Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[go1111111]

Most of you have probably seen ViaBTC's twitter poll asking if people want SegWit activated -- currently 5015 votes, and 83% supporting SegWit.

Of course, twitter polls are not especially reliable, and can be gamed, but an interesting fact about this one is that at the same time, ViaBTC posted a poll for "should we increase the block size?" which currently has 2524 responses, with 57% saying yes.

This second result weakens the argument that the overwhelming SegWit support is due to Core-supporters rigging the vote. Why would there be such a strong bias in only one of the polls? If Core's troll army were rigging the vote, wouldn't they vote in both polls? After all, letting that second poll sit there at 57% weakens Core's narrative than only a small fringe wants bigger blocks.

(See both polls at https://twitter.com/ViaBTC. A problem with the second poll is that it's unclear if people are interpreting activating SegWit as counting as "increasing the block size").

My hypothesis is that the economy really does want both SegWit and a regular block size increase. The strategy of big block supporters to be rabidly anti-SegWit is alienating to allies who would otherwise be on our side.

Let me remind you of some evidence I posted earlier suggesting that the twitter polls aren't as rigged as you might assume:

21.co did a survey of 'Blockchain influencers': https://medium.com/@21/using-21-to-survey-blockchain-personalities-on-the-bitcoin-hard-fork-1953c9bcb8ed. Being a big blocker was more popular than being a small blocker by 49% to 34%, but wanting SegWit to activate was more popular than not wanting it to activate, 75% to 18%.

When you normalize the above results to throw out responses that were 'other', 59% of people say they're big blockers, and 81% support SegWit.

It's interesting that these proportions are very roughly in line with the twitter poll, no? This suggests that among people who consider themselves big-blockers, the majority really do support SegWit. This particular forum as well as r/btc are probably unusually anti-SegWit compared to big blockers as a whole.

IMO, we have the economic majority on our side when it comes to big blocks. They also want SegWit. By being so anti-SegWit, projects like BU and Classic (and their supporters) are alienating big-blockers who would otherwise be on our side.

 

[Zarathustra]

Many big blockers would accept a segwit activation à la litecoin, where they came to an agreement that they won't support a suicidal full block strategy. They agreed to always raise the limit as soon as the blocks become half full. BSCore is blocking that kind of segwit activation but has the chuzpah to refer to litecoin.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/69qg70/segregated_bitcoin_im_not_sure_if_we_somehow/

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

The following is modified from comments I made today on @bitsko's bitcoinchat Slack in #general (not the BU slack):


While miners *can* do whatever they want, and can force changes on the community (up to the level where the community changes the PoW, though even that is kind of an admission that cryptocurrency may be a failed concept), they won't because it isn't profitable.

This is all just to respond to your [user:justin in the slack channel, same as @Justin here?] above comment:

BU removes that, it basically allows miners to up the blocksize however much they want if they have 50%+

The profitable thing is obviously to do what the market wants.

Miners always had the ability to force users into unwanted changes. The reason Bitcoin works isn't because people _run code_ that restrains the miners, but because of _incentives_ that restrain miners.

That means it is a mistake to think that running Core (or any blocksized capped software (even BU with AD=infinity)) is what is protecting the rest of the community from the mining majority, and therefore a mistake to think that switching to an uncapped client (which BU isn't, but anyway) would open the network to any new attack from the mining majority.

The point of all the above is to say that, no, BU doesn't allow mining majority to do anything new. It was always like this. Miners and other users could also change settings, just with more cumbersome methods.

--

There has long been a mythical story wherein a contingent of the Bitcoin community can just take their "full nodes" ball and play somewhere else (without PoW change) with whatever rules they like (or even locking in all current rules forever), in defiance of majority hashpower, "because we have full nodes."

The way to effect change (or nonchange) in Bitcoin _requires_ convincing miners to go along with your change (or nonchange). This isn't a problem in principle, since all you have to do is show them that it would be more profitable to make the change (or to avoid a bad change).

All else necessitates a PoW change to be safe. Cases like ETC/ETH where no PoW change happened are fundamentally degenerate in that they aren't stably operating under the original Satoshi design where people "vote with their CPU power" (again, this voting is *not* limited to ordering transactions within valid blocks, but actually is a vote on which blocks are valid at all, effectively, due to the dynamic described above).

Because mining majority malfeasance is defended against by incentives, not hardcoded limits

One CPU, one vote

One PoW, one chain

The two concepts are inextricable

Satoshi even described a block prediction market where basically miners vote on which blocks to mine and mine atop of, in a Keynesian beauty contest where everyone strives to mine and build on the blocks they think will be most acceptable to their fellow miners, because in turn they exect their fellow miners to judge those blocks (and the rules they follow) go be most acceptable to the market/community at large.

