Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Cconvert2G36]

This already happened, several years ago in fact. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.

The former already happening substantially negates your second point. Additionally, we are talking about graduated increases here, not 1 to 256MB overnight.

No it doesn't negate the second point unless you think winner-take-all (or at least greater centralization) of the pools is a desired next step.

Also the former did not already happen for those with sufficient hashrate (or perhaps hardware NAV economics) such that mining on a pool has undesirable tradeoffs, such as paying fees (or perhaps anonymity timing correlation attacks on onion routing to the known termination node the pool). I don't claim to be omniscient on all the reasons why nodes don't all mine on pools. Also keep in mind P2Pool.

You are mistaken if you think solo miners, large enough to reliably mine solo blocks, don't operate very well connected and outfitted nodes already. P2Pool may be another case because of its own architecture, but in reality it's not remotely large enough to justify outsized influence on protocol wide parameters. If miners felt that was wrong, they could work to give P2Pool more share in terms of global hashrate.  

[1713944614]

1713944614

[shmadz]

Once upon a time when gold was used as currency, silver was also used because you couldn't reasonably mint coin small enough to pay for things like a meal (I heard that this is also why the "bar tab" was invented -- when even silver became too valuable).

With Bitcoin, it seems like 1 Satoshi is small enough to ensure that a "silver to bitcoin's gold" does not happen.  However, I think that this is untrue; 1 Satoshi is analogous to 1 atom of gold.  The actual minimum bitcoin transfer can be estimated by the point where is becomes inconvenient or expensive to make the transfer.  This varies by the individual but I feel it would be a transaction fee of somewhere between 1 and 10 percent.

So the Satoshi is not the smallest effective Bitcoin unit.  The smallest practical bitcoin unit is something between 10 and 100 times the transaction fee.

I think that the result of an unscaled bitcoin blockchain is that small-payment niche will open up, allowing a scalable altcoin blockchain to gain market share (lightning network, centralized solutions, and sidechains may block this niche, to an unknown extent -- but note they didn't for gold).  This cryptocurrency will begin as the "silver to bitcoin's gold", and a clever implementation might ride Bitcoin's coat-tails to adoption.  If Bitcoin becomes extremely successful this new cryptocurrency will overtake it in daily use just like silver overtook gold.  But what advantages will Bitcoin have over this new currency?  Gold's advantage was essentially its greater value to volume (and weight) ratio.  But (as with any crypto-currency), you'll be able to carry and transact large quantities of this new cryptocurrency just as easily as small.  So Bitcoin will have no advantage.  The new cryptocurrency will ultimately dominate transactions and market cap.

What do you think about this reasoning?

Very close, but no cigar. You miss the security gap. This is the real selling point for bitcoin. Silver and gold had very similar security profiles, with gold only being ever-so-slightly better (the value per weight).

In crypto, each coin that has it's own chain has a distinctly different security profile. At this point, bitcoin is in the lead when it comes to security of the ledger. Unless this other coin offers better security, or at least very close to equal security, the scenario you theorize is not possible. It could happen,  maybe, someday, but not currently possible.

[cypherdoc]

Once upon a time when gold was used as currency, silver was also used because you couldn't reasonably mint coin small enough to pay for things like a meal (I heard that this is also why the "bar tab" was invented -- when even silver became too valuable).

With Bitcoin, it seems like 1 Satoshi is small enough to ensure that a "silver to bitcoin's gold" does not happen.  However, I think that this is untrue; 1 Satoshi is analogous to 1 atom of gold.  The actual minimum bitcoin transfer can be estimated by the point where is becomes inconvenient or expensive to make the transfer.  This varies by the individual but I feel it would be a transaction fee of somewhere between 1 and 10 percent.

So the Satoshi is not the smallest effective Bitcoin unit.  The smallest practical bitcoin unit is something between 10 and 100 times the transaction fee.

I think that the result of an unscaled bitcoin blockchain is that small-payment niche will open up, allowing a scalable altcoin blockchain to gain market share (lightning network, centralized solutions, and sidechains may block this niche, to an unknown extent -- but note they didn't for gold).  This cryptocurrency will begin as the "silver to bitcoin's gold", and a clever implementation might ride Bitcoin's coat-tails to adoption.  If Bitcoin becomes extremely successful this new cryptocurrency will overtake it in daily use just like silver overtook gold.  But what advantages will Bitcoin have over this new currency?  Gold's advantage was essentially its greater value to volume (and weight) ratio.  But (as with any crypto-currency), you'll be able to carry and transact large quantities of this new cryptocurrency just as easily as small.  So Bitcoin will have no advantage.  The new cryptocurrency will ultimately dominate transactions and market cap.

