Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

Looks like Gavin's plan to get the miners to join his coup d'état is not going so great, lol

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114481/chinese-exchanges-reject-gavin-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase

LOL, this quote just cut the legs out from Blockstream's main objection to raising the block limit; that being the large block attack  on small miners supposedly facilitated by "superior"  bandwidth connections. Well, the largest miners in the world are telling us they have "inferior"  connections! Lol! What a bunch of amateurs.

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

i just have to repeat this quote and add another from the article to discredit the anti-Gavin's #1 objection to increasing the blocksize; the large miner large block attack:

"Similarly, Wang argued:
“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

this was from BTCChina's director of engineering Mikael Wang, the #3 in size mining pool in the world.  his statement is inclusive of the Discus Fish and AntPool, the #1 & #2 pools in size in the world as they are also in China.

so who has more credibility in this matter?  the pools themselves, who have the hard data?  or the armchair apparatchiks being the likes of Greg Maxwell, LukeJr, pwiullie, Corallo, and Peter Todd?  the answer is simple:  the armchair experts are wrong.

Armchairs might be wrong. But toilet USGavin is being flushed away by chineese pandas. China 1 usg 0

the Chinese miner question can easily be counterbalanced by this map of full node locations:

[1714062518]

1714062518

[1714062518]

1714062518

[1714062518]

1714062518

[marcus_of_augustus]

so who has more credibility in this matter?  the pools themselves, who have the hard data?  or the armchair apparatchiks being the likes of Greg Maxwell, LukeJr, pwiullie, Corallo, and Peter Todd?  the answer is simple:  the armchair experts are wrong.

These guys are actually writing the code you are running, are you making code commits ... I mean who's really the "armchair expert" here?

Just stop being a dick. You are looking worse and worse every time you open your ignorant mouth to trash the developers.

[TPTB_need_war]

I understand Cypherdoc criticizes Gregory's stake in Bitcoin because Greg is on the other side of the block size increase debate. And he seems to be jealous that Greg was gifted some hardware in exchange for (and/or to aid) his development work.

Seems to me that there will always be jealously, but Satoshi seems to mostly get a free ride. Is it because he is anonymous, gone, or because he caused a star to appear in the eyes of the Bitcoin supporters?

don't be an idiot about what you don't know.  my criticism of gmax goes back years from simply observing his bearishness and misunderstandings around mining centralization.  it then escalated several notches from the Press Center debate from what i found to be highly authoritarian behavior.  he also has chased me off the dev IRC channels in the past which by itself wasn't a big deal but contributed to my thinking of him as a self important apparatchik presiding over Bitcoin.  then also, i've observed his shameless dealings in the mining hardware section where he lobbies for free hardware.  oh and then the SC's financial conflict with Blockstream.  he keeps adding to the list rather quickly though now with this anti Gavin debate wherein it's becoming all too clear to the community that he is a problem.

I observed some similar behavior. Mea culpa. I will accede to you on that aspect.

But is that a sufficient justification for not wanting him to beg for some hardware so he can be vested in the coin.

Any way maybe the answer to my question is that Gmax isn't the lead dev. Satoshi was.

[hdbuck]

Looks like Gavin's plan to get the miners to join his coup d'état is not going so great, lol

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114481/chinese-exchanges-reject-gavin-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase

LOL, this quote just cut the legs out from Blockstream's main objection to raising the block limit; that being the large block attack  on small miners supposedly facilitated by "superior"  bandwidth connections. Well, the largest miners in the world are telling us they have "inferior"  connections! Lol! What a bunch of amateurs.

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

i just have to repeat this quote and add another from the article to discredit the anti-Gavin's #1 objection to increasing the blocksize; the large miner large block attack:

"Similarly, Wang argued:
“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

this was from BTCChina's director of engineering Mikael Wang, the #3 in size mining pool in the world.  his statement is inclusive of the Discus Fish and AntPool, the #1 & #2 pools in size in the world as they are also in China.

so who has more credibility in this matter?  the pools themselves, who have the hard data?  or the armchair apparatchiks being the likes of Greg Maxwell, LukeJr, pwiullie, Corallo, and Peter Todd?  the answer is simple:  the armchair experts are wrong.

