Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

When does Bitcoin's Adolescence End?

Bitcoin, as a network, is composed solely of miners. Thus the headline question is about miners' maturity as market actors, which in turn is a question about their incentives to be mature.

The block reward, often loosely called a subsidy, does have the character of a (government) subsidy in at least one sense: it crowds out many of the incentives for miners to develop their own software and improve their networking and connectedness.

This overconcentrates R&D into hashing and related infrastructure, while transaction transmission, transport rules, any merchant-facing services (for 0-conf, etc.), and node software development is all left to the volunteer dev teams.

At each halving, miners were to gain more interest in taking matters into their own hands. But without the fee income from transactions, due to a legacy of extremely throttled blocksizes, this maturation process is stunted. We have an immature teenager running around in the form of largely immature miners.

One implication of this is that heretofore independent developers (those who prefer node development to building on top _unwriter-style) may want to look into getting hired by miners. Especially miners who recognize their role, take a long view, and look forward to winning money from other miners by actively pushing the envelope in a market process exploring higher blocksizes seeking greater fee income.

 

[79b79aa8]

and contributing to the immaturity of miners is their coalescence into acephalous pools. this too shall change, when the pickings get slimmer. next's year's halving could very well, for the first time, not be followed by a bull run.

on the other hand, let's not lose sight of the fact that mining on BSV is monopolistic, and probably operating at a loss. these are "more mature" miners in your sense, but the security model is by courtesy only, for the time being anyway.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

When does Bitcoin's Adolescence End?

Bitcoin, as a network, is composed solely of miners. Thus the headline question is about miners' maturity as market actors, which in turn is a question about their incentives to be mature.

The block reward, often loosely called a subsidy, does have the character of a (government) subsidy in at least one sense: it crowds out many of the incentives for miners to develop their own software and improve their networking and connectedness.

This overconcentrates R&D into hashing and related infrastructure, while transaction transmission, transport rules, any merchant-facing services (for 0-conf, etc.), and node software development is all left to the volunteer dev teams.

At each halving, miners were to gain more interest in taking matters into their own hands. But without the fee income from transactions, due to a legacy of extremely throttled blocksizes, this maturation process is stunted. We have an immature teenager running around in the form of largely immature miners.

One implication of this is that heretofore independent developers (those who prefer node development to building on top _unwriter-style) may want to look into getting hired by miners. Especially miners who recognize their role, take a long view, and look forward to winning money from other miners by actively pushing the envelope in a market process exploring higher blocksizes seeking greater fee income.

Very good point. The 1mb blocksize limit restricts the investment of miners to electricity and asic chips while keeping them dumb.

The only smart btc miner is bitfury, they have long started using their mining facilities to upload data on the blockchain, like land registries and so on.

Miners have so many business opportunities to earn money, and I always thought they must deploy smart fee tables, like for secure unconfirmed transactions, for immutable data and so on ... But as long as they are developer slaves with a strict production quota they will only be able to buy more electricity and asic chips ... Let's see if the next halvings curve out smarter miners
[doublepost=1556350994][/doublepost]@Norway yes, bu is an idea, but like all ideas, it need a manifestation in the world. The manifestation is the software, created by developers and run by people. It was a great idea of bu developers to let the idea people take a vote in the manifestation. But you can't force them.

Today it seems the developers are no longer willing to work for the original idea, but focus their work on a half manifestation of it. That's sad, but it makes not much sense to vote against it. The idea of bu lives on, but it's no longer manifested in the bu software.

 

[Norway]

Today it seems the developers are no longer willing to work for the original idea, but focus their work on a half manifestation of it. That's sad, but it makes not much sense to vote against it. The idea of bu lives on, but it's no longer manifested in the bu software.

There are plenty of devs in the world, and BU has funds.

If we want BU to become even more effective, we should go from charity to business. Members become shareholders.

 

[Norway]

The ABC and BU devs fight about power over the protocol. And they think CSW is trying to get the same power.

A protocol set in stone is a threat to people's influence over the protocol. It removes the central planning committee.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

So, yes, we can make a vote to fund a developer who takes care of a bsv version of bu if the resident developers don't want any longer. Good point.

