Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[79b79aa8]

it seems pretty clear to me "the Attacker" is right. obviously this case will test the law and set precedent, if it ends up going to court (by which time ETH value will have nosedived anyway).

hopefully the DAO takes segwit down with it. the lessons are in plain sight.


EDIT:

Vitalik Buterin
Just to be clear at this point I see no evidence that the signature on that message is valid; the v value is completely wrong. So it likely could have been made by anyone.

Point is made, whether by the Attacker or not.

 

[Dusty]

The message from the attacker is perfectly correct from a formal standpoint.

I propose to change the name from TheDAO to TheDOA, much more appropriate

 

[Inca]

I will still try and pick up 1 - 2k ethereum at sub 5-10 dollar prices in the next month if it materialises

If ethereum can survive this after the DAO members exit the scheme (presumably many will sell off) it should drive the price down even further than this. This should be temporarily bitcoin bullish - many will flee back to bitcoin. There will be a point of maximum pain and fear for ethereum where an opportunity to load up will present itself.

This DAO business may also put the brakes on outside investors rushing into bitcoin and could mute the bitcoin rally somewhat.

A tech savvy friend I have often talked about bitcoin with txt'ed me independently telling me that ethereum was 'hacked' this morning (my friends know I divested a portion of my crypto holdings including ETH a day or two ago). So this story is leaking into the tech press and could give the bitcoin rally a cold.

Imagine what could have been if we weren't shackled by the blocksize debate and now this in terms of driving this rally higher. Perhaps we won't crash to the same degree as a consequence.

 

[Dusty]

A slow but continuous growth is much better for the ecosystem so I think these "cold showers" are good for temporarily slowing down the rally.

 

[cypherdoc]

Couldn't someone sue kore dev similarly for implementing a SWSF that preferentially advantages SW tx's and LN over regular, time tested, and honored regular tx's to the tune of 75%? Not to mention all the other changes that arguably change Bitcoin economics and disenfranchise early adopters by shifting Bitcoin's emphasis away from the WP's title of "p2p cash" to "Smart contracting" or even "settlement layer"?

it seems pretty clear to me "the Attacker" is right. obviously this case will test the law and set precedent, if it ends up going to court (by which time ETH value will have nosedived anyway).

hopefully the DAO takes segwit down with it. the lessons are in plain sight.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

If miners starting mining Classic tomorrow we could have headlines like "Bitcoin solves scalability issues while competitor bites the dust."
To the moon!

 

[cypherdoc]

@Inca

this story is leaking into the tech press and could give the bitcoin rally a cold.

 

[Peter Tschipper]

Given the oracle problem (essentially that all useful programs use data and there's no way to inject data into the blockchain in a trustless fashion), I always thought that these contracts should be executed by a layer above the blockchain.

I believe you are right in that the contracts need to be completely abstracted from the blockchain layer, meaning that miners and developers can never revoke them with a hard or soft fork other than doing a complete rollback of the blockchain (which would be fatal). This keeps miners/developers safe from outside pressure and undue influence to rollback contracts, and also removes them from the moral dilemma (and future ones) that ETH now faces.

 

[IstvanZoltan]

Proposal: The "Bitcoin Votechain" - Summary

We can implement a separate "Bitcoin Votechain" as a simple program allowing investors to offline-sign and online-broadcast votes, saying:

- Bitcoin voting address 1V.... (controlling eg 99.9999 bitcoins) hereby votes in favor of proposed Rule R (eg: "max blocksize" = 2 MB)

This would provide the desired "signalling mechanism" whereby Bitcoin's economic majority can express their wishes regarding a proposed rule-change (eg, for bigger blocks).

Existing cryptocurrency code (probably something supporting proof-of-stake) could be adapted to implement this sort of "Bitcoin Votechain" - totally separate from the Bitcoin network.

Privacy could be guaranteed by implementing a new "Bitcoin public voting address / key" - similar to Bitcoin's existing (transactional) voting address / keys - ie, computed via a one-way function such as a hash.

This new "Bitcoin Votechain" could also support offline storage with offline vote-signing followed by online vote-(broad)casting - similar to the way existing software like Armory or Electrum already does, and sites like blockchain.info/pushtx also do. And it should also work behind Tor or VPN, so people don't have to reveal their geographic location.

---

Detailed proposal:

Right now, we can already implement an approach which would satisfy the broadest range of stakeholders' suggestions on resolving the ongoing "blocksize debate", ranging from the exchange-based "fork futures" as proposed by @Zangelbert Bingledack, to the bitcoinocracy-style voting sites as proposed by @awemany - and also the preference for "pre-signalling consensus without forcing things on people" expressed by users such as @jonny1000.