What do you think about this reasoning?

Very close, but no cigar. You miss the security gap. This is the real selling point for bitcoin. Silver and gold had very similar security profiles, with gold only being ever-so-slightly better (the value per weight).

In crypto, each coin that has it's own chain has a distinctly different security profile. At this point, bitcoin is in the lead when it comes to security of the ledger. Unless this other coin offers better security, or at least very close to equal security, the scenario you theorize is not possible. It could happen,  maybe, someday, but not currently possible.

you may be the one missing something.

what i think he was saying is that if Cripplecoin is allowed to remain in place even with the addition of SC's or LN, it won't be able to compete with a lighter nimble altcoin that has no such block limit.  reason being, that some feel that SC's or LN, esp if Blockstream is allowed to continue it's financial confliction, will result in a centralized, settlement level, high tx value type unusable cryptocurrency only for institutions, geeks, and wealthy elite.  that is, if it doesn't just outright die from small niche use.

a truly scalable Bitcoin knock off w/o this confliction and centralization might be able to truly take off and fund the masses even at the level of microtx's. 

let's hope this isn't what has to happen.

[thezerg]

Once upon a time when gold was used as currency, silver was also used because you couldn't reasonably mint coin small enough to pay for things like a meal (I heard that this is also why the "bar tab" was invented -- when even silver became too valuable).

With Bitcoin, it seems like 1 Satoshi is small enough to ensure that a "silver to bitcoin's gold" does not happen.  However, I think that this is untrue; 1 Satoshi is analogous to 1 atom of gold.  The actual minimum bitcoin transfer can be estimated by the point where is becomes inconvenient or expensive to make the transfer.  This varies by the individual but I feel it would be a transaction fee of somewhere between 1 and 10 percent.

So the Satoshi is not the smallest effective Bitcoin unit.  The smallest practical bitcoin unit is something between 10 and 100 times the transaction fee.

I think that the result of an unscaled bitcoin blockchain is that small-payment niche will open up, allowing a scalable altcoin blockchain to gain market share (lightning network, centralized solutions, and sidechains may block this niche, to an unknown extent -- but note they didn't for gold).  This cryptocurrency will begin as the "silver to bitcoin's gold", and a clever implementation might ride Bitcoin's coat-tails to adoption.  If Bitcoin becomes extremely successful this new cryptocurrency will overtake it in daily use just like silver overtook gold.  But what advantages will Bitcoin have over this new currency?  Gold's advantage was essentially its greater value to volume (and weight) ratio.  But (as with any crypto-currency), you'll be able to carry and transact large quantities of this new cryptocurrency just as easily as small.  So Bitcoin will have no advantage.  The new cryptocurrency will ultimately dominate transactions and market cap.

What do you think about this reasoning?

Very close, but no cigar. You miss the security gap. This is the real selling point for bitcoin. Silver and gold had very similar security profiles, with gold only being ever-so-slightly better (the value per weight).

In crypto, each coin that has it's own chain has a distinctly different security profile. At this point, bitcoin is in the lead when it comes to security of the ledger. Unless this other coin offers better security, or at least very close to equal security, the scenario you theorize is not possible. It could happen,  maybe, someday, but not currently possible.

you may be the one missing something.

what i think he was saying is that if Cripplecoin is allowed to remain in place even with the addition of SC's or LN, it won't be able to compete with a lighter nimble altcoin that has no such block limit.  reason being, that some feel that SC's or LN, esp if Blockstream is allowed to continue it's financial confliction, will result in a centralized, settlement level, high tx value type unusable cryptocurrency only for institutions, geeks, and wealthy elite.  that is, if it doesn't just outright die from small niche use.

a truly scalable Bitcoin knock off w/o this confliction and centralization might be able to truly take off and fund the masses even at the level of microtx's.  

let's hope this isn't what has to happen.

