Bitcoin Forum

If you look at the way things are going now, you might realize that miners have lost the plot. They are sabotaging the whole Bitcoin experiment, because they want to make more profit and if they cannot do this, they will attack the minority chain to achieve their goal.

Satoshi had hoped that this will never happen, but it is happening now. Miners are willing to kill the cow to feed them now, even if the cow is providing milk on a daily basis.

What is Bitcoin without people using it?
What is Bitcoin without trust? < If people stop trusting that miners will act in good faith to keep the cow alive >
What is Bitcoin without security? < 51% attacks provide no security >
What is Bitcoin with no value?

Some of these miners should realize that the "milking" of Bitcoin users will stop, once they have killed the cow. We should act in the best interest of this technology and reduce the hold they have over us.

~ Pay less fees < Just be patient > They are getting $350 000 daily in higher tx fees according to Trace Mayer.
~ Fire up the old miners and host nodes to have a say
~ Ask developers to change the code to keep them honest or to remove the hold they have over the Bitcoin users.

Let's change our mindset and show these miners who makes up Bitcoin. ^grrrrrrr^

You should have had a look what happened with the ETH/ETC split.  You don't know what "miners want".  You just hear some vocal people say a lot of things, but are they the official "representative" of the miner cartel ?  People were also claiming that miners were going to attack the minority chain ETC.  It didn't happen.  Miners want to make profit, period.  They don't waste their precious hash power on war games that profit THEIR PEERS.

The only thing that is happening, is that miners are essentially quite happy with the current form of bitcoin, it brings them guaranteed fees in the future, and don't want this to be MODIFIED seriously.  Core has decided to force a modification upon them which would take the essence of the fees to another layer.  THIS is what miners don't want.  So they will side with anybody who helps them stop these modifications.  They want immutability, because it suits them.  Immutability was what bitcoin was designed for.  Bitcoin is what it is, and will not change if that change is against the interests of a part of the community.  That was the whole idea.  Only (technical) changes that don't matter for people's situation can eventually be implemented. 

Bitcoin's immutability mechanism is at full steam, and is protecting the protocol from any changes.  It is all that is happening.  Nothing more.  Bitcoin is what it is, and will remain what it is.

Note that deep down, miners wouldn't mind bigger blocks right now, as their income is still mainly block reward.  They are thinking after the next halving.  Sooner or later (bitcoin's fundamental design) fees will have to replace block reward.  That can only happen if transactions are scarce.  So transactions HAVE TO BE SCARCE FOR BITCOIN TO FUNCTION in the long run.
That was in the system since the beginning, but as long as there were big block rewards, people weren't thinking of that.  The last block halving has signalled the beginning of the end of that period when transactions were cheap.  Now, they have to become expensive to pay for PoW.

I disagree strongly. SegWit comes with a Block size increase and it is conveniently ignored. They are getting greedy and there are no other logical reason why they would block SegWit. The LN takes some of these fees to a second layer, that are accessible to everyone.

Some tx's still need to be done on the 1st layer, so it does not take away ALL the fees from that layer.

These miners have seen a opportunity to drag this whole process out and might even be behind these spam attacks to inflate the fees, so that they can make bigger profits. < unfortunately these people can hide behind pseudo-anonymity, so we might never know who they are>

Do not underestimate the power that normal users have, over the outcome of this whole experiment. 

Do you have any other suggestions? Paying less fees would just be a hassle for me because I fear that my tx will get rejected and if it does I just waited time by following your advice. I don't think they will fully kill the cow maybe up to half only because some support what they believe is good for bitcoin(for me I don't support any sides). It's hard to influence/convince miners unless all bitcoin users are miners themselves.

That would mean no transaction volume going around but it's unlikely to happen.

Because *they don't want a block size increase*, and *certainly* not a second layer.  A finite block size increase, they could cope with even if they don't like it.  


Bitcoin's basic idea is that everyone is greedy, and hence stops everyone else from changing rules that go against one's greed.  That is "immutability".  Stopping others from making you less greedy.  The fundamental principle of decentralization: non-colluding greedy people, that won't allow any changes that bring more to another one --> only possible consensus is status quo --> immutability.


The fee market is only interesting if it is under pressure, if there is scarcity of transactions, and people have to fight amongst one another to get their transaction through.

Otherwise, you would be at fee levels like before the 1 MB limit hit: much, much less than the block reward.  The total of fees must rise to about 6 BTC per block before the next halving, and to 9 BTC per block before the following halving, in order to keep miner income constant and secure PoW.  

Today:

https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees

total transaction fees per day: about 200 BTC.  During a day, there are about 144 blocks so the fee reward is 1.4 BTC per bloc *because the market is under pressure*.   Without pressure, that was about 50 BTC per day, so only about 0.3 BTC fee per bloc.

At that fee level, blocks should become 20 times bigger in order to become 6 BTC at the next halving ; probably not realistic.  However, with the market under pressure, the SAME 1 MB brings in 4 times more, and there is extra potential.

In other words, fees are much more interesting if transactions are scarce and fees per transaction are high, than if we have super large blocks with loads of transactions with low fee.  The more people fight for the few transactions that can go on a small block, the more miners are assured to keep their income at the next halving.

It even secures against market crashing: if they can pump up the fees in BTC because of scarcity, they care less about lower market $$ value of bitcoin.  If the fee amount doubles in the market, they can have up to a halving of the bitcoin price and market cap in $$. 
There's more to be pressured out of the fee market, than hope for doubling or tripling of bitcoin's price soon.

This is why miners LOVE 1 MB blocks and no second layer. 

Segwit it not a block size increase, and so it being conveniently misunderstood. It introduces a new segwit block. It requires users to move to segwit keys to be of any benefit. People don't have funds on segwit keys yet. Real world effective increase in capacity is not known.
Show me how a real lightning network works in the real world. What if everybody doesn't trust each other and forces the frequent settling of open channels. Yep, we don't know how effective LN really will be in real world use.

Software developers are not adequately dealing with live network requirements in a timely fashion. And you can't blame miners if the developers proposed solution (which only provides pie in the sky future capacity increases) requires miners to hand over their wallets or they will be mugged.

Miners will sit back and take the fees while the deadlock period allows. If they are holding out for a faster approach to a live system with real world live demand/capacity issues, with a better future roadmap which doesn't take the incentive element of the white paper away, then who can blame them.

But that's not what's happening now.


The miners are threatening these things, not doing them. Let's just see where their big-talk leads, besides, we already have effective ways to defend against these attacks anyway.


I'm increasingly less concerned, more and more people are showing interest in both Flag Day acitvation for Segwit and/or PoW change to Cuckoo Cycle or suchlike ASIC resistant hashing algos. The revolting miners are going into the space heater business, and that's their prerogative.

Threats on both sides are apparent. Many sheep following their flock.

Transactions have to be scarce (at a high cost) or become numerous (at a low cost).  :)
Right now, Bitcoin's price may shoot up if the block size issue is resolved. Then the miners will be more than well compensated (through the block reward) for lower transaction fees.

It really depends on what type of mining attack they try to do. Right now the mining is pretty basic, there isn't that much to worry about because Bitcoin works and the miners are pretty much getting paid for their work.

Once Bitcoin Mining is available with Quantum Computers and they people with big money start mining blocks for real then the miners will have to step their game up and that means there would be much less promotion for Bitcoin going on from the miners.
At least the transaction confirmations should be fast then.

Not until the price of bitcoins drop down below $500 that miners will realize how the whole bitcoin ecosystem works for everybody and not just for a certain sector. For all what's happening lately, it seems the one thing that will eventually kill bitcoin, is the same thing that's destroying every society since modern civilization, GREED.

I get where you're coming from... But there's multiple aspects of this whole thing.

I have my bias like anyone else but i'll just tell you what I think miners are thinking:

For one thing, a seeming majority of users wanted bigger blocks a long time ago
(and core never provided it so far).  The miners do think they are doing what the market
wants.

Not everyone thinks segwit (or the core roadmap in general) is the way to go.
Even if some people like it in theory, for them it falls into the 'day late and
a dollar short' category.  And it may not even activate... and Greg Maxwell
is saying that is just fine and dandy.

A lot of miners and users are upset with core.  We see their actions as
stonewalling, or creating a problem on purpose so they can come in with
their solution.  On the extreme end of the conspiracy theories,
some even believe that Blockstream is intentionally trying to destroy Bitcoin
because the banker-tied investors want that. 

We can't let one small of group of developers stop us from scaling Bitcoin
in a timely manner.  There is economic pressure because Bitcoin is already
losing market share to altcoins and can have its network effect eroded.
Congestion has already hurt Bitcoin's utility.  Many feel that we cannot
wait any longer to get some relief in the way of scaling and that its
long overdue.

Some miners want bigger blocks but don't think EC is a great idea, others
do think it its a good idea.

BU is buggy but many just want EC from a variety of implementations.

Anyway i'm not saying i'm right because who cares who is wrong/right,
but just giving you the other side of the fence perspective.

Miners are not trying to destroy Bitcoin, they are trying to scale it.
My opinion.

I am disappointed with the miners for some time now. They are always aiming for the short term gains. Why they are not realizing that if they sacrifice something now, they will get a 100x returns later?

Yes, but the "numerous transactions" wouldn't go in the miners' pockets if LN activates.  So they would have a small fraction of the "numerous" transactions at low cost.   You clearly see from the fee revenue of miners, that scarcity is more efficient in rising income, than high volume.  You may think that in the long run, this kills bitcoin.  I'm not sure, because a reserve currency is exactly having these properties.  So this niche is what is open for bitcoin: reserve currency, with very few transactions, at very high amounts, between big institutional players using it to settle their unregulated affairs.
These big settlers don't mind paying large fees, because compared to their business, it is still a small cost.  
Bitcoin is not made for the masses ; like gold is not made for the masses.
The masses just served to get bitcoin up and running but at a certain point, the masses will become a nuisance.

Miner's interest runs as long as the life time of their gear.  They can go and mine just any other alt coin with more profit, but they first have to render profitable the gear they have invested in.  Once that investment has had a sufficient ROI, they don't care switching. Miners are not investors in crypto, they are investors in mining gear.  That gear has a finite life time.  After that life time, they don't care about what that gear was mining.

No they haven't.


