Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[freetrader]

I've seen a few people (some making vlogs) whose eyes seem glazed over with $$$ signs.

Watched Vin & Dave's show (#19) and Vin gave some really useful background about the scene.

I believe he correctly touched on the psychology going on there, and Craig and Calvin's strategy to deny service on the "ABC" chain to push the price down as far as they can to drive other miners to surrender.

This is of course a harsh thing to face, it's pure intimidation, brinkmanship etc etc
Craig's letter is probably just the tip of the iceberg here.

To defend, some ideas:

Technically, to recap the idea there is that they will mine empty blocks on the attacked (ABC) chain with sustained majority hashrate in an attempt to deny as much service to the chain as possible.
Very likely they'll use the stress test (blaster / Satoshi's shotgun) to keep the mempool filled at > 32mb / 10min while they do it.

Defending miners could (and imo should) raise the minimum fee level (with announcements) to defend and make this two-pronged attack much more costly for the stressers. Let them figure out that they should conduct their tests some other time than during a network upgrade. That was obviously coordinated with the 'hash war' crowd.

Users who wish to help honest miners defend the chain against an empty block attack (any of you around? ) can also voluntarily and temporarily increase their transaction fees - which directly helps make mining the chain honestly more profitable, allowing other miners to bring more hashrate on to it which reduces effectiveness of the empty block attackers.

It may be a small price to pay compared to letting such financial terrorists and their backers take over the network.

 

[Zarathustra]

It wasn't obvious back then. If it was obvious to you, great.

No no, obviously not just to me. Most of us - as @Peter R just showed - knew back then what they are doing. They Block The Stream.

 

[Zarathustra]

@majamalu The Zangelbert I knew back in the day was a different person. There's no way such an eloquent and thoughtful writer could possibly believe that Craig is Satoshi. Maybe his account was purchased (along with his BU signing key?). Who knows -- everything is so crazy these days.

@chriswilmer the conspiracy theorist. I'm not surprised, since the CTO's cyber terrorism wasn't obvious to you until September 2015. Some of you conspiracy theorists also believe that Adrian-X sold his soul too.

There's no way such an eloquent and thoughtful writer could possibly believe that Craig is Satoshi

That's always the same strawman. Which part of the team Satoshi? The coder, the blogger or the organiser? The swindler and techno babble talker Elon Musk for example has a broad knowledge and the talent to even become the main part of the team Tesla, and the plagiarist Steve Jobs the main part of the team Apple. CSW at least has been able to attract and organise the most Bitcoin Cash hashing power around him; more than all his critics combined, lol. They prefer to mine the blocked stream of the streamblockers at Blockstream.

 

[Roy Badami]

Personally I think P2SH elimination is a good idea. Goes towards more transparency in the unlock scripts. Multisig can be done other ways. Such as raw multisig (if fixed) or threshold signatures which don’t suffer from the security vulnerabilities of the 160bit hash birthday attack. It’s expected P2SH only has about 10 more years to it before it is broken anyhow due to the lack of random bits used vs SHA256

Which can be mitigated simply by moving to SHA256, which would require minimal changes to the rest of the ecosystem.

Of course, threshold signatures are cool, but they should complete on their own merit, without forcing people to use them by banning the alternative.
[doublepost=1541840661,1541839857][/doublepost]@AdrianX I really don't understand why you think that P2SH takes advantage of miners, or lead to the whole Blockstream situation.

But more to the point, deciding now to remove a feature that many people have built on simply sends the message that it's not safe to invest time and money implementing anything on top of this coin, because a few years down the line we might just arbitrarily decide to remove features you're relying on, rendering your work next to useless

 

[BldSwtTrs]

That's bad reporting, for not validating the source, not dishonest behaviour, unprofessional yes, reputation diminishing, yes. I found it almost comical and absolutely bizarre and I'm glad to learn the truth.

This is not a one time event.

Ayre and Wright don't look like very trustable people, to say the least.
What about Wright several plagiarisms for example?

