Topic: Well, well, well, now we know what Jihan Wu’s been up to. - page 3. (Read 19997 times)

I think I'm seeing this now or perhaps remembering what I had known previously. So much discussion of changes to BTC I probably forgot what I'd seen as it's core property in the first place.

It's like voting on the countries monetary policy. It's impossible for a mutable currency, subject to human fallibility, to become a long term store of value.

Having a choice between 100 alt-coins (all subject to mutability or other flaws) is sort of like having a choice between 100 national fiat currencies. Yes, we can shuffle between them (not everyone gets hurt in the event that one implodes) and some are better than others (USD more trusted than Bolivars or something) but they are ultimately still subject to whims of bankers and politicians.

See my comment there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/64kavb/be_very_careful_segwit_signaling_percentage/

But if all our options have the same flaws, then the multiple choices theory is also centralization.

See if humans can UASF on one blockchain or SF, then they will do it on all, because humans are incapable of resisting their urge to fuck themselves with democracy.

So if Bitcoin fails immutability, then PoW is toasted and the entire blockchain ecosystem might collapse, because alternatives such as PoS are centralized and controllable by whales because there is nothing-at-stake to attack it.

Jihan Wu is protecting us from ourselves.

To be clear, I'm talking from the perspective that ultimately having a choice between currencies is ensuring decentralization from a higher level. My argument is not what is decentralized at the protocol or coin level. Obviously a coin that can be controlled by whales or miners is not decentralized, but unless these coins become mandated through law (as fiat) then ultimately can't we just abandon them when it's clear they've become hostile toward us? So isn't the real power simply about choice?

UASF either means the whales are colluding in which case we can never trust that coin ever again, or it will fail in chaos. Both of which are very bad.

Immutability is the only reason we trust to keep our money in a token. If whales control the thing, we might as well put our money in a private bank without any regulation.

Litecoin may already be immutability and will certainly become so as the vested interests diverge within it. But I think the low marketcap means there is a very strong incentive for Scrypt manufacturers and individual miners to want to add scaling via SegWit to Litecoin otherwise Litecoin is basically just a xerox of Bitcoin that no one needs.

The gimicks of 2.5 min blocks and 4X more transaction rate capacity on chain, don't seem to be compelling enough to justify a serious huge move of users into Litecoin.

If Litecoin forsakes its opportunity then I guess some other scaling altcoin will takes its place.


HFs are centralized control. Democracy is not decentralization.

We hope that Litecoin has 75% consensus for SegWit SF, but then hope the mcap will rise enough that from then on no major protocol changes can attain consensus.

Litecoin suddenly became massively undervalued when it became apparent that Bitcoin can't ever get SegWit (scaling), and Litecoin is the best possible fit and given its very low price and mcap, then it might be possible to get 75% consensus.

Also the chart of LTC is telling me that it is the anointed scaling coin that its price will rise to $100 over the next year or so.

Its possible the SegWit will fail and LTC will fade away. But I think the odds of that not very high.

Which other coin could Jihan anoint for scaling? It would be insane for him to be totally against scaling.

There was mention of renting hashing power to push LTC over 75%, but I guess as usually happens , people would rather take the perceived cheap and easy route rather than do what takes effort and delayed gratification. They're gonna bank on the fact that they believe they're in the market majority and that miners are objectively evil rather than look at the natural economics and use logic, which would mean simple patience would probably give them what they desire anyways (Jihan would eventually favor SegWit as you say!)

I don't know, the fact is that a coin or open source in general can be forked. Anybody could create LTC2 from scratch with all the features, but it wouldn't have the network effect, which is arguably the most important thing. Is creating a situation where there is a contentious hard fork on an existing blockchain showing us the flaws in their design or is it just natural economics and the market will reward or punish the good vs the bad, with good winning out eventually? I know you say that that POW is flawed because it tends towards centralization, but aren't hard forks counter to that just like the fact that we can choose alt-coins if we believe BTC is too centralized?

I'm sure this has been discussed to death somewhere and I'll probably come across it, so feel free to not answer this







There's lots to think about, but ultimately it's what you said above, which I bolded. He's not evil, just responding to the economic incentives and making calculations both short and long term to make decisions. Nobody here knows his business from the inside and nobody advocating for UASF would behave any more altruistically if they were in his shoes (nor should they!).

