Bitcoin Forum

(possibly).

Very interesting article.

https://medium.com/@peter_r/on-the-emerging-consensus-regarding-bitcoins-block-size-limit-insights-from-my-visit-with-2348878a16d8#.hih385eti

I was surprised to see this idea  that if a small minority wants to fight the emerging consensus of bigger blocks, the majority will stop them with their hashpower.

I know people will take this out of context and scream "Bu wants to 51% attack bitcoin" but the idea is eliminate replay risk and a split network, which
would be bad for everyone.  So it makes sense.

This is why Core floats the idea of changing their PoW to keep a minority chain alive. (also makes sense)

Ok, let the flaming begin.  Go!


 

They have to try and kill it. Their Emergent Chaos design doesn't have any wipeout protection. If another chain becomes the longest, the entire BU chain just vanishes!

I didnt realize synthetic fork was going to be utilized.

China is very big and powerful country and if it wants to take over bitcoins it would be easy for them to get some asics. So hashpower won't matter. Bitcoin must protect itselves by any means necessary.
Though I dont think that BU seriously threaten Bitcoin now. It's just a bunch of Ver's shills and altcoin guys most of them don't even have bitcoins they go into alts and now they want bitcoin to die, for their altcoins to grow in prise.
Ver says that he sells his bitcoins for the BTU, buy he already sold and bought dash and eth so I doubt he have any amount of bitcoins.
But you may countinue to post what your china daddys tell you.
https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FQ5uvAB6.jpg&t=574&c=m1XLUlSigmcd3Q

 LMFAO

aarturka, that is pretty funny... but i wish you had an avatar so i could also have some fun!  :P

I guess @Peter R is being paid off well. Analogous to how the Japanese paid our best engineers to transfer our technologies some decades ago.


Still complacent I see...

Changing the PoW would render all mining investments worthless. The nuclear option that would nuke Bitcoin.
There are not so many possibilities to render the first mover approach worthless. This is one of them.

That is what I thought at first, but now I think they can probably change the PoW without changing the basic hashing function.  For example instead of 2 rounds of SHA-256, there's 3 rounds.  Or something like that.  Might only need a small software tweak...but I'm not an expert.
 

If they do actually attack the chain then it's very likely the hashing algorithm will get changed to sha-3. The Chinese miners have said they will attempt to sue the devs if that happens (lulz).

Here's how I see it play out:

Chain splits
Miners learn that BTU is worth less than BTC because it has a much smaller economy, and they are earning less money by mining it

They switch back to the original chain

Or:

They try to attack the original chain to force the users to switch to BU and bring up the price
The hashing algorithm gets changed
Miners are fucked and all their ASIC's are worthless bricks

It would be so awesome if the hashing algorithm was changed to Cuckoo or something like that that was GPU/ASIC resistant, so that we could bring Bitcoin back to it's roots and people could mine on their own computers and end mining centralization. I don't think that will happen though as it's been discussed for years and we can't decide on a new algorithm. SHA-3 is mostly agreed upon in case of attack only. Besides Cuckoo is very new and untested.

You were spreading FUD. lol. (imo anyway).

You were saying crazy stuff like all bitcoiners are going to end up in jail.  You were also a perma-bear on the price and all around consistent pessimist.   No?

Whomever are behind any attack against Bitcoin, is not FOR Bitcoin. Why would you want to destroy the technology, if you do not win the war? It reminds me of the days when I was a kid. We would play in the park with the other kids and one kid would have brought his ball, but when things did not go his way, he would take his ball or someone would kick the ball onto a roof so that nobody can play. ^hmmmmm^

This is Childish indeed. ^grrrrrr^

So essentially, BU has now become a bilateral split.  They are not backwards compatible any more if they require BU signalling.  Good.  Simplifies things.  Now, if people think that this imposes the absence of a fork, they are deluded. 

