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As there is visibly a strong desire to remove, censor, displace ... certain subjects on which no rational counter argument can be given, I post here again a reasoning on which I would like to have only rationally argumented answers (although, because I believe in freedom of speech, I don't self-moderate this thread, and everybody is welcome to say whatever he wants).


(the original post is now moved from bitcoin discussion to some obscure place on the forum where, I suppose, it was hoped that nobody would find it...)

The reason why I want to bring this up, is that it seems that ASIC boost is considered "cheating" or "an attack" by some, and if I try to argue with them, they censor or oppose or do other things (<-- I'm not sure yet, testing things), but never have a sensible argument.

So, why is asic boost necessary ?  Because it is public knowledge now, and if miners DON'T use it, they render the PoW scheme more vulnerable.

If anything, the biggest problem with rendering a PoW improvement both public and patented, is the best way to decrease PoW security.  So if there's any "exploit", it is by the one that tries to take a patent on it.

Indeed, imagine the day that someone takes a patent on a method that, say, increases the PoW calculation efficiency with not 20%, but a factor of 20.  At that moment, PoW security is entirely gone.  No honest miner can permit himself to use it, because of patent liabilities.  But an attacker now knows how to attack the PoW scheme (the patent renders this knowledge public).  So even though the attacker could expose himself to a patent liability, he can nevertheless execute an attack successfully with the 20 times lower security of PoW.

Imagine that ASICS were invented, but patented, and not sold to miners, but that the producer of ASICS kept them for himself, and he could stop anyone from buying them, or making other ASICS because he was holding the patent on it.   Now, wouldn't that have been quite a dangerous situation for the PoW security ?  No miner would have ASICS, and at most GPU or FPGA, but there would be a guy fabricating tons of ASICS that cannot be legally used by anyone else but him.

I think you make some good arguments for it.

What about the difference between overt and covert boosting and what are the detrimental affects on the network by using these techniques?

Would the patents hold up in court?

You aren't really arguing that AsicBoost itself is necessary. You are arguing that a level playing field is necessary.

I totally agree with that, but a level playing field without AsicBoost is preferable because it interferes with potential improvements to the protocol.

But to create a level playing field, it requires a change to render AsicBoost useless. This has to be a fork, or the AsicBoosters just use an older version of the software.

when core use a backdoor to go soft its called a "potential improvements to the protocol"
when anything else wants to use it its called an attack.

ask yourself:
if hearne made segwit with the intention of offering future backdoors to be made easier to do things soft for things like commercial LN hubs for banks. where the code was line for line exactly the same as blockstreams..where the only difference is WHO implemented it

would you call segwits half baked code a "potential improvements to the protocol" or an attack on bitcoin.

would you then think that filling that backdoor by allowing the mining community to secure bitcoin further with a higher difficulty by allowing asic boost an efficiency benefit


think open minded
having a back door where code changes can be slid in without needing node consensus.. vs  allowing mining to be more efficiently done to increase difficulty. which would you choose.

remember saying let the coders have the back door and keep bitcoin miners from being 20% efficient can be used against bitcoin by outside parties.

Yes.  But not for matters of "fairness", but rather for matters of the inherent cryptographic security requirements (which are very bad !) of PoW.  PoW security is based upon the attacker needing to spend at least as much economical effort than the "good guy" (in PoW crypto, the good guy is by definition, the miner that ADDS a block, because he's the one determining the latest consensus).  The "bad guy" is the one trying to modify former consensus for other reasons than "orphaning by error", in order to reverse a transaction (and double spend) ; censor a transaction (DoS), ....  If techniques are known to the bad guy, that the good guy is not supposed to use, then the economic cost of an attack becomes less than than the cost of making the original consensus !


Well, I haven't studied that part, but I have a hard part imagining that asicboost cannot be applied to whatever change in the protocol.  Maybe the calculations have to be re-organized or so, but, without having looked into it in detail, I don't see at first sight how you cannot use ASIC BOOST, because the way I understand it, it is just a smarter re-organisation of calculations that have to be done *in any case*.  So essentially, instead of doing them over at random orders, you organize them better so that you can re-use calculations you would simply do over without thinking.  But maybe that the *way* of organizing this is different with a new protocol, and maybe that this screws up the way it is *currently* implemented. (*)

I wanted to point out too, that already now, the standard way of doing the hash calculations, does a very similar thing, by organizing the calculations in such a way that a lot of them don't have to be stupidly re-done: the first compression function call is NOT re-done when looping over the nonce that only occurs in the second block.  So "organizing your calculations so that you don't do all explicit full hashes of all tested blocks, but re-use results" is already standard practice.  Asic boost simply pushes this somewhat further.

