Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[TPTB_need_war]

I don't understand your comparison to blockchain.info.

Blockchain.info centralizes your wallet, but you control your private keys (server can't decrypt them) and all the encryption is done client side. Reggie is pointing out that the user of his wallet controls his private keys and signs transactions client-side and I suppose he is asserting that any the centralized functions (e.g. the data feed or the Facilitator) of his system do not impinge on the user's autonomous control.

Thanks for chipping in! Your other post ("centralized oracle") confirmed my suspicion. I don't share TPTB_need_war's view that that fact makes veritaseum centralized bullshit, though. I suspect it might be a great system.

In my posts prior this one from you, I did not state the oracle as my reason for suspecting centralized bullshit. I specifically mentioned for example patent trolling, apparently attempts at proprietary lockin (not just a protocol), and lack of open source. You appear to be entirely dismissing the social engineering aspects.

[cypherdoc]

most of the comments in this UTXO thread don't seem to see it as too much of a problem.  the predictable concern trolls, like gmax, are in there as expected but the vast majority seem positive on dealing with UTXO growth:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35asg6/gavin_andresen_utxo_uhoh/

[TPTB_need_war]

The reason we have to worry about miners producing "too large" blocks is because they don't pay for all the P2P network resources they use (neither do end users).

All the arguments we have about resource consumption are derived from that primary design flaw.

If we fix it, then we won't have to argue any more.

Any mechanism you envision must also incorporate the fact that if collusion and monopolistic strategies are viable, they will be deployed.

Miners and pools have an incentive to include as many txns as they can get paid for and scale up the resource requirements to drive small miners to pools. So the community got up in arms about GHash.io, so no problem just hide your ownership behind a Sybil attack on the pools (that is surely the case today) so the community is either ignorantly pacified or can play Whack-A-Mole.

Even if you made txns free or negative cost (miners pay spenders), the incentive of the prior paragraph remains.

There is fundamental design flaw here that can't be fixed without radical overhaul of the design of PoW.

[iCEBREAKER]

Do you want Bitcoin to fail, because you want more attention to flow to Monero?

Referring to our upthread debate, I am trying to determine if you truly have an interest in Bitcoin being only a store-of-value (with more third party risk than gold and roughly the same limited avenues for exchange), instead of shooting for widespread unit-of-exchange (albeit losing the decentralized attribute in the process)?

Again I want all-of-the-above and decentralized in the same crypto-currency. And I think I know how to do it. No trade-offs.

Of course I don't want Bitcoin to fail.  Could you possibly more dishonest and uncharitable?

If trade-offs did not exit, there would be no tension between Bitcoin (The Currency) functioning as both a store-of-value and widespread unit-of-exchange.

But here in the real world, bound by the pesky laws of thermodynamics, trade-offs do and will always exit.

The UXTO set is only the current bottleneck for scaling BTC to Visa++ levels of retail usage.  There are many others waiting in the wings (*cough, 10 min. block time, cough*).

Bitcoin's Mother-of-All-Blockchains is simply not the right tool for real-time retail POS interfaces.  Bitcoin's Mother-of-All-Blockchains is a back-office tool.

As for your VaporCoin, please either show us the whitepaper or stop hyping/teasing/marketing/pimping it.

[TPTB_need_war]

I've been solving blocks on the BTC train longer than you, and (like gmaxwell, tacotime, etc) am perfectly capable of simultaneously riding the XMR train as well.

Should have read this post before asking my question about his motives.

BTC's "intrinsic value" is the fact is fulfills Aristotle's criteria for good money better than anything else (except Monero).

The BTC price is rising in terms of the last 5/4/3 years.  Zero to $250, by way of $1200.  Excellent performance by any definition.

The price rises when more people act on the optimistic zoomed out view than a cherry-picked local retrace.

You apparently have fooled yourself into believing the market performance of Bitcoin had nothing to do with the promotion of Bitcoin by the mainstream media (and thus implicitly by the banksters who own the mainstream media) or that you believe the MSM can be induced to cover a grassroots, virally growing phenomenon w/o the blessing of the banksters. I assert that if you were to go against their aims and goals (which you won't be able to do any way, Gavincoin has already won), then they would pull the plug on your fork and you would learn about the reverse wealth effect (the fact that the market cap != the amount of capital invested in the coin and this levered effect is a snowball uphill and downhill).

The synergy of believing Bitcoin is an improved money along with the prospect of future scaling of Bitcoin to the world's txns, is what drives wealth effect you love. Take away one, you lose the other. I do hope you try to fork Gavincoin.

