Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zarathustra]

I like Satoshi's quote on this:

...
Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.
...

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09979.html

The nonchalance, to me, indicates a nice trust in markets to do their job of optimizing allocation over time. But - if Bitcoin ever starts to become a serious global economic force, mainstream economists are going to flip out over the above quote, given the initial-distribution algo didn't go through some deep analysis, etc...  

I think it's interesting how the engineering decision of making a simple/transparent (easy to implement, thus more secure) distribution algorithm trumped any potential detailed economic complexity, presumably due to Satoshi's understanding that the market would eventually allocate the capital optimally anyways, given the transparency of the current and future supply.

One of the nice things about having a 'benevolent dictator' is that it will be much easier to make decisions about these things going forward.

We already know that in the noble interest of getting a 'critical mass' in order to 'outrun regulation', it is critical  to subsidize transaction costs.  We also know with some reasonable certainty that one of the early attractions of Bitcoin was that people could 'make free money' with only a token effort.  People like free shit.  Always will.

In order to spread the wealth there are two choices.

 - make more wealth and give it away (e.g., screw the obsolete 21 million cap thingy.)

 - appropriate existing or lost money and hand it out.

Idea!  We can be pretty sure that if/when XT takes over, coin tainting is not far behind.  Why don't we use the otherwise wasted value to pass around to the masses.  Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses.  To be more fair and reduce gaming, however, it makes sense that people would need to appropriately register their true identities in order to receive the dividend though.

My god, cheezes christ, what a socialist pile of crap.

These socialists should be forced to spread their wealth. 'Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses'.

[1714295189]

1714295189

[1714295189]

1714295189

[1714295189]

1714295189

[tvbcof]

One of the nice things about having a 'benevolent dictator' is that it will be much easier to make decisions about these things going forward.
...

My god, cheezes christ, what a socialist pile of crap.

These socialists should be forced to spread their wealth. 'Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses'.

Zikes!  You guys make some pretty strong arguments and have convinced me of the error of my ways.  Let it be known that I hereby drop my support (however brief) for switching Bitcoin to be under a 'benevolent dictator' and under XT.

Thanks for setting me right guys.

[Carlton Banks]

One of the nice things about having a 'benevolent dictator' is that it will be much easier to make decisions about these things going forward.
...

My god, cheezes christ, what a socialist pile of crap.

These socialists should be forced to spread their wealth. 'Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses'.

Zikes!  You guys make some pretty strong arguments and have convinced me of the error of my ways.  Let it be known that I hereby drop my support (however brief) for switching Bitcoin to be under a 'benevolent dictator' and under XT.

Thanks for setting me right guys.

You're saying Mike Hearn was performing an altruistic power grab? That's not so terrible is it? Who wouldn't want one person to control the way their monetary system develops, the sort of person you can rely on to ignore everything that anyone else has to say and override it with a unilateral hard fork, all because that person knows better? What's wrong with Mike, with his superior understanding of what I want for myself, making more of my decisions for me? Why not all of them? He's a smart guy, and there's no way he'd make decisions on my behalf that benefit him.

[Erdogan]

One of the nice things about having a 'benevolent dictator' is that it will be much easier to make decisions about these things going forward.
...

My god, cheezes christ, what a socialist pile of crap.

These socialists should be forced to spread their wealth. 'Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses'.

Zikes!  You guys make some pretty strong arguments and have convinced me of the error of my ways.  Let it be known that I hereby drop my support (however brief) for switching Bitcoin to be under a 'benevolent dictator' and under XT.

Thanks for setting me right guys.

You're saying Mike Hearn was performing an altruistic power grab? That's not so terrible is it? Who wouldn't want one person to control the way their monetary system develops, the sort of person you can rely on to ignore everything that anyone else has to say and override it with a unilateral hard fork, all because that person knows better? What's wrong with Mike, with his superior understanding of what I want for myself, making more of my decisions for me? Why not all of them? He's a smart guy, and there's no way he'd make decisions on my behalf that benefit him.

