Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[ErisDiscordia]

Bitcoin sits at a strange intersection of computer science, mathematics, economics and sociology, and we can all probably learn a bit from each other.  Communication is hard, especially across disciplines.  

well said! Having an interest in most of these fields, yet considering myself an expert in none of them I try to limit my role on the forums to facilitating productive discussion. With so many big egos around it can be very difficult at times.

[sickpig]

Bitcoin sits at a strange intersection of computer science, mathematics, economics and sociology, and we can all probably learn a bit from each other.  Communication is hard, especially across disciplines.  

Thats quite fair and true.

As an aside, today's 3 block invalid chain reorg included a 'v3' block on the invalid fork which contained a lot of transactions. Which may suggest someone is SPV mining while including transactions (something I'd pointed out was possible previously).

If I may ask, what were the pools involved in this reorg?

[TPTB_need_war]

you might slip and mess up your future as "the LeBron James of the Bitcoin world" (as your attorney decribed you (18:30), under oath, to a federal judge as part of litigation related to your possession of 3000 BTC taken primarly from members of this forum.).

I listened only to the 7 minute point where judge was skewering the female attorney who is arguing for the plaintiffs against our resident Dr. Lebron alias Cypherdorc (lol, just kidding ya my BOO!).

In any case, the plaintiffs will lose the case with that bonehead attorney and line of argument.

If they wanted to win, they wouldn't argue that DorkyDoc didn't do adequate promotion (because there is an entire thread on this forum showing he did, and now we have a core Dev admitting he invested 100 BTC based on Dorc's thread which adds validity to his promotional value). Rather they would argue that contract was fraudulent because why would they limit themselves to an exclusive marketing arrangement when there were multitudes of others who had similar reputations on Bitcointalk.org at the time (which is provable). In other words, DonaldDorc wasn't a scarce resource and thus it was an intentional overpayment of collusion.

But then the problem is HashFast (the plaintiff) would argue against themselves, so that is why they are not arguing to win the case. They've hired a female attorney to purposefully lose the case. This is a setup. I speculate I know what is happening here.

Vokain and Gmax kiss your BTC goodbye. Suckers.

(just joking for the dramatic effect but it also a point to everyone to be careful and responsible and also raises the question why is a core Dev speculating on scams, I would never get caught in that... my weaknesses was ... nevermind. Gmax thanks for sharing any way)

P.S. Gmax you committed a category error. It doesn't matter to his case if he slobbers on the technology (and because so many people can't understand the technology including some of the readers here, the attorneys, and the judge); it only matters that he has a huge following.

(my pops is former West coast Division head attorney for Exxon)

[newb4now]

Again I think the heart of it for me personally is that felt Monero doesn't really own anything, other than its own (perhaps smaller than Bitcoin's rather small) community and its refined implementation. In the sense that Python owns its syntax. If you create a JPython you are still helping Python. If you create a BitcoinJ, you are still helping Bitcoin. This is what I meant when I wrote the ecosystem was a "clusterfuck" (or let's say non-ideal). We had developers and communities fighting each other on the same protocol. It felt like copycoins vs. Bitcoin, except in this case none of them were the first and legitimate one.

Yes, that's what happens when you build something and try to launch it with a fraudulent 82% premine, a fake backstory, and an army of shills trying to make it appear popular and established. A clusterfuck. So that is (or more accurately was) a fair characterization, but not one of any of our making, and one that Monero has attempted (with a fair degree of success) to replace with a vibrant and successful community.

I disagree with your last sentence though. Monero is indeed the first legitimate cryptonote coin, which was launched as a minimal fork for the sole reason of getting rid of the fraudulent premine. (Also worth noting that the public face of the cryptonote team welcomed and invited forks, and even released a "coin fork creation kit"; https://cryptonotestarter.org)

Monero has always been a fully public open source project where everyone including the original developers has been (and continue to be) welcome to contribute. For all we know, some of the original developers (who are anonymous, as are many Monero contributing developers) have contributed. We know, for example, that during the chain fork attack last year, the cryptonote group sent a fix (though the community had already by that time developed one anyway).

One of the signs of leadership is being able to get everyone working together.

