Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Golarz Filip]

It's my first post here. I'm lurker of this thread for few months now, reading it daily from the time being.

I'm lately reading old discussions on /r/bitcoin to gain broader perspective. Take this one for example, it was one year ago. It seems that /r/bitcoin community was more relaxed and positive on rising max block limit.



There is some interesting comments in this thread, also vote emphasis seems so different than now.

 

[rocks]

Its not even close

https://mining.bitcoin.cz/proposal/detail/517/

 

[lunar]

I wish that Satoshi hadn't set us up for a hard fork :/

This was either their biggest mistake. Or a cunning master stroke that effectively left the community with a canary warrant and a rites of passage test.

As time passes, my mind is changing and I'm beginning to believe it was the latter.

Ohhh for a peek at Satoshis diary

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

No time to dig up the reddit comments right now, but today Gmax said an unlimited blocksize cap was only "fairly reckless" (why insert "fairly"? Seems like a softening of his stance.). He also said the bump to 2MB is more complicated codewise than Segwit, which made me do a doubletake. Any idea what he means here?

 

[Richy_T]

Still no quote button on the last post.

I think he means that by the time you add in all the voting stuff that's required because Core did not do their due diligence with forking things properly, it's bigger. The Satoshi patch is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller, of course.

 

[cypherdoc]

No time to dig up the reddit comments right now, but today Gmax said an unlimited blocksize cap was only "fairly reckless" (why insert "fairly"? Seems like a softening of his stance.). He also said the bump to 2MB is more complicated codewise than Segwit, which made me do a doubletake. Any idea what he means here?

just yesterday he was saying he "personally" didn't have a problem with 2MB back in the summer in that same thread where i caught him in that disagreement with pwuille about SW facilitating LN:

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

This conversation looks nearly fatal, for now at least, for LN as a promise of future scalability for Bitcoin.


Greg seemingly cannot - or refuses to - show that LN pathfinding can be decentralized at all.

 

[tynwald]

Cuts to the core (sic) concern of mine re LN hubs - how will anyone find a good/cheap/reliable/liquid hub when LN is supposed to be completely decentralized and anonymous.

Assuming people care about who they lock up their money with, then the idea of anonymous nodes looks dead in the water to me. Or the whole model of personal finance will be proven wrong i.e. people balance risk with reward and will give up quite a lot of lost income to assure trust when they deposit funds at trusted bank 'X' vs lesser-trusted bank 'Y'.

 

[sgbett]

Why do we need to store the entire blockchain in the first place?

Because a complete copy of the blockchain is necessary in order to verify the validity of new blocks. This is the only way to check for certain types of fraud.

The cost of storing a compete copy of the blockchain is linear with the number of transactions performed since the genesis block.

It's clear why that worries some people, but proof of storage is the opposite of a solution.

The root cause of the problem is that the proof system in Bitcoin has this requirement for history to be stored forever. That's a great thing to try to fix, not to permanently enshrine even more firmly into the protocol.

A perfect proof system would have the property of giving us complete assurance of the integrity of the money supply, while allowing most of the prior transaction to be forgotten, even for nodes that never say the forgotten transactions.

AFAIK, this isn't possible yet, but it might be in theory.
[doublepost=1454361290][/doublepost]And that I updated it in response to a request from someone else.

What's hilarious is that yesterday on Reddit I made a comment about Core developers and supporters were known to be vindictive, and gave an example.

Now I have another example.

Is this a case of good enough for now though? Storage is significantly less scarce resource than bandwidth (wrt block propagation latency) imho. (Initial blockchain download bandwidth is a concern granted, i.e. serving old blocks to people hurts). I've got no qualms about storing the entire blockchain though, we're still way below the current 6TB standard...

Importantly though this does seem to reflect a change in MP's thinking. I think even he accepts blocksize increases aren't a critical threat to his preferred model of 'bitcoin as settlement'. Even more importantly is that I think this demonstrates his support of 1MB was not necessarily a vote of confidence for core. His rejection of segwit bundled with a "meh-2mb-whatever" nod, looks to me to be actually a vote of no-confidence for core.

I think he believes that core *is* a threat (whereas before I think he was just letting it ride because it suited him). I think that he has now taken the position that he would actively prefer for core to no longer be in control. I can't be sure why he thinks that, just that his recent post seems to imply it.

