Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Lee Adams]

@adamstgbit

my understanding of how that works is that in SW, a node would first DL the entire blockchain with sigs from a bonafide full node to first verify it's integrity. then, it could pare down the blockchain data by discarding sigs. or even pare down the UTXO set if they want. thus, it becomes a "partially validating SW SPV node hybrid". seems like the sky is all pie as far as SW is concerned. i'm very skeptical of how this will all work out esp the ANYONECANSPEND tx's seen by old nodes. which if only the Satoshi 0.12 nodes upgrade to, leaves 75% of the network not upgrading to SW, potentially leaving unknown security concerns to be exploited.

These were also my concerns also... however:

1. 75% is not a thing anymore, segwit will use BIP9 (versioning with 95% by a certain date) not BIP65 (the 75%, 95% activation)
   
2. bitcoin nodes (core, classic, unlimited) do not currently check signatures after a checkpoint, even when downlodaing the entire blockchain for the first time. Signatures (witnesses become irrelevant very quickly)
3. The anyonecanspend is probably the MOST confusing thing in the entire protocol. It's taken me weeks to get a handle on it. This is how I think it currently works. Please let me know if I've got any of this wrong:

• An anyonecanspend transaction is still sent to a bitcoin address. Normally this could be spent by that address, but much infinitely more likely to be spent by the miner who solved the block.
• After segwit activation, miners can no longer spend these, because if they do, the blocks would be rejected by the other 95% of miners. This has already been tested by CLTV BIP65.

The more I understand about segwit, the more I like it.

 

[go1111111]

So far so good, but a 2wp means it is impossible to mine hivecoins as such, because they can only be made by locking up a set amount of BTC that never changes. If hivecoins could *also* be made by mining them, there is no way to ensure the 1 hivecoin you won on the prediction market would allow you to unlock a full 1 BTC, since there would be more hivecoins than locked BTC. Where is the incentive to mine the sidechain? Perhaps there needn't be one?

It is likely that most sidechains will be merge-mined, so the cost of mining on them will just be the cost of processing and storing its blockchain rather than the cost of hashing. This should be pretty low, so transaction fees on the sidechain will probably be enough to incentivize enough of Bitcoin's hashpower to do this.

Another option is for there to be some small amount of inflation on the sidechain. So you transfer 1 BTC to the sidechain, and the inflation rate is 1% per year. In one year you withdraw your coin from the sidechain. The withdrawal gives you ~0.99 bitcoins back.

 

[go1111111]

Yes. A mixed bag of great points and some big errors. I was moved to comment, though in mid-sleep:

...

...without that basic store of value function, there can be no security for these many ancillary applications....

A cryptocurrency can obtain a stable value even if no one uses it as a long term store of value, based on the equation of exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_exchange).

Bitcoin is mainly used as a store of value now, but its network effect is still pretty tiny. People will be more comfortable with a store of value that also happens to be a popular global currency, than they'll be with a store of value that is only valued for the digital gold use case. The more use cases your store of value has, the more you're protected against people in the future deciding not to value that asset.

So I do think there is a scenario where an alternate ledger becomes the standard digital gold. It's true that early Bitcoin holders will have lost their savings, but this wouldn't have to ruin the concept of digital gold for everyone. Holders of the new digital gold would simply think "that's what happens when you invest in a digital gold that has yet to establish itself widely and has no other significant uses. Yes, things were risky back then as Bitcoin's failure showed, but now that most people in the world use the asset I'm holding now, things are pretty safe"

As you acknowledge in your post, current holders of Bitcoin are not such a powerful group that they'll be able to dictate which ledger gets used when many more extremely wealthy people get involved. Sure, their current backing of Bitcoin will provide some momentum for keeping the current ledger, but the longer that something like Ethereum exists with its own ledger and the more time Ethereum has to accumulate its own investors, the higher the chance that future people coming into the space will think that it's unfair to reward Bitcoin investors for Ethereum's success.

I do like the vision of one core ledger being carried forth by different protocols, but the extent to which this happens seems murky. Someone already forked Ethereum to use Bitcoin's ledger (it's called Aethereum). No one uses the fork as far as I can tell. Is that because Ethereum is just smoke and mirrors and being pumped by people hoping to get rich? Is it just too early to expect such a fork, since Ethereum isn't actually used for anything yet? Or does this call into question the idea that any new network will inevitably use Bitcoin's ledger?

