Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[79b79aa8]

> What dent in their margin?

it seems you are arguing that:

(1) weak blocks incentivize miners to mine empty blocks while they wait for others to build strong ones, which is more expensive.

(2) censorship-inclined miners are more likely than neutral ones to incur the extra expense to build strong blocks (putting a dent in their margin in order to further their ideology).

thus

(3) weak blocks could generate a tendency towards transaction censorship.

@albin and I are asking you why one should accept (2).

 

[Peter R]

@Tom Zander

Weak blocks have been coming up more recently because @awemany coded a prototype system of the subchain protocol which is running successfully on the Gigablock Testnet.

It is difficult to talk about the effects of "weak blocks" in general, because there are different types of weak blocks and different ways to use them. When I'm talking about weak blocks, it's normally in the context of the specific type of weak block that is used to implement the subchain protocol.

With the subchain protocol, there is no additional cost to create weak blocks. These "weak blocks" are a natural byproduct of the mining process. They occur when a miner looking for a strong block has a "near miss" -- a nonce that results in a hash with not quite enough leading zeros to be a strong block. Something all miners create anyways and just throw away. As such, there is no cost to create them. There is only the choice of propagating them when you find them.

Indeed a certain miner could decide not to add a new layer of transactions to an already-propagated weak block. He would just modify the coinbase transactions and mine away on the new Merkle root. Should he find a strong block, it will propagate very quickly because the only information he needs to communicate is his block header, coinbase transaction, and a pointer to the weak block template he used. But of course, he would then be losing out by not adding additional fee paying transactions to his block, and thus earning less profit than he otherwise could.

To me this as the same as what happens today with miners mining empty blocks upon a previous strong block today -- just happening at a finer time scale. With subchains, a miner is still free to add new transactions to his block template if it is worth the added cost (orphaning risk, etc.).

I see no reason why weak blocks of the type I'm imagining would decrease censorship resistance. On the contrary, since it takes less PoW to make a weak block than a strong block, once could argue that it would increase censorship resistance since one can get a valid TX into the subchain more easily.

 

[hodl]

The mad scramble continues. The confusion and panic is palpable:

http://www.darkwebguide.net/worlds-central-bank-crypto-could-risk-bank-runs/amp/

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

If anybody loves green tee, teasenz.com ships directly from china worldwide for Bch. They disabled BTC after fee desaster, but if you ask, they take Bch directly. No middle men at all!

I researched the history of scaling wars, back to 2013. It's even worse than I remembered. Nearly no one except blockstream stuff liked segwit softfork ... And Jeff and Gavin saw the political instrumentalization of the 1mb limit in 2015 ... It just got worse and worse

 

[jessquit]

@Peter R I like the weak blocks proposal. Always have. Though I like the term fastblocks or fast confirms better than "weak" anything.

I think the ability to get a fast confirm that is very unlikely to reverse while maintaining "original 10 min security" is a "killer feature" for BCH.

 

[Bagatell]

Use cases for re-enabled op codes in May protocol upgrade

 

[Richy_T]

And what happens when not enough miners signal for the rule changes? We have already seen how that plays out in the block size debate.

Then it doesn't happen. We didn't really get to see how it played out in the block size debate properly for various reasons, not least because of the stunning combination of Segwit fuckery and S2X idiocy. The BU way was gaining ground. It was slow and I'm not saying it was inevitable but progress was ongoing.

I also support full chain splits if necessary. I just think the model of devs forcing things through is one we should be learning to recoil from.

 

[rocks]

@Richy_T fair enough. I guess my concern remains that this makes network improvements very difficult to impossible because you need a super majority of miners to opt into something but by default they do nothing.

To me the Aug fork was not just about forcing the blocksize issue but also to implement a BCH+ model which was part of the vision circa 2013. This implies a series of UAHFs to enable op codes, add extension blocks to enable zero knowledge proofs, etc., until we catch up to the original BTC vision of including more basic functionality.

After this initial phase I agree it is better for developers to not have full control and the process to change consensus rules should be gated with miner support required.

