Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 596. (Read 2032266 times)

Let me save you some time

"We're not asking to change the sourcecode to the "disadvantage" of competitors ; We don't have core developers on board"

The primary safe guard is what I said Everything is FOSS, open IP.   Thats just like bitcoin right.  If the company changes management later down the road after investment rounds or whatever, and it tries to do something bad (which would sabotage its investment as the ecosytem would reject it), we could all leave (which would cripple its ability to maintain code nor execute its plan).  Or if it was us under blackmail or some legal threat, the same logic as applies to bitcoin applies: if the core does bad things, a new core can fork it and undo the bad things.

Clear enough?

We also did a bunch of stuff in terms of GMaxwell and Pieter Wuille's contract that was mentioned (can walk and continue to get paid if company does bad stuff) as was mentioned, and chose investors with similar and compatible ethos (understanding of FOSS, need for decentralisation, need for open IP, etc. they get it and get bitcoins value hinging on its decentralisation. )  Reid Hoffman is you might notice Chairman of the Mozilla foundation and you can find videos online where you can see he's enthused about bitcoin potential himself pre-blockstream.


Well kind of what we said is "dont trust us"  ie if we succeeded in the cant be evil you dont have to trust us, and we cant be coerced because we have no control or power.  And if you think about it, its in our interests individually to not have a position of power or control as potentially even governments or organised criminals (there's a difference) might get interested in abusing control.


You know not to troll you, but Justus you also work for a for profit company - Monetas/Open Transactions - right? Nothing is known about the funding of that company.  We dont know what your motives are.  The OT network voting trusts escrow everyones bitcoins so are a form of trust.  Should we trust you.  You dont have to answer.. just illustrating the sorts of questions you're asking so you can think about them and see the perspective on the receiving end.

I am quite happy for people to ask tough questions.  Indeed it would be kind of surprising and disappointing if they did not given how important it is for bitcoin to remain decentralised, neutral and free from proprietary control.

I am also quite happy to voice my opinion if I see bad stuff (take a look at the coinvalidation redlist thread for example).  You might notice Greg doing the same.

I suppose the cipherdoc version of such questions is that he's biased to the value of his bitcoin hoard.  Personally I think thats a pretty healthy bias.  And as maybe Greg said or maybe implied (or not) everyone at blockstream has some bitcoins.  Anyway Daniel Krawisz view is that the investors are driving bitcoin so the extent he's right and certain things about bitcoin must not change or it isnt bitcoin.

Adam

sure but that's all subject to interpretation.  Greg has said that you guys have been granted stock options.  clearly there is an incentive to make those go up and that means making a profit.  why didn't you guys consider forming a non-profit at reasonable salaries.  that way no one could accuse you of any of this in the first place.

Yeah that figure comes from memory if you google around there was someone offering Jackson Palmer $500 or $600k to develop and market dogecoin.  He told them to go away as it was a joke.  Unfortunately the dogecoiners havent realised the joke yet  I believe I heard others were offered similar amounts to develop an alt-coin.  (I dont think that would be no-strings - they'd own a defined share of the premine, and there would be multiple developers to run the project for a period of time in the budget).

However its very likely the case that people working at blockstream, including myself, could've made more pay going to the dark side and starting their own alts, or taking money from unscrupulous people to start pyramid pump & dump scams.  However they have ethical problems with that.  It also probably helps them avoid sharing a jail cell with the pump & dumpers

We also want to be constructive and think bitcoin is where the future is.  Good things dont magically happen someone has to design and code them.  Thats why we co-founded blockstream to go do those things.

So that was partly why I mentioned it because people were saying, but they'll be beholden to the company for pay so they can eat etc.  Screw that they walked away from more money doing alt-coin crap - ie they already demonstrated willingness to walk away from things they think are unethical.

Adam

that's what happens when you hit the wrong button on your Android while biking 

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.

Adam

Jorge, your answer is here.  notice how much of what you fear as Unknown is actually known. mining is naturally evening out as i predicted long ago according to Nash Equilibrium.  pro-tip:  don't use blockchain.info for pool stats:

http://mempool.info/pools

Patent trolls dont feel the need to be concrete - there are patents on how to run a CPU on top of homomorphic encryption before there is usable performance FHE.

