People! Bitcoin is not worth 100+ dollars per. STOP BUYING!

That fuckwit Satoshi bravely turned his tail and fled years ago and now there's nobody to tell the world to STOP ALREADY!

Let us recall one of the guy's last dozen messages :

Every weakness present then is present today, not less so but more so.

• The codebase is broken beyond any hope, leaving aside that it's an undocumented, off the cuff, nonsensical piece of crapⁱ.
• The self-styled "developers" are by and large a bunch of retarded children, looking for "sexy projects" and who knows, maybe if they geek out more they might become spergrockstars and some fattie somewhere is throwing her bra at them.
• The network is in dire straits. Three years ago we had as many as 80`000 full nodes doing the integrity checking and propagating transactions. Two years ago that was cut in half. A year ago we were pushing 10`000. Last month they were a little over 1`000 and now there's barely even that. Think about it for a second, decentralised currency run on 500 nodes ? Paypal has a lot more than that for the love of Christ, what is this!
• Speaking of "decentralisation" : collusion between the self-styled devteamⁱⁱ and the largest pool operatorⁱⁱⁱ yielded a conspiracy to destroy the at-that-time longest chain. Which conspiracy succeeded. What decentralisation, baby ?^iv

To make the conclusion short and sweet : you have been fed a bunch of bull by the media (as usual) and are now parting with your hard earned fiat cash in exchange for something you don't understand, haven't evaluated and is not worth that much. As usual.

Please stop. You're not doing us, you're not doing yourself and you're not doing anyone any favours.

In the interest of full disclosure : I've personally lost about 15`000 BTC last month alone from covering CALL options, which would superficially seem like I have vested interest in saying all this.

There's two main reasons why that is false.

On one hand, the 68k BTC selling for ~25 each at the beginning of the month come to a lot less than 53k BTC selling for 100+ each at the end of the month. So no, price appreciation does not hurt my holdings, even if you discount the fact that I own a lot - a lot!^v more than that.

On the other hand, I have a long and glorious history of speaking the truth come Hell or high water, and no matter who might get hurt. You may be unfamiliar with this long and glorious history, but that doesn't make it go away, it just gives you more stuff to discover in the future.

PS.

ThickAsThieves is it possible for something to be oversold and overpriced?
mircea_popescu ThickAsThieves yes.

ThickAsThieves whats that mean? for it to be both
mircea_popescu ThickAsThieves mania.

ThickAsThieves hah thats exactly the only word i could come up with earlier

Seriously. Stop.

