Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

adamstgbit

Well-Known Member
Mar 13, 2016
1,206
2,650
I wouldn't take the approach of trying to "convince" Antonopoulos that BU is a "better" scaling solution than segwit. Just that it is a legitimate alternative, it involves a different set of tradeoffs, and it is reasonable that some (or many) people will prefer it.

He can prefer segwit if he wants, but when he says there are no alternatives, that's a problem.

You could also ask him if he favors decentralization of development.
right, he could at least acknowledge BU.
but forcing him to do that, might open the door for him saying somthing about why he doesn't put much consideration toward BU. "BU sucks because XYZ"...

If we had a godly public speaker that was as knowledgeable as him + BU supporter
I'd pay money to watch these two truly battle out the debate.:ROFLMAO:

@Justus Ranvier is our best bet? i would guess.

or Peter.
 
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awemany

Well-Known Member
Aug 19, 2015
1,387
5,054
Yeah. My thinking is that the green line is extremely bogus. Even if it hadn't been disproven, it seems like how it is supposed to relate to the red line is very unclear and that simply drawing two lines on a graph and that where they cross happens to pick a number previously chosen seems like a very post-hoc rationalization (this page and graph are from Jan 2017). There also appears to be no chain of logic or reasoning that applies to this usage and there appears to be no consideration of other factors that may apply when it would come to such a discount (even if the precepts for such a choice were acceptable).
Indeed. The 'cross over' struck me as post-hoc rationalization as well. In any case: The green curve that he uses is scare mongering as well: He's arguing with the worst case and 'it could happen at any time'. Well, yes, it could of course, but we have 8 years of Bitcoin operation with this attack not taking place.

You do not design the electrical network so that everyone can draw the connection rating of power in their homes all at once - the electrical network would immediately fail, because it has been designed for the expected use case.

The electric network has circuit breakers. So if there would be an UTXO circuit breaker preventing 'the green curve at 3' from happening over significant stretches of time, I'd be o.k. with that - in principle.

But on the other hand, given that the 'max blocksize limit' circuit breaker, which was meant as just a circuit breaker and that was its only function for the majority of Bitcoin's existence became a tool of politics now, I'd also be very wary with such an UTXO circuit breaker being implemented but not being able to auto-increase and being a good measure above expected demand.

Along other lines, this debate makes me wonder now: Maybe we should plot UTXO growth / blocksize vs. 'block fullness'?

People like /u/peoplma on reddit argue that the high fees keep people from coalescing their inputs. Due to the blocksize fuckup, we might get some data on this actually. No reason to not make the best out of this shitty situation? @Peter R., did you ever do such a plot?

Of course, it doesn't help that I'm predisposed to distrust anything that emits from the keyboard of "blocks have always been full" Maxwell. But I'm pretty good at graphs. I have a piece of paper with a fancy seal on the wall that is that product, in part, of being able to interpret graphs. I even know where the 0 on a log plot goes.
:)
 

Norway

Well-Known Member
Sep 29, 2015
2,424
6,410
@Norway

Andreas isn't exactly somebody you would typically think of as deliberately misleading or taking advantage of bad actor status (like your Maxwells or Backs of the world), so I would argue it's very reasonable to host him. He has a lot of speaking subjects that are not related to stumping for segwit to begin with, and depending on your format, having plenty of Q&A time could make the whole thing a good experience.
I deleted the post when I came to my senses. It was an emotional thing. I guess I was a little disappointed in AA because I like him so much.
 

8up

Active Member
Mar 14, 2016
120
344
@Norway I see it as one of the best choices we as humans can make if we talk about our feelings with the persons who make us feel in a special way. It's a very good basis for understanding each others perspective and positions. Would encourage you to tell AA about it and see what happens.

If you're not familiar with this concept I'd like to point you to this resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
 

Richy_T

Well-Known Member
Dec 27, 2015
1,085
2,741
@awemany the logic (which does not really seem to be presented for some reason) seems questionable too. Why not 8? Because the network is not capable of accepting 8. So if it could accept 8? 16? 32? 128? It would be OK to discount SW data that much? Because UTXO growth is that much more important than anything else that you'd give SW data essentially for free? And where is the proof or analysis of what such a discount would have on UTXOs? All he did was show some ratio.

