Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[thezerg]

Big Bitcoin breakout underway.

ok you've made me go to bitcoinity.  This had better be good...

Edit: Big O notation is just a way to describe that the "order" of a function is less than that of another function, not counting the constant factor.

Typically used to describe CPU or memory complexity.  Painfully, people rarely identify the variables in their function or what complexity is being described.  So someone will say: "A bitcoin node scales as O(n)", but should really say "A bitcoin node's CPU use scales at O(t), where t = # of transactions, its disk use at O(b) where b = # of blocks, and memory use at O(u) where u = # of individual unspent accounts (UTXOs)"


EDIT2: ok, broke $250 (on all major exchanges) that IS good!

[cypherdoc]

we've broken over the top of resistance:

[cypherdoc]

Long term MACD confirming:

[cypherdoc]

Ouch, short squeeze up the ass.

[TPTB_need_war]

Sell at $320. Remember I told you all in May that rally was coming in June.

[cypherdoc]

Sell at $320. Remember I told you all in May that rally was coming in June.

oh, shut the hell up.

Skype address please.

[thezerg]

Sell at $320. Remember I told you all in May that rally was coming in June.

you say a lot of things.  A LOT of things.  You reply to yourself 20 times.  Your signal to noise ratio is frankly abysmally low.

[cypherdoc]

Sell at $320. Remember I told you all in May that rally was coming in June.

you say a lot of things.  A LOT of things.  You reply to yourself 20 times.  Your signal to noise ratio is frankly abysmally low.

it's zeroo.

[TPTB_need_war]

Readers who do not work for TPTB as shrills, please observe carefully what is going on now.

Hopefully you are smart enough to see.

Sell at $320. Remember I told you all in May that rally was coming in June.

you say a lot of things.  A LOT of things.  You reply to yourself 20 times.  Your signal to noise ratio is frankly abysmally low.

I have consistently stated one prediction for the BTC price in this thread, which was a bounce in summer and a renewed decline to the final low after that < $150.

Btw, I see 3 more No votes since you started this lame ad hominem attack.

[Peter R]

Sell at $320. Remember I told you all in May that rally was coming in June.

you say a lot of things.  A LOT of things.  You reply to yourself 20 times.  Your signal to noise ratio is frankly abysmally low.

it's zeroo.

His posts can be summarized with two bits of information:

00 = "The powers that be will enslave you all!"
01 = He makes a pessimistic comment that distracts from any progress currently being made in the thread
10 = He challenges someone to a boxing match
11 = "I am brilliant and will now leave this thread forever"

I now see full-node count as a red herring; the number of full nodes is dropping because we don't need that many full nodes…

You are forgetting propagation delay and the need for IBLT to deal with it...

Hey!  It looks like with my encoding scheme above we can implement an IBLT for your comments!!

[Adrian-x]

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

I don't have an (maybe I should say: a valid) opinion on the block size debate. I would prefer to err on the side of decentralization, but at this point I'm not even sure what that is. I think magic numbers are a poor solution (but I'm sure they are sometimes necessary).

I'm not afraid of forks, like most people seem to be. I think that everyone should be prepared for how they will deal with possible forks in the future.

What I do know is that after spending a lot of time reading about Bitcoin for the past several years, and getting a feel for some of the people involved, I would prefer to stay far, far away from anything that is related to Mike Hearn. For the life of me, I can't even understand why someone like him is interested in Bitcoin (unless it's to change it into something else entirely). I'm thankful that he has barely touched Bitcoin Core.

So I oppose BitcoinXT, but not necessarily a block size increase.

Disclaimer: I use Mycelium for convenience from time to time and do not know whether or not that is based on any of Hearn's BitcoinJ.

thanks Holiday,

I find myself thinking similar things, ultimately I'm for decentralization, and while I've been horrified by some of Mikes off the cuff ideas in the past, I am largely inspired by the ideas he has pushed through to fruition.

to me decentralization = more distributed, and having centralized control by a group of people no matter their track record is still centralization, Mike is not my first choice for a dictator, but I respect that he doesn't care to do what other people think he should do, but is going to do what he thinks is best that makes it easy to follow him, so long as we are going to the same place it is easy to part ways when he decides to go somewhere strange.  

