Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[lunarboy]

This should be interesting to watch,

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3agk61/ultimate_bitcoin_stress_test_monday_june_22nd/

By 14:00 GMT Monday June 22, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 10mb By 24:00 GMT Monday June 22nd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 130mb By 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 22rd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 241mb

At this point the backlog of transactions will be approximately 241 blocks, or 1.67 days. When the average new transactions are factored into the equation, the backlog could drag on for 2-3 days. At this point, questions are raised such as whether or not this will cause a "crash landing." It is impossible to know with certainty, however we are anxiously looking forward to Monday.

The SatoshiDice stress tess was a lot better than this plan.

At least the capacity problems they caused were from actual customers receving a service for which they were willing to pay rather than admitted spam.

Agreed, but with a permission-less ledger nobody can or should be able to stop them. So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with. Time to address the issues and and scale up.

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[justusranvier]

So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with.

Of course the protocol is not going to break. Does anyone thing it will?

It's not about the protocol or the network.

[lunarboy]

So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with.

Of course the protocol is not going to break. Does anyone thing it will?

It's not about the protocol or the network.

Ok break, is a little harsh. The usage of the term depends on the same structural divides currently splintering the development. Namely, what is the protocol/network for? It will be broken under this stress test WRT micro transactions, as they will be crowded out due to cost.

I don't want to comment further on this as I don't feel qualified to pass judgement. I do feel it's an interesting development, and am intrigued to see where the chips land afterwards. Will certain peoples standpoints soften? Will it spark some development compromise? Or is the whole idea some sort of scam to somehow make a few coins?
 

[cypherdoc]

So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with.

Of course the protocol is not going to break. Does anyone thing it will?

It's not about the protocol or the network.

Ok break, is a little harsh. The usage of the term depends on the same structural divides currently splintering the development. Namely, what is the protocol/network for? It will be broken under this stress test WRT micro transactions, as they will be crowded out due to cost.

I don't want to comment further on this as I don't feel qualified to pass judgement. I do feel it's an interesting development, and am intrigued to see where the chips land afterwards. Will certain peoples standpoints soften? Will it spark some development compromise? Or is the whole idea some sort of scam to somehow make a few coins?
 

My bet would be that the Coinwallet ploy is tied to that large asymmetric bid wall on BFX which is probably someone's short position trying to get out. 

[cypherdoc]

OK! Time to get busy!

https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoinxt/commit/821e223ccc4c8ab967399371761718f1015c766b

[Erdogan]

Comparing a successful fork to a runaway sidechain.

A chain fork, while painful, will succeed only if the fork is better than the original. A bitcoiner need only do nothing to join the fork.

A sidechain will either be less valuable and therefore be very small, or more valuable and therefore run away. A bitcoiner might be left behind, unless he converts to the sidechain in time.

I prefer a chain fork to a runaway sidechain.

Yes, chain fork = (Peter R's) spin off, though the latter carries a connotation of being done in a somewhat less chaotic fashion. As I said before, spin offs make a lot more sense than side chains as a way to (potentially) upgrade bitcoin. Even Adam's one-way pegs are better than side chains, but spin offs are better than one way pegs.

But Blockstream's two-way pegged side chains don't runaway from your BTC value. Thus they are best, because they are not all-or-nothing choices, you can go back and forth, and your BTC value is protected.

Pegging two different, however slightly, money types together is a problem in theory and practice. As long as they are different, they will have different value. If the value is smaller, they will be converted to bitcoins. If the value is larger, they will be converted to sidecoins.

When a fiat system goes bust, a new one is created, and it is quite common to peg the value to for instance the dollar. This is to try to give people a reason to trust the new money. The reason to have local money at all, is to get the seigniorage, which otherwise would be wasted to another government. To peg the value, you need an institution to be the guarantor, that means a kind of bank with reserves in the other money type. In practice, exact pegging is not possible, because there will be leakage of value to speculants and money exchange services. Therefore there will be a band, where the value will be pegged to somewhere between the upper and lower limits. Even better, the exact limits are secret, to avoid speculation near the edge. This can go on for a while, until they have created too much (sometimes too little), the peg breaks and is set to another value.

If there is a mathematical peg defined by protocol and secured by the blockchain, the difference in value will have to escape somehow, and that is either the coins disappear if they are worth less than bitcoin, otherwise all bitcoins will be converted to sidecoins. It is not rocket science.

