Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Bagatell]

@freetrader Last i heard there was still a firefox version coming. I'm also waiting for some sort of import function.

 

[cypherdoc]

yeah, an import function would be great. i got tons of logins in my usual pwd manager. doubt there will be compatibility though.

my initial impressions are positive though.

 

[cliff]

Noob-ish quesiton here (don't judge!) from a non-noob (apologies if wrong thread - feel free to delete):

I've been thinking about long, long-term storage of for my BTC. I've got some in cold storage on an old laptop that was wiped before installing the wallet software etc. This arrangement is fine except that the computer sits stashed away in my house, not plugged in for long periods of time (yr + at a time). I'm concerned that I could lose data at some point due to hardware failure, human error, lack of power, etc. I've been contemplating moving coins to a paperwallet, but its been around 2 years since I last made one and I feel a little rusty on storage options. Do people still use these and consider them safe? What is the best/safest software to use for making one these days (previously I used https://www.bitaddress.org's software on an offline computer)?

Sorry for clutter, thanks in advance.

 

[cypherdoc]

@cliff

i wouldn't move them at all. you know it's secure and it's already in place and setup with a system you know. that laptop is likely to stay functional for years. yes, the hard disk could degrade so simply make backups of the wallet on 3-4 usb sticks. preferably usb's with security passwords and of high quality and put them in separate safety deposit boxes.

 

[Erdogan]

@Erdogan :

> The unit of account function, not so much, I really think it should be abolished.

If there is accounting, a unit is immediately needed. Saying abolish that function - how does that make sense / how can it be replaced?

Use another currency for accounting, or maybe a unit of whatever stuff you sell. You need to know that your business in fact produce value, and how much.

Note that there is a difference between formal accounting, used for taxes, and the real accounting, what you use to plan and improve your business.

 

[cliff]

@cypherdoc

Thanks. I always follow the Doc's orders.

 

[Erdogan]

@Zarathustra

Anarchy works today, for an individual who choose to follow the natural law, and his immediate surroundings. One person can not change everything, so what.

The violence you find all around, you can regard it as a risk you try to protect yourself and your friends against, by avoiding the violence and avoiding confrontation. Just like a woman would not be smart to walk home alone, high heels and miniskirt, through a dark park, known to have many robbers and rapers. There is no doubt as to the right for anyone to walk there and be left in peace, that is not the question, the question is what to do to defend your property, yourself.
[doublepost=1467921975][/doublepost]

Noob-ish quesiton here (don't judge!) from a non-noob (apologies if wrong thread - feel free to delete):

I've been thinking about long, long-term storage of for my BTC. I've got some in cold storage on an old laptop that was wiped before installing the wallet software etc. This arrangement is fine except that the computer sits stashed away in my house, not plugged in for long periods of time (yr + at a time). I'm concerned that I could lose data at some point due to hardware failure, human error, lack of power, etc. I've been contemplating moving coins to a paperwallet, but its been around 2 years since I last made one and I feel a little rusty on storage options. Do people still use these and consider them safe? What is the best/safest software to use for making one these days (previously I used https://www.bitaddress.org's software on an offline computer)?

Sorry for clutter, thanks in advance.

The Trezor has been the best choice, top safety and ease of use, since it's entry into the market a couple of years ago. Check it out.

 

[Jihan]

In the last month or so the largest pool has had a c24% share of the global hashrate. This makes orphan risk costs only 76% of that of a small miner, assuming all else is equal.

You exaggerated the situation by manipulating the data.

Right now the orphan rate risk is generally very very low, even for a small pool. if orphan rate is below 0.2%, a 76% is only 0.15% advantage, which is very minimal. 0.15% advantage compared with a 2.5%~4% PPS fee rate, or 2%-4% PPLNS tx fee revenue, is also negligible.

You have an assumption which is wrong. The assumption is wrong that information spread inside a large scale pool is larger than light speed. Inside a large scale mining pool which serves global users, nodes are distributed in different places, the propagation inside one same pool also will consume time. So a pool has 24% market share, has more than 76% of the average orphan risk level.

 

[Zarathustra]

@Zarathustra

Anarchy works today, for an individual who choose to follow the natural law, and his immediate surroundings. One person can not change everything, so what.