During a moment of maximum controversy between Policy A and Policy B, mining then becomes a _speculative_ process. In other words, a bet. An investment.

Essentially each time a miner builds a block, they are investing in one of the two (or possible more) incompatible policies for block validity rules. Most typically the old policy and a new candidate policy.

It is a bona fide prediction market because the miner takes - say - a 30% risk of having theirs blocks orphaned but stands to gain 30% more mining revenue if they win the Keynesian beauty contest (because in the case where they win, 30% of their peers would have wasted their hashpower on blocks that got orphaned).

Likewise if they vote for a longshot policy (90% orphan expectation) they can 10x their revenue if they turn out to be right.

And if you're wondering whether waiting for more confirmations during such a time of maximum controversy is a good idea, yes.

BU's AD (acceptance depth) setting shoved that issue of "confirmation time uncertainty during extreme controversy" in people's faces, but it is merely a case of people shooting the messenger (or rather shooting the clarifier of Satoshi's original message that people didn't grok). It isn't anything new that BU added to Bitcoin.
[doublepost=1494156332][/doublepost]Note: the reddit comments by /u/tomtomtom7 explain how I am saying miners have the *ability* (but not the incentive) to force changes on the rest of the users (barring PoW change).
[doublepost=1494156613,1494155876][/doublepost]@go1111111

If we have many polls that agree with each other, it at most shows *popular* opinion, which can diverge widely from the kind of market-weighted opinion that is relevant to Bitcoin changes (or what is the same, relevant to what miners should do to maximize their profits).

 

[awemany]

@Zangelbert Bingledack : Overall, excellent points.

On CSW, what weirds me out is the sudden incoherence in his writings. Why is he suddenly inserting something about Bitcoin timestamping in an article that otherwise does have quite a few good points?

I might simply not get it - but to me this looks like it is inserted completely without any motivation on why you want to write about it whatsoever.

Also, AFAIR there was talk and proof about some articles being copypastas from somewhere else. Does anyone else remember this?

Compare this to the real Satoshi - coherent, well thought-out arguments in each single post he made.

Now, maybe keeping this secret for so long has taken a toll on him, a.k.a. 'Nobel disease'.

And @Zarathustra certainly has that Nietzsche quote at hand to insert here on the Übermensch that eventually destroys himself while reaching for greatness

I don't know what to make of him. The double-hashing explanation he gave me made sense at first but then upon applying further thought, it didn't.

But it was the kind of thinking that one has when one gets on the wrong track - and doesn't have enough feedback on that.

Which also makes it hard - though not impossible - to believe that a scammer would create such an argument.

If he's the latter, he's certainly a master at that.

 

[Zarathustra]

@awemany
> And @Zarathustra certainly has that Nietzsche quote at hand to insert here on the Übermensch that eventually destroys himself while reaching for greatness


Zarathustra's Übermensch (overman) is the next step in our evolution:

.............

Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spoke thus:

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman -- a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.

I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may become the Overman's.

I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Overman may hereafter live. Thus he seeks his own down-going.

I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Overman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus he seeks his own down-going.

I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.

I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus he walks as spirit over the bridge.

I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.

I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.

I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always gives, and desires not to keep for himself.

I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a cheat?" -- for he wants to perish.

I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.

I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to perish through the present ones.

I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must perish through the wrath of his God.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may perish through a small matter: thus he goes willingly over the bridge.

I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.

I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.

I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and perish as heralds.

Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the Overman!"

5



When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he again looked at the people, and was silent. And to his heart he said:


There they stand; there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.

Must one first batter their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammerer?

They have something of which they are proud. What do they call it, that which makes them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguishes them from the goatherds.

They dislike, therefore, to hear of “contempt” of themselves. So I will appeal to their pride.

I will speak to them of the most contemptible thing: that, however, is the Last Man!"

I will speak to them of the most contemptible thing: that, however, is the Last Man!"

And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people:

It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope.

His soil is still rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow there.

Alas! there comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man -- and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whiz!

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you the Last Man.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.

"We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death.

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

"Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled -- otherwise it upsets their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

"We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink.
And here ended the first discourse of Zarathustra, which is also called "The Prologue," for at this point the shouting and mirth of the multitude interrupted him. "Give us this Last Man, O Zarathustra," -- they called out -- "make us into these Last Men! Then will we make you a gift of the Overman!" And all the people exulted and smacked their lips. Zarathustra, however, turned sad, and said to his heart:

They do not understand me: I am not the mouth for these ears.

Perhaps I have lived too long in the mountains; I have hearkened too much to the brooks and trees: now I speak to them as to the goatherds.

My soul is calm and clear, like the mountains in the morning. But they think I am cold, and a mocker with terrible jests.

