Topic: The Barry Silbert segwit2x agreement with >80% miner support. - page 59. (Read 120030 times)

Well we *obviously* disagree but I have laid out my position and you yours.

In the end we will vote with our feet. I suspect you will ultimately leave the bitcoin community pursuing your vision of "freedom currently" involving anonyminity limited development and total immutability. If you choose to own bitcoins at all it will be only for a very limited period of time until you choose to cash out of the "Ponzi scheme".

I on the other hand will avoid alternative cryptocurrencies as I feel they lack the foundation necessary to keep them sustainability afloat. Instead I will spend the weekend on an activity that offers no prospect for financial return learning how to set up a bitcoin node. As I lack a technical background this should be an interesting challenge for me. I have a moderate investment in bitcoin and plan to hold the majority of that more or less indefinitely (see my profile picture).  

Others throughout the bitcoin economy will make similar diverging choices. Time will tell which of us presents a more accurate vision of the future.

You mean guys like MPex and Roger Ver and the Winklevoss twins ?  No, they are in the game to get insanely rich on the back of the whole crowd of greater fool adopters.  Of course, given their whale status, they will do everything they can to promote bitcoin adoption (not merchant adoption, but speculative adoption), until they cash out of course.

The idealists of the first hour have been pushed out of the eco system by the design flaws of bitcoin that was made to "get rich quickly" rather than to become a neutral freedom currency (by capping, not the value, but the number of coins), and that separated users from industrial block chain providers (miners) with the PoW consensus mechanism.  Once you have an industrial "provider/customer" system (provider of industrial block chain vs user of transactions), in a highly speculative get-rich-quickly scheme, the system is such that there's too much money to be made to leave room for idealists, and you get a crabs bucket of sleazy players.  That's what bitcoin became, and it is baked into its initial design.

You have early adopters, indeed, getting rich quickly on the back of greater fools: these may behave as if they are "true believers" but are of course motivated by the growth of their wealth ; you have greater fools, hoping to be in still early enough in the game to imitate the early adopters, and become "somewhat rich quickly" too ; they are the main pumpers of the speculative market price.  All of these only want one thing: "More fresh flesh", but they call it "adoption", so that there's still enough influx of greater fools.  There's not much "idealism" behind that.  Hell, they are screaming for regulation and legal adoption, the opposite of what bitcoin was supposed to be, to be able to attract the funds of family fathers as greater fools to pump up the price and hence their wealth, and to keep out enough "freedom" by law so that these family fathers are not scared away from any anarchist thoughts.

Then you have the business around bitcoin: exchanges and industrial miners, that live off the "value leaks" in the system: they are the industrials living off the speculative hopes of family fathers making early adopters rich in the process: the more the gamblers play on the system they provide, the more they can leak off value from the players.  There's not much idealism in that either.


Yup, and because of fundamental design errors, it became a shark's greater-fool game with an industry that lives off the players.


These "whales" will cash out at a certain point, dumping on all the greater fools "and thanks for all the fish", to go to more lucrative horizons when bitcoin's greater-fool adoption potential reaches a ceiling ; or use their coins to win political power by bribing deciders in anonymous ways.


It is *obviously* a zero sum game ; well, it is a negative-sum game, because there's a net value flowing out to miners and exchanges.  There is (almost) no value created by the system (the only value that is created is the business opportunities on dark markets and other means of payment that cannot be easily done in fiat, but that's on the few percent level of the market cap at best), so obviously, all value that flows out of bitcoin, has to be put in there by other users. 


Nope.  Bitcoin's market cap is ENTIRELY DOMINATED by speculation.   Its "usage" as a currency is a negligible part of its market cap.   If tomorrow, all merchants decide to stop accepting bitcoin, that wouldn't influence the market cap in the slightest bit, because bitcoin's value is essentially determined by gamblers on exchanges, not by the demand for coins because you want to buy something.

And it is no surprise, because it was designed that way, and advertised that way: "there will only be 21 million coins, so buy your coins now, and be rich in 15 years".  That's the perfect invitation for a greater-fool game, and it is working as hell.  Once big financial players will find their way, it will go even much much higher ; and in the end, the last layer of greater fools will have paid for everything.

