Bitcoin 内の OnwaytoNZ によるリンク if bitcoin does fork, do we loose our existing balance? what do we have to do to ensure that our hodlings are secure ?

[–]theymos -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

I've probably communicated with all of the main Blockstream people at one time or another.

Bitcoin 内の metallicchrysalis2 によるリンク Are any core devs opposed to XT who AREN'T on the Blockstream payroll?

[–]theymos 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Note: altcoins like XT are off-topic on /r/Bitcoin, and you're mostly talking about XT, so this is deleted.

Wladamir opposes it and he works for the same organization as Gavin (MIT DCI). I think that Jeff (BitPay) might oppose XT because it is an altcoin/"hostile hardfork", though he does support a larger max block size in general.

Bitcoin 内の OnwaytoNZ によるリンク if bitcoin does fork, do we loose our existing balance? what do we have to do to ensure that our hodlings are secure ?

[–]theymos -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Do you have any financial relationship with blockstream, blockstreem employees or anyone else directly connected to blockstream?

Since before Blockstream existed, I paid some people who are now Blockstream employees for bitcointalk.org-related work. AFAIK, I'm not now and have never been paid by Blockstream or anyone related to Blockstream. (I guess maybe someone at Blockstream may have bought a forum ad or something at one time, but nothing comes to mind.)

Has you censorship decision been in any influenced by blockstream, blockstreem employees or anyone else directly connected to blockstream?

Probably not in any significant way. Some sort of influence is unavoidable when you're communicating with people, but I'm pretty confident that I would have classified XT as an altcoin if you asked me about it anytime after mid-2011 or so (when my understanding of Bitcoin reached reasonable levels).

Bitcoin 内の OnwaytoNZ によるリンク if bitcoin does fork, do we loose our existing balance? what do we have to do to ensure that our hodlings are secure ?

[–]theymos -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

XT is an altcoin (and is therefore deleted from /r/Bitcoin) because it breaks the core consensus rules without consensus, not because it breaks Bitcoin's "currency guarantees". The currency guarantee that everyone knows is the 21 million BTC limit. Maybe there are other guarantees, though that's debatable. XT doesn't break the currency guarantees IMO (though I've heard people make the argument).

Either I don't know what I'm talking there, or I'm talking about something else, because the comment about setting the client-side maturation time to 500 blocks only makes sense if there are often 2+ very long valid block chains. This isn't applicable to changes in the core consensus rules, since that produces invalid chains.

I admit that there are occasional errors in my old posts, though my spirit stays the same, and I don't remember ever being super embarrassed by an old post of mine. If I hadn't learned anything in 5+ years, that'd be quite disappointing. That post was from when I knew Bitcoin for less than a year and no one really knew anything about Bitcoin's technology. I certainly didn't have that "expert" badge then...

Bitcoin 内の OnwaytoNZ によるリンク if bitcoin does fork, do we loose our existing balance? what do we have to do to ensure that our hodlings are secure ?

[–]theymos -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

I wrote it, so of course I've seen it.

I strongly disagree with the idea that changing the max block size is a violation of the "Bitcoin currency guarantees".

I still agree with this.

The market/community would find a way to pay for the network's security

I still agree with this.

[with no max blocksize,] it would be easy enough to become a full node that the currency wouldn't be at risk

I no longer agree with this, for reasons which I have explained in detail everywhere. (At least in the naïve "just set the MAX_BLOCK_SIZE constant to the protocol max" method of having no max blocksize. There might be some way to have no global max if miners were still restricted to some effective max which allowed enough people to run full nodes, but that'd require some extra work, and it'd probably still be sub-optimal in many ways compared to a global max.)

Bitcoin 内の billybob1978 によるリンク Thread about backdoors in XT?

[–]theymos -6ポイント-5ポイント  (0子コメント)

XT is an altcoin, and that was XT-specific, so it was off-topic for /r/Bitcoin. Probably it is a legitimate issue.

