Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[freetrader]

anything that doesnt work with current mining ASIC is an altcoin and is DOA as a bitcoin harkfork.

This remains to be seen. I'm not going to argue likelihoods just yet - let's just say we disagree on this conclusion. Maybe I'll come around in time.

So the danger of being attacked, well this will be an issue with any hardfork, and the way to prevent this is to have a transition weekend where all the major miners and exchanges upgrade to the new hardfork, using a snapshot as of specific time on Friday. Then when things resume, the old bitcoin will still continue but the security will be with the miners and the businesses will want the highest security.

This is not the way Satoshi illustrated his hardfork - he just used a certain blockheight. Not necessarily any great advance warnings, prepare meetings, etc. Those remind me too much of what goes on in corporations. I don't know for sure, but I don't think Bitcoin was born in a corporation. And I don't want to see it die in one (unless it's run by an evil AI, hehe) or at the hands of one (why does the name Blockstream come to my mind).

This is NOT a technical issue. It is a political/business issue where the main decision makers are give a clear path to more revenues and an exact migration path.

Again, this is being nice. I'm not talking about being nice, giving someone a powerpoint presentation with a clear upgrade path and a promise of great lucre.

Fork that sucker while they're on lunch - or better, while they're holding Stalling Conference 3.

From now on, they should be on notice to watch their backs.

 

[AdrianX]

Thanks so much guys for the thoughtful comments!

@freetrader: the "competitiveness of regulation" is a greater talking point. I know the gentlemen from the Dept. of Finance heads the financial crimes divisions (AML/terrorist financing) and you've brought up a great counterpoint to overly-strict AML rules.

@cypherdoc: I like the quantum computer / compromised keys example from the perspective of "ownership vs control" and the interesting legal/ethical questions this brings up. The Bitcoin network doesn't authenticate humans--it authenticates keys (strings of numbers); but us humans would probably prefer it (and half expect it) to be the other way round.

@tynwald: Great question regarding the Bank of Canada eventually issuing its own cryptocurrency. Their long term plan must be to move away from physical money eventually. On that note, does anyone know the latest on Ecquador's purported digital currency?

@AdrianX: Yes, I'd love to introduce the "money as memory" talking points somehow. I'm hoping Jillian speaks to this in her remarks. However, the panel is about "regulation" and "blockchain" and I probably shouldn't steer the conversation too much into the "what is money" direction if it doesn't flow there naturally. And thanks for the vote of confidence, although I'm hardly qualified to talk about regulation for "blockchain" <-- I still don't really know what that even means

@79b79aa8: I knew I had recently read a great post about permissioned ledgers but I couldn't remember where I saw it. Thanks for the link (and great post).

@_mr_e: PM sent.

Hey @Peter R my bad, I had in mind something full spectrum like the Canadian Senate Hearing without reading the link provided. I still think you're extremely well qualified for the task.

Anyway looking at the agenda and reflecting on past recommendations, what's changed sines regulation was last discussed at Canadian Senate Hearing starting at 11 min 41s is the rise of "blockchain technology", permissioned or centralised ledgers.

I suppose the question its worth understanding where "blockchains" fit in with regards to other applications and relative to Bitcoin and where could regulation and oversight be needed given the relative security provided by such systems.

Still I don't get the feeling that Antonopoulos was totally understood although I was most impressed by his astute accuracy in dealing with questions.

I guess Bitcoin has also changed, most of Antonopoulos's assumptions were based on bitcoin governance being decentralized and a public good.

That begs another question (or a can of worms) given that Bockstream is in control of development, doing back room deals with miners to implement changes to bitcoin and re-engineering bitcoin's economic policy. Is some form of corporate regulation and compliance needed for such companies to ensure bitcoin remains decentralized?

 

[jl777]

the problem is that regardless of how it started, it is now a corporate thing and that means it is only about the money.

hardfork that gives miners the most revenue in the short term without any huge negative long term, will win

and releasing a version that is not used by miners can do whatever it wants, but without the major exchanges and businesses adopting it, then why would the miner's care?

 

[yrral86]

it is orthogonal to increasing blocksizes
so it adds complexity for 10x gain in tx capacity.
it also allows potentially shorter latency for users (assuming the interleaved blocks arent all full)

so 10x capacity and faster response and being able to work in conjunction with increased blocksizes. you call that "no gain"?

10x increase in block size achieves the same thing. What do you mean by "shorter latency for users"? As I see it there will still be ~10 minute confirmation times since the transaction can only go in one of the interleaves.