IMO, we have far too much impatience and people willing to act in haste. Pro SegWit, UASF advocates in LTC and BU advocates in BTC.








I am torn between seeing it two ways:

1. The value of the coin could collapse because democracy is ultimately not what we had hoped for in Crypto. We believed it was immutable and trusted the code so to speak. This means we need a new solution that truly can't be manipulated. (Perhaps that would be your solution)

2. Confidence will be shaken and price will drop as result of hard fork uncertainties, but hard forks are what ensures decentralization. People choose short term pain/long term gain over. In the end we are still free to choose forks or any other alt-coins, so it comes down to widespread education and the decisions of individuals.


So you believe LTC will become immutable in the same way as BTC (eventually stuck in a stalemate)?

UASF is very dangerous and subject to manipulation.

How do you know who will sell which fork for sure?

You've got one chance to get SegWit on Litecoin, which is because it is in the miners' vested interest and otherwise Litecoin has no reason to exist. Scaling has to go somewhere since Bitcoin will never get it.


Jihan Wu (Bitmain) wanted to remove Blockstream's ability to muck up Bitcoin. He was protecting his investment by designing a poison pill with covert AsicBoost which he'll use to defeat any SegWit or covert AsicBlocking fork.

But he has every incentive to want to see higher prices on Litecoin for as long as it doesn't dilute his profits on Bitcoin mining.

I think he is stalling the SegWit activation on Litecoin for two reasons:

1. To wait until transaction fees are so high on Bitcoin that users start leaving for alts. Then he isn't losing any demand from Bitcoin that goes to Litecoin.

2. To accumulate as many LTC at low prices as he can via mining given that the ASIC supply is constrained, before he allows the price of LTC to rise to $50+.

So I think he will try to drag this out as long as he can, except if I am correct that Bitcoin's price will remain rangebound $800 - $1200 until LTC catches up on its adoption price curve, then he might see he is losing more revenue on Bitcoin by blocking SegWit on Litecoin.

I think perhaps he is just trying to manage the rise on LTC to maximize his LTC share, since price has risen so much faster than hashrate. He knows if prices too much then his competition (Innosilicon) can gain more cash flow to expand production. So I think he is playing this strategically for maximizing his marketshare.


I think it makes the value of the coin collapse forever, because investors can't trust a democracy to make sane decisions.

Litecoin needs to become immutable, but it needs to add SegWit for off chain scaling before the marketcap grows and becomes immutable forever after.

Guys (@iamnotback, @dinofelis),

What are your thoughts on the increased talk of UASF for Litecoin? https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/

Is Jihad just firing up more hashpower as a response to make a quick buck on recent LTC prices increases? Seems to me he's responding in that way, but if he fails to signal for SegWit, then price will drop and hence his profits once again. Longer term doesn't it make sense for him to support SegWit to see a sustained and/or increasing LTC price?

I think UASF is unnecessary and sounds a bit like BU in the sense that it's just sort of a hasteful bullying, just that the little guy feels empowered and morally justified because it's a response to the big, bad miners.

As a free markets guy, it is what it is. Either way, the market will respond.

I am understanding more and more your ideas of immutability. A truly immutable protocol sort of reminds me of the idea of the benevolent dictator, only a protocol isn't fallible like humans and really could be benevolent so to speak. What's happening with BTC/LTC looks to me like Democracy, where we champion the idea of "will of the people", but in reality the stupid uniformed voter steers the government towards increasing totalitarianism because they're easily swayed with emotional arguments and promises of free goodies.

I can't quite put it into words, but you can probably get what I'm saying.

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The bolded is very well summarized.

But open source has the same crab bucket properties as Satoshi's PoW. Those who can't conform to the inertia of the project, must fork and leave. It is nearly impossible for the consensus to form about radical changes in the original inertia of an open source project.

Nobody owns the Inverse Commons. It is quite different from fungible money, as I've been explaining.


I have refuted you on this point.

Satoshi's PoW is working out exactly as planned. Bitcoin remains the settlement layer and scaling is moving to Litecoin with off chain private fractional reserve banking that will be Lightning Networks on Litecoin.

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Uh, anybody home?

