Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[warboat]

what you call an "attack", Nakamoto Consensus defines as the Truth.
Nakamoto consensus does not give entitlement to righteousness to good or bad. The determinant is sunk cost commitment thru PoW.
Checkpointing is propaganda. Like all propaganda, it only works until it doesn't. It could be a very long time (chain split), but it is still delusional.

 

[adamstgbit]

the check pointing is not a replacement to PoW
its just a way to ignore an attacker. no one wants to wast PoW on some bullshit chain caused by some manic miner trying to disrupt the network.
your just pissed that miners are not going to bend over and let their chain get reorged now and then, by some bitch with some silly bursts of hashpower.
[doublepost=1543378192][/doublepost]CSW talks about how only PoW matters..
what he fails to see is that miners are Slaves to the market makers.
all the pow in the world didnt stop Segwit.
all the pow in the world isnt going to stop BCH
[doublepost=1543378538,1543377602][/doublepost]but i must admit, its a bit sad that BCH doesn't have enough hashpower to easily dismiss SV, and has to resort to dirty checkpoints.

 

[molecular]

one of SV's talking points is "locking down the protocol".
thanks this helps.

locking down the protocal, but at the same time pushing the limit to 128MB, ironic! I agree uping the limit is hardly a protocol change, but its a change and i'm sure its not the only change SV is making / will make. I guess every change they make will have to not effect "the core protocol" ( a self imposed limitation i am 99% sure they will inevitably break -_- )

I think bitcoin is not ready to have its protocol "locked down", give it a few years, get the tech in there to allow for huge blocks and then Lock it down.

Thanks @adamstgbit for writing the answer to @Norways post I wanted to write. "Freezing" the "protocol"... what does that even mean? If it means what I feel intuitively it means then I agree: it's premature at best and impossible to do at worst. Seems to me the center of disagreement would move from wether or not a change should be done to where on the axis/continuum between "protocol level consensus rule" and "implementation detail" it lies and where the line should be drawn. I'm not sure which of these discussions would be more fruitful.

I've said this a couple weeks back: I think we would greatly benefit from categorizing "changes" (across the above-mentioned axis and maybe otherwise) in order to be able to have a more nuanced discussion both about any suggested changes, but also about the framework we use to evaluate them. You know, like: does it affect monetary properties?, does it fiddle with economic incentives? does it affect wallets/infrastructure? and so on. I think this would make the discussion more productive and less harmful because we wouldn't be talking about different things using the same words all the time, which I feel is a source of unneccessary misunderstanding and socially harmful animosities.

I feel pretty strongly that in the end we all desire very similar outcomes. I think we might be currently engaged in a form of bikeshedding,... a very destructive one.

 

[Zarathustra]

CSW talks about how only PoW matters..
what he fails to see is that miners are Slaves to the market makers.
all the pow in the world didnt stop Segwit.
all the pow in the world isnt going to stop BCH

Yes, the bigger the bullshit, the more value. With the miners of the last 10 years Bitcoin needed no more enemies. Hopefully, this market failure is just one of those countless failures that happen in the short term, which get corrected in the middle and longer term.

The market is an environment with countless positive and negative feedback loops.
The miners are among the biggest influencing factors on the market. They are not just slaves to the market makers, they are market makers. If they had followed their own promises and killed the North Corean project with BU instead of cowardly doing the opposite, the market today would look completely different.

 

[freetrader]

IN DEFENSE OF THE AGREEABLE MAXIMALIST

I've been critical of maximalists, going so far as to call some of them 'dumbshits' [1].

Here I'm going to present the other side - the "maximalist" that I know also exists, and who I get along with fine. An "agreeable maximalist", to me.

The agreeable maximalist believes that Bitcoin [2] is the non plus ultra perfect *incentive* system up to now. (S)he's happy putting all their efforts into it, but doesn't feel a need to put down others who disagree with them, or who pursue other cryptocurrency experiments. In fact, (s)he's happy to debate the merits of Bitcoin with them, to persuade them to see the light, but also to learn their points of view.

