Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Richy_T]

what is the perfect shape of this chart?

Well, that would be every block being at precisely 10 minutes

 

[molecular]

@molecular: Incidentally, I am working on weak blocks for BUcash (and eventually ABC as well) right now.

This is awesome!

Interesting graphs, thank you very much!
Nitpick: I think a simple exponential is not called a long tail distribution?

Thanks for the correction. I'm not very literate with these things.

What I find really interesting is that there's a drop and what looks like another exponential at the 25min mark in all of your curves where the statistics are large enough to show this effect? WTF?

WTF indeed. The effect seems to come from early data. Look at this:

It's almost like there was some sort of an EDA in early Bitcoin that kicked in at around 25 minutes. I also have no idea regarding the lack of blocks < 5 minutes. Maybe Satoshi throttled deliberately for some reason.

Anyone know anything about that?

 

[Peter R]

Very cool observation, @molecular and @awemany! I wonder what the explanation is.

 

[AdrianX]

it's happening:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7ignzh/widespread_bitcoin_adoption_is_going_to_result_in/

Years of stagnancy, scope-creep, and miserably slow timelines. Apathetic attitudes and arrogance. Complete disregard for anyone outside of the tiny microcosm of those who hold the keys to the repository.

Those days are soon ending.

As the narrative on CNBC and in the general public begins to describe Bitcoin as an "alternative to government fiat systems and federal banking", the store of value/settlement layer bullshit fueled by an obvious conflict of interest related to a single for-profit entity (Blockstream) isn't going to fly when the big boys of development swarm into this space.

A whole stadium full of financial services entrepreneurs and providers who want to coopt Bitcoin are going to start "making expectations" of the protocol development.

A whole stadium full of cryptographers and engineers capable of reading the White Paper are going to start asking the same questions we ask, and calling BS on the answers just like we have. They will neither care, nor put up with changing Bitcoins entire reason for existing, and they are not going to give a rats ass about a single for-profit company (blockstream) nor its goals.

The whole Bitcoin development world is about to get a swift kick in the ass as these businesses, developers, and far more qualified individuals start "participating" in the direction of Bitcoin. I believe (hope) that the days of a Adam and Greg operating in a vacuum are numbered.

I believe the awareness of conflict of interest that is "Blockstream" will be amplified a thousand-fold over the next 12 to 24 months, as intelligent, non-brainwashed individuals begin to ask questions. These people dont rewrite White Papers. They know proper timelines and how to manage projects effectively. And most of all, they know Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, and they're going to want to know why its been changed. The narrative intended to fool the stupid masses isn't going to work on the types of people who are coming. It will no longer be just "Roger and Jihan" making the complaints.

This is incredibly good for lovers of Bitcoin - whether or not you are a Bitcoin Cash maximalist. At the end of the day, I truly believe that Core has operated in a tiny, hidden cave with little outside pressure to perform, deliver, or even play nice with others in the ecosystem. I think this is about to change significantly.

Whether Bitcoin Cash succeeds or fails, there is no doubt it has lit a fire under Cores ass to start performing or be replaced. And I believe (hope) that a lot of very intelligent, rational people are going to come to the same conclusions all of us have. Because - simply put - its common sense. I believe our voice will get much louder soon. Through all these new participants.

**TLDR: A lot more people will be entering the Bitcoin Dev / Business scene soon, and they wont be easily brainwashed by irrational narratives, nor will they put up with incompetence. Major conflicts of interest like Blockstream will likely be called out and condemned. **

Thoughts?

 

[awemany]

@molecular, @Peter R.: I was looking for more info on this. In the process of doing so, I found this, which is maybe unrelated but interesting nonetheless:

https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/a-distinguisher-for-sha256-using-bitcoin-mining-faster-along-the-way/

Uhoh. SHA256 outputs being biased doesn't sound like something I really like to hear. However, what I am missing from that above analysis is exactly the exclusion of the kind of strong oddities like your block time hist or the nonce oddity below. Maybe this is just a red herring, a second order effect from the kind of unexplained, somewhat spooky imbalances in the early history.

