Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Adrian-x]

luckily Monero doesn't have a nullc yet.  

Are you kidding?  A crypto rock star like gmaxwell would be a stellar addition to XMR's core team.  The price would double in an hour.

I'd rather he stay with Bitcoin to help balance/cancel out nefarious MBA/VC/frat boy influence, but if the Gavinistas run him off...  

I'm in the camp that beeves it's the square root of the size of the network that give money its value, don't get me wrong I love the idea of A crypto rock star working in this field, I just can't bring my self to believe they are the reason people invest new economic systems.

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[freakying99]

How did this go from a gold collapsing bitcoin up thread to a poll about Gavin?

[kazuki49]

How did this go from a gold collapsing bitcoin up thread to a poll about Gavin?

Bitcoin is collapsing now or will soon. Monero UP.

[iCEBREAKER]

How did this go from a gold collapsing bitcoin up thread to a poll about Gavin?

The ongoing Gavinista coup and looming Great Schism are widely considered the most serious and credible threats yet to cypher's bullish "Bitcoin UP" prediction/outlook.

[TPTB_need_war]

Note: While the following is all highly speculative as it must be, and though I'm wont to talk about people rather than actual issues, this case seems to warrant it.

I've been looking into Greg Maxwell quite a bit recently. All the core devs actually (except Wladimir), and the blockstream people. Greg seems a sincere and extremely intelligent fellow with the right kind of bent for the job. The way he knocked the wind out of Stellar's sails on Hacker News was quite something, just as one example.

However, I do sense that he and Gavin have a bit of an oil-and-water dynamic going on. I have never seen them debate directly, though that could be because he was busy recently and "caught a bit flat-footed" on Gavin's proposal, as he said. Seems like classic nerd/jock or cat/dog dynamic (I realize Gavin's also a nerd) with weird passive-aggressive miscommunications aplenty. The thing where Gavin said he spent an afternoon reviewing Greg's idea only to not have it acknowledged reminded me of that especially. Still need both sides of the story, and Gavin has his own subtle ways of being bitchy at times if you read between the lines so I won't draw conclusions.

It's most interesting to me, though, that Gavin and Greg have both proposed a series of 50% increases, yet these two seem as you said the main sticking point for this debate. Pieter seems not very entrenched, and Matt I suspect would go along with Greg and Pieter. Luke I'm not sure but on a hunch I'd say he would go wherever the action is dev-wise, despite his principled stances and eccentricities. He's not Mircea Popescu. Adam overall seems eminently reasonable and would probably not do anything disappointing, but that's just my cursory read.

Perhaps it's time to work some social magic to have Greg relax his position a bit. Since I've been reading almost all his posts, I've noticed he gives little glimmers of sunshine at times. He's not an unreasonable person, and despite his hardline stance I can tell he wants more than anything for Bitcoin to succeed. I could swear he gets less accommodative when Gavin's in the thread, though. The rays of sunshine seem to be buried deep in the comments when he's talking to someone else in a thread where Gavin is absent. Maybe just my imagination.

There are issues among such a group of people that we probably can't hope to understand. The politics, the interpersonal clashes, the miscommunications, the lingering grudges tinting things. Again, I think your implication may be right, this may be more a social issue than a technical one.

Gavin is pragmatic and respects his limitations because he values his accomplishments more than his appraisal of his knowledge, i.e. he doesn't have insecurities or is more balanced. Greg is idealistic and doesn't respect his limitations because he values his appraisal of his knowledge more than his accomplishments, i.e. he has some insecurities or is less balanced.

You definitely want Greg to leave your coin and go to the competitor's coin where he can pretty well muck it up. CoinJoin is a great example of that.

Don't get me wrong, Greg is smarter and more knowledgeable than me when it comes to math and crypto. He is a guy you'd love to have for his smarts, but you'd need to be very careful not to hand him the keys. Perhaps you could bring him around with some social engineering. I found that by being more careful about the way I interacted with him in ways that painted his ego well, he was more accommodating. I doubt he wants to leave Bitcoin, because he wouldn't have the same prominence with any other direction. Thus is he ripe to be accommodating.

