Bitcoin Forum

This thread may prove to be interesting. I'm in! Anybody else watching to see how this unfolds?

You know, even if it was a genocidal African warlord kleptocrat proposing the fork, I'd be inclined to support it to see Mircenary Popalottacrack taken down several pegs.

Well it is effectively Obama proposing the fork, so ...

I'm mostly a libertarian.

I used to be mostly a Democrat, but I've become both more cynical and more optimistic as I've grown older.

I'm cynical about the ability of Government to solve our problems. Most of the really big problems (wars, genocides, environmental destruction) are either the direct or indirect result of government.

Sorry, no slur meant on Gavin, I was merely observing that a fork proposal could not be fucked up enough to make me not consider backing it against MP

let him play all he wants. It's a shitcoin anyway and not worth much of anything in a few weeks/months. A hardfork is just the last nail in the coffin.

i say "yes" when the majorty of trustworthy devs say that too and when they give good reasons for a change.

Exactly what is the problem here?
We have forked in the past too. Whoever stands between progress in Bitcoin should be ignored. I honestly hope that we run into an issue that will force us into a fork for all these people who oppose it.

Who exactly is MPEx, I've missed that one?

Bitcoin can be hi-jacked by a simple majority?  

The ALT coins can fork.  

But once a crypto is past the age of 4.  Or $10m in marketcap.
No you do not fork.

Bitcoin the only value it has against the ALTs is that it will not fork, because it is impossible to establish a 99% consensus.  

Want a better 'bitcoin' make one
Launch it on the market.  

Hell give a snap shot distribution to the bitcoin holders.

Let the market, not a group of devs decide.

This thread may prove to be interesting. I'm in! Anybody else watching to see how this unfolds?

It's already better than last week's NFL playoff games, I'm ready to see what happens next...

What does Mircea Popescu have to lose by this proposed fork? It's obvious by his reaction that he feels this would be very negative for him, but why?

nothing will happen. Bitcoiners have proven themselves to be ignorant assholes thinking they are better and more educated. Quite a few on the thread. So run with your fork, we don't give a single fuck.

not against progress at all.
I'm against forking in favour of a bloat - bloating the chain is no progress.

Scalability should be possible to achieve in other ways. I refuse liteversion - i want to be able to store the chain on my system with 100gb max space in the forseeable future. What you do is enforcing centralisation and incapacitate the user.

Has there been a money-price set up for the person providing the most smart solution or is bitcoin only one dev and decisionmaker and that's it?

You make the impression as if you had a decent notch too much marketcap and believe me, this bearmarket will continue throughout the year because bitcoin has a  host of problems with the rewards and the sellpressure they put on the market. Your focus is on the wrong things and your priorities are out of whack.

Bitcoin is some megalomaniac shitcoin. You can't even hold your value, what do you care about scalability? Nobody wants to use a coin which can't hold the value anyways.

Fortunately we don't  have to use it.

If you are worrying about the time when 20MB per block is filled, you are worrying that bitcoin will have 20x more transactions, an increase from the currently throttle of approx 6 per second to around 120 per second. If you are worrying that bitcoin will have 20x more transactions, then you are worrying about it having many more users.

You are free to be left behind.

Let's do the math here.

LTC = mostly China holders
BTC = mostly Westerners (but mostly traded in Shanghai, HongKong)

China says, "Nice fork, but we don't Accept" ... "Oh litecoin prices through the roof, sorry did I do that?"

Let's do the math here.

LTC = mostly China holders
BTC = mostly Westerners (but mostly traded in Shanghai, HongKong)

China says, "Nice fork, but we don't Accept" ... "Oh litecoin prices through the roof, sorry did I do that?"

MP has the idea that Bitcoin should be restricted to some arbitrary "enlightened elite" centered around him. The combination of delusions of grandeur and a small group of worshippers who take his word as gospel enforce this idea. The notion of Bitcoin being adapted to accommodate a higher transaction rate and therefore be more accessible for mass use is completely contrary to his views. So it's no surprise he doesn't like it.

But that doesn't help him, it hurts him. Wider adoption helps him. Doesn't make sense.

I do believe there must be numerous other ways to achive scalability. How many brains have been working on the problem so far?
What are the options?

You are making an ass out of yourself if you say there is only one option because there is always more options.
I don't even see scalability as a pressing issue. With this rapid pricedecline who should care?
Then you have alts. The industry is actually selfregulating.

Bitcoin blocks full, higher fees? Ok, people go over and use doge or another coin then. Et voila: everyone can transact again. The scalability-problem is a pseudo-problem. It does not occure in real life because people just go to the next chain once bitcoin is overloaded.

Your problem is your megalomania - and that megalomania will be your point of fail.
 

Scalability is a problem which is non-existant thanks to altcoins.

140 TPS is still hopelessly short of what is necessary to achieve the laughable pipe-dream of running a sizable exchange economy on native Bitcoin.

It would be like saying that we should just have used separate internets because the first one couldn't scale.

140 tps is 3x greater than PayPal and about 10x the FedWire (US Bank wire network) system.

this sentence doesn't make any sense to me

140 tps is 3x greater than PayPal and about 10x the FedWire (US Bank wire network) system.

A 'sidechains' scenario with Bitcoin freezing in it's current tight and defensible form offers me the best of all worlds.  I can use spy-chains when I don't care, spy-less chains when I do, micro-payment chains when I want to tip someone, and current defensible Bitcoin as a trusted deep-storage solution.

Let me explain it this way. Bitcoin is nothing more than numbers in computers. From an economic perspective these numbers need to be scarce otherwise their value will ultimately goes to zero and be useless for trade and being used as money.  If your solution is to insert an infinite amount of altcoins in the economic network. The number used to represent good and services are not scarce anymore driving their value to zero and ultimately removing the economic incentive to use them.

http://qntra.net/2015/01/the-hard-fork-missile-crisis/

"... Today Gavin posted on his personal blog an article titled "Looking before the Scaling Up Leap", stating "My goal is to prove that it is safe to raise the maximum block size from 1MB to at least 20MB" along with "I'll argue we should schedule a hard fork." Reddit soon blindly praised Gavin for his work, with comments such as "Fork it hard."

It appears as if Gavin will not give up unless his hard fork is a reality, and thus Mircea Popescu has made a declaration of war if Gavin proceeds with his plans. ..."

http://trilema.com/2015/if-you-go-on-a-bitcoin-fork-irrespective-which-scammer-proposes-it-you-will-lose-your-bitcoins/

"... To make it perfectly clear : in no case will MPEx accept this fake Bitcoin, as it's not accepted any other fake Bitcoin to date, and for the exact reasons. Moreover, my budget to sink this scam exceeds the budget of everyone involved on the supporting side.vi That is all. ..."

So, Gavin, do you really want to lose little people their coins? Or could you just let it drop?

His whole post is ignorant and not worth the read.

From an economic perspective these numbers need to be scarce otherwise their value will ultimately goes to zero and be useless for trade and being used as money.

As long as it's not complete ZERO and can be exchanged back and forth very fast, it still can be used for world-wide transactions.

To speak the truth, a real hard fork is very difficult now even if it is required. There is a high chance that the forked one will become an alt coin, just because nodes will not update them. Is there any data about the nodes regarding the versions they are running now ? That may give some idea about how ready we are for a hard fork.

So, having 3 separate chains overwhelm an arbitrary figure of 100GB of storage is helping how?

If you don't want to use prune, and run a full chain, but, the crypto community is now spread across 3 large chains, isn't is as much like using prune to decide only to host one chain, as host all 3?
 

Who is this Mircea Popescu and why is anyone giving this clown any time of the day?

When will sidechains be ready for use?  

When will sidechains be ready for use?   

http://qntra.net/2015/01/the-hard-fork-missile-crisis/

"... Today Gavin posted on his personal blog an article titled "Looking before the Scaling Up Leap", stating "My goal is to prove that it is safe to raise the maximum block size from 1MB to at least 20MB" along with "I'll argue we should schedule a hard fork." Reddit soon blindly praised Gavin for his work, with comments such as "Fork it hard."

It appears as if Gavin will not give up unless his hard fork is a reality, and thus Mircea Popescu has made a declaration of war if Gavin proceeds with his plans. ..."

http://trilema.com/2015/if-you-go-on-a-bitcoin-fork-irrespective-which-scammer-proposes-it-you-will-lose-your-bitcoins/

"... To make it perfectly clear : in no case will MPEx accept this fake Bitcoin, as it's not accepted any other fake Bitcoin to date, and for the exact reasons. Moreover, my budget to sink this scam exceeds the budget of everyone involved on the supporting side.vi That is all. ..."

So, Gavin, do you really want to lose little people their coins? Or could you just let it drop?

Not against changing increasing the max block size. But sidechains, wtf do we need them for?

In case you didn't know, bitcoin is still in beta and a work in progress that needs to scale. It doesn't matter if bitcoin is more than 4 years old or more than $10M in maketcap. If a fork is required then be it.

at least 1-3 years.

Not against changing increasing the max block size. But sidechains, wtf do we need them for?

sidechains are the next stupid megalomaniac idea which endanger its useability for its main purpose by introducing more complexity. Has it even been tested in the wild on an altcoin?
This is such a megalomaniac fail-parade, unbelievable.
Bitcoiners are some serious nutcases.

You're aiming too high all the time. Bitcoin as the only coin and alts as scam-only to support bitcoins #1 position is going to backfire royally.

Bitcoin with its idea to be unaccompanied world #1 coin forever is nothing that's possible. The idea alone warrants to see a doctor for mental examination.

Right now bitcoin stifles innovation and endangers all of crypto to fail with the way it behaves. You got some serious homework on diversity and innovation outside of the btc blockchain to do.

#justsayin'

It's pretty much screwed from the beginning with this longterm high inflation. Bitcoin meets the same fate as most shitcoins: looses 99% of value - but not because it  wouldn't be possible to have a coin that can maintain value but because satoshi designed it inflationary and inflation never was a good thing. It's just a destuctive force on the market, nothing else. Observe the scarce coins. They found their bottom after the bubble mid last year while bitcoin has no bottom apparently.

