Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[steffen]

Is segwit a universal blockchain virus attack and could a vaccine or an immune system be developed to protect against such viruses?

Is segwit a method Blockstream could possibly use to crush all future competing altcoins if they can "just" manage to fork the network to a segwit state once with a sufficiently large (pow) attack?

If I understand correctly all (receiving?) wallets will need to support segwit after a segwit fork unless the user wants his money to be in a anyonecanspend state? Is that correct?

And if a wallet supports segwit, what is the negative consequence of that? Please explain, I am an illiterate wrt computer code.

Would there be a way a minority of hashpower could use to prevent the accept of segwit? Maybe the non-segwit-liking miners and wallets could be just-enough-segwit-aware to completely refuse to cooperate with real segwit supporting wallets and miners, ie refuse supporting transactions using segwit and refuse blocks with segwit transactions? It would be like a segwit vaccination. Or our software could be enough self-aware to completely refuse to cooperate with anything but miners and wallets supporting the same rules, ie refuse to accept transactions which looks different from those created by its own kind of software. That would be like an immune system protecting against segwit and other viruses.

If such defense software could be developed and deployed among supporting miners and users a full fork could maybe automatically occur if/when Blockstream tries to force segwit on bicoin users.

Possible?

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Good thinking @freetrader , but I'm not completely convinced that this is correct.
First I don't think any blocksize increase in the near future would threaten the chinese miners and they should know that. And most or all of them have been and are in favor of a blocksize increase.

Further on, what part plays BitFury, they are the most aggressive core supporters and I would be surprised if they were controlled by the Chinese government.

And why isn't the US government pushing Bitcoin then to put pressure on the Chinese censoring infrastructure?

I'm pretty certain, the miners behave the way they behave because they are stupid cowards.

Either case would be a reason to fork away.

 

[freetrader]

@satoshis_sockpuppet : I can't speak for BitFury, perhaps @SysMan can elaborate on that question. I don't want to speculate on their reasons either - from watching SysMan on the miner panel he struck me as an honest guy who is worried about a danger of "scaling too fast" and feels BS/Core has Bitcoin's best interest at heart.

I don't know what the Internet conditions are like where BitFury operates, and why a little diversification of mining power away from the Chinese center would not possibly leave BitFury in a relatively stronger position. For sure the prospect of a radical full fork such as a POW change must seem a nightmare scenario to their company.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitfury-investing-100-million-new-bitcoin-mining-farm/

Sometimes the only way to save yourself from an oncoming collision is to change course early, and encourage others to do the same.

I am going to keep my musings on motives of the US government for a later date, it is a far too complex and nuanced topic (that's my feeling).
Save to say that I am encouraged that on the whole, Bitcoin is not being repressed all that much over there (look at you, BS, eh?). Maybe it's just a case of temporary regulatory paralysis.

For whatever reason, I think the US is way ahead of the curve when it comes to bringing Bitcoin to common people, as a payment method. I wish Europe would follow suit or even take the lead, but shamefully they are not, being wildly disunited at the moment, with many even forgetting their basic values of liberty, equality and kinship.

We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic.
- Lee Iacocca, from "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?" (2007)

Something to think about:

http://useconomy.about.com/od/tradepolicy/p/us-china-trade.htm

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Hm. Funny, he struck me as being as least as idiotic as the rest of the bunch. He is selling SegWit as a scaling solution... To me he lost all respect after he spread that bullshit graphic with the assigned loc of bitcoin devs.
He believed there would be a huge price jump after the "consensus" and that we are still at ~400 b/c of all the nagging Classic supporters.
In the best case he is just plain stupid and doesn't know any better. In the worst case he is actively trying to replace bitcoin. Either way he isn't good for bitcoin. (I think it's the first option)

Jihan Wu seemed to be on of the more reasonable people but he also doesn't act in any justifiable way.

KNC is the only mining facility doing the right thing.

 

[freetrader]

> bullshit graphic with the assigned loc of bitcoin devs

Agreed, anyone with a deeper knowledge of software development would never do that - it's hard to think of a real-world equivalent but Colin Powell's unfortunate UN slides come to mind.

The fact that @SysMan re-tweeted that suggests there is a lack of understanding at BitFury in that department. Perhaps the ones who do understand just don't have enough of a voice. I still think they are probably lightyears ahead of the Chinese mining community in that respect, but it hurts to think they can be bamboozled by such metrics.

