Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[go1111111]

So, it would be wise to kill it asap, and migrate its users to a chain with a different PoW, thus protected from this kind of attack.

...

Bottom line: the minority chain must clean fork and become an altcoin with different rules and miners

That should be up to users of the new fork to decide. One of the reasons BU folks think Core is lame is because Core tries to force their solutions on people. This kind of tactic is pretty similar.

I understand that the kind of position you describe is a good way of trolling Core supporters by using their own tactics against them, but I don't think that's actually a helpful strategy.

I also see it as unethical, hence why I think the majority chain should change its PoW if it's apparent that the majority of our miners are messing with another network against the wishes of its users.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@go1111111 You don't buy the argument that two coins using the same PoW are in an inherently adversarial situation?

In ethics it's sometimes called a "lifeboat situation." You have a lifeboat only big enough for one person, but two people are on it and it is at risk of sinking. One of you simply has to get off and swim (change the PoW).

So it seems to me that unless you want to argue that it is the majority's job to change the PoW, that burden must fall to the minority. If the minority refuses, they effectively point a loaded gun at the majority (should they ever regain majority, as of course is their aspiration). One of them must attack in self-defense, out of prudence.

Regarding freedom of choice: Freedom to live on using the same PoW here equates to freedom to directly endanger the other chain. It is like the freedom to climb on someone's lifeboat and put them in an inherently adversarial situation. It stretches the word "freedom" to mean nearly the opposite.

Why ETC hasn't been reorged by ETH miners we can only guess, but if ETC rose and threatened to overtake ETH, I don't think they would be safe. Morally, it should be fine to attack someone running at you with a loaded gun. Practically, it is unsustainable to expect such a lifeboat condition to be stable.

 

[albin]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

I think it might get even more complicated for altcoins, because all PoW coins that don't have specialized hardware are in competition, because they all compete for exactly the same hardware, the only difference is your mining software.

 

[albin]

Am I missing something?

I read through BIP 148.

I see absolutely nothing in there that indicates that it could ever work without conducting a 51% attack.

 

[AdrianX]

Whaf if the market weed out Bitcoin and choose Ethereum?

@BldSwtTrs I can be wrong ;-) - some huge big shifts in consciousness happening in the crypto space atm. Long term I don't think Ethereum will dominate - it solves some complex problems and will still grow, however bitcoin solves the biggest problem of all, "Money", bitcoin does not need to run my coffee maker in a trust free environment, it just needs to be digital cash that every one can understand.

 

[AdrianX]

I think this should be BU's new slogan of the month.

I was exploring that earlier. Money velocity is not constrained. So long as the value of an average transaction increases money velocity increases. I.E. if a bitcoin was $100,000 in value and a transaction limit of 2000 tx per block would require the average transaction to be 100 times what it is today. Say the average bitcoin transaction today is $1000 in value then for velocity to increase we'd need the same translation volume and the each bitcoin transaction to be $100,000 in value.

A block size limit constrains Transactions. The difference between MV=PT and MV=PQ is

Q = output produced by the economy
T = Transactions or Output.

Macro economists can't measure Transactions or Output in the economy. so they measure "Q" which is GDP in bitcoin we can accurately measure Transactions, but not GDP. so we can use the base formula.
MV=PT

T and M are constrained Velocity and Price levels are not. Adoption shrinks as velocity increases - the percentage of people who send $100,000 in a single transaction is very small.

 

[VeritasSapere]

My friend David had some great points about why adding replay protection is bad, so I asked him if he could write something a bit longer and if it would be ok if I posted it. So here it is:

In private discussions over the past few days, I've asked several Core developers to explain why weakening Bitcoin's consensus mechanism by adding replay protection is a good idea. Strangely, it didn't seem to have struck any of them that doing so is in any way problematic. But it is, and it is worrisome that none of them understood why.

Why is replay protection bad? The short answer is that it hurts us all by weakening bitcoin's consensus mechanism. The high cost of forking is part of this consensus mechanism. It is what preserves bitcoin's network effect and its value. And so we want it to be expensive for people to fork bitcoin, because the centralization of economic activity on the network is what makes bitcoin valuable and useful.

When I pushed Core developers to explain why they now believe forking should be easier, the only real attempt at an answer came from one developer who claimed that bitcoin has a moral obligation to protect "value" on minority chains. Except that it doesn't, because "value" doesn't exist in duplicate form on the network. Bitcoin guarantees users the ability to send their coins out into the network, but it only guarantees this once. And there are very good reasons for this.