The smart money already knows all about the hard UXTO limit, and is therefor investing in systems built on the core blockchain which offload tx pressure to sidechains and other off-main-chain whatnot.

If one had unlimited number of side-chains, this would fundamentally scale even without changing the fundamental design of the ledger for those side-chains. Those side-chains might even be non-public and/or non-decentralized ledgers (and perhaps even fractional reserves, etc).

I don't consider that option as viable is because currency requires a fungible unit-of-exchange (although there is an argument against this with real-time exchange between side-chains, which is an argument I presented ... but not sure if this is realistic or not). So side-chains won't help scale to the transaction volume of the world. We must fix the fundamental decentralized crypto design, or accept centralized morass (which btw won't scale either so that is yet another reason the NWO coin is going to be a dying paradigm...to be toppled by 2033).

An unlimited number of non-fungible side-chains might be useful for smart contracts but not for money.

As for the Gresham's Law.

Yes, I do want people to HLOD their BTC.  Hoarding helps the price in terms of fiat trash rise, and invigorates the beneficial feedback loops driving adoption which ultimately result in a race condition that breaks petrodollar hegemony.  It's the Cartmanland principle: if people can't have Bitcoin they will want it more than ever.

As much as the people jealously crave platinum, plutonium, and Astatine.  

I specifically didn't mention gold because it is shiny and dense and thus has other appealing attributes for people besides its rare monetary value.

This ship is going to hit an iceberg, stop dead in its tracks and start leaking water as soon as the 1MB limit is hit consistently.

Bro, do you even Nassim Taleb?  

If you did, you'd already know antifragile systems require adversity to grow stronger (BTW, BTC is not analogous to The Titanic).

Conceptually I agree. But realize that creative destruction of species is often a result of competition in evolution.

The UXTO set is only the current bottleneck for scaling BTC to Visa++ levels of retail usage.  There are many others waiting in the wings (*cough, 10 min. block time, cough*).

Bitcoin's Mother-of-All-Blockchains is simply not the right tool for real-time retail POS interfaces.  Bitcoin's Mother-of-All-Blockchains is a back-office tool.

Okay so considering the trade-offs we have today to choose between (even VaporCoin was available, it would still be irrelevant to the choice made for Bitcoin), I have refuted side-chains. What is this back-office Bitcoin going to be used for then?

[molecular]

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.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).

If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.

EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.

See slide 14 here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UxB33wp1rCncBtPbuzQbkS1SZg_fjCTNMqu-wZGii-o/pub?start=true&loop=false&delayms=10000&slide=id.g7b8415063_38

Thanks for chipping in! Your other post ("centralized oracle") confirmed my suspicion. I don't share TPTB_need_war's view that that fact makes veritaseum centralized bullshit, though. I suspect it might be a great system. I love the fact that it lives on the bitcoin blockchain and has no other token. I also love that there's no counterparty risk and in addition I'm guessing it ties up some bitcoins in contracts and I do like that, too.

About the "other risk": where is the oracle on your server getting the tickers from? I guess that process should be made transparent at some point so we can at least know how it could be manipulated.

Certainly the incentive is high for some rogue employee somewhere to falsify some ticker feed you're pulling for just long enough for a large bet to be settled in his favor, no? Clearly there's noone capable/willing to fix something like that after the fact.

Only the data feed is centralized, everything else is fully distributed, which is better than centralized (reference the first link that I put up which explains this). A decentralized data feed just wouldn't work and it would be taking a step backwards from the current legacy system unless and until we have more activity than the centralized exchanges. Securities data fees are commodity items, and very easy to corroborate, very difficult to get away with in terms of fraud and/or manipulation.
As for someone in my camp manipulating a data feed, he/she would have a hard time doing so (we get them from 3rd parties) and even a harder time concealing it, and even a harder time than that getting away with it (each client plus the server has the ability to audit, although that is not implemented yet). You'd have to somehow change a data feed, hack into 3 disparate systems to inject that false data feed (whose real feed is freely availalble to all) and then hope nobody notices.
As it stands now, I believe our system is safer than the status quo by a long shot.

I understand. Thanks again for clearing some things up.

For the second time I will try to get my hands dirty with this. I have the client installed and the wallet backed up. Now I need some newbie type of help. I checked veritaseum.com for documentation and found the quick start video. It's hard to dig through the promotional talk and I stopped midway for now.

Is there some kind of written documentation somewhere on how to use the client and formulate orders? Is there a support chat on irc or a bitcointalk thread? I don't want to spam this beauty here.

[sickpig]

The reason we have to worry about miners producing "too large" blocks is because they don't pay for all the P2P network resources they use (neither do end users).

