Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

i think this is a great discussion from someone whom i consider to be a technically competent and knowledgeable BCH supporter /u/dskloet; but who doesn't seem to have much insight on the game theory and economic incentives that drive miner behavior, imo. i think this is a good example of my PoR and similarly what Daniel was talking about with investors betting on other investors, and not technicians, who can "see" the bigger picture:

 

[lunar]

@satoshis_sockpuppet agreed. This is the right path, miners will have to fund development, but the key here is it should be voluntary. Anything else sounds like a tax. Whatever happens I think building this into the protocol would be a mistake. The article is a little vague on that, surely that's not what they have in mind?

 

[cypherdoc]

for sure, a developer payment scheme should NOT be built directly into the protocol. it's simple enough for miners to independently contribute a portion of their block rewards to a development fund.

 

[imaginary_username]

It would seem especially ironic to see CSW, whose company's entire business model depends on the government bullying other people for them based on a concept that exists solely because the government said so, cry bloody murder over government regulation.

But other than that, I don't see a protocol change coming either way. It's either gonna be gentleman's agreement, or some other soft mechanism, it's not gonna be a coercive consensus-level tax.

 

[cypherdoc]

ahahahaha, this idiot just won't go away:

 

[79b79aa8]

my question is if there are any pending investigations into @helios @amon-ra @huitzilopochtli for unfairly competing against the makers of candles.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

for sure, a developer payment scheme should NOT be built directly into the protocol. it's simple enough for miners to independently contribute a portion of their block rewards to a development fund.

I hope building anything like this into the protocol itself is absolutely nobody's ambition.

 

[SPAZTEEQ]

Could please direct me toward where anybody (miners, developers) suggested any intent of building into protocol?

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

No, because nobody sane did.

 

[cypherdoc]

there hasn't been alot of sanity in the cryptocurrency space for quite a while now...

 

[79b79aa8]

. . . of course there has --

BCH PLS!

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Do people still remember the "strategic partnership" between pwc and Blockstream?
https://blockstream.com/2016/01/28/PwC-and-Blockstream-Announce-Strategic-Partnership.html

Well, today I stumbled over this interview in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" with "Bitcoin expert" (lol) Alex de Vries (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-de-vries-a5b51349/) from PWC:

http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/bitcoin-energieverbrauch-fuer-produktion-und-verwaltung-a-1208635.html

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/bitcoin-energieverbrauch-fuer-produktion-und-verwaltung-a-1208635.html&edit-text=

He is promoting the idea of international agreements to control the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining (although he agrees, that this is unlikely to happen).

And he has (amongst other gems) this to say:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Stiftet der Bitcoin nicht auch Nutzen als alternatives Bezahlmittel?

De Vries: Im praktischen Leben kann man wenig damit anfangen. Die Transaktionskosten sind enorm hoch. Hätte man Ende 2017 einen 5-Dollar-Kaffee mit Bitcoin bezahlt, wären etwa 50 Dollar Kosten obendrauf gekommen. Das ist völlig ineffizient.

Which translates to something like

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Isn't Bitcoin also useful as an alternative currency/payment system?

De Vries: You can't use it in real life. The transaction fees are tremendously high. If I bought a 5 dollar coffee at the end of 2017, I would have had to pay a 50 dollar fee on top. This is absolutely inefficient.

Everything I'd like to say about this person and the people at Blockstream and PWC is probably justiciable in Germany so I'll better say nothing...

edit: archive.is links:
https://archive.fo/v1Cmz
https://archive.fo/BPp3U

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8lhq79/blockstreams_strategic_partner_pwc_wants_bitcoin/

 

[cypherdoc]

Yep, like that one guy says, you gotta try pretty hard not to see the corruption btc has become

 

[79b79aa8]

if the purported solution consists in convincing the united nations to seek worldwide agreements to curb energy consumption in bitcoin mining so as to reduce global warming, we can safely say we'll ride this one out.

i don't see so much corruption as utter cluelessness, about bitcoin and just about everything else.