This is what gives me the fear:

This coin provides an integrated BTC wallet on both PC and phone, simply by forking existing open source Bitcoin wallets and adding "new coin" code (so this is not much harder than creating standalone "new coin" wallets).  The wallet allows you to make trustless anonymously exchanges between new coin and BTC.  This is very easy to do technically: you add a special txn to the new coin which says "only valid if there is a Bitcoin TXN to this public address with N confirmations".  Seller of new coin issues this its first, the Bitcoin seller issues its txn when it sees the new coin txn.  If the Bitcoin seller's txn is not issued or confirmed, the new coin txn is invalidated (it remains on the new coin blockchain but becomes a no-op).

[TPTB_need_war]

This already happened, several years ago in fact. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.

The former already happening substantially negates your second point. Additionally, we are talking about graduated increases here, not 1 to 256MB overnight.

No it doesn't negate the second point unless you think winner-take-all (or at least greater centralization) of the pools is a desired next step.

Also the former did not already happen for those with sufficient hashrate (or perhaps hardware NAV economics) such that mining on a pool has undesirable tradeoffs, such as paying fees (or perhaps anonymity timing correlation attacks on onion routing to the known termination node the pool). I don't claim to be omniscient on all the reasons why nodes don't all mine on pools. Also keep in mind P2Pool.

You are mistaken if you think solo miners, large enough to reliably mine solo blocks, don't operate very well connected and outfitted nodes already. P2Pool may be another case because of its own architecture, but in reality it's not remotely large enough to justify outsized influence on protocol wide parameters. If miners felt that was wrong, they could work to give P2Pool more share in terms of global hashrate.  

So destroy the ability to use P2Pool when we really need later. Illogical to conclude that something underused in one set of constraints is necessarily (without a logical reasoning) no longer need in another set of (lack of) constraints.

Sure go ahead and cut off your feet to spite your face (reduce the degrees-of-freedom because you are omniscient and don't need to walk in the future because you have levitron strapped to your back). MAKE MY DAY PLEASE.

Hey we already have a fiat financial system. Since everybody is doing it that way, let's just move further that direction right. Intelligent way to frame a debate, that since we are already headed into the toilet bowl outcome with Buttcon, then let's accelerate it.

Thanks so much. You are doing my promotion for me. Kudos.

[TPTB_need_war]

sorry you weren't able to discern that i merely parroted your very words back at you.  so any "aggression" you attempt to smear me with, simply look back in the mirror.

No his point was you asserted that DoS protection is no longer needed without providing a logical proof. Your circumstantial BS and sound bite illogic isn't engineering.

[shmadz]

you may be the one missing something.

what i think he was saying is that if Cripplecoin is allowed to remain in place even with the addition of SC's or LN, it won't be able to compete with a lighter nimble altcoin that has no such block limit.  reason being, that some feel that SC's or LN, esp if Blockstream is allowed to continue it's financial confliction, will result in a centralized, settlement level, high tx value type unusable cryptocurrency only for institutions, geeks, and wealthy elite.  that is, if it doesn't just outright die from small niche use.

a truly scalable Bitcoin knock off w/o this confliction and centralization might be able to truly take off and fund the masses even at the level of microtx's.  

let's hope this isn't what has to happen.

This is what gives me the fear:

This coin provides an integrated BTC wallet on both PC and phone, simply by forking existing open source Bitcoin wallets and adding "new coin" code (so this is not much harder than creating standalone "new coin" wallets).  The wallet you make trustless anonymously exchanges between new coin and BTC.  This is very easy to do technically: you add a special txn to the new coin which says "only valid if there is a Bitcoin TXN to this public address with N confirmations".  Seller of new coin issues this its first, the Bitcoin seller issues its txn when it sees the new coin txn.  If the Bitcoin seller's txn is not issued or confirmed, the new coin txn is invalidated (it remains on the new coin blockchain but becomes a no-op).

@doc it seems I'm missing something indeed... You seem to assume that much bad stuff can happen from blocksteam and sc and ln and all this stuff, but none of that can happen unless we increase the block size, so this would seem to invite caution when assessing changes that increase the block size. -- yet you blindly trust and follow and support Mike Hearn and Gavin Andreessen's proposal to recklessly increase the blocksize?

@thezerg how did this new coin achieve greater security and trust than bitcoin? How did "silver" become more trusted than "gold"?

I do not understand the fear, or the reason for it.

[TPTB_need_war]

Once upon a time when gold was used as currency, silver was also used because you couldn't reasonably mint coin small enough to pay for things like a meal (I heard that this is also why the "bar tab" was invented -- when even silver became too valuable).