(S)he's will be satisfied if Bitcoin becomes the dominant world money, but if it doesn't, (s)he's will be gracious in accepting "defeat" as long as a better form of peer to peer cash replaced it. (S)he knows it's a big game, a competition, and that competition is what separates the good from the ... not so good.

(S)he knows the value of a free market, and that this allows even the laggards to migrate to the better forms of money. Which in his/her mind ought to be Bitcoin, therefore Bitcoin needs to continuously improve and learn from the mistakes of other experiments, if it is to remain at the top of this game.

(S)he's won't be overly attached to names, colors, logos - as long as something pursues the goals of Bitcoin, who cares what it's called. Bitcoin, or Bitcoin Cash, or Bitcoin TheUltimate.



[1] This has been misrepresented as me portraying all maximalists as dumbshits. That's not the case, as illustrated by this post.

[2] Substitute whatever cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin that you're a maximalist of, if you are. Maximalists don't only come in "Bitcoin" flavor.

 

[Bagatell]

I dumped my SV too. Am I an ultramaximalist?

 

[awemany]

@molecular: Well said!

 

[go1111111]

what you call an "attack", Nakamoto Consensus defines as the Truth.
Nakamoto consensus does not give entitlement to righteousness to good or bad. The determinant is sunk cost commitment thru PoW.

Over long time periods, I prefer to use my judgment about the coin that I'm going to value.

PoW extremists are essentially delegating their own judgment to a simple algorithm: whichever chain has the most work, that's the one that they prefer.

If this algorithm happens to capture all of the nuances of your preferences of which chains are valuable to you, that's great. You just saved yourself any mental effort and have delegated your autonomy to a simple program.

Unfortunately my preferences can't be captured by a simple algorithm as far as I know. No simple algorithm can make me value something that I don't think is valuable.

For one, I happen to prefer the coin that is going to be worth the most money in the future. Determining which coin will be most valuable in the future is a very complicated matter. It's not just a matter of which chain has the most hash power right now. For instance to determine which of BTC, BCH, ETH, or ZEC is going to be the dominant crypto of the future you need to think about a lot more than accumulated work. You need to think about the value of privacy, the quality of ZKSNARKs, the interplay between MoE and SoV, the value of easily programmable smart contracts, etc.

If you could guarantee that SV would be the most valuable variant of Bitcoin just by spending a few million dollars to rent some hash power in the short term, that would be quite magical.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Checkpointing is propaganda.

How is the genesis block different from a checkblock?

And why on earth are you people even concerned about BCH? Following your logic, you must have been following the chain with the most SHA256 work, which is without a doubt, the BTC chain.

The BTC/BCH split hasn't been decided by PoW.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

I've said this a couple weeks back: I think we would greatly benefit from categorizing "changes" (across the above-mentioned axis and maybe otherwise) in order to be able to have a more nuanced discussion both about any suggested changes, but also about the framework we use to evaluate them. You know, like: does it affect monetary properties?, does it fiddle with economic incentives? does it affect wallets/infrastructure? and so on. I think this would make the discussion more productive and less harmful because we wouldn't be talking about different things using the same words all the time, which I feel is a source of unneccessary misunderstanding and socially harmful animosities..

I don't think this is possible at all. Protocol changes have not only technical effects, but a complex set of social effects (economical, cultural, political, maybe even legal), which is impossible to quantify. Usually developers are not trained to take the social effects into account. I hoped that BCH would establish a culture of hard forks, in which the process of weighting those effects is celebrated. But this did not happen.

With the Nov 15th hard fork we had the luck that it was easy to assess. The social costs outweighted the technical benefits by a large amount. Broken down simply: it maybe helps to process 1gb blocks (I still think ABC neglects the economic importance of orphans), while it makes it much harder to fill 1mb blocks. ABC proofed that they are not only completely blind for the social effects - which have been told over and over - but that they are willing to defend their ignorance even on risk of doing a huge technical harm (hashwar).

I'm not sure if it is really impossible to have a cryptocurrency of changes. But I know that the experiment of doing it with BCH failed, and that I want to stay away from a chain that is up to the hard fork program of ABC.

 

[wrstuv31]

Over long time periods, I prefer to use my judgment about the coin that I'm going to value.

