Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[awemany]

On the infallibility of our Core coder gods:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10106

This is not a DOS-able bug in any critical path. But it is an out-of-bounds access bug.

It is also a bug for which our beloved Greg would have likely attempted to chide BU as 'horribly incompetent'.

I found this by just cursorily browsing Core's current code. To a capable programmer, this is a pretty obvious error. It sat for months in Core's repo.

It also shipped in Core's 0.14 release. BU is not affected AFAICS, as it didn't have the reorg in bitcoin-tx.cpp.

This is a pretty good case why there's no reason at all for Core to try to put themselves above anyone else.

 

[Richy_T]

@bluemoon
Sounds pretty short-sighted for a miner to let Bitcoin die for a soon-to-be PoS coin..

Could be they are not looking to let it die but maybe manipulate the market a little (a risky strategy)

 

[Peter R]

Has anybody read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War? I am currently thinking about some unexpected strategies.

Are there some people interested in formulating such strategies?

Are you in bitcoinunlimited Slack? If you want an invite, send me your email address in a PM.

 

[solex]

I think the recent drop of Bitcoin's market share of crypto coins is a reaction on the braindrain of recent years. Since Altcoins emerged, Bitcoin ever had a structural braindrain, as you can get faster rich with Altcoins and do more innovation. But in a sane relation, this just makes Bitcoin stronger, as Bitcoin is the god standard of Altcoins and can benefit by learning of Altcoins. But current braindrop is something else. It is rather caused by intolerance, toxicity, trolling, stalling, censorship, dislogic, propaganda, conspiracy theories and so on. It's not really attractive for free minds to participate here.

Great post Christoph, and insightful into how the unresolved technical debate has poisoned the earlier atmosphere of enthusiasm when Bitcoiners cheered each new company that adopted bitcoin usage. Free minds feel more rewarded elsewhere and the next challenge after the HF will be winning them back.

 

[albin]

This is so exciting, I got twitter blocked by Samson Mow, and there is absolutely no recent interaction in tweet chains whatsoever that would clue me in as to why.

That's so flattering that he went out of his way to decide that I was too dangerous to see his garbage!

Edit: Beautyon also at exactly the same time.... isn't that interesting?

 

[AdrianX]

here is a quote from Satoshi the first I've read that suggests why the block limit was added.
Block limit was added July 14, 2010 - this quote August 04, 2010

Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01. The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.

Bitcoin is practical for smaller transactions than are practical with existing payment methods. Small enough to include what you might call the top of the micropayment range. But it doesn't claim to be practical for arbitrarily small micropayments.

 

[freetrader]

 

[albin]

@freetrader

The (unintentional?) comedy of the title of that piece is too much!

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Great post Christoph, and insightful into how the unresolved technical debate has poisoned the earlier atmosphere of enthusiasm when Bitcoiners cheered each new company that adopted bitcoin usage. Free minds feel more rewarded elsewhere and the next challenge after the HF will be winning them back.

Thanks you. Yesterday I read the old "flexible blocksize" bitcointalk thread of 2013 ... it's funny how nearly everybody except Maxwell, Todd, you and Justus changed their mind. By now the debate totally poisened the atmosphere.

Maybe the major problem is:

One side is thrilled by the beauty of SegWit (solving so many problems with one strike), don't understand how anybody can reject such a solution except from malice and ego; they love, how Lightning will solve all scaling problems, and are embarassed by those which dare about blocksizes after it is proofed that LN is the superior solution while Bitcoin can't scale to visa level. Let's say this are the geeks, the engineers. They see Bitcoin as a machine, some thousand lines of code.

The other side is more interested in money. They don't care about the beauty of LN, they just see: at best 1.7 MB, probably in real just 1.3 or 1.4, but attacks up to 4 MB - WTF? This is in no way a scaling solution and it is a shame that it is pesented as such. They don't care much about LN now, because LN is not here, will not be for some time, and is just proofen by developers love and not by the market, like real Bitcoin transactions are. This side is shocked seing the growth of Bitcoin transactions choked, as they understand that Bitcoins only inner value is based on the payment system. This is the side more of economists. They see Bitcoin as a market.

