Topic: Domain name update (Read 2473 times)

"registration price" of an org domain is around $9 

good point - but I bet you could look that up. 

I have a question. How much did you pay for registering the domain first time ?

This looks like a post of excellent quality.
I can't say that I have validated all of the claims you have made. However from reading some of your other posts and looking through some of your judgements on things,  you are appear to be an honest and straightforward  person. Also I like the way you will engage in a step by step break down and analysis of peoples posts and give them fair objective appraisal with no apparent care for the popularity of the outcome.

I have read a few of cobra's posts and found him to be very straight talking person who's opinions I largely agree with ( meta board I dont read any others except rep)

The very most important points to me are that he has handed bitcointalk freely to theymos without doing damage to the forum, and as you say has looked after bitcoin.org amazingly considering through those times what could have happened.

I'm glad you made this post. I find it quite ungrateful and disgusting how some here have tried to ruin his name completely. Okay you guys didn't always get along and were not perfectly aligned in every decsion ,but it is nice you can remain objective and give a balanced and credible appraisal of an important character in bitcoin history.

The guy is solid.

Some wanted more color on my thoughts about cobra (and this was too long to fit in the trust system comments).

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“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

I don't know Cobra well.  I don't think anyone does: We can't as a consequence of his anonymity.

But I don't have much doubt that Cobra is a rough man in the above sense.  Brash and at times apparently erratic.  When I trusted him with confidences, he broke them.  Unrepentantly.  He created drama in the community, for reasons that I don't understand or maybe no reason at all.  Just because he's Cobra.

I've seen him lash out in places that I think didn't come close to deserving it-- and we have so much toxicity from outright enemies of Bitcoin, so it hurts all the more from people who should be working toward a common end.  Why?  Because it moved?  I cannot say.

He's abused me personally, calling me evil in public for little reason.  I'm not alone.  At times Cobra can be the kind of ally that makes you think longingly about the company of enemies.

But when things were broken and and really deserved criticism and when many people bit their tongues, Cobra was there also ready to speak up and say what was necessary.

When mobs were being swayed by popular whim, Cobra held strong.

From what I can tell Cobra more or less doesn't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks for better, or for worse.

In many cases I agree with his positions but strongly believe he often promotes them in a counter productive way that creates drama for no good reason.  I don't think it's because he intends to, but maybe because he doesn't really care what people might say or think.

But Bitcoin.org?   He protected it.  Yet, across the years he managed to drive off some extremely valuable contributors and left many in the community stressed that would get turned into something anti-bitcoin.  But he hasn't corrupted the site or handed it to someone who would, he just didn't know or didn't care to say the right words to inspire people's confidence that he wouldn't.

But when I think about how it could have gone instead of Cobra... I shiver.  The ill-fated Bitcoin Foundation wanted to control it-- could you imagine?

What if we'd handed the domain it to some soft-bellied placater that would hand it over to the first Satoshi impersonator that demanded it forcefully enough?

Do I trust him? No.  Would I want to do business with him? Not if I could avoid it. If we wound back the clock to 2011 knowing his personality would I have recommended inviting him to help maintain the domain?  No.

But would that have been a terrible mistake?  Very likely yes.

At the time many of the likely alternatives are ones that would have turned out much, much worse (especially since many of the not obviously worse options would have or actually did turn it down).

As someone else who has at times answered the calling to do what was necessary to protect what matters, I don't think my actions should be above judgement. To conceal that I've found Cobra's actions wanting would be a lie, but to deny his success at the most critical thing I could have asked of him would also be one. I think where I stood to act where others didn't all I could ask is that people judge me against the alternatives. And as far as Bitcoin.org goes, Cobra compares very well.

But that doesn't mean I have to like him or trust him.

And go shill for ETH scams?

Snaking out in courts?

Lol

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The clever snake smells the fear

Right

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

I think AGD is referring to Cøbra's announcement, quoted here :

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.54427415

Maybe he did and maybe you simply don't know. Maybe you should stop commenting things that you don't know about?

If a domain name belonged to you, would you be wanting opinions from strangers on the internet when you haven't requested any assistance regarding who should receive your property?

I'm sure if Cobra needed help making a decision, they would ask.  Until then, it's not our place to say.


//EDIT:  Apologies, I missed that part.  I just saw the more recent post where Cobra mentioned two names they had in mind.

Did someone already throw in Andreas M. Antonopoulos as the domain name keeper?

It doesn't matter which of you were the hardest against Segwit2X, one person cannot change something by himself. It takes several people to oppose change.