I think i'm not the only one exteremely unhappy and annoyed with this arrogant bitcoin-folks, the know-it-alls on the quest for worlddomination on first try while it's actually falling like a rock right in front of you. There's some serious imbalance between peoples perception, wishes, dreams and reality. This whole fork and sidechains-discussion just shows how detached everyone is from reality.

I'm not managing to filter a coherent "position" out of your posts.... "It's all broken anyway, it's failing, please don't fix it, I hate it, but I don't want it to change, I want money that's useful everywhere but I don't want universal money..."

@tvbcof 2 way peg requires hard fork too, no?  would appreciate response to my prior question about how sidechains address storage.

We know roughly 20% of the hash rate is of unknown origin. Does anyone else know if MP controls or has controlling interest any known pools?

This thread would be so much more fun if MPOE-PR was still around.

Few months ago CEX.io CIO Jeffrey Smith expressed concern about the origin of this unknown hash rate. The interview below...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvMQeCl9K-U

That's my point. Before you kick a sleeping tiger that has no teeth make sure you can see his gums.

We have previously seen that this guy, Mircea Popescu, do have some deep pocket...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/20/openbsd_bailed_out/

But I doubt, whether he'll be able to fight against the venture capitalists those have walked into the bitcoin game in 2014, e.g. Tim Draper. To these people Gavin's word is most probably more valuable and I guess, the future of Bitcoin core is ultimately in the hand of The Bitcoin Foundation. So, if Gavin can convince them, it is very difficult to resist it from outside.

At the end of the day, we need to see, who is speaking logical.

Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork. Clout doesn't matter as much as mining power does. Who will follow the new chain?

Oops... am I having a conceptual problem here ? As I understand, hard fork is more about nodes than it is about the miners. Unless, there are some new mining rules coming in, miners do not probably have much to say. It will depend on the mempool of the nodes, which will decide which tx will be accepted and which not + which block found by the miners to be relayed and which not.... again I am confused. Am I wrong ?

You should listen in to the chatter that happens on IRC during a fork. It's pretty funny and panic filled.

The forks I remember were urgent, deployed in a hurry. I would assume a well planned and announced months in advance fork would be somewhat calmer.... unless the "change is bad" crowd holds out and it's only finally applied in an emergency when the network is already practically DDoSing itself to death.

What does Mircea Popescu have to lose by this proposed fork? It's obvious by his reaction that he feels this would be very negative for him, but why?

And I agree, Mircea's attitude and comments about his budget are a big turnoff.

That's like saying "I've lost the fight, so I'm going to go in with my wallet and buy my victory since my logic and arguments didn't prevail."

That's also how the Federal Reserve runs things. They use their control of money as their only power.

Big turn-off. And tyrannical.

If the hard fork happens, it should be possible to cycle funds in and out of exchanges that are dumb enough to switch, splitting away real-bitcoin whenever the withdraw gives you an output that hasn't been doublespent yet. Withdraw, split, send fake-coins back into exchange, repeat. When "dust settles," exchange is now fractional reserve (if it wasn't already).

Here's a glimpse of the war:

The forks I remember were urgent, deployed in a hurry. I would assume a well planned and announced months in advance fork would be somewhat calmer.... unless the "change is bad" crowd holds out and it's only finally applied in an emergency when the network is already practically DDoSing itself to death.

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

I'll be proposing what we did for the block.version=1 to block.version=2 soft fork: miners signal that they approve of the new rules by producing less-than-1-MB-blocks with version=3 (the version number is part of the block header of every block).

When 50% of blocks are version=3, old version of the reference implementation start complaining: "Warning: This version is obsolete, upgrade required!"

Whenever... uhh... 80% of blocks produced are version=3, the fork happens: version=2 blocks are rejected, and miners are free to build bigger-than-1-MB version=3 blocks.

The hard fork would happen sometime after that, when a miner actually DOES produce a bigger-than-1-MB block (that is assuming that we don't decide to make some other incompatible hard-forking change that is also tied to block.version=3 blocks becoming a supermajority).

Lost the fight? It's more like one guy said, "I'm gonna start validating invalid blocks for some derpy reason," and another (much more important) guy said, "alright, well I'm not gonna do that; have fun!" The fight hasn't begun yet; upvoting regurgitations from the latest gospel of derpopolous (or whoever replaced him after his death) does not constitute a fight.

Here's a glimpse of the war:

People who argue that the block size limit should never be increased are arguing from a position of ideology, not practicality. They want as many nodes as possible, helped by low volume overhead, thinking that limiting transaction throughput can maintain Bitcoin as a guerrilla enterprise outside mainstream finance. They want it to be the financial system for the "Unsystem".

Anyone who has read my posts for the last 2 years will know that I rail against the global corruption of central banks, their fiat FRB system, inflation targeting, interest rate manipulation, crony capitalism, asset bubbles, and stealth wealth transfers from the majority to the 0.1%. I see Bitcoin is a reset button for this 100-year mess, a river to flush out the Augean Stables of central banking. However, that river can never be diverted when it is a trickle, dammed upstream.

Answer the question "Is blockchain PoW (or its variants, perhaps even PoS) a better basis for a monetary system than the existing debt-money of CB fiat?"
If "yes", then the inexorable nature of science and technology will ensure that blockchain money prevails in the long run, 10, 20, 30 years from now. So the second question is "Will the future globally successful blockchain money be Bitcoin or some other alt coin?"

The answer to the second question is "Bitcoin, unless its first mover advantage is thrown away by an unresolved fundamental failing." Failure to scale is a fundamental failing which can consign Bitcoin forever to the margins of world finance. But, why would a marginalized Bitcoin be used even by its unsystem adherents when Darkcoin or Monero offer better anonymity?

Constraining the block size, therefore transaction volumes, ignores several important aspects of the situation:

1. The quality of nodes is much better than 5 years ago. There might have been 20,000 PCs and notebooks as nodes in 2010, cpu mining and supporting the network, but was that network better than the 6500 (known) nodes of today? Many of which are owned by companies now earning a living in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Corporate nodes are much more tolerant of volumes than hobbyist nodes.

2. Bandwidth is improving in many countries at up to 40% per year, so volume increases should be acceptable up to that level, or until another constraint is seen such as cpu signature verification. Limiting it at a 2010 baseline means it is being unnecessarily constrained as computing technology is still improving.

3. Block compression techniques exist to reduce propagation overhead. IBLT was only described in 2011, a year after Satoshi put the 1MB limit in place.

4. If Bitcoin fails to scale then I-Can-Scale-Coin will incorporate the necessary changes and the ecosystem will move across to that alt instead. Sidechains do not help with scaling because SC volume still needs to be handled somewhere.

5. Despite the long bearmarket of 2014, and price down at $290 right now, a large percentage of the price assumes that Bitcoin has future scalability. That it can grow to handle a reasonable percentage of world commerce. Its SoV is predicated upon being able to scale.

Accepting the block size limit as it stands is to do the central banks a massive favor by crippling this new emerging monetary system, giving them more years to screw up the world economy, before a new alt coin can eventually prevail.

We know roughly 20% of the hash rate is of unknown origin. Does anyone else know if MP controls or has controlling interest any known pools?

This thread would be so much more fun if MPOE-PR was still around.

Well rationally there is no way the present Bitcoin can win over a higher limit fork:

Step 1:
A. Gavin creates a higher limit BTC fork.
B. Anyone else does it.

Step 2:
Present network can never grow more than it is now, because we are already hitting the limits.

Step 3:
New system takes over by nature of being the biggest - which it cannot avoid becoming because it scales!

Good point. Very true.

As much as we would not want something else to overtake the present version of Bitcoin, if nothing is changed, it will inevitably happen once future transaction volume makes Bitcoin incapable of supporting it. That failure to meet the transaction volume would cripple Bitcoin's usability and open the door wide open for another currency to take over which can scale properly.

Not necessarily true. dont you think that the supply and demand reaction would take effect if we stopped mining bitcoin, or had no more supply?  

Bitcoin has a large community backing it, and I hardly think there going to junkyard every thing, it would bring the bitcoin stable, and make it better for community as a whole.

Just thinking on it as a currency not a commodity.

Realpra is 100% right. Once the software is written for larger block sizes then any of the 1000 alts out there can incorporate it. Many will. Supply and demand then works against Bitcoin as demand will steadily weaken for a coin that cannot scale.
Dogecoin has a large community backing it, but that is not saving it from relentless decline.

So you are an MP shill? Yes, there's a handful of you devoted followers in his IRC room.

MP def lost the intellectual battle by the brag of wealth as his last effort to win.

He invited me to his channel once and I spoke with him. I like the guy and he seemed nice. I had respect for him, but my viewpoint has changed after reading that post and his little snide jabs at various figures and boast of wealth to try to control things. That's no better than a US politician a.k.a. thug with a suit on.

Very good points in favor of the fork!

I would only say that maybe Bitcoin is here not to fight governments, but rather open them up and pull them away from the debt-based fiat capture. In this regard, increasing the block size limit seems like a natural evolution towards that goal. And we still have plenty of alt-coins to fill other niches.

Exactly this! If you are in favor of this hard fork, you are in favor of the USG. Open up to the loving arms of big brother!

If any of these retarded claims were true, there would already exist an altcoin with a greater market share than bitcoin. Since there is not, it is safe to conclude that the block size is not a problem. In fact, none of the "improvements" proposed by the various altcoins amount to anything valuable.

This is one reasonable claim I can agree with against a fork. The principle of not changing fundamentals. Because changing them once means you can change them again. And that opens the door to corruption. Is this your main argument against the fork?

IMO when the bitcoin bull market returns in strength, practically every alt will get a coupon "good for one more pump and dump" along with it. If the bull market translates to the mass adoption tipping point this go around, I think there will be a definite gap open up between the top ~10 coins and "all the rest"as focus narrows. Then anything left behind will be looking increasingly like a "toy" coin, and I doubt will live more than a year or so after that. There maybe some persisting microeconomy of new pump and dump alts, for people who still want to play at the cryptocurrency game, but the world is getting more serious. By the end of 2015 you might have to wear a shirt and tie to post here  ;)

lol, that talk. Bitcoin is a pump and dump coin itself. You bitcoiners are really scared of those other coins, aren't you?

