Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[thezerg]

@solex it seems to me that at best the IBLT idea would halve the bandwidth.   And remove a nasty burst during block propagation.  Is my analysis correct?  If so its good but not really comparable to a 1000x bitcoin adoption.

[1713582388]

1713582388

[TPTB_need_war]

And remove a nasty burst during block propagation.

I already explained that. Afaics, he isn't proposing to compress the block chain. He is proposing to eliminate that nasty burst by rolling out IBLT.

Afaics, he is proposing that miners that don't want to use IBLT can stay within the limit of 1MB block announcements. And the IBLT announcement will be less than 1MB for those using IBLT. But those who don't use IBLT will be at a great disadvantage in terms of orphan rate and ROI, thus in effect he is proposing IBLT rollout.

IBLT can scale up to any amount of txns that all full nodes can coordinate via the P2P relay. I argue that at some level this becomes centralizing. I don't know where his 500 tps comes from. Doesn't seem to correlate to a 20 MB x 10 min. block.

He also apparently proposed that blockchain block size (differentiated from block announcement block size) would not longer be hard limited.

[Odalv]

Compromise solution: up to 500 tps on-chain while keeping the 1MB limit, however, a hard-fork is still needed.

I do not understand how you can add 300,000 transaction * 250 bytes into 1 MB block.   500 tps is 75 MB every 10 minutes. (or will you have 75 * 1 MB blocks every 10 mins ? )

That's the magic of IBLT. The transactions are overlaying each other (via XOR) and can only be extracted by a receiver who knows ~99% of them already. Useless for many applications, but perfect for Bitcoin.

Gavin's original overview of it:
https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

Two test implementations:
http://rustyrussell.github.io/pettycoin/2014/11/05/Playing-with-invertible-bloom-lookup-tables-and-bitcoin-transactions.html

500 tps is ballpark number of what might be achievable after decoupling the block size from the message size. It enables this compression technique to show its full power whereas at present it is very constrained.

So if I understand it right then If every miner collected 75 MB of transactions then you can compress block into 1 MB.

[tvbcof]

...
IBLT can scale up to any amount of txns that all full nodes can coordinate via the P2P relay. I argue that at some level this becomes centralizing. ...

Someone has proposed a 'P2P relay'?  LOL!  I argue that at some level all levels this is label is an absurdity.

[Wekkel]

Since short term direction of the markets cannot be known, I am mostly insterested in long term movements. With enough attention and - moreover - a lot of patience and No Fear when the time comes, big gains are possible. From that perspective, Armstrong got me hooked with his It's Just Time.

I am fond of the long term play between paper (stocks, bonds) and physical (gold). On a long enough time frame, some excellent trends can be seen in the Dow/Gold ratio and Tobin Q. Tobin Q is the ratio between a physical asset's market value and its replacement value. Both indicators are quite apt in catching extremes in the markets (paper when confidence is high and physical if confidence is low).



It is clear to see that Gold made a good run as from the paper highs of 40+ (Dow/Gold ratio). According to the past, there is some more juice to squeeze from that trade. With a temporary bounce of this ratio (currently 15), I would think that history shows that we should see another dip of this ratio between 1-2 before the next paper confidence game starts. The problem is: this is no theory that gives clear timing. It's just a guess based on long term movements and its resolution could take 10-20 years. On the other hand, you only need to act twice in your lifetime to do it right (besides having some capital from the start to invest).

Because of this underlying concept of long term waves, Armstrong's theories spike my curiosity. Besides his 2015.75 time frame, Armstrong has written some concrete scenario's recently that shed some light in what he is thinking about for the near future (1-3 years). It's a bit counter intuitive to me and I am interested to hear what you think of this. See 2 quotes below from two of his recent blog postings.

We still see May – July – September as key targets for turning points. Whatever we end up with in September should produce the opposite trend immediately thereafter. As we now head into the last week of May/first week of June, we should start to see the choppy trends begin.
It is more likely than not that we should see a retest of support that will scare people and cause them to believe the stock market will crash. The high in the Dow still remains March 2nd at 18,335 level. Support begins at the 17,153 level and a daily closing beneath that level will signal the correction is then possible. The key support lies back at 16,540 level. A drop back to that area in the weeks and months ahead should convince everyone to buy more government paper and complete the final bubble top in government debt.