(*) The reason why I think that, is simply the following, but as I said, there may be technicalities that escape me, as I didn't look into it.

What happens now is that there are two fields in the header that can be tuned in order to satisfy the difficulty: there is the nonce, of 32 bits, in the second part of the header, and there is the merkle tree root (32 bytes in total, 256 bits), of which 28 bytes are in the first part, and 4 bytes (32 bits) are in the second part.
The trick of ASIC boost is that instead of using the merkle tree roots that one needs to try in an arbitrary order, one can organize them in chunks where the 4 last bytes are the same (that happens once for every 65000 merkle tree roots tried, so if you're going to try a billion merkle tree roots, you use them in packets of about 15000 roots with the same last 32 bits, and then you try for each nonce value, the 15000 roots first, and you have to re-calculate the "key schedule" of the second block only once in 15000).

I don't see how this will change if we keep the same header structure.  Maybe the way the Merkle tree will have to be calculated will be different, but it is the only handle one has, next to the nonce, which is too small.  So I don't see how asic boost in some or other form, will go away.

Current mining profit margins are roughly 1%.

ASICBOOST increases power efficiency 20%.

That increases profit margin to roughly 20%.

That is a two thousand percent increase in profit margin for anyone using an ASICBOOST compatible miner.

That, and that alone, is the only reason anyone would be in favor of it.  It offers a monumental competitive advantage over other miners.

Like ASICS offered monumental competitive advantage over GPU miners.  What's the difference ?  Are you whining that now happens to the non-asicboost asic miners, what they did to the GPU miners back long ago ?

But what about cryptographic PoW security, also dimished by 20% because of the knowledge of ASICboost ?

And what about the fact that the standard mining algorithm is already "not calculating the complete work" and skips about 25% of it ?

By this last point, I mean that if the difficulty is, say, 2^30, then on average NOT 2^30 complete header hashes have been calculated with the standard algorithm either, that is not all the naively "proved work" has been done either.

ASICBOOST is not a necessary one at present, but the miners group who have been supporting Bitcoin Unlimited have made it effective for the mining purpose describing it as the effecient mining booster which helps with reduction of power and the major concern with the usage is to delay the segwit activation when it suddenly started to gain support from more than 60% miners.

My point is that ANY increase in efficiency of PoW calculations, when publicly known, is necessary to implement by miners.  By efficiency, I mean the ratio between the difficulty attained, and the economic cost related to it.  Because the cryptographic protection of the bitcoin block chain only comes from the economic cost of attaining the difficulty in the "false" chain.  Any means that lowers this cost to the attacker, lowers the security of the "good" chain, unless the miners (those making the good chain) use (at least) the same efficiency increase.

what make you think that those "other miners" don't have access to asic boost, it's not different than gpu mning in the end everyone will have the same speed, this is about more efficiency but it's the same

if all miners have the same advantage no miner have any advantage

Mining profit margins for Jihan Wu will be a lot higher than that, because BITMAIN's mining facilities are based in China with very low electricity costs and a high profit margin anyway.  It wouldn't actually be that extreme, although you do have a point that it's not just 20% for practical purposes.

If ASIC BOOST is necessary can somebody also say that a POW UPGRADE is necessary too? The reason is to improve the security of BTC and to protect it from crafty miners who can find the ability to conceal that they are using ASIC BOOST.

BTC never needs protection from miners, as miners are those that provide the protection.  BTC needs protection from attackers, that want to redo the history of transactions (orphan long pieces of chain on purpose).

BTW, should your remark also apply to the standard algorithm, where the first compression function is not re-calculated ?

In fact, all of these strategies of improved calculation come about because the PoW principle was somehow clumsily designed.  For instance, if SHA-512 had been used, no such techniques would have been possible, as there was only one single compression round to be had ; and if the nonce were not way too small (only 32 bits !) and were "distributed" over the whole header, that would have made any "strategy" impossible.