Users were given the opportunity to support the XT and Classic blocksize forks. And users didn't want that, both were rejected by users.

Creating an echo chamber of sock puppets is not a real majority, jonald




Your opinion is wrong, and so is that of the bigger blocks miners.


If transaction rate increases 1:1 with blocksize increases, that's not scaling by definition. You cannot refute this, because it's an unimpeachable fact

Seems the miners are keen only in their more profits and not worried about bitcoin progress.They should realize nothing could ever become Bitcoin and if users lose their trust in bitcoin,it will be the end of bitcoin.I dont know then where the miners would go and find such a big cryptocoin for mining.Selfishness of miners will make their end in a loss.

Not all minerals are bad some of them e.g. BitFury quite adequate

The whole idea of crypto is to have a collection of greedy bastards that cannot find a way to agree over how to change something.  So one shouldn't throw the stone on the miners: bitcoin's strength comes from their merciless greed that has pushed up the difficulty (and hence the cryptographic security of bitcoin) to mindboggling heights.  Without their cut throat greed, bitcoin wouldn't exist as it does now.  So don't complain that they are greedy: that's what they are supposed to be !

However, you are right that a miner doesn't care about the currency he mines beyond the horizon of his investment in its particular mining gear.  There are 700 different altcoins to mine too, but they require different investments.  So for a miner, bitcoin should remain valuable the time he needs to make his gear profitable.  Say, 1-2 years.  (what's the average life time of competitive bitcoin mining gear ?)

I think we don't need to do anything special

It is natural selection of sorts, so let the nature clear the path and not get in its way. There are over 30 thousand full Bitcoin nodes running out there at any given moment, therefore if top miners leave (which is an unlikely event, anyway), their place will be immediately taken. Most transactions today are still made in-house, and even if there is a time lag between major miners leaving and difficulty readjusting (it should take approximately 2 weeks), it won't paralyze or kill Bitcoin. It will be a healing event, a catharsis of sorts, that Bitcoin should come through

We are not losing market share to Alt coins because of a possible hardfork, that is just the smoke screen for clever people to push stupid people to sell their Bitcoins and then to buy Alt coins the clever people have invested in prior to the hype. No matter what Alt coin you invest in now, miners will have a huge influence in the "politics" involved.

Asic manufacturers also have a huge hold over miners and what side they have to be on in this debate. Some miners wanted to give SegWit a chance on other Alt coins, to see what would happen and they were "influenced" by some of the bigger Asic manufacturers not to allow that. < Why? >

 

Since when are we using Bitcoin mining equipment to mine precious metals and other stones?
Minerals are cool -try to stay on topic because most of the people here isn't really interested in a worst case scenario of a 51% Mineral mining attack lol

Bitcoin is nice to have on the side so if a Bitcoin mining attack were to happen then the people holding the coins would still have their coins. I don't understand why there is a big fuss about it when the wallet files could be transferred manually offline.

Miners, miners, miners (in Steve Ballmer's voice)!

Miners here, miners there, miners everywhere. The basic problem with miners is that they have too much power over Bitcoin, which they shouldn't have had in the first place. After all, Bitcoin is supposed to be decentralized or what? I know what you are going to say, namely, that without miners Bitcoin could not exist. But it is not the overall utility of miners that matters here, it is their marginal utility which is important. There is plenty of air around, and you don't basically care if someone breathes in more air than you. The matter is essentially the same with miners, their marginal utility should necessarily be made very low (if we want Bitcoin to stay or revert to being properly decentralized). And that would be possible only through heavy decentralization of mining, the process which would be diametrically opposite to what we have by now

isn't that true with any method you want to implement for scaling? otherwise how do you "scale" by your definition

i mean it's clear that the number of transaction will eventually catch the limit, that the point, to have more room..

well maybe a solution is to have always the block size needed +"1", so you don't have ever the 1:1 ratio

^ shocker, carlton disagrees with my opinion.  :D  :D


I'm not saying this.  I'm saying we are losing market share because there's not enough bandwidth and the fees are too high.  When we had network congestion (spam attack or not) it really freaked a lot of people out who were actually using Bitcoin to transfer money.  I was one of those people -- one of my employees was pretty upset he had to wait 2 days while his transaction got stuck in the mempool.  People started using dash and ethereum.  I'm close to 100% sure that none of this is good for Bitcoin.  And if those problems come up again (its only a matter of time unless we have some scaling solution), I'm certaintly not going to be using Bitcoin to pay people if it becomes more expensive than Paypal.  Why should I?


ASIC manufactures can influence what is going on with altcoins?   I don't know much about that.  Sounds a little far fetched/doesnt make sense.

It is certainly not true

With off-chain transactions you can scale up transactions indefinitely (basically, up to a point where the transaction processing capacity is limited only by the sheer network bandwidth of the processing node). Even with strictly on-chain transactions, you can make them more efficient overall by packing more transactions in the block of the same size. I think there are a number of ways of scaling up with ratios higher than 1 to 1 (e.g. you could use some packing algorithm for big transactions or something to that tune)

It is accurate to call what the miners do is to destroy the bitcoin. They are too greedy, so they come up with the idea of BU, because of that greed they are making the bitcoin die off. At present, the value of bitcoin is severely depreciated. While alt coins are growing and going up to an incredible level, most altcoins go up, but the bitcoin goes against it, it is dying, and the killer Dead bitcoin is the main miners. They are bad guys who just satisfy their greed and do not think about anyone.

FTFY.

Yes your actually right. But i dont think so if miners really think about that. As you said they are aiming in short term gains? i dont really understand why they would do some things that can destroy bitcoin.  Yes many of the miners wanted to become rich even in my part, i also dream to become rich through bitcoin, but in good ways, ways that will help bitcoin also to improve since one of the reasons why bitcoin became famous in the market is that there are many users trusted and used it.

You scale On-Chain by increasing the rate of transactions, but keeping the amount of resources (i.e. blocksize) the same. It's not my definition, it's called mathematics.


Simple examples:

Schnorr signatures

~30% smaller than the ECDSA sig scheme Bitcoin uses now. That means ~ 30% extra space in the same blocksize.

Transaction encoding

Improve transaction encoding so it's more space efficient than the current system. gmaxwell talks about the details (with links to full detals) here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1700405.msg17053119#msg17053119 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1700405.msg17053119#msg17053119)

Can the moderators not check to see if all of these accounts are managed by the same person?

We halve the rewards every four years. Why not automatically double (or some other multiplier) the block size at the same time? That way things scale up gradually.

I'm sure there are other possible compromise positions as well. Honestly, the two sides just need to sit down with an experienced conflict resolution expert, and come up with a deal.

Proof of work consensus system.


Of course it could exist, but it was not designed that way.  Call it a design error, call it "on purpose", I don't know.  But if the consensus is Proof of Work, those delivering Proof of Work decide about consensus, and hence about everything.  Except the market of course.  That's the users.

They did that a long time ago, both sides (core and miners) then came up with the Honk Kong agreement. Basically it was something along the lines of, miners will use core if they release their scaling method before a certain date (can't remember when it was off the top of my head). Core then broke the agreement by not releasing it in time...

Miners (and by miners, I mean the usual chinese mafia) are bribed by institutions and states that have more money than the entire bitcoin marketcap combined. This is what explains the odd behavior with miners, because im under the assumption that they are intelligent enough to know going against 80% of the nodes and supporting inferior software + killing the network effect and price in the process, is not by any means a good idea.

Think about it, how else would TPTB attack bitcoin, if it wasn't by bribing miners?
What we are seeing is an obvious incentivized attack, so they don't care about the outcome of bitcoin.
It is yet to be seen if the community reacts and rejects it and the bitcoin network effect survives, and I hope and trust it does.


Bitcoin was designed with payment channels (lightning network) in mind, so satoshi saw LN coming. LN is supported by the likes of Nick Szabo (aka satoshi nakamoto). LN would in the long term deliver more gains to miners. Miners supporting shitty software and killing the network effect via HF aren't using their brains or are getting bribed.

this amuses me.    What account do you think might be also managed by me? 

There may be no place for miners in the future

Not miners as such, of course, but mining monopoly as what we have today. So miners are trying to squeeze maximum profits today even if that would severely hurt Bitcoin tomorrow. If there is no future for them, why should they care about Bitcoin fate at all? Their days are numbered, anyway (with or without Bitcoin). It can be said with certainty that instant, off-chain transactions are the thing of the future. And in this future, miners will be purely utilitarian, and they won't be able to indirectly set transaction fees like they do today

You know when James D'Angelo's said this, people laughed this off as if he was crazy.... now people should realize that he was actually right.  :o

https://buyabitcoin.com.au/blog/james-dangelo-bitcoin-mining-centralizing-worst-possible-places-china/

I quote a little bit of this article here : " Di Angelo explained that they Chinese government will forcefully take over the operations in China and

launch a 51% attack on the entire network."   <----- Strange how this is becoming a reality.... right?

Maybe even this guy couldn't have predicted the 51% attack would include such an elaborate social engineering component too.

The People's Republic of China are so desperate to protect their turf, they're willing to employ some seriously complex plausible deniability, not to mention an army of English speaking trolls. Anyone would think that the PRC aren't working alone here.... but that would be craaaazzzzzzzy talk, right? Surely the Chinese, American and/or the European establishment wouldn't be working together to kill Bitcoin, right? Right?

couldn't we just HF away from a malicious monopoly?

Scaling, in general, is a complex topic.  To thoroughly examine all aspects of the scaling of Bitcoin would involve a lot of work.

Often improving/replacing an algorithm can provide much more improvement than any other activity.  I always applaud/encourage/support efforts in this direction but realize they can take substantial time/investment especially as compared to just tweaking parameters.

If instead we try holding the algorithms pretty still (for now) while adjusting resources then maybe at least some progress can be made.

In terms of transaction rate (as opposed to any other measure), surely, at first, there would be some positive scaling (linear or not) increasing the current 1MB block size a little bit but eventually (as we continue to increase the size of the block) there could be/would be negative scaling.  Is anyone thinking/saying that a small block size increase would immediately *reduce* the transaction rate?  Does anyone think/say that a gigantic enough block won't lead to negative scaling?

Dismissing a reasonable amount of block size increase because gigantic enough blocks will scale negatively is misguided.

