Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[rocks]

Obviously reality is broken for failing to conform to a simplified mathematical model.

It is almost as if core is behaving and thinking exactly the same as the FED board members.

What is it with a tiny amount of power that makes humans lose 50 IQ points.

 

[bitsko]

Sentence Peter Todd to jail and offer probation on the condition that he writes code to improve the reliability of 0-conf.

Just kidding.

Put Peter Todd in solitary until RBF blows over.



Seriously though, should have been more responsible in his disclosure. Just wanted to give Coinbase shit is what it looked like to me.

 

[rocks]

@bitsko
Never underestimate the ability for the US government to go after and over sentence minor infractions.

We live in an environment where the FBI quite literally creates domestic terrorists. For example they find people at the margin looking for options, radicalize them, provide the plans and money, and then make an arrest at the end. It is all about making headline arrest numbers to grow budget.

Whenever they find someone in the wild who committed a crime on their own accord, they jump on it. Some people's entire job is looking for cases that can be turned into reco cases, so they can make their next promotion.

Financial fraud is high up in the list. Knowingly depositing a counterfeit $10 at a bank is a serious offence, double spending looks similar to me.

I personally do not think Peter deserves his life to be ruined over a stunt like this, but never underestimate the vigor with which the US government goes after it's own citizens, or a jury's ability to follow judges directions and not follow their own conscience.

 

[VeritasSapere]

So that thread I mentioned a bit earlier is presently going nuts. So if anyone is in the mood for debating with ideological opponents that might be a good place to do it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1318519.msg13521758#msg13521758

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I personally do not think Peter deserves his life to be ruined over a stunt like this

I would normally agree with that, but in this case this exact issue was discussed last year on the dev mailing list, and he participated in that discussion.

Since he then went on to either dismiss or disregard warnings that such stunts could plausibly cross into criminal territory, then I'm not going to be able to summon much sympathy for him if it does.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

What Todd did was foolish, but I can't say he deserves federal action being taken against him. His heart was in the right place, however misguided and cavalier he was and how horrible RBF is. I wouldn't want that standard held against one of us. However, he should be called out for being reckless and naïve; it casts doubt on his general judgment, especially of how things happen in the real world - which is what RBF is all about.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I can't say he deserves federal action being taken against him.

It's possible to both not deserve deserve federal action, and also not deserve sympathy for receiving it.

 

[cliff]

What Todd did was foolish, but I can't say he deserves federal action being taken against him. His heart was in the right place, however misguided and cavalier he was and how horrible RBF is. I wouldn't want that standard held against one of us. However, he should be called out for being reckless and naïve; it casts doubt on his general judgment, especially of how things happen in the real world - which is what RBF is all about.

Would tax payers want to fund pursuing this, assuming its isolated? NO! The expense isn't justified. Should there be a consequence? Maybe, but the market will probably figure it out here.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

/u/tsontar nails it with his explanation of why "devs gotta dev":

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/40hlp3/ramblings_on_the_dev_community/

First off, in order to be a great dev you need at least to be both technical and creative. Non-technical creative people can't actualize their ideas in code and non-creative technical people don't have ideas worth actualizing.

Creative people want to create. The more creative you are, the bigger your ideas, and the more you want to actualize them.

This leads to the very well-known phenomenon of IT NIH (Not Invented Here) Syndrome which is so well documented as to be legend. The last thing any talented dev wants is to get a job maintaining someone else's brilliant software creation. That's the kiss of death career-wise to a truly talented dev, or at the very least, too rote to be sufficiently stimulating for someone with high creative aptitude.

So we should expect talented devs to do things like

1. Failing to implement routine, helpful, but tedious and obvious changes in favor of attempting to solve much harder, less obvious problems.
   
   
2. Tending to view legacy code and ideas as less interesting and probably inferior to ideas that haven't been implemented yet
   
   
3. Focusing like a laser on all known defects of legacy code (while keeping a Pollyanna glow over the prospects of their own pet projects)
   

Devs are famous for NIH infighting. I've seen big, important projects come very close to failure over something as trivial as two teams being unable to agree on a common specification for a software interface. And good devs will leave projects that don't afford enough opportunity to build from scratch.

I'm not just telling you this because I've seen it. I'm telling you this because I've done it myself. These are instincts that are not only natural, but actually seem to intensify in devs with very high aptitudes (but maybe less experience or more ego invested in the particular subject).