All the arguments we have about resource consumption are derived from that primary design flaw.

If we fix it, then we won't have to argue any more.

Well put.

Till we have had a 1:1 ratio between full node and miner, the block reward
did pay for all the resoures involed in the process. Once such ratio started
to decrease, due to the introduction of mining pools, mining and full node
role became more and more decoupled.

The block reward remains on the miner side, though.

[sickpig]

- other things we don't know yet caused by rising block max size. (Mircea will deploy his 'GavinCoin Short' financial weapon of mass destruction, with utterly unpredictable consequences)

Expanded that for you.

Thanks for your time.

In the last point I was referring to problems related to unexpected technical issues and/or unforseen demages to the economic incentives structure, rather than political maneuvers.

[iCEBREAKER]

- other things we don't know yet caused by rising block max size. (Mircea will deploy his 'GavinCoin Short' financial weapon of mass destruction, with utterly unpredictable consequences)

Expanded that for you.

Thanks for your time.

In the last point I was referring to problems related to unexpected technical issues and/or unforseen demages to the economic incentives structure, rather than political maneuvers.

Ah yes, the unknown unknowns.  It will be interesting to see if Gavin's TitaniCoin 20mb fork inherits enough antifragility from BTC to survive them, or if it actually generates anti-antifragility sufficient to destroy both chains.

[tvbcof]

...
The UXTO constraint may never be solved in an acceptable (sub)linear way, or the solution(s) could for political reasons never be implemented in BTC.
...

Almost certainly 'never' by any realistic definition of various things.
...
Solving 'the UTXO problem' would require what is by most definitions 'magic'.  Perhaps some future quantum-effect storage, communications, and processing schemes could 'solve' the problem but I'm not expecting to pick up such technology at Fry's by the next holiday season (Moore's law notwithstanding.)

A comment from chriswilmer got me thinking…

The UTXO set is actually bounded. The total amount of satoshis that will ever exists is

   (21x10^6) x (10^8) = 2.1 x 10^15 = 2.1 "peta-sats"
...
...
OK, now let's be reasonable!  Let's assume that 10 billion people on earth each control about 4 unspent outputs on average.  That's a total of 40 billion outputs, or

    (40 x 10^9) x (65 bytes) = 2.6 terabytes

With these assumptions, it now only takes about 20 of those SD cards to store the UTXO set:

    (2.6 x 10^12) / (128 x 10^9) = 20.3,

or, three 1-terrabyte SSDs, for a total cost of about $1,500.  
...

I have thought about this bounding (mostly in the context of the current rather awkward/deceptive 'unspendable dust' settings.)  I think that there is currently, and probably for quite some time, some big problems with this rosy picture:

 - UTXO is changing in real time through it's entire population.  This necessitates currently (as I understand things) a rather more sophisticated data-structure than something mineable like the blockchain.  UTXO is in ram and under the thing that replaced BDB (forgot the name of that database at the moment) because seeks, inserts, and deletes are bus intensive and, again, in constant flux.  Trying to do this on even high-ish end secondary storage architecture is a fail.  Large players use what amounts to clustered ramdisk to achieve scale.  Yes, it is within the realistic grasp of at least mid-sized companies to build such clusters, but it may never be so for lesser players at commodity scale due to market dynamics (no real demand.)

 - The picture painted (each individual controlling four unspent outputs) is pretty optimistic.  In order to achieve it there would need to be constant optimizations on the individual level which further adds to the messaging load and that's what pretty much everyone sees as the bottleneck.

 - The picture painted (each individual controlling four unspent outputs) is kind of a snapshot.  Even if each person makes only one spend per day, it means effectively a high percentage of the UTXO data in the database would be recycled daily.  Anyone who has tried to do even a relatively simple operation on a relatively modest size file (say a simple md5 or even a wc on a gigabyte sized file) will recognize that passing info from storage into a processor can be a real drag.  Some datastructures are conducive to multi-processing and whatever nosql databases which might hold the UTXO are probably in that category, but again one needs a cluster to do such things.

The risk of centralization to players who are prone to come under pressure is significant.  I may be willing to retract my assertion that,  within the current 'bounds', 'magic' would be required, but I stand fast to my contention that it is far from practical for Bitcoin's support framework to remain distributed at these kinds of scales.   Edit: ...but would be interested to see a proof-of-concept, simulator, prototype, etc.

[TPTB_need_war]

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.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).

If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.

EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.

