Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 461. (Read 2032286 times)

The coins go to the same destination on both chains (or nowhere at all if the transaction isn't valid on both chains). So unless you were sending coins to the hacker on one chain, he won't get them on the other chain either.

Yes, but hacker(bot) can move fork-coins to fresh address too ? :-)

edit:
I only want to say. One mistake(signature) on worthless fork-chain and you lose all bitcoins in main-chain

I wouldn't say that gold collapsed today. Pretty much not. Let's see if we can get the double bottom painted on the charts.
How about gold up and bitcoin up (my scenario of choice), as the dollar starts to correct after last rally (touched 100)?

This is a storm in a teacup. The reality is that a properly implemented fork will have 80+% hashing power on the new version blocks before the first >1MB block is produced. (Hopefully there will be a grace period of, say, 10k blocks after the 80% is triggered, for laggard miners and non-mining nodes to upgrade). So the old fork will have less than 20% hashing power, quickly dropping to as little as 5%. Blocks on the old fork will take about 2 hours each to produce, with coinbase rewards spendable after 1 to 2 weeks.

No company in the Bitcoin ecosystem will accept fresh reward coins from the old fork. There will be no "market" as the old fork will be unusable as it will take a year for difficulty to fall until old fork blocks take 10 mins each again.

In the scenario where there is a monumental cock-up and no preparations are made until the average block size approaches 1MB, under stress conditions, I expect all the major companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem will quickly converge and agree a change, then two forks would persist for a while. Expect the price to plumb the recent lows if that happens.

you guys cant seriously still be debating side chains? 

It happens all the time with stock spinoffs. Sometimes there is is some effect when the announcement is made if the move is unexpected and viewed as positive but the actual spinoff itself doesn't move the stock much usually.

To make a specific example here, if the infrastructure were in place to do everything like this smoothly and a fork like that to increase the block size were announced I think the price of BTC would go up, not because of the doubling but because of the damn block size being fixed. However, the ability to pull off these kinds of upgrade forks would be more important than the actual content of the fork. Just my opinions.

BTW, something very similar is discussed at some length here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/spin-offs-bootstrap-an-altcoin-with-a-btc-blockchain-based-initial-distribution-563972 (referencing back to this thread!)

Adam Back's one-way peg idea (before it got, er, "improved" to the two way peg) was similar in net effect but slightly different (existing owners get a call option on newcoin at par instead of getting newcoin directly). I think this is slightly worse overall, but it is debatable.

EDIT: clarify difference between spin off and one way peg.

Question about economics: say we have a hard fork coming up and people expect 2 chains with trading as described earlier by Zangelbert. Will that generate buying pressure on BTC (vs. fiat) beforehand because everyone wants to participate in 'the doubling' of coins?

I think Team Sidechain sees that as a feature, not a bug.   

It's also one of my reasons for believing BTC's antifragility will endure and win out or equilibrate versus the 'free options -> hollowed out mainchain' scenario cypher describes.

We need to get this right the first time.  One does not simply "always change it."  Otherwise hard forks would be called 'easy forks.'   

When TOR and other slow/hardened connections are excluded by GavinBlocks, users must then trust their ISP/.gov/etc. to not snoop on or throttle/banhammer their nodes.  This creates intolerable intermediaries at the network layer, which destroys the basis for BTC's antifragility and thus its unique/intrinsic store-of-value function.

We can't ignore the trade off between retail suitability and super-gold fitness.  Trade-offs, like diminishing marginal returns, are economic law. 

Some of us simply won't be able to afford Bitcoin when it assumes its rightful position as Gold 2.0.  Let's accept that and move on, instead of rejiggering everything just to appease us pikers at great risk to the whales who do the heavy lifting to keep BTC viable and growing.  If you can't afford regular gold now, what makes you think you have the right to expect affordable SuperGold?

Many of us will actively resist network degradation and less super-gold fitness in exchange for more retail noise accommodation and uncertainty about the impact of exponential blocksize growth.  It's not just the initial 20MB Gavinblocks, it's the >>20MB Gigablocks that kick in relatively soon which concern those of us who care about the weakest links in the system's chain.

Individuals making low value tx don't have to trust Paymium or other off-chain intermediaries so long as plenty of capacity exists in 2nd tier altcoins' blockchains.  Litecoin, for example, is secured by more than enough ASICs and GPUs to be perfectly acceptable for small and medium size daily retail consumer BS.

Let's also note that blockchain technology, by enabling unprecedented transparency and real time auditing, allows us to keep our off-chain overlords on a short leash.  As Davout put it so succinctly:


This is sig-worthy quote really gets to the crux of the 'retail token vs super-gold' fissure, and makes clear why the FUD of Fundamentalist Monopolists ("Thou shall have no other coins before Holy BTC, lest you be cast into the off-chain lake of fiat") is unfounded.

The wallet could manage that by moving the coins to fresh own address on the other chain?

Yes, but not if the transaction references a coinbase from after the fork directly or indirectly. So 100 blocks after the fork (assuming this rule is not changed), fungibility with respect to publishing on both would start to break.

If you spend bitcoins on one fork then anybody can publish same transaction on other chain ... I think :-)

I agree.

I would like this scenario a lot more if we replaced "exchanges set up to handle multiple forks" to "wallets/nodes set up to handle multiple forks".