You are being sarcastic, ok, just want to point out that what we have is not a dictator that is an algoritm or a protocol, what we have is free market private money.

[Wexlike]

Can someone explain to me, why the chinese miners are against a 20mb block size increase? As far as i understand it, no one can force them to mine maxed out blocks. They can limit their own blocks just to 8 mb - or 1 mb in case of a really slow connection.

[sickpig]

Can someone explain to me, why the chinese miners are against a 20mb block size increase? As far as i understand it, no one can force them to mine maxed out blocks. They can limit their own blocks just to 8 mb - or 1 mb in case of a really slow connection.

sure they can limit their own block, but nonetheless they need to build blocks on top of other miners blocks, hence they need to download (*) and validate blocks as big as 20MB (potentially).

(*) IBLT, matt corallo relay network and the fact that downstream bandwidth costs less than upload could help but maybe not enough for their taste.

[thezerg]

One of the nice things about having a 'benevolent dictator' is that it will be much easier to make decisions about these things going forward.
...

My god, cheezes christ, what a socialist pile of crap.

These socialists should be forced to spread their wealth. 'Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses'.

Zikes!  You guys make some pretty strong arguments and have convinced me of the error of my ways.  Let it be known that I hereby drop my support (however brief) for switching Bitcoin to be under a 'benevolent dictator' and under XT.

Thanks for setting me right guys.

You're saying Mike Hearn was performing an altruistic power grab? That's not so terrible is it? Who wouldn't want one person to control the way their monetary system develops, the sort of person you can rely on to ignore everything that anyone else has to say and override it with a unilateral hard fork, all because that person knows better? What's wrong with Mike, with his superior understanding of what I want for myself, making more of my decisions for me? Why not all of them? He's a smart guy, and there's no way he'd make decisions on my behalf that benefit him.

These arguments have devolved into stupidity.  We'll (the majority) just fork mike out of power if he does something stupid.  And implying a 21m increase because of an unrelated txn supply increase is a 5yo's logical fallacy.

You guys all need someone/some group in charge so badly that you run home to mamma even when the polled majority clearly wants an increase. But dispute mediation is even more fundamental to how bitcoin works than these other items.  Its called open source.  Run the rule set you want. My home system WILL easily keep up with 8MB and I support BTC user scalability (I want users in the Philippines to pay in coins) so that's what I'm going to run.  Who cares if they (ppl in 2nd or 3rd world or economicly stressed) can't run their own personal copy... especially because 10ppl could pool their resources and do so  If you want BTC to be a tool for bankers go ahead and stay on 1MB.  In that case the only ppl running a full node will be bankers because they are the only ones who can use the network.

[boumalo]

Quite a lot of resistance under 1200$ an once for gold.

[Carlton Banks]

One of the nice things about having a 'benevolent dictator' is that it will be much easier to make decisions about these things going forward.
...

My god, cheezes christ, what a socialist pile of crap.

These socialists should be forced to spread their wealth. 'Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses'.

Zikes!  You guys make some pretty strong arguments and have convinced me of the error of my ways.  Let it be known that I hereby drop my support (however brief) for switching Bitcoin to be under a 'benevolent dictator' and under XT.

Thanks for setting me right guys.

You're saying Mike Hearn was performing an altruistic power grab? That's not so terrible is it? Who wouldn't want one person to control the way their monetary system develops, the sort of person you can rely on to ignore everything that anyone else has to say and override it with a unilateral hard fork, all because that person knows better? What's wrong with Mike, with his superior understanding of what I want for myself, making more of my decisions for me? Why not all of them? He's a smart guy, and there's no way he'd make decisions on my behalf that benefit him.

These arguments have devolved into stupidity.  We'll (the majority) just fork mike out of power if he does something stupid.  And implying a 21m increase because of an unrelated txn supply increase is a 5yo's logical fallacy.

