Bitcoin Forum

Seems to be that Eligius is back under the new name ocean.
I wonder why Luke Dashjr. did not open up a thread about this.
 
source:
www.ocean.xyz

I had a look at the pool, I found some interesting claims, such as


Isn't this how mining pools have always been from the get-go? what has changed? why does Luke think it's a recent development of some kind? in fact, before the Chinese government banned mining, 2-3 Chinese entities or perhaps people had well over 50% of the hashrate, furthermore, at that point, not only were mining pools centralized  -- the physical location of the hashrate origin was pretty damn centralized (which is still the case now, except it moved from China to the U.S).


The first part is correct, although I doubt that at any point in the past, we had anything more than 11 large pools, however, the second part, 2 largest can't have 100% success in censorship, the two largest pools today own 55% of the hashrate, to make it easier to understand, let's just say the mine half the blocks out there, and thus their censorship success rate would be 0%, on average, every other block is found by someone else (not antpool and foundry), so there is always a 50% that you may need to wait for the 2 blocks to get 1 confirmation.

Obviously, it gets worse the more these two grow, even worse if they take in the 3rd largest pool with them, so ya, more pools will always help, however, I just dislike the sales pitch.

Now back to the pool itself, I see that this pool is not PPS, and thus, I don't see it going anywhere far, I sure can't be teaching someone Luke about Bitcoin mining history, but history shows that anything non-PPS is very likely to fail.

It's on his twitter
https://twitter.com/ocean_mining/status/1729527427615932493

Personally I don't think it's gong to do well, but that is just me. More and more people want FPPS or similar.
And using other methods until they get larger is going to be a tough sell.

But, he might get traction. Time will tell.

-Dave

This is very interesting. Already the pool has more than 100 Pentahash per second judging by their own dashboard.
https://mempool.space/mining puts current network hashrate at 479.8 EH/s. A good start, hopefully it'll grow bigger.

One question I'm interested in asking, given Mr Luke's thoughts on Ordinals, will this pool mine BRC-20 and Ordinal NFT transactions in its blocks?

I see it at 118.2 Ph/s from the top of the 1st page and from the list of miners.
Also, looking here https://ocean.xyz/blocktemplate you can see the TXs that they plan to put into a block if they find one. So you can check the individual TXs to see if they have BRC-20 in them.

-Dave

By the way, you all should definitely give a watch to the presentation of OCEAN:
https://youtu.be/_PH5sKrkzZY?t=14527

The panel and discussion about the pool start around the 4 hours and 2 minutes mark in the video.
Jack Dorsey, Luke Dashjr and OCEAN's Bitcoin Mechanic spoke and detailed what makes the pool unique.

Well the first 4 hours also had a few interesting parts but it's not directly related to the pool. I can try summarizing since I watched the whole thing.
Basically barefoot mining has put on an old hydro plant to put mining hardware under 100% clean energy. So a partner/supporter of the initiative is putting his own hashrate towards the pool, we can assume that's the bulk of the current hashrate that was switched on recently.

Jack Dorsey who also spoke, he seems to be a major backer of this project financially (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/ocean-jack-dorsey-funds-bitcoin-mining-pool).

Then there was a lot of talk about how to get "pleb miners" on board in order to decentralize mining. Basically the best idea centered around integrating chips as heating elements to utilize them efficiently and desirable on a home environment. To make that feasible though more durable and more open chip technology must be made available. Jack Dorsey also revealed that his company Square has an ASIC research unit!?

Predictably there was quite a bit of talk about how much Ordinals suck. Although at no point in this presentation was it explicitly stated that the pool will be filtering Ordinal transactions out of mined blocks.

You should really watch the video and read the contents of the website for stuff about the pool in order to better understand technicalities around the pool and why it's superior and helps in decentralization.

Although I must mention one downside. Looking at the website's FAQ section, the minimum payout is 0.01048576. For so much talk about pleb miners, a payout threshold that high is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it would be technically feasible to decrease to a lower minimum dynamically. Hopefully that'll get looked into in the pool's future.

Sort of, they bought the tech from intel when intel figured they could not make any money with it:

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/28/jack-dorseys-block-snaps-up-bitcoin-mining-chip-as-intel-winds-down-production/



Yeah, that is high. Back of the napkin math is about 60 days at 100 TH/s so someone with only a single miner would have to wait a while to get paid.

That gets into opportunity costs, are you better off loosing whatever % with a FPPS pool then waiting on your BTC
Obviously, everyone will be different, but it's something to think about.

-Dave

Any rational pool would mine any thing marked as valid by the code that most other nodes operate, it does not matter what there inside, as long as it is valid and pays more -- should be in.

Any pool that does not do that will lose many miners, either for paying less than average or for censorship.

According to that tweet https://twitter.com/checksum0/status/1730004768410493183 they are probably censoring high fee transactions ( probably ordinals and such ) .
Oh , the irony , the guys that are crying out loud about censorship are those censoring others . What a joke ( didn't expect something else from Luke and Jack tbh :D ) .
Good luck to the miners that decide to join them and burn money .
I would like to see if other pools will reject their block in case ocean pool hits the jackpot . Interesting times ahead .

Just as I along with many others suspected.
Mr. Luke has repeatedly called Ordinals an attack on bitcoin and had developed his bitcoin client to run without broadcasting them as a node.
I think it's good that such choice exists though, because so far all other pools were mining ordinals without consulting their miners at all.

Interestingly though, OCEAN has mentioned that miners will be able to propose their own block templates, being one of the first to do so.
So miners on OCEAN could easily propose their own block templates including ordinals no problem if they wanted.

Luke has censored / blacklisted before when he tried to block some addresses related to BTC casinos.
Luke has 51% attacked coins he did not like: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56675.260
And lets not forget he was hacked earlier this year: https://gizmodo.com/bitcoin-price-hack-217-btc-og-developer-luke-dashjr-1849944799

So not a pool I would mine at, but whatever, people will always mine where they want.

-Dave

Looks like ocean got their first block https://twitter.com/ocean_mining/status/1730524828757901470 .
It includes some ordinals but still down close to 0.30 btc in fees compared to what they could get .

OCEAN's block included 1571 inscriptions (Ordinal NFT images and BRC-20 tokens alike):
https://ordinals.com/block/000000000000000000009ef7ac2c30976bc7e05c2cdab10e5a5de7efd96492a7

So... These rumors about censorship weren't true at all!?
One has to wonder why these rumors weren't addressed in a more direct manner but hey... Good do know it was just FUD. The pool is only active for a few days.
Sooner than later it should allow for public access to its block template API and people will be able to bring it under all the scrutiny they want with even more transparency.

Until they are proven censorship would probably not a good idea as the blowback would be enormous.

With that being said, look at the post I made last night about LukeJR and some of the things Block / Square / Dorsey have done:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5341906.0

If they can show they are a reliable pool and are behaving well they will get people to mine there, but and this is just my opinion, there are a lot of trust issues to overcome 1st.

-Dave

As I understand it, there are quite a few bitcoin users that don't particularly like Ordinals and the effects they're having on bitcoin's blockchain, especially fees. So Luke isn't alone in that.
Surely plenty of miners would probably be on board in creating block templates that would not include Ordinal transactions.

But the thing with mining is that it has nothing to do with individual (person) support. It's all in the hashpower.
OCEAN has promised create infrastructure which would allow their miners to create their own block templates. And so far AFAIK there wasn't a pool that actually gave miners the opportunity to say no to mining ordinals. Once that update is released on the pool I guess there wouldn't be any reason for there to be any blowback. It would be purely the choice of miners to exclude ordinals from the transactions they confirm with their own hash.

         
Ok, so their next block is going to be half full with the payments from their previous block!
But wait..


So, still custodial if you don't have 0.2% of the pool hashrate, so ~350TH/s right now.
Can't wait to see how this decentralized stuff will work with Ocean reaching 100exa and having a few tens of thousands of small miners.  ;D
Luke turning into a big blocker will be looking at a duck screaming for a lifebuoy.

Yes, that was also a point I recogniced when I looked after the stats.
Looks like that only the big miners need to be decentralised on that pool.

Ya, good luck finding miners who would leave money on the table.



It is still custodial no matter what, the custodianship only ends when you receive your payouts to your wallet, and it starts again right after the first hash you submit, so the pool will always be custodial of something, be it your hashrate or the actually sats.

Currently, the pool would find a single block every 12 days, so in terms of custodianship, it's worse than all PPS pools, and it doesn't matter how much hashrate it gets, any PPS pool could outpace it in that regard, a PPS pool could start paying out every time they find a block or even every hour for that matter. so what gives?

You would expect that these devs would have created a truly decentralized mining pool, but no, just make another ordinary pool as if more pools will solve the problem, what happens when Luke gets a warning from the authorities and is forced to censor certain transactions, is he going to fight the government over it? creating a single point of failure is not going to solve censorship.

How sure are you that Ordinal transactions make sense to include in blocks economically?
Did you know that Ordinal transactions can get a ~75% fee discount from exploiting Taproot OP codes and SegWit?

Example: https://mempool.space/tx/77e996de08c48ed282a7b8bc88ca199712a15fa68babb10a0b3ee760674cf21b

So maybe it could be in a miners best interest to actually not mine any of them as they take too much space in blocks and get big discounts.

That's job negotiation protocol of stratum V2 .
Miners creating their own templates will create a profitability disadvantage for the pool and the miners . If each user of ocean starts creating his own template that means that they will start working on it . So , the pool is not pointing it's entire hashrate for producing a block . It's essentially solo mining re introduced .
The reason pools were created is to increase/stabilize profitability . I don't see any reason miners will start using it in massive scale .
I'd like to hear what other people think .

Not just Ordinal, every type of transaction could use/abuse/exploit those upgrades to make their transactions smaller in size and thus save on fees, but that does not matter, what matters is sat/Vbyte, so to answer this question


I am not sure, and it does not matter, the transactions that pay the most per the space they use -- make perfect sense to be included, you could argue that Ordinals are spam and should be banned on a protocol/node level, but that would be a different topic to discuss, the majority of miners would want to make the most profit regardless.

I am sure many miners would settle with lower payouts using a pool that does not censor certain transactions (like ditching F2pool for another pool), but settling with less profit due to the censorship of Ordinals isn't going to work, you may get a few miners to side with you on that regard, but I wouldn't be so optimistic, of course, this would also apply to pools that would for example do the opposite, like ban non-Ordinals transactions that pay more just to accept Ordinals that pay less.

This is funny.

Luke was the first to advocate censorship on a large scale by adding blacklisting of casino addresses - and it also randomly got other addresses.
He put it in the debian PPA and the code even stated it was blacklisting.
So anyone running the debian/ubuntu/whatever release of bitcoin back then was censoring.
After many complaints on the debian dev site it was finally removed.


As stated above, it's core bitcoin's calculation to maximise the block reward.
If you have some baseless conspiracy that bitcoin core code is crap and can't do that - go complain to them.

Yes, anyone can utilize fee discounts, but who's actually going to ABUSE them?
Someone transaction BTC from address A to address B, or someone uploading entire JPEGs on the blockchain?
That's the thing that matters on this issue. ::)

It does not, this is what I have been trying to explain all along, this is the mining section where most people are miners who pay bills and invest a lot of money, the majority could not care less if you are transacting btc to buy coffee or to upload some stupid worthless Jpeg.

So miners can't fix this issue because they do not view it as an issue, but rather as a solution to the low income, if you post the same thing in the bitcoin discussion board -- the answers will differ, but again, if this is actually an issue, it needs to addressed before the core devs, miners simply do not care.

And BTW, i do not have a crystal ball but if any pool starts to actually ban Ordinals and start to pay less than other pools that do not, said pool will go broke, i so want to be proven wrong if one of the pools is willing to launch this experiment.

I feel like you're not answering my main question. Maybe I'm dumb, so let me dumb things down (for my own understanding).

On the point of Ordinals making sense to include in blocks:
I presented a transaction where an ordinal gets a 75% discount.

I was then told anyone can utilize these discounts.

But it's only ordinals that utilize the discounts to that extreme by essentially tricking the system.

---

So tell me in the end, with these massive discounts, does it make more sense financially for a miner to actually include an ordinal inscription or to include non-incription transacitons that don't abuse fee discount mechanisms?

How does it get a 75% discount?

All transactions that are not '1' addresses get it - that's what core decided long ago
(for no real good reason other than removal of the witness data made them somewhat smaller)

Though the reality actually is that '1' addresses pay 4 times as much as '3' and 'bc' addresses.
Not the other way around.

Again, core getblocktemplate (used for mining) maximises your block fees gained, on what is available, your supposed discount is irrelevant.

How do some ordinals transactions get a 75% discount?
Idk, maybe you can look at the tx I linked, hover over the green text saying "SegWit" on mempool.space and verify it yourself to tell me as also. (77e996de08c48ed282a7b8bc88ca199712a15fa68babb10a0b3ee760674cf21b)

Do non-ordinal transactions regardless of address type get the same discount? Probably not as they don't throw as much data in the blockhain.

The dynamic that is created here is that you get a transaction that is considered to be paying optimal fees, while actually grossly underpaying for the space it takes in a block.

Look at the stats for the provided transaction:

‎Size          19.99 kB
Virtual size ‎5.07 kvB

75% discount means the one making the inscription actually pays for what can count as an acceptable optimal fee transaction on the Virtual size instead of the actual space it takes.

OK but what is your argument? here is another random non-Ordinal transaction from the same block the got some good "discount"


had it been non-Segwit, it would have doubled the fees.

Why does it look like the transaction you linked tricked the pool in anyway? it did not, it used segwit+taproot to minimize it's virtual size, it paid 40 sat / Vbyte which was the median fee rate for that block, so he did not outsmart the mining pool, he paid a nice 207,778 sats on a transaction that consumed ‎19.99 kB on the desk, the fee/space checks out, nobody cares if that was a discount, the core code allows them to do so -- so they do it.

So based on this logic, if you ask miners to block those transactions, then they would also block segwit transactions, because without segwit, transactions would take more space and thus increase miners profit, so they would censor P2TR, P2WPKH and force everyone else to back to P2PKH.

Miners do not oppose any protocol upgrades that make transacting on the blockchain cheaper, so nobody should expect them to oppose transactions that pay more, miners would take every sat they can off the table.