You can't necessarily ever get everyone working together. Nevertheless a great many people are indeed working together a year later, and that should say something about the leadership. When you count the core developers, contributing developers to the core project, people working on Monaro-related businesses such as MyMonero and Crypto-Kingdom, mining pools, various independent developers and other significant projects (such as the new Android mobile wallet) there are at least several dozen actual developers working on various aspects of it, along with many non-developers contributing in their own ways too.

I will leave to others whether that constitutes good leadership, but my opinion should be fairly obvious.

I find it interesting how most coins only have 1 primary developer (and often fail when/if that developer leaves) and some coins have many people developing. Did some/most of these developers come to Monero on their own? Or were they invited to Monero from existing developers whom they already new?

Do you have any tips for attracting (or keeping) developers? Specifically for new coins that do not have much if any funding yet.

Bitcoin I can understand as most core developers were early adopters and have a vested interest in the project.

Now that bitcoin has been relatively well established (compared to all other coins) it seems that most new development is going into supporting services and infrastructure instead of bitcoin itself. Do you see that as a pattern that will be repeated with other coins (that developers who come along after a coin has been established will be more interested in building supporting services instead of working on the core itself)?

[TPTB_need_war]

Do you have any tips for attracting (or keeping) developers?

Yeah hire them. It helps if you are a programmer too and can talk shop with them. Presenting sexy tech helps a lot too. Helps also if you are likeable, reasonable, and demonstrate strong technical acumen. Mutual respect builds confidence.

Realize there are very few people who can possess all those skills, plus marketing skills, organizational skills, etc.. Not easy to find such a leader. Monero apparently had a core group of well-heeled guys (some that are also programmers) that gelled I believe via some connection to rpietila and David but perhaps I am mistaken. Probing my memory of the threads I read back in April, perhaps it was Tacotime that was the driving force.

Specifically for new coins that do not have much if any funding yet.

Nope. Get funding. Unless you are lucky to find well-heeled devs such as apparently Tacotime, fluffypony, smooth, etc.. But they don't want to corralled by someone into a project. They joined together because they had mutual respect and wanted to together address an anonymity weakness in the market.

Now that bitcoin has been relatively well established (compared to all other coins) it seems that most new development is going into supporting services and infrastructure instead of bitcoin itself. Do you see that as a pattern that will be repeated with other coins (that developers who come along after a coin has been established will be more interested in building supporting services instead of working on the core itself)?

That is the big question. Critical mass is well... critical. Blockstream's pegged side chains may help that a lot.

Monero appears to have its own community now and I am not following it, but for the brief moment I was reading their thread the other day, I saw others contributing a GUI. So maybe they are starting to get some traction on that. It is a big mountain to climb compared to Bitcoin's network effects.

[newb4now]

Do you have any tips for attracting (or keeping) developers?

Yeah hire them. It helps if you are a programmer too and can talk shop with them. Presenting sexy tech helps a lot too. Helps also if you are likeable, reasonable, and demonstrate strong technical acumen. Mutual respect builds confidence.

Realize there are very few people who can possess all those skills, plus marketing skills, organizational skills, etc.. Not easy to find such a leader. Monero apparently had a core group of guys that gelled I believe via some connection to rpietila but perhaps I am mistaken.

Specifically for new coins that do not have much if any funding yet.

Nope. Get funding.

I think rpietila came along early in the life of Monero but after the core devs already joined the project.

One if the interesting things I see in Monero is that proportionally more bitcoin early adopters are involved than I see in other alt coins.

Is it because:

1. Bitcoin early adopters see Monero as a viable hedge to side chains and other potential fungibility/privacy fixes for bitcoin?

or

2. Bitcoin early adopters have been around long enough to recognize obvious pump/dump clone coins lacking much innovation and are far better at avoiding them than cryptocurrency newcomers trying to find the "next bitcoin"

I think we all can agree that 99+% of all altcoins will fail. How do early adopters identify coins that may be among the <1% to succeed as either a bitcoin hedge or a viable option to fill some niche that bitcoin either can/will not?

[TPTB_need_war]

I think rpietila came along early in the life of Monero but after the core devs already joined the project.