That depends on how you see it. Some might see Bitcoin Unlimited as an attack to BTC itself. They presume that some of the miners are acting together on their own self interest by rallying behind the hard fork. Bitmain also made their intentions clear of using their power to kill the original chain.

Well, of course, in a permissionless, trustless system, all parties are supposed to act out of self interest.  So what is "an attack on bitcoin" ?
It can mean two things, that touch upon the immutability of bitcoin:
- its protocol
- its transaction history

I was essentially talking about the transaction history, because the *cryptographic protection by PoW* only protects that, of course.  Miners pushing BU don't do this, I think, in order to modify the transaction history.   

So the only thing left, as an "attack" is the desire to modify the protocol.  But then, anyone wanting to modify the protocol, in the first place, Core with its segwit, is an attacker of bitcoin.  As I think that BU was only a way to keep segwit away, because small blocs and high fees are a benefit to miners, you could then even say that BU backing to keep off segwit, was in fact, protecting the current protocol of bitcoin from Core's Segwit attack, that wants to modify it.   
If you see "modifying the protocol" as an attack, then anything else but the current bitcoin protocol (including 1 MB blocks) is an attack.  And if you are considering that protocol modifications are to be envisioned, then increasing the block size is just as well a possible protocol modification than introducing segwit, so if one is an attack, the other is one too.

This thread is a good bud sad example of what happens when people don't know what they don't know.

You guys keep writing about ASICBOOST like some godsend. But the best achievable boosting gains are still lower than the manufacturing tolerances in the commercial semiconductor fabrication.

From the AB whitepaper:

	Number of colliding work items	1	2	4	5	8	16
	Gain in percent	0.00	12.50	18.75	20.00	21.9	23.4

So the maximum theoretically achievable gain for a 16-way boosted chip is 23.4% provided that the chip can only work boosted and is no longer capable of mining non-boosted because the 1-way (non-boosted) logic was removed.

Guy Corem of Spoondolies posted his very optimistic estimate that the achievable ASIC gain from boosting is 15% in a chip than can mine both non-boosted and boosted. I consider his estimate to be super-optimistic, in the past he was always giving bombastic predictions.

I'm no longer under any NDA and my experience with semiconductor fabbing relates to the processes now obsolete. The normal commercial manufacturing tolerances then were between +/- 10% and +/- 20%, with the clear trend up: each newer process started with wider tolerances than the previous generation at their inception. So lets make a scientific wild-ass guess that the current acceptable tolerances are +/- 30%.

Note +/- above. Even in the most optimistic assumptions the gain from boosting is within the margins of normal manufacturing variation.

You guys keep making completely wild extrapolations from your initial bad assumption.

The reality is that if the guy at the fab does something like eat phosphorus-rich food (e.g. fish) (Ph is a n-dopant for Si) and neglects the customary crouching when sneezing in the fab, he is apt to more affect the mining chip performance than the ASICBOOST. When some gal at the fab doesn't wash down her aluminum-containing makeup (Al is a p-dopant for Si) before entering the clean rooms at the fab she will have more effect on the mining that what you are discussing.

I can't say that you are spewing bullshit, because the typical bullshitters are aware that they are bullshitting.

But the net-effect of your discussion is quite similar. Please have mercy on us and yourself. We are drowning in whatever you are spewing.

You seem to confuse "average" and "standard deviation".   You could just as well say that mining with a higher efficiency doesn't make any sense, because the standard deviation on what you are doing is of the same order than your efficiency (for a Poissonian stream).  This is not true of course, because ON AVERAGE you win more, even though your fluctuations are larger than the gain.

Suppose that you win, on average, 10% of the blocks (you have 10% of the total hash rate).   It means you have a probability of 0.1 to win a block.   The standard deviation of "winning one block" is also 10%.  You might say that upping my hash rate from 10 to 15% doesn't make much sense, because the 5% extra is smaller than the variation of my single process chance, 10%.   But of course, in the long term, my revenue has increased with 50% !

BTW, I already explained why I "explain" stuff here: I write out my proper understanding of the thing, and look at the technical arguments against it, to learn from it, which is the sole reason why I am here.

