Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[iCEBREAKER]

signs of co-dependence

If you could please spare us from further demonstrations of your miraculous ability to remotely diagnose mental disorders, that would be great.

As for MP's "shtick" versus your own...

I'd rather be MP's cultist than a snotty, pseudo-Freudian, utterly-normative frump like you.  You think you're cool but you are actually just another cultural Marxist parrot repeating the smug groupthink prevalent on Reddit and campus.

MP may be a weirdo or whatever but at least he's not a haughty, preening, typical Austinite snob.

If you insist on buying gluten-free funnel cakes from your favorite food truck using on-chain transactions, do us a favor and instead of Bitcoin use LTC, PPC, XPM, XCN, or DOGE.

[tvbcof]

I believe the block size limit issue is getting critical.  You guys should check out Reggie Middleton's Veritaseum.  Quoting:

Veritaseum uses only bitcoin, and subsists completely on the bitcoin blockchain. It is the only bitcoin wallet system that can trade simple and complex value structures without using non-bitcoin tokens, alt coins, sidechains or alternative blockchains. It can trade the value of over 45,000 tickers in all asset classes, from major exchanges from all around the world. At it’s essence, Veritaseum is a hyper-intelligent Bitcoin wallet “system” that is able to create and interpret smart contracts through the blockchain. It coordinates with an Oracle to gain access to conventional, physical and legacy financial data and information and uses it to price, value, trade and settle OTC, P2P financial instruments - all in BTC.

The Veritaseum platform, using nothing but pure bitcoin with no tokens or alternative internal currencies, moves the value of all that he mentioned plus much more (over 45k tickers), with absolutely no counterparty risk on a fully autonomous basis using smart contracts based solely on bitcoin script

A member of our board of advisors, which we are just putting together, is the ex-chief investment office of one of the largest funds in the world — a few hundred billion dollars. He was a maverick in his space, is excited about the opportunity to literally shake up the world of finance, and is tasked with basically getting institutions to do trades. So, for every ten billion dollar institution that [trades on our platform], that’s the equivalent of an entire Bitfinex in one month’s worth of trades. That’s how we’re going to start, and then we have different verticals — we have that vertical, we have retail, and we have other, specialized verticals.”

Pretty bold claims from Middleton, but I have tried it and it works, at least in a beta phase, not vapor phase or proof of concept phase, but beta phase.  You can trade all tickers that Cypherdoc mentions on here. 

The potential for a massive influx of usage is there, but 7 tps won't cut it.  We have already hit that limit with people just experimenting.  Frankly, I don't think 20mb will cut it either, but its a step in the right direction.  I am for a dynamic limit based on something like one standard deviation above a 30 day moving average of blocksize, or something similar, but I am with Gavin in that it has become mission-critical.

One more in a long list of efforts built around getting a free ride on the protocol at the expense of others.  They should be being worried about it being ballooned, weakened, and ultimately controlled more than anyone unless they are running some sort of pump-n-dump scam platform or are as dumb as a box of rocks.

Whatever the case, this is a classic example of where a dedicated sidechain could shine.  Reggie and co can make their own determinations about how much engineering and transparency they want to pay for for their VeritaseumCoin sidechain based on the market demand in their segment.  They can also decide how much effort they should be putting into securing Bitcoin core, and I doubt that it would be less than it is today.

[necrita]

signs of co-dependence

If you could please spare us from further demonstrates of your miraculous ability to remotely diagnose mental disorders, that would be great.

As for MP's "shtick" versus your own...

I'd rather be MP's cultist than a snotty, pseudo-Freudian, utterly-normative frump like you.  You think you're cool but you are actually just another cultural Marxist parrot repeating the smug groupthink prevalent on Reddit and campus.

MP may be a weirdo or whatever but at least he's not a haughty, preening, typical Austinite snob.

If you insist on buying gluten-free funnel cakes from your favorite food truck using on-chain transactions, do us a favor and instead of Bitcoin use LTC, PPC, XPM, XCN, or DOGE.

I know you've been here a long time, but people are allowed to have their own opinions.
The BTC ecosystem can exist just fine with MP, Justus and the crew on this thread. There's no need to ad-hom justus.
I like the effort he's put in to address the issues we discuss here and his wallet report. MP is also a valuable contributor to the BTC economy with his exchange and other BTC related businesses.

Go back to shilling XMR in the alt forum.

[thezerg]

Wow, I think I really raised the temp in here!  But let me point out that I said that iCEBREAKER's vision sucks, not himself -- that is I wasn't attacking him, just the idea.

But I can't resist saying one thing ad-hominem about MP since others have brought him up.  He seems to post in an obfuscated, I know more than thou manner, but when you finally decode his meaning it typically turns out to be pretty boring and predictable.

