Bitcoin Forum

Some thoughts about the activation mechanism for soft forks. In the past we used IsSuperMajority and currently use BIP9 as soft fork activation methods, where a supermajority of hashrate triggers nodes to begin enforcing new rules. Hashrate based activation is convenient because it is the simplest and most straightforward process. While convenient there are a number limitations with this method.

Firstly, it requires trusting the hash power will validate after activation. The BIP66 soft fork was a case where 95% of the hashrate was signaling readiness but in reality about half was not actually validating the upgraded rules and mined upon an invalid block by mistake[1].

Secondly, miner signalling has a natural veto which allows a small percentage of hashrate to veto node activation of the upgrade for everyone. To date, soft forks have taken advantage of the relatively centralised mining landscape where there are relatively few mining pools building valid blocks; as we move towards more hashrate decentralization, it's likely that we will suffer more and more from "upgrade inertia" which will veto most upgrades.

Upgrade inertia in inevitable for widely deployed software and can be seen for example, with Microsoft Windows. At the time of writing 5.72% of all Microsoft Windows installations are still running Windows XP, despite mainstream support ending in 2009 and being superseded by 4 software generations, Vista, 7, 8 and 10.

Thirdly, the signaling methodology is widely misinterpreted to mean the hash power is voting on a proposal and it seems difficult to correct this misunderstanding in the wider community. The hash powers' role is to select valid transactions, and to extend the blockchain with valid blocks. Fully validating economic nodes ensure that blocks are valid. Nodes therefore define validity according to the software they run, but miners decide what already valid transactions gets included in the block chain.

As such, soft forks rules are actually always enforced by the nodes, not the miners. Miners of course can opt-out by simply not including transactions that use the new soft fork feature, but they cannot produce blocks that are invalid to the soft fork. The P2SH soft fork is a good example of this, where non-upgraded miners would see P2SH as spendable without a signature and consider them valid. If such an transaction were to be included in a block, the block would be invalid and the miner would lose the block reward and fees.

So-called "censorship" soft forks do not require nodes to opt in, because >51% of the hash power already have the ability to orphan blocks that contain transactions they have blacklisted. Since this is not a change in validity, nodes will accept the censored block chain automatically.

The fourth problem with supermajority hash power signaling is it draws unnecessary attention to miners which can become unnecessarily political. Already misunderstood as a vote, miners may feel pressure to "make a decision" on behalf of the community: who is and isn't signalling becomes a huge public focus and may put pressures onto miners they are unprepared for. Some miners may not be in a position to upgrade, or may prefer not to participate in the soft fork which is their right. However, that miner may now become a lone reason that vetoes activation for everyone, where the soft fork is an opt-in feature! This situation seems to be against the voluntary nature of the Bitcoin system where participation at all levels is voluntary and kept honest by well balanced incentives.

Since miners already have the protocol level right to select whatever transaction they prefer (and not mine those they don't), it would be better if a miner could chose to not participate in triggering activation of something they won't use, but, without being a veto to the process (and all the ire they may have to experience as a consequence).

The alternative discussed here is "flag day activation" where nodes begin enforcement at a predetermined time in the future. This method needs a longer lead time than a hash power based activation trigger, but offers a number of advantages and perhaps provides a better tradeoff.

Soft forks are still entirely optional to use post activation. For example, with P2SH, many participants in the Bitcoin ecosystem still do not use P2SH. Only 11% of bitcoins[2] are stored in P2SH addresses at the time of writing. Miners are free to not mine P2SH transactions, however, the incentives are such that miners should still validate transactions so they don't accidentally include invalid transactions and cause their block to be rejected. As an additional safety measure for well designed soft forks, relay policy rules prevent non-standard and invalid transactions from being relayed and mined by default; a miner would have to purposefully mine an invalid transaction, which is against their own economic interest.

Since the incentives of the Bitcoin system rely on self validation, economic nodes (miners and users) should always remain safe by ensuring their nodes either validate the current rules, or, they can place their network behind a full node that will filter out invalid transactions and blocks at the edge of their network (so called firewall or border nodes).

A user activated soft fork is permissive. Miners do not have to produce new version blocks and non-upgraded miners' blocks will not be orphaned as was the case with IsSuperMajority soft forks (e.g. BIP34, BIP66, BIP65-CLTV) which made it a compulsory upgrade for miners.

BIP9 "versionbits" soft fork activation method is also permissive in so far as non-upgraded miners are not forced to upgrade after activation because their blocks wont be orphaned. A recent case was the "CSV" soft fork that activated BIP68, BIP112 and BIP113. As such, the CSV soft fork allows non-upgraded miners to continue mining so long as they didn't produce invalid blocks.

Miners always retain discretion on which transactions to mine. However, regardless of whether they actively include transactions using the new soft fork feature, or not, the incentive for hash power to upgrade in order to validate is strong: if they do not, they could be vulnerable to a rogue miner willing to waste 12.5BTC to create an invalid block, which may cause non-validating miners to build on an invalid chain similar to the BIP66 incident. Validation has always had a strong requirement.

A user activated soft fork is win-win because it adds an option that some people want that does not detract from other peoples' enjoyment. Even if only 10% of users ever wanted a feature, so long as the benefit outweighed the technical risks, it would not be rational to deny others the ability to opt-in.

My suggestion is to have the best of both worlds. Since a user activated soft fork needs a relatively long lead time before activation, we can combine with BIP9 to give the option of a faster hash power coordinated activation or activation by flag day, whichever is the sooner. In both cases, we can leverage the warning systems in BIP9. The change is relatively simple, adding an activation-time parameter which will transition the BIP9 state to LOCKED_IN before the end of the BIP9 deployment timeout.

You can find the proposal here https://gist.github.com/shaolinfry/0f7d1fd22743bb966da0c0b1682ea2ab

References:

[1]: https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-mining
[2]: http://p2sh.info/dashboard/db/p2sh-statistics?from=1472043312917&to=1488030912918

[Edit: looks like it just came through]

I didn't see this on the bitcoin-dev mail list, maybe I missed it, but if not, perhaps crosspost it there:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

Cool! Sounds really good! Lets do it! Waiting for other opinions.. but sounds great!

Users are retarded and don't like this kind of Google Android like fragmentation.

I think we need something like this to break the scaling solution standoff.  Mining has become too centralized to allow for a properly democratic Bitcoin ecosystem.

I love this, seriously, amazing work on this. I support this 100%.

Miners have no business deciding on new features. Maybe in the past it was assumed that miners would go along in the best interests of users, but now it's clear that miners have become too political and keen to push their own agenda.

Good follow up reply with some concerns -

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-February/013648.html

I like the idea , but think it needs to be fleshed out some more.

Perhaps lowering miner activation to 51% + getting direct support from all major exchanges and wallet providers  + 95% full node support + long flag day delay + better education with users and miners about using border nodes for miners opting out + 95% developer support = a safe Soft Fork.

I think 95% is not archieveable - independent from soft or hardfork or what about the change would be. I think we are already too big and diversified for this. imagine a society where you have a government which is only able to work if more than 95% of the citizen voted for it (in freedom). Sounds not possible anymore.

I would suggest over 95% support is achievable for a consensus critical bug like we saw in 2013. This solution may make it far easier to activate a SF , but yes supermajority HFs are still extremely difficult. I also believe that we should try and get segwit activated as it might be the last SF we see as bitcoin begins to ossify.

I don't think that we would even agree all on a 95% fix for a bug in bitcoin...  i have the feeling that there are already too many enemies which try to kill or damage bitcoin.. so 75% around would be reachable i think.

We have reached 95% consensus among the miners many times in the past.

I don't see this as anything more than an attempt to activate a contentious fork.

There is good evidence that those opposing it are in the minority(Even many "Big Blockers" support segwit - Gavin/Garzik, ect...). Miners controlling most hashpower are only a handful of people and one miner Bitmain may control over 50% . Thus this proposal would not be about getting a lower level of consensus to activate a SF but an accurate and high level of 95% of the community. 95% hashpower doesn't necessarily mean 95% economic user support.

i think is better this solution even if a small group of nodes will activate it.

the strange to me is why three days after this proposal not a single bitcoin developer except from Jameson Lopp bitgo eng has not tell us his opinion about this.
It seems that all of them keep mysterious silent... ???

Yeah, would also love to hear some opinions.. Maybe they are discussing it at the moment internally  about how to cope with the current situation and if a flag day is possible (and working).

i hope so. Because i am afraid that they avoid to take position to this. I have ask to slack and to irc and in irc i have ask gmaxwell what is his opinion in this and never get an answer even a single word from them.  
My most fear is that they avoid to do it because maybe they afraid that Jihan will get angry :P

Yeah I'm also a bit scared that it is like this... :/

This is a good idea, if done carefully. I really dislike giving miners any decision-making power, for the reasons you mentioned and also because they are employees of the network -- the only parties paid by the Bitcoin system. I proposed similarly forcing the P2SH softfork when miners were (for a time) blocking that softfork, though miners stopped blocking it before too long.

This has the potential to get messy, though. Without miners, you have to be really sure that a large majority of the economy is going to enforce the new rules, since otherwise a prolonged split could develop. There's a worrying situation today where both mining and verification is centralized, even though Bitcoin really requires that at least one of them is decentralized. So there'd still be the ridiculous need to engage in lobbying, though in this case it'd be with big centralized verifiers like BitGo and bc.i rather than with centralized miners. (Verifiers are a lot less centralized than miners, though, which makes somewhat better.) If the softfork activates without a substantial majority of the economy enforcing it, then it could end up splitting the network/currency long-term, which would be the same sort of disaster as a contentious hardfork. There are a lot of economic reasons why this is an unlikely outcome, but it could happen if the softfork isn't done carefully. Before something like this is added for any particular softfork, I'd like to see a detailed investigation into how much of the economy is committing to support it; how much is actually doing verification rather than just blindly trusting miners; the popularity and expected behavior of each end-user wallet software; etc.

Another consideration is that if miners are expected to keep producing very long invalid chains under the new rules, then this sort of softfork has almost exactly the same costs as a hardfork. So if this is considered a likely outcome, then it'd may be better to just hardfork and make some other useful hardfork changes at the same time.

