Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

@Mengerian:

Indeed, CSW's obstinance in admitting his mistakes resulted in people getting their hands dirty with the selfish-mining math and in the processes learning more about bitcoin mining, difficulty adjustments, and chain re-orgs.

In other news, it turns out that Sections 3 (minus 3.1), 4, 5 and 6 of CSW's "Selfish Mining Fallacy" paper were copied from Liu & Wang:

 

[witly]

I also just started to look into SM issue. One thing I found all the simulations are missing is to take time into consideration. If I understand CSW's blog correctly, a miner who does selfish mining (even when alpha > 0.3) will mine less blocks (less revenue) in a given period than would the miner mine honestly even though SMers gain an advantage over HMers relatively. SM is lose-lose game while HMM is win-win game.

It seems that the longer Craig Wright campaigns against Selfish Mining, the more people come to realize that the result, though counter-intuitive, is correct.

Some recent examples:


https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8b2uah/i_built_a_selfish_mining_simulator_in_javascript/

https://www.yours.org/content/a-javascript-selfish-mining-simulator-4c123c97b8a3

https://www.yours.org/content/selfish-mining-for-the-laymen---part-ii-a33d56e4e61c

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8avoa3/psa_i_have_been_down_the_sm_rabbit_hole_for_weeks/ (This last example is from a formerly ardent critic of selfish mining, basically backing down in a face-saving manner).

I actually find this quite encouraging, it seems this episode is leading to many people investigating for themselves, looking into the math, building simulations, etc. It gives me some hope that with open and uncensored dialogue, the community may actually improve in understanding and knowledge of complex topics.

 

[Peter R]

@witly: This is what is so unintuitive about selfish mining: once the difficulty resets, the selfish miner earns more block rewards in absolute terms (i.e., blocks per unit time) as well.

 

[Zarathustra]

Amazing that they are never mining selfishly, when it's profitable.

 

[Peter R]

@Zarathustra: Selfish Mining is only necessarily profitable in terms of block rewards measured in BCH. In $-terms it may or may not be profitable, depending on how the exchange rate reacts to the presence of the selfish miner.

The logic for why a miner who has the ability to selfish mine may choose not to mirrors what Satoshi said about a 51% miner:

"He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."

 

[witly]

I am lost again on this. When difficulty drops of course everybody earns more but how this compares to HM? Doesn't the same argument still apply? That is SM is a lose-lose game?

@witly: This is what is so unintuitive about selfish mining: once the difficulty resets, the selfish miner earns more block rewards in absolute terms (i.e., blocks per unit time) as well.

 

[go1111111]

@witly selfish mining gives the SM a higher % of total block rewards, but before difficulty adjusts it also causes blocks to be found more slowly. However when difficulty adjusts, it completely counteracts the slowdown in block discovery. So total rewards per unit time are back to what they were before (difficulty adjustment means that how much $ is up for grabs in total is ~constant), but now the SM gets a higher % of total rewards. So SM gets more $ in absolute terms.

 

[Zarathustra]

I guess selfish mining is not used because the risk to lose is higher than the chance to win. The same is true for a 51% attack. Rogue miners will be punished by honest miners.

 

[Richy_T]

I think selfish mining is just probably too much hassle even if it would be profitable. Miners didn't even want to rock the boat over the block size increase. Why engage in subterfuge when you can rake it in anyway.

 

[cypherdoc]

so practical...

 

[cypherdoc]

Keep your eyes on the cross guys

 

[Zarathustra]

so practical...

I don't understand where Emin's assumption (that a 33- or 40% hashing power miner will risk his Billion Dollar investment with such an irrational and suicidal strategy) comes from, and why it has to be fixed. A strategy that is profitable for some days or weeks is not profitable.

 

[jessquit]

Sadly it seems that the responses to my post centered around a refutation of something I did not say, or at least didn't intend to imply.

I would really like to get discussion on the meat of the issue so I'm editing the post to remove the cheese, bun, and pickles. Also, no added salt

...

One of the three key attributes of sound money is that it can become used as a unit of account.

it's long been understood by economists that if your money has non-monetary use cases, that's detrimental to its use as a unit of account, because prices of all goods and services can begin to swing wildly based on entirely non monetary demand.

If you're an economist looking for sound money, then that's bad.

On the other hand if what you're doing is mining and selling gold, then maybe you want all the use cases you can find.

