Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 598. (Read 2032266 times)

you're missing the point.  the act of leaving by those devs requires a conscious act and decision to do the "right" thing.  how can we keep trying to sell Bitcoin to the world as a "trustless" system when we have to "trust" Blockstream devs to do the right thing?

i thought this comment from coinlock debating aminok on Reddit was interesting:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2qtdxi/thoughts_on_sidechains_by_lukas_ryan/cn9zpi7

I read somewhere that they invested personally instead of via organized venture funds specifically because they are bitcoin supporters and the investment didn't really meet the usual criteria for the funds (roughly described by you as a 10x return). I can't vouch for any of this being actually true or relevant, but I did read it.

And that’s why I’m participating in this first-round financing as an individual investor, and why Blockstream itself will function similarly to the Mozilla Corporation. Here, our first interest is maintaining and enhancing Bitcoin’s strong open ecosystem. And the structure we’ve chosen will give us the freedom and flexibility to prioritize public good over returns to investors.

Adam, you're soft and need to develop a back bone.

you don't understand how to develop a popular thread nor sustain interest in one over a several year time period either it appears.  the reason this thread is so popular and long lasting is precisely b/c i am NOT a troll.  i bring a large amount of dedicated, insightful info, and logic to this thread and balance it with a healthy bit of "discipline" towards those who i think deserve it. it's my way of screening out the real trolls. i've been very effective at it over the years yet you conveniently try to lump this thread with bitcointroll.org while ignoring what Justusranvier just said a few posts up about how this thread has a high SNR unlike other threads throughout the forum. the high # of views and the mere fact that you are here are testimony to this fact.  you have no insight into the relationship i have with tvbcof going back 4 yrs so you ought not comment on it.  i actually don't mind him and i think he actually likes me.  but we go back and forth with each other once in a while and it provides entertainment for everyone.  we have a "volatile relationship" so to speak.

speaking of trolling, btw, did you or BS hire brg444 to come here and troll me and promote SC's?

Adam, how can you possibly say you're not "for-profit" when in fact that is precisely what Blockstream is?  do you seriously expect us to believe that Reid Hoffman, et al invested $21M while not expecting at least a 10x return on their investment?

Sidechains are not a proprietary technology.  Everything is FOSS, open IP.  And we invested a fair bit of mental energy and legal review already into making sure it stays that way, even if blockstream management were someone replaced or blackmailed; to imagine yourself or a company a perpetual lifetime role is naive, and we've seen it before eg digicash patents got sold by the investors when they went bankrupt to some company that sat on them, preventing people who wanted to innovate using ecash.  We're all anti-patent and want to avoid that kind of crap creeping into bitcoin.  I have some first hand knowledge that some companies are patenting things related to bitcoin, and probably much more I dont know about.  I suppose someone could search patent db though filing is a long slow process.  At ZKS where I was working on our ToR-precursor and ecash, back in 1999-2001, Austin tried to buy digicash patent and making it available in the public domain, we failed to buy it sadly.  John Gilmore was our advisor and he'd helped cook up an open patent license GNU like scheme.

Its not our softfork - its a softfork to enable a generic extension mechanism.  We have no monopoly (and wouldnt want one) on use of the op code.  Our only defence is meritocracy - if we build better, more secure sidechains and people prefer to use them.  We wont be getting the fees off the sidechain either because those go to miners.  If we have the technical edge and people use our stuff that seems sort of fair enough to me.

Personally I guarantee I trust each and everyone of our team more than J Random web2.0 startup CEO.  What do those guys want?  To make a profit.  Would they stop at sabotaging bitcoin to get there?  I doubt it.  Some of the bitcoin web2.0 startup guys are cool and bitcoin enthused.  But they're getting patents some of them, and not all of them will survive.  Crappy things the less cool startup CEOs might try eg the red-ilist or other things so sucky I wouldnt even describe them for fear it'd give people ideas that they lack the technical competence to design.

I do get where you're coming from, in the past I was the guy holding people to account eg PGP incorporated when they were busy trying to include key escrow into PGP ostensibly for corporate data access.  (I imagine people selling stingrays tell themselves something also).  Partly due to my efforts that was never included in the open-pgp IETF spec.

Sidechains are just a mechanism to extend bitcoin.  The interesting thing is the extension not the chain.  If a better way to do it materialises great.  If some sidechain innovations are so cool and well validated from $1b resting on them for a year that it allows bitcoin core to merge them fantastic.  Actually Pieter Wuille views that as the best way to view the utility of sidechains, to enable longer and live validation of things that could then go into bitcoin where that'd be difficult to impossible to gain that confidence on directly.

There can also however be one-size fits-all limits.  Some extensions are mutually incompatible, or too risky though interesting (eg snark contracts, zerocash) unless a way to contain the risk in chain is found.  Also you can get some new scaling possibilities by having chains with different blocksizes.  Its more decentralised and safer to have a small bitcoin main block and a medium sized sidechain block, than introduce a large main bitcoin block as there is an escape route and choice.  You can within limits get your cake and eat it.

