I have posted code online for the MIDAS difficulty adjustment algorithm.

Please use it. 

You know the way altcoins get rushed by miners and then left with a difficulty too high for anyone to get a block?

Or the way time warps work when someone finds a way to make the blocks come faster and faster while they have the majority of hashing power? 

That's the kind of crap MIDAS is designed to prevent. 

here. 

http://dillingers.com/blog/2015/04/21/altcoin-difficulty-adjustment-with-midas/

I've wondered if I did the right thing posting those articles on my blog. 

Let's just say the survival record for altcoins ain't good, and at this point I'd say the majority of altcoin devs have been accused of running a scam.  Further, I'd say the majority of the accusations have been correct.

But what the heck.  I thought it was interesting, so I put it up, unix command lines and all, to make it easy.  I probably enabled some scammers.  But you know what?  Providing resources that others can use for good or evil, is not the same thing as doing evil. 

Those changes (special treatment for Tor exit nodes, downloading a list) haven't been a point of contention for developers as far as I know.  It would be silly to assume they're not going into the next revision of core. 

It's true that the expenses for mounting such an attack are smaller (hence reward greater) as real transactions become more numerous. 

Sadly, it is also true that the mining coalition can make more money than that by driving up fee prices to the point where people only fill half a block.

Yeeeah.  Right on the head.  I've given up talking to these clowns, but you're right.

Small blocks and high fees are NOT a viable way forward. 

It is deeply concerning that the Bitcoin community has failed to address the technical scalability issues.

With everything else lining up, every concrete measure that should have addressed scalability became the target of a social/political fight.  And it doesn't look like the community is getting past the fight to actually do something about it.

In fact it looks like the fight is being deliberately orchestrated and carefully maintained.  This bodes ill.  None of the stuff that's getting ready to work will matter if scaling hasn't already happened.

Already did.  It makes me sad, but yes, I'm out of the market. 

Nope.  Got altcoin code ready to go, but then had a good long look at the market and use cases, and it's a fucking cesspool out there.  There's essentially no way to launch an alt without being used for some scam by somebody.  So I didn't.

Also, I don't really give much of a crap about XT vs. not XT at this point; when I did the math behind these "stress tests" and realized that someone is making a profit and so these stress tests will never ever stop, and saw that the community is effectively paralyzed on making the decision that is necessary to stop it, I gave up on you guys and sold all my bitcoins.  Hey, I made my 1500%.  Why get greedy? 

I don't have anything against the bitcoin community.  I just have no confidence at this point that you'll do what you need to do in time.   The issue is technical. All the responses to it are social and therefore meaningless.  There is too much arguing and denial and accusations and recriminations and FUD and calling each other FUDsters and so on, and not enough decisive action.   You don't have to hate New Orleans to see that they're not doing what they need to do about flood preparation, right?  And if people in New Orleans hate you for thinking they're not doing enough about flood preparation, that has absolutely no effect on  whether it's true or not. 

So, I no longer have a horse in the race.  Nobody's paying me, I'm not holding out for a price rise or fall, I don't have an alt in the market, nothing.  Sure, I'm disappointed.  I'd like to see Bitcoin succeed.  But when the block size decision got this political, it became very likely IMO that it won't.  The politics have become more important to the community than the underlying technical facts.

I'm still following along because I'm interested in it as a technology and as an example of how community dynamics and technology interact.  But in terms of input, all I'm doing is pointing out the facts.

The mathematical fact is that as long as the maximum block size is smaller than twice the number of "real" transactions that people will pay increased fees for, it costs less for a mining coalition to drive fees up by making bogus transactions, than the coalition can reap in increased fees.  (assuming the coalition is at least 38% of the mining power)  You don't have to take my word for it;  Do the math.

The "stress test" ceases to be profitable to a mining coalition if it costs them more to drive fees up than they get in increased fees.

Increasing the block size doesn't affect the opportunity to collect fees; it does however affect the amount of tx volume a coalition would have to pay fees for before it would have the effect of driving up costs for users and fee revenue for miners.

It increases the expense of the attack.

Ding!  It's all about the profit motive.  Regardless of whether the miners claim tobe Pro-XT or Pro-Core, some coalition of them is making money by doing these "stress tests" that won't work under XT. 

Get serious.  He has a long history of not giving a crap how his miners feel about things.

There'll probably be some exchanges that try to take payments in transactions good on both chains and then craft transactions valid only on one chain or the other when making payments, hoping to double spend. 

