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Apparently, Jihan Wu has been covertly using some patented exploit called asicboost to gain 20%+ efficiency on his hardware that’s incompatible with SegWit. It all makes sense now. Hope he gets his ass sued off.

Shills care to chime in?

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html

Fucking over everyone using bitcoin is great... Potential user sees a group that's able to game the system with an advantage, and want's to run the other way. Was it illegal, who knows. Amoral, unethical, fucked up central banker shit absolutely.

One man holding up development of Bitcoin to further his own personal agenda (and wallet).

FUD.  Asicboost been known about for a long time and Bitmain holds the patent in China.

http://211.157.104.77:8080/sipo_EN/search/detail.do?method=view&parm=16b414c21a2f19d11b2c18401bcd1a5f183a19561ad91be11a501c4805792c231f5421b222572195236c20482755275723ca24be2221222525702494250d26c0274025822c3f29092a7c29a02d6d2d6f28fa2ed62bd12c892f482c34330947932f5c2c0a2ac731b9333c316c366534e7318235ee337934f1360837f03747371b371a34e231bf38f13b04390c3e0d3f6f39ea3dc63c573d6d3e683e4c26d918c33ffe3c523c273e354334405c47c545774302408e4423458d47b04688462b46a846c246aa436f47554bcc49784a2d

Just more distractions from king Gregory.

Still nothing from the shills? Come on guys, I want your opinions  ;D

Re: Well, well, well, now we know what Jihan Wu’s been up to.

Apparently, Jihan Wu has been covertly using some patented exploit called asicboost to gain 20%+ efficiency on his hardware that’s incompatible with SegWit. It all makes sense now. Hope he gets his ass sued off.

Shills care to chime in?

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html

FUD.  Asicboost been known about for a long time and Bitmain holds the patent in China.

your link looks fishy no hostname? whatever
They Patented this?

Press Release
March 25, 2016.
 
A breakthrough invention in Bitcoin mining named AsicBoost allows to improve the total cost of hashing  20%. The patent-pending invention by Timo Hanke and Sergio Demian Lerner is applicable to any type of chip design for Bitcoin ASICs.
 
AsicBoost is a patent-pending method to improve the efficiency and cost of Bitcoin mining by approximately 20%. Through gate count reduction on the silicon AsicBoost improves two essential Bitcoin mining cost metrics simultaneously and by a similar factor: the energy consumption (Joule per Gh) and the system cost ($ per Gh/s). With the system cost being proportional to the

13 May 2016
Note to miners: We, the core devs, discovered a patented optimization in your ASIC. We will make it obsolete in the next update. Thank you.

Now that Jihan and Bitmain have been outed as exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin's PoW and that SegWit would have made it impossible for them to continue exploiting this vulnerability the motivations for blocking SegWit and supporting BU have now become very clear. We're going to see a shift in SegWit support in Bitcoin very soon and LTC is also helping here by activating SegWit first. I can see some more room up for Litecoin until around 0.02 or $25, but this will change as soon as Bitcoin starts to make progress towards activating SegWit as well and people start moving back into BTC. If you think BTC will stay behind and never activate SW or LN you are sorely mistaken. Let's see what happens and see who turns out to be right.

wait...
if his asicboost is rendered invalid, doesn't that make all his ASIC+asicboost hardware useless ( totally useless) ?

As I understand the whitepaper, yes it would because the logic gates for avoiding the optimization have been eliminated which makes it 20% more efficient.

All those who own Bitmain hardware for mining SHA2 coins, must fight SegWit.

 
Well I would agree that given the context of Bitcoin that everyone should be able to compete fairly, a patent should be unenforceable, but I wouldn't blame Jihan for trying to mine.  Everyone using ASICs is trying to gain an advantage.

Ridiculous imo to try to change the PoW... its the last thing Core should be doing.

We, in particular I, am not. This proposal does not prevent ASICBOOST, it only interferes with the covert version and only to the extent that the covert version is incompatible with protocol upgrades.

The argument for blocking ASICBOOST outright is that a patent is a government granted monopoly and restrictive licensing of ASICBOOST is likely to result in an eventual monopoly in mining (because difficulty adjustments push mining to a break even equilibrium, so potentially all unboosted miners would operate at a loss). I share the concern but I do not consider it to be as serious an issue as the disruption to protocol upgrade capability.

If any parties who would be adversely impacted by this proposal would like to speak up, I would love to hear their arguments. My guess is that they will not want to admit to patent infringement in public, and so they will not.

You need to distinguish overt and covert boosting. The proposed BIP only addresses covert boosting.

If miners all used covert boosting Bitcoin could never gain, or gain only with significant increases complexity or loss of functionality many different protocol improvements, including:

(1) Segwit. (2) UTXO commitments. (non-delayed, at least) (3) Committed Bloom filters (4) Committed address indexes (5) STXO commitments (non-delayed). (6) Weak blocks (7) Most kinds of fraud proofs -- to state a few.

 
Well I would agree that given the context of Bitcoin that everyone should be able to compete fairly, a patent should be unenforceable, but I wouldn't blame Jihan for trying to mine.  Everyone using ASICs is trying to gain an advantage.

Ridiculous imo to try to change the PoW... its the last thing Core should be doing.

If you fork and bankrupt miners who bought hardware, Bitcoin can never again be trusted. It means Bitcoin is run by democracy and not by immutability. Satoshi (Nash) will roll over in his grave.

The whales of Bitcoin will destroy any such fork. I guarantee you that!

My understanding from the paper is that the proposed segwit BIP will render obsolete only the covert version of ASICboost, not the overt portion.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfvvhvn/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfvzklr/

I don't fully understand how blocking the covert portion of ASICboost would affect mining performance on pre-existing hardware containing this feature. Whether you simply lose the increased efficiency (all S9's increase power consumption by 30%?) or reduces hashrate by 30%.

Either way, it is unlikely for Bitmain to side with any proposal that will effectively neuter their hardware and cost them 10's or more millions of dollars per year, and disrupt sales.  Especially if they are unable to openly admit that such technology is in fact in their ASIC's due to patent infringement.  So where does that leave us, omit their hashrate while taking block signalling into account and force a hardfork, or concede that you cannot circumvent a player like themselves from the table and find a compromise?

Dude, it's considered an attack because whoever gets this efficiency eventually out competes all other miners, making mining centralization the end result.
If any of the components which make bitcoin a truly decentralized P2P network is captured by any means, in this case centralization, then bitcoin looses it's fundamental properties. That's why ASICBOOST is considered an attack.

If you fork and bankrupt miners who bought hardware, Bitcoin can never again be trusted. It means Bitcoin is run by democracy and not by immutability. Satoshi (Nash) will roll over in his grave.

The whales of Bitcoin will destroy any such fork. I guarantee you that!

...
Either way, it is unlikely for Bitmain to side with any proposal that will effectively neuter their hardware and cost them 10's or more millions of dollars per year, and disrupt sales.  Especially if they are unable to openly admit that such technology is in fact in their ASIC's due to patent infringement.  So where does that leave us, omit their hashrate while taking block signalling into account and force a hardfork, or concede that you cannot circumvent a player like themselves from the table and find a compromise?

As I understand the whitepaper, yes it would because the logic gates for avoiding the optimization have been eliminated which makes it 20% more efficient.

All those who own Bitmain hardware for mining SHA2 coins, must fight SegWit.

If you fork and bankrupt miners who bought hardware, Bitcoin can never again be trusted. It means Bitcoin is run by democracy and not by immutability. Satoshi (Nash) will roll over in his grave.

The whales of Bitcoin will destroy any such fork. I guarantee you that!

If you fork and bankrupt miners who bought hardware, Bitcoin can never again be trusted. It means Bitcoin is run by democracy and not by immutability. Satoshi (Nash) will roll over in his grave.

The whales of Bitcoin will destroy any such fork. I guarantee you that!

This is the other glaring point of it. The respect was hard fought, and the trust is barely there (we just got denied the ETF yet again). If majority of miners get burned because of a political decision, bitcoin will be passed over. We will go out like ETH went out with Slock.it, it wasn't a pretty thing. But ETH recovered, amazingly so. I don't think BTC would do as well. And some would call me a maximalist.

Why is taking advantage of an opportunity that is legal in the protocol sleazy? I think it is sleazy of you to disrespect what Bitcoin is, which is protocol that is the law. Bitcoin is not a democracy. Democracy is the problem we are trying to avoid with Bitcoin.

They are guilty of patent infringement. How much longer do you think they are going to be allowed to keep their mining equipment running if they are continuing to infringe?

The whales are busy on twitter, and by all accounts they rather disagree with you (besides Ver) ;-)

That is communism. If you disrespect Bitmain's right to act in the free market, and gang up together to launch an attack on Bitcoin's immutability, then the whales of Bitcoin will destroy your illegal fork and take your BTC from you. The protocol is the law. Bitcoin's protocol doesn't give a shit about patents. And China doesn't give a shit about Western patents. And socialists/collectivists are what Bitcoin is destroying. Do you know who the real whales of Bitcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857162.msg18474427#msg18474427) are?

I wrote:


The whales of Bitcoin will bankrupt those who mine on some democratic attempt to fork the protocol without unanimous support. I had already explained in the past days how the whales can do this (and profit from doing by taking BTC away from all those fools who go on the democratic fork).


Bitcoin's protocol doesn't give a shit about patents. And China doesn't respect Western patents either.

The largest whale of Bitcoin who has all the other significant whales in his WoT doesn't not do Twitter. You can find him at trilemma.com

He was also the DAO attacker.

And he thinks Gmaxwell is a duplicitous idiot and told him that he is a slave.

Y'all will be crying to moma.

Apparently, Jihan Wu has been covertly using some patented exploit called asicboost to gain 20%+ efficiency on his hardware that’s incompatible with SegWit. It all makes sense now. Hope he gets his ass sued off.

Shills care to chime in?

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html

maxell tends to say things that while perfectly true, are misleading...

2 bloody paragraphs and we still dont have a clue if this BIP would brick there hardware, or simply make their advantage useless.

1st off, do you guys even bother to read the Lies that G.Maxwell tells.
 

What I don't know is, can existing ASIC's switch over from the secret way to the obvious way? I don't see why not, but I'm not entirely sure.

you can't simple change the logic a ASIC runs, its burnt into the chip

also Gmax said in the email that should anyone start using the obvious way, then they will take steps to stop them too.

tl;dr for someone just learning of the controversy. Please correct if I make any factual errors.

Greg Maxwell discovered by reverse engineering that a Bitcoin ASIC manufacturer had implemented in hardware a covert, hard to detect version of the AsicBoost algorithm developed and patented by Timo Hanke. Proprietary software is needed to take advantage of the hardware boost and can result in an energy cost savings of up to 30% which is a huge advantage over competitors. Kyle Torpey claims that the ASIC manufacturer is Bitmain.

