Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jessquit]

If mining is fully-connected, then miners have a strong incentive to make themselves discoverable, do they not?

 

[awemany]

@jessquit: On 1), I can only say I am not too worried now, but I can fundamentally understand your impetus why you might be worried.

On 2): Maybe I simplify too much, but I think Bitcoin fundamentally is a very interesting variant of the age-old "might makes right situation". In any conflict, it is very hard to go squarely against the power majority. With majority meaning those with the most guns in the political field.

With one major difference: Bitcoin isn't about guns, it is about peacefully solving puzzles. Which IMO is the fundamental paradigm shift changing the course of humanity (hopefully for the better).

And the 50% are quite natural. You have a scale, and more mass will tip that scale to the side the mass rests on... . I cannot imagine a scenario where this 50% threshold can be fundamentally broken in Bitcoin. And this is why I, back then, was calling bullshit with the hyped variant of SM that alluded to a fundamental problem with Bitcoin, where none ever existed.

But any problems with the current implementation is a different issue. And I don't see any problem on that front, people are discussing this, bringing up solutions, some more drastic, some not so drastic, and folks like you and me pointing out that it is mostly and academic issue.

Reddit noise is simply not everything, even though I, myself am guilty of heavily contributing to that, and quite often

 

[freetrader]

If mining is fully-connected, then miners have a strong incentive to make themselves discoverable, do they not?

Tough question.

Would love to hear some big miners speak out on this.

There must be a conflict between diluting the profitability and the value that increased decentralization brings to the system as a whole.

I'm not a miner, but I imagine few think of the higher-order benefits and instead think first how to protect their own operations and keep them profitable.

 

[awemany]

YOU JUST DID IT AGAIN.

BECAUSE I AM ADVANCING AN IDEA THAT IS BEING ATTACHED TO THIS PERSON, NOW HE'S MY THOUGHT LEADER, AND NOW I'M BEING TOLD TO DEFEND HIM.

STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP DOING THIS FOR FUCKS SAKE.

LET ME MAKE THIS ABUNDANTLY CLEAR: I'M MY OWN FUCKING THOUGHT LEADER. NOBODY LEADS MY THOUGHT.

ONLY A SMALL MINDED PERSON ATTACKS ANOTHER PERSON BECAUSE HE HAPPENS TO REPEAT WORDS ALSO UTTERED BY UNDESIRABLES.

No, I didn't. To quote you from one post further up:

This individual was excoriated by the technical crowd for blatantly plagiarizing the work of others and adding no particular value of his own, yet without this person's vision of THE BIG PICTURE we might have waited another decade to get the innovation that made computers accessible to everyone.

Let me repeat your own thought here once more for you, emphasis mine:

yet without this person's vision of THE BIG PICTURE

This person does not matter as per your own sayings. Yet you bring it up, explicitly. Does not compute.

 

[jessquit]

I think if someone wants to make the claim that it's easy for miners to obfuscate their hashpower, then they need to explain how, in the context of miners needing to participate in a fully-connected graph, because these appear to me to be mutually-exclusive goals.
[doublepost=1523616895][/doublepost]@awemany regardless of which person you're referring to, you are nevertheless out of line. I have no thought leaders. Don't paint one onto me, just because I happen to echo something that someone else said.

 

[awemany]

@awemany regardless of which person you're referring to, you are nevertheless out of line. I have no thought leaders. Don't paint one onto me, just because I happen to echo something that someone else said.

Fine. But likewise don't needlessly paint all or some of those who are highly critical of CSW, as being avoidant of issues and not being willing or able to tackle issues because of the CSW stench.

This is symmetrical.

 

[freetrader]

I think if someone wants to make the claim that it's easy for miners to obfuscate their hashpower, then they need to explain how, in the context of miners needing to participate in a fully-connected graph, because these appear to me to be mutually-exclusive goals.

I will further research the origin and basis of the fully connected graph claim. Given other recent material published on the matter of the network topology, I must question that premise.

 

[Tom Zander]

And I refuse to be sucked into anyone's cult of personality or anti-personality.

You have that right. You may insteaad consider the amount of time and focus taken away from doing actually useful stuff (like building things). These are the facts, this is not about personality this is about how he affects the people.

If I look at his personality I don't expect this to get better, I expect it to get worse. But if you want to ignore the personality, then at least look at the facts of how much of a time-waster and how much agression he caused (pointing to an all-caps number of parags above).

One of the facts that nobody seems to remember is that Craig has not just tried one way of proving the paper wrong, he tried a dozen and just went with what sticked. As the saying goes; it costs a magnitude more effort to disprove statements than it costs to make them. He factually has a net negative effect.

