Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 233. (Read 2032248 times)

Quite lengthy reply from Adam:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34208939/

worth reading, though.

edit: fix typo

The entire point of Bitcoin is to push the critical infrastructure support role to a decentralize DAC that no people handle or control and that has no single point of failure.

Your entire argument is contrary to the very purpose of Bitcoin and most people's participation in the project. If Bitcoin become becomes dependent on SCs that manage risk for people to protect them from their own mistakes, then we are back into FRN land, where we are all protected and coddled for the minor fee of being slowly boiled alive in the FEDs inflationary pot.

This guy is consistently getting me to listen carefully.

Kudos. You've refined my plans. And I think I am entirely in alignment with your stated views (thus far).

Btw, just because you want to stay only in BTC, doesn't mean others won't want to speculate on higher ROI and the potential to jump back in time and front run your early investment in BTC. And they might be correct. One thing you have to contemplate is that an altcoin could be structured to benefit from the pegged side chain BTC investment it (yes an altcoin that is also a pegged side chain) and offer a higher ROI on its own coin. You might assert you'd opt for the pegged side chain clone that eliminated the side coin atribute, but market dynamics may not play nicely with your desire.

gmaxwell and the others simply ignore every single sensible counter argument to their statements. There has been no discussion with them, other than statements that they are the experts and we should listen to them, said as they themselves make what can best be described as misleading statements at best.

Thank you, just booked marked this post for future reference.

still posturing bullish.  apparently there is a bot chewing thru 2BTC buys every 30 sec?

The last time I ran bitcoind in support mode (allowing incoming 8333) was on a soekris router which is comparable to an RPI.  That was many years ago, and while it worked, it was very close to not 'working fine'.  Granted, leveldb and some other optimizations have happened since then which helped but things were pushing the envelope, and that is ignoring considerations such at UTXO size and network capacity.  Since I won't allow UPnP on my network and won't run bitcoind on an important machine, I need a sacrifice machine to run it.  I'm currently stuck on satellite here at home which pretty much precludes supporting the network even at the 1MB setting due to total data constraints.  To run bitcoind I have to arrange a remote system that I can trust and that is something of a challenge for a suspicious and careful person.  I'm not about to sacrifice the time and money in support of Bitcoin when the likes of Andresen and Hearn are hanging around trying to kill it.


To understand my thoughts you need to understand that I consider joe-sixpack users to be a liability on all fronts.  'Outrunning regulation' is laughable to me, and idiots do more harm than good when they try to run critical systems.  Multibitch users are not helpful to the network and, as I say, not helpful in the 'critical mass' equation since Bitcoin with it's batch-mode native function is simply not competitive as an exchange currency and never will be a big factor there.  IOW, the kinds of percentages we need for anything remotely resembling 'critical mass' are completely pie-in-the-sky.  Even if Bitcoin worked worth a shit here, a lot of people love big brother and would hate Bitcoin for that reason anyway.  All Bitcoin traction does is to attract attack from TPTB by virtue of it's positive attributes such as lack of counter-party risk.

Time and time again we see idiots losing their money to criminals and hucksters.  Being a Bitcoin enthusiast has been like watching a fight between a skilled boxer and a punching bag and I don't see that changing as long as idiots are using Bitcoin in it's native form.

Sidechains breaks the single-point-of-failure problem which vexes a 'one-size-fits-all' solution and pushes the critical infrastructure support role to people who can handle it.  It also pushes the benefits of a counter-party-risk free solution down to the masses.  Nobody can stop the masses from giving their money to shysters but it's very possible to arrange for the sidechain operates themselves to have a tough time robbing their users (unlike general alts.)

Am I an 'elitist'?  Fuck ya.  At the end of the day, though, my goal is to have everyone who wants to be able to enjoy the benefits of distributed crypto-currencies.  I just don't want to see Bitcoin ruined in the process of trying to achieve this...but am prepared to deal with this eventuality if that's the way the cookie is to crumble.

i'm really glad to see Fred Wilson continiuing to push this.  and eventually, they will.  great for decentralization:

Banks and Brokerages Should Be Mining The Blockchain

http://avc.com/2015/06/banks-and-brokerages-should-be-mining-the-blockchain/

If you believe largest size = maximum ROI, then you don't have much experience as an investor or you haven't learned from your experience. If you believe that the largest system always subsumes the smaller, fasting growing (in percentage terms) system, then you fail to study history.

If you haven't forgotten there are three reasons people invest in Bitcoin:

1) Gain wealth

2) Change the world according to their ideology

3) Protect their future wealth against a burgeoning totalitarianism

Superior means technology, marketing, and ecosystem kicking Buttcon's a$$ on all of those key attributes.

For example, Buttcon can not do micropayments now. That is an immediate opening for example. But it is not the only one. I (or let's say the group I'm delegating to) won't reveal the entire hand of cards just yet...

If you view the world's wealth as a pie, then the earliest investors gain the largest slice of the pie. The NWO coin is the dying paradigm. Large but dying. It will expropriate all the wealth it sucks into it.

Stay in Buttcon and you will end up a pauper at the end of it all. With pegged side chains, you have potential outlet to great wealth.

