Topic: Miner cartel, Bankster cartel, or an altcoin? Your choice? - page 22. (Read 33250 times)

The splitting of the coins can be orthogonal to dumping and pumping on exchanges.

Only a small portion of the whales' tokens needs to on the exchange at any given time in order to paint the float.

Any way, I agreed that your proposal could be employed if the whales are not so numerous. So why are you still disagreeing?

Also I think MPEx (MP's exchange) is actually the place where most of the volume is done and the actual prices of Bitcoin are set (between players of sufficient size). But I might be mistaken about that. I haven't actually researched the data.


Not all on the same day.


No for the reason I explained that marketing has little or nothing to do with it:

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Surely they can attempt that but they have the prisoner's dilemma that the miners can then debase them to hell, because they already proved to each other that they are duplicitous.

So the fools die in their own tarpit as always.


Only the fools believe marketing matters that much.

The economic paradigm is what ultimately decides.


Incorrect/disagree. Miners want max(volume x fee per transactions) on chain.


Incorrect/disagree.


Because Core doesn't want to maximize max(volume x fee per transactions) on chain, and because this is what the whales want.

And Core wants to enable off chain transactions.

And the miners always will be driven to increase the number minted tokens eventually if they have that control (but they can only have that control if the whales are duplicitous thus suicidal).


Perhaps. We'll see how desperate the mining cartel becomes to stop SegWit while their revenue is being squeezed by the small blocks. Core has time on its side. If the miners raise fees too high, then they kill off Bitcoin destroying their sunk cost investment. If miners allow SegWit, they loose control over the fees charged off chain. If the miners attack with HF to get larger blocks, they end up with a million ASIC pet rocks.

Miner are stuck between a (n ASIC) rock and a hard place. Lol. BU are some technologically incompetent masochists who willfully enjoined the flogging.

Miners are slaves. Got it.

Who wrote that it is a conspiracy? The power-law distribution of wealth is well documented in published research.

Afair, roughly 50% of the wealth is held by the top 1%. And the remaining 50% follows the actions of the coordinated whales, because the remaining 50% can't self-organize (they're only organized in a manipulation by whales). When the whales fight, they need to fight over which of them can manipulate the other 50% of peons.

Apparently the reason the whale MP hates the dumb masses is because the USG.MIT is capable of manipulating the peons with the debt-based fiat system, which thus puts the stupid and incompetent in control because manipulating the masses is not a meritocracy. This is why MP is always foaming at the mouth about how much he hates social networking, marketing, Ethereum, etc..


Is such a system decentralized given that the power-law distribution of wealth means the control is highly concentrated?

Well if the Bitcoin whales fight each other, then there can be a split which doesn't immediately devolve to winner-take-all. For example, MP alleges that Ethereum is a project of the USG.MIT and even quoted @r0ach who says Ethereum is run by the R3 consortium. He also thinks similarly about Ripple.

So either Bitcoin is top-down controlled by a coordination of whales (e.g. MP's WoT) or it is a chaotic, ongoing, insoluble Godzilla vs. King Kong wars with us peons as fodder and collateral damage. This is why we peons prefer a winner-take-all outcome.


Core (actually afaik only some members of Core) did not aggressively propose changing the PoW until BU threatened to HF. It is not a pre-emptive action but a defensive one.

Whether the miners were happy with 1MB blocks or not, they are apparently not happy about the SegWit softfork.

And I think I may understand the reason now. The miners don't want any economic activity to occur off chain, because they want a monopoly on the economic value of Bitcoin. This relates to what I wrote in my prior post in bold text:

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Well we'll see if BU actually attempts a hard fork.

Wouldn't miners prefer larger block sizes so that Bitcoin's economic value can grow and all on chain  

And you are the one who is making elaborate conspiracy theories. Occam's Razor says the miners want everything on chain and they want larger blocks.


Which works both ways. By having BU threaten to HF if SegWit gains more adoption, they threaten the miners not to adopt SegWit, because it is quite clear that if BU attempts a HF and the whales are united around small blocks, then the PoW hash will be changed and the miners will all be bankrupted.

Therefor, the threat works in both directions.


Agreed would need 80% of the whales agreeing to go for the small blocks with PoW hash change.


I don't think that is absolutely necessary, since the whales will decide which ticker symbol wins.

But if you have 80% of the whales colluding, then the exchanges don't want to get spanked and will comply.


Agreed it was the collusion of the economic majority, not the ticker name in particular.


The price and marketcap of Bitcoin determines the level of mining security, not the PoW hash continuity.

One set of miners get replaced by another. The bankrupted miners get millions of ASIC pet rocks.


Because only fools would enable a mining cartel that has every incentive to increase the number of tokens to 1 billion tokens, because neither the miners nor the fools own many tokens. The miners have sunk costs, ASICs, and debt.

So all those fools would debase each other into a tarpit as fools always do.

It is a huge inkblot to not remember that the whales have every incentive to protect the 21 million tokens limit, but the miners do not. That is why the whales are very likely to collude to prevent HFs by the miners. The miners must always remain slaves.

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But your (correct) theory is that coin owners will dump on the chain they don't like, to obtain more coins on the chain they like.  Now *where else but on an exchange* are they going to do that ?
This can't be a "friendly over the counter" encounter by 10 equal-minded big whales somewhere on an island in the Pacific, because those BUYING the coins you dump, are in the other camp.  

So you HAVE TO TRUST the exchanges in this affair.  The only way to "dump a chain into oblivion" by a whale, is to put to sale his stash on that chain *to the public*.  Otherwise, the public price wouldn't fall down.  The place where the value of a chain is made, given that there is almost no *economic value* to crypto, is on exchanges.  
The "oh my god, merchant X is only accepting BU coin or is only accepting Core Coin" doesn't play the slightest bit of a role, as this represents maybe $10,- in the bitcoin price (I even think less).
The "oh, my preferred dark market is now only doing Core Coin" won't matter much.  