This had some serious implications and seems to support @theZerg

cc: @cypherdoc

 

[Zarathustra]

 

[jessquit]

@Zarathustra

jessquit
4 points3 hours ago


Steve Jobs was a lousy engineer and computer programmer.

Recommended reading

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Kingdom-Private-Story-Computer/dp/0688039731

 

[reina]

I think a flexible limit on blocksize and not over-designing the system is a solid approach too. I enjoy reading about tokenisation etc, but firstly I think the bread-n-butter usage of BCH needs to be supported much more robustly for general use.

I foresee that within the next five years, a large portion of monetary transactions and spending will move to phone interfaces. This is not unfathomable as it's already happening in certain countries in the world.

For BCH, it's not so much about battling "traditional banking", but rather the functionality of payment solutions like WeChat Pay and AliPay: How to make paying even more frictionless.

We can make it more frictionless when employers are paying directly into your BCH wallet, and you in turn, are paying directly into other BCH wallets. That should be the ecology when there is enough support for BCH that even employers see it useful to go that route, or more employees request that payments go to BCH wallets. It's not about crushing banking, it's actually more about the natural or aided evolution of services becoming more and more frictionless. You can beat banks without even caring about them, if this is truly the easiest and most useful and most flexible solution for users.

Projects like what @Norway is working on, Ka-ching, with the touchless, keyring-sized RFID wallets for spending from, kind of align well with the culture of a more minimalist and unintrusive lifestyle (we already use contactless payment very much in the Nordics). I can imagine people who go running don't want to carry a phone or even bankcard, but they can carry something that won't fall off, like an RFID keyring, to buy a bottle of water whenever needed.

Once useful devices like that become a habit, people will doubt why there are debit cards anyway - it will seem dated and obsolete.

All tech is firstly a design question that looks for gaps in human interaction and experience with the world and with others. Adoption doesn't mysteriously happen or not happen: It's about bridging the gap between what someone wants to do and cannot do now, to what they will be able to do, with your tech. Everything gets a bit less mysterious (and less slow), when you capture those needs and offer a technical solution to them, rather than design a technology and just hope someone needs it.

The whole ecology around using BCH needs strengthening. 10 years ago the average person wasn't as adapted to tech as they are now, and movement was slow. But now there are a lot of tech habits and behaviours are already similar to what's needed to understand and use BCH. It is easy to bridge over, if we find a good reason for users to switch from one service to another.

As a user, I just need places and services and novel uses for BCH. It's simple conceptually but alot of work to do: Suddenly we have to invent uses where BCH so fluidly beats fiat or credit cards, or paypal, that users would never leave the comfort of BCH again. Speed is one thing, but the fact that you can take out all the preloading credit, or linking of cards (typing credit card numbers), or any kind of usability obstacle, is actually worth a lot to the user. Micropayments and games make the most sense, doing fun things for very little money, also for social apps, has very global appeal. Build stuff for users that give them more time and enjoyment, and alleviates stress.

We needed 10 years to get from 0 to 1mb, and Bitcoin Cash is still at 0.1mb. I don't believe that there will ever be a demand for filling 32mb blocks, as long as banks, fiatmoney and credit card exists. Bitcoin will always be a special purpose money, e. G. paying coffee on an international airport, but not paying coffee at your local coffeeshop, and so on.

I have no problem being proofen wrong, and I'm sure, whenever we hit the 32mb limit, we don't need to have a constitution or a governance model to raise the limit. I also have no problem to have a flexible limit. This is the reason I support Bitcoin Unlimited since Early 2016.

However, I think Bitcoin would be great for a very long time if we let it like it is, don't care about extra features, don't care about any change of the consensus model and so on, but just use it and harden the non-consensus software. I even think it is possible that it would be greater than making Bitcoin subject to an unconstituted development process, which always risks to let Bitcoin being damaged by a cartel of developers which tries to win with its own, very special, very intelligent solutions, like SegWit and Lightning. As deadalnix said in Arnheim, engineers tend to engineer for the goal of engineering.

 

[cypherdoc]

finally, the cross is climbing. the bottom could be in.

 

[jessquit]

Selfish Mining is only necessarily profitable in terms of block rewards measured in BCH. In $-terms it may or may not be profitable, depending on how the exchange rate reacts to the presence of the selfish miner.

You should correct Vitalik. I have read his claim that SM is profitable, full stop. However, I'm just a nobody on the internet, who am I to argue with my betters?