 

[cypherdoc]

These were also my concerns also... however:

1. 75% is not a thing anymore, segwit will use BIP9 (versioning with 95% by a certain date) not BIP65 (the 75%, 95% activation)
   
2. bitcoin nodes (core, classic, unlimited) do not currently check signatures after a checkpoint, even when downlodaing the entire blockchain for the first time. Signatures (witnesses become irrelevant very quickly)
3. The anyonecanspend is probably the MOST confusing thing in the entire protocol. It's taken me weeks to get a handle on it. This is how I think it currently works. Please let me know if I've got any of this wrong:

• An anyonecanspend transaction is still sent to a bitcoin address. Normally this could be spent by that address, but much infinitely more likely to be spent by the miner who solved the block.
• After segwit activation, miners can no longer spend these, because if they do, the blocks would be rejected by the other 95% of miners. This has already been tested by CLTV BIP65.

The more I understand about segwit, the more I like it.

the 2 things i dislike about SW are:

1. the centrally planned discount which favors complex multisig tx's like LN over regular tx's.
2. the wide open script versioning that allows 29 soft fork proposals in parallel which miners are unlikely to understand.

i wonder also about unknown attacks on ANYONECANSPEND.

 

[cypherdoc]

http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2016/03/staff-working-paper-2016-14/
[doublepost=1459465568][/doublepost]

 

[theZerg]

@adamstgbit

the sigs are only dropped by a full node after the block with sigs has been propagated to it. i sure as heck hope miners won't be pushing out blocks into the network w/o sigs in SW. altho i guess that is the concept behind XThins to a degree as they push out hashes instead.

Its completely different. Xthin does not send the tx because the destination already has it. But the node is fully validating. SW is proposing to simply trust that others have validated older blocks.

 

[albin]

I would argue honestly that softforking segwit is pretty unethical, because of the sweeping changes that it makes to economics and future development. Soft forking is no different in principle than a 51% attack, because both are cases of miners deciding to orphan work on the basis of rules that the nodes do not have to know. In the case of a straightforward 51% attack that rule happens to be simply "your block is not made by me", but the principle is exactly the same.

This is such a sweeping change whose consequences and risks are not really opt-in, so not putting this up to the consensus of the community-at-large and simply forcing through by some combination of scaring and intimidating miners is literally an attack on Bitcoin. Just because they might believe that what they want to do is the right thing for Bitcoin does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that these means are morally-acceptable.
[doublepost=1459470562,1459469838][/doublepost]Also from a marketing perspective, piling on soft fork after soft fork basically guarantees that Bitcoin is going to die.

Imagine versionbits for public mining pools. They absolutely need to implement voting right now, because suppose several softfork votes are out there at the same time in the near future, and each public pool just decided to mine whatever version number they wanted. They would constantly be losing hashing power because of political reasons and they would have no way exactly of knowing what they did that lost what numbers of users, without spending great effort in customer outreach and polling. Implementing voting guarantees that users will continue to use the pool on its own merits and not just burn it to the ground for political reasons.

Bitcoin itself is exactly the same way. By never ever taking the question to the community at-large via hardforking, they're making it so that the only outlets the community has are all extreme decisions that cause paranoia and existential uncertainty, especially if there's a disconnect between the miners and the community, which basically takes development project decentralization off the table. If the only voice the community has is either abandon Bitcoin entirely, or create a different PoW or PoS spinoff altcoin, then Bitcoin cannot receive relevant feedback from the market and will inevitably die and there's nothing that Core can do about it, just like the scenario with pools above.

The question is not really whether hardforking is safe or not, the question is whether it's safe to continue not hardforking and keeping nodes powerless and the community irrelevant.

 

[AdrianX]

Hey just want to cross post for those mono threadders

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/03/31/2158024/craig-wrights-upcoming-big-reveal/

If Satoshi does surface, what should he say?
I'd like to understand his original design intent, what unexpected events got his attention, and I'd value some clarification on the original design intent of Bitcoin, where and how it deviated and his commentary on those events thinking evolved.
I've got my own opinions - including a bunch of potential pseudonym ;-)

 

[JVWVU]

If Satoshi does surface, what should he say?

I AM RICH, BITCHES COME!

 

[cypherdoc]

[doublepost=1459476023][/doublepost]listen to this idiot. this is a form of leverage as huge amounts of value can exchange hands as a 0 conf tx:

 

[johnyj]

These were also my concerns also... however:

1. 75% is not a thing anymore, segwit will use BIP9 (versioning with 95% by a certain date) not BIP65 (the 75%, 95% activation)
   
2. bitcoin nodes (core, classic, unlimited) do not currently check signatures after a checkpoint, even when downlodaing the entire blockchain for the first time. Signatures (witnesses become irrelevant very quickly)
3. The anyonecanspend is probably the MOST confusing thing in the entire protocol. It's taken me weeks to get a handle on it. This is how I think it currently works. Please let me know if I've got any of this wrong:

• An anyonecanspend transaction is still sent to a bitcoin address. Normally this could be spent by that address, but much infinitely more likely to be spent by the miner who solved the block.
• After segwit activation, miners can no longer spend these, because if they do, the blocks would be rejected by the other 95% of miners. This has already been tested by CLTV BIP65.

