Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[adamstgbit]

Wow people are really freaking out at the idea of miners orphaning blocks. Myself, I just can't wait till they start.

I would hope its not going to be with 51% hashing power. Something like 71% is more acceptable.
51% synthetic fork? that's somthing to freak out about...
Core's gone bonkers aswell with their UASF and or Pow Change.
So i guess we are even now.

 

[AdrianX]

@Mengerian the ideas expressed in this thread are an interpretation of the analysts of the facts in relation to bitcoin. I agree 100% with your sentiment, I was telling my wife the exact same thing last night. ;-) after the fork I expect a bull run like we have never seen before (those developers won't hedge that they are wrong and buy - they'll sell and bitcoin will be free for exponential growth.

Mining is going to grow too, I suspect the big chip manufacturers are going to enter the market if we hard fork to remove the block limit. - Looking at the graph I overlaid yesterday - people on reddit saying bitcoin is big and that's why growth is stagnant, bitcoin is a fraction of what it could become we are going to see some serious price growth and competition in mining. - we are going to flush out these limit thinkers, and continue distributing BTC - all the damage done over the last 2 years will be undone.

@Peter R is under attack today because he wrote about how bitcoin works. (I can't see the future, bitcoin may fail, because it succumbed to centralized control as miners lose controle. Still we have an asymmetric investment opportunity, I have no idea what it is, if the fork doesn't happen and it probably doesn't involve selling but it puts us outside of the mass hysteria.)

They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

The transaction limit is not a needed rule. simple as that, Peter just described, objectively and very professionally, how we remove that limit within the framework of the apolitical bitcoin rules enforced by PoW Nodes.

The thing that gives bitcoin its value is the network of users. If users have a legitimate reason for limiting the number of bitcoin transaction, it needs to be presented.

(we've had thousands of very creative people invent reasons for almost 6 years - and each one have been discussed and debunked independently and in combination)

Insisting individuals have a right to not upgrade is an acceptable position, however it's not a reason to limit the number of bitcoin transactions, this mentality is is a psychosis many bitcoin users are suffering.

Holding bitcoin is not dependent on limiting transaction volume, it's dependent on the users of the network accepting the private keys that protect valid bitcoin - the network is not degraded by allowing more connections, it's enhanced.

 

[Mengerian]

Another random thought. This time about Bitcoin in relation to Ethereum.

I'm not that up to speed on all the ins and outs of Ethereum, but it gives me the impression of being a developer-oriented system. Most of the people excited about it seem to come from a development background, and its selling point seem of be all kinds of fancy computer science stuff.

If Bitcoin manages a hard fork, that will represent a shift in power away from developers into the hands of investors (and the miners as their proxies).

So if the block size hard fork happens, we will be left with Bitcoin under Market Governance, competing against Ethereum under dev-led governance.
[doublepost=1490380618][/doublepost]

@Peter R is under attack today because he wrote about how bitcoin works.

Yup. Peter is under attack because he is is effective.

He's a good communicator and he cuts through all the bullshit.

He reminds me of the child who points out the emperor has no clothes.

There's so much smoke and mirrors about something so simple.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

The transaction limit is not a needed rule. simple as that,

A block is valid if the transactions in the block are valid and not spent.

 

[BldSwtTrs]

Small blockists are killing Bitcoin. For the first time I think it's possible that the market cap of Ethereum will exceed Bitcoin in the not so distant future.

They are destroying the main asset of Bitcoin: the network effect.

To make it worse, they think altcoins are rising because of the fork threat whereas it's because Bitcoin is internally constrained.

 

[Matthew Light]

I remember when computers and programming was only for the geeks. And then the internet - only for the nerds and misfits. And we had all these ideas about how the whole world was going to be changed, that we only halfway believed. Because in truth we never imagined that the entire world was going to come into our playground and join us on the net. But they did!

Cryptocurrency is the same thing. The geeks and nerds see what it can do, how it can remake the whole financial system just as it has completely changed how people communicate. But it takes a fully programmable cryptocurrency to really do that. And one that doesn't burn half of the electricity generated on the planet to function as a global monetary system.

Ethereum is the financial internet. And people with money and vision have been and are seeing that, and purchasing their share of the future financial system of the entire planet.