Smart capital sees the crisis. Look for the development here going into the last week of May. We should get a bounce thereafter, but government debt will decline after 2015.75 on a worldwide scale.
The share markets hopefully create the false move and that should send more capital rushing into government paper. There is not enough short-term paper around so we should then see capital forced to start moving up the maturity duration just to park money as share markets correct.

Armstrong sees a downturn in bond markets. Tipping point to watch is 2015.75, marked as possible reversal date. From the above, I understand that he takes a scenario into account of a correction in stocks the last few months before this reversal date, leading to the last push into government bonds. After that, in his scenario bonds will tank but - counterintuitive - I understand he thinks stocks will be a good place to park money. He is not fond of gold and only sees it as a long term investement (if somebody wants to take that trade) or suitable for panics. This is where I cannot fit the long term theory I started this post with (see background here and here). How can stocks do well if the bond market is in upheavel? It does not fit the picture of paper burning and a rush to physical. In our current interconnected financial markets, a crash in bond markets will render many parties insolvent and will have devastating effects on markets overall. I cannot see stocks surviving this ordeal without heavy damage, depending as it is on finance and leverage at current levels (not even speaking about business profits).

I do see a good moment going full into stocks after this bond market crash has played out, provided that we will still have 'free markets' (quotes intended, you know why...). I believe Armstrong describes this as the start of the private wave instead of the public wave that is moving towards or in the end phase. From my perspective, it should simply be a bottoming of long term indicators telling me that fear and the rush to physical is at its extreme, demanding a move to paper against all odds (at that time). I do known that negative interest rates and the obvious move to non-cash societies are not helping Joe Sixpac's level of trust.

Whether Bitcoin (or other coins like Monero) play any role in this scenario is something I cannot get a feeling for. It seems too much of a gimmick to benefit from (or be negatively affected by) the gyrations of the paper/physical markets, having a mind of its own. I do see some vague similarities in Gold seeming to bottom just like Bitcoin. I do hope that crypto chooses the side of physical, as its turn is around the corner after decades of paper deluge.

Bring it on!  

[STT]

Is gold likely to rocket? And bitcoin? Also the dollar has been sagging quite a bit lately. That should help gold but what about BTC?

The confusing thing is that gold does not change, its inert and its really the same value every day.  The dollar is changing and thats why gold appears to rise in price, inevitably the price of gold goes up.  Its the dollars which change, the gold has the same worth.  I think thats the baseline, of course people speculate but that wont determine gold itself

Apart from that there is the idea that gold when used more widely will rise in value not just price.   Im not seeing great use of gold though, we can only point at central banks which as a whole are buying gold not selling as was true for decades.    The biggest buyer is China which does not declare their reserves properly, so we really have no idea if gold is being more valued by world population or not.  
BTC reacts to dollar but its price is mostly about usage by its holders so I dont think its comparable to gold really, it changes every day.  On two extremes its obvious if nobody uses it then we are talking very low value but if I can exchange it with everyone, its value becomes very high.  People argue this is same as gold but gold can be used outside of money and even if not used a hundred years remains the same where btc would not, its very volatile and velocity driven, there is a great fear of zero worth there where as people will swap food for gold as it is superior always in its durability

[TPTB_need_war]

...
IBLT can scale up to any amount of txns that all full nodes can coordinate via the P2P relay. I argue that at some level this becomes centralizing. ...

Someone has proposed a 'P2P relay'?  LOL!  I argue that at some level all levels this is label is an absurdity.

Mea culpa on the pedantic, nitpicking difference in usage of terminology. I believe the accepted term here is "P2P network". I visualize that as P2P nodes relaying (propagating) information across the network.

The level of childish and ego behavior is tiresome.

I posit it will be a great relief for some of us (however few or numerous we may be) when there is exists a community and coin that has a level of professionalism and no-egotistical crap. And which can fund its development properly relying neither on "venture capital" nor "consensus politics" donations pollution. I posit that the most productive will migrate there, while those who are most concerned with stroking their ego will not migrate there, as it should be.

P.S. I understand you may think the P2P network is the antithesis of centralization. I understand you may think my allegation of centralization is absurd. I also understand that I've already explained that if every full node has to see and verify every transaction on the P2P network, then full nodes can't scale decentralized because for example renting a cloud server to mine with can easily be regulated because it is not mixed with the normal activity of a home user surfing the internet. It also means the home user can't mine with a full node, which impacts the maximization of utility in the distribution of the coin (and no, rpietila is not currently a seed investor of mine and we have been unable to discuss my design).