To me it seems like a pretty obvious tactic to cap the size of individual transactions to something like 1MB while increasing the block size.  Someone wanting a bigger transaction can just launch two or more transactions to effectively get the same work done.  Question: under SegWit are transaction sizes capped?

What's to stop them from invading the HF?

Why should it reduce the transaction rate at all?

It is often said (though I'm inclined to think that this is largely an erroneous opinion) that increasing the (small) size of the block would actually lead to an increase in the number of transactions processed per unit of time. I disagree with this point but people are still claiming that increasing the block size would lead to a wider adoption and thus to more transactions made. On the other hand, I don't quite understand why there should ever be a negative scaling (whatever you might mean by that). Basically, we are increasing the upper limit of the block size, but that doesn't mean that all blocks should necessarily be of that size. They will remain as big as the number of transactions included. For example, some miners deliberately choose to ignore all transactions and thus their blocks are tiny

dunno

You're conflating "scaling" with "increasing resource usage"


Both improve transaction capacity. But they're not the same.

Obviously there are two transaction rates;

1) the rate at which transactions are presented to the system by users
2) the rate at which transactions are booked into blocks.

These are related over time -- if the first rate exceeds the second for a long enough period of time then a backlog will grow; queueing theory 101.  Try driving on a highway during rush hour.

Increasing the current block size of 1MB to say 2MB would roughly allow twice as many transactions to be booked into blocks thereby increasing the second rate.  Naturally we'd have to constrain the size of individual transactions to avoid problems with them.  Miners that don't fill a block up are missing out on fees.

Negative scaling just refers to a situation where increasing a resource/parameter decreases the processing rate.  In the case of Bitcoin, there is a block size which is "too" big.  A block that is too big would lead to some processing problem, e.g. excessive page faulting, etc., and so the second rate would actually drop lower.

I don't think this is a valid argument

As I said in my previous post, the bigger block size doesn't set a requirement that all mined blocks should necessarily be of that size exactly. Obviously, they can be of smaller sizes since you fill them with the transactions that are pending confirmation and you don't wait until there are enough new transactions in the mempool to fill up the block (or fill the block with trailing zeroes). Even today you can see blocks of around 750k in size which corresponds to the former block size limit. And if someone aims for the upper limit and includes in the block he's found more transactions than his system is able to process, then he is basically shooting himself in the foot

Yes, improving the ability of the Bitcoin software to verify both transactions and blocks is a major purpose for Segwit's deployment (commonly referred to as "solving quadratic sighashing")

You're now conflating "scaling" with "processing blocks". They're not the same, even superficially.


There is no relationship between blocksize and scaling except a linear relationship, they're 1:1 at any value. Hence it's meaningless to talk about "scaling the blocksize" and other such expressions.

True enough; a gigantic block size limit does not necessarily lead to negative scaling but it does make it possible.  If the block size limit is constrained to something reasonable then we can safely avoid negative scaling at the risk of building a backlog.

Blocksize changes are nothing to do with scaling, David

I don't know how I can make that any clearer

Improving the algorithm is often/always? the better way to go but while we're waiting it is not unreasonable to tweak parameters.

Seriously? Clearly we have a difference in definitions.  I am not talking about taking the scales off of a fish here.  I'm talking about the term scaling where we are talking about the processing rate changing.  An increase in the processing rate is positive scaling.  A decrease in the processing rate is negative scaling.  Scaling can be linear or non-linear.  Linear scaling simply means that we get a 1:1 change in the processing rate as we vary some parameter.  How are you using the term scaling?

Today we are pumping somewhere between 2-7 transactions per second through into blocks on average.  Anything that changes that rate ability is a scaling factor.  If the block size limit were increased from 1MB to 2MB then we would see roughly twice that number flowing through.  That's pretty much scaling in my book.  Even if it were sub-linear so that we got only 3-8 transactions per second through on average, that's still scaling up.  Yes, it would grow the size of the block chain faster but something has to give until a superior algorithm is deployed.

Block size limit changes have way more than nothing to do with scaling the transaction rate through.  If it has nothing to do with it then decreasing the limit wouldn't hurt, right?

Explain how changing the relationship between transaction rate and blocksize from 1:1, to 1:1 changes the scale.

It changes the rate of processing.

What is the term you prefer to use for changing the rate of processing?

This is way off point but just to pick nits; Since there is only one fixed size block header then the ratio of transactions to block size does scale even in your definition although granted it is a tiny amount and not worthy of this mighty discussion.

I think we misunderstand each other because we are using a different definitions of scaling.

Recognizing this will help future discussions.

Evidently they only stopped short of carrying out their nefarious intentions, because the exchanges were able to put up a fight and made it quite clear that the world can always do without a best man! In the absence of that check, those miners were far gone on punching a hole on Bitcoin. Centralization of miners is a misnomer for Bitcoin, whose major selling point, is its decentralized nature.

Agreed.

I think the PoW change is still important, because of the situation with the current ASIC miners. If they can behave so recklessly once, I have little confidence that they will not do so again.

I feel for the small miners in a way, but not that much. They're the ones actually subjugated by firms like Bitmain, as the highly gouged prices they pay to people like Bitmain (surely it's only Bitmain and Canaan still selling to allcomers these days) are what funded the oligopoly to begin with.

If the miners thought more carefully, they'd see that CPU mining would put the ability to compete against the Bitmain mentality back on the table. And PoW changes really should not be attempted in an emergency, it would be highly disruptive and cause a great deal of uncertainty (not to mention the knock-on consequences of all that).


I propose that an orderly, staged PoW change, implemented 5% gradations via a series of soft forks, would do alot to secure Bitcoin's future. It's not my actual proposal, but one that is being discussed in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833391.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833391.0)

Not only would we decentralise mining from it's current cartel state, we could attract more users keen to compete in a fairer mining market. I see no downsides, executed diligently.

It is true that BU will give more power to the miners but i am not certain that they want to destroy bitcoin,they just want more control over the entire process ,who would not like to like their fingers when they put their hands in honey pot,all the major miners has invested a huge amount of money and they want to have a sustainable profit on par with their investment and may be so is the reason they are siding with them.

"Miners are semi-trusted & serve at will of users. Users have full rights of self-defense when preponderance of miners behaving insecurely."  - Nick Szabo

(a few hours ago)

BU is garbage m8, not sure if you can even justify using it in a serious way and not also want to literally bend over for an extremely centralized system compared to what we have going on right now.

Reminder that there is no way that centralizing power and giving control to miners is a solution.

Also, welcome to the free market.

maybe instead of making the blocks bigger, or adding an extra network. they can cut the block time and reward in half.. making available twice the transactions in the same time frame.. but keeping the same number of generated coins.. they would then need to move the next halving to 8 years instead of 4..

problem solved?

Far too radical.

Even if viable, core has expressed complete unwillingness to compromise or scale in any way, shape, or form, other than Gregory Maxwell's roadmap, which is at the heart of the dillema.

You are one of the most level headed people here, so no disrespect, but are you getting all your information from r/BTC ? This statement of yours is not exactly true. Contributors to Core have varying degrees of opinion but have more or less agreed to converge on a compromise, including increase in block size. If you could give more examples, I may be missing part of the picture.

Won't work out for pretty obvious reasons

People (miners and developers alike) cannot agree even on just direct block size change (by setting one constant/variable in the Bitcoin code) that would do basically the same stuff. The changes you suggest don't fix the problem (just like simple block size increase), they would only alleviate and postpone it somewhat. Even SegWit itself should be considered as an interim solution only since instant transactions are the thing of the future and we are getting there fast (that's what Dash seems to be already doing)

Uh, no !  DASH only confirms that your transaction is in the mem pool.  It also "confirms" that the mem pool won't allow another transaction double spend ; but that is fundamentally flawed because it would violate the CAP theorem. In other words, some master nodes may honestly confirm your transaction, while some OTHER masternodes may confirm your OTHER transaction during network delays, leading to an inconsistency in confirmed transactions.  The only way to avoid that, would be to require 100% masternode confirmation, at which point, THEY are the solvers of the consensus, and you don't need a block chain any more !  But it would be sufficient to have one badly behaving masternode and you would bring all of DASH to a stand still.  So this doesn't work.  Instant Pay only works at very low traffic rates.  It is a snake oil scheme of confirmation.
It still has to go on the block chain before really being confirmed, that block could just as well be orphaned, and gone is your transaction !

I don't really know since I'm not very interested in altcoins nowadays

I just read it in the trollbox of one exchange that Dash makes instant transactions possible and thought that the future has already arrived. Therefore, Bitcoin might really have started to become obsolete with its 10 minute confirmation times as well as seriously lagging behind some advanced altcoins that have emerged recently. If what you say is true, Bitcoin might in fact have some leeway, at least, so far. Nevertheless, the time is running out for it and it is running out fast at that

If Dash's instant transactions work as dinofelis says they do, then they are not worth the digits they are stored in. Masternodes are really nothing more than a taxation method on miners earnings for providing services of dubious quality.

In BTC, zero confirmation economic risk as been replaced from the disadvantageous double spend propagation attempt to one where the transaction does not confirm at all due to the exceeding of block capacity, transaction pool forgetfulness and selective node transaction relay.

There are methods that could be considered to reduce zero confirmation economic risk for on-chain transactions, but I suppose there is little interest in solving it when it is full steam ahead on a lightning network future.

PoW change, ladies & gentlemen. It's time. (it's overdue in fact)


Eat, or be eaten

Well, from the paper that describes this way of working:

https://www.dash.org/instantx/


--> the part in bold is a clear impossibility in a P2P network and is essentially the fundamental problem of consensus making.

and


Essentially, this mechanism proposes that once consensus is reached, it can reach consensus :)
If it were possible to ensure that "all nodes received the message", there would never ever be any consensus problem.  In other words, instant pay works well, if there is no double spend attempt.

After that, the miners still include what they want, if I understand well.  However, most probably they are asked to include instant-pay confirmed transactions first.