But the improvements planned for May 2018 should be considered as part of the Aug fork plan and vision and should not be gated. If they don't happen in May I'd have to question if my BCH stake is better placed in ETH as I do not believe BCH has a couple of years to wait on improving functionality over BTC. The main thing BCH has going for it right now is a belief that more functionality is coming, if it doesn't....

that quote from Greg was not posted in 2009. probably sometime in 2016-17.

Yes thanks, my bad I read that image too quickly. To be fair a bias to jump to the worst possible conclusion regarding Greg is not entirely unwarranted given our history...

 

[solex]

Co-incidentally, the website Zerohedge was launched very close to the launch date of Bitcoin in January 2009. As it happened, I became a subscriber to ZH very much earlier than hearing about Bitcoin. However, I look back and see that it was in no small part due to being an avid reader of the hard-money articles and sources linked on ZH, which made it possible to quickly appreciate the potential of Bitcoin as 21st century hard-money.

So, I still regularly read it, and now find it an external lens into the cryptocurrency space which gives a refreshing viewpoint after spending so much time looking from the inside.

I find this graphic from today's news, to be an external view, unencumbered by the emotion of being involved and devoid of the tribalism that seems to surround each cryptocurrency.

It speaks for itself, highlighting that 9 years in we are seeing an evolving specialisation, where peer-to-peer cash is a decreasing slice of the total landscape of applications. It places BCH squarely in the "conventional" grouping. Well, that is a fair assessment, but is it where the maximum value will remain? My view still leans for absorbing some of the other functionalities, particularly of tokens and smart contracts, to allow BCH to become the Amazon of this revolution in finance.

 

[Inca]

What would any of you say are the main use cases for enabling historic opcodes on BCH?

Is there a possibility the enemies of BCH who we know to be highly malicious could use them to enact some kind of attack upon BCH?

Seems like an exciting update, with further improvements to the codebase likely to drive up the value of the BCH ecosystem going forwards. Well done, chaps.

 

[hodl]

Slow and careful, hmm. But how would you feel if everyone went with the competition in the time you have no product on the market?

oh c'mon. you think BCH with it's big block philosophy for onchain scaling isn't a product unto itself? i'm patiently reading all the varied comments on this subject while trying to remain open to the WoW platform concept of being everything to everyone, but your comment is ridiculous. you think that if BCH became the next world reserve currency as a dumb token, and nothing else, that wouldn't be a huge thing?
[doublepost=1521134542,1521133693][/doublepost]

It's pretty easy to fuck up the one thing that makes your product so valuable, being good money.

Bitcoin Cash is the conservative plan for a worldwide currency. It shouldn't become a testbed for half-baked "solutions" and fancy tech stuff out of fear of the competition.


If anybody thinks, that Ethereum got that big because of smart contracts, they haven't been following the events in the last years very carefully.

Bitcoin would be at 90+ % marketcap share if Bip101 would have been deployed. Without new opcodes or anything.

this is really true. i'm sorry but i think the XCP ppl (and Ethereum) are trying to shoehorn their metacoin into BCH using the half baked argument that their failures, and especially BTC's failures, are a direct result of the core devs not cooperating with them.

 

[theZerg]

I don't think that bch will become the next world reserve currency if it remains solely a payments network. Additional functionality that opens tremendous addtl utility is too easy to add.

We need to break "the merchant doesn't accept because consumer doesn't use because merchant..." cycle by enabling compelling use cases even if these uses ultimately are a fraction of the payment network use case.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

I prefer doing everything that makes Bitcoin Cash good P2P Cash, instead of making it the Icer Dicer of Blockchain.

https://www.bader.de/celum/celum_assets/2011HE9_0002034FS020_520330_eps_1_local_l_rd_local_l_rd.jpg/x19565-000_genius-nicer-dicer-plus-kompakt-9-teilig.jpg.pagespeed.ic.GeaCl4pDOL.jpg

I like the idea of adding token, fancy smart contracts, more privacy.