And one note to those of you trying to label the 20MB patch "Gavincoin":  That's not how its going to go down.  Its going to be called Bitcoin V0.11 (or whatever), and your 1MB fork is going to be the old V0.10.

And finally, in a 1MB block world its likely that Bitcoin will never grow because it will not find acceptance due to high txn fees.  But if it beats those odds, in places like Venezuela and Argentina, institutions will "back" their accounts and fiat with bitcoins, but then just like gold surprise surprise the world will discover that they are 10 to 1 fractional and all the account holders are wiped out.  In other words, as I previously stated, back to 19th century banking.

[mrhelpful]

I know its a matter of when, so it can be like within this year or maybe 4 years down the road.

But, why cant we just upgrade our wallets to handle the 20 mb, besides I thought the 1 mb issue is regarding on seperate transactions anyways. Right now its like 300 kb at most per transaction with me.

[HeliKopterBen]

We get several of these a day now.  We would probably see >1mb if there were no limit.

[iCEBREAKER]

I know you've been here a long time, but people are allowed to have their own opinions.
The BTC ecosystem can exist just fine with MP, Justus and the crew on this thread. There's no need to ad-hom justus.
I like the effort he's put in to address the issues we discuss here and his wallet report. MP is also a valuable contributor to the BTC economy with his exchange and other BTC related businesses.

Go back to shilling XMR in the alt forum.

I like how you first proclaim "people are allowed to have their own opinions" and four sentences later demand I "Go back to shilling XMR in the alt forum."  

I never sought to disallow others from having "their own opinions" but you have fun knocking down that strawman.

Justus started the ad hom with his cheap remote Freudian analysis schtick.

That's a pet peeve of mine, not just because such folk psychology was debunked decades ago but more because trying to pathologize difference of opinion is a hallmark of the Marxist left.

Instead of recognizing MP's legit objections to 20mb blocks, Justus chose to insult our intelligence with asinine psychobabble about "daddy issues" and "cultists."

There's no *need* to turn steer the critique away from MP and back onto Justus, but you must admit the process of doing so is fun when such a rich target volunteers itself.  

Justus' code-free naval-gazing speculative effort at designing altcoin parameters is not unique.

What is unique are MP's concrete contributions to Bitcoin and the supporting FOSS ecosystem (WoT, OpenBSD).

The 20mb patch is being called "GavinCoin" because no core dev other than Gavin supports it.  It's the Obamacare of Bitcoin updates!  

thezerg's FUD WRT 1mb blocks --> fractional reserve banking is ridiculous; you don't seem to be able to grok the implication of real-time audits (even though davout's above quote spells it out in clear, non-obfuscated terms).

[TPTB_need_war]

...

Please note Satoshi chose to include in the blockchain a newspaper quote from an article about bailouts for TBTF banks, instead of one from an article about excessive bank, ATM, or credit card fees.  

Bitcoin is revolution and financial freedom, not a nifty gadget to put in retail points of sale.  If a guy in Venezuala (or Florida) can't be his own private bank by running a full node over TOR on a slow 5mb DSL line, this experiment has failed.

Satoshi did not create Bitcoin because he was mad about the 50 cent credit/debit surcharge on his iced Americano, and you can't kill/obsolete the BIS with some stupid VC micropayment daydream internet-of-bullshit Visa-wannabe transaction network.

And there is this:

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.

If we subsidize blockchain bloat, we'll get more of it.

That most precious resource should be optimized, not diluted.

The sooner you Monopolist Maximalists get over the fact that GavinCoin doesn't have the required 80% consensus, the better.

The max doesn't have to stay 1mb forever, but now is not the time to potentially undermine the diffuse/defensible/resilient nature that provides BTC's antifragilty.

I agree with everything you wrote above, except 1) Gavincoin has 80% of the mining consensus (which is centralized already), you freedom figthers lost and you will soon be forced to admit it, 2) Micropayments are undesired if done by Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc, but there is a way to do this without centralization and SOBO you will not get enough network effects from just making a decentralized store-of-value that can't be spent nor converted to anything any where . (SOBO = statement of the blatantly obvious)

We are headed into a global contagion where physical black markets will not exist. You will not be able to trade crypto-currency for legal tender nor for gold. The only economy left standing (other than the NWO monetary reset) will be the anonymous micropayments economy of the fledgling Knowledge Age.