[cypherdoc]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3aieuj/gavin_andresens_block_size_increase_code_8mb_cap/cscxaox

[Odalv]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3aieuj/gavin_andresens_block_size_increase_code_8mb_cap/cscxaox

so ... block size will be 8,192,000,000 bytes in 2036.

[cypherdoc]

the market is going to LOVE Gavin's new XT release.  it set a reliable "plan" going forward.  markets love certainty and the message is clear:  BITCOIN IS PRIMED FOR GROWTH.

[cypherdoc]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3aieuj/gavin_andresens_block_size_increase_code_8mb_cap/cscxaox

so ... block size will be 8,192,000,000 bytes in 2036.

see that big green candle?

[cypherdoc]

what Gavin's XT proposal does is not only automate out financiers, banksters, politicians, & corrupt gvts, but also DEVS. 

esp a few core devs who think they know better.

and that, imo, is a worthy goal.

[cypherdoc]

heads up.

the anti Gavin guys have taken to a new strategy on Reddit to push upvoted primary comments DOWN.  that's by sub-commenting negatively and heavily in the top most upvoted comment so ppl read their negative shit first near the top.  phantomcircuit (Strateman from Blockstream) and BitFast (Greenaddress skeptic) are filling up Gavin's thread with this strategy.

[Ronan-]

what Gavin's XT proposal does is not only automate out financiers, banksters, politicians, & corrupt gvts, but also DEVS. 

esp a few core devs who think they know better.

and that, imo, is a worthy goal.

heads up.

the anti Gavin guys have taken to a new strategy on Reddit to push upvoted primary comments DOWN.  that's by sub-commenting negatively and heavily in the top most upvoted comment so ppl read their negative shit first near the top.  phantomcircuit (Strateman from Blockstream) and BitFast (Greenaddress skeptic) are filling up Gavin's thread with this strategy.

Reddit is already heavily astroturfed in favor of Gavin's strategy. Which if does include pushing other devs out is deeply wrong. I was on the fence before but I cannot support Gavin if he is trying to become the king of bitcoin. Its fundamentally anti-bitcoin and everything we stand for. What does this all come from? The aggressive need to scale so we can bubble again? Since when has this community become so greedy.

[cypherdoc]

what Gavin's XT proposal does is not only automate out financiers, banksters, politicians, & corrupt gvts, but also DEVS. 

esp a few core devs who think they know better.

and that, imo, is a worthy goal.

heads up.

the anti Gavin guys have taken to a new strategy on Reddit to push upvoted primary comments DOWN.  that's by sub-commenting negatively and heavily in the top most upvoted comment so ppl read their negative shit first near the top.  phantomcircuit (Strateman from Blockstream) and BitFast (Greenaddress skeptic) are filling up Gavin's thread with this strategy.

Reddit is already heavily astroturfed in favor of Gavin's strategy. Which if does include pushing other devs out is deeply wrong. I was on the fence before but I cannot support Gavin if he is trying to become the king of bitcoin. Its fundamentally anti-bitcoin and everything we stand for. What does this all come from? The aggressive need to scale so we can bubble again? Since when has this community become so greedy.

you miss the whole pt of what i said. 

Gavin is ALSO trying to automate out HIMSELF.

if you've observed Gavin carefully ever since he was given the keys by Satoshi, he has always been much more optimistic and hands off with Bitcoin than all the other core devs who just obsess all day long about what's wrong with Bitcoin and what they should be doing about it.  Gavin, being the understanding leader that he is, simply let those guys go off and tinker at the edges for the longest time.  now, when the block size limit continues to be hit, he HAS to step up and take charge to prevent repeated DoS'ing of the network.  in the meantime, what was entirely unpredictable was a faction of core dev going off and creating their own private for profit company which actually depends on deprecating/choking Bitcoin Core. 

his vision with XT, which i entirely agree with, is to get it to a point where it upgrades itself over time to keep up with internet capacity.  he doesn't want this shitfest debate coming up again.  that's not good news for devs who gotta dev.

this is a worthy goal.

[Ronan-]

what Gavin's XT proposal does is not only automate out financiers, banksters, politicians, & corrupt gvts, but also DEVS. 

esp a few core devs who think they know better.

and that, imo, is a worthy goal.

heads up.

the anti Gavin guys have taken to a new strategy on Reddit to push upvoted primary comments DOWN.  that's by sub-commenting negatively and heavily in the top most upvoted comment so ppl read their negative shit first near the top.  phantomcircuit (Strateman from Blockstream) and BitFast (Greenaddress skeptic) are filling up Gavin's thread with this strategy.

