Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Richy_T]

I do not see much credence in the idea that the minority chain will be attacked to its destruction by the longest chain and that therefore only one chain with the same hashing algorithm can exist. I think the altcoin space actually serves as a good counterfactual to this claim, since there are even altcoins out there that use the same algorithm as Bitcoin, it is not a problem, the market finds its own equilibrium based on mining profitability.

Luke-jr has already turned his pool towards destroying one altcoin so I'm not sure that holds.

 

[theZerg]

The real question is should BU/Classic generate SW compatible transactions? I think not for months. I don't want my wallet to be signing that kind of tx and relying on the good faith of the miners.

 

[Richy_T]

Well, since the segwit code would still need to be in there, configurable option on the generation?

 

[VeritasSapere]

Luke-jr has already turned his pool towards destroying one altcoin so I'm not sure that holds.

I believe you are referring to BBQCoin. In this case Luke-jr had more then fifty one percent of the hashpower in the pool that he controlled. This is obviously with a very low security coin. Hypothetically if the minority fork had even ten percent of hashpower of Bitcoin spread across several pools the security would still be far superior compared to the situation that you mentioned.

BBQCoin also used the scrypt algorithm before ASICs where developed for scrypt. Which made it a ASIC resistant algorithm for the time.

Furthermore BBQCoin is still alive and kicking, one thing I have noticed is that cryptocurrencies tend to almost never die, they are very resilient, much more then I think we give them credit for sometimes. It was only a fifty one percent attack which effectively censored transactions for a while before returning back to normal. So I do think my point still stands, in the altcoin space fifty one percent attacks and hard forks are much more common. I have noticed that any coin with a decent group of people behind it who stick behind it survives regardless.

 

[Richy_T]

I believe it was coiledcoin.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/o6qwx/lukejr_attacks_and_kills_coiledcoin_altcurrency/

And it didn't make it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56675.0

You may be right that it would be harder to attack a full-forked Bitcoin but I suspect it would be good to devise some kind of protection.

Eligius is no longer owned by Luke (which may or may not mean much) and the pool has a tiny share these days in any case but antpool and f2pool have >22% which would make them a threat to a fork with only 10% of the hashpower (not that I'm suggesting they would). And, to be honest, I suspect that in the early days, 10% might be hard to come by.

It occurs to me that the x-thinblocks might hold a solution somewhat. Currently, miners can mine empty blocks and it is pointless to require that they include some number of transactions since they can add dummy transactions. If it was required that any block include some number of transactions from the mempool, that might help and x-thinblocks, since it refers to the mempool, might make that easy to incorporate.

 

[bitcartel]

The Bitcoin Roundtable - https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff - includes a signature from:

Han Solo
CEO
Blockcloud​

Can anyone shed some light on this?

 

[VeritasSapere]

Wow I suppose he did it at least twice then. I would seriously question the character of any person who regularly carries out fifty one percent attacks against altcoins because he does not agree with them. It really is terrible behavior.

Coil Coin was actually a merged mined coin, which have notoriously bad security. Namecoin being a more well known example of this. It was a conventional fifty one percent attack and the project was simply abandoned. I think people just did not want it to live badly enough, it did not have much going for it to be honest, which lead to an extremely low level of security not to mention that this was a merged mined coin as well which tends to have terrible game theory security. I do not think that the first chain fork of Bitcoin would encounter such problems, at least its security will not be able to be overcome with such impunity, and our wills not as easily broken.

So again, I do think my point still stands.

It is funny technically you might even be able to argue that Coil Coin is still alive, even though it has been abandoned by its developers and it lives in obscurity, it only takes a few nodes to keep the blockchain running and it is. There are even some people showing interest in using Coil Coin for some gaming guilds tokens. It is amazing how resilient these cryptocurrencies really are.

 

[Richy_T]

I suspect someone is going to give it a go. Sooner, rather than later, now that this consensus letter is done. It will be interesting to be sure. I may even throw a few hashes their way.