Perhaps miners have all been having trouble keeping up with the myriad of "improvements" that BS/Core is throwing out there to see if some stick. ( RBF, SegWit, LN, ... )

I wouldn't discount the probability of existing support contracts between them and BS/Core, making for some vendor ties which might be a little more difficult / costly for them to separate.
Many companies are very afraid of true open source if there is no clear way for them to contract for support.

The whole way in which SegWit was introduced as a short-term panacea at the first HK confererence reeked of a marketing stunt. The debate on its technical demerits has been quite successfully stifled in the media.

> KNC is the only mining facility doing the right thing

Yes.

 

[theZerg]

can you link that graphic?

Also please everyone take a 10 minutes to find quotes of core devs and others stating that they are somehow better developers, or that core is somehow more stable than the other clients and PM them to me or reply here. I need your help here, you guys are much more connected with tweets and the other forums!

Thanks!

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

@theZerg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CZ3lzCyW0AAw0BJ.jpg:large
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-400#post-13891

 

[molecular]

All things being equal the relative number of nodes is important. The only way that it doesn't matter is if you accept the rumour that all the new nodes are fake and that they are all fake classic nodes.

One could just as easily say all the new nodes are fake core nodes! It's all just speculation.

The most likely explanation is that there is just as much "faking" on for both clients. In which case I think the relative numbers are a good metric.

Personally I like to think all the talk of faking is just sensationalist nonsense. Just like the talk of spam transactions.

Nodes are nodes, transactions are transactions. Honey badger doesn't care.

The node count is just a proxy for support. I agree it's hard to say anything concrete, but neither is it possible for people to credibly say that the core client is in the same position it always has been in terms of popularity. 25% classic nodes says something very loudly imho.

accepting your "nodes are nodes" notion. To gauge support I like the 0.12 vs 0.12 comparison done by nodecounter: http://nodecounter.com/#classic_012_vs_core_012

I love this one because it excludes "old sleeping core nodes" and old bitcoin-qt clients (see the daily wobbling?). One can also see some jump in classic nodes (1 large, about 500 nodes and one smaller, about 150 nodes), which are probably some bulk-hosted nodes being upgraded as a batch.

This also explains why coredevs fear hardforks.

and of course slush pool's voting by hashrate excluding non-voters: https://slushpool.com/stats/

always confidence-inspiring to look at

 

[freetrader]

BitFury CEO: "I don't like the word 'mining'".
Opens $100M mining farm [1].

To understand them a little better, read this:

http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-ceo-bitcoin-mining-company/

Section of note in above article: "Sidestepping the consumer market"

"We decided to not deal with small clients, because it's a headache. We would need a big support team to support all these clients. When you're dealing with big clients, he's paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the headache you're getting from small clients can be much bigger, because for him $5 is like the last money."

They're not wrong (it's their right to orient the company), but it suggests why they are not paying attention to calls and initiatives for decentralization.

I like this quote from the CEO the most:

"For us, reputation is very important," he said. "Reputation is everything and sometimes the biggest currency in the world is trust."

---

@SysMan has told us that BitFury sponsors MIT with $100K donation .

We know now that 2 months x 4 BS/Core devs are a gift from Core to Chinese miners to the amount of $320K. That puts Core devs of that calibre at $40K / month.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if large miners (possibly excl. BitFury - they are not miners ) have software support contracts with Core well in excess of $100K annually. The back of my envelope says that's a lower bound.
That's peanuts compared to building a new data center for $100M, isn't it?

The official message from Core/BS devs is: "Miners are always on their own, entirely responsible for the code they run".

Now that's actually true - the Bitcoin software is open-source, free for all, as-is. By default, no-one owes anything except a debt of gratitude.

Surprising then, how nearly all of the successful miners (with the notable positive exception of KNC) defer to BS/Core when it comes to matters of the code.

In Slack channels, Core devs talk about how miners should be running optimized and modularized implementations of critical code pieces. How likely is it that they aren't?

There is also no reason I can see that would prevent BS/Core from offering an optimized derivative of the Bitcoin code as a special service to miners under a license which prohibits further distribution. They could even be maintaining or developing a completely proprietary implementation on the side. You wouldn't be able to tell from the user agent string, after all.

When you're maintaining custom implementations for N important clients, then making changes for what could otherwise be a simple hard fork suddenly becomes a whole of of effort and takes a whole lot of time.