Reddit is already heavily astroturfed in favor of Gavin's strategy. Which if does include pushing other devs out is deeply wrong. I was on the fence before but I cannot support Gavin if he is trying to become the king of bitcoin. Its fundamentally anti-bitcoin and everything we stand for. What does this all come from? The aggressive need to scale so we can bubble again? Since when has this community become so greedy.

you miss the whole pt of what i said. 

Gavin is ALSO trying to automate out HIMSELF.

if you've observed Gavin carefully ever since he was given the keys by Satoshi, he has always been much more optimistic and hands off with Bitcoin than all the other core devs who just obsess all day long about what's wrong with Bitcoin and what they should be doing about it.  Gavin, being the understanding leader that he is, simply let those guys go off and tinker at the edges for the longest time.  now, when the block size limit continues to be hit, he HAS to step up and take charge to prevent repeated DoS'ing of the network.  in the meantime, what was entirely unpredictable was a faction of core dev going off and creating their own private for profit company which actually depends on deprecating/choking Bitcoin Core. 

his vision with XT, which i entirely agree with, is to get it to a point where it upgrades itself over time to keep up with internet capacity.  he doesn't want this shitfest debate coming up again.  that's not good news for devs who gotta dev.

this is a worthy goal.

Given the keys by Satoshi? Even you are blindly repeating that? Satoshi only gave him the alert keys, the metaphorical keys you speak of do not exist. Gavin took advantage of Satoshi's disappearance by repeating that same story over and over again of Satoshi putting his email on the website like it means he is Satoshi's heir. There is no such position in bitcoin anyways.

What you portray as 'going off to tinker' and 'obsessing' is creating solutions and being cautious about modifying what is like changing the function of a car engine while the car is moving. This hyperbole betrays the weakness of your position, only the weak side resorts to such in a discussion. The network has been DoSed, but not significantly and in any capacity to impact more than most users. Deprecating/choking bitcoin core? How? By moving wealth (that probably wasn't already there due to an inadequacy) from something bitcoin can't do well or can't do at all into a sidechain? The only choking is of possible future financial wealth, which shows stake in the game.

[cypherdoc]

what Gavin's XT proposal does is not only automate out financiers, banksters, politicians, & corrupt gvts, but also DEVS. 

esp a few core devs who think they know better.

and that, imo, is a worthy goal.

heads up.

the anti Gavin guys have taken to a new strategy on Reddit to push upvoted primary comments DOWN.  that's by sub-commenting negatively and heavily in the top most upvoted comment so ppl read their negative shit first near the top.  phantomcircuit (Strateman from Blockstream) and BitFast (Greenaddress skeptic) are filling up Gavin's thread with this strategy.

Reddit is already heavily astroturfed in favor of Gavin's strategy. Which if does include pushing other devs out is deeply wrong. I was on the fence before but I cannot support Gavin if he is trying to become the king of bitcoin. Its fundamentally anti-bitcoin and everything we stand for. What does this all come from? The aggressive need to scale so we can bubble again? Since when has this community become so greedy.

you miss the whole pt of what i said. 

Gavin is ALSO trying to automate out HIMSELF.

if you've observed Gavin carefully ever since he was given the keys by Satoshi, he has always been much more optimistic and hands off with Bitcoin than all the other core devs who just obsess all day long about what's wrong with Bitcoin and what they should be doing about it.  Gavin, being the understanding leader that he is, simply let those guys go off and tinker at the edges for the longest time.  now, when the block size limit continues to be hit, he HAS to step up and take charge to prevent repeated DoS'ing of the network.  in the meantime, what was entirely unpredictable was a faction of core dev going off and creating their own private for profit company which actually depends on deprecating/choking Bitcoin Core. 

his vision with XT, which i entirely agree with, is to get it to a point where it upgrades itself over time to keep up with internet capacity.  he doesn't want this shitfest debate coming up again.  that's not good news for devs who gotta dev.

this is a worthy goal.

Given the keys by Satoshi? Even you are blindly repeating that? Satoshi only gave him the alert keys, the metaphorical keys you speak of do not exist. Gavin took advantage of Satoshi's disappearance by repeating that same story over and over again of Satoshi putting his email on the website like it means he is Satoshi's heir. There is no such position in bitcoin anyways.