I was listening Vin Armani podcast yesterday, he seems like a highly intelligent person, but he was extatic because Wright was an amoral personality and he found that cool and mix that with mystic stuff about Bitcoin meaning and other wishy washy thing.

This situation looks unreal to me. It looks like a bunch of SV supporters have lost touch with reality.

I just want to say WAKE UP GUYS.

 

[solex]

Kudo's to @Zangelbert Bingledack for being the first to elucidate in detail about the potential of fork futures markets.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@chriswilmer the conspiracy theorist. I'm not surprised, since the CTO's cyber terrorism wasn't obvious to you until September 2015. Some of you conspiracy theorists also believe that Adrian-X sold his soul too.

That's always the same strawman. Which part of the team Satoshi? The coder, the blogger or the organiser? The swindler and techno babble talker Elon Musk for example has a broad knowledge and the talent to even become the main part of the team Tesla, and the plagiarist Steve Jobs the main part of the team Apple. CSW at least has been able to attract and organise the most Bitcoin Cash hashing power around him; more than all his critics combined, lol. They prefer to mine the blocked stream of the streamblockers at Blockstream.

A lot of people have a lack of imagination and confuse it with being smarter than other people. I noticed this scheme a lot on the last years.

Maybe CSW is Satoshi, but has simply lost his mind? Once he told me about very hard years, with his business, with his marriage. Or he had a stroke, or a drug / alcohol problem? Such things can change people. Or maybe he is still playing a role? Or he was playing a role when he was Satoshi, and never changed? Or he is not Satoshi, but still good at finding out what Satoshi would say? Or he is advised by very smart people? Or he is just a puppet from someone else? Or ... there are so many possibliities. Deciding for one and thinking it is true is not smart, but boring and lacking of imagination.

@BidSwtTrs

This situation looks unreal to me. It looks like a bunch of SV supporter's have lost touch with reality.

I just want to say WAKE UP GUYS.

BTC people tell me this since 2016. If there is a sudden burst of massive publicly pressure to "wake up" it's a good reason to keep on dreamining --


Something else.

Imagine for a moment CTOR was introduced in two steps.

First step would have been an elimination of the rule that transactions must be ordered topographically. This would have been a so called "hard fork." It would not have split the chain at forking day. Rather, it would need one brave miner to mine a non-ttor-block to activate the split. He must be really brave, because if it ever happens that a TTOR-chain gets dominant, the no-ttor-chain including his blocks would dissolve. He not only need to be sure that non-ttor has hashpower dominance, but he needs to be sure that it keeps this for the foreseeable future.

Such a setup perfectly enables hashpower to decide about which feature is activated. It is what we call Nakamoto Consensus. You can introduce a large variety of changes with a date based hardfork, but which of it gets really activated by being mined is up to hashpower to decide.

For DSV: Would you activate DSV as long as CoinGeeks hashfleet is against it in such a scenario? No. It would be insane, as there is a high chance the DSV-chain is eliminated later.

Second step: enforcing CTOR. After some time, when the no-TTOR-chain has been activated and survived it, you can do a soft fork to make CTOR a rule. Users don't need to upgrade, as their node are ok with any transaction ordering. Only miner need to upgrade. You can do it in a way Core did, demanding a certain percentage of miners to vote for it. There is no need to hurry, because everybody is already free to use CTOR, so we can do it securely and without disruption.

This is what the November upgrade could have been. But there is one tiny detail that changes everything.

Seeing what CTOR in November really is

This thought-experiment is interesting because it tells a lot about the forking mechanism of CTOR as proposed in the November hard fork. Basically, it combines the hard fork and the soft fork.

It hard forks the ttor-rule away, but immediately demands ctor. This means it becomes incompatible with the old chain in the very moment the rule is activated, independently of which transactions are mined, independently of the amount of hashpower behind. Using hard and soft forks at the same time is a sharp sword to cut chains. It is a very strong tool, and it was successfully used to free Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin (remember the rule that a certain block must be bigger than 1mb --> soft fork on top of a hard fork). But using it to enforce CTOR is like throwing dynamite on flies.