Also, keep in mind that most pools use the default getblocktemplate made by core devs, the way it operates is rather simple, it sorts transactions by sat/byte, something like


There is no "transaction type" or "who" is transferring "what", it's all about sats.

I'm not saying that miners should block anything.
Actually, they can do whatever the hell they want.
And that's what has been happening anyway.
In fact there's very little about what we can do about other people's hash power anyway.

But the argument about including ordinals in blocks because it makes the most economic sense doesn't seem to actually make too much sense from what I see.
At a time of high transaction congestion, a block template that made space by excluding ordinals to replace them with many more smaller transactions, would likely get similar or perhaps even higher fee rewards.
So all I'm saying is that in the end it doesn't make much of a difference economically probably.
But I'm not the one that came up with this argument actually, so the burden of proof lies with the accuser.

This is not true, which is what I have been trying to explain to you, I literally gave you the code logic that does the sorting, the number of transactions is irrelevant, it is all about how much they pay per space unit.

You are probably better off with ignoring virtual size, just think of the block as 1MB in size ( that is what it actually is on the desk anyway).

If 1000 transactions each of the size of 1kb and all are paying 1 sat per kb, the total fee reward for the miner would be 1000 sat, if someone else has a transaction size of 1kb and decides to pay 1000 sat per kb, one of those 1000 1 sat guys will need to waite, if comes a guy with a transaction size of 1MB and is paying 1001 sat per kb all those 1 sat guys + the 1000 sat guy will have to wait till the next block.

So it is all about bitcoin spent per space unit ( be it byte or Vbyte), so every transaction that gets included always makes economical sense.

... this on and on going 'but but but what about the discount' ...

It's quite clear from the start that there's no special discount for 'ordinal' transactions, they pay as much per space as any other non '1' output transaction.
Bitcoin tries over and over and over again to maximise the fees received (there's a loop that tries a lot to do it) and ensure you get the most per block.
There is no special 'ordinal' transaction discount.

An 'ordinal' transaction is just a transaction, like any other.
The problem with 'ordinal' transactions is that they use a flaw in taproot to make very large transactions of whatever data you like.
If you pay a lot (per space) to put it in a block, it will win out against transactions that pay less (per space) to be in the block, if there's enough space left over after filling it with all the higher paying transactions.
In fact since they are so large, and due to the above, they may not make it into a block and there may be a bunch of lower paying transactions in the block with total space less than the 'ordinal' transaction.

I highly suggest he go read the code rather than believe some random person who told him about some 'special' ordinal discount.

Or I could point directly to where I made the mistake of thinking there was an issue and a number of people jumped at me pointing out I was wrong :D
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437464.msg61863960#msg61863960

No it doesn't mean that!
To have a 75% discount he would need to pay less per sat/vb than the others by 75%, which is not happening.

People sending 1 billion BTC in a tx don't have a discount on those that send half a coin.
People that cram 100 t-shirts in their luggage don't have a discount over the guy who puts in their already inflated sex doll.


Hihi, please to elaborate how
-replacing a tx of 5kvb that pays 50sat/vb would fetch more than 10 tx of 0.5kwb paying 45sat/vb
-also, how in name of god would a tx that pays more in fees not be already included in a block before of an ordinal that pays less per sat/vb


I'm pretty sure that the guys who told us we need to keep nodes requirement as small as possible to run on every computer as cheaply as possible are going to start saying we need each bitcoiner to host some 10kw $20k machines in their bedroom for the sake of decentralization. 
Everything around the forum lately is just popcorn material! Oh, sorry, fudgeee! ;D

Are we not counting transaction fee discounts as discounts now? :-X
I thought it was pretty standard bitcoin functionality by now, enough for most users to understand how they work.

For taking more block space, these transactions pay less fees (by the actual space). They unit is called vBytes because the fee is accounted in VIRTUAL bytes.
So, if that's not a discount, what should we rename this as?

oh boy, tell me about it, I just had a 3-4 day long debate on repution last week (in case anyone missed me here) :D. I hate debates.


You could call them whatever you want, it doesn't change the answer to your initial and main question which was/ still is




Ok, we have to stop here, at this point, I can't help but think that there is a major misunderstanding at the core of this topic, you are confusing two things, block weight and block size.

When Segwit/Block weight came into existing (bip 141 IIRC), the introduction of a new "way" to measure segwit transaction was introduced, and it's a simple formula;


In plain English, the segwit upgrade added another 3MB which could only be facilitated by witness data, so a non-segiwt block will still be capped by 1MB, so in theory a 100% segwit block could have the size of 4MB which is 4vM or 4M weigh units.

Nowadays, the VAST majority of transactions are segwit, which means, almost everyone using BTC is getting what you call a "discount", so everyone is using/abusing those 3MB added by the core devs.

So now we need to think of a Bitcoin block as 2 disks in 1, something like a bus where the bus cabin has a max capacity of 1000KG worth of people, and 3000KG in the luggage compartment, of course, people are free to cut their hands and put them in the compartment to spend less on those limited 1000KG,

Now if someone is pretty fat and weighs 1000KG and isn't willing to cut any of that fat to put it in the luggage compartment to allow other people to ride with him, that person will need to pay for the 1000KG + the 3000KG luggage compartment.

I like this analogy so let me keep going;

if that fat ass offers the bus driver 1k for the ride but then come 50 people who weigh 80KG each (4000KG in total) and are willing to cut 3000KG of their body parts to send it to the luggage compartment, each of them offered to pay only $40, the bus driver will then collect $2000, so he would pick these people first because he makes an extra $1000 in profit.

The bus driver here does not care about how the bus is going to be filled, he just runs a simple code that picks the best combination of people that would give him the highest reward for the trip, it could be 5 fat people or 500 apes who could squeeze themselves in and pay more per KG, he just couldn't give a flying fudge.

Well , looks like finally ocean established it's position on filtering transactions .

"We are happy to announce testing of Bitcoin Knots v25.1 has completed successfully, and is now deployed to production. Among other improvements, this upgrade fixes this long-standing vulnerability exploited by modern spammers. As a result, our blocks will now include many more real transactions and help to bring an end to the DoS attack being performed on the #Bitcoin network."

https://twitter.com/ocean_mining/status/1732207450114162855?s=20

Luke and the team essentially said that the first two blocks including inscriptions was due to not having the filtering fully in place, but it is the intention nevertheless. So the next block will probably be ok without inscriptions if all goes according to the team's plan.

On the plus side, Luke's comments on the matter have been gathering a lot of positive attention. Many people seem to be looking forward for the next Bitcoin Core release to block filter Ordinals entirely after Luke said it's possible:

https://i.ibb.co/sHHRBzf/Screenshot-20231206-195123.png
Via https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1732204937466032285

Look at all these retweets and likes this tweet has.

Yep , Luke knows better what's the network's purpose and that's just financial transactions , ability only to send and receive money . I wonder why satoshi in the whitepaper referenced those two whitepapers if bitcoin was solely intented for financial transactions and nothing else .
 
[3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no 2, pages 99-111, 1991.
[4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping," In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/12/06/NpbIb.md.png (https://www.talkimg.com/image/NpbIb)

Not to mention his genesis block message , making him the first "spammer" ( according to your definition of spam ) .

Really liked the last sentence of yours , twitter likes and retweets that shows how much approved Luke's tweet is . I have to admit , i lol'd hard . Thanks for that laugh .

PS . Anyone know if Luke finally ate a cat ? Or a dog ?  https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1169615995742380035 . One the most sane people you should follow :D
      

I'm honestly surprised you know every gossip in the Bitcoin town. :)

How about all the negative attention and the people who are looking forward to disabling the filtering of Ordinals if it becomes the default setting for new core versions, I am sure you will find many of those in the same place you found all the positive attention.

Also, I would like to know the reason behind moving your other thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5475867.msg63265113#msg63265113) to archive, I believe it was an insertings discussion that should have stayed on the mining board.

Nothing happens without consequence. It will be very interesting to see how things turn out an if the people following ordinals try to fin workarounds if Core happens to follow this path.

The answer is more boring that one might guess. I wear a signature on my profile which the pool admins might not like so I decided to voluntarily delete my thread to allow them to post their thread on their own, if they want.
I think they will do it sooner than later. Luke is one of the first users of this forum so he knows how to deal with that stuff.  

Indeed, many incredible events are going to unfold just in time for the halving, though I wonder why on Ocean's main page it says "Message from Luke"

"Bitcoin is no longer censorship-resistant, and mining centralisation endangers its security too. It's time to fix that."

And then Ocean is the first pool to censor certain types of transactions for something that has yet to reach consensus, wouldn't be wise to just sense what the other nodes would do and let his pool facilitate the transactions that are agreed upon by other nodes? in other words, let the filter/ban come from BTC itself rather than the pool code?
 


That is a reasonable answer, thanks for answering my question. although I think you should have kept your post debunking the other user's claim regarding certain miners can't use the pool, that topic will still be acceptable via the search engine, but ya, perhaps if Ocean folks create their own topic here, the discussion could move there instead.

Actually Ocean is not the 1st but Luke's original Eligius may have been, remember he blocked casino tx's going through it. More recently, back in 2021 Marathon mining group (MARA) tried the idea (https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-have-started-censoring-bitcoin-transactions-heres-what-that-means/) and immediately caught all kinds of hell for doing it. After just few months they stopped censoring tx's because of the uproar.

Where's the hue-and-cry from the anti-censorship crowd today on this?  :-X

You can't compare apples to oranges.
Marathon pool complying with OFAC sanctions has nothing to do with filtering out ordinal transactions.
The government of the U.S. has nothing against Ordinals and inscriptions.

But there are good arguments towards pointing that inscriptions are actually a valid exploit of bitcoin's protocol and should be patched or at least filtered to the maximum extent.

The u.s. gov would be very happy to let us destroy BTC on our own I am sure.

Is anyone from here mining at that pool right now? It would be interesting to know how TIDES distributed the rewards in a practical setting compared to FPPS.


That would be an irony that must be carefully followed. :D

I mean, this has always been a controversial pool even before the rebranding, so there will always be people against it.

Many of those people think that Core Devs can do whatever they want, they are the good guys, it is us the miners and regular users, it is always us causing all the problems which the devs need to fix.

So devs' censorship is viewed as "protection" for bitcoin.

Yep , devs can do what they want and censor according to their beliefs . It's funny though that Luke was pushing the arbitrary data he liked in the past :D https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38007.0

Seems like Luke was very specific on the type of arbitrary data, he wants Catholic data on blockchain ;D, so, it is okay to put your own religion prayers on the blockchain but no for things that people view as an "art" of some nature?

The problem is not with Luke, it is all these selfish bitcoiners who want to transact for 2 sat / vbyte, if you tell them Luke is going to censorship 90% of transactions that isn't theirs -- they would probably accept it.

What some people do not understand is that this action (call it filtration or bug-fix or whatever) is going to be viewed as censorship by many people, and this is bad for bitcoin, probably worse than high fees.

https://twitter.com/SamouraiWallet/status/1732584009442443336


If you mine here I really hope you don't like privacy.
I have said this about other pools many times. Their house, their rules you don't like it mine elsewhere.

But they are not even censoring OFAC addresses, they are not allowing coinjoins in general.

-Dave

No, you've got it all wrong.
It's ok to put your religion prayers in the blockchain as long as you're catholic, if you're not you're free to not put them!  ;)

I don't remember to well as I never really bothered with such a thing but I was living under the impression Arabic and Chinese characters are larger in size, so you're going to have to pay extra for your faith! Free market capitalism!!!


Simple explanation, starts with derange* and ends with *eranged individual with an ego the size of Olympus Mons.
I remember how he was angry at everyone when he got "hacked" and everything was flawed and to blame other than this won setup.


Oh yeah here we go again, how many times am I going to post this in a row today?
Repeat after me: My censorship is good, yours is bad!

Unfortunately BTC cannot fix the flawed human nature/psychology (hypocrisy/double standards).

Lol, i hope it stops there, what if we start actually censoring non-catholic prayers? Even better I suppose, but ya, fudge is all i can say.


Anything outside the ASCII code will require more space, so basically chars including all Latin letters, Arabic/Hindu letters ( which many people call English numbers for whatever reason) and a few other chars, so ya basically, any prayers that are not Latin are going to cost you at least double the price since unicode is 16 to 32 bits depending on the encoding while ASCI is just 7 or 8 bits (ASCII or Extended ASCII)

So you either pray in Latin letters or convert your religion, both should work.

Every time something Luke talks about is brought up people will have to remind everyone of his religion.
Why? We are not in a Christian or religious debate forum. Literally nobody should care about this.

The discussion on how inscriptions abuse bugs in Bitcoin code is a very serious discussion on its own and whoever conflates it with irrelevant points and assassinations of character is actively doing a disservice to bitcoin's future.
And like, ok, I get that some people here have conflicting interests like for example someone running a competing pool to Luke' OCEAN now... But for Bitcoin users? Increasing bitcoin's transactional utility is literally good for everyone.

Because big blockers hate him and they have to "remind" us that he's a religious fanatic and/or dog-cat eater. ::)

«Άμα θέλω να σε βρίσω, 1000 αφoρμές σoυ βρίσκω»

People hate Luke for do many reasons that I have completely lost count.
Frankly I don't even remember what he did in the block size wars time. Probably his stance wasn't as remarkable.
But most points in have heard against him date to years even before that, like more than 10 years ago.

Idk but people still in the Bitcoin community seem to have some long standing interpersonal hatred, it's kinda odd to observe tbh.

It's not that strange TBH... ever been involved in other communities/fora?

Linux distro wars (i.e. Ubuntu vs Debian = which one is the "true" GNU/Linux?) are not all that different compared to block size wars.

Human nature/psychology (deeply tribal) is always the same. "My tribe is better than your tribe"

But most people here are IT-focused, so it's understandable that they don't know much about human psychology traits.

He brought his religion on the blockchain, I doubt anyone would have asked him about his religion if he did not do it, but then again, we are not debating religion, you need to

1- read things in their context
2- understand our sense of humor

Now ya, given that most of us miners are boring tech folks, our humor is probably terrible, but for real, we are not debating his religion, i could not care less about it.

The criticism is:

1-If Luke is allowed to put his religious prayers or scriptures on the blockchain, why can't I put my penis jpeg on the blockchain?

