Hey Cøbra, mucho gusto conocerte. I know that we have had interactions previously, but I am getting to know that you have a lot of nonsense in your thinking.
OK.
Think about it. Your statement is a bit crazy. I accept the idea that no inventor is necessarily going to be able to see several steps ahead in order to know how his/her invention is going to play out or how it is going to be used, but surely Satoshi knew enough about what he was inventing to be able to understand what it was attempting to achieve, so your criticisms of Satoshi's purported lackings are presumptuous at best, and really show your own seemingly lack of understanding of the topic in which you are trying to spout out knowledge.
What's so crazy about an inventor of a piece of technology not fully understand its future implications? There's nothing to suggest Satoshi anticipated these hard fork dramas, and if he did, there was no warning from him, which would have been nice.
I think that my characterization of your statement is fair, and I doubt that Satoshi needed to portend all situations in order to be adequately anticipating battles. It should have already been clear that he was expecting attack vectors from a lot of directions and he even mentioned imitations and shams as attack vectors. I doubt that it would have been necessary for him to elaborate any further. What are we expecting from Satoshi? God-like portension status?
Can't really disagree with what you are saying here, yet you seem to be describing a kind of objective value rather than subjective value. Currencies achieve values that are systematic and does not really matter what the individual assigns to it or the various actors within those systems.
I wasn't talking about value, I was talking about attributing the name "Bitcoin" to something.
Well that would make your argument even worse, wouldn't it? Who cares about the actual name bitcoin? Sure people get upset about it, but in the end, bitcoin is the network effects, and if the network effects move to other projects, then those projects will gain more power.. surely both bcash and bcashsv had been hoping that their use of the bitcoin name would allow network effects to move over to them if the right circumstances would play out.
Value is derived from the free market and is systemic as you say, but attribution requires subjective interpretation. Let's assume two chains derived from Bitcoin compete in the free market, with one valued more than the other, you don't determine the "real" Bitcoin from value alone because the market might put a premium on a chain that disagrees with your ideals (e.g. the chain increases the 21M limit).
Fair enough. I think that it is superficial to get caught up in the name anyhow, but of course, people including your truly are going to get upset when scam projects like bcash and bcash sv are trying to create brand confusion when they do not have anything close to actual network effects or community confidence.. even though there supporters keep trying to suggest that they are more than what they are in order to create the impression of network effects that they don't really have.
So there remains a need to differentiate bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies in making this kind of assessment in order to recognize both how it compares to gold and fiat and how it differs from gold and fiat in that bitcoin is more sound than both gold and fiat.. Of course, there is a bit of a spectrum with gold being more sound than fiat and less sound than bitcoin, but some of these matters are sometimes questioned too and speculated on, and maybe that is where you are trying to play out the subjective matters to some extent, which surely cause individuals to act in different ways in trying to recognize the differing values of different asset classes - including assessing how present value might diverge from future value and how others might be getting their calculations right or wrong in regards to future value.
How can you claim gold is less sound than Bitcoin? Bitcoin has existed for a little over a decade as money.
Fair enough that I am speculating to some extent, but we can look at various aspects to compare including scarcity, portability, verifiability, divisibility and ease of use without having as many third party expenses or risks.
Gold has been used as money for thousands of years. In all that time, gold has never really changed. We need to let more time pass before we can even begin consider claiming Bitcoin is more sound than gold.
You may be correct that we cannot really determine with any confidence in the midst of the transition, and of course, bitcoin is in the midst of a period of scurve exponential adoption, so there is a bit of a growth biasness that favors bitcoin.
So, sure there might be a decent amount of short terms expectations coming on my behalf, and surely if some kind of Armageddon were to come, then gold would likely experience better holding of value than bitcoin, but we should not be planning our lives around Armageddon scenarios and instead planning more likely scenarios in which bitcoin largely takes away golds various storage of value propositions. Of course, anyone can do what they want in the event that they want to put much if any value into gold, when it is quite likely to continue to underperform bitcoin absent some weird ass Armageddon like scenario...