The real reason why there will not be a fork, is not technical.  It is the bitcoin brand name.  That's all.
As long as that name is worth something (and for the moment, it is worth the whole of bitcoin's market cap, because as an alt coin, bitcoin is worthless: launch a new "bitcoin" altcoin and nobody is going to buy a single token, not even the dev), nobody will want to be the fork without that name.

It is very simple.  If you want to get rid of the miners, don't implement PoW.  Seems so trivially logical, that I wonder how people miss it.  PoW = miner cartels.  Unavoidable.   Don't want that ?  Don't use PoW.  Switch to PoS.  Bitcoin could, right now.

(apart from the fact that it can't and will remain bitcoin, as long as the name means something).

PoS on it's own is very broken and insecure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism

yeah nah, xem and eth are using is and dash will go pos.....I think

your views?

Why would Dash need to go POS? Evan's extensive masternode network already has the miners paying them tax.

The masternodes are effectively pos though i'm not accross it but I think they are

as for the nothing at stake argument on the wiki link, all that get u is a diferent chain being mined and who cares, it just mean you get effective sort of *merged mining* going on, and you have coins on all the chains

Maybe a good fist fight 51% attack IS the only way for this to be resolved..

Maybe everyone having their say, big or small, and seeing what's left at the end of the ensuing carnage is the only FAIR way of proceeding..

Yes - it's dangerous, yes - could kill bitcoin, yes - we could be kissing a million dollar bitcoin goodbye.

but maybe not.

WE ALL WANT A WORKING BITCOIN.. we just have different opinions about how to get there.. and maybe that's enough for 'something' to 'emerge'.

I hope it is.

(If nothing else we'll learn a lot from the experience, a $20Billion lesson.. better be good)

there is no $16B-$20B dollars!

thats the speculative bubble number based on a few thousand coins being stired around in exchanges to have a $1000 'price' and the multiplying it by 16m

there are not 16-20 billion actual dollars sitting in bank accounts.
i can make an altcoin tomorrow with 5,000,000,000,000 premined coins. get just 1 coin onto an exchange and sell it to myself for $1.. and instantly have a $5trillion market cap.

so stop talking about the speculative bubble number.. its meaningless. all the holders of the 16m coins of bitcoin are not promised or guaranteed $1000 if they all cashed out today. its not a 'valuation' .. its a bubble number of multiplication

LOL.. it must be tiring fighting ALL the time Franky.

Anyway, if you don't think that BITCOIN, as a 'thing' is worth 20BILLION in jobs, business's, R+D, speculation etc etc.. let alone the simple total coins*price metric.. we're using different versions of Bitcoin.. oh.. wait a sec..

I agree with this one.

It is a measure of how much people think they will find greater fools.

great point and very true. BTC capitalization is just a bubble. nobody owns billions of USD in their bank accounts. get real ! :)

BTC is just a trendy e-currency like e-gold was at its time and it will end once something new will appear.

well when the dozen main core devs are being paid in fiat. and their 100 spell checkers are volunteers. you cant try twisting that into how your  kingdom, thats only a corner of bitcoin is worth billions.. their debt shows its only worth $70m for their corner.

then the exchanges, their financial reports of actual holdings is not that much.

yea alot of VC money may add up. but you have to realise thats all FIAT DEBT
and a secondary market/value/thing that is not linked to the "market cap" calculation in any way

i lov bitcoin and i understand it much better than most. but i am a realist. there is no point exaggerating the numbers, over promising and using twist sales pitches followed by algo changing threats..

bitcoin is much better than fiat in many ways. but there is no need to centralise it into a Core Tier network to kiss fiat VC ass. using scripts, hidden agenda's and half promise empty gestures

bitcoin should remain decentralised and that means let the nodes vote. not the devs.
devs can move onto other projects, get old and retire, companies can change policies, and stop accepting a coin (circle for instance) so we need to think about what the community want.. not the corporate army of devs that are only temporary

Yes,either the miners would leave BU due to low profitability or they would try to attack original chain to make them switch to BU.I hope probably the second condition would occur and if it happens,it would be the time to change the hashing algorithms and it would be interesting to see the selfish miners suffer.

sorry to burst your bubble but its core doing all the threats and blackmails, and subverting nodes

That is true I was spreading other FUD^[1], but no I wasn't saying all Bitcoiners were going to jail. I wrote about (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.msg15121763#msg15121763) whether altcoin ICOs and such could be subject to SEC investment securities jurisdiction.