Read this article if you doubt the statement that he has a net negative effect; https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best-decision-we-ever-made-4c0a99728fde

The true issue is the SWPATs, not some license detail.

Software patents are explicitly mentioned in the license quite a lot. Its not really a 'detail'. And flowee is not the only one. You must know about libbitcoin ? There were several projects from Jeff Garzik as well in this license. Like CPUMiner (now obsolete).

I'm not sure why you put yourself down by saying you are just one voice. You write code, that makes a huge difference. You can dictate the terms under which other people can use your code. You have that freedom. I'm just hubly pointing out you have the option of license and that I personally believe it can make a difference.

Bitcoin 's network passively resists discovery of the topology, does it not?

It does.

Anyone that runs a node for his business (this includes miners) will see no benefit to making their nodes reachable by untrusted parties. There is a negative by doing so which is that you allow attackers to target you. Natural consequence is that the majority of the nodes are not going to be seen by crawlers. And crawlers are the main way we have of doing discovery.

Anyone that states he can map or predict what the network of Bitcoin is like is delusional.
[doublepost=1523618756,1523618043][/doublepost]

If mining is fully-connected, then miners have a strong incentive to make themselves discoverable, do they not?

Discoverable by whom?

If you mean the general public? Then no. That general public can start DDOSing them if they do.

 

[go1111111]

I bring up small world mining, you bring up Craig Motherfucking Wright as some sort of hex against discussion

Our discussion was about CSW. You were saying that despite some bad things about CSW, he has still made some valuable points. I then argued that his non-erroneous points that are possible to understand are not that valuable. You pointed to "small world mining" as a valuable contribution. I said that CSW's claim about it was pretty basic and non-controversial. You alluded to some hidden depth in the topic of small-world mining, and I pointed out that neither CSW or you or his other translators had said anything deep about it as far as I've seen. Then you acted shocked and appalled that I "brought up" CSW.

and tell me that you're literally not going to think about it, since he said it.

You seem to have misunderstood my meaning when I said "I don't see why listening to CSW is worthwhile." I'm talking about the future. In the past I've spent a lot of time trying to make sense of CSW's technobabble, and pointing out his errors. When I've taken the time to examine them, all of his claims either turned out to be errors, nonsensical, or basic / not insightful. Given that he speaks and writes with such a lack of clarity, the ROI on trying to parse his confused thoughts is negative (except to the extent that popularizing his errors helps other people see that he's a bullshitter). This is why I say he's not worth listening to.

You act like CSW has brought up some great ideas about miners being directly connected to each other. My point above is that he has not done so. I see the vague statements you've made about this here, but nothing concrete or novel from CSW or you. If you have something concrete and insightful to share about miners all being directly connected, please share.

The reason why CSW is an interesting topic of conversation is his bizarre and puzzling ability to act so technically incompetent and fraudulent yet still have otherwise smart people like you and Zanglebert spending such huge amounts of effort making excuses for him. It wouldn't matter, except it makes the BCH community appear to be filled with clowns and is terrible for the brand.

 

[jessquit]

I will further research the origin and basis of the fully connected graph claim. Given other recent material published on the matter of the network topology, I must question that premise.

One would think that the skepticism would have been directed at the person to have claimed five years ago to know the topology of the mining network without having presented any data or logic to support it whatsoever. You'd think that by now the assumptions would have been demonstrated. But better late than never.

@Peter R just told me that none of this (miners being in a fully connected toplogy) is news and it's all been well-understood for years. Now @freetrader disputes it. ORLY?

Now. Gentlemen. How can it be that this is all well-understood and has been for years and yet we're all quibbling about whether or not miners are connected this way or that and there's no data -- meanwhile "SM is proven fact."

If I may try to summarize:

1. Topology matters. To almost everything.

2. Key assumptions about topology - quite likely incorrect - permeate our ecosystem

3. Nobody has really bothered to overturn all the incorrect conclusions that we as a community have likely reached due to our flawed understanding of mining topology. We don't have any idea how deeply our misunderstanding reaches

Discoverable by whom?

other miners obviously

you can't secretly be part of a graph network where literally every other participant must whitelist you to participate

this ought to be patently obvious, the fact that it wasn't speaks volumes about our paradigm blindness

 

[theZerg]

I know you had doubts about this before, but let me please point out again that Flowee is using GPLv3 which has a patent clause. I think it would be very healthy for the ecosystem for every major implemetation to move to this same license. For reasons of patents as well as for reasons of building an open source community.