You guys all need someone/some group in charge so badly that you run home to mamma even when the polled majority clearly wants an increase. But dispute mediation is even more fundamental to how bitcoin works than these other items.  Its called open source.  Run the rule set you want. My home system WILL easily keep up with 8MB and I support BTC user scalability (I want users in the Philippines to pay in coins) so that's what I'm going to run.  Who cares if they (ppl in 2nd or 3rd world or economicly stressed) can't run their own personal copy... especially because 10ppl could pool their resources and do so  If you want BTC to be a tool for bankers go ahead and stay on 1MB.  In that case the only ppl running a full node will be bankers because they are the only ones who can use the network.

speaking of fallacies, what makes you think I'm a 1 MB block man?

To answer your question about who cares when 3rd world people can't get access to 1st world technology: they do. Who is this "who" that you're referring to, when you say "who cares?". What you really mean is: I'm in my little 1st world country group of people, and I don't consider these 3rd world peasants as fully fledged humans. Who cares about them? Everyone got everything solely by merit, ergo I am superior. Let me tell you, you're looking like less of a human to me.

And speaking of consensus polling, the unilateral (i.e. the perfect opposite of a consensus poll) forked client has been rejected in favor of going through the channels to consensus that already exist.

The reality is that the former XT supporters are the people who are in desperate need of a monetary despot; you can't paint unilateral forks any other way than exactly that.

[cypherdoc]

all over.  and it would be the same at 8MB:

So you've abandoned 20 MB? And Bitcoin XT? What made you change your mind?

even given that i feel i have a deeper understanding of what's going on than most ppl here, i have to defer to a core dev who can tell us what the code does, has greater communications with users/merchants/players i don't know, has a longer track in Bitcoin than i (before Jan 2011), who was looked upon by Satoshi as qualified & trusted enough to receive Bitcoin's Alert Key, who has lead Bitcoin to where it is with little to no controversy along the way, who i feel is mature enough, who i feel is a leader, who has no financial conflicts thru stock options and investors, and whom i TRUST.

so if he drops from 20 to 8MB and decides to put up a BIP on Core, who am i to argue?  imo, he has the true original Satoshi Vision for Bitcoin's long term success.

[cypherdoc]

The main point is even on this forum we have nowhere near the 95%+ consensus that we need to do a hard-fork.

If there's 95% consensus, there's no need for a hard fork in the sense of campaigning to leave the 1 MB chain high and dry. There's a decent amount of time to decide though, I'm in favor of getting rid of 1MB, but it's still not totally obvious which of the many ideas is best.

Why is no-one proposing to build a series of test rigs to demonstrate the leading ideas for governing the block size? That would seem like the most thorough approach. Proposing a whole host of abstract ideas, and then saying "...and game theory tells us the users will respond to these extrema in these ways, the relay nodes will respond..."; that's not very convincing to me. Asking people to choose before they've observed some empirical reality isn't a very professional approach for such a fundamental design feature. For a system that is itself fundamental, it looks reckless.

what's reckless is ignoring the two recent stress tests that tied up blocks for hours along with the complaints from users that resulted.

when you say this, "There's a decent amount of time to decide though", it's clear to me you mean "bumping up against the limit routinely".  how is that forward looking?  what's it gonna take, fees going over $100 per?

there are those of us who've built and planned businesses and looking forward and being prepared for the next ramp in tx's is key to success.

[NewLiberty]

The reality is that the former XT supporters are the people who are in desperate need of a monetary despot; you can't paint unilateral forks any other way than exactly that.

Are there that many people that need a monetary despot, or could it be that some people simply agree on these particulars?

I don't like some features of Gavin's plan because it has too much guesswork where decisions are made today that affect far future.
So I won't run a lot of XT nodes, but maybe just one.

The gmax BIP 100 mechanism is superior in that it allows these decisions to be made closer to the time when they matter.  It also decentralizes the decisions.  Gavin's proposals hadn't progressed yet to the BIP stage, they are still in the spaghetti on the wall phase, so discussing block size increases in Bitcoin Core should be discussing BIP 100.  