It's a house of cards. Built on sand.

This is why the "these people are so smart" people need to be put in place. They allow for the kind of bullshit Maxwell is peddling. They assume that if they can't understand it, it's over their heads and they'd better just go along with it.

Part of the problem is that they are providing answers, no matter how dubious. For many, "The market will decide" just doesn't make them comfortable.

[doublepost=1487348470][/doublepost]@Norway, if you can get a little time with AA, it might be interesting to sound out what is behind what his feelings are. It might just be, as I suspect, that his personal interests align with Core SegWit but there could be other reasons like he just hasn't thought through the implications. It would be interesting also to know some nuances on his thoughts on a hard-fork and BU. Such things often don't come through well on social media. Maybe find out what he would do if he was king of Bitcoinland.
[doublepost=1487348777,1487347968][/doublepost]It seems to me, if I was the kind of person who would have developed Core SegWit that I would have done the work that Andrew Stone did to get to an effective increase of 1.7MB and then set the discount at 50% to give a new "blockweight" that effectively matched expected use. If I truly believed the network could only support 4MB blocks, that would also allow the option of a hard fork to 2MB base blocks, 3.4MB over all, should it turn out to be necessary (which it might even by my small-blocker standards). If I wasn't trying to block the possibility of a hard-fork, that is.
 
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awemany

Well-Known Member
Aug 19, 2015
1,387
5,054
It's a house of cards. Built on sand.

This is why the "these people are so smart" people need to be put in place. They allow for the kind of bullshit Maxwell is peddling. They assume that if they can't understand it, it's over their heads and they'd better just go along with it.

Part of the problem is that they are providing answers, no matter how dubious. For many, "The market will decide" just doesn't make them comfortable.
Yes, absolutely.
 

Richy_T

Well-Known Member
Dec 27, 2015
1,085
2,741
Just playing with the node-counts a little. The accusation is often that "fake nodes" are making the node counts an unreliable indicator. This is probably true for both sides to some extent. But what about some actual numbers? So I pulled the data from bitnodes.21.co and broke it down to client per IP, per class C and per network. My reasoning for this (yes, it's often good to post reasoning) is that fake nodes might be run in one of a few ways. One might have access to a range of IPs. This is common in a company where you might be provided a whole class C network. Bitcoin is still uncommon enough that multiple nodes might be on the same class C but it will be a rarity and not affect results greatly. Another way is to run nodes in the cloud. Some of this will be picked up by screening for class-Cs but several cloud providers have access to many class C networks so it will still be possible to bypass this to a degree. Thus also grouping by network. My preliminary results are as follows.


Code:
ip
  Satoshi 4164 82.4%
  BitcoinUnlimited 597 11.8%
  Classic 114 2.3%
  Bitcoin XT 54 1.1%
  BTCC 56 1.1%
  btcwire 23 0.5%
  Others 46 0.9%

classc
  Satoshi 3697 82.5%
  BitcoinUnlimited 533 11.9%
  Classic 104 2.3%
  Bitcoin XT 44 1%
  BTCC 54 1.2%
  Others 96 2.1%

net
  Satoshi 923 72.1%
  BitcoinUnlimited 210 16.4%
  Classic 76 5.9%
  Bitcoin XT 28 2.2%
  Others 139 10.8%
What's interesting here is that the percentages are broadly similar between ip and class C. However, when going to networks, the Core client drops by nearly 10% while unlimited increases by almost 5. This appears to indicate that Core is concentrated in a relatively smaller number of networks than BU by comparison.*

I hesitate to ascribe this to "fake nodes" as there is bound to be some attenuation for more popular clients as we go to a higher-level view. I'm going to play with this some more though and see what falls out. If I can group it by cloud providers vs non-cloud-providers, that might be interesting.

Provisional conclusion is that node counts are probably reasonably trustworthy for now.

