Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 589. (Read 2032291 times)

I dont know much about it (so these are just questions):

So what is it?  Whats the TLDR; version.  

Is it an alt-coin market + plug-in framework?

Is it decentralised?  Or central-checkpointed PoS?

Does it include a floating alt-coin?  Does it incentivise developers to make example apps by paying them from a pre-mine?

Adam

Aethereum is probably more useful as a sidechain (rather than a spin-off¹) and launching it as such would certainly help make the point that the value of a cryptocurrency comes from the network effect rather than from its features (which can be forked).  

I think spin-offs are less useful than sidechains but conceptually still important because they help shift people from thinking that the value comes from the tech, to realizing that the value comes from the distribution of wealth encoded in the ledger (i.e., the 'money-is-memory' point of view).  Spin-offs challenge the notion that a technically-superior alt-coin could supersede bitcoin, since all its superior features could be cloned and then re-launched using Bitcoin's ledger.  (Spin-offs also challenge the IPO-model of launching a cryptocurrency.)

I always suspected that if Aethereum launched as a spin-off with some fanfare along with Ethereum, that Aethereum would slowly leach liquidity from Ethereum, but that both coins would eventually end up dead.  On the other hand, Aethereum launched as a sidechain could survive indefinitely (as it's tied to Bitcoin's pool of liquidity rather than floating) and add value to the bitcoin network by offering features that aren't possible using the main chain (and I still suspect Ethereum would end up dead).      

¹Yes, the value of aether would float and Bitcoin users had a perpetual right to claim their share of coins.

My concern with the "do a little and then do more later" approach is the huge political effort required to implement multiple hard forks.  If Bitcoin's market cap is 10 - 100X bigger, are we really going to be able to hard fork the protocol again?  I don't think so, and thus scaling will happen in sidechains rather than the main chain by default (rather than because it's the best thing to do).  

Why not open up the Blockchain according to Gavin's proposal (a single hard fork to address scalability), while working towards methods of price discovery for P2P bandwidth / blockchain space?  Worst case it's a soft-fork to reduce the blocksize limit in the future.  

You might enjoy this post:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10012730

or the short tldr; twitter version:

https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/550841397927235584

OK, since this is the "de facto" sidechain thread, here is some serious trolling:

Having read the whitepaper, the grayblogpost, and several lightblueforumposts, I am currently convinced that the sidechains "project" is 100% marketing, with no technical contents whatsoever.  

Specifically, I claim that there is no functionality that sidechains would enable that could not be provided by a project totally independent of the blockchain.  The only (possible, far from certain) advantage of implementing something as a  sidechain would be the transfer of prestige from the bitcoin project to that something.

I am very skeptical of the future of bitcoin as investment and as a currency for e-commerce, but I admit that the bitcoin protocol provides some non-trivial and interesting functionality.    However, paradoxically, its value lies not so much in what one can do to the blockchain, but in what one cannot do (unless one has 51% of the hashing power):

* One cannot insert a transaction with an input that is not an output of an earlier trasaction, or a coinbase;
* One cannot use the output of a transaction more than once as input to another transaction;
* One cannot insert a transaction whose output total is greater than the input total;
* One cannot insert a transaction whose inputs are not properly signed;
* One cannot add a new block that does not have the crypto signature of the previous block and the required proof of work;

and so on.  It is because of these "cannots"  that the blockchain has a non-trivial functionality.

Now, the sidechains proposal describes many wonderful things that one could do with them.  But it does not specify a single thing that a sidechain protocol cannot do, other than the trivial constraint that it cannot return more bitcoins to the blockchain than it took from it.  

The process of transfering bitcoins between the main chain and the side chain is formally equivalent to sending the bitcoins to a blockchain address owned by the sidechain admins, and later from that address to some other address specified by the sidechain admins.  Thus the only constraint above is trivially enforced by the bitcoin protocol as it is (which the proponents seem to admit).

As far as I can tell, since there is no clearing or overseeing of the sidechains by any entity, the sidechain can do absolutely anything at all,  even immediately destroy the keys that would allow "return" of the bitcoins to the blockchain.  It can create its own tokens from nothing,  rewite its operations history, impose arbitrary fees, steal from its clients, use broken cryptography, whatever.  Nothing prevents the "sidechain" from being centrally managed.  Nothing prevents it from being a reincarnation of MtGOX, with Willy and all.  Nothing prevents it from being, by all objective criteria, an altcoin totally independent from the blockchain.

