His post is mostly FUD because he is pushing an Anti-Gavin agenda and myopically assumes himself to be on the winning side rather than looking at the system as a whole.

If the world was beautiful and clean a fork would instantly separate the networks, so if you had N coins on Bitcoin, you'd now have N on BitcoinA and N on BitcoinB.  Someone would then quickly put up an exchange site that let you trade BitcoinA for BitcoinB, so you could sell the side you think will lose and buy the other, or choose nothing, in which case you'd end up unaffected (that is, still with N coins) once one fork dwindled to nothing.

But the reality is more complicated and you'd need careful code analysis and probably simulation to figure it out.  Yes you have N coins on both forks but the problem is that when you issue a transaction, it will be picked up by BOTH forks.  You can't spend on just one fork!  Your txn is valid on both, and even if you figure out how to "trigger" it on just one fork, the receiver could reissue it on the other thereby "stealing" your coins on the other fork.

But in theory the receiver would not have to; pending transactions won't be purged, so BitcoinA and BitcoinB would process the same transactions on different blockchains forever, keeping the forks in sync.  In practice, the smaller blockchain would probably drop some pending transactions eventually, resulting in a slow divergence.  Could you force this divergence?  It would take careful code analysis to figure out a way, but it would certainly be messy and probability based.  But eventually when transactions increase to consistently exceed the capacity of blocks in the smaller chain it would chew up all RAM and crash the code today (as per Mike Hearn's analysis).  But if patches were added clean that up, then finally you'd be able to pretty reliably target a transaction to a particular fork (by giving a txn fee too low for the fork with smaller blocks, for example).  Once you get the first single-fork transaction, you can now spend those coins independently because they are on different addresses on different forks.

At that point, both forks would see and attempt to apply each other's transactions, so you end up with lots of spends from "invalid" addresses "spamming" the network.  This would be a huge mess for statistics, visibility and analysis sites like blockchain.info.

Rather then risk the mess above, it would probably be better to add a "version" field to the transactions (and every other protocol message), change this version field EVEN if that protocol message didn't actually change, and have clients ignore messages of the wrong version.  Write your new clients to rev the version field once a particular block # is mined.  This would get you a clean separation.

The first site (http://www.proofofexistence.com/) does a digital "fingerprint" (SHA256) of the document and then puts that on the blockchain -- so it does not do a digital signature.

If you look at the second site closely (https://brainwallet.org/#sign), you'll see that it is capable of "signing" the document using a variety of different flavors.  This is because the actual digital signature algorithm can be different.  Do you want a particular algorithm (which might be trickier because the engineer would need to research it, and do interoperability testing) or do you just need your own digital signature algorithm (only works in your web site in the 2 tabs you described).

First off, miners can't spend your coins, they can only deny that you spend them.  So counterparty risk is so significantly diminished as to warrant a different term.  And so is trust.

Second, if you don't like what miners are doing (presumably denying your transactions), you (or more likely a group of similarly minded people) can pool your money and buy your own miners.  (This presupposes that the miners can even identify your transactions which is a necessary step before one can even think about granting permission) Your miners can join the network (without permission) and so some % of blocks mined will be what you want them to be, unless the majority of other miners collectively choose to ignore your blocks at a potential economic disadvantage to themselves.  In which case you can continue on your own fork if you really want.  So again so much less permission is required as compared to traditional payment networks that is does not make sense to claim that bitcoin requires "permission".

Any network engineers on here?  I have been thinking that Bitcoin could help solve the network neutrality problem: that is, the problem where telecom operators and customers would benefit from dynamically created differentiated service flows (for non network engineers that means you stream a movie from Netflix and get more bandwidth for the duration of the movie), but ONLY if the telecom operator cannot preferentially enable some service providers and not others.  Otherwise, the operator can and will harm innovation by preferring incumbent or in-house services.

