Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Emperor Bob]

IIRC almost all miners only include a fixed amount of free transactions per block, and only if there's space left over for them.

The priority rule is a holdover from the old days, it gave a good heuristic to allow free transactions without allowing massive DOS attacks by moving coins back and forth. It's slowly disappearing, but the difference between "free (sometimes)" and "0.0001/kB" is not going to be an issue for most users, I think.

 

[Peter R]

Other interesting observations:

I was involved in two "round tables" today: (1) communication without official structures, and (2) how to get 10x the number of devs involved in protocol development.

In the first round table, the problem of "trolling" and "low signal-to-noise" was brought up, especially as the number of people participating on (e.g.) the bitcoin-dev list had increased. I gave the XT fork as an example of how communication can be improved by splitting up into smaller groups full of people with better-aligned ideologies. As an example, I said the discourse here and on /r/bitcoinxt is much more friendly and positive now. I would say 75% of people agreed based on body language that this was good. However, there was at least one individual who appeared to strongly disagree with this suggestion. He said that although he agreed with the idea that people should "vote with their feet," that what XT did was wrong since it went against consensus. I said "well who defines consensus?" and then the moderator had to tell us both to shut up.

At the second round table (how to get more devs), I pointed out how XT had created a "vacuum" that sucked in new devs eager to play an important rule (that they couldn't with Core). I said that with even more friendly implementations that we could get even more programmers involved. Looking around the table, the idea was met with mostly smiles except for one heavily furrowed brow (a Core Dev) who quickly quizzed me on the number of GitHub pull requests to prove my claim. Someone else then reaffirmed that I was correct and I didn't have to answer the GitHub question

So again, there's this inconsistency with Core Dev: they want high SNR and more devs but they don't want to implement the obvious solution (more implementations each full of like-minded people)

 

[BldSwtTrs]

@Peter R

I think the appropriate response to the perceived need to micromanage is, "If that were necessary, Bitcoin would already be doomed." Somehow these guys have some steet cred with some Austrians/ancaps for being "cypherpunks" and decentralists; this deep-seated mistrust of the market, with the centralization of development that implies, really strips away that facade.

It's one thing to have an ideology, but it demands some special virtues to stand on that ideology when it is contrary to one personal interest.

A lot CEOs are ideologically pro-markets and competition, yet in practice they do whatever they can to lobby the government in order to prevent the competition on their market and push their company interest.

 

[solex]

@cypherdoc : yes, I think you're correct.

This conference has really opened my eyes to what I see as a huge divide in ideology between the small-block camp and the large-block camp.

The small-block camp seem to want to create rules to micromanage every aspect of the system; the large-block camp want the consensus rules to be as simple as possible and allow the market to sort out the details.

Here's a perfect example from maaku:

Here he's arguing with Gavin that propagation time is too long to support 8 MB blocks. However, just last night he was arguing with me that propagation time is too short to support a fee market.

At first I couldn't understand how they could argue from both sides of most topics: how can they honestly think that there are too many orphans AND not enough orphans? Well, it's simply that they can't see how the market will come to an equilibrium. They actually think they need to micromanage everything in order for the system not to break. This is why orphans can be too high (for safety) but too low (for a fee market) in their minds.

Indeed. And Greg has given us a similar doublethink with IBLT. He cites Gavin as support for the position that IBLT will not be efficient for scaling anytime soon (if it is then that will take away a lot of the fear about larger blocks).
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68655.msg11809660#msg11809660

It has never relayed a _single_ block, not in a lab, not anywhere. It does _not_ exist. It certantly can and will exist-- though it's not yet clear how useful it will be over the relay network-- Gavin, for example, doesn't believe it will be useful "until blocks are hundreds of megabytes".

However, he severely criticises your fee market paper on the basis that block propagation efficiencies like IBLT (but even better?!) will swamp the demand pressure with supply pressure.

If he is right that IBLT is not imminent then the fee market has no obvious drawbacks and should be allowed to work within a very high limit (e.g. 100MB).

