Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[rocks]

from Jameson Lopp an hour ago:

https://i.imgur.com/kX1Ed19.png

now we need hodlers more than ewar

dont sell, and dont send also, just hodl

If only people stopped using their BTC and just held it and looked at it, then Bitcion would be as useful as gold is to Goldbugs (who don't seem to understand that gold will never be revalued as money unless the average person uses gold as money)

[cypherdoc]

from Jameson Lopp an hour ago:

https://i.imgur.com/kX1Ed19.png

now we need hodlers more than ewar

dont sell, and dont send also, just hodl

Right. And tell me what happens  to all the merchants dependent on TX's? And then when  merchants disappear, what happens  to users?  And once users disappear, what happens to hodlers?

[TPTB_need_war]

This is the first video I've seen of Gregory Maxwell. This adds some confirmation for me of my upthread speculation about Greg seeing himself as critic and the smartest person in the room. He specifically states in this video that his role is more as a reviewer than a doer (even his stated goal is maximum impact with the least coding...which is a desirable goal but only if it is not the only one), right after admitting that he was wrong in 2004 about decentralized consensus being impossible. The audacity. Socrates taught us that recognizing that we are not omniscient is a primary attribute of cognition.

(Edit: in the "Selection Cryptography" portion of the video, he elaborates on why his role is appropriate — "Pragmatic has its place, but beware against biasing against competence")

No doubt this is a very smart guy with powerful crypto+math domain knowledge who can add considerable analysis and even new ideas. You'd definitely want him on your team (I would) if he can contain himself to a non-leadership role. But hand him the keys and you are likely to go too far down dead-end paths—e.g. CoinJoin—because my impression of him so far (limited interaction) is he is more of a narrow space thinker who doesn't pay as much attention to what is going on in the kitchen when he is in the basement (unless if he a lead on a very narrow space, orthogonally contained project domain such as an audio codec). And this is precisely what I told him the very first time he spanked me in public in these forums; I warned him that I am more of a pragmatic generalist and that we tend to paradigm shift around people like him (which is precisely what I am hoping to do accomplish this year). The first exposure I had to Greg was when I was very impressed by his forum post containing analysis of a proposed proof-of-work hash for something bytemaster was proposing (I forget the details).

I am taking a deeper look at Blockstream and side chains today for the first time. I will report back my findings shortly.

P.S. I am only 10 minutes into the linked video and it is particularly poignant so far. I highly recommend it. So far it appears to be making the case for Monero. It admits Tor is weak against the State, which is a concept I was promulgating since 2013 and was initially resisted (afair by Greg and many others). Good to see that my work in the forum in 2013 finally was accepted. I will say as AnonyMint, I was pushing hard for greater in anonymity starting in 2013 with some posts I made in the anoncoin thread.

The anti-"Eclipse" (Sybil attack mitigation) slide at the 11:45 minute mark is a very important point. An inherent weakness in PoW is the simultaneity requirement which makes network topology so critical (think orphan rates, selfish mining attacks, etc) and which is also difficult to anneal because of the self-referential relativity of the paradigm. This is one of the main fundamental flaws I want to address in crypto currency. I had referred to this recently as "anti-aliasing". Ironically where Greg says Satoshi's solution to decentralized consensus achieved something "not quite as strong" as that which he thought he had proved was impossible, the same applies to my solution to centralized consensus which implicitly resists centralization and scales to micropayment volume.

Another interesting point at 21 minutes, that multisig negatively impacts decentralization and scaling. This is another fundamental aspect my solution fixes. Schnorr as a potential solution to this problem for Bitcoin lacks optional accountability (or loses some of the scaling and decentralization advantages with Greg's TREE scheme) and has a simultaneity issue vaguely analogously related to the problem with CoinJoin.

