Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

solex

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Aug 22, 2015
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Great presentation by Peter Rizun and Andrew Stone on the first Gigablock Testnet results at Stanford. Example of a bottleneck found and resolved. Lots of optimisation is theoretically possible in the Satoshi client software allowing very high transaction throughput.
 

molecular

Active Member
Aug 31, 2015
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@NewLibertyAnother option for the next HF is to target 1 minute blocks with 0.1x rewards.
I'm not a fan of faster blocks because I don't think they really provide any more security for the bricks-and-mortar retailers.
Non-applicability to a certain use-case is not a good reason, imo.

It *does* provide a definite a clear upside for cases where you *want* to wait for a confirmation, though. Street deals, for example (not everyone is a bricks-and-mortar retailer): I vividly recall waiting for blocks for around and hour on multiple occasions, zipping bad coffee in unpleasant surroundings, or even standing in the rain on one occasion. Such trades often necessitate 1-conf, if not for purely security reasons, then at least for building confidence and not leaving the buyer with an uneasy feeling until the first confirmation. I just had it as a rule, also for educational purposes.

There's another clear upside: public perception: "Bitcoin Cash just got 10 times faster!".

Also: I don't see any downside. Security-wise: just wait for 10 times as many confirmations as you did before.
[doublepost=1509875851][/doublepost]
I'm not sure we need a block time target at all. Let miners mine at any difficulty for a proportionately lower reward. A market mechanism would emerge where miners converge on the best block time for network conditions and the demands of users (which I suspect would be less than 10 min).
fucking hell, yes man. On first sight this seems like a great idea. Any potential problems with that approach? I know the smallblockers will have issues with it and will want to introduce a rule to limit the number of transactions "per time" (instead of "per block").
 

solex

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Aug 22, 2015
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@molecular
Exactly. Perception means a lot. After doing both LTC and ETH txns recently the fast confirms which quickly count up is very satisfying. BTC is glacial and topped with some high-fee pain the glacial is getting really annoying. It's a turnoff.

Bitcoin Cash is cheap to send but the confirms can be very slow. The 10 minute paradigm was good for many years, but competition is fierce and users expect better.
Damn right that "Cash just got 10x faster" is a powerful meme in the global battle for users, market share and increased price!

Also, as @Peter R points out a flexible target for pro-rata rewards, at miner discretion, warrants serious investigation as an even better improvement.
 

Tom Zander

Active Member
Jun 2, 2016
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That's a distressing finding. Could you please share detailed results so we can try reproduce this. Apologies if I missed a link.
At first I only noticed it visibly, which is the reason why I wrote a visual simulator. So I added a statistics calculator to it and did the average over 5000 blocks, and all I had to do is keep the hashrate steady. (I don't understand how I can set or modify hashrate in the python app, so I don't see the usefulness of the app to actually understand specific scenarios).

If you compile master and look at the stderr where my quick & dirty statistics output is printed every 500 blocks, you'll notice the offset I'm talking about. After 5000 blocks are mined it will show you the rolling average over those.

You can compile the app from; https://github.com/zander/difficultySim

ps. the actual algo for generating blocks is identical, for as much as C++ and python can be.

ps2. I was considering compiling a stand-alone app so people can just download the exe, but since any such research is now useless I can't be bothered.
 

awemany

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Aug 19, 2015
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@throwaway : Fair point. I guess what I do not like to see is systematic deviance from the 10min mean due to the algorithm used.

That Satoshi's DAA also produces less than 10min average block times so far due to the growth of hash rate - well I think that's acceptable as long as it is symmetric (shrinking hash rate -> longer blocks) - and a status quo argument can be applied here as well.

Now, whether that kind of systematic deviance is actually happening in Cash, I don't know. But the fact that it doesn't seem to be sufficiently explored yet makes me wonder whether the DAA change is rushed.

(Note I am still one of the few big blockers who sees BCH as solely insurance)
[doublepost=1509902748][/doublepost]@Peter R , @theZerg , @sickpig : Awesome presentation at Stanford, I just watched it!

Real data, real measurements, down to earth, exactly what Bitcoin needs. I looked at the schedule for the conf and it looks like there's otherwise quite some stuff in there that doesn't seem particularly related to actually scaling Bitcoin.
 

freetrader

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Dec 16, 2015
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Thanks @Tom Zander .
I tried reproducing it, but I think I don't see the 5% effect you mention.
Firstly, I applied this little patch to set the default algorithm to cw144 right from the sim start.
I let it run with the two default miners, hashrates untouched.

The "Average" values that it emits are pretty close to 10 mins (ignoring the difficulty ramp up at the beginning in the first interval).
Below are the values I got (stopped the sim after a while).
I don't really see this persistently increased average block speed that you claim.
576 blocks
Average: 294 seconds per block (<--- ignoring this, difficulty is initially adjusting to hash)
576 blocks
Average: 594 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 606 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 601 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 603 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 593 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 605 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 557 seconds per block (<--- 1st long-range average skewed by initial ramp?)
576 blocks
Average: 601 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 601 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 605 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 602 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 602 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 601 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 618 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 604 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 587 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 601 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 601 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 602 seconds per block
576 blocks
Average: 599 seconds per block
4032 blocks
Average: 602 seconds per block
What am I doing differently than you that I'm getting different results?

P.S. neat simulator!
 
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Zarathustra

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Aug 28, 2015
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3,797
In tend to agree:

"Engineer A: we need black for its heat-absorbing properties -- Engineer B: no, we need white for its REFLECTIVE properties -- Barry Silbert: "Eureka! The answer is gray!"


"Segwit2X was always a stupid political compromise made by people with a dim view of the technical underpinnings of the situation.

