Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[AdrianX]

multiculturalism has many barriers that extend beyond even language to religion and politics that frame everything we do or say.

Multiculturalism is something you can observe it's there or it's not, it's not a policy or a political view or an ideology it's a subjective observation.

I lived in Apartheid South Africa with some of the most racist laws you can imagine, the laws were so vial that one had to break them to be a decent human being. Yet when those laws were removed multiculturalism emerged. It turns out that just a small minority of racists tried to legitimize their actions, people carried on as best they could as normal without them.

I now live in Vancouver Canada and people refer to it as multicultural city. The government thinks it's developing multiculturalism as an ideology - being something that is you managed - news flash its not.

I see more racism expresses toward definable ethnicities here in Canada than I ever saw in my travels thought southern Africa per or post Apartheid. ( it may have been in SA there were such high tensions that people just respected each other - because if you didn't you would get shot - here in Canada you can be obnoxious racist and insulting as much as the law allows and suffer no ill consequences.)

I also feel more discriminated against for being a white mail. My family even bevel it's warranted - I can say from experiences it's conforming that gives one white mail privilege regardless of skin color. I have run a design consultancy and have employed many designers, the most creative are the ones who do not conform. and I can't tell you how often these people are discriminated against for being non conformist dispirit being white mail and privileged.

 

[awemany]

@Bagatell: As @Dusty said. The set of UTXOs is the 'balance sheet of Bitcoin' so it contains the amount and output script for every address that has any money on it in Bitcoin. This set is a lot smaller than the blockchain itself - as money gets moved around - and is currently 1.5GiB or so. The more addresses you have with non-zero balances, the larger the UTXO set. The UTXO set is in a way the most valuable thing in Bitcoin.

A potential problem might become that this set could grow, and grow a lot. Gavin wrote about it here.

You can now do several things about this potential growth:

a) Ignore it. Safe for the near term future as we're far from any problem regarding its size.
b) Create incentives to reduce the UTXO set or incentives not create new UTXOs
c) Find ways to make the UTXO less taxing on hardware

I am fine with a) for now. You can get decent mid-size servers with 1TiB of RAM now, so that would allow the UTXO set to grow by a couple hundred times even if you think you need to have them all in RAM - and that would expectedly correspond to a similar growth in the Bitcoin user base. We should embrace growth, and not be worried by it!

I am also not totally opposed to b). I am willing to entertain trade-offs, and if nodes/miners implement/follow a policy that reduces the amount of 'coin dust' (lots of small UTXOs with not a lot of money in them), I am fine with that. However, 'creating incentives against UTXO growth' quickly becomes 'creating incentives against Bitcoin's growth' as obviously, each new Bitcoiner will create a few new UTXOs and if you prevent that, you prevent new Bitcoiners from joining and thus suppress the price. As far as I can see, moving stuff off-chain will only reduce this problem by a limited amount, as you'd still likely have at least one (maybe not up-to-date, but that doesn't matter in terms of storage cost) UTXO for each channel you open in Lightning or similar. If you think about this, this is also an argument against the argument that is sometimes seemingly implied by Greg and the like of: 'LN will help against UTXO growth'. As far as I can see, it doesn't, at all. (With the intermediate nodes, it might actually increase UTXO demand!)

Option c) is something I really look forward to. What could be possible is to for example implement UTXO commitments and make them so that very old UTXOs get hashed together into a Merkle tree and then just the tip of the tree is stored.

Note that this is not at all the same as confiscating old coins. Rather, the burden to store Merkle branches leading to old UTXOs would become the duty of the holder of these UTXOs, and every couple years (e.g. ten or so), s/he'd need to save parts of that tree. As schemes could be implemented that make this still only a couple hundred of kB per output per decade or so (with lots of on-chain use), I think this would be an acceptable trade-off to reduce the burden of running full nodes and put that burden back to the originator of transactions. It should of course also be noted for honesty when discussing this, that if you then go and lose your Merkle branches, you lose your old coins. Archival nodes will likely become a paid service to help in these cases.

 

[AdrianX]

but back to the real issue this needs to be understood everything is a distraction from whats happening here.

After thinking again about what @awemany wrote about the "malleability fix" I think it's really something to think about again, before allowing any change in that direction.