It is important to realize the circular argument in this, because it can sound credible.   The whole, and the SINGLE difficulty in setting up a crypto coin, and the exact reason why Satoshi invented Proof of Work and the Block chain, is that it is essentially impossible to:

1) make sure that EVERYONE on the network got the transaction

2) that the order in which two contradictory transactions are received on the network is the same for everyone

If one could make this happen, crypto would be MUCH MUCH simpler.  There wouldn't be any mining, blocks or whatever.  Indeed, every node on the network would receive ALL transactions in order, and only accept the first one if there's a double spend attempt.  There wouldn't be any need to put these transactions in blocks, to mine them, to "secure" them with PoW or anything of the kind.  That whole circus only serves ONE SINGLE PURPOSE: deciding, once and for all, in what order the propagated transactions should be processed, and picking (at random) one of the conflicting ones.

If you can SOLVE this problem in one way or another (like DASH pretends, with its propagating "locks"), then there's no need for blockchains, mining or any other securing.  Propagating the lock, or propagating the transaction, is the same.  The first one should be locking out the second one, and it is exactly because this cannot be rigorously imposed, that all the hassle with block chains has been invented.  So if you can propagate the LOCKS correctly, you could have propagated the transactions correctly.  And no more mining, blocks and whatever.

So instant pay solves the problem, when the problem didn't need to be solved.

Why is it impossible now? Is it because of the seemingly gradual drop in Bitcoin prices?

I really think that miners are just testing our patience here, they keep increasing the fees just to see to what point they can get a good amount of it without hurting the prices or the overall exchange market of the bitcoin, they are not afraid of making things worst because they know they can just hold the bitcoin for a while and that will make things go back to normal, there goes to show you how they have a strong control over the bitcoin.

dash is trash if it relies on masternodes.

also this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/61e645/good_to_remember_ethereum_and_monero_dont_have_a/

The miners don't set the fee directly.  Essentially there is a dual auction; users bid up, while miners work down.

Users set the fee in each of their transactions often/mostly relying on automation to calculate it.  Even if every miner set a high minimum fee, if every user set their fees below that then eventually some miner would break rank in order to earn the lower fees.  But some users want a faster confirmation and so they set a higher fee.

Organizing users to act in unison to keep fees low seems unlikely.  Some users will break rank and use a slightly higher fee in order to get their transaction done quicker.  The users bid up the fees; the miners just take it happily.  The miners work down the fees; if the users united they could keep fees low.

Btw, I recently set a fee to 0 and it only took 11 days to confirm; Bitfury did it.  Your mileage may vary.  Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future behavior.  Be prepared to recover if your no-fee transaction doesn't ever commit.

You are telling that it took 11 days to confirm the transaction with zero fee, but each of them cannot wait so long and if the online shop owners will wait so much time then it is not good for bitcoin. and what about if it got cancelled and returned to the sender. So it is always good to send with the correct fee to it get confirmation soon.

This is the main reason that is why the miner wanted the more faster and secure way of transaction, that they wanted to create BU

Users are setting the fees

Miners cannot increase the transaction fees but they can choose to ignore transactions with fees below certain limit. Or they can just ignore all transactions altogether (as some of them are deliberately doing). If there were plenty of miners as well as plenty of room in the blocks, that wouldn't be an issue since some of them (and I'd rather say most of them) would be including all transactions with or without fees. But since there is only a dozen of miners out there (call them mining pools or whatever, it doesn't matter), they can effectively and in unison bid the fees up. That's why mining monopoly is evil

If I were a miner (too expensive for my taste) then I would configure my mining software to mine only 0-fee transactions unless it didn't fill a block in which case then I would include the lowest fee transactions until it filled a block up to the limit allowed.  I am not most people.

If the developers would develop a less expensive way to be a miner then I would appreciate it.  Perhaps they could let miners like me win ever so often (every tenth block?) if we produce a block full of 0-fee transactions?

Bitcoin died when all those ASIC mining companies made appearance. We should do something about it and bring bitcoin mining back to home level. Mining companies made bitcoin centralized, that's all.

I don't think their intention is to destroy bitcoin, they live from it, but because mining has become realy expensive they have exaggerated with fees. Of course, that will not make them rich but they want to cover the expenses somehow. We'll see where this will bring us, but something has be changed because there should be balance and both miners and users should be satisfied.

i REALLY dont think people understand how mining works..

for one, its NOT THE MINERS that set the fee.. or choose to mine a certain fee, or really do anything..

everyone in this thread is saying MINERS this and MINERS that.. but, they should be saying MINING POOLS..

its the POOLS that set everything up.. and YES YOU CAN START YOUR OWN MINING POOL.. if you get enough miners on it, you can set it do mine zero fee tx's

Antpool should hear from you! They want to make a separation (fork) in bitcoin just to gain the certain control of that. For this purpose, they create delays and high fees which totally are not fair for the bitcoin community.

Mining is expensive because the concept behind mining is severely flawed

We just should accept this fact and search for alternative ways of setting up mining that wouldn't lead to monopolization of the whole process. If mining was cheap and available to anyone, there would be enough nodes eager to include all transactions (with or without any fees altogether). Wtf, there are over 30 thousand Bitcoin full nodes running out there which don't get a satoshi apart from supporting the network (indirect benefit), and that's what the pay should be and how the concept behind mining should work. You buy foods to support your life but taken as such feeding is economically unsustainable since it incurs direct expenses and doesn't bring direct profits

This is no news and we've heard similar stories about antpool and other miners but the question will always remain that are they doing this to strengthen or weaken Bitcoin? I think it's not in Bitcoin's interest.

This distinction is inconsequential to the matter in question

Mining pools act on their own even if they consist of many individual miners. Apart from that, I have strong suspicions that the largest mining pools are actually disguising huge mining farms which belong to a certain figure, and, at least, a few of noteworthy mining pools actually belong to the same person (we all know him). If so, we should understand that it is likely not even a matter of mining pools but of their owners to who possess the most of hashing power in these pools, and their number seems to be less that the number of pools themselves out there

Yes.  Mining pools are the deciders.  I guess that what you call "miners" is in fact sellers of hash rate with their devices.  The only thing these hash rate sellers decide, is to whom they sell their hash rate (usually one of the biggest pools, because they have the smoothest rewards).

Absolutely.  I fully agree with you. 

There are essentially two fundamental problems.  The first is with Proof of Work.  Proof of Work needs to destroy value in order to be valuable.  Proof of work is perfect to kill seigniorage, but is a totally horrible way to have "cryptographic security", because there's no advantage for the "good guys".  The "good guys" are those that can waste most, not those that "posses a secret key" (which is the usual form of cryptographic protection).
The race to waste most leads to economies of scale (ASICS...) and hence to a concentration of producers of proof of work.
This leads to two problems: centralization, and the fact that those producing proof of work are not necessarily stake holders in the system.

But there's another problem, which is the fact that blocks are rewarded in the first place in "big lumps".  This makes that there is a fight to make blocks, and to deny others to make blocks.  As such, "making blocks" becomes a huge lottery with big rewards, where pooling together always pays against playing solo.  This is a second vector of centralization: pooling.

Finally, the fact that there ARE rewards to "secure" the chain means that strategies to obtain those rewards are more important than correctly securing the chain, and to correctly process transactions.  If fees are due, then there will be strategies to extract as many fees from the users as the market can bear, and not the optimal point of resource utilisation.

The whole system of blocks, that are rewarded, and that this reward is an incentive for people to "secure" the chain as by-product, leads to a dynamics that is centralizing, and far from optimal for the users and stake holders.

1. You don't understand PoW's purpose in the Bitcoin system, at all

2. You don't understand the value conferred by cumulative hashes in the PoW scheme

3. As a result of points 1 & 2, you don't even understand the blockchain concept


So why should anyone be expected to read your overlong posts when you don't even understand some of the fundamental ideas behind Bitcoin?

That is the other side of the coin. One of the reasons why the miners are setting much higher fees is because of the difficulty to mine bitcoins or to solve blocks at this point of time. If the miner fees are too low then they cannot pay for the electricity bill and also for the personnel and hardwares. Most of all they can no longer feed their family if they will not ask for higher fees. But hopefully some new mining hardwares will come in which is more powerful and more efficient and less cost so that the miner fees could somehow lessen for a bit.

The bitcoin destroyers, a way to call, are accurate. The miners were too greedy, so they headed for the bitcoin unlimit, which was an experimental option and risked great repercussions; however, they did not see that, they assumed they would. Become wealthy if that comes true. I believe they will not do this, the minority can not resist the majority, the market always wins the greedy. They refuse to work steadily each day, and to an unprofitable source of income, they are destroying the bitcoin, and everyone is suffering the consequences. This is not allowed.

It's not the miners that are destroying bitcoin. It's the imbeciles that still believe we should keep 1MB blocks forever.       
   
the miners are trying to protect the network, but they are being hindered by powerful propaganda and the ignorance that comes with it.

Because they contain valuable logical arguments, that go against some religious dogma that doesn't stand up to logical analysis by "bitcoiners".  

Of course I understand the "value of cumulative hashes in a PoW scheme".  It is a cryptographic securing ("signing") of a specific chain over another one ; the only way to make a "false copy" is to spend more hashes on the false copy.

Note that most cryptographic systems introduce an asymmetry in the difficulty for the "good guy" and the "bad buy".  If I provide a signature of an original document, the making of that signature doesn't cost me a lot of effort, but for the one trying to make a false document with my signature, he has to essentially brute force my public key, which is an infeasible amount of work.  This is why a digital signature is an efficient way of securing a given document.

If I were to "sign my document" with PoW, then I would have to spend JUST AS MUCH effort on making the signature, than the attacker.  In fact, the one with more hash power would win: perfect symmetry between the "good guy" and the "bad guy".  This is the problem with PoW.   The "security" comes from the fact that we assume that the good guys wasted most.

If I have two block chains, in order to decide which one is the right one, I have to find out which one has most PoW.  That is then the "right" one.  With digital signatures, this is totally different: I check the digital signature against the public key of the signer, and if it fits, I know that the signer is the owner of the right secret key OR that the attacker has spend an IMMENSE amount of work to brute-force the key pair.  With a block chain, I only know that the "good" one has wasted more heat than the "bad one".

As compared to a proof of stake system for instance, PoW is pretty lousy cryptography.

But it is a great system to waste seigniorage, and to allow newcomers without any interaction with the originators of the system to obtain coins.  

It is a horrible system to "secure" something.  Just any outsider can totally overrule the system, if he spends, say, 50 billion on it.  The day the Chinese government wants to fuck up bitcoin, it generates 20 different block chains, that will cost them 50 or 100 billion dollar, and that's it.  In a PoS system, that is cryptographically impossible.

