Absolutely not. Increasing the number of full bitcoins past 21M is inflationary, necessarily stealing (real) wealth from all current holders through the hidden tax known as inflation. Further subdividing beyond satoshis allows all current holders to retain wealth.

Of course, there will be somewhere on the order of 2.1 quadrillion satoshis* before accounting for permanent losses. I forget the figures, but there was a comparison done several years ago between 2.1Q satoshis, and the number of US pennies required to denominate world wealth. They were plausibly within the same order of magnitude.

*(Unless something has changed there are 100 million satoshis in a Bitcoin, not 1 billion as stated earlier).

Oh yeah - that EMP scenario? Do you really feel this is a problem only with bitcoin? You do realize that most fiat money is electronic as well, right? I have more faith in my backup scheme's resistance to EMP, than I do the backups my banks maintain.

Hasn't Liberland declared Bitcoin their national currency?

http://insidebitcoins.com/news/liberland-europes-newly-formed-country-to-use-bitcoin/31979

Not much, but it's a start.

FTFY.

If you are counting on subsequent generations becoming smarter, I am afraid you will be sorely disappointed. If anything, average intelligence will decrease, due to the fact that society subsidizes stupidity, allowing the incompetent to survive to procreational age, and 'nurture' their defective genetic offspring through to their subsequent dependent 'adulthood'.


Good. The financialization of derivatives is a theft of wealth from the rest of us. Derivatives are not true wealth. You can't eat a derivative, and a derivative cannot paint your house. Absolutely worthless in terms of things that add value to human lives. The only value that they have is gained in skimming purchasing power from everyone else.

It seems this way because news outlets are reporting the proclamations of bankers, as if having more authority than the opinions of a band of ragtag technologists and libertarian amateur economists. Bankers, for their part, are interested in blockchain technology and not Bitcoin itself, as they want the cheapness of decentralized ledgers while maintaining insulative control that allows them to create money at will.


Yes. The Blockchain (I note you accorded it proper noun status) -- the specific blockchain attached to Bitcoin -- is the valuable thing. Banks have a major challenge ahead of them trying to create a separate blockchain under their control, that is secure against 'incursions', when Bitcoin's Blockchain is already secured with the largest collection of computing power that humanity has ever amassed against a single problem.

I raced onto Ustream as soon as I saw it posted here. Arrived about 45 minutes in.

I found his statement that securities lending (e.g. owners of securities lending them to hedge funds in order to allow options and other derivatives) make up 40-45% of the profits of big wall street firms interesting. The spreads involved (if indeed his claims are valid) are usurious. His example had the middleman pocketing 95% of the costs of this activity. He claims that t0 can tokenize this ownership. Once tokenized, these rights can be traded on a (the?) blockchain. This would disintermediate all but the tokenization process, leading to significant (read that a la Trump saying 'uuuuuge) savings for both buyer and seller. And replacing regulation made of fallible human controls with regulation made of algorithm.

I don't know anything about large-scale finance, but I find this extremely interesting news. Oh yeah - and bullish.

How do we know the 550K BTC even _exist_? Is it not possible that Karp sold them on Gox, pocketing the proceeds, and the buyers merely withdrew them from the exchange?  After all, he had full custody of all BTC and all fiat on Gox. Bitcoins illegitimately sold thusly could have remained in each depositor's Gox accounts on paper, as if Gox still had custody of them, while in actuality having been long gone.

Makes no sense. There is always a price whereby motivated buyers can induce an owner to become a seller.

At the following week's price, you bet I would.

It sounds as if they are describing bitcoin as it consists of merely software. It is the protocol which is the important thing, no?

I get your point now. But I don't get their decision. Seems like putting the cart before the horse.

Shall I build my great new business upon:
1) the world's most hardened and secure crypto currency, with the proviso that I'll need to rewrite some of the lower-level code; or
2) some apparently well-written software without any real-world testing, implementing new and novel untested technology, dependent upon new untested economic concepts?

Oh well, it's not my VC dollar...

Well, no.

With regards to XT, the only poll that matters is the one tabulated on the blockchain. You know - what with the 2016, and the 75%, and the two-week average.

Bless your heart. You're such a lovable muppet.

But not 73% of those that actually have any clue of what Bitcoin and the blockchain actually are. From the quoted article:

"Nearly three-quarters of participants in the [study] believe the blockchain can be put to good use without bitcoin. This result doesn’t scream controversial. But while capital markets professionals (who make up most of our sample) are convinced, those with backgrounds in bitcoin and the blockchain are not."

edit:spelling

Well, no. Not really, you are not. You are merely repeating the same shillspeak over and over. The first time you posted the links to the Forbes articles, you could plausibly call that news. By the 8th time you posted the very same links in the very same thread, it was well past the point that it was obvious shilling.

And your juvenile name calling just makes you look petty. And juvenile. Did I mention juvenile?

Wait - what?
Clearly, the limit just ensures that relatively few spam transactions are required to fill up blocks.

...yet his article totally avoids discussion of the other crap he tried to sneak into XT. Were XT limited to the block size change ( his '...single number...' claim - riiiight), I would be running it. It may not be the best approach to the block size, but it's a damned sight better than 1 MB forever (or even 1 MB now). But with the other crap changes? No thanks.

No. If it has an inbuilt polling mechanism upon which a switch to larger blocks is predicated, I might. Where is definitive info to be found?

I kind of bowed out of the entire discussion after it got too acrimonious and both sides dug in for trench warfare.

Speculation has been building that Cryptsy has gone 'full gox fractional reserve' for several months now.

Well, obviously not. If Zarathustra were to somehow start deleting your posts, then that would be censorship.

2014 Jun 01 (on the way down):

So, ya know how YouTube pushes ads at you, right? And they have some algorithm for which ads get pushed at which people, right? And that the advertisers get to pick the demographics for whom their ads will be pushed, right? In order to maximize return on advertising dollar, right? Due to the targeted audience being a likely purchaser of that product, right?

I clicked through the above link. The ad before the video was a Maserati ad. I've never before in my life seen a video ad for Maserati.

This is more than an omen - it is data mining at its most sophisticated.

Clickthrough from this thread > Bitcoin vid leads to upper-upscale auto ad.

This is gentlemen.

Question: How would Coinbase have any visibility into any off-chain transactions that happened on other exchanges? Might their figures for 'Off-Chain' omit this majority that occur elsewhere?

Buy? Sell? Trading can be profitable, but it can also cause one to lose one's shirt. The macro is always up. The obvious answer is HODL.

Can't go vertical 'till the masses start buying in en masse.
The masses can't buy in until they have large money available in a venue in which they can trade.
Masses wont have money in such a venue until the 'signup/KYC/AML' process runs its course.
Signup process takes 1-2 weeks after opening account.
Masses will not open account until FOMO.
Masses won't FOMO until news of rise is omnipresent.
News of rise will not be ubiquitous until ATH.
ATH not until..... next week?

Net: If we can sustain this rally until ATH, the real fireworks will happen 2-4 weeks after that.

Yeah - boom.

Brace yourselves. With the rise comes the news. With the news comes yet another eternal september.

Because pre-existing law says that all property they acquire as a result of confiscation due to illegal activity, must be auctioned.

I hate to wade in here, as it's political crap, and I usually agree with your postings. But... REALLY?

Hyperjacked didn't even explicitly solicit donations. Just gave rationale for their actions.

That you feel that stealing from your neighbors to give to the homeless is somehow more noble than voluntary support is dumbfounding.

I just stated what the law encoded in the books said. I made no value judgement.

The visual aids are a nice distraction from blood in the streets.

Only as measured against other crap fiat ponzi currencies. Try measuring it against something real.

In the world of the blind, a one-eyed man is as king.

FTFY

The extreme opposite viewpoint is that there is demand for 25BTC/block * 6block/hr * 24hr/day * $320/BTC = $1,152,000 worth of BTC per day. This $1.15 M demand may stay the same across the halving. This would indicate an equal value. In such a case, the new equilibrium price would be $640.

Granted, the truth will likely be somewhere in between.

Of course, I am of the opinion that BTC is drastically undervalued today. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

Right. Price will double as the result of the halving, but some of the increase will be in the runup to the date due to future expectation, and some will be after the date as constrained supply works its way through the system. The slope of this function is unknowable in advance.

What we can state with absolute certainty is that the supply of newly-created bitcoins entering the marketplace will be slashed by a factor of two on the date of the halving. I realize this is a tautology, but this does carry implications that seem to escape some.

We'll probably all head back to this forum enough times that it makes an impact upon other things we could be doing with our lives.

Irrelevant. How hard would it be to force a majority of the broader bitcoin community to adopt this fork that was sure to tank the value of their precious to $0.00?

Or perhaps it merely serves the functionaries' needs to appear to be 'doing something about terrorism'.

Please stop automatically conflating money laundering with unethical behaviors. It may be that laws against money laundering did some net good in the first few years after their enactment. Today, however, their primary use case is to criminalize perfectly moral activities.

How soon we forget.

Let's try Two-Point-Frickin-Three-TRILLION dollars.

Announced when? Oh, right. On a date that the following day's news would ensure that nobody noticed.

2001. September. The tenth.

Donald Rumsfeld -- then Secretary of Defense -- an authoritative enough source for you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU

How soon we forget indeed. Sheesh.

'zackly


Check it again. Not the day _after_ 9/11. The day _before_.

... but what does the ticker tape say? Three-buck-and-a-quarter today. Honey badger be honeybadgeratin'

Today. If tomorrow seven billion decide that the use of bitcoin over fiat is in their best interest, it shall come to pass.

The immovable object is demolished by the unstoppable force.

Lolitas with Nagants - points for style.

"The system"? I assume you mean the current smallblockian cripplecoined system? Yes. Agreed.