If I wanted to introduce a layer on top of Bitcoin, which resembled the current monetary system and (again) decoupled valuable items and paper money, I wouldn't introduce that system as "the FED 2.0". I would try to find something that "needs to be fixed", a "software bug". Coincidentally, that "fix" allows us to never touch the blockchain again with our transactions. Maybe that should be explored more and presented to the miners, the miners voting for SW might be cutting the branch they are sitting on.

The wording in the early Lightning presentations always made me puke a little, guys with no known contributions to Bitcoin come up with "Bitcoin doesn't scale, here we present you the fix". (And, I know it's been repeated often, the lightning whitepaper is not touching the central issue of Lightning, which makes me suspect, that the plan actually always was the centralized "Big hub - many connected clients" system.)
Find an alleged problem, present the solution, undermine the system. And it seems the endless repetitions of "malleability bug" worked, as the resistance against "layer 2" systems, which aim to undermine Bitcoins principle of PoW are actually seen as "ok" in all fractions.

The discussion has to be flipped around. Raise the blocksize, implement single hop payment channels for microtransactions, go back on track with the plan that existed from the beginning.
Now, in a situation, where Bitcoin works again, the LN guys can come again and present some calculations and scenarios. They should be the applicants for implementing a change. Not the ones who want to preserve the existing system.

And 1 MB Bitcoin is still better than SW. The amount of work that went into SW from the day it was announced, propaganda wise, is a huge red flag. It isn't about an "uncontentious" fix and different opinions about the favorised update process and/or priorities. It might very well be the try to change Bitcoin forever. In favour of BS investors.

[doublepost=1485118370,1485117742][/doublepost]Trump is not a politician but this sums up what happening - it's not Trump - he's no where near the type of person u/nullc is, - I personally don't see the progress attributed to Obama.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Everywhere in the West. The creation of a multicultural society is an openly defined goal of many parties in Europe.
...
But, again, your reaction sadly is the same the media and politicians have. And that's why they don't find a way to stop Le Pen etc. They just live in their filter bubble and they never step outside.

Sorry for the hostility, I reacted too emotional. I don't want get sumped in offtopic, and I don't want to bring this fight in this forum, so I try to find something to end this discussion in peace and understanding and to make that point I seem to be in a terrible need to make.

I'm terrified, running around like a headless chicken. We, the only "We" relevant for me, Europeans, achieved so much in the last decades. We escaped darkness and created an open European sociecy. This is not my merit, it is that of the generations of my parents, and, maybe most, of my grandparents, which had the longest and hardest way to go.

In this context I'm afraid that we go back into the darkness. This whole rightist movement currently swapping over Europe and, obviously, the US, is in my view just a movement against progress and openness. I have no problem with single positions and am not satisfied at all with things as they are. For example, I'm too sick of that it's a scandal when I, a man, say to a woman: Do the wash!, but that it is nothing special at all, if a woman says to a man: carry that heavy thing! Or that we just headlessly kick away nuclear research while we still produce the waste. Or that we are unable to correct an Euro-misconstruction destroying greece and all our wealth, or that we stand helplessly in front of an islamofacistic mindset crawling into our societies ... there are so many problems, and pretending everything's good is definitely not the way to go.

But, as a whole, it is a movement against progress. Don't ever think that these Le Pen and AfD and Wilders and so on would be ever good for Bitcoin. They are not for the open and free, but for the authoritarians and prohibitions. The dominant mindset in these milieaus is: Everything I don't like should be banned. It is directed backward, it crawls on the borders of unsatisfaction with modernity and fishes for supporters.

We produce energy without burning something? Fuck that! Let's go back and produce radioactive waste again, which kills everything close to it for 200.000 years. We tolerate homosexuality? Fuck that! This will kill the reproduction of our race and doesn't please God! We eat more vegebales? Fuck that, I will riot if my kindergarten kitchen makes a weekly vegetable day! Strong boys need meat! We have united borders and money in Europe? Fuck that! I don't want to share with this Italian / Spain / Polands. I want my small island country back where I can think bad about my neighbours without ever seeing them. We try to reform the school system to break the education inequality? Fuck that! The children I will birth sometime should not need to share a class with stupid / foreign children. And so on.