They can just move faster, can't they? And they are mushrooming too. You must be sweating every night over altcoins.

lol, that talk. Bitcoin is a pump and dump coin itself. You bitcoiners are really scared of those other coins, aren't you?

They can just move faster, can't they? And they are mushrooming too. You must be sweating every night over altcoins. Particularly with that many problems btc has. Looks increasingly like a shitcoin with a community with just slighlty higher IQ and rethorical skills.

Bitcoin lost its untouchable status as you went off your holy exponential curve and you know it well.

Yeah, mushrooming! More food for Honey BTCadger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg), he is a hungry little bastard :)

Off topic... go back to the trollbox on BTC-e already. As far as I'm concerned couldn't care less about the price at this stage.

He never made such a claim AFAIK, and even if he had 20% of the hashrate, that still wouldn't be quite enough to cause serious trouble, would it?


Why, are you missing the big boobs? ;D

Seriously, I don't get the point of his reluctance, i.e. why he makes such a big deal about it. Not that I care a lot, to be perfectly honest. Back in the days, Luke-jr also had some reluctance regarding newer versions of bitcoind, but IIRC they were a little more / better substantiated... and *he* was running a pool, unlike MP.

Nothing can stop the honeybadger when it’s hungry. Oh, what a crazy fuck.

Realpra is right. Once the software is written for larger block sizes then any of the 1000 alts out there can incorporate it. Many will. Supply and demand then works against Bitcoin as demand will steadily weaken for a coin that cannot scale.
Dogecoin has a large community backing it, but that is not saving it from relentless decline.

I think Satoshi didn't consider the block size to be among fundamentals, but rather a temporary precaution against DDOS attacks. PoW's nature is such that it is hard to hide because of the physical presence, thus pretending that power players of today don't exist is meaningless. We need to make them accept the new rules and for that the volume cap needs to increase. We still have Litecoin if that route fails.

I think any of the alts could have made block sizes 100 times bigger at any point so unless all really have little understanding of the code, the argument that alts are merely waiting on software and that they would use it seems to ring hallow.

This isn't worth talking much about.  It's a foregone conclusion that the anti-spam measure called Max_block_size that was quickly added to the code without much though in the first place (other than: "yup, that'll be plenty big for a while") was destined to increase.

The newbies that disagree just don't know the history of that kludge.

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

Yup. That's why I keep posting this:

then why do people like MP freak out?

I honestly believe that after Satoshi disappeared he later remembered this change was left out, and thought to himself "Damn. I should have done it when I had the chance. It'll get done .. I'm sure ... I hope I don't regret this."

satoshi left.

There are new powers that be, and powers that wanna be.

anyway...
I thought we were all agreed that inflation is bad...

anyway...
I thought we were all agreed that inflation is bad...

News at 9: Gavin still right about block size and controlled hard forks, represents majority view of Bitcoin holders and users on the topic. Mircopu Pippescex still a drama queen, but now without sockpuppet representation on btctalk ^_^

You are correct - I linked to what Satoshi said about the block size just above this and it was not something untouchable. (Not that we are bound by what he said, but anyone who argues that it is fundamental, never to be changed is just uninformed.)

So what's next, if this somehow succeeds? Two years from now, Liberia uses bitcoin as national currency; suddenly the workers go on strike, ask for double salaries. Government asks Gavin to fork Bitcoin to give them an extra one-off five million BTC to pay the workers. Everyone agrees, right? Because: a) poor workers, they need it, and b) not agreeing would be being against expanded usage of Bitcoin. And for that matter, c) there's already precedent, the "poor users" who wanted to play but didn't want to pay transaction fees were given free stuff before.

I don't know. People get things stuck in their head, dig in, and then get all stupid and irrational about it.

Satoshi is gone. Gavin is not Satoshi. There was once a time when these things could have been changed; that time has passed. Or else you can expect to see this kind of scenario play out:

There are not many people like MP. Many would recall that the precursor to his MPEx web site was hosted on the same domain that also hosted some kind of Eastern European dating/escort service. Would a rational person do that?

This particular design has its advantages and its disadvantages. The main advantage is that since the trade engine does not connect to the Internet, it does not need a whole lot of software. Apache, for instance, is something that it doesn't need to have installed. This lack of software makes it a lot easier to secure, and a lot more difficult to mess with. In general I have found so far that the best results in computer security are achieved not by those who are most competent at securing a system, but by those who are backed by management most inclined to simplify their task. Your mileage may, obviously, vary.

Bitcoin can be hi-jacked by a simple majority?  

The ALT coins can fork.  

But once a crypto is past the age of 4.  Or $10m in marketcap.
No you do not fork.

Bitcoin the only value it has against the ALTs is that it will not fork, because it is impossible to establish a 99% consensus.  

Want a better 'bitcoin' make one
Launch it on the market.  

Hell give a snap shot distribution to the bitcoin holders.

Let the market, not a group of devs decide.

Worst example ever. Please go away. The only reason to be against this fork would be to be against more adoption.
The limitation is really something that will cause problems in the future, a lot of them.

Such a ridiculous fork would never take place because :a) block size limit isn't a fundamental feature; b) the supply is.
Changing the block size limit doesn't affect the market or miners at all.

Now, they have a new plan, one which aims to convince the world that Bitcoin can be compartmentalised as if it were nothing more than an estate sale in which governments and their lackeys pick over the best parts while the junk is tossed. You might be inclined, as I was, to think that the communist shitlord, otherwise known as Andreas M Antonopoulos, was the only one stating blockchain technology platitudes but you would be wrong. In fact, it appears there is a contrived effort to insert the idea into our minds that the Bitcoin network and the technology can be separated from Bitcoin the unit of account. They failed to convince us that Bitcoin in its entirety was worthless but their compromise seeks to trick you into believing that bitcoin remains worthless while the technology holds value for them, but not you.

MPEx isn't a "web site." Unlike gox and stamp and all the other scam-exchanges, MPEx is a legitimate trading engine that also happens to have a few web front-ends.

In this climate all the alts which have a larger block limit trumpet their capability. One or two of them could gain traction and erode Bitcoin's first mover status. Serious erosion would result if nothing gets done.

And there is most certainly an affected market when you manipulate block sizes! You don't see it yet because it isn't an issue yet, but there will be a market for mining fees. This is a much bigger threat to Bitcoin than the prospect of a bunch of poor nobodies having to actually pay for the seeming miraculous service of sending any amount of wealth anywhere in the world in an hour. You should better worry about the people who literally secure the network. Do you think they will do this work for free? They will not keep mining blocks when the block reward is no longer significant, and users will not make up the difference out of the kindness of their hearts. Supply and demand drive price. There is a finite supply of transaction space, and that is why users will include a fee.

Throttling the motion of money by making it expensive to move smells authoritarian/elitist to me.

I don't know about authoritarian, but elitists, I believe that's exactly what they are. I don't even think they would object to being called elitists. Did you read Trilema (http://trilema.com)? Not making any judgment here, but I believe it needs to be pointed out to understand their point of view.

Or maybe I just belong to idiots ;)

Throttling the motion of money by making it expensive to move smells authoritarian/elitist to me. Better 10,000 tx at 5c per, than having to persuade 100 people to spend $5 on it. Fungibility, liquidity and velocity are all related. Something fucking expensive, but fucking hard to move is not going to find a buyer quickly.

The trading engine wasn't what I was talking about. I was referring to his Options Emporium (MPOE). If you have brilliant technology and build a product on top of it (in the case a web-enabled product - I won't use the term "web site" since it is too demeaning for you), shouldn't you at least try to put in minimal effort to make it usable by regular people?

Throttling the motion of money by making it expensive to move smells authoritarian/elitist to me. Better 10,000 tx at 5c per, than having to persuade 100 people to spend $5 on it. Fungibility, liquidity and velocity are all related. Something fucking expensive, but fucking hard to move is not going to find a buyer quickly.

I don't know about authoritarian, but elitists, I believe that's exactly what they are. I don't even think they would object to being called just that. Did you read Trilema (http://trilema.com)? Not making any judgment here, but I believe it needs to be pointed out to understand their point of view.

Or maybe I just belong to idiots ;)

Elitism is very much a fact of life, in any and all cases where your life works, and your experiences are satisfactory or enjoyable; it's as much a requisite of happy living as clean air. For instance: you meet a girl. Do you take her to a soup kitchen? No, you do not. You take her to Pomodoro's. Why? Oh, because you wish to project this air of elitism about you, like saying "Honey, as long as you're hanging on my arm, no doors in this city are closed to you" ? Well done you elitist democrat you.

I think the thing to do is to click "ignore danielpbarron."

And that's just what I have done.

Ahh, problem solved.

I seriously encourage all who disagree with him to follow suit.

If no one is listening to him then that cuts his "power" to argue insanities, as no one will be listening.

...
For instance: you meet a girl. Do you take her to a soup kitchen? No, you do not.  ...

And there is most certainly an affected market when you manipulate block sizes! You don't see it yet because it isn't an issue yet, but there will be a market for mining fees. This is a much bigger threat to Bitcoin than the prospect of a bunch of poor nobodies having to actually pay for the seeming miraculous service of sending any amount of wealth anywhere in the world in an hour. You should better worry about the people who literally secure the network. Do you think they will do this work for free? They will not keep mining blocks when the block reward is no longer significant, and users will not make up the difference out of the kindness of their hearts. Supply and demand drive price. There is a finite supply of transaction space, and that is why users will include a fee. This whole hard fork drama is part of the bigger brain-damaged notion that Bitcoin isn't about money.

I think the thing to do is to click "ignore danielpbarron."

And that's just what I have done.
Ahh, problem solved.
I seriously encourage all who disagree with him to follow suit.

If no one is listening to him then that cuts his "power" to argue insanities, as no one will be listening.

Smart move.

i disagree here. Supply and demand make the price of a coin. Bitcoin isn't scarce enough right now because of this insanely long phase of high inflation (8% to 10% this  year). This inflation bleeds out your marketcap. So that's the number one thing to be noticed: bitcoin is right now not scarce at all with 3600 new coins every day dumped on the market

#2 thing is: in an industry of competing alts scarcity will become mandatory - and i mean 'scarcity' ... not like 10% to 30% inflation years into adoption.
Coins will be valued according to demand and supply (of course). As long as they are scarce and useful nothing goes to zero, why should it?