Remember also, as a kind of aside, that gold has been manipulated the fuck out of for 30 years or more including paper gold and just the various difficulties in claiming actual physical gold and even if bitcoin suffers some similar manipulation attempts it is going to be a lot more difficult to play some of the same games with bitcoin in terms of refusing people from taking possession of their bitcoin.. even though various powers that be are going to try as fuck to play those games with bitcoin and sure we have to see how it is going to play out and sure put your chips where you will and choose your level of allocation wisely.
Of course, I have hardly any clue about the future, but when I got into bitcoin in late 2013, I was largely allocating in bitcoin because I was looking for a hedge against the dollar and I had already had a lot of discomfort with gold for the previous 10 years or so that I had been considered diversifying some of my investment portfolio into gold.. but bitcoin did end up serving that purpose for me, and likely there are some other people who are coming around to understanding bitcoin as that kind of a hedge against the dollar in a way that is similar to gold (and likely better.. but of course, your milage may vary).
I doubt that whether any of us is running a node or not is very relevant in terms of our ability to attempt to assess the soundness of the money, bitcoin compared with fiat and gold and other assets such as equities.... bitcoin is more sound, and sure some of that soundness comes from the fact that a lot of individuals can run nodes and make sure... so bitcoin becomes assessed as being sound than gold or fiat.. so we would rather spend our fiat or gold first before spending our bitcoin.. (that is if we have a choice and options and apportionment of different assets in our various wallets).
I would argue a lot more than "some" of that soundness comes from users running nodes and verifying that everybody is following the rules. But again, we can't say Bitcoin is more sound than fiat, gold or equities because Bitcoin simply hasn't been around long, and we need to let more time pass before we can make such claims.
I can make whatever claims that I like, and sure, you are free to criticize my claims or say that I have not adequately backed up my claims or that certain factors are not sufficiently present. I have a right to criticize you for the same lack of appreciating my claims, and probably in the end, we can go our separate ways and make our claims in circles willing to listen to us or be convinced. Of course, if we are putting some variation of our money where our mouth is, then some of the validity of our claims might play out to our advantage or it might not.
By the way, I am not investing on either the past or some 1,000 year plan; I am investing and allocating based on what I know now, which also consists on choosing my level of allocation into bitcoin based on a variety of personal financial factors (that I have already said, but bear repeating) my cash flow, other investments, view of bitcoin compared to other assets, my risk tolerance, timeline, and time, abilities and skills to learn trade or tweak my holdings and strategies from time to time.
I recommend to anyone who is interested at all in investing to consider to invest 1% to 10% of their quasi-liquid assets into bitcoin, and of course, they are responsible for their own choice in that regard, and of course if someone has a pretty short timeline, such as less than 5 years, then they have to be a lot more careful with how they invest... and then some people are just in a liquidation phase of their life rather than increasing their investment allocation or maintaining it, so they might not be in a position to invest much if anything into bitcoin, either.
In the end, who gives any shits about your various subjective values. You either choose to use bitcoin or you do not, and you can also choose your level of allocation, it is not an all or nothing decision. I might have 25% of my value in bitcoin, and the other 75% in a variety of other assets.. maybe a couple percent in shitcoins and gold and maybe I have several assets that are tied to fiat values in various ways which might include having a few percentage points in actual cash for a kind of floating balance which is going to vary from person to person depending on a variety of individual reasons including how far they need to project out their expenses (whether a few months for someone who lives with mom and dad or maybe 18 to 24 months for someone who has a variety of complicated business arrangements or needs to support various families), and I might have some property (real estate), so if I have less confidence in bitcoin or where I perceive it to be going then I will reduce my allocations in it or decide NOT allocate into it or to use it versus some other assets or currencies.