[solex]

So if I understand it right then If every miner collected 75 MB of transactions then you can compress block into 1 MB.

Yes, correct. The miner can compress it into his/her new block announcement message, and it is then decompressed by all the receivers, and stored in the blockchain decompressed.

@solex it seems to me that at best the IBLT idea would halve the bandwidth.   And remove a nasty burst during block propagation.  Is my analysis correct?  If so its good but not really comparable to a 1000x bitcoin adoption.

Also correct. However, removing (most) of the burst requirement is very significant, because even though block announcements are 50% of the data traffic they are time-critical and every second counts. The whole mining network is hashing uselessly as soon as a block is found, until it is propagated. Whereas the other 50%, real-time tx flow, is uniformly spread over a 200x wider time-frame, and none of it critical except to two people: the sender and receiver of each particular tx.

So, I am arguing for an accelerated use of data compression, ideally IBLT, but that is not the only option available. Fully agreed that 1000x Bitcoin adoption has to be the long-term goal, and just maybe using compression is finally putting the horse before the cart, because a lot of the argument against Gavin's 20MB ignores that compression is possible.

[TPTB_need_war]

First they fight your correct statements.

Then they pretend your correct statements didn't exist:

Then they join you.


“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/19684

When Gandhi was studying law at the University College of London, there was a professor, whose last name was Peters, who felt animosity for Gandhi, and because Gandhi never lowered his head towards him, their “arguments” were very common.

One day, Mr. Peters was having lunch at the dining room of the University and Gandhi came along with his tray and sat next to the professor. The professor, in his arrogance, said, “Mr Gandhi: you do not understand… a pig and a bird do not sit together to eat “, to which Gandhi replies, “You do not worry professor, I’ll fly away “, and he went and sat at another table.

Mr. Peters, green of rage, decides to take revenge on the next test, but Gandhi responds brilliantly to all questions. Then, Mr. Peters asked him the following question, “Mr Gandhi, if you are walking down the street and find a package, and within it there is a bag of wisdom and another bag with a lot of money; which one will you take?” Without hesitating, Gandhi responded, “the one with the money, of course”.

Mr. Peters, smiling, said, “I, in your place, would have taken the wisdom,  don’t you think?”

“Each one take what one doesn’t have”, responded Gandhi indifferently.

Mr. Peters, already hysteric, writes on the exam sheet the word “idiot” and gives it to Gandhi. Gandhi takes the exam sheet and sits down. A few minutes later, Gandhi goes to the professor and says, “Mr. Peters, you signed the sheet, but you did not give me the grade.”

[TPTB_need_war]

Armstrong sees a downturn in bond markets. Tipping point to watch is 2015.75, marked as possible reversal date. From the above, I understand that he takes a scenario into account of a correction in stocks the last few months before this reversal date, leading to the last push into government bonds. After that, in his scenario bonds will tank but - counterintuitive - I understand he thinks stocks will be a good place to park money. He is not fond of gold and only sees it as a long term investement (if somebody wants to take that trade) or suitable for panics. This is where I cannot fit the long term theory I started this post with (see background here and here). How can stocks do well if the bond market is in upheavel? It does not fit the picture of paper burning and a rush to physical. In our current interconnected financial markets, a crash in bond markets will render many parties insolvent and will have devastating effects on markets overall. I cannot see stocks surviving this ordeal without heavy damage, depending as it is on finance and leverage at current levels (not even speaking about business profits).

I do see a good moment going full into stocks after this bond market crash has played out, provided that we will still have 'free markets' (quotes intended, you know why...). I believe Armstrong describes this as the start of the private wave instead of the public wave that is moving towards or in the end phase. From my perspective, it should simply be a bottoming of long term indicators telling me that fear and the rush to physical is at its extreme, demanding a move to paper against all odds (at that time). I do known that negative interest rates and the obvious move to non-cash societies are not helping Joe Sixpac's level of trust.

Whether Bitcoin (or other coins like Monero) play any role in this scenario is something I cannot get a feeling for. It seems too much of a gimmick to benefit from (or be negatively affected by) the gyrations of the paper/physical markets, having a mind of its own. I do see some vague similarities in Gold seeming to bottom just like Bitcoin. I do hope that crypto chooses the side of physical, as its turn is around the corner after decades of paper deluge.

