Proof of Crawl -- do we have a winning idea there?

Iron know, do you?

Overstock found a good excuse to unload those bitcoins that they were holding. Their bitcoiner fans will cheer while their Q1 financial report will not say "idiots" in red. [/troll]

Will freedom still be waiting for them when they finally get there?

Don't they fear to end up in many pieces?

Would it be impertinent for me to write again "the Chinese set the price, and they don't give a damn about Bitstamp"?

What are turtles doing in a country where no one likes them?

Are arbitragers  warming up still?

Thanks! But I can only read French, not speak it. 
My parents were from Veneto and I spoke Venetian at home as a kid.
I learned Portuguese at school, Italian and Spanish starting at 10 or so,
from magazines that my parents bought.  Some French a bit later.
Then English at school and from reading technical stuff.
That's about it.

Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq

In 2015 I will lose my teeth

In 2022 I will do Ramadan

Lots of money, but at least he was consciously gambling, with know odds.  To me it is not as bad as that other guy who deposited 50 k$ into MtGOX, just before it died, to buy those bitcoins at 80% discount from market.

EDIT: on the other hand, maybe he will get 20% of his money back, so it was not that bad...

I accept that there may be exceptions.  I believe my analysis above applies to most of what people call "pump-and-dump" or "junk" cryptocoins.  (I called them "altcoins" out of laziness, it is easier to type.)

PS. I find this discussion bizarre, because until a month ago bitcoiners claimed that altcoins would die because they did not have the huge mining network that bitcoin has.  Now it is the number of users that matters?  Then Auroracoin must have been a success -- didn't they "airdrop" some AUR to every person in Iceland? 

Options 1 and 2 are different coins, that will have different market prices and different expectations of survival.  Each old bitcoin user starts out with the same number of coins in both chains.  There is no option for him to take: if he does not spend or sell the coins in one chain, they will simply sit there, as if he had decided to hoard them.  He could burn them, but that would mean throwing some value away -- and would make the price of that coin to rise.

So the question is not "which coin would the users choose", but "what will happen to the market price of each coin".

Coin 1 is just the same old bitcoin, with the same network and protocol, minus a reward halving that was scheduled to occur and will be postponed.  It will keep working smoothly through the transiiton. Its price may fall considerably, but it is unlikely to become insignificant.

Coin 2 is a brand new coin that happens to start with the same coin assignments, but has yet to build its network.  There is a bunch of rich guys out there -- the old bitcoin miners and their investors -- who have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake invested in coin 1, and therefore are quite interested in having the price of coin 2 crash so that it will not steal market value from coin 1.

So, except for the ideologues, if someone wanted to invest some money in "bitcoin" after the change, which of the two bitcoins would he choose?

Except for the ideologues, once the cartel has announced his plans, how many bitcoiners would still wish for the Red Button to be pressed?  If the button is pressed, how many will do whatever they could to kill coin 2?

Perhaps, as you say, there will be smart guys who will wait for the cartel to stop jamming coin 2 and then will start mining it, or buy tons of it as penny stock, counting on its recovery.  But, if that strategy turns out to be profitable, what would stop other people from forking other Red-Button-style clones of bitcoin?  

Note that altcoins are created not because they can be better than bitcoin (which in some cases may be true), but because their creators think: "Why should I buy an existing coin, and see its early adopters become filthy rich at my expense, when I can create my own altcoin, and become filthy rich at other people's expense?"

It seems that you believe that the Red-Button coin 2 will prevail (or at least survive) for a similar reason, namely it would give to ordinary PC owners the opportunity to become early miners of "bitcoin" again, and amass a hoard of "bitcoin" with little cost. That cloned "bitcoin" would have a low price perhaps, but all users of the old bitcoin would automatically be its users too, and (by your belief) it would have a nonzero chance of conquering the bitcoin market.  

But, if so, what will stop people from creating more such clones, independently of any 51% threat?

These possibilities with two or more clones of bitcoin are already too confusing for me to reason about them.  After all, I am already unable to see why bitcoin would survive in the long term, even with no clones and no 51% shenaniigans.   Lucky for you that your beliefs a priori exclude the possibility of protocol changes, 51% attacks, hard clones, and anything that might be a problem for bitcoin.  

Please go back and read the plan I outlined.  The one with chains (1), (2), (3). Then please show me how the non-conformant cartel would be "removed from the pool" (?).

Could you name them please? I am not aware of any minimally developed society that would not have some sort of government backed by some sort of police.

I have seen people cite ancient Ireland (which seems to be false, false, the tribes had chiefs and there was even a "High King" at some point) and Iceland (where the population was all isolated farmers and the first village formed in the 18th century).  Do you mean some other?

And, again, I never said that they would be a cartel of rebel-chain miners.  They would still be a cartel of miners of the old chain and the cartel chain.  In fact they would have 100% of the active ASIC miners on their side, because the old chain miners would have no other viable option except join them.

Come on, you know that "the cartel" there means "the cartel of old-chain miners who want to force a change in the block schedule".  It is not "a cartel of rebel-chain miners".  

Assuming that "the cartel" wants to kill the value of the rebel chain, it will try to put enough CPU power working on the rebel chain to jam it.  That should not be hard at first, because the rebels and opportunistic miners will not all start mining all at once.  If the cartel acts quickly, then the rebels who try to use or mine the rebel chain will be frustrated, and (so the cartel hopes) they will give up before others join the rebellion.

Note that, while this struggle is going on in the rebel chain, the cartel's chain (with old protocol except for halving) will operate normally all the time for everybody who upgrades to it, except perhaps for some temporary variation in the block rate.

Know nothing about PoS or PoI (or PoB), sorry.

My understanding of Ripple is that it is two things:

* The Ripple Network is a system for interbank settlements that uses some cryptocoin technology, but is centrally managed by RippleLabs and/or a bank consortium;

* The Ripple Coin (XRP) is a cryptocurrency, also managed by RippleLabs.  The coin could be used by the Ripple Network as an intermediate step when converting between two minor currencies, but the same role could be performed by a major currency such as UDS or EUR.  Success of the Network does not imply success of the coin, and vice-versa.

Is this understanding correct?
 

Yes, it is school vacations here.