Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Roger_Murdock]

@Zangelbert BingledackI'm starting to really like this strong consensus angle. We could call it "The Strong Consensus Doctrine [of Blockstream/Core]."

Nope. 'Strong' as in 'strong consensus' automatically conveys positive spin. 'Maximalist'? 'Extreme'? In context, they mean the same thing, but do not convey positive bias.

Agreed. For that matter, I also don't like the use of "consensus" because of the intentional conflation with actual (i.e., Nakamoto) consensus. So maybe instead we could call it something like "Blockstream/Core Bullshit Excuse No. 713"? (That numbering may need to be adjusted. I haven't been following the debate as closely as some of you guys, so I may have missed a few.)

 

[Mengerian]

which is probably something like what the strong consensusites picture when they think of the dreaded Free Shit Army.

Ha ha, love the mental image...

Imagine, if you will, an epic battle between good and evil. An team of incorruptible and wise wizards sworn to protect their precious coins, against an ignorant mob bent on destruction known as the Free Shit Army.

As dawn rises on another day, the irrational hordes of the Free Shit Army continue to amass around the walls of Fort Consensus. High in his ivory tower, Lord Maxwell surveys the scene. “You fools”, he thinks to himself “cannot you see that I am wiser and cleverer than all of you! Why will you not let me rule in peace? I am the wisest of wizards!”

He summons his council. Around the table sit Dr. Backtrack, Todd the Trickster, and Matt the Blue Haired Elf.

“Why do the hordes continue to attack? Cannot they see then by attacking with their pitchforks, they threaten the strong walls of Fort Consensus? Dr. Backtrack, give me a status update”

“My Lord, we have tried to dazzle and befuddle them with tricks of words, we have offered them fancy gimmicks of cryptographic toys, we have blocked the stream to cut off their vital transaction flow, but still they do not relent! They still demand more transactions! Perhaps it is time for compromise”

“Yes!” Chimed in Matt the Blue Haired Elf “I have traveled to distant lands to seek compromise with the miners, if we can only get them to underst-”

“Silence!” bellowed Lord Maxwell. “You are a bunch of well meaning dipshits!” And with that he stormed out of the room.

Back in his tower, Lord Maxwell gazed with dismay at the Free Shit Army. Those silly forks they all carry, what kind of weapon is that? How can they think they can break the strong walls of Fort consensus armed with nothing but forks?

 

[Inca]

Brilliant @Mengerian

 

[cypherdoc]

Now that was funny

Ha ha, love the mental image...

Imagine, if you will, an epic battle between good and evil. An team of incorruptible and wise wizards sworn to protect their precious coins, against an ignorant mob bent on destruction known as the Free Shit Army.

As dawn rises on another day, the irrational hordes of the Free Shit Army continue to amass around the walls of Fort Consensus. High in his ivory tower, Lord Maxwell surveys the scene. “You fools”, he thinks to himself “cannot you see that I am wiser and cleverer than all of you! Why will you not let me rule in peace? I am the wisest of wizards!”

He summons his council. Around the table sit Dr. Backtrack, Todd the Trickster, and Matt the Blue Haired Elf.

“Why do the hordes continue to attack? Cannot they see then by attacking with their pitchforks, they threaten the strong walls of Fort Consensus? Dr. Backtrack, give me a status update”

“My Lord, we have tried to dazzle and befuddle them with tricks of words, we have offered them fancy gimmicks of cryptographic toys, we have blocked the stream to cut off their vital transaction flow, but still they do not relent! They still demand more transactions! Perhaps it is time for compromise”

“Yes!” Chimed in Matt the Blue Haired Elf “I have traveled to distant lands to seek compromise with the miners, if we can only get them to underst-”

“Silence!” bellowed Lord Maxwell. “You are a bunch of well meaning dipshits!” And with that he stormed out of the room.

Back in his tower, Lord Maxwell gazed with dismay at the Free Shit Army. Those silly forks they all carry, what kind of weapon is that? How can they think they can break the strong walls of Fort consensus armed with nothing but forks?

 

[AdrianX]

Imagine, if you will, an epic battle between good and evil. An team of incorruptible and wise wizards sworn to protect their precious coins, against an ignorant mob bent on destruction known as the Free Shit Army.