 

[bitsko]

BitcoinMediumLimited (until it is safe, we will let you know)

 

[shilch]

Very plausible explanation of why bitcoin hashes everything twice: It's to easily prove knowledge of the preimage without revealing it.

 

[79b79aa8]

@awemany wanted an explanation for that, but couldn't get an answer from CSW. consider this Q&A with CSW from two years ago (before the BCH split), on BTC slack:
https://pastebin.com/zU6YZWXK

reading the chat is infuriating, because the format allows different people to ask questions while previous ones have not been disposed of, while others keep interrupting and derailing the conversation. topics are not narrowed down in advance, nor does the interviewee know what to assume about the technical level of interlocutors, nor can he know which handles are reputable and which ones are not. it is hopeless. towards the end, the whole thing turns into insults and should have been stopped. to make it worse, sometimes there are gaps in the transcription, i think at points CSW is copy/pasting answers from a paper and the symbols didn’t carry through.

with all that being said, track @awemany's second question (a first one about nChain is ruled out as beyond scope). he asks for the reasons for the double SHA256 hashing. CSW assumes the question is being raised because of fears that quantum computing will eventually brake bitcoin, and slaps something from a paper addressing that.

but awemany is not spreading QC FUD, he just wants to know why the function is iterated (one might assume the process increases security, but also probability of collision). this gets us into an interesting discussion about cardinality and computability. the question is never fully answered. awemany is unsatisfied, gives benefit of doubt, but later concludes, iirc, that CSW does not know the answer, and is obfuscating.

i don't think that conclusion is warranted. i think the discussion was sabotaged. i think the guy has every reason to not to participate on anything of that sort anymore.

but i am not sure how satisfactory the answer in the video is, i have to think about it. it might start making sense when tx fees > block reward. interesting how this dovetails with what @Zangelbert Bingledack was discussing a few posts up.

 

[cbeast]

Very plausible explanation of why bitcoin hashes everything twice: It's to easily prove knowledge of the preimage without revealing it.

This is the kind of stuff that shows he is Satoshi (or is psychically channeling him). It also hints at the upcoming patents he's been alluding to with regards to multi-party Diffie-Hellman key exchange, parallel Turing machines, and other exotic scripting.

 

[79b79aa8]

assume the substantial block subsidy ends before miners have replaced revenue with tx fees. this may or may not tank the price, but in any case further assume that decreased income wipes out most miners. the first thing they'll do is liquidate the asics. someone else will buy them for cheap and mostly have to worry about electricity. SHA256 hashsrate is at least maintained, massive head start in security built up in the bonanza years of minting your own money gives time to the network to adapt to a more competitive mining environment, focused on volume.

time, time, time is on our side.

 

[cypherdoc]

well, the price could go all the way to zero preventing any re buying of asics.

but this is why the sound money aspects of 21M can never be violated despite what lunatics like Toddler are now proposing (inflation). and it's also why it's so important to remove all the key economic limits in place NOW, like blocksize, so that the Fidelity's of the world can confidently grab market share in a competitive race to prominence.

not when devs decide to allow it.
[doublepost=1556380895][/doublepost]upon thinking about it, it may be Bitcoin's destiny (better path) to onboard institutions before ordinary users in order to allow them to grow just as big and fast as nchain/CSW in a future BSV world. that way, if and when CSW fraud decides to inappropriately change the protocol (in a Satoshi coin grab for instance) those institutions would be in a great position to hard fork the code away from him while easily weathering financially any patent lawsuit using the promises heretofore provided by Nchain to be responsible against him

 

[cypherdoc]

the second LN author expresses doubts. listen carefully, he also says that without high onchain fees no one will use LN:

https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cud2hhdGJpdGNvaW5kaWQuY29tL3BvZGNhc3Q_Zm9ybWF0PVJTUw&episode=NTk2NDFhMjhmZjdjNTA5OWMxMmE1ZWRhOjVhMTgzMGQyZjk2MTlhZmE2YWYzOGYxODo1Y2MyYjU0OGE0MjIyZmNmMDkxZTQ0NGE

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

but the security model is by courtesy only

Or long time horizon, protecting a long-term investment. I don't think BTC is going to be around much longer, but Coingeek's and nChain's mining infrastructure will be (and seeking a big return as it's a huge sunk cost).