If this algorithm happens to capture all of the nuances of your preferences of which chains are valuable to you, that's great. You just saved yourself any mental effort and have delegated your autonomy to a simple program.

I don't see how a chain that doesn't follow POW governance will be able to endure and deliver lasting value. There's no point investing in the social governance version of crypto when the value is derived from market governance, which comes from the economics behind the POW game. The social government version of crypto is not able to compete with existing socially governed currencies unless they are a proxy for the state because their governing organizations are weak, ignorant, and poor compared to their competitors. If the plan for ABC is to hope that the existing leadership outperforms their competitors through their own insight, then I'd rather invest in Amazon. POW doesn't magically force you to use it, but if you do you will have much less overhead and take less risk overall.

For one, I happen to prefer the coin that is going to be worth the most money in the future. Determining which coin will be most valuable in the future is a very complicated matter.

What are the measures you use to do this complicated task? Is it more than a techy projecting their experience onto everyone else?

 

[cypherdoc]

_edit_ re-orgs are not prevented. The fallback is manual config to track the majority fork

that's a problem

 

[RollieMe]

This is encouraging, more so for ABC but a sliver for SV too. I'm not familiar with some of these pool names so I'm assuming they're usually BTC miners who have flipped over to BCH and SV because of profitability:

 

[Norway]

[doublepost=1543413930,1543413062][/doublepost]Rolling checkpoints is not a change to the protocol. It's a change of the consensus rules.
Think about it.

 

[_bc]

This is wrong. Bob has found a block at height k, and someone else has already found and propagated a block at height k. Bob knows that other miners won't switch to his block at k unless he finds another block at k+1 before the rest of the network finds a block at k+1. Bob has two choices:

(1) Mine on top of the block someone else found at height k. If he finds the next block, he gets 12.5 BCH (just the ones from block k+1). If he doesn't find the next block he gets nothing.

(2) Keep mining on his own block. If he finds the next block, he gets 25 BCH (from blocks k, and k+1). If he doesn't find the next block he gets nothing.

Either way he's going up against the rest of the network. By sticking with his own block at k he can double his expected value.

hmmm

it might be in the best interest of the miner to do (2) cuz he stands to gain double.
say he has 1% hash rate. then he has a 1% chance of finding the next block, in both cases.
why would he take a 1% chance of making 12.5 when he can take a 1% chance of making 25??

Well, that's embarassing. I was wrong.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@Norway
Nobody forces you to use Bitcoin Cash.
Nobody forces you to follow a chain with checkpoints (btw, how did you choose the genesis block of the chain you are following?)
Nobody forces you to use the minor PoW chain (you can use the BTC chain).

So, what is the problem? We can stop all this bickering about chains. Everybody can use the one they want.
[doublepost=1543416366][/doublepost](The same goes for the BTC/BCH split btw)

 

[Norway]

@satoshis_sockpuppet
I enjoy talking about the different chains, it's a hot topic to me and a lot of other people here. It's also important for BU as an organization to figure out what we will be doing going forward.

And as an investor, I'm gathering valuable information in the process.

If you want me to shut up, say so.

 

[Tom Zander]

Rolling checkpoints is not a change to the protocol.

No client in Bitcoin Cash has "rolling checkpoints" or any checkpoints really after the Nov 15th.

The people that call what ABC implemented "checkpoints" are confusing everyone including themselves.

Checkpoints are set by software developers and shipped hardcoded in the software. Chosing which software you run implies choosing which checkpoints (and thus chain) you run.

What ABC added was a deep reorg protection because such a situation leave a node in a weird state and thus needed protection. Instead of picking the software based on checkpoints, now the chain is selected based on who you connect to and which fully mined chain is seen first.

Very different things, please understand the differences.

 

[lunar]

Tokenized team making a tonnes of sense. Ones to watch, no doubt.


lol "if you purchase a house on the blockchain and it splits, you can live in one and sell the other"

Multicoiners rekt

 

[Norway]

@Tom Zander
I think you're adressing terminology here, which is fine. Let me rephrase:

Deep reorg protection is not a change to the protocol. It's a change of the consensus rules.

Do you agree with this statement?