2- Luke sells his pool as the "anti-censorship" pool, it is almost the main feature the pool claims to have, so he does not censorship OFAC listed addresses, but goes to censor other transactions, censorship is censorship does not matter how you label it, is censorship good or bad for bitcoin?


You must be new here, big blockers are next door, in the altcoin section.

You must be new here if you don't know why HmmMAA visits this thread... he's a BSV fanatic and he's going to attack everyone (character assassination) who doesn't support big blocks.

Yes indeed, I am indeed new here, 6 years in the mining section does not make me old by any measure, but then I don't care why HmmMAA or anyone else comes to post here, all I read is their "content", and he brings valid points which you need to counter with valid points instead of personal b.s, if your argument against HmmMAA is the fact that he is BSV supporter and supports bigger blocks bla bla(which I don't even know if they are valid accusations or not and honestly I don't care), then what's your argument against everyone else here who surely aren't buying Luke's pool bullshit?

I have nothing against Luke, his religion, his small block narrative or anything of that nature, my only concern is the fact that when you visit the pool website you see a bold statement with font size 36 or so saying


And then he goes to censorship transactions, in fact,  Ocean is the only pool now that practices non state-forced censorship, the other 1-2 pools who censor based on the OFAC list can argue that they are forced to by the government, Luke is practicing censorship without any sort of pressure, so what gives?

Then me and the other members commented on some false claims posted on their websites such as


first of all, the number 11 was pulled out of no where, and then that 100% success claim is false, so in a polite statement, Luke posts some wrong info there, in a not so polite manner, whatever he wrote there is just pure bullshit to promote his pool.

If you have any good arguments to defend him without targeting anyone who criticizes him -- go ahead.

"Valid" points indeed, zero personal bullshit:


Care to explain why should we care about Luke's eating habits? ::)

I did not say he brings nothing but valid points, so not sure what are you trying to do here, there valid points, and I summarized some of them in my previous post, do you have any actual argument against them?

Can you you put HmmMAA on ignore so none of his posts show to you and then explain why you called us big blockers and how can you counter our arguments?

HmmMAA doesn't give a shit about BTC, his "interest" (concern trolling at its finest) regarding BTC censorship is 100% fake. In fact he loves it and would love it even more if BTC was destroyed.

But sure, you can listen to him if you want...

ps: I never called you a big blocker. Learn to read more carefully:

And yet, you felt "offended" somehow...

I'm only responsible for what I write, not for what you understand.

Not at all, i do not think calling for larger blocks is a crime, and so i do not think of "big blockers' as an insult, i simply asked why would you call us as such in your response.

Now after a few posts back and forth i can see that you are not interested in having a constructive conversation, just name calling and drama, likely because you have zero clue on the actual subject.

Everyone that is outside of the cult and uses his brain , according to cryptosize don't want the good of bitcoin ( as he imagines bitcoin ) . He bite the maxis narrative that btc will worth millions and that's what he's only interested about . We had many arguments in the past ( until i put him on ignore with his "friend" blackhatcoiner which when he disagreed at some point cryptosize decided to almost doxx him ) and there were no valid points from his side other than insults . We had extensive talks in the greek subforum about fee market and why the model is not sustainable , the future of bitcoin , how btc has became centralised through a group of devs deciding what's good or bad etc . It was tiring to interact with him and he is one of the persons that brandolini's law appies the most .  
I love bitcoin , i got into bitcoin because i thought it could change the world as we know it . And i still believe it , it's just that btc doesn't provide that anymore . If btc wasn't taken over by the maxis cult and offered a solution to everyone in the world to use it i would still be in the btc camp . But unfortunately btc has become a tool only to profit , no real advancement for years . Nothing is build anymore , devs are too focused in L2 . Ordinals and brc-20's is the only thing for years that moves btc forward . And it's a perfect example of how wrong maxis were , a project that can not be taken down by countries faces huge problems due to a couple of guys that decided to use it as it was intended to be used and that's not just as money . Transactions can be about anything , from money to data or anything else we can - or not yet - imagine .  
  

ANY American company can be served a gag order at any moment on "National Security" grounds, and they are not allowed to speak about it. They can easily obtain it point "address x is linked to terrorist group y" and that's the end of it. Of course the OFAC rules have to be followed as well or else they get basically unable to operate anymore, so its not even a choice they have.

I'm sure govs and bankers are super happy that this exploit exists and is rapidly deteriorating Bitcoin reputation as an alternative to fiat, and the spammers making a quick buck at it while promoting their altcoins; win/win.

---

Gentoo obviously, where you can get the knots patch for bitcoind or reject it by adding a little flag, because surprise surprise, who maintains the bitcoind package? Yup :)

---

Those who use the word "censorship" fail to realize it is our freedom to block whatever we want from our nodes, or propose the template blocks we want from our mining. Blocking the spam entirely from Bitcoin is basically impossible, but the devs CAN make it harder/more expensive for the spam vs normal transactions, that is, actual bitcoin the "Electronic Cash System" not the p2p database of spam of late. The valid argument is that it was made much easier lately for spammers vs regular transactions as demonstrated all this year starting with ordinals but a bunch of other spammers trolls and anti bitcoiners who want to see the project die joined.

Everyone has the freedom to block any transactions they want, but how does it not fit into censorship? it still does,  and nobody can stop you from doing so, but when you sell your mining pool as a saviour from censorship and still block certain transactions, it's normal for people to call you out.


How do you define spam? I could argue that transactions that pay high fees are not done to spam the blockchain, otherwise, if someone wants to "spam" the blockchain they can do so using only what you call "normal transactions".

Millions of $ were spent on ordinals and BRC-20 transactions, you could say they are worthless which I would agree with, but they sure are not the best definition of spam, but then let's just say that we all agree on calling them "spam", let's say they have been effectively blocked entirely, on a node level not just a few pools blocking them, something extreme that you would need to fork BTC to make such transactions valid.

What is going to happen next when those "spammers" start spending the same amount of $ on fees for actual spam transactions, i.e. transactions that are generated for the sole purpose of spam, what are you going to do about them? block any transactions that pay> x sat/vbyte? KYC all Bitcoin users to limit their transactions?

Transacting on the blockchain is not cheap, it's a fact we have to live with, if 1% of the world transactions start happening on BTC, you will miss the 500 sat/Vbyte era, so how are you going to solve this? what other types of transactions you are going to have to censor to save Bitcoin form failing?

Because he keeps shoving it into people's faces?
Besides, just so you know m family is catholic (old continent catholic, if you know what I mean), and I still believe this guy is nuts and should juts shut up!


One coulda argue that internet speed and packets that allow you to stream and store porn when computers should be just used for programing and emails are bugs to the system. Have you seen the carbon footprint of porn?  ;) Imagine there would be no more porn downloaded and uploaded, how cheap will the internet be then if we ban that! See the f* slippery slope when you call everything bugs and ask to ban what you don't like?


More crying and arguing on a forum or social media?
Total reward from fees was 136.93 BTC last day, so this include "legit" transactions but let's ignore that, so for some malevolent entity to spam the network into making it almost unusable it needs around 5 million a day, Manchester City alone spent close to 3 million a day on running cost , wage plus whatever the others thigs are. We're still day dreaming (some of us) of a system to replace banks and Visa and other non-sense when it could be bought down to its knees by some jpg monkeys and a the budget of a football team. And yeah, some think we could win a war with a f** country!

Ban coffee transactions and you will be good to go. :D but ya all jokes aside, I have a very hard time believing that all these cries are actually related to the fact that they think "jpegs actually hurt bitcoin" because I am convinced that -- it's only because those jpegs are increasing the fees.

I mean two different scenarios with different outcomes. 

Scenario one: magically Ordis and BRC-20 transitions could actually reduce transaction fees for "normal transactions" would we get the same volume of complaints? sure not, most people don't even run their own node so they can't even be bettered with more disk space or anything of that nature, they just want to transact for cheap whenever possible, despite the fact that they very seldom use BTC anyway.

Scenario two: No ordis, no Apes, but we start writing news on the blockchain

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" X1000

Scnerio there: People have started to actually use Bitcoin, there are roughly 2 billion credit card transactions per day (no counting every other payment method on planet Earth), 1% of that would be 20,000,000, or 20M transactions, compare that to the current transactions of BTC which are roughly 0.5M transactions, that's 3900% more transactions, even with the assumption that all of these will be "normal transactions" with a single input and two outputs, the fee floor for such volume with probably be the 1k sat/ Vbye range, which is a lot worse than all these Ordis can do.

What is going to be the argument then? what is average Joe going to complain about in scnerio 3? You want adoption -- there you go, but now you have to compete with the rest of the world, so your 2 sat/ Vbyte transactions are something from the past, how are you going to solve it? what are you going to censor?

I have said this a dozen times, BTC will always be a store of value and not something fit for daily transactions, this is how the majority of people view it, nobody is willing to spend dear sats for a cup of coffee, they would always use their bad money and preserve their good bitcoins, I treat BTC as a store of value, I am not ashamed of saying it out loud, I know most people treat it as such but they just want to stir that "P2P e-cash" concept to attack everyone else who wants to use BTC differently.

People could keep on daydreaming about BTC being widely adopted, worth 10M$ / BTC while transaction fees are 1 sat per byte, but these three things can't happen together, you will have to least sacrifice one of your dreams, transactions can only be cheap if nobody uses BTC, if nobody uses it -- it can't be worth 10M.


I like these debates, and I do want the best for BTC, but it seems like in this forum, every time you raise a reasonable concern, you will be attacked and viewed as an enemy, look at the comment above "YOU BIG BLOCKERS DEVILS" :D, you can't even propose or support the idea of raising block size, I wonder -- what will these people do when core devs actually raise block size, are they going to insult them and call them big blockers scums? :D

If BTC becomes a store of value (like gold), then there is no need for big blocks.

I thought this would be obvious to you, but apparently it isn't... gold is expensive to move for a reason. BTC might become digital gold (store of value as you said) and equally expensive to move (despite being digital).

In general I agree with your post, minus the last sentence.

Either BTC becomes a store of value with expensive fees or p2p ecash with big blocks and cheap fees. Pick one.

ps: BTC devs can do whatever they want, but there is no guarantee that the hard fork won't be considered yet another altcoin (like BCH/BSV). There is no guarantee that miners will follow the new chain. How can you be so sure that they will abandon the old chain? BlockStream isn't so powerful as some folks think it is.

I have presented my technical arguments many times before (BTC is akin to IPv4, BSV is akin to IPv6 -> which one the dominant internet protocol?), but feel free to assume I've never had technical discussions before.

I think we have gone past the "if" speculation with BTC, it is indeed a store of value, the percentage of people who use it it for other purposes rounded to the nearest whole number is exactly ZERO, and yes, as it stands right now -- there is no need for big blocks, in fact, big blocks are never going to solve the fundamental issues, they would just reduce the size of the problem, of course, while creating other potential issues.

Transacting on the most secured blockchain has to be expensive, it is what it is, people need to accept that, it's up to them to use BTC however they want to, a store of value, e-cash system, or even for fun, it does not matter, they just need to accept that using the main blockchain is expensive, but many people don't want to accept this fact, they just want to eliminate competition so that they can use the blockchain for free -- which won't work.



You are now repeating what I just said above, you can't have it all, the best of everything in one place is just not going to be there, BTC is indeed treated as a store of value for the most part, AND it's expected and normal for fees to be high --  I understand that and I am prepared to live with it -- those who don't should look for ways to solve their problems, or to least improve them, wether they ask for bigger blocks or 1 min average block time is up to them -- I see no problem with how things operate right now, it's a free market where the highest bidders get their transactions accepted, I don't go around asking to censor other transactions so that my transactions fee become cheaper. :D



Allow me to quote you just for reference:



You could say


But then again, you comments cleary show that you use that big blockers as in insult, at least you think of it as such, it's very common here to consider anyone who asks for bigger blocks to be an enemy of BTC, and as it stands right now -- you too seem to have issues with big blockers, so my question is simple, if core devs raised the block size, do they get a pass or are they going to be harassed just like everyone else?

Have you read my IPv4 vs IPv6 posts? You clearly haven't.

For me big blockers are like IPv6 proponents. That's fine and dandy, but care to explain HOW do you plan to make IPv6 the dominant internet protocol?

Still waiting since 1995... how many more years decades do I have to wait?

See my point? Big block blockchains (BSV) are the equivalent of IPv6 in the Bitcoin space.

You CANNOT force everyone to abandon IPv4 (small blocks/small 32-bit addresses) in favor of IPv6 (big blocks/big 128-bit addresses).

Nobody in this forum has any compelling arguments about why the superior IPv6 still has inferior network effect compared to IPv4.

And yes, I'm only responsible for what I write, not for what you understand. You see insults out of nowhere. Not my fault.

People who are IT-savvy understand that backwards compatibility always wins in the IT space.

Look at x86 (i386). AMD extended it to 64 bits (AMD64/x86-64). Huge success compared to Intel's failed Itanium experiment.

4MB blocks in BTC are basically the same in a sense... it's 1MB legacy + 3MB extension (optional). Just like AMD's 64-bit extension is totally optional, unlike Itanium's brand new architecture!

You can also have a look at RFC 1918 and try to understand how NAT solved the IPv4 32-bit limitation (4 billion addresses/devices). It's like SegWit for IPv4.

Do you need more technical arguments for me, or is that enough for now?

ps: I've already responded about BTC devs (BlockStream), look it up. No need to repeat myself.

I did and I ignored it because I didn't see where the argument was, IPv6 adoption was at 45% last sep, and is very likely to go past 50% next year, where BSV vs BTC is just a long shot, also, the reason why IPv6 exited in the first place is fundamentally different than the reasons BSV existed, so you are comparing apples vs oranges here.


I have yet to see any technical argument in regards to banning/censoring BRC-20 on the blockchain, and whether you think it's a good thing for BTC and why or why not? the main reason why you engaged in this topic was to insult us for saying something "bad" about Luke, I am still waiting for your technical argument that supports Luke's actions, something specific to the topic in question, not IPv6, not Luke's religion, not big blockers, just the topic of censoring those transactions.

45-50% is nothing 3 decades later on, considering the fact IPv4 has 100% adoption.

You also don't understand that IPv6 provides more (address) space to accommodate more users, just like BSV provides more (block) space to accommodate more users, so no, it's not apples vs oranges.

