I appreciate the probing questions so that hopefully we can get all these points written down concisely for future readers.

Please re-read my post which you replied to, because I have clarified my points in that post. Also look for the numerous edits I have made in my blog and several of my comment posts on this blog.

You seem to be missing my point.

Nope. I have responded to (and I think refuted) your argument over and over again at the threads on BCTalk which I linked to from my blog(s) and comments. I also implicitly (and cordially) rebuked your argument again in the reply you’re replying to. But I now understand that I need to unpack my logic more so it will be more evident.

Those persons whose BTC are stolen will report it. The first victim will scream bloody murder, and until they are satisfied their property is returned to their possession, they will not stop screaming. Even if law enforcement does not take action to end that predatory scheme, other BTC holders will learn of it, and will not avail their BTC to miners to steal. Further, NO ONE will buy those coins until the theft is no longer possible.

There will be no market for BTC stolen by miners after the initial confusion is resolved. Would you trade your hard earned fiat for BTC that are unable to be secure from theft that is ongoing globally at that time? No one else will either. In the event such theft is undertaken, the value of BTC will plunge to nothing, because there will be no market for it.

Until you grasp and integrate this into your projections, you will just be playing games with pretty numbers. None of them will mean anything, because you have not reckoned that people will not throw money at the miners stealing it from them.

The economic majority will decide. Enabling the economic majority to decide is what distinguishes the deception of contentious soft forks from hard forks. Hard forks give the economic majority the opportunity to vote by selling one fork and buying the other fork. Core never wanted a hard work because they know (secretly and among themselves) damn well they will lose that economic-weighted vote.

Remember that the minority control most of the wealth. This will always be the case because its the natural law. So nobody of discernible wealth cares what witless fools are going to complain about. The minions (like us) are economically irrelevant. Those minions who used SegWit made the mistake of following scammers, so they will rightfully lose all their legacy Bitcoins (but keep their scammer Core tokens) because they intentionally sent their Bitcoins to unrecognized, nonstandard addresses (from the perspective of Satoshi’s immutable protocol).

My prior post which you replied to, explains the valuation model of Bitcoin. The donations booty will fund orders-of-magnitude increase in hashrate. Maybe even GPUs will be profitable mining Bitcoin again during the early stages of donations taking in 2020. This will drive orders-of-magnitude increase in the cost of mining production and thus orders-of-magnitude increase in the Bitcoin price.

The minions do not matter at all. Bitcoin was not designed as a medium-of-exchange for minions. It is to be a global reserve currency asset for $multi-millionaires and $billionaires. That is why Satoshi intentionally set the block size limit to 1 MB and intentionally ran away so he could not be pressured to increase it.

The wealthy are going to see a resurgent legacy Bitcoin as more and more valuable, because immutability has won. And USAF (aka democracy) has lost. Remember gold is a hedge against the failures of government, i.e. the failure of democracy.

You claim that miners will be taking BTC from their rightful possessors.

No. Absolutely incorrect. And a critical error that leads to your overall misunderstanding.

I claim that legacy miners will be spending BTC that was erroneously sent to “anyone can spend” addresses that have no public/private key “rightful possessor” in Satoshi’s legacy, immutable 0.5.3 protocol. Those who are foolish enough to believe the Core scammers and send their Bitcoins to addresses which the legacy protocol can’t recognize, have willfully donated their Bitcoin to the legacy miners.

In this blog I wrote:

^{Satoshi’s immutable legacy protocol (c.f. Satoshi’s post and important discussion about it here, here, here, here, here and here) does not recognize Core addresses as being protected by any signature. Thus anyone can spend them (that is until perhaps some future FATF demand forces miners to freeze them in the future). So legacy miners will spend the donated SegWit “anyone can spend” UTXO to themselves.}

I can’t find in the list of Bitcoin versions on the Core website, the version that contained the “1 April 2012” BIP16 change listed on the complete history of changes to Bitcoin. Trilema.com dude’s Real (i.e. a legacy) Bitcoin client includes support for only up to Core v0.5.3 — i.e. inclusive only up to the “15 March 2012” BIP30 change.

BIP16 aka pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) changes the meaning of Bitcoin addresses (thus violating the immutability of Satoshi’s protocol) and consequently they begin with a 3 to differentiate them from a legacy pay-to-pubkey-hash (P2PKH) address which always begin with 1.

The legacy protocol interprets these intentional human errors as Bitcoin sent to an unrecognizable address. So miners either have to interpret these errors as “provably unspendable” (but there was already a standard way to do that in the legacy protocol), or allow them to be “ANYONECANSPEND” as the analog dual of ANYONECANPAY.

Normally perhaps what should have happened (if the miners had decided to enforce) is these errors should never have been relayed, put in a block, nor achieved consensus. Yet since that was not enforced, the legacy protocol must interpret these errors which are already in the blockchain.

Since the legacy protocol can’t enforce its rules without an economic incentive for a Schelling point that is greater than the incentive Schelling point to continue supporting the SegWit soft fork, then the only way for the legacy protocol to force the Core/SegWit/P2SH soft fork to become a hard fork (i.e. to fork off and fuck-off) so that the Bitcoin wealth can then vote by selling one fork and buying the other, is to both violate a protocol rule of the Core/SegWit/P2SH soft fork and reward miners for doing so. So in this natural economic and game theoretic circumstance, the P2SH (including SegWit) addresses will be (at least initially) interpreted by legacy miners as “ANYONECANSPEND” (spent to themselves when they win a legacy protocol block) instead of as “provably unspendable”. Because “provably unspendable” can’t be declared in a block (i.e. they just don’t get spent) and thus doesn’t violate a protocol rule of the Core/SegWit/P2SH soft fork.