What we have in Bitcoin is a divergence of opinion as to what we are supposed to be building.

One group thinks we should be building a "settlement layer" for "Banking 2.0" aka Lightning Network (that's not a pejorative statement, either - if you're "settling" on L1 then the thing you're doing on L2 is "banking") and therefore capacity should be kept limited to push use-cases offchain. The 1X / 2X dispute is merely a question of "how limited should onchain be."

The other group thinks we should be building "P2P cash" which requires us to scale up onchain as much as possible, full-stop.

These are mutually opposed points of view. It's like one half of a group of expeditioners wants to go east, the other half wants to go west. Barry Silbert appears and says, "let's go north!" That's no "compromise."

Another way to see SW2X for what it is, is the ice-cream vendor analogy.

Let's say you are selling ice cream. Half your customers want strawberry. The other half want chocolate. Is the solution to make one flavor - "Strawberry-Chocolate?" Will that increase your sales?

Folks, we already got a divorce. Big blockers have Bitcoin Cash. Small blockers have SW1X. The only people arguing for SW2X at this point are people who would argue for gray paint, the north route, strawberry-chocolate. It's just dumb." u/jessquit
 

solex

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Staff member
Aug 22, 2015
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Bizarre cognitive dissonance from small-blockers at Stanford.
Enthusiasm for hardening transaction propagation against theoretical disruption, when high fees and unreliable confirmation times from a fixed block size limit is developer induced, clear and present, disruption.
 

satoshis_sockpuppet

Active Member
Feb 22, 2016
776
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is there a graceful way for j. garzik to let SW2X go and get on board with bitcoin cash?
At this point I don't want Bitcoin cash to "win the war".

Letting SW2X die will create a huge mess and Bitcoin will definitely lose it's number one spot to Ethereum. I hope the miners know that. SW2X is an update to Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash a spinoff. And after so much time, a flippening will be highly disruptive and not good for Bitcoin.

@solex
It's the same bullshit as the "Blockstream satellite". The 1 MB limit has become so ridiculous, they'll create the next reason why we have to keep Bitcoin ultrasmall. For now a full node must be able to run on a Raspberry Pi, the next move is that a full node must be able to run without any internet connection.

How can the attack on Bitcoin not be obvious to every thinking person? For years now, they openly work on keeping Bitcoin small and irrelevant.
 

Tom Zander

Active Member
Jun 2, 2016
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Letting SW2X die will create a huge mess and Bitcoin will definitely lose it's number one spot to Ethereum. I hope the miners know that. SW2X is an update to Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash a spinoff. And after so much time, a flippening will be highly disruptive and not good for Bitcoin.
I want to point out that "the flippening" is a very different event from letting SW2X die off.

I fully agree that letting anything that is today BTC die off in the upcoming fork will be highly disruptive and not very beneficial to Crypto as a whole.

But "the flippening" is a very different story. This event is not something the miners have control over, it is the market slowly moving value from BTC to BCH. As we have seen in the past, just having BCH be more profitable to mine does not mean 100% of the miners stop mining it. Especially since the updated DAA adjusts quickly to added hashpower and thus keeps the equilibrium between the price of BCH and the profitability a linear line based on the actual price.
With the blocks being twice the size on BTC, I am sure we'll see congestion, but not all out panic and complete loss of confidence in Crypto as a whole.

Or, in simple words; we'll slowly see more haspower being added to BCH as the price rises with no 40 blocks/hour silliness and equally slowly we'll see the hashpower drain away from BTC.
Markets move slowly, especially uncertain ones which are played mostly by day-traders.

But please don't take this as investment advice. I won't take responsibility for your choices
 

satoshis_sockpuppet

Active Member
Feb 22, 2016
776
3,312
@Tom Zander
If this is what will happen it's fine. But people start arguing, that miners should boycott SW2X to give Bitcoin cash more value and that's not very wise imho. And I'd argue, that a successful SW2X fork that destroys the core chain could be a death blow to cash mid/long term as well.

We will see!

On another topic, sorry for the gossip, but if anybody of you needs some soap opera drama from luke-jr, please read this twitter thread:

My personal highlight of a "bitcoin twitter debate" between the crypto-wizards Charlie Lee and Luke-jr:
 

Zarathustra

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Aug 28, 2015
1,439
3,797
At this point I don't want Bitcoin cash to "win the war".
I do!

Letting SW2X die will create a huge mess and Bitcoin will definitely lose it's number one spot to Ethereum.
Why? Bitcoin then simply scales into Bitcoin Cash and absorbes all transactions that can't be done on the Segwit chain.

I hope the miners know that. SW2X is an update to Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash a spinoff. And after so much time, a flippening will be highly disruptive and not good for Bitcoin.
Numerous academic studies have demonstrated that spin-offs outperform the overall market by a large margin. Spin-offs as a group, outperform the broader stock market. Over the past 14 years (from 12/21/02 to 12/30/16) the Bloomberg US Spun-Off Index returned 714%, while the S&P 500 Index returned 155%.

Why do spin-offs prosper? Much of the impressive performance comes from the altered dynamics of the spun-off business and its parent. Spins do well partly because when a business and its management are freed from a large corporate entity, pent-up entrepreneurial forces are unleashed. The combination of accountability, responsibility and more direct incentives take their natural course. Managers have greater freedom to pursue new ventures, streamline production, and pare overhead. After the spin-off, stock options can more directly compensate management of the new company. This often leads to improved operating performance over time. When one reconstitutes the parent and spin-off after a one to two year period, often outstanding overall returns are observed.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/joecornell/2017/01/05/the-top-15-spin-offs-of-2016/#1c57324d204d