That is true I correctly predicted the price decline to $150 (including some of the twist and turns along the way down). But then I thought it would go lower to below $100 before bottoming (my reason was thinking adoption was stalling due to centralization and also I thought both gold & BTC would collapse together at the beginning of the collapse of EU's coming crisis due to the stampede out of Euros causing a strong dollar & USA stocks bubble).

But at $600 I realized the bottom had been reached and became a bull and I actually timed the blast off nearly perfectly (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1663070.0).


^[1] In my defense I will say that I only diagnosed the disseminated Tuberculosis illness in January 2017 that had been giving me insane delirium since 2012ish. Franz Kafka died of TB. Read some his kafkaesque writings for indication of the cognitive effects of the illness. Fortunately TB can be treated and I am.

franky nailed it. This shit-bird could take a big dump on everything at anytime.

And of this talk about changing the hashing algo and/or changing to proof of stake? Insanity. Are people that stupid?

Rizun is going out on the wing a bit. Something tells me people aren't buying his Koolaid. And his coders might not be up to mixing it just right.

Attacking the developers that conform 99.99% of the software you copy-paste all the hard work from, yep makes total sense.

Too bad PoW change will be deployed and their miners will be useless. People will continue supporting Core because people don't want to use buggy software.

So they have to choose:

1) Abandon the BUcoin disaster
2) Keep going and be rendered useless as the PoW change happens

I wish you a full recovery from your TB ...as well as your psychological problems  (jk on the last part)  :P

I have opened the link and I did not find the idea that you showed in your post. What I found was that there is an internal block within bitcoin that limits the growth of its blocksize. This internal wall will be the basis as to how the proposed consensus will work and as to what blocksize increase will it implement. And in the end that author would suggest that everyone should accept bigger blocks as well as accept Bitcoin unlimited but with the bug killed in the process.

Look man... that's how open source software works... anyone can fork the code and do whatever they want with it... by definition!

If more people want to run your code or my code or Greg Maxwell's code or Peter Rizun's code... well that's their right... that's their choice.

And its a beautiful thing because no one can force anyone to do anything.  You can run or not run any code you want.

We all knew this, getting into Bitcoin.  If a large group of people decided to run the same code (forming a consensus) and that happens to
be different from another large group with their own consensus, well I understand the ramifications but again, that was always part of the
deal with Bitcoin.  Not everyone would call that an "attack".  I wouldn't.   I am trying to avoid labels and just describe things as they are.
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@Xester: search on [Level 3] Anti-split protection

Lol. Ty. I don't anticipate Stockholm's syndrome w.r.t. to the discombobulated delirium effects.  :-\

it's funny how the most dangerous thing about bitcoin is the only way now to solve this issue, with a 51% we can also change the pow and get rid of chinese dictatorship

the problem is that chinese is holding 70% of the net, so unless core do fork their own coins called bitcoin core again, and leave chinese with the old chain that will become BU, there is nothing we can do

"Attacking a minority hashrate chain stands against everything Bitcoin represents. Bitcoin is voluntary money. People use it because they choose to, not because they are coerced." Meni Rosenfeld

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6181y2/attacking_a_minority_hashrate_chain_stands/

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With this statement, I fully agree with. Peter and the likes of him should be ashamed of themselves.

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you.  I'm not 100% convinced they should be doing that. 

Their (Coinbase,Bitpay) intention is to prevent a confusing network split, and they may be right that
this will be good for Bitcoin in the short term, but philosophically it kind of makes more sense to
just let the market decide.