I don't see what you're actually fearing because bitcoin right now is useless as money because of  the megalomania which says it needs to be inflationary which turns out to be constant oversupply and loss in cap and declining interest from the public. This bitcoincommunities entire logic and idea is totally strange and actually wrong logic.

10 alts can coexists literally forever if they 1) traget different groups of consumers 2) are useful for different things 3)can each secure a demand for them 4) they are reasonably scarce (low inflation) to support their value and reduce their volatility

Bitcoins volatilty is a pain and is caused mainly by the high inflation. That inflation you got there kills it right in front of you but you seem to be all high on something so you actually don't even see that. Scalability isn't even a topic for a coin that's unable to maintain a value like bitcoin.

Coins will be valued according to demand and supply (of course). As long as they are scarce and useful nothing goes to zero, why should it?

Block size =/= block size limit.
Okay you obviously are smarter than Gavin.  ::)


Smart move.

I think it's a smart move to block him. I disagree with what he's saying. I decided on my opinion for myself after hearing the arguments from both sides. His was insanity (in my opinion). So I'm on the side opposing him (and you too apparently), that's all.

If a raving lunatic is shouting things at me in the street I don't necessarily listen to him either. That's a bit more of an extreme example than in this case, but serves to illustrate my point.

Look how sensitive you are to my simple blocking of him. It just goes to prove my point: If no one is listening to him then that cuts his "power" to argue insanities, as no one will be listening. The whelping has begun already.

Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the risk themselves and begin to dump them at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged blockchain gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork which had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two chains look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged side of the blockchain fork gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork that initially had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two chains look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

I have a few Qs...

1. Even If all miners accept the fork, can it sustain unless majority of nodes do not update themselves ?

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

On the technical side, you only need enough nodes using the software that implements the hard-fork to ensure that post-fork blocks get propagated.  But even if *nearly* all miners accept the fork, even if you only had something like 10% still hashing without the changes implemented you'ld still get a block every two hours -- frequently enough to include most high-value and high-fee transactions.


Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

I was thinking more about the opposite direction. For the sake of argument let's say MP owns all of the unknown hash rate and 35% of the known. He has no intention of upgrading and there ends up being two legitimate bitcoin chains. What do you suppose the outcome of that would be? A lot of money lost I'm sure. Just as Slush and eleuthria lost money during the .7 to .8 upgrade someone else would too. But that was fixed quickly by the dev team in a rather frenzied session of downgrading and damage control. What would happen if half of the current mining power decided not to cooperate?

On the technical side, you only need enough nodes using the software that implements the hard-fork to ensure that post-fork blocks get propagated.  But even if *nearly* all miners accept the fork, even if you only had something like 10% still hashing without the changes implemented you'ld still get a block every two hours -- frequently enough to include most high-value and high-fee transactions.

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

Looks like the after fork situation is like a mining war ;)

Devs, Miners, Traders: they are the three branches of Bitcoin Government. They check and balance each other. Traders and miners have ruled too long. Their power is waning. It's time for devs to bring hope and change to the Bitcoin community. Then we can come back stronger.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged side of the blockchain fork gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork that initially had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two sides look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

Have you looked at the hash rate chart lately... I don't see the miners conceding any power.

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.  

If you are on one fork then you wouldn't even see txns using coninbase inputs from the other fork.   Your fork would simply see the txns as invalid no different then if someone right now made upa bogus input and tried to send you imaginary bitcoins.

Shhh, MP thinks different LOL

If you are on one fork then you wouldn't even see txns using coninbase inputs from the other fork.   Your fork would simply see the txns as invalid no different then if someone right now made up a bogus input (or a coinbase with 100,000 BTC reward) and tried to send you imaginary bitcoins.  Invalid is invalid.

We've already handled a fork years ago... when changing database cores.

It's no big deal.

It will not be as easy as it looks like, especially now when the hashing power is much more distributed between different pools and farms. But we will first see what kind of consequence a fixed 1MB block size will bring when transactions pass 4000 per block

If you haven't seen it already, you haven't been paying attention. Has happened temporarily a few times when luck has given us a cluster of 20 or 30 minute blocks during medium/heavy tx volume...  tx start getting backed up.

No I didn't. But I guess that it is not yet a problem when they can be cleared in a hour or two. For small transactions, I don't care about confirmation, will just deliver the goods when seeing unconfirmed transaction. For larger transaction, wait one day is still faster than most of the bank transfer today

My read of Gornick's sentence is that tainting would happen on a particular chain.  That is to say, and transaction containing a coinbase input or derivative thereof (post-fork) on the same chain would be considered 'tainted' (and destroy fungibility _on that chain_.)

No I didn't. But I guess that it is not yet a problem when they can be cleared in a hour or two. For small transactions, I don't care about confirmation, will just deliver the goods when seeing unconfirmed transaction. For larger transaction, wait one day is still faster than most of the bank transfer today

It's "dangerous" in the sense that you may want to insist on receiving equal amounts of mpcoin (http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=12-01-2015#973877) and gavincoin (http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=11-01-2015#973677) in exchange for your goods or services. That is, if you don't want to pick a side in this war. A transaction gets "tainted" in the sense that 1 bitcoin pre-fork becomes 1 mpcoin and 1 gavincoin post-fork; these two different coins stay together in one unspent output, in the same block. If you spend the output on either chain, anybody watching the network can broadcast it to the other chain (both see it as a valid unspent output sending funds to a valid address). The taint appears when the transaction is finally confirmed in both chains. It's in two different blocks instead of the same one (even if still sharing the same address).

This is one of the reasons why this should have been done in the past. Less people, less useless complaints.
I wonder what you will say when we start hitting our current limit?

...
A fork without consensus is practically creating chaos and will destroy bitcoin.

Not that i would care too much because my holdings in litecoin, unobtanium and many other alts will explode in value from that.
...

"Look!  Meaningful transaction fees after only 7 8 9 ? years."

But meaningful transaction fees probably won't happen at all unless the 'tbfcoin' bloatchain fork fails.  To many people are to attached to the quaint notion that indigents get stuff for free after growing up in and environment rife with public services and welfare and such.  Seems that nobody is more attached to this notion of deep subsidies for all than the ardent Libertarians around here.  Go figure?

---

BTW, I think that 'tbfcoin' is more appropriate (and effective and fun) than 'gavincoin'.  The Bitcoin Foundation funds the work and their upper-tier membership are the ones who benefit (or imagine that they will at least.)

Not so crazy about 'mpcoin' either, also for propaganda reasons.  Hopefully it will be just plain old 'bitcoin', but the victors write the history books.

Oh. I see the problem. You're an idiot. :)

you call me an idiot? You want to see an idiot go off in your dumb face?

...
I don't understand the reluctance of upgrading. When Bitcoin came out most people were still using Windows XP. All they're doing is changing a number FFS!

The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount.

A fork, no matter hard or soft, would not be successful without >95% of miner's support. If Gavin's fork is really supported by 95% of miners, good luck to the 5% and MPEx: they will have a block every 200 minutes for 280 days, followed by a block every 50 minutes for 70 days, until they get back to normal speed.

But actually, block size could be increased without hardfork: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283746.0 . It's just a bit cumbersome

There should be a small fork before the next block reward halving, maybe raise the size limit to 1.5MB just to hold the hands of the crybabies. Then after the halving, raise it to 25MB. I don't understand the reluctance of upgrading. When Bitcoin came out most people were still using Windows XP. All they're doing is changing a number FFS!

There should be a small fork before the next block reward halving, maybe raise the size limit to 1.5MB just to hold the hands of the crybabies. Then after the halving, raise it to 25MB. I don't understand the reluctance of upgrading. When Bitcoin came out most people were still using Windows XP. All they're doing is changing a number FFS!

The fork will not happen without miners' explicitly signaling consensus by updating the version number in the blocks they create.

Firstly it assumes that miners are driven to much by economics and to little by politics than is probably true.  I'm sure that most of the miners who count these days have every likelihoods of looking out days or weeks into the future and taking a monetary hit for a future enduring reward.

If that were true, p2Pool would be among the top 3.

But a miner can rollback to running a node that does not implement the hard-fork in just seconds, should there be any doubt that the hard fork might not succeed.  So just like in March 2013 when v0.8 blocks were ahead by a wide margin that didn't mean that side would ultimately continue as the longest chain.


If that were true, p2Pool would be among the top 3.

Centralisation in every aspect is what i read here. Well done folks. That was quite fast.

Exactly. This doesn't harm Bitcoin in any way.
Imagine if the 1MB limit was never documented but was there, would you know about it and/or care? No.

It's not like they are changing the daily supply or anything, numbers, that actually matter.

If the long term average number of transactions per 10 minutes is greater then what the network can handle then the average wait time to get a confirmation will always increase until the max block size is either increased or the market evolves so that less transactions are sent per every 10 minutes (on average)

This is one of the reasons why this should have been done in the past. Less people, less useless complaints.
I wonder what you will say when we start hitting our current limit?

"Look!  Meaningful transaction fees after only 7 8 9 ? years."

But meaningful transaction fees probably won't happen at all unless the 'tbfcoin' bloatchain fork fails.  To many people are to attached to the quaint notion that indigents get stuff for free after growing up in and environment rife with public services and welfare and such.  Seems that nobody is more attached to this notion of deep subsidies for all than the ardent Libertarians around here.  Go figure?

---

BTW, I think that 'tbfcoin' is more appropriate (and effective and fun) than 'gavincoin'.  The Bitcoin Foundation funds the work and their upper-tier membership are the ones who benefit (or imagine that they will at least.)

Not so crazy about 'mpcoin' either, also for propaganda reasons.  Hopefully it will be just plain old 'bitcoin', but the victors write the history books.

I wonder about Multibit (which I don't and cannot use) and whether anyone using it would really know or care what was happening vis-a-vis forks and potential wars associated with them?  As I understand things the client just asks some random unknown someone for an spv proof and maybe verifies it with some headers or some such.  Would people running that client (most these days I would guess) even need to upgrade or push any buttons or anything?

