Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[bitsko]

Yes, tokenized fiat. Volatility makes efficiently using bitcoin as cash cumbersome. Mass use of bitcoin as cash without unworkable pains is a lofty endgoal for a time when the price moves slowly and liquidity is massive.

 

[cypherdoc]

I can't stop laughing:

 

[trinoxol]

They have a BSV alert bot

Read the fine print at the bottom. This is purely for informational purposes!

 

[79b79aa8]

to the two absurdities above, add jonald fyookball's claim that stabilizing the protocol is equivalent to refusing to update the software.

none of this changes the fact that an unlimited, industrial-scale bitcoin is coming. this bitcoin does not have a block size limit, not even an adjustable one. there will be a de facto limit, of course, established by the capacity in which miners invest, ultimately set by demand.

the BCH dev community cannot stomach such abandon? laissez faire, mais pas trop?

 

[Norway]

This patent will supposedly make it difficult for FaceBook's Libra:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/21/56/f4/3d0a13fc8b4164/US10055720.pdf

 

[lunar]

Simplified Payment Verification

https://craigwright.net/blog/bitcoin-blockchain-tech/simplified-payment-verification/

Snippets:

“SPV or simplified payment verification is a critical aspect of scaling Bitcoin. I thought it was rather clear and obvious when I released the white paper, but it seems that people have overlooked or misunderstood all of the different aspects. The truth of the matter is, nobody realised how simple SPV could be.”

“By definition, ‘peer-to-peer’ refers to the direct exchange between individuals or other parties. As such, a consumer, Alice, who wishes to purchase goods from a merchant, Bob, would send a transaction directly to Bob. Bob can validate it and send it to the blockchain for clearing and settlement. The process is peer-to-peer.”

“Winston Churchill supported the reintroduction of the gold standard, although at a mispriced level, as it stopped the knaves in Parliament from altering values for political concerns. A distributed system enables a method that will stop such knaves seeking to alter the monetary supply yet not turn them into trusted third parties.”

“Users in the system are only required to maintain a copy of the block header to which they can compare transactions. At present, the block header is under 50 MB in size. Many image files can exceed such levels. A decade from now, the growth will only be linear.”

“A user could implement a Bayesian system to ensure that they had the longest chain. Rather than checking with one miner, they would query multiple random nodes. In doing so, it is possible to ensure very simply and without much bandwidth that they have the longest path.”

“[M]iners are geographically located and cannot easily move, making them subject to the provisions of law, where a dishonest miner would be liable to losses. (…) [T]he reason that the word honest is mentioned 15 times in the white paper is that it relates directly to acts such as the U.K.'s Fraud Act 2006.”

“I had written in an early draft of the white paper that transactions would only be vulnerable to reversal. It is so because Bitcoin is not designed to be a system that acts outside of the controls of law. It is a system that supports honest trading and allows the capture and sequestration of transactions that can be shown to be associated with criminal activity.”

“As governments, regulators, and law enforcement start to wake up and see the true design of Bitcoin, they will start to understand that it is a system that is friendly to law. It assists in the tracing of transactions, and provides a high level of privacy for the small cash like transfers whilst also being able to immutably record money laundering and crimes.”

“Note that Alice does not maintain merely her private keys in the system. She will save the Merkle path and the input transactions that she is seeking to use. Alice does not need to maintain access to the blockchain to be able to spend her money.”

“If Bob seeks to alter the transaction so that the change is not incorporated, the entire transaction will be invalid. The result is that Bob either submits the payment he has received from Alice to the blockchain for settlement, with the change to be paid to Alice, or he does not receive payment, in which case Alice does not need to worry about her change at all.”

“As the merchant, Bob sends the transactions to the blockchain, and not Alice; she has more privacy than if she sent it herself. (…) As Bob sends the transactions, and as he is likely to be a merchant with many transactions, his IP address is made public, not Alice's. (…) So, Alice reveals far less and can maintain her privacy in the world at large.
Chain analysis and recording IP addresses will not reveal Alice's exchange. Bob holds a record, but it is not public.”“Bitcoin can neither be peer-to-peer nor scale without the implementation of SPV.”

“Bitcoin can neither be peer-to-peer nor scale without the implementation of SPV.”