Yeah I jogged my memory and edited my prior post while you were writing.

One if the interesting things I see in Monero is that proportionally more bitcoin early adopters are involved than I see in other alt coins.

Is it because:

1. Bitcoin early adopters see Monero as a viable hedge to side chains and other potential fungibility/privacy fixes for bitcoin?

No I think side chains weren't a reality when Monero was launched. CN is strong on chain anonymity (but again isn't also IP obfuscation, which Tor and I2P are but I personally have doubts on Tor's and probably I2P's efficacy). Strong bet to make. Adds a real feature needed by the crypto market.

or

2. Bitcoin early adopters have been around long enough to recognize obvious pump/dump clone coins lacking much innovation and are far better at avoiding them than cryptocurrency newcomers trying to find the "next bitcoin"

I think we all can agree that 99+% of all altcoins will fail. How do early adopters identify coins that may be among the <1% to succeed as either a bitcoin hedge or a viable option to fill some niche that bitcoin either can/will not?

Yeah I think they are more astute. And I don't think you can protect grandmothers from mass delusions and scams, unless you regulate a market. I suspect most of the money in shitcoins is people who know they are shit and are playing the musical chairs game of the greater fool pyramid, i.e. as long is you aren't last it doesn't matter that you weren't first and that the asset has no underlying value.

[cypherdoc]

ok, we've all been lead to believe up to now that validation of tx's had to occur twice by full nodes.  first, upon receipt.  second, upon receipt of the block.  this was crucial to the FUD scare tactic of decrementing
[...]
what am i missing?

Where I expicitly pointed out to you in many places, in excruciating detail, that this was not at all the case??  https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/39tgno/letting_miners_vote_on_the_maximum_block_size_is/cs6rek5?context=3   You seemed so happy to argue with it before, has your memory vanished now that you don't think it would be convient for you?

what's interesting is that we've never seen it done to the degree it is now.  we had the Mystery Miner a few years ago but he stopped it pretty quick.  also, despite many upgrades added to the protocol previously, we've never had a fork as a result of SPV mining before either.  what's different this time is the consistently full blocks and the fact that Wang Chun told us they create SPV blocks in response to large blocks as a defense.  it seems they consider full blocks large blocks so the excessive SPV mining created last nights fork in light of BIP66 and the upgrade to 0.10.x.  so in that sense, the 1MB cap is the direct cause of what is happening.  

The incohearence in some of these posts is so foaming so thick that it's oozing out and making the floor slick; careful-- you might slip and mess up your future as "the LeBron James of the Bitcoin world" (as your attorney decribed you (18:30), under oath, to a federal judge as part of litigation related to your possession of 3000 BTC taken primarly from members of this forum.).

As miners have created larger blocks F2Pool expirenced high orphaning (>4% according to them); they responded by adding software to mine without transfering or verifying blocks to avoid delays related to transfering and processing block data. Contrary to your claim-- the blocksize limit stems the bleeding here. Their issue is that large blocks take more time to transfer/handle and that they're falling behind as a result. Making blocks _bigger_ would not help this problem, it would do the _opposite_. If a miner wanted to avoid any processing of transaction backlog they'd simply set their minimum fee high and they'd never even mempool the large backlog.

Reasonable minds can differ on the relative importance of difference considerations, but when you're falling all over yourself to describe evidence against your position as support of it-- redefining F2pools crystal clear and plain descption of "large blocks" as their source of problems with the technically inexplicable "full" that you think supports your position, it really burns up whatever credibility you had left. That you can get away with it in this thread without a loud wall of "WTF" just shows what a strange echochamber it has become.

1.  Why do larger mining pools have less orphans, assuming most miners even small ones are connected to the relay network?
2. Even if mining pools set higher fees, aren't the unconfirmed TX's still added to their mempools?
3. How is it that 1MB just "happened" to be the magic number at which blocks are deemed to be "large" ?

[TPTB_need_war]

I'm thinking about maybe making Trapqoin by Shetty One Eye.