Armchairs might be wrong. But toilet USGavin is being flushed away by chineese pandas. China 1 usg 0

the Chinese miner question can easily be counterbalanced by this map of full node locations:

Most chineese outsource their servers for obvious reasons. Its not the service providers location that counts but rather the location of their contractors. Nice try

[Adrian-x]

Looks like Gavin's plan to get the miners to join his coup d'état is not going so great, lol

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114481/chinese-exchanges-reject-gavin-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase

LOL, this quote just cut the legs out from Blockstream's main objection to raising the block limit; that being the large block attack  on small miners supposedly facilitated by "superior"  bandwidth connections. Well, the largest miners in the world are telling us they have "inferior"  connections! Lol! What a bunch of amateurs.

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

i just have to repeat this quote and add another from the article to discredit the anti-Gavin's #1 objection to increasing the blocksize; the large miner large block attack:

"Similarly, Wang argued:
“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

this was from BTCChina's director of engineering Mikael Wang, the #3 in size mining pool in the world.  his statement is inclusive of the Discus Fish and AntPool, the #1 & #2 pools in size in the world as they are also in China.

so who has more credibility in this matter?  the pools themselves, who have the hard data?  or the armchair apparatchiks being the likes of Greg Maxwell, LukeJr, pwiullie, Corallo, and Peter Todd?  the answer is simple:  the armchair experts are wrong.

Its a Business issue not a Bitcoin issue, cheep warehousing and energy coat with poor bandwidth "V" expensive warehousing and Energy with Good Bandwidth, Gmax and LukeJr feel a central planing comity can resolve the indifference with smaller blocks.

It's a free market the bigger farms should move closer to the majority of the nodes, or should we have the Core Dev's engineer Bitcoin to accommodate the Chinese minority.  

[TPTB_need_war]

Now, if Monero or pretty much any total shitcoin was a sidechain and I could have the proper level of confidence that I could, autonomously, shift my holdings back to BTC, I'd be all over it.  If XMR is as great for privacy as iCEBREAKER claims (again and again and again), fantastic!  I'd happily use it whenever I have that need.

...
But I don't see why we need Blockstream to do that. Afaics, any altcoin could offer the feature where its coin supply is the number of BTC on specified reserve on the Bitcoin blockchain (using the methods devised by Blockstream).

Where I see something like Blockstream being of enduring value is that I'm not going to be checking every line of code of every (of the many) sidechains I want to peg.  The stamp of approval from some organization I trust is what I would be using to make a judgement.

Of course in the early stages there is a lot of fairly intricate work to get the crypto and certain aspects of the security developed.

I focus on the makeup of the Blockstream group significantly for these reasons.  Indeed, it is because sipa and Maxwell in particular are involved in Bitcoin core that I retain the position that I do.  I would probably have sold a lot more (or tried to) at the $1000 mark if Gavin was the main guy actually doing things.  Ironically it looks like Maxwell might have done me a dis-service by lending Bitcoin credibility at a time when I should have been bailing.

Edit: there is one way side chains enable scaling. That is the side chain is a centralized ledger. So if the masses can be enticed to spend their BTC into the Coinbase+Paypal+Circle cartel side chain, then it can scale easily. And then the hashrate of the Bitcoin blockchain will wane and can be attacked by the cartel.

Yeah a cartel side chain is great sell out to TPTB. Go! Good job!

Blockstream is (unwittingly?) enabling an easy path for the cartel to fork Bitcoin.

I don't think it was clear to readers that the reason the red bolded sentence is particularly worrisome for Bitcoin is because those who remain in the decentralized fork have to fear a declining hashrate and 50% attack.

Side chains are a natural feature that will be added to any crypto-coin in the future, thus the design of crypto-coins has to eliminate the 50% attack.

Again I propose doing that by reducing the power of the consensus center, i.e. applying Tim Berner-Lee's Principle of Least Power.

[cypherdoc]

so who has more credibility in this matter?  the pools themselves, who have the hard data?  or the armchair apparatchiks being the likes of Greg Maxwell, LukeJr, pwiullie, Corallo, and Peter Todd?  the answer is simple:  the armchair experts are wrong.

These guys are actually writing the code you are running, are you making code commits ... I mean who's really the "armchair expert" here?

Just stop being a dick. You are looking worse and worse every time you open your ignorant mouth to trash the developers.

marcus, you have long been the real dick.

nice of you to ignore the thrust of my argument.  the armchair experts on this matter who haven't done any studies on the matter are blockading the 80-90% of the community's wishes to increase the block size based on just this large block attack hypothetical that just got totally trashed by the large miners they were pontificating about.

how do you explain that?

[Armando]

By the way, are there any reliable exchanges for XBT/XAU trading with margin trade etc.. ?

[TPTB_need_war]

do you care to explain how it's centralized again.

if the idea you have is correct then it needs to spread, it wont spread if it cant be understood.

can you ELI5.