"I shall continue detailing the processes involved with SPV in following posts, and explain how Bitcoin can be scaled not to a few individuals but to millions of transactions a second."

 

[Norway]

This is getting interesting. Shitcoin Unlimited (BU) is getting competitive and will try to threaten miners with a poison chain to make them start running BU.

BU developers will next coordinate with the Bitcoin.com Mining Pool to begin mining chains of up to 500 unconfirmed transactions on mainnet. This represents a 20x increase in the max chained transaction length.

Other miners who want to help solve the problems caused by the limits on the number of chained mempool transactions can make an immediate positive impact by running BU.

BU has convinced Roger's pool Bitcoin.com to do this. This week, Bitcoin.com had just 7.8% of the hash power on BCH. The act is similar to what someone called a poison block attack, a block larger than other nodes can handle.

From what it looks like, Bitcoin.com will orphan their own blocks, rent some temporary hash power from BTC or create a persistent split. Or scare at least 51% of BCH miners to run BU. I guess the last option is Plan A.

Stack up on popcorn!

Source:
https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/blog/6a710fed-21d3-499a-97a5-e1a419bc0a6f

And yes, BU is implementing CPFP, lol!

 

[Richy_T]

Some mundane level stuff from "the creator of bitcoin" there. But I take exception to this.

“As the merchant, Bob sends the transactions to the blockchain, and not Alice; she has more privacy than if she sent it herself. (…) As Bob sends the transactions, and as he is likely to be a merchant with many transactions, his IP address is made public, not Alice's. (…) So, Alice reveals far less and can maintain her privacy in the world at large.
Chain analysis and recording IP addresses will not reveal Alice's exchange. Bob holds a record, but it is not public.”“Bitcoin can neither be peer-to-peer nor scale without the implementation of SPV.”

Alice would, for a regular transaction, send her transaction to the gossip network. Only the nodes she directly spoke to would be able to identify her by IP and even then, many could not be sure that she wasn't just forwarding that transaction from elsewhere and by the time it got to any miner, all bets would be off. Note that nothing about SPV requires that Alice can't just send her transactions to the Bitcoin network directly.

Sending the transaction to the merchant directly ties that transaction to the IP address. It's a net loss of privacy, even if it's only directly to the merchant (who may well be compromised). Of course, Alice has probably given up her IP already but possibly not. Though, in fact, we're basically there already in a lot of cases with Bitpay (and others) implementation of BIP70.

I know at one point, people were looking at contextless transactions. You would make a payment and that payment would include everything that was needed to complete the sale, including address details and item list (encrypted of course). Now there's your privacy.

There's some other head-scratching stuff in there too but whateva.

 

[trinoxol]

BCH does BSV stuff again. Incompetent miners are left behind as they should be. I wonder if bitcoin.com is actually going to go on the warpath here. If they are willing to do that Roger can't be happy.

> Satoshi Dice should consider awarding the 1000 BCH bounty to BU and the developers who made this happen once the software is released in production and the first long chain of mempool transactions is mined on mainnet.

Companies are paying developers for software improvements (not protocol changes). As they should.

Awesome to see that BU is back in the game.

 

[Richy_T]

I suspect this won't make the French one happy.

 

[Norway]

I suspect countermeasures from both BU and ABC if a poison chain strategy is enforced. I hope we get a persistent chain split of BCH.

 

[Peter R]

BCH does BSV stuff again. Incompetent miners are left behind as they should be. I wonder if bitcoin.com is actually going to go on the warpath here. If they are willing to do that Roger can't be happy.

> Satoshi Dice should consider awarding the 1000 BCH bounty to BU and the developers who made this happen once the software is released in production and the first long chain of mempool transactions is mined on mainnet.

Companies are paying developers for software improvements (not protocol changes). As they should.

Awesome to see that BU is back in the game.

I'm curious how this plays out. Here an ABC contributor is arguing that modifying the ABC code to permit longer mempool chains is difficult because it makes back-porting from Core harder, and they are already under funded.

To me, this reads as an admission that they cannot compete and will be left behind should BCH continue to scale.

Miners relying on ABC, which in turn relies on Core, is insane. Core is following a small-block path and so will _never_ make the changes that would allow ABC to scale.