[1] https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitfury-investing-100-million-new-bitcoin-mining-farm/

 

[Zarathustra]

accepting your "nodes are nodes" notion. To gauge support I like the 0.12 vs 0.12 comparison done by nodecounter: http://nodecounter.com/#classic_012_vs_core_012

I love this one because it excludes "old sleeping core nodes" and old bitcoin-qt clients (see the daily wobbling?).

I would love it even more if it would compare all 2MB hardfork compatible nodes (Classic, BU and XT) with Blockstream's Ruin By Fee 0.12.0 nodes.

 

[Richy_T]

It is great that there are so many places to optimize Bitcoin. Just with what BU has already done is fantastic and it seems people are just getting started. This whole "Bitcoin won't scale, go home everybody" attitude from certain groups seems so antithetical to the project they are involved in--it is really strange. I am really inspired by the great work the BU folks have already done to release these great optimizations in production with more on the way. And the Classic folks for getting some great traction in node counts.

I think this is just more stuff that stems from the core implementation of Bitcoin being kitchen-sink. With a more modularized Bitcoin, the whole transport layer might not be part of the specification just as HTML and HTTP are separate things (In fact, there might be legitimate cases for doing Bitcoin over HTTP). It would probably have made the issue of the 1MB block size limit moot as that code would likely have been in the transport layer code and *not* the consensus code (which I think I recall it wasn't anyway).

If we could get bitcoind more properly modularized, it might make it really easy to drop in, for example, jl777's work when he has that more ready without having to build a whole bitcoind from scratch.

 

[freetrader]

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/bitfury-invests-in-pan-african-bitcoin-trading-platform-bitpesa-cm591898

BitFury must believe in the growth of Bitcoin.

BitPesa seems to be doing well in Kenya, enabling a good climate for Bitcoin there:

https://news.bitcoin.com/kenyan-president-nominates-bitpesa-board-member-for-cabinet/

I wonder if they have voiced their opinion in the blocksize debate so far. Anyone know?

Also, what has changed BitFury's attitude since this announcement of theirs?

http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/01/17/bitfury-announces-support-for-bitcoin-classic-2mb-block-size/

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

What has changed since this announcement of theirs?

Blockstream collected a huge VC check.

 

[freetrader]

Hmm, are you suggesting BitFury perhaps has lucrative hardware R&D contracts with Blockstream? How else might they stand a chance to get a piece of that other VC pie?

I really think they must be either:

• scared of being left out of the BS/Core technology game plan for other miners, that is other products like Liquid, Lightning etc.
• or afraid of the Chinese miners ganging up on them if they step out of the "BS/Core" loyalty circle. Witness the recent DDOS of F2Pool [1], not that they are angels in any way.

The only other option would be that they are getting paid for their loyalty out of the BS VC war chest.

I'm sure there is a much simpler and more rational explanation which I am missing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4984ta/f2pool_we_are_currently_under_ddos_attack/

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

From what I've seen, F2Pool and Antpool seem to be more willing to leave the BS/Core loyalty circle than BitFury. AFAIK BitFury is also the only miner who wanted to have their support signature removed from the Classic website after they were properly consensified by Adam.

I don't know what kind of back room deals BS made with BitFury but I hope for them, that they got at last some money out of them. Else they supported the death of bitcoin without getting anything out of it.
Maybe they have a hardware deal? Maybe Blockstream will buy some mining hardware with some of their VC money.

 

[steffen]

Is segwit a universal blockchain virus attack and could a vaccine or an immune system be developed to protect against such viruses?

Is segwit a method Blockstream could possibly use to crush all future competing altcoins if they can "just" manage to fork the network to a segwit state once with a sufficiently large (pow) attack?

If I understand correctly all (receiving?) wallets will need to support segwit after a segwit fork unless the user wants his money to be in a anyonecanspend state? Is that correct?

And if a wallet supports segwit, what is the negative consequence of that? Please explain, I am an illiterate wrt computer code.

Would there be a way a minority of hashpower could use to prevent the accept of segwit? Maybe the non-segwit-liking miners and wallets could be just-enough-segwit-aware to completely refuse to cooperate with real segwit supporting wallets and miners, ie refuse supporting transactions using segwit and refuse blocks with segwit transactions? It would be like a segwit vaccination. Or our software could be enough self-aware to completely refuse to cooperate with anything but miners and wallets supporting the same rules, ie refuse to accept transactions which looks different from those created by its own kind of software. That would be like an immune system protecting against segwit and other viruses.

If such defense software could be developed and deployed among supporting miners and users a full fork could maybe automatically occur if/when Blockstream tries to force segwit on bicoin users.

