Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[molecular]

Great post by someone who has enumerated many of the concepts in this thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3k6i8c/bip_101_kiss_keep_it_simple_stupid/

Excellent post. Reflecting my opinion to a very large extent.

Question (sorry for ot): I use that like button on posts. Where can we see the number of likes a post has received? What implications does this have?

 

[molecular]

And we can see these vulnerabilities being addressed already after only a short amount of time. It's kind of ironic that the "small block" proponents, with their worries about hypothetical future node centralization have actually revealed a far worse "centralization" problem that exist right now, that is just now starting to be addressed.

So true. This cannot be stressed enough and frankly in my mind it undermines their credibility.

However this (and what I said in response) points to another problem that is showing it's hideous visage: the veering off of discussion into the area of ad hominems and similar attacks and the 'lumping together' of large groups of people as if they were homogenous single-minded lemmings.

This sort of generalization is really doing people injustice and I'm guilty of it. A majority of the people in any group of bitcoiners would probably condemn DDOSing of pools, faking node counts or censorship of discussion sites. It's just so much easier to judge that 'whole group' by the actions of some (who may or may not be part of that group) than to continually engage with single individuals and their opinions.

If it wasn't so much at stake here (and I don't just mean the value of my little bitcoin stash, but much larger societal implications I really really want to see play out), I would've probably turned my back to Bitcoin long ago, during the recent 'blocksize / censorship' crisis (yes, I call it that) at the latest. I was quite disgusted, frankly.

So I agree: it's good to see these problems are being addressed and it's good to see this movement just keeps going and I'm not the only one so highly motivated to pull through and see this experiment play out in a successful way.

 

[awemany]

[...]
One last point, I've just discovered that the talks will be streamed live on youtube, see:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCmwaDulmQtX-H8FOSQTKqMg

Does that also mean they'll be archived for longer on youtube, so we all have something to refer to?

 

[sickpig]

@awemany as far as I know as long as the channel's owner decide to keep them there they will be available. on a broader note once something hit the net it tends to stay there for quite a long time, independently from owner's will

 

[awemany]

@sickpig: Unless it ends up as [deleted] on reddit If it is of high interest, then yes, but otherwise, things might get lost. I just think it would be nice if they'd say they keep the archive online (at least for a while).

 

[Aquent]

Mempool has reached 150mb

as the "givaway" picks up steam https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1175321.0;all

 

[molecular]

should I employ bitcoinxt 0.11B patched with the mempool size limit feature?

Well, I guess those 24 GB of RAM on my node allow me to postpone that decision for a while.

 

[cypherdoc]

as you can see, we've been co-opted:

 

[cypherdoc]

anyone have a live stream link?:

 

[AdrianX]

Excellent post. Reflecting my opinion to a very large extent.

Question (sorry for ot): I use that like button on posts. Where can we see the number of likes a post has received? What implications does this have?

On my mobile where I read the most there is a little blue box that tells you who has liked the post at the bottom of the post. (you don't need to be a member here to see who liked it.)

Like imo is defined as: an acknowledgment; endorsement; thank you; support or a bookmark. It's a social hack that the author can interpret it as like or whatever they want.

 

[Mengerian]

@molecular I agree the ad hominems are not helpful.

In general, I think people on both sides of the debate are well intentioned, and want bitcoin to succeed.

I think some people simply have a mistaken idea of how changes to Bitcoin can and should happen. They believe that the overall system can be designed to behave in a certain manner based on code implemented in the reference software. They treat it as a monolithic system which can be designed by tweaking certain parameters. According to this view, the survival of the system depends critically on design decisions made by Bitcoin Core, and thus they need to cautiously vet any important changes and come to broad consensus among the developers.

In reality though, people will walk with their feet. A node operator can run any software they want, and interact with the network however they choose. A miner can put any transactions they want into blocks, and produce blocks of whatever size they choose. Whether or not all these individual behaviours will interact together smoothly is an emergent property of the system that can be assessed by looking at the individual incentives facing all the participants in the system.