 

[Justus Ranvier]

On its face, this article doesn't appear to be directly related to Bitcoin, but there's a pattern here that's worth noting:

http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html

The response of the medical establishment, both in America and in Britain, was one of outrage; the institution of lodge practice was denounced in harsh language and apocalyptic tones. Such low fees, many doctors charged, were bankrupting the medical profession. Moreover, many saw it as a blow to the dignity of the profession that trained physicians should be eagerly bidding for the chance to serve as the hirelings of lower-class tradesmen. It was particularly detestable that such uneducated and socially inferior people should be permitted to set fees for the physicians' services, or to sit in judgment on professionals to determine whether their services had been satisfactory. The government, they demanded, must do something.

At least the highly schooled products of modern academia have adopted a much more enlightened relationship to the free market in the intervening century, right?

 

[molecular]

IIRC almost all miners only include a fixed amount of free transactions per block, and only if there's space left over for them.

The priority rule is a holdover from the old days, it gave a good heuristic to allow free transactions without allowing massive DOS attacks by moving coins back and forth. It's slowly disappearing, but the difference between "free (sometimes)" and "0.0001/kB" is not going to be an issue for most users, I think.

Our marketing departments will finally have to do away with that dreaded "you can send money from anywhere to anywhere for free" adage and that's a good thing. That dishonesty has been bugging me ever since. If only for that reason I'm all for getting rid of the free tx space. Another reason is cleaner implementation. It's kind of weird to discuss this here, though, because miners can do what they want regarding this anyway and core is losing ground as being the one implementation setting these kinds of soft rules.

 

[Jose Perez]

Additionally, while Bitcoin has a libertarian ethos, and returns power to the people. If it trips up then the new successful cryptocurrency could be a Central Bank-driven alternative with all the major banks participating, like this example with "mintettes".

Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.06895v1.pdf

Why would this only be the result of Bitcoin tripping up? Money doesn't work like that. You're not going to get adoption by working on little features, just as altcoins don't. That's not what makes Bitcoin what it is.

Thanks for the mentioning that paper. It blew my mind how much it fulfils what I predicted here: http://moraluniversal.com/en/why-bitcoin-cannot-win/

It's all well and good to develop Bitcoin, but I think having some perspective and knowing your niche is very important in order not to trip up, precisely, which is what all this minutiae about the blocks size is. It is only undermining Bitcoin and the people's perception of it as a solid alternative to state money, which is where the adoption really is.

 

[awemany]

@Peter R.

Those are interesting observations from the conference, thank you very much for the talk and thanks for the insights and report! It was announced as a 'presentation only' one, but it seems there was actually a lot of discussion? Was the atmosphere hostile or still friendly?

 

[Peter R]

@awemany

It was definitely a positive and friendly atmosphere. Everyone wants Bitcoin to succeed and I think most people really tried to use the conference as an opportunity to make progress towards this goal. I am a big fan of Elizabeth Stark who helped to foster a great conference atmosphere.

There was still a bit of hostility, but it was relayed through the rumour mill as opposed to face-to-face. There were also a few individuals who would not make eye contact with me (even though they were often staring right at me until I would look there way).

 

[sickpig]

Other interesting observations:

I was involved in two "round tables" today: (1) communication without official structures, and (2) how to get 10x the number of devs involved in protocol development.

In the first round table, the problem of "trolling" and "low signal-to-noise" was brought up, especially as the number of people participating on (e.g.) the bitcoin-dev list had increased. I gave the XT fork as an example of how communication can be improved by splitting up into smaller groups full of people with better-aligned ideologies. As an example, I said the discourse here and on /r/bitcoinxt is much more friendly and positive now. I would say 75% of people agreed based on body language that this was good. However, there was at least one individual who appeared to strongly disagree with this suggestion. He said that although he agreed with the idea that people should "vote with their feet," that what XT did was wrong since it went against consensus. I said "well who defines consensus?" and then the moderator had to tell us both to shut up.

