Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[王英清]

@satoshis_sockpuppet thankyou for your reply, you again have given me many more things to think about!

It was said to be ready and it isn't. And nobody could use it even if miners allowed it.

Fees aren't small imho. I don't know how it is in China but in Europe Bitcoin can't compete with traditional banking anymore in terms of fees, at all.

Wow! The fees must be really low in Europe (outside Bitcoin)! - Or people just use it for really really small amounts of value.

We find the fees really low; there normally more than 1000tx in each block. The total fees are around 0.3BTC. That is 0.0003 BTC fee per transaction on average. (of course larger transactions take more fee).

In China we normally transfer larger amounts of value; such as 0.1 BTC or much much more. Are people in Europe using Bitcoin completely differently? If I was going to transfer 1 CYN, I would use an instant messaging app; not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is for larger amounts of money.

And the most important fact: There are no serious investments into the bitcoin eco system any more as the system is already booked out.

Again, Europe must be very different to China. We have huge investment into Bitcoin, particularly mining.

And what do you win by that? You now have thousands of zombie nodes who don't add any value at all to the network. You are feeding them data they don't understand and they're tricked into saying "yes and amen" to everything the newer nodes present them.
A non SW node in a SW network is as valuable as an electrum node to the bitcoin network.

I hope everyone upgrades very quickly; it is nice that they are not forced to. - They can keep on using (the old parts) of Bitcoin without issue. - Some some transactions will look strange to them. But they already ignore those strange transactions anyway.

There is not much to understand. SW doesn't reduce the size of transmitted data. That's all, it doesn't have any connection to scaling.

I'm even more confused about this now. I thought that SW was about making life easier for wallet developers. SW wont somehow make transactions smaller; it just splits them into two parts:

1. The normal transaction part (that says what coins are spent - and where the coins go).
2. The 'Witness' part: the part that says that you 'can' spend those coins.

When I talk to the wallet developers they say that they can separate the part that makes the transaction from the part that signs the transaction very easy with SW.

The central authority is a development team that chose to give a discount for certain transactions (coincidentally exactly the kind of transactions Blockstreams lightning network needs).
I don't understand what you mean by the 2nd part (2 MB?).

It was announced as a proposal at the HK conference. Everyone liked Pieter and thought that it was a really cool idea. I didn't see anyone against SW until I went here.

We like that the transactions that make wallets easier to make are discounted. Of course, miners can have any fee policy they wish; the protocol just is the maximum. - Some miners will continue making blocks without SW transactions.

Most miners I speak to say they will include SW transactions once they have tested their systems.

 

[albin]

@王英清

In China we normally transfer larger amounts of value; such as 0.1 BTC or much much more. Are people in Europe using Bitcoin completely differently? If I was going to transfer 1 CYN, I would use an instant messaging app; not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is for larger amounts of money.

In the US we have a much more poorly-developed infrastructure and userbase for person-to-person money transfers through apps. We have some apps now similar to what's in China (Venmo, Facebook messenger payments, etc.), but I don't know a single person who actually uses any of them.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@BitcoinBelle then addresses the @Dr_Craig_Wright account as "Uyen".

 

[albin]

I didn't see anyone against SW until I went here.

The most well-trafficked sources of information have been heavily heavily censored for a while now, and from what I understand (I don't know all the details), until fairly recently the most popular forum in China was like that too?

 

[王英清]

@albin

You mean 8btc? I don't think it has much censorship, you just cannot post spam or illegal.

I like to get information from the Bitcoin meet-up and WeChat. I find often much more informative than online.

I don't see censorship of Bitcoin within China. Everyone post how SW is a good idea.

The real argument isn't about SW, but about blocksize. Everyone wants SW. - Some people want bigger blocks now. Other people say that we should make larger blocks once the fees are high.

I normally send 1BTC or more. The fees are very low for me. I think it is important to increase blocksize in future, but I don't rush to do it.

 

[albin]

@王英清

I just went and looked up what it is I'm remembering, apparently it wasn't necessarily the top forum, in English language forums about a month ago we heard allegations of Bikeji being censored by the HaoBTC CEO as moderator.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@王英清

The biggest English-language forums being heavily censored and controlled to suit a certain agenda still has a large effect on the global dialog, especially since almost all the main developers are English speakers who aren't fluent in Chinese.

 

[Richy_T]

I now have to make a little excursus to explain why I interpreted this part as the possibility of plain ECC signature instead of the classic (modern) way of signing a message.