Tom, I've been wanting to mention something about this. The MIT license does not allow you to relicense the code. So I hope that the portions of flowee that come from bitcoin classic remain MIT licensed.

 

[freetrader]

The MIT license does not allow you to relicense the code.

@theZerg, I believe you are wrong about this, and the FSF disagrees with you.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License ("GPL compatible")

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5832/relicensing-an-mit-licensed-project-under-the-gpl-that-has-non-code-contribution

Tom releasing that code under GPL does not take away the fact that the original code is still licensed under MIT.

EDIT: that last sentence was missing a 'not'

 

[awemany]

@freetrader: Yes, however there is an absolutely excellent point that we (ABC and BU and XT) cannot take anything specifically from Flowee back into BU/XT/ABC bitcoind without violating the GPLv3 or Tom Zander (and whoever else who might have worked on that) explicitly relicensing their code to be MIT as well.

But I think this will rather work against Flowee, as most people, I suspect, don't want to change the MIT license.

@Tom Zander as I said earlier, I have written GPL-licensed code, the BU voting system is an example. I absolutely do see the benefits of the GPL.

I do neither see the benefits of a bitcoind implementation moving to GPLv3 nor trying to address the rather important issue of SWPAT problems through that move. It is futile IMO. But you do you.

 

[Norway]

There is a $100T market for sound money. It's called "global M1" and that is my vision.

My vision was always global M2, he he.

One of the first questions I asked myself when I got into bitcoin was : How much can it be worth? I had to figure out what it really was and what it could replace/what market to take over. So the answer was really simple. It's money. And it can replace and overtake the value of the current currencies.

Maybe M1 is more correct than M2, I'm not here to fight about that. But I ended up manually calculating the value of 200+ currencies for M2 measurered in USD, and made these pie charts. They are the reason I have invested so extremely hard in bitcoin and have been rewarded for it.

[doublepost=1523626077,1523625110][/doublepost]

@jessquit: I appreciated your post. I thought it was particularly intellectually honest/thoughtful of you to ask if maxwell and szabo were right all along. I'll dig up the rest of that post of yours - no time right now.

Was gold really usurped because of industrial use cases? (asking) I've thought of it more related to portability. But fine, for your argument, that sounds valid in the abstract at least.

Bitcoin is volatile right now. And it's small. So, yes, right now its unit-of-account properties aren't stellar. But won't that come much later? isn't that to be expected anyway - until full-ish adoption? Wouldn't $100 trillion M1 dwarf concert ticket and ICO mania. Sure, right now it'll add spikes, but our YoY trend would remain up - I'd hope.

Also, mightn't the volatility of 10 use-cases (ICOs, IoT payments, etc) still have a bigger DC component (trend higher) and maybe even be smoother or steeper than just one use case? (not sure. asking)
[doublepost=1523308987][/doublepost]Regardless, I'm not decided. You, and Cypherdoc make good points. We're dealing with something that's never been possible before, though, so, I don't want to fall for any form of normalcy bias. I'd like to challenge all assumptions. It's hard.

Regarding bitcoin not being a stellar unit of account:
You are absolutely right. But it's not a problem now. We just price products and services in fiat and use current exchange rates to pay.

However, the unit of account issue can become a problem in my apocalyptic future. I believe we will come to a point where the fiats of the world hyperinflate, and bitcoin (cash, of course) spike in value. At this point, we will not have a unit of account.

How will this resolve? Well, it just does. The world will not end. It will be chaos, but eventually, BCH will become a very stable unit of account and a store of value. It will be extremely boring. But the rest of the economy will be really fun!
[doublepost=1523626864][/doublepost]

1) problem with divisibility. This was an early issue seen even before the time of the Roman Empire where the value of a standard gold coin exceeded most transactions, therefore requiring sub-unit coins made in base metals, especially copper, also by silver, which were convertible to gold at a problematic fixed or market rate. Coin-clipping was an early crime. Money had to be visibly standardized for common usage.

Just want to add some colour to this. I think the silver denari was the tool on the street in the roman empire. As the roman empire collapsed, the government watered down the silver content in the coins to way less than 1%. And the government stopped accepting silver as payment for tax, they required gold, lol!

I have read that this counterfeiting done by the roman government was a desperate consequence of the empire falling. But I have a competing theory:

What if the roman empire collapsed because they watered down their silver coins?

 

[Tom Zander]

Tom, I've been wanting to mention something about this. The MIT license does not allow you to relicense the code.

The MIT license in actual fact allows you to release it as almost anything you want. Which is the exact problem that Bitcoin has had for years.

Anyone can use MIT licensed code and include it in their closed-source project, for instance. They just relicensed it to "private".