The idea is to create a pseudo-anonymous market for differentiated service flows...

http://effluviaofascatteredmind.blogspot.com/2015/05/network-neutrality-and-bitcoin.html

I like it too but havent analyzed IBLT yet.  One possible concern is that it discourages miner's personal choice to add or remove a txn from the block.  But is this even bad?  If it is a simple addition to the protocol could be a list of modification s to the canonical txn ordering.

@solex it seems to me that at best the IBLT idea would halve the bandwidth.   And remove a nasty burst during block propagation.  Is my analysis correct?  If so its good but not really comparable to a 1000x bitcoin adoption.

Is this idle curiosity or important to you?  If important probably I could fork the satoshi client and instrument it.  But then we'd have to collect data, etc. Its a medium time length project.

WRT TPTB/Anonymint, I vote that we put the speculation and constructive advice to bed at this point (I think he's heard enough), and rely on volunteers to very selectively quote and respond to his few information-filled bitcoin-related sentences.

The future is bifurcated.  If Bitcoin continues to be legal in any jurisdiction, it will be very popular so we will need these high powered computers.  If it is outlawed to the point where you can't even be part of the network then running in your home computer over TOR will be fine.  But BTW TOR will likely be outlawed first.

If is illegal in some jurisdictions, you won't be able to run a full node there.  But you'll be able to do stuff like hide txns in image files and upload them out of the jurisdiction.


This kind of comment is the exact reason why you head over to a forum topic full of early adopters and you can't even score 10-20k seed.  Your technical "hints" don't suck which makes me think you might have some ideas in there (I mean I only have time to read 1% of your walls of text), but you somehow think that you are the end-all-be-all of BTC and economic knowledge and you need to "prod" me from backsliding.  

The truth is that I haven't learned a single thing from you, possibly because you don't share your ideas, possibly because there is nothing there.  We'll never know.  But from my perspective reading your stuff is just a waste of time so I only read it when someone else quotes you.

And it is simply rude to be so holier-than-thou to non-programmers like cypherdoc about technical issues.  They make great contributions here by distilling the gestalt of today's markets into something that readers can understand quickly.  I try to do the same for the technical side.

yes, the block subsidy and relay delay basically makes all these shenanigans unprofitable.  But doing my suggestion really closes the hole, and closes for the future when the block subsidy is low.  It closes a whole class of loopholes we haven't yet considered. 

I mean, txn fees are the basic way to discourage spam generated for any reason (by definition its not spam if someone is willing to pay the going rate for it).  The design relies on that and it relies on the idea that although the real cost of a block is socialized (ie borne by all full nodes), its ok for the subsidy and txn fees to just benefit a single miner.  This idea is that the cost to the spammer will keep spam down so all nodes benefit.  But that does not happen in the case where a miner is generating spam blocks.

It would be really painful for a malicious miner if he had to pay TXN fees on those 125000 txns.  And he DOES have to do so because the txns would trigger the spam detector (actually I'm not sure if the spam detector is a rule-of-thumb or a requirement -- but they'd be a requirement if we used my txn-fee expands block idea). 

But unfortunately the miner will pay the transaction fees to himself, so no loss.

By requiring miners to pay half of the txn fees to the prior block a malicious miner loses half of his txn fees...

I think that you are right in general.  But there is a small hole.  If a miner creates 125000 fake transactions he could not broadcast them, keeping them for the block he mines and therefore collecting his own txn fees.  Therefore the net loss is only the CPU effort to make these fake txns.  It would be better if he loses txn fees.

An elegant solution (probably not possible for Bitcoin due to politics) would be to require that half of the txn fees be paid to the address in the prior block.  Given honest transactions, presumably a miner would make on average what he's making today because the miner of block N pays to the block N-1 but receives from block N+1.  BUT the miner that holds fake transactions until he mines a block must pay half of those fees to some other miner.  