The flag day would probably need to be at least 1 year in the future to be reasonably safe. 2 years would be better. Backports would be needed for all versions that are actually being used, including the #bitcoin-assets 0.3.x version. I wonder if there's any reasonable way to handle the (hopefully very unlikely) scenario where a softfork needs to be canceled partway into the wait time.

sounds terrible, keep your auditing and lobbying and polling for incorporated statists(tm)(r).

nobody ever really knows in the bitcoin.

its all greed and mystery.


PS: the only truly reliable and safest to some extend (not for the forkers obv) way to market pull such "improvement" is commit hardfork and see how the shitcoin goes.

just pick a day, and fork off. :)

and why a whole blockchain system has to wait when or if Jihan wake up in a good mood, or to be his panda happy or whatever to enable a tech improvement? if bitcoin ecosystem want it it can bypass him. And for sure he has more to loose than anyone else here.

Proof of work = one cpu one vote.

That was the original design intent for the network.

The introduction of pools + ASICs has changed the nature of the system design.

So the original concept design was around a majority decision making process. Lots of different people voting with their nodes.

With large mining farms, the majority of hash power can be considered irrelevant as the original design also suggested that using IP addresses as a way to identify the longest chain was easy to sybil.

If the network wasn't so heavily biased towards pools and big central mining farms, a majority vote of the miners would be appropriate. But that is not the case at this present time.

The problem with having fixed rules is that the network isn't fixed. People innovate and the nature of the network changes. There should be a way to come to consensus on what the overriding principle should be and then make a judgement call on a case by case basis. While this can be gamed by politics, it makes sense to try and find a mechanism that adapts with the times.

Perhaps an agreed network governance process should be considered which regularly takes a view on such matters before any such voting is required. This should stop voting rules being tailored to suit a preferred outcome.

But at this time, it makes more sense to seek a super majority of the economic nodes (where most of the 'effort is') than the mining nodes - which are mostly just SPV's anyway.

Having said that, i'd edge for a segwit hard fork if at all possible. But if not, a softfork it is.

eh wut super  ???

and its not about "economic" nodes, its about full nodes.

<spoilers>
there will be no softforked segwit with a 95% threshold but rather a softfork ending in hardfork.
</spoilers>

Anyone can make a soft fork and split the chain with the minimum hash power, no need to ask for anyone's permission, but how high is the chance of surviving?

Short term wise the value will crash to the corresponding hash power cost, due to arbitraging (if it costs $100 to mine one segwitcoin but the market price is $1000, then everyone will borrow coin to sell and mine them back to cash in $900 profit immediately, so I guess before this even happens the price will already crash to the mining cost)

Long term wise the hash rate and value might rise if the demand for this chain is growing. But remember that there is another chain with larger hash power thus higher value existing, and I think most of the demand for bitcoin is investment/value storage, so it is not a guarantee that hash rate will rise on the chain that has less hash power/value

One thing that is left out of your argument, and left out of the argument of many of the so called 'Bitcoin experts' is that the miners as a whole have very real incentives to do what is best for Bitcoin, including when deciding if they will signal for a particular fork/proposal, and if/when there is a serious threat to their ability to continue mining bitcoin (such as a serious threat to change the PoW), they have substantial incentives to not act in Bitcon's best interest (they have incentives to act in a way so that they can continue mining bitcoin, even if this means acting in a way that will damage Bitcoin over the long term).

When a person buys mining equipment, they are essentially paying a bond to the manufacturer that they will use their mining equipment in a way that is not harmful to Bitcoin over the long run. The reason for this is because ASICs have no other use than for mining Bitcoin (the actual use of Bitcoin ASICs is slightly more broad, however I do not see any reason why any other crypto would want to use the same PoW as Bitcoin as this would likely expose them to significant security vulnerabilities), and that mining equipment will have net revenues that will only recuperate the cost of purchasing said mining equipment over very long periods of time (it is also noteworthy that, as a general rule, as mining equipment has recouped a larger percentage of it's purchase cost, it will have less of an impact on the overall network due to both advances in technology and additional purchases of other mining equipment).

Mining pools provide their services of pooling resources together in a way so that variance is reduced, and recently either take a stance on various political issues, or allow individual users to take a stance on various issues. For the most part, pools collect fees in exchange for this service. If a pool is acting in a way that is contradictory to the long term interests of Bitcoin, then miners will point their equipment elsewhere. 

The above causes trust to be placed onto the manufacturers of mining equipment, however the manufacturers of mining equipment have incentives to act honestly (as defined as selling their equipment at a price that is not below fair market value), because they are essentially paying a bond in the form of the costs of manufacturing their equipment (generally fairly low), and the costs of R&D of their equipment (generally fairly high). Some mining manufacturers will use their own equipment, which results in them paying the above "bond" to themselves, however they would still need to pay the "bond" described in this paragraph, and has incentives to earn at least as much mining revenue (plus capital costs - eg, interest) as they would get if they had sold the equipment to the public. Mining manufacturers also will care about Bitcoin over the long run, because in order to recoup the R&D costs of designing/manufacturing mining equipment, they need to sell their equipment over fairly long periods of time.

The engineers that are hired by the above mining equipment manufacturers have fairly transferrable skills, and if they are not offered a high enough salary by a mining manufacturer then they will simply find work elsewhere. The market for these kinds of engineers is generally very competitive.

It is for the above reason why the miners as a whole will act in the best long term interest of Bitcoin, and can be trusted to do as much. The scope of when a miner should signal for a particular proposal is entirely up the individual miner, and the claim that miners should signal for a particular proposal when they are ready to implement said proposal is made by those with self-claimed expertise of Bitcoin, with self-appointed authority over Bitcoin, and contradicts with the above, as this does not necessarily mean that a miner would be acting in the best interest of Bitcoin if a proposal was not in the best interest of Bitcoin.

Node count is very easily faked, and it is fairly easy to fake economic activity, so it is very difficult to use either of these as a means to measure if a proposal should be implemented (the same is true for essentially every other measurable indicator). As a result of my above argument, a better measure to determine consensus is signaling from the miners, more specifically, that the miners are signaling for a proposal that is (a) in the long term interest of Bitcoin, and (b) in the miners' good judgment, there is a consensus for a particular proposal -- if both of these criteria are not met, then a proposal should not be signaled for. I would argue that this would roughly fall in line with Satoshi's whitepaper and early statements, as his whitepaper made statements assuming that miners would act in their own economic best interests.

---

At the end of the day, this is essentially 'proof of bitcoin.org/bitcointalk.org and I would note that both domains are heavily accessed partly because they are sites that Satoshi originally built and posted on.

Wrong

If I was an organisation like Western Union or the IMF (who can print fiat money, so it's essentially cost free to them), I would set up a mining farm, sell all the BTC for profit, and block any attempts to upgrade the Bitcoin network. I'd design a hard fork that screws Bitcoin up, and employ loads of trolls to promote it.

Bad actors can and do mine BTC. You're very naive

With your logic no group can be trusted to make network improvements that aren't intended to harm the network.

Nodes can be faked or spoofed, miners can hard fork to bad outcome, users really don't give a crap, they just want faster tx.

Are we stuck with Bitcoin as is forever, and the only scaling solutions must be built on top of the current utterly fixed ruleset?

Probably.

I agree.  Likewise, given the difficulty of changes now as shown by segwit and block size changes, any further changes will be even more difficult to get consensus.  And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, changes should be very difficult to make barring something catastrophic (e.g March 2013).  Think about changing tcp/ip.

the question is why we cant get a two step consensus with segwit now and a hard fork later? Especially for the next hard fork step we can all agree that will trigger if only 99% of miners support it and 80%+ nodes and with some months preparation.
I think in a proposal like this everyone will agree.

If you think EVERYONE will ever agree on anything, you have a VERY optimistic view of the world.  There are too many people with to many agendas to ever get everyone to agree on any protocol changes.  The best you can hope for is to get a significant enough majority to agree to force the minority into submission.

immutability is bullish af, just look at btc price now.

If that was true, explain how the CSV opcode soft fork was activated only 6 months ago? It achieved +95% signalling and is activated and usable on the network.

I appreciate that Bitcoin will attain more protocol inertia as it becomes more widespread, but you seem to be suggesting that all possibility and time itself have finished (which would be typical of your character). You've taken too much inspiration from Dr Who storylines, it seems

User is counted by full node count?

So what speaks against that high capitalized miners just buy some cheap full nodes to vote for their intersts if needed?

^This

When is flag day?  I will spin up full nodes from here to Timbuktu....perhaps a few proxies as well....   8)

anything that pisses in the face of people who wield amounts of power that never should've been awarded to them is fine by me.

How exactly is the UASF design going to prevent the hashing majority from conducting 50% attacks on the node ('users') majority branch after they'd split?

Because, as I understand it, they will split at the first tx spending a segwit output.  

Am I missing something or do we get to deal again with geniuses who try to change bitcoin protocol while not even having a clue about the basic of its security?

The whole reddit of idiots along with bitcoin news websites are suddenly excited on how someone allegedly found a way to kick miners' arses...
But has he? Because I don't think so.
After activation of such 'user fork' all the weapons would  still belong to the miners. Which would surely not hesitate to fire them on the rebels.

People should stop seeing bitcoin as an alternative to PayPal. Bitcoin is not a toy, or a computer game which rules can be adjusted and controlled by a ruling elite.
Bitcoin is a self regulating arm race - without the weapon you can't change the rules. And there is only one type of weapon: the mining farms.

Everyone knows that Jihan Wu is currently a cancer for the network, but I fail to see how UASF will help in getting rid of it.

1 cpu = 1 vote sounds good, but isn't it ultimately the same as mining?

At the end of the day, a bad actor with a bunch of money, can buy a huge building and fill it with thousands of computers and run whatever software node they want.

At the end of the day, the rich can mold the system and aim it the way they want it to take a direction to... because at some point the masses may follow this strong single entity controlling a massive amount of nodes (sheep mentality, conservation/fear etc)

And also, even in a post UASF scenario, we still ultimately need the miners and this fucker got the biggest hashing power on earth as far as I know. So even if nodes don't agree with him, he still got the biggest hashing power. What will merchants do? And what if people running nodes get scared and switch places to whatever the biggest hashing power is supporting? I hope this question makes sense.