[smooth]

There wasn't really a single person as the driving force behind the Monero team coming together. We were all following cryptonote already for its anonymity and other interesting features and all wanted a cryptonote fork without the 82% premine. Several of us were independently studying the code and planning one. After a few more discussions on threads, PM's and IRC, the idea of a public open source project with the core team as leadership came together.

[iCEBREAKER]

1.  Why do larger mining pools have less orphans, assuming most miners even small ones are connected to the relay network?
2. Even if mining pools set higher fees, aren't the unconfirmed TX's still added to their mempools?
3. How is it that 1MB just "happened" to be the magic number at which blocks are deemed to be "large" ?

1.  Larger pools solve more blocks, smoothing out the orphan variance experienced by smaller ones.
2.  Verifying the new tx incoming blocks contain has nothing to do with tx in mempools, which are waiting to be included in subsequent blocks.  Mining pools may choose to include or exclude tx based on fees, and individual implementations constantly adjust.
3.  Time to verify (via CPU-hard although parallelizable ECDSA) incoming block's tx is already (absent clusters of 48-core Xeons) problematic at sizes near 1MB, hence use of the subjective descriptor "large" and your conflation of that term with "full."

Gmax, did I get these right?  Can I get paid the big LeBron bucks now?   

[iCEBREAKER]

I'd like to hear Holliday's take on replace-by-fee.

I'm going to take the easy way out and quote someone who seems to have similar views as mine. I'm not really married to my opinion of this (I haven't really looked at it all that much) and I am certainly willing to listen to any arguments. I will say that I don't really care for Bitcoin as a daily transactional currency, unless it can easily do that while remaining a censorship-proof store of value. On the other hand, I can think of several situtations where it would be better to use Bitcoin instead of more traditional payment methods (in which case I have no problem waiting for however many confirmations the seller is comfortable with).

Like jdillon, I believe that in the long term, many miners will allow paid replacements of transactions and zero-conf transactions will become as useless as what we're afraid of.  You can talk about ethics, and what's in the "best interest of miners", but that is just wishful thinking that in a completely-decentralized system everyone will have the same ethics and motives.  I'd rather just see it happen and let the ecosystem adjust to the loss of remaining zero-conf security/sanity, instead of naively hope that everyone will follow the same guidelines that are not bound to follow.  Especially when there is economic incentive to breaking these guidelines.  Not all miners are dependent on the security of zero-conf transactions.  Many of them will just do what's best for their bottom line.

I've seen the phrase "allow" when referring to miners replacing zero-conf transactions.  Above, im3w1l mentioned "setting a precedent".  This is meaningless, because no one has control over all the miners, and they don't need to seek anyone's permission to do something that is entirely within the rules of the system.  The best we can do is "recommend" guidelines by making it part of the default client, but that's it.  It's part of the blessing&curse of being decentralized.  Sure, a lot of miners won't do it.  But some will, and you only need any to do it, in order for it to dramatically degrade this system.

Therefore, we are adapting ourselves (and letting others adapt) to a false reality by designing systems with an assumption that there is some security in zero-conf transactions.  I'd much rather just write it off completely, and let businesses and users adapt to the idea that zero-conf transactions are basically useless for exchanges between untrusted parties.  Forget it.  If you don't trust the person, don't mess with zero-confirmation transactions.  Period.

Thanks for that XPOST.  It's a great explanation and a great thread.

I love the smell of Hearn getting r3kt in the morning!   

[sickpig]

Bitcoin sits at a strange intersection of computer science, mathematics, economics and sociology, and we can all probably learn a bit from each other.  Communication is hard, especially across disciplines.  

Thats quite fair and true.

As an aside, today's 3 block invalid chain reorg included a 'v3' block on the invalid fork which contained a lot of transactions. Which may suggest someone is SPV mining while including transactions (something I'd pointed out was possible previously).