 

[albin]

@bitcartel

Spoiler alert: he was murdered by

Kylo Ren
CEO
First Order

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Zarathustra

Wake me up when altcoins are over 10% of Bitcoin's market cap. (Premines and presales don't count.) Or when fees are very high, people are leaving in droves, and miners continue to stand by stoicly saying, "This is what must happen. Must hold out for LN."

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Reading the roundtable-paper, I found that this sentence is the most important (and shows a strength of the chinese miners a first and soft read doesn't):

We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core.

This means: SegWit will not be used by miners before Core releases a version of Bitcoin Core with a possible Hard Fork implemented.

So, no capacity increase untill July

--

And yeah, Monday-morning in Europe and a backlog of ~10k transactions. If this is not spam and only grows a lilttle bit, there is no way that we reach july without increasing capacity.

--

Since July is the date of the halving, we'll see if we follow the plan 1.) the economic event of the raise of a fee market 2.) the economic event of the halving and 3.) the economic event of the brake of the fee market.

Sounds like madness and if miner did sign the plan to their own destruction.

 

[Zarathustra]

@Zarathustra

Wake me up when altcoins are over 10% of Bitcoin's market cap. (Premines and presales don't count.) Or when fees are very high, people are leaving in droves, and miners continue to stand by stoicly saying, "This is what must happen. Must hold out for LN."

I don't think that this definition makes sense. Then you could also argue that those 12 Million Bitcoins that have been mined within the very first Bitcoin years don't count. But they count. The fees will never be 'very high'. The frustration is very high. The constant migration began before the fees became very high, and additional adoption has been prevented since month (fidelity effect). That did not impress the big miners. Never underestimate the stupidity of the homo oeconomicus! But yes, I still hope and guess that small miners leave the big dumb pool operators and force them to react.

 

[cypherdoc]

You can see that the 2MB HF part of the agreement will never happen:

 

[kyuupichan]

The huge numbers of transactions are amazing. It's hard not to believe it's spam from someone pissed off, but looking at them it's not clear they are spam. I can't even find the old obvious spam txs any more; they seem to have been squeezed out.

coinwallet.eu hasn't managed to reclaim the ~2 million dust UTXOs she still has outstanding; that has been gradually slowing down with block space pressure --- the >+10% difficulty bumps gave it a last few chances to get in --- and has come to a halt (I've been watching it).

I can't see how this tx pressure ends well. I don't see the miners holding out until July 2017 if they have any common sense at all (which is in question at the moment).

 

[dwaltrip]

Why does this graph make it seem like there isn't a TX pressure problem?

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

Is it because it shows the median confirmation time, and not average? Does anyone have that graph?

 

[VeritasSapere]

That graph shows avarage confirmation time, that will start to go up once the congestion really begins. For now this graph is a better indicator of the trend.

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

 

[freetrader]

@VeritasSapere: Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful reply re: the ASIC topic.

My personal hope is that open research into more useful forms of PoW, spurred on by the successes and failures of the first cryptocurrencies, will deliver us algorithms with a natural tendency toward decentralization.

 

[VeritasSapere]

Thanks for the question, it was rather stimulating. In regards to having a POW with a natural tendency towards decentralization, I am not convinced that it exists. Since it is all specific to the situation of the cryptocurrency itself. It might be that it makes sense for Ethereum to use a new ASIC resistant algorithm for increased decentralization and fairer distribution. However it could also be the case that in the case of a chain fork of Bitcoin SHA256 might still be the most decentralized choice, with everything considered.

 

[Norway]

New roundtable next weekend:
http://satoshiroundtable.org/

 

[cypherdoc]

i think the last HK roundtable of a few days ago was a highly biased core-centric affair since it was organized by Samson Mow who is a rabid core follower. Olivier & Marshall wanted to go but were denied entry b/c of "no space". which is why they only had core dev represented. also suspiciously missing were Sam Cole of KNC who's been more pro big blocks.