The most important is that without replay protection, users have to CHOOSE whether they spend their coins on the majority fork (where the coins are more valuable) or the minority fork (where they are less valuable). The loss of wealth that comes from spending money on a minority fork is part of bitcoin's consensus pressure: it is what drives people to support the majority fork. So while people who want to support the minority chain are of course free to do so, the fact that they take an economic hit for doing so is useful: it is what drives the network to consensus on a majority chain in the first place.

In this sense, what is replay protection but insurance for losers? Letting users spend their coins twice undermines the influence of users have in determining for themselves which fork is really the proper consensus chain. And this is hardly the only perverse incentive replay protection creates. Consider Gresham's Law, for instance, the principle that "bad money drives out good money" (i.e. people hold valuable assets and dump low-value assets). In the cryptocurrency world, we saw this happen with the ETH/ETC fork when many users dumped coins on a fork they believed rapidly would lose value. A moment's reflection will show that this would not have happened without replay protection since it makes zero sense for anyone to spend a valuable coin in order to sell a less valuable one. But what distortionary pressures replay protection introduced! At a minimum, the trading activity that resulted from the frenzied dumping created an active market that incentivized miners, users and exchanges to support the minority chain and diluted consensus in the ETH community. Had the chain been left to fend for its own on the basis of actual usage it is much less likely the ETC fork would have succeeded: most exchanges would never have added it.

So what is the campaign to add replay protection to bitcoin? Considered politically, it seems to be an ill-considered attempt to make miners the only parties in the bitcoin ecosystem who run any real risks from a fork, and disempower users and exchanges by giving them incentives to vote for both rather than simply one fork. Replay protection gives exchanges a profitable road to support minority forks. It lets users gamble with "free money" and allows developers leech off bitcoin's network effect when forking. But this is far from costless behavior, as we all pay far higher costs in the long-term, not only through the erosion of the consensus pressures that encourage us to reach consensus, but also through the way easy forking makes important economic constraints like bitcoin's 21 million coin cap meaningless through the debasement of the currency and the dilution of the economic activity it supports.

David currently runs an awesome business in China called Wesecretary, and has been active in the bitcoin scene there for years. Wesecretary is a concierge service over WeChat that accepts Bitcoin. Rising fees and Circle dropping bitcoin as an option have caused his Bitcoin sales to drop off precipitously. Funny how almost anyone that actually uses bitcoin understands the damage being done by network congestion. I've invited him to this thread, hopefully he can join in discussion here.

edit: yes it should have read "replay" protection and not "relay." updated!

This is a good post, and a great argument, however one of the underlying premises of this argument is wrong, which also makes the rest of the argument incorrect.

Not adding replay protection does not prevent someone from spending their coins on both chains. There are several ways to split coins after a fork, most of these methods are more advanced however, by adding a form of replay protection it just makes it easier for everyday users to split their coins themselves instead of less advanced users potentially losing coins.

You used Ethereum Classic as an example of how much better it would have been if there was no replay protection, your facts are wrong here unfortunately, neither side introduced replay protection during the ETH split and the split still persisted. There is no way to make people choose between two chains, they end up with coins on both sides of the fork regardless which I do think not think is a bad thing. It is important to see this from both sides, we want people to have this freedom of choice since that freedom does cut both ways.

 

[adamstgbit]

attentive users are seeing past the BullShit and getting pissed off

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1842146.msg18335776#msg18335776

 

[KoKansei]

@adamstgbit I am surprised to see so much truth on bitcointalk.org. Are they loosening up the censorship regime?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@adamstgbit

Pretty high-powered post with some great quotes. I bet a lot of Core supporters are feeling this way recently.

 

[VeritasSapere]

@go1111111 You don't buy the argument that two coins using the same PoW are in an inherently adversarial situation?

In ethics it's sometimes called a "lifeboat situation." You have a lifeboat only big enough for one person, but two people are on it and it is at risk of sinking. One of you simply has to get off and swim (change the PoW).

So it seems to me that unless you want to argue that it is the majority's job to change the PoW, that burden must fall to the minority. If the minority refuses, they effectively point a loaded gun at the majority (should they ever regain majority, as of course is their aspiration). One of them must attack in self-defense, out of prudence.

Regarding freedom of choice: Freedom to live on using the same PoW here equates to freedom to directly endanger the other chain. It is like the freedom to climb on someone's lifeboat and put them in an inherently adversarial situation. It stretches the word "freedom" to mean nearly the opposite.

Why ETC hasn't been reorged by ETH miners we can only guess, but if ETC rose and threatened to overtake ETH, I don't think they would be safe. Morally, it should be fine to attack someone running at you with a loaded gun. Practically, it is unsustainable to expect such a lifeboat condition to be stable.