[kazuki49]

speaking of fallacies, what makes you think I'm a 1 MB block man?

To answer your question about who cares when 3rd world people can't get access to 1st world technology: they do. Who is this "who" that you're referring to, when you say "who cares?". What you really mean is: I'm in my little 1st world country group of people, and I don't consider these 3rd world peasants as fully fledged humans. Who cares about them? Everyone got everything solely by merit, ergo I am superior. Let me tell you, you're looking like less of a human to me.

And speaking of consensus polling, the unilateral (i.e. the perfect opposite of a consensus poll) forked client has been rejected in favor of going through the channels to consensus that already exist.

The reality is that the former XT supporters are the people who are in desperate need of a monetary despot; you can't paint unilateral forks any other way than exactly that.

Yes, its not about the 1MB forever which is insuficient for Bitcoin on the long run, its all about consensus, and how it got destroyed prior to the hardfork that removed the 21m cap, and it will happen mark my words.

[cypherdoc]

I like Satoshi's quote on this:

...
Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.
...

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09979.html

The nonchalance, to me, indicates a nice trust in markets to do their job of optimizing allocation over time. But - if Bitcoin ever starts to become a serious global economic force, mainstream economists are going to flip out over the above quote, given the initial-distribution algo didn't go through some deep analysis, etc... 

I think it's interesting how the engineering decision of making a simple/transparent (easy to implement, thus more secure) distribution algorithm trumped any potential detailed economic complexity, presumably due to Satoshi's understanding that the market would eventually allocate the capital optimally anyways, given the transparency of the current and future supply.

One of the nice things about having a 'benevolent dictator' is that it will be much easier to make decisions about these things going forward.

We already know that in the noble interest of getting a 'critical mass' in order to 'outrun regulation', it is critical  to subsidize transaction costs.  We also know with some reasonable certainty that one of the early attractions of Bitcoin was that people could 'make free money' with only a token effort.  People like free shit.  Always will.

In order to spread the wealth there are two choices.

 - make more wealth and give it away (e.g., screw the obsolete 21 million cap thingy.)

 - appropriate existing or lost money and hand it out.

Idea!  We can be pretty sure that if/when XT takes over, coin tainting is not far behind.  Why don't we use the otherwise wasted value to pass around to the masses.  Maybe like a dividend to be distributed to all existing addresses.  To be more fair and reduce gaming, however, it makes sense that people would need to appropriately register their true identities in order to receive the dividend though.

My god, cheezes christ, what a socialist pile of crap.

I can personally guarantee that bitcoin with the crucial coin limit will continue, even if I have to run my own miner and wait decennia before the difficulty adjusts. More likely though, I will be joined by at least a percentage of current miners, meaning the system will continue with the slight annoyance of having confirmation times of a day or so. Have your fork, the inflatacoin will go the way of the fiats.

that's tvbcof

[smooth]

Gavin's proposals hadn't progressed yet to the BIP stage, they are still in the spaghetti on the wall phase

It's certainly close to that: https://github.com/gavinandresen/bips/blob/blocksize/bip-8MB.mediawiki

Is it not an actual BIP until it has a number? I don't even know.

[cypherdoc]

speaking of fallacies, what makes you think I'm a 1 MB block man?

To answer your question about who cares when 3rd world people can't get access to 1st world technology: they do. Who is this "who" that you're referring to, when you say "who cares?". What you really mean is: I'm in my little 1st world country group of people, and I don't consider these 3rd world peasants as fully fledged humans. Who cares about them? Everyone got everything solely by merit, ergo I am superior. Let me tell you, you're looking like less of a human to me.

And speaking of consensus polling, the unilateral (i.e. the perfect opposite of a consensus poll) forked client has been rejected in favor of going through the channels to consensus that already exist.