Replying to nullius:

Speaking from a new user's perspective here. I found bitcoin from a LinusTechTips video where he was attempting to mine bitcoin and talking about getting crazy rich from it. This is how the vast majority of newbies are exposed to bitcoin these days. You either tell them that there's this thing called "bitcoin" which you can mine and get free coins out of it (even though that isn't technically true), or show them that people are getting crazy rich off of it, either way the person in question dips their toes into bitcoin. But:

• Have you ever seen a popular youtube channel talking about BCH or BSV? Crypto channels do not count because their audience is people who already know about bitcoin.
• Have you seen a popular news outlet talking about BCH or BSV? Same disqualification above applies here too.

That's it. Those are the only avenues that reach large swaths of diverse users. Even the NYT article I linked did not once mention the words Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, despite containing much other terminology verbage. And a social media post will only be read by a few hundred or thousand people, which is the consequence of having a Follow button, most of whom are either not newbies or have other, busy things to do with their time. Meaning BCH and BSV shills' sphere of influence on social media is limited to the people who want to believe it i.e. not the average joes, and they are a large majority, who are trying to use bitcoin to become rich.

I mean, if someone clicked the Follow button on one of those people, then they are clearly not a bitcoin newbie.

Whether you like Cobra or not is irrelevant. This discussion is happening on the back page of an internet forum far away from the bitcoin.org landing page. It is worth noting though that discussions like these are necessary to prevent mainstream channels from hosting these arguments in their own medium, exposing this to clueless people on Youtube and news. That is something I would worry about more than whether you trust Cobra with the bitcoin domain, and judging by the length of this thread you guys are doing a good job at keeping this discussion out of mainstream news, as I haven't seen a single article about this as of today.

Wake me up when LinusTechTips, which is sometimes listed here, or some other youtuber starts talking about BCH/BSV.

In fine, I'm sharply more worried about (the highly unlikely scenario given the point above) a large trending youtube channel with millions of subscribers merely talking about forkcoins than posts that morons like this one make here.

That update was likely the result of my prompting.  On 23 November (my local time), I emailed several people I knew who owned .org domains encouraging them to renew as far in the future as possible because the .org registry was being sold.  Here's a copy of the email I sent Cøbra:


Cøbra replied thanking me for the tip and saying that he'd update both domains, although he wasn't sure it was strictly necessary (indeed, so far, I don't think renewal fees have increased much).

This post is quite clear.

Cobra had ultimate control of both domains.
Cobra gives 1 domain to theymos

I'm not sure how lauda " now " decides this inspires = " very likely malicious intent" from cobra.
To me this appears relinquishing power not gaining power over the direction / perception of bitcoin.

I can guarantee if these " critics" had owned both domains they wouldn't consider giving or sharing either.
They would be personally milking them for every cent like they do here with their gambling sigs, escrowing, lending, scamming.
Be grateful cobra had the domains not lauda. Wallets emptied, cpu maxed out mining shitcoins, your granny getting threatening phone calls in the middle of the night by "under cover agents".

Unless either theymos or cobra want to set up some co ownership scenario which I guess they don't. Then it will be as it has pretty much been before. We just keep trusting the same people have had to trust previously.
So far. So good, overall. Secretly I was hoping cobra would remove the merit tumour one night when theymos was sleeping.
More shattered dreams.

Personally I think this forum is the one I would choose if I had a pick. You can't replace the history here.

At first it sounded a move in the wrong direction because I had assumed they were co owners of both with joint influence.
Now it seems if anything a little more decentralized/ distributed.
Could it be more so.....yes

I always look at ultimate control.  The rest is pretty much a facade. Now you have 2 separate owners.

I am not too fond of this change. I feel like Cøbra was a counterbalancing force as well as a means to protect the forum by division of ownership, IE if say some legal action happens to the forum server itself it can be re-opened again or vice versa. I understand doing it for simplicity sake, but I believe there were distinct benefits to keeping it the way it was.



That is the primary function of The Clown Pope and his Clown Cardinals.

Surely, I am missing something here.



Like an insider joke, or something... 

That is an excellent point.  From here, the discussion inevitably devolves into big talk about some plan to redesign the Web to have at least the decentralization that Usenet had 40 years ago.  To avoid that discussion, all I’ll say is that “cypherpunks write code”. :-)


Sound advice.  With a centrally controlled resource, it is all a matter of trust.  There are some individuals whom I myself would trust with such responsibility.  (And what happens when they die—is there trustworthy clear succession of responsibility?  And what if others do not likewise trust them?  And...)