The violence you find all around, you can regard it as a risk you try to protect yourself and your friends against, by avoiding the violence and avoiding confrontation. Just like a woman would not be smart to walk home alone, high heels and miniskirt, through a dark park, known to have many robbers and rapers. There is no doubt as to the right for anyone to walk there and be left in peace, that is not the question, the question is what to do to defend your property, yourself.

Yes, if you are self-sufficient as an individual and don't want to participate in this contest to produce the surplus that the mafia demands, you can avoid confrontation. As soon as you have children, you cannot.
The violence is organized and they take your children to 'teach' them. Your own children! They don't ask you. Try to defend your 'property'!
If you want to participate in the Bitcoin environment because it gave you high hopes, you cannot avoid confrontation with the totalitarian traitors who already managed to dominate this former libertarian project. You will always find libertarian anarchistic niches within the society, but they will always be niches only. Thats the difference to the community, where anarchism and altruism is a main rule.

 

[Peter R]

Peter, thanks for your response and thanks for conceding that its not ideal.

con·cede
[kənˈsēd]
VERB
Admit that something is true or valid after first denying or resisting it.

I have always acknowledged that larger miners had a small theoretical advantage due to mining two blocks in a row more often. In fact, I've gone out of my way to explain why the advantage exists in several posts. Perhaps you misspoke, but I'm not conceding anything.

In the last month or so the largest pool has had a c24% share of the global hashrate. This makes orphan risk costs only 76% of that of a small miner, assuming all else is equal.

They'd have a 24% advantage in terms of orphaning risk over a tiny pool, assuming that they have instant communication across the pool. Like @Jihan pointed out,

(1) the intrapool communication also has latency, so the actual advantage is less than 24%

(2) the advantage only counts against the orphan risk, which is (historically) ~1% of the total cost. So, we're talking a ~0.2% advantage in total.

0.2% is small compared to pay-per-share costs (like Jihan said), compared to fluctuations in electricity cost, and also compared to luck (the expected absolute difference between the revenue of two identical pools over a month is a lot more than 0.2%).

At the same time you argue (incorrectly in my view, due to improvements in technology you often talk about) that miners will not empty the memory pool of fee paying transactions because of this orphan risk cost. The only way this makes sense is if orphan risk costs are significant, if they are very tiny then miners will empty the memory pool of fee paying transactions.

Orphan costs can be significant compared to certain things and insignificant compared to other things. Let's do the math:

For simplicity, let's assume that a 1 MB block has a 1% orphaning probability, a 2 MB block has a 2% orphaning probability, a 3 MB block has a 3% orphaning probability, etc. Let's assume an empty block will not be orphaned. This isn't exact, but it's pretty close to what the actual orphaning stats would be if the block size limit were removed.

If I mine an empty block, I'm going to get 25 BTC.

If I mine a 1 MB block, I'm going to get 25 BTC 99% of the time and 0 BTC 1% of the time. So, on average, adding 1 MB costs me 0.01 x 25 BTC = 0.25 BTC. At $600 / BTC that is $150 of risk. Why would I mine a 1 MB block unless the fees were greater than $150?

The orphaning cost is significant in this case, because its compared to the cost of deciding to mine and empty block or a 1 MB block, which is probably less than a penny of CPU time.

So I think I just killed your argument.

In this scenario, how will a small miner stand a chance against a larger pool? How will a 10% pool stand a chance against a 40% pool? In a competitive industry any reduction in costs could have a large impact. I appreciate this issue is not ideal for you, but please try to understand that from my point of view, it is simply not acceptable to make a decision on this right now.

Because now the orphaning cost is compared to the total revenue which is 25 BTC ($15,000)! The 40% miner has less than a $45 advantage over the 10% miner (all else equal). This $45 is insignificant compared to the other costs of running the mining business (electricity, hardware replacement, luck, pool maintenance or fees).

...all I ask is you end the campaign to impose your view on others on this matter and stop trying to change Bitcoin before discussing these issues and reaching some type of pragmatic compromise.

im·pose
[imˈpōz]
VERB
Force (something unwelcome or unfamiliar) to be accepted or put in place.