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

finally, the cross is climbing. the bottom could be in.

I doubt it. Or do you see a reason for why 21 cryptocurrencies have a marketcap > 1 billion? As long as the "unicorn-index" does contain pumpy shitcoins, the bottom is not in.

I see reasons for BTC, BCH, XMR, LTC, IOTA, ETH, ETC to be > 1b. Maybe Dash, NEO, XRP.

But everything else? WTF?

Imho the bear market needs to exaggerate to further a switch back to a bull market. Right now this did not happen.

Also, there are some events possibly up to us, which could shatter the market. The most serious would be a Tether / Bitfinex blow up. This could trigger the market to bottom.

---

About CSW:

I have a disturbing dualistic impression on him. I totally agree that he a) creates technobubble, b) promises without delivering, c) patent trolls, d) creates toxicity. I'm more than happy to see competent people in our sphere come out against him and calling out his bullshit.

But I also tend to accept that he is sometimes right, especially when it comes to real live, while scientists are often wrong in real live (but right in theory).

Examples:

- Selfish Mining: While in theory Emin / Peter seem to be completely right (I can't assess this), in practice Selfish Mining seems to be no menace. Technocrats trying to change Bitcoin because of an illusional menace is more of a menace. We know this from the "Bitcoin cannot scale" experts. And IIRC the selfish mining paper supposes to change Bitcoin to solve the "problem".

- Double Spends: In an interesting tweet-dialogue someone asked Emin if CSW's idea of a "gentlemen's agreement" of miners against double spend is good. Emin: Bitcoin-NG is better in protecting against double-spending. Imho in real life CSW's gentlemen's agreement can be a part of strengthening 0conf for some edge cases. Again, we have technocrats supposing to change Bitcoin to solve something that is rather a no-problem.

- Quantum Computing: I recently wrote about a paper of scientists about quantum computing. They declared QC a menace, b/c they can break ECDSA and enable 3-party-double-spends of unconfirmed tx. So the scientists supposed a solution to enable a soft switch to QC-resistant algorithm. CSW also published a paper about QC. Between the technobubble and strange conspiracies against Core / Sidechains he made a good point, why QC is irrelevant: Even with a sci-fi 1mio-qubits QC you'll need a week to break ECDSA. So no chance to do a 3-party-double-spend. Again we have scientists supposing to change Bitcoin because of a non-existent problem, while CSW spitting out technobubble but being correct in saying that the problem does not exist.

Do you see the pattern? I'm sure there is more.

In his speech in Arnhem he made a lot of good points - between technobubble and seemingly wrong assumptions - about the future of Bitcoin. Everyone attending remembers his show. In years of blocksize-discussion I have never seen someone bringing Bit Block arguments on such a good point, in various dimensions.

Also he seems to use the money he gets to invest wise: In Bitcoin Unlimited (?), Electron, Yours, CoinShuffle -- all investments whose sole purpose seems to be to strengthen the Bitcoin Cahs ecosystem.

I have no clue where to go from here. It's disturbingly two-faced.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

I see reasons for BTC, BCH, XMR, LTC, IOTA, ETH, ETC to be > 1b. Maybe Dash, NEO, XRP.

I don't know enough about most of the alts but IOTA should be worth -1b. IOTA is bullshitting on another level. It is just crap and the developers are obviously mentally retarded and/or lying douchebags.

In his speech in Arnhem he made a lot of good points - between technobubble and seemingly wrong assumptions - about the future of Bitcoin. Everyone attending remembers his show. In years of blocksize-discussion I have never seen someone bringing Bit Block arguments on such a good point, in various dimensions.

He says, what people on the big block side want to hear. I can't understand why anybody still thinks he has to say something meaningful at this point. He hasn't been able to express a single useful thought. He is patenting bullshit, he is stealing other peoples work and he is attacking people for using scientific methods.

I think SM is a very academical topic to this point and I guess Peter R. would agree, that we don't have a problem in the current state. But the SM paper is actual scientific research about PoW mining and the results were interesting and counter intuitive (for most I think). Emin said something along "Bitcoin is broken" back then IIRC, which was complete bullshit and overselling of his work. But CSW apparently does not understand anything he talks about.

CSW isn't even able to copy other peoples work and keep the formulas correct. He also doesn't understand mining. His work has no academic value at this point.