That said, I must point out that this:


...is exactly an instance of this:

If you don't like Cøbra: Cøbra had ultimate technical authority over both domains; I only had management access. There was never a point in history where I had ultimate authority over either domain. Now Cøbra only has one domain. Furthermore, I have not been very active in influencing anything related to bitcoin.org for a couple of years, so nothing is likely to change as a result of me being removed from the list of domain administrators.

If you don't like me: Cøbra never had any access to the bitcointalk.org server, and had essentially no influence over its operation, so things have not gotten "worse" in any way.

---

Cøbra has been erratic at times, and has made some statements/decisions which I disagreed with, but I really don't think that he will suddenly "turn evil". He could've done that at any time over the past several years, and nobody would've been able to stop him. Lately, bitcoin.org has been developing especially well.

The ideal solution would be to somehow stop people from considering centralized sites like bitcoin.org/bitcoin.com/etc. as "important", but that's not going to happen. Even if you got everyone to switch to btcinformation.org or whatever, then you'd be creating a new important centralized site which would eventually be corrupted. (Not to say that such an effort is pointless, though, if you don't like bitcoin.org.) All we can do about this situation is to just individually try our best:
 - If you see something about bitcoin.org (or another site) that you don't like, try to get it changed.
 - If you don't like bitcoin.org (or another site) or you don't like the way that it's managed, point people to a different site instead, or create your own.
 - If you end up controlling an "important site", try to keep it operating in the most correct way that you can, for as long as possible.

Bottom line up front:


In my experience, the moment that I hear the phrase “Blockstream propaganda”, I know that I am speaking to an idiot.  It’s a kind of shibboleth for those who believe everything that they read on /r/btc.


WTF, were you now around in September–November 2017?  All that talk about “the flippening” may seem like a sick joke now; but at the time, it did not seem so.

I myself will never forget the day of 12 November 2017.  I was fucking glued to the computer screen all day as our hashrate plummeted—I think that at some point, Slushpool alone was something like 70% of our hashrate, which is really bad.  Block generation slowed to a crawl, mempools backed up to hell, and meanwhile, all the Btrashers were on social media prematurely gloating about their victory as BCH prices spiked something like 300% in about 12 hours on FOMO rush—for before the dump, first comes the pump...

(Details thereby are recounted off the top of my head, subject to the lability of human memory.)

Of course, what ultimately happened is that even the worst bad actors in mining had to come crawling back to Bitcoin if they wanted to pay their electric bills, the BCH price crashed as quickly as it had spiked, FOMO sheep got fleeced, and Bitcoin moved on.  But that would not have happened if fewer Bitcoiners had my attitude, and more Bitcoiners had your attitude.  If the economic majority had your way of thinking, Bitcoin would have been “flippened” out of existence; and its replacement would have been pwned by Jihan & Co. as a centrally managed shitcoin, with no alternatives remaining.


What part of “X and Y would both have been very bad” is difficult to understand?


Interesting, the part that you ignored there.  Well, let us take the three that you did list one by one:


As a security expert, I can attest that you have no idea what a Sybil attack is.  How does Blockstream Satellite generate unbounded numbers of sockpuppet identities using cheap identifiers to overwhelm your view of the network?

I myself love the concept of Blockstream Satellite because, if used properly, it can give a 100% anonymous (receipt of broadcast radio waves with <$100 in commonly-available hardware) view of the blockchain that is immune to targeted attacks, and is probably more reliable on average than an anonymous peer randomly selected from a network currently infested with actual Sybil nodes.  When combined with the P2P network, I think that Blockstream Satellite adds a safety check against eclipse attacks.  Although that is not their primary advertised use case, I myself think it is a good use case.

For those with very limited Internet connections, receiving blocks through Blockstream Satellite and then checking the block hashes against those observed on the P2P network would give all the security of the P2P network, and would not in any way be comparable to SPV.  I have not configured it this way, and I admit I don’t know off the top of my head exactly the magic to make Core do this; but if I were consulting for someone with limited Internet access, it is the first thing that I would look into.  The first thing that I would check is if Blockstream has already done the hard work here...

Core independently validates the blocks that you would be receiving through Blockstream; and if the chain you’re being fed by them does not match the hashes of whatever your P2P peers are advertising as their best chain tips, Blockstream  has no way of stopping you from downloading the other blocks from the Internet, and immediately figuring out that Blockstream is trying to mislead you.

