Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[awemany]

@Richy_T : Thanks for this analysis. I always wanted to do the same, great that you made this. I assume 'Network' means AS in your analysis?

Great response, @awemany!

Thanks. It really helps to dig through old reddit comments from time to time

The whole thread was one of the more interesting ones. As I have said earlier: "Confidential transactions" by Adam and Greg is one of the few things from them that might potentially be positive for Bitcoin. It is their strength (cryptography) applied in a good way. I think it is far off still and needs a lot more further thought, but I think it is a positive contribution, if only to the overall discussion.

 

[sgbett]

I'm sure I'm not the first to think this, but nobody's said it yet.

Behind closed doors I think pools will have been discussing amongst themselves what they do with the expiry of HK agreement.

They know they can't just all jump on BU right away for fear of alienating the userbase, but they know they need to scale and they are smart enough to see the game that block stream is playing.

So they have been waiting for the right time. The situation is so untenable now that it probably is that time.

I think Mow leaving BTCC is an indicator, that the miners are about to go full BU and so he is getting out beforehand to save face.

Those guys running pools. They are not stupid and they are making money. I think BS underestimates how much acumen the miners have. I think BS think they have got it all figured out, and are going to get a nasty surprise when the market (miners & users) moves against them, and makes them just a bit player and largely irrelevant. Hubris will be their downfall.

 

[Richy_T]

Sgbett, there are other ways for miners to engage too. Bringing some more hashpower online? Direct it to a new or existing BU pool and no one has to know it's you. Then if/when it gets popular enough, you look like you're going along with the broad consensus and not making risky decisions.

 

[sgbett]

If you believe the twitterverse today, that exactly what ViaBTC are "doing"

 

[bitsko]

Bobby Lee is much cooler than samson mow.

 

[Impulse]

Between Bobby Lee's statements and Samson Mow's leave, I would bet that something is brewing with the miners. It may not be Unlimited but I bet a hard fork is coming.

 

[albin]

Pure speculation w/ no inside baseball here, but I'm guessing it's possible it's go-time right now for the Chinese exchanges.

I've heard Bobby Lee explain a couple times years ago in interviews that basically to do business in an emerging tech in China, you start up, they give you alot of free reign while the regulators figure out what's going on, then eventually the government issues licenses to the top few firms and everybody else has to stop.

If PBOC's behavior is maybe indicative of the government coming closer to the phase of formally licensing Bitcoin exchanges, then maximizing your metrics to make the case that you are one of the biggest players is literally do or die. They don't have zero fee or subsidizing ridiculous margin to burn money on to bump up their customer numbers, and they can't publicly advertise Bitcoin as a safe-haven from CNY devaluation, so they have to do something else. In a way maybe the PBOC rules are in part to take away whatever cheapo tricks certain exchanges exploited to bump their metrics, so that an accurate decision can be made about which exchanges to actually deem quasi-official?

Meanwhile it did them no favors to have a twitter troll who has no respect in China as their public face, whose entire public persona is built around cheerleading Bitcoin Core, when from what I've heard it's a popular and growing sentiment in the Chinese Bitcoin community that western programmers have too much influence.

 

[freetrader]

I found this a curious comment - is it true?
Is the counting based on transactions that have in the past been dropped from the network's mempools?
Greg once mentioned he keeps a large record of unconfirmed transactions - I cannot remember exactly how big, but I'd be surprised if it's in the GB's ...

 

[albin]

@freetrader

A quick glance at what's up on statoshi suggests that simply allowing 2MB blocks would clear the mempool in a matter of days max, even without anywhere near peak capacity utilization.

 

[chriswilmer]

@freetrader : in either case, any kind of minimum fee policy (10 sat/byte) would prevent GB of mempool txns from flooding if they really were spam-ish (i.e., not paying any reasonable fee)

 

[albin]

Most unintentionally funny ultimatum ever:

 

[lunar]

I must say the debate in this thread is absolutely first class.

@theZerg outstanding response, The BSCore position really doesn't have anywhere left to hide.


huge win for free speech North Corean ban obviously

 

[Richy_T]

In theory, we could just record incoming transactions and compare it to how many are being confirmed. If incoming>confirmed, backlog increases. If incoming<confirmed, backlog clears.

This doesn't even account for resubmitted transactions, of course.
[doublepost=1487492483][/doublepost]@lunar, sadly, I think we are seeing a number of trolls coming in whose goal is to waste people's time by asking "newb" questions. My assumption is that the goal is to prevent people from advancing arguments on the front-line and probably to evoke some kind of response. I think these posts need to be humored but people need to not pour their time into them.

 

[lunar]

@Richy_T

You might be right to a certain extent, but threads like that advance the knowledge of many who just wish to understand. You're right that it can be a waste of time for some, but many responses make good examples for the wiki, and they could be collated to avoid future repetition.

A general debunking every few weeks cleans the air and strengthens the resolve.

 

[freetrader]

Some comments from Greg in threads about the 0.14.0 release candidate 1 which I'm trying to make sense of. First is an extract from a long comment:

A similar thing was previously done for 'checkpoints' but in Core we stopped updating checkpoints long ago because we are very uncomfortable with the fact that the pin consensus and caused serious misunderstandings about our security model (in particular, for some academics), and we plan to fully remove them soon.

Anyone can enlighten me about what the problem is with pinning consensus on a block that's typically buried under months of work?

My second interest is in the new 'precious block' feature:

Nah, it's not like a checkpoint, it only influences the "first accepted" tiebreaker in the "Valid, Most Work, First accepted" decision set.

It was added because a miner requested it and was doing something very dangerous (like a checkpoint) instead of something that would naturally 'give up' if another fork actually got ahead. The use there is things like getting multiple nodes backing one pool onto the same chain in the event of a race. It's also useful for testing reorgs.

Greg goes into a little more detail in the GH issue ( https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/6995#issuecomment-156051325 ):

The normal reason for asks like this is because of a high-ish hashpower miner who found a tying block moments after they had already accepted a first longer block from the network (due to hardware and submission delays); and rather than accept their defeat gracefully they'd like to attempt a momentary majority hashpower attack and try to get lucky excluding the other block. If you simulate this behavior of selfishly mining on your own later blocks, for many hashrate distributions and latency choices it gives massively worse convergence times for the network. (I think for a toy example of two 50% miners and a 30 second submission latency it increased the frequency of 6+ deep reorgs 100 fold or something insane like that)

I've bolded the comment about potential for 'massively worse convergence times' as I believe it bears more thought.

 

[albin]

Am I imagining things, or is there maybe (if even unintentionally) alot more minor feature creep than usual, perhaps for public relations against BU?

 

[molecular]

@albin: I read nullc say something like "BU is already xxx commits behind core" today. So it's possible, yes.

 

[freetrader]

 

[bitsein]

Am I imagining things, or is there maybe (if even unintentionally) alot more minor feature creep than usual, perhaps for public relations against BU?

A little, but not so much.

 

[sickpig]

Some comments from Greg in threads about the 0.14.0 release candidate 1 which I'm trying to make sense of. First is an extract from a long comment:

A similar thing was previously done for 'checkpoints' but in Core we stopped updating checkpoints long ago because we are very uncomfortable with the fact that the pin consensus and caused serious misunderstandings about our security model (in particular, for some academics), and we plan to fully remove them soon.

he's talking about this: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9484 ("Introduce assumevalid setting to skip validation presumed valid scripts.")

Basically a new way to cut the validation work that it is immune to big reorg (contrary to what happens with checkpoints).