Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Richy_T]

CSW is NChain's "Chief Scientist" so I can see how the relationship with Peter might prove untenable. But I look at it this way: If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Hopefully the Gigablock testnet, something designed to help Bitcoin Cash and, presumably, by induction, cryptos in general can find alternative funding.

My impression is that the community in general is disapproving of CSW but there are some small number of people working very hard (for whatever the motivation) to rehabilitate his image. I think that's likely an impossible mission long term but as others have pointed out, "Fake it till you make it" does succeed from time to time.

 

[awemany]

@AdrianX: I think you are very wrong in your reading about the situation and - no offense meant - I see a pattern in you as I see in so many people in the BCH-sphere defending CSW: Finding excuses for him even though there's a sizable pile of evidence showing what is really going on and blaming those who point out where the bad apple is. Bullshit is not something to build success upon, and (highly likely deliberately engineered!) conflicts of interests that cause someone to defend that bullshit even less so. As I have said earlier, someone is very skillful in what he is doing. We could go on now, but I suspect we'd run around in circles.

Again, I see absolutely no misdeed on Peter's part.

In that sense, and to look forward, I'll go with your blessing in disguise reading here, I do think it will be good and healthy that BU and nChain are separate again.

 

[Richy_T]

This fable expresses by my understanding of the situation.

That's funny cause I find this one in my mind quite often these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes

 

[witly]

Time to reread this:

https://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/letter-from-the-ceo.pdf

OUR SEVEN SOCIAL PRINCIPLES:

WE ASSUME GOOD FAITH.
WE REWARD THE POSITIVE.
WE ACT WITH DIGNITY.
WE TRUST EACH OTHER TO FAIL WELL.
WE DO NOT ASK PERMISSION.
THE NETWORK IS MOTHER, THE NETWORK IS FATHER.
WE HAVE FUN, BECAUSE IT ATTRACTS MORE PEOPLE.

 

[AdrianX]

Everyone is projecting (emotionally) in this space. Before this blew up I had the opportunity to talk to a few nChain employees none of them were aware that nChain had expressed willingness to build an enterprise version of Bitcoin software on top of BU.

This looks like CSW justifying his actions after the fact.

At the end of the day, ABS does not look like an option to me. I appreciate your post @micropresident ABC seems to lack the cognitive diversity held by BU's nonprogrammer members and it looks a little too much like typical OSS development team reminding me of Core, ultimately @deadalnix has the last say, no offense intended.

Mostly we just debate until we come to a mutually agreeable solution; or someone writes some code that works.

"We" I'm presuming are people with High Psychological Safety and Low Cognitive Diversity in a cacoon called slack (a cacoon BU exists in too, glad to @cypherdoc back and over 20 pages of reading to catch up on so maybe things are moving in the right direction for BU)

@micropresident in response to your post deadalnix failed to convince BU to vote for his proposals implying BU is very conservative, a strength, not a weakness that said I encourage you to spend more time here I value your input. That said deadalnix has a good track record of making good decisions and I support what he has done is doing. But I acknowledge what I think is BU has superiority here. Should a time come when deadalnix does something I don't agree with we have another Core on our hands, BU was designed to avoid that exact situation?

I still think BU should be doing what we are doing, and I never for a moment felt nChain had any say in what our members were doing or ant influence in convincing members to incorporate nChain patents into the implementation. (not to mention I don's suspect nChain has the ability to patent tech already in the public domain) I think some members went too far to prove it. So I still think they could make a good partner in the future.

That said member vote buying could become a huge issue in the near future just wait and see what happens when the price hits $200,000. BU is going to become a politicians dream. I'm not a politician and I'm shocked to know they are already among us.

@awemany and @Peter R we should look into making this a formal BUIP, https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip032-passed-vote-peter-r-for-secretary.1504/#post-29178. it is the solution to our growth and political corruption.

Thanks again everyone for being yourselves you all rock Bitcoin is Back baby.