I've always been negative about Multibit (and like things) because as far as I can tell they don't do jack shit to support the network other than increase the head-count of the herd.  When I was more interested in being peeved about it, I theorized that it might be used to more conveniently herd the sheep but I lost interest in trying to find out.  Now I'm more interested again.

Exactly. This doesn't harm Bitcoin in any way.
Imagine if the 1MB limit was never documented but was there, would you know about it and/or care? No.

It's not like they are changing the daily supply or anything, numbers, that actually matter.

https://i.imgur.com/cXBE3p7.png

Hm... no. They are not.

Not exactly. Please note: I'm on Gavin's side in this matter, but the block size limit is an economic factor of the network, so it's not just a meaningless constant that is being changed.

How about the following, crude, distinction of relevance of protocol changes:

1) purely technical adjustments of the protocol without (obvious) economic consequences

2) economically relevant changes that are compatible with the original protocol and its rules

3) economically relevant changes that are not compatible with the original protocol and its rules


Now, whether a change falls under 2) or 3) is a matter of discussion of course, and is precisely the topic of this thread. But using the above terminology, my claim would be that raising block size limit is considered 2) by a majority of users, miners, investors as of now, while only a minority considers it to fall under 3).

The real test will be if and when Gavin seriously pushes for the change: ultimately, the market reaction to a more formal announcement will be the deciding factor. I expect that reaction to be utterly unimpressive, and the change to go through nearly uncontested. If so, have fun with your "MPcoin", daniel.

You don't see it yet because it isn't an issue yet, but there will be a market for mining fees. This is a much bigger threat to Bitcoin than the prospect of a bunch of poor nobodies having to actually pay for the seeming miraculous service of sending any amount of wealth anywhere in the world in an hour. You should better worry about the people who literally secure the network. Do you think they will do this work for free? They will not keep mining blocks when the block reward is no longer significant, and users will not make up the difference out of the kindness of their hearts. Supply and demand drive price. There is a finite supply of transaction space, and that is why users will include a fee. This whole hard fork drama is part of the bigger brain-damaged notion that Bitcoin isn't about money.

A larger block size limit does not preclude miners from rejecting transactions with too low a fee.

Maybe there needs to be a Bitcoin Mining Foundation with free membership and some perks for pool owners so you at least have the ability to communicate with them before a major change.

You must be trolling.

A larger block size limit does not preclude miners from rejecting transactions with too low a fee.

Miners are supposed to compete with each other, but that doesn't work well when mining pools are so dominant. Currently they have no real incentive to gouge on fees, but that will change as the block-reward halves and fees become more important. High fees are in all miners interests, so it makes some sense that they will collude on that. We will probably get some small fraction, say 5% of miners who accept low fees, which means a user paying a low fee will have to wait on average 20 times as long for their transaction to be confirmed.

Whatever. The point is that market forces will play out regardless of the block size limit.

I love how retards like you word your posts as if there is a discussion to be had on this issue.

You do not change Bitcoin; Bitcoin changes you.

But a miner can rollback to running a node that does not implement the hard-fork in just seconds, should there be any doubt that the hard fork might not succeed.  So just like in March 2013 when v0.8 blocks were ahead by a wide margin that didn't mean that side would ultimately continue as the longest chain.

If that were true, p2Pool would be among the top 3.

There should be a small fork before the next block reward halving, maybe raise the size limit to 1.5MB just to hold the hands of the crybabies. Then after the halving, raise it to 25MB. I don't understand the reluctance of upgrading. When Bitcoin came out most people were still using Windows XP. All they're doing is changing a number FFS!

I will vote with MP and tvbcof. I don't think the new fork will be economical to mine or use.

Isn't it amazing the difference adding one small caveat makes. This is why I'd default to trusting Gavin's judgement, because everyone is trying to smash all of these ideas in his face and he has to make decisions that protect brilliant ideas from naive attacks. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/schneiers_law.html (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/schneiers_law.html)

Bitcoin can be hi-jacked by a simple majority?  

The ALT coins can fork.  

But once a crypto is past the age of 4.  Or $10m in marketcap.
No you do not fork.

Bitcoin the only value it has against the ALTs is that it will not fork, because it is impossible to establish a 99% consensus.  

Want a better 'bitcoin' make one
Launch it on the market.  

Hell give a snap shot distribution to the bitcoin holders.

Let the market, not a group of devs decide.

So, what changed?

The landscape for bitcoin mining will be completely different at the end of 2013 than the beginning.

23:48:53 (http://l.b-a.link/?date=12-01-2015#975021) mircea_popescu: reminds me of a much older but quite central asciilifeform point : "These fools have been handed a technology so clever, so disruptive and revolutionary, that the rulers of the world would have to fully unmask themselves as ruthless tyrants in order to suppress it, ? or give up their thrones on their own free will ? if it were used correctly, that is."

And we propose to change it?

Are we so arrogant that we can say we begin to know bitcoin's correct uses? Maybe they are just the microtransactions, drugs and poker (http://l.b-a.link/?date=12-01-2015#974960) that this fork would lead to?

I doubt it, because that sounds very much like the status quo, but with crypto, yo.

I will vote with MP and tvbcof. I don't think the new fork will be economical to mine or use.

I don't understand why Gavin is in such a hurry?

It would be good to accomplish this

the next bubble

No.



k.

What are the characteristics of proposed fork in a nutshell?

I don't know if anybody has calculated this before as it seems pretty stupid , but how much it will cost in transaction fees to fill all the blocks to the maximum ?

Right now. Less than 1 BTC per block, or about 100 BTC per day. Which is a relatively cheap attack. The limit creates an increasing risk of this event as tx volumes approach it.

It does sound idiotic but this a cheaper way of attacking the blockchain than trying to build up 51% hash power.
So , is this kind of attack possible ? Can it bring legit transactions to a halt?

Yes and no, legit transactions would have to pay a higher fee than normal to get through during the attack.

Thanks for the answer.
So if one lunatic decided to throw this money away everyday what will happen to legit transactions ?
I know there is a transaction pool for most clients but i guess there is a time limit also i guess.

It does sound idiotic but this a cheaper way of attacking the blockchain than trying to build up 51% hash power.
So , is this kind of attack possible ? Can it bring legit transactions to a halt?

For a formerly important participant in this experiment, where the heck have you been?

True, ordinary users would have to pay more than the block-stuffer. It becomes somewhat of a bidding war, but also a huge inconvenience for users as there is no replace-unconf-tx-with-a-higher-fee yet.

I read Mircea's blog post but I don't see any argument on why he is against the fork other than that it is a fork of Bitcoin and he doesn't like it.
And that he hates Gavin.

I don't get it. Someone please explain the downside of the proposed fork.
I guess one argument could be that Bitcoin is too big to fork?

I read Mircea's blog post but I don't see any argument on why he is against the fork other than that it is a fork of Bitcoin and he doesn't like it.
And that he hates Gavin.

I don't get it. Someone please explain the downside of the proposed fork.
I guess one argument could be that Bitcoin is too big to fork?

I read Mircea's blog post but I don't see any argument on why he is against the fork other than that it is a fork of Bitcoin and he doesn't like it.
And that he hates Gavin.

I don't get it. Someone please explain the downside of the proposed fork.
I guess one argument could be that Bitcoin is too big to fork?

At this point, i'm guessing its some kind of overreaction/miscommunication.
I don't think even Gavin is suggesting we fork RIGHT NOW...he's
doing tests in preparation...and there is no consensus yet from the
development community on whether the blocksize should be increased,
or whether an alternative approach such as sidechains should be used.
Certainly, there is no agreement to raise the blocksize right now, and
that is probably what MP is reacting to.

So bottom line, probably a lot of drama for nothing. 

To make it perfectly clear : irrespective of how much time and effort USG assets spend grooming Reddit and generally the crowds of self-entitled poor for support, the poor have no speaking part in Bitcoin. This is what we're doing here: reducing the franchise, reducing social benefits, reducing the welfare state. To ruin, all of them.

what has Mircea done lately for bitcoin!?  he can go screw himself.  he's no longer relevant in BTC world.

Hating Gavin is enough reason to oppose his proposed hard fork; if you don't trust the chef (http://trilema.com/2013/and-gavin-moves-on-to-the-dark-side-the-bitcoin-project-is-officially-hijacked/), don't eat his food (http://trilema.com/2015/if-you-go-on-a-bitcoin-fork-irrespective-which-scammer-proposes-it-you-will-lose-your-bitcoins/). The reasons for opposing this specific justification for a hard fork have been covered (http://qntra.net/2015/01/transaction-fees-and-the-future-of-bitcoin/).


The only consensus that matters is by the miners; it doesn't matter what the "development community" has to say about anything.

Miners aren't just gonna drop free money.

When the block reward halves, the fees are not going to pick up the slack.

Hating Gavin is enough reason to oppose his proposed hard fork; if you don't trust the chef (http://trilema.com/2013/and-gavin-moves-on-to-the-dark-side-the-bitcoin-project-is-officially-hijacked/), don't eat his food (http://trilema.com/2015/if-you-go-on-a-bitcoin-fork-irrespective-which-scammer-proposes-it-you-will-lose-your-bitcoins/). The reasons for opposing this specific justification for a hard fork have been covered (http://qntra.net/2015/01/transaction-fees-and-the-future-of-bitcoin/).

How does your failure to see me imply my absence?

Scarcity in terms of space in blocks for transactions to be confirmed is necessary to cultivate a healthy transaction fee market.

Did you or anyone you know do anything fun with Phin's (one time) million dollars worth of BTC?

This argument presumes the value of the transactions will justify exorbitant fees.

I think

No it really doesn't, it just says there's a market, a set of variables and that the former will bitchslap the latter into place.

Or it won't.

Bitcoin is open source

the overwhelming majority

Imaginary BTC isn't fungible with the real thing.



No it really doesn't, it just says there's a market, a set of variables and that the former will bitchslap the latter into place.



That remains to be demonstrated.

One thing to note is that Mircea is highly critical of Andreas Antonopoulous and Gavin Andresen. "Critical" as in, trying to make them look bad and calling them names.

