Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

AdrianX

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
2,097
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bitco.in
The mistake is to somehow think there's some force making the 2MB "final
LOL no. "I told you so" won't cut it when we can't fork and small cartel of miners won't raise the limit. And fee pressure has forced transactions onto Layer 2 transaction networks.

There is a real risk there will be less pressure to fork to remove the limit in the future because TPTB will have the tools to control miners fees. Miner won't be in control, 2.0 banks (LN hubs) will control the network. Miners forking will just fork themselves off because they won't have customers.

You can't guarantee that's not going to happen and I'm at fault for accepting it. No thank you. Just remove the limited have a soft stop at 2MB and let's negotiate from the perspective of no limit if we fail to age next time.
 
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Zangelbert Bingledack

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Aug 29, 2015
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I think the bigger strategic move here is to get people to stop using Core software. It was the Core monopoly on protocol expertise coupled with Theymos's willingness to go along as the perfect cheerleader that has made increasing the blocksize so difficult. With a different team "in charge" who isn't aligned with Theymos, or better yet with no "reference implementation" at all, the problem of raising the limit in the future may be as trivial as we originally expected it to be.

However, there is also a chance that this is just kicking the Core political football to another devious team. A risk Core has been taking in leveraging its "reference implementation" position to the hilt is that it shows the world how much power the "reference implementation" coders have for so little investment. The bankers who funded Blockstream were early to the party, but other bankers were bound to see the amazingly better leverage controlling this One Ring of Power offered compared to, say, mining.

In fact, they may even see that although Segwit was a valiant effort, Core could have leveraged their position so much more in light of how mindbendingly much power they have ended up having. People want that One Ring, and as a new very rich entrant into Bitcoin it just makes sense to choose the high-leverage play. Hopefully by fighting over it they will accidentally destroy it, and instead new entrants looking to right the ship will go into the less exciting field of mining.

The Segwit poison pill is a major concern, but the 2MB thing doesn't worry me as long as people stop running Core. Hard fork away from Core to unstick the protocol, then future increases should be easy. In fact, if the Bcoin team also turn out to be micro-blockers, it may even be Core offering blocksize increases in a bid to stay relevant.
 

awemany

Well-Known Member
Aug 19, 2015
1,387
5,054
@lunar: IOW, two sides to the agreement already seem to strongly disagree about its pesky and totally unimportant details (/s), such as when to activate it, or whether to do HF first followed by SegWit, or the other way around.

An agreement that can be easily read in two different ways isn't worth the electrons that are wiggled for it.

Or maybe worth a lot if you can use it to do a massive pump and dump?

Meanwhile, the blocksize and Ethereum problem becomes really fucking pressing now.

I still don't believe this is the last word on scaling Bitcoin.

The mistake is to somehow think there's some force making the 2MB "final." The same pressures that are causing the 2 MB HF will also cause future block size increases, only in the future the "omg hard forks are so scary" argument will fail because we will have already done one without much incident. So a 2 MB fork, far from being "final", will simply make further increases easier.
If that's true, then, and also in light of the above agreement, what are the miners waiting for now, in the current situation, with Core having lost grip on Bitcoin, to simply go to a larger blocksize first?
 

Dusty

Active Member
Mar 14, 2016
362
1,172
This is misleading. A 51% attacker can only steal funds after SegWit activates on a chain where people agree that SegWit rules can be broken. But that doesn't add any new risks. A 51% majority of miners could similarly "steal funds" from any current address on any chain where people decided such theft was valid.
No, there is a massive difference on how the transactions are handled by non-upgraded clients (and miners): with current bitcoin rules you can't rob funds from people because a miner is not able to forge the signature of a user and hence create a viable transaction that gets accepted from an old client.

On the other hand, with segwit, a coalition of bad miners just have to not enforce segwit and collect the funds sent via anyone can spend transaction: the old nodes will accept it just fine.
 
@Bagatell: Two were from Deloitte, one was from some Bitcoin company, and the other I forget. Not that age matters, but all looked to be in their twenties, which is something I've noticed before: the mean age of a small blocker is less than that of a big blocker.
I'm really not surprised by this. Growing older is physically not alway fun, but mentally a joy!

If I look back at my tweenty-something self I maybe would also be on small block side. Who knows?

people < 30 years usually are more driven by ideology. A German politician once said some decades ago: "Who is not a socialist below 30, has no heart. Who is it beyond 30, has no brain." When I was in my tweenties this quote made me angry :)

A second reason might be a lack of life experience. An earlier job of mine was to write about jobs, education and occupation. I had interviews with dozens of young engineers starting their career. While technically sophisticated, all of them had serious problems to answer simple questions and to simply describe what they are doing. After I bothered them for an hour with questions, most of them were really mentally exhausted.

Maybe this is the reason why so many people fall on the blockstream narrative, wave away the markets and don't realize that they are played by propaganda.

@Peter_R

Great post! The separation of Core devs from this decision indeed is the major point of the agreement.

I'm happy to read your "note": That BU-nodes don't need to update to follow the agreed blocksize-increase is a message that could not be told often enough. If you run a Core node and forget to update, you will go dark with the hardfork. If you run an Unlimited node since v0.12, you will be on chain. That makes imho the agreement a major victory for BU.
 
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Windowly

Active Member
Dec 10, 2015
157
385
.

So maybe these types of block-size increase initiatives are still worth keeping alive. Based on what BitPay was saying during the panel discussion, it seems they urgently need an on-chain capacity increase. They may not want to wait around for 6 months, as this agreement envisions.
I actually hope bitpay doesn't wait. Them forking by themselves, even though it's a rather radical option might be the best way to break the impasse. I'm quite sure majority of hashing power and economic interests will converge on their fork.
 