Bitcoin 内の justpaulplease によるリンク Where is the best place for a US based company to buy under a $1000 worth of Bitcoin?

[–]theymos -4ポイント-3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Coinbase is OK for buying/selling in my experience, though I wouldn't use them as a wallet, and their invoicing isn't that great.

You can trade for 0% fee on Coinbase by using ACH bank transfers, trading on the exchange (not instant buy/sells), and being careful to be the maker rather than the taker on trades.

Bitcoin 内の Neldonado によるリンク What's going on with Bitcoin?

[–]theymos -6ポイント-5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yeah, I think we might end up creating a daily thread for questions like this.

Bitcoin 内の Neldonado によるリンク What's going on with Bitcoin?

[–]theymos -10ポイント-9ポイント  (0子コメント)

Note: altcoins like XT are off-topic on /r/Bitcoin, and you're mostly talking about XT, so this is deleted.

Bitcoin has a set of unbreakable rules. These include the 21 million BTC limit, but also a limit on the maximum size of blocks. These rules can't be broken even if all miners agreed. They can only be changed in a hardfork, which is where a new currency (and network) is created based on Bitcoin (with all of the same address balances, etc.), and essentially everyone agrees to move to this currency and call it "Bitcoin". Most experts believe that the Bitcoin network is currently not ready to handle blocks above the current 1 MB limit, but a few disagree and are trying to do a "hardfork" without having everyone agree. Since there isn't widespread agreement on this change, this attempt is really the same as creating an altcoin with the same address balances as Bitcoin and trying to trick people into moving to it and calling it Bitcoin. It sounds like it might work OK if you get the majority of people to switch to it, but in reality this altcoin can't really be called Bitcoin, and the attempt will tear Bitcoin apart if it has any success because some people will stay with Bitcoin and some people will move to XT. Imagine if one day half of all stores stopped accepting dollars and only accepted some new Dollar XT currency -- the market value and usefulness of both currencies would go way down compared to the original Dollar value/usefulness, and it'd be amazingly bad for everyone.

Also see:

Bitcoin 内の WannabeWingsuitPilot によるリンク Technical question... Is this possible?

[–]theymos -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

The unspent-output can be multisig so that either of them can spend it.

Bitcoin 内の WannabeWingsuitPilot によるリンク Technical question... Is this possible?

[–]theymos -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Not sure if I understand your question. One transaction will be valid and the rest will be invalid. It'll be like the invalid transactions never happened.

Bitcoin 内の Yodan によるリンク Not technically literate with bitcoin, how does the fork affect users who only hold/sell through coinbase/circle/etc?

[–]theymos -9ポイント-8ポイント  (0子コメント)

Note: altcoins like XT are off-topic on /r/Bitcoin, so this is deleted.

XT is programmed to become a separate network/currency from Bitcoin in the future. If your exchange uses XT after XT diverges from Bitcoin, then your bitcoins will probably end up being converted to "xt-coins" incompatible with Bitcoin. When XT fails economically, these xt-coins will be worthless. Therefore, you should not use an exchange that supports XT. Also, if you think that XT has any chance of sucessfully hijacking Bitcoin, you should withdraw bitcoins even from Bitcoin exchanges to a cold wallet and hold them until everything settles. This will ensure that you still have something when the dust settles, though if XT ends up tearing the Bitcoin economy apart you will probably still lose significant purchasing power.

Bitcoin 内の BitttBurger によるリンク XT fork for Dummies. What happens if....

[–]theymos -8ポイント-7ポイント  (0子コメント)

Note: altcoins are off-topic on /r/Bitcoin, so this is deleted.

1) First: is this considered a fork?

Like most altcoins, XT is a software fork of Bitcoin Core. XT is not some sort of new version/incarnation of Bitcoin: it is compatible with Bitcoin for the moment in order to more easily sucker fools into using it, but it is programmed to become a separate network/currency in the future.

2) What happens if 3/4 of miners begin using XT and 1/4 of people stay with old client? And it stays that way for more than a year? Anything?