I for one hold Andreas in very high regard and do not appreciate that.
And I like Gavin too. I think they are both doing their best to aid the Bitcoin space.
Andreas talked to the Canadian senate and encouraged them to delay regulations for crying out loud.

Mircea says: "Andreas Antonopoulous thought he was very important before his untimely death."  (This statement doesn't even make sense as Andreas is more popular than ever)
Mircea says: "Gavin Andresen, known principally for his costumed clown services, where he goes to various conferences dressed as this or that for the amusement of the participants."

What the...?

Mircea is like a rebel tyrant.

Source: footnotes on http://trilema.com/2015/if-you-go-on-a-bitcoin-fork-irrespective-which-scammer-proposes-it-you-will-lose-your-bitcoins/#footnote_1_59124

Say it: "i'm a socialist". That'll make everything clearer.



Sure, a lot of derps of your kind have forked bitcoin to various irrelevant altcoins.
Exactly what gavin intends to do.



of redditards. so what?
they're as irrelevant as dogecoin when it comes to Bitcoin.

One man's opinion. So what indeed.

I'm not a libertard that believes in magic hands that fix all.

I have not seen an argument against a larger block limit that uses facts.

Although I'd expect anyone
[derpage]
tyrant protecting his monopoly with violence.

That's dumb, for there can hardly be any viable rent situation without serious barriers, of which the regulatory ones are the most obvious ones.

Except the burden of making a convincing argument doesn't lie with those who are perfectly happy with Bitcoin as it is.

So you favor the maintenance of artificial barriers to create rent situations?

Admit it, you are a Union Organizer. You don't want to increase productivity, but you want to be paid more so you try to convince others to go on strike. You can be replaced.

There are no barriers to create an offchain transaction clearing service.

Admit it, you are a Union Organizer. You don't want to increase productivity, but you want to be paid more so you try to convince others to go on strike. You can be replaced.

Haha, very weaselly

Admit it, you are a Union Organizer. You don't want to increase productivity, but you want to be paid more so you try to convince others to go on strike. You can be replaced.

That's an ad-hominem, not an argument. Try harder.

Haha, I'm not the only one who noticed that ex-cbeast loves to use ad-hominems...

Oh shit, is that cbeast? No wonder.

Oh shit, is that cbeast? No wonder.

Say it: "i'm a socialist". That'll make everything clearer.

of redditards. so what?
they're as irrelevant as dogecoin when it comes to Bitcoin.

This argument presumes the value of the transactions will justify exorbitant fees. That will end Bitcoin as a currency. I can see their point, but it's premature. Bitcoin isn't ready to replace gold as a store of value, but it's already losing power in confirming transactions. Bitcoin should work towards staying relevant as a currency until the market deems it's better as something else. While I agree with Justus that the market can help find the best equilibrium between fees and block sizes, I think it's best to allow network science to determine that ratio rather than market exploiters.

So you prefer central planning over selfregulation and free market when it comes to transactionfees?

I wasn't the one to start using ad hominem.

Your argument makes no sense, you defend central planning, and therefore you're a socialist fuckwit.

You're this, and that, also lalalalala I can't hear all the sense you make because it goes against my conviction of being entitled to free stuff.

Bitcoin is economically broken at the fundamental level with respect to support reward for POW.  This because it will always approach net zero no matter what.

PoW is economically broken because the margins tend towards zero? Seriously?

PoW is economically broken because the margins tend towards zero? Seriously?

A blatant attempt to push PoS :P

PoW is economically broken because the margins tend towards zero? Seriously?

No, it's not. But payout to miners are way too high in this very first example here. Miners rule the market and shortsellers riding it down - with no end to it.
It's not the POW, it's the high rewards. But totally OT now.
...

There are actually two distinct constructs at play here, they are not equivalent. Consider:

Me.

You.

Yes.  It means that to attack Bitcoin one must only make the reward higher to do so.  And if the reward for supporting Bitcoin tends toward zero the cost of doing so is fairly minimal.

Not exactly... because even if the net profit tends toward slightly above breakeven, the gross rewards still ensure a high network hashrate which cannot be attacked without suffering major financial losses.
Still makes more sense to participate in the network (or not at all) than to attack it.

Several points:

 - With any significant fluctuation in value we should expect a fair percentage of mining to be below net zero.

 - I would not rule out a 'major financial loss' being acceptable to some who could be threatened by competition from a successful Bitcoin.

 - Being able to accurately predict the future (say, because you are going to implement an attack and it will probably be successful in achieving a result) could offer ways to realize a significant reward which would offset some costs.

 - How much sense it makes to power-down vs. to participate in an attack depends a great deal on whether you have gear which might be useful in the future or is likely to be at the end of it's useful life.  This depends on, among other things, the technological landscape, the likely future of Bitcoin, and the jurisdictional issues on one's locale.

All that said, you well could be right.  Your gross v. net observations are good ones.  I would not bet that my concerns are terribly valid.  This is theoretical hand-waving mostly, and I always like to play devil's advocate.

---

I would point out that a system collapse is not the only kind of attack and probably not the most likely one.  I would consider tainting to be very much an attack and probably terminal for the system.  Certainly it would be terminal for my interest in it (though my coins and transactions are clean so I would just register and liquidate at the first whiff of trouble here...and it is the thing I watch for most closely.)  Here is something I could easily see happening:

 - govt works with a partner to do some sort of licence and registration service.

 - partner runs infrastructure to efficiently communicate {color}-listed transactions, authorize clean block formations, or whatever implementation works.  (I've wondered aloud whether the new Inverse Bloom Filter Lookup Tables could help here.)

 - govt makes regulations that all miners must comply at the risk of confiscation of gear and/or other mild punishments.  Or perhaps just a tax break.

 - govt coordinates with other governments to follow more or less the same pattern and use the same tech partner(s).  The only business model I could see for 'Coin Validation' (who seems to be at least playing dead) was this.

Really the biggest argument I see against something like that would be that A) Bitcoin in it's present form is really pretty useful as a honeypot, and B) attacks of this nature would just provoke development of a more hardened system.

The same weakness in terms of minimal profits I outlined above exists here, however, and just as much of a factor.  It would be more easy for a miner to capitulate (rather than shut down) because a fair fraction of the population (and even plenty of Bitcoiners perhaps!) would see it as a good thing.  Gotta do something about all those evil terrorists, druggies, pedos, etc you know.

What variables would you like to know to make you cofortable?

  - snip: quote above where I specifically addressed profits several times since they are critical

Since the only point in question was a matter of profits, I was curious why you decided to rant further in this thread. Then I remembered having asked a question about your feelings about PoW mining. Of course I won't quote the entire thread here, but you answered it nicely here.

 - snip: incomplete quote from a different thread which is pretty unrelated.

In a nutshell I like proof-of-work fine, but like anything it needs to be implemented fairly carefully to optimize it's usefulness.

but like anything it needs to be implemented fairly

...

It was announced in a white paper long before its public release and is open source. That's about as fair as you can get in the real world. It's usefulness is upgraded through an open source system. Anyone that has the best scientific research to achieve peer-reviewed consensus contributes to the optimization of usefulness.

Who's quote is that?  It's not mine.  If it's your own invention then you are basically forgot to pull the shades before playing with yourself and I've little interest in being involved in the endeavor.

Yes.  It means that to attack Bitcoin one must only make the reward higher to do so.  And if the reward for supporting Bitcoin tends toward zero the cost of doing so is fairly minimal.

My point on this matter hasn't change since the very beginning, and it is summed up in Garzik's words in my signature.

Block space scarcity is needed for a healthy fee market. If someone wants to make economic micro-transactions they can use an altcoin (such as "Bitcoin 2" proposed by Gavin) or just an off-chain solution.

Not everything is economical in this world, because not everything can be bought. If it was so, then one country would simply print a bunch of bank notes and buy out all other countries for nothing. See? Doesn't work that way. That's why countries maintain their armies, which is costly, but that is the price of sovereignity.

Your mistake here, I quoted you verbatim.
 DO NOT POST SESC LINKS #top

thanks for the discount on bitcoin gavin, continue your shit and i might accumulate a real fortune. not in the form of gavincoins of course, there are better alternatives when we are talking altcoins.

It's the margin that tends to zero, not the reward.
Your attack is self-correcting, manage to make the global hashrate drop, everyone's rig is suddenly more valuable.

We can just stop reading there. Idiot contradicts himself in three sentences.

Please don't tell me you think that the recent price drop is because of Gavin's research on bigger block sizes.

an uncertainty of a hard fork (what's more a controversial one) must put some kind of pressure on bitcoin - that seems indisputable. the speculation part only covers only the amount of influence a hard fork  has on the market.

Tell us all a bit more about the magic of hashrate adjustments and the lightning responses.  /sarc

IIRC, some sha256 alt coins which use the same mechanism found it more practical to just re-distribute new binaries than to wait it out when faced with PoW attacks.

Maintaining your independence (as in "freedom") might be costly (as in "wasteful"), but it cannot be bought if it's not for sale! Two idiots are better than one, as they can always throw sand at each other, like 5 year olds! :D

So back at ya, barron!

If it was so, then one country would simply print a bunch of bank notes and buy out all other countries for nothing.

Alright let's take a closer look at the middle sentence.


Just look at it! Adorable.

https://twitter.com/TomReichhart/status/557629706317889539
@gavinandresen Thanks for pushing this. You are a hero.
re:
http://gavintech.blogspot.no/2015/01/twenty-megabytes-testing-results.html
"... So how will blockchain security get paid for in the future?

I honestly don't know. ..."

https://twitter.com/TomReichhart/status/557629706317889539
@gavinandresen Thanks for pushing this. You are a hero.
re:
http://gavintech.blogspot.no/2015/01/twenty-megabytes-testing-results.html
"... So how will blockchain security get paid for in the future?

I honestly don't know. ..."

I say, fork it, fork it real good!

So much vitriol in this thread.  Normally the consensus around here is that the free market is king and that natural selection means everything will either live or die on it's merits.  But as soon as the topic of a hard fork comes up, forcing the market to choose which one to use, suddenly it's all "there's only one valid choice and everyone else is wrong, so let's start throwing insults around".   ::)

Agree, disagree, whatever.  Ultimately it doesn't matter because the market will decide.