The covert version of AsicBoost is hard to detect but would explain the odd behaviour of mining empty blocks by Antpool. The improvement in energy use is countered by SegWit, which could explain why Bitmain has been so opposed to adoption of SegWit: it would neutralize the competitive advantage they have from their covert use of a patented technology.

The whole BU drama appears to be nothing but smoke to allow the manufacturer (Bitmain?) to enjoy an unfair advantage over the competition for as long as possible. Greg Maxwell is working on a BIP that would render the advantage useless. 

Part of the logic of ASICBoost is done on a separate computer's CPU. There is preprocessing.

maxell tends to say things that while perfectly true, are misleading...

2 bloody paragraphs and we still dont have a clue if this BIP would brick there hardware, or simply make their advantage useless.

Is it likely that your BIP would cripple the existing hardware with the covert boost? Could the covert boost be reconfigured with s/w upgrade to run in overt mode? Separately, if the boosting circuit can't be used anymore, is the entire ASIC chip useless or can the chip route around the boosting optimization without crippling efficiency worse than just losing the boost efficiency?

In other words, is your BIP proposing to cripple existing hardware?

Hilarious, from Reddit:

A list of all the BU supporter concocted conspiracies that turned out to all be true of Bitmain and BU.

They would never stop to think that there is now a provable motive to show that their poster child of BU support was doing so for so many of the reasons they have hated, derided, and absolutely lambasted Blockstream for.

So, Blockstream is holding back bitcoin scaling so they can profit from their centralized product?
• Nope, that was Bitmain

So, SegWit is just overly complex code to sneak in discounts for Blockstream's "products"?
• Nope... that was Bitmain realizing SegWit negated their already profitable discount and ruined their product.

So Blockstream wants the bitcoin market to be centralized through a few central companies and hubs?
• Nope, that was Bitmain that wanted to maintain centralization of mining hardware and hashing power through their company and hubs.

So, Blockstream is centralized development and wants everyone to run the code that makes their company valuable?
• Nope, it is Bitmain that supports any competing client, regardless of the effect on Bitcoin, in order to maintain the code that is specifically profitable for them and them alone.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63qaps/a_list_of_all_the_bu_supporter_concocted/

i bet most asic used today are Boosting, and possibly ignoring the pending-chain-patent

segwit coreBIP??? will break some 80% of hashing power.

Note the proposed BIP is not SegWit. It is a separate BIP to force the boosting to be overt. I have asked Gmaxwell a question:

There are two ways to do ASICBoost, the obvious way anyone can detect by looking at the blockchain, or the secret way.

The secret way doesn't work with segwit, it also causes miners to occasionally do strange things, like mine empty blocks. Antpool has been spotted doing these strange things, which implies they are currently doing this the secret way. They didn't want people to find out they were doing this.

The BIP gmaxwell proposes breaks the secret way from working. ASICboost can still work using the obvious way, and the obvious way works with segwit and doesn't do strange things.

What I don't know is, can existing ASIC's switch over from the secret way to the obvious way? I don't see why not, but I'm not entirely sure.

IMO the should just block the entire optimization. Patents in mining hardware create monopolies.

The AsicBoost method is based on a new way to process work items inside and outside of the Bitcoin mining ASIC.
It involves a new design of the SHA 256 hash­engines (inside the ASIC)
and an additional pre­processing step as part of the mining software (outside the ASIC). The
result is a performance improvement of up to 20% achieved through a reduction of gate count
on the silicon. The purpose of this paper is to present the idea behind the method and to
describe the information flow in implementations of AsicBoost
​

Hilarious, from Reddit:

A list of all the BU supporter concocted conspiracies that turned out to all be true of Bitmain and BU.

They would never stop to think that there is now a provable motive to show that their poster child of BU support was doing so for so many of the reasons they have hated, derided, and absolutely lambasted Blockstream for.

So, Blockstream is holding back bitcoin scaling so they can profit from their centralized product?
• Nope, that was Bitmain

So, SegWit is just overly complex code to sneak in discounts for Blockstream's "products"?
• Nope... that was Bitmain realizing SegWit negated their already profitable discount and ruined their product.

So Blockstream wants the bitcoin market to be centralized through a few central companies and hubs?
• Nope, that was Bitmain that wanted to maintain centralization of mining hardware and hashing power through their company and hubs.

So, Blockstream is centralized development and wants everyone to run the code that makes their company valuable?
• Nope, it is Bitmain that supports any competing client, regardless of the effect on Bitcoin, in order to maintain the code that is specifically profitable for them and them alone.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63qaps/a_list_of_all_the_bu_supporter_concocted/

Pretty disgusting to see all of this opposition being down to money being made but I had been thinking this and it's a known point that money is usually the point behind most arguements. In this case, that wonderful point stands true.

Will be interesting to see the public reaction of the patent holders of the ASICBOOST exploit - since G. Maxwell's post makes it clear they were made aware of the hardware exploit. If I was Jihan and company I'd stop screwing around deleting tweets (as reported on reddit) and be lawyering up right now.

That is far from certain also.


I think you better scurry off over to Litecoin where you belong. You are soon going to find out that Bitcoin is immutable. Satoshi (Nash) designed it that way. If you want your democratic communist/socialist clusterfuck, then you'll have it on Litecoin, except the Chinese are going to be your bosses. Well they already are aren't they.

The free market has to deal with patents. They are part of the landscape. Putting some humans in charge of deciding what is fair and not fair competition is turning Bitcoin into a government.

The intent of the protocol is the protocol, not your misinterpretations of what the game theory should be. If the protocol could be changed every time someone discovered a proprietary (secret or otherwise) advantage, then we've reduced Bitcoin's value to that of a bankrupt democracy. The protocol trusts the free market to work it out. Now I do happen to believe Satoshi's design is a winner-take-all, but making tweaks as you propose with this BIP will not fix the fundamental winner-take-all economics. So we might as well leave Bitcoin's protocol as it is, so it can be a known stable thing. Small blocks are fine. You can scale on Litecoin, we've worked to active SegWit for you there. The door is open, take it.

All you communists are going to be pushed onto to Litecoin with your fellow communist/fascist @gmaxwell, where you belong. Bitcoin will remain immutable and reliable protocol where the free market is free to compete in all its ugly but efficient glory.


You're hoping China will enforce a Western patent, which then means China's government can have a monopoly on covert boosting.

Jilian Wu has tried to defeat patents. I have to congratulate him on that aspect. Also he has defeated Blockstream's attempt to turn Bitcoin into a communist/socialist/experimental clusterfuck and made Bitcoin more immutable. The guy is becoming a hero.

I hope he wasn't stupid enough to really believe that BU was a sound direction forward. I think likely he was just bluffing. He apparently did try to prevent Litecoin from getting SegWit also, so not sure if this means he has a covert boosting for Scrypt also (which seems unlikely).

You know G.Maxwell Lies , Right?

Example : he claims it is a secret technique,

ASICS BOOST WHITEPAPER DATED MARCH 31, 2016
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf

Strange, it has been in a Whitepaper that it was inside the ASICS for over a year.
But G.Maxwell claims it was a secret, well LIARS do that.  :P

 8)

you got some balls man!  ;D

Having an exploit and using it is one thing. Especially when that thing is a sizeable advantage. But an entirely different thing to manipulate the environment, in order to maintain that advantage. You should evolve, not.stagnate everyone else.  I hate this about DC politics, hate to see it in BTC as well :(

your link looks fishy no hostname? whatever
They Patented this?
so only they can produce chips with this hack-like-optimization?
we knew about this for how long?


BU shill here.

this is the free market at work... if you want to mine less effectively go ahead and mine with your CPU.
Its ALMOST as if they created a new chip that simply mines bitcoin more effectively and all of you are like WELL THAT'S UNFAIR!

The method described in the paper is publicly detectable on the blockchain.

The method miners are using is not publicly detectable, it's secret.

I heard about this happening months ago, I've been trying to tell people:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/630ue1/someone_hacked_major_mining_operations_and_their/dfqyixr/?context=1

We can't get 95% to activate SegWit on Bitcoin without Bitmain's approval. They have every right to protect their patent's value. Those who think Bitcoiners will rally to fight him are socialists and communists, who deny capitalism, game theory, and economic reality.

We can't lower the 95% threshold for Bitcoin, because it will cause too much risk and wild price swings.

Also we shouldn't be putting such experimental shit on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is supposed to remain reliable.

Sorry Bitcoin will remain unmodified, as Satoshi (aka Nash) intended its equilibrium game theory to be a clusterfuck of politics insuring the immutability of the protocol which is what gives Bitcoin its trust and value.

1) Its patented and selectively available, in a competitive industry like mining it gives huge advantage and has lead to centralisation of mining and could lead to even more centralisation. Centralisation of mining is not good for Bitcoin you agree? We should act to prevent centralisation of mining right?

2) The miner that has benefited from centralisation is now blocking a hugely beneficial protocol upgrade and capacity increase that is for the benefit of all Bitcoin holders. By blocking this they are improving their own financial position at the expense of holders and centralising bitcoin to their benefit further.

Tell M$ that! :P

Apparently, Jihan Wu has been covertly using some patented exploit called asicboost to gain 20%+ efficiency on his hardware that’s incompatible with SegWit. It all makes sense now. Hope he gets his ass sued off.

And then I will go back to my programming cave and work on replacing PoW with something that isn't a winner-take-all.

2 issues

1) Its patented and selectively available, in a competitive industry like mining it gives huge advantage and has lead to centralisation of mining and could lead to even more centralisation. Centralisation of mining is not good for Bitcoin you agree? We should act to prevent centralisation of mining right?


2) The miner that has benefited from centralisation is now blocking a hugely beneficial protocol upgrade and capacity increase that is for the benefit of all Bitcoin holders. By blocking this they are improving their own financial position at the expense of holders and centralising bitcoin to their benefit further.

User activated soft fork will be the likely solution

The whales of Bitcoin will bankrupt those who mine on some democratic attempt to fork the protocol without unanimous support. I had already explained in the past days how the whales can do this (and profit from doing by taking BTC away from all those fools who go on the democratic fork).

...

The largest whale of Bitcoin who has all the other significant whales in his WoT doesn't not do Twitter. You can find him at trilemma.com

He was also the DAO attacker.

And he thinks Gmaxwell is a duplicitous idiot and told him that he is a slave.

Y'all will be crying to moma.

2) the claim that segwit breaks asicboosting appears to be a lie, there is a separate BIP that aims to break asicboosting.
clarification is needed.

Can we file this under the list of other things you say you will do, but never actually do?