1) How large is the community of "true believers"?

This is unknown but I suspect the "true believers" control a huge percentage of the bitcoins and this is a good thing.

Bitcoin came on the scene as the obscure technical pet project of idealists, anarchist, open source advocates and libertarians who wanted to improve the world and reform the status quo.

These "true believers" will over time take on an altruistic role to stabilize and maintain the system. If you read my link on group selection above they are the functional equivalent of the fluorescens that maintain the polymer.

2) What influence will these true believers have on the ecosystem?

They will have an ever growing influence because true believers form a large percentage now and they stick around while those who erroneously think this is a zero-sum game are unlikely to enter or will come and go.

Yes there is competition and speculation. These fuel interests and motivate people to enter and explore the ecosystem but they are ultimately secondary. Competition of this kind fuels growth but as bitcoin block rewards dwindle to zero and knowledge of bitcoin becomes increasingly common these speculative opportunities fade unmasking the ever growing network of cooperative win-win interactions that represent the long term value of bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a self reinforcing consensus mechanism that ultimately screens for cooperation. There is a necessity for a degree altruism that is built in. This is most easily seen when looking at nodes. There is no financial incentive for any individual to run a node yet there are thousands of them despite that fact that pure economic self-interest would dictate free riding on someone else's node. The bitcoin consensus system is cleverly piggybacked on a delivery vector of speculation leveraging human greed to attract broad interest while selectively retaining those most interested in long term cooperation.

Incorrect.

I am willing to accept BU. Indeed, I prefer its design to any other option currently under discussion. As do many others.

When one needs to lie in order to argue their point, it belies a weakness in the argument.

What you say doesn't contradict what I'm saying.  You may claim that there is a hard core of "true believers" which ARE indeed a community.  Most probably, yes, there is probably a hard core community of true believers.  However, the questions are:
1) how much of the ecosystem do they make up at any given moment in time
2) what influence can they have on the ecosystem ?

The way bitcoin is designed to be, turns around antagonism: we all want to possess coins, and if you possess a coin, I don't and vice versa, which makes us de facto antagonists ; there is competition in proof of work mining and the gains that go with it ; and deep down, it turns around speculation (which is a zero sum game).   There's nothing in bitcoin that is designed to be cooperative, apart from having to stick to the consensus protocol for reasons of greater loss if you don't.   This is entirely different with an open source software project, where the participants  - the creators, devs, users... are not put on antagonist relationships and each can profit of the contribution of another one.  There are many other systems that have an intrinsic functioning that lead to altruism ; but bitcoin and many other crypto are fundamentally based upon an ecosystem of antagonists.  In fact, if everyone were fully altruistic in the bitcoin eco system, it wouldn't make any sense to use it !

As such, it is very well possible that there is a small core of hard believers in bitcoin that are perfectly altruistic and form a community, but most probably they have almost no influence on the power games and the antagonism in bitcoin: they mostly don't control large hash rates, they don't control large capitals that determine market price.  These are mainly aspects in the hands of "true players of the game", that is, antagonists trying to get wealth out of one-another's hands.

You are right that most probably, this core of believers is steady in time.  However, at any given moment in time, this core makes up only a very small fraction of the eco system.  This means that the "non believers" are of course coming and going, and are not the same crowd at different moments in time, but are nevertheless the influential majority at any given moment in time.

In other words, to influence bitcoin, you need big money (whether in the market or with hash rate or with developers) ; if you are in bitcoin with big money, you're there to use it to get more money (out of the pockets of other players).  And if you do that, you're most probably just a temporary, but important antagonist in the system, and these constitute, at any given moment, the power structure of the system.

This is what is known as a false dichotomy. There are other ways to increase the amount of transactions processed that don't include segwit.

People who believe bitcoin has no long term future are unlikely to participate in the system in any sustained manner. If you believe bitcoin is just a scam you may participate in the periphery trying to make money but logic will dictate you constantly keep one foot in the doorway. You will hesitate at being involved in anything but the most superficial manner.  