Bring it on!  

I understand Armstrong perhaps better any person on the forum. I am inside his head already and I literally write his posts before he does. I understand conceptually how he built his computer model and why it works statistically.

The coming peak on the short-end of the yield curve in bonds Oct 1, is the last hooray for the multi-decade sovereign bond bubble (at least excluding USA treasuries). This will probably correlate with a pullback in private assets (i.e. non government a.k.a. 'public' assets such as sovereign bonds) such as Bitcoin, stocks, and gold.

Armstrong has this concept of inversion where assets align with the public wave then invert to become aligned with the  private wave, or vice versa. This all about public confidence. The USA stock market was aligned with the public sector waves but has recently inverted and is becoming more aligned with gold, crypto, and other private assets.

All non-sovereign bond assets are becoming aligned together as private assets. Why? Because $250 trillion of capital has to go some where. And it will have to flood out of sovereign bonds to some where.

Armstrong thinks gold will go as high as $5000 on this move up in private assets after 2015.75.

You are making the mistake of thinking that defaults will crater the stock market. You misunderstand the most crucial fact of investing: CONFIDENCE DETERMINES EVERYTHING.

Confidence will shift from public to private and private assets will skyrocket.

Since the Oct collapse will originate in Europe and Asia, there will be a mad rush into the USD and USD assets and USA stocks will be seen as a safe haven away from bonds. You fail to understand that size matters. Gold and Bitcoin are simply to small to absorb all of the $250 trillion of shifting confidence.

This is why I say this is the absolute best time to be working on a new altcoin. We will see a low in BTC and gold this year (perhaps $90 and $850) and then moving back up in 2016. New all time highs 2017 or 2018.

Note the USD and USA will peak in 2017 as this influx of capital will peak. And the strong USD will choke off the global economy and the USA economy as well. The fundamental USA economy will be imploding while the Fed is raising interest rates to counter the massive speculative influx of safe haven capital into the USD and USD assets (including stocks and real estate).

Thus after 2017 will be the moonshoot for gold and crypto! And I bet anonymous crypto is going to be the go to investment even more so than gold, because a war on cash (and gold) will become severe by then. 2018 - 2024 will be scorched earth globally, but Asia should bottom by 2020 and start to solidify in spite of likely war ongoing. This is because Asia has better fundamentals than the rest of the world (youthful demographics, higher savings rates, govt < 25% of GDP, less socialism, higher education, etc).

Armstrong thinks the authorities are going to war against private capital. And he does not see crypto as a solution for hiding capital. I have tried to email him about this myopia but I think he remains skeptical (maybe because he doesn't seeing it scaling enough to help the masses). I have explained that I think the masses are falling into a NWO and there is nothing we can do to stop that.

P.S. Kudos to Monero. It is going to prove quite essential to me. Thank you!

[stereotype]

The level of childish and ego behavior is tiresome.

Well, yeah.

And no one understands you. Right?

[TPTB_need_war]

The level of childish and ego behavior is tiresome.

Well, yeah.

And no one understands you. Right?

Tiresome. You can either lose that useless ego (socialism, touchy-feely, we are all peers, feminist bull) shit or fail. It is your problem, not mine.

I write to discuss correct statements and distill down to the facts and get solutions. Some of you seem to have other ("on the rag" menstruation) priorities. I know that some (or many or even most but I haven't measured it) Western men have been feminized even they don't realize it. This is hard proof for me. Women are concerned about inclusion and equality of social interaction (but in fact they will attract to man who is on top and is not a peer). Men are focused (and not worried) about analytical progression.

P.S. and I don't write that to dislike you or wish bad outcomes on you. I sincerely hope you emasculate and get on with what we men do best. I have no great need to be superior. I want to be the best I can be, and accomplish the most I can with my life. And I wish the same to you. If ever we compete, I will try to win. If we are allies, I try to succeed. This is gentleman's competition arrangement. We understand that by competing, we make the world and ourselves the best we can be.

[tvbcof]

Just thought I'd log the current state of the current poll in case cypherdoc forgets:
---
Question:   Will you support Gavin's recent block size hard fork proposal of 20MB by March 1, 2016?
1.  yes   - 165 (74.7%)
2.  no   - 56 (25.3%)
Total Voters: 221

[stereotype]

The level of childish and ego behavior is tiresome.