MP's public display points to some psychological issues.

My public displays do also. The Multiple Sclerosis has amplified the effect. Hopefully I can get it under control and be more attuned to accomplishments. I have some past performances to remind me that I could.

Edit: Gavin's allusion to Greg overextending himself is an example of his pragmatism and balance. Gavin made choices based on being able to deliver, not based on what is ideal. My successes have come from being more like Gavin. My failures have come from being more like Greg.

I've been looking into Greg Maxwell quite a bit recently. All the core devs actually (except Wladimir), and the blockstream people. Greg seems a sincere and extremely intelligent fellow with the right kind of bent for the job. The way he knocked the wind out of Stellar's sails on Hacker News was quite something, just as one example.
 ...

My sense after observing things for a while here is that Greg is actually a fairly patient person except in instance when the other person really ought to be doing better.  I think that in addition to having significant inherent differences about the role of Bitcoin he has also lost patience with Gavin who is, by his own admission, not the brightest bulb.

On top of that, everyone who is anyone should be mortified at Gavin's slavish devotion to Hearn and the Bitcoin Foundation crowd who can be counted on for atrociously bad ideas by the standards of most early adopters.  I'm sure that this is a contributing factor to Greg's loss of patience.  This unbelievable scenario should make almost everyone 'run, not walk' away from Gavin, and I suspect that it was a major factor for Blockstream getting some wind in it's sails.

There you go. You are describing Greg's need for everyone to measure up to how he measures himself. A typical academic attitude. Academics are great at running intellectual circles around others, but they mostly don't ever accomplish anything significant in the real world.

And when I pointed out to Greg (gmaxell) that blacklisting in CoinJoin can't work because the entire point was to make the chain untraceable, did he say "ah yes, thank you". No.

And he continued to push that braindead paradigm, because he doesn't want to admit that Bitcoin can't be untraceable and non-fungible. His idealism and ego is coloring his pragmaticism.

Gavin will win. And I will also likely win over Greg, because I do have a pragmatic hat. I just have to remember to wear it more often.

[freakying99]

How did this go from a gold collapsing bitcoin up thread to a poll about Gavin?

The ongoing Gavinista coup and looming Great Schism are widely considered the most serious and credible threats yet to cypher's bullish "Bitcoin UP" prediction/outlook.

 

You mean we may go down?

 

[marcus_of_augustus]

How did this go from a gold collapsing bitcoin up thread to a poll about Gavin?

frap.doc's man crush on gavin the g-man turned into a cheerleading rally session to get the plebes onto the new bitcoin spook-fork.



both frap.doc and karpeles want to frap it up on the blockchain.

[iCEBREAKER]

How did this go from a gold collapsing bitcoin up thread to a poll about Gavin?

The ongoing Gavinista coup and looming Great Schism are widely considered the most serious and credible threats yet to cypher's bullish "Bitcoin UP" prediction/outlook.

You mean we may go down?

No, I mean we may continue going sideways, until the allegedly acute max_blocksize issue and core team mismanagement problem are resolved.

frap.doc's man crush on gavin the g-man turned into a cheerleading rally session to get the plebes onto the new bitcoin spook-fork.

both frap.doc and karpeles want to frap it up on the blockchain.

Now that's just cruel.  LOL!  

[marcus_of_augustus]

frap.doc's man crush on gavin the g-man turned into a cheerleading rally session to get the plebes onto the new bitcoin spook-fork.

both frap.doc and karpeles want to frap it up on the blockchain.

Now that's just cruel.  LOL!  

seems character assassination and smearing is what frap.doc wants this thread to be about, I can oblige in any good mud-slinging, pig-wrestling descent into farce.

[Adrian-x]

Not only that friend, what else are they planing to change down the line? Like I said many moons ago, they will try change the emission and they will start making Bitcoin permanently inflationary, not that I'm against the model, I like Monero exactly because the disinflation but it is a severe rupture of Bitcoin's trust and social contract and all started with the project being hijacked into this obscure XT fork.

If they try to make a change like that, users will migrate away from their fork just as easy as they migrated to it.