This

The only way to take power back from the miners, is to take away the actual source of their power: mining ASIC processors.

i.e. change the proof of work to something that is too difficult/expensive to make ASIC processors for

How do we move forward? Let's do it

What do you want to achieve?

I believe everyone wants cheaper transactions.
How do you get cheaper transactions without asking miners for permission?
Two ways:
1) centralized bitcoin banks that settle balances between each other
2) side-channel payments that are based on the current protocol

Both are possible.
We don't need miners permission to have cheaper transactions. Which is important because it's unlikely that we'd get it.
And the incentives to develop either of the two solutions are already there - high txs fees that have been and likely will be growing.

Stop trying to change a weather in order to build a house and start thinking how to build a house in the existing weather.
A developer's metaphor :)

It's actually quite funny for me to see all this spectacle on how the miners allegedly stop bitcoin from moving forward.

I consider myself an experienced bitcoin developer.
I understand that the miners don't want the lighting networks and I understand why - because it goes against their interests.
But how is it different for the major core devs preventing the ultimate block chain compression feature from being implemented?
Most people don't realize that their full bitcoin node can be quite functional needing only 3gb of disk and can bootstrap within one hour... And the core devs don't want you to know that. At least not yet...
So how is it different?
For me it isn't at all - they obviously  also have their own self interest in this and they don't have to explain themselves to anyone.
Just like the miners that you hate here so much.


The bottom line is: the miners are obviously  not going to help you in deploying your existing business solution by activating segwit.
Therefore better start rewriting your shit so it could work without it.
C'est la vie - welcome to the fucking club :)

They perceive it as going against their interests. But this perception appears flawed.

Bitcoin needs scaling improvements like lightning in order to thrive in the long term.
A non-scalable bitcoin will ultimately be overtaken by a better-scalable competitor.

cut the crap, Bitcoin doesnt "need" anything.

c'est la vie indeed.

This sounds like a great idea, but doesn't it require that lots of otherwise-disinterested parties be financially incentivized to start and maintain nodes?

How does that solve the fact that rich people can buy a big building and run a million computers running any software they want and that would count as nodes (votes)? It has nothing to do with mining/ASICS/PoW. We are talking about the NODES.

There's no way to solve this. Rich people can always corner nodes/hashing power/whatever.

It doesn't.

It solves the problem of ASIC manufacturers taking advantage of the market. The development and production of ASIC chips is highly privileged endeavor; engineering talent available to design the chip is very scarce as well as expensive, and access to chip fabrication plants is also scarce and expensive. Not to mention, the number of chips produced in a minimum sized batch would need that big building to house the miners; a significant barrier to entry.

My proposal (really Meni Rosenfeld's broad proposal) would let people mine with CPU's or GPU/FPGA's again. It wouldn't prevent mining warehouses, but it would change the balance of opportunity so that small miners can participate with a similar barrier to entry as big miners.

When I remember all the things bitcoin "needed", but has failed to get, it makes me smile.

I remember when bitcoin needed more merchants, although less drug dealers because it was a bad press.

Then bitcoin needed to be much more user friendly - so much that even Gavin's granny could use it.

Then the client needed to be compatible with external hardware wallets, because they were the future.

Then it needed to have a bigger blocks, so it could "scale - or segwit for the same reason.

Then it needed to have tx malleability removed, so some people could deploy their existing side-chain solution.

(that's just from the top of my head, from the past 5+ years)

Today bitcoin needs to get rid of the miners, because... they are endangering its future by doing their job of securing the protocol :o
Plus nobody is going to admit, but it would not have been such a big issue if the miners had been Americans, or at least white.
Which brings us to: bitcoin needs to be in control of a white people! :)

Fuck knows what bitcoin is going to need tomorrow, in order to "succeed".
When I think about this, it's actually quite shocking that it has succeeded that far. :)

+1  great point

We will invariably move towards systems which successfully interface with Bitcoin as it works now.

i dont agree with this racist view that the problem is miners because they are Chinese and  i really fell more secure with mining to China or any other country than USA with shadow organisation like NSA,CIA etc
The real problem is that miners has not the right to do political games with bitcoin. They are the only part of bitcoin network that get payed for what they done. For that reason they must activated every upgrade developers propose without any questions.

but why without any questions?

what if the developers get corrupted by shadow organisation like NSA,CIA etc?

because they are not them that set the rules how bitcoin network works. is very simple. In the other hand to be fair consensus means everyone must agree for changes among them and miners. But in the segwit case we dont have a critical change that need to be blocked by a part of bitcoin ecosystem. A hard fork yes but not a software upgrade that anyone can ignore easy if dont want to use it.

Well. You see, the funny thing is that they are them that set the rules how bitcoin network works.
You just don't get it, just like so many other people.

and what you suggest. Everyone in bitcoin ecosystem to be fatalist and accept the situation with Jihan Wu as the defacto dictatorship?

How is he a dictatorship?
Even if he's the only ruler of his corporation, which i doubt,  he has like 20% of the hashing power - today. It's surely going to change tomorrow.
With this he can't change a shit as well.
Which is a good thing - nobody can change it, so nobody can break it.

Just stop whining and start adjusting yourself to the system.
It's working just fine and exactly as had been designed.

It's not a "great point" it's a smug, cherry-picked, self-referential list topped with a red herring about "Americans."

If the original Satoshi client never needed anything we wouldn't now be at 0.14.x, dozens of BIPs and thousands of LOCs later.

Nationality and race have nothing to do with it, other than the fact the guy (Jihan) bamboozled and/or bribed by the felonious, very white, and formerly American Roger into blocking segwit happens to be from China.

Don't be ridiculous. Miners have their own brains and make their own independent decisions. They don't have to and do not follow orders from any 'Americans'.

And it's funny how you see a great development of the small piece of the bitcoin software, but you fail to notice a huge development of the worldwide mining infrastructure.
If you think that what gave bitcoins the value was the core software advancing to version 0.14.x, and not the gigawatts of power burned inside the mining hardware, then you sir obviously know nothing about what the bitcoin phenomenon is, and you are the last who should have a vote on deciding about it's future.
And conveniently, you are the last... :)

... and we watch: They are using their brains due to their mega investments. Hacking in 1000s of SW code that mostly give them some 2 MB (1 line) and the real fear losing fees to 2nd layers on top of SW - than for ever  (who really believes in a HF LATER ?) - bad incentive...


You are rare here - but brain is.

The PoW and the code that uses it are two sides of the same coin.  I know that because I've been mining BTC since 2011.

I said Jihan was "bamboozled and/or bribed by the felonious, very white, and formerly American Roger into blocking segwit."

I didn't say Jihan can't make "independent decisions."  I didn't say Jihan has to "follow orders."

If you don't understand the difference between an order and a bamboozle/bribe, GET A FUCKING DICTIONARY AND LEARN IT.

Don't twist and misrepresent what I said ever again.

You're talking nonsense, man (check "nonsense" in a dictionary).

Segwit has currently 25% of support among the miners and your symbol of evil Jihan doesn't seem to control more than 20% of the current network's hashing power. It's probably closer to 10%

So enlighten us, please: who and how is "bamboozing and/or bribing" the remaining 55+% of the miners into blocking segwit?
These are mostly people who don't even care to introduce or explain themselves to you, or anyone else.

You're putting a single face behind 75% of the network's miners and then you make up some crazy stories about their evil motives.
What for? In which way doesn't it look like some populist propaganda crap, straight from the books used by your freshly elected president?

From what i've read here, Jihan Wu controls 70% of the hashrate

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5wuxxc/jihan_wu_cofounder_of_bitmain_who_supply_70_of/

Before r/btc/ trolls claim that is just r/bitcoin conspiracy, the same thread is discussed in r/btc and nobody is doubting that

If he controls anything over 50% of the network then it is an obvious problem. But again, I don't see how UASF could help us, eventually centralization would happen again at node levels.

How does that change anything?

You get rid of ASICs, and all you do is lower the overall network hashrate, but as I see it, the centralization % is the same. If someone can buy a farm of ASICs, that same entity can buy a farm of computers... at the end of the day, it's a single rich entity owning a ton of machines (for 1 ASIC machine, how many computers can you run?), centralization is still there. With enough money it's always possible to be a deciding entity in the network.. am i missing something?

Well, I have been reading that all his hashing power is signalling support for 2MB blocks...

But I only see 51 blocks (2.5%) with version 0x30000000 in the past 2016 block period.
And it's gone down to 15 (1.5%) inside the last 1000 blocks.

It teaches me to not believe anything that has been posted (and upvoted) on reddit - no mater the sub.

We should pursue a safe UASF process regardless of the miners activating segwit or not because using miners to activate upgrades has always been an indirect and rough means of determining consensus within bitcoin and it would be far better allowing the economic users directly determine upgrades to the network.

This being said, there are still many problems that need to be resolved first with UASF.

Additionally, we should also pursue a well tested and PoW HF as another backup option.

The mere threat of these may keep the miners honest but only if we are honest and prepared to use them. "Speak softly but carry a big stick"

Yes, we may(?) to some extent be using Jihan as shorthand for all miners blocking segwit due to Ver's bribes and bamboozling.

I'm correcting your twisted strawman "nonsense" version of what I actually said.

To wit, it makes no sense for me to claim

A. Jihan has no free will (or at minimum lacks agency), and
B. must follow "orders" (your word) from "white Americans" (your other two words), while
C. he is being bribed/bamboozled by Roger Ver (my actual claim).

Do you understand that Roger would not have to bribe/bamboozle (ie influence the free decisions of) Jihan if he could simply issue an anti-segwit order to him instead?

Can you comprehend that I implicitly acknowledged Jihans's free will/agency/"brain" when I accused his decision making process of being unduly/unwisely influenced by Ver's politics and/or $$$$?

That last line though...found the butthurt NeverTrumper!   8) 8) 8)

Oh.. right... But what about the miners who are blocking segwit due to other reasons?

Are they free to keep doing their job the way they like, or are you also planing to find some dirt on them? :)

Good for these miners. It is great they are inspiring us to develop a UASF and further test a POW HF backup because these are both long overdo.

If we can't survive Jihan and Ver attacking Bitcoin than we deserve to die. We will come out stronger in the end.

Man, this is some really heavy shit, next to which Jihan's recent threats sound like a sincere and friendly advise.