Even worse is when you come into a project whose architecture you never really agreed with entirely for one reason or another. It can be difficult to lend support to something you don't really buy into. It's natural for some people to turn into what we call "project snipers" - they don't agree with the direction so in their minds the most constructive thing they can do is to derail what everyone else is working toward. And of course a highly functional team needs skeptics so it can be hard to tell a valuable skeptic from an obstreperous sniper.

I bring all this up because all of these problems are endemic to all non trivial software teams composed of people with talent.

Fortunately, the market doesn't suffer from not-invented-here syndrome, and will fork off those who do.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

An overview of user views on Bitcoin Classic:

https://bitcoinclassic.consider.it/

 

[Richy_T]

EDIT - Further, tinkering too much allows tx fees to be a tool of the wealthy - they can buy their way to the front of the line (the line of to-be-validated TXs) whether their TX was broadcast first or not. Seems highly unfair.

We call that the free market and it's central to the operation of BItcoin.

Edit: Oh, I see where you're coming from. I don't entirely agree but I do think it is wrong for the poor to be excluded when they are willing to pay fees that miners would be willing to accept.
[doublepost=1452562194][/doublepost]

If you start to think that the "solution" to fast
zeroconf transfers is to have them backed by police
then why do we need confirmations anyway?
Or blockchain for that matter? Unwieldy, expensive to
secure. Not to mention the p2p network. Just write everything
into a central database and you will have an efficient and
safe system protected by the benevolent State forces.

They clearly cannot be backed by the police due to jurisdictional matters. Indeed, since Todd resides in Canada and Coinbase is US based, it seems less likely (but not impossible) that there will be nothing done about this (at least if/until Todd sets foot on US soil)

 

[Peter R]

I think our work with Bitcoin Unlimited is permeating through the community consciousness. For example, Brian Armstrong recently said to Theymos that Coinbase would never go off the longest chain:


In other words, if the longest chain contains blocks > 1 MB, Coinbase will track it. Just like BU.
[doublepost=1452567782,1452566730][/doublepost]@sgornick

If a smaller chain persists after the main chain includes blocks > 1 MB, does it really make sense to call that smaller chain the "original chain"?


I disagree with calling it the "original chain" for two reasons:

1. If one argues that the smaller chain is the "original" because it would be valid according to an earlier version of the software (i.e., blocks smaller than 1 MB), then is it not equally valid to argue that the longer chain is the "original" because it adheres to an earlier economic rule (i.e., a block size limit greater than the free market equilibrium block size)? Why would code take precedence over economics in defining what the "original chain" was?

2. As per the Bitcoin white paper, "nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one and will keep working on extending it." There is no mention of a block size limit, so the "original design" is to follow the longest chain. For this reason, the smaller chain is just a curiosity that will no doubt peter out (similar to how the 50 BTC/block chain that persisted for a while after the first halving eventually died).

I like #2 because it removes all subjectivity in the definition of what Bitcoin is.

 

[cliff]

@Richy_T

I am not at all opposed to free market, or even a fee market. I'm coming from a legalistic/policy perspective RE: the "first in time, first in right" regime that has pervaded property law for a long time.

Specifically, I'm wondering whether the first to record doctrine can co-exist with a fee market that results from a supply crunch of block space - this is kinda untested territory and I'm not sure the kinds of big transactions contemplated for a small block protocol will actually come into fruition. For example:

1_An unstable fee market may introduce too much risk into transactions in the way of unpredictable and hidden transaction costs. Right now, transactions fees are predictable and published well in advance. How does one hedge against price manipulation? Who has to pay for that?

2_If fees become the main determiner of when rights can be perfected, rather than chronology of the broadcasting events, then I think many parties to bigger transactions will choose the fastest and most guaranteed route to perfection, which currently does not include navigating a block space fee market with possible time delays, given the current legal system.

(i.e., why voluntarily take on this risk? sure, maybe one could buy insurance to mitigate the risk , but why would they want that cost - what's the ROI on that expense?).
​

In essence, I'm worried that settlement time, even with insurance, becomes too costly of a risk for parties of big transaction to take on. Wouldn't it be more efficient to eliminate that risk (which is a legal problem) and focus on hedging the risk of unused block space (which is an economic problem) with an annuity,insurance/misc hedge product (Hearn has written about this) - something like crop insurance for block space? [1]

3_How would courts resolve a dispute in the case of double spend (assume a situation where the bitcoin is the deed to X property)? It seems obvious from a payments perspective, but what about the old first-in-time property law I've been harping on? If the blockchain is also the title record, then a double spend is not necessarily illegal or prohibited - all that matters is whose transaction hit the ledger first. Can you imagine all the scammers that would flock to this world. How fast do you think law can change?