In the end, the developers don't actually have any power - they can only product the software which users want or refrain from doing so.

I would have thought the same until his last statement, you are clearly ignoring the power he is displaying to hold as he forces his plan with help of the billionaire backed VC companies so if you want to buy Bitcoin on exchange X, you'll need to install his fork.

I think you need to consider who the billionaire backed VC companies are backing. we don't know how this turns out, but your concerns are valid, i just don't know if you are directing them towards the correct developers.

if this is a 1 way path why do you think so, I agree with justusranvier, you just switch back if they move in the wrong direction how do you see it?

Masses are easily influenced, you would think most people think like you, there is no "going back" from this, the bitcoin eco-system is already centralized in few companies backed by same hands, what I see is a move to put the bitcoin network effect in great peril if this fork happens, because the way bitcoin and decentralized crypto works, only when theres absolute consensus should a move like that happen. What I believe to be the hidden intention behind this fork is to open the bitcoin network to new regulatory frameworks that will be born from the centralized nature of mining and the inherent traceability and likability of the protocol, and establishing a precedent of strong-arming forks.

If you can't see the messages from the same agents pointing towards this scenario, well, you are making a fool of yourself to the future community that will be studying Bitcoin-history http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34161751/

I share many of your concerns, however I don't agree with your interpretation of centralization, a trend in the contraction of nodes and a specialization in mining is influenced by many factors, i just don't see it a centralizing.

There is one exception though I see the development of the code that protects the protocol as centralized.

There was some info posted earlier that showed that their can be wisdom in mass behavior, I think its relevant, and i believe big picture we are coming out of the hypnoses of mass manipulation as invented by Edward Bernays and deployed by politicians and marketiers, (to quote Douglas Adams who did a talk on the topic) we moving away from the 1 to many communication age of broadcasters and moving to a new age of many to many communication of the internet. - which is proceeded by his parody of all the other ages from caveman times categorized by technology. I think the metaphor is quite apt given the Internet is a technology that wasn't invented for the masses to communicate.

[TPTB_need_war]

i think the problem is that they've identified the wrong fundamental unit in the system. as geeks, they identify with the full node as that unit.

otoh, the economic majority identifies the user as that fundamental unit, which i think is correct. Metcalfe's Law will work off the user who needs cheap, reliable tx's to be onboarded.

Why can't the users be the full nodes. (this isn't a question)

[TPTB_need_war]

i think the problem is that they've identified the wrong fundamental unit in the system. as geeks, they identify with the full node as that unit.

otoh, the economic majority identifies the user as that fundamental unit, which i think is correct. Metcalfe's Law will work off the user who needs cheap, reliable tx's to be onboarded.

and the full node and user are not mutually exclusive. increasing users will result in increasing nodes.

edit:  if you listen to Gavin & Peter's debate on LTB yesterday, the node is all that Peter ever talks about.

Bingo, Satoshi's invention and the core of Bitcoin is the distributed security mechanism. It is the essense of what Bitcoin is and how Bitcoin remains free of external influence. I still fail to see how this distributed security mechanism is in any way effected by an increase from 1 to 20MB blocks. Every single pool could easily handle the change and individual miners are completely unaffected.

Then you haven't read nor comprehended my posts in this thread.

[TPTB_need_war]

Gavin's strength is his maturity and calm demeanor, imo.  he'll win if it comes down to a battle.

Nope.  Szatoshi will back Back and Maxwell.  The cypherpunks will stick together (or hang separately).

Are you implying Szabo is Satoshi?

[TPTB_need_war]

I singled out the first posts by 2 core Devs. to get a taste for there personality in the wild - early days when everyone was working nicely.  (note if you read it, many other devs. are quite encouraging.)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122013.msg1331489#msg1331489
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122013.msg1389749#msg1389749

Sorry need to quote the first one explicitly:

All rules I found are enforced. I am eager to learn any outstanding.
The biggest deliverable is serious testing.
I would love to get this production ready this year, but since I only work on this on my spare time and my family has other plans with me around Christmas, I can not commit.

Okay. You're missing at least one important rule, but I don't know what else is missing that I missed in review.