This is why a claim against the gendering of the language is mostly indirectly a claim against immigrants, against homosexuality, for radioactive energy, against the idea of a cliimate change, against vegetarism, against anything new and so on. In most cases all of this comes together, as on packet. A "pro-atom" troll is mostyl at the same time an "anti-immigration" troll, and when I discuss immigration with some relatives, it goes fluently into the same positions on climate change, and when a person says, she votes AFD because of these stupid Green Party education experiments, she will also be against immigrants. And so on. Don't ever think you can have some parts of the whole thing and not the rest.

But, after all, I think you are right.

My reaction is the same as the media has. Like a headless chicken. It happens, we obviously can't stop it, can't reach the people, don't understand it. I would lie if I said that I seriusly try to understand "the people", I don't think I can, this is not my mindset, I'm not "they", I don't integrate, and I'm happy that this society accepts that not everybody has to integrate and assimilate and that it is ok to live with aliens in our middle.

"Open Society" is the word I searched for. I guess we will loose it.

So. Sorry for the rand. I try to not continue this discussion --

 

[awemany]

I'm terrified, running around like a headless chicken. We, the only "We" relevant for me, Europeans, achieved so much in the last decades. We escaped darkness and created an open European sociecy.

I understand your worries, but I think the problems are at least as much in the 'establishment' as they are in the 'Authoritarian elements of the alt-right'. The problem I see and have seen for the last couple decades is that any problem brought onto the table is absorbed with a Amoeba- or Borg-like reaction of 'yes, we're going to do something about it' - but then nothing happens. That breeds contempt and 'voting protest'.

In any case, rather than fighting over the wrong politics, lets get to the right politics. After writing the above to @Bagatell, I just posted this on /r/btc and I am happy for input on this as I think this could well be an argument that is absolutely deadly to the whole Lightning Network craze:


https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5pjoq2/lightning_and_the_size_and_scalability_of_the/

 

[AdrianX]

-----------------------------------------

Ok, that's all very much offtopic, even for this thread.

Bitcoin related again:

So, I asked myself, does anywhere out there exist some kind of collection of arguments for/against BS rise, SW and LN?
I think it's tiring to repeat the same stuff over and over and you forget a lot of stuff in the storm of misinformation and propaganda.
If not, I guess it's time to start something like that? BS ramped up their SW propaganda lately.

I just want to see this on this page too.

 

[awemany]

Ooops. That was a fast reaction. Greg wrote a comment. I wanted to answer, but he right away deleted it:

https://archive.fo/Yjo4k

Greg, don't be afraid talking to us. Obviously, you are watching us here.

 

[AdrianX]

I am still very reluctant regarding 'fixing' malleability and SegWit, but at least it is good that he seems to appear to be more willing to talk.

The framing needs to change - malleability is associated with MtGox as being the reason people lost money, hence a bug. it doesn't look like a bug but more like a feature. Why is it something that needs to be fixed?

It's a feature that's preventing moving fee paying transactions off the blockchain, fees being a good thing that secure the blockchain as the subsidy diminishes.

Malleability is a behavior that encourages network participants using the network in other ways to have functions other than money confirm on the blockchain. Its functions should be defined and agreed before it's classified as something needing a fix, it's not a bug it's not harmed bitcoin, if anything it's been a scapegoat used to arguer fraud and that bitcoin is not broken and works for everyone, fix this and we fix fraud (NOT).

Bitcoin Transaction Malleability puts individual users who want to be their own bank on the same playing field as multinational corporations who want to use bitcoin to build a private banking layer on top of bitcoin, why remove it?

 

[awemany]

@AdrianX : Exactly. At least it should be looked at in neutral terms. And if malleability is indeed crucial for Bitcoin, the word needs to get out on that.

Interestingly, except for Greg's hiccup, I still have silence from small blockers on my "LN will make the UTXO worse" submission.

 

[Peter R]

a) Ignore it. Safe for the near term future as we're far from any problem regarding its size.
b) Create incentives to reduce the UTXO set or incentives not create new UTXOs
c) Find ways to make the UTXO less taxing on hardware

I wonder if orphaning risk + parallel validation can address UTXO growth by making very old UTXOs more expensive to spend.