My view is that node operators should set their block size limits as they please and try to communicate their preferences to other node operators and miners (e.g., through user-agent signalling). Miners should then decide how big to make blocks based on orphaning risk and based on whether they're confident the network will accept them (e.g., not many people are going to accept 100 MB blocks right now). My view is that nothing should be imposed on anyone.

 

[lunar]

@Peter R Nice Burn

 

[AdrianX]

@Peter R thank for explaining that again, I so enjoy reading your posts.

I'm still a little unclear, if we look at orphan risk through the lens of the deployed and working solutions like BU's Xthin where we use the bitcoin network to propagate transactions as opposed to a relay network.

We see blocks in the worst case scenario take an average of 1.8 seconds to propagate from the West to China, knowing that the block interval is an average of 10 minutes (or 600 seconds), what is the likelihood of a block being found within 1.8 seconds of the previous block and propagating through the network before the 1.8 seconds (i.e. Xthin's orphan risk)

I'm basically wanting to put a dollar value on orphan risk as you've defined it with the historic 1% equating to $150 risk but I'm looking for an estimate using actual Xthin data as deployed and putting a dollar value per 1MB block (pre and post halving)

As a miner I could then see what the orphan risk cost was for using Xthin, and compare it to the for profit solution FIBRE, (FIBRE obviously comes with its own set of centralization issues and modification to the bitcoin incentive design so its not exactly an apples with apples comparison. )

 

[Zarathustra]

Once upon a time Bitcoin has been a libertarian community (a niche within a totalitarian society, which is a tautology). Today Bitcoin Unlimited is a libertarian community (which is a tautology too), a niche within a totalitarian bitcoin society that is dominated by a swarm who's majority is marching with the mafia. An organism is not ruled by single organs. All organs together constitute the organism. In other words: the whole organism is sick today, but not just the core of it. The question is: Does it have enough self-healing power?

 

[Roger_Murdock]

I wish they would lose the flawed comparison to Visa.

Visa is a dollar-denominated credit transfer system.

Bitcoin is money.

Yeah, I've been wondering for a while how much VISA paid to become the official credit card sponsor of Bitcoin scaling comparisons.

What I find the most plausible is the notion that pre-civilized money was mentally keeping track of favors among a limited number of individuals you know all your life, whereas tangible forms of money with the traditional properties was a massive technological advancement that allowed objectively-valued trading of favors with people that you don't have any prior personal relationship with. Without some system of accomplishing that, I doubt human beings had the logistics to build any larger forms of social organization.

Yep, and sort of related to that is the idea that people tend to be somewhat uncomfortable, at least in certain contexts, with explicit / quid pro quo exchange (including monetary exchange) because it traditionally signaled social distance. It was something that you did with outsiders whereas the economics of tribal life were based on informal gifts / debts (not unlike how intra-family economics are usually handled today). An illustration of this idea is that weird ritual you sometimes see where two friends who are dining out together argue over who gets to pick up the check. Why would you ever want to pay (and how hard is it to ask for separate checks)? But of course that's not the point. The point is to signal that the other person is in your inner circle -- "I value our friendship and the time we spend together so much that $20 to cover your loaded potato skins and baby back ribs isn't even a rounding error."

 

[Erdogan]

Yes, if you are self-sufficient as an individual and don't want to participate in this contest to produce the surplus that the mafia demands, you can avoid confrontation. As soon as you have children, you cannot.
The violence is organized and they take your children to 'teach' them. Your own children! They don't ask you. Try to defend your 'property'!
If you want to participate in the Bitcoin environment because it gave you high hopes, you cannot avoid confrontation with the totalitarian traitors who already managed to dominate this former libertarian project. You will always find libertarian anarchistic niches within the society, but they will always be niches only. Thats the difference to the community, where anarchism and altruism is a main rule.

I don't deny that the mafia is powerful. They have great power over an area, due to strong command and control and a long memory. But geographical area is not everything, communities can exist crossing areas.
[doublepost=1467961376,1467960730][/doublepost]A decent man will not steal or kill, he will protect his possessions, most people are like this. But it is too easy to support others doing the stealing and killing, and it is to easy to outsource your protection to people who feel they can steal or kill with impunity.

