Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Erdogan]

Great article explaining some profound details about ownership:

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-ownership-impact-fungibility/

When you aquire a stolen article from a thief, you might be responsible, and have to give the article back to the rightful owner.

Not so with money, when you sell a can of beer to a known thief, nobody can claim the money from you. The reasoning behind it is to secure the fungibility of the money. When you receive money in a transaction, you should not worry about the source of that money. Exactly what we need for bitcoin, for the same reason.

Come to think of it, this is not so with the banks, they worry a lot where the money comes from, and I  have to declare by which acceptable means I have come to own them. Are deposit money not fungible? Strange world, indeed.

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[thezerg]

...

tvbcof, in an alternate universe where we were ALREADY dropping 50MB blocks or so every 10 minutes your arguments would be very sound.  But you can run a full node on a freakin' Raspberry PI!  This very premature limiting of the blockchain size, coupled with Blockstream's possibly competitive technologies, is what makes us cry foul.

The last time I ran bitcoind in support mode (allowing incoming 8333) was on a soekris router which is comparable to an RPI.  That was many years ago, and while it worked, it was very close to not 'working fine'.  Granted, leveldb and some other optimizations have happened since then which helped but things were pushing the envelope, and that is ignoring considerations such at UTXO size and network capacity.  Since I won't allow UPnP on my network and won't run bitcoind on an important machine, I need a sacrifice machine to run it.  I'm currently stuck on satellite here at home which pretty much precludes supporting the network even at the 1MB setting due to total data constraints.  To run bitcoind I have to arrange a remote system that I can trust and that is something of a challenge for a suspicious and careful person.  I'm not about to sacrifice the time and money in support of Bitcoin when the likes of Andresen and Hearn are hanging around trying to kill it.

I'm running it on a used laptop that I bought on ebay 3 years ago for $45 (had to add a disk).  The same laptop doubles as my music player.  Satellite has always been pretty downstream skewed so I'm not surprised if you have issues with any symmetric P2P application.  But your situation is not typical, and you can always purchase a virtual machine for very little if you really wanted a node.

I wish Bitcoin used almost no bandwidth as well... but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

We don't need to shunt Bitcoin off into a settlement-only currency just yet.  We could grow 50 times greater before we have to think about doing that, and there is tremendous value in doing so.  For one, it would allow all the layered technologies time to develop.  And also, we'd probably have 50-100x more users, which IMHO pushes bitcoin over the mass adoption chasm.

To understand my thoughts you need to understand that I consider joe-sixpack users to be a liability on all fronts.  'Outrunning regulation' is laughable to me, and idiots do more harm than good when they try to run critical systems.  Multibitch users are not helpful to the network and, as I say, not helpful in the 'critical mass' equation since Bitcoin with it's batch-mode native function is simply not competitive as an exchange currency and never will be a big factor there.  IOW, the kinds of percentages we need for anything remotely resembling 'critical mass' are completely pie-in-the-sky.  Even if Bitcoin worked worth a shit here, a lot of people love big brother and would hate Bitcoin for that reason anyway.  All Bitcoin traction does is to attract attack from TPTB by virtue of it's positive attributes such as lack of counter-party risk.

Time and time again we see idiots losing their money to criminals and hucksters.  Being a Bitcoin enthusiast has been like watching a fight between a skilled boxer and a punching bag and I don't see that changing as long as idiots are using Bitcoin in it's native form.

Sidechains breaks the single-point-of-failure problem which vexes a 'one-size-fits-all' solution and pushes the critical infrastructure support role to people who can handle it.  It also pushes the benefits of a counter-party-risk free solution down to the masses.  Nobody can stop the masses from giving their money to shysters but it's very possible to arrange for the sidechain operates themselves to have a tough time robbing their users (unlike general alts.)

Am I an 'elitist'?  Fuck ya.  At the end of the day, though, my goal is to have everyone who wants to be able to enjoy the benefits of distributed crypto-currencies.  I just don't want to see Bitcoin ruined in the process of trying to achieve this...but am prepared to deal with this eventuality if that's the way the cookie is to crumble.