As soon as China starts "enforcing their regulation" onto Bitcoin transactions, the nuclear option will be the only option. The good news is that China cannot destroy everybodys private keys so no coins will be lost  ;D

The nodes should vote? How about USERS? What about the economic majority? They have shown their opinion in countless polls and Bitcoin Unlimited via hard fork is CLEARLY something they do not want. And yet here we see Franky explaining everyone how appropriate it is that miners+nodes push their agenda down everyone's throats.

Well let me tell you somenthing, Franky. You cannot tell the market who to prefer. It can only be the other way. Enforcin BU and successfully destroying bitcoin core will turn Bitcoin into an altcoin. Bitcoin will NEVER EVER regain the brand name and value it had compared to other coins. It will get lost in history. Sad ending. What BU is causing right now is treading over users choice. It will not go unpunished. Never.

Be honest, you've already started supporting the 4th hard-fork coup attempt: EC-coin.

Out with the old, eh jonald

but most people here wanted bigger blocks for the longest time.  sorry but we cant wait for LN -- we're getting killed by ethereum right now.  BTC marketshare below 70%. scary.

If you were a true, and rational Bitcoiner, you would be 100% convinced that they should not be trying to do that.

They aren't helping at all.

The primary, if not the only reason for which that is happening is the BTU hard fork fear mongering. Remember, ETF was declined and the price was back up above $1200 in a few days. This started as soon as the hard fork drama spread. ::)

HF fear is part of it for sure.  its obviously related to the scaling issue and loss of utility. 3tps btc won't cut it.  maybe you disagree. i dont care. have a good weekend

What does that matter when most Bitcoiners (who aren't here) chose against it. They've done that 3 times now, haven't they jonald

But dude, that's how they calculate a company's value in the stock market. So it should be same for bitcoin either. You can make an altcoin and buy it yourself and stuff but no exchange will list your coin in the first place and it won't be on coinmarketcap.com. And if you somehow manage to make it to be used by several people, your shitcoin will lose value in a flash.

Bitcoin is (for the moment still) immutable.  Nothing changes fundamentally.  Some technical quirks nobody cared about did.  This is why EVERY attempt at significant change, fails.  Not only block size (since it mattered to miners).  Also segwit.  Also nimble wimble.  Immutability by disagreement over change.

Change can only happen in a centralized system with strong leadership ; and even then, if it is contentious, it forks, look at ETH/ETC.  Ethereum is strongly centralized and Vitalik has the leadership like Satoshi had in bitcoin.

Bitcoin can't change any more.  Until it is (again) fully centralized, not under Satoshi this time, but under the Chinese miner cartel (and their government).  Then it will be able to change again.

The PoW hash will change (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1837136.msg18323952#msg18323952) if the mining cartel doesn't abort their attack.

Another alt coin ?

I would agree with you, but there's still 16% of bitcoin market cap dominance to be lost before that can happen...

We'll see.  It would be fun, but I think that the change of the PoW is going to be such a huge cluster fuck, that bitcoin will be negligible quantity afterwards.  Somewhere between ZCASH and PIVX or so.

Bitcoin is only a brand name.  If ever it loses its number 1 place, it is nothing any more.

What altcoin. All the big money will stay on the small block fork with the new PoW hash, because BU is technologically incompetent and the Bitcoin whales are in MPeX's WoT. MPeX probably controls a million BTC himself. Plus his bankster friends.

BU's altcoin will be sold off and the Chinese mining cartel will then own a shitcoin.

MPeX is capable of this. He couldn't win against Ethereum, because he didn't have the whales of Ethereum on his side. He does have the whales of Bitcoin on his side.


Money talks. The whales will decide. The miners don't have liquid assets, they have only debt and sunk costs, thus the mining cartel are just slaves to the whales.