The said donations “attack” (not really an attack but a restoration and self-defense mechanism) just awaits a leader with sufficient hashrate to initiate it. Also Craig Wright will amplify the chances of success, by dumping ~1 million Core Bitcoins on the exchanges at the halving event, so the miners will be starved of profit, because the difficulty will not reset soon enough. So the miners will be forced to go mine on legacy protocol and partake of the additional revenue from the donations.

From the perspective of the legacy protocol, there’s no way to return the P2SH addresses to their “rightful possessors” because there is no unambiguous means of identifying those “rightful possessors”.

For P2SH the OP_CHECKSIG is inside a script which is not recorded on the blockchain! The redeemer (i.e. original payee) provides the script, not the original sender. Who should the miner fairly allow to spend it, if not themselves? The legacy miners will simply be following the protocol rules. How could they give those coins back to the “rightful possessors” when there is no public/private key to identify who are the “rightful possessors”! From the legacy protocol’s Nash equilibrium perspective, there is no unambiguous “rightful possessor” because which nonstandard interpretation of unrecognized addresses is the correct one? There could be unbounded proposals in the public for nonstandard addresses and there’s no Schelling point in the legacy protocol for choosing between those unbounded choices. That’s a key point all my detractors fail to grok.

The Core (including SegWit) protocol changes are unrecognized by the legacy protocol. Which protocol changes should the legacy miners change to? Should they use Core rules or my rules or your rules? No! That would be mayhem and lacks any Nash equilibrium nor Schelling point. There would be no convergence on a single, longest chain. They have no choice but to stay with their protocol as their Schelling point and Nash equilibrium. Was SegWit miner signaling a valid Schelling point and Nash equilibrium? Not for legacy miners because there is nothing in the legacy protocol that says such signaling is binding! Signaling means nothing in the economic and game theory. There were many public arguments about the veracity of the miner signaling because signaling costs nothing! They can signal one way (e.g. for or against some protocol change such as SegWit), and then mine the opposite. So thus if some legacy miners were to go for one interpretation, others might go for another. Mayhem! Only economics can rule! Only Schelling points and Nash equilibrium matters. This is why soft-forks do not mean anything, because no economic decision has been made yet. This is why even if 100% of the miners are supporting SegWit, it is meaningless because the hard fork test has not occurred yet — soft forks are deceptive scams.

The witless democracy-tards in our collapsing Western Civilization can’t seem to understand the salient theoretic issue. I hate democracy (especially large scale democracy) because due to coordination of altruism being an undersupplied public good, thus democracy is always a power vacuum captured by the elite which rewards making the populace retarded! I want decentralization and permissionless, trustlessness instead. Ignorance of these basic facts is what drives a lot of the ignorant drivel I have to wade through on this issue. I do not blame you for being ignorant of these facts, because presumably you’re not a computer scientist.

@fabiorem wrote on BCTalk:

^{If the global elites want bitcoin to be hated by the population, and bitcoin still will reach one million in the next four years, then I can guess that, in this scenario, the global elites would be using bitcoin to shield themselves from the destruction of the fiat system, which is starting with these trade wars.}

^{But how they will convince the population to use cryptocurrencies afterwards? The only way to do that would be with a global reset, probably with a new world war. Then they would design a new cryptocurrency and the people, tired by the war (and the poverty it brings), would accept it.}

^{How can we, small investors, which are not part of the global elite, and would not be affected by the event described by Shelby, protect ourselves against the crowd? I only read celebrities talking about price, like 250k (Tim Draper), or 1 million (McAfee), but not a single one of them talks about social consequences of these prices, specially in the short-term.}

I wrote on BCTalk:

^{If Bitcoin users all succumbed to a mere censorship attack and switched to the miners' fork, it would unequivocally prove Bitcoin's incentives do not work. If miners merely need to 51% attack the blockchain to force contentious consensus changes, the entire design discussed in Bitcoin's whitepaper is broken.}

^{If no SegWit booty exists to create the incentive, then no Schelling point exists to cause the miners to go mine where the greater value is.}

^{The incentives of proof-of-work remain extremely secure. It is the deception of Core which creates the huge “anyone can spend” booty, that causes the miners to rally towards the immutable value. This is a clever game theory that Satoshi put in Bitcoin, which protects against such attempts to use politics to take control of Bitcoin. Because we know politics is rent-seeking, kleptocracy (which is precisely what Core has been attempting to do with their Omnibus list of “features” and business models).}

^{IOW, none of the miners can unilaterally 50+% attack Bitcoin. Even Craig’s group only has about 3% of the network hashrate, but that is ostensibly enough to be the leader of the SegWit booty driven Schelling point. The miners need some huge carrot for a Schelling point to exist. Once the Core deception is removed, then Nash equilibrium will be restored and no 50+% attack will be possible.}

^{Obviously miners can change whatever rules they want and user consensus doesn't matter at all.}

^{Nope. The miners [if sufficiently decentralized] can not change anything. They can only enforce Satoshi’s immutable protocol via the clever game theory Satoshi created.}