To stop abuse in the 2-in-a-row situation, maybe pay txn fee/2^(N-X) txn to block X (i.e. halve the fee and pay that to your block, halve it again and pay the prior block, halve it again paying block-2, etc)


I'm a fan of this kind of idea in general, because I think something similar can be used to discourage miners from hopping between alt-coins.


EDIT: On the other topic, I also don't think scalability is this huge doom and gloom issue for bitcoin, so long as we allow it to happen!  Worst case, when BTC is adopted worldwide it may not be usable for small payments, and you may need to rent a kick-ass cloud computer to run a full node.  But that's an effect of too much success... I wish we had that problem today! :-)  This is why I'm not in a huge rush to post my ideas on a scalable blockchain. [today I'm running a full node at home on an old junker laptop I bought for $25 on ebay.  We have a long way to go]

@molecular: yes you get the concept.  And yes hash rate would suffer.  However, the actual security may not.  Block subsidy is tiny so 51%ing the network can't be financially motivated.  Also, unlike today, imagine if 99% of presumably honest miners are turned off (on average).  If something starts to go wrong due to misbehaving miners people with stake in the success of the system (coinbase, bitpay, etc) would convince these miners to turn back on -- they could just pay them per ghash for example.  And you couldn't use your "paper" 51% to deny a txn.  Submitter just resubmits with a high txn fee and all the sudden you have 99 times more hash power mining your txn!

@Erdogan: Right now it makes no sense to turn off miners.  Miners today are high priced based at the lowest on NRE (non-recurring-engineering) costs and at the actual price is what the market will bear (i.e. how many BTC the miner is projected to produce).  But making another batch of ASICs puts the NRE at zero and the actual cost of production of a QFN32 packaged chip has got to be < a buck because you can buy microcontrollers in that package for $2 in volume.  So in a future where miners are priced a reasonable margin above actual chip fab costs, miners cost very little and electricity costs become paramount.

@cypherdoc & @anonymint:

Cypher, he's not full of shit talking about txns being orthogonal to blocks.  He's on the right track.  I mean I would not have used the term orthogonal but the real confusion here is that a reformulation needs to tweak the definition of what a block and txn is, so using those terms creates confusion and mental blocks.  Think about it this way:

Today every node needs to see the full information of every other part of the network.  This is inherently not scalable.  What if every mobile phone in the world received everybody's email and chats?  The idea is silly.

In fact, the ONLY way to scale is to limit the information propagation across the network.  But you need to preserve the essential security of having blocks record transactions, so I would have said that blocks and txns should be not-quite-entirely-orthogonal.

A long time ago I wrote that Satoshi's genius was to realize that disks have gotten so large that you could put the entire world's transactions on a single $100 drive.  But in fact he was wrong -- you might be able to store them all, but you can't send them all.  On the other hand, its quite possible that he was not trying to replace credit cards, only bank accounts and wire transfers... in which case my hunch is that Bitcoin at 20MB or 100MB blocks works fine.  And also it may not be ideal but its OK if full nodes exceed the home hobbyist's budget.  If it takes some $ to rent a small data center to become a full node we will still have "permissionless innovation" for small startup companies.  This is what really matters.

Absolutely I think many 20MB proponents believe this but see a high limit as a compromise. And note that my suggestion to expand the limit based on txn fees essentially magnifies the slope of the equilibrium curve.  Also note that the same argument also applies to txn fees.  Some future day when the subsidy is near zero miners will refuse to mine a block unless it at least pays for its electricity.  You could even power miners dynamically based on whether a profitable block is available.

Ok but I'd love to see something supportive from a guy who is NOT peddling PMs.  And some charts... anybody read any other sources?

EDIT: oops quoted the wrong msg

No man, I am certainly demanding nothing of you, and am the last to desire Communism.  This is a strategy to actually maximize your returns.  Look at current altcoins; if you or your investors poison your coin you'll get nothing.  If you do not poision it, you and a small number of people will be the first to mine the next new thing and you may actually get help implementing it -- help which seems to be needed because haven't you been talking about this for over a year now?