 

[AdrianX]

see in so many people in the BCH-sphere defending CSW:

I've never defended CSW, I've only asked for evidence. People are being irrational in their witch hunt and that is the issue. if we see eye to eye on something I propagate the message, in Bitcoin we don't follow personalities, we follow economic incentives. CSW would be a nobody but for the attention everyone gives him.

If anything I'm suspicious of CSW because everything he says I think I said first.

That's funny cause I find this one in my mind quite often these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes

We don't have an Emperor, we have a CEO. https://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/letter-from-the-ceo.pdf

Tell me folks, if the base assumption is that a minority of the hashrate being dishonest can effectively game bitcoin, what follows from that assumption?

Does it follow that we cannot trust the hashrate, and that one must fully validate all network activity themselves?

Should BU then focus on being a collective of non-mining nodes? We are making great strides courting UASF, LTC, and Core fans. Should we embrace it?

answers:

1) Sell bitcoin before everyone learns the truth.

2) Network activity is validated by the Hashers you trusting the economic incentive to keep the hashes honest if you are not hashing all you can do is validate the hashing.

3) Yes and No. we should be focusing on miners and businesses that need to run a node and want a reliable implementation, we should also be moving towards running our own pool (ie, developing hashrate we can behind our voice.)

 

[79b79aa8]

We pick ou[r] battles

word.

 

[Peter R]

I like this figure because it illustrates the silliness of people's strong reactions to SM: at the end of the day it changes a "1/2" to a "1/3." Bitcoin's security model is still very strong.

 

[bitsko]

'implying BU is very conservative, a strength, not a weakness'

a democratic process necessarily slows down decisions or even prevents them, given how new and unrefined the crypto space is, I find it to be a weakness presently.

i would find excessive conservativism a good idea perhaps when bitcoin was at 1.0 and beyond... not to say we should run with any idea(like Casper or ng), but that the chance of success in a shorter time frame is greatly increased when a very bright and benevolent person is able to quickly decide upon gridlocked or contentious issues.

that being said I appreciate your recent comments greatly @AdrianX , showing yourself as a strongly independent and critical thinker.

 

[Richy_T]

we should also be moving towards running our own pool

Is there a thread for this? I only have trivial hashrate but have been thinking about turning it back on.

 

[Tom Zander]

@Richy_T https://pool.bitcoin.com/index_en.html

 

[Zarathustra]

@Zarathustra: Re: http://www.dasgelbeforum.net/forum_entry.php?id=254750

Is that talking about this stuff?

Ehhh.... believe in whatever crazy stuff you want, but I've got better things to do.

Your time would have been better invested if you would have thought about the arguments instead of google 'Orgon'. I've met many people who believed in crazy religion but could still formulate great and logical thoughts.
[doublepost=1523745339,1523744301][/doublepost]

so what's the point then... what follows...?

Maybe this:

"The argument for selfish mining as it presently stands is based on the requirement of irrational and dumb miners. That is it. It is an argument for stupid investors who set machines running and do not care about their profitability. Selfish mining is simple to detect and block today without any change to the protocol. Miners within the small world graph that is bitcoin prioritise known mining nodes which they can see releasing blocks on a regular basis.

(...)

Conclusion
In summary, the entire premise of the selfish mining paper is that a bunch of dolts sit running expensive computer equipment worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and at the same time are definitively too ignorant and care too little to react to an attack.

The authors of the paper seek to defend their position not through rational discourse or the analysis of the results but rather through false authority and ridicule.

The attack is not realistic in the most straightforward manner as it is less expensive to install and run a sufficient amount of hardware to achieve the gain in percentage hash rate without risk of loss or orphaning."

 

[AdrianX]

a democratic process necessarily slows down decisions or even prevents them, given how new and unrefined the crypto space is, I find it to be a weakness presently.

Potentially, I agree. But fortunately we the BU members federation are not in charge. Bitcoin is permissionless and @deadalnix did not need our permission to do what he did, and nor did the BU developers need to get BU members permission to code up a compatible implementation before the fork. they acted appropriately by thinking independently.