I may not agree with him on many issues despite that, decentralization of control is the future for Bitcoin. I'm happy with the understanding that running an XT node is not giving him the keys to Bitcoin but doing just the posit, distributing the control system.

[Adrian-x]

I now see full-node count as a red herring; the number of full nodes is dropping because we don't need that many full nodes (see my arguments above).  There's a huge gap between running bitcoin on a raspberry pie and "only the Googles of the world will be able to run bitcoin."  According to all my analysis, we are so far away from bitcoin being runnable by "a few mega corporations," that the "don't-increase-the-blocksize-because-centralization-arguments" come across as hyperbole to me.  

You are forgetting propagation delay and the need for IBLT to deal with it, which is a paradigm which will eventually hand a winner-take-all to the entities that can handle Visa volume on the block chain.

I believe before the big boys throw their transactions at Bitcoin, they want to make sure the paradigm is in place for them to capture it. Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc its all primed and ready to go after IBLT is implemented or large enough block size to handle the scale they want to throw at Bitcoin and force IBLT.

Mike Hearn and the Foundation appears to be captured by those big boys (TPTB).

Blockstream is attempting a rear guard and trying to not give them so much headroom all at once.

Or you might have two factions of the TPTB competing (since the end result if the same for as long as PoW is not fixed).

In any case, I don't really care. It is a morass and needs to be replaced by something that remains truly decentralized long-term.

you do realize the Foundation has been defunct for months now?

Or so you were lead to believe.

And the Rothschilds and Rockefellers also divested all their wealth too.

P.S. I am fairly certain Cypherdoc is a mouthpiece for TPTB. I posit he was purposely compromised by the HashFast offer to maintain his allegiance. This is their usual modus operandi. This is evident by his public role and other factors such as his denial of the fact that Bitcoin core is heading towards a centralized end game.

i am in agreement to talk with you on video Skype.  what's your handle?

yoohoo, TPTB_need_war, yoohoo.

yoohoo, TPTB_need_war, yoohoo.

hooohoooohoooo.

Lol I just realized that you probably can't run bitcoin on a raspberry pie 

if you put the pi2 on top of your raspberry pie you can.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/494420603/raspnode/description

[TPTB_need_war]

Sell at $320. Remember I told you all in May that rally was coming in June.

you say a lot of things.  A LOT of things.  You reply to yourself 20 times.  Your signal to noise ratio is frankly abysmally low.

it's zeroo.

His posts can be summarized with two bits of information:

00 = "The powers that be will enslave you all!"
01 = He makes a pessimistic comment that distracts from any progress currently being made in the thread
10 = He challenges someone to a boxing match
11 = "I am brilliant and will now leave this thread forever"

I now see full-node count as a red herring; the number of full nodes is dropping because we don't need that many full nodes…

You are forgetting propagation delay and the need for IBLT to deal with it...

Hey!  It looks like with my encoding scheme above we can implement an IBLT for your comments!!

Peter R upthread where we were discussing the 21 Inc economics it seemed you were open minded and rational.

Now you are acting like a shrill. Why?

I always respected you as being a engineer of some sorts (obvious sometimes from your use of math, etc). You of course must realize you've completely mischaracterized my posts. You don't like that I pointed out to you some potential game theory on IBLT and headroom in the block size. Okay. Why? You don't want to consider all the possibilities? You are premarried to a preferred conclusion. That is the antithesis of rationality.

Step back from the ledge...

[cypherdoc]

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

I don't have an (maybe I should say: a valid) opinion on the block size debate. I would prefer to err on the side of decentralization, but at this point I'm not even sure what that is. I think magic numbers are a poor solution (but I'm sure they are sometimes necessary).

I'm not afraid of forks, like most people seem to be. I think that everyone should be prepared for how they will deal with possible forks in the future.

What I do know is that after spending a lot of time reading about Bitcoin for the past several years, and getting a feel for some of the people involved, I would prefer to stay far, far away from anything that is related to Mike Hearn. For the life of me, I can't even understand why someone like him is interested in Bitcoin (unless it's to change it into something else entirely). I'm thankful that he has barely touched Bitcoin Core.

So I oppose BitcoinXT, but not necessarily a block size increase.