We've had a robust (raging?) debate for several years now on a simple proposed rule change: max blocksize = 2 MB.

And recently, we had the spectacle of Craig Wright, which reminded us of the principle of "cryptographically sign a message or it didn't happen."

Let's combine the two!

It is easily within our power to develop a kind of minimalist, simplistic, separate mini-program providing a "Bitcoin stakeholder voting mechanism" or "Bitcoin Votechain" which would allow the economic majority to securely, privately, and verifiably express their wishes regarding any proposed rule changes to Bitcoin.

Related work:

Tezos - In a sense, a "Bitcoin Votechain" would implement the first baby-steps towards the "meta upgrades" feature which was proposed in the Tezos white paper & position paper, mentioned in my comments yesterday - while avoiding writing a whole lot of new code like Tezos, avoiding doing a spinoff and avoiding impacting the existing Bitcoin network.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-644#post-22726

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-644#post-22727

Bitcoin Unlimited - Bitcoin Unlimited already provides a very useful "signalling mechanism" where a node can publicly broadcast its preference regarding acceptable blocksizes.

This new proposal for a "Bitcoin Votechain" would be different from BU, because:

- This would not involve running a "transacting/verifying node" - instead, a user would only run a "voting node" - possibly only for very short periods (only the time required to broadcast their vote).

- Alternatively, a voter could run no node at all: they could offline-sign their vote (using this new "Bitcoin Votechain" client software in offline mode), and then upload their pre-signed "raw (signed) vote" to new sites like blockchian.info/pushvote - which would be similar to existing sites like blockchain.info/pushtx.

- The "Bitcoin Votechain" would use its own network, mempool, and "votechain" - to avoid impacting anything in the existing Bitcoin system.

- Perhaps more importantly, a node or message broacast on the the "Bitcoin Votechain" would not merely be saying "this node supports max blocksize of eg 2 MB".

- Instead, it would be saying "this address, holding 99.999 coins, votes for max blocksize of eg 2 MB".

Thus, the "Bitcoin Votechain" would be able to express the desires of the economic majority - a feature which Satoshi intended in his whitepaper (which has since become obscured by the tendency of voting and validating nodes to be separate, as well as the tendency of the majority of big investors to keep their bitcoins offline in cold storage).

How would such a "Bitcoin Votechain" work?

A "Bitcoin Votechain" would allow every hodler (investor) to vote on rule changes...

- at their leisure (during a convenient, prolonged voting period, of perhaps weeks or months)

- and fully offline (without revealing their private keys - only revealing their public addresses, or perhaps only revealing some sort of new, special-purpose obfuscated "Bitcoin public voting addresses", similar to existing "Bitcoin public (transacting) addresses" - ie, hashed)

People would be able to offline-sign and online-broadcast cryptographically signed messages saying:

- I control address such-and-such (which controls x number of coins) and I hereby vote for blocksize such-and-such.

That's it.

Data structures

Regarding the data structures which would be involved here: I imagine that instead of the usual "transaction mempool" (a global "soup" of pending transactions) plus a "blockchain" (a list of transactions, showing coins going from one address to another), we would (in this case involving voting instead of transacting) probably want a similar but separate "vote mempool" - and instead of appending "transactions" to Bitcoin's usual "blockchain" we would be appending "votes" to a separate "votechain".

Of course, the semantics of the "votechain" would be slightly different - actually a bit simpler than Bitcoin's normal "blockchain".

- A transaction in a (transaction-)block appended to Bitcoin's normal "blockchain" spends coins from public address A to public address B.

- A vote in a (vote-)block appended to this new "votechain" would not move any coins from Address A to B. It would merely "signal" that:

"Public voting address V, which holds eg 99.999 coins, votes for new rule R, eg blocksize eg 2 MB".

We could further stipulate that any later vote from the same "Bitcoin public voting address" would of course simply override/overwrite any earlier vote(s) from that address, in the votechain.

Implementation approach

I think there are programmers who could easily implement this sort of thing (using familiar languages such as C/C++). A certain amount of existing proof-of-stake cryptocurrency code could easily be exploited and adapted.

Introduce a new "Bitcoin public voting key":

Privacy would be of the utmost importance, and could be provided as follows:

- A new sort of public key could be provided - in this case a "Bitcoin public voting key / address" (say, with a special format like 1V...).

- Like Bitcoin's existing public (transacting) keys and addresses, a "Bitcoin public voting key / address" would be computed using a special one-way function such as a hash, which would make it impossible to figure out a person's other Bitcoin keys (public or private transacting keys), based on knowing their "Bitcoin public voting key / address".

