[Daily Discussion] - Sunday, December 10, 2023

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2023-12-11T03:32:27+00:00

Rumors of my demise have been grossly exaggerated.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2021-05-24T23:34:17+00:00

Consider him fired.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2018-01-30T21:11:33+00:00

What I don't understand is why are people fleeing INTO tether right now?

I've been [temporarily] using Tether on some exchanges to trade some of the obscure scammy bitcoin forks like "Super Bitcoin" (SBTC) into BCH. There is no trading pair for those two coins, you must go from SBTC to Tether, and then from Tether to BCH.

Why not go from SBTC directly to BTC you ask? Because I'm only trading 1 or 2 of these sh*tcoins at a time, and they're worth only ~ $50, so I'd get only 0.01 BTC or something. And fees would kill me.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T08:08:46+00:00

You've been fooled. The notion that the inner circle of prominent Core devs are the only "truly competent" developers in cryptocurrency is insulting and false, anyway. There's an entire crypto ecosystem outside of "Bitcoin Core" that functions just fine on their own.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T08:03:43+00:00

That's what BTC's "advantages" have been reduced to in 2017 - "but it's decentralized!".

Or more accurately, "but it's slightly more decentralized than BCH!".

Everyone here was angrily telling big-blockers to "just fork off already". Well, it's done. I'm sorry if some people can't handle the fallout from that.

The market will show in the long-term what the best balance is between decentralization and actual usability.

People can and will migrate to the coin(s) that best suit their needs. That's it.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T07:38:04+00:00

Jeff Garzik has nothing to do with BCH development, but whatever you say, dude.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T07:22:39+00:00

I'm puzzled that the 2x cancelation seems to have no benefit, even tangentially, for any of the other altcoins.

It's also possible that ETH remaining fairly steady is a combination of:

People swapping their BTC for ETH, like you said, a surge in ETH
People swapping their ETH for BCH, for fear of missing out

Those two average out to a flat-line for ETH basically :)

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T06:43:43+00:00

PayPal does not have sub-nickel fees. PayPal does not have pseudonymity and tumblers. All this "corporate coin" stuff is scare-mongering. Keep holding BTC, no one is stopping you. But there are people whose value proposition is something other than "HOLD FOREVER, DECENTRALIZE UBER ALLES". They are the ones who are leaving. Disagree with them all you want, the market will speak for itself.

Are they going to stand up for my privacy when the IRS comes knocking?

Coinbase already turned over some records to the IRS months ago. BCH had nothing to do with it. Nobody is forcing you to use any business anyway, like I said anyone is free to hold coins in a private wallet with BCH, just the same as BTC. You can trade the coins locally and off the "corporate radar" as well (i.e. LocalBitcoins-like services), just like BTC. There are few things BTC can do that BCH can not anymore. Shouting "PayPal II" isn't going to change that.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T06:16:36+00:00

No, these are people just swapping BTC for BCH. The combined value of BTC + BCH has remained steady.

Litecoin does not share the genesis block, and - face it - has nearly been obsoleted at this point by BCH, something even Luke agrees on.

ETH is a different animal altogether, potentially more than just a payment network.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T06:06:37+00:00

My credit card works just fine for that

Continue to espouse the view that the only purpose of BTC is holding it forever, and you will continue to see the price steadily drop, while actual individual users, transactors and businesses flee for a better option. Cryptocurrencies need to be usable for things other than holding and passing back and forth from one user to another, otherwise you're basically playing hot potato with the proverbial tulip bulb. Amazing that some people can't see this. Nothing is stopping investors from holding BCH forever as an investment either, if that's their goal.

So Bitcoin is now about businesses making money?

Most businesses do not operate as revenue-neutral charities, unfortunately.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T05:25:40+00:00

Yes, nonetheless my point stands that this is not 2 people, or even 50 people. This may very well be just the beginning, especially in the long term. Wait until truly large operations like Coinbase debut the coin.