The current Core threat is BTW funny.  If they would switch to another PoW system, then bitcoin's chain would become MIGHTILY INSECURE, because there's not yet much hardware available for the other PoW system.  So for a while, the amount of PoW (the amount of wasted effort) on the PoW on the new chain would be ridiculously small as compared to what bitcoin was used to, and with relatively small capital, one would easily 51% attack such a meager chain protection.

However, if bitcoin switched to a PoS system, the security would be entirely guaranteed.  There would be no way to FAKE a PoS fork, because they are done by digital signatures of stake holders, not by having somewhat more hash power.

This coin should not be there in the first place

And then you wouldn't have to deal with its other, ugly side. Miners are going for profits, even if bitcoins they happen to mine didn't cost them anything, we would still be where we are today (maybe, a little bit later). In other words, greed has no limits. More specifically, the whole system is corrupt conceptually. So you cannot justify miners (as a system) on the assumption that they have to pay the bills and things like that. If we accept the truth, we should find a solution but there is an old wisdom which says that in solving a problem you can't rely on people (miners) which create this problem

As I said, you don't get it

1. The hashing stops the whole blockchain being recomputed and the ledger being entirely altered. Signatures have nothing to do with that. Zero.

2. The cryptographic signatures (and the corresponding public and private keypairs) are a completely separate form of security. With an immutable blockchain of transactions (which point 1 provides), the keys and the signatures secure the rights to moving BTC funds between one public key and another. If a transaction between to public keys doesn't have a valid form of signature, it gets rejected.


If you're not capable of conflating very, very basic concepts into a total mess of an incomprehensible non-sensical "description", then please be quiet

Threats on both sides are apparent. Many sheep following their flock.

The amount of hashing is the clumsy equivalent of a "digital signature" on the "original" so that it cannot get modified, exactly like the digital signature of a document proves that it is the original and not a modified version.  That was the analogy which visibly you didn't understand.

However, the difference between PoW and a digital signature is that with PoW, the "security" is not larger than the effort (waste) put in by the "signer" (the miners that made the first, original chain) and can hence be redone by anyone wishing to put more effort into it ; while with a genuine digital signature, the effort to make the signature is negligible, and the effort needed to fake it, is astronomical.   You essentially have that the cryptographic "proof of authenticity" with PoW is 1:1  (original/modified copy) while with a digital signature it is close to 0 : infinity.  That was my point.


I was not talking about the transaction signatures.  I was talking about the cryptographic function of PoW as a proof that it is the "original block chain".  PoW has the FUNCTION of a cryptographic signature, but a very bad one that is.
(it has other functions too, like resolving consensus by organizing a lottery and burning seigniorage).

How do you know that, amongst 3 different block chains, one is the "true" one ?  You check total PoW, and the largest number indicates you which one is the "true one". 

How do you know that, amongst 3 different digitally signed documents, one is the true one ?  You check the digital signature against my public key: only one will match. 

The certainty of the first (PoW) is only as good as your belief that an attacker will not have wasted MORE than the "good guys".  The certainty of the second (digital signature) is that an attacker couldn't have wasted an ASTRONOMICAL amount of work to brute force the key pair, while the true signer spend a millisecond of his PC effort on it.

You see the difference in security between a digital signature of a document, and PoW "signature" of a block chain ?  And do you see the difference in COST of that security between a digital signature (almost nothing) and PoW (400 million $ per year) ?

That's my point.  PoW as "security" signature of the "right" block chain is horrendously bad.

In PoS, the PoW is replaced by digital signatures by stake holders.   You can simply not fake a PoS chain, and its security is that of a digital signature.  PoS has a theoretical consensus problem (nothing at stake), but its cryptographic security, on the other hand, is total.  There is no way for an *external attacker* to do the PoS chain over.

Well, it was a terrible explanation. Using a cryptographic concept to metaphorically explain another is bound to confuse anyone reading


Please stop taking up so much space to say nothing, you're not a very good communicator, and it's a waste of everyone's time

Not anyone.  Only those that are not very fluid in cryptographic notions.  Saying that "proof of work is a form of digital signature of the right block chain" is taking a perspective that maybe not everyone had immediately seen, and those understanding these notions may 1) have had that idea already by themselves or 2) have a Aha Erlebnis, in which case I opened their view on things.

Once you realize this function of PoW, you realize also that there must be better ways, and you are less bound to repeat "most secure block chain in the world" and other religious bitcoin nonsense.

It could also be that I've been overlooking something, and then maybe someone could make an *intelligent* comment that helps me in my own understanding.  That's why I am here: to test my understanding of crypto systems.


Mileage can vary :)

I'm not saying nothing at all.  You may understand nothing of what I'm saying.  You're free to read or not to read my comments.  I don't care. If they are not helpful in your understanding, then simply don't read them.  Your answers are not very helpful to me, but they allow me to fathom the level of understanding (or lack thereof) of others although I don't know how representative they are.

I really mean it, you're a terrible communicator, like verbosity incarnate. Please work on using fewer words, and on presenting your thoughts clearly.

I think your point should be weighed critically

While I certainly agree with your inference that with PoW the effort to undo something essentially equals the effort it took to do it in the first place but it is still more consistent overall. What I mean to say is that there cannot be a loophole or vulnerability to somehow not to do the required amount of work to undo what's been already done. You would still need to spend the same amount of work, no matter what. In this way, PoW is more reliable and bulletproof. On the other hand, with asymmetric encryption you can never be 100% certain that there is not some shortcut due to cryptographic vulnerability, by chance or by design

Absolutely not.  If you can reverse the hash function (that is, if you succeed in cracking it), you can redo a "proof of work" block chain in half an hour on a PC (well, maybe half a day :) ).  A cracked hash function is not a proof of work any more.  Note moreover that you do not need to *fully* crack the hash function, but to find simply a way for it to find precedents with leading zeros without having to "brute force" it.  The whole proof of work resides on the assumption that brute-forcing is the only way to find hashes with leading zeros.  


Indeed, but that's just as well the case for a hash function.  And hell, if reversing a digital asymetric key pair is to be envisioned, then the *ownership* of coins is put severely to a test.  (ok, I agree that the hash protection of the public key until you spend the outcome, is a smart protection of that, but in fact, it just MODIFIES the asymetric key pair, it doesn't undo the fact that there is a key pair).

I don't have the time nor the energy for effort to be concise.  As I write on a keyboard about as fast as I talk, my stuff is always very verbose.

I don't think they really care about bitcoin's future as in bitcoin in isolation. Delaying SegWit & LN means they're currently getting much bigger fees than before i.e. better profits which is what they're bothered about.

Amen.  Someone is getting it.

You cannot blame the miner, implementing segwit and LN will definitely cut their profit.  The first reaction of person should be protect their interest. Though as I read segwit and LN explanation, they are only for micro payment, I think it is somewhere around 0.042 BTC and larger than that can't be handled by LN by now but the possibility of increasing that is very possible, besides it is just a code.

That's partly true because they are monetizing Bitcoin transactions and it's gradually killing our beloved cryptocurrency.

I'm not very familiar with cryptography in Bitcoin specifically (apart from basic concepts), thus bear with me. So even if you "crack" the hash function, you would still need to do absolutely the same amount of work now in direct order (as you yourself said in one of your previous posts), at least as far as I understand it. Besides, how are you go to crack hash function? Hash is basically a function that maps some data of arbitrary size (usually orders of magnitude greater in size than the resulting hash) to data of fixed size. Therefore, "cracking" a hash would pose to you conceptually the same task as finding a private key having only a public one, i.e. you will have to check myriads of possibilities that give you the same hash. And which one are you going to choose?

In short, you can't crack a hash function

Of course you can.  What is a hash function essentially ?  It is a function f that maps a number in the set A = {0,...N-1} into the set B = {0,...M-1} where M << N ; f(n) = m.

The trick of a hash function is that the calculation of f(n) = m is rather simple, but that there's no way, given an m, to find an n other than by exhaustively trying all elements of A. 

Given that M << N, there are essentially on average Q = N / M elements of A that map onto a given value of m.
If you find a way to find easily the set of these Q elements, given m, without having to scan over all of A, you have cracked the hash function.

Usually, a hash function is already considered cracked when you can easily find ONE SINGLE element of the inverse image of m, but a fully cracked hash function gives you all of them.

If on top of that, I'm able to search quickly  in the set of solutions (for instance, if I can generate them in an ordered way), I don't have to run over each of the solutions, I have only logarithmic difficulty to search in this set of solutions the one that satisfies the conditions I need (for instance, the block header without nonce).

I can work backwards in the hashing tree towards those data points where I have liberty to change things, and search each time, logarithmically, whether a solution exists.

In fact, the solution set I would take would start from m = 0: infinite difficulty in bitcoin: the hash being zero !
Once I have the header solution set, I look (logarithmically) for those solutions that have the right previous block hash and a few other things that need to be fixed, and essentially look for those solutions giving a merkel tree hash and a nonce.

For a found merkel tree hash, I now apply the same technique where everything is fixed except the coinbase transaction: so I calculate backward a/the solutions for this coinbase transaction, imposing (searching) everything that is fixed in the coinbase transaction --> I find the/a solution with the/a right coinbase comment.

I've just produced a correct block with maximum difficulty !  This chain is unbeatable now, nobody can make a chain with more PoW !  My PoW is orders of magnitude bigger than what has ever been done on bitcoin.

Note that even if I fork off 100 blocks ago, the new chain where I orphaned 100 blocks has orders of magnitude more PoW, with a calculation that I can do on my PC, if I have:

1) a simple way to generate the ORDERED set of solutions n to f(n) = 0.
2) a quick way to search into that set without having to "enumerate" it ; that is: if I can generate "solution number p" in that set without having to calculate solution 1, solution 2, ....

It seems this is where you make an impossible assumption (I didn't read past that)

In other words, there cannot be even theoretically such a way that you could find all elements of the set A that map into the set B by using a shortcut unless you check all possible elements of A if they actually map into B (provided that A is an arbitrary set of random numbers, of course). Thereby, you still have to brute force elements of A, which roughly corresponds to finding a private key. Indeed, you may not need to find precisely all elements that fit into the hash, but it is essentially the same with asymmetric encryption as well. There may be more than just one private key that produces a certain public key but you don't need to find all of them. The first encounered will suffice

Bitcoin mining is a business. In a business, the proprietors are only concerned about making profit. They know that Bitcoin is not going to last forever. So their aim is to make as much profit as possible, before the coin becomes obsolete.