- Traditional high-security approaches for offline/cold storage should be supported, so the voting program would have two "modes": offline and online (the way Armory and Electrum already do).

- As usual, Bitcoin private keys would only be kept on the offline machine, and the offline-signing of transactions would be done there.

- This would result in an offline-signed & online-broadcastable message (vote).

- The offline-signed & online-broadcastable message (vote) could then be transferred via "sneakernet" (eg, on removable media such as a USB drive), to an online machine, for broadcasting to the network.

- People who don't want to run a "Bitcoin voting" node online could still use the offline-signing / online-broadcasting approach: They could sign their votes on an offline machine running a "Bitcoin voting" node offline, and broadcast their votes from websites similar to blockchain.info/pushtx - ie, new sites could be created where anyone could input a previously offline-signed vote.

Note that all of the above would operate completely separate / parallel to the existing Bitcoin network, to avoid any disruptions. It would only be leveraging people's existing private keys - while keeping them offline.

But the new "Bitcoin public voting keys / addresses" and the "votechain" and the client software supporting this (as well as any sites such as blockchain.info/pushvote) would be new.

Conclusion:

I hope I'm not being crazy here - I think this is simple enough to be doable.

I would be interested to hear how other people feel about this proposal for a separate, offline-signable, online-broadcastable approach based on a new Bitcoin votechain - to reflect the wishes of the economic majority.

The goal is to be convenient and secure enough, and "leisurely" enough (ie, have long-running elections), to incentivize long-term hodlers/investors to occasionally dust off their existing Bitcoin private keys to offline-sign and online-broadcast "votes" using their new "Bitcoin public voting keys" on this proposed new, separate Bitcoin votechain.

 

[cypherdoc]

I said a long time ago that Satoshi was wise to step down and go anonymous. Any person or company that attempts to present themselves as having influence over the Bitcoin code sets themselves up as a target for a lawsuit. We know that Austin Hill has indeed claimed as much several times on reddit by posing the question of "who will pay for Bitcoin development if we don't?", the implication being that it wouldn't happen if they didn't pay the 10-11 kore devs that they do. We even know the approximate amount of "influence" they employ, $480,000 per year, and that's just salary apparently (ignores nlocktime options, stock, etc). They also love to put up that LOC horizontal bar graph demonstrating that their koders are at the top. I'm not suggesting anyone do this; merely pointing out an unfortunate reality of our sue happy nation. And this applies equally well to other crypto companies that can be targeted. Kore dev, out of practical necessity, needs to be decentralized to the maximum.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Can someone explain this:

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/

 

[awemany]

I said a long time ago that Satoshi was wise to step down and go anonymous. Any person or company that attempts to present themselves as having influence over the Bitcoin code sets themselves up as a target for a lawsuit. We know that Austin Hill has indeed claimed as much several times on reddit by posing the question of "who will pay for Bitcoin development if we don't?", the implication being that it wouldn't happen if they didn't pay the 10-11 kore devs that they do. We even know the approximate amount of "influence" they employ, $480,000 per year, and that's just salary apparently (ignores nlocktime options, stock, etc). They also love to put up that LOC horizontal bar graph demonstrating that their koders are at the top. I'm not suggesting anyone do this; merely pointing out an unfortunate reality of our sue happy nation. And this applies equally well to other crypto companies that can be targeted. Kore dev, out of practical necessity, needs to be decentralized to the maximum.

THIS. I'd even go and say without a pseudonymous Satoshi, Bitcoin wouldn't have a chance to be decentralized and survive in the long term. I am extremely happy that the creator is still unknown.
[doublepost=1466258101,1466257452][/doublepost]@IstvanZoltan : You certainly bring up good ideas. I think the problem lies at another level, though.

It is a good argument around here that the meta rules of Bitcoin are regulated by the market. But market means humans (or collectives of humans) in 2016 still. We here, as participants in the blocksize debate are participants in this market (on all levels, mostly in the 'market place of ideas' sense), and are trying to do our best that the eventual market efficiency means Bitcoin will rule, and not an Altcoin.

No offense, but I think we don't have the problem that we lack ideas on how to implement technical rules to support decision making on meta rules - or in more concrete terms, a detailed scheme on how to decentrally vote for blocksize.

That's why I said POS vote, with details TBD. Because we're not even on agreement on such a meta rule yet!

We simply have the problem that the people who try to push through their broken interpretation of the meta rules with all their nefarious means are not open to even implement a meta rule to properly defer decision making from the meta back to the technical realm.

In other words: Core is thriving on making blocksize a meta rule, even though decision on its value should be a technical rule. Such as the 2x median proposal from BitPay.