If I may ask, what were the pools involved in this reorg?

found the list:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/July_2015_Forks#Invalid_Block_Hashes

those are the one related to July 5th reorg (from 21:50 to 23:40):

• 000000000000000003ae1223f4926ec86100885cfe1484dc52fd67e042a19b12 mined by MegaBigPower (255 non-coinbase transactions)
• 00000000000000000063f97f292fb559773437fb3558c474efec6053a7b0d5a2 mined by an unknown miner (0 non-coinbase transactions)
• 000000000000000012dbd422d7bf1c4b55982c37b390d4613dcee00d31741c6a mined by an unknown miner (1,597 non-coinbase transactions)

[TPTB_need_war]

There wasn't really a single person as the driving force behind the Monero team coming together. We were all following cryptonote already for its anonymity and other interesting features and all wanted a cryptonote fork without the 82% premine. Several of us were independently studying the code and planning one. After a few more discussions on threads, PM's and IRC, the idea of a public open source project with the core team as leadership came together.

It is interesting that the power vacuum opened by the inventor's ineptitude (or Bytenote's alleged) was filled by a "leaderless" organization yet this apparent victor (within CN sphere) is apparently winner-take-all.

Similar in some ways to the outcome of the power vacuum from politics, but more like a benevolent junta.

I don't really have time to contemplate a more developed political, game theory analysis at the moment.

[dragonseer]

Without reading every page in this thread, I'll add my two cents worth here.

I can't see a reason why Gold can't rise along with Bitcoin at the moment, just at different rates. Whereas Bitcoin can approach $1000 again by the end of year (nearly 4x the current price) similarly Gold can approach $2000 by the end of the year (nearly 2x the current price). Neither Bitcoin or Gold are undermined by debt compared to all the trillions of dollars in stocks and bonds which are leveraged to general confidence in elite lending strategies.

[rpietila]

I think rpietila came along early in the life of Monero but after the core devs already joined the project.

Correct.

One if the interesting things I see in Monero is that proportionally more bitcoin early adopters are involved than I see in other alt coins.

Is it because:

1. Bitcoin early adopters see Monero as a viable hedge to side chains and other potential fungibility/privacy fixes for bitcoin?

or

2. Bitcoin early adopters have been around long enough to recognize obvious pump/dump clone coins lacking much innovation and are far better at avoiding them than cryptocurrency newcomers trying to find the "next bitcoin"

I think we all can agree that 99+% of all altcoins will fail. How do early adopters identify coins that may be among the <1% to succeed as either a bitcoin hedge or a viable option to fill some niche that bitcoin either can/will not?

+1 All of the above is true.

My process on "how" is in reality based on hunch, but in theory goes about as follows:

The coin needs to be the first legitimate instance of its kind, had a fair start/emission, and a market niche
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Litecoin FAIL (not the first of its kind)
Peercoin FAIL (no market niche)
Bytecoin FAIL (not fair start)
Boolberry FAIL (not the first of its kind)
Ethereum FAIL (questionable start)
All shitcoins FAIL (2-3 counts)

Only BTC and XMR fulfill all conditions, so it makes sense to invest into them (and them alone). To be fully hedged, you can keep 99.8% in BTC and set 0.2% aside in XMR. Going over this ratio, is overinvesting in XMR.

[hdbuck]

Without reading every page in this thread, I'll add my two cents worth here.

I can't see a reason why Gold can't rise along with Bitcoin at the moment, just at different rates. Whereas Bitcoin can approach $1000 again by the end of year (nearly 4x the current price) similarly Gold can approach $2000 by the end of the year (nearly 2x the current price). Neither Bitcoin or Gold are undermined by debt compared to all the trillions of dollars in stocks and bonds which are leveraged to general confidence in elite lending strategies.

mymy you are severely out of context considering the last 1000 or so pages you should have read here.

anyway, do not forget about how the gold market is rigged, rotten from its heart by the FED Masters, whom nonetheless deem worth accumulating/stealing shit tons of it @FortKnox.

bitcorn and popcoin is cheap now too tho

[cypherdoc]

1.  Why do larger mining pools have less orphans, assuming most miners even small ones are connected to the relay network?
2. Even if mining pools set higher fees, aren't the unconfirmed TX's still added to their mempools?
3. How is it that 1MB just "happened" to be the magic number at which blocks are deemed to be "large" ?

