Hold Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash ?

[TheGooner]

Still confirming.... Gooner how long did you wait?

How long "did" I wait ? I am STILL waiting - there have been 17 BCH blocks since I posted 20 hours ago..
So I'll be able to actually trade these BCH tokens tonight sometime ...

I did trade some BCH earlier - but that was because I deposited some BTC at Kraken ahead of the blockchain split to see how they handled the credits at Kraken. That all worked well and I was able to sell at good prices.

I don't think there is a big rush ... it looks like BCH is stabilising at approx 1/10th of a BTC .. and has been relatively level in the last 24 hours.
Of course that could all change if others are rushing to sell too - so it pays to keep an eye on trends.

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The trouble is of course that with these tokens there is ZERO real metrics to compare and estimate future value. The BCH token is to all effects very similar to the BTC token. It's the same algo apart from allowing big blocks - and possibly it's more pure as it keeps to the original Satoshi Nakamoto idea of all information staying on the blockchain.

So why is it valued at 1/10th of BTC? Emotion, perception and lack of demand. All of which shows what a weird market this space really is.

However, given the low price, low transactions and low miner fees. I just don't see this token getting the public love, and staying in the public mindspace enough to really compete and become adopted by many.

I am still tending towards selling my BCH in the short term - with 50% conversion to BTC and 50% cash dividend, and given the slow block times of BCH and 20 confirmation requirement by exchanges I'm pleased to have started the process yesterday.

[Muppet]

I believe in Bitcoin. Bitcoin I define as the bitcoin legacy chain, that we all use for affiliate payments. The chain that Bovada/5dimes/BetDSI etc. use for player deposits and payouts. The chain, that is mainly used at Darkmarkets. The chain with Network effect.?

The interesting point of relevance to this is that Craig Wright, the fraudster who tried to claim he was Satoshi Nakamoto, is well known to be working for Calvin Ayre. Wright is a big blocker. So I wonder if Ayre is going to be convinced to try to push this needless crap coin on his sites?

If you're in a hurry to dump BCH try the HitBTC exchange - only 2 confirmations needed.

[TheGooner]

Confirmations have sped up today .. as the hashing difficulty algo has dropped right off.
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks

But very little traffic with many blocks having less than 100 transactions and most blocks under 100kb.
"Big Blockers" ... LOL.


I'm still unsure as to whether to sell ... surely the vested interests have to generate more enthusiam for the BCH token than this?
Or was it all a split, pump and dump scheme?

Strange times.

[Sherlock]

The interesting point of relevance to this is that Craig Wright, the fraudster who tried to claim he was Satoshi Nakamoto, is well known to be working for Calvin Ayre. Wright is a big blocker. So I wonder if Ayre is going to be convinced to try to push this needless crap coin on his sites?

No, Jesus. It is a narrative of internet boards and people with no money and anything to do, that small and big blockers are 2 clans that hate each other beyond money and they are friends only within the clans. Only people who have money can afford this nonsense.

On the top Wright scammed Calvin, so there is no sympathy I guess.

Bodog is doing great job promoting Bitcoin (BTC), but it is beyond their power to push completely new cryptocurrency. They will, as everyone else, follow the main chain.

[Muppet]

That is interesting. How/when did Wright scam Ayre? He has been regularly quoted in articles pumping the everything on chain or big block approach on Ayre's website as recently as the past fortnight. And it was widely reported that they were trying to patent blockchain related technologies together only a few months ago.

[Sherlock]

Then it just shows the bizarre world of big blockers, blockchain "debate" and overall state of information spreading.

From the 1st moment was simply certain that Wright is a scammer. I wrote it even here on GPWA immediately.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew...satoshi-affair
I am not sure if this is the right article and it is not complete now. But Wright from my understanding was just trying to pull money from Calvin. I think 9M was quoted. He pissed him/his company spending money on vintage cars in London. (Logic aside: one can either be Satoshi or some other geek OR can spend money on shiny nonsense; it is not possible both).