Maybe the ASIC circuitry can be patented.  I would highly doubt that the mathematics of using a cryptographical scheme more cleverly, can be patented.  After all, this is just using a smarter way of scanning through the hash space.  It is a bit as if you could take a patent on the fact that you don't have to re-compute the Merkle hash each time you want to use a new header nonce.  That's all there is to it: not re-doing a computation that is not needed in a well-known cryptographic weakness in the Merkle-Damgard construction (extension attack).  The idea is that in the iteration of the hash compression function, you don't have to re-do the previous hash calculations if only the last block changes (or if you want to add an extra block, hence the name "extension attack").
Depending on the application, this extension attack is a problem or not.  For a normal hash application, it isn't a problem. But it can speed up attacks (and hence, proof of work).
This is well known and in several crypto intro books.
It is just one more "error" in the whole of bitcoin's cryptography.

Maybe the ASIC circuitry can be patented.  I would highly doubt that the mathematics of using a cryptographical scheme more cleverly, can be patented.

And by trying to block covert applications of technology, @gmaxwell is proposing to make it more difficult for others to compete with patents.

Yes, cryptography can be patented.

Yes, cryptography can be patented.

The United States has released the patent under a royalty-free license.

Yes, cryptography can be patented.

I know.  But you cannot patent a way to USE a public cryptographic scheme if that is well-known knowledge.  There's nothing special in using the publicly known extention attack of the Merkle-Damgard construction.  

https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=Is-My-US-Patent-Good-in-Other-Countries

US Patent does not mean crap in other countries and Vice-A-Versa.


 8)

Can you tell me some things of significance you've claimed to do and have actually done?

It is easy for you to talk some shit, but if we compare our performance records, it will get more interesting.

(and I bet you aren't battling Tuberculosis)

I can make a list of such very significant things I've claimed to do and have done, such as for example the claim that I had invested all my BTC into LTC at $6.50 and the result of nearly doubling my BTC value thus far, because I actually did what I was claiming and backed up my prediction that Bitcoin would not break out of a range until Litecoin gets SegWit and catches up in terms of the second hump of price in technology adoption.

Right but there are only a handful of foundries in the world that can make ASIC's, so it's not difficult to patent the tech in each jurisdiction. ASICBoost appears to be patented in most jurisdictions that have foundries, though each patent seems to be owned by a different company.

Hmm, Nope,

Show me a Patent # with a link.

The Patent Process is very expensive, even LTC dropped their patent a few years ago.
ASICBoost says Patent Pending, but no patent is on file , unless you have a link, the US Patent office did not list them at all.

 8)

So that's why Jihan is so oppose with the segwit concept.
His using this exploit for maximum effiency for his own BU network so that all the transactions fees will benefit him. Does he wants a centralized network?
Good game well played

I had started a topic that became a redundancy to this one so I've locked it. Will just join you guys here.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857167.0



So Jihan has oddly started coping with the latest revelations by posting repeated panda pictures.


https://twitter.com/JihanWu/status/849837547891023873

This is getting weird.

So we both agree that you will never do it?

Betting on a price and being right happens 50% of the time. It's as significant as flipping a coin.

DANGER!

But couldn't miners and then whales treat it as a HF and refuse to mine on blocks that implemented the BIP?

In that case, would a block height trigger not put us in danger of a HF war?

A miner majority doesn't guarantee that whales can't sell the majority hashrate fork and buy the minority hashrate fork, thus elevating the hashrate of the one they choose and killing the one they don't allow.

You can pretty much patent/copyright/trademark anything you want. Facebook has a trademark on the word "face": https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/23/patent-office-agrees-to-facebooks-face-trademark/

He is proposing making the covert way of doing this one optimization impossible, because the covert way of this optimization makes many kinds of network upgrades harder and causes miners to do strange things, like occasionally mine empty blocks, reorder txes or include never-seen-before txes.

He is not banning any kind of optimization.

Personally I think these optimizations should be made impossible to do, it's disengenous to call them efficiencies, more like shortcuts, as these kinds of optimizations do not contribute to the security of the network as they can be made impossible to do so that attackers cannot use them either.

I remember from my courses in intellectual property that there's a fundamental difference between the way US and for instance, European patent offices work ; even though the end result is the same.  The US patent office actually accepts almost any patent that is not blatantly inappropriate (in form or in content).  It works mainly as a kind of attorney, where they act the fact that you've deposited a patent.  But it has no legal standing, apart from the fact of being deposited.  It is only on the very first case in court that the validity of the patent is really tested.
European patent offices are much more restrictive in their attribution of a patent, and they essentially only accept a patent if they think that it has good chances to be considered valid the first time it is tested in court.  
Ultimately, all patents are only tested in court.  Only, a US one is totally open and can just as well be rejected as accepted by the judge as valid ; in principle that's the same in Europe, except that the patent office already looked in much more detail at it, and so it has much more chance to be upheld in court if ever the patent was granted.  Although, in the end, it is always the judge who decides.

So it is probably much easier to patent the trademark "Face" in the US than in Europe, but that doesn't mean that it will be upheld in court.

None of those issues are a problem.

Yes he is. He is banning the optimization of using secrecy to avoid patents and gain market share covertly.

If miners had been using this tech prior to the p2sh (multisig) softfork, then that softfork would not have been possible in it's current form.

The secret method can likely still be detected on the blockchain once more is understood about it. A patent holder would have little problem doing this.

Yes he is. He is banning the optimization of using secrecy to avoid patents and gain market share covertly. In short, he is blocking the free market. @gmaxwell has always believed the world would be better if he could be in charge of organizing it "better".

It is specifically designed to not cripple the hardware; at worst it would return it to normal efficiency. (And the BIP takes an effort to point out that it does not degrade the optimization in general, only in covert case that damages protocol extensions).

Since the specifics of any usage are secret its possible that there is some interaction that I don't know about. I'd be very interested in feedback otherwise.

probably fake and it doesn't make sense, if anyone use that boost it's like they are doing nothing, and the result would be the same earnig as before

also the only boost you can get is by adding or having better hardware, via software there is no optimization that can be done anymore on the mining scene

just look at this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1843662.0, cgminer for bitcoin asic, is as optimized as it get there is no room for anything

Once the camel gets his nose under the edge of tent, run because the tent is fucked.

Note someone disagrees with my assumption and I am asking for clarification:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfvz5g2/

Because if Bitmain can't do it covertly then if they either can't or can reconfigure via s/w to do it overtly then their customers (who have the same boost capable hardware) will either not be at an efficiency disadvantage or they demand that they receive the software to also be able to do overtly.

But what if Bitmain release the s/w for covert boosting anonymously, then their customers might fight the BIP, because their customers might reside in jurisdictions where the Western patent applies.

I wouldn't be surprised for them to turn on the covert version (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfwcswm/)!

A HF war seems possible if this BIP is activated on a flag day.

Read here:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575

if that was possible still the there is no advantage because everyone now would be able to use it, and if everyone has the 20% boost it's like they have only added more to the diff and earning will be the same as before

Now that the cat is out the bag...

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-a-mining-manufacturer-blocking-segwit-to-benefit-from-asicboost-cm770504

Jihan Wu is holding up Bitcoin development and trying to push it in a direction beneficial to him at the expense of the entire network.

AND of course the shills have no problem with it  ::)

BTW imnotback, I refuse to be relegated to Litecoin  ;D

To make an ASIC chip, you need a billion dollar facility. Bitcoin ASIC manufacturers design chips, get foundries to make them and put them on a PCB. There are only a handful of foundries in the world.

There are patents on ASICBoost in most countries that have foundries. No foundry will risk a lawsuit to make the chip for anyone that the patent holder doesn't give permission to. This gives patent holders exclusive rights to the tech, which  leads to the creation of monopolies.


The other issue, the main issue right now, is that the secret way of using ASICBoost prevents many network upgrades from working, including segwit. This gives miners incentives to oppose these upgrades.

The devs have not decided that they want to make these optimizations impossible. They have instead decided to make the secret way of using ASICBoost impossible. The normal way that shows up on the blockchain will still work. The economic majority will still need to support this change, along with a portion of miners, in order for it to work.

The whales who control the majority of BTC want small blocks and immutability. Thus I think they would say that the attack is the proposed BIP which seems to be clearly designed to play favorites in the free market and disable the free market from making the protocol immutable as Satoshi (Nash) apparently intended.

And another interesting comment:

When you put it this way it certainly makes sense why Bitmain went with the covert operation. But doesn't this add to the question of whether miners play the role of the dominant "voters" vs just signalling readiness?

Wouldn't the conflict of interest wherein a company like Bitmain may choose an upgrade or scaling solution based foremost on compatibility with their covert ASICBOOST (or whatever else may come) rather than what is best for the security and long term viability of Bitcoin as a whole, be bad for everyone?  Doesn't this make a case in favor of Users and coders acting as a balance check?

Disclaimer: I know what i may not know, so don't take my questions as a bold assertion of fact. Also, I am a little drunk.  

Dear god. Well, I hope someone figures it out and us little guys can upgrade our firmware and get to a level playing field... between this and Jihan's ridiculous tweets, Bitmain is trying real hard to destroy their brand.

Incorrect. The BIP would block use of the overt case in Western jurisdictions where the ASCIIBOOST patent applies. But the Chinese could continue to use the overt boost, because they have a patent already in China and afaik  China doesn't enforce Western patents. So you aren't normalizing. You are just making it impossible for the Western owners of the hardware to ever get a level playing field. If you attempt your crazy flag day activation, they'll probably anonymously release the covert s/w so then all the Western miners with their hardware will block your BIP and you'll have a HF war on your bloody hands. Great for your reputation.

meanwhile bitcoins segwit 31% block flagging is only temporary due to a hack expect it to drop back down below 30% in the next fortnight

https://twitter.com/f2pool_wangchun/status/848582740798611456

https://i.imgur.com/TbBF7PW.png

Apparently, Jihan Wu has been covertly using some patented exploit called asicboost to gain 20%+ efficiency on his hardware that’s incompatible with SegWit. It all makes sense now. Hope he gets his ass sued off.

Apparently, Jihan Wu

That is so shady of him, money above everything.
Good it was revealed, now we can push segwit :)

Is @gmaxwell about to cause a HF war on Bitcoin with his nonsense?


I can see the butthurt for Gregory and he is getting desperate because he knows soon he is going to be working for the Chinese doing work on Litecoin.

That is my point. And the whales have the most BTC and thus make the decision. And they have already told you that if you ever try to break Bitcoin's immutability, they will take your BTC. Please do bet the wrong way and lose your BTC. You don't remember your exchange with MP, the whale who controls a million BTC himself and has a WoT of the majority of the wealth in Bitcoin. Also you've been checkmated by Bitmain as they can just release the covert s/w to kill your BIP. You can safely assume MP was behind this cleverness. He was also the DAO attacker. Be careful. Luckily you can have SegWit on Litecoin, so your work won't be wasted. I worked very hard the past week to help SegWit get activated on Litecoin. You're welcome. Hope you do great things with Litecoin.