Now they look at me and laugh: and while they laugh they hate me too. There is ice in their laughter.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/69s2wf/the_right_way_to_fix_transaction_malleability/

 

[awemany]

@Zarathustra: Close but not quite. I think what I have in mind is also from "Thus spoke Zarathustra". I forgot the details, though.

 

[awemany]

I don't really know how to reach that guy given that he's inactive for a long while, but in case he sees it:

/u/raisethelimit

I am certain you are the right guy to do a rewrite of the whitepaper, to help out Cobra-Bitcoin with this important job


(If it contains an "/s" at the end, even better

 

[go1111111]

I think with the whitepaper, if CSW wrote it, he had help (CSW obviously delegates a huge amount as it is). There are actually several cases I can think of in both the whitepaper and the Satoshi forum posts where he essentially pulls the same trick of saying something without enough clarification.

The whitepaper and Satoshi's forum posts and mailing list posts are similar in style. So if CSW was Satoshi you wouldn't only need to explain the whitepaper, but all of his forum posts too.

Some of Satoshi's comments may have been hard to understand because he was concise and assumed the reader was especially perceptive. CSW's unintelligibly is different in that he rambles about irrelevant stuff, and entirely omits necessary info to support arguments he's making. In the post about selfish mining, he shows zero understanding of how selfish mining works.

If someone thinks CSW is Satoshi and can think of a bet that you'd want to make about this, I'd be very interested in betting against you.

While miners *can* do whatever they want, and can force changes on the community (up to the level where the community changes the PoW, though even that is kind of an admission that cryptocurrency may be a failed concept), they won't because it isn't profitable.

This may be true after we have fork-futures markets, but right now I think it's likely that the mining majority doesn't currently understand what is profitable in the long run. Note also that because mining is an extremely competitive business, long run profits for miners are expected to go to 0. So there is an inherent short-termism baked into any rational miner's profit strategy.

This also assumes that incentives are perfectly aligned. They're only somewhat aligned though. If miners can get 20% more profit for themselves by making Bitcoin as a whole 5% less valuable, they'll do it unless they sufficiently fear a user activated fork.

Because of this, it might be good to be even a bit more aggressive with user activated forks now, because miners don't seem to understand the power dynamics at play.

It's theoretically possible that the miners currently blocking SegWit are doing so purely because they think this is best for Bitcoin, but they're not doing a good job at making it look like this. They don't show the proper deference and fear of going against the users that they should ideally have.

If we have many polls that agree with each other, it at most shows *popular* opinion, which can diverge widely from the kind of market-weighted opinion that is relevant to Bitcoin changes (or what is the same, relevant to what miners should do to maximize their profits).

True, popular opinion often diverges from market-weighted opinion, but without any better information (i.e. futures markets), it should serve as a rough approximation of market-weighted opinion.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

"If miners can get 20% more profit for themselves by making Bitcoin as a whole 5% less valuable, they'll do it unless they sufficiently fear a user activated fork."

@go1111111 That hypothetical 20% extra profit can't be from mining extra coins (that would be way more of a value hit to Bitcoin than 5%), and it can't be from those coins being more valuable (ex hypothesi), so where would it come from?

@awemany The complex of someone who has grown a bit drunk on their own power and surrounds themselves with adoring employees who are hesitant to shoot holes in things to let him know he isn't being as clear as he could (or is just missing something obvious) sounds about right. Also again there seems to have been collaboration, perhaps with Dave Kleiman being the prevailing theory. Over years without people to curb his excesses...

A quite characteristic thing about Satoshi's writing is its lack of much flavor or personality. Makes sense when you think of someone trying to avoid doxxing by writing style, but also someone who is writing for someone else, trying to relay info without feeling comfortable putting their own spin on the actual words.

 

[go1111111]

@Zangelbert Bingledack there are lots of ways.

The simplest is that extra profit at the expense of BTC value could come from setting block size at a level where fees were higher than the optimal level.

Or miners could form a loose cartel and dial down their hashpower to a level where they didn't have such high electricity costs, only ramping up their hash power to orphan non-cartel blocks. People might not think it was worthwhile to change PoW because the cartel's incentives were "kinda aligned" with users, but that fact that a cartel did in fact control mining might depress the price.

Or, miners might take bribes to interfere with certain transactions.

 

[AdrianX]

Popular opinions in bitcoin don't count. We the bitcoin holders the sound money advocates are the minority. The only thing protecting bitcoin from a tyranny of the majority is the mining profit motive to preserve the needed rules that give bitcoin value. The industry developing around bitcoin is here to serve, earn and extract that value.

The nodes that spend energy to write transactions to the blockchain enforce the rules because people pay for the privilege of using sound money, and only those nodes that can prove PoW are valid.

Users will be drawn to the network with sound money. Users are free and are not required to compete with each other to transact on the network, they value the network because they want to interact in an economy that uses sound money. They will compete with each other because money is scares they is no benefit to compete for limited ability to transact.