Running a full client is ALREADY too resource-intensive for average Joe.  The blockchain.info model is better suited for average Joe.  That model has proven to solve the problem of trust in an environment where trust has been violated a majority of the time.  Average Joe will be his own bank with a simple web interface where he has full control over his keys.  

excuse my ignorance, but why is average joe (or average jose in argentina) "required" to run a full node.

why cant they run an spv client?  Are spv clients like multibit unsafe (or not safe enough?) once sync'd to the rest of the nodes. satoshi believed that the vast majority would use spv clients. was this an unwise decision to make?

If mining isn't decentralized, then you've lost control over Bitcoin to the financial elite.

...

Blockchain size is not the main issue with micropayments (no amount of pruning is scalable if the unpruned chain isn't scalable, i.e. scalability is a different complexity class from bounded compression). Rather as I discussed with thezerg upthread, at some scale micropayments force centralization of full nodes due to processing and bandwidth requirements. I argued that renting a hosting server is not decentralization, because the authorities can regulate the ISPs. Anonymity derives from mixing targeted activity (monopolization of mining by the cartel that runs our world) with untargeted activity (users surfing the net from a home ISP connection).

...

The 20 MB blocks will drive more centralization of mining.

And you can't fork away from that...

...

Until we make crypto-currency technically impossible to monopolize, then we've given them no choice but to do what they do best.

Bitcoin's design can't resist monopolization. Impossible. Do I need to repeat all the detailed reasons again?

...

...

You can't fork away from the masses whom are owned by these mainstream elite who are now taking over Bitcoin. No one will follow you. Money requires some critical mass.

If you are going to fork, you must do it now and build some critical mass (even if smaller than Bitcoin's mass).

Which is precisely what I am intending to do very soon, i.e. fork those of us who are aware into a design that technically can resist all forms of attack on the decentralization and permission-less attributes.

Until you have that, you are just blowing hot air here.

...

Very simple. They have monopolized the mining (ASICs concentrated into farms, 21 Inc, pools hidden behind Sybil attack) and the userbase (Coinbase, Paypal, Circle, Bitpay, etc). Checkmate.

...

P.S. Bitcoin will succeed in being widely adoped, because the elite want it to succeed. But they will be in control of Bitcoin. The decentralized, permission-less quality of Bitcoin will be a propaganda lie only, not reality.

[TPTB_need_war]

yes, the avg Venezuelan doesn't care about running a full node.  he cares about reliable, cheap tx's.  sad thing is, if we stay at 1MB blocks, he might never know about Bitcoin.  and he certainly will never learn about the more complex concept of digital gold.

I agree actually that decentralization doesn't scale if it relies on ideological consensus dedication. And that is why a major overhaul of the design of crypto-currency is required in order to align the incentives properly for decentralization. Bitcoin's design is fundamentally flawed and can't be rescued. The forces are already in play that prevent even Bitcoin adopting my superior design which even Satoshi foresaw...

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.

[thezerg]

I don't believe in real time audits.  Perhaps I haven't studied them enough.  But it seems to me that all you need to do is get a group of large holders to agree to basically keep their mouth shut (large hedge, retirement or other mutual funds for example), and you can then "pile" the fractional part (the missing Bitcoin) into their accounts for the purpose of the audit.

Or you pile the fractional part into fiat, gold, real estate, stocks or other assets that have traditional auditing practices.

Or you just play it completely above-board: have a "100% reserve" portion of your business, and also an "investment" portion.  The investment portion is fractional, not the "100% reserve" portion.  Of course, in the eyes of the law, its all one company and account holders DO NOT OWN THOSE COINS.  They simply own a promise that the company will pay them those coins.

Like that classic XKCD comic about beating passwords out of people rather than breaking encryption, you can nerd out on provable audits but the reality is a lot messier.

And when push comes to shove and the bank goes belly up, all assets are totaled (just like Mt. Gox) and then divided among all holders of liabilities according to a judge, byzantine rules, and negotiated contracts.  But there are a few things that you can be sure that will happen during that big mess:
1. It will take forever
2. The process will cost a fortune, massively reducing the payout.
3. The little guy, with no lawyer and no pre-negotiated contract will end up with shit.

[solex]

Time to shift the Sacred Cow!



My latest thoughts on this, FWIW.

[TPTB_need_war]

The experiment will likely fail if it the network is NOT upgraded and the limit eventually removed.  The limit has already been reached anyway.

no. and no.

The first one is opinion.  The second one is fact.  I have seen plenty of blocks come through at 9xx kb, so yes the 1mb limit has been reached.

yes. and (soon) yes.

If Bitcoin is not "up"graded to centralization, then it withers on the vine because the ideological delusionfever was that we were going to decentrallyventure-capital scale this out to every human in the world. If we "down"grade to a hobbiest store-of-value then the network effects that allow us to exchange Bitcoins for other things fall away. In short, Bitcoin is a cooperative effort between mainstream media, financial powers, and the ideological geeks who got fooled (yet who cling to their delusions about MSM and TPTB defecting  ). Without that cooperation, it never happened.