Wright is just a sociopath who probably was involved in early stages of Bitcoin and got some patents and it made impression on Calvin. When I talked with Bodog guys approx 2.5 years ago when there were probalems with fiat processors about bitcoin, their approach was wtf, like most people on this forum. This means that Ayre probably did not see potential of btc by the time. Then suddenly things changed in early 2016, when I got offer to be paid in btc as experiment and next month or 2 was announced "only btc from now on". The time matches with start Ayre/Wright cooperation (it might start in late 2015 though).

It is just my imagination, but people like Ayre try to get everything from an opportunity that emerges, so once he spotted bitcoin potential, he wanted to get as much as possible out of it. I was trying to obtain some info from Bodog guys, but obviously some other group from Ayre conglomerate cares about Wright.

But tldr is that Calvin can afford to throw away few millions on idiots like Wright and it is probably the right thing to do, because that is the life of progressive businessman. But Bodog group can not switch the main chain. I think not even power of the wealthiest person or state can do that. Everyone will follow the network effect. And for now it is clearly BTC and not BCH.

Imagine the chaos: the people who just learned about BTC will be sending BTC to BCH addresses. Just that is enough to know that promoting BCH on BTC sites is a crazy idea. Until I read from Bodog directly that they go for BCH I do not believe it. But it is such a nonsense. Why should they? Bitcoin works fine and even when they paid the few dollars per transaction it was very cheap for them. (Remember the panic 3-4 months ago even here, where even on GPWA people predicted fees like X0 per transaction? Where are we now?).

[Muppet]

I think you're reading a bit more into what I said than I intended. I totally agree that the main chain has the network effect and Wright is definitely a fraud, but he is still working with or for Ayre. I just wonder if this well known connection will be enough for them to try to push BCH on Ayre's sites. Not that I think this will move the whole market.

Now that the transaction spamming scam has stopped it is clear that Bitcoin doesn't need bigger blocks any time soon. So it will be interesting to see if this fork scenario plays out yet again in November as the core developers seem pretty solid that they will not be doing the 2x part of segwit2x.

[Sherlock]

Bodog group can not use minor chain only because Ayre likes Wright. He will not kill his business. That is my point. Only hipsters with a hipster business (=that will not feed them, but make them happy) can afford to use minor chain. Calvin Ayre is not a hipster.

The only way Bodog uses BCH is if BCH is main chain (which is not) or if they make it main chain (that was my point). Both impossible. It is way to early for common market to promote more currencies for regular people. People can mess up much simpler banking things than bitcoin... and here we talk about 2 bitcoins.

People think that if someone is a friend of someone, they must follow the same rules. But this is business. And they are very far from being friends. Wright scammed Ayre, but he still has the patents probably. So Ayre maybe wants something from that. But... we know nothing. Maybe their relationship ended long time ago, and it is alive only in virtual blogosphere, that ignored it when it was real.

Big blockers are desperate. All they can is to create buzz from ****. We know the copywriting world, right. The news... any news... are good, because it is a content, that can be rewritten and then it is something good for Google. But this world supports spreading nonsense and that nonsense is "justified", because many sources mention it. An the many sources usually quote one fancy hoax.

Bitcoin BTC now, as transactions are smooth, is stronger than ever. NFL about to start.

(The network spamming stopped, but on the other hand, it can also start again. True: with Segwit it is less probable and profitable and it would only push L2 solution further. But who knows what happens in 3 months.)

[PROFRBcom]

(Remember the panic 3-4 months ago even here, where even on GPWA people predicted fees like X0 per transaction? Where are we now?).

I vividly remember this. $3 a transaction? That would have severely hampered bitcoin adoption had it continued scaling up any further.

Now that the transaction spamming scam has stopped it is clear that Bitcoin doesn't need bigger blocks any time soon. So it will be interesting to see if this fork scenario plays out yet again in November as the core developers seem pretty solid that they will not be doing the 2x part of segwit2x.

Yes and now. Yes, now that there is no spamming, there is no need for larger blocks. However, if the spamming were to start up again, bigger blocks would nullify that. What scares me is that the spam attacks can really hurt the network and what if someone with some really deep pockets decided to do just that? It confuses me as to why we as users wouldn't want this vulnerability fixed, if at least temporarily, by using larger blocks and making it more difficult to pull off.