Because the center (the group acting in lock step) has the power to include or not include transactions (and set transaction fees).

That alone is already centralization.

And worse is that power (lack of autonomy of the ends of the network) can be monopolized, e.g. State regulation of mining, Larry Summer's 21 Inc economics that mine for free for the cartel, Sybil attack on pools, economies-of-scale (and fiat subsidy via the usury backstop) with ASICs, electricity costs charged to the society, Transactions Withholding Attack, etc, etc, etc. Do I need to enumerate every monopolization vector in detail again (each was already debated upthread)?

I feel the force of the argument, but I think it only applies to the ledger-updating protocol, not the ledger itself. From an investment perspective, the ledger is what matters. The ledger is where the most economically important network effects are.

Even if TPTB can centralize and control the protocol, they can't stop the users of the ledger (BTC holders) from switching to a different ledger-updating protocol. Thus the store of value is maintained, and the network effect of what is now called "the Bitcoin ledger" is maintained. Now they could cut it off in its infancy, push another ledger to compete with it, etc., and that would be damaging, but you'd still have that core group of people who are aligned with the principles Bitcoin was intended to uphold, ready to carry on with that ledger.

One of the general classes of mistakes I see repeated in economic analysis is the erroneous concept that time is reversible.

Path dependencies proliferate not vice versa.

For example, the wealth effect (i.e. market price determines market cap != wealth invested) destroys wealth on the egress.

[TPTB_need_war]

XMR is a complement, not competition, for BTC.  One provides transparency, the other opacity.  Salt & Pepper.  

If it is competition at least there's a remote chance for xmr, otherwise it is doomed -- people that need it will not hold the units; they will make use and those units will be exchanged for btc units ASAP in the other end.

It might survive as a sidechain though.

Where is the evidence for these naked assertions?  (Visible) market volume vs emission indicates most XMR miners are accumulating.

Why would the mutually-reinforcing perfect complement to BTC be "doomed?"  Let's wait until sidechains exist before drawing conclusions.

Another part of XMR's attraction is its property of being a hedge against BTC implemented with a completely different dev team, codebase, and PoW.

If forced to choose between them, I'd rather hold perfectly fungible XMR than possibly tainted, potentially white/black/red/grey-listed BTC.

majamalu's point is that for money, there can only be one dominate ledger. He is saying that for Monero to succeed, Monero has to become that ledger over Bitcoin, and there will not be 2 separate ledgers side by side.  

Commerce requires a single ledger in order for two entities to interact, and this is why we have always ended up with a single global unit of money that everyone uses. That unit was gold where national currencies were valued by how much gold backed their issuance. This switched over night at Brenton woods when the world agreed to switch the backing unit from Gold to FRNs, and today currencies now require FRNs in the form of treasuries to back them.

If crypto currencies succeed, there will be one successful one. That is why majamalu says Monero needs to be in competition with Bitcoin to succeed. It's either or, not side by side.

This presumes that Bitcoin has any chance of becoming the global unit-of-account, which I assert is preposterous (any NWO reserve is going to have to be negotiated politically among a power-sharing between nations in a multi-polar world and any non-NWO attempt will need scaling and decentralization Bitcoin can't do).

We are no where near that. We are still trying to unlock huge markets which Bitcoin can't EVER touch (not without radical redesign that is not only implausible but wouldn't be "Bitcoin" any more).

[Adrian-x]

Most chineese outsource their servers for obvious reasons. Its not the service providers location that counts but rather the location of their contractors. Nice try

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

Are most Chinese outsourcing to the 1 of 91 nodes located in China? the concern quoted above would imply that or it would imply they are outsourcing to some on in North America.

eather way they better jack up of piss off, Bitcoin is not a charity, they should outsource to someone with more bandwidth, let me guess Blockstream wants to keep a client happy by limiting the block size?

Nice try

[cypherdoc]

Most chineese outsource their servers for obvious reasons. Its not the service providers location that counts but rather the location of their contractors. Nice try

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

Are most Chinese outsourcing to the 1 of 91 nodes located in China? the concern quoted above would imply that or it would imply they are outsourcing to some on in North America.

eather way they better jack up of piss off, Bitcoin is not a charity, they should outsource to someone with more bandwidth, let me guess Blockstream wants to keep a client happy by limiting the block size?

Nice try

not a client but $21M worth of investors.

[TPTB_need_war]

Note that just proving the cryptographic properties of ring signatures isn't enough, because some other part of the system might leak information or be susceptible to privacy-reducing user error. You have to evaluate the entire stack.