I doubt that the patent will stand up against ALL "ASIC" based technology.... then many other technologies would never have existed. You can

patent the design, but not the whole technology. In many instances companies will still manufacture the ASIC's but they will have to pay some

kind of royalties to the patent owner.  ???

Look, all your arguments are true, but pointless. Ultimately, Bitcoin mining is about money, and if you reformulate all your argumentation is terms money-gained per money-spend-to-achieve-the-gain-in-the-numerator, you'll reach the same conclusion as I did.

What gmaxwell did with his covert-asic-boost post and BIP was a test balloon smeared with shit. The test was "how many flies can we catch with it" and on this measure it was a great success. It is greatly valuable in discovering who will write about it without having a foggiest understanding of electronic device manufacturing and operation.

I understand that you consider yourself more of a pure mathematician and scholar than a "in the trenches" operator. I'm sorry that I had to tell you that you've felt for the oldest trick in the electronic device manufacturing business. But you've fell so deeply for it that I felt sorry for watching you making a fool out of yourself. Please have some self-respect even if you don't respect me or anyone else here.

The technical value of this asicboost patent is exactly "chicken scratch". It is only valuable as a legal bargaining chip for cross-licensing and as a propaganda device. This is the same for many other patents in the electronic and computer engineering business.

I haven't heard of ASIC Boost before (mostly since I've been gone for a long, long time) but I guess based off of your post it does appear to have some value as a security measure for the rest of the blockchain. My only question is whether or not it would actually be distributed to the miners in a fair way so that everyone had access to it and there wasn't any of this funny business like what's going on with Jihan or whatever his name is.
It's definitely a unique piece, and I'm not entirely sure how someone came up with this kind of idea, but I like it either way. It's a neat system and I'd like to see more talk about it in the future.

You do understand that the propaganda was coming from the side that claimed to be a victim, right ?
But I agree with you that such a scheme is hardly going to hold up in court, as I outlined: it is too close, in my opinion, to standard techniques of key schedule re-usage.

It is just a somewhat smarter way of organizing the calculations for the "proof of work", by allowing to re-use of some results.  There's actually nothing special about it.  But the thing is that its discoverer, of Core, filed a patent for it (= the calculational scheme) and apparently, the main ASIC miner producer has incorporated it in his chips without asking for a licence, and can, or cannot, activate it with the right firmware.  
Now, people on the Core side accuse the miners using this, and the supplier of the ASICS, to organize, with these chips, an "outright attack on bitcoin" by "cheating" on the proof of work, and present one of the principal mining barons as a big cheater.


Well, the only potential problem is that a core guy has a pending patent on it.  

When I tried to explain technically that there was nothing special about ASIC boost to one of the core propagandists here accusing Ji I don't know of being an outright attacker on bitcoin, using an "exploit" that defied all competition, he censored me about that (it was a self-censored thread), meaning that he must have known that his argument didn't hold any water.    He got this thread as an effect.

The main argument was that asic boost was "an exploit" and "cheating" because it allowed to "show more work than one really did".  This is an argument that was also used on reddit, that asic boost was an "exploit" because it rendered the block chain insecure because people (miners) didn't really do the work they showed.  I simply argued that that reasoning didn't hold any water, and it is actually the opposite: it is not the effort by the block-adding miner that secures the chain, but the work NEEDED by the attacker that is the security of the chain.

Whether 20% or so more or less, makes a big difference, is an open question, but in as much as it is considered a terrible act of cheating by the Core defenders, it would also be a terrible loss in security by not using it.  And in as much as it doesn't matter much on one side, it doesn't matter much on the other side.

In other words, I just turned the Core defender logic upside down with the title of this thread: in as much as asic boost means something, by all means, it should be used for security reasons ; and in as much as it is no big deal, well, it is no big deal.

In general, patents on improved economical efficiency of hash calculations are a serious danger to the cryptographic security of bitcoin, because in as much as these patents don't allow all miners to profit from the improvement, they can secure the chain with less proof of work than an attacker (of course not caring about licenses) now has potential technology to overcome it.  

Whether 15-25% efficiency improvement is an actual issue, I leave in the middle.  

As far as I understood, it is the *calculation* that was patented, not an asic design.  A bit like the RSA calculation scheme had a patent on it for years.

