Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 28. (Read 378980 times)

Interesting (if true.)  Maxwell mentioned that it may be unwise for any American to have a lot of sway in Bitcoin.  It would not surprise me if he had a variety of 'personal issues' to deal with here, but of course this is wild speculation.

I find Maxwell to have the best combination of skills, dedication, ethics, etc, though of course my visibility is limited and judgement subject to error.  I'll certainly track whatever repo he suggests (with a shrug about the dev commit makeup aspects of this post.)  If it's Blockstream's, fine.  Maxwell can (purportedly) walk away from Blockstream at his leisure and little loss which is confidence inspiring.  If it's some other repo, that's fine to.  So happens I'm occupying myself building a new machine upon which to do some crypto-currency related stuff among other things.  It makes little difference to me what repo(s) I pull from functionally.

As for spending my hodlings, I'll be sure to be tainting anything I might cash in for fiat at Coinbase.  There is no reason a fork cannot happen at an opportune point even if that point ends up being sometime in the past (e.g., the last revision representing input by /u/nullc.)

Greg, if you are reading this, let us know where we might keep tabs on your thoughts and plans.  I, for one, am with you...although given the makeup of the ecosystem that might be taken as faint praise...

Politicians can not legislate the value of PI because it is a simple fact that almost anyone can verify. However, when it comes to if time space travel is possible given relative theory or the cat is dead or not before you open the box, we really enter the technical politics world: When a knowledge becomes  so complex that only a few understand (and no one can prove that they really understand), politics will take over

So it is very important to keep to the simplest solution that gains majority of understanding. A brilliant solution without understanding will just be trashed by the majority, unless you find a way to bribe the majority to accept your solution, and that become politics

This kind of knowledge and time barrier even exists in core devs: None of the core devs have enough time to thoroughly understand a complex proposal by another core dev, so they just go ahead and promote an even more complex solution which no one will understand, and polish it with lots of end user benefits

The problem seems to be that the number of vocal users outweighs the IQ and experience of the node operators. A type of "Long September" effect as bitcoin edges into the mainstream. In earlier times there was never any disagreement on the way ahead because it was logically apparent to all concerned (not that many of us).

It's the flaw of democracy when you let it run it's natural course, you end up with things like politicians legislating the numerical value of Pi.

The centralization of the knowledge is the problem here, if everyone could easily understand what is going on then there will be no problem, so it is extremely important to keep the solution easy to understand for majority of users, e.g. decentralize the knowledge. And from this point of view, 2MB block is the most viable solution that can be understood by majority of users

People are political animals. Money is power, and Bitcoin changes the fundamental nature of money.

There is a mechanism in place to limit the power of developers, the governance mechanism of Bitcoin allows for this by having multiple alternative implementations and the ability to hard fork. We are now going through the process of developing the understanding and ecosystem to further allow this. I believe this is a necessary part of the evolution and growth of the protocol as a whole.

Because it's money, people will lose their mind and become animals when money is involved 

Who could have thought the governance of an open-source protocol would be so political...

This is very bad, bitcoin is created to prevent such kind of political disasters but unfortunately because core devs holds too much political power in deciding bitcoin's direction, the same thing happened exactly as a political fight in large enterprises: A faction with enough political expertise can use very ugly skill to make their opponents give up. In fact these core devs are the biggest target that can be compromised and the single point of failure of bitcoin, we should limit as much as possible the power from them but curretly there is no mechanism

Now only Wladimir is holding ground, he will be the next target to be compromised. I think the worst case scenario is that no consensus at all will be reached among core devs and bitcoin keeps as it is today forever, all the scaling solutions goes to offchain but that does not really matter for most of the IT illiterate people

True, in the past, people from the ruling class decided what should be used as currency, majority of users had no choice (Even today they still don't have a choice, they just want something secure and trustworthy (and simple), and of course the one that is backed by the power of government/central bank is most trustworthy). So I think gold was not a selection of average people's free will, but the will of the ruling class (They need gold to decorate their house, so there is always a demand from them to support the value of this kind of commodity)

I don't care that you can use Google when your absence of logical skills refrains you from adressing the original argument.

"I am a history buff myself"



To be clear:


You might want to carry on pretending that everyone was using gold coins back then but certainly that would make you the idiot worthy of being ridiculed.

In those days some families whole possessions weren't worth one single gold coin.

*edit wrong meme 

Gold and silver coins sometimes mixed with copper and other precious metals indeed. Wheat and grains have not been used as currencies, certainly not for the majority of human history like gold and silver coins have. I am not sure whether to ridicule you here or to go about teaching history 101, I am a history buff myself, so I am a bit shocked that you are not aware of this well known basic fact and that you are even trying to debate this with me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_daric
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_coinage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_coinage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Chinese_coinage#Gold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florin_%28English_coin%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_German_gulden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_dinar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_%28coin%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_of_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illyrian_coinage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visigothic_coinage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_coinage

Right, but there's a difference between trustlessness in transacting and trustlessness in holding your assets.

What I mean by that is provided I can run a full node and always check my balance in a trustless manner then it matters less to me if I have to use third-parties for everyday transactions.

I'm quite serious actually, if you take my point as a whole, not pick a phrase from it. What we have now is that anyone can transact on the main chain in a trustless manner. As that might be not workable long-term, there are proposals for a level 2 payment network, e.g. LN. These proposals are meant to be trustless (up to a point) as well. There's a hell of a difference between trustful and trustless off-chain solutions, even though both eventually settle on the main chain.

I did use the word trustless so many times here because it's the thing that matters. If I'm completely cut off from the blockchain's trustlessness, then Bitcoin is of no use for me. I cannot be sure I actually have coins, I cannot be sure I'm not involved in fractional reserve. If you have to trust a third-party in order to use Bitcoin, it's no better than fiat. It's just Fiat 2.0. That's what I meant in my reply to johnyj.

I'm not saying financial institutions will disappear, I'm saying that I want to have a choince not to trust them.

Or copper, wheat, grains and other such commodities.

Your point doesn't stand because you've provided factual evidence against it: gold was never a one-size-fits-all type of deal.

In the same way Bitcoin cannot and will never accomodate all use cases

Even the poor needed a currency for the exchange of goods and services, for the majority of known human history this has been in the form of gold and silver coins, my point still stands.

The plebs didn't hold any significant amount of gold. They were too poor for that. 

Right so gold was first hoarded and collected because it made nice weapon. Thanks for supporting my point!

Gold became money when it was demanded as tribute (tax). The war lords demanded it to produce weapons.

http://www.tutanchamun-game.de/downloads/bilderKatalog/images/dolch.jpg
http://www.goldseiten.de/content/kolumnen/download/pcm-17.pdf

Yes, once upon a time when gold was money. Now gold 2.0 is money.