1. Here's a funny excerpt off the dev log, ftr :
   

   18:24 jurov maybe i'll get banned, but i'll leave this here: http://trilema.com/2013/bitcoind-not-quite-ready-for-prime-time/
   18:24 jurov in spririt of our yest discussion
   18:25 TD lol
   18:26 TD that's the guy who thinks using a single address for everything is good for privacy?
   18:26 jurov yes, let's smear him instead of talking about actual problem
   18:27 jurov this time he is using the addresses properly. and bitcoind jsut isn't up to the task.
   18:27 gmaxwell jurov: saying someone is confused ... when they are confused.. is not a smear.
   18:27 TD his problem, if you want to call it that, is he's using APIs designed for developers who know what they're doing - and he does, sorta, because he knows it won't let him create a 1mb transaction
   18:27 TD and he knows why
   18:27 TD but he still feels like he should be able to create a 1mb tx even though it will never confirm
   18:27 jurov if you read till the end, the transactions end up being only 6kb total
   18:28 TD anyway, yes, at the core of his post is a point - eventually bitcoin APIs will need to start working with sets of transactions instead of single transactions
   18:28 TD i suspect there would have been an explanation in the log
   18:28 TD propagating the messages from the logging to the rpc error would certainly be a good improvement
   18:29 TD as would better coin selection, the ability to batch transactions to avoid making huge ones, etc
   18:29 TD but that guy doesn't write patches, he just bitches. so ???.
   18:29 gmaxwell jurov: what he's describing there doesn't follow.
   18:30 petertodd re: createrawtransaction and sendrawtransaction, is there any technical reason why the error messages couldn't be made different for each type of error? I've found that annoying myself.
   18:30 gmaxwell jurov: he solved his problem by splitting up the transaction. Then he claims that the single transaction would be 6k. This is not the case.
   18:30 TD petertodd: nope. just that satoshi wrote the code to write all errors to stderr
   18:31 TD petertodd: so i guess someone would need to go through and change it all so errors are accumulated in some request-scoped buffer and then returned
   18:31 gmaxwell jurov: are you the author of that page?
   18:31 gmaxwell oh, it's MP.
   18:32 TD i don't know all the reasons tx creation can fail like that.
   18:32 petertodd TD: Well, for say, sendrawtransaction, there should only be one error right? (IE, it'll quit on the first problem)
   18:32 TD but i presume size is the primary one
   18:32 TD he was using sendmany
   18:32 gmaxwell TD: yes, that would be the resulting txn was >100kb.
   18:33 sipa petertodd: o'
   18:33 petertodd sipa: ?
   18:34 sipa petertodd: i'm not sure about your nTimeLock'ed transactions - on one hand it sounds nice way to prevent wrong mining incentives, but it may cause transactions to be unacceptable to the mempool if there is a weird at-retarget-boundary reorg that decreases height but increases bnChaiNWork
   18:34 TD right, it does seem like that's the only way it can fail if SelectCoins succeeds
   18:35 gmaxwell TD: I've see behavior like that when someone has a wallet with _lots_ of dust inputs in it, and they make a txn large enough that it dips too far into the dust. Litecoin carries a patch to make coin selection ignore very tiny inputs, which has its own problem.
   18:35 petertodd sipa: Oh, that's possible? Hmm... I could do a "GetNetworkChainHeight" function for the odd-cases like that; I nearly was going to do a simple nBestHeight thing that delayed a bit to account for propagation.
   18:35 TD i guess the question is, is MP right that a better algorithm would have allowed the tx to fit under the limit?
   18:36 TD he doesn't offer any ideas for such an algorithm, but maybe a real constraint solver could do it
   18:36 petertodd sipa: I didn't bother when it looked like propagation delays weren't a problem.
   18:36 petertodd sipa: It has to be a change with no bad effects after all.
   18:37 gmaxwell TD: I've never see a case where our solver was pessimal like that, actually??? ignoring priority??? it seems to do a pretty good job.
   18:40 gmaxwell if we'd like some amusement, I could go ask him for an (encrypted) copy of his wallet to try to reproduce. Amusement because apparently when I made that taint-rich thread he was going around telling people that I was trying to rob people.
   18:49 TD jurov: that article did have one benefit, it reminded me to implement the max tx size check in bitcoinj
   18:50 gmaxwell well, it's making me add some dust tests to the wallet tests too. I hadn't looked at the selection quality since the last changes.
   18:51 gmaxwell derp tests are currently broken in git master.
   18:52 sipa :o
   18:54 jgarzik lots of variables to balance... this is evolving into a Transaction Optimizer
   18:55 jgarzik an optimal (to the network) sendmany situation might spread its work across multiple transactions
   19:00 gmaxwell ::sigh:: douglas broken the solver in some corner cases.
   19:00 gmaxwell the sorted first pass makes its greedy.
   19:00 gmaxwell and when the wallet has lots of dust inputs it prefers to use them.
   19:01 sipa it probably makes sense to not consider inputs that at an order of magnitude smaller than the wanted output, at first

   I've quoted extensively because it displays in concentrated form a majority of the mental issues these people are struggling with.

   First off, the assumption that they know better than me. This is such a dangerous thing it can't really be put into words, but let us indulge : if any one of the petrified aspie cocksuckers ever gets his manly bits in sufficient order to come talk to me rather than about me and actually presents his rationale for why he mistakenly believes unique addy is bad for privacy I'll reciprocate by explaining why unique addy is great for privacy in the actual usecase. And by this he'll learn something, and be less stupid.

   Second off, they aren't interested in fixing problems. They are interested in finding fault with other people (petrified aspie cocksuckers that they are) and in daydreaming. This is why those companies that put their engineers in stocks and whip them hourly achieve results in the marketplace whereas those companies that don't slowly fade away into a meaningless, unidentifiable mess of nothing at all. The Google versus Amazon comparison works wonders here : Google is still depending on the Adsense revenue stream, something they've released over a decade ago. Meanwhile Amazon built two businesses, and both crazy profitable, and they'll build a third and a fifteenth while Google will still be dicking around re-making Wave.

   Fucking HerpDerp, Inc what can I tell you. I hope Bezos figures it out, buys fiddy billion ASICs from whoever is making his electronics and takes over the show. [↩]

2. No, it is not "the Bitcoin devteam", stop calling them that. It's a bunch of dorks that keep adding hairs to a huge hairball by virtue of mindless inertia. [↩]
3. Not a miner, mind you. A pool operator. Because what you were told about how miners strengthen the network and so on and so forth is pure bull - the dozen or so pool ops decide what's what, miners couldn't care less just like voters couldn't care less. And yes, just like in the case of real world "representatives" nobody could explain how in carnation they ended up with the job. Something like "they've been there forever" or maybe "they schmooze well". [↩]
4. And yes, the catastrophe was hailed in terms of what a great success it was, purest Soviet style available anywhere. [↩]
5. Just of what's publicly known, my stake in S.MPOE goes for about 550`000 BTC at current market. [↩]