The more I understand about segwit, the more I like it.

I'm on the opposite side, the more I understand it, the more I dislike it, especially as a soft fork, since it violated many fundamental rules in both bitcoin and software engineering

1. Soft forks makes it easy to do centralized control (you only need to collude with major mining pools and you can implement anything with a soft fork). Programmers like it since it give them power of control, but this is against the spirit of decentralization
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4cszqx/preference_of_softforking_over_hardforking_as_a/

2. The transaction malleability is not a real problem, since unconfirmed transactions are not safe in bitcoin, it can be orphaned, this is a limitation of POW, not transaction format. Changing several thousand lines to fix a non-problem is just insane, so they have other plans behind it (LN). What if an LN transaction is orphaned or doublespended?

3. LN is prepaid card model, and it has been abandoned by telecom operators years ago, because majority of people don't do transaction that way (only travelers do): If you repeatedly pay to some merchant, what do you usually do? You buy a large volume at a discount rate, that's one transaction, you don't need LN to do that

4. Segwit soft fork changed bitcoin to twin-block architecture and this has never been time and market tested (current bitcoin architecture has been time and market tested for 7 years) it will introduce many new attack vectors and potential security holes, no one knows how would they look like

5. It is a complex change thus need extremely long time to test and deploy, if ever reaching consensus. In fact the biggest difficulty for segwit to reach consensus is its complexity, so far I have never seen anyone expect Pieter fully understand what segwit is

6. Centralization of knowledge to Pieter would make him the single point of failure, if he disappear then bitcoin is screwed, that's just too large risk

7. Bitcoin works well without segwit, why bother?

 

[cypherdoc]

@johnyj

well said.

 

[awemany]

@Peter R , @AdrianX : Thanks guys, much appreciated! TTYL.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@go1111111

How can there be any tx fees on a 2wp sidechain? No additional coins can be made, as explained above, or else there will be more sidecoins than locked BTC and a race for the exits.

If you do allow inflation where you lock 1 BTC to get 1 sidecoin, then a year later you can only get back 0.99 BTC for that sidecoin, that's by definition not a 2wp.

--

I agree there is still opportunity for a sui generis ledger, but if Ethereum achieved that it would be entirely by accident. And the window is fast closing, especially since you have to project several years out to when any new ledger has a track record and maturity through weathering extreme volatility.

 

[freetrader]

Can't tell if satire or not (it is April Fools today after all):

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/blockstream-bloq-gem-itbit-thomson-reuters-and-others-join-the-linux-foundation-s-hyperledger-project-1459455103?#_=_

The Linux Foundation, Hyperledger seems a radical alternative to the Bitcoin blockchain built by the banks, for the banks, which wants to retain the practical advantages of distributed ledger technology ‒ fast and cheap transactions permanently recorded in a tamper-proof ledger ‒ without the troublesome P2P openness and grassroots, anarchic nature of the the open, public Bitcoin blockchain.

Who is giving Linux and Bitcoin a bad name here?

Ok: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Masters

Just so I know for the future - a news site calling itself 'bitcoinmagazine' trashing Bitcoin in the worst possible way?

 

[cypherdoc]

Who is giving Bitcoin a bad name? simple. Adam and Greg through Blockstream. It should be painfully obvious by now that they've sold out. What's worse is watching their fanboys like Torpey, Tuur, Matonis Goldstein, and Andreev among others cheer them on. Whodathunk?

 

[freetrader]

Hyperledger seems like a much bigger consortium.

I think we're seeing what Bitcoin is up against next, after Blockstream.
Blockstream who by the way seems to be retreating into the fold of Hyperledger.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

 

[cypherdoc]

Can someone explain this?'

Every soft fork chooses an unused bit: these are using bit 1 (not bit 0), so expect to see blocks with version 536870914.
http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=576

 

[freetrader]

That's hex^H^H^Hbinary
100000000000000000000000000010 , the second bit from right (bit 1) is set.
Those are 30 bits there, topmost is 1, or rather, the 3 high bits are 001.

From https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009.mediawiki#Specification:

Bit flags
Blocks in the STARTED state get an nVersion whose bit position bit is set to 1. The top 3 bits of such blocks must be 001, so the range of actually possible nVersion values is [0x20000000...0x3FFFFFFF], inclusive.

 

[cypherdoc]

In your example I get 20000002.

How did he get 536870914?