Regarding Greg's redefinition of Cryptography at the 40+ minute mark, he is on the right track but I fundamentally disagree with his definition because it presumes we could both exist and information could be entirely free, i.e. it is vacuous because it presumes mutually incongruent assumptions. The generative essence is that the entropy of the universe is trending to maximum (i.e. not infinity) according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics (refer to the upthread philosophical discussion about existence and theoretic physics). I would instead define, "Cryptography is the art of structuring information such that hidden entropy doesn't collapse to 0 over known domains in time and computability".

[Natalia_AnatolioPAMM]

Satoshi's own words: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366

satoshi left us 

hopefully nope!

[sickpig]

how many do we have so far?

https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/?q=NODE_GETUTXOS

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/383jam/support_larger_blocks_by_running_a_bitcoin_xt/crsfori

my node still registers as Satoshi:0.10.1/ on bitnodes.io

If i remember correctly Hearn said on btc dev mailing list that in curr xt version user agent string is screwed up

edit: add source http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34155603/

[Odalv]

from Jameson Lopp an hour ago:

https://i.imgur.com/kX1Ed19.png

That is scary. March 2016 is looking more and more that it might be too late.

But I'm sure the blockstream guys only see the emergence of fee pressure that will push people onto sidechains.

The whole blocksize debate has been theoretical so far. But once people's transactions start to backlog the discussion will take a very different turn. People want to be able to transaction directly with Bitcoin in an affordable manner. That is the entire ethos of the project.

tvbcof
marcus
iCE
kazuki

I'm afraid it is you who cannot comprehend that there are a big disadvantages with big blocks.

Brute force (increasing block size limit) is not a solution .. we need something smarter than  "The bigger stone the bigger hammer"

edit: 100 kg hammer is not practical :-)
edit2: we need jackhammer

[_mr_e]

how many do we have so far?

https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/?q=NODE_GETUTXOS

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/383jam/support_larger_blocks_by_running_a_bitcoin_xt/crsfori

my node still registers as Satoshi:0.10.1/ on bitnodes.io

If i remember correctly Hearn said on btc dev mailing list that in curr xt version user agent string is screwed up

edit: add source http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34155603/

Surprisingly I was able to pick my node off that list accidentally just by city and isp... Had to check my ip but sure enough it was me - and it's showing me as satoshi client even though I'm running XT.

[Odalv]

Converted my first node to XT today.

Let's know how many 20M blocks will you mine. (I'll guess "no single ONE" :-) )

edit: Your are not Herkules and 100 kg hammer is too heavy

[marcus_of_augustus]

bad smell all over xt ... note it is not even a faithful branch fork of the main bitcoin repo look https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt at the main link, if it was fork it would have a link beneath it to the git repo it was forked from. So what? you might ask, software forking with git trackinng is subtle ... what this means is there is no way to easily know what has and hasn't been left out of XT that was in Core ... why do that? Git is a system of hashing every commit so you can easily verify every commit back to the original source dump and know it hasn't been messed with, exactly like a block hash chain ... XT has branched in such a way you will never really easily know how it is different from Core, except for, yes you guessed it, "just trust us".

On the front page you can tell things have been changed that have nothing to do with "only 3 major differences" there is a file called "pkg.m4"https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/0.10.2A/pkg.m4 that was removed from Core because of erroneous behaviour that made every system it was built on to default to using it instead of the system pkg.m4 ... why put broken behaviour back in? Maybe some bad coding reasons but way too much fishy shit right on the front page of XT to trust in the slightest. Removed files put back in, and not a correct, verifiable fork of Core, it looks dodgy as all heck. If it was just some anonymous guy on the internet I would expect coins to go missing immediately if you ran this code.

[phoenix1]

bad smell all over xt ... note it is not even a faithful branch fork of the main bitcoin repo look https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt at the main link, if it was fork it would have a link beneath it to the git repo it was forked from. So what? you might ask, software forking is subtle ... what this means is there is no way to easily know what has and hasn't been left out out of XT that was in Core ... why do that?