Possible?

Here is more specific what I propose if a "vaccination" against segwit can be developed:
The Anti Virus Fork (AVF) solution

The segwit proposal and the continued 1 MB block size limit is considered a sort of virus attack on bitcoin. I suggest we fork away from it even though we are initially supported by a minority of hashing power. When we have sufficient support (fx 50 out of the previous 500 mined blocks = 10% support for this Anti Virus Fork) the decision to switch away from the traditional bitcoin network and form a new network, the Bitcoin AVF network is triggered. 10% is not a lot but it should be plenty to provide the necessary hashing power to support a new well functioning bitcoin AVF network with good security. I suggest a 14 days grace period from the decision is triggered to the new rules start being used.

How:
Implement in Bitcoin Unlimited the ability to detect the use of Segwit in a transaction.
Implement that the Bitcoin Unlimited software can listen on two ports, tcp port 8333 (for backward compatibility with the 1 MB network) and one specific new tcp port for when the fork goes into production. Only one port, the new port, is used after the switch.

During those 14 days these things need to happen:
If it hasn't happened already the AVF supporting nodes must make sure their nodes can also listen on the new port besides port 8333. A button to test the network connectivity would be good.
Users send their bitcoins to a wallet supporting Bitcoin AVF if they want to switch their bitcoins to the new kind of bitcoins. If they don't, their bitcoin will remain the old sort only living within the 1 MB block size limited network. Sending your bitcoins to the wallet in Bitcoin Unlimited AVF should of course mean your bitcoins will become the new kind of bitcoin.
The remaining <90% of mining power have this time to change their mind and switch to the Anti Virus Fork software if they want to. Or they can do it later if they want to.

When the 14 days have passed the AVF-supporting nodes:
Recalculate the new difficulty based on say the proportion of the last 100 blocks which signal support for AVF.
Can produce and will accept blocks larger than 1 MB
Will not accept any blocks or transactions using segwit
Will insist that the first block on the Bitcoin AVF chain is >1 MB so all the small block miners cannot mine on this new chain.

Would such a proposal create a solution?

Wouldn't it provide a good option for both users and minority miners who want to get rid of Core?

And how big a proportion of all outstanding coins do you think would be moved to the unlimited space during the 14 days grace period?

I have noticed that I didn't get any response to my previous post. Often, that is what happens with crazy posts. Does my post belong in that category? If yes, please tell me why. It seems to me we are getting almost nowhere if we continue insisting that we should have the majority of miners backing us before we can move forward. The majority could easily be stupid, corrupted and/or owned by the powers that be.

 

[lunar]

P2P just got their first? classic block.

Nice work

https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/block/402220

 

[Inca]

Looking at xtnodes.com what is strange is the oscillation of Core nodes in a sinusoidal waveform; not seen if you look at the XT, Classic or Unlimited node count. Also there are occasionally rapid drops and rises in node count for both camps suggesting to me that perhaps there are fake nodes out there.

What is needed is another large miner to support Classic and start mining with that intention. Disappointed in slush not being more proactive.

 

[AdrianX]

@theZerg most of the claims come from shills that have a close relationship with the cold developers.

Here is one example from u/nullc using irrelevant information to make the argument that Gavin is not relevant and manipulating data to make himself seem more relevant.


It's particularly note worthy that he uses the number off commits as a measure of contribution, and then goes on to claim other developers contributions as his own. He claims it was an "attribution mistake" and is fixed (I can't check as I'm on my phone.) But read the link to see a an example of the history books reflecting the false account of history that have not been changed.


It's relevant to note in the image you requested image below that Maxwell's contribution is falsely attributed. And the commits are no a reflection of quality but just quantity.

 

[freetrader]

Valery Vavilov, CEO, BitFury:

Everyone who cares about making opportunities available to anyone in the world, who believes in democracy and the power of the people to have a voice and say in their future, should be interested in and enthusiastic about the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Source: https://medium.com/@BitFuryGroup/the-missing-piece-of-the-internet-is-here-5-fundamental-facts-everyone-needs-to-know-about-the-6ed5fc6d57a#.lnal4appm

Adam Back, President, Blockstream:

A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

Source:
I like the emphasis on 'cannot' in the slide title. Another one for the history books?

Forkology 201: how many controversial hard-forks can happen at once, and how do you identify which ones are harmless?

or put another way:

How many hard forks would a hard fork fork, if a hard fork could fork hard?

If you answered 0, then you probably flunked your Bitcoin Certification.