Worse: Combining soft and hard forks is the ultimate control tool for developers. It's much much more than what Core ever demanded to have. Core never did hard forks, but only soft forks, and these only when activated by hash power, and when hash power did refuse, they started a social media war for UASF - which everyone on the BCH side was against. "Because it's hashpower that matters". What CTOR does in terms of developer control is much much worse. Just ask yourself for a second what you would think of if Core would have done such a thing.

I can't believe that Roger Ver takes part in this. It is the opposite of what we all on the side of BCH wanted. We wanted to let hashpower control the coin - and we got the perfection of developer control.

This is the reason why I might appear to be hysterical, dramatizing, polarizing and freaking out about the fork.

 

[Roy Badami]

Re the P2SH birthday attack: doesn't the attack rely on the fact that someone has to go last, and therefore knows the other public keys in the script at the time they're generating theirs? Wouldn't it be enough to commit to the public keys before exchanging them?

Granted, this doesn't help in deterministic schemes since you don't want the security to rely on the secrecy of the extended public key, so you have to assume that the public keys you will use are already known to an attacker. But I think you could fix that by taking the HD-derived keys and then performing a (point) addition of some suitably generated data. EDIT: It's messy, though, as you need to make sure you retain this additional data, losing one of the big benefits of HD wallets. EDIT^2: Although the additional data isn't secret, so you could relatively easily come up with a scheme to store it on the blockchain.

But nonetheless, unless I'm missing something, I think it can all be fixed in the wallets, without needed any changes to the consensus rules. (Which is not to say that allowing SHA256 P2SH wouldn't be a good thing anyway.)

EDIT: Also, in a corporate or institutional cold storage scheme, where you have full control of the whole key generation process, there are probably other ways to mitigate against this attack.

 

[Dusty]

It seems like fakoshi is not quite bluffing regarding some serious hashpower: a nice percentage of the last mined blocks are by their pool (mempool.com).


Also, someone just mined the biggest BCH block ever: 32MB with 166739 transactions in it: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/block/556034

It this one by the SV team too?

 

[go1111111]

So it appears coingeek has lied about Maxwell's email:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5065996.msg47722245#msg47722245

Coingeek misinterpreted the email, but the email likely was sent by Greg and the quotes are likely accurate.

Notice that Greg never denied sending the email. He just denied supporting SV. The email is Greg trying to help CSW because he believes CSW is a clown and he wants CSW to have influence over BCH, so that BCH is less of a threat to BTC.

Greg sees the current situation going very badly for CSW if he tries to go through with his threats (I agree with Greg here). There’s a general sense among smart people that CSW is about to flame out spectacularly and be ejected from the BCH community. His latest behavior is that of a cornered, desperate man. Greg is trying to pull some strings behind the scenes to keep this cancer on BCH alive as long as possible, because it’s good for Core.

Read Greg’s email and bitcointalk post again. The lines are pretty easy to read between. He talks about his “interests” aligning with CSWs and talks about a “win-win” but in his email he never reveals to CSW what his interests actually are.

 

[throwaway]

@Christoph Bergmann
There's no such thing as a "hard-soft fork". That's like saying adding even and odd numbers together turns them into "odd-even numbers"!

 

[Dusty]

Meanwhile the 3rd 32MB block has been mined and the hash power siding with SV is growing bigger and bigger.

Well, I guess we'll see a real hash war battle, and this will settle a lot of past debates once and for all about who decides what in the network.

Very, very interesting.

 

[wrstuv31]

That was obviously coordinated with the 'hash war' crowd.

No, it was because of a poll on memo. Clearly all rational thought is suspended until after Nov 15...

 

[freetrader]

No, it was because of a poll on memo. Clearly all rational thought is suspended until after Nov 15...

Show us the poll you refer to please, @wrstuv31

 

[wrstuv31]

yes, I definitely saved it for the benefit of conspiracy believers...

if you're going to claim bad faith from genuine BCH contributors, you need the proof! The stress test is the thing that woke up this community, and made people notice. One little date being what you don't like has pushed you over the edge. That's all it took. One coincidental date, and a social media clown, and you're ready to turn on your teammates.

