Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

@Tom Zander

I think we both agree that free transactions, rate limited e.g. by bitcoin-days-destroyed, are a positive thing.

But what are your feelings on (a) the dust limits and (b) miners with widely-varying mempool-acceptance policies (e.g., the risks this imposes on instant transaction security)?

 

[Tom Zander]

I think we both agree that free transactions, rate limited e.g. by bitcoin-days-destroyed, are a positive thing.​

That is right, we are on one line there.

But what are your feelings on (a) the dust limits and (b) miners with widely-varying mempool-acceptance policies (e.g., the risks this imposes on instant transaction security)?​

Ok, personal opinion rant coming up

a)
I think dust limits only exist as an artificial construct that exists to reinforce the "fee market" concept that Core made up.
The way I figure that is simple. When transactions are no longer prioritized based on a fee and gratis (free) transactions are allowed then there can be no dust. Because dust outputs are defined as being too expensive (fee wise) to spend.

b)
yes, I do think that widely varying mempool acceptance policies has the potential for abuse with regards to zero-conf. This opens up scenarios where an attacker can send a transaction it knows some miners reject, and then offer an alternative transaction to those miners (which he can do even after he leaves the store) and repeat this attack until his target miner mines a block whcih leads to his profit.

Personally I'm a fan of allowing miners to differentiate. The opposite of stasis. Any distributed system has to be always changing, or it becomes too easy to attack. So I want to make clear that in my opinion the problem here is NOT that miners used different policies. Instead the problem is that we don't detect such double spends.

The BUIP85 (relay both transactions when a double spend is detected) idea doesn't solve this exact problem. You still hit those mempool limitations. I explained this more on that BUIP post for the curious.

The proper solution is more in the direction of a BUIP88 which describes the creation of a double-spend-proof which notifies both the miners and the merchant of said double spend attempt so they can react and do the right thing based again on those local policies.

 

[lunar]

Big boys are coming for their pound of flesh. Watch out ICO's. As some have been saying for a while now, securities laws apply. Code is not law.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/sec-chairman-clayton-says-agency-wont-change-definition-of-a-security.html

 

[cbeast]

Would that include Ethereum's unlicensed ICO with bitcoins for premined tokens? I doubt it.

 

[lunar]

@cbeast that's a multi billion $ question. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but it doesn't sound promising. Also Dash with it's rewarded masternodes might be under scrutiny? Once these guys get their teeth in, you can bet all the lawyers will have dollar signs in their eyes.

Expect Europe to follow suit.

At the very least, this will throttle ICO development massively.

We live in interesting times.

 

[lunar]

@Zangelbert Bingledack let me return the favour, if you haven't seen it already. This guy is so awake it hurts.

"Bitcoin is economics, but with something very unusual, a complete mastery of second order consequences, where you know how people react, and you've built upon this reaction to catalyse the whole thing. Like playing chess an infinite number of moves ahead."

https://www.yours.org/content/terabyte-blocks--faster-than-light-transactions--and-tokens-on-bitcoin-5519b6516824


Recommended viewing for all BU members. (@11 - 29 mins) Section goes to the very heart of the issues BU are dealing with right now. Wallets and mining nodes are two very separate things. Mining nodes will be chasing one thing only, profit.​

Paraphrased - . "Decomposing Bitcoin (implementations) from a functional perspective, you do not want to have the wallet with the whole blockchain, that would defeat the purpose of the wallet. From the part that needs the least data (virtually stateless wallet component) to the part that needs the most data, you have about 15 orders of magnitude -The same principle applies to processing power"

My take on this, is that mining node software is the new frontier for ASIC level leaps in efficiency, they will be forced by the ruthless nature of competitive capitalism, to seek anything that will give them a financial edge. Massive Tx processing, parallelisation, filtering/batching, mempool management, latency - anything that will improve profit margins and allow more throughput. I believe this once again, is the built in economic incentives and inevitable path. High end machines.

In other words BU perhaps needs to ask itself. Where are we going? If it's towards full mining node. Then the second question is, how do we make miners a profit?

The other path might be towards enterprise level wallet, coin control, token management - creation - tracking, and obviously best in the space security.

Maybe we can do both, but they are clearly separate jobs.​

 

[theZerg]

@lunar, yes I have a branch a few ppl are fooling with now that creates a shared lib for some key wallet functions like signing tx. I'll be playing with core wallet functions over the next few months to make a high performance tool for testing interesting scripts (the satoshi code is very rigid in what it can sign). Perhaps this can grow into a high perf scriptable wallet for enterprise, and then maybe get a front end for personal use.

 

[AdrianX]

And the Cobra strikes at the honey badger again.

 

[79b79aa8]

and thus the group behind bitcoin dot org hastens its own demise. don't interrupt them.