I think they should redo their analysis only with blocks since Bitcoin is well-known.

There is the old nonce oddity of the suspected-to-be Satoshi-mined blocks:

https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/

But I haven't found anything on the time histogram. Is this known already?

 

[Peter R]

@awemany: I've never seen the odd time histogram for early blocks discussed. This is a new discovery as far as I know.

 

[awemany]

Honestly, how do you even make them? The only thing I can imagine is to have a lot of hash power on idle which finds lots of blocks but basically doing block withholding!

???!???!???

 

[Peter R]

Another way without block withholding would be to start mining a new block with (for example) 5% of your hash power, if no block is found by 5 minutes, increase to 20%, and if no block is found by 25 minutes, increase to 100%.

 

[awemany]

Yes. That would be a way to do it as well. But shape-wise, I'd expect this to be used to basically steepen the decay on the right end. But then this strange bump also around 5..10min!

Given how fucking steep it drops off after 25min would point to an extreme amount of hash power employed in the early days, or am I mistaken?

Any guess as to what the objective might have been for that time histogram?

Maybe regularizing block times wasn't even the main goal. Maybe this was a side-effect of something else?

What if multiple computers with slightly different clocks are used for mining? I still can't see how that explains the step drop, but maybe that explains the peak around 5..8 min? Two computers with vastly out of sync clocks?

Very spooky. Fuck this is interesting.

 

[molecular]

Honestly, how do you even make them?

You put into the consensus rules: If no block is found for 25 minutes, you're allowed to mine at x% difficulty.

Waaaait, I see how that's easily verifyable to not have happened (look at the difficulty)... too tired to do that now, but assuming this wasn't what was done I have no clue whatsoever how these could've been mined at all, either.

That's really dubious. "spooky"? actually yeah: that's a bit spooky. I say: "aliens"!
[doublepost=1512766303,1512765437][/doublepost]

Another way without block withholding would be to start mining a new block with (for example) 5% of your hash power, if no block is found by 5 minutes, increase to 20%, and if no block is found by 25 minutes, increase to 100%.

This makes the most sense to me at this point.

Let's call this the "throttling theory".

Makes sense: first batch of hashrate is added after 5 minutes as you suggest. This explains the way-too-low block-count < 5 minutes. After an initial hefty increase of the hashrate, more is added constantly. This explains why there's no "exponential dropoff" from 5 minutes to 24 minutes but more of a linear decrease. At the 25 minute mark the full hashrate is finally added (again as you suggest) and we see the expected "exponential dropoff" curve for the next couple bars, pretty much leveling out at ~ 30 minutes.

As for the motivation for this? I have no idea... keep the system more accessible to new miners (not drive them away by not letting them have a block) while not having too large block intervals could be an explanation.

The "clock offset" idea is interesting, too, but I think less likely.

 

[molecular]

doesn't really give more info, but here's a histogram with bin size = 6 seconds.

The first bar (0 to 6 seconds) includes negative values, btw. This is an indication that clocks aren't synchronized.

 

[molecular]

in support of the "clock offset" idea I extended the histogram into the negative:

Note the bar at -20? There's 17 blocks in that bin. I think block time isn't allowed to be more than 20 minutes prior to the previous block? So the "real" clock offset could be much greater (maybe an hour?) and many invalid blocks were mined?

Could this explain the whole weirdness? Not sure, can't wrap my head around it.

More questions, though: why no blocks at -19, -18, ..., -10, -9 ?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Maybe a block not being found for a long time increases the profitability (mempool fees rise) and miners hop over from BCH?

Bingo. I was just thinking about this. Indeed, from the few blocks I glanced at, it appears that when there is a dry spell the next block often has substantially higher total fees. Like an extra 2BTC worth. This actually helps damp the long tail as more miners see the money piling up and switch.