Try to even get them to agree on doing a POS vote on the blocksize proposal. They will evade.

 

[freetrader]

Is everyone having fun pondering who "The Attacker" could be?

Looking at /r/Bitcoin, they are rallying behind the Core leadership message which is basically a big FU to Ethereum, and sympathizing with the attacker's legal threat.

Not sure if he's bluffing, but imagine if the attacker turned out to be a well-known blockchain company, or some giant corporation or consortium with well-funded lawyers. Cough.

I think whichever way this goes, there must be a lot of low-rank Core supporters who are also investors in Ethereum / DAO, and might become alienated by the hardline maximalist sentiments. Hopefully this will wash over into some more support for alternatives in the Bitcoin development sphere.

 

[cypherdoc]

to try and pretend that Ethereum doesn't have a problem here is to bury one's head in the sand. contrarily, this is why i am so defensive when it comes to Bitcoin; it's proven itself over and over again over it's 7.5 yr history to do what it says it does. let's not change it in favor of a major change in Bitcoin economics called SWSF:

The descriptions didn't matter; only the code did. The descriptions didn't allow for today's hack, but the code did. (By definition! If the code could be hacked, the code allowed for the hack.) Any vulnerabilities in the DAO's code were not flaws in the code; they were flaws in the descriptions -- which were purely for entertainment purposes. The DAO's websites failed to explain to investors that the code allowed a hacker to take $60 million by using a "recursive splitting function." But the recursive splitting function itself is part of the DAO's code, and therefore part of the DAO. Using it isn't a "hack," and using it to take money isn't a "theft"; it is just using the DAO as intended. Where the only measure of intent is what is allowed by the "immutable, unstoppable, and irrefutable" code.

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchain-company-s-smart-contracts-were-dumb

 

[kyuupichan]

As a related tangent...there *is* potentially a decent reason why there are on the order of 2.1 quadrillion unique addressable units in the bitcoin system.

Ray Dillinger (who appears in Satoshi's original mailing list thread) claims:


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=819656.msg9170781#msg9170781

#knowYourBitcoinHistory

I'm a bit behind here. Thanks for the link. "Ray"'s posts are weird. First 3 signed Edward and written in apparently bad English, in a kinda obviously not a real foreigner way. Then a few posts in perfect English. Then back to weird shit. No idea what's going on there.

 

[cypherdoc]

It is a world of bright lines and sharp edges; you can see why it would appeal to libertarians and techno-utopians, but it might be a bit unforgiving for a wider range of investors.

 

[freetrader]

@kyuupichan : He might answer you if you enquire. Ray Dillinger is his real name AFAIK.

 

[Norway]

Is everyone having fun pondering who "The Attacker" could be?

Looking at /r/Bitcoin, they are rallying behind the Core leadership message which is basically a big FU to Ethereum, and sympathizing with the attacker's legal threat.

Not sure if he's bluffing, but imagine if the attacker turned out to be a well-known blockchain company, or some giant corporation or consortium with well-funded lawyers. Cough.

I think whichever way this goes, there must be a lot of low-rank Core supporters who are also investors in Ethereum / DAO, and might become alienated by the hardline maximalist sentiments. Hopefully this will wash over into some more support for alternatives in the Bitcoin development sphere.

The person behind it remains anonymous, so it's most likely a bluff.

 

[freetrader]

@Norway: I agree, esp. because the signature seems to be fake:
I'm going to be running out of popcorn if this keeps up.

<> <|> v_v​

I find it fascinating how this spectacle is focusing the spotlight on Ethereum's miners, and they are suddenly faced with a momentous decision - for me this strikes parallels to the role of miners in the still-unresolved Bitcoin blocksize debate. I would not like to place bets, if ETH were to split in two over this ideological divide, which side of a fork would win. It just looks like this diamond could get cut in what looks like a skillfully executed game of 'divide and conquer'.

 

[cypherdoc]

The most fascinating thing about the DAO hack may be the way it exposes these tensions. To true believers in smart contracts, there is no problem here. The system is fine; the failures -- writing bad code and not anticipating this attack -- were trivial, mere human error.Next time, write better smart contracts and you'll be fine. To those true believers, changing the code after the fact -- even to conform it to almost-everyone's reasonable expectations about how the DAO would work -- would be a betrayal of the smart-contract ideal.

On the other hand, to the humans who read the English descriptions of the DAO and invested their money based on their reasonable expectations, their losses probably do seem like a problem. You can't really base the financial system of the future on computers rather than humans, on trusting to immutable code no matter what happens. Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the humans, something has gone wrong.