You also deliberately ignored my x86/NAT/SegWit references, so I think I'm done here. There's nothing more to be said, it will be a waste of my time once again.

Carry on

Wait a minute no one cares what religion I am.  Why why why that seems like the song that got John Lennon killed.

R.I. P. John as he was shot on Dec 8th in 1980. Hmm seems like yesterday to me. oh another song title.


I used to like Luke quite a bit but he drifted very sideways over time.


BTW

no one has solved

scrypt 12 blocks  LTC+Doge
sha 256 1 block   BTC


basically it is unsolvable.

best thin BTC can do for now is ban all BTC sends under 0.0001 for 1 having and see if that works.

It should act to flood scrypt with smaller sends and allow LN to be correctly setup in BTC as a subset of core wallet

It's funny how you want to argue about what I understand and what I don't. There is a fundamental difference between the two upgrades. Nobody woke up to find that they don't have an IP address and needed to shop for one. The 3.7 billion-something IPs on IPv4 were not fully utilized when IPv6 came into existence, not even close. IPv6 was there to solve a problem that would emerge in the future. Now, when the future has come, the problem is getting fixed easily and smoothly, IPv6 was a proactive approach.

With BTC, the problem is current and has been there for years. In 2017, the blockchain was unusable for most people for a good while. There were no NFTs and no BRC-20 b.s on the blockchain. What did we do to solve it? We let the free market do its thing a few months later—problem solved. Fast forward every couple of months from then until now, and the problem emerges. People complain: BTC is not usable. These spammers need to be banned. Bitmain/Antpool is spamming the blockchain. No, it's BSV folks doing it. No, it's these weird BRC-20 tokens. Ban this, ban that. Don't look for scalability solutions; just stop other people from using the blockchain so we can use it for free.

I have yet to see a whole month without someone complaining about transaction fees. But I don't see people complaining about not getting a public IP address. Do you see why you are doing apples vs. tomatoes here? What is your proposal to fix the high fees? Do you think we should ban/censor any types of transactions? Why or why not? Still waiting for your answer.

You obviously don't know what CGNAT is.

Try to use a p2p app (Bitcoin node, BitTorrent) and see if you can upload anything to anyone... maybe then you'll understand.

ps: I'm not going to spoon feed you, you can use forum search to find my posts.

Every day I spend on this debate I keep thinking that those talking about censorship are either concern trolling (perhaps even unbeknownst to themselves even) or have a personal gripe with Luke for some reason.

Some people beef to put whatever beef with whatever Luke might have done to sadden them in the past aside for a second and consider some of the facts for once.

First of all, banning inscriptions from Bitcoin on a protocol level is not a Luke Dashjr issue. It's a Bitcoin Core issue.
There needs to be a discussion about this entirely independent of who Luke is and what he has done, because regardless of his opinions, this issue isn't concerning him. It's concerning everyone using Bitcoin.
Think about it, when SegWit and later Taproot were introduced, were Ordinals a use the developers had predicted?
Some examination of historical evidence leads to the contrary conclusion. SegWit developers probably had never predicted that certain OP_codes could have allowed for large data inclusions in transactions, and therefore hadn't considered the fee discounts would be getting abused to that extent.
Likewise for Taproot developers, who released OP_return without setting good spam limits.
Since these started getting abused, naturally developers of Bitcoin have become concerned and are now considering imposing some limits. This is only natural and follows the course that Satoshi set. Given the nuance of Bitcoin as a piece of software, many mistakes had to be corrected on the fly historically.


Now, what Luke is doing with OCEAN as a pool, is to merely offer miners a choise on what transactions they confirm.
Especially given that many pools openly receive off-band payments in a centralized way, only to confirm certain transactions... Payments that are more often than not not stared with miners, there are some very concerning trends on how pool operators have power over actual miners. OCEAN pool sets out to change that by eventually allowing people to pick their own block templates on how they confirm transactions.

So mining with ocean, arguably there will be absolutely not even a possibility for transaction censorship, as miners will be absolutely fee to pick what gets confirmed, as opposed to any other pool, where only the operator decides.

Edit: I am not affiliated with OCEAN in any way but from listening to the staff talks, I feel like they aren't even very fond of blocking ordinals at the protocol level. If you ACTUALLY pay attention to what Luke says, he has acknowledged multiple times that people can keep putting data in the Blockchain as they wish, he just says that they should be paying block fees for that space normally, without being allowed to abuse certain features to get discounts. And that's very likely to also end the ordinals craze.

I can, i got my own public ip, if you don't -- go complain to your ISP as to why they put you behind a NAT, or pay for a public IP oh, i forgot, you want everything for free. :D

Censoring transactions, ordinals, and other garbage is bad however you look at it, the best course of action is to make them ordinal/NFTs as expensive as possible, but if they are incompetent to develop a method to do that, then it would be a good idea to dump them from the scene.

Ever since he got hacked, he has changed, maybe they found something on him to blackmail, we don't know. even though I very much like the way ord/nft/garbage is limited, but it's wrong, they should be allowed but expensive.

He will either repent and correct his path, or he will have to answer to God for such oppression against financial freedom of millions of people, I guess he didn't think of that.

you are missing the point completely if you think ordinals are the point.

LN is not easy peasy way to avoid high fees. .  and the blockchain can be clogged in many ways.

Miners want higher fees as rewards shrink = fact    this is what the battle is.

Miners are able to make fees higher in so many profitable ways Luke is playing whack a mole.

So the solution is not banning any transaction on the block in any manner except by value.

This will make it too costly to use the block chain for small sends.

do it for ½ ing while you make LN really work.

build an LN type address into core.  

It pulls out 10% of your normal wallet.  and you can do small sends with it.

And for the next 4 years develop the fuck out of  scaling.


this is simple economics

scrypt has longer worth while ability to send small sends with ease.

banning select transactions like Luke wants to does not remove the economic desires by miners to clog the btc blockchain up.


here 148 blocks I am foundry.

I deliberately drop my hash rate on days 10 11 12 13 14  of a diff jump.

I can make on average 48 blocks a day if I mine one.

If I drop to 40 blocks a day right now I lose 8 x 6.25 = 50 coins

but I triple fees due to clogging the chain.

and the fee is 3 coins vs .5 coins. so 40 x 2.5 = 100 coins and I spend less power.

Lukes idea does not fix this.

and in the next ½ ing those raised fees would mean

8 x 3.125 coins lost or 25 coins lost.

and if they raise fees by .5 to just 2.5  40 x 2 = 80 coins

so this just gets worse with each ½ ing

and Lukes idea does not stop this.

I can know zero about code and zero about pc's.

I do know value. and if I can lose 50 coins to earn 100 coins plus cut power costs by 16% I am doing it.

or after the ½ ing if I can lose 25 coins to earn 80 coins plus cost my power costs by 16% I am doing it.


I have been talking about fee issues for over 5 years no make it 6 years

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2634505.0


this issue ain't getting fixed by Lukes idea.

I can demonstrate many ways big pools can clog the main chain.


I can also tell you Lukes idea is a fail. as pools will do shit like I am describing and they are too big .

Developers need to make it too costly for the pool to be clogged by the ones that want it clogged.


Good luck with it.

BTW
 ltc makes 288 blocks today value of 1800 LTC about $140,400>> ½ ing is done
doge makes 1440 blocks today value of 1,440,000 >>>>>>>>> no ½ ing at all

total value of 1,580,400 a day

btc made 144 blocks at 7.25 coins = 1044 coins = 43,000,000

nice edge for btc but ½ ing drops it to 21,500,000 a day if fees remain at a coin

edge is greatly lowered. big miners will do every trick they can to boost fees. to make that edge up.

and it will be worse in 2028

Though out its existence, Bitcoin has never been attacked by miners contributing to an increase in the difficulty and then dropping their hashrate (or the opposite). If that was to become a recurring problem however, it's not like there are't viable solutions. Many altcoins had this issue with profit-hopping miners 10 years ago. It was fixed with solutions like Kimoto's gravity well. Bitcoin being the biggest crypto doesn't really face this issue. Yes miners have power to cause issues with the difficulty but I don't see how that's relevant to inscriptions taking too much space in blocks.

Well, there is a solution for that, LN!
But, we have a problem, for everyone to use that we have to wait till 2040 till everyone in the world will be able to get some coins and open their LN channel, cause, you still need block space to do that, and once we multiply that by even 1 billion it starts being funny!
Which brings us back to the current capacity!


But if we go for the gold scenario, why do we even need 1MB blocks, we should reduce that to 10kb ones so noes could be easily hosted on a Nokia 3310, for the sake of decentralization! That would show those big blockers how things are done!!!


Yeah it's apple and oranges!
Now tell me , do you still have a 56 kbit/s modem?

One thing is the number of users that can usa a thing, like IPv4 which is still sufficient as we speak but won't be if we reach 20 billion on this planet and 99% internet adoption, and the other thing is capacity! If the guys in the last century would have thought like some of you they would have never developed speeds over 1kbs since the internet was supposed to be for data, not for sending pictures!
So, apple and oranges, taxi licenses and car manufacturing!


Done!
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/12/10/EnuC3.jpeg
Btw , this is anime, not porn! Trust me!


And miners have the choice of mining wherever they want, right?
What are they doing right now?

We don't need 20 billion people and 99% internet adoption to reach IPv4's limits.

Currently there are 15 billion connected devices (each one needs an IP address), but only 4 billion IPv4 addresses. By 2030 we will have 30 billion devices. How come the ancient IPv4 is still sufficient?

SegWit is the equivalent of NAT (RFC 1918) in the Bitcoin space. A soft fork that respects backwards compatibility

BSV is the equivalent of IPv6 in the Bitcoin space. A hard fork that doesn't respect backwards compatibility.

Don't believe me?

Then listen to IPv6 proponents/big blockers (Craig Wright himself):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdXHA-WBvbU (hell, I would expect HmmMAA to post this, but maybe he's not very savvy in IPv4/IPv6 IIRC)...

https://www.bsvblockchain.org/news/dr-craig-wright-explains-how-bsv-blockchain-and-ipv6-will-change-the-internet

It's not apples to oranges, UNLESS you're uneducated in computer networking protocols. :)

Would you agree if Bitcoin Core not only increased the block size limit, but also ditched IPv4 support and became IPv6-only? If not, why?

Do you know what CGNAT is? And why it hinders p2p apps?

Or segwit seamlessly between Bitcoin and Litecoin and essentially use Litecoin as a sidechain instead of LN? Opening channels in LN is its Achilles heel, not only you have to fight against the spam you are also arbitrarily limited to the amount you put upfront, and/or surrender your privacy and trusting others.

Clearly we had a different Bitcoin before and after this year spam in the blockchain. A little string of text in the blockchain or 4mb images? I think there is a huge difference. This tweet (https://twitter.com/spacebull/status/1732638442637643785?s=61&t=Igz8AUtTmsLyFsn3QU7nVA) (and the bus vs train meme a bit below) portraits it well. It may be technically a transaction, but is it bitcoin? it isn't.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GAxsXW-XkAAFI93?format=jpg (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GAxsXW-XkAAFI93?format=jpg)

Remember the difference between Bitcoin (project, network) and bitcoin (electronic p2p cash).

And no, i don't buy the fallacy that the spam is needed to "secure" the network, its not the spam that makes mining profitable, but the actual bitcoin price, remember this. The success (adoption) of bitcoin (as currency) is what would naturally drive the tx prices up, but when you allow saboteurs to make this less and less viable...

Nice idea.

see right in front of us we have scrypt.

and scrypt can do 12x the volume that sha 256 can do

I have an accounting back ground and I have worked with pcs and main frames from 1975.

I see this as a value and economic problem.

Details of how  are for programmers and developers.

But to fight the scrypt structure rather than adapt is  dumb.

Lukes pool is not the way to do it.

I am a nobody in mining.

6/450,000 is my share of sha 256:hashrate.

but I see what is being done and unless a better scaling method is placed in btc is in trouble.

if we blend  in scypt we increase from 1x to 13x every ten minutes.

if we make btc sends under 0.0001 route via scrypt  automatically large fees drop.

we could  make the cutoff float if btc fees get too low.

seems to me the two algos need to create a shunting move.


and I would think the fallout to miners would be buy more scrypt gear.

time will tell 2024 and 2028 ½ ings should be different.


think about a 1.5625 block in 2028 getting 3 btc in fees.

that would be a 6.25 block in 2023 getting 18.75 in fees

I think right now big miners can do the 2028 case with ease.

thus they plan to do it.


this is new territory plain and simple.

Interesting , food for thought https://twitter.com/derekm00r3/status/1733686055105069105 .

Now that Luke has pave the way to filter transactions , what happens if his pool mine an OFAC banned transaction ? Can he say that it's not his decision which transactions can be added to a block ? If mined , as a US citizen , can he face jail time ?

This is where user-generated block templates can be useful, the the pool operator proves that they have no say on what goes into the block templates, and they would have a better legal position, although not perfectly protected but at least something valuable you can use to defend yourself.

I really think someone with the skill set that Luke has would have served BTC better if they built something decentralized that actually works, an enhanced version of P2pool where miners bear the entire responsibility of the transactions they mine, this would be a lot harder for the state to stop or impose any sort restrictions on, think of it as torrent, do we really think that governments don't want to ban it altogether? they probably want -- they just can't.

Compare that to a centralized server that hosts "illegal" content and sits on U.S soil, as I said before, a 2 line letter and the law enforcement will shut it down.

More pools aren't the solution to censorship resistance, even worse is when those pools are centralized and owned by a known figure like Luke, it makes taking it down a piece of cake.

Does luck generally average out over time with smaller pools? Ocean found 2 blocks pretty fast, but looks like the third one is averaging out. Sitting at 2.57 times expected currently. Generally what would be a worse case between blocks? I’m pretty new to mining just wondering how bad could it get? It’s difficult hanging around when you have the electric bill to pay.

Things average out almost perfectly when measured against infinity, any thing short of infinity is unlikely to get you at 100%, I could throw some random numbers like every 7.4 blocks a block would take double the time, i.e 200%, and then again 1000% in 20k blocks or something, ya, and half the time every 1.6 blocks or so, but these are random figures and only start to average out over a very long period of time when the sample size is large enough.


