Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

there is this. but doesn't seem to be getting much traffic.

https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/will-bitcoin-xt-be-run-by-more-than-50-of-all-nodes-till-april-2016/

the real killer prediction mkt would be something that Coinbase organizes. front and center for all.

 

[cypherdoc]

Just clicked your link; and found a message I wrote. And that I was replying to the concern troll Peter Todd.

ah, zebedee!

great posting back then. way to out Todd.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

On BCT @Peter R called out this short sweet post by tl121 in response to the claim that "longest chain" is insufficient for consensus and that its must be "longest valid chain":

So what if a given version of bitcoin software is obsoleted by evolution of the network? The "core" developers have done this themselves several times. Arguments along the line of "longest valid chain" do not resolve the issue under debate. They just move the debate to the meaning of the word "valid".

Despite some advertising claims, the security of bitcoin does not depend on mathematics alone, it depends upon running software, which intern depends on running hardware which is supported by the economic majority. Any other way of defining "valid" necessarily requires the argument from authority, which ultimately results in a debate over who is the authority. With this, any hope of a decentralized system goes out the door.

Then, reviewing Forkology 101...

How do we really know there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins?

Choose the best answer from the following:

(a) Because Bitcoin is a consensus system. Any node breaking with the issuance schedule would be out of consensus and ignored.

(b) Because it was set in stone by Satoshi and software ossifies over time as the governance system of the Bitcoin Core implementation gets ever more conservative, protected by cypherpunk libertarian devs who abhor inflation.

(c) We don't. But we can be pretty darn sure of it because the market would be very unlikely to support a fork that messes with the 21M coin limit, since the hardness of that limit is a tremendous source of investor confidence.

...I was surprised to see each of the subsequent posts from the regulars in that thread fell in line with statement after statement clearly pointing to option (b) as their answer, reinforcing statements Peter R gathered here.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

that thread is a mess. this post links to several gems from Satoshi:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1162684.msg12974418#msg12974418

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cypherdoc

Those quotes make it eminently clear that Satoshi didn't intend for small blocksize caps to stay, despite people trying to claim that he didn't really say that.

However, as a tactical point, even we prove Satoshi agreed with us, the miniblockists will just move to more practical arguments like attack vectors, chiding us for being bound by what he said and noting that he may have changed his view since then, so I think it may be a lost cause to bring up Satoshi's view anymore except in passing. Bringing him up as a main thrust of argument plays into the tendency toward Forkology 101 answer (b), which is seems to me like a losing direction as we'd be debating more on their elitist turf.

 

[albin]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

They go even further, on the LTB show a while back where Gavin and Peter Todd argued about it, Todd very strongly insinuated that Satoshi would agree with him right now.

 

[Peter R]

- When a miner sees a new weak block, they keep working on the block they were working on, but calculate differences between their block and the weak block.

That could be made to work, but it seems unnecessary. Since the probability of solving a block is independent to how long you've been working on it, the optimal decision (assuming zero switching time) is to switch to a new block that contains the previous weak block verbatim plus a bunch of new TXs (since this allows you to claim all the fees in the weak block for exactly zero additional orphaning risk).

- When the miner finds a new weak block, he transmits the weak block solution, a hash pointing to another weak block, and a "diff" between the transactions in the weak block and his new block.

Again, this works, but it requires a bunch of code to efficiently calculate the "diff." The code to reference a previous weak block verbatim is trivial, on the other hand.

- This diff can add or remove transactions.

Easily allowing miners to cherry-pick which parts of the previous weak block they want (a) adds code complexity, (b) reduces security for 0-conf, and (c) reduces censorship resistance.

If we make it easiest for miners to build off the previous weak block verbatim then once a TX is included in a weak block, it is very likely to be included in the next strong block.

Furthermore, if it costs miners something to cherry-pick out certain TXs they want to "censor," then they are less likely to censor transactions.

At a minimum they would want to switch out the coinbase transaction.

Yes, the coinbase TX has to change. When I say build off a weak block, I mean all the TXs except the coinbase TX (and all the TXs written in the same order too).

- There is nothing forcing miners to build on previous weak blocks, or for weak block to form a chain. There could be many different weak blocks transmitted through the network that refer to other arbitrary weak blocks.

Indeed there could be many weak blocks floating around, just like there could be many valid blocks at the same block height (and all but one would later be orphaned). But I don't expect it to play out this way, because once the weak block has been propagated, a miner can include the weak block in the block he's working on and claim all the fees from that weak block with zero orphaning risk. This means that there's every reason to build off the last weak block verbatim and no reason to cherry-pick (as cherry-picking adds orphaning risk while reducing fee revenue).

