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Friday 29 January 2016

The Political Mausoleum

Following the American presidential debates lately, you might realise how ridiculous its become. Polarised politics no longer conform to the norms of center, left and right. On the conservative side people are grabbing sound bites and boycotting debates strategically, Donald trump is not conservative enough, yet Sarah Palin calls him a "beer drinking, gun slinging redneck". On the democratic side people are criticising other leadership challengers for getting negative on people of there own party. People are straying from the for running contender Hillary Clinton, because she's not seen as anti establishment enough. The whole thing is a nightmare to watch. Politicians recite their strategic voter demographic policy points over and over. Finding a new thought towards progress is a rare occasion. Despite the thousands of questions we are just getting the same answers. It would be to much of a risk to veer from the campaign agenda. Many of the character involved have become parodies of themselves. It's is a sure sign that politics as a constructive part of a society moving forward is dead!
On the other hand crypto currencies are on the cusp of creating a political system that makes sense in the modern world. There is a leadership debate and a whole host of cohesive solutions developing and vying for popular approval. Its multi dimensional, people are debating the policy structure in its self. Miners are actively voting on their views and users are promoting there own agendas. The political developer structure in itself is evolving with multiple competing core like groups. On top of that once ad hoc political bitcoin groups are giving good clarification of their positions, clarifying the divisions of their existing power structure, and new alternative groups are immerging. The Bitcoin Unlimited group just release a detailed manifesto. It is substantial stuff, not sound bytes.

This has been catalysed by pressure built up naturally and over the last two months due to increasing transaction load on the network. Every detail of bitcoin governance is being discussed, scrutinised and progressed. With the escalating drama and media attention there has been a huge amount of progress in this area though some may stress not enough. The positive thing is that there are valuable ideas, creative solutions and actual actions taking place. Things that many people have lost faith in with politics around the world.

Funding is a common area of concern in both the American and the bitcoin political arenas. This is clearly more transparent in the bitcoin scene. Could this simply be caused by size, or is there something else. Is transparency allowed by crypto currency an integral part of our future democracies? Is there new value to be found in the optional participation model of governance in bitcoin? When you compare these two political universes we find a clearly less offensive solution in new models for cryptocurrency. We are all sick of these old guys babbling on about themselves. Old politics may be coming to an end.

Thursday 28 January 2016

Exahash

Very soon the bitcoin network may reach a milestone level in computing power. The "exahash" will be a world first and a game changer in network processing. No other entity could hope to achieve this. The theoretical 2nd place competition record less than 1% of this hashing power (in petaflop equivalent).

Achieving the exahash may be delayed. The approaching mining reward halving will act as a disincentive for new miners and may slow down what has been an incredible increase in computing power. If it is achieved this round however it will be something worth celebrating. It makes for a very strong security against external threats to the bitcoin network.
Visualising an exahash is difficult. A hash being one cycle of cryptography. Where any parcel of data can be turned into one of those stings of strange characters we have grown to love. Say like turning potatoes into hash browns, except it doesn't matter how many potatoes you put in, it always just looks like one tater patty. Sound hashy?  Anyway, an exahash does what it does at 10 to the 18th that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times per second!

In other words two million of these. A wall about two meters (6 units) high and 83 kilometers long.
What was once almost impossible to get (the miner above from two years ago) is now almost insignificant and obsolete. We need to talk about the significance of what has been achieved and how to use it for good. Bitcoin has definitely come a long way.


Monday 4 January 2016

Waves Reapeating - Bitcoin Price $2400 by June 2016

As the old stock markets have been shut down over the Christmas/New Year season there has been a lot of time for me to take a step back and look at the long term charts. For some time I have suspected a pattern in bitcoin boom waves, and i'm not alone on this. But until now I hadn't given it to much credence. Looking at the long term gold chart however has lead to this admittedly bazaar conclusion.

Bitcoin

Gold 

Silver


There's a similarity in these precious metal charts that seems to be giving guidance for the price of bitcoin. The "boom an wobble down to boom"  pattern is repeated on different time scales. It maybe caused by some kind of psychological phenomenon in relation to safe havens for value and bubbles. I'm not sure why its doing this but it seems to be repeated at least 3 times in btc and twice in gold. Considering also that trading bots are looking for repeating patterns and make up a big part of the market, I was compelled to overlay the charts.


I wouldn't want to get all Nostradamus on it, but now is the season. I feel this level of market capitalisation is reasonable so in good faith I'll  time stamp my prediction for the year in the blockchain.

"I, MidwayCrypto estimate a price of $2400 by mid 2016 followed by a dip to $1400 by year end"


Toon of the Day - Wall Street "Sell Sell Sell"



Saturday 2 January 2016

Segregated Witness - Endorsed by the Wu Tang Clan


There has been a new development in bitcoins scaling debate and its triggering a reddit battle rap. Whatever "segregated witness" is it seems to be holding ground in this hostile world. Those who are not familiar with programming and more with Wu Tang will like what they are getting here, more transactions. Understanding how it works is another thing.

The bitcoin improvement proposal increases the amount of transactions that bitcoin can process with out increasing the block size, something once considered impossible without a hard fork. It does this by folding transaction data into encrypted signatures. The result is increased transaction capacity by up to four times. Thats 28 transactions per second or around 2.4m per day.

There are auxiliary benefits to the proposal as well. It fixes long standing concerns about malleability and allows the existing block chain to be trimmed without compromising security. "SegWit" is also compatible with other scaling projects such as the lightning network and sidechains. It gives these systems more time to be fully dispersed and reduces the risk of a transaction bottleneck before they are fully utilised. It seems holding out on change, in this case, has paid off with more innovation.

Bitcoiners are having a decentralised block party on this and it shows in the price. It has been years in the making. Gregory Maxwell of the bitcoin "core" first floated the concept for testing at the Hong Kong scaling conference. Following that Pieter Wuille, another prominent bitcoin coder made a presentation streaming live on the 14th of December. The price of bitcoin rose by $15 that day to $460 USD. The proposal now has at least 31 signatures from the bitcoin core group, which is by far the most significant group of bitcoin coders, bitcoin gurus so to speak so far. There are now 50 signatures on a road map to have this implemented by April 2016 along with other measures.

Its not unanimous, people have come back and said that the SegWit code is ugly. They debate the idea of adding many lines of code to solve a solution that can be solved with just one line in the consensus code. Even though SegWit does not change the consensus code it may add complexity to the overall system and it is unclear what the repercussions of the change could be. The code in itself could be considered quite elegant or atrocious, judge for yourself. In the end it depends on your opinion of a hard fork. Increasing block size means that all bitcoin software needs to be updated to avoid major disruption to the system. SegWit doesn't require this simultaneous upgrading of nodes.

It's exciting to see such practical results and problem solving developing far a decentralised community. Segregated witness at the very least proves the ability of bitcoin and core developers to innovate and make wise decisions under pressure. An early change as proposed by Mike Yearn certainly seems foolish now. Group think concerns seem to have given way to the hive-mind. This is positive progress without a true leader. We will be watching this space into 2016 and eager to hear more. With some relief this could be the end of the argument and start of a new phase for bitcoin addoption. 

"Can I get Segwitness to testify that we take care of business?"