I propose the following experiment: take the whitepaper, or any paper that discusses sidechains, and replace the word 'sidechain' everywhere by the word 'something'.  Would it make any difference?

I see this project as a desperate attempt by faithful bitcoiners to save the "bitcoin industry" from looming collapse, in two ways:

(1) by trying to co-opt the best altcoin projects, so that instead of them saying "bitcoin is broken and cannot be fixed, use our coin instead" they will say "use our coin, which, among other advantages, builds on and is backed by bitcoin, the 'gold of the internet'"  

(2) by trying to convince investors that bitcoin is worth investing in, even if it is failing as a payment system and may be superseded by other altcoins, because it will be the 'gold of the internet'.

I believe that this marketing effort is 'evil' because it is trying to make people think that bitcoin will be contributing functionality to the sidechains, when in fact it is only contributing prestige.  Just as every nation that issued a paper currency found that pegging it to gold or silver was only a marketing gimmick, more a nuisance and embarassment than a concrete advatage, any successful project that starts as a sidechain will almost certainly detach from bitcoin, for the same reasons.

So, fire away.[/troll]

So not a single thought on the SuperNet model eh Adam?

As you say, the use of the BTC chain to secure the GNC chain has to be public, but it may not be possible to detect it in time.  For example, suppose that, in order to sanctify a block B of the GNC chain, some GNC node must insert in the BTC blockchain the string y = (SHA(B) XOR x), where x is a random 256-bit string; and then publish the string x, only after that transaction has been confirmed.    Then the BTC miners would have no way to detect that the string y is a GNC hook before confirming it.

Other variants are possible.  For example, y can be SHAⁿ(B), where n is (say) 2 trillion.  Then anyone with a 1 GH/s machine could recognize y as the hash of B in ~30 minutes; but no one could do it in much less than that time.  Even if the BTC miners were to run the check in parallel with block mining, it would delay the first confirmation of a trasaction by 20 minutes, and would force them to waste a significant amount of mining work.

My opinion is we dont need too many chains, as more asset types can be available on the same chain (its easier to write a smart-contract between assets natively on or pegged to the same chain).

Doesnt bitcoin's SOV get helped by more demand for bitcoin arising from more types of transactions (eg share trades, zerocash transactions, snark contracts, micropayments, richer contract language etc)?  Most people seem pretty ecstatic about sidechains for that kind of reason, bringing innovation back to bitcoin rather than in altcoins or featurecoins or altshares.  Maybe one analogy would be say with gold if there was some law mandating you cant use it below some value, and you cant do more than so much trade, and you cant use it for property transactions only cash trades - that might have dented golds 6000 rule as a world currency no?

Yeah I'm not disagreeing other than to suggest you maybe want to take it easy increasing it, eg do it a little and then do more later and monitor the situation.

Its probably fair to say you want to support both because a sidechain is also a different security formula.  However I think you acknowledge there are centralisation risks so that'd have to be balanced.  If both were done we could see where users were willing to put transactions.

QE headed for a eurozone near you.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-02/draghi-says-ecb-prepares-action-as-deflation-risk-non-negligible.html


but not all germans are happy about it.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-02/merkel-ally-fuchs-draghi-stop-talking-qe-we-shouldnt-pump-money-struggling-eu-nation

QE headed for a eurozone near you.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-02/draghi-says-ecb-prepares-action-as-deflation-risk-non-negligible.html


but not all germans are happy about it.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-02/merkel-ally-fuchs-draghi-stop-talking-qe-we-shouldnt-pump-money-struggling-eu-nation

i've been nice to you ever since you entered this thread in a big way.  yet this is about the 4th time you've called me a troll despite the fact i even complimented you on your POW work.

1. in the WP, you mentioned that it is possible that if a SC became popular enough, then Bitcoiners might have to move all their BTC to the SC.  what about those who don't get the memo?  this question is similar to the big debate we had a couple years ago about harvesting apparent "un-used" addresses.  that was obviously shot down real quick in that there is no way to ever be sure exactly that the true owner was dead or had lost the privkey.