I am still concerned that Monero allows rings to be oversubscribed in terms of being overlapping ring sets. This might need to be improved but I need to spend more time analyzing this.

But the anonymity set issue is distinct from the End-to-End principle scaling issue which off-chain mixing can not achieve.

[TPTB_need_war]

i've said this for years.  so all you boomer-fucks (my colleagues like tvbcof) who think you're going to impose your will, retirement benefits, and debts onto the young of this country got a nasty surprise awaiting you:

http://www.coindesk.com/nyse-chairman-millennials-trust-bitcoin-more-than-fiat/

your only salvation will be to buy Bitcoin to, at minimum, act as a hedge against fiat implosion.  but if you actually want to make money thru the transition, you will buy moar.

And you think the millennial generation with all their swiping won't embrace a micropayment per second in their activity.

[Adrian-x]

Now, if Monero or pretty much any total shitcoin was a sidechain and I could have the proper level of confidence that I could, autonomously, shift my holdings back to BTC, I'd be all over it.  If XMR is as great for privacy as iCEBREAKER claims (again and again and again), fantastic!  I'd happily use it whenever I have that need.

...
But I don't see why we need Blockstream to do that. Afaics, any altcoin could offer the feature where its coin supply is the number of BTC on specified reserve on the Bitcoin blockchain (using the methods devised by Blockstream).

Where I see something like Blockstream being of enduring value is that I'm not going to be checking every line of code of every (of the many) sidechains I want to peg.  The stamp of approval from some organization I trust is what I would be using to make a judgement.

Of course in the early stages there is a lot of fairly intricate work to get the crypto and certain aspects of the security developed.

I focus on the makeup of the Blockstream group significantly for these reasons.  Indeed, it is because sipa and Maxwell in particular are involved in Bitcoin core that I retain the position that I do.  I would probably have sold a lot more (or tried to) at the $1000 mark if Gavin was the main guy actually doing things.  Ironically it looks like Maxwell might have done me a dis-service by lending Bitcoin credibility at a time when I should have been bailing.

Edit: there is one way side chains enable scaling. That is the side chain is a centralized ledger. So if the masses can be enticed to spend their BTC into the Coinbase+Paypal+Circle cartel side chain, then it can scale easily. And then the hashrate of the Bitcoin blockchain will wane and can be attacked by the cartel.

Yeah a cartel side chain is great sell out to TPTB. Go! Good job!

Blockstream is (unwittingly?) enabling an easy path for the cartel to fork Bitcoin.

I don't think it was clear to readers that the reason the red bolded sentence is particularly worrisome for Bitcoin is because those who remain in the decentralized fork have to fear a declining hashrate and 50% attack.

Side chains are a natural feature that will be added to any crypto-coin in the future, thus the design of crypto-coins has to eliminate the 50% attack.

Again I propose doing that by reducing the power of the consensus center, i.e. applying Tim Berner-Lee's Principle of Least Power.

the only centralization problem i see is the centralization of Core developers under the Blockstream banner, and their lack economic understanding and yes if you have read the 200 pages of SC debate I've argued your point in red until red in the face.

The money won't come in to Bitcoin unless it has no other choice, the economic majority with trillions have yet to invest in crypto wherever that money flows, the network grows, SC will have features that serve the economic majority better than Bitcoin.

I would rather the economic majority bend to the will of Satoshi (screw the developers who don't get it) than have the economic majority create a better crypto by leveraging a SC.  

[TPTB_need_war]

I'd imagine that there are quite a few litecoin bagholders there who would be happy to see bitcoin hobbled by limited transaction capacity.

This is a really informative thread,  particularly page 17: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144895.335

Really the entire thread is worth reading, so you don't miss quotes like this:

RE: lots of code to write if you can't keep up with transaction volume:  sure.  So?

Transaction volume itself leads to centralization too, simply by ensuring that only a miner able to keep up with the large volume of low-fee transactions can make a profit.

I really don't understand this logic.

Yes, it is a fact of life that if you have a system where people are competing, the people who are less efficient will be driven out of business. So there will be fewer people in that business.

You seem to be saying that we should subsidize inefficient miners by limiting the block size, therefore driving up fees and making users pay for their inefficiency.

All in the name of vague worries about "too much centralization."

Gavin doesn't think out-of-the-box in this case and builds a strawman.

Are they inefficient because the design forces them to be.

