I'm acting once again as impartial messenger with this latest (now edited) response from Shelby:
Before anything, someone needs to send Andreas M. Antonopoulos a link to this thread, because he obviously doesn’t understand that Core will be the hard fork, not vice versa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBnC9AhKjws
Firstly, I want to offer an olive branch to @jbreher by recognizing:
1. I appreciate his effort and participation. It’s frustrating to both appreciate someone and simultaneously deal with the propensity of certain snarky words to be later cited by others as evidence of something I am not. This has happened to me many times, even it is not @jbreher’s intention. IOW, I did not impress upon him how his use of certain words and phrases can by no fault of his, end up taking a life of their own because this forum has often become a “he said, she said” clusterfuck in my past experience. IOW, some people will later claim that @jbreher does not respect me and spanked me. Which is why I am not eager to post on this forum. But again I appreciate his effort and participation.
2. Misunderstandings and learning are part of any human process even between intelligent forms of life. I have a thick skin but it did not help me from being banned. So now I am more of stickler about letting people get away with snarky statements about me, because as I said they take on a life of their own. @jbreher may feel his statements were no big deal, factual, appropriate, and constructive dialogue. But that does not guarantee that others will interpret the way he does. I guess it is very difficult for us to write on forums and not have unintentional misunderstandings. We must be very, very meticulous with our wording if we want to avoid misunderstandings. I can understand any person for not being so meticulous and anal about it. Yet the word “absurd” is reasonably overt admonishment. So I don’t know for sure if my reaction was over the top. In any case, I am expressing a conciliatory tone now. That is not to claim that I never had a snarky Freudian slip. I hope most of my sharp-tongued bullets have been reserved for those who lashed out first with such kind words as “nutjob” (@jbreher did not use that word to describe me, which was instead flung by @exatsie and hopefully he will not again … I’m usually willing to forgive, forget, and be friends, unless there’s a pattern of abuse that never improves).
3. To clarify what I tried to convey, but poorly stated in my prior post, I think @jbreher has been trying to assist in promulgating awareness and meritorious analysis of my views and I do not think he was overtly attempting character assassination. I was slightly put off by him making statements which could be (mis?)interpreted as judgmental, callous, and not giving more understanding to my human suffering and commensurate with fully appreciating the effort I am trying to apply to help us search for the truth. IOW, I thought that he appreciated the effort I am putting in to try to help him understand why I think he is being fooled by Craig and to help him not lose moAr BTC value. I felt this is very noble of me and in the spirit of being a true brother and friend, so I was more shocked to read “absurd”. I thought I was sacrificing myself for the benefit of a group of men who are friends. Perhaps I need to recalibrate my expectations and motivations. Essentially I think both of us got sloppy/careless and should try to appear to be more cooperative and less snarky. Also he and I may at times have a different perspective about philosophical priorities. My philosophical stance is not cast in stone yet. I am still trying to figure it out.
4. After re-reading my prior post, I again did not explain my perspective optimally. So readers are to be forgiven for arguing with me and missing some of my points, when my exposition is somewhat discombobulated.
5. My illness has flared up again the past days (after a few good weeks) and it literally discombobulates my mental state to something that is sort of analogous to being very drunk and inability to connect thoughts clearly, and inability to proof-read text. The energy for the brain becomes severely lacking. It is a struggle I can not describe because it does not have an exact analog in the experience of those who haven’t endured this sort of illness. As I said, I should not even try to write here. I am asking for trouble. But I did it because this issue is so critically important for all of us.
6. I have become very exhausted from this discussion, so I find it very arduous to unravel misunderstandings. But I think this discussion is so important. Which is why I making one more post. I am gravely concerned about where the world might be heading. However I want to also keep an open mind and hope that there is a near-term positive outcome for humanity. (See the bottom of this post for some positive thoughts about our plight against statism) Please do not perceive my comments as entirely rigid and closed minded. I remain open to new data and new mental approaches. Sometimes I am so overloaded just to react to what others have written, that I do not make it clear that I am not so rigid in my beliefs as might be perceived.
7. I do not presume I am absolutely correct. As my illness and energy allow, I revisit my perspective again and again, searching for flaws in my prior statements. Sometimes I want to correct some past statements but it is too late. Inertia builds. I have other work to do. Etc..
Here is a clarification of my main points from my prior post:1.