I don't know about modern but signing anything has always meant taking a hash and then encrypting that hash with a private key for as long as I can remember. Typically your software will take care of the hashing, making it a one-step process.
[doublepost=1462685963,1462685122][/doublepost]

When someone like Ian Grigg stakes his reputation and legacy on a public statement, that's a substantial price to pay if it turns out that he's lying.

He could also simply be mistaken.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Grigg just backed up probably-Uyen (Tulip Boy) on the founding of the Prometheus Project, so he'd have to be more than just mistaken.

 

[awemany]

She's Greg Maxwell's partner, who was elected to the Wikimedia board a little after the drama w/ Maxwell going on a vandalizing spree of user pages, and until a few years ago. In the Administrators Noticeboard link that ydtm cited a couple months ago on /r/btc in his big writeup, she's the "Mindspillage" person that somebody is referring to in observing that IP blocking Maxwell from editing would also block.

Kind of hard to sift through as an outsider due to jargon and reference to personalities, but shocking parallels to exactly the stuff @Justus Ranvier is talking about, especially with respect to discussion about how to deal with Maxwell further down the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=36639732#User:Gmaxwell

[doublepost=1462661365][/doublepost]Here's some encouraging info about what Blockstream thinks about Bitcoin:

Ok, thanks a lot for that info. We shouldn't infer anything about her character from looking at Gmax' character, though. She apparently was a lawyer at the FSF before joining BS? Compared to Greg himself, I can't see anything wrong with her so far.

The tweet you linked could be seen as quite worrying when applied to Bitcoin as a whole - or it could also be seen as simply meaning that some internal BS processes are broken. I think the latter is more likely.

I must say I see lawyers in general as a necessary evil, but that is probably a bit OT here.

 

[Dusty]

We like that the transactions that make wallets easier to make are discounted. Of course, miners can have any fee policy they wish; the protocol just is the maximum

I can't understand how a miner could be happy to give a discount on certain type of transaction if the time and cost to process them is completely the same: can you please elaborate?

Also, "the protocol just is the maximum" makes no sense: what do you mean by that?

 

[awemany]

> I can't understand how a miner could be happy to give a discount on certain type of transaction if the time and cost to process them is completely the same: can you please elaborate?

External factors. The miner could be vertically integrated and operate an approved BS LN HUB (TM) on top. That might lead to certain prioritization schemes.

 

[Dusty]

I don't know about modern but signing anything has always meant taking a hash and then encrypting that hash with a private key for as long as I can remember. Typically your software will take care of the hashing, making it a one-step process.

Yes, but as I tried to explain in my post, to verify a signature you need the public key and bitcoin adresses do not expose them (since it's sha160 hashed).
So when you sign a message with your wallet you create a signature that includes both the ECC signature and a parameter used to recover the pubkey associated with the address.
[doublepost=1462696322][/doublepost]

External factors. The miner could be vertically integrated and operate an approved BS LN HUB (TM) on top. That might lead to certain prioritization schemes.

Yes, but this means that the BS LN HUB is paying the miner via some other channel, otherwise why a rational miner would do it?

The point is that applying a discount for SW transactions is just plain dumb, it would be the same that arbitrarily discount fee on transactions whose txid begins with "88": they have no benefit in doing that.

 

[Inca]

@王英清 : are you trolling us?

 

[王英清]

I can't understand how a miner could be happy to give a discount on certain type of transaction if the time and cost to process them is completely the same: can you please elaborate?

Also, "the protocol just is the maximum" makes no sense: what do you mean by that?

Hello @Dusty,

Sorry about not be clear in my response. Let me try again:

1. Miners can include any set of transactions in the block they wish, providing they do not break any consensus rules.


2. Some miners may prefer to only include traditional bitcoin transactions, others may prefer SW transactions. They can choose what they want.

I like it when each miner has their own policy, based upon what they feel is important.


3. From my understanding. The 'discount' has nothing to do about fees. It it about the maximum possible blocksize when counting both the normal bitcoin transactions and the SW transactions.

Some miners say that they think that SW is cool, and look forward to including SW transactions. (Once they have their infrastructure tested).

My guess is that they will only include a couple SW transactions per block at the start. - Maybe they will even charge a fee-premium to include a SW transaction.

In China most miners just use the default Bitcoin transaction selection rules. In the new 0.12 Bitcoin this was much improved.
[doublepost=1462699059,1462698120][/doublepost]

@王英清 : are you trolling us?

Hello @Inca,

I don't really know how to respond.

If it is believed that my presence is disruptive, then I will of course leave this forum.