The fact that these individual incentives can all come together to produce a stable and valuable system is one of the things that makes Bitcoin so interesting, in my opinion. We can call it a Nash equilibrium, anti-fragility, or emergent properties of a complex adaptive system. But either way it's the thing that, if it works, will allow Bitcoin to grow and prosper in the future in ways that we probably can't even imagine. In fact, if Bitcoin could be designed by a central committee, I think it would be doomed to eventual failure. So although the current turmoil seems messy, it is a necessary maturing process for the ecosystem and should inspire hope for the future.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

In that spirit, whatever happened to the user-adjustable blocksize limit idea born from the insight that the blocksize is a feature of the transport layer that has errantly crept into the consensus layer?

 

[AdrianX]

I think it was considered too dangerous and shut down. /

I liked the idea that block size is not part of the conscious layer but still open to ideas on how best to achieve that in practice.

 

[Peter R]

In that spirit, whatever happened to the user-adjustable blocksize limit idea born from the insight that the blocksize is a feature of the transport layer that has errantly crept into the consensus layer?

I suggest we wait to see how things look a month from now. If it still seems like presenting this idea as a serious proposal would be helpful, perhaps someone could present it at the 2nd scaling conference in Hong Kong.

We would also need someone credible to act as code maintainer. Preferably someone who already had name recognition in the community.

 

[Mengerian]

Along the same lines, how about combining the user- configurable blocksize with the idea of implementing multiple BIPs simultaneously mentioned a few pages back by @Peter R and @solex ?

Node user would chose among options something like:
1) Follow BIP 100 consensus rules
2) Follow BIP 101 consensus rules
3) Enforce user-defined blocksize limit
4) Accept blocks in longest proof-of-work blockchain regardless of size (subject to technical limitations)

 

[Peter R]

@Mengerian : Agreed.

 

[theZerg]

Its interesting how 4 covers 1 and 2 for normal (non-mining) nodes. Ofc you would want to wait for multiple confirms on the first > 1MB block to make sure that someone isn't attempting a double spend on you (handing you a > 1MB block, while knowing that the rest of the network will ultimately reject it)

EDIT: and the logic behind "3" should really be more like:
Don't forward blocks bigger than X that build on the longest chain. But if a block bigger than X is > N deep in the chain then accept it. This logic discourages blocks larger than your limit but does not fork you off if the rest of the network chooses to use them.

 

[Mengerian]

Yeah, for a non-mining node it's hard to see what incentive they would have to implement a particular blocksize limit policy, rather than just following the longest chain. Of course it would make sense to monitor the network for blockchain forks and be extra cautious when one is detected, perhaps waiting until there is an obvious resolution.

For mining nodes the stakes are higher, as mining on a chain that ends up being rejected could be very costly. They have strong incentive to pre-determine which consensus rules will be accepted by the rest of the network. So for them it makes sense to choose a particular blocksize policy subject to the expectation that the rest of the network will follow the same policy.

 

[Georg Engelmann]

I think gold might have reached the bottom now. In 2011 it was indeed in bubble mode.

For Bitcoin to really go up again I think the governance of the protocol needs to improve.

Thanks for bringing back this legendary thread!

 

[BldSwtTrs]

Hi there,

I just want to say that the more I talk with anti-XTer the more I am convinced XT (or even better, no blocksize limit whatsoever) is the right solution.

In the BTC meetup where I go there are only dev type geeks which are all cripplecoiners and they make fun of me saying that's because I don't understand the technicals that I am pro XT. What they don't understand is that it's not a fucking technical problem but an economic one. And they basically have no clue about economics.

Before I had some doubts about what was the best course of actions regarding this debate but while talking with them I understoodd that all their arguments are flawed and lie on the same basic mistakes engineers make when they think about economis (the type of mistakes that lead to socialism), ie thinking they know better than the market/thinking they can predict the future/thinking competition will somehow lead to monopolies. Engineers are just dumb.