I want to try a new experiment. We freedom fighters and knowledge age workers go make a coin that remains decentralized by design without ideological dedication, and it scales to our virtual markets. We spin our economy off from the dying NWO industrial age morass of socialism, and we grow our economy over 2 decades to become the main economy by 2033.

[TPTB_need_war]

Avg. Jose doesn't yet care about full nodes because he's never heard of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin hasn't yet closed the loop w/r/t fiat exclusion.

In Marketing 101, the chicken-and-egg problem is an example of what to NOT do.

The infrastructure needed to onboard Avg. Jose, such as Lightning/Sidechains/linear UXTO scaling, is still in the vapor R&D stagealready exists waiting in the wings to be switched on and goes by the names of Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc.

[TPTB_need_war]

iCEBREAKER, your vision sucks. 

People can't directly submit txns because they are too expensive due to limited space.  So coin used for spending must be held by larger institutions who handle payments internally, and periodically make blockchain transfers among themselves.  These institutions will inevitably go fractional reserve even though they claim they won't.

Congratulations, you've reinvented the gold backed banking system of the 19th century!

And you get the same result if you increase the block size, due to the centralization it ultimately enables.

Catch-22. Checkmate. NWO design.

[zeeshsnrehman2]

$223 within 10days. who wants to bet? 0.1btc, choose your escrow

[blockssolved]

I think no matter what we can agree gold will always be a safe bet.  Long term it will remain to have value.  It is something no matter country it has a value.

With past history I would think if your in it for long haul gold is a good investment.

[TPTB_need_war]

Mircea and his #BTC-assets brigade has already declared 20mb blocks to be an attack on Bitcoin, so some degree of fireworks/popcorn/tears/LULZ/drama are guaranteed.

Forcing txn fees higher to contain the blockchain bloat would also implode the BTC price because you will destroy the ideological propaganda that caused people to predict much higher BTC prices due to network effects.

You would essentially be relegating Bitcoin to a hobbiest experiment on the virtues of small currencies used by a fraction of the population with that population sparsely distributed over the globe.

[TPTB_need_war]

I think no matter what we can agree gold will always be a safe bet.  Long term it will remain to have value.  It is something no matter country it has a value.

With past history I would think if your in it for long haul gold is a good investment.

You haven't read my posts about gold.

I entirely disagree. I predict you will throw your gold into the street one day (or at least bury it in the ground foreverfor numerous lifetimes as they did in the Middle Ages).

[zeeshsnrehman2]

I think no matter what we can agree gold will always be a safe bet.  Long term it will remain to have value.  It is something no matter country it has a value.

With past history I would think if your in it for long haul gold is a good investment.

gold has been a safe bet because there are countries who depends on it, on its price. huge economic crash is likely to occur if gold becomes "not so scarce"

[iCEBREAKER]

If Bitcoin is not "up"graded to centralization, then it withers on the vine because the ideological delusion was that we were going to scale this out to every human in the world. If we "down"grade to a hobbiest store-of-value then the network effects that allow us to exchange Bitcoins for other things fall away.

You are conflating quantity of users with quality.

I'd rather the richest 1% (who own 95% of world assets) use Bitcoin, and exclude the 99% of poorer people, than the reverse.

Poor people have no need for a store of value, as they have little or no value to store (much less the ability to manage their stored wealth wisely).

There are plenty of less crowded and expensive blockchains for poor nerds with an on-chain tx fetish.

Bitcoin The Technology scales to "every human in the world" in the form of sidechains, altcoins, and institutions kept honest via realtime auditing.

Bitcoin the Premium Limited Edition 21e6 Cryptocurrency does not.  Like fine art, gold, and real estate, its distribution will follow Pareto-type power laws.

This bleeding heart desire to press Actual Bitcoins into the open palm of every yuppie at Starbucks and every child in Africa is misguided.

We will keep Bitcoin elite, whether you and TBTB like it or not.  

In Marketing 101, the chicken-and-egg problem is an example of what to NOT do.

Bitcoin already solved the chicken-and-egg problem.  Have you been in a coma since 2011, when Bitcoin obviously started rapidly taking over the world?  

Everyone that needs to know about Bitcoin already does.  Closing the loop (IE excluding fiat) is at this point merely an exercise in patience and applying Gresham's Law.

Sand Hill Road's embrace-extend-extinguish attack is as predictable as it is futile.

They are trying to suborn Bitcoin into their quotidian schemes to collect Visa-like quantities of economic rent, but are really just pounding sand.

The harder they hit, the more resistant we become.