 

[Dusty]

2. Some miners may prefer to only include traditional bitcoin transactions, others may prefer SW transactions. They can choose what they want.
I like it when each miner has their own policy, based upon what they feel is important.

Of course, but a rational miner would try to maximize its income by selecting tx with higher fees.

3. From my understanding. The 'discount' has nothing to do about fees. It it about the maximum possible blocksize when counting both the normal bitcoin transactions and the SW transactions.

From what I know, since there is a 75% discount on the size of the witness data, the same goes for the calc of the fees.
That's why in Bitcoin Classic they changed this value to be correctly calculated.

Can someone please confirm how fees are calculated with SW?

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Voting is closed on the recent BU Improvement Proposals and four are passed.

Congratulations to the new BU members: @jbreher @sgbett @jl777 @Roger_Murdock @AdrianX

The following technical improvements can be developed for a future BU release:

BUIP016: Consensus with Classic on txn size limit
BUIP017: Datastream Compression
BUIP018: Bitnodes Seeding and User-Configurable DNS Seeds

It is disappointing that the take-up of BU v0.12.0 has not been significant, leaving the node count at about 100. If things were different, an uncensored environment and an atmosphere of widespread co-operation and community enthusiasm such as what existed in 2013, then we would probably be seeing more like 500 BU nodes.

Momentum is not lost. The project (BUIP014) using Xthin to create a BU-based alternative to the Corallo Relay Network for miner's fast block propagation is well advanced. A lot more about this will be reported in the near future.

Don't get frustrated. You do a really great work with Bitcoin Unlimited. I don't want to use any other software, Making bitcoin able to securely fork, making a client able to swim on forking chains, is far ahead of time.

Unlimited deserves far more nodes than it has and it would have, if there was and is not this crazy narrative "Running any software beside core will make you loose money".

Most clients - and the important nodes - are run by companies, I think. And companies usually are risk-averse. While they want Bitcoin to scale and are in favor of bigger blocks, their fear of a fork outcompetes this wish. A fork could make them loose funds, is complicated and hard to predict precisely, make a company to rewrite / change their bitcoin implementation.

As long as the pressure has not grown to a existential level, companies will mostly not use a software that supports a fork. Companies don't start revolution, they either deal with a political environment or leave. They usually don't burn money to change an environment.

Many companies I talked with prefer bigger blocks, but don't run classic. If there was a fork, you'd see the share of core-clients rapidly go down and that of classic go up. But as long as there is no fork and no majority of classic, companies will continue run core.
[doublepost=1462708489,1462707823][/doublepost]

Of course, but a rational miner would try to maximize its income by selecting tx with higher fees.


From what I know, since there is a 75% discount on the size of the witness data, the same goes for the calc of the fees.
That's why in Bitcoin Classic they changed this value to be correctly calculated.

Can someone please confirm how fees are calculated with SW?

I guess fees are calculated in relation to the "block size".

"Block size" doesn't mean the size a transaction needs, but it's size without the signatures.

If you have a transaction with 2 inputs and 2 outputs, you pay for it's size minus the signatures. Transactions with many inputs and a view outputs, that are today very expensive because of the space the signatures need, will be a lot cheaper. In fact there will be little difference between the cost of inputs and outputs.

While this cuts the connections between space (bandwith, memory, harddisk) and fees, there are reasons to confirm Adam Back's theory of a "correction of economic incentives" that helps to reduce bloating of the UTXO. Currently it's cheap to build a transaction with one input and hundreds of outputs, like e. G. genesis mining does for its daily payout. Such transactions build a mass of outputs. If this outputs are spent, they need to be signed one by one.

As I collected all my micro-transactions of genesis mining and build a transaction of ~0.2 btc, I had to pay 0.01 btc fees, because I needed to build so many inputs. This "bug" enables genesis mining and other pools and faucets and so on to bloat the UTXO and to determine a future waste of blockchain-space without paying for it. It's like heiring debts to the future generation.

But in the end - fees are the less critical issue of SegWit. There are a lot of things I don't understand. Will the witness be part of a block - or not? Will the network be partitioned, in one subnetwork, that verifies and relays signatures, and one network, that doesn't? Will every exchange and so on need to implement a dual transaction system when customers can choose to get outputs on their adress as traditiol outputs or with witnesses segregated? And what can prevent a spam attack by just collecting all the anyonecanspend-outputs and sending it to all the nodes, because all old nodes will accept that? And will such a spam attack result in a hard fork to the version? And will it be possible to run SegWit without running 0.12.1 with that strange script-softforks that enables "revocable transactions" that lightning needs?