(Edit: converting the values to percentages may be a bit questionable and was done for visualization purposes only)

*Is more decentralized ;)
 
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Richy_T

Well-Known Member
Dec 27, 2015
1,085
2,741
Continuing the node analysts, I broke things down by network. Full details here:

http://termbin.com/i63f

Highlights:

Code:
Total,ISP,BU,Core,Ratio
72 ,MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business,9,58,6.444
89 ,Liberty Global Operations B.V.,13,74,5.692
97 ,Online S.a.s.,7,88,12.571
112 ,Time Warner Cable Internet LLC,25,83,3.32
153 ,Hangzhou Alibaba Advertising Co.,Ltd.,14,138,9.857
204 ,Amazon.com, Inc.,21,115,5.476
204 ,Tor network,13,171,13.154
209 ,Digital Ocean, Inc.,5,189,37.8
239 ,Comcast Cable Communications, LLC,31,202,6.516
383 ,OVH SAS,20,341,17.05
587 ,Hetzner Online GmbH,142,429,3.021
The ratio of Core nodes to BU nodes by IP alone is approximately 7:1. The ratio per network is represented in the last column in the above. A higher value means core nodes are represented more and a lower value, BU.

Comcast, which I assume to be mostly regular users, comes out close to this. Hetzner and OVH appear to be cloud/hosting providers and seem to be in competition Core vs BU (17.05 and 3.021 respectively, geometric mean 7.177). Amazon appears to be running close to neutral and Tor overwhelming towards Core (possibly a way to have multiple nodes if you only have a single IP?). I have no idea why Alibaba is in there but I guess they are doing their own thing.

I find it interesting that AT&T is hardly in it with only 39 nodes using their service (34 core, 5 BU FWIW so bang on the ratio).

So still quite happy with the number of nodes representing reality so far (for whatever that reality means)
 

Richy_T

Well-Known Member
Dec 27, 2015
1,085
2,741
Observation: BitcoinUnlimited is currently differentiated into "BitcoinUnlimited" and "BitcoinUnlimited - https". Currently at position 5 and 7 on the bitnodes.21.co chart respectively. If these were combined, it would be within 3 votes of position 4, displacing Core 0.13.0. I believe this is an incorrect usage of the version string (there is a BIP for it https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0014.mediawiki which specifies Name:Version) and that it should be fixed in a future version...

An optional comments field after the version number is also allowed. Comments should be delimited by brackets (...). The contents of comments is entirely implementation defined although this BIP recommends the use of semi-colons ; as a delimiter between pieces of information.
 
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chriswilmer

Active Member
Sep 21, 2015
146
431
I still think we should just cap the UTXO to a max based on requiring every txn to move at least 1 satoshi. It's a big number but then you never have to worry about out of control growth.

In fact, maybe this could be another consensus parameter. For the next few years requiring that at least 10 satoshis be moved in each txn is probably fine... and way down the road we might need to add additional granularity to Bitcoin so that people can send 0.1 satoshi to each other.
 

go1111111

Active Member
It now seems increasingly likely that I will write a more comprehensive post about hard fork governance and try to publicize it throughout the Bitcoin world.
After a couple months of vacationing, I'm now ready to write this post. Since I've been away for so long, I may have missed someone else writing this already, though.

Does anyone know of an existing thorough post covering all aspects of the fundamentals of emergent consensus / hard fork governance?

Some topics it should cover are:

-The value and usefulness of a cryptocurrency is fundamentally based on user demand.
-No one has any obligation to value your coins / keep using your network
-People should be free to join/leave any network they like at any time
-Bitcoin software is a means to an end, not an end in itself
-Emergent consensus is very different from democracy
-Using a particular version of Bitcoin doesn't create obligations for you in the future
-The purpose of names, and why 'Bitcoin' doesn't necessarily belong to people who want to freeze the protocol
-Why market forces + decentralization will make this actually work
 

majamalu

Active Member
Aug 28, 2015
144
775

AdrianX

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
2,097
5,797
bitco.in
@Peter R some members may not actually have a public persona. I think having a head shot of all members who hold any formal position is important, not sure about all members?

Is it practical to have a members bio page for all members? also I'm not entirely clear on what an optimal number of members is - given BU adoption I think we need many more - does anyone have an estimate and why?

I would have guessed 1-200 but I have no rationale for that number other than I think it would be more democratic than Core.