to upgrade bitcoin.

[cellard]

Anonymint and Shelby Moore are the same ("he" also in the past was behind Bitcointalk usernames TPTB_need_war, iamnotback, dinofelis, trainscarwreck, + many many more)

But it's highly likely that the whole "Shelby" thing is simply a theatrical version of Mircea Popescu (this entire line of reasoning originated with him), a rich early adopter of Bitcoin who became crazed with trying to control the discourse on Bitcointalk about 5 years ago, and was subsequently banned. It would make alot of sense if so, as it would be unusual for someone like that to lose their motivation in a puff of smoke.

Creating dozens of alt accounts to push the conversation/positon in a direction for which the only public adherent is Mircea Popescu would be exactly the slightly deranged behaiour you would expect of someone who has been perma-banned like that.



achow101 doesn't mention in the above that there are over 4 million BTC in P2SH addresses, and probably were a year ago when he wrote that reply. If 4 million BTC isn't enough to trigger P2SH booty, I don't know what would be (and the irony is that the more BTC stolen in a hardfork, the more disgruntled opponents, and the less likely it is that anyone will follow the fork).

What achow101 said is what I originally claimed: that no one would care, because all economic activity would be happening on the SegWit chain, but then again, once P2SH/bech32 addresses are exposed, would you continue trusting said chain?

The "there' is already an huge booty, why aren't they done it yet" question is a valid one, I don't have the answer for that. As goddog said, they may be waiting for an opportunity to present itself, but wouldn't BCH gain more traction from that? They have all the "anti-segwit" marketing themselves, tons of people would fall for that and move their coins into BCH, so they would have another task: To kill BCH (assuming the September stress test doesn't do that already).

[Carlton Banks]

probably they are waiting some very fail from Core. As soon as core fail a single commit they can take the momentum to discredit all work done by all core developers and by all people trying to upgrade bitcoin.

They've been waiting since 2011, that's kind of a long time. And Core did screw up since then; the accidental hard-fork in 2013 being the most prominent example I can think of. That was the biggest chance to discredit the devs, and it wasn't taken. Segwit's long road to activation was a major opportunity too, but there was barely a whisper from this "Satoshi immutabilist" camp

Don't you think that nigh on 8 years of failing to convince anyone of the reality of this attack (and let's not forget 8 years of network upgrades...) discredits this immutability argument? You're saying "the longer we wait, the more likely everyone is to want to return to the 2011 Bitcoin software, where the miners get awarded an extra 5 million Bitcoin", but maybe it's more like that the longer we wait, the more insignificant and bizarre the whole idea is.

what I originally claimed: that no one would care, because all economic activity would be happening on the SegWit chain, but then again, once P2SH/bech32 addresses are exposed, would you continue trusting said chain?

If P2SH/bech32 are "exposed", then that's only happening on the hard-forked blockchain with different rules that permits it. Why would that concern anyone on the Bitcoin chain? Different chains, different rules