And as another thought about Ayre and Wright. Let us consider that Calvin Ayre just got promoted into the Antiguan government. He's going to be pushing cryptos at them pretty hard I imagine. For the sake of argument, what if he convinced them to use btc (or bch) in some official capacity? Sure A&B is a small island chain with limited population, but they used to be quite the gambling hub. And the US lost their WTO case against A&B. What if A&B adopts crypto in a big way and opens back up the gambling floodgates? Could be interesting stuff.

[Muppet]

Interesting questions. I'm happy to be corrected if I am wrong here. I have been doing a lot of reading about this over the past few months and this is how I understand things.

Transaction spamming is not free. You can't earn back more than you spend by spamming the network because at most you can get back 100% of the fees, but the reality is that since no-one controls 100% of the mining market that can't happen. So whoever was doing it was burning money to push their agenda. How long is someone going to be willing to do that in reality? Clearly they tried a few months ago, they spent a lot of money, and they failed.

Bitcoin as it is now will never succeed as a global transactional currency for everyday purchases. The network simply doesn't have the capacity, and doubling or even quadrupling the block size isn't going to change that. It needs orders of magnitude increases in capacity. I would argue that it also needs a change in the proof of work system because deliberately wasting electricity is an inefficient and wasteful strategy long term in a world without limitless free energy, but that is a bit of a tangent.

Segwit does effectively double the capacity of the blocks by reducing the amount of data that goes into the block for each transaction. That should lock in next week and this will ramp up over time as people start using new segwit compatible wallet addresses. Longer term, having off-chain channels for transactions (look up lightning network) means that you can have a bunch of instant transactions with near zero fees that don't need to be included on the main blockchain. Of course then the miners earn less fees processing on chain transaction so this is a clue as to why the miners are so pro big blocks.

Re your question: why wouldn't you just increase the block size anyway? Because, as above, its only a band-aid fix. Also every block size increase increases the storage and bandwidth requirements to record the blockchain, which raises the barrier to entry for people who want to run a node (the program that stores and validates the blockchain). Wright is famously quoted as saying "**** Raspberry Pis, if you can't afford a $20,000 node to help the network, **** off". So I guess it comes down to whether you think that a decentralised trustless electronic currency should be easy for anyone to participate in, or whether you think its better to be more centralised with a few large actors having a disproportionate say in how the system is run.

[Sherlock]

Bitcoin as it is now will never succeed as a global transactional currency for everyday purchases.

That was never a realistic goal, at least in narrow definition of Bitcoin.

It really depends how you define Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is Layer2 solution and/or payment hubs (let's not forget that 1 transaction is generally not 1 address to 1 address transaction; therefore if even now the capacity is 3 tx/sec, it does not mean that max 3 people / sec can exchange the money), then Bitcoin can easily be the transactional currency in a form of reserve currency (=the currency behind all currencies, like Lightning or fiat).

The highest incentive to adopt 2MB blocks was to cease the stalemate. It was simply a bribe in the **** situation where bitcoin made it. Compromise. Something like when you give 5 USD to the guy from slums who is "guarding" a car in a fancy quarter. You give it to him ofc especially because he is guarding the car against himself.

Raising the blocks fundamentally does not make sense, because it will not bring the capacity anywhere. Doubling, quadrupling or making it 64x higher is far insufficient, but the centralization, that can not be avoided can cause harm. Where is the sweet spot of centralization is something that sadly should never be tested. Like sane people do not drive 200mph through a city, even when the chance of a crash is maybe still lower than 50%.