 

[AdrianX]

here is some interesting analysis https://blog.chainalysis.com/money-supply/

The supply of bitcoin available for trading has increased by 57% since December 2017

Bitcoin Cash is in good hands. my reaction, "a BTC winter is coming" if you held BTC through the December rally you may be among the minority of holders.

ps, many here may know not all lost bitcoins are lost.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

That's interesting.

3.5 billion BTC in speculative wallets vs. 1.5 billion BTC in speculative wallets.

This is also a gem:

"The average velocity from January to April 2018 has fallen to 8.5 on a money supply of transactional and speculative coins only and 4.4 on a money supply of all available bitcoin. This decline in velocity in 2018 so far is due to an increase in short term speculators and a decline in transaction volumes. Either economic activity in bitcoin will pick up, if new use cases develop or new users enter - perhaps induced by a price fall, or these new speculators will inadvertently become HODLers."

Something else, good news: Craig Wright does not only work on his fourth doctorate, but is "even a qualified motor mechanic"
https://www.yours.org/content/a-call-to-arms-cac97203528f#
[doublepost=1528486488][/doublepost][QUOTE="lunar, post: 73343, member: 55"

In other words BU perhaps needs to ask itself. Where are we going? If it's towards full mining node. Then the second question is, how do we make miners a profit?​

[/QUOTE]

Miner can offer a lot of special services: They can demand a fee for processing memos (they should!), an even higher fee for stamping pictures in the utxo-set (they really should!), for transferring confidential transactions (some day), for securing high-value 0conf transactions against miner-involved double-spends ... if the network effect grows, they can do what most successfull internet companies do: give the basic product (transactions) for free while charging the extra-services.

 

[Dusty]

​

 

[AdrianX]

As the Layer 2 network reality sets in that you can't have Bitcoin without economies of scale in fee-paying transactions written to the blockchain - here comes the pivot.

 

[79b79aa8]

who cares? only those who have an interest in defending BTC's fixed supply.

the rest of us, who already gave up hope in that project, will calmly observe as either (a) the proposal is abandoned, after much useless noise and fury; or (b) BTC sheds one of its defining economic parameters.

either option gives BCH further advantage.

 

[AdrianX]

Yes, that was more a confirmation of the BS/Core Fud narrative.

Bitcoin has forked so the cancer has been removed. With this BTC BS, comes a bunch of PR (propaganda) Bitcoin Cash has to leverage that to its advantage to prosper. Forking it out is not enough we need people to understand the advantages of hard money and with it if we are to get adoption.

 

[79b79aa8]

at this point it's about providing use cases and driving adoption . . . there is a thread on r/btc today about on-chain BCH betting, u/jonald_fyookball proposes a simple protocol for coinflips. it appears to be sound (some networking issues might need extra attention), and it would seem that more exciting possibilities (i.e. full-blown sports betting with the associated oracles) are just waiting to be built.

 

[lunar]

https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/opabehnam7

U.S. COMMODITY FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION
"The debate on virtual assets is just beginning. None of us know where it will end.But it has forced us to rethink.We have learned that virtual assets respect no borders.Regulation is often behind the curve, unable to keep up with daily developments.At least the developments we know about.As a result, some countries have outlawed virtual currencies.Others have new, strict laws to control them.Many countries simply don’t know what to do.Their policy is bewilderment.Or avoidance.And, some countries think virtual currencies are only a problem for developed countries like Switzerland, or Germany, or Singapore, or the United States.

But virtual currencies may – will – become part of the economic practices of any country, anywhere. Let me repeat that:these currencies are not going away and they will proliferate to every economy and every part of the planet.Some places, small economies, may become dependent on virtual assets for survival.And, these currencies will be outside traditional monetary intermediaries, like government, banks, investors, ministries, or international organizations.

We are witnessing a technological revolution. Perhaps we are witnessing a modern miracle."

 

[_bc]

Everyone seems to be heads-down. Maybe that's a good sign - we currently need not speculate and debate as much.

 

[cypherdoc]

sure, it might be theoretically better to have individual hashers construct their block tx's, but overall, i don't like it. this is the dangerous part, afaic. :

"The extensibility of BetterHash is also noteworthy, as it's structured to rely more heavily on the templating logic in Bitcoin Core than its predecessor getblocktemplate. The switch increases performance, simplifies the transition to new consensus rules, and allows for more robust templating logic (e.g. better mempool eviction). The overall architecture of the pool is also much simpler as additional servers can be added with lower overhead (because work is managed by the client). This helps mitigate connection flooding in addition to the first-class proxy support.


While entirely replacing the Stratum protocol may not have been strictly necessary to achieve the stated goals, the required architectural changes presented an opportunity to fix many of Stratum's long-standing issues. In this context a wholesale protocol rewrite seemed more advantageous than an additional Stratum extension."

https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/bips/blob/betterhash/bip-XXXX.mediawiki

 

[79b79aa8]

i see, so to alleviate the kind of centralization due to widespread use of stratum, miners should abandon it in favor of a mining protocol that relies more heavily on bitcoin core's templating logic.

that's not a centralizing vector at all.