 

[SanchoPanza]

¡Hola!
Buen día a todos.

I have been following the journey of the Bitcoin protocol for a while.
Today I present to you a small proposal I came up with for improving the BIP9 voting:

Generalized version bits voting (provisionally: 'bip-genvbvoting' aka 'BIP9+')

I posted this to bitcoin-dev too, for some more discussion, but am still waiting for it to appear.
In the meantime, your feedback is appreciated.

Muchas gracias!

 

[Norway]

Is the 130 MW mining facility in the Xinjiang province waking up?

Speculation:
- Antpool just got a new mining node called yn1. (Short for Yining in Xinjiang? It's close to the huge Ili river, could be the power source for the facility...)

- Canoe pool, who bought at least parts of this facility, has bumped up their hashrate the last 24 hours: https://www.canoepool.com/

**********************************************
Source of this speculation:

***********************************************
EDIT: According to the article in the reddit-link, the facility is powered by solar and wind, so the river might not be related.

But speculating more: The two blocks from yn1 (459378 and 459379) were in a row! It's almost like they turned on the mega facility, mined two blocks in a row as a test, and turned it off. Is Jihan flexing muscles?

 

[SanchoPanza]

https://np.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_uncensored/comments/626h9i/generalized_version_bits_voting_bip9/

Maybe I should explain a little more. The benefits of the 'Generalized version bits voting' BIP are several:

• not limited to fixed 95% threshold / 2016 window for all bits - can configure each bit with individual threshold and window size
  
  
• specification will explicitly apply not only to soft forks, but also hard forks
  
  
• can better represent changes with varying degrees of contentiousness
  
  
• re-uses BIP9 state machine, so quite familiar to most

As an afterthought, this BIP could be used to facilitate a reduction in the activation threshold of SegWit, e.g. to 75% without interfering with existing soft-fork activation criteria.

P.S. I cannot find the post below in the 'New' queue of /r/Bitcoin. Not sure what I did wrong.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/626jch/generalized_version_bits_voting_bip9_xpost/

 

[Windowly]

Is the 130 MW mining facility in the Xinjiang province waking up?

Speculation:
- Antpool just got a new mining node called yn1. (Short for Yining in Xinjiang? It's close to the huge Ili river, could be the power source for the facility...)

- Canoe pool, who bought at least parts of this facility, has bumped up their hashrate the last 24 hours: https://www.canoepool.com/

You might be right. As far as I see from news reports it is in the Hefeng Industrial Park which is in Hoboksar Mongol Autonomous County. This is a different county than Yining (or Ilii as it's called in some maps), but Yining might be the biggest city near the park?

There was a big power plant that was planned for that industrial park once but according to wikipedia the plant was shelved. You can see though from the link to the big power plant that it's a decent distance north from Yining. (Xinjiang province is huge and takes more than a day train travel from one side to another.)

Update: One worrisome thing about having a bitcoin mining facility in Xinjiang -- you have lots of cheap electricity but the internet there is worse than the rest of China by far. There's like a second firewall guarding that province, and every once in a while they block internet wholesale for weeks at a time. (Here's hoping that industrial parks have special internet access lines that the cities and towns don't have.)

 

[torusJKL]

Why is there a second firewall?

I'm certain they have some agreement or special access otherwise it would be foolish to take the risk to be cut off for weeks,

 

[Richy_T]

Let's say this are the geeks, the engineers. They see Bitcoin as a machine, some thousand lines of code.

I don't think this is fair. A lot of people who are opposing this are geeks and engineers with a bit of experience that know that trusting your success to untried and unreleased systems is not a wise idea and that certain ways of working only leads to more problems down the road.

Core is more like a newb sysadmin who wants to upgrade a mission critical system with beta software during business hours with no management approval and no rollback plan.
[doublepost=1490801612][/doublepost]Thought: a fork with (near) 50% hashrate might actually not be a bad thing, providing a "backup" should there prove to be an issue with the fork. I can't see miners going along with this though.

 

[Tomothy]

¡Hola!
Buen día a todos.