If its called "Bitcoin" and it looks walks smells and scales like Satoshi's Bitcoin, and still has the dominant network effect, it will remain king of the hill imo

Do we want a split or do we not want a split?  In the discussions I've had with Coinbase, Bitpay and with BU members that are in close contact with nearly all of the world's mining power, it seems that no one wants a split.  So I suspect there will be no split. 

If a minority wants to start a little-bitty blockchain based on the Bitcoin ledger, then change the PoW.  I'm sure you'll be left alone. 

I haven't reallly fully understood what is this all about. But according to my knowledge this could be a good side right?  because  if this happen it could really improve the transaction process for good

Definitely. By increasing the block size limit, wait times will be reduced back to historical norms (~10 min) and transaction fees will fall back to a penny or so.  If you're interested, here is the talk (https://medium.com/@peter_r/on-the-emerging-consensus-regarding-bitcoins-block-size-limit-insights-from-my-visit-with-2348878a16d8#.rlze8ag24) I gave to Coinbase and Bitpay.  And here is a description (https://medium.com/@peter_r/what-were-doing-with-bitcoin-unlimited-simply-6f71072f9b94#.f4vch7a00) of what we're doing with Bitcoin Unlimited. 

And why would miners appreciate transaction fees falling back to a penny ?
What silly miner is going to truly allow increase in block size if he can keep his peers at 1 MB and hence keep the fee market under pressure ?

What idiot miner is REALLY going to fork to kill the goose with the golden eggs ?

If any of the "big block" solutions had the support of the economic majority, they would have forked ages ago without a second thought.

Pretending that only a minority favors a "small block" solution does you no credit. If it were true, you would fork this instant, and that's obvious.

The only metric that shows more than a smidgen of support for BU is pool operator signalling. Mining pools have long been a thorn in Bitcoin's side and I suspect a renewed effort to bring decentralization back to mining in the near future.

And a portion of the reason that is happening is because Roger Ver's pool.bitcoin.com is paying them 110% PPS. He originally wanted to pay them double (25BTC per block). So he is essentially buying their hashpower.

http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/11/06/roger-ver-considers-offering-double-block-rewards-bitcoin-miners/

Changing the PoW would render all mining investments worthless. The nuclear option that would nuke Bitcoin.
There are not so many possibilities to render the first mover approach worthless. This is one of them.

Not really.  You would make a tiny litecoin, forked off bitcoin.  Why not use the bigger litecoin that is a copy of bitcoin, but with:
1) 4 times faster block times (so 4 times more transactions possible)
2) another PoW algorithm (Scrypt) ; for the rest, LTC is bitcoin's code
3) already segwit ready to activate ?

Why is Core imitating litecoin after all these years ?

Because a PoW fork will take the real value with it

• users
• the Bitcoin economy
• the Bitcoin developers (i.e. the talent)

Litecoin does not, and cannot, get those attributes so easily. Bitcoin can (as it already has them all).

I can't even. This is more retarded than the UASF proposal. I'm shocked by the stupidity of anyone who believes changing the algo would work?  Do you have any idea how much money is invested in ASICs that hash SHA256?  Who is going to mine this shitcoin? Isn't it obvious that the core fanbois don't have majority hashpower? 

The real bitcoin would just keep merrily hashing along while these fools proclaimed their altcoin to be authentic, pissing into the wind.

The only way we'll get larger blocks is if a hash power super-majority supports larger blocks.  The only way a hash power super-majority will support larger blocks is if they believe that it is in their and Bitcoin's best interest.  Right now this is not the case.  We know this because when Bitcoin.com accidentally produced a 1.000023 MB block, it was orphaned.  

If you're point is that right now blocks larger than 1 MB would be orphaned, then yes I agree.  What we're doing with Bitcoin Unlimited is providing node operators the tools to allow them to accept larger blocks, providing miners the tools to produce larger blocks, and both groups the tools to signal their block size preference to the network. (https://medium.com/@peter_r/what-were-doing-with-bitcoin-unlimited-simply-6f71072f9b94#.mkx3xfirw) I believe soon the network will be upgraded accordingly.