cliff
Active Member
- Dec 15, 2015
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@freetrader - To be fair, he has to stay in character and the show must go on.
Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
- Thread starter cypherdoc
- Start date
@cliff: They kind of provoked this, with arrogance, ignorance and defining cultural and political consensus irrespective of the wishes of the populace. It is not even that I am opposed to many of the 'European' ideals. But the very bureaucratic and opaque E.U. institutions delivered a proposal for a EU constitution that was roughly a kilopage of dead tree in my native language and when that was - obviously - vetoed, still never ever came to their senses and just outright ignored the whole idea of at least trying to work on the legitimacy of their ad-hoc, quite broken political system.
Unfortunately, it appears such structures thrive to become even more complex and even more entrenched.
Add the caste of absolute dipshit (yes!) mainstream journalists that formed over the last decade, and you have a problem at hand.
I guess that was on a lot of people's minds when they voted pro Brexit - and even though I think I would have probably voted 'stay' as a Brit - I can totally understand the sentiment.
This all oddly reminds me of Bitcoin and Corium.
Unfortunately, it appears such structures thrive to become even more complex and even more entrenched.
Add the caste of absolute dipshit (yes!) mainstream journalists that formed over the last decade, and you have a problem at hand.
I guess that was on a lot of people's minds when they voted pro Brexit - and even though I think I would have probably voted 'stay' as a Brit - I can totally understand the sentiment.
This all oddly reminds me of Bitcoin and Corium.
cliff
Active Member
- Dec 15, 2015
- 345
- 854
@awemany
RE: "This all oddly reminds me of Bitcoin . . . ."
Yup, that's why I shared. I believe I said a few weeks back that politics in the UK and the US seem very similar to the politics happening in bitcoin these days. My personal philosophy is that TV/Entertainment news - which is like all the news on TV in the US except for PBS - must sell advertisements to stay on the air. In turn, news networks love to drum up drama on what should be boring stuff to draw in viewers. Two caveats:
1. Artificial drama does not mean illegitimate concerns by those riled up by said drama.
2. I suppose one could argue pretty decently that news today is what it is due to the ease and speed which information travels in the world of the interwebs - news is certainly more distributed than it was in the past, especially w/ social media. Twitter is amazing for news - it broke Bin Laden's death within minutes (a "random"* tweeter heard it all go down from the down the street ).
*That tweeter could have been arranged ahead of time - certain agencies work creatively.
RE: "This all oddly reminds me of Bitcoin . . . ."
Yup, that's why I shared. I believe I said a few weeks back that politics in the UK and the US seem very similar to the politics happening in bitcoin these days. My personal philosophy is that TV/Entertainment news - which is like all the news on TV in the US except for PBS - must sell advertisements to stay on the air. In turn, news networks love to drum up drama on what should be boring stuff to draw in viewers. Two caveats:
1. Artificial drama does not mean illegitimate concerns by those riled up by said drama.
2. I suppose one could argue pretty decently that news today is what it is due to the ease and speed which information travels in the world of the interwebs - news is certainly more distributed than it was in the past, especially w/ social media. Twitter is amazing for news - it broke Bin Laden's death within minutes (a "random"* tweeter heard it all go down from the down the street ).
*That tweeter could have been arranged ahead of time - certain agencies work creatively.
@Mengerian
That might make a nice standalone post on /r/btc. "Imagine a world..." Yes there is a serious lack of imagination in the Core side. I think that world would terrify them, especially Theymos.
That might make a nice standalone post on /r/btc. "Imagine a world..." Yes there is a serious lack of imagination in the Core side. I think that world would terrify them, especially Theymos.
Lol, just unlocked next level. Being called a "notorious troll" by theymos is a deep honor and I accept the award with the greatest humbleness,
I wanted to reply to @xhiggy though, because he makes some great points. I don't think a hardfork would be an easy ride at this point, in fact it would be extremely difficult as positions now are incredibly hardened. The developers do have expert domain knowledge, so they can wreck havoc if they wish, but they are kept in check by numerous considerations.