Disclaimer: I use Mycelium for convenience from time to time and do not know whether or not that is based on any of Hearn's BitcoinJ.

thanks Holiday,

I find myself thinking similar things, ultimately I'm for decentralization, and while I've been horrified by some of Mikes off the cuff ideas in the past, I am largely inspired by the ideas he has pushed through to fruition.

to me decentralization = more distributed, and having centralized control by a group of people no matter their track record is still centralization, Mike is not my first choice for a dictator, but I respect that he doesn't care to do what other people think he should do, but is going to do what he thinks is best that makes it easy to follow him, so long as we are going to the same place and easy to part ways when he decides to go somewhere strange.  

I may not agree with him on many issues despite that, decentralization of control is the future for Bitcoin. I'm happy with the understanding that running an XT node is not giving him the keys to Bitcoin but doing just the posit, distributing the control system.

imagine the worst case; he is lead core dev dictator and makes a pig headed wrong move with the code. 

just refuse to update or just fork him off.

[TPTB_need_war]

imagine the worst case; he is lead core dev dictator and makes a pig headed wrong move with the code. 

just refuse to update or just fork him off.

You know damn well it isn't that simple.

The disingenuous way you present arguments is so obvious for someone with a brain stem.

[rocks]

I don't think the full node count would scale as far as 12m in the growth example above, but payment channels for node services would at least reverse the decline even when it becomes necessary to support that loading.

I agree.  

I've been thinking a lot about full node count lately, and I could also imagine a future where node count continues to decline but network decentralization actually improves.  

Let's imagine a distant future where:

  - Every major research university operates 1 full node on average (there's 108 in the US, 15 in Canada, and let's assume 150 elsewhere). That makes about 280 nodes.  

  - Every major bitcoin company in this "bitcoin future" and every mining pool operates a full node.  Assume another 280 nodes.  

  - Various branches of governments in most countries run a few nodes.  Assume 190 countries x 2 nodes = 380 nodes.

  - And a bunch of wealthy bitcoiners operate their own nodes.  Assume another 300 or so.
 
This gives a total of only ~1,240 nodes, but I think such a configuration would be more decentralized than the current state of the network.  
I'm not suggesting that this will actually happen, just pointing out that the network doesn't necessarily need hundreds of thousands of nodes.  

Fully agree, I was saying something along these lines in the earlier UTXO commit discussion where we might end up with only a small number of "archival" nodes that maintain a full history, while most nodes function as some form of pruned node. The reason this or your situation above works is you only need one honest node on the network to highlight and flag issues.

If some majority of full nodes (which is possible with a small node count) decide to collude and cheat, because of the way the blockchain is structured any single honest node has the ability to present irrefutable proof of such collusion to the public.

Again, this goes back to the fact that Bitcoin's decentralization is driven by the mining security process, not the node count (which can be influenced by Sybil attacks, mining cannot be influenced by Sybil attacks because it requires work). Even with 1 billion tps the mining situation looks similar to today. A large number of independent miners operating over stratum (<1kbps) connected to a small number of pools. If any pools collude, it only takes one honest node to highlight that and those pools would see their miners switch to honest pools. As long as the independent miner remains decentralized, Bitcoin is OK.

This is also why your O(nm) equation works. It is OK for the number of nodes m to decrease as needed bringing us back to O(n). The devs' arguments that you can't scale O(n^2) networks is correct, but this is showing they don't understand the network and Bitcoin's economics as well as they think.

[Adrian-x]

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

I don't have an (maybe I should say: a valid) opinion on the block size debate. I would prefer to err on the side of decentralization, but at this point I'm not even sure what that is. I think magic numbers are a poor solution (but I'm sure they are sometimes necessary).

I'm not afraid of forks, like most people seem to be. I think that everyone should be prepared for how they will deal with possible forks in the future.

What I do know is that after spending a lot of time reading about Bitcoin for the past several years, and getting a feel for some of the people involved, I would prefer to stay far, far away from anything that is related to Mike Hearn. For the life of me, I can't even understand why someone like him is interested in Bitcoin (unless it's to change it into something else entirely). I'm thankful that he has barely touched Bitcoin Core.

So I oppose BitcoinXT, but not necessarily a block size increase.