Please consider my possible reasons for "jealous veiled character assassination".  Look at my post history to see if I'm a troll.  I have none of these motivations.  Consider that you applied a pejorative -- a negative emotional reaction -- to the idea of narcissism, not me.  Consider that you always manage to get into these endless ad hominem postings, not me.   I'm actually trying to help you where I think you most need help; read some of those posts. How are you similar?  How are you different?

But that will be all I say or read on this subject; by the time I read this thread next these messages will be buried too deeply for me to see.

No actually.  trying to get seed capital and forming a startup is the wrong approach if you really want to make a difference.  Otherwise pressure for corporate profits will poison the coin.  And the ability of external entities to apply pressure to a corporate entity (see Ripple) could destroy it.  

Publish your insight for the rep, good jobs will follow.

Also if you aren't going to describe your ideas, don't gloat about them endlessly -- there is no information content in most of your posts.

Since you are not sharing your ideas and consider that we are not intelligent enough to contribute to them, I think you should ask yourself why you bother posting at all.  What do you get out of it?  Wouldn't your time would be better spent implementing your ideas?  You need help seeing yourself...

And finally, you might consider that many people here are fighting great hardship yet you will likely not know about it until you read their "so long and thanks for all the fish" post.  I am sorry that you do not have others, closer to you to share these troubles.  Today I heard a sermon about a guy who could wish for anything so he imagined a luxury mansion, cars, gourmet food and the like... and he ended up with what he wished for -- an empty house.  Maybe you should start by sharing here to fill that house.  Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/ it may help you.

I believe I know how to solve that.  There are 3 innovations that form the core of a microtxn coin -- a problem I've been keen to solve because like I said years ago i think there are room 4 3 coins:
BTC: first mover for holding and large txns.
AnonCoin: maybe MRO
MicroCoin: undefined.

The 3 innovations are:
1. UTXO oriented protocol and storage.  (Merkle UTXO trees that I discussed previously)
2. UTXO size consolidation.  There are various approaches.  The previously mentioned idea for addtl fees if outputs > inputs is not quite there.  Better is addtl fee for every not-previously seen address and UTXO merkle is changed to be address-with-balance merkle tree.  Other ideas are to make address creation expensive (like vanity addresses) and address consolidation txn gets fee rebate.
3. Transformation of blockchain to scale.


And I think 2 more innovation might as well be thrown in.
4. A distributed trustless way to communicate price of coin against USD. (Solved)
5. A way to inject oracle data into the blockchain so scripting has value (easy)

Anyway hoping to lay out my microcoin in a doc soon but I can't wrap my head around how to play nice with bitcoin... sidechain altcoin etc... what would you guys do?

Yes exactly.  Its too late for greeks but the more heavy handed their govt is the more it will create a background of distrust in fiat currencies that will fuel btc demand.

I love that the crypto anarchists are trying to build a closed system in which everything that is possible is legal.  But let us not forget the reality here.  Multiple successful large double spends will destroy the network so your double spend needs to not just pay for the block opportunity cost but also to pay for all your miners.  And you need to figure out how to cash out quickoy.  And how did you acquire those miners install and run them without anyone knowing who you are?  Because once you steal hundreds of millions and destroy the bitcoin network every other miner is going to collude with the chip fabs and the fbi to figure out who you are. 

Therefore we can conclude that the only entities who could do this would not be motivated by profit and not fear legal responses.  But much cheaper and easier for those entities to declare bitcoin illegal.

But if it can't handle lots of txns it won't be that either.  Limiting txns to 1MB is giving up b4 the match begins.  1mb is too small for even overlay settlement networks. The only way fwd is to put in the higher txn rates now encourage growth and work on scalability.  U need scarcity and intrinsic value to make a currency.  BTC intrinsic value IS its ease of worldwide cheap txns and large network.  Without that its no different than a unique poker chip or an alt coin.