Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Christoph Bergmann]

@Christoph Bergmann : I don't know, he compares it to VISA's 10,000 tx/s and that clearly puts it in perspective.

Today's state of the art should be the future's legacy systems, so I'd hope that Bitcoin can scale far beyond its current limitations. I think this is a situation where all attempts to do that will happen in parallel

Now I'm waiting for CSW to publish full details of his ~340GB blocks / 500k tx/s test results to prove Decker wrong. /s

Yeah, this good old VISA-comparison ... it has currently the same relevance as if you had asked if it was possible in 1989 to stream the worlds complete TV consum through the internet. Maybe we will at some time need methods to transact 10.000 tx/s, I don't think so, but maybe. Than it will happen by a combination of centralized offchain-transactions, several altcoins that manage to pay nodes for spending bandwith, decentralized offchain-transactions and very big blocks.

But in the current debate the comparison with visa makes as much sense as a not making cars faster than 80 km/h because they can't drive 800 km/h. Or to not use renewables because they can't produce power as efficient as nuclear plants.

We don't know how the final scale will be. But I don't want to use this what I hear lightning and other payment channels do.

And if we use them, it will be far easier to implement them in ethereum than in Bitcoin, I guess.

 

[Melbustus]

Here is an example: ethereum has now more nodes than Bitcoin
...

Turns out that Bitcoin Core, Blockstream, and small-blockers in general are really good at incentivizing more people to run nodes......just not BitcoinCore nodes.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

I am slightly worried this Halving period could be make or break for our nascent currency.

My view is that the sound monetary principles around which bitcoin functions are more important than 'decentralisation'. I put the word in inverted commas because it is entirely subjective. Is bitcoin any worse a system with 3000 well funded high traffic nodes compared with 6000? Is it truly better with 50,000?
Would it function any less well with just 500 full nodes housed in data centres? To the hobbiest this is anathema. But bitcoin would continue to be open, verifiable and remain decentralised, especially compared to mining pools.

Personally I would far rather we allow bitcoin to run as far as it can technically on chain and worry about gradations of decentralisation later. The fixed monetary scarcity and frictionless nature of bitcoin are the key points which attract new users to the currency/asset class and have the actual potential to change the world for the better.

Bitcoin is far better for the world with 1000 nodes and 150 million users, still abiding by sound money principles, than 5000 nodes with a meagre market cap and soviet style daily transaction quotas resulting in a more decentralised currency but at the cost of closing access to those who would stand to benefit the most - the poor.

You are right, I think, but bitcoinland decided you are wrong and a traitor that just makes toxicity to poor, hard working core devs by saying so.

Reality is: bitcoin has it's special role, it is a product of libertarian-decentralization-extremism with a tendency to make a cult around devs and seeing companies and users as parasites. The good news is: this will maybe kill bitcoin, but not crypto, and maybe it will play out that bitcoin becomes some kind of totally unflexible digital gold while other currencies offer the usefull applications of cryptomoney.

(sorry, I am still flashed from my experiences with ethereum)

 

[Melbustus]

...
My view is that the sound monetary principles around which bitcoin functions are more important than 'decentralisation'. I put the word in inverted commas because it is entirely subjective. Is bitcoin any worse a system with 3000 well funded high traffic nodes compared with 6000? Is it truly better with 50,000?
Would it function any less well with just 500 full nodes housed in data centres? To the hobbiest this is anathema. But bitcoin would continue to be open, verifiable and remain decentralised, especially compared to mining pools.
...

Agreed. I've noted previously that Bitcoin's metric for acceptable "decentralization" shouldn't be number of nodes at all. It should be an economic definition such as:

"Bitcoin can be considered sufficiently decentralized if every actor has affordable access to credible blockchain-state information at all times."

That might mean 10,000 small nodes, and it might mean 25 huge nodes from competing governments and institutions around the world...those are topological details that can *lead to* the actual system properties that we want. Specifically, the critical property we seek, to which nodes are just a means, is that anyone can inspect the authoritative bitcoin blockchain at any time, with little effort/cost, and with confidence they're getting credible data. That's it.

Edit: wording

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Yeah, this good old VISA-comparison ... it has currently the same relevance as if you had asked if it was possible in 1989 to stream the worlds complete TV consum through the internet. Maybe we will at some time need methods to transact 10.000 tx/s, I don't think so, but maybe. Than it will happen by a combination of centralized offchain-transactions, several altcoins that manage to pay nodes for spending bandwith, decentralized offchain-transactions and very big blocks.

I don't know of any technical reason that prevents us from 10k tx/s.
The method for doing that already exists, it's called a Bitcoin transcation.

Honestly, what changed since the publishing of the Bitcoin whitepaper?

 

[Inca]

Agreed. I've noted previously that Bitcoin's metric for acceptable "decentralization" shouldn't be number of nodes at all. It should be an economic definition such as:

"Bitcoin can be considered sufficiently decentralized if every actor has affordable access to credible blockchain-state information at all times."

That might mean 10,000 small nodes, and it might mean 25 huge nodes from competing governments and institutions around the world...those are topological details that can *lead to* the actual system properties that we want. Specifically, the critical property we seek, to which nodes are just a means, is that anyone can inspect the authoritative bitcoin blockchain at any time, with little effort/cost, and with confidence they're getting credible data. That's it.