With Bitcoin, it seems like 1 Satoshi is small enough to ensure that a "silver to bitcoin's gold" does not happen.  However, I think that this is untrue; 1 Satoshi is analogous to 1 atom of gold.  The actual minimum bitcoin transfer can be estimated by the point where is becomes inconvenient or expensive to make the transfer.  This varies by the individual but I feel it would be a transaction fee of somewhere between 1 and 10 percent.

So the Satoshi is not the smallest effective Bitcoin unit.  The smallest practical bitcoin unit is something between 10 and 100 times the transaction fee.

I think that the result of an unscaled bitcoin blockchain is that small-payment niche will open up, allowing a scalable altcoin blockchain to gain market share (lightning network, centralized solutions, and sidechains may block this niche, to an unknown extent -- but note they didn't for gold).  This cryptocurrency will begin as the "silver to bitcoin's gold", and a clever implementation might ride Bitcoin's coat-tails to adoption.  If Bitcoin becomes extremely successful this new cryptocurrency will overtake it in daily use just like silver overtook gold.  But what advantages will Bitcoin have over this new currency?  Gold's advantage was essentially its greater value to volume (and weight) ratio.  But (as with any crypto-currency), you'll be able to carry and transact large quantities of this new cryptocurrency just as easily as small.  So Bitcoin will have no advantage.  The new cryptocurrency will ultimately dominate transactions and market cap.

What do you think about this reasoning?

Very close, but no cigar. You miss the security gap.

And so now you know why I think I am sitting on a motherlode silver mine right now.

@thezerg how did this new coin achieve greater security and trust than bitcoin? How did "silver" become more trusted than "gold"?

That is for me to know and for you to find out  

what i think he was saying is that if Cripplecoin is allowed to remain in place even with the addition of SC's or LN, it won't be able to compete with a lighter nimble altcoin that has no such block limit.

It won't compete either if you raise or don't raise the block size. Go ahead and make my day either way.

[Cconvert2G36]

Thanks so much. You are doing my promotion for me. Kudos.

Delusions of grandeur, check.

[cypherdoc]

you may be the one missing something.

what i think he was saying is that if Cripplecoin is allowed to remain in place even with the addition of SC's or LN, it won't be able to compete with a lighter nimble altcoin that has no such block limit.  reason being, that some feel that SC's or LN, esp if Blockstream is allowed to continue it's financial confliction, will result in a centralized, settlement level, high tx value type unusable cryptocurrency only for institutions, geeks, and wealthy elite.  that is, if it doesn't just outright die from small niche use.

a truly scalable Bitcoin knock off w/o this confliction and centralization might be able to truly take off and fund the masses even at the level of microtx's.  

let's hope this isn't what has to happen.

This is what gives me the fear:

This coin provides an integrated BTC wallet on both PC and phone, simply by forking existing open source Bitcoin wallets and adding "new coin" code (so this is not much harder than creating standalone "new coin" wallets).  The wallet you make trustless anonymously exchanges between new coin and BTC.  This is very easy to do technically: you add a special txn to the new coin which says "only valid if there is a Bitcoin TXN to this public address with N confirmations".  Seller of new coin issues this its first, the Bitcoin seller issues its txn when it sees the new coin txn.  If the Bitcoin seller's txn is not issued or confirmed, the new coin txn is invalidated (it remains on the new coin blockchain but becomes a no-op).

@doc it seems I'm missing something indeed... You seem to assume that much bad stuff can happen from blocksteam and sc and ln and all this stuff, but none of that can happen unless we increase the block size, so this would seem to invite caution when assessing changes that increase the block size. -- yet you blindly trust and follow and support Mike Hearn and Gavin Andreessen's proposal to recklessly increase the blocksize?

it's not blind trust.  do you follow Reddit and other sources?  there have been plenty of analyses of the scaling issue.  i've also looked at Gavin's calcs and simulation.  the Tradeblock analyses are good.  basically, there's lots of good info on scaling if you're willing to look around.  it should work out just fine.  and yes, i trust Gavin way more than the BS devs.  all the character assassinations don't help as well.

@thezerg how did this new coin achieve greater security and trust than bitcoin? How did "silver" become more trusted than "gold"?

I do not understand the fear, or the reason for it.

his theory depends on Bitcoin simply failing to execute Satoshi's vision.