On the front page you can tell things have been changed that have nothing to do with "only 3 major difference" there is a file called "pkg.m4"https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/0.10.2A/pkg.m4 that was removed from Core because of erroneous behaviour that made every system it was built on to default to using it instead of the system pkg.m4 ... why put broken behaviour back in? Maybe some bad coding reasons but way too much fishy shit right on the front page of XT to trust in the slightest. Removed files put back in, and not a correct, verifiable fork of Core, it looks dodgy as all heck. If it was just some anonymous guy on the internet I would expect coins to go missing immediately if you ran this code.

To me this seems like more fear-mongering from you  m_o_a
Just like when you told us that BitStamp would never come back after the hack as they were all crooks (I am not going to waste my time digging out your post, but you know what you said)
I don't know the truth of the matter, but I don't trust your judgement either. I have seen it to be negatively biased on more than one occasion, enough to make me think that you have your own (unspoken) agenda here

"just trust us" (your ninja edit) ... I don't trust you

[justusranvier]

Meanwhile...

https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/pull/430

https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/commit/58f29ad939c967e03838c1cc7e354ca6e6ed452b

[rocks]

bad smell all over xt ... note it is not even a faithful branch fork of the main bitcoin repo look https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt at the main link, if it was fork it would have a link beneath it to the git repo it was forked from. So what? you might ask, software forking with git trackinng is subtle ... what this means is there is no way to easily know what has and hasn't been left out of XT that was in Core ... why do that? Git is a system of hashing every commit so you can easily verify every commit back to the original source dump and know it hasn't been messed with, exactly like a block hash chain ... XT has branched in such a way you will never really easily know how it is different from Core, except for, yes you guessed it, "just trust us".

On the front page you can tell things have been changed that have nothing to do with "only 3 major differences" there is a file called "pkg.m4"https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/0.10.2A/pkg.m4 that was removed from Core because of erroneous behaviour that made every system it was built on to default to using it instead of the system pkg.m4 ... why put broken behaviour back in? Maybe some bad coding reasons but way too much fishy shit right on the front page of XT to trust in the slightest. Removed files put back in, and not a correct, verifiable fork of Core, it looks dodgy as all heck. If it was just some anonymous guy on the internet I would expect coins to go missing immediately if you ran this code.

The other reason is to simply get on the path of being a fully independent implementation that breaks ties with the Satoshi client. As per yesterday's discussion multiple independently developed implementations is a good thing. Sure with multiple implementations there is the risk that one or more are controlled by negative actors, but overall the risk of negative actors taking over is much less with several implementations than one dominate implementation.

[rocks]

from Jameson Lopp an hour ago:

https://i.imgur.com/kX1Ed19.png

That is scary. March 2016 is looking more and more that it might be too late.

But I'm sure the blockstream guys only see the emergence of fee pressure that will push people onto sidechains.

The whole blocksize debate has been theoretical so far. But once people's transactions start to backlog the discussion will take a very different turn. People want to be able to transaction directly with Bitcoin in an affordable manner. That is the entire ethos of the project.

tvbcof
marcus
iCE
kazuki

I'm afraid it is you who cannot comprehend that there are a big disadvantages with big blocks.

Brute force (increasing block size limit) is not a solution .. we need something smarter than  "The bigger stone the bigger hammer"

edit: 100 kg hammer is not practical :-)
edit2: we need jackhammer

No one is suggesting massive jackhammer blocks to put every coffee cup transaction on the planet into the blockchain.

Yes there is a balance between everything on the blockchain and something smarter.

But something smarter still requires much larger than 1MB blocks, and 20MB blocks is in no manner a dumb jackhammer that kicks people off the network. I have a crappy home network and will still be able to function fine with 20MB blocks.

Something smarter is also not available today. Options that do not exist and are ready today are not solutions to be discussed. 20MB blocks provides breathing room to find a smart balance. That balance BTW will very likely settle on even larger blocks.