The imagery and The Lord of The Rings metaphors are uncanny. I'm thinking the White Wizard as I read this LOL. Just a slight correction he looks into the black Palantir orb for consulting. And that blue haired elf is Wormtongue who has the miners under a spell called the relay network.

 

[albin]

I'm always amazed when Theymos starts pontificating about economics. I see no evidence of any shred of subject-matter expertise, but I can see clearly where he's an expert at synthesizing totally unvetted information he's seen before for regurgitation.

I swear to God all these people need is an outline of the main sections from an Intermediate Micro book with some bullet points, and the level of discourse would shoot up by orders of magnitude. Not to in any way marginalize people who have never taken these courses, but nobody has to pretend they understand the first thing like these guys routinely do.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

"But now, when I try to forget all that and view Bitcoin governance as literally a "consensus system,"* where the sound money properties of Bitcoin are preserved by the fact that almost everyone must come to consensus in order to make changes, a whole new world opens up."

But that is not how kore dev thinks in general. Consensus only is applicable when entities other than themselves come up with ideas contrary to theirs that require HF's that result in change of governance.

In all other matters, SF's are perfectly fine, with consensus confined to a mere handful of kore devs and not to the wider community.

IOW, it's just a made up convenience for certain times as a result of financial confliction.

SFs are generally fine to people who think this way because, although they might cause some loss of functionality, they usually don't risk destroying Bitcoin outright by loss of consensus - since people can't avoid staying in consensus (they think). The problem with HFs is they open up the possibility of factions breaking off. You can see the basic authoritarian mindset this goes hand in hand with (to hint at how I plan to reply to @Roger_Murdock's objection later).

 

[Roger_Murdock]

A little late on this, but I was thinking more about orphaning risk in the context of block size. It seems to me that there are, in a sense, two kinds of “orphaning risk” associated with larger blocks:

propagation-delay-based (“natural”) orphaning risk – This is the idea that a larger block will propagate to the rest of the network more slowly, increasing the likelihood that it will be orphaned by another block found in the interim.

consensus-based (“artificial”) orphaning risk – This is exemplified by the current 1-MB “block size limit.” Why aren’t miners creating blocks larger than 1 MB right now? Because they’re confident that, if they did, those blocks would simply be orphaned. So, for now, the 99.9999%-plus estimated probability that a larger than 1-MB block will be orphaned greatly outweighs the modest marginal fee revenue they could theoretically collect by stuffing in a few more transactions.

I don’t think the small-blockists necessarily dispute that the first type of orphaning risk can act as a restraint on block size. They just doubt that it’s a sufficient restraint. In other words, they think that attempting to rely solely on “natural” orphaning risk would lead to dangerous levels of centralization. And therefore we need to create some “artificial” orphaning risk (or essentially, orphaning certainty) with a block size limit consensus rule. And I have to say, that argument doesn’t strike me as crazy. My intuition is that it’s a question of where Bitcoin is operating at a particular time in terms of (a) the demand for block space versus (b) the network’s “technological capacity.” Right now, the former seems to be relatively low compared to the latter. In other words, if the 1-MB limit were removed entirely today, miners could essentially empty the order books for block space by creating 1.5 MB blocks, no? And blocks of that size can be propagated and validated very quickly today such that the significance of the “self-propagation” / reduced-orphan-risk advantage of large miners (and thus its centralizing impact) is likely relatively modest? But as demand increases (and as the overall importance of transaction fees to miners’ bottom lines increases thanks to a reduced block reward), large miners’ self-propagation / reduced-orphan-risk advantage could become more significant (perhaps dangerously so) assuming that increases in the Bitcoin network’s technological capacity don’t keep pace. So if that situation were to materialize, it may make sense for the network to impose some degree of artificial orphaning risk in response.

But even if that’s so, that doesn’t support the Blockstream / Core position. For starters, it seems pretty obvious that 1-MB is too low right now and is not the magic number that gets the supposed tradeoffs just right. But even more fundamentally, the questions of whether or not we need a block size limit and if so what that limit should be are less important than the question of how that limit should be determined (assuming one is needed). And to me, it’s obvious that an approach like that of Bitcoin Unlimited is far superior to the approach of simply following the top-down diktat of a handful of interest-conflicted developers.