Firstly, if they burn bitcoin to the ground then all current Bitcoin Core contributors would probably be tainted with the same brush, making it highly unlikely they would be welcomed in any fora. Secondly, there is already a brain drain going on which would only accelerate.
The current situation isn't really welcoming, especially with the daily 2 minutes hate in r/bitcoin. Few, save for maybe at the start, wish to participate in an environment where rigid ideology is enforced as if a cult. Most, see a new cool tech which has potential and thus want to be part of the tech aspect. Those are already leaving. And many have already left as far as time and contributing efforts are concerned. I, for example, was strongly in favor of a fork, but now I don't really care. The market will and has provided choice.
Some still use voice, however, and though that number is dwindling it still provides miners with a choice which may not be around for much longer. Either way, I think an incredible amount of damage has already been done, so at this point, few really care. Users are hedging, businesses are pivoting.
As far as I'm concerned, at this point, it is entirely the miners' business. Their money, their equipment, we, as in I, have spoken enough.
I wanted to reply to @xhiggy though, because he makes some great points. I don't think a hardfork would be an easy ride at this point, in fact it would be extremely difficult as positions now are incredibly hardened. The developers do have expert domain knowledge, so they can wreck havoc if they wish, but they are kept in check by numerous considerations.
Firstly, if they burn bitcoin to the ground then all current Bitcoin Core contributors would probably be tainted with the same brush, making it highly unlikely they would be welcomed in any fora. Secondly, there is already a brain drain going on which would only accelerate.
The current situation isn't really welcoming, especially with the daily 2 minutes hate in r/bitcoin. Few, save for maybe at the start, wish to participate in an environment where rigid ideology is enforced as if a cult. Most, see a new cool tech which has potential and thus want to be part of the tech aspect. Those are already leaving. And many have already left as far as time and contributing efforts are concerned. I, for example, was strongly in favor of a fork, but now I don't really care. The market will and has provided choice.
Some still use voice, however, and though that number is dwindling it still provides miners with a choice which may not be around for much longer. Either way, I think an incredible amount of damage has already been done, so at this point, few really care. Users are hedging, businesses are pivoting.
As far as I'm concerned, at this point, it is entirely the miners' business. Their money, their equipment, we, as in I, have spoken enough.
Ah, I actually posted a pic of Corium a couple weeks ago on this thread, but I guess that quickly scrolled by
Wikipedia gives you all you need to know.
To make it short and boring: Corium is the red to white-hot, lava-like, absolutely unfathomably radioactive substance you get when the Core of your nuclear power plant melts down.
People on reddit today expected Core to further increase their FUDding and agressions, should the miners indeed decide on leaving them behind, ending in a final meltdown (for them, not Bitcoin, jonny..
). So far that and other reasons (e.g. Core is toxic) I find that reference kind of fitting I am also only very cautiously optimistic regarding the miner's intentions. I have seen too much back-and-forth.
Roger_Murdock
Active Member
- Dec 17, 2015
- 223
- 1,453
Agreed. I also think, and this is a point I've made before, that in a healthy ecosystem of competing implementations, smart development teams would recognize that the "unbundling" of their code offerings is inevitable (and healthy) and actively facilitate it themselves, especially with respect to controversial features or settings. And in fact, even teams that might hate this would need to do so simply as a way to preserve their own relevance. So, for example, it seems to me that Core should take a page out of Bitcoin Unlimited's playbook and make the block size limit user configurable (but with the current 1-MB limit set as the default). That way, users who trust Core's coding abilities and generally like their approach, but who support an increased block size limit, aren't forced to download their clients from another repository that Core doesn't control. And of course, Core would still be free to recommend that users not change the default at this time.
In other words, in the kind of environment I'm envisioning, development teams would only be able to exercise "soft power" over Bitcoin's direction rather than the "hard power" that Core is currently attempting to exercise. Such soft power could take the form of:
- simply writing really good code that people want to use because it's clear, well-tested, and enables features that people want;
- establishing yourself (e.g., via 1) as a credible authority in the space such that miners and node operators are inclined to defer to your recommendations regarding parameter settings, which features to enable or disable, and which fork triggers to vote for or against;
- default settings, e.g., even if competitive pressure forces you to provide support for a feature you don't like, you can release your client with that feature disabled by default.