If this is distributed to all miners, it nullify the advantage of other miners.  I also believe asicboost is really necessary because it renders the one who own it cheaper electricity to run the miner.  But if all miners use this then the advantage is nullified since each will add another 20% of hashing power to meet the maximum capacity of their electricity.

The only thing here is that this was kept secret to all miners until someone discovered that it was beeing used covertly.

So your stance is that 20% more or less efficiency doesn't matter in the electronics industry.  I have my doubts about that.  As I told you already, I think you are confusing the standard deviation on an individual chip, and the fact that the average over a lot of them, shifts.

I would agree with you that if the technique, used to gain 20% more efficiency, would INCREASE the dropout rate by 20% or more, then, yes, this is not a good idea.  But if you get the same per-wafer dropout (even if it is 20%), and your *average* efficiency increases by 20%, that's something that, in most competitive markets, wouldn't be neglected, I'm sure.  If all else equal, there's no reason NOT to profit from 20% more efficiency.

That's more or less it.  But it wasn't kept secret, it was published in 2016.  Now, what miners put in their devices, or what their manufacturers put in their devices is their affair, no ?  

That said, I have my doubts that mining is a 1% margin affair ;)  It wouldn't be worth it.  Too few return on investment.  Better go to the stock market instead of buying mining equipment, no ?

I do not believe it either.  They are just making an exaggeration about that 20% boost.  But I wonder why they did not use a 0.01% or lower than that profit margin.  That would really give asicboost a 200,000% increase in profit.  



Or just buy Bitcoins, at least we have the finish product and saved from all troubles of setting up and maintenance.

Your mistake here is repeating the thinking about "side"s or even "two sides" or adversaries like in a civil lawsuits.

I'm going to quote recent thread by chopstick quoting me from 2012:
I shouldn't have used the word "propaganda", I should've used "marketing" before value. It would not imply less of "taking sides", and more of general "selling".

This is simply not true, ASICBOOSt stops us from creating ANYTHING which changes the header - USING Asicboost is a detriment to bitcoin. Get the facts right sir.

Look, I'm not Shelby Moore. You've spent too much time trading simplistic arguments with him, I will not be easily bullshitted.

Firstly, don't repeat the propaganda number of "20+%" gain. This is a pure marketing bullshit. Tightly coupling 16 pipelines will greatly reduce the maximum possible clocking rate or lowest possible supply voltage. Additionally the yield of useable chips will be lower. From my general observation of modern semiconductor devices the optimum number of coupled pipelines would be 2,4 or 8, hard to tell. 16 would be past "diminishing returns" and into a "diminishing" territory. I've seen full simulation and analysis made for a different chip (not related to mining) and after doing some substitutions I arrive at the first guess of "-2%", i.e. small loss from synchronous 16-way hashing.

Secondly, by the very fact of using "standard deviation" in you argument you show the depth of your misunderstanding. It is hard for me to guess what you don't understand. My two best guesses are:

1) you may be thinking in terms of some unimodal distributions, where in reality they are always bimodal or multi-modal.

2) you continue to use simplistic textbook statistical models in your estimates. "In statistics, a trial is a single performance of well-defined experiment (Papoulis 1984, p. 25), such as the flipping of a coin,..." This maybe a good approximation of one hashing pipeline pass, where one trial block header is processed in microseconds at the cost of probably nano-dollars. Yet you seem to use it completely exchangeably with chip manufacturing workflow that takes months and costs kilo-dollars or mega-dollars.

Please upgrade your arguments to something more professional. Thanks in advance.

I thought that was more or less established, so I took that for granted.  But as I said, my argument was not so much for asic boost by itself (I only looked at the theoretical calculation scheme without imagining that its hardware implementation would be seriously different from the standard way of doing so, as I said, i took that for granted), my argument was this:

"IF you consider asic boost such a phenomenal gain in efficiency that one could call it "an exploit" or "cheating" or whatever, THEN it is entirely wrong to stop miners from using it, because its mere existence lowers PoW security"

Note that the "if ... then ..." is also correct when applied to "if false, then false".

This thread was nothing else but a reaction to my argument being censored by people claiming that asic boost is an exploit and should not be used by miners, as it "lowered proof of work".  In as much as technically, asic boost is not doing anything, then it is not an exploit, and in as much as it does, then it should be used.  