- In order to reduce their block solution propagation times, miners would have an incentive to reduce the differences between the blocks they are working on and previous weak blocks. They would also be incentivised to work on blocks that include the most transactions and fees. So it is likely that the weak blocks would end up forming a chain of mostly adding transactions.

Agreed.

 

[cypherdoc]

http://www.walmart.com/ip/45822125?u1=8a1835348ae611e59da8e6fb3409ace10000&oid=289955.1&wmlspartner=lw9MynSeamY&sourceid=07079407560200143898&affillinktype=10&veh=aff

 

[Erdogan]

We get one shot at this. If we can keep the original vision and the incentive design from degrading Bitcoin will win. If Bitcoin is degraded, I dont think we'll have the same chance we have now to let it grow organically in my lifetime. There are a fie hundred pages dedicated to how SideChains allow value to move off the Bitcoin blockchain, (blockchain-tech they they call it) while still keeping your bitcoin and the relative private keys secure. I totally get blockchain tech is a nice The Trojan Horse idea, but the sidechain white paper highlighted very clearly how value can move onto other blockchains while keeping your keys secure. I'm just saying don't be so confident, lots of smart people working to make that a reality.

No worry. If the essential hard quantity aspect of bitcoin is changed, the original will continue. The enemy of the market may have a short lived advantage using bitcoins value as a starting point, but that is all. The market actors decide what is money, and they will choose the best.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

They go even further, on the LTB show a while back where Gavin and Peter Todd argued about it, Todd very strongly insinuated that Satoshi would agree with him right now.

in Todd's dreams.

 

[solex]

http://www.walmart.com/ip/45822125?u1=8a1835348ae611e59da8e6fb3409ace10000&oid=289955.1&wmlspartner=lw9MynSeamY&sourceid=07079407560200143898&affillinktype=10&veh=aff

Just 15 years ago that $9.82 phone would have looked like it came from another planet, and couldn't have been replicated even if millions of dollars were spent reverse engineering it.

Unfortunately, people like Luke "Dialup" Jr. don't see this, and are looking at the future of Bitcoin framed within today's technology.

 

[Mengerian]

@Peter R I generally agree with your points on a practical level, and you're probably correct in how things would work best. However I think it's also useful to imagine different ways things could play out, and try to explore all the possibilities implied by a concept, if only to help delineate and clarify those ideas in our minds.

That could be made to work, but it seems unnecessary. Since the probability of solving a block is independent to how long you've been working on it, the optimal decision (assuming zero switching time) is to switch to a new block that contains the previous weak block verbatim plus a bunch of new TXs (since this allows you to claim all the fees in the weak block for exactly zero additional orphaning risk).

Yeah, I just gave that example to point out that however the miners choose to work on block solutions is an independent concept from weak blocks. They can choose to build blocks however they want, and they would likely do what you say. The weak block idea is simply a way for them to communicate to the network what they are working on, and is conceptually distinct from their internal block building and solving process.

For the "diff" idea, versus just adding transactions, I pretty much just wanted to explore it as a possibility. You could be right that it's unnecessarily complicated and pointless. But it does follow logically from the concept of communicating a block by referencing a previous weak block and appending changes.

I'm not sure if there's any reason that miners would want to remove transactions, the only reason I can think of right now is if there is a block size limit But I do see it as a market phenomenon, so if miners have some incentive to remove certain transactions then it has a good possibility happening and it's worth thinking about.

 

[cypherdoc]

That spike to 340 means someone is getting itchy fingers. Especially if they think the stock market is starting to roll.

 

[Peter R]

@Peter R I generally agree with your points on a practical level, and you're probably correct in how things would work best. However I think it's also useful to imagine different ways things could play out, and try to explore all the possibilities implied by a concept, if only to help delineate and clarify those ideas in our minds.


Yeah, I just gave that example to point out that however the miners choose to work on block solutions is an independent concept from weak blocks. They can choose to build blocks however they want, and they would likely do what you say. The weak block idea is simply a way for them to communicate to the network what they are working on, and is conceptually distinct from their internal block building and solving process.

For the "diff" idea, versus just adding transactions, I pretty much just wanted to explore it as a possibility. You could be right that it's unnecessarily complicated and pointless. But it does follow logically from the concept of communicating a block by referencing a previous weak block and appending changes.

I'm not sure if there's any reason that miners would want to remove transactions, the only reason I can think of right now is if there is a block size limit But I do see it as a market phenomenon, so if miners have some incentive to remove certain transactions then it has a good possibility happening and it's worth thinking about.

Yes, it is definitely worth thinking about!