Unforgeable costliness is all the (proof-of-)work that was burned to mine an asset and it is stored as the confidence—amongst the wealth of the hodlers of that the asset— that the asset is a reliable and good store-of-value. The unforgeable costliness is transferred from a physics phenomenon (i.e. cost of work) to a public confidence. Money exists only due to a Schelling point of public confidence (amongst the extant hodlers of the wealth in the said asset, e.g. Bitcoin’s power-law distributed wealth) which can’t be overridden by the
nonexistent Schelling points for forgeries (
amongst that power-law distributed wealth, disregarding worthless minions who incorrectly think voting is free but who actually do not matter in the economic equation), i.e. confidence that the store-of-value is unforgeable, reliable, fungible, widely accepted, liquid, etc.. Note recently several of my tweets further clarifying my conceptualization of the valuation of PlanB’s stock-to-flow’s model where deleted by PlanB and I was banned from ever commenting on his tweets again:
https://twitter.com/iamnotback/with_replies (
archive of the specific posts)
Is PlanB part of some conspiracy to drive more fools into Core before Craig starts the hard fork? Or is just offended by my tweets? Or does he disagree with my logic? Strange.
2. Block size changes, or any protocol changes other than
benevolent bug fixes, break unforgeability. Because there is no single, one-and-only choice for the new protocol. And thus all the various protocol choices for forks are “forgeries” and lack the necessary confidence amongst the hodlers the wealth of that asset. All of us admit that all hard forks of Bitcoin have been sold off to buy more moar real Bitcoin. Core delayed the decision of the Bitcoin wealth, with a deception named “soft fork” which eventually becomes a hard fork, free airdrop for the real (aka legacy) Bitcoin wealth hodlers so that the said wealth can vote with its decision about which fork represents the unforgeable costliness. The only Schelling point of confidence which is definitively never a forgery is the immutable, one-and-only original. Thus it is impossible to transfer to a protocol change, the
unforgeable costliness that gives an asset its monetary value (by way of the stocks-to-flows model I have cited numerous times in this thread).
3. @jbreher ponders whether Bitcoin never had a 1 MB limit. He and all big blockers must maintain that Satoshi had an adaptive limit and then put the 1 MB hard cap limit there as an afterthought and not as intentionally immutable. But I have explained and argued that any form of adaptive or mutable block size limit is incompatible with both decentralization and unforgeability. So thus there is no question (at least in my mind) that Satoshi had to make the block size immutable. If he didn’t then Bitcoin would have no Schelling point to provide and sustain unforgeability. This game theory seems to be very solid and comprehensible. I have never read a cogent rebuttal to it.
4. Craig correctly argues that governments will apply their power to
attempt to force identity onto cryptocurrency transactions. Bitcoin has very weak to non-existent mechanisms for protections of our identities and correlatable activities which are recorded on-chain. Thus Bitcoin as a system is less of a threat to that aspect of government power than a more anonymous altcoin (although it has been shown that Monero is not very anonymous, may be a honey pot, and there really are not any truly effective anonymity altcoins yet, so Craig’s distinction on that point may not be that germane yet).
5. The lack of strong on-chain privacy and anonymity for Bitcoin is less of an issue for most people, because they were going to be kicked off of Bitcoin anyway by higher and higher transaction fees. And the Bitcoin $millionaires who can afford the txn fees, are going to be targeted by capital controls, taxation, etc... So the problem here is that since unforgeable (i.e. the real, immutable, one-and-only) Bitcoin is not going to be a widely used medium-of-exchange (can not scale transaction volume), the $millionaires are not going to have the political support of the masses. Bitcoin will likely become known/viewed by the public via propaganda of statism as a haven for “crime”, “terrorists”, “political manipulators”, “other religions than your own”, and general as something bad that governments must apply the full force of law to attempt to control:
Italy's Deputy Prime Minister has proposed a plan to "tax" money and valuables held by citizens in their private safety deposit boxes.
Don't be surprised if more people around the world start looking for a non-censorable, non-seizable asset to store their wealth in. 🔥
https://twitter.com/apompliano/status/1138803120119648258?s=21Lol
As a fellow Italian I suggest you an alternative way of looking at that.
They are desperate.
Nobody in her right mind would voluntarily open her own security safe box just to be taxed.
So? How does it works?
If I work on the illegal economy, or simply I never paid my taxes I have a LOT of cash I store there.
If I want to “clean it” I can take it off, being taxed on it (15%-20%) and deposit in the bank.
State money laundering, at a very competitive rate I also would add.
gawds i love good spin
+1 WOsMerit
Thanks for some education about Europe.
Jurisdictional arbitrage of this form (between just hodling whilst their socialist, clusterfucked kleptocracies collapse or declaring assets if they offer a good enough deal) is a plausible reason to be more optimistic.
This can be another interpretation of what is meant by positing that Bitcoin is here to enable the wealthy to perserve their wealth through the chaos coming to the world, not as a (especially if forgeable) medium-of-exchange.
And there are apparently a lot of Italian descendants in Argentina. And I might even become one of them.
You definitely cannot create the accumulated Proof Of Work of Bitcoin within your basement, nobody can, which is why Bitcoin has value.