See slide 14 here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UxB33wp1rCncBtPbuzQbkS1SZg_fjCTNMqu-wZGii-o/pub?start=true&loop=false&delayms=10000&slide=id.g7b8415063_38

Thanks for chipping in! Your other post ("centralized oracle") confirmed my suspicion. I don't share TPTB_need_war's view that that fact makes veritaseum centralized bullshit, though. I suspect it might be a great system. I love the fact that it lives on the bitcoin blockchain and has no other token. I also love that there's no counterparty risk and in addition I'm guessing it ties up some bitcoins in contracts and I do like that, too.

About the "other risk": where is the oracle on your server getting the tickers from? I guess that process should be made transparent at some point so we can at least know how it could be manipulated.

Certainly the incentive is high for some rogue employee somewhere to falsify some ticker feed you're pulling for just long enough for a large bet to be settled in his favor, no? Clearly there's noone capable/willing to fix something like that after the fact.

Only the data feed is centralized, everything else is fully distributed, which is better than centralized (reference the first link that I put up which explains this). A decentralized data feed just wouldn't work and it would be taking a step backwards from the current legacy system unless and until we have more activity than the centralized exchanges. Securities data fees are commodity items, and very easy to corroborate, very difficult to get away with in terms of fraud and/or manipulation.
As for someone in my camp manipulating a data feed, he/she would have a hard time doing so (we get them from 3rd parties) and even a harder time concealing it, and even a harder time than that getting away with it (each client plus the server has the ability to audit, although that is not implemented yet). You'd have to somehow change a data feed, hack into 3 disparate systems to inject that false data feed (whose real feed is freely availalble to all) and then hope nobody notices.
As it stands now, I believe our system is safer than the status quo by a long shot.

I understand.

Are you sure you (and he) understand?

Reggie sidesteps the issue of transient (perhaps un-auditable) manipulation of data feeds in conjunction with high frequency trading manipulation.

One thing programmers know that n00bs don't, "the devil is in the details" and "you don't know the whole story until you dig into the coding (the top-down perspective may be altered in the process)".

Download the client and give it a try. It's a fully functional system and you can see that it runs cleanly.

It is probably impossible (short of reverse engineering or building an extensive test kit) to determine that it runs cleanly without seeing the source code, because for example how do we evaluate how it might work in extreme or panic market conditions, under DDoS or high-frequency trading attacks, etc..

[Erdogan]

The problem with Bitcoin is that so many people didn't get on the train.  So now they hope it will fail so they can board a new train -- Monero, Etherium, whatever.  And they go onto these forums concern trolling as if they are actually Bitcoin proponents.  But suck it up. There is no other train available to you -- the next train Bitcoin ramp will have exclusive membership and will actually be a rocketship (think Apple ipay) deployed simultaneously onto millions of POS, default installation in your phone, automatically connected with checking accounts for several major banks etc.

ftfy

It's on the station now - get on board!

[TPTB_need_war]

The problem with Bitcoin is that so many people didn't get on the train.  So now they hope it will fail so they can board a new train -- Monero, Etherium, whatever.  And they go onto these forums concern trolling as if they are actually Bitcoin proponents.  But suck it up. There is no other train available to you -- the next train Bitcoin ramp

ftfy

It's onsome months from the station now - get on boardsell the rallies and await a sub-$100 price as it approaches the station!

ftfy

- other things we don't know yet caused by rising block max size. (Mircea will deploy his 'GavinCoin Short' financial weapon of mass destruction, with utterly unpredictable consequences)

Expanded that for you.

Thanks for your time.

In the last point I was referring to problems related to unexpected technical issues and/or unforseen demages to the economic incentives structure, rather than political maneuvers.

Ah yes, the unknown unknowns.  It will be interesting to see if Gavin's TitaniCoin 20mb fork inherits enough antifragility from BTC to survive them, or if it actually generates anti-antifragility sufficient fragility to destroy both chains.

Alas now I see the sub-$100 price coming into view. After the dust settles, we can begin the next ramp.

Bitcoin can't be destroyed until the NWO dies, because the banksters are pushing out it to their sheeople masses.

Or maybe Mircea is shorting BTC.

[inca]

<snip>

It's cute you think you know where the price is going..

[TPTB_need_war]

The UTXO set is actually bounded. The total amount of satoshis that will ever exists is

   (21x10^6) x (10^8) = 2.1 x 10^15 = 2.1 "peta-sats"  
...

I have thought about this bounding (mostly in the context of the current rather awkward/deceptive 'unspendable dust' settings.)  I think that there is currently, and probably for quite some time, some big problems with this rosy picture:

 - UTXO is changing in real time through it's entire population.  This necessitates currently (as I understand things) a rather more sophisticated data-structure than something mineable like the blockchain...