The only thing that makes and kills coins in this greater-fool game that crypto is, are the casinos: the exchanges.

You only need 4 or 5 of them listing the two coins, and that will do.  And I can guarantee you that they will play the game: THEY will become rich because of this, because THEY take fees on the exchanging of Miner Coin against Core Coin.  


But your "whales dumping" plan HAS to be executed on exchanges.  They don't have a choice.


They are going to dump their Miner coins on who ?  Who will buy them directly from them, and not on exchanges ?
Who are the big whales who will BUY these coins from them, if it is not on an exchange ?

But there's another problem.  How much are these whales trusting one another ?  Because you get a Prisoners dilemma between them, unless they are sitting together in the same room before their lap tops, holding guns to shoot down the cheater.

Because there's no more fun than to get your co-whales dump on the wrong chain, buy up their stash at ridiculous prices, and when they are "empty", start pumping the chain they just tried to dump to oblivion, on which they released all of their stash !   You can dump slightly on the "expensive chain", which the whales will buy, giving you a huge amount of cash, with which you buy the "cheap chain".  Especially if it is the "good old bitcoin" : people will see a huge dip, and when you start buying up, the price will go up again, investors will hesitate following the "pumped fork", you start dumping the "whale fork" after a while, your co-whales have to buy in like crazy and make you rich.

The "true bitcoin" name of the miner chain will in the end survive, the enemy whales have nothing any more to dump on it, you have bought their stash on that chain for a penny, and now you have:

1) all their "miner coins" which is the good old bitcoin chain
2) most of their stash when you dumped on the whales chain

"old bitcoin" will have survived the fork, the other whales are "rich in whale coin" and you are rich in bitcoin and cash.

The miners are back in business with a lot of PoW ; the other chain is a pumped alt coin.

Very very dangerous game for whales to dump their "true bitcoin".

What the block size issue is about ?  Very simple: miners want big fees, so small blocks and no second layer.  Exactly the bitcoin of today.  They don't want all these Core ideas.  They simply want bitcoin remaining the way it is (note that this is the true FUNCTION of proof of work: keep the network honest = keep it to the rules).
But how do they counter core which IMPLEMENTS AUTOMATIC protocol modifications ?  By going for a competitor.  Just ANY competitor that kills Core's de facto centralized software hegemony and (as they thought) their governance of modifications of the protocol.

This is why miners will never allow the BU fork to happen.  They will keep BU at 30-40%.  Sufficient to show that Core doesn't have consensus.  If ever Core implements a 50% soft fork, they will augment BU to 50-60% but that's dangerous, because some idiot might pull the trigger.  But now that core threatens to pull the trigger with change of PoW, the "altcoin guys" are on the Core side.

Nothing will happen.  Until after bitcoin has lost its first place.

So you propose a few exchanges will split the tokens in bulk for the owners of the tokens. That works except it assumes we can trust the exchanges. What if one or a plurality of them conveniently lose all the tokens to a hacker.

As I wrote before, your idea doesn't scale well decentralized and thus it is more risky.

However, if we assume that 80% of the Bitcoins are held by whales (such as MP, Roger Ver, and @rpietila) who will make the decision^[1], then it seems they could adequately employ your method without relying on any exchange. So in that case, I wonder what the block size issue is really about?

Perhaps the whales view Bitcoin as a settlement system for those who matter, and think the peons can trade off chain and be settled with offsetting transaction on chain (e.g. the LN design). But I am wondering why they are so adamant about preventing Bitcoin from being uses for other things on chain.

Perhaps it is because Bitcoin whales want to minimize the level of top-down control that themselves have via their control over the protocol.

Perhaps they think by forcing the bulk of humanity activity to be organized off chain, then it affords others the opportunity to build other systems (even other blockchain instances) which then get periodically settled back to the master Bitcoin blockchain with a hashed summary transaction.

So maybe the 1MB blocksize limit is unselfish and a forward looking attempt to have more bottom-up anti-fragility baked in? Top-down control is vulnerable to blackswans so the whales need to be concerned about blackswans wiping them out, thus more bottom-up control is better:



^[1] When I originally rejected your idea (actually it was my idea also but had rejected it), it was because I wasn't thinking of Bitcoin as entirely controlled by a couple dozen whales. But obviously it must be, due to the power-law distribution of wealth.

Hi Risto. Please excuse my atrocious ignorance, naivete, and cluelessness w.r.t. the underworld of darkhigh finance. This is a strange new terrain for me. I feel like a child who is struggling to take his first steps without stumbling onto my face.

In particular I would really like to understand what is different if anything about your perspective/approach compared to MP's economic philosophy and assessment of the value of humanity. MP seems to think those with the most wealth should be in control of the monetary system yet he hates democracy and mass marketing because he sees those as ways of enslaving the stupid masses in a farcical, house-of-cards, debt-based economic system. Perhaps it can't be any other way? My technological approach with my attempt to find an improvement to Satoshi's design, has been to try to find a design in which nobody is in control.

So I would judge your ability to enlighten me on these issues—either in public or private communication—as the critieria.

Note that your WoT (your relationships with other whales) is not my first chosen criteria, because leadership insight is IMO the most important criteria. A person's reputation and position within the inertia of the economy is relevant but not necessarily a predictor of future performance because of blackswans (we are in a highly transformative epoch, which is why I am here).

Without publicizing any specific event, your actions indicate you are wealthy.

He wrote about you: