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Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

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Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#221

Post by propter_hoc »

buttershakes wrote: post #26

This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…

> [Blockstream's] CEO should have been kicked out a long time ago

He was. http://www.montrealintechnology.com/austin-hill-out-as-block...

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#222

Post by buttershakes »

propter_hoc wrote: post #221
buttershakes wrote: post #26

This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…

> [Blockstream's] CEO should have been kicked out a long time ago He was. http://www.montrealintechnology.com/austin-hill-out-as-block...

Wrong one.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#223

Post by buttershakes »

jcranmer wrote: post #197
hudon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't think the market actually values censorship resistance in their digital cash Alphabay processed $600,000 to $800,000 per day [1]. This is economic activity for tangible goods. In the list of other top uses of the blockchain might be ICOs, which are a way to leverage censorship resistance to raise money without permission from the SEC. On the high end, these accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars w…

The standard financial example for blockchains is financial clearing, and the amount of money processed in these transactions is truly staggering. CHIPS alone processes $1,000,000 every minute .

The metrics aren't very comparable though because of the way they work, mostly just mainframe apps I imagine. Blockchains are going to require a lot of engineering to get there.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#224

Post by StavrosK »

jethro_tell wrote: post #62
StavrosK wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference?

The difference is that when I buy a stock, they have a balance sheet, usually physical and/or digital assets like buildings, datacenters, warehouses, trucks, intellectual property, software programs, patents. They usually also have people, and some type of plan to leverage everything so that the sum is greater then the parts. That's an investment, when you pay them to leverage their assets and people. Even in a situa…

So buying gold is gambling because gold doesn't have a balance sheet? The distinction seems naive, if not disingenuous.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#225

Post by buttershakes »

jerguismi wrote: post #166
buttershakes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taking a little while to adapt is because their is less hash power, which means it takes longer to find blocks which means the remaining hash power will have less blocks for many many weeks. This means their expected return is lower, not higher, they aren't getting a larger percentage of found blocks, and those blocks occur farther apart. Then when the difficulty has fallen enough to make mining profitable and ha…

"This means their expected return is lower, not higher, they aren't getting a larger percentage of found blocks, and those blocks occur farther apart." The blocks would happen farther apart, but it would also mean that the remaining miners would have much higher change of actually finding a block, since there would be less competition. Also as there would be the same amount of transactions and less blocks, the blocks…

This isn't the way it would go down. :) Let's wait and see...

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#226

Post by timq »

statoshi wrote: post #48
buttershakes wrote: post #26

This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…

Core developers never had control in the first place. No one has control; it's weird to see so many people applying authoritarian concepts to an anti-authoritarian system.

By design, miners control Bitcoin. Before Ethereum, miners were fine with Bitcoin core because they were still making tons of profits, and blocks weren't full. They were almost all following core and that's why core has a lot of power.

Now that Bitcoin hit a scaling ceiling and a competitor who can scale way beyond Bitcoin is rapidely taking the lead, they finally realize why Core/Blockstream strategy is bad for them, and bad for Bitcoin. Hence they came up with setwit2x, wich is a weak attempt to get ride of Blockstream (because its segwit first, then 2Mb blocks, then... not much), but a strong signal that something is changing.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#227

Post by RealityVoid »

criddell wrote: post #219
Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The governance issue is, to me, the 'final boss' of Bitcoin. They way it's set up, Bitcoin should ruthlessly follow the will of the majority and generate new consensus. I cannot think of another system that could potentially do this as effectively. It's ugly, bitter, and has real costs, but the way it's playing out gives me confidence that cryptocurrencies are truly a novel form of human communication about value.

> Bitcoin should ruthlessly follow the will of the majority and generate new consensus. This might be a dumb question, but the majority of what?

As I understand it, the majority of the hashing power. The trick is that hashing power alone can not dictate the network, else the users disappear and all that hashing power becomes worthless. So we have cryptografically reproduced a problem of governance present since the dawn of time.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#228

Post by wyldfire »

swampangel wrote: post #203
nfriedly wrote: post #189

What is Bitcoin and friends good for right now besides speculating with and trading for other currencies? A while back there was a BTC marketplace where among other things, I spent 1 BTC on a steam key for the game Portal (a poor trade in hindsight). But they shut down and the only other place that I can think of that accepts BTC is humblebundle.com - and presumably they convert it to USD right away. Actually: > Bitc…

Steam accepts bitcoin. Quite a few domain/web hosting/VPS companies accept it, like Namecheap and Namesilo. Online gambling sites accept it for obvious reasons. It's hardly ubiquitous, but for some things it's fairly practical.

Many vendors (including Amazon & Walmart) indirectly accept bitcoin via gift cards (Gyft, cardcash.com, etc).

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#229

Post by FooHentai »

buttershakes wrote: post #71
statoshi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core developers never had control in the first place. No one has control; it's weird to see so many people applying authoritarian concepts to an anti-authoritarian system.

This is false. Bitcoin is a consensus system, and the default client for better or for worse has a stickiness that doesn't exist in normal open source software because of this group consensus. So there is definitely a measure of control. Yes, it's not total or complete, but it is there.

That measure of control extends about as far as it did for the default bit torrent client. Negligible.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#230

Post by gcb0 »

hudon wrote: post #149
buttershakes wrote: post #26

This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…

> SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team I disagree. SegWit2x is a misguided attempt to make Bitcoin "more efficient" without realizing that it puts at risk the core value proposition of Bitcoin: censorship resistance. At the root of this debate is a disagreement about what the blockchain is for. On one side, you have all the developers working on the Core project and activists like Amir Taak…

how can't you validate a block if that is trivial, even with the changes? honest question. does the proposal screw things up that much that you need to do a trillion hashes to validate instead of one?
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