If the block chain were bounded in the sense of what most users could process, you could potentially have serious problems because it would also perhaps open the possibility that users can also exceed that bound in their demand for coin divisibility. One of the reasons I am so big on micropayments is I believe that divisibility is scaling with computation scale. I also believe this is related (in a round-about manner) to the inexorable trend to maximum division-of-labor. I'll expound on this in the future, perhaps in the Economics Devastation thread.

I do believe the fundamental design error is requiring the blockchain to include transactions. (I am of course cognizant that many would dismiss that prior sentence as bizarre, n00b, insane, or what ever adjective you prefer)

[Reggie Middleton]

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

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Our server acts as an Oracle feeding commodity ticker data (think Reuters, Google, Bloomberg) into the wallets to adjudicate P&L.

There is research available on how to create a more decentralized, consensus driven oracle. Apologies I will not google now for a citation.

Edit: perhaps it was on Ethereum's blog that I saw some mention of research.

Veritaseum is not a research project, it's a for profit business. We have developed ways to decentralize, or even fully distribute the oracle but that did not improve the product. We (and presumably you as well) don't want to decentralize things for the sake of just decentralizing it. Decentralization is done to improve the outcomes. If the outcome is not improved, then the decision to decentralize is simply not made (at least in our camp). Once it comes to custody of the assets, we went way beyond decentralization and fully distributed the network. Why? Because it makes for a better outcome. The same can't be said for everything, though.

[Reggie Middleton]

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.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).

If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.

EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.

It works from an end-user standpoint, which is more than I've seen from any other project.  Tickers prices are fed through an oracle, which is centralized.  Also, the code is not open source... yet, which i cant blame them for not wanting all their work to just be copied into another system.  In a nutshell, it appears to be blockchain.info 2.0.  The blockchain.info model has proven to work thus far with zero trust issues, but we will just have to wait for more info to become available. 

Thanks for the info regarding the centralized oracle.

I don't understand your comparison to blockchain.info.

I compare it to blockchain.info in that users retain control of their keys while using the service but without running a full node themselves - it is much more convenient and less resource-intensive.  Of course it's not a Web client but they may have plans for that.

@Reggie Middleton
Do you have plans to develop a hosted Web interface for your product?

We have an API and will encourage others to do that. We have started looking into doing it ourselves as well.

[Reggie Middleton]

Download the client and give it a try. It's a fully functional system and you can see that it runs cleanly.

It is probably impossible (short of reverse engineering or building an extensive test kit) to determine that it runs cleanly without seeing the source code, because for example how do we evaluate how it might work in extreme or panic market conditions, under DDoS or high-frequency trading attacks, etc..

Be fair to me. How do you do the same with Citibank, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bitfinex, Coinbase, itBit, Circle or anyone else? Whatever standard you hold our startup venture to you must hold the rest of the financial and fintech industry to as well. None of these industries are open source. We are, by far, the most distributed, and the most open in the industry. In addition, I can give you 100% access to the client code and/or open source it completely and you still wouldn't know what happens under the situations you described because you still wouldn't have access to the server code and/or the server business logic. To give access to such would be corporate suicide. I'm all for openness, but in a business environ there are pluses and minuses and open sourcing everything makes little sense if you must derive profits from selling said software. Now, if you are a purely services model (ex. Red Hat) then it may be a different story.

We offer tokens for sale that allow you to consult with us to extend both our tech and our financial engineering see https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FMyNvogofqojqG6nkIjgvvjAnsWs1qOtKUFExvtp_m0/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=10000 and use this link to purchase them http://veritaseum.com/index.php/buy-veritas/quick-start-guide. So, if access to the client code is something that a client really wants, I'm sure we can work something out.

[stereotype]

We offer tokens for sale that allow you to consult with us to extend both our tech and our financial engineering see https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FMyNvogofqojqG6nkIjgvvjAnsWs1qOtKUFExvtp_m0/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=10000 and use this link to purchase them http://veritaseum.com/index.php/buy-veritas/quick-start-guide. So, if access to the client code is something that a client really wants, I'm sure we can work something out.

I threw 1BTC at this when you first released it a little while back. Is this tradeable now? 

[aysha985343]

gold is physical asset whilst bitcoin can be dead anytime.

gold can have ups and down but the fact remains, almost everyone has one gram of gold. but not everybody has bitcoins, and even if 7 billion people decides to use bitcoins, only 21million will be able to have 1 bitcoin.

want to divide by 2?

makes 42million

even by 10 it makes 210,000,000 people. a very small % compared to worldst population