 

[awemany]

Noob-ish quesiton here (don't judge!) from a non-noob (apologies if wrong thread - feel free to delete):

I've been thinking about long, long-term storage of for my BTC. I've got some in cold storage on an old laptop that was wiped before installing the wallet software etc. This arrangement is fine except that the computer sits stashed away in my house, not plugged in for long periods of time (yr + at a time). I'm concerned that I could lose data at some point due to hardware failure, human error, lack of power, etc. I've been contemplating moving coins to a paperwallet, but its been around 2 years since I last made one and I feel a little rusty on storage options. Do people still use these and consider them safe? What is the best/safest software to use for making one these days (previously I used https://www.bitaddress.org's software on an offline computer)?

Sorry for clutter, thanks in advance.

I disagree with @cypherdoc that a HDD or (SSD?) in the Laptop with a couple of backups on USB-Sticks is necessarily the right way to go.

This is also a question of thermodynamics. At a given temperature, there is a certain survival probability for each magnetic domain, for each electron in a floating gate (like for USB sticks /SSDs).
So there is also a survival probability for each bit in your HDD/SSD/USB stick. When enough electrons migrated out of your gate or spins flipped on your HDD, your bit reads out as zero (or one, depending on interpretation logic), and the data is lost.

And that is, with today's hardware and technology, quite finite. The market doesn't really optimize for longevity of data, simply because most don't want to pay the (comparatively small amount) for that.

AFAIR, SSDs even have refresh cycles that are run when the SSD is powered, replenishing charge in the cells that slowly decays when the device is sitting around unpowered - but that's exactly the scenario encountered in your cold storage scenario! (HDDs have similar mechanisms since a long time: When a block reads with a bad error rate, it will be rewritten or written to another physical location on the HDD - should it still be readable)

Remember that USB Sticks as well as SSDs store their information just as electrical charge. And the charge involved per bit is much smaller than the charge you'll pick up by running a comb through your hair on a dry day, for example! (That charge is likely much higher even than all the bits of all your Bitcoin keys on all your flash memory media combined).

How much permanence do you see in the charges on your comb after combing?

Exactly. Doesn't really seems to be that permanent!

Now, of course, the charge is well protected, it is sitting around, insulated in layers of silicon oxide. It will likely last for years, but not so likely for decades.

Do you want to trust your money to that?

With paper backups, thermodynamics apply as well (including such potential worries as acid in your paper letting it eat itself). However, the amount of energy used in a written letter or a code block in a printed QR code is much higher than just the couple charges in your USB stick, and so the decay rate is a lot lower. Bonus: Your eyes are a quick, low-tech method to estimate the bit-error-rate of such storage methods

(Of course, the long tail principle applies here: Less likely, bit still possible thermodynamic events, such as your house burning down might still destroy your paper wallet (though they'd also fry your USB sticks...) ... there is a another discussion for geographical redundancy excluded here...)

Media wise, best thing is probably to engrave the keys into something. But that's of course also quite an effort. My adivse: Use good, acid-free paper and a ball-point pen with permanent ink. The mechanical deformation of your paper from hand-writing the letters can be seen as a minor redundancy mechanism, should the ink fade over decades...
[doublepost=1467963605][/doublepost]For a different topic:

One of the things we smallblockers vs. bigblockers repeatedly argue around is whether bigger blocks will cause full node centralization, keep the node count the same, or even cause decentralization.

I'd say that with 2MB, we have the perfect figure for it to be an experiment on this front, harmless enough to hopefully convince most except the very stubborn smallblockers:

We put a unit step into the system (maxblocksize doubling), and we'll observe how the full node count changes.

How about that? Instead of bickering endlessly, we see it as an experiment and we decide on the path forward from further observations on this matter!
[doublepost=1467963928,1467963244][/doublepost]

@awemany: That BIP section would be quite the hoodwink if used as the basis for arguing predictable settlement times under main-chain blocks-full conditions.

Fully agreed, but I can see them already applying that 'logic'. I also read the BIP along those lines, simply because I have seen too many of their political games in this whole mess.

And sorry for the spam posting here

 

[freetrader]

@awemany

Media wise, best thing is probably to engrave the keys into something.

http://cryptosteel.com/
Depending on one's needs this MAY be part of a solution. Personally, I haven't used them, but I hope they continue to be around. If Bitcoin becomes more valuable I think that's assured.
Another form of engraving that could be used if you're planning to pull the backup out again sooner is optical disc (archival DVDs) with redundant copies of the data on the disk (using error correction in software).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster

 

[jonny1000]

You exaggerated the situation by manipulating the data.

