Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 190. (Read 2032248 times)

The whitepaper seemed pretty basic as most of them are.  It's counter-productive to bog a reader down in minutia in such works.

The 'flash of insight' came, I think, with Maxwell's update on the various 'elements' and progress on them.  Whether he outlined it specifically or whether I half invented it, I'm not sure.  I had put my mind to the problem of incremental value pegging and mostly failed but I kinda started to see some of the possibilities when (I think) Maxwell was describing some of the time-lock primitives and such.

I never really appreciated (or even fully understood) some of the stuff about payment channels.  To me it seemed like a lot of trouble and undesirable complexity for a rather narrow use-case.  I can recognize the efficiency of controlling flows with start/stop messenging along a pre-defined channel (vs. a multitude of incremental value transactions) but it didn't (to me) translate much beyond paying for a porn movie until one finished their thing which can be difficult to predict ahead of time.  I'm starting to glimpse how such efficiency could be used in more critical contexts, and in particular how such a thing could result in a default return of value absent occasional update pings.

the way it would need to happen in normal circumstances is for the scBTC to be mined back to BTC, by reversing the proof, most likely via merge mining.  since the most common cause of a failure is likely to come from a 51% of the SC since it is inherently less secure (<100% MM'd) by definition being able to get mined back is not going to happen.  after all, that would be the purpose for the attack; to kill off everyone's scBTC while simultaneously shorting scBTC on an exchange while going long BTC on the MC.

that would be a fun attack.

Who is going to do that, some administrator? A bankruptcy trustee? No.

The best that could be achieved would be to build in some sort of rules like that into the scripts. No concrete method for doing that is proposed, but even if it were, it couldn't possibly handle all possible failures, since some if not all failures are by definition unanticipated. In the event that the state of a side chain were scrambled, there would just be no way to know who should be able to redeem.

For this reason, even the hint (or in some cases merely a rumor) of a problem on a side chain will lead to a run-on-the-bank scenario.

i smell desperation from the 1MB'ers. 

they love to flap their lips don't they?

btw, my poll is back over 73%.  tisk, tisk.

Good grief Gavin not only didn't understand the exponential function, he now explains that he apparently never learned the concept of statistical variance. For example, I can only be sure to obtain about 56 kbps here where I am when I am on a 3G (that drops down to EDGE/2G) wireless connection with my laptop.

And these are the retards you entrust the future of Bitcoin to?

Did all these Yes voters just suddenly become dumb or were they somehow fooled?

The BTC peg means that tvbcof could leverage the chain which spreads BTC out to the masses, while storing his BTC on a side chain that has the attributes he wants.

And if that side chain employs my consensus algorithm, then it can not be 50% attacked. So therefor there is no risk. Even if you disbelieve I have such a solution, the side chain could perhaps use merged mining. Even if you disbelieve that both my solution won't exist and merged mining won't be sufficient, then tvbcof claims it is possible to recover your BTC from an attacked side chain (but I need to go check the white paper to learn how this claim is achieved).

Edit: I can't find anything in the Blockstream whitepaper to support tvbcof's claim that one can recover their assets from an attacked chain. The closest is section 4.2 Fraudulent transfers, but the only really viable action there is to dilute everyone's BTC by the amount of the stolen coins.

The concept of how political regulatory capture works is beyond the comprehension of people who choose to believe it doesn't exist. Thus it doesn't matter how many times I define a metric for decentralized mining to you related to the autonomy of ephemeral nodes on home internet connections (as a valid resilience against the regulatory capture phenomenon of the Logic of Collective Action), you will still won't acknowledge it.

Another vector of decentralization is that there should be no politics involved with the protocol. We clearly see Bitcoin has failed that metric too.

But it an enormous fucking waste of time to argue here. It would be more productive to talk to myself in a desert.

I am going to enjoy LMAO when you retards are toast.

Onion routing was created by the US Navy.

I dug up a few links:

Last I looked TOR survives with 80% of it's financing coming directly from the U.S. government and most knowledgeable people who I find credible (in addition to my own analysis) saying that it has limited usefulness against attackers with the capabilities of the NSA.  Call me a skeptic, but the claims that TOR is funded by the govt to help Iranian dissidents avoid persecution and what-not I have a hard time swallowing it hook, line, and sinker.  That's but one of a long list of rather questionable observations as far as I am concerned.

I may use TOR for protection against certain privacy losses against certain classes of attacker, but I certainly would not trust such a solution with a great deal of my financial nest-egg.  Or at least not against a situation where the government wanted me to use a different solution for wealth preservation and transmission than I wished to.

Gold is almost entirely propped up by central banks who control the majority of the world's supply. They never had to pay for that gold themselves, since it was obtained via the taxing powers of the respective governments.

How vaulable would gold be if all the central banks auctioned off their supplies to the highest bidder and then refused to buy any more?

In terms of ensuring Bitcoin's survival in the face of hostile and well-resourced interests, I think a better model to look at is the Tor project. Why are they able to survive in spite of a lot of powerful interests who'd like to see otherwise?