How exactly do any UASF proposals break the immutability of Bitcoin? Serious question. Ledger will remain unchanged, Bitcoins will remain unchanged. What am I missing here?

(I am asking someone to tell me like I am 5 years old without posting a wall of text and non-referenced/tagged links. We can continue talking about this stuff in the echo chamber of bitcointalk but it'd be nice to have some digestible evidence for the community at large)

Don't be so butthurt just because you were too incompetent to do your due diligence. Bitmain was actually helping to enforce immutability of the protocol (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857162.msg18476607#msg18476607), which is the holiest of pursuits for a Real Bitcoin supporter. Some of us understood what was going on and we tried to tell you all, but you ignored us. Bitmain is doing a great service teaching fools to get their head out of their arse. But instead of learning, you want to shoot the messenger so you can double down on your continued ignorance.

How exactly do any UASF proposals break the immutability of Bitcoin? Serious question. Ledger will remain unchanged, Bitcoins will remain unchanged. What am I missing here?

(I am asking someone to tell me like I am 5 years old without posting a wall of text and non-referenced/tagged links. We can continue talking about this stuff in the echo chamber of bitcointalk but it'd be nice to have some digestible evidence for the community at large)

He is proposing making the covert way of doing this one optimization impossible, because the covert way of this optimization makes many kinds of network upgrades harder and causes miners to do strange things, like occasionally mine empty blocks, reorder txes or include never-seen-before txes.

He is not banning any kind of optimization.

Personally I think these optimizations should be made impossible to do, it's disengenous to call them efficiencies, more like shortcuts, as these kinds of optimizations do not contribute to the security of the network as they can be made impossible to do so that attackers cannot use them either.

Network "upgrades" can still take place, and can be done via hardforks.

Most of the side effects of ASICBOOST are mostly harmless to the network (with the exception of empty blocks, which sometimes have a legitimate reason to be broadcast anyway).

If ASICBOOST were to start being used more broadly, then we could see a market for ASICs regarding the "BOOST" portion of the technology, which may make the network less vulnerable to malicious mining actors if manufacturers are diversified.

in short.
a block should only be rejected if it breaks the rules that consensus desire.

but if new banning mechanisms reject blocks because of WHO made the block. whereby the transaction data is acceptable, but rejected purely on biased/social reasons. then things start to go grey

whats next
lets say
Gmaxwell say "jihan is destroying coins by putting coins into a address.. so we must now increase the 21m coin cap" - even if no coins are destroyed
Gmaxwell say "jihan is going to split the network.. so we must now invoke our own split"- even if no split deadline  by non-core is made
Gmaxwell say "jihan could be using asicboost we need to destroy ASICS" - even if is btcc or f2pool that might be the ones using it

Immutability of the protocol of Bitcoin. If we can mutate the protocol, then Bitcoin is not a level playing field. It looses its value as a stable metric of value which beyond the influence of anybody.

The gaming of the mining will be met by other gaming the mining. That is just free market competition. The free market finds ways around patents.

But if we have King Blockstream acting as a government lord, then Bitcoin is as worthless as any other fiat.

@gmaxwell is protecting the "improvements" he wants to make to Bitcoin's protocol. He is saying he knows what is best and will modify that level playing field. He will not be allowed to do this. He has been banished to do his scaling work on Litecoin. None of you can change this outcome. Bitcoin will retain small blocks and so Litecoin will get much of the scaling. Hope Gregory takes it in stride and doesn't get too depressed.

ASICBOOST is a bullshit shortcut to make Jihan Wu more money at the expense of the network.

To keep using it will prevent useful upgrades to the protocol.

One man's greed should not be able to stand in the way of progress.

I think that it is an attack is a completely unambiguous technical description of what it is. If a signature is supposed to resist forgery against 2128 operations, but you find a way to do it with 280 instead, this is an attack.

Yup. Now everything is clear and now we know why everyone must buy LTC.


https://www.asicboost.com/patent

All ASIC manufacturing will be in China.

Sorry Bitcoin will never get SegWit nor LN, because Bitmain will block it on Bitcoin. And the whales of Bitcoin will always block larger blocks for the reasons I have explained else where.

But Bitmain is unable to block SegWit on Litecoin, even though they tried to.

Now we know why the other ASIC manufacturers are not against SegWit. They don't want to pay patent fees. Perhaps Baron Wu offered some deals to some others to get them to join his efforts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfwcki3/

so libsecp256k1 "efficiency gain" is also an attack because it improved efficiency by 5x
so segwit quadratic/linear 'fix' is an attack because it improved efficiency
so when something developed by blockstream is used to get more efficient, its ok. but not blockstream=attack
. hmmm i see..

might be easier for blockstreams partners to become more efficient instead of spitting out the dummy because they are not as efficient.

****
buy LTC? what value does LTC bring to the industry?

atleast tezos solves the hardfork problem

***
What is this garbage about ASICBOOST being an exploit?***

What is this garbage about ASICBOOST being an exploit? First off, the technique was patented by 2 Core devs in 2016. Second, it's simply a way to hash more efficiently.  If it really does break Segwit, well then fix Segwit, or trash it!

The crap about Bitmain breaking patent law - well maybe Gmaxwell broke the law when he reversed the ASIC?

I don't give a fuck if Wu loses all his business and money, if it's needed for Bitcon to thrive. One greedy chinese blocks development of so important technology that can change the world, that's no good.   :(

Apparently, Jihan Wu has been covertly using some patented exploit called asicboost to gain 20%+ efficiency on his hardware that’s incompatible with SegWit. It all makes sense now. Hope he gets his ass sued off.

Shills care to chime in?

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html

***The truth is that they do not give a penny about the acceptance or development bitcoin.

Hope he gets his ass sued off.

Clearly most people here are not happy with Satoshi's PoW system for one reason or another.  ;)

Now you want to judge people based on their politics, their competitive strategies, or what ever, because PoW didn't satisfy your opinion of what is fair or helpful or best for mankind or Bitcoin what ever agenda each person has. As if we are all going to agree on politics.  ::)

Let's get out the pitchforks and get it over with. Splattering blood all over the place and let the coach roaches feast on our corpses.

Clearly most people here are not happy with Satoshi's PoW system for one reason or another.  ;)

Now you want to judge people based on their politics, their competitive strategies, or what ever, because PoW didn't satisfy your opinion of what is fair or helpful or best for mankind or Bitcoin what ever agenda each person has. As if we are all going to agree on politics.  ::)

Let's get out the pitchforks and get it over with. Splattering blood all over the place and let the coach roaches feast on our corpses.

Roger Ver has been silent on this so far, I think. Or does anyone know if he responded to the news?

Probably has lawyers advising him at this point, and isn't their advice generally "Shut up"?

Let's say that somehow Jihan Wu has legal rights to this patent or corrupt Chinese courts allow him to get away with this. Does that mean everything is fine and dandy?

It leaves Wu in a position to monopolize bitcoin mining. He's been screwing not only the competition but also his own customers insofar as he hasn't shared his little trick while he runs everybody else into the ground. And mining empty blocks while goading followers (who are still in full evidence on this forum) to shriek about high fees. Bloody hypocrisy.

And then there have been all the BU posts on r/btc etc. about Core retarding progress, when it is now absolutely clear that Wu and Ver have been fighting progress (SW and LN) for all they are worth because it breaks their little monopoly scheme.

Immutability of the protocol of Bitcoin. If we can mutate the protocol, then Bitcoin is not a level playing field. It looses its value as a stable metric of value which beyond the influence of anybody.

The gaming of the mining will be met by other gaming the mining. That is just free market competition. The free market finds ways around patents.

But if we have King Blockstream acting as a government lord, then Bitcoin is as worthless as any other fiat.

@gmaxwell is protecting the "improvements" he wants to make to Bitcoin's protocol. He is saying he knows what is best and will modify that level playing field. He will not be allowed to do this. He has been banished to do his scaling work on Litecoin. None of you can change this outcome. Bitcoin will retain small blocks and so Litecoin will get much of the scaling. Hope Gregory takes it in stride and doesn't get too depressed.

Bitcoin is beyond the influence of any one person, but not beyond the influence of a >51% group.

Just remember you and I are not in that 51%.

None of us in this thread have any influence whatsoever on what will happen to the Bitcoin protocol.

The whales will decide.

The point of my prior msg was that you don't like Satoshi's PoW, because you prefer a democracy. You already have a democracy, it is called fiat. I think you guys are highly confused.

I am in that 51% we all are, the 51% i speak of is unmeasurable, it not 51% of hashing power, its not 51% of coins, its somthing intangible but i can FEEL i am a part of it.

At the most generative essence level, we are fighting because fungible money forces us to. It is a fundamental flaw in the nature of money. And I am proposing a solution (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1837136.msg18479266#msg18479266) to that.

Efficiency advantages should not be the grounds on which to condemn Bitmain, ...l

Ah that lie of democracy is hard to kill in humans. You want to believe you have a vote, but you do not. We never have.

That said, I fully side with Nick Szabo in what he said:

"Secret mining advantage is expected. The problem is incentive to oppose incompatible upgrades for secret reasons."

Just remove the roadblocks that hinder future improvement protocols (covert boost), and demand transparency in issues that revolve around bitcoin governance and the future of the protocol instead of hiding behind secret agendas.  

If Bitmain is already taking advantage of ASICboost covertly for their own mining, and they own the patent in their own jurisdiction (again, set morality/ethics of potential infringement aside), then what would prevent them from continuing to use ASICboost technology overtly and reap the same advantage/benefit they are already? If it's to protect the public opinion of their company, they need to take their head out of the sand. Everyone knows what they are about.

Bitmain is a hero. And should be exalted and praised for all the sneaky and clever things they have done in order to prevent you fools from being able to mutate the protocol.

says the guy that owns coins on a fork of bitcoin. (litecoin)

Network "upgrades" can still take place, and can be done via hardforks.

I sold all my LTC about an hour ago.

Now you attack the messager who explains the inviolable reality of the situation, because you don't like reality? So when the reality kicks you in the ass, will you still blame me for reality being reality.

As if I am the God who makes reality.

Bitmain is protecting the immutability of the protocol, This is simply false.  They are driven purely by self-interest, and understandably so. You are interpreting it as a campaign to protect the immutability of Bitcoin without any real evidence.

Any one who tries to change the protocol of Bitcoin is the attacker. And they will be bankrupted. That is your opinion, you are certainly entitled to it given your knowledge and experience in the matter.