At the second round table (how to get more devs), I pointed out how XT had created a "vacuum" that sucked in new devs eager to play an important rule (that they couldn't with Core). I said that with even more friendly implementations that we could get even more programmers involved. Looking around the table, the idea was met with mostly smiles except for one heavily furrowed brow (a Core Dev) who quickly quizzed me on the number of GitHub pull requests to prove my claim. Someone else then reaffirmed that I was correct and I didn't have to answer the GitHub question

So again, there's this inconsistency with Core Dev: they want high SNR and more devs but they don't want to implement the obvious solution (more implementations each full of like-minded people)

Chatham House Rule strikes again

 

[lunar]

Most of the talks from the scaling conference seem to be broken on youtube. Has anyone got links to Day 1 Video, especially Peters R presentation ?

 

[cypherdoc]

@lunarboy

that's too bad. i want to view them too.

almost by fate, Peter_R's presentation was the only one i got to view live from beginning to end. over my weekends, which include Fridays these days, my morning 3h bike ride takes priority over everything so i had to miss the streams. i just happened to get home from my ride right when Peter_R came on. the funny thing is that i thought his talk was going to be later in the day so i entirely got lucky to see it. my ears perked right up when the announcer said his name and mentioned that he was an ardent Peter_R follower. i took it as a sign of just how many lurkers we have here.

it was quite the presentation so we have to get a copy of it.

 

[theZerg]

If I mined I'd allow maybe 10pct txns free if otherwise I was making a few cents per txn. Same reason some tix to sports/concerts underprice the market: the goodwill and viral marketing generated is priceless.

 

[Peter R]

@theZerg

I agree; I too would accept a small amount of free TXs just for the goodwill.

The idea that this breaks the fee market shows (again) how many of these programmers have a poor grasp on economics. The free market works when its participants do what they think is in their rational self interest. If a miner thinks it is worthwhile to include free transactions, then he should! For a Core Dev to say "it's irrational for you to do that, and it also distorts the market" is the height of absurdity!

Of course, then a Core Dev might say: "well Peter, according to your theory, miners should not accept no-fee TXs."

To which I would respond "the fee market paper uses a very simple model that didn't take into account things like goodwill and marketing. But these are just small perturbations; the average underlying behaviour is what my model suggests."

To which the Core Dev might respond: "so you're admitting that your model is wrong?"

 

[Justus Ranvier]

tl;dr: some Core developers are great at math but have absolutely no idea how to operate a business. When people don't behave like their models they have no idea what to do.

 

[theZerg]

Yes, the first thing to understand about any game theory model (or any other model) is that it doesn't take into effect anything outside of the model. I mean, years ago when the assumption of block space was implicit, people used to imagine that when the block subsidy went to zero miners would quit because unprofitable and that would be the end of bitcoin. But obviously that model ignores all the Bitcoin companies who would run miners to get the txns they need into the blockchain to make money in whatever way they make money. Like web sites, for example. A web site is not a direct profit driver for companies like Intel or GE but somehow they still think the expense is justified.

WRT: getting devs involved. There are other issues code related. The build process is actually great, but then I ran bitcoin-qt and it would not see my full node sitting right next to it! So there's a barrier to entry which is basically setting up a fake experimental network, or even a real bitcoin sub-network within the larger network.

Ofc, I'm sure with a few more hours of time and effort I would solve this issue, but stuff like this is a real turn off for someone who can only work on it during leisure time.

 

[bucktotal]

regarding tx fees... and perhaps obvious, but a presentation from Bitfury implied that tx fees were absolutely meaningless and would be even at 100x the number of tx. The speaker said something to effect of "...Who cares about tx fees totaling 20-200 usd per month when you have an electric bill of 100k..."

...i suppose that suggests the system needs to 1000-10000x the number of tx to make the fees meaningful in the current environment.

 

[cypherdoc]

@bucktotal

Yeah, but don't forget that in a growth scenario where billions of users are transacting, the price per BTC should go up commensurately to adequately compensate miners for processing all those TX's.

 

[sickpig]

@cypherdoc I was wondering if smooth and rocks are aware of this new venue, did you already ask them to join?

 

[cypherdoc]

@sickpig

Why don't you let them know? Would love to see them here.