Actually not even.  The podcast is on a completely different topic: a response to Vitalik Buterin's bitcoin maximalism assertion (its pretty funny everyone is too polite to accuse Vitalik of ether maximalism given the percentage of the premine he owns).  

I encourage you (or others) to read David Krawisz article http://bitcoinist.net/the-two-ideologies-in-bitcoin/ he is quite knowledgeable about economics and able to reason.  He draws a conclusion that is a little different to what most are assuming: that it is investors that drive bitcoins price & network effect, and transactional usage follows; rather than the assumption many make that it is the usage that drives intrinsic value & network effect.  I am not sure about that - maybe its a bit of both, but its an interesting and well reasoned argument, that is somewhat reassuring - we're not fully beholden to the success of people like bitpay trying to integrate merchants and the success of those merchants in having people pay in bitcoin etc. if Krawisz is to some extent right.

Adam

speaking of trolling, btw, did you or BS hire brg444 to come here and troll me and promote SC's?

[A majority cartel] can only force soft-forks, hard-forks are ignored by full-nodes and clients.  An attempted forced-hard fork results in hostile miners forming an alt-coin with no users.  The limiting factor is soft-forks are quite flexible and can do a lot, some of which could be undesirable.

the nuclear big-red-button option of tweaking the PoW hash is a meta threat to miners that they dont quite have the upper hand - if they abuse it, or get too crazily centralised - people would worst case be willing to push it.

Probably thats a MAD argument that keeps miners somewhat sensible as if that button is pushed they are sitting on $500m of scrap electronics with a low scrap parts salvage value.

Outside of spam limits which could be protocol enforced, its caveat emptor, you shouldnt put money into a chain unless there is some assurance that security & bitcoin protocol knowledgeable people have audited it.  People could certify chains (like sign them - "my name is blah and I'm a security researcher with reputation and I and my buddies audited this code and its good") or wallets could etc.  Its good and a feature that people can opt to use uncertified chains.  You want a situation where there is real open possibility for technical innovation & competition in chain features.

You also want no central control so no chains can get black listed.

i view Bitcoin as digital gold which is the principle behind this long thread.  but better.  no one can transmute gold atoms into SCgold. 

I thought you said you didnt do ad-hominems to troll and fan reaction?  Just a few posts back too.  

Decorum!

Stuff like that is why bitcointroll.org is redirecting here.  Also it pushes out more tech focussed people who want some civility and dont have the USENET flame war developed rhinoceros hide and egos to say "fuck you too" and keep talking.

What the tvbcof said seemed pretty reasoned to me, and if you read it neutrally, not to be calling Gavin names, just talking about hypothetical conflicts of interest, independence etc.  

I share his view about balance of power helping also, eg you can see that Microsoft & Apple are both pretty world domination evil corporations.  And yet the growth of apple's market penetration of OSX has weakened eithers ability to execute on their rent-seeking actions.  Thats a pretty conventional understanding of the real-world.

Adam

You are aware of the Eyal and Sirer paper on this, right?  As I understant, a majority coalition of miners can force users to change the protocol, by sabotaging the "orthodox" chain.  Then it would be in the interest of uses and any "orthodox" miners to upgrade to the protocol chosen by the cartel.

If the change is minor (e.g., "postpone the next reward halving to 2018"), most bitcoin users will not mind.  Only ideological purists will be upset, but all they could do is create yet another fork, with a PoW that cannot be mined by the current equipment.  But then no orthodox miners could mine this new "true bitcoin reborn" chain either, so it would start out with a minuscule CPU-based network.

What would prevent a sidechain from being a scam?  Sidechains will not be cleared, audited, or reulated, by Blockstream or anyone else.  Their protocols cannot be constrained in any significant way, without destroying their presumed merits.  Or is there anything in the whitepaper and other literature that I have missed?

you're still that little dog who nips at my trouser bottoms.

the bitcoin network is really controlled by the economic majority.  Thats kind of what cant be evil is about, an attempt to replicate that type of thinking into a corporate structure to fail-safe it.  Not even miners can fork the protocol if no full nodes nor users like the change.

outside of some disagreement that sidechains create more risk than they remove (I say they remove risk, because bitcoin is exposed to offchain risk & monetary shocks from eg mtgoxings, such that sidechains are a clear improvement over offchain economically)

furthermore, imo for global adoption to occur, Bitcoin must be free from all conflicts of interest.  it has evolved to the level of a public good.

Sure hoping 2015 is the year (and earlier in better than later!) they get the bitcoin ETF operational.  I know lots of semi-technical or even technical people who'd really like to invest in bitcoin that cant handle or dont want the risk of the technical management of coins and so have held off buying for purely that reason.

Adam

Death also does this, but I am not eager for it.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2014/12/31/winklevoss-bitcoin-trust-files-to-sell-201-million-shares/

"The Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust on Wednesday filed to sell 20.1 million shares on the Nasdaq exchange. The shares represent units of interest in the bitcoin exchange-traded fund launched by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the twins who are best known for their legal dispute with Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's origins. The ETF will be listed under the symbol COIN, according to the filing. The Winklevoss brothers also launched a bitcoin index - the Winkdex - in February. Bitcoin is a decentralized virtual currency that has attracted attention for its big price swings."