You can blame them, and let me take an example : If the needs of the consumers change, the company has to adapt to the changes or they will not survive. All parties in this debate is clear on the fact that aggressive scaling must happen. The miners or let me rather say the ones supporting BU, has decided that it is a better solution to scale Bitcoin slowly, because it benefits them, when congestion push up the fees. 

SegWit & LN eliminates this problem, because it scales aggressively, so we will not have to deal with this problem again soon.

The problem is, these miners has had a taste of these higher fees and they want more. ^grrrrrr^   

If I am not mistaken miners they choose to join in a mining pool in order to mine more effectively. Therefore it's a matter of choice which is the pool they go with. Moreover, mining is an investment and as investment has not only profit but risk too. Yesterday, I was written an article where the author is a miner and had invested about $30K and was claiming that had to protect his investment. So I would like to ask; What is the difference between miner's investment and bitcoin's holder investment who bought 30 coins with $1000 per coin? Miners are securing bitcoin but bitcoin has value because people want it.

This is not the only viable explanation

In fact, we would be perfectly fine if it was the only rationale behind the actions of the puppet masters of BU team and their cronies. But we can't completely write off the possibility that they are ultimately looking to destroy Bitcoin (the reasons for wanting that vary greatly). Obviously, they can't openly admit that since admitting that would instantly make all their efforts futile. So they should necessarily hide their intentions by disguising them through claims of making Bitcoin better, and we can only look at indirect evidence to find out their true intentions

Of course not.  You are making a circular argument here.  You take for granted the properties of a hash function, to prove that a hash function has these properties.

Let me give you a toy example.  Suppose that my hash function is:

f(X) = (K.X) modulo M + C

This has the "random" properties of a hash function, right ?

You can solve this equation into:

f(n) = m

becomes:

n = (m - C) / K modulo M + L . M

where the division is unique in the field modulo M (supposed to be a prime), or has a few solutions in the ring modulo M if M is not prime or no solution, easily determined by Euclid's extended algorithm.

We now have an ordered solution set for n, where L is the index in the solution set, eventually with a second index in the division solution set if M is not prime and there are multiple solutions to the inverse of K.

Of course this was a trivial hash function.   A cryptographic hash function is way more complicated and supposed NOT to lead to such a solution.  But the principle is possible, as I just showed.  I don't have to spend any work to find the L-th solution to my hash problem:

f(n) = m.

This is what I understand by "cracking the hash function completely": being able to have an algorithm that spits out solution number L of the ordered solution set.

I won't pour mathematical formulas here since no one will try to get into them anyway

I will just give a simple (relatively) task. Say, you have some vulnerable information that you want to protect. For example, it may be access keys to your exchange account which allow to manage your funds and which you want to protect. You set a password, get its hash and then encode the keys using this hash by applying exclusive disjunction on the keys (logical XOR). XOR operation is required so that you could do the process in the reverse order (i.e. decrypt the keys using your password) but it is inconsequential as such. Now you have stolen the encrypted keys, you know how they get encrypted, so how are going to decrypt them? Hash function is known, let it be sha:512. I guess you would have to check possible combinations sequentially until you find the keys that fit

You have just re-invented a one-time pad encryption which cannot be cracked of course.  The hash function is not even necessary.  You only needed a random number (the one-time pad), and you used the entropy of your password, and the hash function, to use this to generate a random number serving as one time pad.  Even worse, I can NEVER find your keys, even with infinite amount of work, because I will never know when I found them.

You haven't used the irreversibility of the hash function here.  You only used it to transform some entropy (that of your password) into another random number.

It is a pity that you didn't look at the simple math I posted, because it explained exactly what I wanted to illustrate.  Note that you could use my toy hash function in your example, and your system would be just as secure.  Because the irreversibility of a hash function is not needed in your case.

It is assumed that you can check them

In reality, you could use them to try to access the funds and if you are allowed, then you have found the correct key pair. So you could assume that you can check the keys instantly (this won't work in real life but we are conceptualizing the process). But that doesn't in the least defy the fact that you would still have to check each key one by one. Regarding using a random number, I don't really see how you would be able to decode the encrypted access keys later if this random number is not saved somewhere which makes the whole idea of using a random number worthless (as I get it)

I don't think that miners, woke up one day and try to hurt btc and people who using it. Someone force them to do that, if there is someone. And I believe that they want to play with btc, make more bitcoins. That won't be good. Do you know why there is economic crisis?  Bcs governments can make as much money as they want. If they want billions, will have them. Fiat money has no value anymore bcs of that. But there are only 21M btc, and people know that they won't be more, that's why btc has a value now, same as gold. There is a dirty game behind of all this, and if we con't do something now, it won't end up well.

My point is that in your example, your key is encrypted with a "one time pad", which is, by definition, a random number that YOU know, and that the enemy (me) doesn't.  However, instead of "remembering" the one time pad directly, you prefer remembering a (random) password, and you have to TRANSFORM that random number (your password) into another random number of different format.  To do this entropy transformation, you use a hash function, but you don't NEED a hash function for that ; any injective function from the password set into the "one time pad" set is good enough.  You don't need the irreversibility of that function (which is the property of a hash function: practical irreversibility).  As I showed you, my function f(n) = m = (K n) mod M + C, which is a "randomly looking function" that is perfectly reversible, could do just as well for your case.  The fact that f(n) would be "cracked" and made reversible, doesn't alter the security of your key protection, which is simply protected by the entropy of your password, that simply had to be mathematically transformed in the right form factor to be XORed with your key.

Whether I can calculate back from the one time pad to the password, or not, doesn't matter in your case.  So the fact that reversing the hash function doesn't destroy your system, is non sequitur.

There is always some force behind anyone doing anything

But just knowing this doesn't tell us anything in particular. If they want to simply make more bitcoins (in this subtle way bypassing the fixed limit of 21M bitcoins to be mined), why are there rumors that they are preparing a 51% attack against Bitcoin? Somehow this doesn't add up well to your theory. Given how many bugs the BU code contains, they don't seem to be particularly interested to actually bring BU to life. That says that they might in fact be looking to destroy Bitcoin, not just mine more bitcoins in search of profits


Okay, I see you point. As I said, I'm not very familiar with Bitcoin cryptography to continue this discussion in depth

+1

That's what all the "sudden" seismic political movements around the world these days are probably all about. There's no proper proof, of course, but it fits the long term pattern of history: when the old monetary system begins to lose control and break down, tyrants begin the biggest wars they can summon up.

Are we heading for big changes to the monetary system, an economic depression, and huge wars? It's not impossible, but let's not wish for it by over-interpreting the current situation. At the same time, diligent behaviour is necessary, just in case.

Above all, cryptocurrency could really help cut off the money that today's politicians need to wage major wars. We need to cut them off from cryptocurrency, and fortunately, Satoshi designed Bitcoin that way from the outset. Maybe, (dare I say it) this time will be different

Miners have invested millions in bitcoin, do you really think they're so stupid to destroy it?

If you are opposed to the miners, you should think twice about your opinions, because miners only want 1 thing.    

Miners want bitcoin to be successful, because otherwise they lose millions.

Investors can just sell their bitcoin and they'll be fine, even if they invested millions into bitcoin. Miners can't sell their hardware and recover their investment. So miners will be the one who suffer most when bitcoin crashes.   
They will do everything in their power to keep bitcoin healthy.

If this is true what Trace Mayer say that daily fees are 350 000 dollars that is a lot, but how many miners needs to split that amount? Is there any info about that? I could`t find any answer on that in this thread, and in search over internet, almost all is just about hash power.


That is logical assumption, and in all this argues in the forum about bitcoin next step I believe that miners will come up wish some good solution in the end. Like you said millions of dollars are in the game, and why would they ruin all that, and all future potential that bitcoin have.

I guess you can more or less consider hash rate distribution as the same as that of fee distribution, given that all blocks are more or less equally full.  Maybe some pools are smarter than others in putting the best-paying transactions in their blocks, but I don't think so.

So, essentially, half of that amount (175 000 dollars per day) goes to 5 pools, so essentially 35 000 dollars a day per pool.  The other half goes essentially to 10 other pools.

Maybe, because they might have no other option left for them specifically?

What I mean to say is that they feel that their days are numbered anyway. The future of payment processing seems to be lying with instant transactions and with SegWit activated and Lightning Network just around the corner miners are inexorably set to lose their influence and power (read money). So they don't have to particularly care about Bitcoin with themselves no longer around, that's pretty obvious. And if they have been offered multimillion "severance payouts" to finally destroy Bitcoin, they (basically, a few mining barons) might agree to accept such offers after all

You confused me since I wasn't thinking quite clearly yesterday

Indeed, this approach doesn't add to security, but that was not my point initially which I somehow lost during this conversation with you myself. My point is that if you are reversing the hash function you will still have to brute force all passwords as you would do if there was no hash function at all. In this way, hash function doesn't lower the security which you seem to accept yourself, and this was exactly my point. In other words, you would anyway do the same amount of work, and there is no shortcut or backdoor which could give you a clue what a password might be, for example, its length or which symbols should be excluded

Yes, so ?


No, of course not, it conserves entropy as long as the input is smaller than the output.  But that was not the point.  In other words, your example is right, but non sequitur for what I said earlier.


Nope. That's your error.

Providing a "hash with conditions" is a proof of work *because of the assumed irreversibility of the hash function* ; because you have no other way of satisfying the condition on the hash output, but to try randomly at the input.

However, if you crack the hash function, that is, if you can find EASILY all input solutions that give a given output hash, then providing a hash that satisfies a given condition is NOT a proof of work any more.

This has nothing to do with your example of transforming entropy, because proof of work is not a matter of entropy.

Let us take a very simple example.  Suppose my silly hash function is again:
f(n) = (K.n + C) mod M, with K,M and C fixed parameters of the hash function.  I'm a naive guy thinking that my hash function is a good, irreversible function.