Fine example of the dipshit scammer slogans you see plastered over Reddit all day. The kind of bumper sticker slogan lies Andreas Antonopolous pushes. Proof of work DOES NOT CREATE value. It's sunk cost fallacy. Jesus Christ, reading this continuous stream of mindless shit from you is too much. This accumulated sunk cost fallacy also has ZERO bearing on future security.
It preserves value.
You are getting annoying. It's not like you don't know how it works.
Sunk cost fallacy does not "preserve" value. Sunk cost fallacy by definition has NO BEARING on future value. For example, if the Chicom miners band together and collude with their 70% hash power or whatever they have (I know it's at least 60% but probably higher), if you're on the minority fork with 30% or less, how has the current or past hash power "preserved" your value? It hasn't. You're now on a minority fork that might wither away and die off.
Yea, you still have your Jihan Wu tokens on the majority fork, but maybe the tokens on that fork don't even have anything to do with the Bitcoin of yesterday at all and are instead Chinese social credit score tokens with built-in chain anchor. Where is this so called "immutable" bullshit ledger again? It doesn't exist. Your chain can just be nullified by becoming an unsupported minority fork that dies. There is no Nash equilibrium in bitcoin. Arguably, no change would ever take place in the software if there was since there's no such thing as inherently 'good' code that can't have some hidden repurposed motives to it.
Read my prior post in this thread. Bitcoin mining is ostensibly becoming more decentralized, not more centralized, at least until some singularity is reached wherein the minted coinbase reward (aka the flow of new stock) becomes too small. I will be blogging about my thoughts about that eventual singularity, but it is a decade or decades from now, but not later then 2141.
Sunk costs are not what provides value to Bitcoin in the stocks-to-flows valuation model. The
mining cost of the new annual flow provides the baseline for valuation of all the above ground stock. (
<--- click that link for more detailed explanation). I explained in this post that the sunk costs is transferred to the Schelling point of public confidence. Read this post and my prior one carefully.
There’s no Schelling point for the Bitcoin wealth to sell the immutable protocol and buy any fork. So the only Schelling point is to sell all the forks and buy the one-and-only, real, immutable Bitcoin with the proceeds.
So you are entirely incorrect about Schelling points and numerous forks. The forks have no (lasting) value thus they are irrelevant.
And you are also incorrect if you think Bitcoin is not physical. The physical mass of Bitcoin is all the mining equipment out there. It just so happens that unlike gold, the mass is detached and only tethered virtually, which gives Bitcoin utility that gold does not have.
You sold Bitcoin at $600. Lol. Announce it to the world. Refuse to buy back into Bitcoin at every chance you have been given to rectify your mistake. Ditto some guys in this thread who perhaps will not be wise enough to sell BSV when the greater fools rush in. Because they refuse to acknowledge reality.
I have explained this all very clearly now. There is no excuse.
.
.
I debunk the incorrect belief that gold is physical (aka tangible) and Bitcoin is not. They are both physical. Bitcoin’s physical mass is not tethered to the ability to transport the value. So Bitcoin has all of gold’s properties, plus we do not need to use fractional reserve receipts, because the physical mass (the mining hardware) stays in the “vault” whilst the value can be transferred cryptographically. Amazing!
Indeed no one can predict all the potential outcomes w.r.t. Bitcoin. But the problem with gold is that government has an asymmetrical advantage because gold has to be physically transported. Thus the government and thieves can physically take it from me if I need to move between countries. Look for example at
Armstrong’s current reopened (“new”) court case. Apparently someone stole his rare coins while he was unjustly imprisoned. Gold is an albatross around my neck (which I painstakingly learned by getting burned after shipping my precious metals to the Philippines). It limits my freedom to react to different situations that might arise. So it is actually the antithesis of diversification. A little bit of gold yeah maybe, especially given that
as of Basel-III European banks will have an incentive to increase their gold reserves. But exceedingly large hodlings of gold diverge from diversification. We’re a sitting duck in that case with the gold
albatross around our neck.
Again I also refer readers to @fillippone’s point and my reaction to it in this post. That to perserve our wealth through what is coming we may need to just hodl
BTC for decade(s) until the governments become so bankrupted and desperate that they agree to legitimize our wealth. We have to squeeze those criminals until they acquiesce.
If you have a way to transport gold without actually transporting it which does not involve a trusted party, I would appreciate if you would share with me how to accomplish it. Bitcoin is trustless. I do not need to trust anyone in order to store my Bitcoin and transport it.
Yes I know you are very conservative and unwilling to accept that (the real not the fake) Bitcoin is a ~2000 – 3000 year monetary cycle event that radically changes the old order of money. That is what I believe based on the facts that I am aware of. Even the Bible says we will throw our gold into the streets. Gold was not even money at the inception of human civilization. Gold is not some permanent form of money.