Not creating that breathing room starves Bitcoin today of usage, usage that it needs to constantly grow.

[cypherdoc]

from Jameson Lopp an hour ago:

https://i.imgur.com/kX1Ed19.png

That is scary. March 2016 is looking more and more that it might be too late.

But I'm sure the blockstream guys only see the emergence of fee pressure that will push people onto sidechains.

The whole blocksize debate has been theoretical so far. But once people's transactions start to backlog the discussion will take a very different turn. People want to be able to transaction directly with Bitcoin in an affordable manner. That is the entire ethos of the project.

tvbcof
marcus
iCE
kazuki

I'm afraid it is you who cannot comprehend that there are a big disadvantages with big blocks.

Brute force (increasing block size limit) is not a solution .. we need something smarter than  "The bigger stone the bigger hammer"

edit: 100 kg hammer is not practical :-)
edit2: we need jackhammer

No one is suggesting massive jackhammer blocks to put every coffee cup transaction on the planet into the blockchain.

Yes there is a balance between everything on the blockchain and something smarter.

But something smarter still requires much larger than 1MB blocks, and 20MB blocks is in no manner a dumb jackhammer that kicks people off the network. I have a crappy home network and will still be able to function fine with 20MB blocks.

Something smarter is also not available today. Options that do not exist and are ready today are not solutions to be discussed. 20MB blocks provides breathing room to find a smart balance. That balance BTW will very likely settle on even larger blocks.

Not creating that breathing room starves Bitcoin today of usage, usage that it needs to constantly grow.

in the meantime, large and small miners are STILL going to be going after the block reward vs any bloated insignificant tx fees they might want to generate for nefarious purposes.

[cypherdoc]

bad smell all over xt ... note it is not even a faithful branch fork of the main bitcoin repo look https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt at the main link, if it was fork it would have a link beneath it to the git repo it was forked from. So what? you might ask, software forking is subtle ... what this means is there is no way to easily know what has and hasn't been left out out of XT that was in Core ... why do that?

On the front page you can tell things have been changed that have nothing to do with "only 3 major difference" there is a file called "pkg.m4"https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/0.10.2A/pkg.m4 that was removed from Core because of erroneous behaviour that made every system it was built on to default to using it instead of the system pkg.m4 ... why put broken behaviour back in? Maybe some bad coding reasons but way too much fishy shit right on the front page of XT to trust in the slightest. Removed files put back in, and not a correct, verifiable fork of Core, it looks dodgy as all heck. If it was just some anonymous guy on the internet I would expect coins to go missing immediately if you ran this code.

To me this seems like more fear-mongering from you  m_o_a
Just like when you told us that BitStamp would never come back after the hack as they were all crooks (I am not going to waste my time digging out your post, but you know what you said)
I don't know the truth of the matter, but I don't trust your judgement either. I have seen it to be negatively biased on more than one occasion, enough to make me think that you have your own (unspoken) agenda here

"just trust us" (your ninja edit) ... I don't trust you

i smell Monero all over him.

[phoenix1]

<snip>

i smell Monero all over him.

Ok, as you mention it, and this is not meant as an attack on Monero, what I really don't understand is how a truly anonymous coin can survive, regardless of the tech, when the lead developers are public figures (eg Smooth, who was extremely helpful when I asked about the 21inc stuff) and they have a very public 'castle' as the home of one of their lead promoters (Risto).
How does that work if/when  the SHTF ??
Honestly, I have nothing against Monero, but I can't wrap my head around how something that TPTB will obviously fight against can flourish with these criteria. $5 wrench anyone ??

Please enlighten me. I say this in a truly non-confrontational manner - I am truly confused

[cypherdoc]

that's good that California is winning:

https://coincenter.org/2015/06/our-thoughts-on-the-bitlicense-california-is-winning/

[tvbcof]

bad smell all over xt ... note it is not even a faithful branch fork of the main bitcoin repo look https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt at the main link, if it was fork it would have a link beneath it to the git repo it was forked from. So what? you might ask, software forking is subtle ... what this means is there is no way to easily know what has and hasn't been left out out of XT that was in Core ... why do that?