Miners don't matter. What matters is what the economy does. It's possible for 75% of miners to switch to XT while essentially none of the economy does so.

If there's a 75-25 split in the economy, then the usefulness and market value of both the Bitcoin and XT currencies will drop significantly. What would happen if some big chunk of stores stopped accepting dollars?

What happens to people's Bitcoins in the above scenarios? I hear talk of possible alt coin but everybody gets pissed at that term.

Your bitcoins will remain technically safe, but they might become worth substantially less if XT tears the Bitcoin economy apart. Also, if you use XT to transact after it diverges from Bitcoin, then its wallet software will tend to convert your bitcoins into xt-coins incompatible with Bitcoin.

It's probably a good idea to not touch old coins after XT diverges if you think that XT has any chance of successfully hijacking Bitcoin.

Is it correct to state that this has nothing to do with bitcoin protocol itself but purely the software chosen to process blocks therefore none of the above is a concern?

No. XT creates a separate currency/network. You need to choose between sticking with Bitcoin and moving to a different currency which contains changes which most experts believe make it far inferior to Bitcoin. Running XT is not a "vote" for bigger blocks: it is agreeing to a "suicide pact" to sell Bitcoin, buy an altcoin, and start calling this altcoin Bitcoin at some point in the future.

Bitcoin 内の btc_observer によるリンク Why must ALL nodes download the entire blockchain? How about a partial download of the last say 10,000 blocks?

[–]theymos -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

That might be done someday. You still have to keep up with ongoing blocks, though.

Probably Bitcoin Core would continue to download old blocks in the background to become progressively more sure that you're on the right chain.

Bitcoin 内の [deleted] によるリンク How do I pay taxes on a significantly large amount of bitcoins that have been moved around throughout the years?

[–]theymos -3ポイント-2ポイント  (0子コメント)

My understanding (not an expert):

For taxes, since most of them were mined, do I just declare them as capital gains

Yes. Your cost basis is the cost of mining them.

I'm just not sure how to deal with the fact that I've moved them around so much throughout the years in exchanges.

When you sell them or buy something with them, that's when capital gains/losses take effect.

Is this moment of income only considered when the money lands in my own bank account?

No. Every exchange trade needs to be taken into account. Usually they'll provide the trade data in a form that you can import into a spreadsheet. I wrote a simple program to take spreadsheet trades and do the actual cost-basis calculations (it's way too tedious to do by hand), but I don't want to publish it in case it's wrong... Maybe there's something similar on the Web somewhere, or maybe you could write something. For simplicity you could stick to FIFO/LIFO if you want, but it's also OK to arbitrarily decide which bitcoins are actually being sold, since bitcoins are fungible like stock shares. Though if you sell a batch of bitcoins, make sure you mark this in your spreadsheet so that you don't sell it again in the future.

Basically, anything you do with bitcoins other than sending them to yourself needs to be added to a spreadsheet and used in your capital gains calculation.

Bitcoin 内の sexystick によるリンク If fear of future centralization is (potentially) "enabled" by PoW, are there provisions in place to switch to PoS as a counter-balance?

[–]theymos 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Plain PoS doesn't work. See: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

I think that some mixture of PoS and PoW might be an improvement over pure PoW, but AFAIK this idea isn't popular in the expert community.

Bitcoin 内の WannabeWingsuitPilot によるリンク Technical question... Is this possible?

[–]theymos 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yes. A and B need to include at least one of the same unspent-output as an input (using multisig or something to allow both Alice and Bob to spend the same unspent-output). Then including both and A and B in the same block chain would be invalid.

Bitcoin 内の awemany によるリンク Backup of the wiki on bitcoin.it

[–]theymos -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

It could be, but I haven't set that up. Maybe someday.

Bitcoin 内の awemany によるリンク Backup of the wiki on bitcoin.it

[–]theymos -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

Not publicly. Much of that data is non-public (PMs, etc.).