 

[awemany]

On this:


He's right, in the same sense that a country's defense, unused, is a waste of expenses and lots of energy.

With the one minor difference that Bitcoin produces just a couple hashes and heat, and not lots of innocent dead people.

The military can and is being abused in many countries as a not-so-pure defensive force.

If the UN really goes and does something about Bitcoin's energy consumption, then we have proof that we're living in a world government situation.

I am gladly pretty sure that that is not the case.

 

[79b79aa8]

new round of the confirmation-time-too-long objection: CHECK
new round of the quantum-computing-vulnerability objection: CHECK
new round of the waste-of-energy objection: CHECK

UP NEXT: new and improved proposals to replace bitcoin with Blockchain technology using USD as the underlying asset.

keep your eyes on the ball. for example, consider getting ready to BTFD.

 

[awemany]

new round of the quantum-computing-vulnerability objection: CHECK

As far as I understand, the QC-hardness of Bitcoin is due to the extra hashing of the pubkey, with the hash part being hard to invert, even with QC algorithms.

Assuming you could quickly break ECC, really powerful quantum computing could theoretically allow for a 'quantum replacement attack' - you could try to quickly reinject another, signed transaction (with the key you then know) while the real one is sitting in the mempool, waiting to be mined.

However, I also do not, at all, believe the hype that QC is just around the corner, and even less believe it will be viable for breaking crypto any time soon that is worth less than a couple millions of today's dollar value.

Still, and to simply stop the whole 'what if QC happens' scaremongering tactics, I wonder whether it might be a good idea to work on a new signature scheme that would support straight-forward SHA256-based Lamport signatures in Bitcoin.

Would also reduce the number of crypto primitives that need to be used in Bitcoin to pretty much just SHA256.

Is it just me, or does this seem to be quite doable, except for the quite substantial bloat in network traffic and chain size?

Implementing it would allow for a pragmatic and hybrid approach where people store larger sums on QC-safe addresses and use ECC crypto for the bulk of the daily, small scale transaction volume.

Given the steep distribution of amounts in Bitcoin addresses, the total amount of Lamport-signed BCHs and UTXOs would be quite small. It would stay small until the moment QC would become so powerful (if it ever happens - those 50 qubits from IBM are supposedly stable for like 20usec or so) and ubiquitous that one would need to protect smaller and smaller amounts with QC-hard crypto. But those can likely still be quite large, due to the expected hardness of inverting RIPEMD160 and the bad guys having to resort to 'quantum replacement' approaches for a viable attack.

But by then, I'd expect the field of QC-safe crypto to have advanced sufficiently for better schemes to be available.

 

[AdrianX]

He's right, in the same sense that a country's defense, unused, is a waste of expenses and lots of energy.

Miners chasing the security subsidy are building the infrastructure for the global financial network.

The energy spent is not wasted it's incentivizing growth. Emin, is wrong, we are not protecting the value today we are protecting the value in the future. The subsidy that is incentivizing this energy consumption is reduced by 50% every 4 years. it's a short-term cost, once the infrastructure is in place wast will be mitigated, the math in the protocol guarantees it.

The problem is energy is subsidized by governments, it's not going to ever be as cheap as it is now, uses it to build something worthwhile for the future while we have it.

Bootstrapping Bitcoin needs PoW we a race to build the biggest strongest network. The fact energy can't be created out of nothing is the only thing prevents people from cheating and making real-world cost vs benefit calculations.

When we buy coins we say we value this energy more than we value other energy expenditures.

Governments can mandate a lower price and the amount of energy used will reduce, or governments can accelerate the halving thus reducing the reward per block and the money used to consume energy.

Either way, if they succeed the network infrastructure won't be adequately funded for scale.

 

[Richy_T]

I like modularity and generizability so I thing it would be good if we looked at allowing pluggable signature schemes. Heck, no reason we shouldn't allow people to sign with ROT13 if the consensus went that way.

 

[Richy_T]

POW is needed because the attack needs to be guarded against. In the absence of the risk of attack, *Bitcoin* is redundant.