I didn't say it was an all or nothing decision, you can allocate whatever value you want into Bitcoin. My point has been that there are possible scenarios in the future where you might have to do your own evaluation of whether something actually is Bitcoin or not compared to your specific subjective ideals.
Well, maybe we do not disagree on this portion, because people need to be making their own assessments regarding if or how to allocate into bitcoin as I discussed in my above response.
Again. A big so fucking what? If half of the people use one bitcoin and the other half uses the other bitcoin, then who cares? People can choose to use what they want, and if there is no real perceivable difference in their soundness of money including network effects, then maybe some kind of balance will be reached there in which people allocate 50/50 in each. Most likely with the passage of time, however, one might show itself to have a more sound money aspect which would likely cause more people to allocate towards the asset with the more sound money aspect.. but in the end, who fucking cares if they gravitate or not or if they recognize one for being more sound or not, and even if they pick the one with the less sound money aspect for utility reasons or something, I don't see why it matters. Individuals can decide to allocate however they like, even if they are wrong from an objective viewpoint.
You don't get it. It's not sound money if it can split up in that way, definitely not
more sound than gold.
We can agree to disagree on this point, and of course, any view that I hold can be changed by facts and logic, so merely because I might take a certain kind of aggressive stance, I am still to change my portfolio allocations and my approach in the event that facts and logic change my thinking on a topic.
You can put all your value in gold and at least be assured that it won't split apart into two competing forms of money.
I have no reason to believe that gold is going to perform any better than it's piss poor performance over the past 20 years or so,.. even if you look at gold's meteoric price increases since around 2008, it has barely even kept value in respect to the dollar.. so sure maybe gold is going to double in price or even quadruple in price in the coming 5 years, and bitcoin seems to have a much better chance for outperforming gold... Of course, past performance does not guarantee future performance either, so each of us can choose how to allocate.
You won't ever need to allocate between two different forms of gold and watch them compete with each other in the free market. Your casual dismissal of Bitcoin breaking into two with a "so fucking what?" shows that you don't really understand why Bitcoin has value in the first place.
First of all, you can invest in gold if you want.. thats your choice. I am not going to waste my time with it, and sure people are going to differ in their choices in regard whether to invest in gold and how much to allocate. do what you want.
Second, maybe I misspoke in regards to what I thought about a split in bitcoin. You presented the split as a given, and sure I was going along with your hypothetical as already a given, and once it happens, then you just deal with it and allocate based on that. You did not give too many specifics of your hypothetical, so it seems to me that now, after I already responded, you are trying to add new facts to suggest that I would have gotten screwed from the split, which seems to me to be a pretty BIG ASS assumption.
Now, on the other hand, if you want me to currently consider that a split might be coming to bitcoin, then sure I might have to weigh that possibility, but the fact that I have not entertained such a changed set of circumstances does not mean that I am totally disregarding that such a split could happen at some time in the future, but based on little to no facts, I am not going to assume that I am either negatively affected or that I had not been able to lessen my allocation in bitcoin if I believe that such a threat has become more probable.
If you are suggesting that such a detrimental split is currently imminent, then seems to me that you are adding facts and maybe we are getting a bit far afield anyhow... .. good for you that you feel a certain level of comfort to allocate some of your bitcoin value into gold.
First of all, those both should be referred to as bcash variants, and second of all they are NOT ahead of bitcoin in any regard because they are just inadequate imitations (snake oils) that are trying to pose as if they have the same or similar qualities as bitcoin when they do not. They have very few network effects, which also seems to be reflected in why they have way lower prices than bitcoin to the extent that either one might also be artificially pumped up by bullshit smoke and mirror nonsense.
They are ahead in acknowledging the politics more openly.
I am not sure if I would call that being "ahead," but sure maybe there are ways to consider some aspects of what is going on in bcash or bcash sv as positives, perhaps?