We also have a social issue where the majority of the actors in the Bitcoin space feel they are competing with each other. Forgetting they are TOGETHER competing against the old system. The direct effect is that people making mistakes in public (as it the nature of open source) is laughed at. People make fun of their colleagues making mistakes. As you can imagine the result is that many companies and individuals never release their work to the open source community. BU will remember clearly when Peter Todd tweeted about a certain merge request in BU.

MIT license is an enabler. It clearly states you don't mind anyone using your work and not giving back to the community. It enables people to stay underground and attract no attention.

Any copyleft license is the opposite. And we have 20 years or experience to draw on. Copyleft licenses give measurable larger return on investment because they embrace and grow the community.

As a good example we can look at point-of-sale software. There literally are hundreds of companies and individuals that have over the last 10 years written Bitcoin based POS software. Not a single one of them was done open source (till this year). The sheer amount of hours lost in re-doing that work boggles the mind.

Flowee has a very different goal than BU and many others in this space do. Flowee has a clear goal to turn Bitcoin into a platform for others to build on top of. To allow new people to get started quickly (we have a point-of-sale in Flowee, for instance) and to make new components part of the platform instead of just a closed solution.

----

I, for one, am in Bitcoin because I want economic freedom for a huge part of the planet. My work needs to express that and I do this by choosing a license that I know will allow the community to grow beyond anything we can foresee now. Because I'm not stupid enough to think that a small number of paid-for people can write all the software that will be needed to get there.
I know BU has a huge amount of money to pay their devs with, Flowee on the other hand can't afford to just give away all the code to any company that wants to take the code and relicense it.

 

[Norway]

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.

Again: Tell me why Ka-ching wouldn't work! Be the devils advocate here:
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/the-ka-ching-project.10113/

 

[freetrader]

Not opening a new thread about Bitcoin network topology research at this point, but going to accumulate some results here in the meantime:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip043-closed-exploring-the-bitcoin-network.1689/page-2#post-62214

So far, found nice work from Andrew Miller et al that I basically wasn't paying much attention to in 2015.

 

[Norway]

By "small-world mining" you just mean miners are directly connected to each other? If so, Craig could have just made the very simple point "If miners are all directly connected, it's really hard to increase gamma much above 0 via a Sybil attack." Pretty much everyone would agree with this. It's not that insightful.

This is supposed to be the big contribution that Craig made to the discussion which we should use to excuse all the false and silly things he says?

Well, nobody did until he did it. This was last year, and the debate about the role of nonmining nodes was high, UASF-hats and all. It's easy to be captain hindsight, but CSW was the first to put focus on this issue.

[doublepost=1523630412][/doublepost]

Nice video about Lightning Network:

The abacus metaphor is brilliant!

 

[Richy_T]

why are we even discussing it?

Because CSW brought it up as part of his scheme of self-aggrandizement and to ingratiate himself with the BCH community. No one was talking about it before he stirred the pot. EGS brought out his paper, most people were "nice theoretical attack" and got on with Bitcoining, some raised objections and counterpoints then it all blew over because the real-world truth was the Bitcoin was continuing to work just fine.

I have to say, if nothing else, his ability to gain attention and appear relevant is masterful.

 

[freetrader]

@Norway. are you sure you just weren't paying attention - like me - to what others were saying even earlier (2015)?

https://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/coinscope/coinscope.pdf

I'll quote you some excerpts:

We analyze the measured topology to discover both high-degree nodes and a well connected giant component.

A major contribution of this paper is the finding that the broadcast topology conceals influential nodes that represent disproportionate amounts of mining power.

We show that this small set of nodes (100 or so) seemingly account for over three-quarters of the hash power. We hypothesize that these nodes are either gateways to mining pools, or are other-wise connected with low-latency to gateways. Interestingly, the set of influential nodes have entirely benign topological and protocol features: they don’t have exceptionally high degree, don’t form an exclusive community, don’t have a unique version string, or are even particularly long lived in the network, making it difficult to find and track these nodes.
However, these nodes provide an exceptional network advantage for broadcast: as long as a transaction (block) reaches these nodes, it is far more likely to be included in a block (extended in the block chain).

From p.13 of the slides about this research :

Mostly random, mostly low degree
Super nodes detected:
“bitcoinaffiliate” miners: ~40 nodes with 1k+ connections

and p.14

Visible network may be irrelevant anyway
Private miner peering
BlueMatt’s optimized miner relay network

Tantalizing results and thorough description of methodology (!) which have already caused me to revise my assumptions about what could be discovered about the network's topology.