What you portray as 'going off to tinker' and 'obsessing' is creating solutions and being cautious about modifying what is like changing the function of a car engine while the car is moving. This hyperbole betrays the weakness of your position, only the weak side resorts to such in a discussion. The network has been DoSed, but not significantly and in any capacity to impact more than most users. Deprecating/choking bitcoin core? How? By moving wealth (that probably wasn't already there due to an inadequacy) from something bitcoin can't do well or can't do at all into a sidechain? The only choking is of possible future financial wealth, which shows stake in the game.

what's ridiculous is your claim in bold. 

if it was so controversial, why hasn't your point come up before?  i've never heard any of the other core devs spouting your allegations, even now.

[tvbcof]

Reddit is already heavily astroturfed in favor of Gavin's strategy. Which if does include pushing other devs out is deeply wrong. I was on the fence before but I cannot support Gavin if he is trying to become the king of bitcoin. Its fundamentally anti-bitcoin and everything we stand for. What does this all come from? The aggressive need to scale so we can bubble again? Since when has this community become so greedy.

you miss the whole pt of what i said. 

Gavin is ALSO trying to automate out HIMSELF.

if you've observed Gavin carefully ever since he was given the keys by Satoshi, he has always been much more optimistic and hands off with Bitcoin than all the other core devs who just obsess all day long about what's wrong with Bitcoin and what they should be doing about it.  Gavin, being the understanding leader that he is, simply let those guys go off and tinker at the edges for the longest time.  now, when the block size limit continues to be hit, he HAS to step up and take charge to prevent repeated DoS'ing of the network.  in the meantime, what was entirely unpredictable was a faction of core dev going off and creating their own private for profit company which actually depends on deprecating/choking Bitcoin Core. 

his vision with XT, which i entirely agree with, is to get it to a point where it upgrades itself over time to keep up with internet capacity.  he doesn't want this shitfest debate coming up again.  that's not good news for devs who gotta dev.

this is a worthy goal.

Since I got interested, Gavin's focus seemed to be on making the GUI more pretty and such rather than to put much focus on things like pruning (which was one of the big selling points to me in the whitepaper and still has not happened.)  Another in the list of useless and counterproductive development pushes was to get SSL with it's reliance on certificate authorities put in.  That one opened us up to the heartbleed bug.

There did seem to be a change when Gavin visited the Council of Foriegn Relations and refused the most basic of transparency requests on the part of the user-base.  It seems to correspond roughly with the point when Hearn's whole arm worked it's way from Gavin's ass all the way up to his jaw.  That's what it seems to me at any rate.  It also seems to correspond whit the point when he stopped doing almost any coding at all.

'devs gotta dev' because Bitcoin is important, under stress, and has a variety of core defects and has experienced  a stream of quasi-attacks.  Most of the devs have spent their efforts on these issues as far as I'm concerned and have done quite a nice job.  To my way of thinking Gavin has never been hugely helpful but until relatively recently he has at least not been obstructionist.

[Odalv]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3aieuj/gavin_andresens_block_size_increase_code_8mb_cap/cscxaox

so ... block size will be 8,192,000,000 bytes in 2036.

see that big green candle?

...

Is it you who created that candle ?

[TPTB_need_war]

Comparing a successful fork to a runaway sidechain.

A chain fork, while painful, will succeed only if the fork is better than the original. A bitcoiner need only do nothing to join the fork.

A sidechain will either be less valuable and therefore be very small, or more valuable and therefore run away. A bitcoiner might be left behind, unless he converts to the sidechain in time.

I prefer a chain fork to a runaway sidechain.

Yes, chain fork = (Peter R's) spin off, though the latter carries a connotation of being done in a somewhat less chaotic fashion. As I said before, spin offs make a lot more sense than side chains as a way to (potentially) upgrade bitcoin. Even Adam's one-way pegs are better than side chains, but spin offs are better than one way pegs.

But Blockstream's two-way pegged side chains don't runaway from your BTC value. Thus they are best, because they are not all-or-nothing choices, you can go back and forth, and your BTC value is protected.

I consider the entire scheme unstable and unsound, and quite plausibly will never even be implemented (in other than federated form, at which point it instead becomes uninteresting).