As I said, I took for granted that the gain was of the order of 20%, because that's the amount of raw calculations that one has to do less. I didn't consider that there were technical problems in realizing this, but that doesn't alter the argument that or it is insignificant (and then there's no reason to accuse those trying to implement it to cheat or to exploit) OR it is significant (and then my argument is that it should be used by all means).


Your argument probably makes sense - as I said, I took the 20% gain for granted and established.


I initially thought that your argument was that for two different chip designs with *identical drop out*, as I considered the two designs of comparable difficulty (which, as you line out, may not be the case), it is not because their dropout percentages are higher than the difference in performance, that this difference in performance is negligible.   But this was apparently not the argument you were making, so my "rebuttal" was targetting a mis-understood point (I misunderstood your initial argument).

I didn't realize that the design of an asic boost circuit was more difficult than a design of the normal system, as people were shouting about accusations of a (established, in my mind) 20% increase in efficiency.

The point is that this entire technical hardware discussion doesn't matter for the point I was making: *in as much as* asic boost is any kind of significant boost, it should be used.  In as much as it isn't, it is also not "an exploit" "a cheat" or whatever other accusations it took.

What I highlighted in your post from back then is a fundamental observation on your part I think.  But it would normally also lead to sufficient distributed antagonism so that no important changes can ever happen to the protocol.   The fact that there is now this immense pressure for segwit and LN means that this got centralized, no ? (in other words, that a non-immutable colluding consensus over change has been found, and obviously under the "leadership" of one or a few colluding entities pushing for it).
 

I said it depends how you see it. Some sees BU not only as a modification on the protocol but a move to get power away from the current developers. Theres nothing wrong with it but it should be seen for what it really is.

This is how I see BU too.  The problem is that if you run core software, you automatically vote for changes (at least, I think there's no option you can switch on or off for changes like segwit - I may be wrong on that), so you need to run "something else" if you don't want to signal for segwit.

Core doesn't signal for segwit by default....

I didn't mean "miner signalling".  I meant, in the "node count" that "support segwit" for unofficial "measurement of support by users".  I was of the opinion that if you had a sufficiently recent core version of the code (from 0.13.1 onward I think) you were automatically counted as a "segwit supporter user", or am I mistaken here ?  Is there an option somewhere to say, I run core software, but as a non-mining node, I don't support segwit ?

Node counts are pointless.

No non-mining node "support segwit". Segwit doesn't need any node support at all, it's a softfork. Node counting websites just assume all recent versions of Core "support segwit".

You can change the useragent of your Core node to match Bitcoin Unlimited if you want it to be counted as a BU node.

I agree with you, but then what are these UASF, these "all users want segwit" and all the rest ?


That was my point.  If you desperately don't want to signal for segwit on these web sites, you need to run "something else".
And yes, you can just cheat on the name :)

UASF works by nodes enforcing the new rules themselves on a given date. The number of nodes is irrelevant, it is the amount of the economy running UASF that matters.



No you don't, just change your uacomment. That is what every BU node that is currently online is doing (the real ones are all down).

I must not understand the mechanism of a UASF then.  Any pointers ?




Yes, that's what I mean, you cheat on the name, but the name has to exist !  So some unimportant buggy version needs to exist so that you can pretend to be running it !

http://www.uasf.co/

To sum it up the way BIP148 UASF works:

Businesses and exchanges all agree to activate segwit at a certain date. Any non-segwit signalling blocks mined after that date will be ignored by those businesses/exchanges nodes. If the miners mining non-segwit signalling blocks want to spend the coins they earned at those businesses/exchanges, they won't be able to, they mined blocks that the businesses think are invalid. So the miners not signalling segwit will be mining worthless coins and will be forced to signal segwit.

The risk of this is if not enough businesses and exchanges support it, there will be a split. This particular proposal is also quite risky even with a lot of support. There are better UASF proposal going around that are less risky. But the general idea of UASF is that the Bitcoin economy forces the new rules.

To gauge UASF support you would need to ask businesses if they support it or not. Node count's are not so useful.

UASF is not a new idea. It was how all forks were done prior to 2012. There was no such thing as miner signalling back then. Ultimately all forks are enforced by the economy anyway, it's just miners "activate" them.


Just make up a name like "FuckSegwit" and convince a bunch of people to use it. Eventually when enough nodes use it the node counter websites will add it.