But I speak here of a larger truth. The world is awakening to the evils of the system we call fiat. Today, ten times the fraction of the populace understands the true nature of fractional reserve banking as did just a single digit's number of years ago. Bitcoin is merely today's most likely tool for bringing the needed change. What was it that Henry Ford said? Oh yeah -

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”


I'm a patient man...


...but I don't believe in magic.

Well, the Shift card is $10 for the card itself and zero-point-zero to use, but why let the truth get in the way of a good bout of hyperbolic ranting?

Personally, I don't find a one-time charge of around the cost of a good hamburger to be too much to be able to convert my Bitcoin into merchandise at will, at literally every merchant that accepts Visa. But maybe I'm unique in that regard.

Well, you were the one slinging out allegations of 'stupid'. Ya rude fuck.


Yup, in comparison to the Shift card, which started the convo...


Whatevs. Use a service, pay for the privilege. Not a problem. You got a better way to spend bitcoin at 'Every Where You Want To Be', as it says in the tagline?

...aaand can I get another 'stupid' for good measure?


Ah! There is is. My day is complete.

No problem at all. I guess in a world where you will never ever never part with your bitcoins, then the ability to spend them without any pain, strain, fuss, muss, bother, wear, or tear might not matter to you.

But to me -- and, I would assume, to most of the populace -- money is not and end in itself, but rather a tool with which to achieve one's goals. Money unspent upon one's death is money that has served you no purpose. I plan on spending some of my bitcoin before I die. You gonna croak with all of yours as unrealized potential?

Plus, it neatly solves the repeated dilemma of the conversation with the bitcoin skeptic:

Skeptic: "Well, what good is your magic internet money when nobody accepts it? I mean really, where can you spend that shit?"

Shift Card holder: "Anywhere that takes Visa"

Skeptic: "Oooooohhhh...."

I'll take that as a 'no' then.

At the instant of purchase. So what? It is still an effortless means of converting bitcoin to stuff.

Thereby making two transactions -- one of them fairly heavy-weight -- and a wait time in between, out of each transaction. My time in a single such transaction is worth the $10 one time fee.


And providing you with a nice tidy statement capturing the taxable event which is automatically imported into my accounting software.

I think maybe you're too dug in on hating this idea to open your mind to the benefits.

It's not something I'd use daily. Hell - it's not even available yet in my jurisdiction. But any option is another option. In this crypto world, more options are only a good thing.

Are you starting your own corporation? Because if not, it's just an extra step in the most convoluted way to buy shit: Buy bonds with USD, pay trading fee; Buy Visa card from brokerage, pay for card; Have brokerage convert the bonds you just bought back into USD, pay merchant.

A well balanced liquid asset portfolio is likely to contain more than just cash. A bitcoiner's liquid asset portfolio might even contain some (*gasp!*) bitcoin. What makes you think I'd need to buy bitcoin in order to fund the card to spend on a single transaction?


Guess which steps don't need to be cut out?
You can have that day and hint to do your own thinking on the matter.

<<This text is meant to serve as a standin for the semi-obligatory Nicholas Cage 'You Don't Say" meme>>

Hmm. Yeah - most people with brokerage accounts, and managing liquid assets in multiple asset classes, have credit ratings that are in the toilet </sarc> eta: a deserved buncha eyerolly smilies: 


A Bitcoiner that believes in the future of Bitcoin might plausibly put the bulk of their highly liquid (i.e. cash equivalent) funds in Bitcoin rather than in cash. This way, the price appreciation that he expects for his underlying asset works to increase his liquid funds, in the time when the funds are sitting awaiting spending. Putting off the conversion to USD at the last moment is advantageous in a bull market.

But hey - if you're too damn cheap to spend $10 in order to make many many times more, that's your bidnez.


I don't recall you actually asking that question, but whatevs. Why are you so fascinated with what I do with my money? That said, I have indeed bought bitcoin. I buy some from time to time. Would seem to me to be pretty odd for me to participate in this forum if I didn't have any connection to bitcoin.

If only I could take you at your word, sonnyderp.

Back in 2013, Edan Yago's / Epiphyte's project was negotiating with some relatively impoverished nation to create a kind of 'regulatory hands-off' real-life Galt's Gulch equivalent. I lost track of that project somewhere along the way.

no.

no.


no.

It rings plenty of bells. Different project. That's why I am denying it. Quite simple, really. I don't know why you persist in trying to mischaracterize my posts.

I honestly don't know. When Yago presented at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose, he quite pointedly refused to divulge with which country Epiphyte was negotiating. Honduras seems quite plausible.

That since-imploded Chilean thing had already been in discussion elsewhere, so I know that it is not the same effort.

eta: more info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=316449.0

Further eta: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=208333.0;all

Further further edit after re-familiarization: Nope - not Honduras.

Well, no. At that point, he is clearly referring to an earlier attempt on the part of his group. The one that fell through when the Honduran Supreme Court overturned the constitutional changes that would have allowed the project to happen therein.  See 7:00 - "when ... interests in Honduras .. rejected the plan, it was a bitter defeat. But Honduras was not the only country we were negotiating with. Queitly we have been working with a different country on a different project"

Enough waiting? Three years ago today, the price was about twelve bucks american. From my perspective, that ain't too bad. Perhaps more patience is in order.

Is BlindMayorBitcorn related to ChartBuddy? I liked the HAL theme, but there is something deliciously ironic about Brother Ray with 3D shades.

Whoever does run ChartBuddy - thanx for the occasional alternate gifs. They almost always elicit a little chuckle.

WTF is GBTC? Whose implication?

Aside from the fact that OP was talking about *fiat-lover's* WWIII bunker, not bitcoin-lover's bunker....

Wait, you expect to use your USD - overwhelmingly digital, or your Visa - intractibly dependent upon the Internet, after the apocalypse you've been prepping for? Because the comsats'll be comsatting and interweb providers'll be providing interwebs@groundzer0?
Maybe swap the $117.37 that your on-hand cash is limited to for tins of dog food, hmm?
You wacky, conventionally stupid old people! The nutty shit you imagine!

Umm, no. Not if the bank is charging them negative interest. Let alone the fact that one cannot live on $2 a day in the UK.

The point is that the old saw about 'your bitcoin is useless when the interwebs go dark' is trotted out time after time by idiot detractors that don't even realize that they're in the exact same predicament. They ignorantly toss it about as if to make their case.

Of course, when it comes to picking up the pieces afterwards, my money is on the prospect that the resourceful cryptonerds will get up a fully functional bitcoin packet radio network long before the merely resource-controlling overlords will restore access to the Internet-dependent monetary system to the mere peon subjects. Of course, if not, it's not as if its dollars before bitcoins -- it would be dollars concurrent with bitcoins.

edit: s/their/they're/

if the lights go out quickly and the power stops working...
- you can accept fiat if'n you want
- fiat is *way* down on the list of what I'll accept, unless it be pre-64 US coinage (i.e. junk silver). Other preferred forms of currency: Food, ammo, fuel, anything else tangible.


Better placed than the traditional banking system. That was my point.

Yea, and the average person in today's society has about enough cash on hand as might feed him three meals a day in a restaurant - for maybe three days. Whatever cash is on hand, it'll be about gone before people are scrambling for potable water.


Whatevs. When the chips have been down (twice, by my recollection), the community has rallied to collective action to resolve the impending doom before a handful of hours had passed.


What's that? Your 9 survival-quantity person-months of water, probably sufficient ammo, and single firearm? Tryin' ta scare me? Is that your point? I ain't skeered.

eta: ...junior

OTOH, depending upon the coding of the website, the operator of 'howsecureismypassword.net' may already know yours.

Three buck, four bits, and a dime. Honey badger be honeybadgeratin'

...for less?

Sorry - couldn't resist. AAR, looks interesting enough to learn more about. The article you link talks about it being Bitcoin, but I can't quite imagine GS would do that. Perhaps it is actually some permissioned blockchain? 'Twould be fun to watch some significant miner to throw their hash power that way just to see what might happen, no?

It's a reasonable model. Perhaps he merely misjudged the date.

<<insert gratuitous Frye "can't tell if serious" meme here>>

For 'permissioned' cases, I would agree with you.

However, if your use case is a trustless public ledger, it is absolutely the best data structure of which mankind is aware. Efficiency is only meaningful in relative terms when comparing alternatives. Accordingly, for the trustless public ledger use case, it is the most efficient  available.

Well, yeah.

Except that every significant financial institution is looking at 'the blockchain', trying to figure out how they're gonna use it. Which, by the way, was the topic of this sidebar to begin with.

::le sigh:: looks like we've come full circle - the following is what we were discussing:

http://www.tradersmagazine.com/news/brokerage/goldman-sachs-files-patent-to-settle-securities-in-bitcoin-114721-1.html

I mean, I know you're new here, but...  *cough*

How did you manage to get so much win in one little statement?

FTFY.

wait… what?


oops - not quite


That's better.

I am disappointed that google translate was unable to turn that into "You are an idiot"

Though making this shit up could be a wonderful tool in the front-running game.

BlindMayorBitcorn counter-trolls like a true sophisticate. Grin

Little bit of 'shop around the lower half in that first pic, but yes, easy on the eyes.

What? Ivanka is chopped liver ? ::snicker::

OTOH, A Trump white house is likely to be one adorned with booth babes - can't you see it?

There is a cost. See _my_ sig.

You too.

Yeah. That last one added a lot of value. </sarc>

I understand that not everyone agrees with Stolfi. Indeed, why would we, when we are true beliebers? But why the continued hostility? Does it actually cause you physical pain to hear an alternate viewpoint from time to time? Could we maybe tone down the demeaning attitude a bit?

This isn't meant to single out becoin - there's a bunch of you caught up in the playground group bullying/scapegoat syndrome.

For the record, I completely disagree with Stolfi as to the long-term prospects of Bitcoin. I agree with becoin that Bitcoin is (likely to be) the future of money. But I value Stolfi's contributions to the dialogue. Without an opposing view, we would miss opportunities for improvement.