I just wonder who do you actually have in mind while saying "we" and taking such a crazy things.

Can you give me some names, or at least nicknames? :)

From what i've read Jihan Wu controls several different pools to make it look as if he doesn't have that much of a control of the hashrate. He is also playing a double game... he wants BU, but he doesn't want to go all in... he will betray BUcoiners if that means he can save his ass. Delusional BUcoiners think Jihan Wu cares about bitcoin and wants the best for it (whatever concept you think bitcoin is the "real" and best bitcoin, in this case they think BU is the "real" bitcoin) and is on their side with the BU, but what they don't realize is, Jihan just wants profit, that's all.

Who doesn't? :)

I have no fear of his business exactly because I know that he just wants profit.
As the owner of (allegedly) the biggest bitcoin mining infrastructure he has the biggest interest in keeping the BTC price high.
Bitcoin devs, Roger Ver, Winklevoss twins, you or me - we can just cash out our stash and move on with our life.
For the owners of the mining infrastructure a drop in the BTC price is a far bigger issue.

Bitcoin deserves to die if it can't survive these bozos , not humans.

Anyways , I'm getting my paperwallets ready to dump the split coins as Antpool just started mining BU blocks -

https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/block/00000000000000000204cd2c9840023f1434f3dcdd7f471e4b8c8638d14d7006

Eeee... what is so "BU" about this specific block?

The only pool I know signalling BIP109 (2MB blocks) is Slush.
Which is also the first pool that started signalling segwit.

It antpools first block signalling for BU - https://coin.dance/blocks/unlimited

0367f506234d696e656420627920416e74506f6f6c20626a352f4542312f4144362f022058bdab6 efabe6d6d3abbc4fd04647f22af1d514e7fba1c861fd335f4cb9ec0ce5b4a2c67fd8f3c6d040000 00000000006709000019440000
gõ#Mined by AntPool bj5/EB1/AD6/ X½«nú¾mm:»Äýd"¯QNº†Ó5ôËžÀÎ[J,gý�<m

Exactly.  Honey Badger eats up cupcakes like those two and will be stronger after shitting them out.

If the Gavinistas didn't exist, we'd need to invent them!   ;D

If Bitcoin dies from something as absurd as the Unlimite_ clown fiesta (it won't), we'll simply move on to new and improved versions of the experiment.

Sorry man.
Which part of the block says that it is "signalling for BU"?

Its in HEx == g#Mined by AntPool bj5/EB1/AD6/ Xnmm:d"QN5˞[J,g<mg D

I gave you a link to coin.dance to help you ... no bother because Antpools third mined block was not supporting segwit so looks like another transparent and feeble bluff.

Are you kidding me?
What kind of a technical reference some chart on some coin.dance flashy website is?

Please refer me to a spec, or a source code that defines the criteria upon which this specific block is "signalling for BU".

Why do I need to hold your hand when the info is very clearly displayed ?

EB1/AD6

https://medium.com/@ViaBTC/miner-guide-how-to-safely-hard-fork-to-bitcoin-unlimited-8ac1570dc1a8#.q665ncaok

Are you even aware how BU works?

Sorry, you must speak English to me, if you want me to understand.

The article says that "EB1" actually means that the pool which made the block wants to use max block size of 1MB.
Or am I not getting something?

excessiveblocksize=1000000
excessiveacceptdepth=6

this has nothing to do with bitcoin and means they are signalling for BU because that is BU terminology. Since BU has no activation mechanism it by itself will activate at 51% thus the article I provided explaining how ViaBTC recommends EB1 to not cause havock at 51% than they can decide to fork at 75%

Sorry, I still don't know what "signalling for BU" means in practice.

Although I understand now that they use BU scheme to indicate that they want the max block size to stay at 1MB.

But what is the big deal about it?
Aren't almost all of the other miners also indicating that they want the max block size to stay at 1MB?
Except that they do it without adding "/EB1/" to the coinbase...

No, miners advocating for segwit are advocating for larger blocks because segwit literally increases the blocksize.
Additionally, if you read the article, they are only signally EB1 as a temporary measure because because Bu lacks an activation mechanicm and they will increase this number around 75%.

My guess is Jihan is bluffing , still running core nodes, but false signalling BU to try and renegotiate(not going to happen).

Regardless , we should treat this threat seriously and prepare for the worst as this is essentially the start of a  51% attack because HF consensus without a doubt has not been reached.

We all know Jihan is a cancer for bitcoin currently, but you convinced UASF proponents are all failing to explain what is the point of UASF at all when node count can easily be gamed.

Not to mention, it's yet to be seen what will happen if the hashrate is bigger in BUcoin than the original chain.

"Node count" is easily gamed.

"Economic node count" not so much.

You really believe shaolinfry, Cøbra, Adam Back, and I don't know the difference?  Hint: we do, but it seems you don't.

Your presumption that those of us who remember the NotXT and NotClassic and PseudoNode version signaling wars suddenly forgot about sybil attacks is so hideously stupid as to be laughable.  In this very thread, I already posted a *cough* joke *cough* about spinning up "a few proxies."   ;)

SWUASF may or may not work.  The larger point is it signals a turn in the tide of the battle.  Core is going on the offensive and now Unlimite_ must defend.

Thanks to Ver and Jihan's assclowning, it's clear the future of Bitcoin requires the miners be demoted and letters of reprimand placed in their permanent records.  That will happen sooner with segwit or later with Low-Latency Delayed TXO Commitments.  Doesn't matter; either way the miners are going to be put back in their place, hopefully once and for all.

@shaolinfry
You are a Litecoin dev, why don't you try this your "great" idea on Litecoin first? ;)

As a first step against hostile pool operators blocking the evolution of the system, I would not start with dropping their blocks but I will not relay their new blocks anymore. If a large number of nodes do not relay those blocking blocks, there will be a chance that a good block with the same height is found. In this case the blocking block is dropped and the good block is the new head of the chain. If a good block is built on top of a blocking block the blocking block is accepted as well. If a lot of nodes use such a rule it will lead to bad luck for hostile pool operators.

Suddenly everyone is a bloody bitcoin expert who knows a way to control the protocol by other means than mining majority.

If Satoshi is still alive he must be having loads of fun watching you idiots trying to break his system. I know I am... :)

It is the most worked Valid chain (not simply longest). Even if the miners fork BU with 75%, 90% of all bitcoin nodes will simply reject those blocks and ban all BU nodes relaying those blocks and treat the BUcoin as a hostile alt. This isn't a matter of opinion , but simply a fact of the way bitcoin was designed.

Any fork with a majority hashpower will be short lived as the minority chain has an advantage(in addition to being the economic majority) .A really neat aspect to this is the minority hash chain would have several advantages in this trading. First advantage is the original coin would have 25% or less hashpower therefore it will be easier to transfer the BUforkcoin to an exchange. BU supporters wanting to dump their original btc on exchanges will have to wait for seriously delayed confirmations while the original chain supporters will be able to get quicker confirmations to quickly devastate the price of BUforkcoin. BU miners will lose a lot of money here before running back to follow the profits and insure they don't go bankrupt.

OK, sure.  But only if we test the "great" ideas from Unlimite_ on Dash first.   ;D

I am curious what method you are using to accomplish this.

Thanks

Yes, I don't fully understand this, im trying to learn.

What do you mean with "Economic node count"?

What is difference between "regular node" count and "Economic node count"?

Also is this true?:

Cutting out the miners and forcing features they don't want is a very bad policy, no one is more invested in bitcoin than the miners, you people keep bitching about having to spend a few more dollars in storage to run a full node, miners spent millions to build their operations and someone really thinks it is wise to simply cut them off?

By patching my client to not relay any blocks without my preferred BIP9 flag(s) and by giving more weight to chains with a head block with these BIP9 flag(s) set.

It makes sense to make the feature configurable because if BU will follow the XT/Classic road, these guys will show up with the next "solution" and try to block further development of the system. Those guys will never stop bullying the Bitcoin community.

There was a man on this forum who once said:


Now there is apparently much more men who say:


Isn't that funny? :)


FYI, I am not against segwit myself - personally, I'd like to see it activated..
But I want to point out that if you try to change protocol with this kind of arrogance, you will fail and end up in the same place as the man before you; at the bitcoin developers' junkyard. Because as ridiculously as it sounds, Bitcoin will simply get rid of you.

FYI, I'm fine with one blocksize increase up to a maximum of 8MB if segwit (or another linear transaction verification time method) is available and most of the community is supporting this change as well.

FYI, Bitcoin doesn't care about what most of the 'community' wants.
It's only what most of the miners want that matters.

In this case the nodes would not need to verify the blocks against the consensus rules. In reality all nodes have to verify and accept the blocks. Even if a majority of the miners create invalid blocks the other nodes will not accept these invalid blocks. Every node has to decide what is valid and what is invalid.

Sure, that sound like a good idea... :)
But why don't you optimize it even further..?

Make the nodes not even needing to connect to the bitcoin p2p network!
Instead they'd just fetch the 'distributed ledger'  from a github repo controlled by 'the people who are actually writing code and using Bitcoin for products and services'

This solution would be much more resistant to 51% attacks and the nodes would be needing far less resources  :)  

At the end, money is a social thing - there is no value without peers. Everybody using the same system provides the maximum value. If this is impossible the better approach is to split the system. I'm fine with BU splitting the chain and following it's own way - without myself.

I agree.

A fork of the two communities may be the only answer now.
If you think we can continue to outmaneuver each other till one
side wins, then it may be you don't actually understand Bitcoin.

The ones shouting the loudest are actually not paying attention.
The fork is inevitable now and must be accepted and prepared for
as best we can. Shaolinfry's idea, though interesting and noteworthy,
is just a distraction.

Negotiation between the two groups has failed because we want separate
things that each contradict the others desires.

This is not a choice in the community now, it is a "fork" in the road.

+1 And so, the future of bitcoin was written.



 8)

Was that a proposed solution that relies upon a centralized system, controlled by a handful
of people, who are subject to laws and agencies of the countries in which they reside?
Sounds like we get rid of one attack vector to take on an easier one.

I'm I missing something here?

That's wrong. It's what users want that matters. Miners may want to keep mining 12.5 BTC blocks during the next block having, but if users are not OK with that, miners will just fork themselves off the "Bitcoin" network.