Unless you object, I'm contemplating keeping this missing rule to myself for now so that it can function as a test of the testing. E.g. if the test don't find it, they're incomplete.  Obviously I don't want to withhold information which could undermine the network, but absent better testing the software shouldn't be in production use anyways... and there are scarcely few good ways of testing the tests.   Does this sound reasonable to you?

My english vocabulary is not wide enough to define how presumptuous gmaxwell's reply was. Thanks for the pointer Adrian, very informative.

Greg's post is myopic, self-serving, not pragmatic, and too idealistic.

[TPTB_need_war]

...
There are issues among such a group of people that we probably can't hope to understand. The politics, the interpersonal clashes, the miscommunications, the lingering grudges tinting things. Again, I think your implication may be right, this may be more a social issue than a technical one.

Interesting. I decided to read all Greg's recent posts and found one which makes his position much clearer.

There is a soft blocksize limit in addition to the hard one. Originally it wasn't easy to adjust. We ran into the soft limit, and were pushing into it for months at a time back at the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013. Transactions slowed down and there was some complaining, but the wheels did not fall off and Bitcoin's adoption grew substantially during that time. A lot of technical innovation happened then-- in particular replace-by-fee was invented and child-pays-for-parent was deployed. After the soft limits were increased, development on these improvements went fallow, sadly (e.g. CFPF was never merged, or matured to a merge ready state, in Bitcoin Core).
The experience we have says there will not likely be a dire emergency. We also have reason to believe, from the prior accidental quasi-hardfork, that the mining portion of the network can be updated within a day or two during an actual emergency. A straight-forward blocksize bump also has the benefit of being completely compatible with existing SPV clients (they can't see the blocksize). If there really were a dire situation where it was larger blocks or doom-- I'm confident that larger blocks could be deployed quickly without much trouble; and in that kind of situation: consensus would be easy. No matter how concerned people are about larger sizes, if the choice is really larger or a useless network, the former is preferable to everyone. There is also plenty of room for other creativity, as we saw before in 2013, should the need arise, but it can be hard to predict in advance.

He doesn't really want to engage in the mechanics of a block size increase right now, because his opinion is that the limit can be safely maxed out. I wish he had said this a couple of years ago in BCT because then the pros-and-cons of letting the limit be hit could have been hammered out before the question of how to change the limit needed addressing (which is the case now). Maybe he didn't say this two years ago because it wasn't his position then?

Compromise is very difficult when one side does not recognize that an urgent problem, or even just that a problem, exists.

He is looking at it from a very technical level. Advantages of hitting the limit is speeding the development of some software components, work in adversity etc, the downside is non-technical: a PR disaster, collapsing price, loss of VC enthusiasm, academics noting that a decentralized community cannot be trusted to manage a global currency. IMHO, these downsides far outweigh the technical, software benefits. It is simply playing with fire.

He also forgets that not all mining pools obeyed the soft-limits in 2013. A few didn't. e.g. when the soft-limit was 250KB Eligius was mining 500, when the soft-limit was 500 Eligius mined 750. There was always some level of extra capacity which does not exist at 1MB.

He repeatedly says that he is worried about centralization, loss of nodes. Well, the fact is the fastest way to kill^*off the most nodes at once is to quickly deploy a hard-fork. A hard-fork needs as much time as possible to be as smooth as possible, maintaining the network intact.

^*Nodes left on an old fork are not guaranteed to upgrade, some will just switch off.

Yes again you can see Greg as the nerd in the basement with his trains, optimizing all the gears and mechanisms, but totally oblivious to what is going on in the kitchen.

Btw, I had trains in the basement. But I did come up from the dungeon eventually.

[TPTB_need_war]

One classic Gmax thing is to make every statement interpretable in a safe way. For example, today's reddit post where someone was accusing Peter Todd of being biased against an increase because of his affiliation with Viacoin. I don't think there is much merit to the accusation (though that doesn't excuse Todd's sensationalism), but in Greg's reply he said, "Welcome to Reddit, 'Viacoin66'!"