Indeed, which is why I have been always under the impression that eventually, only PPS pools would survive, not because they pay more "actually they pay less due to fees", but because not everyone can handle the variance, I don't want to give you the bad news, but given the size of the pool, it won't be out of the ordinary if you had to wait for a few more months, it could hit 2 blocks tomorrow, you just can't tell.

This may be a personal question or slightly off-topic, but I would love to know the reason why you decided to use Ocean pool.
 

The main reason I decided to try Ocean Pool was because I liked the idea of transparency with payouts (i.e getting paid directly when each block is found).
Also the 0% fee and promotional payout helped too. I didn't start until just before the first block on the 1st. I think it was like a few hours before too. And I had to stop on the 14th so I could mine enough to pay my electric bill. I'll still get paid something on the next block, but that obviously is diluting as the more days pass. I will probably end up losing maybe a few days to a week of income, hard to tell at this point. But yeh, I'm running a business here, so I probably should have stayed with one of the bigger pools.

This is quite a thing, didn't seem pretty important at first as obviously in the end, 10 years from now ocean is going to mine close to the numbers of blocks it is supposed to do but, even ignoring the payout scheme adn going for the straight model of reward plus tx fee minus pool fees, isn't there high chance nowadays for Ocean miners to get really screwed?
We know there were blocks these days with fees exceeding the reward, of course not all pools mined one but with a ten in one chance you at least get one of those, now with a small pool, you might end with a block that was mined exactly at low tide..lols, in some Sunday morning or x-mas days, and bag only half a bitcoin in fees at most. Of course, they could also hit a big block with 500sat/vb but excluding ordinals they are already taking a chuck out so..

Why would a miner looking for $ and not for the beliefs behind the movement risk this?
You're looking at missing out on that and taking even a 40% hit, not really the brightest thing, right?

I have said it before but it's also the opportunity cost of money. Even if you are earning less with a FPPPS pool then with PPLNS or whatever. Getting regular payments allows you to have cash flow (Bitcon Flow?) which allows you to do other things which may allow you to make more money. Be it buy another miner sooner, move to a cheaper place to host sine you you can generally figure out expenses vs costs, whatever.

And now it's even worse with block 840000 approaching. Imagine being in a small PPLNS pool that mines a block just after the 2024 1/2ing it's going to take a while to make up that loss. *Although with fees where they are it's going to hurt less.  If fees get back to normal them ouch....

-Dave

So you did this to avoid custody, which is great, I mine on PPS pool that keeps my money for 24 hours before paying me, Ocean now has your money (dust and in form of hashpower) for a few weeks, probably for a lot longer, so the custody aspect is even worse.

Also for the 0 fee thing, they censor ordinal transactions, which means if they find a block now, instead of getting say 9.25 btc they would get about 7.75, so in other words, you would lose 15% of your potential profit, the highest PPS fee is 4% so you are paying 11% extra for the time being at least given that ordinals are still a thing.

Thank you for answering my question, I wish you the best of luck.

A regulator isn't going to let the pool operator off the hook just because they let their clients create block templates. The operator still disburses payments to the clients creating the block templates. Regulators do not care if you didn't generate illicit content, they care that you are serving it to your clients. A pool operator who serves the public will be regulated, as all public service providers are. They would probably be better off going private, and approving all client connections, if they are worried about getting regulated.

That would be somewhat similar to regulating P2P nodes, is it not? If your node receives and relay a banned transaction, they take you to jail?

When the pool no longer operates in a centralized manner they become just a pooling service, just like a bus driver, if someone carries something illegal with them on the bus -- the bus driver can't be held responsible in the same manner as if they found those illegal stuff in his pocket.

So I run a pool service which I have no control over, how can I be responsible for what happens inside? Similar to the bus driver analogy, the worst would be shutting down the bus service or the pool.

But when you are the owner, and the operator of the pool, you are at a greater risk, because now, not only that you facilitate illegal transaction a byproduct, you intentionally do so.

It is a lot easier to regulate a pool that create their own blocks vs pools who work as a medium between miners, it's also easier to regulate centralized exchanges and force them to ban or even seize funds of certain addresses, but it is nowhere near easy to regulate bitcoin nodes.

Obviously, it's not impossible, it just a lot harder.

Alas you are missing a rather important point.
The pool would be allowing the transaction - they specifically receive it from the miner.
You cant distribute a block if you don't know the full details of all the transactions in it. Just the block header isn't enough.

I think that both miners and pools will face legal problems in case of sanctioned funds move . Not to mention core devs . But what do i know .
It's time to understand that this space isn't a place where you only have rights , but also obligations . And by coding or hashing or creating templates you're not not outside the law . The "it's decentralised so we can do anything we want" mentality starts to fall apart .

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/29137

'With this Issue being posted to the official repository for Bitcoin and with this Issue being closed/dismissed by an official representative of Bitcoin Core, sanctions violations on Bitcoin have now moved from "negligent" to "culpable mental state greater than negligence." Thank you for your service.'

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.6.htm

Sec. 6.03.  DEFINITIONS OF CULPABLE MENTAL STATES.  (a)  A person acts intentionally, or with intent, with respect to the nature of his conduct or to a result of his conduct when it is his conscious objective or desire to engage in the conduct or cause the result.

(b)  A person acts knowingly, or with knowledge, with respect to the nature of his conduct or to circumstances surrounding his conduct when he is aware of the nature of his conduct or that the circumstances exist.  A person acts knowingly, or with knowledge, with respect to a result of his conduct when he is aware that his conduct is reasonably certain to cause the result.

(c)  A person acts recklessly, or is reckless, with respect to circumstances surrounding his conduct or the result of his conduct when he is aware of but consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur.  The risk must be of such a nature and degree that its disregard constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the actor's standpoint.

(d)  A person acts with criminal negligence, or is criminally negligent, with respect to circumstances surrounding his conduct or the result of his conduct when he ought to be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur.  The risk must be of such a nature and degree that the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the actor's standpoint.



 

"Bitcoiners" who succumb to state demands, may as well migrate to CBDC and do us a favor by selling their BTC for cheap...

Cheers. I had already applied to Foundry while mining on Ocean, so I switched to them mid month. Getting paid every 24 hours is the definitely way to go for me.

Mined their 3rd block after 24 days.
From what others are saying it is BTC 0.15 to 0.16 less than a block mined with a block template with everything in it that could be in it.
Standard block? Normal block? Don't know what term to use.

Guess that's $6000 that people that mine there don't need.
If you don't need $6000 I can send you a BTC address to send funds too.

-Dave

Here is an example of a transaction (https://mempool.space/tx/123edc85fcaee4832ded581a98428fdc6a8c9d093e8f05637a8f705abaee12b3) that was sitting in the mempool for long enough but was not picked by Ocean, it was paying 321 sat/Vbyte, here is a transaction (https://mempool.space/tx/f2f9c61d95eeab7ae51c3f9d24365fdae3d3d4d85b8b7065c55c419577ab0ade) they did include to replace some of those taproot transactions paying 83 sat/Vbyte


mempool rates this block at 85%, which is a very terrible rate, the calculation is rather simple


The total fees that were available to extract on that block were 1.306BTC, the actual fee after the censorship turned out to be 1.162 btc, which is roughly 11% loss on fees, or 0.144 btc to be exact, that would be pretty similar to your calculation above.

Of course, this could have been a lot worse if there was a whole BTC of Ordinal fees sitting in the mempool like there was a few days ago, I think it's for their best interest that they did not hit a block when fees were skyhigh.



Of course, it's not, which is why I made the compassion with full nodes, every time a node receives a transaction it becomes fully aware of what the transaction has in it, the same concept would apply to a pool.

If the pool creates the blocktemplete they would include
Transaction A > legal
Transaction B > legal
Transaction C > Illegal

This means the pool has purposely included the transaction.

If the pool does nothing but broadcast a block found by miners, and the block is

Transaction A > legal
Transaction B > legal
Transaction C > Illegal

The pool can't just remove transaction C as that will invalidate the block, and given that the pool has no control over what the miner includes, legally speaking, it would be at least a bit more complicated to regulate this scenario compared to the first one. 

I understand it's possible for regulators to state that "As a pool you must not broadcast a block that includes a sanctioned transactions", but I assume it's easier to state "As a pool you must not include any sanction transaction in the blocktemplets you send to miners".

I also understand it's perfectly possible for regulators to impose these laws on every node, not only miners' node, something like "Anyone running a BTC node must blacklist the following addresses".

I could be wrong, but i would assume something like that would be a lot more difficult.

There's no need to impose anything on full nodes , as long as these transactions aren't included into a block . In the future an alert system similar to what satoshi had implemented will work for mining nodes . All other nodes play no part in consensus , so there's no reason to try to regulate them . It would be a total waste of energy to try to hunt down every non mining node on the planet . 

That is true, but hard in practice, if the U.S wants certain addresses to be banned, they have no say on a miner node that sits in China, that node will still include the transaction and broadcast it to U.S nodes.

There is no way that all governments and all countries will impose the same rules, it will always be one country and its pawns, so IMO if x country wants to go full retard, they would force the ban on all nodes running in their country.

OCEAN has been steadily increasing its hashrate.
https://i.ibb.co/3p958dd/Screenshot-20231231-055712.png

Now that a new block was mined more people might want to jump on the pool with their hashrate that they had sitting on other pools.
OCEAN's TIDES system is quite rewarding compared to FPPS/PPS and PPLNS pools, especially now. If s block is mined with exceeding luck miners on Ocean Pool get paid their full rewards, including luck, immediately.

Nope a single miner that is probably ocean themselves keeps adding hashrate:
https://ocean.xyz/stats/3MkwkMZHBkpz8czCipgf4SwsNwpgbV38Qz

No miner who is in it to make as much BTC as possible would be mining here.
Giving up $6000 per block or more is just nonsensical just because you don't want to include certain transactions.

-Dave

Miners in OCEAN probably make more than a miner in any other pool by hashrate given the 0% fee and the disadvantages of FPPS share models other than TIDES which ocean utilizes.

Also something most people don't realize is that OCEAN doesn't exactly ban inscriptions. In their latest block there was a single inscription that was included. It was included because there are certain requirements in the filters. Maximum data included must be under 42 bytes and the fee paid must be higher so as not to take advantage of the bug that gives full witness discounts to excessive data.

Not to mention that most pools that include Ordinals without limitationsn also accept our of band payments, which takes up space in the block for “accelerated” transactions without having any transparency on if these funds will be distributed to miners.

So yeah, smaller miners are also naturally migrating to OCEAN. The dashboard shows the total amount of workers and individual miner addresses. And it's also growing slowly but surely. 8)
Well a lot of the hash power is owned by corporations with their own pool these days so we can't realistically expect these to switch but still, the growth is there.

They also do not mine Whirlpool coinjoin transactions and BIP47 notification transactions and who knows what else that we have not seen yet that they will not mine.

With the last few blocks as of this post being heavy on inscriptions with higher fees it would be worse if they found a block as @mikeywith pointed out.
A lot of high fee TXs that they don't approve of without a decent number of those that they do and it's going to hurt.
If it's like the block they found and are only giving up BTC.14 give or take then the 0 fee does make up for it.

-Dave

0% is just some marketing stuff, it won't last forever, many pools did it when they first started, and it's only a matter of time before they change that unless they treat the pool as a charity then that would be a different story, in their last block they traded a 7.556BTC block for a 7.412 BTC block that's 1.9% which is higher than many PPLNS pools (not sure why you compare a PPLNS to a PPS pool in the first place).

 

I'm just gonna leave this here...

https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000358db21e5c9343f96c0733e2343d0c8c7137fd80dd47c?showDetails=true&view=actual#details (https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000358db21e5c9343f96c0733e2343d0c8c7137fd80dd47c?showDetails=true&view=actual#details)

So they've now decided to mine empty blocks if there is not enough 'legit' tx's available?
Idiots...  ::)

Certainly seems that way.

How is it possible to have ZERO "legit" transactions in that block? :o

The mempool is far from empty... do they censor literally EVERY transaction and just get the coinbase transaction (6.25 BTC)?

And now Ocean is helping the spam by mining empty blocks, this is just gold! But..
Neah, it's not censorship, it's too much luck  :D
The block Was mined at 00:32 and the previous at 00:31 probably again the same thing, found the block the second they started, didn't wait for the the tx template and broadcasted the empty block to make sure they get at least the block reward. Others do it too but for Ocean with their 1/1000 chance of finding a block this really blows.

Alani123, how are those profits coming?


LE, yeah, as I thought, Luke is against going nuts on x!
He says his empty block is actually a good thing since it adds security to the blockchain! LMAO!

https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1741967158282686683

Censoring cannot last for too long, it's not the first time it happens in the BTC network:

https://ir.mara.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1239/marathon-digital-holdings-becomes-the-first-north-american

vs

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-company-marathon-will-stop-censoring-transactions-start-signaling-for

I'm not sure but this maybe the first empty block of 2024
 Congrats I guess  ::)

Edit: They mined the 2nd empty block of 2024...

Except they threw away more than 1BTC in fees - so they are clearly NOT making more than other pools ...

Reminds me of "go woke, go broke".

Won't last for too long in Capitalism...

block timestamps are not to be trusted 100%, but ya, it probably happened in no more than 5 seconds or so.


Public transport, could take a while.


He is actually right, empty blocks do contribute to the overall strength of the blockchain, and does make a lot of money, here is a simple math I did years ago arguing with Kano


Of course, it no more 1.5k a day for those large pools, but the "good sum of money" theory holds stronger than ever today lol, but anyway, not to forget that doing so risks forking the blockchain, if you mine empty blocks then you likely don't verify the transactions, you are blindly building on a block of which you did not fully verify.

But I gotta be fair to Luke, he was always fine with empty blocks, he was very vocal against Jeff Garzik when Jeff proposed to change the protocol to disallow empty blocks.

How sure can you be about that though?
Have you measured how much the same work would pay in OCEAN and how much it would pay under other share models?
For all I know even if a pool doesn't accept payments for "accelerating" transactions (which take space away from other transactions without guaranteeing payment to miners), most other share models heavily favor the handful of largest miners in a pool at the detriment of any smaller miner that might not be as "professional" end up earning much less.

Vague comments about random possibilities of other pools stupidly ignoring transactions (like you do) mean nothing.