We're all in Bitcoin to counteract a...... wait for it........ drumrolllll...........


Designed Economic phenomena, fiat currency. Created by the individuals behind the Central Banks.


Your as obsessed with Hayek and Mises as you are with John Nash. Their observations were astute, but you've fetishised them way beyond their worth. The real world is even more complicated, and I only have to choose 1 simple example to demonstrate you're wrong.

There are no designed economic phenomena.  Almost by definition, I would say.
There are emergent economic phenomena, and you think that someone designed them, just like there are emergent life forms by natural selection and many think that a God designed them.  There is no plan.  What you think is a plan, is something that emerged.  That's the whole point.


Bitcoin was designed by a guy that thought he had to invent something to counter something else that he thought was badly designed, and in doing so, he made a lot of "mistakes" himself.  And now, what happens in bitcoin are also emergent phenomena, but there it is even more interesting, because the basic premise of bitcoin was exactly that it was going to be a thing without leadership and centralisation (except that the creator of the thing itself didn't grasp the full extend of that notion).

So bitcoin leads its dynamical life, and you, and many others, think that you can do something about that, which is wrong, and which was exactly how it was designed (most probably against the understanding of its creator itself).  

That's a bit like the lion that thinks that he can decide how prey and lions should evolve.


Nope.  All of them HAVE TO run the same consensus rules.  Like all living beings on earth HAVE TO use the same genetic code.  Those that don't, can't participate.  That's all.


Yes.


Yes.  But this is not a plan that someone made, and that was executed, like an orderly strategic plan.  This is like the lion that is trying to capture his prey, and by capturing the slowest prey, he makes the prey species faster after a few generations.  That wasn't his plan, but it is part of the dynamics of the system.  And the prey, by running faster, only lets the fastest lions eat.  So they make the lions faster.  That was not their plan.  


Nope.  That's where you're wrong.  You have the very proof under your nose since about 2 years or more, and you refuse to see it.  The only things that changed that way were utterly insignificant, and done because there was still a central power in bitcoin: core.


Ok, next time I read something is missing the essence, I know how to call it  

If we UASf the chinese miner mafia will attack the network most likely, can they do it? right now is more or less tied, but what if other join and attack too? cause if you change PoW you screw all miners.

3, 2, 1 before the communists accuse me of capitalism and the capitalists accuse me of being a commie

@Dino, you're wrong.


Both emergent economic phenomena (resulting from individual action) and designed economic phenomena (resulting from collective action) are part of the real world.

They intertwine with each other in complex feedback loops, where the consequences of individual action compel changes in collective action, and vice versa, all in a cascade of collectives and individuals existing and acting at different scales.


Bitcoin's effect on our world is a perfect example of this.


Bitcoin was written by an individual. Or a collective, no one knows. Both one and many, unknowably.

Bitcoin is a collective of Bitcoin nodes, operating in concert. All run the same consensus rules, like a commune.

But then individuals start making individualistic decisions within the collective we know as the Bitcoin network. They chose how much mining power they used, and so how much BTC they earned from mining. They chose how much to keep, when to sell (if at all), and how much they sold for, and what they buy with their BTC.

Bitcoin exchanges were established. Initially, an individual exchange, MtGox. Which was not Mark Karpeles working alone, he relied on external collectives (ISPs, hosting companies, office letting agencies) and individuals (programmers he hired, support staff he hired), to form his collective. Which together, was an individual company called Mt Gox. The Many is the One, the One is The Many.

Then more exchanges emerged, the individual MtGox was joined by bitcoin.de and BTC-e, and so on. They were indiviudal companies, within an overall collective of Bitcoin exchanges, and today they behave both ways. Exchanges have individual policies, websites and premises. But they pool liquidity in a collective, using the Liquid sidechain. And they mostly (looking at BTC-e as the exception here) conform to a collective ruleset (KYC & AML), determined by another collective of individuals, the international finance lobby.

Bitcoin development grew into a collective. Of individuals. They don't all think the same thing at the same time, like an ant colony or a flock of birds. But they do agree to overall directions in development, whereby a smaller collective of individuals within the development team takes the casting vote on ideas advanced and conceived by individuals (those with the repo keys, Wladimir, Pieter, Suhas, etc)

The Many is the One, the One is The Many, within the One, comprised of Many.

