Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 283. (Read 2032266 times)

don't be an idiot.  you remember when he and Adam were posting here a few months ago to play their silly games?

I'm quite sure that Maxwell is way to busy with real stuff to play your silly little games.

An observation about the blockchain, that I have not seen commented elsewhere.

The blockchain appears to be a ledger, which is a tool to record and thus document transactions. But that is not the purpose of the blockchain, neither do we need it for that. We need it only to ensure the integrity of the system, to avoid double spending and guard against coin fractions coming from nowhere.

You can deduce, with a level of confidence, who owns an output if you know something about the inputs, but that is all. The confidence level will always be less than one, unless you know with full confidence who owned each of the inputs and manage to compel the owner to tell you who he sent them to (if he knows). The same consideration if you know the owner of the output and want to deduce who owned the inputs.

I propose that most people will not tell, and therefore most outputs will have an unknown owner. The anonymity in the basic system is quite good, if not absolute. There is plausible deniability, unconfiscatibility, and the anonymity can be enhanced by simple means.

Rocks, they can't do that because any kind of "mixing routine" that would be adopted by wallets or users on top of Bitcoin would require interaction between them (some sort of coordination or key exchange type process). However, that isn't how Monero works and the relaxation of a simultaneity and coordination requirements is probably the most important part of the protocol.

If you want to comment intelligently on it you really need to understand how the protocol works, and not just understand it in vague terms of "people decided to use mixing." The type of "mixing" that occurs in Monero is not really the same type that Bitcoin mixing uses, even though the word is the same.

It really is different cryptography. You can't just have a group of Bitcoin users decide to use Zerocash, nor can you have group of Bitcoin users decide to do Cryptonote-style mixing either.

i thought there was supposed to be a recovery going on?:

Australia, home to commodity mining:


BHP, world's biggest mine:


Exxon Mobil, world's biggest energy conglomerate:


Natgas, the supposed new energy source:

Yeah its posible that one or two people could be taken out in a "suspicious" manner. So as I said earlier, open the project. Get others to participate (even if that includes giving up some measure of your anonymity to do it, and I think it does). Otherwise, as long as you remain critical to the effort, you are betting solely on your ability to actually remain anonymous for your safety. That is difficult and may even be impossible. It certainly didn't work out too well for Ross.

For all we know satoshi's identity is well known to the NSA, etc. (I consider that quite likely). Likewise the developers of cryptonote are probably identifiable by the NSA too. But what difference does either really make at this point? The code is out there. Interest has been established, so the projects will continue.

i'm quite sure that gmax and his buddies came here to register their no votes.  i openly told him about it back when the ratio was 4:1 or 80%  for earlier on.  immediately, a bunch of no votes started getting registered bringing it down to just over 3:1 where it is now.

of course consensus would be best which is the same thing as saying 100% for or against but in some forks like this one that doesn't appear possible.  the "vote" at least gives everyone an idea where the majority of ppl stand on this in the community.  it's alot better than no information.  and we have 3 independent polls, including mine, all saying the same thing.

well that's the question, isn't it?  is it really simply a technical question?  on it's face it may seem to be but i learned a while ago that the computer scientists don't have a lock on how Bitcoin works.  which is why there was only one inventor, Satoshi, who made the breakthrough.  most CS geeks have been shown to be armchair analysts, esp ones like Peter Todd.  i am one too.  point being, it's not simply a technical matter.  there's economics, both macro and micro, going on and a huge chunk of game theory determining what actually motivates the players. 

for instance, i think if we expand the blocks, we'll get more tx's and users resulting in more full nodes as a result of more investment money coming into the system and more vested players trying to help as full nodes.  mining will go back to being more profitable and we'll have better security.  Metcalfe's Law should work off the userbase, not the full nodes.

assuming that the majority have holes in their heads is exactly how authoritarian states get going; when a few minority ppl in the system think they know better than everyone else and should be determining all the decision making.  gmax and luke are the epitome of that.  and no, Gavin is not doing the same thing b/c he is responding to what the community as a whole wants.

Gavin's proposal was just bad timing for them, they are not ready to deploy and would not have the opportunity to deploy should there be no demand, so they look for reasons to delay.

easily. if you're just running the full node as a service, like most of us do, then there's never any reason to login.  the way i check it's up and running periodically is by going to https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ and checking the ip address to make sure there's a connection there.  thus, i would NOT get any alerts which, btw, i've only ever seen in the GUI and not in the command line which i use if and when i do happen to rarely go into the vps.

do you care to explain how it's centralized again.

if the idea you have is correct then it needs to spread, it wont spread if it cant be understood.

can you ELI5.

how ridiculously obtuse can they both get?  they've also gone on record saying that they think the block size should be reduced.  and just recently.

I would have voted with the minority, but I don't go off-site to use some data harvesting bullshit site just to vote in on a silly poll.  People who are not familiar with sample selection (and certain other network sciences) should be careful about interpretation of jokes like this.

My best guess is that by headcount, the split is about 1/4 on the hard fork.  That is much more promising than I'd expected given the makeup of the community.  25% by headcount is easily enough to keep a defensible system healthy.  By actual skin-in-the-game it would not surprise me in the least if a significant majority by HODL both favored the conservative approach and, more importantly, have the skills to protect their asses/assets.  Edit:...and probably exploit many of the other 75% if they so choose.

This begs the question.  It presupposes success.
When a fork occurs, you are on one side or the other at the time of the fork.

"If everyone's doing it" means that they have already done it, so there is no longer anything to be attractive to them.  It is an event, not a migration.  Unless you are imagining many many failed forks until one finally succeeds, which would be exceedingly chaotic.

I don't see how that's the case. If it's a good idea, and everyone's doing it, then the trade-off becomes attractive for just about everyone, so it can happen pretty fast without any centralization. Marching in lockstep doesn't mean centralized (of course; that's the whole idea of Bitcoin in a way).

Isn't there some kind of alert key that goes to every full node? SPV nodes don't matter since they don't care about blocksize. If the problem is just alerting everyone that a fork is coming and they have to choose sides, then what is the worst that can happen? Can someone even operate a full node without seeing the alert?

Interesting result. If that is truly reflective of the community as a whole then the anti-increase crown are quite disproportionately represented in this debate. Greg, Luke and Peter sure do know how to stir up some serious shit.

And what's the point of voting on highly technical question? Democracy doesn't work with this stuff, because majority have holes in their brains and then they lean on opinions of others and marketing campaigns.

The devil is in the details, with no details, its all angels.

I suppose I would vote "NO" to most any change without knowing the details, but not "NO" to change itself.  I think Gavin is getting closer and closer to something that will make sense.  He is down to 8mb now, changed at a particular future block?

Yes because almost everyone agrees it should be raised (Greg and Luke excepted, though they agree it should be raised eventually). The poll didn't ask about raising to 20MB.

The goal is clear enough, and laudable.  It is the path to that goal that remains occluded.