OK I'm confused. Why are people wigging about about giving Bitcoin the ability to process more transactions? How do people expect anything near mass adoption with a 7tps system?

This. It's a FACT that we need tons and tons of more transactions per second to absorb all that is expected if we want it to become mainstream. Why is this even a discussion?

Yes! The 1 MB limit was there to stop spam in the beginning of bitcoin history. It has no relevance any longer. Too bad it was designed so that it needs a hard fork, but no matter what, it is needed and expected. Those who are against it should understand that it is always up to the miners to decide.

It should be no problem upping that limit as far as I know.
It must be doner and sooner than late is better.

Also, the miners need it to be able to make any profit once the block reward is too low.

OK I'm confused. Why are people wigging about about giving Bitcoin the ability to process more transactions? How do people expect anything near mass adoption with a 7tps system?

Ah, Fonzie's bogus URL trick.  Not as common as your 'false-strawman' on the other thread though.  The new cbeast is plumbing the depths for sure.

Good morning class.  Yesterday we derived the chances of a thread spanning more than 10 pages and not containing a false-strawman assertion.   In today's class we will talk about the ethics of retaining a 'Donator' tag when buying an old forum personna.

If you legitimately did screw up the URL and are trying to indicate that "fairly carefully" and "fairly" are the same thing (then go on to give a dissertation about 'fairness') that's pretty weak sauce.

If you legitimately did screw up the URL and are trying to indicate that "fairly carefully" and "fairly" are the same thing (then go on to give a dissertation about 'fairness') that's pretty weak sauce.

Hrm? Elaborate a bit on the practicalities of your cheap attack where one "must only make the reward higher" will you?

Luke-jr raped some altcoin once, that's a super cool story but that doesn't really relate to Bitcoin in any way other than being some lame anecdotal evidence for your nebulous argument.

It's actually the other way around (http://fr.anco.is/2015/gavineries/).

With 24.62 million messages per day, December 2014 is the best traffic month ever for SWIFT, beating previous months’ record with more than 1.2 million messages per day. During the last three months of the year, growth versus the previous year was above 12%, further improving the YTD growth and ending the year with a growth of 11.0%, which is the greatest increase in traffic recorded since 2007. Over 5.6 billion FIN messages were recorded in 2014. On top of being the month in which a new total SWIFT FIN traffic record was reached, December is also a new best month for Payments (+8.6% vs November) and Securities (+1.8% vs June).

Edit: Fees with different block-sizes (assuming 100µBTC/kB)
1MB=100mBTC
20MB=2BTC
56MB=5.6BTC

Those figures imply the fees won't be be significant until the block reward drops to 12.5 or 6.25 BTC/block. Note that the 2BTC figure is almost 10% at the current block subsidy (but the block-size is limited).

I wasn't following it closely (and was a little disgusted) but as I recall, all lukedashjr did was mine for a while then quite and it had a devastating impact on whatever coin it was.  Hell, the same thing could happen to Bitcoin without any attack if the price drops steeply or suddenly (but that could never happen, right?) and/or a few large clusters were molested.  I'll call this an 'Invisible hand of Adam Smith lukedashjr Attack.'  Maybe the adjustment algorithms have been patched up to preclude this, but I doubt it...such things occurring proactively seem rare in Bitcoinland.

Second, even with an "infinite" block-size, there are still practical limits to the size of blocks. For example, my full node (with idle token hash-power) is currently set to broadcast 500kB blocks. The reason is that my (ADSL) Bandwidth is limited to 5Mbps up. If I want to send a newly found block to 16 hosts at once, we are talking a delay of about 12.8 Seconds. With a 600 second block-time, that corresponds to an orphan rate of at least 2.1% (one hop). If I had a 1Gbps connection, and wanted to limit my orphan rate to 5%: 600x.05=30 seconds. 1Gbps*30s/(say)64 connections*8bits/byte=58.6MB Block-size (again assuming one hop). At about 300 bytes per transaction (many transactions are larger), that works out to about 195 thousand transactions per block.

In other words, people will naturally stop using Bitcoin to buy snacks/coffee.

I wasn't following it closely (and was a little disgusted) but as I recall, all lukedashjr did was mine for a while then quite and it had a devastating impact on whatever coin it was.  Hell, the same thing could happen to Bitcoin without any attack if the price drops steeply or suddenly (but that could never happen, right?) and/or a few large clusters were molested.  I'll call this an 'Invisible hand of Adam Smith lukedashjr Attack.'  Maybe the adjustment algorithms have been patched up to preclude this, but I doubt it...such things occurring proactively seem rare in Bitcoinland.

Ever heard of "headers first" ?

Well, perhaps if by "mine for a while", you mean "51% the coin while excluding anyone's transactions from the mined blocks", then that would be pretty close to what happened (if I remember correctly).

Can you explain that please i don't really get the concept.

Totally not.
With a 51% attack you can at most make half the blocks empty, not "exclude anyone's toes from mined blocks".

Nonsense.  If you simply ignore everyone else's blocks, you can make *every* block empty as long as you have at least slightly more hashrate than everyone else, by mining your own blockchain in isolation from the network and leaking it out to the other nodes.  If you have at least slightly more hashrate than everyone else, eventually your blockchain (with every block empty) will win.

Mining on top of other blocks found by other miners would pretty much defeat the purpose of a 51% attack.  That would certainly be "amateur night at the 51% party."  A correctly executed 51% attack mines on top of the attacker's own blocks, so they can override everyone else's blocks when their alternative blockchain with a higher chain trust is introduced to the network.

Can someone explain again why it's not a free market selfregulating process? And why we need a bigger blockchain before we need it?

By doing this you end up with central control over txfees and will have to make them fixed and rising later. I don't see the point in responding to things that aren't even an issue yet.

Can someone also please explain to me why something needs to be done before something needs to be done?

People want to maximize the price paid to miners as fees when the block reward drops to zero-- or, at least, have some assurance that there is enough diverse mining to protect the chain against potential attackers.

And people believe the way to accomplish that is to artificially limit the number of transactions below the technical capabilities of the network.

But production quotas don't work. Limit the number of transactions that can happen on the Bitcoin blockchain, and instead of paying higher fees people will perform their transactions somewhere else. I have no idea whether that would be Western Union, an alt-coin, a sidechain, or good old fashioned SWIFT wire transfers, but I do know that nobody besides a central government can force people to use product with higher costs, if there is a lower-cost option available.

So how will blockchain security get paid for in the future?

I honestly don't know.

Thoughts from 2013 (Outside the current emo-drama) ...

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43677417318/economics-of-block-size-limit

Can any members of the self appointed Plutocratic League for Ending Bitcoins Servicability please provide references to any post of Satoshi's that emphatically states that the block size is intended to be a hard limit? ... annnnd don't do a cut and paste cherry pick, link it so we see it in context.

He put the limit in the source code.
It's up to you to find a quote of him suggesting it'd have to be removed.

If the miners hit the block limit, it would only mean one thing: there is a desire to process more transactions, but historical untested agreement does not allow it. Then miners and other full nodes will either raise the limit (the smaller the increment, the bigger support it will have), or transaction fees will go up as people compete for the space in blocks. As transaction fees go up, not only miners, but also regular users and service companies using the full blockchain would desire increment of the limit. So it will be even easier to achieve a consensus about raising the limit.

My prediction is that the block size limit will probably never be abolished, but will be constantly pushed up by a factor of two as amount of transactions approaches the limit.

Currently, paying a fee is controlled manually with the -paytxfee switch.  It would be very easy to make the software automatically check the size of recent blocks to see if it should pay a fee.  We're so far from reaching the threshold, we don't need that yet.  It's a good idea to see how things go with controlling it manually first anyway.

It's not a big deal if we reach the threshold.  Free transactions would just take longer to get into a block.

I did a rough tally of 4000 blocks from around 74000-78000.  This is excluding the block reward transactions:

There were average 2 transactions per block, 17 transactions per hour, 400 transactions per day.

Average transaction bytes per block was 428 bytes, or 214 bytes per transaction.

The current threshold is 200KB per block, or about 1000 transactions per block.  I think it should be lowered to 50KB per block.  That would still be more than 100 times the average transactions per block.

The threshold can easily be changed in the future.  We can decide to increase it when the time comes.  It's a good idea to keep it lower as a circuit breaker and increase it as needed.  If we hit the threshold now, it would almost certainly be some kind of flood and not actual use.  Keeping the threshold lower would help limit the amount of wasted disk space in that event.

Just do the math. if Bitcoin goes mainstream (as mainstream as say, credit cards) it will not be able to deal with so many transactions per second without bad consequences such as bloat, slowness and whatnot. So we need to think before the problem actually happens.

collapsing hashrate

Collapsing hashrate? The hash-rate at the last difficulty re-target (12/01) was 314,761,417 GH/s - the higher hashrate we ever had. Please point out some hard numbers (taking into account variance) that supports your "collapsing hashrate" theory.

12 minute blocks today reported by https://blockchain.info/de/stats
not 10 minute blocks

LOL at 11.43 minutes blocks meaning a "collapse" in the hashrate.

Look at the chart below. Hashrate already "collapsed" a few times in the past. Mid 2009, end of 2011, end of 2012. So what? Bitcoin died?

http://....

In case you hardfork it, you hardfork it ONCE and when you have to, not twice a year when you feel like it and it appears to be 'maybe useful in the future'.

I believe the intent with raising it 20 fold is not to have to mess with it again for several years. We are on the shallow part of the adoption S curve at present, and when we hit the inflection point when true mass adoption occurs, tx volume may double several times within a year. That is not the time to be saying "Oh wait a minute everyone, just got to do a hard fork". And to go for minimal increase and have to do it more than once in that period would be suicide.

The critical mass will be reached not within years - maybe never.

What 'inflection point'? Have you been looking at the charts lately? Any signs of rising demand?
No, we have to wait out the socialist distribution for the whales to corner the market and pump and dump it for the halving-party which they hopefully will so we can unload our heavy bags. That's the status quo and not hitting any imaginary 'inflection points'.