The general view seems to be that the UTXO set must be stored in "hot" memory so that it's fast to look-up outputs, while the blockchain can be stored in less-expensive "cold" memory. It makes sense to store the outputs that are likely to spent somewhere that they can be found quickly: the quicker a miner can validate a block the quicker he can begin mining on top of it (or including transactions if he's SPV mining), thereby better utilizing his hash power.

But would it be a bad thing if 1 satoshi outputs from 2010 took a lot longer to look up? The chance that a given block actually includes one of these outputs is so small that miners don't have to worry about looking these outputs up quickly on the blocks they might receive. But a miner including such an old output in his block does have to worry. Including such a transaction will noticeably increase that block's orphaning risk.

As an example, let's imagine a future where the UTXO set is 90% spam outputs that will likely never be spent and are thus stored on a solid-state drive. Let's say it takes about 60 milliseconds to look up one of these spam outputs. If a miner includes one of these spam outputs in his block, the chance that another block is found somewhere on the network during those extra 0.06 s is 0.06s / 600s = 0.01%. It thus costs about 0.01% * 12.5 BTC = $1.25 of marginal orphaning risk for a miner to include it and so he might demand a $2.00 fee in order to do so.

I'm not a database expert, so I'm not sure if today's database technology can already deal with a situation like this elegantly, but if not, there is no reason why it couldn't if the demand is there. The cost to store UTXO spam could drop dramatically.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

As @theZerg points out in the above comment, we obviously need at least one UTXO per user. And clearly UTXO growth representing Bitcoin adoption by new users is desirable. In addition, he makes the point that per-user UTXO growth may also be desirable as a result of privacy issues.

Also -- aren't there already built-in incentives against per-user UTXO growth? Isn't "dustifying" your own holdings expensive -- both on the front end when you spend to all those outputs and then on the back end when you actually spend your coins and now have to bundle together a large number of inputs?

To the extent that UTXO consolidation is a good thing, can't miners already incentivize it with their fee policies -- by choosing to discount UTXO reducing transactions?

In any event, to the extent that UTXO growth is a real problem (which again, still seems dubious to me), what does seem clear, at least to me, is that the "solution" is NOT an arbitrary, centrally-planned data discount -- that's part of this arbitrary, centrally-planned supply quota on "block weight." But maybe I'm missing something?

 

[awemany]

I wonder if orphaning risk + parallel validation can address UTXO growth by making very old UTXOs more expensive to spend.

That's what I was proposing, except going a step further: Throw away the data regarding the old UTXO, except for a sum hash that one can use to prove that one still possesses an old UTXO, by 'opening' that sum hash up by providing Merkle branches.

As an example, let's imagine a future where the UTXO set is 90% spam outputs that will likely never be spend and are thus stored on a solid-state drive. Let's say it takes about 60 milliseconds to look up one of these spam outputs. If a miner includes on of these spam outputs in his block, the chance that another block is found somewhere on the network during those extra 0.06 s is 0.06s / 600s = 0.01%. It thus costs about 0.01% * 12.5 BTC = $1.25 of marginal orphaning risk for a miner to include it and so he might demand a $2.00 fee in order to do so.

That's exactly how I see it as well. If we don't throw old UTXOs away (as in leave them spendable, but only with proof) and go with just what we have and the old, cold UTXOs have to be pulled from disk, that will make those blocks slower to validate and thus increases orphan risk - and as you say the miner has to price that in accordingly.

I'm not a database expert, so I'm not sure if today's database technology can already deal with a situation like this elegantly, but if not, there is no reason why it couldn't if the demand is there. The cost to store UTXO spam could drop dramatically.

A more fancy model could even take other parameters into account when figuring out whether an UTXO is 'hot or not'. For example, there could even be a machine learning model incorporating all kinds of stats about an UTXO to figure out the likelihood on whether it will be spent soon.

Of course, that would need some coordination with the current situation of lots of validating but non-mining nodes, as they'd all need similar models or the miner needs to know at least what models are popular right now.

 

[lunar]

But would it be a bad thing if 1 satoshi outputs from 2010 took a lot longer to look up?