The thing that makes me optimistic these days is that Bitcoin Cash has a lot of energy towards everything payment. New wallets, tippbots, BitPay, a commitment to supporting 0-conf instead of scorching it ... I think this should be a priority, a must-have -. strengthening all kind of payments. Everything else is more a nice-to-have

 

[hodl]

I don't think that bch will become the next world reserve currency if it remains solely a payments network.

no one ever said it should only be a payments network. that's only half the equation. it should also be a SOV, which would be doubtful if you let a bunch competing metacoins or assets into the BCH wheelhouse (as @NewLiberty once used the term) that attract their own investment dollars. those would be dilutional.

Additional functionality that opens tremendous addtl utility is too easy to add.

of course, it's software, only limited by devs imagination. it's called an "abstraction boundary" as someone on reddit said. IOW, there are no bounds. does that mean every idea is a good one?

We need to break "the merchant doesn't accept because consumer doesn't use because merchant..." cycle by enabling compelling use cases even if these uses ultimately are a fraction of the payment network use case.

did you ever believe in a pure deflationary, fixed supply currency?

My view still leans for absorbing some of the other functionalities, particularly of tokens and smart contracts, to allow BCH to become the Amazon of this revolution in finance.

what do all these competing assets do for the value of a single BCH? imo, it dilutes it, preventing BCH from ever becoming a unit of account worldwide. if that's the case, forget world reserve currency and forget disrupting central banks.

based on these two comments from the both of you, as well as from @Peter R, is it the official BU position that BCH should attempt to become the new Amazon (WoW) of the cryptocurrency space? i just want to clarify. if so, everyone should see here that we've moved well beyond this concept of simply enabling previous OP_CODES for simple mathematical functions for smart contracting and optimization of the BCH blockchain.

 

[Tom Zander]

@Peter R ... Though I like the term fastblocks or fast confirms better than "weak" anything.

After reading the first explanation I heard on this topic from Peters post above, I have to agree that the name "weakblocks" is less than grand.

If for no other reason as that it is not the same technology by the same name from years ago. And, yeah, calling it "weak"-anything is not good marketing.

The proposal is interesting. Actual results needed to see what difference it actually makes.

 

[solex]

@hodl

is it the official BU position that BCH should attempt to become the new Amazon (WoW)

As I mentioned the other day, the official position of BU is what is in the BUIPs, not opinions of officers and members which are laid out here to generate feedback and debate. The vast majority of BUIPs enhance the capabilities of Bitcoin (now Bitcoin Cash) as peer-to-peer currency, exactly as you envisage. BU and nChain have jointly spent over $50k to build and deploy the Gigablock Testnet for scaling purposes with p2p flow in mind.

I see the OP codes enabling scripting features which will generate market-share growth in directions we can't fully predict, except for the one constant being that users who are making use of sophisticated scripting features will do more p2p transactions onchain. So, the enhanced functionality is a means to an end of driving p2p currency usage. Perhaps "Amazon" is not the best choice of word to describe a wider footprint in the cryptocurrency space.

The diluting/siphoning of value is a point you make which is hard to pin down numerically. When BCH was launched we saw an unlocking of value from BTC rather than a siphoning of value. I think that the ERC20 tokens on ETH have similarly unlocked value rather than siphoned from the ETH unit, hence we are likely to see the same in BCH if it supports other tokens natively e.g. like in OP_GROUP.

Peter was being open-minded about the issue when he posted this question on twitter. It got significant feedback which is probably a reasonable reflection of opinion from the community.

 

[solex]

Changing the point somewhat. Since Bitcoin Cash was launched there has been a non-stop drive for p2p adoption. Hundreds, if not thousands of people have made real-world business decisions and publicity initiatives to drive up adoption and usage. This is ongoing and not stopping. I am reading on reddit how people are liking the cheering of businesses accepting BCH, just like it was in 2012/13 for BTC.

So, with BitPay and Coinbase onboard, and many other companies, where is the adoption effort headed in the next 6 months? The conference will provide some boost, but what is the overall trend of p2p adoption? This chart shows that BCH is not making much of a gain compared to LTC's market-share (for example).
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-ltc-bch.html#6m

Time to think outside the box.