The world badly needs patent reform.  Ban patents, copyright cant be too soon IMO.

Adam

(Summary being from the reddit attack described at the above link that a miner with > 50% DoS's transactions on bitcoin chain (ie does not accept any transactions just mines empty blocks on the main chain people are trying to use) until people either abandon bitcoin or capitulate and adopt the rules the DoS miner is threatening.) 

Yeah that is kind of logical, there are some caveats.  The miner has a lot of capital invested maybe > $300m to do that now.  (You can be sure most pool miners would abandon a pool that did that.)  This is going to be disruptive to bitcoin confidence and price and that affects the value of bitcoins they are mining, or the equipment itself which is worthless if bitcoin fails or crashes badly as a result.  Dangerous game to play with a $300m good behaviour bond.  Secondly while they are DoSing bitcoin, they are not mining coins nor on their proposed alternative chain at any kind of usable speed as they have almost no hashpower left (if they have 55% and they're using 53% to DoS bitcoin that gives them 500min blocks if the new chain has the same difficulty.  If the new chain has reset difficulty the honest miners might DoS it in retaliation (block transactions there).  Now if the attacker had maybe 70% they could dominate both chains reliably.

This is beyond mining a new hard-fork protocol version (which honest users and full nodes would ignore) and more DoS warfare to kill the main chain to give users a choice of no transactions or to fold and use the new chain.  I would imagine users would be annoyed enough about that so as to be a scenario where the bit red button might get pushed - destroying the $300m capital of the attacker (and the $245m of the rest of the miners who probably are going to sue the attacker, and its not easy to hide the delivery and location of $300m worth of mining equipment drawing perhaps a GW of power.)


Yep its a unfortunate.  This is why decentralisation of mining is important.


I dont think you cant really technically enforce freedom from security issues or freedom from bad economic parameter choices kind of stuff, thats probably AI / halting-problem type difficulty which we dont know how to do.  You could certainly make some best practices statement about how security should be achieved, and acceptable parameters and configurations for user safety, and have someone competent audit that and certify their audit.


Well bitstamp isnt trying to algorithmically peg - they're saying trust our host security, cold wallet physical security, audit, governance / separation of duty etc.  Ie you are trusting humans to manage an IOU.  (Not saying bitstamp is a bad exchange).

Adam

creeping fear.  trendline holding:

with energy stocks hot on their heels to the downside:

if natural gas was supposed to be the new bull market in energy to replace that of oil, why is it plunging along with it?

short term Dow Theory non-confirmation right on time corresponding to a complex double bottom in Bitcoin after an overextended year long downturn.  i really like this setup:

Thats another reason to want to be cautious about side chains and all this blossoming innovation. Every new improvement creates new openings for patents. If it is broken, then by all means fix it. But if it isn't broken, it might be best to leave well enough alone and let the patent clock on the existing methods run out.

Except that he also posts on a variety of other topics that add value. You don't.

I'm sorry but there is a particular disingenuity in cypherdoc discourse that irritates & annoys me to the highest point.

Even though it is his own thread I don't believe it justifies or provide him with the right to promote slander, FUD or half-truths.

You accuse me of repeating the same content when cypherdoc has been parroting the same non-sense about sidechains & "sound money" anytime he gets the chance.

How come the thread was locked a while ago?

No, it's just that I recognize that he wouldn't be here were  it not for the fact that I have been one of the more vocal opponents of SC's as well as being an early adopter with a popular thread. 

I agree with CD, although the term spamming isn't really the right one.

Your volume of posts on the thread is too high and content per post is too low.

Nobody appointed you truth police to refute each individual cyperdoc post you disagree with, even when you have nothing new to add.

It isn't about you being a side chain supporter either. There are other side chain supporters here who express the same views as you but do so while contributing a lot more value per post (Adam for example).

The thread was more compelling in your absence or relative absence. Please cool it.

Spamming?

I am merely attempting to correct some misconceived opinions. If you've read Adam's post it is apparent he doesn't quite hold you in high-esteem. I'm certain you could careless because you're cypherdoc and you're so awesome, found Bitcoin and understood it as sound money in 2011, etc, etc. but that's beside the point.


there's that ego again