Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[theZerg]

Yes BU aleady prevalidates transactions as part of its XThin work. But you can only prevalidate so many in a 10 minute period, and you can only do so if you already have the tx. So throughput is ultimately based on network and computer performance.

 

[Norway]

Just a quick question: Is there a trustworthy bitcoin wallet that is a chrome app, and that can sign messages? Mycelium can sign messages, but has not a chrome app. Copay has a chrome app, but can't sign messages.

I'm looking for a practical tool to vote on BUIPs.

 

[awemany]

I just found that one do a quite general approach to find reddit user's talking points / pet peeves / invented propaganda words. For a fun look at that, have a look here.

 

[adamstgbit]

Yes BU aleady prevalidates transactions as part of its XThin work. But you can only prevalidate so many in a 10 minute period, and you can only do so if you already have the tx. So throughput is ultimately based on network and computer performance.

really? well cool, so...
Using Xthin to download the block, means 90% of it is already validated, so i believe if minners used BU they would be much less likely to create an empty block. no?

and would you agree your data is out of date because of libsecp256k1?
the relatively new addition of libsecp256k1 has improved validation time by like 2-5X hasn't it.

 

[albin]

How come none of the small blockers ever address the relationship between block delay type attacks such as selfish mining, and the disincentives created by compressed block propagation and pre-validation?
[doublepost=1480615467,1480614724][/doublepost]Tangential shower thought that might relate to the Chinese Bitcoin landscape, occurred to me by combining these two pieces of information --

1) If you're a running a business lending out liquidity, and there is a huge bull run, you're going to get a lot of defaults; according to the Bitcoin Uncensored interview where they coddled him, this is ostensibly what brought down Trendon Shavers.

2) The allegation has come up over and over that Chinese exchanges are running fractional reserve secretly to maximize their profits, sitting on that capital. There are a number of outright bitcoin-denominated loan operations in China, because turns out the Chinese government is nowhere near as psychotic as the US and Europe about being a regulatory control freak.

So combining these two observations, and taking into account the verticals you might see miners and exchanges involved in (whether openly or surreptitiously), would it stand to reason that there might be some strong self-interest to try to suppress the Bitcoin price as long as possible? If I were making great money on lots of short bitcoin loans, that's what I'd be interested in promoting.

 

[Inca]

@awemany i was thinking last night about the best way to uncover alts. It is probably possible to mathematically compare the collected written messages on reddit of two users to see if there is a match.

Writing a python script to do collect each users posts would be trivial. Comparing words used, frequency, common turns of phrase or patterns would be relatively easy. It may be that certain people use a rare word or phrase that could be identified in the alt account. Punctuation styles, grammatical peculiarities and sentence structure could also be assessed but would be more difficult. Sources of info such as irc logs could generate a very large written data set to mine.

This could all be cross referenced with posting times and taking things a step farther to see if certain accounts post in the same threads as the suspected original account as the alt or to see if the suspected alts post in threads or in response to messages which use the original authors name..

It could be a really fun project which could be made endlessly complex. But I am about a third of the way through my QRL whitepaper so I must plough on with that this weekend instead.

---

By the way we are price wise at the point the last rally petered out. No moonsuits this time because bitcoin seems priced appropriately. Now ethereum has deflated somewhat it wouldn't surprise me to see a major push upwards in the btc price, possibly followed by an alt rally. I would prefer if we sat here for a month or two and experienced a huge rally next year sometime. More chance to accumulate.

 

[awemany]

@Inca:

@awemany i was thinking last night about the best way to uncover alts. It is probably possible to mathematically compare the collected written messages on reddit of two users to see if there is a match.

I did such a thing, and so did someone else, I think about a year back. I made a reddit submission about it AFAIK, look at my posting history on reddit.

Back then, I wasn't really convinced that there are many sockpuppets around after my analysis, and I am still doubtful that it is the case now.

Note that there are many, many ways to calculate such similarity scores and that there is no good way to calibrate the algorithm without knowing real identities so that you could attach proper probabilities to the result of your analysis. That's why I refrained from saying 'user X writes like user Y' because I knew the data is basically BS without the calibration. The other guy went and said so anyways, but admitted that it is basically BS after I poked him on that. Lots of people complained in his analysis submission that 'no way this other guy is me'.

So what I suspect could have happened in the mean time or could have happened even back then (hard to say because there's no conclusive data that I can think of that would show that) that maybe some or many of the fresh accounts are sockpuppets.

However, I believe that some of our most dangerous enemies, such as Greg, have a very unique writing style and I believe the mental effort it would take to create and keep a separate sockpuppet identity for more than maybe a couple of unlinkable posts is too demanding - and not effective, he could rather write as himself. I'd certainly consider it too demanding myself. Note also that my recent post on reddit shows that he has some very peculiar things he does and says. Any account with similar post frequency as Greg's (He's second on /r/btc, right after /u/jstolfi AFAIR) would have been intuitively found out.

Writing a python script to do collect each users posts would be trivial.

That data already exists, you can download it e.g. on files.pushshift.io and I believe some people specifically crawled the Bitcoin subreddits. That's what I did - I just filtered it down to Bitcoin data, because I don't need the rest.

Comparing words used, frequency, common turns of phrase or patterns would be relatively easy. It may be that certain people use a rare word or phrase that could be identified in the alt account. Punctuation styles, grammatical peculiarities and sentence structure could also be assessed but would be more difficult. Sources of info such as irc logs could generate a very large written data set to mine.

Yes. But as I said above the calibration is missing and the frequent posters are (I believe) mostly unique. And the suspected random, often replaced, fresh sockpuppets - they appear and disappear so quickly (I guess the negative karma is when they are abandoned) that it is hard to put the pieces of the puzzle together there.