The point of UASF is that users collectively have more control than miners. But because there's no easy way to gouge user desires, it's much harder to pull off a UASF. BIP9 miner softfork is used because mining solved the Byzantine General's problem and we can use it to measure exact support.

I think it's good that this UASF got people thinking about who is actually in control. But it's not for sure that UASF can be pulled off safely.

Obviously you don't even get it that we are taking a piss out of your ideas to "fix bitcoin" by removing miners out of the system.

I guess not. I'm used to sarcasm being more obvious.
Your statement fell in line with some BU supporters ideas.
So I thought it was genuine.

If you read my post above, you'll see I don't support UASF.

Nobody who understands what bitcoin is and how it really works supports it.
It won't work.

We can only hope that it won't work... This proposal is by far the WORST I've heard in recent history. Absolutely throwing gasoline on a fire to put it out. After all of Core's FUD and screeching about hard forks, this proposal makes a hard fork look like Sunday brunch in the Hamptons. There are so many different ways this UASF could fail catastrophically... Not to mention, excluding miners from consensus is revolting, and completely against the founding principles of bitcoin. As others have said, they're the ones with the most skin in the game.

If Core actually tries this, their reign as the custodians of the bitcoin code and the de facto creators of the bitcoin roadmap will end. At least we will get some lulz if Core writes another ten thousand lines of code that nobody ever uses...

Hmm, and the proposal is posted from a new forum account with no posting history... Seems Legit...

Perhaps they're floating the idea to see just how much rage they'll face.  Or possibly, they're trolling Ver. In this case, they want to appear adversial, but quietly they know full well that this proposal could never work.

EDIT: the troll theory makes sense given the double-whammy of Ver announcing 110% mining bounty for Unlimited clients and Antpool switching to BU.

Theymos has already weighed in.

inb4 GMaxwell urges caution and says Segwit is a "much better compromise".

I'm waiting for the detailed analysis (minus the usual ad hominem) ...

I don't think a detailed analysis is worth my time (and may be beyond my expertise)... it's a stupid idea and it won't get off the ground.

Not an ad hom guy - you must be thinking of someone else.

You could've googled it yourself, but here you go:
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/antpool-now-mining-bitcoin-unlimited/ (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/antpool-now-mining-bitcoin-unlimited/)

I see, the "no one should ever have left the oceans" argument. q.e.d.

Here is a question. Suppose that something like BIP65 (CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY) never went through and that only 10 users wanted it an not the majority of the network. Could those 10 users still make the changes to their software necessary to get their clients to work with CLTV? The rest of the network would still verify those transactions since they redefine OP_NOP2 and find them valid (like old clients do for BIP65). Would this make any sense? Is it UASF?

you need and a miner to support it so it can add your segwit transactions to blockchain. of course if this miners has very low hashrate you will need very long until your segwit transaction to add to blockchain until this miner find a block.

In this case the hash rate will adapt within a short amount of time to usual hash rate target.

but we talk here for a soft fork and not a hard fork. nothing will happen. the not upgrade nodes or miners will still works as ti nothing happens to the network.

When the non-mining nodes an some of the miner nodes accept a soft-fork block, the miner nodes blocking the change will stay in the current network and mine their own chain.

Well, first off I did post a copy/paste of some obvious major issues that could arise.

Secondly, when you want to do something, the onus is on YOU to do a detailed analysis and determine that it would be safe. It's not like you do it unless someone raises an objection, that's madness!

this idea is awesome. is OP one of LTC devs ?

Alright, I've been giving this a ton of thought and and both for and against UASF.

No offense meant to the OP, but it absolutely is dogshit, conceptually. Devs on this thread could instantly see that. It took me -slightly- longer.

The worst part, I'm convinced, is what the BU community can do in response. Since UASF tells everyone to pick a side by X date or be left behind in a hostile manner, the BU team has NOTHING TO LOSE by Hard forking on that date. It would be extremely dumb of them not to.

So basically, UASF forces a hard fork, the most horrible outcome for bitcoin's price. Hopefully no one wants that here.

There is something to be gained by it's existence though.  Remember your Nuclear cold war tactics? Nuclear Proliferation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Arguments_for_and_against_proliferation) and Mutually Assured Destruction? UASF can act as a threat to counter BU. I say it should be developed if for no other reason than if they're going to HF anyway, we can scare them back in line with UASF.


Like with the cold war, we really should be thinking about hiring a UN-certified Negotiator though. Is protecting $20 Billion not worth their price? 

Thank you for that sanity check - I was beginning to think I was alone in my horror about UASF. Everything I've read indicates it would be a disaster technically, and it's also a violation of fundamental bitcoin concepts and consensus. So bad that it's literally an anonymous proposal.

Funny, I was just wading through a thread about John Nash - game theory etc. I almost came to the conclusion that bitcoin is in a Nash Equilibrium. This could mean that bitcoin development is DONE. 0.12 from now to eternity! I guess I could live with it...

https://s27.postimg.org/ep47gqasz/Flag_Day.png

Q.E.D.

I would be interested in seeing these mods too. 

I am sorry, but I am not wrong.

First of all, neither Western Union, nor the IMF can do anything that remotely resembles printing money. Any entity that can "print money" freely would do just that, and buy up assets for their own benefit, not use that printed money to harm a perceived competitor of theirs.

Your scenario is very sensational, however it is simply not realistic.

If an entity wanted to harm Bitcoin, they would not ned to bother blocking a proposed network improvement, they could simply buy up sufficient mining equipment to be able to prevent transactions from confirming, and/or cause the orphan rate to be uncomfortably high, especially by orphaning long chains of blocks, and/or abandoning the long standing principle that the first seen transaction is the valid transaction, and that conflicting transactions should be ignored, subject to certain limitations. This entity could harm Bitcoin even if the PoW is changed, it would simply be more expensive, although if the PoW is changed for this reason, it is likely that confidence in Bitcoin would have likely declined sufficiently so that not many people would use it anymore.

It is not possible for an entity to both mine bitcoin to harm Bitcoin and mine bitcoin that results in profit (from that mining activity). If the miners are collectively harming the network, then presumably, the price of bitcoin would decline, rather substantially, and the time it takes for a miner to recoup his investment in mining equipment is a long time, with higher amounts of revenues at the beginning of a miners' useful life.

1. Quickseller says "all miners are perfect economic actors who only behave with rational self-interest towards the Bitcoin network"

2. I say "That's wrong, what about a malicious miner scenario"

3. Quickseller says "I'm not wrong, what about a malicious miner scenario"



Exactly how stupid do you think everyone is?  ::) Can I have my 90 seconds of skim-reading back?

No, you are misrepresenting what I am saying. I am saying that there is no reason for a malicious miner to execute a complex attack against Bitcoin because a malicious miner could execute a much simpler attack if they wanted to harm Bitcoin.

I am also saying that it would not make sense for an entity to act maliciously towards Bitcoin via mining because doing so would force them to act economically irrationally.

A Bitcoin competitor who is caught trying to actively harm Bitcoin would lose the trust of their customer base, and this damage would far exceed the potential gains from having one less competitor.

And yet you started by saying that miners would never attack Bitcoin because of rational self interest?


Knowing you, you will pretend this conversation never took place at some time in the future. You will just reiterate that miners are only incentivised towards co-operative behaviour, as if we're all living in a Bitcoin bubble where everyone thinks it's wonderful, if it suits your purpose.


Why do you make contradictory statements as and when they suit your argument du jour?

How about that you are both wrong?

I've been hearing this argument for a long time.
"If a government or a big financial corp wanted to destroy bitcoin, they'd just buy a lot of mining equipment".

I believe first time I read it, it was gmaxwell calculated how cheap it would be to conduct 51% attack... it was ages ago.

Well, then my question is: why haven't they destroyed bitcoin yet, this way?
You really think they would not want to?

They failed to destroy Bitcoin because it is not only about buying mining hardware, just like wining a war is not just about buying weapons.
There is a shit loads of logistics involved with using these weapons while there is a lot of human factor involved and the situation on the battle field is changing constantly.
The governments and the big corps are too slow to follow this battle.
They don't have an organisation in place that could handle manufacturing and deploying mining equipment quickly enough and then maintaining it (undisturbed) for long enough. And they have too much corruption inside.

The only way it can work now is because it is distributed and each mining operation is independent.
Some of them are actually secret.


For the big organisations that would want to get rid of bitcoin, it is much easier to corrupt people and conduct propaganda campaigns in the media.
And that's what they do.

Mining is the most important (and the most resilient) point of resistance of Bitcoin, against the governments and the financial oligarchy.

Fixed it for you.  Bitcoin mining is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

I wish you could understand the difference between

A. signaling readiness for a new feature, and
B. voting for a new features

I know it's all very subtle and you don't do nuance, but please stop spreading the lie that miners are in charge of Bitcoin.

They are not and never will be.  That's not how any of this works.

Just because there are armed guards in front of the bank it doesn't mean those armed guards make executive decisions for the bank.

They are just hired muscle and may be fired if they forget their place and get uppity.

+1

Good to see some military metaphors used to describe the situation, and exactly on point!

It's naive to assume that state actors are not involved in bitcoin in a major way. Personally I believe the Chinese govt. is subsidizing the miners, possibly even precisely to prevent a 51% percent attack from US banks? Makes sense to me. As far as US government involvement, normally that would be done via US multinational corporations and Wall Street financiers, who are in fact "hiding in plain sight" in bitcoin. Wall Street wants to control bitcoin for their own profit, but will do the bidding of the Fed when the phone call comes in.  A Faustian bargain? There could well be financial execs "committing suicide" in their cars again... It will get more interesting in the next few years...


Looks like iceTARD has finally seen the light - you're right, Core could get fired if they get too uppity.  UASF could be the straw that broke the camel's back...

Final note - this thread is almost devoid of technical debate on the UASF proposal. Is it safe to say that technically it's complete crap?

It it safe to say absence of evidence is evidence of absence?

Or it is more safe to say you don't understand basic freshman-level predicate logic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Absence_of_evidence), and thus have no business concerning yourself with high order affairs such as computer science and distributed systems?

Sure man.

You are in charge of bitcoin. You and the other people who are actually writing code and using Bitcoin for products and services.