Well, yeah.

And no one understands you. Right?

Tiresome. You can either lose that useless ego (socialism, touchy-feely, we are all peers, feminist bull) shit or fail. It is your problem, not mine.

I write to discuss correct statements and distill down to the facts and get solutions. Some of you seem to have other ("on the rag" menstruation) priorities. I know that some (or many or even most but I haven't measured it) Western men have been feminized even they don't realize it. This is hard proof for me. Women are concerned about inclusion and equality of social interaction (but in fact they will attract to man who is on top and is not a peer). Men are focused (and not worried) about analytical progression.

P.S. and I don't write that to dislike you or wish bad outcomes on you. I sincerely hope you emasculate and get on with what we men do best. I have no great need to be superior. I want to be the best I can be, and accomplish the most I can with my life. And I wish the same to you. If ever we compete, I will try to win. If we are allies, I try to succeed. This is gentleman's competition arrangement. We understand that by competing, we make the world and ourselves the best we can be.

Wow. Your response triggers, definitely need attending to, my over-defensive friend.
Maybe take the dog for an extra walk, or something?

[TPTB_need_war]

The level of childish and ego behavior is tiresome.

Well, yeah.

And no one understands you. Right?

Tiresome. You can either lose that useless ego (socialism, touchy-feely, we are all peers, feminist bull) shit or fail. It is your problem, not mine.

I write to discuss correct statements and distill down to the facts and get solutions. Some of you seem to have other ("on the rag" menstruation) priorities. I know that some (or many or even most but I haven't measured it) Western men have been feminized even they don't realize it. This is hard proof for me. Women are concerned about inclusion and equality of social interaction (but in fact they will attract to man who is on top and is not a peer). Men are focused (and not worried) about analytical progression.

P.S. and I don't write that to dislike you or wish bad outcomes on you. I sincerely hope you emasculate and get on with what we men do best. I have no great need to be superior. I want to be the best I can be, and accomplish the most I can with my life. And I wish the same to you. If ever we compete, I will try to win. If we are allies, I try to succeed. This is gentleman's competition arrangement. We understand that by competing, we make the world and ourselves the best we can be.

Wow. Your response triggers, definitely need attending to, my over-defensive friend.
Maybe take the dog for an extra walk, or something?

  I am responding to your post that alleges I am at fault for group acrimony. I respond defiantly stating that I think the group is responsible for their own menstruation diversions.

Sorry but these youth raised in socialism and feminism are not going to understand me. And I am not going to relate to you, even I understand why you think the way you do (you've been raised in it).

To end the ego bullshit, simply stop raising the issue.

No I am not going to claim any culpability for needing cowtail to the easily offended egos of others. I didn't write any statements that were non factual. When others turn those statements into ego wars, I can't be responsible for their problem.

I had a relaxing day at the beach on Friday. I want to be driven on serious issues right now. I am not interested in these diversions. Some of you keep pushing me to conform and you are wasting your effort. I never will. Your next reaction would be to ignore me, because I won't conform to the socialism you've been taught is normal behavior. Lastly you will join me or lose (if I succeed), because socialism loses, and leadership wins. Or I will lose if my efforts are insufficient. That is the nature of competition.

[stereotype]

Always fascinates me when older intelligent people, loose their acquired wisdom, at the very point they disappear up their own proverbial backside.

You are talking to yourself, TPTB. Have a fine n dandy day.

[Wekkel]

I understand Armstrong perhaps better any person on the forum. [...]

Thanks for sharing your views and detailing Armstrong's thoughts on this. I do not think the long term play I outlined differs from Armstrong's in terms of 'CONFIDENCE'. The flow from paper to physical and back again is all about confidence (confidence in the 'system').

The flow from European/Asian (Japan?) bonds into US stocks until 2017 is something I can imagine. This is typically described as the US having the cleanest 'dirty shirt'. However, this is a rush from one type of paper somewhere in the world to another type of paper in a different part of the world (the loose cannons of capital). It all takes place within the paper world.

What I am interested in is under which circumstances Armstrong sees Gold reaching $5,000 and what the stock market will be like when that happens. After all, this is a crucial premise of the paper vs physical theory. Whether Gold peaks at $2,000 or $20,000 is not interesting. It is only interesting to know at what level stocks are at that moment (will it reach the long term bottom between 1:1 and 2:1?). With Gold at the suggested peak of $5,000, the Dow should then be between 5,000-10,000, meaning a serious crash (no longer a correction) from current levels. Perhaps this is something Armstrong may see happening beyond 2017 in the bottoming process of 2018-2023. Is this the time period in which he sees also US bonds break down (resulting in the anticipated rush from paper - all paper - into physical)?

