Topic: Is Gavin "The Financial Crisis Is Over" Andresen correct, compromised, or crazy? (Read 6516 times)

If Back, Maxwell, Wuille, etc don't say exactly the same thing you did and encourage people to watch for it, I will be disappointed in them.


At some point for most people, money in USD terms probably becomes secondary to other goals and mostly just a tool.  Most people will never know what that point is for themselves.  A guy like Schmidt is probably at least as interested in things like his role in guiding the world through the technotronic revolution than he is in increasing his net worth by {n} million more dollars.

Back into a more typical scale, when I threw some fairly minor portion of my excess USD into Bitcoin I of course hoped that I would win in monetary terms, but I think it is fair to say that I was at least as interested in Bitcoin for it's potentially semi-revolutionary role in the future.  I considered the possibility that anything would come out of my speculation to be low, and that anything which I considered 'good' would be lower yet.  I have no trouble imagining Schmidt's calculations vis-a-vis his stake in Blockstream being similar.


I have been agitated since day one that the blockchain could be 'crippled'.  By bloat, be it by organic means or a strategic attack.  Once that happens it would be impossible to undo without some unpleasant and probably devastating compromises.

This concern about bloat has informed my own utilization of Bitcoin and my feelings about development direction.  It is exactly why I am so positive about moving forward on ways to address the problem, and as I've said before, 'subordinate chains' was the thing that hit me back when I finished reading the whitepaper in 2011.

I think it very probable that certain of the named names we are discussing here have the same set of concerns about the health of the blockchain as I do, and that it is a very good explanation for their work and ideas vis-a-vis structure of the blockchain.  In other words, I think that they probably organized under Blockstream in order to address blockchain issues more than they address blockchain issues because they organized under Blockstream.


I've had a strong sense that it is desirable for everyone who uses Bitcoin to also support it in some tangible way from an infrastructure perspective.  If this ever was a theoretically possible scenario, it died in the early days and I have to be practical about this.  I've only briefly skimmed segwit, but it seems like a practical 'engineering' realization that the real world structure that I (and I suspect others) would would like to see is untenable.  Seems to me a way of addressing the real-world flexibility problems while not necessarily permanently damaging the blockchain from a bloat perspective.  At least not right this moment.  My main concern about segwit is that the flexibility enhancements could make it more practical and likely to get stuck in the Chinese-finger-trap of bloat at some point in the future, but such concerns do not outweigh the benefits of potential progress on other fronts.  But I digress.

hehe, one more gavinerie: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13531754

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Well that narrows it down.  "Correct" is no longer a viable option.  That leaves "compromised" and "crazy."

Given Gavin's "Classic" alliance with the Cryptsy scammer, I'm leaning towards the former.

Maybe?  Just stop the fucking prevarication and admit it, the financial crisis is not over.

The longer you hem and haw, the more evasive, intensely dishonest, and economically illiterate you look.

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I'll preface by saying that the Blockstream guys are highly competent coders and cryptographers, they were before they formed Blockstream, and they are today. Your placement of trust in them thus far is not alien to me. However, a conflict of interest is an insidious thing, it may start out benign, but under the pressure of investors, deadlines, and runway... may begin to allow a form of self delusion... a self reinforcing mentality that what is best for the company is best for the protocol.

The investors that deposited $21 mil didn't do so out of charity, they were sold an eventual ROI. I'm not satisfied with the thesis that it was "we're going to altruistically contribute open source code to better Bitcoin, which will probably make us massive amounts of money somehow, and we'll dissolve the company while stiffing the investors if we have second thoughts about it." I want to know how they plan to make money, and if artificially crippling the main chain could incubate that plan.

It seems that more distribution of available software is the only way to allow miners, who issue the votes that count, to fully exercise their built in right of voting with hashes. If the miners continue to choose core's direction, so be it, I'll convert my node to a segwit node so it actually continues to fully verify. I got interested in Bitcoin because it felt like there wasn't a central point of control, that it natively resisted control by centralized influence. I have confidence that the market will settle the blocksize just as efficiently as it sets the price and the difficulty, a market with production quotas is not a market. Mining valid blocks is not a trivial thing, and those doing it have an interest in seeing the system they manage be as successful as possible.

Ok on thread: Maybe Gavin is wrong, stupid and evil, but I do not think that one sentence tells you much of anything. Also the poll is pretty bad.

Case closed?

As for scaling I believe something like 2mb and 20% growth would definitely be safe.

I also believe that even larger blocks would be safe if we developed swarm nodes:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/revised-swarm-node-proposal-1314482

Schmidt taking a share of Blockstream doesn't surprise or bother me that much.  I'm sure he has some hope of guiding the company's trajectory, or at least keeping informed on it, but I'm also fairly confident that the important players (esp, Back, Maxwell and Wuille) are well aware of and wary of this, and I think it probable that they would bail if it became a problem.  In the mean time, the work made possible by the availability of resources is open-source to a reasonable degree and if they split what (if any) is not open would probably go along with them.