Edit: the larger a system becomes, especially a political system like this, the more difficult it becomes to make any changes to it. It will become more and more brittle over time. You have no experience at all with software and scaling if you don't understand clearly that Bitcoin core is doomed long-term. You must have outlets for innovation, else you will end up with an inescapable morass. Nothing scales monolithically. Only the End-to-end principle scales and Bitcoin core doesn't have it.

excellent post.

and don't expect gmax or any of the 1MB crowd to actually respond coherently to it.  they never do.

Agreed...

this is where you are so wrong! what is superior? Bitcoin is not defined by a hierarchy of superiority, its defined by a juxtaposition of incentives that create a network of people that benefit from those incentives and so the tool is created it's spreads natural like a virus. Those who see value in the tool can use it those who don't use other tools like fiat, alts or gold or whatever they think is hierarchically superior.

the only reason a "superior" sidechain can exist is because the incentives inherent in the Bitcoin protocol have been changed and a bigger network of users could by some engendering supersede Bitcoins network in size, the result is if that were to happen yes all the Bitcoin value would be sucked out.

So superior is defined only as something all those non thinking masses you want to heard believe is better, it doesn't have to be better in any way that's important to me, in fact by your definition of "superior" could even apply to an inflationary sidechain that is followed by the economic majority, with a little manipulation from TPTB, bitcoiners would move there bitcoin over just to survive.

if you want to test whether or not your idea had market appeal use a Spin-off, if you want to co opt Bitcoin and leverage its first mover advantage promote centralized development and Sidechains. The problem is your competing with the actual TPTB for the succeeding SC, not the free market.

tvbcof, in an alternate universe where we were ALREADY dropping 50MB blocks or so every 10 minutes your arguments would be very sound.  But you can run a full node on a freakin' Raspberry PI!  This very premature limiting of the blockchain size, coupled with Blockstream's possibly competitive technologies, is what makes us cry foul.

We don't need to shunt Bitcoin off into a settlement-only currency just yet.  We could grow 50 times greater before we have to think about doing that, and there is tremendous value in doing so.  For one, it would allow all the layered technologies time to develop.  And also, we'd probably have 50-100x more users, which IMHO pushes bitcoin over the mass adoption chasm.


I think we are at the polarization point in this debate where people are making "arguments" that they barely even believe themselves -- on both sides.  And no one is actually responding to the other side's concerns.  For example, I have not read any response to the problem that if bitcoin becomes a settlement currency it will centralize because the only people who will care to run full nodes will be companies who do settlement.

At this point further discussion is useless.  So we shall proceed with the fork and/or BIP 100 and hope to gain a clear majority.  If that point comes you'll have an interesting choice: you'll be on an old fork that is essentially an altcoin with (as you just described above) significant technical limitations.  So your fork will have neither technical or largest-user advantage.  In such a situation, I hope that you will choose to come over to the majority fork.

I had used those quotes in 2013 to back my argument that Bitcoin was designed to be centralized.

And now that I have figured out the correct way to design crypto-currency so that it won't be centralized, it has become even more clear to me that Satoshi was not designing this for our benefit (unless he was planting the bad design as a Trojan horse on itself, perhaps because he was working for the DEEP STATE and knew that it was better he plant it a certain way than allow the DEEP STATE to realize a different design).

Just because Satoshi saw the inevitability of the centralization (and given we know the implication of centralization and out-of-band game theory w.r.t. vested interests) doesn't mean that we must accept that outcome. We have the technical ability to do pegged side chains and eloquently fork our way out of this mess I call BTCuttcon.

Perhaps you're forgetting the below, but we do have a number of Satoshi quotes that are relevant to today's discussion:


(emphasis added)



(emphasis added)







I read these in aggregate to indicate that Satoshi thought Bitcoin should eventually support a high number of transactions (even very low "micro" transactions), and that consolidation of network resources (nodes and miners) was both inevitable and workable in order to achieve that *primary* goal of high-adoption rate and a large number of on-chain transactions.

I'm not saying with any absolute that Satoshi was right (though I tend to think he was), but if we're going to be discussing "original precepts", let's look at the relevant statements.

is voting confined to miners?

Miners vote by encoding ‘BV’+BlockSizeRequestValue into coinbase scriptSig, e.g.
“/BV8000000/” to vote for 8M. Votes are evaluated by dropping bottom 20% and top
20%, and then the most common floor (minimum) is chosen.

Do you really assert there are not very powerful vested interests against stronger anonymity? They are likely lurking and haven't displayed their power yet (if historic norms are not to suddenly cease...yeah I know it is different this time...it always is until it isn't).

I think you are delusional. Just try it.

I see it potentially playing out a different way due to my inside knowledge of that black swan formula which Gregory suspects might come one day. An altcoin comes along that beats Bitcoin core in terms of decentralization, scaling, and TPS (and other attributes).

The reverse leveraged wealth effect will snowball because Core can't add these changes (they are far too invasive because they destroy the profit of mining...goodbye 21 Inc!).

Thus without pegged side chains your BTC is toast. I think you better start being more nice to Blockstream.  

there is insurance, when people collectively decide to contribute to a community's well being in addition to the individuals, I'd say it's more likely to happen with in a global blockchain system than it was ever as a set of kleptocratic government institutions. In South Africa we pay people to watch our cars because if we don't they will break in to see if there is anything of value, that is the free market system at work it's called symbiosis, is works the same way as insurance it not theft like you think it's theft, to believe it is theft is to believe it is a right to be born with more assess to resources than you competition, what makes it theft is using an inflating money supply.