Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[lunar]

Andreas-A - Scaling bitcoin. From his talk 22.march @ Paralelni Polis. Prague


Well worth a watch if you are suffering from a little despondency.

Some of his points could use a little cross examination. Especially the analogy with UseNet. Were there big sophisticated players around in the early days who could push development in harmful directions?

Bitcoin the network may survive this challenge, but will Bitcoin the sound money P2P decentralised cash?

 

[Zarathustra]

this has got to get me a ban. 1,2,3...

[doublepost=1459661355][/doublepost]
i have been consistently making the argument the last few weeks that it's highly likely that only 25% of the current full nodes upgrade to SW; namely only the Satoshi 0.12 nodes:

https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=utxo

if so, that would mean 75% of the full nodes don't and thus see ANYONECANSPEND tx's. there seems to be a likelihood that this could be attacked in some way. highly unstable, imo.

"Wouldn't it be a pity if 95% of miners upgrade and 95% of nodes reject the new blocks?"

 

[albin]

All the implications of segwit make me think that softforking is the "just the tip" of consensus rule changes, like it doesn't count but we all know it really does count.

 

[Richy_T]

look at the deception going on by both Adam and Greg in this interaction on N. Korea.

note how Adam tries to claim, ONCE AGAIN, that the purpose of the 75% discount is to consolidate the UTXO set as opposed to being a subsidy to use complex LN multisigs to enter a pmt channel. and then Greg with one i hadn't heard of before; a diversionary argument about how "the signatures for lightning (HTLC) transactions are smaller than the average on the network right now". i had to go quickly do some reading on HTLC's as i haven't studied the LN in great detail. note my answer to which i haven't gotten a response from Greg yet so i presume i'm right. @Dusty might want to confirm my assumption:

See, you can try and assume good faith and then they come out with bullshit like this.

In my mind, the discount is a side-effect of the way they are hackishly fudging getting around the block-size limit that they find it convenient not to fix. There is *no* economic reasoning behind this, just post-facto rationalization.
[doublepost=1459698626][/doublepost]

if so, that would mean 75% of the full nodes don't and thus see ANYONECANSPEND tx's. there seems to be a likelihood that this could be attacked in some way. highly unstable, imo.

I think Peter Todd himself made some reference to what would happen if segwit activated and not enough full nodes were part of the scheme.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Richy_T]

Just a question: What does "consolidating UTXOs" look like? I have a sneaking suspicion it would be an anti-privacy action.

 

[cypherdoc]

Cypherdoc you have talk about the failure of SegWit as the event which would trigger the breakout of the wedge we are currently in, I can think about two other potential events:
- the release of OpenBazaar
- the confirmation of Craig Wright as Satoshi

Both would be bullish.

i can't see how finding satoshi would be a good thing. cuz of all those addresses he possibly still controls. i'd rather like to continue thinking he just threw away all those private keys.

 

[Inca]

So allegedly both Core and Classic want segwit and a blocksize bump.

If Core are actually were planning to hard fork to 2mb anyway, why alienate a large proportion of users by implementing segwit as a soft fork first?

It really makes no sense from a game theory point of view to move forward this way. Unless we consider they have no intention of bumping up the blocksize. In that context they can point to the imaginary roadmap and use that to attempt to placate users and miners for another year.

Whether it is so they can add in new bells and whistles for additional payment layers or just stall bitcoin growth for their paymasters it doesn't matter.

Incredible the 'core' developers have gone from being heros to villains in just three years. Gregory Maxwell is going to piss off a lot of people when they discover they have held bitcoin for years and right when it should be ready for mass adoption, another blockchain becomes the universal ledger for the internet.

You can almost write his Wikipedia page now for 2125:

'Lead developer for bitcoin during its final years before <insert winner> rose to global prominence. Personally responsible for controversial design decisions which many attribute to bitcoin's failure to take the next step onto the global stage.
Amongst his many contributions to the cryptocurrency asset class it was his insistence that a '1mb blocksize would be enough for everyone' that led to the capacity crisis in late 2016 and the disastrous Great Bitcoin Crash that followed. He will be remembered not for his earlier contributions but for destroying billions of dollars of paper value in one day and held directly responsible for the bankruptcy of hundreds of nascent bitcoin companies thereafter.

Historians reviewing the digital exchanges between early crypto enthusiasts and detractors to Maxwell's design decisions and style of communication noted his Napoleonic tendencies, superiority complex and have since coined the term 'Maxwell maunder' to describe his communications throughout this period.