 

[79b79aa8]

@hodl, i appreciate your conservative instinct. it is imperative to make sure no situation arises in which someone loses funds due to an unforeseen Script exploit. the moment that happens BCH ceases to function as money -- one mistake is all it takes.

on the other hand, we can assume all of us want to see an evolution of monetary functions (brought to the absurd limit, the conservative position is to only accept physical gold as money, on the grounds that presumed improvements could lead to unforeseen losses). in addition, adoption must increase fast, and other things equal innovative use cases drive it. let's not lose sight of the fact that BCH is still not even handling 1 tps.

with that in mind i would like to get a firmer hold on your objections to added functionality, and in particular your animosity towards metacoins. if such schemes generate paying on-chain txns and under the assumption the security model is not affected, what exactly is the grave sin? what do you mean by 'dilution'?

 

[Norway]

I'm starting my first open source project. It's called

Ka-ching!

The goal of the Ka-ching project is to make NFC payments with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as convenient as possible with reasonable security.

Picture this: You pay for your goods by holding your ring against the NFC POS terminal in a store. Ka-ching! You have now paid with Bitcoin Cash.

Is this user experience too good to be true? What about security!!!???!!!


https://bitco.in/forum/threads/the-ka-ching-project.10113/

 

[theZerg]

no one ever said it should only be a payments network. that's only half the equation. it should also be a SOV, which would be doubtful if you let a bunch competing metacoins or assets into the BCH wheelhouse (as @NewLiberty once used the term) that attract their own investment dollars. those would be dilutional.

If you believe that some trust-based representative token, stock or bond is going to somehow replace BCH, you don't understand the advantages of cryptocurrency. But I know that you do so I think you haven't really thought it through.

Likewise, the idea that BCH will capture all storage of value is a complete fantasy. Stocks, bonds, land, PMs will all have a role. Anything that has utility and scarcity can become a store of value. By increasing BCHes utility we will increase its value, but you aren't going to convince people that land has no value, or that TSLA is a worthless investment just because BCH exists.

of course, it's software, only limited by devs imagination. it's called an "abstraction boundary" as someone on reddit said. IOW, there are no bounds. does that mean every idea is a good one?

did you ever believe in a pure deflationary, fixed supply currency?

Every idea a good one? A backhanded accusation of inflationary policy, which has no relation to the discussion at hand?

Did a troll suddenly wake up and take over your keyboard?

what do all these competing assets do for the value of a single BCH? imo, it dilutes it, preventing BCH from ever becoming a unit of account worldwide. if that's the case, forget world reserve currency and forget disrupting central banks.

based on these two comments from the both of you, as well as from @Peter R, is it the official BU position that BCH should attempt to become the new Amazon (WoW) of the cryptocurrency space? i just want to clarify. if so, everyone should see here that we've moved well beyond this concept of simply enabling previous OP_CODES for simple mathematical functions for smart contracting and optimization of the BCH blockchain.

You are simply wrong that tokenized assets dilutes BCH. There will only be one native, limited quantity cryptocurrency (BCH) that is used as the money to exchange all the mortgages, stocks, bonds, tickets, coupons, etc placed on the blockchain. Sure, someone could put USD on there as an asset (but you are trusting that someone). And if doing so was that compelling, companies would already do that in their own phone apps -- oh yeah applepay, googlepay, samsungpay, wechat. So that train (convenient phone payment apps) has left the station and crypto is fine.

What will dilute BCH is if someone creates a completely separate blockchain with their own limited supply XYZ crypto that supports stocks and P2P wagers and fantasy football and subway tickets and so everyone who wants to trade those stocks, make bets with friends, play a ff league, or buy a tix has to do so with XYZ and not BCH as the intermediary.

Or native tokens will be blocked on BCH and someone will make a meta-blockchain in OP_RETURN and add their own crypto maybe called XCP to dilute the utility of BCH. Of course, in that case you STILL have to move from BCH to XCP to token, and pay fees in BCH so its almost certainly better for BCH valuation than that same facility existing on the completely unrelated XYZ blockchain.