• TL;DR - In other words, title will not transfer until payment is considered final. No home seller, buyer, or lender is going to wait 10 days for a payment to clear.

In any case, I'm really puzzled (and kind of all over the place in my thinking) by what I see as sort of a mini clash of civilizations brewing - tech, law, ethics, economics - and some factions within assembling into positions. There is some sort of balance here I think, but I don't think anybody has a clear vision about it yet. I may have to dig out my old copy of the Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.

EDIT - Insert footnote
[1] One related factor that seems to be overlooked - if I understand it correctly - is that the protocol uses a poisson process in assembling blocks. I have aggregated some links about it in this post here.

 

[Peter R]

Be like @Gavin Andresen and (if you're not a miner) accept any block with a valid PoW (composed of valid transactions) regardless of its size:


Running Bitcoin Unlimited (with a high limit) allows you to signal to the miners: "you mine a big block, I'll accept it!"

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Peter R

I realize you probably already agree with the following, but I'll write it out for consolidation of our understanding. (Let me know if you don't agree.)

As I mentioned a few days ago, I think there is always going to be subjectivity about what Bitcoin is, in the sense that the World Wide Ledger is whatever people choose to accept payment in (assuming there's only one universal ledger for civilization). It seems to me that nodes are effectively the proxies for those people on the network, so nodes determine what is valid on the network; miners determine what the longest chain is from among all the chains the nodes would consider valid. The nodes agree to respect that longest chain as representing the current state of the WWL.

"Bitcoin" then refers to an objective selection of intersubjectively valid chains representing possible valid ledger states of the WWL. The subjectivity cannot be avoided, but the centralized subjectivity of Core can be. "Whatever people choose to accept payment in" is a decentralized subjectivity, rather than Core's centralized subjective shoehorning.

In simple terms, nodes rack up the cards, miners pick a card. Nodes agree to go with the card the miners pick from among the options. Cards that change the 21M coin limit, for example, will probably never be on the table, never offered as options (at least for the foreseeable future), so even in the unlikely event that miners were to mine a longer chain that changed that limit, it would be irrelevant to the nodes because it would be irrelevant to the larger economy. It'd be like if the miners picked a card from an Uno deck and claimed it trumped the options offered; everyone would say, "That's not a valid choice." Regardless of the PoW behind it. It's like the nodes merely hire the miners to determine which of several valid choices is to be the definitive one, not to determine what the choices are. (Though for completeness we should note that there is a complication in that miners are also nodes and have stake in the system.)

In summary, we have in Core a centralized subjective mechanism for determining what kinds of chains are valid, and in BU we have a decentralized subjective mechanism for the same. In both, we have an objective method for choosing the winning chain from among the valid chains, by proof of work. Rough table:

 

[Justus Ranvier]

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/40kymx/when_is_the_chain_with_the_most_proof_of_work_not/

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

That is Satoshi's original vision, and I agree with it, but some day - possibly already today - the economic majority may not. Core certainly does not, and even Satoshi temporarily did not when he instituted the 1MB blocksize cap. Sticking to what Satoshi set in stone in the whitepaper should work for a long time, but if it stops working I don't think the market will hold to it fetishistically. In any case, it is still a subjective decision on the part of the Bitcoin stakeholders as represented by the nodes, even if that decision is continually to stick to the strong (objective) Schelling point Satoshi set up.

Right now two things are distracting from the strength of that original Schelling point:

1) The fact that Satoshi himself added in the 1MB cap, even though clearly only meant to be temporary

2) The fact that Core, the dominant implementation, has been taken over by people who think we need a cap (in fact a very low one)

So in total we have a subjective mechanism that is continually converging on the objective criteria Satoshi laid down for valid chains (though apparently now including the blocksize limit), an objective mechanism for choosing among those subjectively determined valid chains (proof of work), and finally a subjective agreement to consider the objectively longest valid chain as the ledger state. Core is interfering by trying to make it a centralized subjective mechanism, seemingly intent on holding to Satoshi's code change that was intended to be temporary.