[shmadz]

@thezerg how did this new coin achieve greater security and trust than bitcoin? How did "silver" become more trusted than "gold"?

That is for me to know and for you to find out  

If you know how to spin lead into gold, why do you bother to goad me?

[cypherdoc]

"85% chance that Greece is forced to leave the Euro zone".

oops.

[cypherdoc]

Dow futures -255

[shmadz]

it's not blind trust.  do you follow Reddit and other sources?  there have been plenty of analyses of the scaling issue.  i've also looked at Gavin's calcs and simulation.  the Tradeblock analyses are good.  basically, there's lots of good info on scaling if you're willing to look around.  it should work out just fine.  and yes, i trust Gavin way more than the BS devs.  all the character assassinations don't help as well.

@thezerg how did this new coin achieve greater security and trust than bitcoin? How did "silver" become more trusted than "gold"?

I do not understand the fear, or the reason for it.

his theory depends on Bitcoin simply failing to execute Satoshi's vision.

I do not follow reddit. If I'm directed to an interesting post I'll check it out, but I do not like the format.

If you've looked into it and you're confident that it's a better choice, then that's good. I always appreciate considering an informed opinion.

But when you're flat out trolling and spreading FUD like your comment from earlier then you forfeit any semblance of respect.
 

[iCEBREAKER]

"85% chance that Greece is forced to leave the Euro zone".

oops.

Don't worry, because "The Financial Crisis Is Over."

Dow futures -255

Good.  More money printing quantitative easing will lead to an explosion of broadband to the home.

[sidhujag]

Dow futures -255

No worries will be up 100 by morning

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

^ Time to post this again: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/who-controls-bitcoin/

This would be the final arbiter.

But, like the fork in 2013, I think miners would solve it before trading on classic vs new began.

Yup. It's the silent ace up investors' sleeves that prevents any funny business by the miners, devs, or other stakeholders.

This is incomplete logic thus illogical.

The essay forgets:

1. A 51% attack can enforce a protocol, but not including minority blocks in the longest chain. I already obliterated rocks' argument upthread that anyone could prove this is happening and thus get the masses to act on it by pulling their mining nodes (the masses don't mine). There is no way to prove that a minority chain is the honest one when it comes to censoring transactions.

2. Mining income is not the only potential profit motive from some entity aggregating hashrate for the purposes of censoring transactions.

3. Asymmetries in the impacts on profitability of different classifications of miners due to protocol changes, potentially change the dynamics in ways that the author's simpleton analysis miss.

I don't think you see the full extent of the paradigm shift the author hints at (perhaps the author doesn't, either).

A 51% attack is one thing, sure, if that's your concern it gets more complicated but certainly not impossible to tell that, for example, there is widespread inability to get transactions through. In the worst case, a nuke (spinoff to protocol with a different mining algo, retaining the ledger) can be made to be very easy to do. No proof of miner malfeasance is needed, mere suspicion will do if it is easy enough to go through the spinoff process. If it needs to be a regular thing, it can soon be done without the user even noticing by having the wallet software be advanced enough. Let that sink in. Investors always hold the final card. Miners make investors jumpy at their own peril, no matter what the miners' motivations are. Certainly there are tradeoffs, as investors know not to piss miners off too much or else alienate their hashing security team, but if this is just going to be another "Bitcoin is broken because 51% attack" argument where you are saying your system fixes this, well, that's cool but only once you show it. It doesn't mean anything to anyone just saying you have a better solution. We have no way of knowing you're right or wrong, and there are too many claiming the same.

Now if you'll say everyday users/sheep will just go with the flow, sure, they may and they will have their transactions censored, then, but with wallet software that makes it a snap - even unnoticeable, default - to switch to spinoffs at will so that the ledger is always maintained, the friction is reduced to practically zero. At worst we are back to a situation where people "don't realize they should be using Bitcoin," but this time it's little more than a single click on an interface to fix that.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

[stereotype]

Currently trying to fill the gap. Big shorts @ 1.1160, i would say.

[cypherdoc]

"85% chance that Greece is forced to leave the Euro zone".

oops.

Don't worry, because "The Financial Crisis Is Over."

Dow futures -255

Good.  More money printing quantitative easing will lead to an explosion of broadband to the home.

if you're serious then that's a great argument for block size increases.