And let's not forget that these interlocking fractal pattern of individuals within collectives, which themselves operate as bigger individuals within larger collectives are pursuing a specific purpose: to unseat a powerful collective of individuals (the world's central banks), which themselves are presided over by a collective of powerful organisations (i.e. IMF, BIS etc), which in turn are run by some of the most powerful individuals on the planet.


So, I hope you can see that your Mises/Hayek inspired appraisal is too simplistic to describe what is, as opposed to the idealised philosophical polarisation that it actually is.

Where's this all coming from? Me. I've never heard an economist that doesn't take the view of 100% this ideology, or 100% that ideology. You're well versed in economic theorists though Dino, is this a novel approach, lest we must call it Carlton's Economics?

Bitmain has already released their statement that they have not used Asicboost yet due to their support on core before. And so the culprit for the attack on segwit is no other than Jihan Wu. I am not sure either of my statement is true but if Wu is really using asicboost in mining then he has proved that his statement on crushing segwit is really true and is being done on the process.

This is true, but maybe not as you understand it.  When individuals interact, a collective dynamics EMERGES.  However, the specificity and properties of that dynamics is not decided upon by the participants.  Their interactions determine the emerging dynamics, but their local intelligence and local interest doesn't allow them to steer their interactions in such a way that what they would *prefer* as an outcome for the emergent properties, is the actual result.  Missing this understanding is the fundamental error that almost all social engineers and other catastrophic world changers commit.  It is also what is at the origin of the tragedy of the commons.  The realisation of emergent properties of interacting entities is what drives a lot of great insights in several scientific domains, and resistance to it abounds because as arrogant humans we have a lot of difficulty accepting that.  We like to think in hierarchical schemes, where human intelligence "decides" about what "should happen" in one way or another.  This is not how complex interacting systems work.

The very first insight that was suggesting this was the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, where the wealth of nations follows from the selfishness of economic agents.
Darwinian evolution is also an example, of how improved life forms emerge from death, hunger and preying.
But most probably the most profound insights in that domain are by the hand of John Forbes Nash.

Once many individual systems are put into relationship, what emerges is not decided by those individuals, but by the complex dynamics of their interactions.


These are limited views on economic interaction, which, as you say, have communist, capitalist, and many other facets.  Communism is the silly idea that one can organize economy.  Capitalism is the silly idea that an economic agent only wants to accumulate material wealth, and makes on top of that, the silly assumption that the economic entities are not understanding the economic game, and will try to game it.


I agree with you, but it is not a matter of *choice*.  It is a matter of emergent dynamics.  We have no choice but to interact the way we interact: we are selfish, but at the same time, empathic, deluded, influential, manipulable, naive, greedy and most of the time quite stupid entities interacting in a complex system.  The behaviour of that system is not decided by us.  It just emerges.  If we try to "organize" it, the result is always a terrible monster.


Nope.  The "experts" are just as deluded as the "BU proponents" and both are totally missing the dynamics of bitcoin, because both of them have not sufficiently profound understanding of the complex game-theoretical aspects of it.  Especially, the concept of "consensus" is totally misunderstood.  Even Satoshi didn't understand it.  


I'm not saying that this is what "bitcoin SHOULD be", I'm telling you what the dynamics of bitcoin WILL BE (and IS, look, how many years is one fighting over this now ?).


Bitcoin doesn't "need to succeed".  It is a dynamic system now, and what emerges from that system is not going to be decided by its individual components, not more so than that your fingers and your toes are deciding what the color of your eyes should be.

You could just as well say that heating water shouldn't start to boil if it is to be successful.

"The One is the Many, and the Many are the One"


Successful systems in the real world resemble that paradox rather closely. (and it has a strange correspondance to an atom being both whole and indivisable, yet composed of increasingly indiscernible quantum phenomena)


100% communism does not work. Everyone shares socks and toothbrushes, has no free will to experiment, and the elite (who are not part of "everyone") abuse the top-down system, presenting their draconian power as "efficient"

100% capitalism does not work. Everyone wants to charge everyone else for every microsecond of valuable service, and power concentrates in the hands of the few.