If Blockstream were to broadcast bad blocks worldwide through a system that by its nature cannot target users, it would be an excellent means for them to out themselves as totally corrupt and worthy of universal hatred.


I have not evaluated Blockstream Green, nor was I familiar with its predecessor GreenAddress; so I can’t speak to this.


So, bluematt flamed them for an advertisement that damn well deserved it.  His twitter bio still proudly lists him as Blockstream co-founder.  Call me when he starts tweeting about “Blockstream propaganda”.

I don’t (and can’t) transact on Liquid.  Insofar as I have looked into it, it seems to be primarily a way for non-Bitcoin assets to be managed.  Call me if Blockstream starts to position it as a replacement for Bitcoin, or otherwise as a competitor to Bitcoin.


Such as Lightning Network?  Most of what I know directly about Blockstream’s current market position comes from my following (in various degrees) c-lightning and related Elements Project work on Lightning integration with everything from shopping carts to tipjars to pay-per-call Web APIs.

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Merited by nullius (100)

(Oh, and libwally is little bundle of joy.  I say that based on having read the code, not based on the name of the company who published it.  I have been planning that if/when I dust off some of my little Bitcoin utilities on Github, I should probably use libwally to replace my own address-wrangling and BIP32-derivation code.  It’s a small thing in the big picture, but nevertheless worth mention in small text.)

Of the Blockstream goodies that I just described, all of which you somehow forgot to mention, what doesn’t push trustlessness and decentralization?

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I actually do oppose forks almost categorically.  I began to write a long essay on that, which perhaps I may finish later and post somewhere...  The nutshell version is that:


Indeed, you are right.  But without fallacious overextension, the same analogy works perfectly well for observing that excreted toxins are just that:  Shit (or shitcoins) which are dead weight to be flushed down the sewer.

It is not exactly a ringing endorsement of forks. :-)

---

Long post by Jay came in while I was writing my long post.  Will catch up soon.

How about you go and create your own site and make it as successful, and then give it away if you like communism so much.

It's his site, he can do whatever the f he pleases with it. You don't get a say. Sorry.

I believe that we cannot really have a world without attacks on bitcoin.

Even satoshi anticipated a lot of scams, attacks and snake oil salesmen.

I am NOT saying that those attacks should not be denigrated or called out for what they are, but I do not consider myself even willing to go down a road of hypothesizing a world without such attacks, because that seems to be nearly pure fantasy thinking and the world does not work like that.  Human greed does not work like that.  Even honest people will try to find ways around bitcoin, and they truly believe some of the bad analogies regarding the first generation does not work.  They put bitcoin in a first generation and try to act like nothing preceded it and then they try to create bitcoin 2.0, and they may even purposefully be in those false histories.

I also don't proclaim to be any kind of bitcoin expert, and so I appreciate that there might be symbiosis between bitcoin and the various shitcoins and even some learning that bitcoin does from those various attacks and experiments, so in some sense, bitcoin might not really be able to go up, until it has been attacked a number of times and proven itself worthy of continuing to go up.



I am not either familiar with all of the various attack vectors to figure out which ones are more pernicious.  Of course the forks were to some degree attempts to attack bitcoin from the inside, so yeah in 2017, it is possible that the BIG blocker nutjobs could have won that battle and gotten bitcoin into a place that is no better than paypal.. or just easy to change at the whim of any group that could muster up the most kind of whining.... but probably some of the cyperpunks would have gone off and started working on a new bitcoin that was really censorship resistant... but instead, we are in a history in which, so far, that has not need to be done, and bitcoin continues to exist in a kind of bullish variation of a cyperpunks wet dream, with second layer systems that are built on bitcoin, but a lot of optionality too.  Sure, not everything is perfect in bitcoin in terms of any of the cyperpunks principles, but it seems quite difficult to imagine any other more better scenarios of where bitcoin is at as compared to where it could be.  

Yeah, we are likely to have a lot more attacks in terms of fungibility and privacy, but there still continue to be a lot of options in bitcoin that help us to consider that we are in a much better position by having bitcoin (those of us who know about it and invest into it) than we would be in our current precarious money printing situation and a kind of world calamity of various  ongoing productivity uncertainties.  I say fuck gold to some extent, but we are in a world that even gold is likely to perform quite well even though it does not seem to have as much flexibility as bitcoin in terms of a lot of things, including portability, divisibility and ease of access and self-storage.  So, yeah, even though a lot of BIGGER players seem to know about gold and trying to get some security in gold's likelihood to retain its value, bitcoin is still quite likely to outperform gold in magnitudes in the coming couple of years... so even with uncertainties, including likely ongoing snakeoil deceptions in various shitcoins, including stable coins, I am still quite confident that bitcoiner could not really imagine too much of a better place to be, because I still believe it is a bit unrealistic to just wish that the talented shitcoiners would work on bitcoin rather than wanting to get away with printing their own money... cannot really stop those behaviors and get those people to "work" on bitcoin.