Frankly, I admire Stolfi for never losing his cool when subjected to inappropriate ridicule and disrespect. Could we maybe just try to act like grownups?

... because ...*

* the trailing ellipsis should be interpreted as a rhetorical leading question mark

Yeah - it's a neat accounting trick. Split the block into the signature, and everything else. Call the 'everything else' the newblock. Put only newblock on the blockchain. Make a new data structure out of the signatures. Sweep under the rug the fact that the blocks are meaningless without the signatures. Ignore the fact that trustless use of bitcoin requires knowledge of, and maintenance of, both the newblockchain and the signature tree - now ever-so-slightly _larger_ than the old blockchain. Pretend you've done something about scalability. Profit!

I must be missing something. Everyone else seems to luuurve The New Hotness.

And. Perhaps many. Maybe. I think so. Yes, see link below. I don't know how long. I think the answer is that it does.

Rather than reiterate, I point you here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1279444.msg13197163#msg13197163

Maybe my fears are unjustified. I don't yet know enough about it to know. What I do know is that I don't trust that all those crowing about how this SegWit is going to save us have really looked at it to the point where they understand it.

..b-but everything you post below seems to indicate that we *should* be long.

Well, I don't think it answers any questions. Though I agree with what your point seems to be - that we should not automatically assume this is broken.

However, if one embraces (what I perceive to be) the key tenets of Bitcoin -- trustlessness and decentralization -- then we _all_ have a duty to perform due diligence before accepting even a minor change, let alone one that so radically alters the allocation of responsibility as this.

I guess I am just advocating some judicious scrutiny of which of the pied pipers you choose to follow. For it seems that some of the loudest such have not even as of yet read the entire score.

When relay nodes are incapable of distinguishing between valid transactions, and fake (note: near-zero-cost fake) transactions, all an attacker would have to do to bring the network down is to start injecting fake transactions. The crap would swamp out the legit. This seems to make us more vulnerable to capacity constraints, not less.

Having a second blockchain does absolutely nothing to reduce bloat. In order to use a federated blockchain in a trustless manner requires the user to download the entire bitcoin blockchain plus the entire federated blockchain. This can be no smaller than the bitcoin blockchain would be if all transactions were done in bitcoin. What's the point?

If one wants to accept a different trust model, one can avoid downloading these blockchains by using SPV clients. Or one could just put all transactions on the bitcoin blockchain, and use an SPV client. Again, what's the point?

Or, we could go to SegWit, which will buy us a one-time 1.8x bump in capacity -- with the tradeoff that it becomes free for an attacker to have false transactions relayed throughout the network, crowding out real transactions in a false transaction storm. But one still needs to download the entire signature tree in order to continue to use bitcoin in a trustless manner. Which can be no smaller than the current blockchain design. Again, what's the point?

So you're saying... don't use bitcoin then? Great! Scale bitcoin by not using it!

Equity markets fall in the crapper, leading to widespread pain and misery. Yet less than would be the case if they don't, and the asset bubble is allowed to inflate further, due to removing the signaling of the price of capital from the economy.

haha. I've been thinking about adding something along that line to my sidesig

After a while, that queasy-seasicky feeling in the pit of your stomach doesn't even register in your consciousness.

Risk free? And if BFX pulls a pirate?

Naaah - not a problem for investors. There is a simple calculus involved. Figure out if you like the long-term prospects of bitcoin. If so, buy as much as you can afford. Hodl. Done. No detailed info needed.

Day traders, well, that's a different problem.

7,961,281 PetaFLOPS
7,961 ExaFLOPS
8 ZetaFLOPS

We won't know for some time which is the better deal. They're both likely a safer bet than USD - at least for the long term.

What on earth could the anonymous owners of BFX have to gain by pocketing your cash?

Oh.

Yeah.

If you are not the sole controller of the keys, you don't really own that bitcoin. Hard lesson that each person seems to need to learn through negative reinforcement.

Ripple: The First Cryptocurrency Of the Central Banker Set [tm]



BULLISH!

Don't really know. As a consequence, I keep less than pocket change on either. I might, however, point out that they are federally regulated*. Is BFX?

*Still a devil, but a devil with known parameters.

For clarification, I meant Bullish for Bitcoin. (cuckoo for cocoa puffs?)


I'm in the clear. I've got some several dozen thousand Ripples, but I've not been able to access them since they reconfigured their site access credentials some months (years?) ago. I've long since written them off.


ehhh... probably not.

Probably someone wanted to buy a house.

I dunno, in the bigger picture, one would expect somebody somewhere to once and a while exchange coins for a down payment on a house, if this is indeed to be a new default global currency. If we can't use it, what good is it?

In the overall scheme of things, it was not that long ago that 823 BTC was pocket lint.

eta: now that I see the figure was 836, I feel the point is better made by not correcting it. Whatev

Absolute twaddle. Reducing the proportion of the wealth of the populace that the vampire squid is able to hoover up though legalistically-chartered theft is reason enough. Even if it were not for the fact that the legacy financial system already consumes a huge share of humanity's electricity production.

That's merely the abstract aggregate collection of people we call 'consumers' telling you that they don't want your damned widgets. That's a producer fail, pure and simple.

Incidentally, this thing we call 'economy' is nothing more than the abstract aggregate rollup of countless individual consumers and countless individual producers involved in countless individual transactions. If individual consumers don't value highly enough the goods that the producers are producing in order to engage in trade, so what? You speak as if it is a problem that requires solving by manipulation of monetary characteristics. It is not. If people don't want the crap that's being made, it is self-evident that their needs are being met. If people's needs are being met, there is no problem.

Four bills, four bits. Honey Badger keep on honeybadgeratin'

ASICs at the next smaller process node have just become available. For miners, this requires a response to either pony up for the new more efficient equipment, or start your exit from the mining game. As long as the older gear is still revenue positive, it will stay in service. Given the rate of adoption of the new generation, this may not be very long.

IOW, this hash rate boost is driven by chip geometries, and does not require collusion with exchanges to be beneficial for the miners.

Must. read. moar.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg13289831#msg13289831

post less.

GMax has abdicated his bitcoin github commit access. This is a significant development. Stated reason 'personal'. Speculation on inferred subtext may include 'ragequit' - dunno. Net result: less support for 1MB4Eva within the core team.

BULLISH!

There's no question Greg's a smart guy, and one of Bitcoin's stronger intellects. His technical ability will be missed. However, he seemed ideologically blindered to smallblockianism. I think this is a net positive.

...and in times of congestion, your 0-fee transaction will not get included in any blocks. Fine. But what happens when everyone (e.g. more than 4-7 per second) is including a fee? Is it reasonable that nobody is granted access to the system but those prepared to pay 0.1 BTC? 1 BTC? 10 BTC? The central question is whether or not a protocol limited to 4 tps is reasonable. I reply with an emphatic 'NO'.


Let us amend that to 'no effective spam attack'.

But small blocks only make it cheaper for an attacker to clog the system. Large blocks make it more expensive to clog the system. With large blocks, the attacker must create more transactions, each accompanied by whatever minimum fee the miners on average set for their individual policies for fee threshold for block inclusion.

Not only is the letter stupid, but the article is stupid as well. Coin Telegraph really debased their reputation with this clickbait.

Cry me a river. What is the line between not-bullshit and bullshit? I don't measure it in size of transaction, I measure it in number of transactions. Do you personally run a full node? I do. If you do not personally run a node, WTF do you care about number of transactions? If you do, then why are you so damned cheap to spend another $USD 10 on HDD space, and another $USD 0.50/mo on bandwidth - especially as you're so incensed about small-value transactions?

Baldly unsubstantiated assertion. Actually two of them. I disagree with both.
1) The bigger the blockchain the more transactions it has processed > the more it has been used > the more usable it is.
2) The smaller bigger the blockchain, the more transactions can be processed in given interval > the less need to deal with off-chain 'solutions' > the less need to deal with centralized off-chain 'solution' providers > the less centralization.


By ensuring that they have no recourse to direct transactions upon the blockchain? Logical inconsistency duly noted.

edit: emphasized

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

Do not ascribe to me characteristics which I do not possess. You seem to be so blinded by your ideology that you cannot even allow for your opposition to possess humanity within.


We don't need to rehash this truism. We all know this.


Another bald unsupported assertion. Show the analysis please.

An alternate hypothesis (one I deem more rational) is that per-transaction fees do not need to rise to untenable levels, should more transactions be allowed within each block. Well, that's not a hypothesis, that is a provable fact by appeal to simple arithmetic. The hypothesis is that total fees will be larger in this case than they will be in a smallblock world.

Here is another hypothesis, one many deem plausible: that faced with a Bitcoin with little utility because it does not support enough tps to allow a person to use it directly, and the option of XCoin (I hope there is not real coin named XCoin - this is just a variable) with all the characteristics of Bitcoin save its blocksize limitation, enough will adopt XCoin because it provides them real utility, such that XCoin will overtake Bitcoin in transaction volume, monetary volume, and mining concentration.

So who's a member of the Free Shit Army now?

I agree. It would take a pretty significant advantage for some other coin to capture Bitcoin's market share. I believe the fact that such an XCoin competitor would be usable by people directly due to tps capability, rather than requiring all users to line up behind centralized aggregated access providers required by a 4 tps Bitcoin, may be such an advantage.

Further, once everyone is using these centralized aggregated access providers anyhow, what is the motivation of these centralized actors to continue to use the relatively expensive Bitcoin, rather than the more capable, cheaper XCoin?

Yeah. The fact that average transaction is not minimum size. Judging by recent transactions, the limit is more like 4-5 tps.

I guess I would have thought that would have been self-evident for anybody that pondered the prospect with any seriousness.

whaaaat!?

What the heck does a decades-old report on a theoretical centralized digital cash system have to do with anything?