Gold in modern societies counters your argument, but I agree that wide use is desirable.  Not necessarily for security but more for humanity.  This is exactly why sidechains are so important.  They're promise is a cryptographically strong and thus near perfect proxy for Bitcoin which is then free to hide out.  That it hides out significantly under the care of people with the skills to protect it is a good thing and a key to it's robustness.  Again, not at all unlike gold.

The sidechains where Bitcoin use flows among the masses are highly flexible to fill a variety of niches (e.g., a 'safe' monitored and controlled currency for use within the mandates of the state.)  They are also dispensable which addresses the single-point-of-failure problem.  What I never did envision was the crypto methods which could allow individuals using a successfully attacked sidechain to reclaim their original BTC eventually.  Brilliant!

There is no way to achieve the goal you want through the methods you're proposing.

If you want a currency that can store value, then it needs to be used by other people. That means it has to support the kind of usage levels that you're afraid of.

If remains too small to be effectively attacked, then it will also be too small to retain any kind of monetary value.

Safety through smallness is a dead end, which leaves safety through growth.

That might not work, but staying small for certain won't work.

I want a solution which can give me something approaching the confidence I have in precious metals under times of stress.

I say that when (not if) there is another financial crisis of the type which (according to legend) incited Satoshi, and it cannot be controlled with bail-outs and such, it is a near certainty that alternates to whatever solution we are funneled into will be attacked vigorously.  This includes gold and Bitcoin.

I say that these attacks are nearly certain to include pressure on corporate internet infrastructure providers and leveraging of the monitoring framworks known to be available to entities such as our NSA.

You seem to be saying that such things are entirely fanciful.  I disagree and I simply cannot bet as much as I would like on a solution which does not have the potential to defend itself against such things.  Bitcoin with it's 1MB/block cap has this potential, but only barely by my systems analysis and the available technologies and geopolitical landscapes as I understand them.

I want a value core that is as defensible as possible, and I want it to be Bitcoin because BTC is all that I own at this time.  I'll fight for it as long as there is hope then I'll switch to something else if we lose this battle.

If XT is so great, it should be great as a sidechain.  I honestly hope that it gets your 'critical mass' and 'outruns regulation' but I'm certainly not betting my BTC stash on it.  In fact I'll work toward this because I'm happy to use such a solution for whatever I can.  I already leverage the 'kindness' of various mega-players who give me nice toys for 'free', and XT seems like it would be a shoe-in for such use.  Hopefully you guys are porting the XT 'upgrades' to your btcd as we speak, and hopefully the hooks to make the XT protocol a sidechain will be easy and freely available to you.

Don't worry your pretty little head about ^that^ sort of gloom and doom FUD.

Per Gavin, "the financial crises is over" and we can (because Netflix) all count on the current economic boom to provide us with broadband in line with the idealistic expectations of Nielsen's Law.

A lot of those 'sensible counter arguments' take the form of:

"There's a tradeoff between scaling and decentralization."

"Can you explain what exactly you mean by 'decentralization' and how to measure it?"

"...no."

It's hard not to notice that you guys are highly proficient at ignoring 'sensible counter arguments' as though they didn't exist.  It's OK.  I understand...which is not to say that I would stoop to your level, but anyway...

Not embracing the 'SC fork' (soft) would be a monumental mistake by anyone who is sitting on sha256 ASIC gear.  I'll let you ponder that and/or wait to find out why.

Well said, and I think a lot of people see it this way.

There are lots of people who understand Bitcoin well enough and back a blocksize increase. Them being simply told they are unqualified to have a view/voice and to trust the "experts" without any sensible counter arguments, has turned them off as well it should.

And lots of people will remember this when it comes time to propose the SC fork.

Playing politics is precisely playing into the failure mode for Bitcoin. That is why I argued they should use only back channels and otherwise STFU and code.

The victory comes from code, not from talk.

Talk to explain new technologies is fine.

I personally see the bloat push as a threat because it is exactly how I would attack the system if I were chartered to come up with a strategy for doing so.  That is the first thing that hit me years ago when I put my mind to figuring out how it could be done.

This bloat push has happened periodically over the last number of years.  It was strong enough for me to diddle around philosophically with a variety of ideas, most of which pivot off of my initial conception of how to safely scale using subordinate chains.  Thankfully a lot of folks who are a lot more dedicated and a lot more capable than myself have carried this ball forward and have made giant progress toward a genuine scaling scheme which not only solves the scaling problems but adds a lot more capabilities that I didn't even imagine.

If you see 'outrage' on the part of the core devs and folks like me, it is mostly associated with the way Hearn (and by extension, Gavin) went about trying to get bloat stuffed in.  Covertly meeting with power-players inside and outside the ecosystem and trying to switch to a 'benevolent dictator' mode of code control seems outrageous to many of us because it is outrageous.

I think that the 'proper response' from the Blockstream guys and other's of their ilk would be to take off the gloves and go bare knuckles against the attackers, but they seem to cultured and to busy doing real work.  That's probably just as well because my instinct on this could well be wrong.

The point being made is that if Bitcoin is controlled by politics, then it is no longer decentralized thus I pointed out has already failed on 1 of 2 of its goals. The solution to the Bzyantine's Generals Problem is useless, if politics can subvert it. Which is my rationale for arguing that hard money is a delusion.