Fact: ocean produced an empty block, wasted possible transaction space, and threw away the available block fees.
How is ocean going to make up that lost BTC they threw away? They wont. It's by design that they throw away BTC.

On my PPLNS pool, we never ignore transactions, we have never produced an empty block over the past 9.3 years, 2435 blocks, and our last block yesterday, we had over 1BTC in fees on top of the 6.25 BTC reward, and on top of all that my pool only charges a tiny 0.5% fee.

As a pool operator I'm sure you know better than me that under these circumstances the options were to either throw a perfectly good block away, or to mine it empty because the previous one hadn't managed to propagate to all miners at such a short time period.

Pretty much every pool* out there will point their hash to an empty block while they're waiting for the new one to fully propagate. Not doing that would mean wasting hashpower for a bit more of a handful of seconds every time there's a new block.

If you can explain in technical terms a feasible method pools can utilize to avoid wasting hash without mining empty blocks, please, by all means... Stop arguing with me and go publish some code that will improve bitcoin and act as a quality of life improvement to all of the protocol's users.
OR if you have such good skills to be able to implement something like this yourself... I don't know. Maybe pitch it to investors and make your pool grow with some healthy injections of VC funds. Mining is quite big on institutional investment these days, OCEAN got started with a big investment too.

* Worth noting that FOUNDRY USA doesn't appear to be pushing any empty blocks with their label on them. But it's unlikely that they're throwing all this hash power away being the biggest pool so there's probably something else at play here.

It's a fact, kano's pool does not mine empty blocks.

It's possible that Kano pool doesn't mine empty blocks solely because with such low hashrate the chances would be very slim for them to mine any.

Or perhaps the hashrate they have as part of the network isn't considered significant to do something with hash power between block propagation. So if the latter is true, it would mean that by choise Kano is opting to miss out on ALL potential block rewards if such circumstances arise. Not just those coming from Ordinals.

Some napkin math says that if block propagation takes a few seconds and new blocks are found arojndy every 10 minutes perhaps by that standard there would be a ~1% chance to miss the entirety of a block's rewards mining in a pool that doesn't properly handle hashrate during these seconds.

Seriously, if you don't understand bitcoin, don't bother making up garbage to promote a pool.

Block propagation vs knowing about blocks, does not take a few seconds - that's rubbish.

My pool also does transaction verification in less than 100ms.

What you are talking about is when you know a block exists vs when you know the block is valid.
FACT: Mining on an unverified block header is bad for bitcoin.
PROOF: Antpoo and Fupoo went off on a bad fork for 6 blocks because of this, a number of years ago.

The difference between knowing a block exists, and verifying the block, so you can produce valid work, is less than 100ms for my pool.
So you are talking an extra block of mining time in every 6000 (or more) blocks.
So that's a gain of 0.0167% for the loss of 16% in fees on that one block - yeah the math clearly shows that all these pools, mining empty blocks, are idiots.

But alas this is to be expected where most, if not all pools, don't even undeestand the maths and statistics involved in bitcoin mining.

alani123 is a leftist, he doesn't understand free market economics...

Ocean ignores a host variety of transactions, as it appeared out with whirlpool and other non-standard according to Knots transactions. If I was a miner, I'd absolutely not want to mine in such a pool, even if there was a zero fee. The total ignored transaction fees are simply outweighing any potential fee reduction.

I don't understand why there is such a fuss around empty blocks. When a pool receives a new block, it must reconstruct the candidate block, calculate the merkle root and send the block header to their miners. This takes some time. Between that time frame, it'd be better to work on an empty block than have thousands of ASICs sitting idle.

Let's get a few things straight:
You admit to not mining empty blocks here:

It gets pointed out that by sheer chance sometimes block are mined right after a new block was found and this essentially forces the pool that found it to mine an empty block in order to avoid throwing away ALL of the rewards of their block.

With this knowledge you later admitted that not only does kano not mine empty blocks, but also it does it deliberately. But why would a pool be so willing to throw away perfectly good block rewards?

Uh uh. While I can commend the altruistic reasoning behind deliberately throwing away hash power and potential minned blocks, one must recognize some irony here.
Completely missing on the entirety of a block (i.e. not mining it at all) is definitely worse for the interests of a miner.
Your just admitted your pool has a high chance of doing that because of altruistic reasons.

Meanwhile though you seem to have made it your mission recently to discredit Ocean, failing to ignore its many mertis, in spite of it being arguably the most decentralized pool and the most small-miner friendly pool.
How sure are we than that you're in it for what's good for bitcoin?
If it dawned on you that doing self-promotion at someone else's expense is at best a bit out of place, at worse highly unethical, you perhaps would have restricted yourself in just commenting about the technicals (which I'm sure you have the knowledge to). But instead every second sentence we hear "my pool".
Well good luck defending yourself now that it was discovered that Kano arguably does something much worse to its miners for purely ideological reasons.

I ONCE told you that while some of your ideas make sense, your conclusions on politics and current affairs are outlandish.
I then compared this to the fact that even Marx having been born 200 years ago thus having far fewer access to information and analytical tools than we do, came to better conclusions than you on several matters.

In YOUR mind, me recognizing that you've said things provably dumber than someone born over 2 centuries ago means I admitted that I'm a leftist.
Probably though that only proves that you're allergic to literature and maybe reading as a whole. Not only did what I said fly directly over your head, but you're showing prejudice towards me just because I made a mere passing mention of a historical figure.
Perhaps though, if you had read ANYTHING in the form of a book you would have understood that personal insults don't make up for a good argument.

Such an oxymoron... :D pools are by definition centralized entities, since they reduce decentralization. You don't even have self-custody of the coins until you get paid.

Says the guy who wants the state to restrict Airbnb, instead of letting the market manufacture more buildings (I told you that only Bitcoin has artificial scarcity, buildings can be abundant).

You never responded to my arguments, so don't act "offended" or that you're a "victim", because you're not and you know it.

If you want state intervention, then yes, you're a leftist.

If you believe that Marxism is still relevant (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/could-capitalism-need-some-marxism-to-survive-the-4th-industrial-revolution/), you're also a useful idiot. ;)

Dear internet stranger, it's very easy for me to prove you wrong.

All I have to do is post a photo of my chock-full library (mostly politics/economics/psychology books) and then you'll shut up.

Are you willing to take a bet (1 BTC)? Put your money where your mouth is, I don't like cheap words, nor cowards hiding behind screens.

If you take it like that, yeah it's a found block that on it's own it does so.
Does Ocean's empty rushed block add more to the blockchains security than a full block mined 3 seconds later by Foundry? No! (let's keep it simple and not go there;)
What I was trying to say if that if Ocean wound's have existed, there would have been a full blocks mined 1-20 god know how minutes later with no diminishing capacity to the blockchain. So his block is not a net gain how he was trying to post it, it's a gain in security just how any other block would have been but a serious decrease in capacity.

The fact is that in this case Ocean didn't think about security of the chain, it though about profits, simple, just as everyone else, there was nothing magically different that Ocean did, he just behave like every pool with $ on it's mind!


Well, alani123, this thing does make a bit of sense, since socialist will always care about somebody's else money than their own, and to me it seems you care far more on those virtual miners that would magically gains something moving to Ocean than real economics.
Which brings us back to the questions you refused to answer
- do you actually have any kind of proof, hard proof (!) it's more profitable to mine on Ocean?
- do you actually mine there and since you have moved there have your profits increased?

If the answers are as I already know the song of crickets, don't you think that before trying to convince us to move you should be the leading example?

Mining is a business
Unicorns farts about an utopia nobody wants while doing business is bankruptcy /end

ps:
vs:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5475893.0

How times change!

Thanks for the link, gotta love his hypocrisy/flip-flopping! ;D Pretty typical for socialists... ::)

It risks forking the blockchain, and it did happen in the past, it really depends on what stage of the process was the nonce found


1- I receive a block notification from pool x via the P2P network or some relay network
2- I construct an empty block template using only the prev-block hash and start sending work to miners
3- I verify every transaction in that block
4- I exclude those from my mempool
5- construct a new block template with transactions and send work to miners

If a pool hits a block anywhere before point 3, then that's a huge risk because you are now possibly building on the wrong chain since the block you building on could have 1 bad transaction in it, the next thing you do is send your block hash to another pool and the network end up with a parallel chain that is invalid, I think the last thing something like that happened a few pools went ahead with 6 blocks or so and they were all invalidated later, pools who completely verified every transaction in that block rejected it and went on building on the correct chain.

If you mine an empty block post the 3rd point  -- that's fine at least based on my opinion, but you must AT LEAST verify that you are building on a valid block.



I won't even argue that they did it for the rewards since the risks are greater than the reward as far as the entire blockchain is concerned, but it doesn't mean an empty block doesn't add to the security of the blockchain, it does, if block no 100 is an empty block, it adds 1 confirmation to every transaction in all the previous blocks before it, it makes double-spending a transaction in the last blocks more costly and less likely, it also doesn't affect the chances of any other pool hitting another block right after that empty block.

I would do the exact same thing if I owned that pool, I know you would do the same "don't lie I can see you  :D", but what I won't do is pretend that I did it for the security of BTC and not my own profit.

But guys, you forgot a very serious issue to discuss here, have you checked the coinbase transaction (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/8ed1ca62af49883fa85563e094bb73d5609bc1692ad79b4915ec5ffdb5a539ef) for that block? lol, I mean given the nature of empty blocks, it sure didn't payout to anybody but the default coinbase address which belongs to Ocean, but on their main page they advertise their pool as


The empty block was found on Jan 1, 2024, 10:32 PM UTC, the funds stayed in their custody until  Jan 2, 2024, 4:21 PMUTC , or 103 blocks post that, it's true that 100 of them must be there given the fact that those are newly mined coins, but according to their sales b.s, every time they hit a block the rewards would go directly to miner's addresses, i.e, paid out in the coinbase transaction and the 100 blocks cool down duration would be at nobody's custody.

Interesting remarks.

Would it require a hard fork to disallow empty blocks? I'm surprised this is being allowed.

BTC already has a limited capacity (7 tx/sec), so there's no reason to waste blocks (no matter the pool).

Security can be strengthened with full blocks too, even if it takes a bit more time to mine them.

Well, if all nodes decide they would reject empty blocks, that would take care of it without a fork, however, this would achieve nothing, say I own a pool and I want to deliberately mine empty blocks, I would simply include only my own made up transactions and wala! my blocks are no longer empty and you will have to accept them.


Honestly speaking, I wouldn't call this a "waste of blocks." This could turn into a chicken-egg debate. But if you think about it, empty blocks do not have an impact on the chances or speed of your transaction getting confirmed as long as they are not excluded intentionally. Your transaction will always be mined in the next block that includes transactions.

We need to make sure that everybody understands that it was not possible for Ocean to pause that block, include transactions, and then transact it. That block was found empty, and it can't be changed. If Ocean would not propagate or even find that block, none of the pending transactions would have been confirmed anyway. It would only lead to Ocean losing a whole block for nothing good "except avoiding the risk of building on an invalid blockchain." But again, we don't know if they did validate the previous block's transactions or not—it's something we can't know. They can't prove, and thus it's always possible to accuse them of not validating, and they would have no way to prove you wrong.

I really feel like the above needs a lot more explanation for the average person to understand how empty blocks are not a waste of transaction space. Since many of you here know I like to use some weird analogies (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5475844.msg63264942#msg63264942), let me use the same bus analogy to try and explain the empty block situation.

Imagine a bus station where people are lining up waiting to be picked up (transactions in mempool). The normal behavior would be many buses waiting at the bus station with their doors open and the crowd of people are lining up (not knowing which bus is going to let them in). None of these buses are allowed to drive unless a pink bird falls on their front glass. When the bird falls, the bus driver or his assistant already know what people they are going to bring in because they sat there long enough to see who has a valid ticket and how much each of them is willing to pay for the seat.

So when the bus drives away, the other buses would now need to see which people took off on that bus so that they can exclude their names from the calling list, or else the next checkpoint would stop the bus and kill the bus driver because his list contains a person's name that isn't on the bus (mining pools clearing their mempool and removing the transactions that were already included in the previous block).

So as long as the time intervals between pink birds falling on a random bus's front glass are long enough, the bus driver will always have the time to entrain those people, and it's all working fine because on average it takes 10 mins for a pink bird to fall, which is enough time for the old bus driver to handle his passenger list. But sometimes, a pink bird would fall into one of the buses right after another pink bird had fallen. So the bus driver doesn't even know which passengers the previous bus took, and he needs to hit the pedal immediately before one of two things happen that would make him lose the ride.

A- Another pink bird falls into another bus (someone else finding a block to propagate it).
B- The pink bird falls on the ground because of gravity (the pool simply didn't propagate the block, threw it away and waited for another block).

The bus driver here would throw away his pen and paper, close his door, and hit the pedal as fast as he can, and the police checkpoint would let him through because he has no list at all (empty blocks are allowed while blocks that contain invalid transactions are not).

Now you can imagine that your transaction is a person sitting in that bus station. Had the second bus driver chosen not to drive away, it doesn't mean he would be able to take you in because, remember, he needs to prepare his list before the pink bird makes it to his front glass. It's not like he could let you in and he chose not to. He had only two options (drive empty or don't drive at all), which means (mine an empty block or don't mine at all). So to you as a person waiting in the bus station, that bus isn't wasted; it just happened.

Of course, doing so means the second bus is now at risk of reaching that checkpoint only to find that the bus driver before him was shot dead by the police because there is something wrong in his list. He looks in the rearview mirror (right before he is shot dead too) and finds another bus behind him who would also be stopped and killed. Lol, of course, while that isn't the end of the world, it simply means that you contributed to misleading the limited number of buses into taking the wrong route. And now the legit buses are fewer in number, and thus those poor people have to wait even longer because of your greedy behavior, not to mention all the misery you created at the bus station.

Humorous analogy but not right.
Mining empty blocks has *always* been allowed for 1 main reason: to maintain the 10min avg time between blocks for the (now) rare occasions that the mempool is empty meaning there are literally no transactions to process for too long of a time. In the very early days that was almost common, but these days is VERY rare but still does happen.