Right now the orphan rate risk is generally very very low, even for a small pool. if orphan rate is below 0.2%, a 76% is only 0.15% advantage, which is very minimal. 0.15% advantage compared with a 2.5%~4% PPS fee rate, or 2%-4% PPLNS tx fee revenue, is also negligible.

Jihan

Thanks for responding to me. I am finding this really frustrating and it seems like you are responding to different points that I am not making, maybe you feel the same. Anyway lets keep trying to explain ourselves.

My comments were about Peter R's theory that orphan risk costs are high and therefore prevent miners putting more transactions in their blocks. I have said many times that I disagree with this theory, in that it is both false and dangerous. His theory necessarily assumes orphan risks costs are high relative to miners income. In fact basic economic logic would suggest that miners keep including transactions up to the point where marginal orphan risk costs equals the fee.

A very basic overview of my argument is that high orphan risk costs are bad and Peter's theory assumes they are high relative to miner income. This is my problem with his theory. Therefore the data you gave, while interesting, is not directly related to my point.

You cannot have it both ways and claim orphan risks costs are both too small to have an impact on centralization and large enough to effect transaction selection. Either orphan risk costs are insignificant like you say (and I agree), they are significant like Peter's theory suggests or they move around depending on the circumstances and all these theories have a degree of validity.
[doublepost=1467967319][/doublepost]

Perhaps you misspoke, but I'm not conceding anything.

Ok, I am sorry for using the word "concede" when I should have said "agreed".

They'd have a 24% advantage in terms of orphaning risk over a tiny pool, assuming that they have instant communication across the pool. Like @Jihan pointed out,

Well what if it is one miner in one location rather than a pool?

(2) the advantage only counts against the orphan risk, which is (historically) ~1% of the total cost. So, we're talking a ~0.2% advantage in total.

This is very frustrating to me. I have discussed this issue with you many times and you constantly misrepresent me by making this point. Please can you stop it? This is simply not a point I care about. I am talking about a situation where orphan risk costs drive fee revenue like your theory suggests. This is likely to result in a situation where orphan risk costs is very large relative to miner income.

If I mine a 1 MB block, I'm going to get 25 BTC 99% of the time and 0 BTC 1% of the time. So, on average, adding 1 MB costs me 0.01 x 25 BTC = 0.25 BTC. At $600 / BTC that is $150 of risk. Why would I mine a 1 MB block unless the fees were greater than $150?

If you are going to assume a large block subsidy forever, then I agree with you and this issue is not a major concern for me. My concerns in this area are interrelated and inseparable from the fact that the subsidy falls exponentially over time.

 

[awemany]

@freetrader: Interesting link @ cryptosteel.

It looks like you have to arrange the keys manually and they are just inserted into that contraption, though?

I feel that's a lot of money for a piece of sheet metal. And it probably isn't quite that rugged, as the letters/digits seem to be just held by the front and back plate? If the thing comes apart, the letters would fall out ...



Personally, I'd rather use a simple sheet of 1.5mm (~ 1/16" for you Americans ) titanium metal (even more corrosion resistant AFAIK(?)) plus one of those.

I think that will be as permanent as it gets.

 

[freetrader]

@awemany: You got the cryptosteel concept right, I think the price is based on ease of re-use without access to specialized tools like you point out (and perhaps a furnace to melt down your sheet metal again). If you have all those already you're probably set
I do agree, it is very expensive right now, but if Bitcoin becomes more popular, hopefully the price will come down (through volume and competition).

Durability: The car test was lame IMO. But I'd still like to see how one of BTCC's physical coins fares in a similar trial.

---

"Slock.it developers release images of bizzare morph suit team building exercise and the post forking positive feedback loop." (/r/Buttcoin link)

I am left wondering what that picture is supposed to represent in the first case. Only one of the participants has the right puzzle piece? (would that be Slockit?)
TBH, I kind of felt sorry for the other 9...

Picture from: https://blog.slock.it/options-in-the-hard-fork-90e467483c0#.ly7vx22kv