Despite there being vocal opposition to his leadership and design decisions he is widely credited for forcing the reemergence of Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym for <insert names(s)>) into the public limelight in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to steer bitcoin back towards its original design goals.

After his brief time in the public spotlight Maxwell became something of a pariah, retreating back into relative obscurity for the remainder of his productive years, leaving the saying 'doing a gregory' behind in the IT world for posterity, to be universally understood as promoting someone into a position of power who then destroys the project through their own perceived superiority and intransigence.

E.g "don't give Eric the job or you will be 'doing a gregory', his colleagues don't like him and I think he's a right tit."

Reviewing national US birth certificates for the last two hundred years there was also a significant reduction in parents naming their children Greg or Gregory after the Great Bitcoin Crash which persisted for a prolonged period of twenty years before reverting to mean levels."

 

[cypherdoc]

Yes, they are bitcoin transactions, but they are not so simple
What problem do you have with that?

i have a problem with how value can exchange hands w/o ever confirming on the blockchain when these pc's are viewed as one giant 0 conf tx. i've already gone over how a time dependent closure of such a pc can be disrupted by a prolonged spam attack. which should be quite a viable attack given core dev wants blocks to run at full capacity to generate a fee mkt.
[doublepost=1459701971][/doublepost]

So allegedly both Core and Classic want segwit and a blocksize bump.

If Core are actually were planning to hard fork to 2mb anyway, why alienate a large proportion of users by implementing segwit as a soft fork first?

It really makes no sense from a game theory point of view to move forward this way. Unless we consider they have no intention of bumping up the blocksize. In that context they can point to the imaginary roadmap and use that to attempt to placate users and miners for another year.

Whether it is so they can add in new bells and whistles for additional payment layers or just stall bitcoin growth for their paymasters it doesn't matter.

Incredible the 'core' developers have gone from being heros to villains in just three years. Gregory Maxwell is going to piss off a lot of people when they discover they have held bitcoin for years and right when it should be ready for mass adoption, another blockchain becomes the universal ledger for the internet.

You can almost write his Wikipedia page now for 2125:

'Lead developer for bitcoin during its final years before <insert winner> rose to global prominence. Personally responsible for controversial design decisions which many attribute to bitcoin's failure to take the next step onto the global stage.
Amongst his many contributions to the cryptocurrency asset class it was his insistence that a '1mb blocksize would be enough for everyone' that led to the capacity crisis in late 2016 and the disastrous Great Bitcoin Crash that followed. He will be remembered not for his earlier contributions but for destroying billions of dollars of paper value in one day and held directly responsible for the bankruptcy of hundreds of nascent bitcoin companies thereafter.

Historians reviewing the digital exchanges between early crypto enthusiasts and detractors to Maxwell's design decisions and style of communication noted his Napoleonic tendencies, superiority complex and have since coined the term 'Maxwell maunder' to describe his communications throughout this period.

Despite there being vocal opposition to his leadership and design decisions he is widely credited for forcing the reemergence of Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym for <insert names(s)>) into the public limelight in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to steer bitcoin back towards its original design goals.

After his brief time in the public spotlight Maxwell became something of a pariah, retreating back into relative obscurity for the remainder of his productive years, leaving the saying 'doing a gregory' behind in the IT world for posterity, to be universally understood as promoting someone into a position of power who then destroys the project through their own perceived superiority and intransigence.

E.g "don't give Eric the job or you will be 'doing a gregory', his colleagues don't like him and I think he's a right tit."

Reviewing national US birth certificates for the last two hundred years there was also a significant reduction in parents naming their children Greg or Gregory after the Great Bitcoin Crash which persisted for a prolonged period of twenty years before reverting to mean levels."

bwahaha. coffee all over screen.

 

[Dusty]

i have a problem with how value can exchange hands w/o ever confirming on the blockchain when these pc's are viewed as one giant 0 conf tx. i've already gone over how a time dependent closure of such a pc can be disrupted by a prolonged spam attack. which should be quite a viable attack given core dev wants blocks to run at full capacity to generate a fee mkt.

Yes! I completely agree, and this is one of the main criticisms I make when talking about LN with smallblockers.
Anyway, the point was that that LN txs are normal bitcoin txs, and it seemed like you were suggesting otherwise.

 

[AdrianX]

Malleability is completely transversal to double spending. Double spending is possible since day 0 of bitcoin, and that's why we usually wait some confirmations on a tx.

@Dusty I've not seen transversal used in that context, are you saying it's not related? I've always understood Malleability to be a non issue that's settled after a confirmation.
[doublepost=1459704910][/doublepost]

Cypherdoc you have talk about the failure of SegWit as the event which would trigger the breakout of the wedge we are currently in, I can think about two other potential events:
- the release of OpenBazaar
- the confirmation of Craig Wright as Satoshi

Both would be bullish.