 

[Jonathan Vaage]

Noticed Norway got bumped off of Twitter a few days ago. Good thing I snapped this gem for posterity. Haha. The Viking spirit never dies!

 

[torusJKL]

The first part was too much. But the second part has something.

Our weapon is competition. Our power is trade. Our battlefield is the market.

 

[go1111111]

Long term it seems clear that Core's plan cannot work

I'm less sure of this than I was before.

I've been thinking more about whether a store of value (SoV) coin can be "stable" at a high valuation when SoV is its only use case. Now I think if the network effect gets enough of a head start, it might be stable (25% chance?).

Think about it like this: users of the iPhone are willing to pay a lot more money for just a small increase in polish and 'feel'. Suppose for wealthy people and organizations who want to store value, the brand of BTC, the fact that it's already established as a schelling point for SoV, and Core's extreme paranoia about centralization serves the same purpose as the iPhone's 2% advantage in "feel" over android. Maybe they're willing to pay high transaction fees for that.

Of course, a SoV that was also a medium of exchange would be even better because its network effects would synergize. But in the startup world they say that a new entrant will sometimes have to be 10x better than existing solutions to take over its market (likely this only applies to markets with some network effect).

Suppose the SoV network effect is strong. Is BCH 10x better than BTC as cash? Definitely. Is BCH 10x better than BTC as a SoV? Maybe not. Especially if BTC runs up to $100k. Its SoV network effect may be established enough to present that kind of "10x challenge" to BCH.

Of course, I also think there's a decent chance that in that scenario BTC would just slowly bleed SoV users to BCH. There's a lot of uncertainty because we don't know how strong these network effects are with cryptocurrencies.

 

[79b79aa8]

i had two transactions stuck for two days in the mempool. i had chosen the highest fees my wallet proposed (something like US$7.50 / txn, for straightforward single output transactions).
my exchange, which means business, pre-credited the txn's the moment they hit the network. i traded a highly volatile market. two days later it was impossible to tell what was going on with those trades.
it was suggested i use an accelerator, or a complicated child-pays-for-parent scheme. both suggestions were discouraged by others, and in any case proved unfeasible. i refuse to even consider RBF, and so does my wallet.
in the end, the transactions cleared and i did not lose a lot of money. i also did not make a lot of money.
it was not pleasant. it was not a polished feeling.

 

[majamalu]

I'm less sure of this than I was before.

Think about it like this: users of the iPhone are willing to pay a lot more money for just a small increase in polish and 'feel'.

I would agree with you if they were willing to pay 1000 times more for each operation they do with the smartphone.

There's a lot of uncertainty because we don't know how strong these network effects are with cryptocurrencies.

It doesn't matter how strong the network effect is, if Facebook starts charging $ 20 per message sent, it will be replaced sooner rather than later.

 

[79b79aa8]

the crucial point is that bitcoin cash inherited bitcoin legacy's distribution, and does not have to rebuild the network from scratch. forks are fundamentally different from altcoins.

 

[awemany]

Promoting LTC (or similar) over BCH for cheap on-chain payments shows exactly where the incentives of the Core folks lie. It is really impressive how newbies still eat their shit up.

The most friendly explanation is that they hate the guts of all of us for daring to speak up against them. But they're the winners - both in terms of having SegWit and no 2x - and (for now ...) price-wise as well. So psychologically, and in case they believe we're posing no threat, pointing towards BCH as the quick and cheap way to do on-chain payments (although it will all fall apart in their minds due to centralization eventually) should be a no-brainer for them.

Because BCH would actually grow the same mining ecosystem underlying BTC as well, whereas pushing LTC would grow a competing ecosystem.

And in case that they really believe their LN works out in the awesomeness that they argue it will (hint: It won't, and they know it), BTC can then easily absorb the former BCH hashpower.

The only exception of someone who seems at least half-friendly to BCH is Luke. Maybe one should point that out.