I think the situation currently with the alternative cryptocurrencies proves that multiple cryptocurrencies sharing the same POW is not a problem. There are many cryptocurrencies that use the same POW algorithm and it has proven not be a problem, we can take that a step further considering it is trivial to change mining software when most of these cryptocurrencies are still using CPU/GPU.

If anything rather then considering it detrimental I could argue it is mutually beneficial, especially in the case of ASICs having a greater total value for mining is better since it would increase the incentive for ASIC manufacturing creating a more decentralized mining ecosystem. While at the same time allowing the mining industry to better switch between cryptocurrencies as values constantly shift, which allows for a more healthy and safe economic environment for miners which could further stir increased mining decentralization.

 

[Inca]

So I did something i haven't for a long time and bothered to venture into /r/bitcoin where I am banned to see how the the propaganda effort is being presently directed.

It seems the meme of the moment is that Core have delivered their wonderful code upgrade and that miners are stopping the network from upgrading - it is up to the users it seems to break the deadlock and marshall behind Core.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see some more downwards price volatility and then Core actively begin to promote this UASF.

It seems crazy to me that rather than give ground on the blocksize issue, a single network parameter, that Core are willing to change the fundamentals of the entire project with barmy ideas like UASF and changing the POW mechanism. Long ago I came to the conclusion that actions speak louder than words and that there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever they are acting maliciously to damage bitcoin and prevent it growing. (exponential fees - 'the fee market is working', hours to confirm a transaction - 'bitcoin was designed to run with full blocks', strong economic arguments for onboarding new users and growing the ecosystem x100 with on chain scaling - 'decentralisation, we dont' want paypal 2 (whilst working a company hoping to become paypal 2, eh Greg?).)

I think the only way forward is for bitcoin to either crash in price at this point leading to the ejection of blockstream/core or a forced and highly contentious hard fork. Either way get on with it so I can buy back in..!

 

[AdrianX]

If you understand bitcoin a hard fork of this nature is not contentious.

Supporting price from my perspective makes the fork more probable.

I'm on the wrong side of this from a trade perspective.

I think the miners will pull through.
[doublepost=1490547075,1490546441][/doublepost]
this was interesting Google trends

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin fork

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2009-01-03 2017-03-26&q=hard fork bitcoin

the 2013 0.7.0 hard fork to 0.8.1 showed market confidence increased after the fork. (I haven't pulled the data or the dates, the video linked about talked about it.

looking at the trend over the last 2 years of we need to appeal to a bigger audience as as they are out there looking for both sides of the story.

 

[lunar]

@AdrianX

Quantity theory of money

My instinct here is that the equation doesn't quite work for cryptocurrencies, or at least it was never intended to be used as such. Certainly Copernicus through to Fisher and Mises didn't have that in mind. ;-)

Nevertheless, the problem is perhaps not with the theory, rather the definition of the terms, because they all did all have Gold/Silver in mind, Bitcoins intended role models. My gut says the past is a little vague or unmeasurable and with cryptocurrencies we can actually advance the theory by being more precise.

Over the years i've searched quite a bit on this subject and yet to find a sufficiently convincing explanation. (usually from gold money crowd - honestly most are so terrible, that I stop reading after the first paragraph- if you know of any good ones let me know) Leads me to believe there is still much we can pin down, that might expand our understanding. When I get a moment, i'll start a new thread, & compile some of the better quotes to get us started.

 

[adamstgbit]

http://www.coindesk.com/charts-determining-ideal-block-size-bitcoin/

I've been talking about this "ideal block size thing" for a while now.
I hope people read this, and there fears about massive "unlimited blocks" filled with "unbound TX demand" will go away.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

I collected some relevant dates into a timeline of sorts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/61mxuj/block_size_limit_debate_history_lesson/

Compare to the last chart on this page:

https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

 

[awemany]

@Justus Ranvier : Bitcoin has the flu.

Nice write-up.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Charlie Shrem: "Hey, buy this bottle of water from me for a hundred bucks. Paying $100 not to die an agonizing death from dehydration is totally worth it. #H2O"

Me: "Well... yeah, I suppose that's true. But you know you're not the only game in town, right? So that might not prove to be such a great business model."

 

[79b79aa8]

paying 8c for the same is better.

 

[Richy_T]

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

Perfect. Except that a valid transaction is also not spent by definition so that's redundant.

Perhaps this is why Core were averse to x-thin (and whatever their version is) until they had a fire lit under them. It peels back another layer of obfuscation.