I don't see it like that. OpenBazaar is a verry bullshit event however it's not a Bitcoin event. It's not dependent on Bitcoin but good digital cash.

Craig Wright coming out as Satoshi. (If he is) is not bullish, he'd be doing it now to signal that Bitcoin is off track.

The event may save Bitcoin but imo it's an act of last resort.

 

[albin]

I think it really comes down to one thing for me personally at the end of the day.

If Core takes an official stand that they're with Maxwell that the system must operate pegged at capacity in order to function, and there is no real hope that anything outside of Core is going to get traction, then at least I know to get out and put my interest somewhere else.

If Core is willing to make a clear mission statement that they are committed to on-chain scaling to the extent that is technologically-possible, and is willing to have good-faith discussion and debate about metrics, methodology, etc., then I'm in and I have no problem with a vigorous and fruitful debate hopefully leading to a better understanding.

But right now we have a project that's really the former, pretending it's the latter.

That's a whole lot of bullcrap. Core/Blockstream peeps, if you're out there and have any decency, please shit or get off the pot.

 

[cypherdoc]

the point was that that LN txs are normal bitcoin txs

yes, i do disagree with that statement.

part of my argument has to do with the HTLC's we were talking about above. how can you misconstrue those as normal Bitcoin tx's? they're nothing of the sort except updates to the original opening tx (still a 0 conf) yet causes value to exchange hands without a confirmation on the blockchain. they're more like an IOU at this point.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

My answer to those who think, "Bitcoin is doomed, therefore we move to Ethereum, Dash, etc."

 

[Dusty]

@Dusty I've not seen transversal used in that context, are you saying it's not related? I've always understood Malleability to be a non issue that's settled after a confirmation

Yes, simply because malleability has nothing to do with double spends: you can double spend (unconfirmed) txs with or without malleability. By simplifying a lot, malleability means you can create two tx which spends same inputs and have same outputs, but with different hash.
For some applications, this is undesirable (this is where my knowledge on the matter ends, unfortunately, for the time being: don't ask me why ).

yes, i do disagree with that statement.
part of my argument has to do with the HTLC's we were talking about above. how can you misconstrue those as normal Bitcoin tx's? they're nothing of the sort except updates to the original opening tx (still a 0 conf) yet causes value to exchange hands without a confirmation on the blockchain. they're more like an IOU at this point.

Yes, but in the same way like an unconfirmed tx is an IOU, until it gets in a block.

By simplifying a lot, look at a payment channel in this way: the two parties keeps exchanging transactions, and if something goes wrong, for example because a party goes offline or decides to close the channel unilaterally, the last transaction can be broadcasted as it is on the bitcoin network.
If it wasn't a bitcoin transaction it would be rejected while instead after a while it gets in a block and the channel state is settled.

(in reality there are complications due to avoid that one party would broadcast an older transaction representing not the final state of the channel and that's why I say it's a simplification)

 

[albin]

@Dusty

Maybe when people talk about double-spends wrt malleability, they're kind of loosely talking about defrauding some off-chain entity (kind of the mythical mtgox style where some external system depends on a canonical txid that is not actually canonical) and not strictly a double-spend on the network, because the replacement tx always necessarily hashes to a different txid anyway?

 

[Dusty]

@albin: maybe, but in the case of MtGox the fault was completely theirs (and with a lot of stupidity). I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand which practical problems segwit solves for LN right now, but I'll try to dig deeper on the subject.

 

[albin]

From what I understand so far having listened to Rusty Russel on a podcast a while back, the main malleability issue I picked up was that in order to have a third party monitor the network on your behalf to enforce the channel(which I can't imagine isn't absolutely essential for this to be usable on mobile or for any light client at all really), such that they do not control your funds but merely act as an agent broadcasting pre-signed tx's you supply if they detect malfeasance, you have to be able to rely on the txids you're referencing on the channel tx's being totally canonical.

 

[cypherdoc]

Interesting attack scenario on SW being proposed by franky1:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1423718.msg14412438#msg14412438

 

[freetrader]

Interesting attack scenario on SW being proposed by franky1

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1423718.msg14412438#msg14412438

Diverting Internet Monies With Invalid Transactions - the DimWit attack.
It's not a bug, it's a feature?

UPDATE April 4 2016: this attack has, to my satisfaction, been shown to be impossible. Non-segwit nodes would still try to validate the input to the malicious tx , find it invalid and reject the malicious block.