Can you articulate your definition of 'fee-paying spam'?


Upon what do you base this bald assertion?

So the fact that, to the average node operator, they have no real alternative -- you are marking that as a solid preference for 1MB blocks?


Can you articulate your definition of 'fee-paying spam'?

And a fine Yule to you, too.

Is that picture your handiwork? Very nice!

Sure, BJA expresses a contrarian opinion frequently.

Some others (look around) spend significant forum space merely complaining about BJA expressing an opinion.

Those who try to shake free their bias and look at the situation objectively might find one of these -- or may find the other of these -- as annoying.

just sayin'

Absolutely. And the fact that forum administrators have done nothing to curtail BJA's postings should give you a clue.

If it helps, think of it as the invisible hand of the marketplace sending a signal.

I told myself a handful of pages back that I was going to disengage from this particular branch of this thread.

Damn you, Fatman, for making an observation so pithy that it compels me to relate that I am very happy I had not a mouthful of coffee when I read it.  

Interestingly, both that thread and this one independently went bat-shit-crazy over the last 48 hours. Are we all really that bored with the market?

I get your point in regards to "cripplecoiners". However, I insist that "small blockers" is as accurate a name as possible, for the group that advocates no increase in the maxblocksize.

I restarted 24/7 on mine about a month ago, due to the controversy. Currently running Core, but not as support for core dev position. I am _very_ motivated to find an alternative. If only the 'anything but 1MB4EVA stasis' crowd had a single standard to rally around...

True, Bitcoin today enjoys a 91% market share of crypto. However, in the overall scope of a USD $7B asset class adrift in a many-$T sea, that market share is not unassailable. Indeed, should the masses finally decide to adopt crypto, I would expect them to adopt one that they can actually _use_, rather than one that prevents them from participating due to an arbitrary limitation. Any of dozens of shitcoins are waiting in the wings to meet this market need, jealously awaiting a chance to procure adoption by delivering real value in comparison to Bitcoin.

IOW, you have an inaccurate picture of the competitive marketplace.

And if you think miners would not switch in a second to some other coin, should it deliver larger profits, you are delusional.

Home. My entire bitcoin folder tree amounts to less than 64 GiB - or less than USD $10 of disk space. Bandwidth is such that I don't even notice any degradation to other apps. I admit that my ISP is better than many. I've never thought to measure it with any finer resolution than 'computing demands are irrelevant'.

BJA might be able to provide more info on VPS use. I think he said $118/yr, and a 'couple bucks/month for bandwidth'. But I don't mean to put words into his mouth.

I guess I was putting words into your mouth then - sorry - such was not my intent. I thought you indicated in another post that you ran a node on a VPS.

Thanks for chiming in. Please clarify, if you are willing.

You are advancing a hypothesis as a known. I think your hypothesis is faulty.

I believe that, should any alt be adopted for small value transactions, the line between 'small value' and 'large value' will quickly trend upwards in absolute value, eventually subsuming all of the actual value within the so-called 'high value' transaction space. If indeed this vision is correct, the Bitcoin would be left eventually as valueless.

Hmm... just a sec... checking....

OK, back. 8. I'm guessing that's a default. I've not modified that part of bitcoin.conf.

As long as we're nitpicking my particular node, it may be worth pointing out that I am running it over Tor.

Thanks. That's actionable info. Once I decide which larger-blocked node client I'll go with, I'll sink the time into reconfiguring.

Just calling it the way I see it.

Well, no. If you are nominally a "small blocker", you may choose from: recent roadmap based on SegWit first; SegWit only; Core 11; whatever MP's acolytes are running; and probably others. If you are nominally a "large blocker", you can choose from: any number of BIPs; XT; Bitcoin Unlimited; roll your own; and probably others.

Those may be good choices. Only after 'beans, bullets, and band-aids' though. Don't forget water storage. Three days without and you're dead. If the tinfoilhatters are right about the FEMA camps, TPTB have no better tool than municipal water supplies to get the masses lined up at the gates.

I'll reply back on the thread that you're porting this from (when I get back there). Suffice to say that I believe that market forces can solve this (non)problem without centralized command and control from the Core devs.

As just one tangential observation, I note that my rather modest node seems to have encountered no issue in swallowing up the referenced block 364292.

I think you are missing my point. First, let us strike 'litecoin' from the discussion, as it only serves as a standin for 'some unspecified altcoin'. Next, let us dispense with 'speed of transaction' - most cryptos have essentially instantaneous transactions, with confirmations taking some time, and a 4x speedup in confirmation is meaningless from the standpoint of real use cases.

The issue is that there is no good reason for multiple blockchains. If you put 'little' transactions on one blockchain, and 'large' transactions on another blockchain, it makes no difference. Anyone who wishes to have trustless operation on both blockchains will need to have a full node for both blockchains. No reduction in overall resource demands.

But mostly, as the alt gains use due to fulfilling use cases that Bitcoin refuses to fulfill, it will necessarily rise in utility value (that's a tautology). With increased utility value, I posit that it will also increase in monetary value. Such will attract miners. Probably at the expense of Bitcoin losing miners. Such will accelerate to the point where the security position between Bitcoin and the alt will flip. At which point, there be no advantage whatsoever that Bitcoin can claim. Net result: Bitcoin would be abandoned forthwith, with complete collapse in monetary value of its associated token.

IOW, advocating a 'low value' alt to absorb all the 'small' transactions is suicidal.

Please provide a definition of 'bogus transaction'. Without such, I am unable to understand your argument.

...

You fail to grasp a very simple concept:

If you make a free, or almost free crypto, that can do only a handful of TX per day, what's stopping someone from abusing it and getting the network to its capacity limits, triggering a priority queue through fees?

If I can have many free txs then I can make a script and fuck the system up for even less peanuts. Hundreds or thousands of nodes will be paying bandwidth and storage costs for junk that took me a few seconds to generate through my script. The game theory of such a system doesn't add up.

IOW, restricting maxblocksize only makes your envisioned scenario worse.

Definition fail. A definition needs to be precise, such that I may objectively determine whether or not a transaction is bogus by examining it. What are the objective observable characteristics of a bogus transaction?

I'm not trying to eliminate it, I am trying to say that in the dichotomy between litecoin and Bitcoin, the 4x blocktime difference is meaningless.

The remaining aspects of transaction time only serve to buttress my point - whatever coin provides true utility to more users will in time subsume the vast majority of the market.


No. Sidechains are a distraction. If the main blockchain of some coin supports all transactional use cases, and the Bitcoin blockchain supports only 'high value' transaction use cases due to some arbitrary maxblocksize limit, over time Bitcoin will become marginalized, and the alt will subsume Bitcoin's market cap.


Coke and Pepsi both provide rehydration and a sugar boost in pretty much identical quantities. The only difference between them is a slight flavor difference. IOW, they fulfill exactly the same use cases. Invalid comparison to two coins where one fulfills the universe of use cases and the other only a proper subset.

Likewise, Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover have differentiated use cases. Amex doesn't give me 5% back on all purchases. Visa doesn't partially make my car payment. Mastercard doesn't get me free stays at airport lounges. Discover isn't 'everywhere you want to be'. Again, differentiated use cases -- due to an inherent capability of the card. Not one card offers a proper superset of the use cases of the others.

Thank you. Exactly.

If there is no observable objective criteria for discriminating between 'legit transactions' and 'bogus transactions', then it is absolutely meaningless to speak of encoding a mechanism in the protocol for rejecting 'bogus transactions'.

Fair enough. However, there is no universal status quo. We need to choose between code status quo vs. economic status quo.

To maintain code status quo (1MB maxblocksize) requires abandoning economic status quo (ability to engage in transaction). To maintain unfettered transaction, we must increase maxblocksize.

Think carefully about which aspect of 'status quo' should dominate.

Why would they not? The protocol is what is important. If one abides by the protocol, your counterparty cannot tell whether or not you are running the same implementation that they are.

Seems to work for TCP/IP stacks.

The value is not in the "work" per se. The value is in the result.

Such would move the hard cap of somewhere around half a million transactions a day to a higher number. If you do not feel that the ability to process more transactions per unit time is an element of scalability, fine. I find such a position absurd, but so be it. If you insist on clinging to such a definition, than I am more interested increasing potential transactions per unit time than in your definition of scalability -- at least at this point in time, when we are rapidly approaching that limit.

And despite your repetitive statements stripping the reality, this has nothing to do with whether the transactions are zero- low- or ouch!-fee. Half a million a day regardless of the fees paid. Period.


You seek technological advances. This is good. But by promoting economic retardation, you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. The ECE is close enough that it can be breached at the next surge of adoption, while SegWit promotors are obviously deluded in claiming it will be in production 1H16.

Yes. A 'spammer' with sufficient resources can clog the system, no matter how high the maxblocksize is. So what? That is not the relevant point.

The relevant point is that, at the current maxblocksize, the system supports only a half-million transactions per day (+/-). Period. No more may be processed, even if every such attempted transaction was accompanied by 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, or more BTC. This is a hard limit currently, and this is an absolute fact. I don't know why you keep trying to deflect the conversation to the less-important 'amount of fees issue'.

In and of itself, the half-million per day limit would be no issue, but only as long as no more than a half-million 'valid' transactions are attempted per day. However, we are currently trending towards saturation. On average, blocks are currently approximately half-full. And in the last year, actual block size has increased 136%. On current trend, we don't have a year to raise this limit before user frustration. We don't have a half-year. If we get a surge in adoption this month (not an unlikely prospect, given the widely-media-discussed doubling in price over the last quarter), we could easily saturate within weeks of today.

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

Did you not admit upthread that you know of no way to examine a given transaction, and objectively categorize it as 'valid transaction' vs. 'bogus transaction'? Or was that someone else? If it was someone else, can you explain to me how you can objectively determine whether a given transaction reflects (what you casually dismiss as) 'actual use'?