Alright, but I think that if you look at Bitcoin's peer-to-peer architecture, consumer wallets like Bitcoin-qt and SPV phone offerings, writings by Satoshi, scalability discussions on the orginal wiki, and countless presentations by others you will see a strong theme where Bitcoin is presented as a universal currency for everyday use by people.  "Be your own bank"

So feel free to make an altcoin with a limited block size.  But for Bitcoin, please stop trying to morph a temporary "growing pains" patch into "the-way-it-was-meant-to-be" to scratch your own personal itch.  It won't work.  We'll see massive abandonment as loss-of-confidence results in holders selling their coins.  And competitive highly scalable crypto-coins will emerge even if I have to build one myself.

[Mixles]

Great article explaining some profound details about ownership:

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-ownership-impact-fungibility/

When you aquire a stolen article from a thief, you might be responsible, and have to give the article back to the rightful owner.

Not so with money, when you sell a can of beer to a known thief, nobody can claim the money from you. The reasoning behind it is to secure the fungibility of the money. When you receive money in a transaction, you should not worry about the source of that money. Exactly what we need for bitcoin, for the same reason.

Come to think of it, this is not so with the banks, they worry a lot where the money comes from, and I  have to declare by which acceptable means I have come to own them. Are deposit money not fungible? Strange world, indeed.

Nobody can claim the specific piece of paper money from you, solely on the basis that it was the very same piece of paper money that was stolen.

They (and others) can still make all sorts of other claims, for money or otherwise, like if you had reasonable cause to believe the paper money was proceeds from criminal activity, and accepted it anyway (see Shrem). The act of spending such knowingly dirty money to make it fungible, is called money laundering, I thought...

[Erdogan]

Great article explaining some profound details about ownership:

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-ownership-impact-fungibility/

When you aquire a stolen article from a thief, you might be responsible, and have to give the article back to the rightful owner.

Not so with money, when you sell a can of beer to a known thief, nobody can claim the money from you. The reasoning behind it is to secure the fungibility of the money. When you receive money in a transaction, you should not worry about the source of that money. Exactly what we need for bitcoin, for the same reason.

Come to think of it, this is not so with the banks, they worry a lot where the money comes from, and I  have to declare by which acceptable means I have come to own them. Are deposit money not fungible? Strange world, indeed.

Nobody can claim the specific piece of paper money from you, solely on the basis that it was the very same piece of paper money that was stolen.

They (and others) can still make all sorts of other claims, for money or otherwise, like if you had reasonable cause to believe the paper money was proceeds from criminal activity, and accepted it anyway (see Shrem). The act of spending such knowingly dirty money to make it fungible, is called money laundering, I thought...

That sounds as a reasonable clarification. I said he was a known thief, and if he wanted to sell me a gold watch that would be suspicious, but there is no reason to believe that the money was stolen, so I think my example is ok. But not totally related to fungibility, so ok, you are right.

[cypherdoc]

the drama continues on:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/894

there's that name Saivann again.  he was involved in the original PressCenter.org debate.

[sickpig]

Mike Hearn's infallible logic:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34206292/

bottomline is you skeptics can disrespect him all day long but the smart among us will listen and think about the content of what he says.

Quite lengthy reply from Adam:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34208939/

worth reding, though.

Remember this quote by Adam when the time comes that they make their proposal to change the Bitcoin protocol to enable LN and SCs.

As you can probably tell I think a unilateral fork without wide-scale consensus from the technical and business communities is a deeply inadvisable.

The bar to add LN and SC enabling protocol changes is wide-scale consensus. If a small number of participants disagree, it doesn't happen by their own logic. Additionally these protocol changes significantly change what Bitcoin fundamentally is much more than a simple 20MB blocksize c

This is the exact reason why I linked Adam's reply: quote for posterity the evaluation criteria used by opponents to gavin's block size increase proposal.

That said, if memory serves the new opcode needed by sc could be introduced by a soft-fork. Though I have to agree that merged mined side chains would introduce a significant modification of miners economic incentives.

One last thing, I think that at least Adam is not opposed to the increase per se, in fact he did say that LN and SC need a modification in the way max block size limit is handled (he talks about burst period), he even praise jgarzik bip 100 on the basis of the "slow" variation entangled in the proposal.

edit: fix typo

[tvbcof]

... But your situation is not typical, and you can always purchase a virtual machine for very little if you really wanted a node.