The real world is more complex than a simplistic adherence to these 2 philosophies which are not the principles that their followers often present them as. The real solution is a constantly changing mix of capitalism, and communism, and progress, and conservatism. All are required for both protecting oneself and advancing oneself. And overall anarchism is needed to allow all the philosophies to find a natural balance of where their boundaries should begin and end between individuals and the organisations they choose to join.


Bitcoin is no different in that regard. The BU proponents tried to push a progressive capitalist approach, where things that should be changed very carefully by expert hands are given instead to any and all non-experts (i.e. simply let miners and users choose the blocksize, where the miners can simply flood the network with fake users to get the blocksize they prefer)

And your 1MB4EVA approach is a combination of conservatism and communism (ironically, considering your espousals above). 1MB4EVA eschews all sensible progress "because conservatism", delivers it through the communist 51% wins mechanism (the 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what's for dinner).


Bitcoin must strike that balance between the One being the Many and the Many being the One.

To succeed, Bitcoin needs conservatism.

To succeed, Bitcoin needs progress.

To succeed, Bitcoin needs bottom-up capitalism.

To succeed, Bitcoin needs top-down communism.


And it must all be in the right balance, applied in the right areas. And it's hard to do, arguably Core aren't doing it perfectly. But they've been thinking in that way perhaps without even looking at it this way at all.



All Core have done is planned and behaved with one philosophy above all: pragmatism. What works, works. When you reason it through. And what doesn't work, does not.

Whether it conforms to any of the -isms is irrelevant, making a fetish out of any philosophy will end in tears, history abounds with examples.

I just paraphrased her well-known quote, that's all.  When I paraphrase something, I do it for its form, not the meaning that the original author was placing behind it (which cannot be known with precision of course).  I wasn't implying that she was saying the same thing as I wanted to say.  What I'm saying is that in bitcoin, there's no such thing as a community, BY DESIGN.  If there were a community, it wouldn't be a decentralized, trustless system.  From the moment there's a community, which implies collusion and which implies trust, and in most cases, which implies a kind of leadership, the principles itself of bitcoin are dead, that's my point.

What I'm repeating here all the time, and I didn't even know that Nash had a theory about it (agencies theory), is that a trustless, decentralized system obtains its "trustworthiness", its respect for its rules, and hence, its immutability (which is the ONLY thing it has going for it), exactly from the fact that there is just a set of non-colluding antagonists who cannot agree over anything else but the immutable protocol and history.

Antagonism, fraud, deception, division and greed is what keeps bitcoin honest. It is the cornerstone of trustless distributed systems.  What kills such system, is community, agreements (what some here erroneously call "consensus") and cooperation (also called collusion).  

A community spirit is perfectly possible in, say, open source development.  But not in trustless distributed systems like bitcoin: if that happens, it fails.  You are witnessing this mechanism at work under your very eyes, and you are totally incapable of seeing the forest because of the trees.  Most bitcoiners don't understand zilch of bitcoin.  They think it is a happy family of people sending tokens to one another, in a way that everyone would like to be as honest as possible.  As if monetary affairs have ever been like that.  With a market cap of $20,-, that's indeed possible.  Back then bitcoin was a happy, trusted, centralized community.  Not with a market cap of $20 billion.  When core lost his central power over the protocol, bitcoin became decentralized (at the same time when PoW was centralizing, but this oligarchic power was needed to kill the central power of core).  Bitcoin is becoming decentralized with the defeat of core.  It is becoming finally trustless with the distrust in miners.  It is becoming the honest, immutable, ugly system of fraudsters, antagonists, deceivers and greedy bastards it was designed to become.  Watch it growing in ugliness.


Apart from the fact that I do like Thatcher as a political figure (this relative, as an anarchist I prefer the end of state and law, but at least, she understood something about it), you are quite ridiculous denying that this is a well-known quote from her, or you are going to explain why so many other sources, like the Guardian, and even www.margaretthatcher.org are as stupid as I am, and not capable of seeing that woman's weekly magazine cannot be anything else but wrong in this macho world.  But that she was a robber-baron enabling liar, is normal, she was involved in state business as a prime minister.  What else do you expect from the CEO of a violence monopolist ?  But she had a much better insight in the ugliness of state than most of her co-politicians.