It could have been Bitcoin with better leadership and uptake of technological advance, but it's very likely going to be Ethereum instead.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Honest Luke Jr is almost on board with BU.
This confirms what I've long said: with a BUIP to remove the blocksize defaults (prompt user to choose settings) and the ability to turn AD off completely (instead of the max AD of 20,000 years, which although indistinguishable from infinity still breeds misunderstanding), BU may get a lot more support. These may seem like petty details, but in this information-warfare environment, clarity of message cannot be underestimated.

 

[AdrianX]

And one that doesn't burn half of the electricity generated on the planet to function as a global monetary system.

Bitcoin is designed to scale fast. The energy invested in bitcoin is proportional to the rate of growth. Energy being the governing limit to growth - Bitcoin network participants have to make a value judgment to divert energy from the economy into bitcoin if it grows too fast.

Mining efficiency manifests in growing infrastructure, the energy consumed is governed by bitcoin price.

Every 4 years the halving reduces the growth and distribution subsidy - reducing the income of PoW energy consumers by about 49%. The trend is for energy consumption to converge on the marginal cost of the production of energy necessary to secure the network.

Arguably more efficient than Ethereum, and still more efficient than Ethereum at equilibrium as PoS is susceptible to the same misallocation as the business cycles we have in our managed economy today.

 

[go1111111]

I'm a bit concerned about the endorsement I see of the 'attack the old chain' strategy. It makes it harder for users to choose the network that best satisfies their preferences.

Yes, I know Peter explicitly said that he was describing the game theory of the situation, not what ought to happen, but part of that game theory is that if users think that miners are acting like jerks, then users might do a PoW-resetting HF. The knowledge that users might do this is a powerful check on bad miner behavior.

If miners actually do attack the old chain, I'd support a PoW resetting HF not only for the small block chain, but also the large block chain.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Wow people are really freaking out at the idea of miners orphaning blocks. Myself, I just can't wait till they start. I don't want to have to sell off my bitcoin horde and buy I don't know what coin to replace it.

All of these people bitching and moaning about Peter R pointing out a core element of bitcoin's economic game theory and somehow trying to frame it as a kind of moral outrage are starting to really get under my skin!

What happened to all the cypherpunks who actually have a firm understanding of what is and is not coercion? Is bitcoin really going to drown in a sea of idiocy, smothered by people who are clearly lesser thinkers than the founding members?

I have always thought that Satoshi staying out of this debate was a wise move. Bitcoin must prove that it does not need a leader. And yet, here we are, with what seems to be a sizable number of ecosystem participants behaving exactly like lemmings as they look for someone to lead them off a cliff, a role that a few sad opportunists are all too happy to fill.

If you were Satoshi and you still had control over at least some of your original keys so you could still establish your identity to the community, how bad would you let this political shitshow get before saying enough is enough?

I think I need another drink...

Edit: Rosenfeld replied to me:


I can't even... I think I need another 10 drinks...

It's all about morals, from the beginning. There have never been questions like: How much can we do? What do we risk? How can we orchestrate the thing? It has all been just about morals: Think about decentralization! Who care's about our west africa full archival node with 178 peers? We can only hardfork with absolute consensus! Respect the work of the Core devs! You shall not promote a fork! And so on. It's always about moral, because a significant group of people think that Bitcoin can only survive with a silent social coercion forcing all people to use the same software ... and this group has a significant group of followers which think such a coercion can not be done if we don't obey to the authority of someone. It's not important who, but it's important to stick with a lord if choosen. After all, it has nothing to do with coercion! It is the free will and the magic of consensus!

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Small blockists are killing Bitcoin. For the first time I think it's possible that the market cap of Ethereum will exceed Bitcoin in the not so distant future.

They are destroying the main asset of Bitcoin: the network effect.

To make it worse, they think altcoins are rising because of the fork threat whereas it's because Bitcoin is internally constrained.

Small-blocker: "No, don't you see? Ethereum isn't starting to eat Bitcoin's lunch because Core's refusal to scale has allowed Bitcoin to become increasingly slow, expensive, and unreliable. It's obviously because of the looming risk of a 'contentious hard fork.' Don't you understand that a contentious hard fork risks creating a chain split?! That would obviously be a complete disaster as was clearly proven by the, uh, Ethereum / Ethereum Class...."

*trails off*

*cognitive dissonance increases causing subject to become visibly agitated*

"SegWit! SegWit, god damn it! We just need those stupid miners to activate SegWit! That will fix everything! And if they won't do it, we will with a 'user-activated soft fork' or a PoW change."