People from both camps say: the other solution is a centralization. That is correct. Big blocks centralize BTC nodes; small blocks centralize L2 nodes or payment hubs. But the main difference here is that it is a centralization on the bitcoin layer and centralization on the top of bitcoin layer. That is IMHO the huge difference. Bitcoin is not something set in stone, there will be constant challenges that we do not forsee. It must be rather much more safe than it is needed, because ... err ... nobody does not know how much is needed. States/systems now started to accept Bitcoin, but it is not that they started to understand it. Hell no. It is that they started to realize that it is impossible to kill it at the current state. Because there is still power big enough in decentralization. Cryptos now are something states must live with, because it is persistent enough. But this can easily change. If you play with number of nodes for example, it is dangerous, because nobody knows what is going on and the system might collapse suddenly. If there are L2 nodes and some centralized hubs, anyone can clearly see the level of pressure from governments. You might see that they go for example against nodes that are not behind tor. So the system will adjust to more crypting and bit higher fees. But here is the trick: the system will understand that going after the less secure part does not make much sense, because bitcoin will adjust, because bitcoin will be able to adjust. So probably system will even not make crazy countersteps. But if you have high blocks, the system knows the adjustment is very hard and it can plan the war secretly. For example now we know, that there will a be a war against tumblers, but there is a time to adjust, so it will not be a fatal problem. Probably some mafia will take over this part, but again: no problem at all, the necessary tumblers will exist.

I would argue that it also needs a change in the proof of work system because deliberately wasting electricity is an inefficient and wasteful strategy long term in a world without limitless free energy, but that is a bit of a tangent.

Bitcoin is wasting now electric energy of a average city. But you are biased now, because it is something that you can count and see. There are much much higher wastes of energy in human life, but they are more or less hidden. If you compare efficiency of whole system of Switzerland and Papua New Guinea (approx the same population), you will see extreme divergence and wasting of resources in Papua. But no one gives a ****. Because we can only feel it, but not measuring it. The electricity used for BTC seems to be wasted, but it is simply a price paid for new independent money. Once it will reach the critical level, the system will I believe adjust to proof-of-stake or something based on that. It is no problem at all. The electricity now going into bitcoin is just a collective investment of power of one power plant. Humans can afford it. They create much more completely useless waste and wars.

Transaction spamming is not free. You can't earn back more than you spend by spamming the network because at most you can get back 100% of the fees, but the reality is that since no-one controls 100% of the mining market that can't happen. So whoever was doing it was burning money to push their agenda. How long is someone going to be willing to do that in reality? Clearly they tried a few months ago, they spent a lot of money, and they failed.

Transaction spamming is "free" for everyone, if we do not count servers and work. 0 fee transactions can spam anyone and I am actually surprised that there are so little 0 fee transactions in mempool all the time.

0 fee spam transactions are always a profit for any miner, because they raise all the other fees. The bigger is the miner, the more profitable it is.

And even low fee spam can be a profit for a miner. It depends on how big the miner is. Here the difference is big. 2 sat/B cost 2x as much as 1 sat/B. But spamming the network with low fee transactions does not always burn the money. It is a common narrative of btc, that some rich people are some essentially evil guys, who just want to burn money to do some evil things. I say bs. People, and especially the rich ones, do things for profit.

Spamming stopped, or was reduced, because the spammer (probably the Chinese mining cartel) probably made some profit of it, but saw the surge of altcoins and was scared, that they will harm the bitcoin and flippening will come and waste their whole business.

[Sherlock]

I vividly remember this. $3 a transaction? That would have severely hampered bitcoin adoption had it continued scaling up any further.

3 usd / tx (and fear of 30 usd/tx) forced people and merchants to use bulk transactions, which was a good thing and it helped to reduce the fees quickly.

[Muppet]

That was never a realistic goal, at least in narrow definition of Bitcoin.

Wright and other big blockers disagree on that. This is exactly what they wish Bitcoin to be. Note their commonly cited example of buying a cup of coffee on chain with Bitcoin directly. Never mind that it is madness to permanently record a multitude of trivial purchases like that on an ever growing and immutable blockchain. I guess if you believe the same as that you can use your BCH now. Good luck finding somewhere to spend it though.

Transaction spamming is "free" for everyone, if we do not count servers and work. 0 fee transactions can spam anyone and I am actually surprised that there are so little 0 fee transactions in mempool all the time.