Maybe I should prepare for such scenario and have a node / wallet ready that does that. Anyone have a suggestion?

money is fleeing from somewhere... the Eurozone, I guess?

Those are neither 'economic' disadvantages, especially from Bitcoin's perspective, nor are they meaningful or true.

Firstly, there is a strong incentive on the parts of the Blocksteam folks to design out counter-party risk, and as engineering problems go it is little or no more difficult than doing so in Satoshi's Bitcoin.  At least as long as Satoshi's Bitcoin itself can be relied upon in this respect.

Secondly, note that if one has a backing such as Bitcoin or gold, one does not need to rely on POW for this function.  One could use POW to a much lesser degree to shore up internal bookeeping to keep away the ankle-biters, but that's a secondary design issue and not terribly important.  The backing currency is the ONE system which actually NEEDS absolute security and Bitcoin has ONLY POW to achieve this.  Alts don't have this advantage since they tend to try to occupy the same place as Bitcoin.  Bitcoin can transfer it's security to other solutions with no net loss.  Just the opposite, really, because the more solutions relying on Bitcoin (and likely supporting native Bitcoin in some manner in most sidechains designs I would guess), the better.

The main thing that a user of a backing needs is for that backing to be solid and usable.  For gold this would mean some combination of physical security and transparency.  Gold was not discontinued as a backing currency because these things were impossibly to achieve, but rather because there was a desire by TPTB to get away from a non-inflationary base currency because they wanted an inflationary monetary system.  Achieving transparency and security for Gold would be, while possible, very much less efficient than with Bitcoin.

I think people lose sight of the value of POW in Bitcoin also.  Say you have a speeding semi truck that you wish to stop.  You build a wall of reinforced concrete which is 100' thick.  (Today's sha256.)  How much value is there to making the wall 200' thick?  Twice?  Nope.  There are other ways to attack the wall which will be explored, and a defender would be well advised to try to anticipate these and defend against them accordingly.

As nonsensical as it is to assign a simplistic linear value function in wall thickness as above, it is even more silly to reject any wall for any purpose simply because it isn't as strong as the massively over-spec'd wall for stopping the speeding semi truck.

As long as I have a reliable store of wealth in native Bitcoin, I care very little about the relatively less security of a sidechain (if it is even that much different.)  My uses of the two solutions will be entirely different.  True, in a sidechain failure I might get stung paying native Bitcoin transaction fees to get my money out upon a sidechain failure, but it's not an event that would be common but rather just a hypothetical issue which would give me confidence to use the solution and lessen the incentive for people to run bogus sidechains for the purposes of ripping people off (like some alts for instance.)

I do see it as rational to exclude some people from the highest echelons of monetary security (e.g., native Bitcoin.)  When I was younger I was sometimes lucky to have enough money in my bank account to pay my car insurance or buy a bag of weed.  Did I have some God-given right or entitlement to have my $25 balance secured in a Swiss vault on someone else's dime?  Absolutely not, and I never dreamed to ask for it.  My money, even if it represented half  of my life's savings was never at significant risk in part because if was only $25 on not worth the bother to steal.

blythechains, now that's a thought. What have we wrought.

300 coming right up.

 Once we get through it, we should see a nice pop. 

Gold Collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

You just can't stop it ;

http://www.cityam.com/211436/new-report-goldman-sachs-shows-why-bitcoin-here-stay

Yes, like most real world activities the situation is not morally clear cut.  And I do sell some at the tops and certainly have bought on the way down.  Perhaps you are right, the real evil is the hype cycle that gets the suckers to invest.  Ofc without the hype cycle there would not be enough media coverage to pull in everyone else.


... and for those people who think that a sidechain might somehow "take over" from Bitcoin, this additional risk is a big reason why one won't.


I think that its fascinating.  A fork is like quantum mechanics applied to the real world.  In other words both possibilities exist simultaneously until an event (everybody selling one fork and buying the other) collapses the probability wave.



Why "forgettable/replaceable retail token"?  You could just as easily have said "spendable super gold".

I think that the promise of Bitcoin is, at its core, disintermediation (transfer to anyone, anywhere, nearly instantly).  This is where it gains its intrinsic value which then supports the value holders put on it by holding.  But if it costs too much for individuals to make transactions, then txns must be posted through intermediaries who as Circle/Coinbase have shown are susceptible to all the problems with today's banking system.  "Welcome the new boss same as the old boss". 

Sidechains could solve some of that problem which is why it is interesting to consider them alongside the block size; I suppose we could have sidechains for daily spending and Bitcoin could be essentially be your super-gold "savings account".  A carefully designed sidechain would still achieve disintermediation.  But money flow between sidechains and Bitcoin will not be quick so it would not be and ideal situation, and is still not achieveable with 1MB block sizes.

So I think we should accept Gavin's scalability plan, and guess what?  its not set in stone.  If it scales faster than the available hardware, we can always change it.

Really, the crux of the argument for me is this:

The worst case with the scalability plan is that individuals can't in practice be full nodes, but can STILL hold BTC in local wallets and spend them.

The worst case without scalability is that individuals must trust intermediaries to hold their BTC because a single txn is so expensive it must be aggregated -- i.e. the same banking system we have today. 

(none of the awesome functionality like multi-sig "custodial" accounts can be used (on a per customer basis); they all require a transaction to unlock the funds which would be too expensive to do per customer)