My confidence in Back-n-co is not infinite, but they are by far the best bet as far as I'm concerned. I feel this way because of their documented history and the quality of their work.  It would have been really interesting to know how Finney would have felt or acted wrt to Blockstream.  I do have points of dispute with at least Back and Maxwell but they are minor and I feel that the overall objective for Bitcoin is similar to what I would like to see happen.

I might add that I don't care much about the 'client' (reference or not.)  It's the protocol which is key as far as I'm concerned.  Ya, having some control over 'the reference client' at this point in Bitcoin's evolution does probably translate into having some significant input into what is practical to do at the protocol level, but it is not a significant concern to me.  To me it's just kind of an organic reality and less risky than the alternate.  I didn't feel that way earlier in Bitcoin's evolution, and I probably won't feel that way half a decade from now (if Bitcoin is still around) but that's my stance at this point.

Sounds like you risked more than you could afford to lose.  Seek help for your compulsive gambling problem.

I will not be persuaded by your appeals to jealousy and 20/20 hindsight.

If you can't post on-topic, please leave the thread.

I second this motion.

Bandwidth will continue to improve in best case scenarios, but Gavin is a unwise to risk destroying Bitcoin if something worse happens instead.

Gavin has to know Nielsen's (like Moore's) "Law" is merely a cutesy figure of speech based on backward-looking observation, not a guarantee the future will be exactly (or even remotely) like the past.

How did you vote in the poll, compromised or crazy?

Here's Gmax's take on it:

I've been aware of Cypherdoc's sales commission for longer than you have.  Your low-information straw-grasping amuses me.

My Sierras ran like champs once the firmware was stable.  And they kept running for the guys who bought them.   

Your entire post is off-topic, and your icky fixation on sexual violence explains why you are using a throwaway account.

But we understand you want to distract everyone from the point of the OP, which is Gavin's "economic crisis is over and NFLX will fiber to the screen ASAP" thesis becomes increasingly invalid with each passing day.

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We're not in violent disagreement here. Although, I don't think miners moving to software with a 2-4MB max makes this inevitable or even likely. My greater concern is that a company, with the involvement of none other than Eric Schmidt, is steering and molding our current (potentially former) first mover advantage to their own ends. I think a diversified array of software choices hardens Bitcoin even further from outside control. Hiring a majority of the devs of the inertia driven "reference" client has proven much cheaper than a 51% attack, highlighting a fragile facet of our antifragile currency.

 

Sure.  We all know (or think we know) that 'disk' is not really a factor in Bitcoin scaling...as useful as it may be for propaganda purposes...but here's an observation which goes to the subject of 'Moore's law':

About the time that Satoshi was birthing Bitcoin, I was building a new workstation.  2008-ish IIRC which is within spitting distance of a decade.  I decided to finally 'do it right' and throw costs out the window.  What I ended up with was an i-family chipset, and for bulk storage a couple of 1.5TB drives (which I built a mirror an encryption on top of.)

Now, in 2016, after a bunch of years and a possible disk anomaly in my mirror, I decided to do a bit of work on the system.  I replaced the disks with another set of WD 'green' drives of a whopping 2TB capacity.  A full 25% increase.  OK, I might have decided to go with 6TB drives if I were feeling the same about spending money as I was back then.  That would make roughly a 400% increase.  Impressive, but vastly out of touch with the Moore's Law mythology.  I might have decided to upgrade the motherboard as well...if the technology had advanced significantly beyond the i-class base that I already owned.

I actually don't doubt that 'Moore's law' has held up better than my 'consumer grade' experience of the decade or so, but it is fairly clear that the friuits of this phenomenon are realized by a wholly different class of beneficiaries.  And I don't trust this class to serve my interests when it comes to protecting my assets against attack.

I've always said that market forces will not distribute technological advancements evenly, and the reasons for this are fairly obvious (to me at least.)  At this point it probably is the case that the likes of Google, Facebook, etc, could run Bitcoin as the global monetary system for everything and everyone.  If not now, they will be able to within a few years while it is completely unlikely that lesser class infrastructure providers will.  Bitcoin could 'evolve' to take advantage of this support base, but in doing so it will lose any advantage it may have over established fiat systems.

From a market perspective, once the bandwidth capacity reaches a point when 'hive-mind consciousness' can be streamed directly into the brains of a household, there is really no more demand which makes it unlikely that further increases will be forthcoming.  The actually bandwidth required for this, after sufficient optimization of the protocols, may not even be all that great.  Basically, as long as a sufficiently strong message to spend all of one's debt limit on new shit is downloaded there is not a lot more that needs to be done.  That is within the reach of what is possible for a lot of people living in appropriately structured 'human habitats' today.

Can we get back on topic please? This thread is about Gavin's naïve impression that internet bandwidth worldwide is improving over time.

Watching iCE gag and sputter when given a dollop of his own medicine is not gratifying at all, and is a grave insult to the great number of bitcoiners who have suffered brutal and occasionally undeserved surprise secs.

TBH, the term 'boy' in this context did not, in my mind, map to 'juvenile' in a chronological sense.  It was a standard insult effective only because it was applied to an adult in fact.  To that extent the humor itself was indeed 'juvenile', and I readily admit that such humor is effective on me from time to time.

