Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Roger_Murdock]

The name "replay attack" seems really unfortunate to me -- because I don't see how "replaying" transactions is an "attack." Of course when you publicly broadcast a transaction, anyone who wants to can include it in any blockchain they want for which it's a valid transaction. Here's a hypothetical conversation that outlines how I see things:

Bitcoin User: "Hey, I received a transaction and it looks like it was included in a block. That's good."

Me: "Yeah, that is good. Oh, and it looks like your transaction was also mined into another block, one that's extremely likely to be orphaned."

Bitcoin User: "Oh? Huh... well, hey, I guess that's good too, right? Now I'm covered in two scenarios. In the unlikely event that that second block isn't orphaned but instead orphans the first, I've still received the funds."

Me: "Yes, absolutely. But there's a small wrinkle. Some people, a minority, are actually intentionally extending the chain that includes that second block, even though it's pretty clearly in the process of being orphaned."

Bitcoin User: "Oh, well that's ... weird. And actually kinda sad. Maybe we should tell them?"

Me: "You could try. But they actually think they know what they're doing. In fact, they'd be willing to trade you real value for outputs that exist only on their in-the-process-of-being-orphaned chain, ones that don't exist on the much higher-PoW chain."

Bitcoin User: "Wait, what? Did these guys not read the whitepaper?"

Me: "I don't think they understood it."

Bitcoin User: "So in order to take advantage of these people's... well, let's just be nice and say 'idiosyncratic value preferences,' I just need to figure out a way to segregate my outputs so that I can sell off these orphaned 'coins' for more actual bitcoins?"

Me: "That's right."

Bitcoin User: "Hmm, I suppose that splitting my outputs might be a little tricky, but certainly doable. Thanks for the heads up."

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

It seems to me the way to do fork futures is simply to sell tokens that are redeemable for 1 BTC in a given side of a fork if that fork takes place. Steps:

0. The miners running BU or other EC implementations, or who are just ready to fork to bigger blocks, reach a supermajority, likely 75% of the hashpower or more.

1. The supermajority of miners communicate that they are planning to publish a 2MB block (for example) on a certain flag day to activate a hard fork (BU/Classic are merely tools the miners could use to make this happen)

2. Exchanges offer one-meg chain tokens (OMCTs) and two-meg chain tokens (TMCTs), redeemable after the flag day.

3. You deposit 1 BTC into the exchange's fork futures market.

4. You're credited with 1 OMCT and 1 TMCT (representing that fact upon such a fork, the 1 BTC you held would have become 1 BTC in each of the two chains).

5. You can offer to sell your OMCT for whatever price you want in TMCTs, and vice versa. Like you could offer 1 OMCT for 0.5 TMCT. If someone took the offer, you would have no OMCT and 1.5 TMCT.

6a. If the miners go through with the fork and the chain containing the 2MB block wins, you are credited with 1.5 BTC, a 50% profit.

6b. If miners go through with the fork and the 2MB chain loses, you lose your investment (since you sold all your 1MB chain tokens).

6c. If miners go through with the fork and it results in, say, a 10/90 split in favor of the 2MB chain, you are credited with 90% of 1.5 BTC, or 1.35 BTC, a 35% profit.

6d. If miners call off the fork, all trading is invalidated and your initial 1BTC deposit is returned (minus fees, presumably). This isn't a problem since no withdrawals were possible in the meantime anyway.

A few other cases: If you buy the extreme underdog, you stand to multiply your money several times over if it wins. If you buy the extremely dominant side, you stand to make only a few percent profit if it wins. If you don't trade at all, you will always break even in every scenario.

Note: The number of BTC going into the exchange will equal the number of BTC they have to pay out on either/both chain(s), so the exchange doesn't need to provide any additional liquidity.

This seems easy and fair. Most notably, BU and Core have nothing to do with it, other than being the tools that might be used to effect the fork (but who knows - miners staying on the 1MB chain might be running BU with EB1AD999999 for all anyone knows, and miners on the 2MB chain might be running Classic, BitcoinEC, or their own mod; clients and repos are simply irrelevant).

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

lol man luke-jr never fails to amuse me:


A PoW fork is less contentious than a blocksize increase! Haha.

When a PoW minority fork for bigger blocks was gaining traction the discussion went to /r/btcfork from /r/btc. But discussing a PoW fork on /r/bitcoin is apparently no altcoin talk (contrary to changing the blocksize!).

Everybody who doesn't condemn Theymos and /r/bitcoin is laughable at best.

 

[Dusty]

Have you seen LukeJr's "unbiased comparison between BU and SegWith"? LOL
I responded with a shorter one

 

[BldSwtTrs]

Hey guys, were you aware of this page and this quote from Maxwell back in 2011:

When techies hear about how bitcoin works they frequently stop at the word "flooding" and say "Oh-my-god! that can't scale!". The purpose of this article is to take an extreme example, the peak transaction rate of Visa, and show that bitcoin could technically reach that kind of rate without any kind of questionable reasoning, changes in the core design, or non-existent overlays. As such, it's merely an extreme example— not a plan for how bitcoin will grow to address wider needs (as a decentralized system it is the bitcoin using public who will decide how bitcoin grows)— it's just an argument that shows that bitcoin's core design can scale much better than an intelligent person might guess at first.