If not, you offer exactly zero solutions.


Keeping the artificial limit at half-mil/day does nothing to deter such a spammer. Indeed, it only makes it cheaper for such a spammer to completely overwhelm the entire network, as less transactions are required to do so.

But again, you're only debating a second-order effect. The first order effect is that keeping the current maxblocksize ensures that no more than a half-mil transactions per day can be conducted in Bitcoin. Period. No matter how much is paid in fees. Finito. Game over.


Duh. Red herring totally unrelated to the discussion at hand. What you seem to fail to acknowledge is that this advantage applies to many cryptos. These benefits are not the exclusive domain of Bitcoin. I would like Bitcoin to remain the only crypto that matters. You seem hell-bent on suiciding it.


Nobody of which I am aware is advocating an instant increase to 100M transactions per day (Visa-scale). And yet you persist in arguing against a modest increase in the maxblocksize. Did I miss where you divulged the magic transaction throughput where you believe the system will break down?


Again, 'small fee' is a red herring. The issue is inability to transact at any price.


IOW, suicide Bitcoin so that some other alt can absorb its market share. Got it. Not a vision I can support - sorry.

Soooo.... centralize the use of crypto by forcing it through gatekeepers? Nope, again - not a vision I can support.


The situation is not dire. Until it is. See that new addition to chartbuddy? Chance that SegWit will even be coded and tested in time for the impending saturation seems nil - let alone time for adoption to do anything. We're outta runway. A modest bump in maxblocksize (e.g. doubling) may put off saturation for enough time for SegWit to become a reality.

As a sidebar, please tell me how multisig increases capacity. I do not believe it does. Multisig actually requires more signature per transaction. Until we have a significant volume of multisig, SegWit's putting the signatures outside the block size accounting does nothing for scalability. SegWit's '3-4x for multisig' is completely dependent upon the proportion of multisig transactions, is it not?

No. My point is that multisig necessarily _increases_ the size of a transaction - by replacing one signature with several. SegWit's 3-4x claim for multisig is based only upon the fact that they don't count the signature portion of the transaction in the 'block size' accounting. If there are no -- or an insignificant number -- of multisig transactions, then SegWit's claimed 3-4x due to multisig is either zero, or an insignificant amount, respectively.

In a world where multisig is the norm, yes SegWit will have an effective transaction count increase. But here in the real world, where multisig is very little, MultiSig's claim of 3-4x increase is smoke and mirrors.

Absolute crazy talk. Let me repeat back what I think you said, and see if I understand your conjecture.

US Government is planning on tanking the US Dollar. Bitcoin is a tool they created in order to facilitate this goal. Despite the strategic value of this tool, .gov decided to use it to extract vast sums via auction. Except it wasn't vast sums - it was a paltry ten mil $. And that's not the pump - that's the entire value. In a tril $ economy. This from the cabal that can print money at will. Right.

Sorry - doesn't pass the sniff test.

Well, I'm glad I reiterated it, because that's how I interpreted it. I certainly don't wish to put words into your mouth. Let's see where I went wrong:

1) US Government is planning on tanking the US Dollar. Is this your belief?
2) Bitcoin is a tool they created in order to facilitate this goal. Is this your belief?
3) ... .gov decided to use [bitcoin] to extract vast sums via auction. Is this your belief?

thanks

'state' as in the governmental state? Are you in the US? I didn't think any state depositories performed this service any longer.


Fascinating. I've not logged into stamp for some time. How does one take possession of the gold they've bought with their bitcoins?


That all makes sense...


... but that sounds looney. If the government or some other form of TPTB wanted to herd the sheeple into bitcoin, they're doing a pretty piss-poor job of it. Seven years of herding with no more than a RCH proportion of the population participating in any crypto. What is the reasoning behind your assertion?


huh hunh. "big block of cheese day". I think I've seen you use that expression before. What is the genesis of this expression? Is it yours? Why cheese? What does it denote? Don't get me wrong - I don't mean to denigrate it. It has a certain appeal.


Plausible.


Not as plausible. While many financial assets could easily tank under such a scenario, stocks are at least _supposed_to_ represent a share of actual tangible wealth. Tangible wealth does not vaporize in a financial or monetary calamity. Because it is ... err ... _tangible_. Connect the dots for me?


I don't get it. Maybe if you can identify who 'they' are I might understand. But AFAICT the 'they' that are usually discussed in these terms have had nothing to do with the development of bitcoin or other cryptos. Unless you want to count Mike Hearn. But not only do I not think he is a member of the canonical 'they', but he has not so much advocated for reduced fungibility of cryptos, as much as pointed out that such could be done from a technical standpoint.


Maybe you can explain to me how the blockchain enables 'maintaining international power of monetary control'?

Mea culpa. I apologize for my misunderstanding.


But now you've lost me again. While I don't want to stretch the metaphor of a criminal trial, in such things one typically needs to prove means, motive and opportunity. While I don't believe the chicken feed involved in the Marshal's auction is enough to even register as motive, I'll spot you that. Won't even ask you for any evidence.

But, what is the means by which the USMS 'pumped' the market? What was the opportunity? Are you telling me that they bought enough bitcoin to manipulate the market upward? I thought they wanted to divest. Where is the evidence?


Plausible. The municipal water here is flouridated. And I drink some of it. On the other hand, it may have more to do with the utter lack of evidence you present. Shall we dig deeper?

BULLISH.

Well, no. Bearish, actually, because gives additional motivation to sell bitcoin. But still, that's pretty cool, and I see it as a step forward.

How does that differ from the SegWit-based 'roadmap'?

I guess I misunderstood. I recently read that Core devs will still hashing out some aspects of how the code will be implemented. No?

Hmm. Really? As in release candidate? I guess I need to source the impression I was given. I do recall that it was a convo on the dev reflector, though I cannot remember details other than that.

Well, no. It is not just like the highway. The difference is that when traffic increases to max safe capacity, additional lanes are constructed.

You persist in saying this. Yet you have not offered your theory as to the mechanism by which the gov accomplished this pump, let alone provide any evidence thereof.

That's no mic drop. A mic drop is a victorious action, taken only when your wordplay has been so devastatingly erudite that there is no possible way your opponent would embarrass himself by trying to follow it up.

Mike's blog post is what is known colloquially as 'throwing in the towel'.

A surprisingly lucid article for mainstream press.

Doesn't make much sense. While 1/10000 of the transaction represents only 0.01% of the customer's transaction cost, it represents 100% of the tranasaction aggregator's cost - and that is the party tasked with selecting the ultimate settlement network.

No. Makes no sense whatsoever.

True, the choice of settlement platform is leveraged 10,000:1 in this scenario for the transacting party. As such, it probably does not much matter to the transaction party whether the underlying settlement platform is Bitcoin or a vastly cheaper alt.

However, to the payment provider -- the party who actually selects the underlying settlement platform -- that cost represents the bulk of the Cost Of Production. If any business can reduce their cost of production by a significant portion, you can be damned sure they are going to take that option.

The benefit to the party actually bearing the cost is huuuuuge.

Edit: Sorry. Unintended duplicate.

Every coin that they withdraw before the fork ends up being one coin on each chain after the fork. If they leave one coin on the exchange, there is likely no existing contractual agreement that the exchange might grant them back one coin on chain A, while keeping the one coin on chain B for itself.

ha. haha. Haha. HahaHa. HaHa HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Ha.


Oh - you had me going there for a bit.

Close. But omits illustrative detail. BU block size limit is whatever the emergent consensus of the entire network is, configured by means of each user setting their own block size limit value.

And some of us watched -- fascinated -- as it unfolded in real time.

Don't know. If so, then how could those BTC be lent to others?

I have stayed away from BFX all these years, as its entire biz model seems predicated upon systemic risk of fractional reserve moral hazard. What am I missing?

Hate to bust your chops on this, but that would be 'dogs and cats... _living_ together...'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ZOKDmorj0

You may wish to ponder his assertion that it is unlikely that anyone will customize a client to provide pushbutton 'rescind payment' abilities. If we have learned anything about script kiddies, it is that there are plenty who destroy only for the lulz of watching the world burn.

With the indirection of the aggregator in between, I don't think most customers will give it a second thought. Quick - what actual bank underwrites your 'Best Buy' or 'Frontier Airlines' credit card?

Yeah... about that post... sorry... I didn't realize I was doubling (long boring story).

But I still think you put too much faith in the purchaser.

Yeah, and I was aware of (and even following) Bitcoin for something like a year before I bought in too. And today, some other person is just becoming aware of Bitcoin - and they'll buy some months down the road at a large increment in price. And _they'll_ score a hundred-bagger. If this thing goes where I'm 80% convinced it is headed, we have several orders of magnitude to go. Still opportunity for riches for everyone.

If _we_ don't F it up.

And if we are capable of F-ing it up, it wasn't the right solution anyhow.

I don't think in terms of liquidation or exit. In my planning, I have built a number of laddered 'diversification points', none of which, itself, divests a large percentage of my stash. Risto codified this as his 'SSS' strategy, though the concept is obvious in and of itself. The basics being 'every time BTC value increases by N*, sell M%', where N and M are constants of your choosing. In my case, each diversification point is enough to make a significant upgrade in lifestyle, without depleting principal.

Either this thing goes where there is no reason to exit, or it crashes to nothing. For me, there is no in between.

I might get scared if a credible report is made. This article is weak. No description of the nature of the exploit. Oh - but any computer that 'is connected to the blockchain' can be affected. WTF does 'connected to the blockchain' even mean?

Google turns up four results for "four punch raid". Wanna ELI5?

Germane part from the link - it was something BJA noticed as a repeated atomic meta-move:


If I know what a 'stutter step' was, I might be able to make use of this knowledge -- should it be a real thing.