Too strong of a statement, Cøbra. You want to point out and exaggerate political attributes in bitcoin, when there seems to be a striving to remove a lot of the political, and sure probably the political cannot be removed completely, but that does not make bitcoin hyperpoliticized merely because you are striving to ascribe such a label to it.
Bitcoin extends political disagreements in the community into the money. How hard is that to understand? I'm not exaggerating anything. Go look at UASF, where a small minority of users got together in a movement and pressured Bitcoin miners to activate Segwit with the threat that they would reject their blocks otherwise. Here, the reasonable technical solution to preserve value was to just wait it out. But these users were willing to fork themselves off the Bitcoin network if they didn't get their Segwit activated right now. You won't find this level of naked populism and politics in any other form of money. Can you imagine if a minority of Americans threatened to use their own spinoff version of the U.S. dollar unless the treasury made certain economic concessions to them?
Fair enough that we can have differing views about how that uncertain time in mid-2017 played out and why it played out the way that it did. There was a lot of gaming going on from a lot of angles and there are a lot of ways to characterize that time. I seem to be more happy about how it played out than you, but still it was not like a stress free time in my life, either.. but in the end, there are a lot of injustices in various parts of the world when you have humans engaging in various kinds of game theory and reacting and over reacting and there are likely going to be differing views about what happened, and there may even be changed views about what happened if relooking at some of the facts or the logic. I doubt that it is very fruitful to bat that information around here, any more than what we already have, but I understand that you seem to be getting some different lessons out of that time period, than me... and I am not even saying that my views are either concrete or they might not be changed, but I am generally happy about how segwit got adopted and 2x got rejected.
I doubt people are giving as much weight to some supposed hate of Roger Ver as you would like to believe, and throughout this post, you, Cøbra, seem to be attempting to ascribe and fantasize way more about political nonsense than what really exists. Might be a good thing that you are retiring your Cøbra persona, but I doubt that you are retiring your inclinations to overly politicize matters.
It's not fantasy, I'm just telling you the realities of Bitcoin that most people have figured out already but you haven't.
Might be better if we just agree to disagree here. It's possible that I accused you of overgeneralizing, but I thought that I was overall fair, and you are suggesting that either I don't have enough information or that I am reaching the wrong conclusions based on available information, and you really have not shown that you are in a better position to know than me.. even though I am NOT going to take that for granted.
Wrong presumption.
Bitcoin is already a success, and likely if it does not change for 100 years, it will still be a success. That's a big presumption because people and institutions are going to continue to build on bitcoin. Maybe they have to build second layer, but bitcoin is not broken, even if it stays the same forever and ever from here on out.
I didn't say Bitcoin wasn't a success, but it's a success because of continued change and improvement.
Another spot where we can agree to disagree, and I think that I already backed up my assertion sufficiently enough.
That all seemed to work out pretty well, even though there was a lot of drama at the time. I was there and I followed a lot of it. So, maybe my experience was different than yours, but it seemed to have worked out pretty well in the end in terms of getting segwit and not getting that 2x bullshit. And, also not having to resort to something less than overwhelming consensus to get segwit passed.
Surely, various people are going to get different lessons from that experience, and hopefully, it can help with future situations like that, if they were to happen and maybe how to deal with those kinds of situations similarly or differently depending on how any such future similar situation might present itself.
Segwit2x burned out a lot of people, it was stressful and caused massive amounts of harm and distrust among members of the community. We can't go through that each and every time a faction of the community wants to change Bitcoin in some way.
Maybe it burned out the people on the wrong side of the fork more than it burned out bitcoiners? I am not saying that I did not feel stress, but there was a certain relief to just letting the BIG blockers go and play around with their own experiment. Bitcoiners did not choose that result. It was Jihun and whoever who unilaterally decided to play hardball with the August 1 hardfork of bcash, and it really did not seem to help their cause.. dumb fucks miscalculated to play hardball.. same thing with the segwit2x diptwats.. they played hardball with that threat too, and they ended up backing down. So, yeah, some people got burned but mostly the people trying to play hardball rather than the ones who were working through bitcoin consensus mechanisms including using the BPIP system.