The vast majority who are still to invest in bitcoin believe perpetual economic growth and inflation are necessary, and I'd say the vast majority invested today don't have a sufficient comprehension of the incentive design necessary to realize only the miners can enforce the needed rules.

 

[SanchoPanza]

My proposal has a BIP number now - BIP135 !

And BU has the first implementation available to it

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@go1111111

I'm pretty sure none of those ways work.

1) Higher than optimal fees actually reduce miner revenue, as has probably been discussed here. Intelligent profit-seeking ensures optimal fees.

2) Positing cartel agreements with various terms is just going to be a merry-go-round conversation where you say, "What about this kind of arrangement?" and I think for a while and say, "Here's how you defeat that one," continuing until the scenarios get so complicated that I can't immediately think of how to defeat it. The pattern is much like proposals for PoS, TaPoS, DPoS, and the endless variations on PoS where the method of "stake grinding" gets more and more complicated to discern until the objectors give up, which the PoS proponent takes as meaning they have found a method of doing away with proof of work.

I think the particular failure mode for the cartel arrangement you mentioned is that members can fake that they are not using all their hashpower but then just "got lucky" sometimes or are bringing on more hashpower "while keeping all these [photo] ASICs in reserve, not running, as per the cartel terms." It just moves the problem (for a would-be cartel designer) around.

3) Bribes to interfere with certain transactions probably becomes a similar merry-go-round conversation once actual terms and motivations are specified.

Satoshi designed a deceptively solid incentive system. It's the "deceptively solid" nature that has resulted in so many skeptics and so many Gmax-style quasi-skeptics over the years. If there is one fundamental insight to completely wraps one's head around as the "master key" to understanding why Bitcoin works against all sorts or seemingly possible attacks, this may be it.

 

[79b79aa8]

Interesting insight into Adam Back's rationale for limiting block growth in the thread JR started yesterday.

EDIT (SPOILER): his BS experience shows that block growth is a problem for private blockchains. he infers it is a problem for the Blockchain.

 

[awemany]

@79b79aa8 : They could have it so easy. If they'd say "Blockstream is ok with BIP100 as-is, with current parameters w/o 32MB limit plus SegWit as-is". They'd likely get their thing through. Some parts of the community (including myself) would be pretty much 'meh' about that, but I think it would be grudingly accepted.

But SegWit with bigger blocks is simply not enough for them. Very clearly so.

They simply don't want that. Any real, open-ended blocksize limit is a threat to them, removing the 1MB stick is clearly feared to nullify the effects of their SegWit carrot.

See also the reaction to (admittedly lacking from a tech perspective) extension blocks.

The whole thing is clear as day now.

 

[xhiggy]

@Zangelbert Bingledack there are lots of ways.

The simplest is that extra profit at the expense of BTC value could come from setting block size at a level where fees were higher than the optimal level.

Or miners could form a loose cartel and dial down their hashpower to a level where they didn't have such high electricity costs, only ramping up their hash power to orphan non-cartel blocks. People might not think it was worthwhile to change PoW because the cartel's incentives were "kinda aligned" with users, but that fact that a cartel did in fact control mining might depress the price.

Or, miners might take bribes to interfere with certain transactions.

Bitcoin won't remain completely unregulated forever.

 

[albin]

@awemany

Lord Maxwell will never ever under any circumstances accept any proposal where blocksize can be increased by miners where they are not arbitrarily penalized by the consensus rules for doing so.

The Core roadmap makes this very clear ("incentive-aligned dynamic block size controls"), so anybody in Core dev who signed this half-assed post-conference email pledge and denies that really has some explaining to do.

 

[awemany]

@albin: Hmm, but they pushed 32MB-capped ('user choice') BIP100 for a moment at least. How does that fit into their roadmap and narrative?

32MB forever is too low IMO, but 32MB is definitely outrageous territory for their current variant of small-blockism.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Wow, just caught something from the whitepaper that I'd somehow previously missed. So those in our camp often quote the final few sentences of the whitepaper for the proposition that hash power is what effectively decides the rules:

"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."​

In my experience, the small blockers will frequently counter with this quote from the whitepaper:

"We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest chain. Even if this is accomplished, it does not throw the system open to arbitrary changes, such as creating value out of thin air or taking money that never belonged to the attacker."​

If Satoshi is only talking about an attacker with a minority of the hash power, there's clearly no conflict between the two statements. What I just realized (and maybe I'm slow here) is that it's quite clear that that's exactly what he was talking about. In that same section, just a few paragraphs later he writes:

"Given our assumption that p > q, the probability drops exponentially as the number of blocks the attacker has to catch up with increases."​

Where p and q were just defined as "p = probability an honest node finds the next block" and "q = probability the attacker finds the next block."