:deleted - unit failure:

Of course, if you do, you have no assurance that bitaddress.org does not have a copy of your private key. Sure, it is said that the code runs locally. Did you audit it? At that instance?

If you're gonna be paranoid, you better noid harder.

Note: you can download the bitaddress page locally, and run it on an airgapped computer. Not too complex an operation to be sure your funds are safe.

According to coinmarketcap, as of yesterday, Bitcoin's share of the entire crypto space was 88%. That seems around last year's mean, if memory serves. IOW, there has not been a significant recent flight from Bitcoin to alts.

Hey - remember back when Ripple's market cap was greater than Bitcoin's? Yeah - those were the days.

No - banks absolutely and unequivocally create most of the money they lend out of nothing. It is zapped into being by the mere act of making the loan. Given your long and august participation on this forum, I am surprised you do not know this already.

eta: reading the rest of the thread to this point, I must have misunderstood your statement? I hope so.

Well, no. But I see you're going to do it anyway.

Well, no. If any more than 50% of the hash power decides to change Bitcoin, then Bitcoin will change. It is a certainty.

It may be painful as the longest chain waffles back and forth between the changed and the unchanged, but eventually, the chain built as per rules agreed to by the majority hash power will dominate. This potential to waffle is why the threshold for activating the new rules is put at a supermajority level - say... 75%.

ha. hahah. HahaHa. HAHAHAHAHa!

As measured how?

Maybe. Dunno. I refer to it as 'simple arithmetic'.


I suppose anyone who resists the change is at risk of losing value, yes.

You know any significant miners that are not nodes? No, neither do I.

Here's the dirty little secret nobody wants to discuss: pure nodes have no power. None whatsoever.

What miners want, miners will get. The only counterbalance is the prospect that the users will abandon the coin en masse.

Yes. It is. The clear trend is that transactions per unit time are increasing. At some point in the very near future, bitcoin will hit a ceiling that it has not before hit - the situation where blocks are persistently full.


I think BJA would argue against "everything fine". I'm in the camp of "things are gonna soon suck, and will continue to suck, until the pain rises to the point where most admit things need doing".

The miners will spin up as many nodes as are needed for the use of the miners. Compared to the cost of a viable mining operation, the cost of operating a node is lost in the noise.

Yes, users have the power to abandon the chain en masse. That is the only power users have. Non mining node operators (note: I would fit that description, so this is not meant as a mere insult) have zero-point-nothing power.

The power rests with the miners. They can do anything that does not cause the users to overwhelmingly abandon the chain.

Actually several years. We've been repeatedly pointing at the same stupid, unnecessary hard ceiling, and pointing out that the inexorable trend of increasing transactions has us on a clear intersect.

In the meantime, we have recently gone from things never sucking in regards to capacity, to things sucking for brief flashes of time. The issue is not how much one needs to pay to get a transaction through, the issue is that with the current block size, no more than about 350,000 transactions can be processed in a day. Period. No matter how much money is thrown at the transactions.

Do you understand the principle of non-parallel lines in a two-dimensional cartesian coordinate system?

When blocks become persistently full, you will never be able to safely assume that a zero-conf transaction will ever get included in a block.

And that is a fact.

In order to have an informed position of the severity of the problem, yes.

But first, let me step back. I may have befuddled you with jargon, and jargon may differ from time to time and from place to place. But the concept is pretty simple, and I imagine you grasp it intuitively, if not intellectually by the jargon I employed.

In a two-dimensional plane, two lines that are not parallel will eventually intersect. This is a geometric mathematical law. Let us illustrate the concept with an example: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions



What we are looking at is a chart of the number of Bitcoin blockchain transactions per day, plotted against the time axis of the last year. While it is very noisy, we can see that the trend over this year interval is that the number of transactions is clearly rising.

If we wanted to, we could engage in a process called 'curve fitting', where we kind of average out the high-frequency highs and lows, to show more of the trend, and less of the day-to-day variation. Even a moving 7-day average filters out a lot of spikiness: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address=



As we filter out the day-to-day noise, we get a curve that we can use to extrapolate into the future, to make educated assumptions about what is likely to happen to that quantity as time passes.

Let us now perform a curve fitting to a straight line - while this may not have great fidelity to the past, in the absence of additional info, it is about the best we can hope for as a prediction tool. Eyeballing the graph, we see that we have gone from 'about 90,000' transactions a day one year ago to 'about 180,000' transactions today now. Or roughly doubled in a year.

So let us mark a point today at 180,000, and another point one year ago at 90,000, and draw a straight line through these points.

So there is one of our non-parallel lines. For the other, we need a representation of the max transactions per day that can be processed, based upon the max block size. Today, that number is 'about 350,000'. A year ago, and in all the intervening time, that number is 'about 350,000'. Before that, dating back to the time the 1MB limit was put in place as a temporary DoS avoidance scheme (back when bitcoins were cheap as pennies, BTW), that number was 'about 350,000'.

To represent this on our graph, let us draw a mental line straight across from left to right at the level above the current graph, where 350,000 would be if we preserved the Y axis scale. This is our other non-parallel line.

So with the max block size fixed at 1MB, yielding a hard limit of 'about 350,000' transactions a day, we can project the slope of our actual transactions per day line into the future. We find that they intersect at a point somewhat less than a year away.


Look - I get that you're relatively new here. But rest assured we have been discussing this very issue for several years. Without that perspective in the rear view mirror, you may feel that the urgency is exaggerated. But to those of us who have been tracking this incipient problem for years, the situation does indeed appear dire.

The issue is that, once the lines intersect, growth is limited at the 'about 350,000' transactions a day level. The upward trending line of transactions a day flatlines - limited at the intersect to the system capacity. She can' take any more, cap'n'

You may claim that nearly a year is enough time to work things out. And that is the ~50% probability (assuming the 2x per year is a good curve fit). But those who have been around this for a while know that this animal seems to get adopted in fits and starts. If we had a proportional spike like we did in Jul, or in Sep, or in Dec, the system could not handle the volume. Period. No capacity whatsoever. If it was a spike, the backlog would eventually clear out. But how would the newcomers feel about their money being in limbo for a month? And what if it would have been Bitcoin's eternal September - we would kill all prospects of an explosion in adoption like the Internet experienced in 1993.

note: this is a napkin analysis. Quibbling on the actual numbers does not affect the outcome of 'we are indeed running out of time'.

If you think the world has enough Bitcoin users as things stand today, you have a point. If you think that use of Bitcoin growing by a factor of more than several dozen percent is desirable, then your point is ridiculous.

You can call it shoddily constructed. I'll call it precise enough for the purpose at hand.

Just so we understand each other, would you be happy if adoption stalls out at somewhat less than twice of where it stands today? (We'll get to following arguments as a follow on....)


Now who's advancing the debate by zero percent?

For the umpteenth time - the issue is NOT dust transactions. The issue is that, with max block size capped at 1MB, the system is simply incapable of handling more than ~350,000 transactions a day - no matter the value of those transactions. Quit changing the topic. Quit putting words in my mouth. Such is dishonest.

I thought you probably did. Sorry for the use of unfamiliar jargon.


No slight intended. I formed the impression that you thought the discussion over the max block size was a recent phenomenon. I just meant to point out that it has been ongoing for years.


By 'trajectory' do you mean to denote the rate of growth in the transactions per day? For there is nothing that _can_ be done about this curve. It just is, and reflects all the multitudinous decisions that scores of independent actors arrive at in their usage of the blockchain. It is a reflection of the actual amount of use that people are getting out of Bitcoin. Accordingly, there is nothing to be done about the trajectory. What we can do something about is the capacity for transactions per unit time.

When should such a change come about? I would advocate ASAP. The 50% bet, based upon a 2x/year extrapolation, is somewhat less than a year. But what if we get a surge in adoption? For we don't know when the next great influx will arrive. If it happens next month, we will have scores of befuddled newcomers utterly unable to comprehend where there money disappeared to. With attendant widely-published horror stories. Which runs a very good chance of shunting these -- and future -- newcomers onto some other system. One without such a stupid artificial restriction.

 

I'm thinking you must have thought something other than you typed here. A certain number of usages will indeed "bring us into this filled up capacity". This is pure math. The consequences that fall out of such an event can be debated, but the capacity is the capacity. The math is the math. It ain't even sophisticated math. Simple elementary school arithmetic will suffice.


First, the problem is not "a variety of attacks from a variety of angles". The problem is simple usage of Bitcoin, in the manner it was designed to be operated, absent a change in the max block size, is limited to 'about 350,000' transactions a day. Period. If more transactions than this are attempted, for a sustained period, those transactions will not be simply delayed. The excess over 'about 350,000' per day will never clear.

That's the guy who seemed to be claiming at Davos 2016 that the only money banks lend out is that money depositors give it. He conveniently 'forgot' about the 90+% of loan money that they zap into creation out of thin air by the very act of making the loan.

I'm on board with your main point, but I need to stop you right here.

Waco, anyone? How soon we forget.

Guess I oughta check it out. Anonymint is obviously a very bright person. But very troubled. I gave up on him (her?) a couple years back. Always with the plan for the anonymous crypto that will bury all other cryptos. Yet somehow ... ... ... nothing ever delivered. Medical issues, you know.

Certainly, it is within your power and within your right to refrain from forwarding any transactions as you desire. But that does not really answer the question.

If you have no criteria for objectively determining whether a given transaction was originated by a Classic or an XT node, you'll still be forwarding these that were forwarded to you by intervening Core nodes. Accordingly, how is it that you believe your action to be anything other than impotent?

What are the objective criteria by which any given transaction can be classified as being either: a) spam; or b) legitimate?

I have been asking this for months of many who like to kick around the term 'spam'. Many of them repeatedly. Perhaps even you? But to date, I have received exactly zero responsive replies.

While I'm with you, it doesn't really fit the bill. According to AlexGR, blocks are overwhelmingly full of spam. Yet if the spam makes it into a block, it does not meet your rational definition.