Disclaimer: I use Mycelium for convenience from time to time and do not know whether or not that is based on any of Hearn's BitcoinJ.

thanks Holiday,

I find myself thinking similar things, ultimately I'm for decentralization, and while I've been horrified by some of Mikes off the cuff ideas in the past, I am largely inspired by the ideas he has pushed through to fruition.

to me decentralization = more distributed, and having centralized control by a group of people no matter their track record is still centralization, Mike is not my first choice for a dictator, but I respect that he doesn't care to do what other people think he should do, but is going to do what he thinks is best that makes it easy to follow him, so long as we are going to the same place and easy to part ways when he decides to go somewhere strange.  

I may not agree with him on many issues despite that, decentralization of control is the future for Bitcoin. I'm happy with the understanding that running an XT node is not giving him the keys to Bitcoin but doing just the posit, distributing the control system.

imagine the worst case; he is lead core dev dictator and makes a pig headed wrong move with the code. 

just refuse to update or just fork him off.

That's the worst case, the first time you do it is the hardest, once we fork from Core, it'll be easier to do it again, next time there will be more options I hope, I don't expect the Core developers to stop developing.  

[justusranvier]

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

I don't have an (maybe I should say: a valid) opinion on the block size debate. I would prefer to err on the side of decentralization, but at this point I'm not even sure what that is. I think magic numbers are a poor solution (but I'm sure they are sometimes necessary).

I'm not afraid of forks, like most people seem to be. I think that everyone should be prepared for how they will deal with possible forks in the future.

What I do know is that after spending a lot of time reading about Bitcoin for the past several years, and getting a feel for some of the people involved, I would prefer to stay far, far away from anything that is related to Mike Hearn. For the life of me, I can't even understand why someone like him is interested in Bitcoin (unless it's to change it into something else entirely). I'm thankful that he has barely touched Bitcoin Core.

So I oppose BitcoinXT, but not necessarily a block size increase.

Disclaimer: I use Mycelium for convenience from time to time and do not know whether or not that is based on any of Hearn's BitcoinJ.

thanks Holiday,

I find myself thinking similar things, ultimately I'm for decentralization, and while I've been horrified by some of Mikes off the cuff ideas in the past, I am largely inspired by the ideas he has pushed through to fruition.

to me decentralization = more distributed, and having centralized control by a group of people no matter their track record is still centralization, Mike is not my first choice for a dictator, but I respect that he doesn't care to do what other people think he should do, but is going to do what he thinks is best that makes it easy to follow him, so long as we are going to the same place it is easy to part ways when he decides to go somewhere strange.  

I may not agree with him on many issues despite that, decentralization of control is the future for Bitcoin. I'm happy with the understanding that running an XT node is not giving him the keys to Bitcoin but doing just the posit, distributing the control system.

The way to support development decentralization is to run nodes that are not Bitcoin Core or its derivatives (including XT)

Once Gavin (or someone) produces a firm proposal, then run libbitcoin or btcd nodes that have been patched to support it.

[TPTB_need_war]

I don't think the full node count would scale as far as 12m in the growth example above, but payment channels for node services would at least reverse the decline even when it becomes necessary to support that loading.

I agree.  

I've been thinking a lot about full node count lately, and I could also imagine a future where node count continues to decline but network decentralization actually improves.  

Let's imagine a distant future where:

  - Every major research university operates 1 full node on average (there's 108 in the US, 15 in Canada, and let's assume 150 elsewhere). That makes about 280 nodes.  

  - Every major bitcoin company in this "bitcoin future" and every mining pool operates a full node.  Assume another 280 nodes.  

  - Various branches of governments in most countries run a few nodes.  Assume 190 countries x 2 nodes = 380 nodes.

  - And a bunch of wealthy bitcoiners operate their own nodes.  Assume another 300 or so.
 
This gives a total of only ~1,240 nodes, but I think such a configuration would be more decentralized than the current state of the network.  
I'm not suggesting that this will actually happen, just pointing out that the network doesn't necessarily need hundreds of thousands of nodes.  

Fully agree, I was saying something along these lines in the earlier UTXO commit discussion where we might end up with only a small number of "archival" nodes that maintain a full history, while most nodes function as some form of pruned node. The reason this or your situation above works is you only need one honest node on the network to highlight and flag issues.

