Is it that difficult or just time consuming. It's no more difficult now than getting money on online poker sites was say 10 years ago.

Let's see if they can actually implement it. Of course, they are using a lolappcoin, so that knocks the project down a bit.

Just a lot of waiting through multiple verification stages. This is on Circle.

if this is the case then the companies who provide btc for credit card payments do not promote them enough because I haven't heard much about it (not that i want to buy btc w/ a credit card but that was the easiest way by far to deposit online 10 years ago and it's no longer as easy today to deposit and neteller setup/verification was trivial back then)

Coinbase today is harder than neteller was back then

I think they feel they can with it being this far in. I'd have to think they would have cut bait a while back if they felt it wasn't going to fly. Having so much of it open source should help their cause too.

Maybe 15 years ago then I remember having to set up neteller and Coinbase experience is nearly identical. Had to link my bank account. Then had to deposit, wait a few days. Then send to poker site. Not sure what is that different.

It's an ambitious project, and most ambitious projects fail. Never underestimate pursuing a path too long for too much expense. This is very common.

Bitcoin so stable there's been no posts for 13 days

Lots happening though.

Surprised there is not more talk about Gavin's coup attempt.

Anyway, a lot of misconceptions about how the fork would work.
This should help clear it up a lot.
https://medium.com/@allenpiscitello/...r-160f0e462371

Life sentence is pretty harsh...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/ny...ison.html?_r=0

imo, gavin is doing a pretty good job facilitating this discussion. he got it going and its certainly happening. i dont see the coup angle...

anyway, another good discussion on various ideas/options...
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/pos...htning-network

rusty russell was just hired by blockstream to work on the lightning network, so that is pretty interesting.

Gavin has decided he will ignore the reasoning of the other core developers and do his own thing. Certainly, he seems committed. Perhaps he is playing chicken and thinks the rest will join him, or enough consensus will move, or perhaps he doesn't care and will just split it. It absolutely is a coup. He is intentionally destroying consensus when even core developers disagree. It's a very dangerous path. There will be a tremendous amount of money won or lost on this, I'm just trying to figure out the right angle.

Assuming some miners decide to go for the big blocks, it comes down to a lot of things. The money invested will decide what is more valuable, not anything else. What do people prefer to hold? People can hold both coins, but can divest of one or the other fairly easily.

1) Bigger blocks may potentially "open up" Bitcoin where adoption hampered, causing a rise in value in BTCXT. TO THE MOON! I have a lot of problems with this view. Bitcoin's value proposition is not being able to send a nickel to someone for a penny. Bitcoin's value proposition is in decentralization and sound money. Centralized solutions will always crush Bitcoin in the long run in terms of cost. I do see a lot of buying before the fork possible where people think "THIS IS WHAT WE NEED!! IT'S GOING TO THE MOON, THEREFORE I BUY NOW!" I'd expect a bubble here and trying to time it could be interesting.

2) A serious schism occurs. When there is chaos, expect a lack of investment and a lot of dumping. People won't know what to buy, so they won't buy anything. Price of both chains combined will drop.

3) Lot of the ownership of coins is from old-guard types who got into Bitcoin for political reasons. They'll now be holders of two kinds of coins. If they strongly prefer old coins, but the incoming market wants the new ones, so if they stick to what they believe, they'll dump new coins for old ones and increase holdings tremendously. Lock for the core devs, the Blockstream folks to follow this path.

4) Miners will probably straddle both forks based on difficulty and price of each fork. The difficulty will be proportional to value, and switching chains will be trivially easy.

I'm thinking my play is to sell immediately before a date of the fork, or possibly wait until the fork and I can split coins. Sell old coins and prepare to buy the old coins back for cheaper, then when the price of new coins rise a lot due to the dumb masses, sell.

Lightning network definitely is one approach. Too bad they'll take away a major profit incentive for it, and it will take a lot longer.

Isn't a company like coinbase going to be an important player in deciding which side wins or loses? They (and the other) major on ramps are unlikely to spend a lot of time and energy to try to educate the market on what's going on right? It's very hard to imagine the average Bitcoin user being informed enough to make some kind of decision and therefore the path of least resistance wins.

They certainly have a lot of influence, but they still have to meet the demands of customers. There's a reason why they sell Bitcoins and not Dogecoins, and it's not because they just arbitrarily chose one. They can certainly set a default. However, its trivially easy to support both or switch when needed.

