E25: SegWit, Attacks, and Wikileaks

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Bits and Pieces

SEGWIT Drama
Part 1) ViaBTC Standoff

This mining pool has taken a political stance against scaling bitcoin, and is blocking any attempt at a soft fork to SegWit. They had 168 Phs and about 10% of blocks. And being that Segwit needs 95% of blocks, they can currently block activation.

‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists.’ The political aims of these hard forks are crazy obvious. They cried about scaling, scaling, scaling. Then they get their scaling and malleability fix to enable more scaling, and they block it. The position has changed from scaling to hard fork now now now.

The finer points they just gloss over, saying stuff like they have a different fix for malleability etc. but we see what happens when you let a small untested group of developers try to program for a project like this, you get ethereum.

Anyway, this is an on-going story, and may take a couple of months to work itself out.

Part 2) June was a big month

Anonymous investor of ViaBTC in June. Reports are that it’s Bitmain, but we don’t know for sure. Ver proposes the bitcoin.com pool. And MGT Capital announces addition of Ver and Voorhees, and starting a mining project.

Part 3) SegWit Released
Mailing List

Japan to stop sales tax on bitcoin purchases.
This article states that Japan is the only G7 nation that has a sales tax on bitcoin. This could be due to pressure they feel as tokens gain popularity, because they use the words virtual currency.

Very soon, the race for bitcoin will be on. Japan is facing declining population, increased debt, impotent monetary policy, a stagnant economy, and more. They are in a position to want a reset or to make a move with huge potential upside.
Nikkei.com Article

SEC Comments on the Winklevoss ETF
The SEC extended the deadline for a decision on the bitcoin ETF, requesting more public comments on 12 Oct. I included a few links in the show notes to some interesting comments they received during this initial period. Does the SEC even have jurisdiction? I think the understanding of juristidiction has changed from a dependence on the what it’s regulating, to who they are regulating.
SEC Kicks The Can

Some out of touch public comments

Tweet Source from @MAbtc

Brave browser KYC/AML’ing you to get your bitcoin
CEO and I tweet

Scaling Bitcoin
Day 1 Morning

The entire conference is available on their YouTube.

Scaling Bitcoin website

Matt Corallo’s (Core dev) blog about his reaction to the conference.

Altcoinville

TheICO.info is hilarious.

Tuur Demeester has been making his rounds on podcasts and stuff recently, after his blog post. He was on Sovryn Tech a good podcast that I listen to, and Epicenter Bitcoin.

I give Tuur huge props. He stepped into hostile territory, with his rational bitcoin positions, and killed it.
Epicenter Blockchain Clip

Tuur’s Medium post

Ethereum Hard Fork
Check out twitter #ethereum or the r/ethereum subreddit.

Featured Article

What the internet was supposed to be. Talking wikileaks, the internet and bitcoin, the coming Dot Bit bubble.
Wikileaks Podesta post

R3’s issues continue
R3 Trouble in Paradise

Flash Point

ECB warns people about the horrible threat of bitcoin to their unpopular regulations. Is the ECB retarded?
Reuters

The dollar will not strengthen as many expect.
Zerohedge article