Dan rightly criticizes the analysis presented here— pointing out that operating at this scale would significantly reduce the decentralized nature of bitcoin: If you have to have many terabytes of disk space to run a "full validating" node then fewer people will do it, and everyone who doesn't will have to trust the ones who do to be honest. Dan appears (from his slides) to have gone too far with that argument: he seems to suggest that this means bitcoins will be controlled by the kind of central banks that are common today. His analysis fails for two reasons (and the second is the fault of this page being a bit misleading):

First, even at the astronomic scale presented here the required capacity is well within the realm of (wealthy) private individuals, and certainly would be at some future time when that kind of capacity was required. A system which puts private individuals, or at least small groups of private parties, on equal footing with central banks could hardly be called a centralized one, though it would be less decentralized than the bitcoin we have today. The system could also not get to this kind of scale without bitcoin users agreeing collectively to increase the maximum block size, so it's not an outcome that can happen without the consent of bitcoin users.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140328052630/https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Talk:Scalability#Response_from_Gregory_Maxwell

 

[chriswilmer]

@BldSwtTrs : Fascinating.

 

[AdrianX]

Is there no activation limit? Or are we just waiting for some miner to pull the trigger?

The economic insensitive guarantees the market makes the optimal activation limited. 51% being technically feasible but with maximum economic loss, and 100% being almost technically impossible but with maximum economic efficiency. And variations in between.

@jonny1000 can explain why we need an authority to set the activation limit.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I think this is called "proof of burn":

 

[yrral86]

At least Brian Armstrong/Coinbase isn't as gullible as the other exchanges:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/606fot/coinbase_responds_to_industry_letter/
(sorry, I'm not sure how to embed it)

 

[AdrianX]

Reading between the lines, Bitfury, flying to China and meeting with Jihan and tweeting let's not forget HK looks like PoB.

 

[Windowly]

It seems like BitClub is now signaling Bitcoin Unlimited as well? Or is it a joke? Their settings for the first block are: /EB1/AD999999999/

 

[Mengerian]

I've been paying attention to Vinny Lingham, as he has had some interesting commentary in the past and predictions about Bitcoin price.

Lately he has been warning of the so-called "dangers" of a hard fork, and his latest article ended with this revelation:

For full disclosure, I have sold the majority of my Bitcoin holdings (90%) earlier this month and I do not intend to repurchase any Bitcoins for long term holdings until there is clarity on a path forward.

Reminds me of @cypherdoc's old saying that most will not make it to the finish line without losing their coins (I probably paraphrased that badly).

A hard fork could end up instigating a significant transfer of wealth if people make the wrong bet.

It's strange, because what he sees as the worst thing that can happen, I see as the best. A hard fork, and decentralizing development, would make me hugely bullish.

 

[yrral86]

It seems like BitClub is now signaling Bitcoin Unlimited as well? Or is it a joke? Their settings for the first block are: /EB1/AD999999999/

That make sense if you want to support BU but don't want to support forking yet.

 

[torusJKL]

"Much less controversial than block size increases. In any case, there is no client software being promoted here, merely consensus-building." - luke-jr on changing the PoW algorithm.

I liked to mine on his pool back in the GPU days.
This is just ridiculous.
If he does not like BU he can run BitcoinEC, or make the necessary patches himself on top of Core.

 

[torusJKL]

Peter Todd is regarding the vote for bigger blocks a 51% attack:
What is happening here? These are all intelligent people.

 

[yrral86]

lol at that link:

Important Disclaimer:This initiative has NOT been endorsed or funded by Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Project, or Blockstream, Inc

 

[freetrader]

"Much less controversial than block size increases. In any case, there is no client software being promoted here, merely consensus-building." - luke-jr on changing the PoW algorithm.

I liked to mine on his pool back in the GPU days.
This is just ridiculous.
If he does not like BU he can run BitcoinEC, or make the necessary patches himself on top of Core.

I think he's tied himself in some Gordian Knots.

 

[KoKansei]

Peter Todd is regarding the vote for bigger blocks a 51% attack:
What is happening here? These are all intelligent people.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The meltdown continues.

Edit: Another thought: Maybe it's just me, but we seem to be seeing an influx of very clueless posts on /r/btc new. More evidence that the information damn is breaking. Things seem to be moving quickly.

 

[Bagatell]

More from Vinny Lingam (sic) - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-19/bitcoins-fork-road

Burn, DCG, burn.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

lol at that link:

Well, that's a too-specific disclaimer.


Funny, that "devs" are somewhat supposed to play a big role in Bitcoin. People write about a "fight between developers and miners". Wonder why Satoshi never mentioned the special role of developers in his whitepaper..

They really twisted this system in a short time. Miners (whose incentives are in principle aligned with bitcoins success) are now evil people and "the developers" (some of them having their own competing altcoins) are the white knights protecting Bitcoin from the bad miners.

I understand, a specific set of miners could be bad and there might be a reason to fork away from them. But the way, mining itself is attacked these days makes it very hard to believe, that this isn't a hostile takeover attempt to destroy the system itself. It really is Animal Farm the Bitcoin edition.

It might be a blow to the ego of some of these super-duper-devs, but developers have no say in this. This isn't about software design, it's economics.

edit: "in principle", not "principally".