I've always lived by the motto "if it's not worth doing right, it's not worth doing."  The only machine I could have some degree of confidence in is bare metal in certain datacenters.  The cost of housing alone is significant and network connectivity is a lot beyond that.  Not to mention the cost and hassle of flying to a jurisdiction where I might have some confidence in the durability of the solution in a failure mode scenario that I (and the system I'm supporting) would be guarding against.  These were the standards I used when I was being paid for my services.

[freakying99]

Someone needs to change the title of this thread to.

Gold up BTC collapsing

[Peter R]

the drama continues on:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/894

there's that name Saivann again.  he was involved in the original PressCenter.org debate.

This is getting bizarre…that post has a strange feel, with hints of desperation, like someone is grasping at authority that's slipping through their fingers.  This type of behaviour will only serve to disenfranchise them further, as power migrates to MIT, CoinCenter, and hopefully several new initiatives at university research labs. 

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

[cypherdoc]

the drama continues on:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/894

there's that name Saivann again.  he was involved in the original PressCenter.org debate.

This is getting bizarre…that post has a strange feel, with hints of desperation, like someone is grasping at authority that's slipping through their fingers.  This type of behaviour will only serve to disenfranchise them further, as power migrates to MIT, CoinCenter, and hopefully several new initiatives at university research labs.  

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

theymos is a strange character that has control of all our media outlets; BCT, Reddit, & apparently Bitcoin.org.

i admired him greatly back in the day b/c he helped me understand Bitcoin thru several pm's and a couple of Skype audio conversations.  at first, he was very hesitant to actually talk to me despite my pleadings that i learn more efficiently with the ability to quickly back and forth from conversation vs typing.  he told me he was very uncomfortable talking even tho i agreed to just the audio on Skype; no video (a concession i made to assuage his awkward social concerns).  he said he types faster than he talks.  he wasn't kidding.  the only way i got him to audio was to pay him 4BTC.  expensive in retrospect but worth it for the knowledge.  he WAS socially awkward and i barely got my money's worth given the difficulty of the communication.  

i've been very disappointed ever since in his allowing forum moderators to essentially run wild around here deleting posts they don't like.  and then with the forum donations for a new site.  i'm certainly not alone.

and now this.  i really think it's a power play by the devs to keep control.  marcus said it flat out.  they want control.

[TPTB_need_war]

I wish Bitcoin used almost no bandwidth as well... but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Yes you can.

[Peter R]

...
and now this.  i really think it's a power play by the devs to keep control.  marcus said it flat out.  they want control.

This reminds me of something my IRAP ITA said: "Do you want to be rich, or do you want to be king?  Because you can't be both."

On that note, here's an interesting graph that shows that founders usually do finacially better when they relinquish some control in order to allow the company to grow.  I imagine the same dynamic will play out in bitcoin, and that the early devs are suffering from a version of the "rich-vs-king" dilemma.  

[tvbcof]

theymos is a strange character that has control of all our media outlets; BCT, Reddit, & apparently Bitcoin.org.

theymos was one of the very few who saw what a train-wreck TBF was likely to be when Gavin floated the idea and spoke up about it.  I'll let you guess who another one of these lonely voices might have been.

i admired him greatly back in the day b/c he helped me understand Bitcoin thru several pm's and a couple of Skype audio conversations. ...

Questionable.

i've been very disappointed ever since in his allowing forum moderators to essentially run wild around here deleting posts they don't like.  and then with the forum donations for a new site.  i'm certainly not alone.

I've been pleasantly surprised at the intolerance for over-moderation that theymos has displayed.  I can think of almost nothing I've seen deleted and moderators who've tried to do so for overtly political reasons seem to have taken a hike.  Whether on theymos's orders or not I don't know.

I've ribbed they guy over the years for allowing fairly obvious scammers to have a voice but at the end of the day it is in keeping with running a very free platform and I appreciate that.  It sucks to see people taken by scammers, but this platform allows them to come back and inform others which is a very valuable educational experience for everyone and a lesson that everyone who putters around with Bitcoin needs to learn by one method or another.