You all have no vote. You think you do. But you don't. The whales will absolutely destroy any fork that significantly changes the protocol.
I am going to laughing when all you fools finally realize that the Bitcoin protocol will never change. Never.        You sound quite emotional about this, rational discussion will get you further than red-faced foot stomping.

You guys are so in love with democracy. It is pitiful. Just go use fiat then, if you want democracy.  You are making some big assumptions on this. I am not the enemy here, I don't have a side nor a dog in the fight.

Bitmain is a hero. And should be exalted and praised for all the sneaky and clever things they have done in order to prevent you fools from being able to mutate the protocol.  Bitmain is a capitalistic self-interested organization. They care about their bottom line, anything more than that is some extremist speculation at this point.

Because they will perhaps instead release the covert upgrade (perhaps release it anonymously) to all their hardware out in the wild and since those people can't use the overt version without breaking patent laws in their non-Chinese jurisdictions, then all those miners will be forced to use the covert version and defeat the overt BIP.

You seem adamant that they have positioned themselves this way in order to anonymously release the s/w for covert boosting to their customers in order to defeat the BIP collectively. That would effectively eliminate their efficiency advantage over the rest of the network once covert boosting went network-wide, costing them 10's of millions of dollars and drive the price of bitcoin down in relation (lowering competition's cost on production).  Whether they do as you say or do not will reveal their true motives (protecting immutability of bitcoin or strictly personal gain).  This really is the defining argument, if they do as you say, they truly are positioning themselves to protect the immutability of Bitcoin, as they will be giving up a SIGNIFICANT efficiency advantage to all of their competition.  If they instead switch to overt boosting, and retain their advantage strictly in-house -since patent laws prevent other jurisdictions from enacting it- it will be clear that their motives were strictly economical.  Until then how can we interpret their actions any further?

i'd say you have invested interest in bitcoin remain stagnant and litecoin gaining advantage

You can choose to follow me into LTC or be jealous.

The reason is because there are no changes going to happen to Bitcoin. Even if Bitmain didn't do what he did, the whales have been scheming for a long time to make sure that Blockstream is defeated.

I am beginning to feel the need to flee to the LTC lifeboat.  :-\

screw it lets repeat myself and add some more  to it

using gmaxweles own mindset

so libsecp256k1 "efficiency gain" is also an attack because it improved efficiency by 5x
so segwit quadratic/linear 'fix' is an attack because it improved efficiency
so fibre making its own tier ring network around the pools is an attack for propagation efficiency
so diluting full node count using prunning is an attack for making home computer efficiency
so diluting fullnodecount by having segwit nowitness mode is an attack
so making LN is an attack

.. at this point i can feel the rage of blockstreamists ready to pounce with their blockstream defender responses

so when something developed by blockstream is used to get more efficient, its ok. but its not blockstream sanctioned=attack
. hmmm i see..

might be easier for blockstreams partners to become more efficient instead of spitting out the dummy because they are not as efficient.

P.S if blockstream are so perfect and have the best codebase.. there should be no reason for so many 'fixes' via segwit because utopia should already have been coded in 2013

An ASIC moving from 56nm to 28nm is an efficiency gain, because it does more work (more operations) for less electricity.

ASICBoost doesn't do more operations for less electricity. ASICBoost lets the ASIC skip doing some of the work.

Agreed. I had previously written the same (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857162.msg18481124#msg18481124).

amnotback,

Why altcoiners even manifest their alt heads in brought daylight? Your thread is altcoin discussion, I'd rather not see your crap in Bitcoin themes

Incorrect. It does more PoW hashes for the same amount of electricity (and time). And it can be sold for a higher price (if enabled) because ... although there is the same amount of silicon, it costs more because it has more human intellectual capital in it.

An ASIC moving from 56nm to 28nm is an efficiency gain, because it does more work (more operations) for less electricity.

ASICBoost doesn't do more operations for less electricity. ASICBoost lets the ASIC skip doing some of the work. It does not contribute any additional security to the network. If everyone used it, it wouldn't make a difference, it would still require the same number of operations to attack the network prior to it existing.

This is why ASICBoost is a shortcut, not an efficiency gain.

The same argument could have been framed around the move to ASIC from FPGA

It is going to funny watch all you Bitcoin maximalists freakout when you can't transact on Bitcoin any more and you can't change Bitcoin and when you try to fork Bitcoin, the whales are going to kill your fork and take all your BTC. I love it. You get what you deserve for being an arrogant fool.

An ASIC moving from 56nm to 28nm is an efficiency gain, because it does more work (more operations) for less electricity.

ASICBoost doesn't do more operations for less electricity. ASICBoost lets the ASIC skip doing some of the work. It does not contribute any additional security to the network. If everyone used it, it wouldn't make a difference, it would still require the same number of operations to attack the network prior to it existing.

This is why ASICBoost is a shortcut, not an efficiency gain, it does not contribute any additional security.

No because that made the network more secure, as it required more work to attack it, ASICBoost doesn't do that.

don't you know that all alts exist with only goal to prey for weak hands' bitcoins

What you really want is to be meaningful. And there is a solution for that:

No because that made the network more secure, as it required more work to attack it, ASICBoost doesn't do that.

Lowering node size makes for lower power consumption from same hashrate. (or higher hashrate for given power consumption)

ASICboost makes for lower power consumption from same hashrate.  (or higher hashrate for given power consumption)

Is this incorrect?

Why do the details of how this is accomplished matter (other than in hindering protocol updates) if it does not create vulnerabilities in the PoW process?

On the contrary.  Attackers having ASICS could now attack a network that cannot be secured any more with FPGA, while before, it could.  PoW is about the expected relationship of the waste of *economic resources* an attacker needs to spend to reach a difficulty level, versus the waste of economic resources that those wanting to secure the network, are ready to spend.  Any improvement in efficiency of this conversion of economic waste into difficulty works both ways: in the hands of attackers, it makes the chain more vulnerable ; in the hands of good guys, it makes the chain more secure.

you're all missing the point

its not about if its a cheat or not

the problem with ASICboost, is that miners using it can't handle most upgrades, and they won't even care about loosing boosting capabilities if ALL miners were using it, since at that point we'd have a level playing field to being with ( every boosting ) and a level playing field after an upgrade ( no one can boost anymore )

And intellectual property expended is one of the capital costs "wasted" (expended) on security.

Bitmain has huge sunk costs invested in ASICs. They have in their interests to protect Bitcoin.

Bitmain is protecting Bitcoin from those who want to change it from "protocol is law" to "governance is law".

Blockstream thinks they own the protocol. So they had to be spanked and sent to an altcoin.

Bitmain depends on being on the same side as the whales. If Bitmain tried to HF with BU, they would commit suicide, because whales would be forced to fight them.

Immutability of the protocol, is not on the table, it never was.

That is your opinion.  Mine is that they are protecting their investment in mining capital, which without their improvement could not have been economically beneficial (as witnessed by ex-KNC statement)

Bitmain depends on being on the same side as the whales. If Bitmain tried to HF with BU, they would commit suicide, because whales would be forced to fight them.

BU was merely a diversionary tactic to get more of Bitmain's miners spread out into the wild, so that they can destroy Blockstream (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857162.msg18480693#msg18480693).

That is your opinion.  Mine is that they are protecting their investment in mining capital, which without their improvement could not have been economically beneficial (as witnessed by ex-KNC statement)

Why do the details of how this is accomplished matter (other than in hindering protocol updates) if it does not create vulnerabilities in the PoW process?

this solution is patented and makes competing with them impossible.

Once you add up of the facts, you'll realize I am correct (@dinofelis preceded me with this opinion and now I have identified the technical specifics of the factual support):

Not if you use the covert (unprovable) way.

ps: i hope one day you'll be able to brag that you told everyone to buy ltc @ 6.5$ like you did for btc @ 10$ in january 2013!

An ASIC moving from 56nm to 28nm is an efficiency gain, because it does more work (more operations) for less electricity.

ASICBoost doesn't do more operations for less electricity. ASICBoost lets the ASIC skip doing some of the work. It does not contribute any additional security to the network. If everyone used it, it wouldn't make a difference, it would still require the same number of operations to attack the network prior to it existing.

This is why ASICBoost is a shortcut, not an efficiency gain, it does not contribute any additional security.

@iamnotback: if btc acts as a settlement network and most of us aren't allowed to transact on it anymore because fees are too high, doesn't it also mean btc price will also be super high? how high do you figure?

if it makes bitmain solve blocks a little faster. then difficulty rises to compensate..
think about it!

Right, but the higher difficulty has the same security as the pre-ASICBoost difficulty...... This is not a problem BTW as it's not less security. It's why this is a shortcut, not efficiency gain.

If only one firm has ASICBoost, that gives them a monopoly, which is a real problem. But the devs are not willing to prevent that from happening right now.

The big issue, the main issue, is that covert ASICboost breaks many kinds of network upgrades, NOT JUST SEGWIT AND NOT JUST SOFTFORKS, but it does break segwit. This gives miners an incentive to oppose these changes. So covert ASICboost needs to be made impossible. antminers support overt ASICBoost, so they can still boost away if they want.

secondly. by selling to competitors then its not an unfair advantage of having asic boost, because the competitors have it tooo..
think about it!

Right, but the higher difficulty has the same security as the pre-ASICBoost difficulty...... This is not a problem BTW as it's not less security. It's why this is a shortcut, not efficiency gain.

If only one firm has ASICBoost, that gives them a monopoly, which is a real problem. But the devs are not willing to prevent that from happening right now as preventing that would brick all ASICBoosted chips.

The big issue, the main issue, is that covert ASICboost breaks many kinds of network upgrades, NOT JUST SEGWIT AND NOT JUST SOFTFORKS AS MANY PEOPLE ARE SPEWING, but it does break segwit. This gives miners an incentive to oppose these changes. So covert ASICboost needs to be made impossible. antminers support overt ASICBoost, so they can still boost away if they want.

These can still be detected on the blockchain.

Not provably (with current protocol).

BIP that forced overt, would force everyone to pay patents fees to Blockstream's Sergio Lamier.

no it wouldn't. Bitmain owns the patent in China. It would force people in China to pay it to Bitmain, but most likely people will just infringe on their patent (if they can convince a foundry to do that) as IP law in china is real messed up.

Sergio Lerner patented this in US and Bitmain patented this in Chain?

Yes. Other companies patented it in other countries that have foundries too (allegedly).

I agree with you as far as ASIC secrets should not be patentable. 

Core is still liars/obstructionists though.

We can't get 95% to activate SegWit on Bitcoin without Bitmain's approval. They have every right to protect their patent's value. Those who think Bitcoiners will rally to fight him are socialists and communists, who deny capitalism, game theory, and economic reality.