Essentially, my hash function takes on ANY number n, and produces a number between 0 and M-1.  Let us say that M is a big prime number, with 256 bits, and K is of that order too and C too.  If you put arbitrary numbers into this function, you get arbitrary-looking numbers out.

Now, if I want you to give me some proof of work, I give you a number A, and I want you to find a number N so that:

f ( f(N) XOR A) < Z

If my hash function is irreversible, the only thing you can do is to try this function so many times as needed, which must be on average 2^256 / Z times.

However, if f is reversible (and it is !), I pick a number, say, Z/2.  I calculate (easily) an inverse value U such that f(U) = Z/2.  I calculate easily V = A xor U, and I calculate just as easily W such that f(W) = V.

W satisfies the condition I asked, but I didn't have to provide for any work of the order of calculating 2^256 / Z hashes.  Hell, I could put in Z = 0, and with the same effort, I calculate U' such that f(U') = 0 (even before you gave me A!) ; I calculate V' = U' xor A ; I calculate W' such that f(W') = V'.  Done.

But this is the crux of the matter

Since it doesn't lower security (which it should, to make your claims valid), you would still have to do the same amount of work as if there were no hash function in the first place at all (i.e. some direct encryption in place which could be cracked only through brute-forcing exclusively). Your argument that you could somehow break hash function (let's assume that for a moment) in respect to my example should necessarily give you a hint as to what this password might look like, and thus you would have less work to do to crack it (i.e. do less brute-forcing). But that would in its turn mean that hashing password actually lowers security. I guess we have arrived at a point where you should make up your mind, i.e. whether hash function (potentially) lowers security or always retains it, no matter what

But the PoW security in bitcoin is not about guessing passwords.  It is in proving that you have done gazillion hashes, to have a funny outcome of the hash.  This is why your example, although correct, has nothing to do with my argument.

If you can reverse the hash function, you don't need to perform gazillion hashes to obtain a funny hash result.  You start with the funny hash result, and you calculate backwards what you needed to put in to find the funny hash.  Given that you have not *total choice* of what you put in, but only special fields, you need also to be able to search quickly in the solution space, so you really have to crack the hash problem entirely.   But the PoW security has nothing to do with guessing passwords.  It is finding inputs that produce funny hash results, and for that, the assumption is that you have to TRY RANDOMLY.  If you can reverse the hash function, you don't have to try randomly to find the hash result you started from, because it is the result of a calculation.
Look again at my toy example, it illustrates perfectly in a simplistic setting what I'm saying here.

The "proof of work" in bitcoin is: providing such a block header, that its hash is a funny result starting with a lot of zeros.
In that block header, you have to have the hash of the previous block (cannot change it), the version number (cannot change it) and the date (cannot change it).  You can change the nonce, and the merkel tree hash.

So if you can resolve the inverse hash function so that it has many zeros (or ALL zeros), and you can search in the solution space for those headers that have the right previous block hash and the right version number, you find one or several possible results for hte merkel tree hash and the nonce.

With that given merkel tree hash, again, you inverse to find the "free parameter" hash of the coinbase, and all imposed hashes of all transactions.  If you can search the solutions in this solution space that satisfy the conditions on the other hashes, you find the free value of the coinbase transaction hash.

You invert again: you now have the coinbase transaction itself, in which you have to fix a lot of bytes, but you leave free the "coinbase comment section".  Searching in the solution space, again, will give you one or multiple solutions satisfying the boundary conditions of the transaction (the fixed pieces) and will give you the comment section.

Filling in this comment section gives you the right coinbase transaction that will then produce the hash that, combined with the other transaction hashes, gives the right merkel tree hash, that, when filled into the block header with the right previous hash and the right version number and nonce, will give a hash of ZERO !  The highest possible PoW, much more than the whole existing block chain !

Could you provide a simple answer to my post above?

I'm not reading past a few sentences of your posts (I'm curious if anyone does). At first you claimed that my question was "non sequitur" and I got confused (since I lost my own point and got led away by your verbiage), but now you are just evading a direct question. Namely, does hashing lowers security in my example or not (due to a possibility of a shortcut or a backdoor)? If it doesn't, then your whole point is null and void. Or you just can't accept being wrong since it was you who first claimed that this example is unbreakable (apart from brute-forcing, of course). I'm not interested in that, anyway. It is your problems with your ego, I don't care

This is the modus operandi of this particular brand of trolling summed up perfectly.


"Super-smart stream-of-consciousness uber-mensch brerates the 'little-people' for not being able to come up with over-long and over-wrought confabulated arguments". I risk sounding too much like them with that description, but that's how I'm seeing it. Maybe shorten it to just plain "intellectual trolling" :D

How come miners will think in such a manner, because it's the one that gives them a reliable earning. If you consider altcoins at the place of bitcoin long back itself mining could have come to an end. The reason is that, what all issues that bitcoin faced cannot be faced by altcoins and withstand moving on the growing path. Decrease in fee might be little disturbing for the miners but they never think of destroying.

You are considering only a small range of possibilities

You implicitly assume that miners wouldn't be killing a goose laying golden eggs. That's not a wrong assumption in and of itself, but it is surely not the only possibility why they may actually want to kill it (or not want to kill it). For example, if they knew in advance that this golden goose is going to die tomorrow on its own, they would be better off overall to slaughter it today to sell its meat for a profit. More specifically, they may understand that they won't be able to withhold future Bitcoin updates any longer, which would bring their power (as well as fees) essentially to nothing. In other words, to betray in time is to foresee

If your attention span is too short to read a one-page argument, I can't help.  One should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.  But to make it as simple as possible, you'd have to pay me, because that's a lot of work for little interesting return.

Bitcoin miners help keep the Bitcoin network secure by approving transactions. Mining is an important and integral part of Bitcoin that ensures fairness while keeping the Bitcoin network stable, safe and secure. I dont really think bitcoin miners will deliberately want to sabotage the bitcoin technology, even if some of their actions puts bitcoin in a risk, I believe in the sustainability of bitcoin.

If developing arguments in the form of a course is called trolling, I can understand why so many people have no clue about how things work.
Mathematical arguments of cryptographic nature, when the common knowledge is seemingly missing on which to build, need more than a few lines to be explained.  I wonder if you got your course on cryptography on a quarter of a page, and if you called the teacher a troll because he gave a text that was more than 20 lines.

In the exchange above, I tried to explain the need for the hash function not to be totally cracked in order for a special hash to be a proof of work.   That should be totally obvious to anyone knowing sufficient cryptography, but visibly the poster I was talking to didn't have that common base of knowledge - no offence.  He confused another notion in cryptography, namely key/password entropy of a secret key (which can indeed only be brute-forced if it is pure entropy) with the proof of work of brute-forcing a hash function, where no entropy is involved.

For anyone fluid in cryptography, what I say above is common knowledge, and easily understandable.  But not everyone here is a knowledgeable cryptographer.  So I made a small course on purpose to teach the difference between both notions.  Yes, it was a free course that I didn't polish.  If you want one, you'll need to pay me.

If the answer by the student is "professor, your course is more than 3 lines, I didn't read it" I stop teaching.

If the shared point of view is that anyone teaching with more than 3 lines is a troll, it is no surprise not many around are understanding crypto.  One needs more attention span than that to understand these matters.  It involves more than just spinal reflexes.   The frontal cortex needs to get involved too.

Right at this moment, I'm reviewing a scientific paper of about 26 pages full of calculations and arguments, 10 times more complex than what I wrote above.  I do this for free too.  I will not answer to the authors "Your paper was more than 5 lines, I didn't read it".

Have you ever wondered that your verbiage may just not be worth reading?

It kinda looks that you are heavily overvaluing yourself ("on a scale of one to ten, you probably think you're a seven, and you wouldn't be alone"). If you can't lay down your thought in a few concise sentences, most likely you don't quite understand yourself what you are talking about. More specifically, if you define a subset of a bigger set that a hashing function can be reversed to, you still basically have an infinite set. But for all practical intents and purposes, it is all six of one and half a dozen of the other since you would still be dealing with an infinite number of possible combinations that would hash to a given value (good luck to you reversing an MD5 hash). That's why the reversing of a hash function is meaningless, and there cannot possibly be a shortcut or loophole. And note that I don't need any mathematical formulas to explain this simple idea. Now you can evaluate how much your time and effort may be worth in dollar terms

Value is a subjective notion, and it may very well be that to most readers, my verbiage is not worth anything.  If their attention span is limited to "a few lines" and "no formulae please", then indeed, even Newton's Principia wouldn't be worth the paper on which it is written to them.


That is a ridiculous statement when you're talking about notions like mathematics and cryptography, and science in general.  Can you explain to me the measurement problem in quantum theory in a few sentences, if it is clear that I don't know what linear superposition is ?  Can you explain the validity of the theorem that the gravity of a sphere can be replaced by a point mass in its centre for every test mass outside of the sphere in a few lines if I don't know what a vector is ?  Can you explain Goedel's theorem in a few lines to someone that doesn't know what an L1 formal language is ?  Hell, can you prove Fermat's last theorem in a few lines to someone who doesn't know what an elliptic group is ?

Open any scientific journal.  Do most articles limit themselves to a few sentences ?  Are all those authors nutcrackers over estimating themselves because these fools took more than 8 pages explaining their stuff to their high-level peer audience ? (the article that proved Fermat's last theorem was about 150 pages, for your information: according to you, that author didn't really understand what he was talking about either).

You were confusing two elementary concepts in cryptography: the distinction between "entropy of a secret key" and "brute forcing a hash function".  I tried several times to explain that to you, but if your attention span cannot go beyond a few lines, indeed, my explanations are worthless to you.  But then, your replies are not very valuable to me too.

I could indeed have answered in one sentence:

"you're confused about entropy of password and proof of work by brute-forcing hash functions".  There.  That's a valuable statement, 100% true.  Would you have accepted it ?

I'm here to learn, but I am beyond the stage where I can still learn from people with limited attention span and visibly confused on elementary notions.  Most probably, they have nothing of value to say for my learning.  That said, me trying to explain stuff to you helps ME to be even clearer on these notions.  So my verbiage does have value, to me.  The fact of writing it up clarifies somewhat more the notions I explain, and so that is interesting for me (although much more limited than someone that discusses on the same or higher level).