On that note, are there any reason why a miner would want to remove a fee-paying transaction from a weak block? Here's what I can come up with:

1. He wants to censor certain transaction so he will remove the TX even though he loses revenue by doing so.

2. He wants to help someone double-spend a zero-conf transaction.

And then what you just pointed out:

3. There is a block size limit and he wants to make room for more higher-paying transactions.

Both #1 and #2 are net negatives for the network, so I would suspect that honest miners wouldn't allow "cherry picking" in this case. I didn't actually think about #3 until you pointed it out. Haha another reason to keep the limit sufficiently high above demand!!

 

[Melbustus]

@Peter R - I saw you jumped into that thread on BCT... I'll probably continue to hop over there every now and then to keep them honest, but as it's mostly just brg444, hdbuck, and icebreaker patting each other on the back, I figured I'd respond to the interesting stuff here:

...
This sort of argument boils down to an assumption that miners are not net economically-rational. If you think that, then you must think that bitcoin can *never* work. Miners being net-econo-rational actually *IS* probably a core axiom that must be accepted for Bitcoin to be viable. So arguments that reject that idea are worthless.
...

Wow, this sort of blew my mind. Can we prove this somehow?

Rigorously? Don't know... At a high level, if more than half of hashpower *isn't* econo-rational, it just becomes impossible to say anything useful; chains could be forked for no predictable reason, etc... If miners *are* net-econorational, we can at least very *clearly* say that no miner would double-spend more than block reward + fees...

But I think that's far too narrow. A rational miner will view their "reward" as the blockreward+fees in the current block, PLUS the net-present-value of their future earnings stream from the business. Thus, probably *much* more than the block reward; hence, if we accept as an axiom that miners are net-econorational, it becomes pretty intuitively clear to me that they'll be long-term coinbase-maxmizing (and therefore fee-maximizing), as well as highly incentivized to find stable equilibria with the rest of the mining community wrt soft-caps (the original context of my comment, in response to brg444's assertion that soft-caps can't work (guess he's ignoring that they *did* work just fine for years)).

And if we did prove this, would it not logically follow that top-down planning à la Core Dev (e.g., using the block size as a policy tool rather than allowing it to emerge naturally) is at best redundant and at worst damaging?

I think this is correct. Seems a corollary to (or special case of) your work...

 

[Peter R]

" I saw you jumped into that thread on BCT... I'll probably continue to hop over there every now and then to keep them honest, but as it's mostly just brg444, hdbuck, and icebreaker patting each other on the back" -- @Melbustus

Yeah we had a good run there. Zarathustra and ZB joined in too and then even Theymos popped by. We should organize a weekly Small-Blocker Smackdown

Heading to bed soon but will reply to the meat of your post later.
[doublepost=1447573387][/doublepost]I see that the latest new member is @AnonyMint. Is this THE AnonyMint?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

And is @dooglus THE dooglus?

 

[Inca]

A major issue that reduces your ability to persuade an outside observer towards your argument is that you seem to think it is ok to pick and choose when an argument is valid. On the one hand you argue that Satoshi's decisions are important when they support your argument, but when someone posts a number of absolutely relevant posts from Satoshi that completely disagree with your position then you decide it is time they must be ignored.

My personal view is that market forces will win the day in this slowly drawn out blocksize drama - not a few developers who were handed over the reins of a single reference client. No end users have voted for a fee market or a blocksize cap and ultimately that will not benefit bitcoin and will be rejected if the economic majority want a different bitcoin as transaction volumes approach the cap.

Arguing that the economic majority cannot be allowed to decide the rules of the protocol is plainly ridiculous as the implementation the majority run is bitcoin - longest valid chain or not, what matters is if it has value. I find the idea of the 21 million limit being raised anathema to me personally, but if the economic majority decide it is to be raised then it will be raised. What makes this an edge case is the threat of catastrophic loss of value to stakeholders in the system, the same powerful economic force which prevents a 51% attack from being attempted even with centralisation of mining.

The only thing that interests me now about the blocksize debate is how the network forks and what form that takes. Major companies in the space like Coinbase and Bitpay are now publicly taking a stand against the Core developer position which is extraordinary on the face of it. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out and whether you and your colleagues who actively promote the limitation of bitcoin with such gusto are happy with the outcome.

Will you still use bitcoin if an industry supported reference client (with a scaling blocksize inbuilt) rapidly garners support and sidelines Core and it's developers?

Thought I would post on that thread for posterity. Brg444 would come across better if he didn't call people 'retards' and 'disingenuous fucks'. He must be pretty young.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Inca

Nice post on BCT!

As for brg444, it's hard to find any poster who posts nearly 100 times a day on a debate topic who doesn't drift into insults. It's easy to get obsessed doing that, regardless of anything else about the person.

 

[albin]

Hong Kong is coming up really soon, just three weeks now. Any hope that something meaningful can come out of it? Or maybe just some consensus theater?