I don't understand what he means. If pushing his transaction on another chain, he must somehow pay the miners and generate new Bitcoins and change old to new Bitcoins. I don't see how this can work ...
[doublepost=1495730968,1495730081][/doublepost]regarding the SegWit attack
https://medium.com/@adam_selene/the-segwit-15-attack-b0ecbb926777

Currently a 51 percent attack can't spend outputs because nobody will accept them as valid, since any block contains the signature.

With Segregated Witness a 51 percent can't spend outputs too, because miners must produce SegWit blocks which contain the signatures in a segregated field.

If we have two chains, the SegWit-outputs can be spent by anybody on the other chain. Not just by the miners.

An attack would be to simulate segwit activation in august, wait some weeks, and then turn back to Bitcoin, spending all those outputs.

The #uasf fans say, it is rational to go UASF, because the UASF chain can make the legacy chain reorg. The same could be said with SegWit transactions: it is rational to not do SegWit transactions. Which makes the whole enterprise senseless
 

bluemoon

Active Member
Jan 15, 2016
215
966
I suppose the Silbert agreement may just push those who've been equivocating or false flagging to decide on/make their real interests known before Segwit + 2MB is activated.

For example, does F2Pool really want Segwit? Or Bixin, Batpool, et al?

I can hope not ...
 

Zangelbert Bingledack

Well-Known Member
Aug 29, 2015
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A rant of mine people liked from slack:

"Full validating nodes" do not really validate, and in fact a block they "validated" (as following the heretofore-existing protocol rules) could be invalidated by miners (in terms of being part of the blockchain).

Though it may be that we can even further say there is no such thing as "the protocol rules" at any given present time, only a history of blocks n through m that fell within certain parameters (i.e., all blocks so far have not exceeded 1MB), so therefore "full nodes" cannot validate a block as following the rules as - strictly speaking - there are no rules at the chain tip; miners simply vote for whatever block they like, whether they do so based on their own private rules or even just arbitrarily.

Sure, in practice the incentives are extremely strong for miners to adhere to certain rules (such as the inflation schedule), but at times of great controversy some rules are up in the air and really don't exist with certainty as the blocks are subject to a vote and a block breaking any such rule could well win the vote.

Thus non-mining "full nodes" can't even be said to validate "the rules"; only mining can be called validation.

Perhaps to summarize, the way Bitcoin works is that there are these rules that exist in people's minds as Schelling points that the market recognizes, and miners are incentivized to follow these rules as long as they remain favored by the market, but strictly speaking the miners can accept or reject any block for any reason and if it gets mined upon and continues as the longest chain, that block becomes part of the Bitcoin blockchain regardless of any rules. Miners have ultimate say, just never the incentive to abuse it.

Any "rules" are only actually _patterns_ judged empirically by looking at historical data in the longest chain.

For example, the 1MB cap is not really a rule just because it is in miners' software (in fact only miners can be sure it is in there) since they could change their software _right now_ [or may have already changed it] and choose to mine or build on a 2MB block. Ths reminds me of @peter_r's talk at
with the alien.

Miners are free agents able to add _whatever they want_ to the chain. Miners decide validity, period. It is ONLY incentives that keep them following Bitcoin's crucial monetary Schelling points like the inflation rate (21M coin limit). *Only incentives, nothing else.*

For example, if your "full node" determines that a block you just received is "invalid" because it contravenes "the protocol rules" but the majority-of-hashpower miners just mined it and proceed to build on top of it, in what possible sense can we say your software "validated" anything?

The miners validated what you invalidated, so who's the real validator here? The miners.

"The protocol rules" are more correctly called Schelling points miners have followed in the _past_, some of which they will be forever incentivized to adhere to in the block voting process (a.k.a. mining, a.k.a. validation).

Rules being baked into client software is a convenience, and shouldn't be mistaken for removing miners' free will in voting for blocks using whatever rules or judgments or whims they please - just keeping in mind that Bitcoin is premised on miners being intelligently profit-seeking by adhering to the rules that the market values (21M coin limit, etc.). It is not software that binds them, but incentives. Everything in the client software could be made user-selectable, even the inflation schedule, and while it would be really user-unfriendly it wouldn't endanger anything because again it is the economic incentives, not the coded "protocol rules" that keep miners in line (though sure, those coded rules did serve to establish the key Schelling points at the genesis of Bitcoin).

Core has it backwards in thinking that hardcoding rules are what keeps miners in line. Once the permanently useful Schelling points were established, they were fated to be solid for all eternity, because the market likes utility.

The blocksize cap is also a Schelling point, and it was once useful, but it has long since outlived its usefulness and miners can and will (if Bitcoin's incentives design actually works!) cease to adhere to it.

EDIT: @Peter R's talk at Coinbase (not Bitpay, I had it wrong in the slack)
And an expanded reddit post version:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6dcybs/unfubaring_cores_terminology_part_1_full/
 
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Windowly

Active Member
Dec 10, 2015
157
385
@AdrianX I think those are very good points you made.

It seems, the key concession the big block side made was to allow segwit to activate at 80% instead of 95%. The key concession the small block side made was to agree that within 6 months there would be a 2MB block size increase HF. As you said the contract doesn't tell people they have to signal for segwit if they don't want to.
 

AdrianX

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
2,097
5,797
bitco.in
@Windowly
segwit2mb said:
This proposal should not prevent other consensus proposals to be
simultaneously merged: segwit2mb is a last resort solution in case we can
not reach consensus on anything better.
I think a better solution is to remove the limit as praposed in BIP101 and in good faith showing my hand I would support an 8MB forked limit with a temporary soft limit to 2 MB is a compromise.

It looks like Silbert‏ doesn't call the shots after all just another puppets puppet.

 
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