Humility is a multifarious phenomena. Is it humble for you to assume that gold is forever money and nothing could possible replace it overnight? I look at
the model that explains why Bitcoin can rise in value so quickly and I understand. I have not yet seen you correctly refute that model.
The only significant uncertainty facet I am willing to grant (in comparison to gold) is that is is unclear what happens to Bitcoin when the aforementioned model’s S/Fs ratio and market cap far exceeds that of gold. But that will not be the case until Bitcoin is over $1 million. So why would I trade a currently $10k asset that is going to $1 million in the next ~8 years or less, for a currently $1300 asset that is going to maybe ~$5000 in that time frame.
Diversification must factor in adjusted for risk versus reward, and risk of loss as well as gain. With gold I have a huge risk of it entirely being stolen, stuck in some legal jurisdiction where I can not liquidate it, and other risks because it is not digital. So huge risk of loss and not very much upside. Whereas with Bitcoin, there is a very high probability of huge upside and very low risk of loss if I am careful about my opsec (which is entirely in my control, and trustless). Bitcoin is about self-responsibility. Gold is more of fiat instrument because it depends on trust for storage and/or for liquidity. Bitcoin is sovereign, gold is not so anymore. For example, gold forces me to come face-to-face with a buyer or seller, unless I rely on trusted 3rd parties. In the scenarios where I need gold to perform, it could be very dangerous to even transact in gold. Whereas with Bitcoin I can transact digitally and no need to come face-to-face not rely on trusted parties.
Yeah I might have some dozens of gold coins just in case. But I am not going to put $millions into gold (presuming I own at least 1
BTC now and the expected future price). Sorry that would be a huge albatross around my neck.
For astute diversification, I would probably choose to have enough gold coins to support my simple life and daily expenses. Gold that I can reliably carry with me where I need to go (or copies of that small hoard in each country where I might reside). Any Bitcoin we hodl is God’s money, not for me personally but for me to use for God’s objectives. Gold will be less effective for that and thus I think by the
Parable of the Talents I am to put more in Bitcoin otherwise the talents will be taken from me and given to someone who will.
What good is it for me 20 years ago to have buried gold at different places in the world? It is entirely useless if I can not get my hands on it when I need to direct it to accomplishing good. We are still digging up buried hoards from the Dark Ages.
The Core address
3s are not Bitcoin. That is just fundamental. Bitcoin has no value whatsoever if any development group can “soft fork” it.
The ability to discern good ideas from bad ones is essential to wealth generation. The fallacy of diversification is that any person could generate wealth without any expertise or maximum division-of-labor, which would be equivalent to the fallacy of egalitarianism and Marxism.
If the chinese colluded to do such a change, they would end up with an useless token and those smart would see the opportunity to mine Bitcoin at a discount while the scammers burn money on their pretend Bitcoin, before the difficulty picks up traction again.
No, that is not how the world works such as how people like Bitcoin core erroneously state that only "nodes" or "users" matter and not miners. Miners determine the fate of Bitcoin because without miners you have no chain security. Yes, you can choose to boycott the majority fork...and then be attacked by them. Then you get to open the can of worms of being forced to change algo. Regardless, since Bitcoin has no Nash equilibrium, no Schelling point, and mining and transaction validators are all designed to centralize, it's nothing more than a corrupt political power vacuum like you would see in a senate.
Miners need transactions to happen in order to stay solvent, and nobody would use inflationcoin. Also, literally all whales (except miners that are part of the attack, assuming they don't back-peddle) would dump their share on the attackers chain, collapsing the price, thus collapsing the hashrate, and forcing miners to come back to the original chain or go out of business.
Nobody said anything about inflation. You erroneously claimed "21 million coins" constitutes a Schelling point for Bitcoin. You're making shit up on the fly. You can have infinite different forks all with a 21 million coin count. There is no Schelling point in shitcoins. Stop constantly lying. It's also 100% guaranteed for Bitcoin to be co-opted by the state since transaction validators are designed to centralize, not that the state wasn't involved in it's creation in the first place.
There is no Schelling point to sell the one-and-only, immutable Bitcoin. Forks are worthless if everybody sells their free airdrop tokens on the forks and buys moar of the one-and-only, immutable Bitcoin with the proceeds.
Miners have no power to change the protocol. Period.
I explained that already upthread. Even the miners who will force Core to stop its “soft fork” deception and hard fork off, will not have any power to change the immutable protocol. They will be merely restoring the Nash Equilibrium by taking as donations the massive, generous SegWit (aka Core) UTXO addresses booty. Then the Nash Equilibrium will be restored and Core will fuck off and die. And the real, immutable Bitcoin will chug along to $1 million per
BTC before 2028. Whilst your gold will go to at most $5000ish.