@awemany:
I think I found a picture from the future; of a Classic dev analyzing the Corium after the meltdown:
http://66.media.tumblr.com/6cbf204151aeabc5ab7750aa9496bfb6/tumblr_mqron3k0kd1sqiaxoo4_500.jpg
// I think the hole to the right is SW!
I think I found a picture from the future; of a Classic dev analyzing the Corium after the meltdown:
http://66.media.tumblr.com/6cbf204151aeabc5ab7750aa9496bfb6/tumblr_mqron3k0kd1sqiaxoo4_500.jpg
// I think the hole to the right is SW!
Imagination was something that happened a couple years back, there was still enthusiasm.
I got a bit of that back by interacting with this guy on Reddit.
Like, the idea that even huge on-chain scaling (with limited storage space) is very possible has been so much attacked by Core and censored so much, one almost forgets that it is actually possible and that it is there.
[doublepost=1467405696][/doublepost]@satoshis_sockpuppet : Is that a hole? It rather looks like a blob of Corium to me?
In any case, I neither want a radioactive blob nor hole of molten SegWit in Bitcoin. Let's hope that they and everyone else who found the time did at least do a good job of testing this beast - or that the miners are reasonable enough to wait for Litecoin/SegWit tests before moving on with SegWit.
That they forgot to deal with the inefficient hashing kind of makes one doubt that.
Since we're on the subject of mini PCs. I run my node on one of these. Running BU (on Ubuntu
albin
Active Member
- Nov 8, 2015
- 931
- 4,008
This makes alot of sense to me, because by the time you setup a single-board ARM computer with the peripherals you need, mount in a case, etc., you're pretty much close to the price range of these mini full-on PCs anyway, which can function as very powerful nodes with no problem at all.
It's fanless, so not the fastest CPU in the world. And the high(ish)-end SSD I used pushes the overall price up. But they're rather nice, well made, industrial mini-PCs. I'm a bit of a fan of Jetways....
[doublepost=1467409786][/doublepost]I assume they're really designed to be used inside other equipment, such as touch-screen kiosks like ticket vending machines. The fact that they gruarantee product availability until 2019 indicates they clearly are expecting people to incorporate these into other products.
[doublepost=1467409786][/doublepost]I assume they're really designed to be used inside other equipment, such as touch-screen kiosks like ticket vending machines. The fact that they gruarantee product availability until 2019 indicates they clearly are expecting people to incorporate these into other products.
Let's do this in Bitcoin Unlimited! @awemany, you and Peter Gregory Jr. could write a BUIP after we sort out the details.
With UTXO commitments implemented, it will give node operators and miners another reason to run BU over Core: super fast initial download times.
The main problem I see is that the commitment hashes are only "trustless" if the majority of the hash power is enforcing this commitment scheme. Since that isn't going to happen anytime soon, I think we need to come up with some "trusted" way to do this that also provides a pathway towards trustlessness once we get enough of the hash power onboard. One idea would be that we simply sign the commitment hashes with BU signing keys, and then eventually drop the signatures should the idea be adopted.
A smaller problem is that since very little (if any) hash power is running BU, it will be difficult to embed the commitment hash in the blockchain at the desired block height. For that reason, perhaps the protocol should permit the commitment for Block X being embedded in Block X + k where k is unknown a priori. I'd also suggest we don't specify any regular update period for the UTXO commitments (the paper proposed 4096 blocks) to allow further flexibility. Nodes can then decide how much history to download depending on their security preferences.
We could ask Jihan to embed the UTXO commitments + our signatures.
Question: an OP_RETURN output is limited to 40 bytes. This is enough to embed a SHA256 hash but not enough to embed an ECDSA signature. Do miners have the ability to include more data in the block header or coinbase TX than 40 bytes per output?
The old checkpoint system in earlier Bitcoin releases worked very well - but Core deprecated it for ideological reasons.