On the front page you can tell things have been changed that have nothing to do with "only 3 major difference" there is a file called "pkg.m4"https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/0.10.2A/pkg.m4 that was removed from Core because of erroneous behaviour that made every system it was built on to default to using it instead of the system pkg.m4 ... why put broken behaviour back in? Maybe some bad coding reasons but way too much fishy shit right on the front page of XT to trust in the slightest. Removed files put back in, and not a correct, verifiable fork of Core, it looks dodgy as all heck. If it was just some anonymous guy on the internet I would expect coins to go missing immediately if you ran this code.

To me this seems like more fear-mongering from you  m_o_a
Just like when you told us that BitStamp would never come back after the hack as they were all crooks (I am not going to waste my time digging out your post, but you know what you said)
I don't know the truth of the matter, but I don't trust your judgement either. I have seen it to be negatively biased on more than one occasion, enough to make me think that you have your own (unspoken) agenda here

"just trust us" (your ninja edit) ... I don't trust you

i smell Monero all over him.

I smell competent engineer who is familiar with standard codebase practices, modern revision control systems, and has his eyes open.  I see a guy who is probably not going to be separated from his wealth in a trivial manner.

[TPTB_need_war]

[gossip about personalities]

This seems very plausible.

It's also irrelevant.

20MB blocks aren't a Gavinista vs Greg issue.  The XT controversy has set the Gavinistas against all our other core devs.

You still haven't answered my bolded question below.

I have reviewed the pegged side-chains idea at Blockstream. The idea is BTC value can be moved to orthogonal blockchains. Assuming these "pegged coins" remain fungible (which is dubious and probably an incorrect assumption[1]), then in theory the shared-in-common unit-of-account network effects are not hindered, yet the network effects due to interoperability is lost because competing chains are not required to interopt, i.e. spending from one chain to another might require a trip back through the Bitcoin blockchain which defeats the scalability due to constricting the Bitcoin blocksize.

Pegged side-chains are a hack that move the same problems that need to be fixed in the main blockchain to the side-chain, but the fundamental problem remains. Worse they destroy interoperability and probably create a huge mess of fungibility.

Bottom line is that Bitcoin is an overly complex, highly flawed mess that can not be fixed. There is only one outcome which will be accepted by the masses, which is the one where they are insured and protected by the State, i.e. Coinbase, Paypal, Circle (CPC). Whether this is achieved with huge blocks (much greater than 20 MB eventually) and centralized Bitcoin mining, or CPC interoption on their proprietary "side-chains" is irrelevant. It doesn't matter which choice is made now, the effectual outcome on the masses will be the same.

[1] For example someone creates a side-chain with anonymity, so then these coins on the Bitcoin blockchain become tainted and subject to blacklisting.

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?

[cypherdoc]

Rusty may very well be the only level headed one within Blockstream:

Interpretation: Hard Landing Unlikely, But Microtransactions Lose
If the block size doesn’t increase (or doesn’t increase in time): we’ll see transactions get slower, and fees become the significant factor in whether your transaction gets processed quickly.  People will change behaviour: I’m not going to spend 20c to send you 50c!

Because block finding is highly variable and many miners are capping blocks at 750k, we see backlogs at times already; these bursts will happen with increasing frequency from now on.  This will put pressure on Satoshdice and similar services, who will be highly incentivized to use StrawPay or roll their own channel mechanism for off-blockchain microtransactions.

http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=500

the anti-increase crowd never bother to explain clear increasing centralization and regulatory risk caused by forcing everyone to use 3rd party offchain services.  

oh, but of course i forgot, who cares about users, it's about full nodes! :/