 

[jl777]

there is no need for fancy powerpoints.

Just a hardfork with a specific understandable upgrade path and it will increase miner's revenues by X% and also provide benefits to the users and allow businesses to make more money due to more tx being possible overall

The weekend of no blocks is needed to avoid the CfB attack

 

[steffen]

So @steffen . Can you give me info that I can use? I just want the most relevant people to be present at the on-chain scaling online conference.

Sorry Norway, I don't know how to get in touch with Dr. Craig Steven Wright or someone working for or with him. The most knowledgeable people about mainchain scaling I can imagine that you can actually find are @cypherdoc, @theZerg, and @Peter R.

 

[freetrader]

there is no need for fancy powerpoints.

Just a hardfork with a specific understandable upgrade path and it will increase miner's revenues by X% and also provide benefits to the users and allow businesses to make more money due to more tx being possible overall

The weekend of no blocks is needed to avoid the CfB attack

No miner in China is going to do a weekend of no blocks. That is not what the Bitcoin economy wants, and if it needed that it would be truly screwed. And even if the Chinese agreed to such a crazy idea (bless with heart), miners outside of China won't. This is wishful thinking.

There can be no promises made. Bitcoin operates on hard math and best efforts, and the magic that results when enough people participate. There are no mining or any other businesses that deserve money unconditionally.

 

[jl777]

10x increase in block size achieves the same thing. What do you mean by "shorter latency for users"? As I see it there will still be ~10 minute confirmation times since the transaction can only go in one of the interleaves.

The problem with 10x increase is that now we have real danger of overflowing buffers and latency of propagation is increased. notice how the thin blocks is getting better performance? In general sending one giant file will be slower over packet switched network than a lot of smaller files. So I disagree with your "same thing" assessment.

10x capacity increase on paper, latency issues, orphan issues in reality.

In any case, interleaving works with whatever blocksize, unless there are some fatal attacks against it and I have not heard about any attacks at all yet.

Your assumption that the user cant control what interleave his tx qualfies for led you to the conclusion that interleaved blocks have the same 10 minute latency. I wouldnt suggest a 1 minute latency due to the sequential interleaves would be already solved in many cases, but if you target 3 to 5 minutes ahead, odds are pretty good you will get your tx into that interleave.

One pseudo attack would be to generate 10 variants of the tx that would be confirmed in all the partitions and if they all use the same input, it would only be valid in one of them. using this method would get 1 minute latency on a 10 minute blocktime, regardless of blocksize.

Is this really the "same thing"?

I do think that extra fees should be charged for above behavior and it could be the "fast delivery" option, so this would give the miners the chance of more revenues

 

[JVWVU]

the guy with the cowboy hat is @haq4good or JVP or NewLiberty (on BCT) who i was tweeting with yesterday. he's a reasonable guy and getting him to understand Classic would be a good thing:

He understands Classic. But look at what he is saying at Halving the move to 2MB gets less risky.

And yes I believe Bitcoin 9000 is based off some of Craig Wrights comments but the shit storm in December makes me wonder where he is with it.

 

[jl777]

No miner in China is going to do a weekend of no blocks. That is not what the Bitcoin economy wants, and if it needed that it would be truly screwed. And even if the Chinese agreed to such a crazy idea (bless with heart), miners outside of China won't. This is wishful thinking.

There can be no promises made. Bitcoin operates on hard math and best efforts, and the magic that results when enough people participate. There are no mining or any other businesses that deserve money unconditionally.

I think I am not being clear. Without a period of no blocks relative to a snapshot, there WILL be double spends via using contaminated vins that are valid on one network and not on the other.

But if this instant switch is needed, I guess we just have to live with an unknown amount of bitcoins being double spent

i am not advocating any guarantees of money unconditionally, I just want to avoid massive double spends
[doublepost=1457464245][/doublepost]Anyway, this is eating up too much time. If you want objective technical analysis on things, ping me.

I also have experience with business type things, but that area is prone to being debated in infinite loops and my time is better spent creating the new tech.

If there is no interest in an interleaved overlay, then I wont bother to code it

 

[rocks]

anything that doesnt work with current mining ASIC is an altcoin and is DOA as a bitcoin harkfork. If this is not understood, then I cannot help.