The reality is that the former XT supporters are the people who are in desperate need of a monetary despot; you can't paint unilateral forks any other way than exactly that.

Yes, its not about the 1MB forever which is insuficient for Bitcoin on the long run, its all about consensus, and how it got destroyed prior to the hardfork that removed the 21m cap, and it will happen mark my words.

totally disagree. i've followed Bitcoin and the core dev interactions for a very, very long time in Bitcoin years.  Gavin's built in increases are him trying to automate out himself as much as possible from the process going forward.  he wants to avoid, if possible, the contention that has arisen from this process.  and don't forget he's been lobbying for this increase for 3y but never got anywhere in discussions with the Blockstream folk.  so now he has introduced his first code on this matter in a BIP in Core, not XT. 

he will never propose an increase to the 21M coin cap.  these are two different things you're desperately trying to conflate to push ppl to Monero.

[cypherdoc]

speaking of IBLT, rusty russel has just posted a prototype on btc dev mailing list:

     http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/009021.html

you could find the github repo here:

     https://github.com/rustyrussell/bitcoin-iblt

the work is based on the famous gavin's gist:

     https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

that's quite encouraging.  the more i hear from this Rusty guy, the more i like him:

"Cheers,
Rusty.
PS. I work for Blockstream.  And I'm supposed to be working on
    Lightning, not this."

[Carlton Banks]

all over.  and it would be the same at 8MB:

So you've abandoned 20 MB? And Bitcoin XT? What made you change your mind?

even given that i feel i have a deeper understanding of what's going on than most ppl here, i have to defer to a core dev who can tell us what the code does, has greater communications with users/merchants/players i don't know, has a longer track in Bitcoin than i (before Jan 2011), who was looked upon by Satoshi as qualified & trusted enough to receive Bitcoin's Alert Key, who has lead Bitcoin to where it is with little to no controversy along the way, who i feel is mature enough, who i feel is a leader, who has no financial conflicts thru stock options and investors, and whom i TRUST.

so if he drops from 20 to 8MB and decides to put up a BIP on Core, who am i to argue?  imo, he has the true original Satoshi Vision for Bitcoin's long term success.

So, because blind faith? Just a few days ago, you were telling everyone in this thread that 20 MB blocks, delivered via a unilateral coup was the best solution. Less than 72 hours later, you've decided that blocks of less than half that, agreed amongst the core devs, is obviously better. What if Gavin changes his mind again? This must be a little confusing to those that blindly follow what you say.

[cypherdoc]

Can someone explain to me, why the chinese miners are against a 20mb block size increase? As far as i understand it, no one can force them to mine maxed out blocks. They can limit their own blocks just to 8 mb - or 1 mb in case of a really slow connection.

they were afraid of choking on blocks that size and suggested 8MB instead which is the major reason Gavin conceded to this size. also, probably a bit of embarrassment from a purported math error he made.

but yes, your overall pt is obvious; miners can limit their block sizes to whatever size they wish.  game theory suggests they will continue as now; construct the smallest, most efficient block so as not to get orphaned from transmission latency.  furthermore, the "ZOMG, large miner, large blk attack on small miner dependent on superior connectivity" attack that you rarely hear about anymore b/c it makes no sense anymore is b/c of just this fact.  the top largest 5 Chinese miners in the world are trapped behind poor connections which eliminate this attack.

[Carlton Banks]

speaking of IBLT, rusty russel has just posted a prototype on btc dev mailing list:

     http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/009021.html

you could find the github repo here:

     https://github.com/rustyrussell/bitcoin-iblt

the work is based on the famous gavin's gist:

     https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

that's quite encouraging.  the more i hear from this Rusty guy, the more i like him:

"Cheers,
Rusty.
PS. I work for Blockstream.  And I'm supposed to be working on
    Lightning, not this."

You view this in terms of tribes. It's not about tribes. It's all conceptual. The individuals and their egos do not matter. All conceptual. You are an actual adult, yes?