We can't lower the 95% threshold for Bitcoin, because it will cause too much risk and wild price swings.

Also we shouldn't be putting such experimental shit on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is supposed to remain reliable.

Sorry Bitcoin will remain unmodified, as Satoshi (aka Nash) intended its equilibrium game theory to be a clusterfuck of politics insuring the immutability of the protocol which is what gives Bitcoin its trust and value.

excuses you might think of for this.... people will still remember them for the "cheater" a$$holes they are. Why would anyone in their right

mind stand behind these cheaters?..... Paid shilling

Bitcoin is decentralised and should not be dictated by anyone to their agenda/advantage. It it driven by consensus and not miners.

Not true. Why does BU set it at 75%? (according to reports.)

Bitcoin needs to evolve according the Satoshi's whitepaper and any improvement must be welcomed.

Bitcoin has already been modified to increase reliability, security, etc.

I want bigger blocks.  I wanted them 2 years ago.

Roger Ver has been silent on this so far, I think. Or does anyone know if he responded to the news?

Not the case, many upgrades are incompatible with secret ASICBoosting. HF segwit with some small changes is compatible however.

If it were the case that ASICBoost makes all SF's impossible (doesn't seem like it TBH), having to do a HF for every upgrade would be the most painful thing ever. Take a look at how many SF there have been in the past 2 years.

My understanding from the paper is that the proposed segwit BIP will render obsolete only the covert version of ASICboost, not the overt portion.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfvvhvn/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfvzklr/

I don't fully understand how blocking the covert portion of ASICboost would affect mining performance on pre-existing hardware containing this feature. Whether you simply lose the increased efficiency (all S9's increase power consumption by 30%?) or reduces hashrate by 30%, or renders it obsolete altogether.

Either way, it is unlikely for Bitmain to side with any proposal that will effectively neuter their hardware and cost them 10's or more millions of dollars per year, and disrupt sales.  Especially if they are unable to openly admit that such technology is in fact in their ASIC's due to patent infringementedit: BMT has patent on technology in China.  Whether this is legitimate or ethical I have no idea.  So where does that leave us, omit their hashrate while taking block signalling into account and force a hardfork, or concede that you cannot circumvent a player like themselves from the table and find a compromise?

I don't particularly like SFs anyway.

It is also my understanding there is a fairly small subset of SFs that are not compatible with ASICBOOST, and SFs could be tailored to ASICBOOST.

No because that made the network more secure, as it required more work to attack it, ASICBoost doesn't do that.

Apparently, Jihan Wu has been covertly using some patented exploit called asicboost to gain 20%+ efficiency on his hardware that’s incompatible with SegWit. It all makes sense now. Hope he gets his ass sued off.

Shills care to chime in?

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html

thats why i said the patent should be unenforceable?   but lets be fair, if you blame Jihan for using legal measures to try to gain an advantage (patenting), why does Blockstream have sidechain patents and why are they employing the most influencial core devs who restrict blocksize while promoting off chain scaling, i mean, come on...

i dont think it matters much if its soft or hard, from the sound of it any change to the header is going to break ASICBOOST

Lol. Your two sentences are mutual conflicting.

Bitcoin is consensus.

I don't particularly like SFs anyway.

It is also my understanding there is a fairly small subset of SFs that are not compatible with ASICBOOST, and SFs could be tailored to ASICBOOST.

Right, so just do a HF that provides access to whatever new "features" and don't change the header -- or allow extra information at the end of the header, which is all that is necessary for ASICBOOST (per my understanding)

its unclear tho, because the FUD going around is that ASICBOOST miners simply cant do pretty much any upgrades

would anyone of these patents hold up in court...

My understanding messing with the merkle root breaks covert ASIBoosting. It does not matter if it is a SF or HF. This makes many network upgrades impossible, there is a list floating around of changes that are outright incompatible with covert ASISBoosting as they change the merkle root in a way that breaks this. Segwit however, can be done as a HF without messing with the merkel root.

doesn't segwit make a complete second merkle tree inorder to be backward compatible??

ahhh the technical details are to vague , and i'm not sure we can trust core to give us a straight answer.

can we implement segwit and all these other SF's without breaking asicboost?

lets ask the BU devs!

How many patents are pooed all over every single day in China? It must be tens or hundreds of thousands. Perhaps some deep pockets might be prepared to assert it but it's probably a dead idea before it even got going.

There is no point to increasing the blocksize, because it isn't a scaling solution. There isn't any size of block that scales.

You've got to scale off chain. But Blockstream is not going to be allowed to mutate Bitcoin's protocol.

How many patents are pooed all over every single day in China? It must be tens or hundreds of thousands. Perhaps some deep pockets might be prepared to assert it but it's probably a dead idea before it even got going.

If those miners tried instead to do overt boost, they would have to pay patent fees because asicboost is patented outside of China by Blockstream's Sergio Lerner.

That's where you're wrong.

On-chain is the on-ramp to off-chain, and off-chain solutions are not a suitable for every use-case anyway. On-chain scaling can be achieved, by changing the use of network resources such that those resources are used at a lower rate (Schnorr sigs decreased size compared to the current ECDSA sigs, and improved tx encoding being the primary possibilities IMO, but no doubt more are possible)

Technically it's patent-pending...

But afaik, still accrue liability for patent fees once the patent has been filed, unless it is invalidated in court.

Why would non-China miners risk the liability if they have the option to mine covertly and avoid provable culpability.

Even China miners prefer to mine covertly, so there can't be any pressure put on China.

I think the main issue with patents is if there is a patent, you can't make the chips, very few foundries will take your business if there is a patent in their country

Also the thing with the covert ASIC design, I am fairly certain foundries can't detect whether the ASIC allows it or not. I think it is possible to put all the key logic in a separate CPU controller. So if I am correct on that assumption, then the foundries can't block it and they can't be sued for patent infringement either.

Bitmain being in China, can't be sued. It is a very clever separation-of-concerns ploy they did. I am impressed.

The compression techniques you mention are also not scaling. Scaling is when there is no limitation of transaction rate. Doing that on chain with Satoshi's PoW is impossible. It is possible to do on chain with an entirely different system.

I agree off chain payment channels are highly limited in what they can do, except for the case of trusting centralized hubs in which it isn't really Bitcoin any more and is private fractional reserve banking. The centralized hubs private banking might actually scale out for some things well. I'd rather see everything on chain, but we are talking about what is available today, not vaporware.

Schnorr sigs are available today, it exists. The schema for improving tx encoding efficiency was produced by Core devs recently, it exists.

You're basically master of waffling nonsense.

word-salad.

combination of nonsense buzzwords

It doesn't matter how convoluted, obfuscated and labyrinthine your lies are, lies do not cut it in the information age.

Here's something else.

If Bitmain sold miners to other pools without telling them how to implement their exploit (or tell them about it at all) and THEN blocked upgrades to Bitcoin to protect their advantage, they would've intentionally ripped off their customers.

trying to assume that asics were hard programmed to actively attack segwit

Now 100% Core.

The problem that most are having is not necessarily the use of AsicBoost, but the covert use of it while supporting improvements that are only compatible with said AsicBoost.

Mr. Szabo chimes in:

"Secret mining advantage is expected. The problem is incentive to oppose incompatible upgrades for secret reasons."

https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/849800229696045058

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/dfw1ewe/?context=3

How many patents are pooed all over every single day in China? It must be tens or hundreds of thousands. Perhaps some deep pockets might be prepared to assert it but it's probably a dead idea before it even got going.

And one of the replies was "Optimising algorithm implementation is not an exploit. SHA256 is quantum-resistant. Never figured you for propagandist."

If anything I see this as a strike against Segwit - how the f*ck did Segwit manage to change bitcoin mining parameters to such a degree that they broke an ASIC that does almost nothing other than hashing!?

And now Segwit is "needed for Bitcoin to thrive"?! LOL it's needed for Lightning to thrive, and for Bitcoin to become a settlement layer.

Statement from Bitmain (Jihan Wu):

https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-smear-campaigns/

Short summary:

• We have asicboost designed in our chips but we don’t use it.
• We can legally use asicboost if we want in China.
• If you think we use it, prove that we do.

smells fishy...

but maybe HE can prove what he is saying by running that BIP that kills boosting.

This just gets more hilarious as time goes on  :D

We have very firm belief that the block size of Bitcoin will be increased. It is the Bitcoin that our co-founders signed up for, it is the roadmap designed by Satoshi and it is the destiny of Bitcoin. We will protect it at any cost.

Larger blocks will not be allowed.


You'll never get them.

Emin Gun Sirer weighed in on this:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/04/05/bitcoin-drama-response/ (http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/04/05/bitcoin-drama-response/)

TLDR;
None of gmaxwell's claims have been independently confirmed, and there are countless patents on ASIC manufacturing that confer far more than 30% speed boost, therefore rendering the FUD about centralization moot.

This just gets more hilarious as time goes on  :D

So we are suppose to believe that Bitmain has this 20-30% efficiency boost and they are NOT using it? That seems kind of hard to believe. I wonder if someone can prove that they are? In any event, interesting times these days. I can not see how anyone can predict the outcome of the scaling debate, it seems like it can go in any direction. Who knows what the next bombshell will bring and where that will lead.

Wrong, Bitmain has confirmed it has asicboost in their chips.

Don't forget:




I thought Bitmain sided with you and the whales?

Emin Gun Sirer weighed in on this:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/04/05/bitcoin-drama-response/ (http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/04/05/bitcoin-drama-response/)

If ASICBOOST was actually used, we'd see ample evidence on the blockchain. This evidence would be in the form of transactions that are picked according to an algorithm that shuffles the transactions to create a sought collision, instead of sorting them by fee-per-byte.

You're right, I only read it once.  I'll spend the night studying Bitmain's statement, to see where they conclusively state that "Larger blocks will not be allowed."  I'll get back to you in the AM, prof.

Bitmain has continuously been advocating for increasing the Bitcoin block size. Increasing the block size will make the collisions even more difficult, damaging the potential benefits of Bitmain’s gain from the private ASICBOOST assumed by Maxwell’s proposal. The conspiracy theories do not add up here.

We have very firm belief that the block size of Bitcoin will be increased. It is the Bitcoin that our co-founders signed up for, it is the roadmap designed by Satoshi and it is the destiny of Bitcoin. We will protect it at any cost..

Empty blocks indicate ASICBOOST usage, though they can also arise out of datacenter connectivity issues or from headers-first mining. Counter to popular opinion, empty blocks help bury other blocks and thus provide security. (Thanks to the ever insightful Dan Robinson of Chain for bringing this up!)

First item is to understand why Blockstream refused to accept 2MB blocks along with SegWit.