The result was full support of the fork and BU's lagging conservative approach (way more progressive than Core's) crossed the "t" and dotted the "i" after the fact.

The developers were like a tugboat moving a tanker through a strait. If BU was irrelevant the develops were not going to be bogged down with our bureaucracy, and neither was @deadalnix.

I like to think BU survived because it is still relevant.
[doublepost=1523745836][/doublepost]

That tweet, THAT is the reason why most of the BCH industry is against CSW.

When you refuse to be part of his yes-men, you get vigorously downvoted, attacked and made to look like you are the worst enemy of all the things you actually stand for.

if anyone else tweeted that would you care? I gave my feedback he's wrong move on you don't need to go on a witch hunt to destroy him because you dislike his tweet!
[doublepost=1523746641,1523745642][/doublepost]

Is there a thread for this? I only have trivial hashrate but have been thinking about turning it back on.

It's in our founding articles, and I think its a great idea.

@theZerg helped set up bitcoin.com maybe he could give some input an what would be involved to run a BU pool.

I've heard a counter-argument to this and that is bitcoin.com is our pool, but I'd like the BU pool fee to fund development and our hasrate to be a market fedback for our general direction.

Ultimately, in the long run, all development should be funded by miners and this is a great way to get it started (for now it is funded by anonymous investors) equally as important but only in the early adoption stages.

I think it is total BS lobbying miners to run our implementation it inverts the power balance. Let's have them pay us to do it.

 

[ParadigmEgress]

nChain informed BU -- after I tweeted about CSW's errors with respect to 0-conf security -- that they would be winding down their funding of the Gigablock Testnet over the next three months. Shortly after I tweeted proof of Craig Wright's plagiarism, nChain informed us that they would be terminating the Gigablock agreement effective immediately. BU agreed to the termination and forgave the small (~$10k) balance owed to BU by nChain. In total, nChain contributed $37,666.78 in cryptocurrency to the Gigablock Testnet. They made no in-kind contributions (engineering, technical writing, code review, or otherwise).

That they terminated the agreement did not come as a surprise. Since the agreement began last summer, each tweet, reddit comment, or forum post I made that pointed out an error in CSW's work, or critiqued him in some other way, was met with a response in private from nChain. By this winter they had made it explicitly clear that I was not to question CSW's ideas, point out errors in his work, or publicly critique him in any way, or they would pull the funding for the Gigablock project.

I had definitely been warned.

I promised myself to remain silent on CSW until after Satoshi's Vision Tokyo, so as not to put the success of the conference at risk. I starting calling Wright out shortly afterwards.

It is due to my actions that nChain terminated the Gigablock project.

I apologize to all those at BU who are dissappointed by this news or with me. But I hope you can see things from my perspective: being unable to speak your mind and being forbidden from pointing out blatant fraud in the ecosystem because it puts your project's funding at risk is a terrible feeling.

Incidentally, since the CSW fraud scandal has blown up in recent weeks, other members of the BCH community have reached out to me in private to express their disillusionment with CSW. A very serious problem however is that nChain is funding many of the projects these people are working on. The people working on them are conflicted like I was: do they speak their minds? Or do they bite their tongue, look the other way, and keep working on what they believe will help grow BCH. It's a difficult decision to make.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

I like this figure because it illustrates the silliness of people's strong reactions to SM: at the end of the day it changes a "1/2" to a "1/3." Bitcoin's security model is still very strong.

Wasn't it that a 51 percent attacks allows you to doublespend a confirmed tx, while a selfish mining 33% attacks allows you to get a little more blocks than the other miners? Seems like a huge difference for me.

 

[Peter R]

@Christoph Bergmann

In the context of the Eyal & Sirer selfish mining paper, "gaming the system" referred to exploiting a deviant strategy to earn more than one's fair share of the block rewards. It was not related to double-spending.