Because of the vulnerability of the network to 50% attacks? But what if a side chain isn't vulnerable to 50% attacks.

In that case, assuming other more serious compromises aren't made, then your system is simply far superior to Bitcoin. You should replace it and not carry the Bitcoin system around as unnecessary and uncompetitive overhead.

If you can carry those BTC units on your coin's network orthogonally to your coin's units, then you get the benefits of leveraging Bitcoin's existing network efforts while ramping up your own coin.

Transition isn't instantaneous. Many may prefer to transfer BTC value and then later after convinced, they convert BTC to your coin.

Any other reasons you think it is unstable and unsound?

Economically I don't believe that two different assets can be successfully pegged to the same price, especially not in a decentralized manner (though doing it in a centralized manner also likely fails to a version of the calculation problem). If you extrapolate from this premise, it is clear that various failure modes are inevitable, some quite catastrophic. But possibly people are mostly smart enough to stay clear of the whole thing in which case the failure mode is non-catestrophic (a whimper not a bang).

Well long-term, it impossible to guarantee that the protocol of the pegged side chain will continue to warrant that it is not creating new BTC units, thus long-term there is no way the peg will be respected on the side of the side chain. The Bitcoin Core block chain wouldn't care because money supply there is not subject to change by what a side coin does. (ditto vice versa)

So yes the BTC value in the pegged side chain can not be warranted long-term, but that is not the targeted purpose. It is a short-term (couple of years or so) test of flow from Core into a new network. If the flow is sufficient, then it succeeds and eventually diverges from Bitcoin Core long-term. Short-term is enough to meet investor expectations.

I think you are making a catastrophic mistake to ignore them. I hope your view doesn't represent Monero's position?

Why is federated uninteresting? The masses don't give a hoot about theoretical decentralization (otherwise they wouldn't buy Bitcoin nor Monero nor any other existing cryptocoin in first place because none are theoretical sound decentralization).

Whose leg are we pulling here.

I don't really care what the masses buy, except in so far as I can successfully front run them.

Non-decentralized systems are uninteresting because there are many well known ways to implement them that don't have the cost and performance compromises nor the user-unfriendliness of blockchains.

But if that semi-centralized federalism is a pathway to a superior decentralized network, then that centralization gets discarded...

Careful the myopia...

[TPTB_need_war]

Comparing a successful fork to a runaway sidechain.

A chain fork, while painful, will succeed only if the fork is better than the original. A bitcoiner need only do nothing to join the fork.

A sidechain will either be less valuable and therefore be very small, or more valuable and therefore run away. A bitcoiner might be left behind, unless he converts to the sidechain in time.

I prefer a chain fork to a runaway sidechain.

Yes, chain fork = (Peter R's) spin off, though the latter carries a connotation of being done in a somewhat less chaotic fashion. As I said before, spin offs make a lot more sense than side chains as a way to (potentially) upgrade bitcoin. Even Adam's one-way pegs are better than side chains, but spin offs are better than one way pegs.

But Blockstream's two-way pegged side chains don't runaway from your BTC value. Thus they are best, because they are not all-or-nothing choices, you can go back and forth, and your BTC value is protected.

Pegging two different, however slightly, money types together is a problem in theory and practice. As long as they are different, they will have different value. If the value is smaller, they will be converted to bitcoins. If the value is larger, they will be converted to sidecoins.

When a fiat system goes bust, a new one is created, and it is quite common to peg the value to for instance the dollar. This is to try to give people a reason to trust the new money. The reason to have local money at all, is to get the seigniorage, which otherwise would be wasted to another government. To peg the value, you need an institution to be the guarantor, that means a kind of bank with reserves in the other money type. In practice, exact pegging is not possible, because there will be leakage of value to speculants and money exchange services. Therefore there will be a band, where the value will be pegged to somewhere between the upper and lower limits. Even better, the exact limits are secret, to avoid speculation near the edge. This can go on for a while, until they have created too much (sometimes too little), the peg breaks and is set to another value.

If there is a mathematical peg defined by protocol and secured by the blockchain, the difference in value will have to escape somehow, and that is either the coins disappear if they are worth less than bitcoin, otherwise all bitcoins will be converted to sidecoins. It is not rocket science.

You are conflating a physical peg with a peg enforced by market exchange dominance. The latter is destined to fail when the dominator exhausts resources. The former fails only if the physical peg fails, i.e. the side chain breaks the protocol rules of the peg.