I haven't actually looked to see their official stated reason, but I can guess that it must be because they know they each time they want to "upgrade" the protocol, they need have some carrot and stick that forces the market to want their upgrade. So keeping blocksize very constrained is necessary so that Blockstream remains in control of the protocol.

In other words, Blockstream can't accept 2MB blocks, because they know their business model depends on them being in control of the protocol of Bitcoin. Also factor in that maybe Bitmain has told them behind the curtain that Bitmain will block all their future protocol changes after the 2MB+SegWit.

Am I correct so far?

First item is to understand why Blockstream refused to accept 2MB blocks along with SegWit.

I haven't actually looked to see their official stated reason, but I can guess that it must be because they know they each time they want to "upgrade" the protocol, they need have some carrot and stick that forces the market to want their upgrade. So keeping blocksize very constrained is necessary so that Blockstream remains in control of the protocol.

In other words, Blockstream can't accept 2MB blocks, because they know their business model depends on them being in control of the protocol of Bitcoin. Also factor in that maybe Bitmain has told them behind the curtain that Bitmain will block all their future protocol changes after the 2MB+SegWit. Blockstream probably couldn't repeat that in public, because Bitmain would deny it and accuse Blockstream of fabricating lies.

Am I correct so far?

They just have a secret channel where they organize their PR and trolling campaigns.

It could be a matter of opinion. Or maybe you have perceived one actors tactical methods used in pursuit of their strategic goals.

So he has been selling cheated miners which give you more hashpower if you don't signal for Segwit, is that it? And everyones's being activating BU because segwit is giving them -%haspower? And that's why BU support were rising over time...

He needs some serious punishment if this shit is true. I mean, JAIL like punishment btw. What a fuckng clown.

You're incompetent and should STFU. Now you are conflating the consensus of transaction ordering, with modifications to the protocol.

Bitcoin's protocol game theory is political clusterfuck, by design to protect the immutability of the protocol.

Give it a rest because obviously you being paid by ??? to attack anyone for ??? reasons.

Even with the transaction-reodering ASICBOOST trick (which we don't have any proof they are doing), they could still upgrade to a new transaction format like FlexTrans or BUIP037. Or even Extension blocks.

The thing that theoretically screws it up is sticking the WTXID Merkle root into the coinbase transaction.

::sigh::
So they admit to having it in their hardware, expected-- this is impossible to deny, and people on Reddit were already uncovering it for themselves. They insist they have a right to use it. The admit to using it on testnet. They deny using it on mainnet "for the good of Bitcoin"-- but where was the "good of bitcoin" when they insisted that they would keep making empty blocks because the protocol allows it?
I expected the denial, the unfortunate thing about covert boosting is that its very difficult to prove its actual except by what it blocks. The proposal I made was specifically constructed with it in mind. If they aren't using the covert boost then they should vigorously support the proposal because it would prevent others from using it and gaining an advantage over them with it (while disrupting protocol improvements).
What I didn't expect was the sheer level of adhominen and personal attack, and the attacks against the Bitcoin project. It makes it hard to respond to, because obviously I reject and refute those points-- but they're also a distraction from points that actually matter: like how they've completely mischaracterized the proposal.

Nobody pays me dude.  I am sincere. And you're still acting like an idiot.

im laughing

hardware that has existed for 2 years has good efficiency boosts..

software that has only been publicly ready 6 months and yet to be in active use...

and gmaxwell thinks the hardware is the problem.

gmaxwell where were you in 2011 , you would probably want to nuke ATI for being more efficient then Geforce. and then blame ATI for some software bug your team didnt pick up on that wasnt ATI compatible.

calling ATI an exploiter/attacker.. rather than admit the software cant do its job right if people want to use ATI GPU's back then
serious snobbery from Gmaxwell

if segwit cant do its job because of a asi effiency boost.. then re-do segwit, while at it, make the code user dynamic to not need dev's to be king overlords

I looked at your post history, if you're not paid to shill why the hell have you been posting non-stop since the asicboost scandal with your anti-core/blockstream propaganda?

Give me a break dude  ::)

You shills crack me up  :D

More anti-core/blockstream bullshit  ::)

You shills crack me up  :D

iamnotback is also the Nashian topic de-railer called traincarwreck. amongst many other names he uses

Statement from Bitmain (Jihan Wu):

https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-smear-campaigns/

Short summary:

• We have asicboost designed in our chips but we don’t use it.
• We can legally use asicboost if we want in China.
• If you think we use it, prove that we do.

if your only rebuttle is to call someone a shill. may i suggest you just make a bot that justs pastes the word "shill" into your posts
or.
take off your defender hat, think logically, have a cup of coffee allow tim for your thought to gather and think of a suitable reply that has some content/substance that can actually refute some stuff.

otherwise your wasting your own time even replying just to shout "shill"

FTFY

i perfer to remain an amartue shill so i can compete in the olympics

OMG, is making a bot to reply a thing?  I would totally do that to you shills if I knew how LOL

not knowing how just reveals your lack of coding talent. thus you have just gone and made yourself redundant to any topic about code discussions

have a nice day though

  BU has lost all credibility at this point.
 

Efficiency advantages should not be the grounds on which to condemn Bitmain, nor should ethics or morality, these were not a part of the founding principles of Bitcoin.  It is written in the rules that PoW mining is a free market as has been said, and is subject to the rules of a free market. It's also disingenuous to claim that shortcuts in the PoW process are an exploit, if they still accomplish the same goal with the same level of security. At most they could be considered an oversight in the design of Merkle–Damgård construction, but in that case they are evenly open to said optimization (patents do not apply to this argument).  The empty block argument is also null, it does not effectively hurt the bitcoin ecosystem, it is simply a byproduct of a process improvement.  That said, I fully side with Nick Szabo in what he said:

"Secret mining advantage is expected. The problem is incentive to oppose incompatible upgrades for secret reasons."

That is it.  No condemnation of shady Chinese backdoor deals about hardware improvements, or how they potentially de-frauded their customers by selling them hardware that was neutered in order to hinder competition and hide their own advantages.  None of that has any bearing on this conversation (though ti deserves its own).  Just remove the roadblocks that hinder future improvement protocols (covert boost), and demand transparency in issues that revolve around bitcoin governance and the future of the protocol instead of hiding behind secret agendas. 

If Bitmain is already taking advantage of ASICboost covertly for their own mining, and they own the patent in their own jurisdiction (again, set morality/ethics of potential infringement aside), then what would prevent them from continuing to use ASICboost technology overtly and reap the same advantage/benefit they are already? If it's to protect the public opinion of their company, they need to take their head out of the sand. Everyone knows what they are about.

First item is to understand why Blockstream refused to accept 2MB blocks along with SegWit.

First item is to understand why Blockstream refused to accept 2MB blocks along with SegWit.
 

they would not be pushing for the max block size to be lowered

Definitely funniest lie I've seen today! Does he think any sane person would believe this. LOL

Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought the fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

It is not that they feel that 1MB is the optimal number (if the max block size was currently 2MB, they would not be pushing for the max block size to be lowered to 1MB), and it is not that they are against 2MB blocks in itself, it is that they are against any max block size increase ever.

Finally--at some point the capacity increases from the above may not
be enough.  Delivery on relay improvements, segwit fraud proofs, dynamic
block size controls, and other advances in technology will reduce the risk
and therefore controversy around moderate block size increase proposals
(such as 2/4/8 rescaled to respect segwit's increase). Bitcoin will
be able to move forward with these increases when improvements and
understanding render their risks widely acceptable relative to the
risks of not deploying them. In Bitcoin Core we should keep patches
ready to implement them as the need and the will arises, to keep the
basic software engineering from being the limiting factor.

  Personally, my biggest concern about large block sizes is, to put simply: Datacenters instead of home users running full nodes.
 

I looked at your post history, if you're not paid to shill why the hell have you been posting non-stop since the asicboost scandal with your anti-core/blockstream propaganda?

Satoshi died on the NJ turnpike recently (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1663070.msg18482002#msg18482002). I am not joking.

iamnotback is also anti BU

Clearly though Blockstream has planned to hijack the protocol with SegWit. And the whales have stopped it.

Larger blocks will not be allowed.


You'll never get them.

Scaling is impossible with larger blocks, because the orphan rate is an exponential function of the block size. BU is idiotic shit. Xthin has a game theory will enables larger hashrate and better connectivity miners to attack lesser miners.

Exponential shit does not scale. If you don't know this, then you don't even know basics of computer science.

There is no point to increasing the blocksize, because it isn't a scaling solution. There isn't any size of block that scales. You've got to scale off chain. But Blockstream is not going to be allowed to mutate Bitcoin's protocol.

That is the reality, whether you like it or not.

Personally, my biggest concern about large block sizes is, to put simply: Datacenters instead of home users running full nodes.

From the core roadmap https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.html


They want improvement and security BEFORE raising the blocksize, nowhere does it say 1mb forever.

First item is to understand why Blockstream refused to accept 2MB blocks along with SegWit.

I haven't actually looked to see their official stated reason, but I can guess that it must be because they know they each time they want to "upgrade" the protocol, they need have some carrot and stick that forces the market to want their upgrade. So keeping blocksize very constrained is necessary so that Blockstream remains in control of the protocol.

In other words, Blockstream can't accept 2MB blocks, because they know their business model depends on them being in control of the protocol of Bitcoin. Also factor in that maybe Bitmain has told them behind the curtain that Bitmain will block all their future protocol changes after the 2MB+SegWit. Blockstream probably couldn't repeat that in public, because Bitmain would deny it and accuse Blockstream of fabricating lies.

Am I correct so far?

If you had the chance to get your most significant work approved (SegWit) and only had to accept a 2MB block, why wouldn't you do it?

It makes absolutely no sense. Can you think of any other rational explanation than the one I offered?

Even if Blockstream had an opinion that they don't like 2MB blocks, they wouldn't block their own work over such a small quibble. There has to be a more significant reason they refuse 2MB blocks with SegWit. I offered my reason. Is there any possible other reason that makes any sense?

(note I am so very sleepy, so we may have to continue this after I sleep)

Presuming I am correct that Bitmain knows that Blockstream will never accept a 2MB+SegWit proposal, then you can then re-analyze their statement knowing full well that he knows there will never be big blocks.

Furthermore Bitmain is challenging the community to make AsicBoost patent licensing accessible to everyone. And to enable AsicBoost in the most optimum way. But Bitmain already stated that larger blocks make AsicBoost less efficient.

And remember some "hacker" (which is actually Bitmain but nobody can prove it) can release the covert upgrade so all Bitmain's [existing customers who own] miners on the planet could increase their efficiency and side-step the patent (and also they would be against large blocks).