Me: "But wouldn't either of those involve a 'contentious fork'?"

Small-blocker: "Uh..."

*cognitive dissonance reaches dangerous levels*

*subject curls into fetal position*

*muttering*

"SegWit... Schnorr... Lightning... overwhelming consensus... Roger Ver... contentious... Jihan... Schnorr... SegWit..."

 

[AdrianX]

I'm a bit concerned about the endorsement I see of the 'attack the old chain' strategy.

It's not an attack it's how PoW uses an apolitical mechanism to enforce the "needed" rules.

is the transaction limit a needed rule?
[doublepost=1490388879][/doublepost]

Think about decentralization! Who care's about our west africa full archival node with 178 peers?

LOL this argument always falls flat when you look at the data. - there are a total of 4 nodes in west Africa - the bandwidth to West Africa may be limited but it can handle many more than 40,000 nodes. >1MB is not going to impact the total number of nodes.

if you go back and look at some small block fundamentalists who say what about nodes in Bolivia,or Uganda, or Guatemala or Morocco, if we increase the block size they will be forces to drop off. - turned out they don't have any full bitcoin nodes.

 

[Peter R]

On RBF:

Me (normative statement): "While miners may technically be able to replace first-seen transactions with double-spent versions, I don't think we should encourage that behaviour by promoting RBF. One of the main points of Bitcoin is to prevent double spending, and RBF makes double spending easier."

Core (descriptive statement): "You cannot stop miners from replacing transactions; if they think it is their advantage to do so, they will do it.

On preventing a split:

Me (descriptive statement): "Miners will likely orphan blocks from non upgraded miners to encourage them to upgrade. If a minority chain emerges anyways, majority miners will likely cause continual re-orgs to prevent transactions from confirming to mitigate replay risk."

Core (normative statement): "You are an unethical man, Peter R! You're encouraging an attack on the very foundation of Bitcoin!!"

***

OK, if we're going to talk norms, then in my opinion RBF is a much greater "attack on the foundation of Bitcoin" than miners orphaning blocks to prevent a blockchain split. With RBF, miners would be acting contrary to the main point of Bitcoin (i.e., to prevent double spending), while by preventing a blockchain split, miners would be helping the blockchain to converge and thus help preserve the ledger's network effect.

So I don't really see how these "ethical-style" arguments are going to be effective one way or another, because whether you see some action as good or bad depends on the lens through which you're looking.

 

[go1111111]

@AdrianX If you're referring to the last line of the whitepaper, I'm pretty sure Satoshi was referring to people following the longest chain as the mechanism to enforce new rules, not the act of going out of your way to mess with another chain.
[doublepost=1490390741,1490389733][/doublepost]@Peter R , that's a really good analogy.

I also agree that we shouldn't have encouraged RBF. I disagree that replaying transactions should be considered 'double spending' (as I discuss here), but agree that keeping users from accidentally having their transactions replayed is valuable. IMO that should be balanced against the desires of other users to actually continue using the old chain if they want to.

It seems to me like casting the orphaning of blocks on the smaller chain as 'replay protection' is a clever rhetorical tactic ("So, Core, you think you can pressure BU into breaking compatibility with the old tx format under the guise of 'replay protection'? Well, if you're so concerned about replay protection, boy do I have the solution for you. How do you like these apples??!"), but doesn't actually balance the accidental harm vs. preventing users from making a choice tradeoff very well.

If this is simply a Machiavellian tactic to achieve BU's goals, it may also be effective in that now we have a bunch of Core supporters defending the principle of giving users a choice, which is one of BU's talking points and undercuts their argument for doing SegWit as a soft fork instead of hard fork.
[doublepost=1490391176][/doublepost]@Roger_Murdock Your hypothetical convo between the big blocker and small blocker would make a fantastic top level post on reddit.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

On RBF:

Me (normative statement): "While miners may technically be able to replace first-seen transactions with double-spent versions, I don't think we should encourage that behaviour by promoting RBF. One of the main points of Bitcoin is to prevent double spending, and RBF makes double spending easier."

Core (descriptive statement): "You cannot stop miners from replacing transactions; if they think it is their advantage to do so, they will do it.

On preventing a split:

Me (descriptive statement): "Miners will likely orphan blocks from non upgraded miners to encourage them to upgrade. If a minority chain emerges anyways, majority miners will likely cause continual re-orgs to prevent transactions from confirming to mitigate replay risk."