I also want you to pay attention to your language, because the language we use reveals a lot, you say "And, also not having to resort to something less than overwhelming consensus to get segwit passed", does that not almost sound like a legislative battle, something that would be said about a political process? Replace the word "segwit" with "obamacare" and it sounds like a sentence you would hear to describe something that happened in congress.
I like the language that I used. I tried to select my words carefully, and your pointing out an issue with my language does not cause me to feel worse about it.
I agree with you that language is important.
Yeah, there is something a bit arbitrary about 95%, but that is overwhelming consensus, rather than some of the BIG blockers were trying to get those standards lowered.. that was deceptive as fuck to try to change governance and make bitcoin easier to change... so yeah, this is not democratic.. it is overwhelming consensus that got segwit passed.. almost unanimous support.. and I think that it is good that almost unanimous support caused segwit to pass... In the future, I am not sure if 95% will be needed for things like schnorr and tap root and some other proposed changes that I believe are in testing out stages.
You can't just bury your head in the sand and completely ignore how political this stuff is.
I doubt that I am burying my head in the sand... maybe we are just emphasizing different things as important and relevant?
You do yourself a disservice, presumably you have a lot of money tied up in Bitcoin, just like most of us. So you should really know what you're getting involved with here.
I have tried to be balanced, even in terms of my investment. I try not to make it so that I am overextended, and I think that anyone who is feeling overallocated might need to change his/her allocation.
My quick story is that I largely decided my allocation level by the end of 2014, so I spent most of 2014 investing into bitcoin, but since we know what happened in 2015 and 2016, BTC prices continued to be pretty stagnant and I continued to dollar cost average into bitcoin during that time... but anyhow, the punchline, is that I have had a decent amount of time to allocate and reallocate and I really did not get caught up in shitcoins such as bcash or bsv, so I sold my bcash between September and October-ish 2017 and then I did get a few more reissued from coinbase in their surprise distribution in December 2017, so I pretty much sold those as quickly as possible when I saw their phony ass pumpening of that shit.. so anyhow, I did not continue to hold too many Bcash bags, so maybe that is causing me to denigrate them a lot more than others who might have thought that it was prudent to hold some of that shit. So perhaps that does explain some of our differing perspective regarding the extent to which their might be some redeeming values in either bcash and/or bcash sv.
So, even if there have been a lot of seeming generalizations batted around by categorizing purported political camps in bitcoin, sometimes some specifics might be necessary to call some of the generalizations into question.... so surely, in any case, if we consider segwit as good or bad, we might tailor our views accordingly, and perhaps part of my criticism of Cøbra has evolved into an impression that he is one of the whiners in terms of his having difficulties accepting segwit as a valid transition that had already happened nearly three years ago in bitcoin.. with of course, subsequent and ongoing building upon that nearly 3 year ago transition that has value and establishes our messy bitcoin in its current state of "as is" rather than wishing it to be something that it is not.
I've never had a problem with Segwit, and it's funny how you immediately jumped to that conclusion. You likely assumed that because we disagree on some stuff today, we must also also disagree on Segwit (another thing that got heavily politicized).
O.k. Maybe I misread you in regards to your position regarding segwit, and like I said, I never really intended for any of my response to be personally towards you, but I am trying to just attack some of your presentation of ideas, and surely it does seem that we disagree on some matters, but we each had our say, too...
Sorry that I can be kind of long winded sometimes, and surely I am not going to try to presume that I understand some of your experiences including some of the behind the scenes stuff that you may have experienced in terms of your involvement in the administration of this website and bitcoin.org.. so surely, I cannot be trying to presume too much about you or your behind the scenes experiences... although I have read some of your previous posts, but sometimes I might not remember various things, too.