Speaking of mempool...
If you checkout https://mempool.space/ you will see *all* of the upcoming tx's in the que and what the expected composition of the block should be based on its profitability (fees paid). Note that while there is no one global mempool: every node on the network maintains its own mempool, so different nodes may hold different transactions in their mempools, ALL pools can also see that information and at least in the case of Kanopool have already selected what tx's they will use and have that data cached for use when a new block-found msg is broadcast to the network. The 1st cached data includes (or should include) the id of the previous block found to propagate the chain. It's how Ocean pre-scans ((or should be pre-scanning) the tx's that they will use in the change of work sent when they see a new block.

Difference is Ocean chooses to not include any tx's related to ordinals whereas Kanopool and all the others accept all of them so scheduling the tx's is easy

@alani123, you said and use that as a reason to mine an empty block. Kano has repeatedly said here that the time for his pool to generate and broadcast new work to all the miners is under 100ms + time needed for the data packets to reach the miners (ping time). I'd think that for most other pools it should be about the same.

Um, for whatever reason(s) Luke's original Eligius pool software was exceeding slow at processing new work and because of that yes even back then he was doing empty blocks. As he has always been censoring tx's (back then casinos) methinks that possibly Ocean has the same issues for the same reason(s)?

It is not very rare, it is more like impossible, mempool has not been empty for years, not for a single moment.

Please point what is not right about it.

But that is not why they mined an empty block, it is not like they had no other transactions to include, nor the censorship of ordinals makes block template handling slower, their Knots nodes could be slower than core, but i wouldn't imagine a huge difference.



In his tweet he talks about a fee seconds, about 6 seconds difference between receiving the block and propagating his own, so ya certainly longer than Kano's.

Pools hitting zero fee blocks due to censoring tx's are going to face class action lawsuit possibilities maybe not now maybe not after 2024 ½ ing but by 2028 the  1.5625 block hit reward will often be lower than the fees. So deliberately reducing fees to hit a block quickly (antpool trick) more so than a censorship trick like Ocean is doing is going to face a lawsuit.

Yeah I know it is off in the future but it will happen. Maybe Ocean won't for doing it to ordinals but he needs to be wary.

This would be true if they had the chance to include transactions and chose not to, but this isn't the case, and probably will never be the case for any pool out there, every pool on the planet mines empty blocks except for Kano and CK, maybe a few more here and there, it would be very hard to prove that x pool intentionally mined an empty block while they had the chances to include transactions, I believe antpool did it around the blocksize debate and the forks, but it's not something you could take to court, they can just claim they had a bug in their software and they were not able to create a block templet with transactions.

However, Ocean pool is at risk of dying on its own if the Ordinal wave continues and its clients see that they are missing out on some good profit just because Luke decided to ban/censor ordinal transactions, this theory holds true assuming all of their clients do know and understand how mining fees work, but then seeing a pool like Antpool that provides PPLNS for 0% while keeping 100% of the transaction fees still has users mining on their PPLNS -- it simply proves that many people are just stupid. if Ocean attracts the same type of people, those people won't even care to check if they are making less and will continue to run on Ocean.

Of course, this is good for everybody else who uses a pool that doesn't ban ordinals, every sat of fee that Ocean leaves on the table is going to be taken by someone else, I'd rather see stupid people mine on Ocean than see them mine on antpool PPLNS, since they are going to lose money anyway, it's better to lose it the other miners and not to Bitmain.

I have been getting 120% to 140% for a block for 40 days in a row .  say 7.2 to 8.4 coins a block.  If this pool gives 7 to 8 coins vs 7.2 to 8.4 it will not get a big player.

I wonder how this will be affected by Ordinals transactions now setting their fees en masse to 20 to 30 sats per byte. This will put them below the legitimate transactions since the average fee always seems to be a bit higher, but it does guarantee that miners will always have a base fee rate for its blocks, given that these transactions now take up almost 200vMB.

You have to add two rules to the analogy
- the bird will only fall after the last buss has left the station
- the bird will not fall unless the driver has already started his engine  ;)
The last one is tricky because in the analogy the driver just spends gas while in the mining scenario it can actually profit.


Those fees are driving us all crazy that we started to think it empty blocks are a thing of past eras but no, the mempool was empty for at least a few seconds during last springs, not full blocks were quite common and there were some moments when indeed it was empty, of course not for more than a few seconds probably till the next tx came but it still did happen.


I know that timestamps are really tricky, but is there a way to find out the smallest interval two full blocks have been found even with approximation?
Viabtc, f2pool offer the data to the seconds but crawling that seems like a pain in the ass and I don't think it's worth the effort.

time stamps are off.

I have seen block xxx10 at 10:00:01. and block xxx11 at 9:59:59

a later block arrived first. no shit timestamp info

this may have been corrected ,but it is was possible at one time.

I have seen antpool do back to back to back blocks  with seconds apart.

As they had a short cut method that made rewards quicker .

The block timestamp is set by the pool when it sends work to the miner.
Some miners can also increment the timestamp - but it is not when the block was found.

exactly that the time stamp does not match the real time.

Correct!


Ya I'd say turning off the engine is not an option here, so maybe the bus driver needs to roll down his window while the engine is running and burning gas? :D me and my bus fudge analogies.



I think it's likely a gltich on the mempool you were checking, otherwise, if that was the case, then we should have seen some empty blocks that are somewhat spaced in propagation time, LoyceV maintains a list of empty blocks somewhere IIRC, might worth checking.


Is it safe to assume that block timestamps are likely set into the future, I don't know exactly how pools handle the timestamp but judging by the(MPT) rule it's safer for a miner to write block timestamp slightly into future , in case the previous blocks were pushed into future which would invalidate their blocks,  it also gives miners an advantage of having a lower difficulty adjustment (nothing much, below 1% indeed if they all pushed the blocktime into the future), plus getting a wider nonce range without having to alter the Merkle root.?

See Bitcoin block data available in CSV format (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5246271.0), and combine for instance time.txt with weight.txt.

@kano
As it's difficult to have a direct contact with a pool owner , can i ask if your node's connections are random or are you mostly ( or fully ) connected to other pools ? It's something i'd like to ask for a long time , it will help me understand if how i think network works is correct on not . Thank you in advance .

To keep from going off topic here, refer to post #1 in the Kanopool thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789369.0) You can post your questions there and he will be sure to reply. Also has a Discord channel (https://discord.com/channels/457139201092091915/457139201092091919). See https://kano.is/ for the Discord invite for better access to the channel.

In short - it has several nodes spread around the world and fastest possible connections to the BTC network.

Interestingly some big miners have hopped onto OCEAN.
The pool briefly reached above 1 exahash yesterday. I am not sure what the logistics and thought process of moving hashrate are but probably the pool is going to keep growing its hashrate if things continue like this.
Miners moving some of their hash temporarily are probably comparing their rewards to PPLNS pools and realizing that they're earning more on OCEAN, then moving their full hashrate on the pool.

Actually most big miners that are on OCEAN had a test run at first. It's interesting that this can be observed through their history on the pool.

Some odd fluctuations in the pool's hashrate seem to be taking place, seems like some of the larger miners are probably dictating that.
https://i.ibb.co/WvMnC08/Screenshot-20240116-011944.png

After the pool peaked at 1 Eh/s a lot of hash power went out, some other went in.
Some facilities might be having issues, other miners might be doing testing...
Who knows. But I still speculate that eventually more hash power will settle in ocean pool as more miners realize that in the long run the TIDES payment structure is more profitable than PPLNS.

On the other hand, the pool also doesn't punish pool hopping, so we'll probably keep seeing noticable changes in it's total hash power till more miners of a larger scale settle in it.

Probably a good time to get in more shares as part of the pie now in case a block is found now if you're a miner though

Weather in the US playing a huge factor in the decline in hashrate across many pools.

In what sense?

In the sense that there were many farms and data centers under curtailment.

What does "curtailment" mean?

I thought many BTC miners (over 50%) got electricity from renewable energy sources.

Curtailments are when miners shut their facilities due to power demands due to weather or high demand by the energy grid. Many farms get a portion of their energy from renewable sources but not all.

Compass for instance had many of their farms offline in the past 48 hours due to the increase in demand on the energy grid caused by inclimate weather resulting in a reduction of hashrate to many pools.

The renewables are the problem. Just *how* do you think being renewable would help matters???

And what does that have to do with power shortages? Answer: Wind & solar power is highly variable and bad weather causes numerable problems such as what Texas is currently experiencing https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/01/16/green-wind-solar-energy-freezing-texas-power-grid-blackout/  Only Nuclear and fossil-fueled (gas of course - not coal) power plants are able to run regardless of weather (and at night). Sorry Greenies but your unrealistic goals of zero-emissions for the world just cannot work. Reality can be a bitch eh?  ;D

Considering the massive mining farms located mainly in Texas and a few in other areas of the US like Nebraska and Montana - all of whom have agreements with their power providers to cut back their mining when power is needed elsewhere in the state - of course the hash rate is way down.

Are you dumb or what? I'm a Net Zero critic (https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1645186289933623296). Calm your titties.

Regarding renewable energy and BTC mining, I believe it's a good combo, since ASICs don't have to run 24/7/365. It's not an industry that produces cars/food or something like that...

You could have solar-powered ASICs dispersed all over the world and they would work only during the day. Not a big deal, since there's always a certain place that has day, while others have night. Hashrate would fluctuate a bit of course, but BTC can handle it.

Wind mills also tend to provide plenty of electricity during the night, so that's another alternative to keep the ASICs running during night hours.

What the f***?


And you actually believed that?  ;D
That's why Mara bought a coal powerplant, riot another one , core one on gas and forgot their names want to burn tires for electricity! ;D
In other news Tesla cars are made with zero energy out of recycles beer bottles and they run on unicorn farts, while  the Exxon Valdez oil spill was actual good for the wildlife helping penguins keep their black color intact (yeah I know there are no penguins in Alaska)

Anyhow


Yeah my bad, I forgot to add by the same pool in that, since we can't trust the times of two different pools I was looking for the time of two blocks mined by the same pool, since those mentioned report the time on their website to the second that would be the minimal time ever with a certain bit of accuracy. But it drops the number of instances by two order of magnitude since that miner has to mine itself two consecutive blocks.
Still the minimal time it ever took them to do so would be interesting!

What part you don't understand exactly?

The BTC network is decentralized, which means ASICs can turn on and off regularly on demand (depending on power sources).

Give me a better source if you can:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/09/21/why-bitcoin-mining-might-actually-be-great-for-sustainability/
https://digitalinfranetwork.com/news/research-suggests-over-50-per-cent-of-btc-mining-uses-clean-energy/
https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/news/bitcoin-mining-fifty-percent-renewable/

ps: I'm not in favor of WEF/Great Reset/ESG, but that doesn't mean that BTC + renewable energy + AI won't be the best tech combo ever invented. Mark my words, BTC has nothing to be afraid of.

One of the (not so many) times I agree with stompix here.

We all have to understand that corporations are in it for the money.
A good image benefits them and they're going to invest a lot in it, but sometimes that also involves being outright deceitful or just lying to get people to think you're doing something good.
Is mining based on renewable energy? Maybe yes, but only to some extent.
To claim that it's based on 50% renewable energy would be a lie though.
First of all the energy draw of a miner is constant, but the energy produced by renewable energy sources never is.

Operators of large mining facilities can strike meaningful agreements with energy producing companies, because they can help them monetize overproduction.
But that can also mean that the operators will be  forced out of the network (either financially or through agreement) when there's high demand that the network has to cover.
They will then have to fall back to more traditional and on-demand ready energy production methods such as fossil fuel (hence the coal). \

One could say that since energy production factories often can't run under capacity and are therefore usually over-producing energy, that if bitcoin miners mostly utilize that then their impact on their environment is mostly negligent since they don't create a carbon footprint that wouldn't be there without them. In this fashion, the claim that bitcoin miners run 50% on renewable energy could have some meaning IF these renewable sources had a positive impact by cutting down the production needs for regular energy consumers while the miners don't have to rely on them. But the coal mines/energy factories being owned and operated by BTC mining companies make this all these Greenwashing claims seem very deceptive.

I actually haven't verified this from a third party source but at least in Ocean's introductory livestream it was claimed that Bob Burnett's Barefoot Mining renovated and turned on an old hydroelectric plant to utilize as the energy source for a BTC mining farm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PH5sKrkzZY&t=3230s). Supposedly attendees even received a tour in the facility. I'm not gonna say you should take them at their word, these things are hard to verify anyway. But if true, then we should give them credit for doing environmentally conscious mining the way it should be done. Hydro, contrary to solar whose productivity dwindles year by year, has a long lifespan, and even if bitcoin mining ends a few decades down the line, hydro projects could continue to be still utilized by future generations.

Well my pool, every so often, sees blocks by two different pools well under 1 second apart, so I've no idea where the 5 second number came from.
eligius used to get a massive high orphan rate, due to their poor code, so I guess they will continue to do that.

Yeah, right, no!
Mining is a business, ASICs are like airplanes, you stop then (you ground them) you lose money!
And it has nothing to do with decentralization, that's the blockchain, this is $!


You consider an article written by a guy:
to not be baised?

The source is pretty simple, Marathon was forced to shut down it coals power plan at Hardin and move out to Rockdale
https://ir.mara.com/sec-filings/all-sec-filings/content/0001493152-23-007879/0001493152-23-007879.pdf guess how the new facility is powered?

https://greenidge.com/our-story/
Check the timeline at the bottom  ;D Good old gas!

Riot and Whinstone, guess what is powering that?
https://www.gem.wiki/Whinstone_Bitcoin_mining_facility

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/texas-bitcoin-riot-ercot-grid-energy-18352398.php

Let's go to hut8:
https://hut8.com/2024/01/08/hut-8-receives-court-approval-in-its-stalking-horse-bid-for-four-natural-gas-power-plants-including-the-north-bay-bitcoin-mine/


Let's move to Aboutbit:
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/05/11/2440883/0/en/AboutBit-launches-one-of-nation-s-largest-cryptocurrency-mining-facilities.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merom_Generating_Station

I'm getting bored, if you want more just google around, now it's your turn to show me one mining farm running on wind and solar alone to balance that to 0.5% at least not 50%. Don't forget Rockdale alone is 750MW!

You do realize that even with coal/gas/nuclear power sometimes ASICs are forced to shut down due to energy shortages, right?

That's part of the business...