Keep in mind too that the friction between networks should be quite low, and those who prefer to hold one vs. the other can just switch if they need to pay someone. I have no interest in Gavincoin just as I have no interest in Doge or Litecoin. Gavincoin may become the defacto payment processing network built upon trusting others, while Bitcoin remains a true P2P network of storage of value.

Sure is fascinating reading the debates between core devs and other intelligent people about the blocksize change. It's really going to be interesting to see how this plays out, especially in an open source environment.

I'm still undecided what I'll do my with coins, I'll defintley be following closely as this plays out.

I havent been following any of this, what is happening? The blockchain will split in 2 so youll have "old" coins and "new" coins, equal to the same amount you had of old coins? Nad they will be traded at different prices?

We're a long way off from this happening. Gavin, the former lead developer, has proposed this change. Many others have opposed this, including all of the other core developers. He has decided to proceed anyway with a new version of Bitcoin, called Bitcoin XT, which will support the change, which would only take effect if a supermajority of miners agreed, in a year. If this was actually implemented, and agreed to, Bitcoin would be split into two - one with larger blocks and one with smaller.

You'd have coins on both sides, and initially, as you spend coins on one side, they would also be spent on the other. It would be possible to have a transaction only go through on the large side, effectively splitting your holdings. You certainly could send coins to be traded between the chains. The price would certainly be different, and my guess would be considerably lower as a sum than what it is today.

If you own bitcoin you better read up on this because you have some major decisions to make and by the sounds of it you need to make them soon. Volumes are low at the moment and if a couple of the big players decide they prefer to play it safe and not own bitcoin through the fork then the price will drop significantly.

I also don't see how the fork itself can go through without a significant price drop. People are going to gamble on which fork is going to come out ahead and sell the other fork and not all people will pick the right side.

I haven't seen anything about the fork in the mainstream media yet and I expect any pieces to show up there to be pretty negative. Probably not good for the price either.

If you are invested for the long term then I guess it doesn't matter as you will continue to hold the winner but if you like to speculate/gamble then I would sell now and rebuy short before the fork and try to pick the winner.

For some reason I dont see this happening. People will come to their senses or not enough miners will transition. Just seems too silly to actually take place.

That is what I thought originally but Gavin seems to be set and I think he has enough followers to make it interesting for miners to mine both and that is enough to cause problems.

Unfortunately, this block size issue presents us with an all-or-nothing outcome.

I would be shocked if Gavin really would try to ram this through if it came to it, I just cant understand why he would literally choose to evaporate billions of value overnight over this. For me, it seems like he would rather quit Bitcoin instead of having to try and ram it through

The real issue here imo are the blockstream guys.

Increasing the block size to 20mb from what I read is the real low hanging fruit. I actually agree that it is, yet I still support the block size increase. The lightning network (sidechain?? TC?? is it??) is like the home run and permanent solution to solve scalability. Further, that sidechains, on the bitcoin blockchain, will be the silver bullet to eliminate altcoins.

My perspective on this is that Gavin believes that scalability can and should be solved by reprogramming of bitcoin core or bitcoind. Further, Gavin actually believes that we can/should move to 1 minute block intervals. This change imo, seems even more drastic than changing block size.

Other bitcoin core developers may not agree and believe that it is best to be solved in sidechains or to continue to wait out 1mb blocks, while preserving the integrity of the bitcoind code-- we know it works when it is worth $10billion, and there is no reason to believe that it wouldnt work at 100$b, and so forth. But the changes that Gavin is proposing are enormous given how distributed the entire bitcoin network currently is. A hard fork after all, is definitely risky.

Ultimately I don't see why the blockstream guys should feel threatened. They dont seem even close to releasing an actual product, and I think ironically they are missing the big picture. Scalability in bitcoin has less to do with fixing the sheer volume of how to handle transactions, but rather how do we handle them instantaneously. Increasing block size doesnt threaten the lightning network, but changing to 1minute block intervals certainly does. So I don't quite understand why they are fighting Gavin on block size while not drawing the line in the sand on block intervals while convincing Gavin that they will have a functional and deployable product well before the 20mb block size becomes an issue again.

Where is onemoretimes now? Sold most of my remaining BTC last week, and deposited some on WPN, and now own less than half a coin.

After selling a bunch in late 2013 and early 2014, my plan was to buy a little each month so that I would be back up to my peak holdings by the time the reward halving happened.

Now that just seems like a bad idea at the current price, considering all the uncertainty being created over this block size thing. Will probably just wait on the sidelines for now, unless we have a big sell off or something.

It seems both Gavin and miners are agreeing to 8MB:
http://sourceforge .net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34162506/

This seems kinda ****ed up.

Called it 24 hours ago