It was always known that a deviant miner controlling over half of the hash power could earn all of the block rewards (if he were willing to subject the network to arbitrarily-long re-orgs), but what Eyal & Sirer showed is that in certain cases a miner controlling less than half of the hash power could also game the incentive system. He couldn't steal all the rewards, just some of them instead.

I think what was most concerning about SM back in 2013 was that it revealed that even a small miner could also game the rewards if he could win most the block races (gamma ~ 1). We no longer think this is feasible (e.g., I think it would be difficult to even achieve gamma = 0.5), but if it were it would mean that there was no stable Nash Equilibrium (at least in the narrow sense of considering only rewards intrinsic to the system and ignoring countermeasures by the other miners).

In terms of double-spending, a 51% miner can double-spend for zero cost with a 100% success rate (again, in the intrinsic sense measuring rewards in BCH, assuming miners don't deploy counter measures, and subjecting the network to arbitrarily-long re-orgs). A 40% selfish miner could probably double-spend a 1-conf transaction for zero cost only ~80% of the time. His success rate would drop sharply after additional confirmations.

 

[Richy_T]

@Richy_T https://pool.bitcoin.com/index_en.html

I actually already mined that for a bit. I meant specifically for BU.
[doublepost=1523754883][/doublepost]

I've heard a counter-argument to this and that is bitcoin.com is our pool, but I'd like the BU pool fee to fund development and our hasrate to be a market fedback for our general direction.

I agree wholeheartedly.
[doublepost=1523755351,1523754656][/doublepost]It would also be interesting to see how we looked on BU Core vs BU Cash wrt hashrate.
[doublepost=1523755648][/doublepost]We could even see what happened if we tried some selfish mining

 

[micropresident]

At the end of the day, ABS does not look like an option to me. I appreciate your post @micropresident ABC seems to lack the cognitive diversity held by BU's nonprogrammer members and it looks a little too much like typical OSS development team reminding me of Core, ultimately @deadalnix has the last say, no offense intended.

You seem to be conflating a few issues in your post, and yet responding to me. Let me paraphrase what you've said, as I understand it:

"ABC is a cognitively homogeneous group of deadalnix sycophants, no offense."

Those kind of assertions aren't worth trying to argue against. If you'd like to learn about how things are done in ABC, feel free to reach out to me privately.

Should a time come when deadalnix does something I don't agree with we have another Core on our hands, BU was designed to avoid that exact situation?

I don't think you fully read my post. Had you read it, you'd know that the solution to having a bad-apple implementation is to have more than one implementation -- rather than trying to build a perfect governance system. N-version programming for a highly available network also gives social redundancy.

I'll leave this here since a lot of people haven't seen it:
Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-version_programming

And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy

 

[jessquit]

You keep saying this - but what exactly is "betting against the charlatan" for you?

For me it was choosing not to purchase shares in Apple Computer Inc at a time when to do so would have made me stupendously rich.

 

[solex]

Since we've established that's not the case the question of leaking becomes open again.

The document in question might have been put on SSRN but it was not publicized in anyway nor could it have been found without explicit searching which is unlikely given that no one other than members of a private slack channel knew it existed.

Opened and closed again. SSRN exists to make papers public, where authors want their work to be widely read by the public, especially by academics. Papers in its eLibrary are equally searchable and web-crawlers will quickly index to show up new papers in search results. No one can be criticized for linking to a public document on SSRN.

You mention "draft" and this puzzles me because the paper is not marked up as a draft and SSRN is specifically an open access repository for working papers, not drafts.

This was the beginning of this whole sorry mess that led to 'the bet'. That snowballed into one of the most sorry episodes in BCH's short history. I've watched closely with dismay for a long time and kept silent because I had hoped it would fizzle out.

You and me both! I hoped as much as anyone the SM debate would fizzle out, but for some unknown reason, the rebuttal of Emin's SM paper requires everything plus the kitchen sink thrown at it, including even a collaboration in testing and enabling the future massive on-chain scaling of Bitcoin Cash.