The transaction spamming in May that ended very soon after the May 23 segwit2x agreement was made was not zero fee transactions. Zero fee tx are meaningless because all sane miners will prefer to process transactions with fees first, so they should have no effect on wait times. Look at the numbers that show that the vastly inflated transactions were mostly fee paying.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...when_spammers/
and https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all

[Sherlock]

Wright and other big blockers disagree on that. This is exactly what they wish Bitcoin to be. Note their commonly cited example of buying a cup of coffee on chain with Bitcoin directly. Never mind that it is madness to permanently record a multitude of trivial purchases like that on an ever growing and immutable blockchain. I guess if you believe the same as that you can use your BCH now. Good luck finding somewhere to spend it though.

Wright and the others are either idiots or they are trying to achieve something through this nonsense. There is really no point of even mentioning them. If someone writes on the internet that "iron is metal" or "icecream is cold", there will be some people who will dispute this in this postmodern bullshit. This is why I am saying it was never a realistic goal. Maybe in far future the technology will advance to the level, that we will be able to use the costly transactions through blockchain. But for now the bottom line is that cryptos are in permanent threat of states and it will be like that for long, until the revolution is done (possibly it will never be done). The only weapon here is cypherpunk. The cryptography. And the bigger blocks are, the less crypting one has. Probably bitcoin would survive even much higher blocks. But that is non argument now, when segwit is locked in.

The transaction spamming in May that ended very soon after the May 23 segwit2x agreement was made was not zero fee transactions. Zero fee tx are meaningless because all sane miners will prefer to process transactions with fees first, so they should have no effect on wait times. Look at the numbers that show that the vastly inflated transactions were mostly fee paying.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...when_spammers/
and https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all

Zero fees are not meaningless. There were times when it was possible to send btc for free. If someone fills the 3tx/sec with 0 fees, then people who want to get the transaction through must pay at least 1 sat/B. Most likely they will pay more. Those people would have paid 0 otherwise. The basic and cheapest strategy of spam is for sure to fill the 0 fee slab.

[cat]

My first contact with bitcoin was this year since an affiliate program chose to payout bitcoin only. I transferred the money to my bank account. Half a year later I of course wish I kept the bitcoin. I decided to learn about crypto currencies to have an idea before investing. I think I'm going to invest not in BTC only but also bitcoin cash, ethereum and maybe one or two other digital currencies.
I"m interested in mining but read that it won't pay out doing this on a small scale from home. How about mining pools? Are you guys invested in mining pools? How does this work for you?
One thing I couldn't find an answer for is this: Will the amount of to be mined bitcoins still be 22.000.000 after the fork? How many BCC will be available? Is the amount depending on the exchange rate? Or 22.000.000 = BTC + BCC. This is confusing. Please help me out here.

[PROFRBcom]

One thing I couldn't find an answer for is this: Will the amount of to be mined bitcoins still be 22.000.000 after the fork? How many BCC will be available? Is the amount depending on the exchange rate? Or 22.000.000 = BTC + BCC. This is confusing. Please help me out here.

There will be a maximum of 21 million bitcoin (btc) created.
There will be a maximum of 21 million bitcoin cash (bch) created.

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[TheGooner]

Theoretically there is a maximum of 21 million of each - currently 16.5 million of each.

However, it is also suggested that as many as 25% of each are locked into addresses with lost keys - and will never be accessed.

[PROFRBcom]

However, it is also suggested that as many as 25% of each are locked into addresses with lost keys - and will never be accessed.

Like this guy...

"Campbell Simpson, editor of technology website Gizmodo Australia, says he missed out on incredible riches because he jettisoned a piece hardware containing 1400 Bitcoins, a form of internet currency."

That's 6.4 million dollars at current prices. He paid $25 for the 1400 coins many years back... DOH

[TheGooner]

What I don't understand is why he thinks it's dependent on that hardware ?

He can recreate the addresses and a new replica of the wallet as long as he has the original seed words, the widespread idea that the coins are sitting on a hard drive, or piece of paper are not correct. All that's there is a blockchain address that public ledgers agree has 1400 BTC associated with it.

So it's not just because he threw out the hardware, he also did not keep his pass phrase in a safe place.

[Sherlock]

There were no seeds years ago. It was a pretty new invention. Bitcoin, wallets, security... it is not set in stone. It is being developed and main developer is bitcoin core. All the altcoins (with lesser or bigger exceptions) just copy btc development.