So Bitmain is total BS about wanting larger blocks. Bitmain is trying to destroy Blockstream by never allowing them to get any protocol changes at all. That is why they proposed the 2MB+SegWit at HongKong. And that is why @Gmaxwell is wanting to block the covert AsicBoost.

But Bitmain has checkmated Blockstream. Think it out. I am too sleepy to explain all the detailed reasoning.

I also think that giving every asicboost for free means that no one will have the advantage, and so now one will stand to lose anything by going with bigger blocks.

Why would Bitmain not want a larger max block size? Larger blocks will ultimately lead to additional total tx fees (and in turn higher overall block rewards), both of which will lead to greater profitability of those who run their equipment, which would theoretically lead to higher market prices for their equipment, and most importantly, more profits for them.

but Bitmain said he would want to work with other patent holders to null and void the patents and make it available to everyone.

his reasoning was, its better for bitcoin's security, to have an extra 20% hashpower over all, then drop hashing power by disabling his (potential) advantage.

Bitmain urges the community to make the patent licensing available (https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-smear-campaigns/) to all (not their patent but the patents held by others on asicboost) so it appears Bitmain is the good guys. Yet in reality, Bitmain knows that the patent licensing won't be forthcoming because you can't organize such a thing given there are multiple patent holders in different jurisdictions. Thus Bitmain knows the covert upgrade is the poison pill that blocks any thing Blockstream would attempt to do. Blockstream is now frantic and desperate.

not really. it rings a tad false to me, and seems highly speculative, but its a workable theory...

Thats already a reality. Vast majority of nodes are currently run in datacenters.

The 300GB/mo bandwidth it takes to run a node is a lot for any home users connection. Even unmetered internet has a "fair usage policy", which is an undisclosed bandwidth limit that the ISP can change at any time. If your running a node at home and have multiple people streaming HD videos, you're going to get a call from your ISP about your "excessive bandwidth usage" regardless of what your limit is.

luke JR wants 0.5mb blocks.. just to correct you a little

From the core roadmap https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.html


They want improvement and security BEFORE raising the blocksize, nowhere does it say 1mb forever.

It is not unusual to see fairly long periods of nearly 1MB blocks in 2015 and technology has improved in the last two years. The max block size has been in place for ~7 years, and technology has drastically improved since then.

The 300GB/mo bandwidth it takes to run a node is a lot for any home users connection.

Even unmetered internet has a "fair usage policy", which is an undisclosed bandwidth limit that the ISP can change at any time. If your running a node at home and have multiple people streaming HD videos, you're going to get a call from your ISP about your "excessive bandwidth usage" regardless of what your limit is.

Internet connection speeds have not improved. In the US, the average internet connection speed has been dropping recently due to increased loads due to HD video streaming etc and not enough investment in new infrastructure to counter this.

Having an exploit and using it is one thing. Especially when that thing is a sizeable advantage. But an entirely different thing to manipulate the environment, in order to maintain that advantage. You should evolve, not.stagnate everyone else.  I hate this about DC politics, hate to see it in BTC as well :(

I am not quite sure where you are getting this number.

144 MB per day times 30 days is 4.32 GB per month if all you download is blocks and do not accept incoming connections.  

If you counted the price of both the additional required phone line and the ISP service, it would cost ~$50 for a 28.8k connection about 20 years ago. Using round numbers, the unit cost of internet speeds (download) have decreased by a factor of ~5000x over the past 20 years.

I also think that giving every asicboost for free means that no one will have the advantage, and so now one will stand to lose anything by going with bigger blocks.

Internet connection speeds have not improved. In the US, the average internet connection speed has been dropping recently due to increased loads due to HD video streaming etc and not enough investment in new infrastructure to counter this.

A big cause of this was many years ago ISP's set up coaxial networks instead of fibre to try and save money, and it's just not economical to rip out the coaxial and replace it with fibre now. Another cause is that in many areas people only have the choice of one ISP. That ISP has a monopoly and has no incentive to invest in a better network as there is no competition. Government regulations prevent new ISP's from setting up in the area.

Try the last couple of years.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/1/2990469/average-global-internet-speed-drop-us

i know people in china, russia, africa, australia urkraine, canada india and thailand that all are NOT crying about the internet.

it currently costs ~$100/month for 300 mbs of internet download speed, and 30 mbs upload speed.

Not everybody has Bitmain's hardware. Not everybody is willing to risk the liability of running a (potentially) patented thing covertly. It is just simple economics. Miners are forced to support what gives them an economic advantage.

Why would Bitmain not want a larger max block size? Larger blocks will ultimately lead to additional total tx fees (and in turn higher overall block rewards), both of which will lead to greater profitability of those who run their equipment, which would theoretically lead to higher market prices for their equipment, and most importantly, more profits for them.

so get it out of your head that 2mb is bad. thats a very old reddit script

but Bitmain said he would want to work with other patent holders to null and void the patents and make it available to everyone.

his reasoning was, its better for bitcoin's security, to have an extra 20% hashpower over all, then drop hashing power by disabling his (potential) advantage.

Bitmain urges the community to make the patent licensing available (https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-smear-campaigns/) to all (not their patent but the patents held by others on asicboost) so it appears Bitmain is the good guys. Yet in reality, Bitmain knows that the patent licensing won't be forthcoming because you can't organize such a thing given there are multiple patent holders in different jurisdictions. Thus Bitmain knows the covert upgrade is the poison pill that blocks any thing Blockstream would attempt to do. Blockstream is now frantic and desperate.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/1/2990469/average-global-internet-speed-drop-us

Whats actually funny is that the internet speeds in developing countries are actually increasing, because they are just now investing in their internet infrastructure, while 1st world countries are stuck with old outdated networks.


Just a note, thats not MB, megabytes, thats Mb, megabits. A common misconception people have. There are 8 bits in a byte. So its 8x less in MB, in reality you can expect it to be around 10x less, as thats the 'maximum' which the ISP will never go over.

I don't think 2MB is bad. 2MB is safe enough I reckon. I think that Bitcoin 'unlimited' is bad, or actually limited to 72MB because thats the maximum the code currently supports.

you dont even know how dynamics works.
hint
its wont be 72mb over night.
seriously, stop reading reddit, its filling you with FUD and out dated data..
yep still laughing at you pulling out the 2011 stats as your rebuttle

https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#minimum-requirements

Plus my own experience with running a node.

Yes, you can limit this a lot by setting everything to minimum, but then you're not really running a full node.


Bandwidth from newly announced blocks is not the only consumption of bandwidth resources. You need to account for:

Transaction relay Accounted for in my 8 peer, receive unconfirmed transactions calculation
New nodes syncing old blocks True, I am not sure how to best measure this
Upload and download bandwidth is not uniform. True, however my 8 peer, receive unconfirmed transactions calculation would be upload, which would be the greater consumer between upload/download
The impact of SPV wallets Each SPV wallet should count towards my 8 connections
Frequency and magnitude of worst-case-scenarios and attacks True, however I don't think these happen frequently, especially not every month
The impact of orphan blocks and reorgs. This should be minimal, maybe 1% increase at best, especially considering that SPV mining reduces orphans/reorgs
The impact of stale blocks. see my response to orphans/reorgs
Blocks may arrive before the last one is received or processed. see my response to orphans/reorgs
Bitcoin does not use bandwidth in a uniform manner, tends to be in spikes. The spikes are due to downloading the entire block once one is found/relayed. This is accounted for in my calculations
Bandwidth availability can vary depending on general ISP congestion. I am not sure how this affects total download/upload amounts when running a node
Transaction backlog and mempool requirements. the minrelayfee should be set to an amount so that you will not relay transactions that are unlikely to get confirmed semi-quickly(maybe 72 blocks) -- I don't see the benefit to relaying these types of transactions for most home users
The processing load of transactions is not identical for every transaction. each transaction that is confirmed still counts against the 1MB per 10 minutes limit. Also this is more a CPU issue, not a bandwidth issue
The impact of block propagation techniques such as invertible bloom lookup tables.
The impact of other bitcoin features, such as replace-by-fee. This is not a feature I support, and as such any node I run will not relay RBF transactions -- I acknowledge others may disagree
The number of peers connected to the node. I understand that it is fairly common for home users to limit their connections to 8
The acceptable latency of blocks when 'catching up' in a series of good luck from miners. This is more of an internet speed issue, not a total bandwidth per month issue as the long term average block time should be about 10 minutes
The effect of pruning nodes vs full nodes. Yes, running a full node might result in more new nodes asking your node for old blocks if there are a lot of pruning nodes
Latency of multiple global hops may become nontrivial. Latency is likely to improve over time, not deteriorate, with the exception of the possibility of a fairly major war breaking out
Other consumers of bandwidth

Try the last 1-2 years.

Can anyone find a flaw in my analysis?

not really. it rings a tad false to me, and seems highly speculative, but its a workable theory...

1. Because killing Blockstream and removing their ability to destroy Bitmain (and Bitcoin) by controlling the protocol is more important.

2. Because SegWit can be added on Litecoin where they can still earn all those fees, and Blockstream will be impotent.

It all about removing the coup d'etat of Blockstream.

In that way I like Bitmain, but as I said the Chinese are fucking with us and making it a fucking mess. I really blame PoW, because PoW makes all of this shit possible.

Can there be a better way? Maybe not. Maybe yes. I have ideas I need to go work on.

So are there are any objections to my analysis of this fucking mess?

It doesn't look like there is very much data available for this measurement. It looks like (http://drpeering.net/FAQ/What-are-the-historical-transit-pricing-trends.php) unit costs of internet declined by ~1/3 in 2015 and 40% in 2014 though. I would be surprised to see those levels of price declines to entirely reverse in the span of two years.

So sorry for the random interjection here but I have regularly observed what seems to be a purely ideological debate against *between blockstream and the presumption that centralized miners are either good or bad actors so.....

Ugh, do I really need to care about centralized hubs in the future? If the market decides they are great and people want to go through them to benefit from the blockchain, why should I care? As long as I can still conduct peer to peer transactions from my own wallet, what skin is it off my back?

yes, these are generalizations, call me devil's advocate.

Yea it looks like things have improved in the US since the last time I researched this. But the article I linked from 2011 shows that internet speeds do not follow moore's law and can drop significantly in the course of a few months.

Some anecdotal evidence, my internet speed has dropped from 250mb to 50mb over the past 4-5 years, when it works, due to the 15+ year old coaxial network being congested. I do not have the choice of switching to a different ISP and my ISP has no incentive to do anything about it as there is no competition. Better technology does not mean end users will have access to it.

If you can't come up with an alternative ECONOMICALLY plausible theory, then you'll know mine isn't speculative.

You can't just believe what people say. You have to analyze if what they say makes any sense or not.