You're giving the perfect example for the dancing-in-the-sky-kind, the one telling people to hold all of 2014.
Bitcoin will remain a pump and dump - the high inflation makes sure it is.
The critical mass will be reached not within years - maybe never.
Most people already lost money with it or have been scammed and most aren't even able to use it safely. People in the streets know bitcoin and they choose not to use it. Go outside and talk to average Joe. So all the fancy hopes of massadoption is delusion and bitcoin fails miserably with being a store of value. I don't see it going up with this demand/supply imbalance and it'll be worse later because once reality sinks in sellpressure will increase even more.

The whole distribution idea was a monumental failure because it leads only to less distribution and slower adoption aswell as higher volatility (and maybe even supports centralization of mining) - but that's offtopic now.

I know the cognitive dissonance must be too much and you'll have to 'put me on ignore' now.  ::)

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

Ever heard of "headers first" ?

And from that you get "Semi fungible high limit poker chips for the elite" ?  ::)

I just saw a commercial for some iOS app that lets you pay instantly with your phone; if that's the kind of functionality you're looking for, there it is! But that's not what bitcoin is for; never has been!

A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

peer-to-peer version of electronic cash

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.

Yes I have. All "headers first" does is save bandwidth on re-transmission. In order for other nodes to build upon your block in a trust-free manner, they still need the whole block. Edit: there is some provision for blindly trusting the header, then banning mis-behaving hosts later.

Well, perhaps if by "mine for a while", you mean "51% the coin while excluding anyone's transactions from the mined blocks", then that would be pretty close to what happened (if I remember correctly).

I don't recall or never knew the precise details of lukedashjr's attacks.  Mining zero-length blocks does shift the financial burden on an attack funder down to just covering the transaction fees, however, in the manner I alluded to in a prior post.

I would observe that if tainting is implemented at the mining layer, mining empty blocks would be an expedient way to assure compliance, and at the margins of profitability a little bit of added efficiency goes a long way.  Not that there is much other than 'impurity' that precludes developments and adoptions which would dis-favor empty blocks though I'll admit.  (So, if we see such efforts being focused on we might raise our eyebrows...)

I also observe that the mention of the NYSE and Singapore governments becoming involved in Bitcoin provokes a response in the community akin to the VE-day celebrations (here on the allies side of things.)  Tainting would probably be a small price for the 'salvation' of mainstream involvement to most it seems, and there are plenty of people who are instinctively favorable toward existing societal norms and power structures.  By all observations Gavin seems to be among these.

With respect to tainting, it seems that there are plenty of people including long-time and high level Bitcoin participants who favor it on it's stand-alone virtues.  There are certainly some such virtues, but I see it as entirely unlikely that the effect would (or could) be 'stand-alone.'

  -edit: likely --> unlikely

He put the limit in the source code.
It's up to you to find a quote of him suggesting it'd have to be removed.

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

Wrt to luke-jr's attack it wasn't this. He simply had the difficulty shoot up, and then left, leaving the altcoin issuing one block every X days, rendering it pretty much unusable.

@davout: In the parallel universe (a forked chain if you wish) where the failed raid 1+0  array thing didn't happen, a post if yours where you gave me link to an interesting thread still exists. Such a thread should had been the proof that satoshi was not an half-god :)

Unluckily my memory failed to remember any details of the actual thread contents. The only thing I know was that satoshi and others were arguing about a code change.

Could you please provide me the link again? Thanks in advance.

It was the discussion about adding an API method to list transactions since insert some previous transaction here. The idea is that it would be easy to get only transactions that you didn't know about yet.

Sadly the search is not working, so I can't dig up the specific thread / post anymore.

And from that you get "Semi fungible high limit poker chips for the elite" ?  ::)

If thou treatest Satoshi's words as gospel, thou shalt at least read thy fucking white paper more carefully...


Title, abstract, and first paragraph:






Note the curious absence of mentioning Bitcoin's purpose being a 'rock solid store of wealth with the sole desire to overthrow the JEWISH SHAPESHIFTERS' & SPACE LIZARDS' FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY' - ahem - I meant to act as "semi fungible high limit poker chips". I like that one.

at the expense of full node operators.

Satoshi talks of nodes running in server farms and a lightweight client being the wallet for the average user. I don't see why the progress of bitcoin should be held hostage by the whiners who are too cheap to run a node on decent hardware, when it was never envisaged that anything less would be necessary in future.

On a second thought, its better not hardfork at all, keeping the block limit at 1mb will create a competitive market for transaction and secure Bitcoin place as a pure electronic gold system, on other hand increasing the size of the blocks will mostly certain ensure a humiliating defeat for Bitcoin against a more efficient blockchain for payments and regular transactions.

It is only its future potential which gives it today's appearance of electronic gold.

No.

Well rationally there is no way the present Bitcoin can win over a higher limit fork:

Step 1:
A. Gavin creates a higher limit BTC fork.
B. Anyone else does it.

Step 2:
Present network can never grow more than it is now, because we are already hitting the limits.

Step 3:
New system takes over by nature of being the biggest - which it cannot avoid becoming because it scales!

Maybe miners are waiting for blocks to fill so they can pump IXC. If they cared about Bitcoin transactions they wouldn't waste resources merge mining

I am torn whether we should simply ignore  Mircea Popescu (and his supporters), or try to continue to teach them the error in their ways on this issue.

I think I read somewhere that he is still on one of the 0.4.x clients. He distrusts a lot of the new features introduced since then. He believes that Bitcoin core should not have a wallet built-in at all. (0.9.x does let you disable the wallet).

I don't think he trusts the Obelisk effort either. Without a detailed spec, forks are likely if alternate Bitcoin node software is not bug-for-bug compatible. This was recently illustrated with recent versions of OpenSSL (https://gist.github.com/sipa/5d12c343746dad376c80) not being bug-for bug compatible (and causing a fork).

Also note the absence of any thing like, "all aspects of bitcoin may be compromised so that maximum adoption is achieved." Satoshi never framed this as "the fastest and bestest way to send money for all people no matter how stupid or poor they are." Your quoted texts prove my point rather than yours; we need "cryptographic proof instead of trust." When it comes to the money supply, I don't want to trust banks; I don't want to trust governments; and I certainly don't want to trust developers!

The threshold can easily be changed in the future.  We can decide to increase it when the time comes.  It's a good idea to keep it lower as a circuit breaker and increase it as needed.  If we hit the threshold now, it would almost certainly be some kind of flood and not actual use.  Keeping the threshold lower would help limit the amount of wasted disk space in that event.

it's really a simple thing. DO WE NEED IT? Is the current limit affecting us or not? Have we reached a point where it is not enough?

it's really a simple thing. DO WE NEED IT? Is the current limit affecting us or not? Have we reached a point where it is not enough?

The answer depends upon whether a system is centralized or decentralized. When Psy's Gangnam Style "broke" the download counter on YouTube the developers could easily upgrade it after the event, even though they saw it was going to happen. Centralized system, fixed in one place. Very easy!

With Bitcoin, the software is being run on many thousands of computers, owned by thousands of different people who have different opinions, speak different languages, have different priorities. If this change is delayed until it is obvious it is needed, then everyone has to upgrade, at once. Very messy!

Remember that a YouTube counter is nothing important, but if large numbers of YouTubers were waiting hours or days to see a video then the service becomes total crap. That is the equivalent to the dismal PR scenario being faced here.

Today no but properly done a hard fork is a 6-9 month process.  Hell it almost took that long for P2SH.   We are roughly 35% to 40% of max capacity and txn volume over the last year (in a major bitcoin decline) still doubled.  Over a longer period of time it has grown more like 3x to 5x per year.  Waiting till 100% of blocks are 1MB and there is a 50,000 txn backlog is probably the wrong time to start discussing the issue.

Bitcoin's ability to destroy socialism is not strengthened by the inclusion of every Tom, Dick, and Harry that has two cents to scrape together.

Who are you to make such grand decisions?

Maybe. I love the idea of algorithmic (in a formal sense) determination of almost anything. Money supply is definitely included in that.

But that wasn't the point. Other than the "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" message, what's the hard evidence Satoshi saw the network's main purpose as 'sound money' more than 'trustless payment system'? I still believe the fixed supply in the limit is more due to finding a solution for the economical bootstrapping problem than political/economical conviction, but my guess is as good as yours in that matter. There's simply not much evidence on this matter, to my knowledge.


That said, there is evidence what Satoshi thought about the max block size limit. Can't quote this often enough, it seems:


Conclusion: Whatever one's arguments for or against raising the limit are, leave Satoshi out of it. From what we can gather, the thought it's a non-issue. Doesn't mean he's automatically right of course, but arguing against a relaxation of the limit by appeal to the creator's authority just doesn't fly, given the evidence.

Thank you both for your answer. Based on that i think it is prudent to lay the ground work for expansion and explain it for what it is, evolution, not a hard fork. Hard fork just has a bad ring to it and is mostly used to explain fixing something broken with the system . I think this is a good step forward.

About space on HDD, the question becomes, do you prefer to have an extra 100GB of sauce or run your own node? The vast majority of users are now on lite clients so they are not affected, but if you can run a full node now then you already have the infrastructure to handle the expansion.

I wasn't aware that everyone had agreed on this being one of Bitcoin's aims.  While you're entitled to have your own agendas, conflating them with Bitcoin seems rather naive.  It's an open source protocol, people can do whatever they want with it.  There are people, myself included, who would like to see the inclusion of everyone in this technology and you can't do anything to change that.  If anything, your insistence to the contrary only reinforces my view that a fork would beneficial, since clearly there are different ideals at work in various corners of the community that aren't compatible.  There are those whose only concern is worshiping at the altar of money and turning a profit, whereas others see Bitcoin as a tool for social and political revolution.  Ultimately, we're all going to use it in the way our own personal ideals deem best, but try to understand that you can't force your view onto others. 



An individual with a mind of his own who is entitled to make his own decisions, much like everyone else.  Anyone who wants to propose a fork can do so, but similarly can't force anyone to go along with it.  Anyone can choose to ignore someone else's view on the matter and can encourage others to do the same if they so choose.  Again, personal freedom.  For what it's worth, if there is a fork, I'll happily go along with it.  Feel free to tell me why you don't agree, but you can't stop me.  Such is the beauty of decentralisation.