 

[solex]

@Roger_Murdock
All very logical and IMHO correct. The 1MB in the Corallo RN really makes the artificial orphaning risk off-scale, and our BU X-Relay work is intended to mitigate that.

The other factor is the non-mining nodes, and @Peter R has re-emphasised that non-miners need to upgrade now. Satoshi missed the distinction, and what clouded the 1MB debate in 2013/14 was everyone treating the block limit as a universal value. All that was needed at the time was to simply separate the non-miners from the miners and get all the non-miners capable of accepting larger blocks even if the miners never produced one. BU achieves this out of the box with the 16MB (accept) /1MB (mining) default settings.

Classic recently had >2000 nodes, but none of them would, or will now, accept a block >1MB which is Classic's raison d'etre. So much effort has been made getting non-miners to upgrade with little benefit thus far.

 

[Peter R]

@Roger_Murdock:

Great points!

There seems to be three different block size limits (or perhaps pseudo limits) that could exist in the absence of a centrally-planned one:

#1. A "cartel style" limit imposed by a faction of miners to maximize their revenues.

#2. A free-market equilibrium (pseudo) limit where the supply curve intersects the demand curve (the supply curve being a function of "natural" orphaning risk).

#3. An "emergent limit" imposed by nodes through a Bitcoin-Unlimited-like process.

Which limit gets "activated" seems to be situation dependant. If the miners are highly-centralized, they may try to restrict supply to maximize revenue per block, as you were discussing last week. In such a case, Limit #1 would be active.

If mining is decentralized and supply and demand are such that the majority of participants aren't worried about "zomg the blocks are sooooo big," then the size of blocks will be set by free-market supply and demand. Limit #2 would be active.

If demand for block space is high and people are worried about the size of blocks for some reason, then the miners will bump up against the emergent limit set by the nodes. Thus limit #3 would be active.

One point I disagree with, however, is that I don't believe the self-propagation advantage would ever become a real problem. For that advantage to be significant, orphan rates need to be high. Even if network orphan rates were 10%, the advantage of a 30% miner over a 10% miner would still be only 2%. Personally, I think as soon as we start to see orphan rates anywhere near 10%, miners will be working together to improve block propagation through techniques such as subchains, as this benefits all of them. So I think the problems that higher demand might create (e.g., increased orphaning risk) also provide the impetus for their solution.

The question I ponder is where the supply and demand curves will meet in terms of the bandwidth and storage requirements for a full node, let's say ten years in the future. But I have a feeling that no matter where they meet, that the hardware requirements will never be out of reach of your typical tech start-up.

 

[Inca]

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I like this. Worth considering regarding open protocol like bitcoin with devs who feel they need to 'fix' bitcoin by adding complexity.

 

[awemany]

I just noticed that the 'we need to keep everything forever' fetish is strong on /r/Bitcoin, multiple trolls stating it as if it is a fact.

Sigh. How did the idiocy spread like this?

 

[lunar]

Classic recently had >2000 nodes, but none of them would, or will now, accept a block >1MB which is Classic's raison d'etre.

I like this idea. It would make a good patch for Classic. Willing to receive/validate large blocks (perhaps the Bitpay option) but not able to produce >1MB <2MB until the normal conditions have been met. That way you'd have the network ready and give the miners the option to take a risk.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Roger_Murdock

On strong consensus, it's not that they want it to become a norm, but rather that they believe Bitcoin loses all value if we don't maintain strong consensus. It's not that stupid, because there is the social contract argument, the network effect argument, and the fact that a lot of these people have much less high hopes for Bitcoin's future (since yes, they think it cannot adapt easily; it must largely be set in stone and only the most obvious and universally accepted changes can get through; adaptation is limited to what can happen on the upper layers).