This are the questions that need to be asked. Going on the fee thing and the rebate for signatures is imho no important question.
[doublepost=1462709115][/doublepost]And, about Craig Wright: did anybody notice the age marks in his face? Don't know if that is important, but in one video he has this kind of marks in the face you usually see on the face of very old people. As he is not old enought to have them, he might have a health-problem (maybe with the liver or the heart).
[doublepost=1462709406][/doublepost]And about Ian Grigg. He is more an enigma than a first glance shows. I read his blog, he proofs he thinks on his own in several disciplines (cryptography, finance, banking, contracts). This is the kind of brain that should be on top of bitcoin development, not people like core, that are good in coding, but have no proofen record of knowledge in other disciplines (maybe greg Maxwell with contracts, maybe adam back with game theory, but that's it).

I read Griggs text in the mailing-list where he talks smart things about keys and identity, and he is to some part correct, if he says, the bitcoin community should be ashamed, that it didn't learn bitcoins most important lesson - that money and identity are no longer connected and that a key is just a key and not connected to a person.

On the other side, Grigg is a buttcoiner, and I wonder, if he just tells his story for fun ...

 

[theZerg]

Hello @Dusty,

Sorry about not be clear in my response. Let me try again:

1. Miners can include any set of transactions in the block they wish, providing they do not break any consensus rules.


2. Some miners may prefer to only include traditional bitcoin transactions, others may prefer SW transactions. They can choose what they want.

I like it when each miner has their own policy, based upon what they feel is important.


3. From my understanding. The 'discount' has nothing to do about fees. It it about the maximum possible blocksize when counting both the normal bitcoin transactions and the SW transactions.

Some miners say that they think that SW is cool, and look forward to including SW transactions. (Once they have their infrastructure tested).

My guess is that they will only include a couple SW transactions per block at the start. - Maybe they will even charge a fee-premium to include a SW transaction.

In China most miners just use the default Bitcoin transaction selection rules. In the new 0.12 Bitcoin this was much improved.
[doublepost=1462699059,1462698120][/doublepost]

Hello @Inca,

I don't really know how to respond.

If it is believed that my presence is disruptive, then I will of course leave this forum.

Please stay here! I appreciate a different perspective.

 

[albin]

While this cuts the connections between space (bandwith, memory, harddisk) and fees, there are reasons to confirm Adam Back's theory of a "correction of economic incentives" that helps to reduce bloating of the UTXO. Currently it's cheap to build a transaction with one input and hundreds of outputs, like e. G. genesis mining does for its daily payout. Such transactions build a mass of outputs. If this outputs are spent, they need to be signed one by one.

I don't really buy Adam Back's "negative externality" argument, because they haven't really solved anything if they believe there's really a problem, all they've actually done is arbitrarily decided that inputs should be 4x cheaper than outputs byte-for-byte. The dynamic is still there where nodes have to store outputs in the utxo set. As an analogy, suppose we're a city council, and we find that rent controls are causing x amount of housing shortage annually, so we decide to relax rent controls by a certain amount to achieve a theoretical 0.25x housing shortage versus the equilibrium condition, per all our fancy econometric modelling. That doesn't suddenly mean we've fixed a "bug" in the incentives structure surrounding rent control.

If anything, I feel his argument is a bizarre fundamental error that needs some rigorous Konrad Graf-style treatment, because I don't see how there's anything stopping the assumptions behind Back's argument to lead us to conclude that every single clock cycle, byte of storage, and bandwidth is a negative externality cost that should be stamped out. Unless there's something significant I'm missing, I don't see how his argument is any different than calling it a "bug" that nodes use any computing resources at all.

Also running a full node benefits from positive externalities due to network effect (as a node operator you're paying linearly for a squared or at least x*log(x) increase in utility) that are completely ignored. I'm not convinced that this kind of entry-level externality-based analysis is really all that applicable to the assumptions surrounding a p2p network.

 

[tynwald]

@satoshis_sockpuppet thankyou for your reply, you again have given me many more things to think about!
...

It was announced as a proposal at the HK conference. Everyone liked Pieter and thought that it was a really cool idea. I didn't see anyone against SW until I went here.

Not true. I was at the conference and people immediately questioned Pieter on Core/Blockstream about-face allowing much greater amounts of data to be moved around the network via SW, when Core developers had spent months saying that BTC network was limited and could fail under greater load.

The questions were brushed aside and discussion moved on - by developer working for Blockstream who held the mic.

Coming from China, surely you'd be familiar with stage-managed events allowing vested interests to massage opinion for profit and power.