Core (normative statement): "You are an unethical man, Peter R! You're encouraging an attack on the very foundation of Bitcoin!!"

***

OK, if we're going to talk norms, then in my opinion RBF is a much greater "attack on the foundation of Bitcoin" than miners orphaning blocks to prevent a blockchain split. With RBF, miners would be acting contrary to the main point of Bitcoin (i.e., to prevent double spending), while by preventing a blockchain split, miners would be helping the blockchain to converge and thus help preserve the ledger's network effect.

So I don't really see how these "ethical-style" arguments are going to be effective one way or another, because whether you see some action as good or bad depends on the lens through which you're looking.

Another thing that's so ridiculous about these people purporting to get the vapors over the idea that the hash power majority might attempt to "kill off" the minority chain via a "51% attack" is that these are the same people who claim to love "soft forks" as a strategy for "preventing chain splits." Well, what is a "soft fork" if not a built-in 51% attack on anyone who might try to stay behind on the old rule set? That's what prevents the chain split (or rather, that's what makes a chain split less likely by forcing a disgruntled minority to coordinate their own counter fork if they want to go their own way and avoid being swept along by the change).

Well, guess what? A hard forking majority can do the same thing via an explicit 51% attack on a minority attempting to stay behind. It's just a little harder to coordinate because participating miners need to sacrifice some hash power to pull it off. Whoop-de-doo.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@Roger_Murdock It's different when they do it, obviously.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

(Posted this on Slack and people seemed to like it so I thought I'd share it here as well)

On the oft-repeated claim that "SegWit IS a block size increase":

"Oh sure, it's an incredibly-tiny, one-time, and slow-motion increase in the effective block size limit -- one whose extremely modest capacity benefits will only be realized slowly over time if and when people convert to SegWit-style transactions. And it comes with a mountain of technical debt and a huge arbitrary, economics-changing discount for certain types of data that will also make future increases in capacity harder to implement... But putting those little details aside for the moment, didn't you people say you wanted larger blocks? You're obviously just impossible to please."

 

[bluemoon]

So I don't really see how these "ethical-style" arguments are going to be effective one way or another, because whether you see some action as good or bad depends on the lens through which you're looking.

This problem of different lenses arises even when two sides are acting in good faith. In that case each side is generally willing to seek to clarify the differences in the lenses to aid understanding and find resolution, perhaps through compromise.

But BSCore won't come clean about which lens they use.

I noticed Adam Back complaining again today about the 'Blockstream Core' characterisation. But I have yet to see him discuss frankly the extent of the links and influences, past and present, between Blockstream and Core: instead he simply denies them.

Nor do Blockstream ever explain candidly the deal or understanding arrived at between them and their investors.

They act to undermine the Bitcoin of Satoshi's white paper, yet disingenuously deny any such intention when challenged. They won't spell out what they are really about: it would be too damaging.

And censorship is of a piece with these sleights of lens.

I don't see how ethical style arguments can arrive at common truths or a common understanding when one side has no interest in such, only in finding ammunition for its 'attacks' while hiding information as to its true intentions and motivation.

 

[solex]

BUIR-2017-03-21
Statement regarding the full node terminations requiring hot-fix patches

Our incident report is out for the assert() exploits.
Painful in the writing, and a distraction for everyone involved.
Thanks to @catlasshrugged for his significant effort there.

The important takeaway is that whatever bugs may still exist in BU are far smaller than the Godzilla of bugs which is the 1MB limit, right at this moment so serious that it can drive Bitcoin into becoming the MySpace of crypto, and into the history books. All we are missing are Ron Paul "It's Happening" gifs with "MySpace" desktop instead of rainbows.

Calling "on the fence" miners. Get that BU hash-rate over 50% and help fix the 1MB Godzilla bug.

 

[albin]

Suppose some adversary decided to spool up a large number (in the hundreds for example) of fake nodes identifying as BU user-agent, and then chose an opportune time to suddenly disconnect all of them at once.

Is it plausible that this kind of fabricated PR event could gain traction in the current fake-facts hashtag-BUlogic cesspool environment? I don't find it hard to believe that the claim could survive for days that there's supposedly some new horrible zero day, and "incompetent shill astroturf BU devs can't even identify what's wrong".