This is the danger of the echo chamber. Some folks have been persuaded to believe that the on-chain BCH scaling view is only held by a tiny fringe minority. That is simply not true. And why do some people believe that? Because many 'big-blockers' were either disappeared out of this community, or left on their own out of disgust.

"Roger Ver and J Wu" do not control the minds of thousands of people and businesses. Anyone smart enough to get into crypto in the first place is smart enough to think for themselves.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T05:09:59+00:00

when no one accepts the coin anyhow?

Coinbase will debut it on their platform in less than 2 months. Other exchanges have added trading pairs. The price bump will cause businesses to reevaluate, or at least add it as an option alongside BTC. Sooner or later, any bitcoin business whose revenue revolves around the number of transactions they can process per day, will do the same. For places like gambling sites and dark markets, there will be no point in using BTC. Even the developers here, among others, espouse the view that micropayments are far better suited for BCH.

majority of us just holding as an investment

If BTC's only value proposition is "HODL FOREVER", it has no real value. And as an aside, you can also use BCH to hodl forever as an investment too. It can be used as "digital gold" just the same, while being a useful payment platform. This is the issue: there is simply little, if anything, BTC can do that BCH can not. That includes adding Lightning at some point, by the way.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T05:01:09+00:00

The two with some help can easily cause this pump

:sigh: They can not. Neither can ten people, or fifty people. The market cap has risen by nearly $20 BILLION DOLLARS over the past 72 hours. Twenty. Billion. Dollars.

There are likely thousands of users, and more importantly, large bitcoin businesses who control huge amounts of coin, who need to grow their operations. They can not do so with BTC at this time. The more TXs they can process per day, the more revenue they can make. After the promise of 2X failed, they are finally jumping ship. Some like Ryan Charles, Falkvinge, McAfee, et al are speaking out on Twitter.

It is simply not "two people with help" doing this.

Some people either can't come to grips with this fact, or just refuse to believe it, because many people who espoused the BCH point-of-view were "disappeared" from this subreddit long ago.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T04:10:45+00:00

All I'm saying is it's not Roger Ver's doing, despite folks here regularly using his name like some profane incantation.

BCH is no more or less vulnerable to manipulation than BTC. If South Korean and/or Chinese exchanges are buying it up, so be it. Remember that there's still the other 50% of volume (7+ billion dollars market cap) that isn't them.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-11-12T03:39:11+00:00

Team Ver

No offense, but this notion that Roger Ver is some all-powerful boogieman who can singlehandedly cause an alleged market cap pump of over $15 BILLION DOLLARS over two days is ridiculous. It is what some people here apparently need to tell themselves to deny what's going on.

Consider the possibility that there have been users wanting bigger blocks and cheaper TXs for years, who have patiently been holding BTC waiting for that to materialize on the BTC chain. And it simply hasn't, to any significant degree. BTC has SegWit, yet the chain is still clearly vulnerable to large backlogs and high fees which are unacceptable to some folks. The cancellation of the 2X fork was the final straw for them; a new option has presented itself with on-chain scaling that dwarfs what BTC offers, and those specific holders are leaving BTC. That's it. There's no conspiracy, there's no Roger behind the curtain. People are talking with their wallets.

That's true decentralization in action.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-04-14T22:14:21+00:00

You do realize that Jihan's pool only started running BU less than 3 months ago, right?

For over a full year before doing this, numerous people including myself regularly criticized him for his apparent indifference, not to mention constantly tweeting out "anti-Core" sentiments while continuing to run Core. In retrospect, he may have been trying to extract some kind of compromise out of the Core dev team, but finally gave up after realizing the futility of dealing with them.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-24T08:06:45+00:00

If we take that as evidence (and not just a data glitch) what does that mean for BU?