3. what real difference is there in forcing more transparency (as we are now doing with Merkle root audits, regulation, better VC funded exchanges) on 3rd party merchants vs. using SC's where supposedly we will be able to view the source code to ensure no backdoors (only a select few can do that)?  i would argue that the former is no different than the real mechanisms we have today and therefore not experimental or as risky to the degree you're wanting to construct via an unprecedented and untested 2wp.

will you sell SC's to govt's if asked?

i posted above that there are several venture funds that have invested.  how can they not want the std 10x return of their investment? those fund constituents do not just represent the viewpoint of their founder.

You should view blockstream as a sort of hybrid.  We are developing FOSS open IP much as a not-for-profit would.  But we are also aiming to make a profit by selling services, doing partnerships, advising integrators etc this is all complicated stuff and people need help to make it work.  Like was said its kind of like Mozilla.

The quote didnt say not to make a profit it said to have a dual objective and compared the approach to Mozilla.  Mozilla made plenty of profit (and is a hybrid incorporating both a for profit and a not-for-profit) and also did a good job of making the firefox browser a leading source of user ethos focussed innovation and features.

Greg Maxwell (nullc on reddit) wrote some about how blockstream plans to make profit.  

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2k3u97/we_are_bitcoin_sidechain_paper_authors_adam_back/clhoo7d

I dont think making a profit is a bad thing - to hire developers & QA and UX designers and maintain software and design protocols and figure out how to use smart-contracts and find business partnerships to make those available to users all takes money.  As those are good outcomes, and require more money, you have to have a profit to fuel it, you cant rely on investors to keep putting in more rounds!

Its quite feasible to make money without being controlling, proprietary, centralising or evil.  We certainly aim to try.

btw, you show your bias when you nitpick my trivial comment to tvbcof here w/o even acknowledging the disgusting, immature video he put up.  i suggest it's b/c he supports your view:

The single currency dropped to the weakest level in more than four years and bond yields slid to a record low as investors bet that QE will start as soon as this quarter.

I think its quite hard to prevent merge mining automatically because people can steganographically watermark bitcoin tx.  eg they could make a multisig where the second sig is not a pub key but a hash of their chain.

However miners could try to find them and block them via whack-a-mole as all users on that network need to know the decoding trick for the stego.  As chains dont tend to be secret society things, that could actually work somewhat.

(Summary of what JorgeSolfi is saying: if one alt-coin overtakes bitcoin, people will lose confidence in cryptocurrency because it will probably happen again, and a series of popping bubbles is not a good store of value).

...
but you're right.  i do love trolling you and the others b/c of this.  perhaps it even helps push it down even further.  i know you hate the title of this thread.  and it is gratifying that i may have helped you change your socialist views to a small degree.  but there's no denying your push back trolling as well.  

you know you love me & this thread and can't stay away.

That reminds me to clarify.  I consider Cypherdoc to be the proverbial and archetypal 'frenemy'.  We've got a long history and the last thing I remember agreeing on was that BTC was worth taking a chance on @$2-ish.  Probably why we are both still around.

The thing that is so endearing about Cypherdoc is that he is near completely a troll and and ass-clown, but he seems to totally miss it and seems to earnestly believe the opposite.

Anyway, this thread was made for trolling.  Look at the title and most of Cypherdoc's input for Christsake!  I personally don't consider trolling to be a bad thing in many circumstances.  I developed my theories of trolling back in the Usenet days after noticing that in order to be effective a troll had to have a subtle element of underlying truth.  To that extent a troll post has value.  Generally they also must be amusing...at least to the group of readers who share one's sense of humor.  Here again is a source of value.

 Since the BTC rewards and fees are now worthless, most miners stop mining BTC and keep mining GNC only.  Only a few persist, for sentimental reasons. The BTC block rate drops to near zero for months, until the difficulty gets readjusted.

  Then someone, not connected to Blockstream, GNC, or any other bitcoin entity, creates a new altcoin SuperShibaCoin (SSC)....

Summary: doesn't merged mining provide a path for an altcoin to steal bitcoin's network power and market cap, with little investment,  even without any change to the BTC protocol and without any special mechanism to "transfer" BTC to it?

Could some sidechains innovation provide suitable incentives to miners that would prevent this risk?