Probably you will choose not to invest at all but if you do then you are likely to cash out of the system at some point choosing to take your profits and leave the "tulip bubble" you have no confidence in. In this manner those who do not appreciate the underlying consensus mechanism will be diluted and replaced over time by those more interested in long term cooperation and building value.

You post have led me to the opinion that you have adopted flawed metaphysics which limit your appreciation of what cryptocurrency offers.

A good place to start correcting this would be to understand what group selection is. Here is a basic introduction:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-the-group/

It's called immutability.  But it is not guaranteed, because there are too few deciders involved (too low decentralization level).  In other words, it is not entirely inconceivable that the governors of bitcoin  (less than, say, 30 persons) sit together in a room and come to an agreement.  On the other hand, if the stalemate is maintained, it means that bitcoin has a higher level of decentralization than one would think.

The fundamental error in this is that bitcoin had an explicitly limited protocol (with the 1 MB limit in it).  Normally, the idea is that one has a "working system", and only if there would be an exceptional global consensus of "yeah, this would even be better", the new protocol could be adopted, but as long as there is even a small minority against it, there's no consensus over this "yeah, this would even be better", which means that it would be better for some, and worse for others, and hence, the system remains in the original protocol.  If that was a working protocol, no bad.  Problem is: bitcoin started out with a protocol that had an obvious flaw in it: the 1MB block limit.  It was a protocol that simply was SET OUT to crash into a wall at a certain point. 

Fundamentally, it is because bitcoin didn't have a solution for certain obvious problems, like the fees, the remuneration of miners in the long term, spam etc... The system simply didn't have a good design for it, and hence, as a "temporary plaster" the 1 MB block was introduced, without a clear solution to the essentially insoluble problems in the long run (mainly induced by the silly desire to have a small number of coins when the Sun will become a Red Giant and swallow the earth).   Sooner or later this was going to blow in bitcoin's face.  The "sooner or later" is determined by a parameter, the frozen-in block size.  It is an arbitrary number, but it has been chosen at 1 MB.  Bitcoin could have been thriving much longer if it were set to, say, 50 MB.  But it has been set at 1 MB, and there's no real solution for the fundamental problem of block rewards in the long run in such a system.  Yes, augmenting the block size is "kicking the can down the road", but the only way to "solve" this issue IS "kicking the can down the road".  It depends how long one wants bitcoin to function.  1 MB is programming a rather short life time indeed.  The real solution - but religiously impossible - is to release the 21 M coins limit and have tail emission.  But that's never going to be accepted.

Not necessarily.  We could both be interested in bitcoin as a tool to take wealth from one another.  Whether that goes through the "success" of bitcoin or not, is a different matter.  For instance, I may want bitcoin to fail if I can make you believe that it will be a success, and I short it so that you accept my short at interesting prices.  Bitcoin is then a useful tool to extract wealth from you to me. 
Another example: as a miner, I could spam the blocks full so that the fees go very high, because people are locked into bitcoin with big fortunes, and they have to transact for their fortunes to mean something.  In the long run, this could kill bitcoin, but I don't care as a miner, bitcoin only has to last the life time of my hardware investment, and by squeezing out the maximum of users now, I make more than if bitcoin were to be successful long term (where I'm not invested).  For the moment, that's still not the right attitude because the block reward is still larger than the fees, but if the fees become the dominant revenue of a miner, it would be logical for the miner to squeeze out the maximum of the users, rather than the long term health of bitcoin.   For instance, if you can multiply the fee by 10 while you make the market price drop by 4, you are winning.
But, on the other hand, if I'm a hodler, I might want bitcoin to be adopted as much as I can, to sell my coins to the largest public of greater fools thinkable, and so I may be rooting for its success.

Bitcoin is just a piece on the chess board, in the game of taking away wealth of your peers into your pocket ; the only "common interest" we have in such a system, is to rip off one another.  This is exactly because bitcoin (like most crypto) is a speculative asset, which is exactly that: a tool to rip off peers in essentially a zero-sum game.  Whether that tool thrives or breaks when doing so, is of lesser importance.  Its thriving or breaking can even be part of the strategies involved.