1.  Larger pools solve more blocks, smoothing out the orphan variance experienced by smaller ones.
2.  Verifying the new tx incoming blocks contain has nothing to do with tx in mempools, which are waiting to be included in subsequent blocks.  Mining pools may choose to include or exclude tx based on fees, and individual implementations constantly adjust.
3.  Time to verify (via CPU-hard although parallelizable ECDSA) incoming block's tx is already (absent clusters of 48-core Xeons) problematic at sizes near 1MB, hence use of the subjective descriptor "large" and your conflation of that term with "full."

Gmax, did I get these right?  Can I get paid the big LeBron bucks now?   

1.  when an individual hasher joins a pool large or small, he will not make earn any more BTC or reduce any orphans he might have gotten otherwise while mining individually, he just smooths both of those out over time.  this assumes that both large and small pools are joining the relay network (it's open so why not) or otherwise have excellent internet connections which i have heard many miners claim.
2.  "Verifying the new tx incoming blocks contain has nothing to do with tx in mempools, which are waiting to be included in subsequent blocks."  such a statement is ignorant.  all the tx's received in the block results in the mempool being cleared of those same unconf tx's.
3.  your argument completely misses the point as well as the reality.  the answer is that it is exceedingly unlikely that Satoshi perfectly chose the point at which the network in July 2015 would consider 1MB to be "too large" to the pt that pools would start SPV creating hard forks.  that is so ridiculous on it's face it's not worth arguing.  also, it also totally ignores the fact that the top 5 Chinese pools have already gone on record stating that despite their problems with the GFC, they are perfectly ready and willing to inc the cap to 8MB and double it every 2 yr according to Gavin's proposal.  which says they are doing SPV mining for a reason other than the blocks are "large".  i can't say for sure b/c afaik, they haven't said exactly why they are SPV'ing.  i think it's b/c the cap is being continuously hit resulting in bloating unconf tx sets which is somehow affecting their willingness to include confirmed tx's in blocks.

[Peter R]

…
3.  your argument completely misses the point as well as the reality.  the answer is that it is exceedingly unlikely that Satoshi perfectly chose the point at which the network in July 2015 would consider 1MB to be "too large" to the pt that pools would start SPV creating hard forks.  that is so ridiculous on it's face it's not worth arguing.  also, it also totally ignores the fact that the top 5 Chinese pools have already gone on record stating that despite their problems with the GFC, they are perfectly ready and willing to inc the cap to 8MB and double it every 2 yr according to Gavin's proposal.  which says they are doing SPV mining for a reason other than the blocks are "large".  i can't say for sure b/c afaik, they haven't said exactly why they are SPV'ing.  i think it's b/c the cap is being continuously hit resulting in bloating unconf tx sets which is somehow affecting their willingness to include confirmed tx's in blocks.

I'd like to run two statistical hypothesis tests:

1.  Is F2Pool/AntPool more likely to produce an empty block when the previous block is large?

2.  Is F2Pool/AntPool more likely to produce an empty block when mempool swells?

I think the answer to Q1 will be "yes." But I don't see why the answer to Q2 would be yes for any reason other than the previous block is more likely to be large when mempool swells (i.e., mempool is not the cause, just correlated).

Johnnybravo0311 is compiling a file that shows:

Code:

Height,NumTx,DateTime,WhoMined

for each block in the Blockchain, which will help answering Q1.  Does anyone know where I can get comprehensive data on the typical node's mempool size versus time to help answer Q2?

[IIOII]

Without reading every page in this thread, I'll add my two cents worth here.

I can't see a reason why Gold can't rise along with Bitcoin at the moment, just at different rates. Whereas Bitcoin can approach $1000 again by the end of year (nearly 4x the current price) similarly Gold can approach $2000 by the end of the year (nearly 2x the current price). Neither Bitcoin or Gold are undermined by debt compared to all the trillions of dollars in stocks and bonds which are leveraged to general confidence in elite lending strategies.

Yeah, I don't think it makes sense to come up with the idea that Bitcoin and precious metals would be mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure that both will rise. Even if gold might ultimately be replaced by Bitcoin I doubt that this process will be fast enough to obstruct the general upward momentum of gold in a collapsing world economy.

After all, Bitcoin's concept is like virtual gold: The supply is limited, it's very difficult to counterfeit and you have to put in substantial effort to obtain it.