If you want 24/7/365, make your own uninterruptible power source. When you depend on someone else, you'll be forced to follow their mandates.

Regarding the energy mix, I never said they don't use coal/gas/nuclear.

I said 50% comes from renewables, which means the remaining 50% comes from other sources (coal/gas/nuclear). There's nothing to debunk here.

You also should consider that at times the cost of energy exceeds the rewards from mining also resulting in mining farm curtailments regardless of energy sources.

Interesting, OCEAN has been sitting at ~1.25 Eh/s for a few hours with relative stability. Let's see if it'll last this time.

As it's pretty natural with mining most of the hashrate comes from the top miners by hashrate, even though the pool has more than 400 individual miners active.
Also this time around the hashrate increased by many new miners tuning in around at the same time. So it might as well be the same operation just using different addresses.
With OCEAN these things can be observed from the pools page which monitors each address' activity very thoroughly.

I wonder what kind of miner decide to join OCEAN. Since OCEAN exclude Ordinals transaction, i only can assume it's someone who really hate Ordinals. It's also interesting this month they found 5 blocks, while last month they only found 3 blocks.

So far OCEAN's payment model is a bit different than most other pools.
Anytime a block is found, the payment happens immediately and the rewards are distributed as soon as the block is there.
That means that if you had 1% of the share log at the time of hitting a block, you get ~1% of the rewards.
This has both its advantages and disadvantages. The good thing means that you get fully rewarded for block finding luck.
So if a block is found earlier than expected, that means that you get all the rewards you could from the potential luck.
That means that right now OCEAN is a favorable pool for miners that feel lucky.
Edit:
I think though this is supposed to change after the 8th block is found? (Still waiting on the extended version of how the TIDAL payment model works in depth btw)
From what I've read in OCEAN's group the 8th block marks the ending of this "bonus" program and now payments will span 8 blocks.
Supposedly now the share log spans 8 blocks? Luke and Co. have been on twitter spaces every other day but here we have only this thread and I'm not their rep so idk.

Anyone know how could it be possible to see how many of OCEAN's mined TXns are from this new BRC-20 like on-chain technology called RUNES? At least with other such spammy things so far it was pretty easy to notice them by pasting the block tx on ordinals.com. I'm pretty sure Ocean mines Runes but I am not sure how to check entire block so far...

Seems that like always, money is king!

After managing to stay a bit over 1ex, ocean is down to 600ph.
https://ocean.xyz/dashboard
Not surprisingly, when the reward is 3btc and the fees often climb above that why mine here?
You can't feed a family on principles and you can't pay your electricity bills with things you think are right.

It was a dad project from the start, you won't get people who don't want to spend 10$ on tax or buy a 4TB drive for larger blocks to spend $5000 on one machine and lose money every day on bills to keep fees low.

The folks behind Ocean Pool are pretty rich, they will probably continue to lose potential profit just to "prove their point", I won't be surprised to see this pool run for many years to come, also, you can't just assume that all miners know what mining is, many folks who already mine on that pool probably don't even know or understand how are they leaving money on the table by mining to this pool, it's wrong to assume that everyone is smart. :D

I wonder how one of those clueless miners would have reacted if Ocean had mined a block now and instead of getting 8 BTC like Antpool and the rest that got lucky the reward would still have been 3 and a bit BTC. For a pool that mines a block every week throwing away sometimes a 200% of normal revenue down the drain would be a clear stay away sign.

But still, I cheered for Ocean once, it would have been damn hilarious for them to mine the halving block! ;D

Many people don't even know that other pools are paying differently, in fact, 90% of miners don't understand how the payouts are generated and what formula the pool uses to calculate the rewards, I am willing to guess that nearly nobody that uses Antpool understands how they calculate their FPPS, there is no mentioned about it online, and the average support folks don't know the answer, it takes too much effort to figure out how these payouts originate for every pool, but again, most people are clueless.

I wouldn't go as far as to call miners in Ocean clueless. There's plenty of miners there but the pool's hashrate to a large extent comes from miners that have to be managing pretty large operations. At this scale it's probably a very conscious choice. I went into the pool's dashboard to look at what part of the hashrate comes from large miners, and the top 5 make up 470 Ph/s. The Ocean dashboard is pretty transparent at letting anyone monitor this: https://ocean.xyz/dashboard

Probably the pool's total hashrate will rise soon also because it currently sits at around 660 Ph/s but most of the time it's above 1k Ph/s. I guess some mining operations shut down every now and then due to electricity cost spikes or weather etc.
This can be observed from the hashrate graph also,
https://i.ibb.co/t47511Q/image.png
With changes to the hashrate that are that steep I have to guess the biggest changes in hashrate are coming from large operations that make a point by mining in Ocean. Or perhaps also have found it might be more profitable to mine under the TIDES payment scheme after a block is found because of the way it rewards luck.

So you want to ignore the obvious facts that exist on the longest blockchain the world has ever known and assume some things that only exist in your imagination? how does that work? Ocean pool leaves a ton of money on the table, look at this block https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000002509da9476db6f578ae8d2bd81d83b992ea37b68db8d1

it has a terrible health score, the pool included some 50+ sat/vByte transactions and left some 140+ sat transactions, anyone who thinks they are somehow magically making more profit mining on Ocean is either clueless or plain stupid, you may argue that they are doing this for the sake of BTC because they think inscription are bad, but you can't just claim they are somehow making a good profit by not mining high paying transactions.

Large pools that found most of the halving blocks have mined more BTC in a single day than they would in weeks, you know how terrible Ocean's rewards would seem if they found a block around the halving when inscriptions were paying 35-40BTC/block? just imagine that you have a 100ph of the 1000ph Ocean has and on that day you received your 0.325BTC when you could have made 4BTC on that same day had your pool mined those transactions.! Ocean Pool was very lucky they didn't mine any of those blocks.

There is no such sake, that's the thing. It's not a "I don't mine it, it doesn't get into the chain". If you don't mine a transaction, somebody else will. That's how censorship-resistance is ensured. Ocean ignoring a transaction produces the equivalent outcome of mining it and giving the transaction fee to someone else.

I still don't understand how a Bitcoin developer is incapable of grasping this simple concept.

Ego. He thinks (hopes) people will follow his lead.
He has censored transactions / addresses before: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2ityg2/warning_bitcoin_address_blacklists_have_been/
He has attacked other coins before: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/o6qwx/lukejr_attacks_and_kills_coiledcoin_altcurrency/

And yet people still mine at his pool.

-Dave

If he's really entitled to his opinion, he should censor transactions after they have been included in a block. You censor them when unconfirmed, but accept them when they're mined? What kind of ethics is this?

Damn, I used to use Gentoo on my desktop PC 20 years ago... what kind of crap has this distro become? ???

His mining pool reminds me of Netflix/modern video games -> "go woke, go broke"

If you're stupid enough to leave money on the table for "holier than thou" reasons, why should I change your mind? :P

He is actually the opposite of woke, he is a Catholic: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_uncensored/comments/492ztl/lukejr_the_only_religion_people_have_a_right_to/

Whatever, it's his pool people are free to mine there and make less BTC. It's good, more BTC for the rest of us.

And this is just my opinion, some of the stratum [mine.ocean.xyz] servers are at Google. Nice to give $ to a company that has banned crypto ads and other crypto things while allowing people to litter their search results with crypto malware links and scams.

-Dave

There's a real tangible effect that ordinals/runes minters will face if part of the hashpower doesn't mine them in the blocks they find.
Effectively they become more expensive to be included in a block. Right now with OCEAN being a small part of the network this effect isn't very large. But it's also acting as a vote of sorts.

If more miners get behind OCEAN it's indicating that they care more about what they perceive as a better step for the health of bitcoin's network rather than some short term profits. Of course Ordinals/Runes give economic incentives for miners to act against the interests of users seeking to transact value on bitcoin's chain, which harms the overall utility of bitcoin as a tool to make electronic cash transactions (which is Satoshi's original intention), so I'd say Luke is right to call these types of transactions an attack on bitcoin.

Surely not everyone has to agree. And not everyone has to follow the same ideals... But Luke isn't forcing anybody to do anything here. It's a novel proposal to miners to opt out of mining abusive transactions completely voluntarily. The results so far show that while some miners hold ideals to support bitcoin against this so called attack, those holding the vast majority of the hash power either don't care enough or would rather go after short term profit.

I know, there are various forms of religions (wokeness is one of them, the most popular these days) that impose their "moral" standards over others. That was my point.

Morality > profit ?

No, thanks! ;)

That's like arguing that the Communist Party may have a small percentage right now (around 5%), but in the future more "moral" people could join it and demolish profit-seeking, "greedy" capitalists. ::)

I mean, good luck with that... you're basically asking people to go against human nature.

Yeah, it will rise and rise ...since..the launch and it still hasn't crossed 0.20% of the global hashrate!
Quite funny that you mention costs when all this is about leaving profits aside!


Or maybe they have switched to another pool that doesn't bankrupt them!


Which is not happening!


And finally, we have the revelation, mining is a business!
That's why Phil shut down his operations, that's why electricity prices have killed mine, that's why the guys with 2 cents per kwh will keep mining as long as they get 1 cent profit and they will shut down when they won't! Ideals don't pay for bills nor do they fill your stomach!
Seriously, listen to mikeywith, he has explained this perfectly, there are dreams and there is a reality, you can't force your way in a decentralized system by ignoring the law of economics and then blabbing about freedom and free markets.


Ordinals in the blocks are bad, catholic prayers are good, small transactions are good, casino transactions have no place in the chain, if nobody sees the patter of "wherever I don't like is bad and should be banned" in here needs another prescription!


Those commies would first need capital to start mining, so I guess that's a bit of a conundrum for them!  ;)
And I can't wait to grab one huge bag of popcorn and check the math of the guys who thing 10tb of storage is too expensive for a node but magically 3 million $4k/3KW beast are doable!

The tangible effect will be in those miners' pockets. Ordinals will get their confirmation sooner or later, whether only 50%, 5%, or even 0.5% of the hashrate mines them.

Nope. They become less expensive. Let me give you an example. Group A ignores Ordinal transactions, where group B ignores no transaction. Let's assume each group owns 50% of the hashrate.

Assume we have the following mempool:

For the sake of simplicity, assume that each block can have up to 4 transactions.

In the hypothetical network state, the group A would mine TX #5, #4, #3 and #2, even if #2 pays less than the Ordinal one. Therefore, it reduces the competition, because the transactions that pay less than the Ordinals have a higher chance to be mined than before. The mempool right after would be:

You can see that the Ordinal now pays way more than the others, and there is still 50% chance that it will be ignored again by group A, so the Ordinal user can reduce their fee from 100 sat/vb to 51, knowing that group B would consider them with the highest priority.

If it isn't completely understandable, think of it this way: In the first mempool figure, if you were the person paying 75 sat/vb, you'd know that you have 50% chance to be picked as highest priority, whereas in the current state, you'd be completely confident that the chance would be 0%, and this would incentivize you to compete with the Ordinal user, and rise your fee rate (which would in consequence incentivize them to do so, as well).

I'd argue that the health of the Bitcoin network relies on principles such as censorship-resistance being preserved at all times, no matter what. Being censorship resistant is not just game theory; it's a principle itself, just like ignoring Ordinals. I don't understand why you think that pro-censorship pools would be more ethical than anti-censorship pools.

there is a lot of push for perfect kyc
translation censoring of transactions

if i were running a big mine say 1 or 2 eh and it was usa based i would put some gear in this pool just in case the usa forces full kyc and tx censorship.

I am thinking a lot of people mining there has usa mines and are prepping for new 🆕 restrictions for usa mining ⛏️.

Yes way too expensive: https://www.microcenter.com/product/616808/seagate-ironwolf-12tb-7200-rpm-sata-iii-6gb-s-35-internal-nas-cmr-hard-drive
Popcorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPFxTous3ew

Makes you wonder what else they will not mine when they decide they don't like it.

And don't forget Block / Square / CashApp are involved with this pool. They like their KYC and data tracking and all of that.


Either way for now I'm out of this thread. It's just getting me aggravated.

-Dave

Can I preface this by saying that I don't mean what I'm about to say in an offensive way? Maybe you can help me come to another revelation because I genuinely fail to understand the motivations behind talking to me like that. :D

I get that people don't like Luke and I get most of your points. But what I don't get is why so many people seem to be on the offensive whenever someone talks about Ocean pool in a non-negative light.
Do senior users of this forum have something to gain from ordinals/runes? I'd bet that not ever 1% of this forum operate mining hardware anymore as it's become too much of a hassle to run as an individual. So what's the deal with siding against those opposing ordinals/runes? I don't understand this.

If we think about bitcoin's long term future, it's probably better to preserve and focus on its value transacting capabilities. Action against ordinals/runes is a novel idea based on good principles. So are we just going to stand completely against it, especially if it happens in a voluntary manner? Or are we just hating on Ocean because of some code Luke released over 10 years ago?

I'm not under the impression that anyone here would have ulterior motives to support Ordinals or Runes but still, attacking those that just oppose them in such passion seems a bit much to me.

There is nothing special in the way I talk and this is how I always do when I need to say things over and over again and again.


I can't speak for others but for me I will simply not agree with censorship when this not only hits against most principles but it will also hurt the entire ecosystem, and once we go into there there are so many things wrong that you will need magical power to fix
- we start censoring ordinals, then we censor dust transactions, then we censor maybe coinjoins, maybe also consolidation cause...they offer no value, when do we draw the line as it is mathematically impossible for 10 million people to use the chain daily
- fees at 30 satoshi cover only 1/3 of the reward, when the reward is gone everyone will need to pay that just to keep the same level of security, if people are not willing to pay...who will? If they are why do you want them to stop and why?
- Luke is asking us to save the chain and allow people with 1 tb nodes to keep running while the same we need as above 3 million 3kw miners to secure the chain, FML, yeah fuck my life, 60knodes running 10tb drives is impossible but 3 million gears as powerful as AC units running 24/7 is doable


Oh, the ones who are not with us are against us, recalling 89 again.
I am free to call Luke  whatever as long as I provide arguments for it and I don't have to like ordinals at all, to be honest, I'm not even completely sure how those work nor am I going to waste my time on it! 


I am focusing on the fire future.  ;)


Don't forget you also need faster internet... ;D Or at least faster than in 2013, oh wait!