What's the difference between a UASF and a core directly activated soft fork then ? I mean, if you download the node code version with the activated fork in it, of course you will only see the blocks that correspond to the new rules, and if all exchanges do that too, then of course miners have to follow if they hope to sell their coinbase coins on that exchange.  

Most probably, the ETH/ETC split, and the exchanges realizing the lucrative thing of listing both of them, must have scared the hell out of this form of centralized soft forking :)



 ;D  After crypto coins on exchanges without a block chain, now full node wallets without code :)  Things get more and more virtual in crypto land !

Food for thought

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/674nln/if_i_was_still_mining_and_i_found_out_that_my/

Profit margin of 1% is possible is the miner sold the BTC straightaway. However in the real world, a company investing does a ROI calculation based on 1 to 5 years period. The profit margin would also be calculated based and expenditure v income. Now the income takes into account the inflation that pushes up the prices of goods. A company can predict selling at a higher price in the future based on idiotic governments fiat policy. If a miner were to do a ROI properly then it does not have to sell all BTC straightaway. Some can be stored and sold, hopefully, at a higher price in the future. Thus the profit margin will be higher than 1%.

The difficulty I have with that view, is that if the "current margin is 1%", then that's the real margin.  If you think that bitcoin's going to rise in price, there's no reason to MINE it if you can BUY it, so all future expectation of benefit from holding the mined bitcoin over selling it right away is fiat/bitcoin arbitrage but is not part of the margin from specifically mining it.

What I mean is this:
Suppose that I have a total cost of mining (everything included) of $100,- and I have now worth an amount X in BTC, what I can sell for $101,-.  That's what a 1% margin means, right ?  Whether that amount X will now be worth $120 next month, doesn't make my margin of mining increase to 20%.  Because I could also have bought bitcoin directly for $100 instead of spend it on mining.  I would then hold now $119 worth.  So the difference between "mining" with $100,- or directly speculating on the rise of BTC, only makes for a difference of 1%.

Now you know first hand how does it feel when you fall hook-line-sinker  for propaganda and become and "useful idiot". This is exactly what you did and yet you persist in spreading the propaganda.

The real way to recover out of it is to admit that you have been had and cease to participate in propaganda operations. Any further arguments that continue to "ASS U ME" (made an ASS of U and ME) will show that you seriously lack introspection.

Edit: start by changing the title of this thread to something less authoritative.

Not it "got centralized". It always "was centralized", "is centralized" and the "central controlling authorities" are resisting the pressure to decentralize.

Also, changes happened and will continue to happen to the protocol. Protocol is being kept intentionally vague, under-defined, long standing bugs aren't getting fixed. This is a normal, regular way to keep the current authorities in continuing control.

Perhaps you've earlier fallen for the past propaganda of "Bitcoin is set in stone" or "Bitcoin is defined by mathematics"?

I'm dense here, but what propaganda are you talking about ?  The propaganda is by the core people in order to vilify the miners so that they can keep the power and appear as a victim, right ?  Or are you talking about something else ?

That said, I'm pretty clear about me having been a useful idiot as a crypto anarchist, having fallen for the joke that bitcoin turned out to be, and I set out to understand why bitcoin was different from what I initially thought is was, yes.

Nevertheless, the phenomenon in itself is a fascinating thing, which is why I'm somehow addicted to trying to understand it for the intellectual fun of it amongst other reasons.


Why would I ?  It catches on, no ?  The main goal of this catchy title was to indicate that it doesn't pay to censor me, but it can maybe serve other purposes. As long as I don't get *what* propaganda I'm spreading, I cannot find out whether I'd like to continue doing so or not, no ? 

There never was such propaganda.  The claim has always been that bitcoin was going to evolve technologically, was going to implement a lot of new features, was going to change a lot of things, like the block rewards, the block period, the signature scheme, the total amount of bitcoins, ....
I'm joking, but from the moment that you can "evolve" all these things are of course possible, so I always found the claim contradictory that bitcoin's protocol could evolve, but that somehow there was a religious belief in certain aspects not to be changeable.  One can change it, and then everything can change, or one cannot change it, and then it is of course fixed in stone.