If its true what MP says about his stash (an I agree with others that I think he wouldnt actually destroy bitcoin to prove a point) then I think his tacit support for 2MB should be of some concern to anyone still holding on to the idea that 1MB's days are not numbered!
[doublepost=1454414681][/doublepost]

This conversation looks nearly fatal, for now at least, for LN as a promise of future scalability for Bitcoin.


Greg seemingly cannot - or refuses to - show that LN pathfinding can be decentralized at all.

Not without basically *being* bitcoin! It's as if some really smart person(s?) once upon a time figured out all of these difficult problems around creating a decentralised secure p2p digital payment network and wrote it all down, then went ahead and developed some software to prove it worked....

 

[Aquent]

LOL. Just been reading some chinese forums, not sure where they seem to be able to consistently get some topnotch pics. Here's one of Luke-jr (note what he is wearing):

http://8btc.com/data/attachment/forum/201601/24/110411f6jsu0u6thjjhwhp.jpg.thumb.jpg

 

[awemany]

[...]
Not without basically *being* bitcoin! It's as if some really smart person(s?) once upon a time figured out all of these difficult problems around creating a decentralised secure p2p digital payment network and wrote it all down, then went ahead and developed some software to prove it worked....

Indeed! You made that nice and clear. It is almost as if you start to deviate from the global eventual consensus model, you get local fiefdoms. This is almost a tautology.

Not that those fiefdoms are wrong per se. Changetip works, I heard Coinbase does, too.

But in this light, promoting the local fiefdoms against the global eventual consensus is rather like the old way of thinking about money systems.

Oh, and, yes, if LN works eventually, I'll be one of the first to use it. Heck, if I don't feel I need to protect Bitcoin itself, I might even spend time on furthering the goal of a workable LN.

The amount of time wasted in this war is staggering.

 

[cypherdoc]

Note how this thread got deleted from N. KOREA :

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/43u5ij/satoshi_released_code_as_proof_of_theory/

 

[Peter R]

Our journal Ledger now has its first central banker: Dr. Michael Kumhof from the Bank of England:

http://ledgerjournal.org/ojs/index.php/ledger/announcement/view/8

http://www.coindesk.com/bank-england-economist-editorial-ledger/

Special thanks to @chriswilmer and Cam Harvey for making this happen!

 

[Aquent]

Wow, that's a great indication that the UK at least takes bitcoin very seriously and I have found the government's approach here to be very friendly to bitcoin as shown by UK being the only English speaking jurisdiction which treats bitcoin as a currency for tax purposes.

I wrote an article about it some time ago: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-taxation-revives-ancient-debate-money/ and during sourcing I found the treasury spokesmen here to behave like jumping supper happy puppies when asked about bitcoin, in great contrast to US taxation authorities which I found to be extremely cold while the ATO was somewhere in the middle.

My speculative theory is that as the government here is conservative (the equivalent of republicants in US) they are ideologically in line with bitcoin's principles of sound money and its Hayek economics and the opposite being the case in the US so being run by democrats.

It is because, in my view, bitcoin has huge political support on one side of society's governance that I find it extremely unlikely for a western government to declare bitcoin illegal.

We hear in our community a labeling of bitcoin as many things, I think one of those things, and perhaps the most important, is that bitcoin applies the economic principles of the austrian school, and, in my view, because of it, bitcoin finds huge political cover and support far beyond ancaps or cypherpunks etc. It further of course provides the huge technological inventions which save a huge amount in fees and friction, thus improving the state of any nation economy and the world.

That is why its success, in my view, is inevitable for what it provides is obviously good and what is obviously good shall necessarily prevail. Some may be able to delay tomorrow's future though... but now that the world's experts have realised just what bitcoin is, we stand at the edge of changing the world with the power of our ideas.


In regards to some miners' comments about BU, they usually a shy bunch, but they didn't say much more than what I stated earlier. I think we just need to prove in some way that it is a perfectly safe client and then get as many nodes up as possible.

 

[cypherdoc]

Our journal Ledger now has its first central banker: Dr. Michael Kumhof from the Bank of England:

http://ledgerjournal.org/ojs/index.php/ledger/announcement/view/8

http://www.coindesk.com/bank-england-economist-editorial-ledger/

Let us not forget our own @Pecuniology who just got added as well!

Congratulations Charles!

