I'm pretty sure @harding is David Harding.  Definitely not a Bitcoin newbie.

https://github.com/harding

I plan to continue working on a competing implementation to Bitcoin Core. It was because of Bitcoin Unlimited that this bug was caught, when Awemany noticed it while working on the consensus changes for the November fork in BCH.  This tells me that multiple implementations and competing development teams is a good thing.

A formal spec would be nice, I agree.  But I think it is interesting that Core's inflation bug wasn't due to nuance in the consensus rules.  Having a formal spec wouldn't have helped in this case.  The bug literally allowed coins to be created out of thin air.  Something that _obviously_ was not supposed to happen.  You might call it the most important consensus rule in Bitcoin!

As to your second point about the consensus layer not changing much, I think this is tricky in practice too. For example, a hot area of research in blockchain scaling is how to parallelize block validation.  This type of work will almost certain involve refactoring consensus critical code.  If we want to eventually processes thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of transactions per second, we will need massive parallelization.

Maybe as a soft fork.  

I suspect BTC won't be able to increase the block size limit directly (i.e., as a HF) without another blockchain split.

Here's a website that tracks 0-conf double-spend attempts on BCH:

https://doublespend.cash/

It is very rare for the transaction broadcast second to be confirmed in a block, even when it offers a higher fee.  

And 0-conf can be improved further, for example with double-spend relaying so that merchants can quickly detect fraud attempts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAt6B7b4GeM

Or by more finely-grained proof-of-work to discourage miners from facilitating fraud:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ

I dunno.  Doesn't look like that much volume:

It looks pitiful.  But is that your point?

My feeling is that this is not a 2014 scenario and we're not heading into a long term bear market.  That said, I could see us hitting $3.5k but only briefly.  I believe we'll hit new ATH's sometime in 2018.  

I consider Bitcoin to be the sum of its forks (BCH + BTC + BTG + ...)

You don't think we can fall to $3.5k?

No.  You take BTC as "the one true bitcoin."  As for me, I say that I don't know.  Maybe BTC will remain dominant; but maybe BCH with its greater block size limit will overtake it.  Or maybe a new branch will prevail.  It doesn't matter to me because Bitcoin is the sum of its forks and I hold them all.  

Marcus is coming to terms with the fact that the Blockstream/Core narrative is collapsing.  He's realizing that Bitcoin cannot succeed as only a "store of value"^TM or as muh "digital gold"^TM on its own -- instead, it needs to be used.  He's invested a lot into attacking people like me who have been doing the scalability research to grow bitcoin into a world-wide electronic cash system.  He sees his narrative coming unglued and so he lashes out.  

Marcus: have you noticed that the engineers of Blockstream are leaving?  Check out the latest Coindesk articles.  

Bitcoin will succeed, and it will succeed as a global e-cash system that is as useful to people making $2 per day as it is to people making $2,000 per day.  The Blockstream/Core "settlement layer" will end with this crash.

Finally some carnage.  This is starting to look like a "real bitcoin crash"^TM.  But don't worry; this is not the end of Bitcoin.  Even if we fall to $3,000, this is not the end.  Bitcoin has survived 3 previous crashes of magnitudes 15x, 5x, and 6x; this crash has cut the price by a factor of only 3x -- tame in comparison.  

Bitcoin is a virus.  The reason we won't fall back to where we came from at $1,000 is because we've infected so many new people -- our base of "hodlers" in now larger than ever. Also remember that bitcoin has just received more global attention than at any other time in history.  We now have another opportunity to get some real work done on adoption, usage and on-boarding new people, as we build a pad for the next launch.  

I think Bitcoin is destined to become a global peer-to-peer electronic cash system that will change the world as we know it in many ways.  Do what you need to do, but don't lose hope.

 

Many developers working on Bitcoin are paid.  

Nearly all software developed by BU is open-source, by the way.  

I haven't heard Fozzie Bear before.  I normally get Kermit the frog.  

@roach:

The three big problems I see with gold are that:

1. It can't be sent over the internet

2. It is difficult to know if you have "real gold"

3. It is difficult to store (I can't keep it in my brain, or password-protect it so that it's useless to a thief) and easy for men with guns to take from me

Gold was the best money the world had ever seen, but standing shoulder-to-shoulder with bitcoin, it looks obvious to me that gold will become a relic of a long-ago era of human development.  

Bitcoin was designed to be a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system."  When I read the white paper, I envisioned a better form of money for mankind, as we transition into the information age.  BTC has given up on that vision in favor of a sort of "digital gold" designed to be held and not spent.  That is not something I'm interested in.  BCH is a return to the original vision for Bitcoin.

To me, for money to be truly better, it also needs to be easy and inexpensive to use (i.e., low fees and reliable confirmations -- what you call the "cash part") but that certainly isn't the _only_ requirement of better money.  So really, your argument reads mostly as a straw-man because your starting point, that "the whole premise [of BCH] is toward the cash part," was false.  


We're going to scale to gigabyte blocks and beyond. But it's not magic; it's really just routine engineering and bottleneck removal.  We're well on our way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M


I'm not sure how the fee market will evolve (fees will be set by supply and demand in a free market) but I find it comforting that many small blockers say "BCH will fail because fees will fall too low and the blockchain will fill up with spam" while other small blockers say "BCH will fail at achieving it's goals of low fees because fees will go through the roof once transaction volume picks up."  

Indeed, gold did serve mankind as a sort of "analog ledger." Gold's special physical properties (scarce, durable, divisible, fungible, transportable, etc.) made it apt for this purpose.  

But I don't think the "oldest ledger wins" will be any sort of rule of thumb.  A ledger only "wins" if the people who give it value (those whom accept it in exchange for their goods or labor) continue to value it.  If it is widely believed that the distribution of money on that ledger is "sufficiently unjust," then people will work to discredit that ledger in favor of replacement, if a possible replacement exists.  

Imagine a world 50 years hence where "bitcoin whales" wage war and spread destruction, while the economy limps along because everyone is indebted (in BTC!) to these whale warlords.  In such a future, it would be in the people's best interest to work to abandon the bitcoin ledger that is both the source of the whales' power (to fund war) and the root of their problems (due to debt).  And so a new cryptocurrency ledger would emerge as people abandoned the old.  

I think what's happening now is a slow discrediting of the fiat ledgers, as value shifts to the crypto ledgers for similar reasons to those I described above.    

Since windjc asked me this exact question last week, I'll quote my response to him:

"I view money as a ledger.  Or "money as memory," as per the work of Kocherlakota. From this viewpoint, it is the information encoded in the ledger about who owns which coins that is of value.  The actual mechanism used to update that ledger is just a technical decision -- which is the best paper to write on?  Which is the best pen?

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Core (BTC) share the same ledger up until August 1.  At this point, the "ledger updating mechanisms" diverged (BCH allowed more information about the state of the ledger to be updated every ten minutes to facilitate growth).

Switching to LTC would be like ripping up the "ledger of money" because the pen we were using to update it ran out of ink.  Instead, just get a better pen and keep updating the same ledger."

Agreed.  My bet is that this isn't actually a crash, but a correction and that the bull market is still in tact.  I suspect we'll see new ATHs for bitcoin in 2018.  

I also suspect the ratio of the two bitcoins (BCH / BTC) will be much higher though once people sober up and realize the problems with BTC....cough....cough....

Haha cool!  Thanks for letting me know.  I should read that paper.  The Mt Gox story is quite fascinating.