Can't we just bring that back? If you don't trust the supplier of your Bitcoin software you have rather bigger problems... Having a recent checkpoint saves a huge amount of CPU on initial blockchain download and - at least on the machines I run on Bitcoin on - blockchain download is CPU-bound for significant chunks of time.
Although I guess this maybe the benefits are smaller now that we have libsecp256k1? (EDIT: Actually, fuller blocks probably prety much completely cancel out the savinds of libsecp256k1 on block verification time, so sratch that.) It would be interesting to benchmark download with and without checkpoints on an average spec (rather than developer spec) system...
Can't we just bring that back? If you don't trust the supplier of your Bitcoin software you have rather bigger problems... Having a recent checkpoint saves a huge amount of CPU on initial blockchain download and - at least on the machines I run on Bitcoin on - blockchain download is CPU-bound for significant chunks of time.
Although I guess this maybe the benefits are smaller now that we have libsecp256k1? (EDIT: Actually, fuller blocks probably prety much completely cancel out the savinds of libsecp256k1 on block verification time, so sratch that.) It would be interesting to benchmark download with and without checkpoints on an average spec (rather than developer spec) system...
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albin
Active Member
- Nov 8, 2015
- 931
- 4,008
I was just reading another /u/nullc reinventing-the-wheel-on-production-quotas-and-price-fixing redux on the North Korea subreddit, and this observation occurred to me.
Doesn't perma-full blocks impose a pretty massive negative externality on the recipient of a payment?
With normal goods or services, a straightforward production quota will typically bid-up price in such a way that actually sends pretty actionable signals to the consumer. By that I mean that while total utility is undermined by deadweight loss, it doesn't necessarily directly create friction between buyers and sellers within the market that's unique vs the market equilibrium condition (This is a similar criticism to the fact that tx fee market can't have trading or market makers).
In the case of a Bitcoin tx, you make these business arrangements, for example communicating with another party that you intend to pay them. Now you submit the transaction praying that there isn't some surge of tx demand right after you submit but before you can get into a block, and that if there is, it doesn't extend past a time horizon that the recipient of your payment would find acceptable.
So here's where things get crazy: depending on how unpredictable confirmations become, recipients of Bitcoin payments might become inclined to demand a premium to reflect absorbing the economic dis-utility of getting paid in this unreliable and unpredictable way. A good common-sense example of this phenomenon is something many have experienced if you've been able to talk a car salesman down further by being willing to pay in cash right there.
This is not a road that I think anyone remotely sane is going to want to walk down. Even if you assume that layer 1 is supposed to be only bulk settlement, these issues are exactly the same as the simple payer-payee scenario, if not worse because failure to perform creates systemic risk and cascading failures, far beyond the guy on Craigslist being pissed that your payment for the furniture you're buying for example isn't clearing.
Doesn't perma-full blocks impose a pretty massive negative externality on the recipient of a payment?
With normal goods or services, a straightforward production quota will typically bid-up price in such a way that actually sends pretty actionable signals to the consumer. By that I mean that while total utility is undermined by deadweight loss, it doesn't necessarily directly create friction between buyers and sellers within the market that's unique vs the market equilibrium condition (This is a similar criticism to the fact that tx fee market can't have trading or market makers).
In the case of a Bitcoin tx, you make these business arrangements, for example communicating with another party that you intend to pay them. Now you submit the transaction praying that there isn't some surge of tx demand right after you submit but before you can get into a block, and that if there is, it doesn't extend past a time horizon that the recipient of your payment would find acceptable.
So here's where things get crazy: depending on how unpredictable confirmations become, recipients of Bitcoin payments might become inclined to demand a premium to reflect absorbing the economic dis-utility of getting paid in this unreliable and unpredictable way. A good common-sense example of this phenomenon is something many have experienced if you've been able to talk a car salesman down further by being willing to pay in cash right there.
This is not a road that I think anyone remotely sane is going to want to walk down. Even if you assume that layer 1 is supposed to be only bulk settlement, these issues are exactly the same as the simple payer-payee scenario, if not worse because failure to perform creates systemic risk and cascading failures, far beyond the guy on Craigslist being pissed that your payment for the furniture you're buying for example isn't clearing.