Maybe I'm using the wrong word, but I thought that cartel formation, even in the open, was a form of collusion.  That is: a kind of temporary agreement between actors in a game, to bundle forces to get advantage over others, if that is a beneficial way of doing.  For instance, the OPEC cartel is/was a collusion between oil providers in order to screw the open competition in the oil market and screw the customers, but there was no secretiveness or deceit in that.

Unfortunately, I'm not so influential as to single-handedly promote SegWit. Without SegWit and with the increase in the number of transactions on the network, the expectation of confirmations will be more and more, the fee for transactions will also grow and eventually the BTC will lose to more progressive coins with a smaller fee and faster confirmations.

Endless and meaningless debates are going on over something so obvious... Bitmain will acknowledge segwit, one way (MASF) or the other.(UASF) Nobody is willing to accept BU. Isn't that obvious? What are you discussing? What common ground are you seeking with Jihan Bu? Money? A chair at the Core Devs Club? Wot?

https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/pull/6

"Now that core is seriously discussing it as a solution and various ways to implement it and appease the mining consortium in the process"

Where can I see this? How can we believe it's not simply more stalling?

IMO, Luke has his hands in so many pies that even a flowchart would make it hard to follow. 

UASF was screwed from the beginning and I always thought it too dangerous and aggressive. The only core dev pushing it now with BIP148 is Luke-jr and the rest are distancing themselves from it - this has happened numerous times before with LJR as his motivations are often called into question by the other core devs who repeatedly have to keep him in line. I previously used to work with him and instead of letting him work on my code with his own motivations I threw him out. If LJR's motives are simply to keep pressure on the miners through the threat of UASF then I could see why it would be helpful, but I'm not sure that's the reason. Either way I think BIP148 is dead in the water without more core support - the BIP148 client is NOT part of the core code and is an external fork as much as BU, classic, and XT...

The rhetoric, chest-thumping and circle jerking continues. My prediction remains that we will see a compromise and segwit+2MB will be it. The question that remains now is how it will be deployed. Previously I couldn't see an end in sight but now it has finally appeared on the horizon and I'm hopeful that a fork is becoming far less likely again. Now that core is seriously discussing it as a solution and various ways to implement it and appease the mining consortium in the process, I can't see any other alternative as having a realistic chance.

I have very limited knowledge of the early history of the internet. It was was before my time.
The example was a hypothetical to highlight the importance and value of network effects.
Any relation or lack thereof to actual history was accidental.

Another attempt at rewriting the history of the Internet.

Consensus was and is quite easy to achieve within the framework of cooperation. Internet didn't split into incompatible islands because from the start the architects intended to cooperate. To debunk comparisons between the Internet and Bitcoin it is sufficient to quote the legacy RFC 1025 "TCP and IP Bake Off":

Whereas very early shifted from cooperation to aggression and competition. I don't even really know how the fights started. i first observed it in the intensive and extensive efforts to derail any clone/alt-coins. It then shifted more intensely into internal infighting by derailing any possibility of alternative implementations or even relatively trivial and not externally visible changes like supporting alternate database engines.

Bitcoin is a fine example of "live by the sword, die by the sword".

This is currently in dispute. There is genuine disagreement within the larger community regarding on-chain vs off-chain scaling.

Given this disagreement I favor the halfway measure of allowing both to be tried in parallel in a safe manner without committing us to either. Thus I like this compromise proposal but only if we can build a broad if reluctant consensus around it.

If we can't build a broad consensus I favor the status quo. Better to stalemate with the high fees and the status quo and lose market share then to rush try to force things and fracture bitcoin into pieces.

Again, imho anything that has 2mb or whatever hardfork, bitcoin core will not do. Claiming it is not
backward compatible like a soft fork. The other side will take nothing less than a hardfork
block size increase.

Both sides are too chicken to fork a split. Thus stalemate. Thus 2 years from now
we will likely be in the same conversation/mess imho.

Each side can stop the other from consensus at any time.

Stalemate.

Obviously they will reach agreement, they do anything to keep price higher cause they get more $$$