Sure.  Hate to quote Roger Ver.. but there is a tragedy of the commons problem, too... so some people can get away without fighting.. or at least not battling as much.. so the amount of outward fighting might not always be clear, and maybe in the end, we just have to have various tests of bitcoin that motivates others to figure out ways to make bitcoin more resilient or to speak out about bitcoin being superior or just superficially and unambiguously calling all the shitcoins, shitcoins, even though there might be one or two that has a tiny bit of value (am I being too generous?   ).


Yeah, maybe we will get lucky and some of them will disappear more quickly, but I don't see them going away very quickly and even if the scammer craig wright gets thrown in jail, BcashSV probably will not die, and it might even pump.  So what I am saying is that it could take 50 years or more for the value to gravitate into bitcoin, including periods of time that some of us could make way more money by supporting various shitcoins that are printing money and we happen to be in the right (or should I say Wright) circles at the right time.  

I am not sacrificing my own psychology to get involved in a bunch of shitcoins, but it is difficult to really stop people from doing it, and maybe we might even meet people who end up getting involved in "superduper the best coin" for the next 20 years and making a killing, while bitcoin is merely just plodding along with only averaging 50% price appreciation per year rather than some higher performing shitcoins.. that end up crashing down 20 years later, but in the meantime the shitcoin pumpeners were buying multiple lambos, hookers and blow... while we were suffering in our Rav4 and other lesser and more practical luxuries because we are "only" averaging 50% per year returns.. but yeah, in the long run, the value would still likely still be gravitating into bitcoin until there is some kind of meaningful other sound money asset that even comes close to bitcoin... and can you name any that come even close?  I thought not..  



O.k.  Fair enough.  I don't see any problem calling out Cøbra, and to the extent that he wants to defend himself, then that is fine, too.  Probably in the end, there are going to be a lot of decent people who are deceived into promoting shitcoins, or bitcoin imitations, so yeah, it could take a long ass time to work a lot of this out.. and sure it is possible also that bitcoin could fail in the process or get on a lower trajectory than what the stock to flow model would proposition.

Even something like stock to flow could still be correct, but have to be jiggered in order to deal with reality, such as moving the curve down or even tweaking some of the parameters in order to deal with the real impacts of some of the fuckery and trickery in the space and including some of the frequently subtle aspects that can deceive good people into supporting the wrong project.

Each of us merely has the choice about how we are going to proceed forward based on our own circumstances, so we have to consider our own particulars including cashflow, other investments, view of bitcoin as compared with other assets, our timeline, risk tolerance and our time and skills to research, manage and tweak our allocations which can include ongoing learning and figuring out how to spend our time, too.  

Maybe even if we are feeling less confident in bitcoin we might take some higher stakes in some of the shitcoins, and yeah, if we are in our early 20s we are going to be more willing to take higher risks and be a bit more adventurous and maybe even engage in a bit more of an active battle against shitcoins or even invest a bit higher allocation in shitcoins because we are not even sure about the direction of matters and what coin to support with our limited financial resources, but our more plentiful resources of energy and a longer time horizon, but sometimes our own personal circumstances are going to limit us more in terms of how we can participate, so even if some older people might be presumed to have gotten their shit together financially and even more worldly smarter, but there are even some older people who have been engaging in a long life of ongoing gambling, and they cannot stop themselves from continuing to gamble and wondering why they had never built up a strong base of wealth.. so they get lured (again) into shitcoins.  

There is only so much that any of us can do to help others, and I am NOT saying not to help others, but still one of the most important things is to make sure that each of us has our own shit together and to put our own oxygen mask on before helping others with their mask....   So, yes, we can also do both, and I don't subscribe to all or nothing, but we have to also think about matters in terms of ourselves and getting our own allocation to a comfortable level and tweaking our own situation from time to time while we venture out and call bullshit on other projects or even figuring out how much time, energy or finances to put into either fighting shitcoin projects or investing in them... None of us has perfect information, either, so the best that we can do, most of the time, is to attempt to tailor as well as we can to what we can figure out about our own circumstances.