Plus, it offers no way of looking at a transaction in isolation, and classifying it as swipe left or swipe right.

Thanks anyhoo.

Thanks for trying. But your definition seems to be bereft of any ability to classify transactions as spam or legitimate. It is situational dependent. Changing by the moment. Under your definition,  a transaction that would be spam at one point in time may not be spam at another point in time, and vice versa.

It may be that you wish to classify something as either: a) below some level of satoshis per byte; or b) above some level of satoshis per byte. Which might be meaningful in our system. But that is not spam vs legitimate. Further, your fellow travelers are distinctly attaching a value of 'bad' to those transactions they deem 'spam', and 'not bad' to those transactions they deem 'legitimate'. Even if your metric was not variable from moment to moment, it does not fit into this framework.

Until recently, a transaction with zero transaction fees attached would have been privileged if it destroyed a sufficient number of bitcoin-days. Under your definition, such a transaction is spam, regardless of the economic value of the transaction - even Satoshi moving his fabled nut. I submit to you that such a definition is at least pejorative.

But hey - its 'a' definition.

Agreed. For better or worse, the experiment is now being run. I would have rather run the other experiment (increasing the block size), but we are where we are - at least for the time being.


Nirvana fallacy. As long as the max block size stays suitably larger than the time-averaged demand, we don't need to be at Visa levels. How long until we do need to be at Visa levels? We don't know. Will Moore's Postulate get us there in time? We don't know. But even many smallblockers believe we can do larger right now  - as just one example, Adam Back publicly proclaimed '4MB no problem' a day or two ago.

Another part of the experiment underway (it is not separable) is the postulate that consistently full blocks will forestall adoption of Bitcoin, driving away potential users. I think this is likely to be proven true, but admittedly, I don't know.

Sure there can. Maybe not for you, as I believe that what you desire for the definition of spam is 'any transaction of which I disapprove'.


In my mind, this may be the best definition we can muster. If one trusts the unseen hand of the marketplace, this should be necessary and sufficient. Absent artificial restrictions, IMNSHO.


They are not burdening everyone else with these costs. The block reward is what it is, and it will continue being emitted regardless of the number of 'spam transactions'. Indeed, such low value transactions only amortizes this cost over more transactions, thereby reducing the sunk block reward cost of making a single transaction. Additionally, this is not a part of the problem that need be solved for the long term. As halvings go on, this part of the problem solves itself.

This just in: hdbuck, despite spending untold hours toiling away upon BCT, reveals himself bereft of belief in The Bitcoin Experiment:

Point taken. But did they used to pay out in Bitcoin? If so, it is one valid data point.

Even in a great upheaval, the movement happens at the margins. Best stay alert.

Your refusal to consider what they are saying seems myopic. They are not complaining about another 3-4 cents. They are complaining about unknowable transaction inclusion times.


You seem to believe that the only route in and out of alts -- and all use cases of alts -- involve Bitcoin. I submit to you that this is likely to be false. Over time, should Bitcoin keep ostracizing more and more use cases, this presumed partial dependency is likely to become less and less.

I wouldn't. I'm somewhat invested in Bitcoin.


We don't. What we do know is that there are scads of alts that are hungry for any portion of Bitcoin's current market share, and are likely to implement anything seen as a competitive advantage.


I personally don't believe that upping the block size by some low integer value is going to be problematic. As long as max block size stays behind the rate of Moore's Postulate, this should cause no issues. If it does get ahead, I trust miners to not fuck up the system.


This discussion has been going on for years. Core's obstinance to not address it in time for the intercept of:
    a) the max block size over time curve; and
    b) the actual block size over time curve,
demonstrates a failure of leadership.

Why the lol? No... really.

Are you trying to make the case that the only reason LTC has only processed 11 transactions in that time is because they are limited to that number? Would that be by design or by flaw?

Point is, while Bitcoin has captured a paltry $6B market cap (as compared to global monetary base), pointing your finger at another even smaller entity (~2.4%) and laughing makes you look the petty bully.

That hardly seems like a solution that would work for large commercial purposes. Do you envision some poor lonely character toiling 24 hours a day, looking up an entry in an accounts payable database, checking some source for the proper transaction fee at that instant, and then handcrafting a transaction, keyed by hand, into some generic wallet?

I mean it might work for a small operation, but does not work at scale. Yes, they could craft a SW solution of their own to do this. Yet if they rely on some central fee/byte trend tracker, that's one more nexus of trustful behavior.

And again, you are ignoring what they have said. Whether or not true, it is certainly plausible that they have abandoned bitcoin for this part of their operations for exactly this reason.


I was making no value judjement about you being a Bitcoin maximalist (whatever that is) - my counter stands on its own. Allow me to restore your quote that you later snipped:


Were you not trying to imply that the larger transaction fee was less than the amount lost in converting from alt to bitcoin for the purpose of cashing out? 'Cause that's certainly what it looks like.

You insult my intelligence. Intentionally? Or is that all the ammo you have?

The amount of determinism in a usually-full-block scenario is vastly reduced in comparison to the usually-room-in-blocks scenario. Period. You realize this, right?

Why the lol? No... really.

Laughing about a business seeking to optimize the value of the expenditures it makes brands you as someone unknowledgeable about how to run a business. That's all.

Again, you miss the point. An entity that regularly needs to make hundreds of transactions is not likely to be entering each one by hand into some off-the-shelf wallet. The fact that some make fee suggestions (some wildly off the mark, by recent reports) is irrelevant.


Several. Mostly Armory, Electrum, Satoshi, and Schildbach. Though I don't see how this is relevant - I'm not in the high-volume-transaction business.


I find your assertion that you know what is best for some other entity's customers mildly interesting. The road to centralization is paved with 'better for them' intentions.

About a minute after the previous block. How long did it take to arrive? We don't know. Perhaps a few seconds before they scored their block (lucky them)? Would you expect them to just not mine in the time it takes them to build a new block that excludes all transactions in the previous?

Good. That notable retrocoiner irritating narcissistic blowhard is toxic to bitcoin.


Alas, your quoted material seems not to support your conclusion. He's been swinging his self-proclaimed massive crypto-schlong around long enough. Yet despite previous threats, there is nothing in the quote where he signals a divestiture. Sure, if he dumps from loss of faith, we might have a short-term drop. But hath the emperor any clothes?

One thing we've unambiguously learned from this is that he not only is bereft of significant mining power, but also bereft of significant influence over those that actually control mining power.

In all truthfulness, I have always wondered the reason for the 2016-block difficulty adjustment. A finer-grained adjustment seems just natural to me. Though I've never looked into it. What are the arguments against a more continuous adjustment?

(The four-year halving always seemed funny to me too. Done merely for simplicity of implementation?)

Sorry - not following. Expanded explanation available?

Incidentally, the irony of Core calling for HF changes to the actual* consensus mechanism is not lost on me.

*I do not consider block size to be part of the fundamental consensus mechanism.

To a miner, a halving is a halving. This has a good chance in causing step-function reductions in security, as hashpower becomes unprofitable overnight.

Seems to me a closer approximation to a continuous function might have been better design. But what do I know? I'm a bear. Waiting for mah dinner.

Right, but that could still be done while also ...

Of course, the design (hope) is that the doubled scarcity (halved rate of new production) will cause price to ~2x. But we know that the market will front-run this expectation to some extent, and maybe lag a bit as well. But for miners, the instant is the instant - revenues suddenly halved.

By no means do I think it is fatal - we've been through it before. I'm just puzzled why it is not more nearly continuous. Same for the difficulty adjustment.

In other news: today, Bitcoin is down to 82.5% market share of the crypto space. Lower than any other data point in my recent memory.

There was a time when Ripple's market cap exceeded that of Bitcoin.

No, really.

Stop laughing - you're gonna feel foolish when you check the facts.

Two things:

1) I didn't say lowest ever. I said lowest in recent memory.

2) Right - you said within 25% or so, and you found a data point to confirm it. I was not arguing against your point, just pointing out that it was way wider thatn your 25% - indeed, at one time Ripple was bigger than Bitcoin. The superfluous tag sentences were merely to drive home how surprised I feel most might be to leran this.

Bonus 3) Well, duh. If Ripple alone used to be bigger than Bitcoin, it is obvious that Bitcoin's market share has indeed been lower than 82.5%. But 82.5% is a recent low.

This is a metric I check once a week or so. When I see any new trend, I go looking for a reason. I think the reason this time is a foolish FOMO into ETH. I think many are likely to end up hurt when this pops. But some other alts are also rising. Is this a trend with legs? I hope not. If Bitcoin dies, the entire crypto field will be set back by a decade or more. But I'm keeping my eye on it.

I'm not checking your math. What you're missing is appreciation in price.

Good call. I'm pretty sure it was in 2013. Ripple was introduced that year, if memory serves. They were prominently at Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose.


I do so hope you are right.

Funny contrast is funny. I know where my bet is placed.

No. We've told you over and over and over that the issue is not the nickel per transaction, but rather that the issue is the hard limit of several thousand transactions per day.

Why you are so dense as to not yet have heard this beggars belief.

FTFY. Especially given the recently published definition of spam as 'transaction accompanied by fee lower than typically included in recent blocks'.

Well, no. In today's environment, given what you are using for 'transaction', your transaction might still be instant, except it now has the very distinct possibility of being rolled back in 72 hours.

::le sigh::

Why? Because if Bitcoin dies, the crypto revolution is set back a decade. A fundamental precept of the crypto promise is the (eventual) non-inflationary measure. It's the most important part of the promise. If Bitcoin loses the property of being The One True Crypto Money, it is just one other in a sea of competing currencies. A sea of competing currencies, with new ones created at will, can not ever be non-inflationary. And mankind loses its only chance to cast off the yoke of the Vampire Squid.