[Adrian-x]

Most chineese outsource their servers for obvious reasons. Its not the service providers location that counts but rather the location of their contractors. Nice try

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

Are most Chinese outsourcing to the 1 of 91 nodes located in China? the concern quoted above would imply that or it would imply they are outsourcing to some on in North America.

eather way they better jack up of piss off, Bitcoin is not a charity, they should outsource to someone with more bandwidth, let me guess Blockstream wants to keep a client happy by limiting the block size?

Nice try

not a client but $21M worth of investors.

Blockstream have many conflicts of interest, as the Duck says, Wang is outsourcing block propagation and optimization to someone for good reason, how are we to know that service is not benign provided by Blockstream, and if it is, that would explain why all Blockstream employees are looking to limit the block size.

[Adrian-x]

i've said this for years.  so all you boomer-fucks (my colleagues like tvbcof) who think you're going to impose your will, retirement benefits, and debts onto the young of this country got a nasty surprise awaiting you:

http://www.coindesk.com/nyse-chairman-millennials-trust-bitcoin-more-than-fiat/

your only salvation will be to buy Bitcoin to, at minimum, act as a hedge against fiat implosion.  but if you actually want to make money thru the transition, you will buy moar.

And you think the millennial generation with all their swiping won't embrace a micropayment per second in their activity.

it all depends on how well they understand Money.

[cypherdoc]

Most chineese outsource their servers for obvious reasons. Its not the service providers location that counts but rather the location of their contractors. Nice try

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

Are most Chinese outsourcing to the 1 of 91 nodes located in China? the concern quoted above would imply that or it would imply they are outsourcing to some on in North America.

eather way they better jack up of piss off, Bitcoin is not a charity, they should outsource to someone with more bandwidth, let me guess Blockstream wants to keep a client happy by limiting the block size?

Nice try

not a client but $21M worth of investors.

Blockstream have many conflicts of interest, as the Duck says, Wang is outsourcing block propagation and optimization to someone for good reason, how are we to know that service is not benign provided by Blockstream, and if it is, that would explain why all Blockstream employees are looking to limit the block size.

Wang just made it quite crystal clear there is no way for them to outsource to improve propagation or optimization.  he didn't say that specifically but he doesn't have to.  if there was, they would've done it by now to further decrease any orphaning they're already having as their margins are quite thin.  they are in the Nash Equilibrium.  

the smaller Chinese miner on the dev list the other day said they were outsourcing to Alydan and Linode which improved their connection to 100MB/s but still left them at a disadvantage b/c they are in China.  in other words, the limiting factor is not the size of the miner but the fact that they are in China.  which shoots the hell outta the Blockstream FUD.

[TPTB_need_war]

i've said this for years.  so all you boomer-fucks (my colleagues like tvbcof) who think you're going to impose your will, retirement benefits, and debts onto the young of this country got a nasty surprise awaiting you:

http://www.coindesk.com/nyse-chairman-millennials-trust-bitcoin-more-than-fiat/

your only salvation will be to buy Bitcoin to, at minimum, act as a hedge against fiat implosion.  but if you actually want to make money thru the transition, you will buy moar.

And you think the millennial generation with all their swiping won't embrace a micropayment per second in their activity.

it all depends on how well they understand Money.

It has nothing to do with their understanding of money.

Micropayments are the only way certain business models could function. There is a huge economy that doesn't happen without micropayments. We will never remove the Sybil attacks on Tor without micropayments.

The generative essence is that the maximization of the division-of-labor trend requires increasing granularity of transactions.

This is an inexorable trend. For example, 1000s of years ago one had to carry around a slap of Iron to make a payment. This required payments to be coalesced supporting the Transaction Cost Theory of the Firm (which is antithetical to the maximum division-of-labor and its End-to-end Principle implication).

The argument against micropayments was the cognitive cost places a lower bound on the transaction size, but this cognitive decision process can be automated for the user. For example, I join a dating site and agree to pay 1 cent per message I send, thus I only make this cognitive decision once for all micropayments I do and this eliminates the need for a CAPTCHA or some other intrusive means of preventing spam (a form of Sybil attack).

It is precisely because of this cognitive load that non-micropayments can't scale to maximum division-of-labor. How many experts can you reason about to pay $100-$1000 each for some service? But let's say you can automate by agreeing to pay 1 cent per research paper accessed then you can preview unlimited experts without cognitive load on each transaction.

Micropayments monetize the Gift Economy of the Knowledge Age. This is what Reddit and Doggie Coin were all about. Without that monetization, the Gift Economy devolves into corporate sponsorship of those with reputation which all that centralized evil of the Transaction Cost Theory of the Corporation.