You don't get it absolutely

But the fact that you don't see the point here itself tells a lot. Essentially, it tells that you know neither mathematics nor cryptography (apart from a few basic concepts which you don't understand either), and that you are not seriously involved in any science in general. Otherwise, you would have known that if you have a deeper understanding of anything than someone else, you can always, and I repeat it, always explain however intricate or fundamental problem or idea in terms which your company understands. But as I said, you should first fully understand the problem yourself (to correctly scale down). That's basically how any scientific discipline is taught. If you are a university professor or a school teacher, you always proceed from the lower scope all the way up to your own limits or limits required by the curriculum. I can't explain the measurement problem in quantum theory because I don't understand it myself, but whatever I understand I can always (I repeat again, always) explain it in a few sentences within the scope of understanding of whoever may get interested. As an aside, that's basically what makes an interesting read

For some reason I feel like the Bitcoin miners are Wuxia miners and want to get the benefits on behalf of the sect which is Bitcoin at the expense of the whole. Kind of a greedy mentality and will just keep the status quo for now.
But that is because I tend to bias the mines to China i'm sure there are also those who care about the chain still.

You have no idea how ironically wrong your message is if you would know who I am.

If your fundamental thesis is that everything is explicable to anyone "in a few sentences", your pedagogical (and most probably your academic) skills are very limited, and the proof of that is so terribly simple that it is stultifying that you can't grasp it: most courses by "professors and school teachers" take more than a few sentences.  Most scientific papers are more than a few sentences. 

Your idea that about any notion can be explained to about any public in a few sentences, means that you limit yourself to very primary notions indeed.  I don't know how you can miss that evidence --- in the same way as I don't know how you can miss the difference between secret key entropy and brute-forcing a hash function, and having the pretence to claim your unknown counter party doesn't know much about cryptography - Dunning Kruger in exponential version I would think.

I agree, miners are not that dumb to kill their cow.  If I aske you, would you kill your own source of income?  Do not put the blame on miners about this recent problem, miners are just mining, they probably setting up their miners to pick up transaction that have high fees but this should be blamed to the people who put a larger amount of tx fee.  If people agreed to limit their tx fee, then there is nothing the miner can do but pick them because it will be their lost if they do not get this tx fee.  Remember they are always competing against each other so if some miners keep themselves stubborn and not pick up the agreed tx fee of these senders, someone will happily get them into the blocks.

I don't care who you are

If you talk bullshit that will remain bullshit no matter who you might be (though I really doubt that you are somebody). For a pissing contest, you may want to look elsewhere (iamnotback will make you a good company, I guess). The aim or courses is to expand knowledge base but you can't expand without proper understanding what has been explained before. And this expansion is done in small increments, basically, a thing explained conceptually in a few sentences if you please and then elaborated to gory details. Going down the learning curve is a pretty good test to see the real level of understanding the subject. In other words, if you can't explain a thing in simple terms within the scope of someone's understanding, your abstruse verbiage goes straight out the window even if it is technically correct (while in your case it is no more than just empty verbiage)

Whatever happens, some solution to the whole scaling and transaction issue has to be found and fast. If Bitcoin is to remain in it's position then it has to be refined and sorted out in a way that pleases everyone. If transaction fees get too high and transaction times get too long, people will turn to other altcoin solutions for their daily needs and Bitcoin will be placed in a position of wealth storage tool as opposed to merchant friendly tool.

It is a pity that you have turned this learning opportunity in a pissing contest, as you say, because of your unwillingness to admit that your lack of attention span width rendered your initial technical and erroneous objection moot when engaging in a technical discussion, which I tried to keep as simple and to the point as possible.  

Re-read the posts from there, and you will see that your shifted attack, namely "you couldn't explain why I was wrong in a few sentences", is a childish response to someone who had taken the pains to explain to you in HALF A PAGE with a mathematically traceable example exactly where the problem in your objection was lying.

In other words, we have the typical example of the not too smart student that tells the professor he's wrong, and when the professor gives him a more involved proof on the black board, goes whining that the argument is too long and hence the professor is an asshole that doesn't know how to teach.

Again: in one sentence:

you are confusing entropy of secret key/password with brute-forcing hash functions.

Short enough ?

Here are (again) the longer explanations:

You are right, miners are not that dumb. To continue feeding this cow when it finally stops producing milk. But apart from giving milk, the cow is utterly useless to them as such while they are not idealists staking some lofty ideas above more material profits, so it makes sense for them to butcher it and sell the meat to whoever is going to pay for it. Therefore, the answer is certainly yes, if this source is exhausted or about to be exhausted in the nearest future, it makes sense to get rid of it, especially if you are going to get paid for doing just that

In short, no milk today!

And how many people will get a clue what you are talking about?

Here's a simple but totally valid explanation why reversing hash function is meaningless and ultimately futile. If you multiply something by 0, you will get 0, as simple as it gets. In a sense, multiplication by zero is as ultimate a hash function as it is useless for any practical purpose. If you tried to reverse it (I won't post links to your posts where you talked about that as if it made sense), you would get a set of possible values ranging from 0 to infinity (for non-negative values). And it is the same with any hash function, and it doesn't matter that a set of infinite collisions leading to this hash will in fact be only a subset of an even more infinite set since you are still dealing with infinity. When hashing you are losing information and there is no way back (note that here I'm not talking about my example with a password as such)

Anybody understanding the basics of cryptography.  I was willing to explain them, but I cannot teach you those basics "in a few lines".

But, if you want it "in a few lines", here it goes:

- entropy of a secret key/password is true ignorance.  If the only thing you have is a test of "yes, it is the right one" vs. "no, it is the wrong one", there's only one single way to destroy that entropy, and that is by trying all possibilities.  If you tell me: "I have a number in my head between 0 and 100, and I will tell you when you guessed it", the only thing I can do is try all numbers until I hit the right one.  So the work needed by guessing is essentially the work of 1 guess, times (grossly) the number of possible keys/passwords.  There's no other way.  It is pure entropy.

- brute-forcing a hash function is "finding an inverse" without knowing any better algorithm but trying all inputs.  If I require that the resulting hash is in 1/10^20 of the possible hash outcomes (for instance, if the output hash is in decimal notation, requiring that it starts with 20 zeros), you need, on average, to calculate 10^20 hashes before you hit one.  So as long as the hash function is irreversible, showing me the input that gives a hash output of that kind, proves that you calculated of the order of 10^20 hashes.  Proof of work.

If the hash function is cracked, and I have an algorithm that allows me to calculate the inverse hash function, then I only have to use my inverse algorithm once, and I can provide you with an input that will end up in this small set that is 1/10^20 of the whole hash output space.  I did a quick calculation, and you think I proved work.


Again, you're missing the point.  Proof of work consists in providing an INPUT to a hash function, so that, when you apply the hash function, you obtain a result that is a "special hash value".  Here, all hashes result in 0.  So this hash function never proves any work.

I'm not going to say more because otherwise it will again be too long for you.  It is maybe already.

In fact, it is you who is missing the whole point here

That was just an illustration of an easy-to-read and simple-to-understand explanation. It was not meant to prove anything as such since it was only to show how things should be explained in a clear-cut, concise and specific way. Honestly, you could spend half as much time and half as much space and convey at that times more if you actually cared about everyone understanding your point. Or do you really think anyone gives a fuck about your verbiage?

Well, given that your entire point is ERRONEOUS, you just illustrated how "adequate" your technique of easy-to-read and simple-to-understand explanations of faulty matters is ;)

One can lead a horse to water, but if it refuses to drink...

I told it twice already (this is the third time) that I'm not very familiar how Bitcoin works internally in respect to cryptography, and I don't understand why PoW doesn't cut it. My point basically came down to assuming that "cracking" Bitcoin would require as much work as it took to get it where it is now. Your efforts at explaining this failed (provided you really tried in the first place). As the other poster has said, your lengthy posts are looking more like intellectual trolling (though I seriously doubt about the so-called intellectual part of them). I don't need lengthy wannabe explanations. I need a short, precise and simple answer

See my explanation above as a reference point

Miners mostly operate on immediate incentives. They arent storing massive amounts of coins for specualtion, they are making money here and now, paying bills and doing what is best for them.

Not all miners do that things, it depends on what type of mining attack they try to do. Now bitcoin is good there isn't that much to worry about bitcoin because everything is fine.

I think it's not possible because many miners are wealthy even if they do not break the bitcoin. For me many miners want the bitcoin because they make a big profit and I think the miner and the bitcoin are united to raise the bitcoin together the miners

Bitcoin died when all those ASIC mining companies made appearance. We should do something about it and bring bitcoin mining back to home level. Mining companies made bitcoin centralized, that's all.

It is easier said than done!

What can we really do? The only way to make Bitcoin great again, i.e. to decentralize it properly is to move it from the POW to POS consensus paradigm, but that would require miners agreement. Obviously, they are not going to kill the goose laying golden eggs, so the only way you can change things is to fork Bitcoin. But do you know how many Bitcoin forks have already been there during just the last year? At least a few dozens, so good luck and more power to you with switching Bitcoin to POS. And I don't think that many would agree that Bitcoin has died. Last time I checked it was still alive and kicking, probably more alive than the total majority of its competitors taken together

If the transaction costs are too high and the transaction time is too long, people will move on to other altcoin solutions for their daily needs and Bitcoin will be placed at the wealthy hosting tool instead of proprietary tools. good with the seller. They do not store a large amount of coins for specualtion, they are making money here and now, paying bills and doing what is best for them. Now bitcoin is good not much to worry about bitcoin because everything is fine. We should do something about it and bring bitcoin mining back home. I do not think Bitcoin's destruction can make the miners rich, but they also lose the chance to make money. The threats on both sides are clear.

They say BItcoin is centralized when it comes to the ones mining, I am not sure what they meant by this but perhaps its true because I have heard of these claim over and over to whcih there are only few mining pools which can control bitcoin soon. Which could lead to the questions as to whether can miners kill bitcoin?

There is no assurance what could happen in the next few more years but there thousands of coins that can replace BTC spot on top, there's ETH, XRP, EOS and most probably EOS.

Destroying Bitcoins will not enrich miners but will rather render Bitcoin more worthless on the market. When Bitcoin becomes worthless, what do miners stand to achieve for mining Bitcoins. Bitcoin needs promotion not destruction in order to create more demand for Bitcoin.