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

awemany is unsatisfied, gives benefit of doubt, but later concludes, iirc, that CSW does not know the answer, and is obfuscating.

Knows but could well have been obfuscating. Saying the reason then would have let other coins catch up before nChain's many patents using the double-SHA256 tricks were granted.

When you can divide mining tasks... what Great Firewall?

 

[Zarathustra]

Wright: "Short History of Progress" ;-)

 

[rocks]

In the odd event of actual high volume use of BCH, "We will not allow until..." can result in this deadweight loss shown here, because it is indeed a political measure. It seems as though there is a central committee of developers, and that this software development aspect of the bitcoin competition has been decidedly removed from BCH.

That is exactly the issue BCH has fallen into, which BTC and all other chains have fallen into as well. The development team of the reference client restricts the chain in some manner that removes free market competition in software development, which cements their position and prevents other developers from improving the ecosystem.

Whether this is done intentionally or unintentionally, the end effect is the same, the chain does not improve because it becomes restricted to the abilities and investment of the reference client developers, and is unable to be improved by other groups or market forces. We saw this in BTC where miners invested zero effort in scaling or software development because BTC core took market forces away and so there was no benefit to invest in scaling.

And this is exactly why the recent BSV re-org is a positive, the re-org is an expression that market forces are what will drive BSV's development, not a central development team. CSW and team have made it clear that they will not invest in scaling and instead will simply remove restrictions on the protocol, which makes it the responsibility of other participants to solve the scaling issues.

In doing so BSV will benefit by market forces and the collective abilities of the entire ecosystem. It's just that simple, yet the majority of people do not seem to understand this.

despite what lunatics like Toddler are now proposing (inflation).

Sadly they are not lunatics for proposing inflation, they broke Bitcoin by preventing others from scaling Bitcoin as described above, and then since they broke Bitcoin inflation became the only mechanism to keep the network running in the long run.

 

[79b79aa8]

before nChain's many patents using the double-SHA256 tricks were granted.

is this a known fact?

And this is exactly why the recent BSV re-org is a positive, the re-org is an expression that market forces are what will drive BSV's development, not a central development team. CSW and team have made it clear that they will not invest in scaling and instead will simply remove restrictions on the protocol, which makes it the responsibility of other participants to solve the scaling issues.

not sure i follow . . . BSV is hellbent on scaling.

also, as others have pointed out, when you control at least 70% of the hash (CG+BMG), how much market pressure does orphan risk exert? dropping a block with does not matter much if you are also the one picking it up.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

IPv6 jumbo payload allows up to 4.3 GB packets. Anyone recognize that number?

It appears that the Metanet idea of encapsulating all Internet data, "a Bitcoin transaction in every packet," was foreseen by Satoshi and baked into the original design with OP_PUSHDATA4.
[doublepost=1556434652][/doublepost]

is this a known fact?

I am saying what I said (the full quote) would make sense assuming Craig knew then what he stated about SHA256d in the recent interview. Though if you want to know whether the patents were actually applied for, given their demonstrated stategy thus far it's fairly safe to assume nChain would patent all the straightforward use cases, of which there are many. As I recall, there's at least one patent already released that uses the double-hash property.
[doublepost=1556435375,1556434307][/doublepost]I had long wondered if mining could be made to not "centralize" in datacenters. I understand economics, but I didn't think it through. Craig understands economics, and he did think it through:

https://medium.com/@craig_10243/decentralised-or-just-inefficient-1eefecec03ff

 

[Norway]

@reina has a great interview with @shadders. Some talk about BU too.

[doublepost=1556445440,1556444789][/doublepost]Lots of interesting stuff in the interview. To me, the best takeaway is that nChain will restore the tx order to the chronological order as the miner see them like it was before Gavin changed it.

This adds a lot of value to bitcoin as a timestamper of transactions. The wet dream of an accountant.