If (US) stocks were to explode higher into 2017 as a result of the public wave going into the private wave (in paper), levels in 2017 will be so high that a crash to Dow 5,000 (to reach Gold 1:1 parity) would be the biggest crash in stocks since 1929-1932. Somehow, I doubt this will happen with CBs on watch, ready to throw the kitchen sink at it if deemed necessary (and they will). In such environment, I do not see Gold peaking at $5,000 but at least a multiple of that. Trouble is, we do not know exactly sure what CBs are going to do (keep on printing or at some point just let it be).

Anyway, on the last theme (predicting CB behaviour), I think Gold provides protection in both scenarios. In case of excessive printing, Gold will protect in the long run and if CBs let the markets collapse, Gold will be a good hedge against banks and other financial institutions failing. In that respect, I find the idea of $250 trillion seeking a safe haven somewhat misleading. If the SHTF, much of that $250 trillion will prove to have been illusory: too much claims on wealth in the system.

By not focussing on stocks, at worst I can be a fool and at best, well protected.

[sidhujag]

Armstrong sees a downturn in bond markets. Tipping point to watch is 2015.75, marked as possible reversal date. From the above, I understand that he takes a scenario into account of a correction in stocks the last few months before this reversal date, leading to the last push into government bonds. After that, in his scenario bonds will tank but - counterintuitive - I understand he thinks stocks will be a good place to park money. He is not fond of gold and only sees it as a long term investement (if somebody wants to take that trade) or suitable for panics. This is where I cannot fit the long term theory I started this post with (see background here and here). How can stocks do well if the bond market is in upheavel? It does not fit the picture of paper burning and a rush to physical. In our current interconnected financial markets, a crash in bond markets will render many parties insolvent and will have devastating effects on markets overall. I cannot see stocks surviving this ordeal without heavy damage, depending as it is on finance and leverage at current levels (not even speaking about business profits).

I do see a good moment going full into stocks after this bond market crash has played out, provided that we will still have 'free markets' (quotes intended, you know why...). I believe Armstrong describes this as the start of the private wave instead of the public wave that is moving towards or in the end phase. From my perspective, it should simply be a bottoming of long term indicators telling me that fear and the rush to physical is at its extreme, demanding a move to paper against all odds (at that time). I do known that negative interest rates and the obvious move to non-cash societies are not helping Joe Sixpac's level of trust.

Whether Bitcoin (or other coins like Monero) play any role in this scenario is something I cannot get a feeling for. It seems too much of a gimmick to benefit from (or be negatively affected by) the gyrations of the paper/physical markets, having a mind of its own. I do see some vague similarities in Gold seeming to bottom just like Bitcoin. I do hope that crypto chooses the side of physical, as its turn is around the corner after decades of paper deluge.

Bring it on!  

I understand Armstrong perhaps better any person on the forum. I am inside his head already and I literally write his posts before he does. I understand conceptually how he built his computer model and why it works statistically.

The coming peak on the short-end of the yield curve in bonds Oct 1, is the last hooray for the multi-decade sovereign bond bubble (at least excluding USA treasuries). This will probably correlate with a pullback in private assets (i.e. non government a.k.a. 'public' assets such as sovereign bonds) such as Bitcoin, stocks, and gold.

Armstrong has this concept of inversion where assets align with the public wave then invert to become aligned with the  private wave, or vice versa. This all about public confidence. The USA stock market was aligned with the public sector waves but has recently inverted and is becoming more aligned with gold, crypto, and other private assets.

All non-sovereign bond assets are becoming aligned together as private assets. Why? Because $250 trillion of capital has to go some where. And it will have to flood out of sovereign bonds to some where.

Armstrong thinks gold will go as high as $5000 on this move up in private assets after 2015.75.

You are making the mistake of thinking that defaults will crater the stock market. You misunderstand the most crucial fact of investing: CONFIDENCE DETERMINES EVERYTHING.

Confidence will shift from public to private and private assets will skyrocket.