So the danger of being attacked, well this will be an issue with any hardfork, and the way to prevent this is to have a transition weekend where all the major miners and exchanges upgrade to the new hardfork, using a snapshot as of specific time on Friday. Then when things resume, the old bitcoin will still continue but the security will be with the miners and the businesses will want the highest security.

This is NOT a technical issue. It is a political/business issue where the main decision makers are give a clear path to more revenues and an exact migration path. With the majority of miners liking more money and the main exchanges wanting to avoid being double spent against, then after the hardfork weekend two thirds or more of the ecosystem will be on the new hardfork. If there isnt commitment from two thirds of hashpower and two thirds of the exchanges (by deposits), then it wont work.

With 2/3 hashpower, the other 1/3 can attack,but it wont work too well and they will be forced to switch or to continue mining the old fork, which then becomes an altcoin. Of course a version that activates with X% hashrate can achieve the same effect too,but that just seems to create a prolonged painful period of doubt, not to mention chance of unexpected things just being included for the ride.

I disagree

The level of protection PoW mining provides is directly proportional to the cost of mining, not the number of hashes. ASIC mining did not increase security, it simply increased the number of hashes per dollar spent.

The amount of money spent always trends towards the value of payouts which depends on the value of the network. We has seen this with both bitcoin and altcoins.

A PoW fork will be as secure as its value. If the coins are priced very low security will be low, if the coins have some value security will increase.

A PoW fork that re-enables CPU mining might gain a lot of interest because people can run it on there home computer for free. This will drive users and node counts up, which could be enough to gain traction.

And it is risk free to try, if it fails you just go back to using the old chain. But if it takes off, you will have mined new coins.

 

[steffen]

So @steffen . Can you give me info that I can use? I just want the most relevant people to be present at the on-chain scaling online conference.

Maybe, I have one usable idea. It is obvious that the person/people behind the bitcoin9000 paper want to stay anonymous. Announce publicly that the author of the bitcoin9000 paper can attend anonymously by proving he is the author (by sending a message from one of the used accounts or something similar). He will likely not want to attend with video but might agree to attend with voice only if he can use some voice distorting software. More realistic, he will only attend using a text-only medium if at all.

 

[jl777]

I disagree

The level of protection PoW mining provides is directly proportional to the cost of mining, not the number of hashes. ASIC mining did not increase security, it simply increased the number of hashes per dollar spent.

The amount of money spent always trends towards the value of payouts which depends on the value of the network. We has seen this with both bitcoin and altcoins.

A PoW fork will be as secure as its value. If the coins are priced very low security will be low, if the coins have some value security will increase.

A PoW fork that re-enables CPU mining might gain a lot of interest because people can run it on there home computer for free. This will drive users and node counts up, which could be enough to gain traction.

And it is risk free to try, if it fails you just go back to using the old chain. But if it takes off, you will have mined new coins.

you describe an altcoin

 

[AdrianX]

this saddens me:

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/trace-mayer-bitcoin-core-has-no-real-competition/

when I read that headline my first thought was so Trace, do you see this as a strength or a weakness?

 

[Richy_T]

for a while i was running with this:

Up yours BS - C L A S S I C 4 E V E R

you can only do this by modifying the regex of your client*.cpp file and is only possible if you compiled from source. problem with this is that i don't think Bitnodes will count your node, which at this point is the only reason to run a Classic node.

I believe 0.12.0 allows comments to be specified in the useragent from the command line (and probably the config file).

At least I was digging around to change it a while back and had accidently downloaded 0.12.0 source and saw the code to implement it in there. (Note that I think this is actually [yet another] bad change. Useragent should be machine defined as it is for web browsers).

 

[freetrader]

you describe an altcoin

A rose is a rose...

I think if it has aspirations to become the main chain, and explicitly declares itself to be the contender for the throne - i.e. lays claim to the name "Bitcoin" in some credible way, it is just a hardfork which could potentially become the next Bitcoin for real.

The question I have is:

- what would be the prerequisites in terms of credibility (i.e. things that should be provided to attract users and market forces)

Some ideas I already have:

• transparent manifesto with clear statement of principles that will be honored and roadmap of what happens if the fork is successful
• open source code, easy to understand and small list of well-reviewed and tested changes to existing code, and clear explanation of every change (even for a layperson to follow)
  
• installable binaries built by reproducible builds (Gitian) and signed by credible public figures
• a sufficient number of well-protected pools to allow small miners to quickly strengthen the new chain
• a difficulty adjustment algorithm that is able to absorb the temporary "system shock" as the fork is kickstarted
• a network of supportive nodes (if the fork stays at 2MB it can use existing >1MB coalition nodes)
• quick initial awareness and sufficient numbers of people willing to mine it (at low initial difficulty)

Any more?