Actually, it is my understanding that if the crabs bucket contains enough non-colluding antagonists, you automatically get the "set in stone" property, but that property can only follow from a certain dynamics, and a certain initial state.   The fascinating aspect of bitcoin is whether this dynamics is actually emerging.  I think actually it is.  I think it is a kind of experiment in decentralization.  Hey, maybe Satoshi conducted an experiment, by setting up a dream for a "world currency", and then, innocently looking, put in that silly 1MB limit, to see whether the system became immutable enough for it not to be able, against all odds, to change that.  Given that the discussions to change this started in 2013, and got serious in 2015, and it still hasn't changed, I think that the crab bucket immutability may very well be at work.  But it is true that the experiment is not over, because it is only recently that people actually FEEL the difficulties of 1MB blocks.  So the pressure to "unite" and screw decentralization, augment.  This is a real test.
If in, say, 2020, there are still 1 MB blocks, and nothing has changed, I think we can call the experiment in immutability succeeded.

If the block size changes, or segwit gets implemented, we know that it is a centrally dictated system.

Well, then don't claim here to learn when what you do is stirring the shitstorm with glee. You'll end up like cypherdoc, they kept edging him on until he lost cool and was quite legitimately censored.

If you can't live without propagandizing at least switch to something more defensible like "ASICBOOST is meh" or "ASICBOOST overpromises and underdelivers" or "How I learned to stop worrying and love the ASICBOOST".
 

You could be right. But then again 2020 might not be long enough for reality to bite. It might take a few more block halvings for that. Without the rising value belief factor, bitcoin will start to lose it's PoW security.

It doesn't work like that.

Cost of mining $100
Buy BTC $100

Both sold for $101 = 1% net profit margin

Cost of mining $100
Buy BTC $100
Both sold for $120 next month = 20% net profit margin.

Normally it would be gross profit margin then deduce tax = net profit margin. I'm assuming you don't pay tax  ;D ;D ;D

The point of ROI (return on investment) is that the future price is estimated/predicted. Cost of mining $100 and Buy BTC $100 are investment. Your potential returns is somewhere in the future when you sell.

Maybe stirring the shitstorm is a way to obtain knowledge.  


I don't see what this has to do with what I'm claiming: I claim that the claim that asicboost is a cheat and an exploit, is a false claim, and I think I've shown logically why.  That's all.  Maybe I'm wrong, and then people will explain this to me, which may convince me.  if I gently ask why asicboost is a cheat, I wouldn't get a serious answer.  It is only when making bold claims, right or wrong, doesn't matter, that one pushes those that do not agree, into giving arguments.
In real life, one cannot do that, because often one's personal reputation gets compromised by the claims so made, but on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. 

What you are telling me, which is interesting in its own right, is that even though on paper, asicboost allows to do about 15-25% less calculations, that doesn't work out when trying to convert that theory into a working chip, because the extra complexity of re-routing the calculation results to different entities on the chip kill the gain one could, on paper, obtain.  Your argument, although not proven, is surely technically sound.  I wouldn't have learned that, without "provoking" you into pointing that out here, would I ?

So now in the end, I don't know whether there actually exist working asicboost chips out there with an advantage.  That's always better than thinking it is established that they exist if it is not the case.  So that too, is good for me, no ?

But all this doesn't change a iota to what I claim: any improvement in efficiency should be applied by miners, or it diminishes the (already very fragile) cryptographic security of PoW.  So miners never "cheat" when they improve the difficulty they can solve with a given economic cost.  I assumed, given the claims, that asicboost was of that kind, but in the end, it doesn't matter.

ASIC BOOST gives technical advantage to a smaller community of miners and gives the patent holder (backed by state law) the power to decide who is accepted in that community. This will break the neutrality of the entire system and slowly pave the way towards either monopoly or bitcoin mining becoming a legally-questionnable operation. I don't know which one is worse.

So, 2112, randomdude, does, or doesn't, physically implemented asicboost increase the efficiency "difficulty reached / economic cost" ?

Huh ?  Asic boost is not a "modification to the bitcoin platform" at all. 

ASIC BOOST and SEGWIT, both of which have great changes in the bitcoin platform, however, whatever the change, it needs to be accepted by everyone. Bitcoin is not owned by anyone, it always starts with the opinion of everyone. Therefore, the comments from experts are always the basis for people to choose the right direction.