Remember that time when I posted a standard picture of a sheep being sheep-like and Cypherdoc's mind mysteriously and immediately conjured up a sexual connotation?  Weird, but then the world is full of weirdness.


I'll gladly hold your beer, and will pull an ice cold one from the cooler for you when you get done.

---

BTW, I actually never understood the 'icedrill' context.  I only basically figured that this 'newb' was making fun of your experience with HashFast, but never cared enough to try to understand what went on there.  All I know is that you had some involvement as did cypherdoc and that it seems that there was a desperate outcome between you two...monetarily speaking.

Relatetedy, the 'iceblow' insult never seemed at all funny to me.  Doesn't rhyme or seem to have any connotation other than a random assertion of oral sexual behavior as best I can tell.  Perhaps it has some connotation associated with the Hashfast goings-on, but that is a black-box to me...mostly because it isn't interesting enough for me to bother to open the top.

Quality wise, "Boy ain't been right since..." and "you're a fag" are on different ends of the 'juvenile' humor scale.  But that's a matter of taste.

I do believe that anti-science anti climate change movements have had much more funding from oil companies than anyone got from the government. Do you realize how small budgets scientist operate on and how underfunded they and NASA are?
If they were in it for the money and corruption they would get more in almost any other job.

That is exactly why oil companies can so easily lobby against common sense in the first place.

When every month is a new heat record it is not just weather.

Substitution only happens if there IS a substitute.

International shipping and planes are not going to run on batteries with our current level of technology nor the next decades level of technology.

These problems affect mainly governments and fiat holders. If you are a sensible person dealing with sensible companies and you don't hold all your wealth at a bank as a pension or fiat you should be pretty okay.

The anti septic properties of silver hardly justifies hording all that much of it.
You can get the same effect with 2 drops of bleach or you know boiling stuff.

History shows that people value food, medicine and cigarettes in emergencies.

Except silver and gold don't rise, they just don't fall. You can never earn long time holding gold or silver.
Bitcoin and property can rise and are just as hard.

For gold or silver to shine you would need an emergency bad enough to knock out the internet+Bitcoin+fiat, but not so bad that only food mattered - a very theoretical scenario honestly.

Please endeavor to understand you are operating on a fairly low level of information.  Any somewhat successful high school policy debater could easily make the same corrective points which follow.  This isn't a fair fight anymore than a pro hockey team vs the peewee league.

1.  The California drought has nothing to do with ManBearPig.  Please learn the difference between weather and climate.  And google "Climategate" (hint: the models represent nothing more than the anti-scientific corruption of academia by government grants).

2.  Peak oil is bunk because of the substitution effect.  You are obviously too poorly read to know Simon won the bet with Ehrlich.

3.  The "economic trouble" stems not from limited resources but rather from central planning/banking and the malinvestment (resource mal-allocation) created thereby.  TBTF banks are emblematic of this, which is why the Genesis Text pointedly refers to their second round of bailouts, with a heavy implication of the entailed systemic risk the created by prevention/delay of creative destruction.  That was actually a good question, BTW.  


It is a certainty silver will be useful in an emergency involving a lack of potable water and antiseptics.  You do at least know why that is, I hope.

In an emergency, silver may or may not be accepted as a medium of exchange.  It Depends^®.  Please don't pretend you know the future, when your superficial knowledge/understanding of the past and present is at a Basic Bitch level of paltry.

As for inflation hedges, note gold, silver, and Bitcoin (ie hard liquid assets) all rise together on days when the fiat trash bleeds red.

Yes, let's all stop focusing on Gavin's idiotic 20MB --> 8GB block "Because economic crisis is over and NFLX will fiber to the screen" proposal and shoot the messenger using horrific shocking imagery.

The insight into the throwaway account's disturbing unconscious thought processes, which involved boys getting savagely raped, is most unwelcome.  More useful is the discovery tvbcof is of the type of weak mind easily impressed with such atrocity-trivializing rhetoric.

Were I to use such an uncouth, disgusting metaphor I would explain why it is apt, not simply steal it to get a cheap laugh from implied emasculation via sexual violence.  I wonder why the noob is so eager to portray me as utterly powerless and intimately violated... 

Actually, I don't.  That's for a therapist (and/or law enforcement) to deal with.

Not that the tu quoque ad hom deserves a response, but I traded most of my iD shares for hardware, which I mined with until selling at a most opportune time.

And I don't need to reach "even greater heights" to hand Realpra his ass on a platter.  Hold muh beer and watch this...   

Hehe.  That's up into the same quality category that iCEBREAKER is famous for dishing out.  For general amusement purposes I can only hope that it spurs him to even greater heights.

Have you been using Luminosity? Cool, me too. 

I've decided that it's better to have 2.7tx per second globally while coders whip up a lightning network. It's really a sure thing, gonna be easier than using Bitcoin itself, people just don't have any patience. They drink the wrong koolaid and the next thing you know they're talking about competitive advantage, adoption rates, and stifled use cases... weirdos.

What people don't understand is that Bitcoin is ours... to have, to HODL. Poors can spend their dogecoins and fiat, I'll be sitting here getting rich through sweet, sweet, stagnation.

Feels good man.