I have been following the journey of the Bitcoin protocol for a while.
Today I present to you a small proposal I came up with for improving the BIP9 voting:

Generalized version bits voting (provisionally: 'bip-genvbvoting' aka 'BIP9+')

I posted this to bitcoin-dev too, for some more discussion, but am still waiting for it to appear.
In the meantime, your feedback is appreciated.

Muchas gracias!

Hi SanchoPanza, I'm not a programmer so I only understand what this means based on your lay person's explanation. Am I to assume, you are essentially suggesting adding (for lack of a better word) a "flag" expanding the user bit's area, so that someone would signal their preference for changes moving forward? In what they say is acceptable, they are also saying at what threshold an event would need to occur for them to be 'ok' with the effects? I'm not the biggest fan of segwit as a SF at the moment, so I don't particularly like helping SW activate as a SF but recognize the importance of allowing expanded up-gradable capabilities of bitcoin in a more streamlined fashion, which I think is what the version bits flagging is suggesting? I thought this has also already been proposed too though?

In simple terms, can you explain this to me like I'm ten years old?

 

[SanchoPanza]

Hi Tomothy, thanks for looking at it!

in ELI10 terms: we don't expand the number of versionbits, but we make the threshold, window size and maybe the grace period configurable for EACH bit, in the software.

Everyone running the same software would e.g. agree that 'bit 1' means SegWit and activates at 95% with a 2016 block window (for counting up the support) and a certain starttime, timeout and time between LOCKED_IN and ACTIVATED.

But 'bit 2' could be another, completely different BIP which activates at 63% with a window of 1000 blocks and e.g. twice the grace period, because the BIP author calculated that the ecosystem might take longer to adapt.

And so on for all the 29 bits - all individually configurable.

There would still be a need between projects to coordinate on the use of the versionbits.
This is unchanged.
And the basic algorithm of BIP9 would still be followed, except that the numbers are different for each bit.

For a better description of the benefits I've opened discussions on here (in the linked thread) and on Reddit here:

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6287pu/i_am_sancho_panza_author_of_the_recent/

I hope I explained that reasonably well, otherwise please let us use the BIP9+ thread in this forum to discuss all questions!

 

[lunar]

@Zangelbert Bingledack quite a following you're developing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/627fq2/true_bitcoin_diaries_the_bitcoin_wars_a_gathering/

It's sad times indeed when simply speaking the rational, bleeding obvious, truth is of notoriety.

Keep it up gents. Having been in the dark and repressed for 5 years our voice is finally shining a bright light on their irrational, toxic, propaganda spewing, controlling junta.

​

"This truth is so simple that's why Blockstream/Core have to create all kinds of red herrings/bullshit excuses/censorships/trolls to justify keeping the blocksize at 1MB. If they stop distracting you from the actual and simple problem for just 1 second, you'll immediately find out they've been lying their asses off for years." Alex BTC - part of another great bct rant.

- - - - - - - - - -​

ps @Zangelbert Bingledack Thanks for the link to the Frédéric Bastiat, essay. At first I thought ,holy wall of text. Turned out to be a great read with some fascinating historical context. It's amazing how we humans keep repeating the same mistakes. Particularly enjoyed the 6franc pane of glass. Sure Bastiat would have appreciated the irony that his essay would stand testament to the unseen effects of inflation eroding the properties of sound money in the 4th dimension.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

I don't think this is fair. A lot of people who are opposing this are geeks and engineers with a bit of experience that know that trusting your success to untried and unreleased systems is not a wise idea and that certain ways of working only leads to more problems down the road.

Core is more like a newb sysadmin who wants to upgrade a mission critical system with beta software during business hours with no management approval and no rollback plan.
.

I did not meant this in any way insulting or someting like this. Just a lack of better words. I meant two perspectives on seeing the world, which usually keep a balance ...

 

[solex]

While Bitcoin Unlimited disagrees with Blockstream about the principal scaling approach for Bitcoin, it is correct to adopt the default position of assuming professional behaviour on their part. They undermine this assumption and stoop to a new low when a communications employee authors fake news.