Sorry if this is cluttering the GCBU thread. I should take this topic to the hard fork thread.

P.S. if there are ppl interested in helping this happen (because I will go forward or join any effort that does it) - feel free to PM me on this forum to discuss further. Or just post your thoughts in the hardfork thread that @satoshis_sockpuppet linked earlier.

 

[rocks]

you describe an altcoin

Exactly, an altcoin that maintains the initial coin distribution.

Altcoins, both new chains and forked chains, are a valid form of decentralization for when control has become centralized and against market preferences.

This is the fundamental strength of bitcoin, it is an open data structure, anyone can take that data structure in any direction. This is not possible with centralized systems such as FED dollars, you can't fork FED dollars.

Why shouldn't users take full advantage of bitcoins greatest strength?

 

[jl777]

A rose is a rose...

I think if it has aspirations to become the main chain, and explicitly declares itself to be the contender for the throne - i.e. lays claim to the name "Bitcoin" in some credible way, it is just a hardfork which could potentially become the next Bitcoin for real.

The question I have is:

- what would be the prerequisites in terms of credibility (i.e. things that should be provided to attract users and market forces)

Some ideas I already have:

• transparent manifesto with clear statement of principles that will be honored and roadmap of what happens if the fork is successful
• open source code, easy to understand and small list of well-reviewed and tested changes to existing code, and clear explanation of every change (even for a layperson to follow)
  
• installable binaries built by reproducible builds (Gitian) and signed by credible public figures
• a sufficient number of well-protected pools to allow small miners to quickly strengthen the new chain
• a difficulty adjustment algorithm that is able to absorb the temporary "system shock" as the fork is kickstarted
• a network of supportive nodes (if the fork stays at 2MB it can use existing >1MB coalition nodes)
• quick initial awareness and sufficient numbers of people willing to mine it (at low initial difficulty)

Any more?

Sorry if this is cluttering the GCBU thread. I should take this topic to the hard fork thread.

add: pays miners more in tx fees
and gives user selectable deliver service level,

The above two is the fundamental trade that allows the rest to happen:
contingent commitments from major miners, exchanges and businesses

the contingency being that enough hashrate also makes a contingent commitment and that it passes technical review

get it reviewed and approved by enough credible bitcoin devs, or at least a list of technical objections by existing devs with the rebuttals, so it isnt a backroom decision, but one that is made via objective feedback, you know like bug reports, with fixes.

 

[freetrader]

pays miners more in tx fees

It pays what it pays as the market dictates the coin's worth. Miners should only invest as much hashpower as they are comfortable. They can decide that themselves, but no coin should make promises it cannot mathematically keep.

gives user selectable deliver service level

Interesting - I haven't heard about this, so right now I don't understand what you mean.

Can you explain more details or link to somewhere that does?

get it reviewed and approved by enough credible bitcoin devs, or at least a list of technical objections by existing devs with the rebuttals, so it isnt a backroom decision, but one that is made via objective feedback, you know like bug reports, with fixes.

For now it's in the concept stage, so all rebuttals against any of the concept are welcome.
The implementation itself will need to be validated to conform to the goals set out beforehand, through code review and testing. The results of these should be made public. There may be a small number of parameters that may not be finally tuned until shortly before the last build, as they will depend on conditions in the ecosystem and estimated initial support base (e.g. activation blockheight, factors used in mining difficulty adjustment algorithms etc.) These might be reviewed with the proviso that they are subject to change at late hour. But by then everyone should be familiar enough with what the code will try to do - it'll just be a matter of when & how fast. Like getting the dose for an antigen quite right.

 

[jl777]

I think you are ignoring the inertia effect. The reality is that miners are mining what they are mining now, so to get them to switch, it needs to make economic sense to them. but let us agree to disagree and you can ignore my business experience on this point.

people pay less than a dollar for first class stamp with decent delivery times, much less for lower delivery times and for guaranteed 3day, 2 day, 1 day delivery more and more, even giant premiums for same day delivery

this concept is known to most of mankind, so no need to explain why it costs more for faster guaranteed delivery.

this creates new revenues from existing tx capacity and a lot more revenues from any increased tx capacity.

more revenues -> miners will choose it
more delivery options -> users wont have any objections and will instantly understand the concept