Hope you feel better now.  Just don't come crying to me when one day you realize that this was actually a lie. :)

This topic is actually far more complicated than anyone here can comprehend.

This  Chinese  guy whose they made now the face of evil - whatever his name.
 If this is true what they say, that he actually owns major amount of the network's hashing power, he must have the shitest job in the world.
Imagine what kind of system he must be having in place to deal with the corruption among his technicians. Technicians that he needs to have and who he needs to trust, in order to have his operation going.
I'm betting that it's just a matter of time before the loses from the corruption among his employees will grow big enough to make his big mining unprofitable.
That's all assuming that he's running a big mining now, which I seriously doubt, exactly because of the reasons I just described.

Now, this brings me to the point that the corruption inside all kind of mining organizations (especially as big as governments)  and the free market around it, eventually favors small miners - such that can control their entire operation by themselves, or with a help from a closest friends. Such operations shall naturally be run under some secrecy, as this is the best protection from all kind of crooks, let alone the government eyes (taxes etc. )

And with all this, I'm predicting that bitcoin mining will become more and more distributed in the future.
The economy will make it happen.
I'm actually saying it has becoming like this already...

So all the fears about how the mining will be becoming more and more centralised - I think it's a bunch of bollocks and people spreading such info simply don't understand how the system works.
Which for fairness nobody fully understands, but certainly some understand it more than others.

Yes

No. The only outcome of this thread is, that political arguments hidden behind a technical argumentation are a complete crap.

I wish you could understand the difference between

A. signaling readiness for a new feature, and

B. voting for a new feature

This is a really good analogy and works to make people understand the difference.

It's very sad to see some people falling for the BU scam wanting to make miners 100% the ones that call all the shots. How can a project like bitcoin be hostage of miners when miners are usually just your average businessman that keeps expanding his monopoly? how can you leave the project in hands of security guards while firing the high IQ people that get the best code done (Core devs)??
This whole thing is ridiculous.

Shaolin(fry) shadowboxing, and the (Jihan)WuTang sword style.....

https://medium.com/@daggerhashimoto/if-what-you-say-is-true-the-shaolin-and-the-wu-tang-could-be-dangerous-ac59c7fb477e#.estfd87e9

Problem is, we don't have a police force that can lock these muscle men up if they were to turn on the bank and become bank robbers themselves. I guess we're stuck with paying them off unless we hire someone bigger and stronger.

Hey Carlton!   ;D

So the IMF can 'print' money?  lol.  You really have no idea, do you?


To engage you in 'debate'? Probably.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, or so they say.

So tell me iCE, whats the difference between

A. Acquiescence

and

B. Engagement

I think that a governing body may be behind this, and if that is the case...

We all know that's not a good thing

We do have such a police force.  It's called 'the economic majority.'



LOL what's the difference between your ass and a hole in the ground?   :D

Seems the only logical choice now since BU  attack is so close.  Oh yes, lets code the UASF and  PoW  change HF at the same time and get rid of those MFkers all at once.

You are fired!

The biggest problems for BTC and all crypto currency:

1. Its centralized. It will never be a decentralized system until all mining process will be as easy as downloading your bitcoin core wallet. Actually, it should be done like this: you can activate mining by clicking one button in your wallet. Now still the whole bitcoin thing is understandable only to small percentage of people in the world, and mining is only possible to those who are advanced level in tech and programming. If BTC has a vision to be better and more popular than fiat, it should be made much more easier to use and to mine. (Soon the whole mining power will be in few hands and it will no longer be different from fiat).

2. Voting power should be not only in miners hands, but in ordinary bitcoins users too. Now BTC is facing the problem that it is slowly transforming to the ordinary money system, where the whole power have federal reserve bank, and here the control is slowly taken by big mining pools and wealthy BTC holders. They want to make decisions to the rest of the users, because they think they can make better decisions.

The whole situation sucks, and the current path of BTC is wrong. Ordinary user with his wallet, should be a miner too, mining rewards should be split among everyone fairly, all have the voting power.

Well, I can understand your pain, and how nice would it be to go back in time and have yet another chance to mine easy BTC when the price was $1 or even less, but unfortunately it's old good 2017 :-) However, if you had that chance again, and knew nothing of what you know today, would you really be interested in Satohi's idea?

You missed my point. If the mining process from the begining would have been easier, like downloading the wallet and pressing button to start it, now we would have really decentralized coin. But from the begining all things related to BTC is too difficult for ordinary people to adopt it.

The beginnings of any technology is difficult for ordinary people. Look at Windows 3.11, or Windows 95 and so on. Do you remember how difficult it was to install device drivers back in late 90's? And now you don't even bother about it in modern Windows or Linux distros.

Ech, you kids... :)

Believe me or not, but the mining process was that easy at the beginning.
You had to check the option "generate coins" in the pop-up menu and they'd sometimes just appear in your wallet.

But that times are long gone. Now you need a bloody power plant to compete on this market.
Nobody could have stopped it and I seriously doubt anyone will be able to...
It's a mining arm race and nobody is really in control.

Which brings us back to the topic: if anyone actually tries to change the bitcoin protocol while not having the mining majority, because he thinks that "users majority" or "economic majority" is just enough, this will be his funeral.
Or in other words, one more time: UASF without mining majority can never succeed, because it's against the nature of bitcoin.
Anyone who doesn't understand this simple fact is not really a very smart bitcoin developer.

Core's behavior is really strange to me. Those guys are smarter than most of the rest of the world, so it's obvious they know how it all works, and what will be the result of going to war with miners, but somehow they're limited to their current stance. Normally, you could expect reasonable discussion with arguments on both sides, and finally a compromise, but surprisingly it's not happening for some reason. Usually, if you have no idea what something is all about, or why something obvious isn't happening, then it's probably about money and/or power.

I think they are just bluffing - both sides.
 One side  claiming that it has enough hash power and interest to enforce controversial protocol changes.
 The other side claiming that bitcoin can either go without the mining or continue to exist with a different POW function.
Both sides are talking bullshit and on both sides you have important people who know it very well, but won't admit that it's only bluffing.
Instead they keep letting their minions to spread FUD and escalate havoc even further.

It's actually very sad to watch how both the parties are playing some pathetic politics which aren't going to change anything about bitcoin, except its perception among people who don't understand it.

FUD is how you motivate people in the tech centers of the world. Think of how much fear they feel from the propaganda they watch every day, showing terror attacks. Fear works.

UASF was pathetic, a non-starter. Hacking Unlimited was a cheap shot, but it worked. Unlimited's 40% mining support is starting to be a major factor. Core is dead silent and dead set on pumping Segwit, which is on life support.

Luckily this ugly blocksize struggle is not playing out too much in the mainstream. It's just too complicated for them.

Yes, fear - I get it.
But FUD can't change bitcoin protocol.
Only majority of miners can do that.

The 40% is not so much disturbing if you know that each single one of them is voting to keep the block size limited to 1MB - nobody's pointing that out.
If it is a political statement, you should read it: we don't like the core, but we want to keep the protocol as is (no fork)

However the disturbing part is that all this fear / FUD about moving the miners out of the business, connected with the price drop must surely have a negative effect on new investments into mining infrastructure. Which means it gets easier to actually build up a single enterprise that controls 50% of the hashrate.

Hey Piotr, welcome back. I still miss your Goxbot. Why don't you make a new one for some major exchange?

Imho what is wrong with Bitcoin is that there are no incentives for full nodes. If a part (or all, why not) of the Tx fees where distributed to full nodes (maybe according the tx relayed by each one) we would have a much stronger network of some order of magnitudes more full nodes. Moreover the game would be much more fair since anyone with a consumer grade puter could gain like in the good old times.

I already made this same proposal here years ago but nobody cared. Maybe now someone will?

In the very beginning, miners where full nodes.  They ve just overoptimized things and now small user nodes think they control bitcoin. I m very sure miners have to rerun more nodes and bitcoin is back.

UASF is a wonderful tool in today's bitcoin political environment, I have no reason to believe it is unsafe and will not work as specified.

Maybe, but if they are, it cannot last forever. The discussion is too long, and it's time for solution(s).
Bitcoin is losing market share quickly, and even the tx backlog is not that big recently.
Apparently many users already started using other coins for their operations.

I don't think there will be any solutions.
The miners votes has been too polarized.
They've seen how some people were trying to fuck them.
It won't be easy now to regain the lost trust - they will be far more skeptical in the future.

IMHO the blockchain protocol will be fixed for years to come.  
You can forget about the core's fancy road map - it's not gonna happen, unless for an altcoin.
Which may actually not be such a bad thing.
It can surely use some stability now, after all these shit and havoc of a two competing forks just about to come... Each one of them 'to fix bitcoin'  :)

Bitcoin doesn't need fixing, but some people should definitely learn more respect towards it.

I prefer the Flag Day approach, precisely because of the toxic political environment you're referring to (or at least I'm calling it toxic). But it's arguably UASF in a different guise, although "user activated" is a little of a misnomer for Flag Day activation.

Any sane UASF will use a flag-day for the activation.

I agree that BU signalling is a statement of opposition to Core. Core doesn't get it, and continues to alienate people who are undecided, and continues to hype the dead Segwit. The FUD is a desperate attempt to scare people into line with Core. It's not working.

The net result is flight into alts. Good job Core. You could've upped the blocksize 4 years ago. Now you're committing suicide in a spectacular show of drama.

That's probably a pretty accurate description of what's going on.

Yep. Could've just ordered all the miners and nodes to do it.

Im not sure about 4 years ago, but it would probably not be unreasonable to believe that concensus could have been reached for 8 MB blocks two years ago.

Judging solely by mores law, it would probably be safe to have a max block size of 8 MB 2 years ago if 1 MB was safe 7 years ago, especially if a very simple fix to the risk of having too many signatures in a transaction was also implemented.

???

Except 2 years ago, an overwhelming consensus of Bitcoin users rejected a less modest 2MB hard fork proposal (and then they also rejected essentially the same proposal by a "different" external development team a year hence, just in case the first rejection wasn't a clear enough message)

What makes you think that we would have all agreed to something 4 times the size of that? 8MB was on the table then, and no-one but a small minority of miners took that even slightly seriously

Except that we fell off the curve for Moore's law years ago. Technology is struggling to grow at even 1/4 the rate Moore's law predicted now.