More miners should run BU which has the resources to continue developing technology to allow BCH to scale.

 

[Otaci]

The small block ethos permeates the code to its very core (pun intended). The fact that ABC havent realised this yet and try to maintain some sort of code compatability with Core just goes to show that they havent even begun to look at the issue of scale.

Simple example: its only 1 meg, so if a peer asks for the block, load the whole damn thing in memory and then start sending it out. Now imagine 2GB blocks and 50 peers requesting different blocks. Yup, won't work. Never mind the crappy response time with loading the whole thing into RAM first before even starting to send it out. This crap is everywhere in the code, at the very core. The whole damn thing needs to be rewritten.

 

[Richy_T]

This crap is everywhere in the code, at the very core. The whole damn thing needs to be rewritten.

Of course, this has been clear for a long time. Doing so might even have revealed better ways of handling DOS attacks than imposing an arbitrary block size limit. The problem is that Core are the gatekeepers and it's to the benefit of Core for the code to be difficult to maintain and require in-depth knowledge as a barrier to entry. This is why shit like Segwit was not immediately rejected for the encumbrance it is.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

That's so weird. Bitcoin cash and bitcoin core have some very different goals. It makes much more sense to design the details for yourself instead of adopting all what core does.

But I heard Amaury thinks core is right, so it might make sense. I wonder if they will backport maxwell's erlay. It throttles network flooding for 'more decentralization', making unconfirmed transactions slower. In core this doesn't matter, as you should use lightning anyway...

Amaury and the others are publicly silent. I guess he's roaring. Ragequit incoming?

Anything but Craig is not so much fun, when you are no longer in Craig's team
[doublepost=1570746330][/doublepost]

Of course, this has been clear for a long time. Doing so might even have revealed better ways of handling DOS attacks than imposing an arbitrary block size limit. The problem is that Core are the gatekeepers and it's to the benefit of Core for the code to be difficult to maintain and require in-depth knowledge as a barrier to entry. This is why shit like Segwit was not immediately rejected for the encumbrance it is.

Oh yes, it's also a source of income. Someone needs to spend money for bitcoin courses and books.

 

[lunar]

Some mundane level stuff from "the creator of bitcoin" there.

Ryan did an explainer. It's mundane stuff, but that's the point, Why are so few wallets integrating with each other, and doing this properly?

 

[trinoxol]

(Re)Writing a node software is a large amount of work. Also, because it's handling consensus and money the code quality must be very high. This further increases costs and it creates a shortage of qualified developers.

It makes sense for BCH to keep the codebases as aligned as possible. That way, code changes can be copied over from Core with minimal changes. From what I hear they don't even have enough manpower to copy over everything there is.

For similar reasons, SV started out reusing the Core/ABC codebase. This is the correct strategy. The rewrite (TerraNode) will take time to bring to production readiness.

Once TerraNode exists all other node software will be obsolete on BSV. As blocks get larger other software will not be able to keep up. Very few organizations have the resources to create a new node software. TerraNode will be the software of the land that everybody uses.

 

[Richy_T]

It's definitely not trivial but the Core software has a staggering amount of technical debt and many functions that are not required to be in a node and which should have been moved out to separate apps (which would have brought other benefits too). Rewriting from the ground up may not have been on the table but certainly refactoring should have been an ongoing task. We have seen that debt result in serious bugs both with external developers and internal.

As to the complexity of a ground-up rewrite, I guess we could look at Flowee. That's a one-man job, I believe.

 

[trinoxol]

Yes, it is kind of ridiculous that the Core software contains a wallet and a GUI. These can be split off fairly easily. This is not cleanly done in the Core codebase. For example, during syncing the GUI often freezes because there is a global lock taken by the GUI and while doing network or disk IO. It's all entangled.

When architecture is messed up like that it is very hard to untangle it. It takes a lot of analysis, work, testing and there is potential for bugs that testing does not catch. Better to do it right in the first place. That's not what Satoshi did.

Writing the first version was a major amount of work for Satoshi. I totally understand any shortcuts that he might have taken to get it out of the door.

 

[Norway]

BU is implementing Child Pays For Parent (CPFP) now. What's next? RBF? Segwit?