Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 363. (Read 2032266 times)

I'm quite certain that most people will not.  I'm comfortable and very used to this scenario.


That is exactly why a nearly perfect proxy like sidechains with a two-way peg appeals to me so much.  The best of both worlds and a classic symbiotic relationship which benefits both native Bitcoin and the multitude of tuned solutions which rely on it.

If I'm a 'superior being' and 'elite' so be it.  It was dumb luck more than anything.  (Thanks again to whoever attacked Wikileaks and opened my eyes to the solution, BTW.)  I very much look forward to re-joining the 'lower classes' and expect to be a prolific user of various kinds of sidechains to use for various things and support various entities who choose to deploy one...thus stealing back the inherent value of an exchange currency which has been monopolized mostly by the Federal Reserve operating within (and parasitizing) the United States.

that is pretty significant.  we know that Ed Felten is pro-Bitcoin and has a deep understanding of what's going on.

Actually there are population-reducing agendas (debatable whether they're conspiracies) out there,* but when they turn on the kill switch, we just fork to a different mining algo (etc.), keep the ledger, and anyone who cares about unimpeachable money (or whatever other feature the NWO decides to remove) joins in. We've discussed this before.

*It doesn't take much study of environmental issues to realize that it always comes back to overpopulation. You can tinker around the edges, but the only final solution (heh) to most environmental problems, at least until space colonization, is a lower population size. This fundamental tradeoff between population and environmental quality means that if someone is hardcore enough about their environmentalist agenda, then population limiting through birth control, propaganda, or even in the extreme case eugenics and murder, might start to look like reasonable options to them.

there's a subtlety in here that bears noting that i've not seen mentioned anywhere yet dovetails nicely with my Wall St vs Silicon Valley thesis.

Lawsky says Coinbase doesn't have license approval in NY and now Dresslar says California Dept of Business Oversight is not prepared to say itBit can operate in California?  Conflict is good when it comes to Bitcoin and it transcends borders:

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/new-york-backs-bitcoin-exchange-may-not-fly-california/

Speaking of Ed Felton, looks like he was just appointed by the White House as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/05/11/white-house-names-dr-ed-felten-deputy-us-chief-technology-officer

Price fixing doesn't work because the incentive to break the price-fixing agreement and undercut the other miners becomes immense; the higher a group of miners agree to set the price floor, the greater the incentive to break the agreement. Say the other miners are refusing any transactions with less than $1 in fees. A miner that picks up the myriad 10-, 20-, 50-, 80-, and 90-cent fee transactions that other miners refuse, in addition to all the $1 fee transactions, is going to positively rake it in whenever they find a block.


The market ultimately determines the blocksize, and every other parameter. The devs, Foundation, etc. only suggest changes. I think it's highly likely the market will be arbitraging all the controversial hard forks on the exchanges, at least after the first one (there might not be time to make the arrangements if the first one is a surprise).

The fact that the book is there on the blockchain means that the nonstandard tx was included in a block.

You need to find a pool accepting your nonstd tx, and it seems that eligius would do it if you pay enough  fees.


I've never tried but as long as you forward the tx directly to the eligius node it should work. In fact it seems to me that nonstandard txs are not relayed by full nodes, but I could be wrong.

that's kind of a weird chart b/c it is denominated in BTC.  even Meni says so:

These values should be taken with a grain of salt, because of the many modeling assumptions made

"value" will vary greatly depending on whether 1BTC buys you a loaf of bread vs an island.

i posted earlier how the incentives in Bitcoin continue to screw up every major theory about mining cartels colluding to cheat.  yet, we continue to get them.  here's Ed Felten again:

ES-miners can’t agree to cheat, because it’s too easy for them to cheat on that agreement.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after-all/

My pleasure.


Meni Rosenfeld does something similar to what you're suggesting in his "Analysis of hashrate-based double-spending" paper from December 2012.  I haven't looked into this paper in detail, but this table from Section 6 caught me eye.  It allows you to figure out how many confirmations you should wait depending on how large the transaction is in addition to the attacker's hash rate.



I'd be interested if you can think of ways to extend this work.

Thanks for the explanation guys. OK, now understand that the equation calculates how likely it is that at some point after 6 confirmations an attacker will gain the longest chain, publish it, and get the rest of the network over to that chain. This is just the odds though, not the cost.

It would be interesting to see the expected cost of such an attack though. If an attacker with 45% hash rate has a 96% chance of eventually gaining the lead for a moment, then a good portion of that probability is most likely in the long tail of many blocks from now. There should be an equation that calculates the average or expected cost of such an attack, such as by 50 blocks the attacker has x probability of succeeding, by 100 blocks y chance & by 10000 block z chance. And of course there is the possibility that the attacker has spent months without gaining the lead, and has lost all of those block rewards.  

I think we'd see that the expected cost is quite high, even for a 45% attacker. i.e. Even if you knew that the counter party to your bitcoin transaction had 45% hash rate and would use it against you, then 6 confirmation would still be enough for the value of a car or house, since an attack would cost more than that, half a day of confirmations would be enough for a skyscraper, and a day of confirmations for an island. This seems OK to me.

Next hurdle is the 200 day / 30 week MA. That's a biggie for the pro technical traders out there.

more importantly, it's a long term momentum indicator much less susceptible to manipulation.

I've been watching the MACD centerline crossover as well. Historically it has been a good confirmation of trend continuation.

grinding higher.  MACD going positive:

I have a theorem which is not even a total joke any more:

Any 'conspiracy theory' to which most people (including oneself unless they just got in from being raised by wolves) have a visceral negative reaction is for THAT reason something worth paying some attention to.  Some of these 'theories' (which are at best hypothesis (unless they are documented facts which a surprising number are)) are absurd enough to be rejected out-of-hand to be sure.

The hypothesis that there are eugenicists who would at least tolerate a mechanism which brought the worldwide population of the homo sapien species to a small fraction of our current number is not one of those to be rejected out of hand as far as I am concerned.  Further, some of them have amassed significant capabilities in some areas.  Ted Turner's case is one of those which is a documented fact unless some of his utterances have been invented out of whole cloth.

There are other things not to love (in my opinion) about Mr. Turner:



I'd give at least even odds that the story is bullshit however.  I'd withhold judgement until confirmation or rejection of some sort.

the other way to look at this is that Africa is the epicenter of gold mining production.  do you think they will stop mining for the stuff if they don't get an opportunity to work/transact with Bitcoin?  well, they won't with a 1MB limit.  we want to get them to stop and realize there is a better alternative form of sound money that doesn't involve sacrificing your kids.

this is why Bitcoin needs to scale as a payment network to push usage and acceptance out to the geographic periphery where even African kids mining for gold are discouraged from going down 3' wide holes 100 yds deep to pull up a useless heavy metal.  Once that happens, Bitcoin becomes universal money and the old white folks won't have any choice.

Many of the older generation hold paper gold in their brokerage accounts and have no problem with that.  I believe once "paper" BTC is readily available on the market, the older generation will have no problem investing some amount.

Gold is tangible asset. Hard to convince older generation to hold bitcoin.