[justusranvier]

theymos was one of the very few who saw what a train-wreck TBF was likely to be when Gavin floated the idea and spoke up about it.  I'll let you guess who another one of these lonely voices might have been.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113400.msg1227012#msg1227012

That post also serves as proof that I wasn't singling out Blockstream when I asked them the same question about potential conflicts of interest.

[chriswilmer]

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

Glad I am not the only one!

You'd think this level of hand-wringing about a hard fork would be reserved for changing the 21 million bitcoin limit or something. In 10 years I think this discussion about whether to have 1 MB blocks or 20 MB blocks will sound really strange in our TB-flash-drive streaming-hd-virtual-reality world.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Ok, the derpiness is plumbing new depths of sadness, i think it might be time to check out of the gold collapse and I have some other projects I'd like to work on ... so long and thanx for all the fish sn

bitcoin will scale eventually, patience grasshoppers.

[cypherdoc]

Ok, the derpiness is plumbing new depths of sadness, i think it might be time to check out of the gold collapse and I have some other projects I'd like to work on ... so long and thanx for all the fish sn

bitcoin will scale eventually, patience grasshoppers.

Why do people keep saying they are leaving this thread then always come right back? Maybe I can help:

marcus, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

[solex]

...in fact, both SC and LN _strongly_ prefer the biggest blocksize the network can handle.  What they can't tolerate, however, is Bitcoin being very centralized-- and I don't think your own interests can tolerate that either (assuming you still own some Bitcoin).

reddit post

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.

(my emphasis)

Greg is giving me serious cognitive dissonance with these posts.
He is very concerned about the trend to centralization and yet can countenance a quick fork if necessary.

The most harmless hard fork is one which is prepared so far in advance that all software instances are upgraded before it takes effect. Something which was almost achievable if it had been scheduled in early 2013 with the target date about 2 years ahead. That is what Bitcoin needed.

Today, the time for this luxury is gone and about 6000 nodes exist (which accept connections). The worst scenario after a quick fork is 3000 left on each side, with the best scenario somewhere between 3000 and 6000 on the majority side, say 4500 nodes upgrading. The remainder either switching off or flailing away on a chain with a ridiculous difficulty. What a hammer-blow towards the furnace of centralization!

In my opinion, the odds of a dire situation after the 1MB is hit, needing a quick fork, is about 99%. This not an unreasonable interpretation of the separate findings of David Hudson and Statoshi. Even if Greg thinks the odds of needing a fast fork is more like 10% or 20% (otherwise why describe it in the manner above) then this is surely an unacceptable risk.

Meanwhile, Adam has just given us a Hallelujah moment:

A hard-fork takes a long period of time to deploy due to the non-upgrade risk, people are working on things in the mean-time.
There can be a case for some increase to create some breathing room to work on scaling and decentralising tech, I just mean to say that if we do it in isolation, we're not focussing on the big picture.

Progress at last, buying time to smoothly scale the MC, as well as buying time for SC and LN. FFS! How can this be contentious to SC and LN supporters?

Lastly.
Perhaps Peter R can put this one to bed:

Adam claims that the network overhead in scaling Bitcoin is O(n^2), where n=transactions
Mike counters that it is O(nm), where m=nodes

The latter makes more sense to me, and further, that m is not as significant as it appears because it is highly parallelized.

[Peter R]

Adam claims that the network overhead in scaling Bitcoin is O(n^2), where n=transactions
Mike counters that it is O(nm), where m=nodes

The latter makes more sense to me, and further, that m is not as significant as it appears because it is highly parallelized.

The way I see it, if m nodes need to be made aware of n transactions, then the network overhead for bandwidth is O(nm).  

If we assume that the number of nodes is linearly proportional to the number of transactions, then m = kn and the network overhead is O(n²).  But as you mentioned, m is probably not this significant.  In fact, for the last several years m has gone down as n has gone up, so the network overhead empirically is more like O(n^0.7) (i.e., better than linear).  

Interesting question: right now the Bitcoin network processes about 1 transaction per second while the Visa network processes about 2000.  Right now there are about 6,000 full nodes. If Bitcoin grew to reach Visa's level of transactions per second (2000X growth), would we expect the number of full nodes to grow from 6,000 to 12,000,000?

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

[justusranvier]

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

Its hard to scare people when you talk about O(n) costs per node.