He will say something that looks safe and unantagonizing (just the standard Reddit welcome), but his real purpose is to point out that the account was bran new and imply that it was obviously created to troll Viacoin/Todd. He's probably right about that, but nevertheless it's an example of what I mean where he'll say whatever serves any sort of low-blow purpose in a debate as long as it can be interpreted as not being that. I guess with his security testing mindset he has become Mr. Plausible Deniability.

You almost got it.

He is winning the "I am the smartest dude here" argument to himself. By obscuring his point, he further proves to himself that he is smarter than everyone else that misses the point. And those who are smart enough to get it, will realize that he is speaking to them, while throwing off the lesser dogs from the scent so he won't have to waste his time arguing with them. He lives in his own world. For as long as he is correct, then he has won.

He is very comfortable with Adam Back because he views him as an intellectual peer.

It isn't about real world results for him, although he doesn't rationalize it that way. In his mind, it probably plays something like, "by being the most correct, we will attain the best outcome".

[TPTB_need_war]

Adam Back is still pinning hopes on alternative solutions...

One theory I have entertained is that Adam and Greg both see Bitcoin's design is highly flawed, and they've been trying to forestall hoping a solution could be found. I bet they on their own long ago realized the points I have written about centralization are correct. They've tried to keep their true appraisals hidden and work for solutions, but haven't really found any (but they don't dare admit that).

P.S. My past few posts about people are highly speculative and not intended to be statements of fact.

[Adrian-x]

Adam Back is still pinning hopes on alternative solutions...

One theory I have entertained is that Adam and Greg both see Bitcoin's design is highly flawed, and they've been trying to forestall hoping a solution could be found. I bet they on their own long ago realized the points I have written about centralization are correct. They've tried to keep their true appraisals hidden and work for solutions, but haven't really found any (but they don't dare admit that).

P.S. My past few posts about people are highly speculative and not intended to be statements of fact.

They may have what they think is a better idea, Sidechains could be a way to sling shot momentum.

[TPTB_need_war]

Gavin's strength is his maturity and calm demeanor, imo.  he'll win if it comes down to a battle.

Nope.  Szatoshi will back Back and Maxwell.  The cypherpunks will stick together (or hang separately).

You should change your handle to 'FrappuccinoDoc.'  

Bitcoin XT is a poison pill for all the newbs and unwary, certain bug fix commits that went into Core have already been omitted. Both Hearn and Andresen have been covertly anti-privacy from day zero, paying it only lip service when pressed. Don't trust it or them. Not to mention it is poorly maintained and totally untested. I can't believe I'm reading such a mad approach being championed on these pages ... it's like a twilight zone episode wtf are you people thinking !!! following Pied Pipers now?

Not only that friend, what else are they planing to change down the line? Like I said many moons ago, they will try change the emission and they will start making Bitcoin permanently inflationary, not that I'm against the model, I like Monero exactly because the disinflation but it is a severe rupture of Bitcoin's trust and social contract and all started with the project being hijacked into this obscure XT fork.

Neither me nor Gavin believe a fee market will work as a substitute for the inflation subsidy. It just doesn’t seem to work, economically.

https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32

Who said that? You guessed right, Gavin's vice-fuhrer.

if they get there way, they wont have any power to change things it will be a democracy of users who decide, luckily Monero doesn't have a nullc yet. 

Same reply as I have to rocks. You apparently haven't been paying attention to my posts.

[TPTB_need_war]

Not only that friend, what else are they planing to change down the line? Like I said many moons ago, they will try change the emission and they will start making Bitcoin permanently inflationary, not that I'm against the model, I like Monero exactly because the disinflation but it is a severe rupture of Bitcoin's trust and social contract and all started with the project being hijacked into this obscure XT fork.

If they try to make a change like that, users will migrate away from their fork just as easy as they migrated to it.

In the end, the developers don't actually have any power - they can only product the software which users want or refrain from doing so.

People are sheep that will go with the loudest/best advertising, regardless of benefit/detriment.   Just look at every other system in existence.  

I should have read these replies first. Seems others agree with my stance.

I will take another hiatus (maybe more than a few days and hopefully forever).