If some majority of full nodes (which is possible with a small node count) decide to collude and cheat, because of the way the blockchain is structured any single honest node has the ability to present irrefutable proof of such collusion to the public.

Again, this goes back to the fact that Bitcoin's decentralization is driven by the mining security process, not the node count (which can be influenced by Sybil attacks, mining cannot be influenced by Sybil attacks because it requires work). Even with 1 billion tps the mining situation looks similar to today. A large number of independent miners operating over stratum (<1kbps) connected to a small number of pools. If any pools collude, it only takes one honest node to highlight that and those pools would see their miners switch to honest pools. As long as the independent miner remains decentralized, Bitcoin is OK.

This is also why your O(nm) equation works. It is OK for the number of nodes m to decrease as needed bringing us back to O(n). The devs' arguments that you can't scale O(n^2) networks is correct, but this is showing they don't understand the network and Bitcoin's economics as well as they think.

This is actually a very astute point in bold and I am surprised given the other dumb technical errors you made upthread.

However what you fail to grasp is that Bitcoin's protocol can be forked by 51% of the hashrate.

Those who don't follow, lose their BTC value in that chain. They could spend in another fork, but the Coinbase, Circle, and Paypal masses will stay on the coin managed by the elite. And they can 50% attack your minority fork too claiming it is rogue.

Now with pegged side chains, you could move your BTC value out of the main and into your minority fork. But it still doesn't protect your minority fork against 50% attack.

And you don't have a concentration of smaller miners. The mining is becoming more and more concentrated in larger ASIC farms (who won't want to risk destroying their hardware investment on some fight against TPTB to support a minority chain). And even the P2P network is becoming concentrated around larger hubs that thus have influence over the propagation delays.

[cypherdoc]

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

I don't have an (maybe I should say: a valid) opinion on the block size debate. I would prefer to err on the side of decentralization, but at this point I'm not even sure what that is. I think magic numbers are a poor solution (but I'm sure they are sometimes necessary).

I'm not afraid of forks, like most people seem to be. I think that everyone should be prepared for how they will deal with possible forks in the future.

What I do know is that after spending a lot of time reading about Bitcoin for the past several years, and getting a feel for some of the people involved, I would prefer to stay far, far away from anything that is related to Mike Hearn. For the life of me, I can't even understand why someone like him is interested in Bitcoin (unless it's to change it into something else entirely). I'm thankful that he has barely touched Bitcoin Core.

So I oppose BitcoinXT, but not necessarily a block size increase.

Disclaimer: I use Mycelium for convenience from time to time and do not know whether or not that is based on any of Hearn's BitcoinJ.

thanks Holiday,

I find myself thinking similar things, ultimately I'm for decentralization, and while I've been horrified by some of Mikes off the cuff ideas in the past, I am largely inspired by the ideas he has pushed through to fruition.

to me decentralization = more distributed, and having centralized control by a group of people no matter their track record is still centralization, Mike is not my first choice for a dictator, but I respect that he doesn't care to do what other people think he should do, but is going to do what he thinks is best that makes it easy to follow him, so long as we are going to the same place and easy to part ways when he decides to go somewhere strange.  

I may not agree with him on many issues despite that, decentralization of control is the future for Bitcoin. I'm happy with the understanding that running an XT node is not giving him the keys to Bitcoin but doing just the posit, distributing the control system.

imagine the worst case; he is lead core dev dictator and makes a pig headed wrong move with the code.  

just refuse to update or just fork him off.

That's the worst case, the first time you do it is the hardest, once we fork from Core, it'll be easier to do it again, next time there will be more options I hope, I don't expect the Core developers to stop developing.  

personally, if XT becomes a reality, i don't expect there to be a surviving Core for devs to dev on.  value will quickly be sucked out of Core and those devs left behind will become totally irrelevant with their careers shattered.  and that's b/c there has been enough of a discussion over this obvious 1MB obstruction that i'd think that there will be no for profits who will be willing to hitch their future to decision making by Blockstream.  esp true for Nasdaq and NYSE who want and need thousands of cheap, reliable tx's throughput on the MC, the most secure and apolitical one.

once this happens, Gavin and Mike will be happy to recruit a whole new core dev team to minimize the chances of such a huge disagreement happening once again.  everyone is for diversity but this hostage situation is way over the top and can't be tolerated.