Looking at it strictly from a cost/unit, then yes you are correct. However in recent years, manufacturers of computer related products have invested less in being able to increase the number of units in the products they sell, and have invested more into making the products they sell more reliable, and otherwise increasing the utility of their products.

Take hard drives for example, while the rate at which the price per GB has declined has fallen, hard drives have failed at lower rates, and can access data more efficiently. This makes comparing the cost of a 1 TB HDD today to the cost of a 1 TB HDD yesterday not an apples-to-apples comparison. There is also the issue of the fact that from a retail user's point of view, there is little reason to need 2 TB worth of space on your HDD, especially considering that things like moves and tv shows can easily (and cheaply) be streamed as the user wishes to watch them -- this fact creates less pressure for manufacturers to create larger HDDs, which keeps somewhat of a mesh floor on the unit cost of HDD space. If a retail consumer has to choose between two hard drives, one with 500 GB worth of space, and one with 1 TB worth of space, he may choose the 500 GB HDD, even though the unit cost of drive space is higher because he has little/no use for the 2nd 500 GB worth of space.

Also, as HDDs become more reliable, consumers need to purchase less of them in order to keep their data on a HDD, along with necessary backups (or cheaper backup options can be used if as the chances of failure approach zero). Having to purchase HDDs less frequently and having to purchase less HDDs for backup purposes further skews the apples-to-apples comparison of unit costs.

If and when there are more real world retail demands for larger HDDs, manufacturers will invest more into creating larger HDDs, and I believe the unit cost will continue to fall at an accelerated rate.

All of which has nothing to do with Moore's law, Quickseller.

Moore's law is done, as ck said. It may be revived in the future, but it will need to use a totally different paradigm to double computational power every 12-18 months (as a side effect of shrinking transistors in size), which is what Moore's law stipulated

You got the point here, I agree, but It looks like crypto devs are do not bother to make it easier to mine...

When I first time learned about BTC, the first question to me was: what will be with those block sizes and overall chain size? I understand that you can move it up always as needed, but cmon, if BTC will ever be the number 1 currency in the world, the blockchain will weight enormous amount of terabytes... anyone from devs thinking about it? Have any solutions to it? Even now on my new mac to download btc core wallet with all blockchain and to purge it to smaller size took like 3 days with normal internet... in future it could take ages...

Right, some of the devs (especially those from Core) are not interested in user experience too much.
Those guys are there for various reasons, and many of the reasons aren't necessarily economic.
As a result, they have no direct incentive for doing what users want, but rather trying to force their own views or ideas.


I think it's already impossible for certain machines to download full Bitcoin blockchain. It's not only the problem of the size but also tech specs.
Few days ago I started to sync the blockchain from scratch on my older laptop (purchased 6-7 years ago), and it's "stuck" at 40% (with db_cache set to 2000 which was max for that machine). The progress is 0.2% per hour now, so I'm pretty sure it will never sync but wanted to check how bad is it :-)

I wonder if regular home-class users will be able to sync BTC blockchain at all in the future (let's say in 5-6 years). Maybe the only option for them will be bootstrap files, but not sure if it's possible to verify the downloaded blockchain against network version.

And we must remember that to run a node you need to have the full blockchain on your computer. With its size increasing at every block, the computational power demand will be constantly rising. This will probably kill the home based nodes, leading to the already much-discussed topic of undesired node centralization, right?

Well, if a node is already synced, then I think there won't be problems to follow the newly created blocks. If you run out of space on your current disk then you just add a new one and continue. If you run out of computation power, then you change the specs and use your synced blockchain.

The main problem is to sync it from scratch and in few years, with bigger blocks (be it Segwit, EC or something else), it may be a problem for any home user.
Having it synced now and keeping updated may be a valuable asset :-)

I'm trying to understand how UASF is supposed to work. Let's consider 2 scenarios:

1) Unupgraded miners are disorganised. Each of them mines on it's own.
Upgraded nodes see unupgraded blocks as invalid, don't relay them, that creates friction in unupgaded blocks propagation. Upgraded miners see unupgraded blocks as invalid, don't mine on top of them. But unupgraded miners see upgraded blocks as valid, mine on top them.

Say we have only 10% of hashpower upgraded, 90% of total hashpower mines on top of unupgraded blocks and 100% of total hashpower mines on top of upgraded blocks. Doesn't matter how long unupgraded chain grows, upgraded nodes see it as invalid. But it does matter when upgraded chain becomes longer than unupgraded, the latter gets orphaned by all nodes, even those who mined it. Nonetheless, permanent (at first sight) divergence is likely to happen. Once unupgraded chain outruns the upgraded (because of variance), unupgraded miners will be locked on it, because it has more accumulated PoW. Situation starts to look like a hardfork.

The greater upgraded hashpower part, the less likely permanent divergence to happen, but still it can happen, unless upgraded hashpower is more than 50%.

2) Unupgraded miners are organised, they detect upgraded blocks, don't mine on top of them. For example, they can create an unupgraded block with a tx conflicting with new rules, and mine only the chain, which contains that block, effectively setting a checkpoint. Essentially it's a hardfork.

In both cases we will likely have a hardfork-like situation, unless more than half of total hashpower is upgraded and unupgraded miners don't decide to fork off. What raises a question: does UASF have any advantages over an explicit hardfork? Well, there are some. I suppose economic majority supports UASF. BTC from the unupgraded fork are of much less utility than from the upgraded. Unupgraded miners will experience difficulties spending their rewards, what will incentivize them to upgrade. Once enough miners upgrade, the unupgraded fork will be naturally orphaned, without involving a real hardfork. In the case unupgraded miners decide to hardfork off, the onus of the fork is on them.

@stdset

You're making and invalid assumption: that miners using non-Segwit clients will reject blocks with Segwit transactions. They won't, the Segwit soft-fork was desgined in a way to prevent that happening.

What would happen as a result of a large proportion of the hashrate mining old style blocks only? The more users that use Segwit addresses, the more old-blocks miners won't be able to pick up fees from confirming the Segwit user's transactions. Segwit miners will be more profitable, but fewer Segwit transactions would be possible. Segwit miners will have more than double the blocksize to fill, so it's not as serious as it sounds, but users will also have to compete more to get their P2PKH/P2SH coins into P2WPKH and P2WSH addresses, because of the reduced amount of Segwit blocks available.

I make this assumption only in the second scenario. In the first scenario this isn't the default unupgraded miner behaviour, but it can accidentally arise if unupgraded hashpower is more than 50%.

Let A be a valid segwit block accepted by both types of miners. On top of A two blocks (both of the same height) are mined: another segwit block B and a non-segwit block C. Now let's assume that half of total hashpower (including all segwit hashpower) mines on top B and another half mines on top of C, the latter group happens to be luckier and they mine another non-segwit block D. Now non-segwit fork is 1 block longer than the segwit fork and all unupgraded hashpower switches to the unupgraded fork. Upgraded hashpower however sees this fork as invalid and doesn't switch. Unless upgraded miners immediately experience an influx of luck, we have a permanent (at first sight) chain split.

There is no blockchain fork possible, regardless of the majority hashpower or the order in which Segwit or legacy blocks are found. Either type of block is equally valid to either type of miner, it wouldn't be a soft-fork if that were the case.

Unless I completely misunderstand something, all upgraded nodes, including upgraded miners will be rejecting unupgraded blocks:

So, can someone finally confirm what's gonna happen when bip148 activates? Is blockchain fork possible or not?

Hmmmm, not what I thought it was (BIP148). If that's the case, it won't work as a soft-fork, it's a Segwit hard-fork, UAHF not UASF.

Did the specification not change recently? I got a different impression from the draft I read, if this is a new change. Simply allowing Segwit-ready miners to begin mining Segwit blocks is sufficient.

At first sight it seemed to me indistinguishable from a hardfork. But it isn't a hardfork. Unupgraded nodes remain compatible, they don't need to upgrade. As soon as economic majority forces miners to upgrade, unupgraded regular users have nothing to worry about.

Is everybody fine here with the reduced hashpower == security?

If major miners dont follow this what happens to the block time at beginning?

How safe are the first blocks after the activation?

No, we are not fine with these things.
We just try to not waste any more energy on repeating things that are obvious.

UASF is not going to work.
When the kids "activate" it by tweaking their nodes' software, the bitcoin network isn't even going to shrug on it - it's going to be that meaningless.

Well, maybe a better description would be as a hybrid soft & hard fork. Miners are essentially hardforked, and regular non-mining nodes are soft-forked.

I'm pretty sure shaolinfry added the legacy-block version orphaning since the initial draft, I read it carefully when I did.


If this got the users' support, then it's no less radical than my previous thoughts on getting Segwit activated by direct user action, I'm willing to promote the idea of orphaning blocks indicating BU strings (although that's perhaps becoming less necessary now that users have come out against it, I still consider it a risk that BU could hardfork as an attack without user support)

So maybe this is not so bad. With BU pools and miners falling, perhaps BIP148 could work to galvanise support for Segwit activation by the miners before users start using a BIP148 client to force the miners' hands. I'd probably use a BIP148 client if shaolinfry released it, but any released binary needs gitian signatures, and that involves such an endorsement from known developers. achow101 stated that Core devs are majority opposed to BIP148, and I guess I can see why in a way. We'll have to wait as everyone thinks it over some more, it would be constructive if actual comments from the devs were forthcoming on this (as it seems they are short on ideas as to what to do, other than "nothing")

Mehh, you again. Should not answer all stuff that clear.

I wanna see some UASF coins falling...

 ;D

Sorry.

When I used to work the managers always hated me for killing their 'great' ideas. And they could also never realize that I was actually doing them a favor, trying to advance  the  project by the months they'd have lost.  :)

I also want to see UASF failing, but considering that no bitcoin celebrity is willing to put his reputation behind this idea, it has no chance to turn into any kind of exciting failure. So all we can do now is take a piss out of some kids.

No pain no gain.
It will increase.
If economic majority supports UASF, even first UASF blocks are reasonably safe. Non-UASF blocks aren't safe at all, even if mining majority doesn't support UASF in the beginning.

You start using exact same arguments as people that want HF and are willing to risk even more.