I'm guessing that the window within which this sort of shenanigans are possible will probably close within 24 hours or less when the losing chain ceases to exist.  But if you're concerned about it, or in the odd scenario that maybe it doesn't cease to exist that fast, you can disallow that kind of crap by just not giving them payments good on both chains.

With a bit of deliberate care you can "beat them to the punch" and craft a payment to the exchange that is only good on one of the two block chains - say by including a bit of "dust" from a mining output you got post-fork, or a bit of "dust" you got from one of those very same exchanges that are making payments good only on one chain, or something.  And that'll leave them no room to play silly buggers with the other-chain image of your coins because they won't have the other-chain image of your coins - you will.


XT is absolutely no different from the current protocol in any way that would facilitate that kind of crap.  That scenario would be every bit as big a failure-and-disaster in an XT world as it would in a non-XT world.

And you expect that they're being honest about why they're doing it.  I think that makes you what the cons used to call an "all-day sucker."

This "stress test" is, IMO, probably being done by a coalition of mining pools.  It exists for the plain and simple purpose of increasing mining profits by forcing users to pay higher fees.

Assuming they are X% of the hashing power, they are getting X% of the fees they put into it back when they get blocks.  So the expense is less than it appears to be.  They make a profit to cover the (100 - X)% because they ALSO get X% of the increased fees that users are putting in to cut ahead of their spam flood.

If we assume that legitimate users will pay increased fees for half the block space, and that the coalition represents more than 38% of the mining power, then spamming the network to keep blocks half full of spam (leaving the other half available for increased fee prices) is more profitable to them than not doing so.  

In practice it's even more profitable than that (or becomes profitable even for a coalition smaller than 38%) because (a) users outbidding them for block space are setting their fees to a nontrivial amount *above* the fee level of the spam rather than just equal to it, and (b) lots of users leave their fee settings higher even when the spammers spend a few weeks not supporting the increased cost of the "stress test".

I'm betting the people doing it DON'T want a switch to Bitcoin-XT; with the larger block size of Bitcoin-XT, legitimate traffic willing to pay the premium to cut ahead of the spam would be less than 1/2 the maximum block size and it wouldn't be profitable any more.

At some point there may be a Hal Finney version 2.0 walking around.

I have no faith that version 2.0 will remember any of the secrets shared between version 1.0 and myself. I suspect that the process, if it works at all, will be a lot more projection and reconstruction rather than restoration and preservation.

Bitcoin XT is an attempt to prevent Bitcoin from being centralized under the control of BlockStream inc.

It appears to me that the data presented (name, employer, vote) is a very strong argument about motives. 

It would be rather incredible if the correlation between people drawing paychecks from Blockstream and people in favor of no maximum block size increase were a coincidence.

Hmmm, Blockstream intends to set up a transaction processing network to mediate people's transactions and use the bitcoin block chain for a settlement network only.  A plan which won't work all that well if people can just use the block chain themselves.  How could people be prevented from just using the block chain themselves?  Hmmmmmm...... 

Conflict of interest much?  Nawww, couldn't be.  But isn't it weird how the every last dev who sees an increase in the maximum block size as a good thing is NOT getting paychecks from Blockstream?

Blockchain.io is a web wallet, and besides was already known to be completely worthless.  

The other two they mention are among the SPV clients I mentioned; I don't know whether they're robust to a backlog volume or not, but they will certainly require more bandwidth to be convinced they're "synchronized" with the network under high-backlog conditions.

I would sell all my bitcoins if .... 

Blockstream shills manage to stymie basic protocol improvements by shouting without logic for months and then when push finally comes to shove admitting defeat by sabotaging consensus mechanisms. 

Oh, wait ....  that already happened.

Interesting.  Things are not as they seem, nor as they are claimed to be.

Hint:  They are spending far too much money on it for this to be a "stress test."  Figure out who profits.  Figure out whether the profit is enough to justify the expense.  Then you will understand what is really happening.  "Mining service" my ass.

As to the claim that it will render most standard wallet software worthless?  I know for sure that it won't bother wallets that run on full nodes.  So-called SPV clients?  I dunno, there's a bunch of them and I haven't reviewed all that code.  Web wallets?  There's no way of knowing at all; most don't even make it clear what code they're even running. 

The effect on transactions will be to extort slightly higher fees out of the users.  Pay a tiny increment in fees over what the backlog bids for block space, and your transactions will go through rapidly and get immediately into a block as usual.