Edit: wording

That is a brilliant post.

---

Perhaps we should arrange a 'bitcoinomics' conference*. Invite some economists, some crypto-economists (thats you guys) and also developers from each bitcoin implementation core, classic, unlimited, btcd etc.

* someone rich would have to sponsor it.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

In another tragically overlooked post, Jameson Lopp argues similarly, that Bitcoin devs should "determine a minimum resource specification for running a full node with target performance characteristics such as worst case time to validate a block."

Of course, doing that would prevent Core from playing its little games.

 

[Peter R]

His disease of calling everything "orthogonal" is also incidentally spreading in the /r/Bitcoin clique.

Q: Did you hear that Greg failed linear algebra in college?

A: Yeah, he thought the answer to every dot product was zero.

 

[sickpig]

Last piece of wisdom (/sarcasm) from Peter Todd and the crew who is in charge to code the famous HF what will(?) be deployed on 2017:

[bitcoin-dev] Making AsicBoost irrelevant

Messing up with bitcoin economic incentives is something they can't avoid. The only plausible reason for this it that they think they are cleverer than the market. Somebody should tells them they are not.


tl;dr core devs want take the occasion of the 2017 HF to slap in a fe useful featurr, among them there's one to make irrelevant asics miner HW that implement a particular optimisation, namely AsicBoost.

Fortunately there's still some rational person who post on btc-dev ml, for example:


http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-May/012662.html

The part "Also the fix should be compatible with existing mining hardware."
is impossible to achieve because it's unclear what "existing mining
hardware" is. There has never been a specification of what mining hardware
should do. There are only acceptance rules.

The only way out is to go the exact opposite way and to embrace as many
optimizations as possible to the point where there are no more
optimizations left to do, or hopefully getting very close to that point.

 

[freetrader]

@sickpig: Timo certainly nails it with the guaranteed persistent chain fork.

Making ASICBoost irrelevant sure seems like a feature request cooked up during Core's recent meeting with Chinese miners to discuss the HF.

Sergio points this out as well:

You say that you want to make patented optimization useless, but you point
to a link that doesn't say anything about ASIC improvements or patents,
which means that you have been planning to change the protocol rules with
some miners (but not all the community).

and Marco Pontello pointedly asks:

Just in the interest of clarity, I think you should clarify who you are
including in the "we".

It's satisfying to see that there are still some critical voices on bitcoin-dev.

 

[albin]

So block size is some huge contentious social-contract breaking change, but it's acceptable to actively try to delete coins and intentionally break perfectly valid improvements to mining techniques??

 

[cypherdoc]

You never let a serious crisis (hard fork} go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

Rahm Emanuel (Peter Todd}

 

[sickpig]

So block size is some huge contentious social-contract breaking change, but it's acceptable to actively try to delete coins and intentionally break perfectly valid improvements to mining techniques??

in the latter case they even want to doing with a soft-fork....

they really never stop to amaze me.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@sickpig

So, with a by-definition-innocent softfork it is possible to destroy bitcoins?

 

[cypherdoc]

More OP_CODE shenanigans.

 

[sickpig]

@sickpig

So, with a by-definition-innocent softfork it is possible to destroy bitcoins?

it seems so:

• One softfork, which would activate ASAP, would assign an OP_NOP to OP_LAMPORT (or whatever QC-resistant crypto will be used). Everyone would be urged to send all of their bitcoins to new OP_LAMPORT-protected addresses.
• One softfork set to trigger in 5 years would convert OP_CHECKSIG to OP_RETURN, destroying all coins protected by OP_CHECKSIG. People would have until then to move their BTC to secure addresses. Anyone who fails to do so would almost certainly have lost their money due to the ECDSA failure anyway -- the number of people who lose additional BTC would be very low. (There might be a whitelist of UTXOs protected by one-time-use addresses, which would remain secure for a long time.)

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

@sickpig @cypherdoc

This is the second proof of core devs lying when they claim, that a softfork is not dangerous, because "it forces nobody to do anything" (shitty libertarian concept of negative freedom).
The first was Peter Todds rage against the MIT (not without a reason, but strange as they don't want to hardfork)

If you do the softforks theymos explained but set the trigger to the second softforks to 2 weeks, you essentially could destroy most of the bitcoins in existence.

 

[cypherdoc]

With regards to AsicBoost, it appears that there is yet another way for Western mining to compete with Chinese mining beyond just BW; innovation. This could be good.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

So wait a minute:
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-May/012652.html

You are telling me all these smug assholes with their fucking HK agreement weren't just discussing how to stop Classic, they were also discussing how to prevent a certain technical improvement to come to effect by hardforking Bitcoin? To keep the existing mining monopoly?
Tell me, where is Bitcoin different from the FED these days?

FUCK THIS SHIT.

Really. WTF. How did Bitcoin become the experimental laboratory for fucking communists asshats like P. Todd?

Please give me a good reason to keep my coins these days...

 

[freetrader]

With regards to AsicBoost, it appears that there is yet another way for Western mining to compete with Chinese mining beyond just BW; innovation. This could be good.

Innovation helps, patents - not sure. I don't believe they would matter much in China, and I would bet there's enough countries who would disregard them to acquire the replicate technology. It might even turn into a profitable black market product.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Will his patent get bought up by some player with a big portfolio? And is there any relationship of Spondoolies to this patent?