 

[freetrader]

Ok, you edited your post to remove the "show me you're not a lizard king that wants to harvest my youthful organs" tripe...

Anyway, that's a real picture of me on the left. As you can see I'm not a lizard king.
I didn't ask for your organs anyway, I asked for a link to the poll you meant.
So many polls on Memo, the good thing is they are 100% on the blockchain.
Take your time.

yes, I definitely saved it for the benefit of conspiracy believers...

if you're going to claim bad faith from genuine BCH contributors, you need the proof! The stress test is the thing that woke up this community, and made people notice. One little date being what you don't like has pushed you over the edge. That's all it took. One coincidental date, and a social media clown, and you're ready to turn on your teammates.

At least I now know where I stand with you - Core troll level post ninja editing, requires copying each of your comments before replying.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

yes, I definitely saved it for the benefit of conspiracy believers...

if you're going to claim bad faith from genuine BCH contributors, you need the proof! The stress test is the thing that woke up this community, and made people notice. One little date being what you don't like has pushed you over the edge. That's all it took. One coincidental date, and a social media clown, and you're ready to turn on your teammates.

I note this, too. There is a trend to try to do the same kind of community purge Core did with those that do not agree with centralized developer consensus. It's really interesting to see how people react.

 

[freetrader]

your teammates

@wrstuv31 bro, you're not even a BU member. Did you ever considering applying?
At least @Christoph Bergmann did...

Where I come from, people that make the claims (like Nov 10 test was based on a poll) are required to bring the evidence.

Here's a poll I know of:

https://memo.cash/post/b327bf5a2898604b97bad916ada47a0de60c9151adc7bed89f0d1b6a916ca21d

That's can't be the one you're talking about, right?
[doublepost=1541864448,1541863817][/doublepost]

I note this, too. There is a trend to try to do the same kind of community purge Core did with those that do not agree with centralized developer consensus. It's really interesting to see how people react.

Christoph, what purge?
[doublepost=1541864749][/doublepost]

One little date being what you don't like has pushed you over the edge. That's all it took. One coincidental date, and a social media clown

You sound like a clown to me now. Bring me the evidence for your 'poll', don't backpedal with "one date that I don't like" BS...

Funny how people freak out when they realize they've just been called on their crap and the blockchain doesn't lie...

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@freetrader yes, "purge" was definitely too strong of a word.

But it is obvious that this is a dragon den's style like social media attack. As I explained above, the CTOR fork is an attack on a basic principle of Bitcoin Cash to reintroduce developer's consensus worse than core, and it is accompanied by a social media campaign directed against the one guy who is a maniac asshole, but also happens to be the first to resist this kind of takeover. It's the typical game, people who are against developer consensus are associated with CSW, while there is a massive campaign against him, combined with what I think are voting bots.

Take a look at this conversation and the votes:

You are a good example of the damage a social media campaign can do. Usually you post very reasonable things, passionate, but objective, aware of persons, but mostly interested in Bitcoin Cash and cool, calm analysis. Since a few weeks Craig Wright or nChain is your answer to nearly everything.

 

[wrstuv31]

@freetrader

My recollection of real world events is that the stress test team consulted the community. I saw multiple polls on memo and I indicated in each one that I wanted the test to be shortly after Nov 15. I did this because it is a direct way for me to provide an incentive for big blocks on the network.

I'm not going to cyber sleuth. If I'm wrong then this is very minor, I'll just adjust and move on. The original accusation is wild speculation.


Edit:

my original post calling you out was more accusatory than it should have been. I wanted to show how easy it is to get someone to think a certain way, even if only for a brief moment. The ingredients were:

1) social media clownery
2) priming
3) triggering coincidence

That's cheap and easy, and could be more efficient than POW at directing human action. If people continue to be susceptible in this way then the Core strategy of social subversion will have actually been the correct move, given how passive the miners were.