Since the Oct collapse will originate in Europe and Asia, there will be a mad rush into the USD and USD assets and USA stocks will be seen as a safe haven away from bonds. You fail to understand that size matters. Gold and Bitcoin are simply to small to absorb all of the $250 trillion of shifting confidence.

This is why I say this is the absolute best time to be working on a new altcoin. We will see a low in BTC and gold this year (perhaps $90 and $850) and then moving back up in 2016. New all time highs 2017 or 2018.

Note the USD and USA will peak in 2017 as this influx of capital will peak. And the strong USD will choke off the global economy and the USA economy as well. The fundamental USA economy will be imploding while the Fed is raising interest rates to counter the massive speculative influx of safe haven capital into the USD and USD assets (including stocks and real estate).

Thus after 2017 will be the moonshoot for gold and crypto! And I bet anonymous crypto is going to be the go to investment even more so than gold, because a war on cash (and gold) will become severe by then. 2018 - 2024 will be scorched earth globally, but Asia should bottom by 2020 and start to solidify in spite of likely war ongoing. This is because Asia has better fundamentals than the rest of the world (youthful demographics, higher savings rates, govt < 25% of GDP, less socialism, higher education, etc).

Armstrong thinks the authorities are going to war against private capital. And he does not see crypto as a solution for hiding capital. I have tried to email him about this myopia but I think he remains skeptical (maybe because he doesn't seeing it scaling enough to help the masses). I have explained that I think the masses are falling into a NWO and there is nothing we can do to stop that.

P.S. Kudos to Monero. It is going to prove quite essential to me. Thank you!

I share those views but arose to it from a different perspective of watching charts and trying to understand long term fundamentals. Anyways I've been saying Dow 32k around there when big money finally pulls out and usd index is just getting started aswell... The central banks are ensuring bond markets don't collapse right now just as they did to stocks for 2008 to 2011.  I put 2015 as pivitol year around in 2012 so let's see if something actually happens.

[cypherdoc]

Compromise solution: up to 500 tps on-chain while keeping the 1MB limit, however, a hard-fork is still needed.

i like this proposal b/c it theoretically accomplishes several things at once:

1.  "clears" out the unconf tx set via incentives to capture fees
2.  eliminates the "burstiness" and propagation delays related to large block transmission latency (ideally block messages should transmit just as fast as real time tx's themselves)
3.  works off the assumption that most nodes and miners have nearly identical mempools
4.  eliminates wasteful hashing of block "receiving" miners.

questions:

1.  how much work and time is involved in decompressing an IBLT for verification/validation and addition of unknown tx's compared to the current method of receiving decompressed tx's contained within a block?
2.  how strong is the assumption that nodes and miners have nearly identical mempools?
3.  what are the most common problems that could occur if adopted?

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Yes, and this is why I was in favour of Gavin's original 20MB + 40%/year growth.  Many people were concerned about the exponential growth of the blocksize limit under this proposal, but in my mind it was just a sensible way to slowly transition from a hard limit to this "Nash equilibrium" limit.  Whether 40% was the *perfect* number to match BW and storage growth was never really that important in my mind.

Let's allow the network to grow!

So... we just need a great visualization of this. If an idea is good enough AND people can understand it easily and quickly, it spreads faster than others and takes over.

Haha, OK I tried to think up a good visualization for this today, but came up blank.  Did you have any ideas?

In my mind, the default ideal visualization is some kind of familiar physical analogy. However, it's hard to find physical systems that are perfectly isomorphic (homomorphic?) to any given concept. So failing that, create some kind of quasi-physical or more complex/strange physical analogy. And if that also can't be done, then use piecemeal visual metaphors for parts of the explanation and visual tokens (non-isomorphic but loosely representative, like in Peter Todd's anti-increase propaganda video) for the rest, accompanied by written/spoken explanation.

It would be important to have a good representation of the mining/consensus process first, then show what would happen in various scenarios of concern. I don't have specific ideas on what sort of physical analogies could be used for, say, the Nash equilibrium*, but it would be something to come up with sort of on the fly.

The best thing would be a simulation, where the viewer could play with the blocksize settings and see the results. But creating something like that is way outside my skillset.

*Note: I don't mean something like a graph showing the mathematical aspects, but rather something like a physical system whose "moving parts" and their movements all correspond to aspects of the system that is being explained. A bit like how a scale, together with its possible motions, is isomorphic to the balance of power in a relationship: when one side goes up, the other goes down.