Combine that with the wishful thinking about how Core can be some kind of decentralized governance structure because they are a "decentralized group" (members don't all live in the same place; another ridiculous play on words, giving evidence that stupidity is not in short supply) and the mythology of the world-beating Bitcoin wizards, cypherpunks who would never compromise their principles, and them being thankless volunteers (finally getting funding via Blockstream), and we get the authoritarian aspects of the worldview. The idea seems to be "the less rocking the boat, the better." Sure it's a fragile and rigid system liable to fail, but it's our best shot, they say.

It doesn't make great sense, but it also seems to be a nebulous sort of unexamined premise. When brought into the light it is of course full of holes. However, from a distance it makes some superficial sense: the basic structure of the blockchain is simple enough that conceivably we never need to touch it, and hopefully strong consensus can keep everyone in line if a change must be made. From that perspective they reason that we need to keep the underlying blockchain as basic as possible, not try to clown car trebuchet to the moon by scaling on the chain itself.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

If one did not understand or believe in the ability to fork away from the Free Shit Army, the extreme-consensus position would have a lot to recommend it. I think it's crucial to distinguish between Nakamoto consensus and the idea of Extreme Consensus, as they are not just two numbers on the same spectrum.


In fact, if I am wrong about the technicals of how a split would happen and there is something preventing forks and spinoffs from working like I think they do, I would assume Bitcoin cannot survive... but if I were forced to try to cobble together a way it could somehow try to survive despite that, I might even have to resort to the Extreme Consensus position. That to me is sufficient explanation for how so many people believe it, because after years of pounding the table about "forkology" I know that it takes people quite a while to see the concept at all, and then they will often have a technical objection that prevents them from accepting it. (If anyone believes there's a technical reason we couldn't just fork away from the Free Shit Army, like in the example in the reddit comment, please let me know.)

 

[freetrader]

1. They know that it's entirely possible to hard fork away from the Free Shit Army or the Evil, Cunning Miners or anyone else who makes it to the number one spot on their enemy list - cf. recent mailing list musings from PT or LJR.

2. They most certainly aren't afraid to change the code in crazy ways (RBF, SFSW, MAST, ...) which shows that the "it must largely be set in stone" angle is just excuse #743.

I think the whole Extreme Consensus model requires dissenters to be periodically "taken out and shot" and be replaced by new faces who will tow the line until they accidentally slip up (at which point they will be taken out and shot, and the cycle repeats).

 

[cypherdoc]

China breaking up and OUT of the small triangle:

 

[Roger_Murdock]

On strong consensus, it's not that they want it to become a norm, but rather that they believe Bitcoin loses all value if we don't maintain strong consensus. It's not that stupid, because there is the social contract argument, the network effect argument, and the fact that a lot of these people have much less high hopes for Bitcoin's future (since yes, they think it cannot adapt easily; it must largely be set in stone and only the most obvious and universally accepted changes can get through; adaptation is limited to what can happen on the upper layers).

I don't know, dude. I'd view the belief that "Bitcoin loses all value if we don't maintain strong consensus" as one possible justification for the norm. But in practice the only way to "maintain strong consensus" is to get enough Bitcoin stakeholders to internalize the idea (thereby making it a widely-shared norm). And that's because everyone is always free to do whatever the hell they want in terms of the code they choose to run and the version of the ledger they choose to accept as valid. And fine, the arguments in support of "strong consensus" aren't that stupid. (I wasn't feeling very charitable yesterday.) But they're also not that good. I think they're pretty easily dispensed with. And I still strongly suspect that the "strong consensus" position is a post-hoc rationalization for the small-blockist position rather than the underlying worldview that gave rise to it.

 

[cypherdoc]

zoomed out view. lookin good boys:

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

2. They most certainly aren't afraid to change the code in crazy ways (RBF, SFSW, MAST, ...) which shows that the "it must largely be set in stone" angle is just excuse #743.

The setting in stone is not as much for avoiding changes as it is for staying in consensus. It's a weird and broken belief system, I grant, but it matches so well with the same bizarreness we've seen for years from Core devs and their supporters.

I think the whole Extreme Consensus model requires dissenters to be periodically "taken out and shot" and be replaced by new faces who will tow the line until they accidentally slip up (at which point they will be taken out and shot, and the cycle repeats).

I think so, too. That is basically what happened to Gavin and Mike, is it not? And then Blockstream is just sinking tendrils deeper toward that end.