Although it hasn't been definitively determined that the 1MB cap will really be respected, if it turns out to be then it will be clear the whitepaper-set Schelling point is pretty much shot, having been superseded by the author adding the cap himself, plus Core's stance and actions.

In short, I'm claiming that the market is what ultimately determines what Bitcoin is, and the whitepaper-set Schelling points are very important but not all-powerful in determining the market's decision. That is why the decision of what constitutes a valid block is subjective, even if tending strongly to converge on certain objective standards (objective criteria make great Schelling points for the emergence of subjective determinations).

 

[VeritasSapere]

I like how this Bitcointalk thread ended today.

Jeebus... these block size wars are a bad train wreck of which I cannot look away.

Both sides of this debate has their own untestable axioms, a handful of reasoned thinkers, a passel of follower-droids, and a handful of ignoramuses who repeatedly spout completely discredited shit. Yet for all the noise and fury, for all the pages of fora we have killed and scrawled e-ink upon, the needle moveth not one iota.

The only way to truly determine whether big blocks or reduced utility will kill bitcoin is to run the damned experiment.

For today, I am tired of trying to get the other side to listen to reason. But we're in a field of permissionless innovation. And I know which hypothesis I believe has the overwhelmingly larger chance of leading to a sustained -- and growing -- Bitcoin.

So fuck all y'all cripplecoiners (admittedly loaded term, employed mostly for comedic effect - you can be offended if'n ya wanna). Imma complete my BU review. If I find no cruft, imma replace my Core node with BU. Imma set it to accept 2 MiB blocks. Then I'll start looking at the other bigblockian options. In case one looks better.

The best part: I don't need your fucking permission. Deal.

Blunt but mostly true.

 

[Peter R]

@Peter R

I realize you probably already agree with the following, but I'll write it out for consolidation of our understanding. (Let me know if you don't agree.)

As I mentioned a few days ago, I think there is always going to be subjectivity about what Bitcoin is, in the sense that the World Wide Ledger is whatever people choose to accept payment in (assuming there's only one universal ledger for civilization). It seems to me that nodes are effectively the proxies for those people on the network, so nodes determine what is valid on the network; miners determine what the longest chain is from among all the chains the nodes would consider valid. The nodes agree to respect that longest chain as representing the current state of the WWL.

"Bitcoin" then refers to an objective selection of intersubjectively valid chains representing possible valid ledger states of the WWL. The subjectivity cannot be avoided, but the centralized subjectivity of Core can be. "Whatever people choose to accept payment in" is a decentralized subjectivity, rather than Core's centralized subjective shoehorning.

In simple terms, nodes rack up the cards, miners pick a card. Nodes agree to go with the card the miners pick from among the options. Cards that change the 21M coin limit, for example, will probably never be on the table, never offered as options (at least for the foreseeable future), so even in the unlikely event that miners were to mine a longer chain that changed that limit, it would be irrelevant to the nodes because it would be irrelevant to the larger economy. It'd be like if the miners picked a card from an Uno deck and claimed it trumped the options offered; everyone would say, "That's not a valid choice." Regardless of the PoW behind it. It's like the nodes merely hire the miners to determine which of several valid choices is to be the definitive one, not to determine what the choices are. (Though for completeness we should note that there is a complication in that miners are also nodes and have stake in the system.)

In summary, we have in Core a centralized subjective mechanism for determining what kinds of chains are valid, and in BU we have a decentralized subjective mechanism for the same. In both, we have an objective method for choosing the winning chain from among the valid chains, by proof of work. Rough table:

Yes, I think I agree on all points!

A couple of new thoughts: I'm wondering if the block size limit debate will resolve with miners running different code than non-mining nodes. For example, Gavin really likes BitPay's moving median method. However, I don't think this can be the complete solution because it gives full control of the block size limit to miners.

It's OK if just the miners run it, but if the nodes run it too, then they've relinquished all of their power to control the size of blocks!

From this perspective, Bitcoin Unlimited suddenly becomes a veto tool useful to small-block proponents. The miners can agree to whatever limits they want as long as those limits are less than the limits imposed by the economic majority of nodes.

I think this means our work on BUIP005 to communicate the node's limits through the user-agent string becomes more important. To give miners confidence, nodes will want a way to let them know "yeah, I'm cool with blocks up to 8 MB (or whatever the node's limit is)."

In other words, the best solution is actually for nodes and miners never to completely agree on a solution. It is that dance of uncertainty which maintains the proper balance of power between miners and nodes.