I wish you good luck but running into that big risk open eyed looks very desparate little boy.

There seems to be no better choice.

So if both "sides" now have a nuclear button they can push, do we escalate from the proverbial civil war up to cold war status?  Clearly all attempts at diplomacy have failed, so it's pretty much a case of seeing who blinks first.  Or, more likely, no one actually does anything and we carry on in stagnant mediocrity while the service deteriorates and the war of words carries on.

I think what I bolded from your words, is what will occur now.

The only thing that gives me some comfort is that during the historical cold war,
it was a standoff between the communist and capitalist, and ultimately due to the
capitalistic system and all of its secondary effects on it's subsystems, the
communists were unable to compete both technologically and financially.

To determine who could win this "Bitcoin coldwar", it should follow somewhat
along those lines. In this case, the technological aspect would be developers and
the financial aspect would be the economic supporting structures like exchanges,
businesses, validators, and etc. If those parts are strong, you can outlast your
enemy over long time periods. Historically, the communist lost the coldwar
because their only assets were their large numbers of troops and massive
amounts of, yet cheaply made weaponry.

From a historical coldwar perspective, either side will not ever "blink first",
but one will eventually collapse and fall apart due to being unable to compete
against every other aspect of the enemy, and other aspects they lack. Sheer
force and numbers are worthless within a standoff.

So, I think there are some interesting real world parallels that could be used to
almost always determine the outcome in any "Bitcoin coldwar". According to our
current "coldwar status" and the "assets on both sides" it is not likely that BU would
be able to overtake Core in a safe and consensus compliant manner. So, the only
results will either be BU collapsing over time or BU causing an intentional
non-consensus hardfork (preemptive nuclear strike with hopes of non-retaliation).

So, we shouldn't fear a coldwar, since that is safely determined over time, but we
should fear whether BU is willing to nuke at low consensus levels. If they are not
afraid and think they can beat the radiation fallout and other devastation to the
ecosystem, we should make our positions plain and clear, we will be forced to enact
MAD like measures to preserve the balance and future liberty to any survivors.

You're advancing a false dichotomy. There is at least a "third side", which says "do nothing". The third side has no nuclear button, but is the most likely to "win". Furthermore, there could very well be a sane fork of the current code that uses none of the BU changes and also no Segwit. In both of these cases, the Core dev team becomes irrelevant, unless they decide their egos can handle rolling back Segfault.

The UASF nuclear button is wired to a dead circuit - UASF is a complete non-starter, as many technical experts have stated in this thread. Changing the POW or hashing algo is even worse - an absolute insult to anyone who believes in the implementation of Satoshi's concept. The BU nuclear button seems to be somewhat dangerous, but I do not predict they will try to force the fork without sufficient support. If BU does have sufficient support, the chain will fork in their favor, and BU will become what we all call bitcoin.

I think this is better and more used as much as possible.

there are some groups that will activate it

What should then happen is Miners would cartel enough to for example start paying themselves 50 BTC reward again and forever, create inflation, and such?

No sir.

This would crash BTC price as nobody would be willing to invest in such an asset anymore.

Miners would be the biggest losers of such a change, left with millions of dollars worth of mining equipment that isn't profitable enough to even plug it in.

Good question. More extended answer:
It's impossible to implement such a change without a hardfork. Miners can fork, but if users don't follow, they will be mining a useless token, and will be forced to switch back to original chain. Miners don't set the rules. If it wasn't obvious for somebody, it should be obvious now, after ETC/ETH split.

When it is said that miners provide a secure, tamper-resistant consensus, consensus on the state of ledger, on transactions history is meant, not consensus on the rules of the network. Rules are chosen by whole community (of which miners constitute an important part) by choosing which crypto/fork to use, accept and thus give it value.

Well, I will be looking forward to see this UASF of yours at work.

Or to you making fools of yourselves - which ever comes at the end. :)

Allright, that's a free market too.

We have 2 groups of users (general users: including miners, investors, nodes, exchanges, pools)

1) The "BU camp": have BU, reject SegWit, retain ASICBOOST.

Pros:

+ for the miners: miners will have 30% lower energy cost (e.g. over 200% more PROFIT, if energy cost eats 80% of their income now)

+ they can have e.g. 10 times more transactions very soon

+ or they can have millions of transactions if they would do something like SegWit but that retains they **patent-based advantage**

2) SegWit camp: have SegWit (with effective block increase > x1.6), it blocks ASICBOOST

+ miners all over the world have no **patent-enforced** "advantage", so this is a level play field for them

+ therefore miners can be much more decentralized again (to level of natural differences between countries, e.g. lower energy costs and better manufacturing)

+ 1.6 transactions increase right now

+ millions of transactions when LN is built

---

So it boils down to either:
a) coin that is good for certain miners to use PATENTS and STATE ENFORCEMENT to artificially create monopoly, and easily centralize it even more. And is focused on doing x10 - x100 more transactions

b) coin that decentralizes, now gives some increase in transactions, and is focused on LN allowing ~ x1000000 more transactions soon. Also allows people to again run more full (and not pruned) nodes.

Which one do you want?

---

Does anyone really want STATE-ENFORCED centralized coin? Wtf.

---

Even when ASICBOOST is killed and out of the picture, then do you want to focus on modest increase (at cost of killing nodes decentralization once you go to x10, x100 and more),  or to focus on giving us millions txes while still on decentralized nodes (plus many, but decentralized, LN nodes)?

---

Back to Free Market, some BU proponents claim that miners vote is better then democracy - that is right. But UASF is not a democracy, it is in practice economic consensus, close to how two altcoins are competing for being more popular: number of users counts for something, but in the end if one has x100 bigger economy then for all purposes that coin wins.

Number of miners is correlated with economical purpose, but as we shown with example of totally rogue miners (mining e.g. 100 BTC reward blocks just because they can) - they do not win.
Well, TECHNICALLY they will win, and they will be left alone on their precious chain, but users will leave.
And we both knows this will kill them,  after short-term profit.

The same here.

Even if miners will be ROGUE and oppose and obvious improvement and FIX to bitcoin (only doing so to keep their STATE ENFORCED patent based advantage) - then well... ok, but hopefully and likely, most of ECONOMY will say "ok fuck this" and will leave.

Sorry mate. Your b) is a wet dream of 'more dcentralization'. Proof?

And whilst your are proving just prove why LN is more decentral?

 ???

-> Hint: do not try the impossible.

Uh.. not using a patented technology is more decentralized... you need that explained more?  ??? ???

SegWit removes ASICBOOST (patented in China technology).

As for LN, why it is decentralised - well you and your business partner can conduct thousands transactions without need for anyone else, any pair of nodes can. And then collapse it into 1 on-chain transaction.

You can optionally use some federated mode too, that is an option, and setting up LN node is easy (not needing gigabytes of own data),
plus you can always do good old on-chain transactions, while rest of world pays for their coffee or toothpicks individually with one-by-one, or federated, LN.

Cool. I feel fully convinced now. Lots of stringent proofs every line...
Thx for such a deep dive into UASF suporter minds.

Why are you guys restrict yourself that much ?

Are you paid or just blind?

I guess you just like overengeneering because you are addicted to gameboy flashs and thats the tragedgy of the common.

Ok so you DO need explanation why patenting mining technology is pro-centralization, no problem:

When granted a patent in China, the patent-holder has monopoly on using his advantage.
In this case that advantage  is 30% lower power consumption while mining.

Since miners already operate on tiny profit margin, and power is major part of mining operation (the reason why we use ASICs, not just FPGA or GPU or CPU) - therefore everyone who is denied this technology has little chance of being a miner.

As a result, one entity - the patent holder - can pick companies he will allow to operate that way - making him the central point of power in the network.

Clearer now?

No - and yes.

All profitable business will lead to centralization. No matter what you try to create around or artificial regulate.

The only true bitcoin free market open source way is: think big and free and play the game - the good will survive.

So Maxwell is suddenly doing interviews coming out as pro-UASF now: http://www.coindesk.com/asicboost-uasf-greg-maxwell-bitcoins-path-forward/ (http://www.coindesk.com/asicboost-uasf-greg-maxwell-bitcoins-path-forward/)


Oh, and did Blockstream really just hire Samson Mao to be chief strategist? http://www.coindesk.com/blockstream-hires-ex-btcc-exec-global-market-push/ (http://www.coindesk.com/blockstream-hires-ex-btcc-exec-global-market-push/)

My favorite is the UASF camo baseball hats... "Break out your flags, boys, it's time to giter dun."

Wow, just wow.

It's interesting news indeed.

I'm guessing he has done the reading (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1823783.msg18177864#msg18177864).
Now he knows enough to be able to crack the Satoshi's system of the consensus guarded by the miners... ;)

I think all these people would be making much less fools of themselves, if they just suggested to change the 95% into 55%.

Although, considering that they would still be half short then, I can understand why some try to reach for a crazy ideas.

Ohh, I m good at that.  Lets try this

BIP 0815:  Get rid of miners... Hm... Let full nodes do the mining ... Mehhhhh? Deja vu?

I'm really shocked at Maxwell, this eclipses even his worst prior trolling attempts. Good job humbling him. He is now venturing into the "delusional and stupid" realm. I suppose he and his minions can write more code that won't ever get adopted by a majority... at some point I will be concerned that all of this crap code running simultaneously will break something, however.

Wow I got the chills with every paragraph.  Great mind.  Great read.
Worth a look. Truly!

In case you are interested, Greg clarifies his position greatly in this post to the developer mailing list:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/014152.html (https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/014152.html)

Seems legit. At least he's sounding more like a leader with a vision, rather than a troll in mom's basement.

I suspect that Greg is smart enough to know that UASF at best won't work, and at worst it could cause a huge disaster. In this case, he's hedging his bets, pretending that UASF is a harsh option that is nonetheless feasible. This would be Blockstream hoping that the pendulum sways back toward "compromise": everybody adopting Segwit like good little children.

Blockstream doesn't have to get their hands dirty, and won't be accountable should the sky fall when some idiot actually releases a UASF Kraken.

UASF could never work.  Where are all the UASF supporters now that Greg has essentially admitted so?
He tried to make it sound like there was something wrong with this particular UASF proposal but
the fact of the matter is that any segwit UASF without majority hash power creates a split.