This could all be cross referenced with posting times and taking things a step farther to see if certain accounts post in the same threads as the suspected original account as the alt or to see if the suspected alts post in threads or in response to messages which use the original authors name..

I did that for a quite a few guys, manually, that were suspected to be Alts of each other. I haven't found anything even close to suspicious yet.

 

[Inca]

@awemay, good to see you have carried the thought experiment to the point of interrogating some hard data! Calibration is of course the important point with such a project - you can write the most elaborate and sophisticated algorithm you like but in the end it has to work.

The simplest way I can see to do that would be to compare prolific posters with their own output to see you could generate a high % likelihood of matching..

The reddit void comp machine for detecting alts

 

[awemany]

The simplest way I can see to do that would be to compare prolific posters with their own output to see you could generate a high % likelihood of matching..

Yes. But then you'd also need a way to know some true negatives.

I guess you could do that by saying the prominent and publicly posters are all unequal each other. I would still be dubious about the quality (and unbiasedness) of this approach to calibrate the algorithm.

And it would be quite some work. Too much for me as a hobby

 

[Inca]

Some kind of neural net program might be able to learn. But as you say to generate accurate matching (specificity and sensitivity) requires good data..

Google could probably whip something up very easily which was pretty darn good.

 

[theZerg]

really? well cool, so...
Using Xthin to download the block, means 90% of it is already validated, so i believe if minners used BU they would be much less likely to create an empty block. no?

and would you agree your data is out of date because of libsecp256k1?
the relatively new addition of libsecp256k1 has improved validation time by like 2-5X hasn't it.

Sure... until it doesn't help because we are hitting network propagation speed limits, mempool limits, or because it would take more than 10 minutes to validate everything in the mempool.

In other words, when we start hitting the real physical limits, Xthin and Xval can't exceed them.

But yes Xthin cut bandwidth in half and libsecp256k1 reportedly cut cpu in half.

So we can double the block size, right.... right?

 

[adamstgbit]

my conclusion is we can 10X the block size... and still be better off then when we started off.

validation time:
validate every single tx in a block without libsec = 17sec/1mbblock
validate every single tx in a block + libsec = 8sec/1mbblock
only validate the 10% of the not already validated tx + libsec = 0.8sec/1mbblock
[doublepost=1480637032,1480636317][/doublepost]am i making any sense?

 

[adamstgbit]

quick call China, my crazy calculations show that miners are losing money by making empty blocks! IMO they are far better off waiting the 17 seconds it takes to validate the previous block in order to capture the 1BTC TX fees they would get if he could fill his block! lol.
i'll let you math wiz prove me wrong.

 

[albin]

Something I don't understand, if Core is really concerned about miners not validating, why haven't they moved to softfork requiring commitment of a valid hash of the canonically-ordered utxo set resulting from the block in question into the coinbase or some other tech debt re-purposing field?

Could it be that they really care more about using the excuse that miners won't validate as an ad hoc argument whenever they find it beneficial?

 

[Norway]

Zooming out on Huobi, I just discovered that the CNY exchanges broke their ATH since january 2014 two weeks ago. The USD exchanges will hopefully do the same soon.

 

[lunar]

@Norway BTCC sitting on at ATH from (almost) the last 3 years right now. 5415

Something i've been watching for a few weeks now, the 5400 level on BTCC seemed quite formidable.

Finger in the air prediction. Now it's broken it's blue sky time, we'll see an attempt at 6000 very soon.

 

[Norway]

@lunar I'll trust you that it's blue sky time. After all, you have moon as your username

 

[solex]

When a group of us gathered in China, on Nov 23rd, it was in my mind to post some updates here. Wow, the Great Firewall bites hard. Anything google is blocked, and this includes the authenticator which I use on this site for login. Also, most VPNs are known and also blocked, including PIA.

Anyway, on the last day of our trip Andrew Quentson published his well-written and informative article which covered the public meet-ups we had. Although, to clarify one area, these meet-ups were done with the help of local organisers, not in connection with miners.

Nevertheless, we did talk to some miners and the general view is unchanged from 1, 2, or 3 years ago: onchain scaling is the way to go and big-blocks are a no-brainer. The miners generally want to follow the community, but seem rather detached from concerns about the high-fees. The answer to high-fees pushing out users is "price is up!".

Well, I think we have debated this ad nauseum in this thread to know that "price is up!" does not give crippled onchain capacity a free pass. So, that is where we are. The sense of urgency is still not present, and probably won't be unless "price is crashing!". Even then the mining pools are diversified into major alts and quite well positioned to latch onto the next big crypto which comes along.

Communications continue, so there are no promises, but we remain optimistic that larger blocks can become a reality sooner than later.

 

[adamstgbit]

nice market movement eh.

this morning i noticed price breaking above that 750 mark and i went to check the segwit adoption
it had just made a nice drop from its 35% high
now segwit is going even lower
and price moves higher faster
i think the market doesn't like segwit.

check it out
roughly same time period on the charts:

 

[adamstgbit]

The sense of urgency is still not present, and probably won't be unless "price is crashing!". Even then the mining pools are diversified into major alts and quite well positioned to latch onto the next big crypto which comes along.

its fascinating there isn't more sense of urgency.
the situation is pretty dire and requires immediate attention big fucking time.
yet alot of poeple are like " HA i told you so bitcoin didnt blow up because full blocks "

watching countless posts about TX delays
watching some alts 10X
bitcoin losing significant market share.
having to tell poeple to try and resycn there wallets to get the limbo coins back

this is a disaster.
feels like bitcoin is ran by Mark Karpeles, they even say the same things he said! "TX malleability is a bug"
wtf is going on.