 

[rocks]

@awemany UTXO commitments are scary because if somebody wants to create a bunch of counterfeit bitcoins for themselves, trying to break the UTXO commitment scheme to add their fraudulent coins is the obvious thing attack vector and it's hard to construct countermeasures that don't put you right back to needing the entire chain again.

If every full nodes parses the entire blochchain, a majority of miners can't print unlimited amounts of Bitcoins for themselves.

If nodes start relying on committed UTXO sets instead of parsing the entire blockchain, then sometimes a majority of miners can print themselves unlimited Bitcoins and it may or may not be efficiently provable.

tl;dr: It has to be very carefully implemented.

It's important to note that UTXO commit schemes do not change or fork Bitcoin at all, they are simply a different method for a new node to enter the network and start. One option is to scan and verify the full history, another is to obtain the current UTXO set plus headers.

I think UTXO sets are greatly simplified due to the following points: 1) The UTXO set is fully known and identical for all nodes on the network at each block, 2) The total spendable value of the UTXO set is a known total at each block, 3) It only takes one single honest node on the network to identify and flag issues to everyone else (which I believe will always exist).

I think the key is for nodes to be able to easily communicate what their working UTXO set is at each node. A simple ordered hash of the UTXO set would suffice here. Nodes could communicate the hash with new blocks as they are propagated to on network nodes, and the hash plus the commit set to new nodes. Any alteration of the UTXO commit set, even if the alteration was not spent, would be easily identified as an invalid hash.

And if you set standard behavior to be nodes maintain the past year of transactions and new nodes download and verify the past year of transactions after starting with the UTXO set from a year ago, it seems quite secure. Any alteration of the UTXO set, even unspent alterations or alterations made by >51% of the hash rate, would be easily spotted and flagged and kicked out of the honest pool set. To sneak something past everyone just does not seem possible here. If there is a way I'd love to hear it.

Edit: All that said UTXO sets are completely unnecessary for the foreseeable future. UTXO sets solve a storage problem, which Bitcoin will not have for a while. The problems today are due to block propagation times, and IBLT and sub-chains together solve that issue. There are years to look at UTXO sets and make sure they are done right. But at some point we will need to implement either UTXO sets or some other method of pruning data and startup validation time, we can't expect full nodes in 200 years to validate every human and M2M transaction over the past two centuries...

 

[Peter R]

Let us not forget our own @Pecuniology who just got added as well!

Congratulations Charles!

Yes, and congrats to Antony Zegers and Josh Westmoreland too!

 

[awemany]

@rocks: Yes, I think they are going to be a very workable security-storage trade-off.

If I'd had all the money and time in the world, I'd move to a small solar-powered hut in the mountains somewhere and just work on that

 

[cypherdoc]

[doublepost=1454443651,1454442546][/doublepost]This is a belt-and-suspenders fix to make sure CreateNewBlock() or external mining software can never produce a block that violates the MAX_BLOCK_SIGHASH rule.

It does this by rejecting transactions that do too much signature hashing -- they are not added to the memory pool, and so will not be considered for inclusion in new blocks.

How the code works: every transaction uses up some fraction of the MAX_BLOCK_SIZE limit and the MAX_BLOCK_SIGHASH limit. If a transaction uses up a larger fraction of the SIGHASH limit than the SIZE limit, it is rejected. That ensures that no matter which transactions are selected for the block, the SIZE limit will be hit before the SIGHASH limit.

This is a much simpler solution than modifying CreateNewBlock or external transaction selection software to keep track of the SIZE limit, the SIGOPS limit, AND the new SIGHASH limit.

This is belt-and-suspenders because, in practice, the 100,000-byte IsStandard transaction size limit prevents the block SIGHASH limit from being hit.

The IsStandard code related to the old SIGOPS limit is left unchanged.

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/65

 

[sgbett]

Wow, that's a great indication that the UK at least takes bitcoin very seriously and I have found the government's approach here to be very friendly to bitcoin as shown by UK being the only English speaking jurisdiction which treats bitcoin as a currency for tax purposes.
...

Unless I am mistaken they are still commodity (zero rated for VAT which was the big win imho) like.

(e.g. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/revenue-and-customs-brief-9-2014-bitcoin-and-other-cryptocurrencies/revenue-and-customs-brief-9-2014-bitcoin-and-other-cryptocurrencies)

For my tax returns for last two years personal gains have been taxable under capital gains legislation. While company gains (for limited company) were taxable(/deductable) as company profits through Corporation Tax legislation.