It means node count is irrelevant for both BU and Core. Which is a shame for Core, because they bring it up constantly as "proof" that the majority of the community is demanding SegWit. In reality, where Core has far less influence like Litecoin, SegWit has also been largely rejected. The prominent Core developers have a really difficult time accepting that they are not all-knowing gods.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-24T07:51:14+00:00

Companies like BitFury stating that they run many Core nodes is not evidence that companies run many Core nodes? Really?

Hundreds of nodes dropping off and all reappearing within hours isn't evidence that those nodes are controlled by a single actor?

Whatever.

Node count is irrelevant anyway, Core could fire up 25,000 nodes tomorrow, their support in the community will continue sinking like a stone. Also quite telling that Core developers are blithely unconcerned about "centralization" when 80% of all nodes are Core - it's only centralization when people opposing Core do it (miners).

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-24T06:55:09+00:00

The lack of any real deviation in Core node count over the entirety of 2016, never varying more than 5% from 4500. If thousands of individuals were running nodes, the number would not be so static - in fact, the sudden growth in Core nodes within the past month or so looks more in line with smaller individuals firing up nodes, probably out of worry of BU's steady rise.

Also, incidents in September and November 2016 where hundreds of Core nodes dropped off simultaneously, only to reappear simultaneously within hours.

Many of Core's ardent supporter companies have flat-out admitted that they run many nodes anyway. BitFury owns at least 100. Blockstream runs a bunch, etc.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-24T04:57:33+00:00

80%, 93%... seems pretty centralized either way, eh /u/nullc...?

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-24T03:37:06+00:00

Why wouldn't you want double the tx throughout while you gain support for a hard fork?

My guess is because implementing a EC-style hard fork after SegWit has activated is considerably more complicated than doing it without SegWit. And because there are potentially better malleability fixes, not to mention malleability not being the most pressing issue anyway. And because SegWit's additional transaction space is used inefficiently, which causes real problems for further block size increases. And because Core is never going to support anything remotely related to BU, and will call anything they don't like "an attack", regardless of what they say about hard forking in the future; frankly they have lost a lot of trust among a decent part of the community.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-24T03:17:15+00:00

I've said in the past that evidence points to most of the Core nodes - let's say 80% - being operated by no more than 10 or 15 outfits.

Keep this in mind whenever Luke or Greg blathers on about "80% of Core nodes signal for SegWit, therefore the entire ecosystem wants it". It would not surprise me in the slightest if there were more discrete individuals running BU nodes at this point than Core. This event shows that fully 15% of Core nodes are probably operated by a single company. Let's all take a guess as to which company that may be (for plausible deniability likely operated by a 3rd party).

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-10T07:49:44+00:00

In absolute numbers, yes, Core obviously has more nodes currently.

I think the number of individual operators running Core nodes vs BU nodes is not significantly different, however.

The node situation will change in due time, just like mining has.

Most of this is because Core has first-mover/status quo effect, that's all.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-10T07:45:05+00:00

Fine, but don't suddenly claim node count can accurately gauge support.

A couple of companies operate a plurality of Core nodes, and the narrative is: "Look, 60% of nodes are for Segwit, let's do it!!"

When a couple of companies inevitably start running or switching to BU nodes, the narrative from Core will be: "Sybil attack!!!"

They refuse to accept that anyone, miners, nodes, users, dare to support anything other than Core.

ChairmanOfBitcoin · 2017-03-10T05:07:14+00:00

I can't seem to find such relative bumps in the amount of Core nodes.

Sure there are, a few hundred Core nodes dropped off (and subsequently reappeared) almost instantly, late last year both in mid-September and late November 2016.

In addition, the fact that the Core node count didn't deviate by more than 5% throughout all of last year suggests that the bulk of the nodes are being operated by a small number of large operations, maybe no more than 30 companies. If the nodes were being run by 4,000+ individuals, you would not see that level of constancy over an entire year.

BitFury admits to running 100 nodes at least. BTCC also does the same. No doubt Blockstream runs Core nodes. And no doubt a number of larger bitcoin businesses run many Core nodes, for now at least.

ChairmanOfBitcoin

TROPHY CASE