Wouldn't this lead to fungibility issues? You are effectively saying older coins are more expensive to spend, therefore worth less.

 

[Peter R]

@lunar: I don't this so. If I pay you with an old coin, then what you have is now a new coin.

 

[chriswilmer]

@lunar : Usually fungibility is an issue if the *recipient* gets a coin of unequal value to other coins with the same face value. In this case, once you receive it, it is a new coin again.

It's really not unlike spending old gold coins that are in my basement somewhere. It's a greater cost to *me* the sender, because I have to find the darned things. Once, I find them and hand them to someone, the gold coin is worth the same as any other gold coin.

 

[awemany]

@lunar: As @Peter R. says. One might argue with an extreme view that it is a fungibility issue, but I think that's just the way business is done in Bitcoin and has nothing to do with the real fungibility issues (like BS KYC/AML).

If you think about it, splintered outputs are also worth less because you pay more for them as they take larger transactions to move around/consolidate. And that's the way it is already.

 

[ascedorf]

I dunno, if I were a miner and a bit less than scrupulous and I knew another miner was not upgraded, I might make sure to send transactions his way that would cause his blocks to be orphaned.

If BU node accepts SegWit anyone can spend transactions. (assuming SegWit activation)

Will they accept and propagate a transaction trying to spend them from a bad actor.

If yes then you don't need to find a BU miner, just any non-SegWit node.

Non-SegWit nodes will propagate to other Non-SegWit nodes they know.

SegWit nodes start banning non-SegWit nodes because they are sending bad transactions.

Non-SegWit miners get their blocks orphaned.

Big Attack for zero cost, as they cannot be spent.

edit. seems they wont be propagated and won't be spent, from a post by nullc

So I assume by default they are only accepted inside blocks, like transactions greater than 100KB

 

[adamstgbit]

The framing needs to change - malleability is associated with MtGox as being the reason people lost money, hence a bug. it doesn't look like a bug but more like a feature. Why is it something that needs to be fixed?

It's a feature that's preventing moving fee paying transactions off the blockchain, fees being a good thing that secure the blockchain as the subsidy diminishes.

Malleability is a behavior that encourages network participants using the network in other ways to wait for the network to confirm on the blockchain. Its functions should be defined and agreed before it's classified, it's not a bug it's not harmed bitcoin, if anything it's been a scapegoat used to arguer fraud and that bitcoin is not broken and works for everyone, fix this and we fix fraud.

Bitcoin Transaction Malleability puts individual users who want to be their own bank on the same playing field as multinational corporations who want to use bitcoin to build a private banking layer on top of bitcoin, why remove it?

malleability makes it harder to implement a wallet and or any service which deals with TX.
I dont believe malleability was intentional, its not so much a bug, it's more of a security hole.
I think your argument that its a desirable feature because it prevents LN, is weak, and most certainly will not be well received by the majority.
off-chain payments are nothing to fear, they do not provide the same functionality as real blockchain payments.
miners will require a fee market on btc TX, which probably means bitcoin will never be suitable for tiny tiny transactions. I think LN might not take away on-chain TX demand, but rather create a new kind of BTC TX demand. that is if we allow blockspace / fee market to be a free market ! very important...

also, even if LN dose tap into on-chain TX demand, its not a net loss, channels must be opened and closed, and if anything goes wrong in the channel it will be "settled" on the blockchain.

But, LN might actually incress onchain TX demand...

 

[79b79aa8]

does anywhere out there exist some kind of collection of arguments for/against BS rise, SW and LN?

you may find the very detailed posts by /u/ydtm useful, he's been at it for months.

https://www.reddit.com/user/ydtm

 

[AdrianX]

Man. I just had a look at the last difficulty jump and it's over 16% and block generation times are still decreasing. this type of growth is crazy. I constantly overestimate how massive bitcoin has grown and how dynamic and flexible it is at this scale. The hash rate has grown the equivalent of about the first 6 years in just 2 weeks. - I'm feeling excited.

If you asked me how difficulty would grow after the halving I would have estimated we'd see more diversification as asic manufactures opted to sell asics and solidify profit as opposed to the risk of mining.

I would have expected more steady growth as price increased, but I'm very surprised to see growth spurts like this.