Plus, I really don't want to divest into alts.

Not the dream - the promise. Hence 21M.


You describe the properties of a deflationary money. Again, the promise. If currency units are created willy-nilly, there is inherently inflation. You're speaking against yourself.


Yes, I do. i do not want my store of value to lose value over time. As do most rational people.

protip: Currency is not wealth. 'Stuff' is wealth. The amount of 'Stuff' in existence, plus created, is not determined by the amount of currency units. As more and more currency units chase after the same amount of 'Stuff', each currency unit buys less 'Stuff'.

I posit to you that for the majority of Bitcoiners, the 21M cap figures very heavily in their decision to get involved. If Bitcoin is not The One True Crypto, then it is just one more in an ever-expanding inflationary sea of equivalents.

Well, actually no.

Daryl Dragon had already had a decade-long successful career as a studio and road musician and producer, when he decided to quit his gig as musical director for The Beach Boys, taking background signer Toni Tennille with him, launching their own platinum-selling recording artist career.

Which of course, has fuck-all to do with Bitcoin.

The More You Know [tm]









Don't ask me why I know this.

If you were being logically consistent, 'status quo' would not be defined as 'the biggest change to the Bitcoin protocol since inception' -- which is exactly what The SegWit Omnibus Changeset really is -- but rather, no change.

But then again, I've not before particularly ascribed logical consistency to your statements...

Well, you're right. My cheap shot did nothing to move the dialogue along. Sorry.

Yet again...


I'm not sure exactly how to extract a single coherent point out of your reply without quoting the whole damned thing. Nevertheless, it would seem that you somehow believe that The SegWit Omnibus Changeset reflects some sort of status quo. Yet it is undeniable that this set of changes is a much greater change to the mechanics of Bitcoin than would be a simple 2MB max block size.

Let us focus upon that for a bit.

It may seem that way to you. Another way of looking at it is that, until very recently, the max block size was no factor in the economics of bitcoin.


If The SegWit Omnibus Changeset had reached consensus, we would not be arguing over it, now would we?


I think I understand your words. I just think they reveal flawed premises.

I can spot you the assertion that you are describing the technical status quo. However, maintaining the technical status quo has necessitated a deviation from the economic status quo. My viewpoint is that the technical status quo (1MB max block size) pales in significance to the economic status quo (enough room in the block on average to accommodate all transactions the miners might be willing to include). We can argue about which of these are more significant. What is indisputable is that there is more than one aspect to declaring 'status quo'.


Color me incredulous. The 'community' has been arguing over this since first proposed at 'SBHK'. You've been participating in these arguments. How can you not be aware of them?

Somehow, moving to more ... hospitable ... climes, with nary a hissyfit thrown, hardly seems like 'ragequit'.

eta: How many times shall we hear 'fork off, already!' before thy will be done?

You really do live in a rose-colored bubble, don't you?





Well, other than your BTC price speculations, of course, which seem fairly moderated.*










* (see what I did there?)

Link please?

Yeah... that's what I thought.

That is exactly what I am saying. I do not believe your representation. I have seen exactly zero instances of people trying to tank the price of Bitcoin as a strategy to get Core to capitulate.

So yes, a link is indeed necessary.

Otherwise, you are just pulling shit out of your ass.

Sure. I'd love to be able to stick to discussing only things that are meaningful.

However, you are spreading bullshit, claiming it to be noncontroversial fact. Accordingly, I am calling you on it.

Either provide links showing that this claim that "This paraphrased theme of "Let's cause bitcoin prices to fall in order that core compromises with us"   is so pervasive and common amongst a large number of XT/Classic supporters" is "non-contoversial", or publicly rescind your fucking lie.

inability to walk balk lie duly noted.

Yeah - about that -

What makes it funny is that the frame size you're talking about is completely unrelated to the TCP window size. Jumbo frames are an Ethernet concept. You're talking about the Ethernet MTU - a lower layer altogether. Has absolutely nothing to do with the TCP window size (which is also not the same as the TCP segment size).

BTW, I ain't Adam, but: Yes, mix of 5e and 6, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes.

And ookla tells me I get 850 Mbps down and 950 Mbps up.

Not that that has anything to do with current Bitcoin limits.

Plenty of grey area for either conclusion.

Not just no, but hell no.


I expect the chance of such an effort would be positively correlated with the appearance of any new evidence supporting the CSW==SN hypothesis. Cause rabies.

Isn't Moy the guy that was on the panel with Craig S Wright, Joseph VaughnPerling, Nick Szabo, and others hosted by Bitcoin Belle end of last calendar year - at the first outing of CSW?

Despite the claim of first Bitcoin IRA, Broad financial has been working this space for some time.

https://www.broadfinancial.com/self-directed/bitcoin-ira/

1) Price gonna up
2) Price gonna down
3) Price gonna sideways









(?)

Anyone have a handy Venn diagram of features for Etherium, Rootstock, Counterparty, and any other smart contracts contender?

...by some unquantifiable subset of actual stakeholders...


...by some similarly unquantifiable -- though mostly complementary -- subset of actual stakeholders.


Obviously because they are not 'pretty much already settled'.


Hmmm. Neither has any implementation of The SegWit Omnibus Proposal as of yet. Funny, that.


I'm still pushing for BU. So sue me.


Well, no. Don't lie to try to make a point. Both XT and Classic were proposed solutions to what their proposers saw as an actual emergency. I still agree with their viewpoint.


Obviously an improper use of English. What is your definition of 'fake proposal'?

You already have by arguing that a fixed cap on block size is anything other than identical to a resource with an inelastic supply.

"The total amount claimed to date stands at 263,519,268,303,371 JPY, approximately $2,411,412,137,427 USD. The total amount of bitcoin held by the MtGox estate is approximately 202, 185 XBT, or approximately $91.2 million, which bitcoin exchange Kraken will help distribute among the claimants."

Wonder how much of the $91 M$ will be left after the lawyers get their cut?

I'm assuming the $2.3T outlier claim was/will be rejected.

"There you go again" - Ronald Reagan

Lying to try to make a point, that is. Show me more than one quote which supports your claim that bigblockers assert we need to scale to visa levels today.

Well, no. But thanks for playing.

The only internal inconsistency was yours, in claiming that a certain item which is perfectly inelastic was actually elastic.

No, the only time I have seen that stated is when the least honest of the smallblockers have been building a straw man to engulf in flames.

Yeah, right. Your making shit up, then clinging to the lie, refusing to back any of it up, speaks volumes to all but you.

duly noted.

Do you have the stomach to re-up?

Don't think that's gonna happen. Congratulations. Sincerely.

Seeing as we found a topic we can be all lovey-dovey over, here's a tip from sad experience... If you're going to trade ladders, building $ on the upswing and BTC on the down, then stay ever-vigilant. When the rocket ignites, it is sudden and violent. You are likely to be come out with a pile of stinky fiat that cannot come anywhere close to buying back the BTC you just sold.

Or perhaps a bunch of FOMO-stricken noobs trying to get in for the first time, only to be rebuffed due to lack of capacity. Maybe never to try again.

We'll never know which.

That is an interesting thought. It's a stretch, but TPTB will make any stretch to cover their asses. (e.g., Not that long ago, the doctrine of 'crime of money laundering' did not even exist.)


I don't know who the underwriters are specifically, but one might be able to learn by trawling though insurance companies' annual reports - listed as a potential risk. I'm pretty certain however that it is not FDIC. They only ensure fiat, 'cause they can get it printed to cover systemic losses.

And food. The west produces food. In abundance. The rest of the world needs to eat something.

No-brainer only if performed via encephalectomy.

I'll read it when I need a laugh. I scanned as far as 'Roscrucians', and could go no farther.

Well, Core _could_ capitulate on the 'anything less than 95% is evil' doctrine. That'd be fun.

jstolfi is still active in some corner of that cesspool called reddit. Imagine dumping the *ahem!* intellectual discussion here for that swamp! I don't get it myself. But he still is espousing interesting insights.

While he always seemed to be a non-believer, he always had cogent analysis to offer.

Dafuq? Can you translate the battle for Willie's soul into swahili too?

And to think I had you pegged as an Iowan... nobody from the midwest 'takes' coffee. *pshaw*

wait... what!? When did OKCoin garner 90% of all transactions!?

Look... I'm as bullish as your average bitcoiner - but WT actual F? Is zerohedge just making shit up, or does one exchange actually have that much volume?

Last time we had a single exchange responsible for such a large share, we got .... Willybot. Followed by implosion.

that-escalated-quickly.gif

I've seen his recent contributions on reddit. He seemed to be a pariah here -- probably due to his nonbeliever status -- but given his axioms*, I always found his reasoning to be solid. Too bad he was driven away by rudeness.

*not ones that I agree with, BTW.

Well, no. Not an _obligation_, but rather a reminder that we see a way forward that we believe to be advantageous to the health of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, and that we remain working to this goal, and that we are not going away.


For the sake of accuracy, we believe it would be _better_ to have fixed this problem _yesterday_.


Like the Core solution of making vastly easier to soft fork in the future? Nay - we reject that dimension of 'easily changed'.


Look - I'm perfectly willing to assert that you are just _wrong_ rather than _malevolent_. Kindly return the courtesy, will you?


Except The SegWit Omnibus Changeset is not yet live on the main Bitcoin network, while XT, BU, and Classic are. So no, by the measure of what is running in production, TSWOC is actually second third fourth.

Of course, it is yet to be seen which activates first. But if you listen to the admonitions of one of the largest miners -- with enough hashpower to stall adoption of TSWOC -- you'd be forgiven for doing a spit-take.


As measured by the infallible wet finger in the air of this echo chamber. Riiiight.

Article indicates beucoup US Treasuries being sold - but it doesn't say who is on the other side of each of those transactions. Can't sell without a buyer. Who's buying? The Treasury? Other bond-seekers? Need more input.