I once had similar problem in Go - it's a pretty optimal compiler, but its current implementation of the big numbers lib is far away from optimal.

So for me it was like 10ms per op, which was still to long, so I decided to use the openssl implementation.
For a moment I even had a solution with a TCP server (written in C, with openssl) that was doing the ECDSAs for my actual app. That was pretty crazy, though it worked..
Later I figured out how to combine the openssl lib with my go app and ever since then it works as fast as I needed.

Most of the languages these days allow creation of wrappers for native libs - that's probably the best way for you to go as well.

For such a CPU OpenSSL needs ~1ms per operation. Even less, if you use 64 bit arch.
So I would say that 100ms is not reasonable.

yeah, i figured it was a stupid idea while writing it :-)
but that is how i'd eventually imagine shortcuts in the hashing process;  as some kind of lookup table stuff.
though, if someone can do it through a math, hell I'd like ton see it

you could think of some kind of rainbow tables, to be used inside the hashing algorithm, that would allow to speed up some steps of it, but its always a trade of 'is it worth it?'.
seems that it isn't. it seems just cheaper to make an asic that will do these ops for you, instead of building rainbow tables or whatever such complex and memory hungry around such a simple binary operations.
though, from the math point of view, keep trying - the nobel prize is waiting...
and if you do it, you will also be my hero

It's a double hash... if you discover an actual shortcut in it, you'd probably deserve a Nobel price, FWIW

If it is a crap then why do you use it?
IMHO he stopped developing it when he realized that the network was already strong enough, to resist any possible corruption within the development team that he left the code to.


As for the rest of your post, your proposals of how to handle the problem are just stupid - no more comments.

I don't know why you came out with 500%, but well.. let's go into it.

For the last 24h, the average block size has been ~88.6KB - this gives you a potential for 1000% growth, yet without touching MAX_BLOCK_SIZE.

In fact the potential is much, much bigger, because when you eliminate free transactions, by forcing the fee market to work, it will make all the small payments (0.01 BTC or less) unprofitable. And now such a tiny transactions seem to be taking a huge amount of the blocks. And who is paying for this? We are all paying for this - and if you increase the bock size, we will be paying for it even more.

Paypal is a payment processor, not a currency. Bitcoin will beat Paypal if it beats the fiat currencies that Paypal operates on.

Payment processors appeared on the market because at some point in time there was a need to send fiat money quickly and cheaply. Sending bills and coins in envelopes was obviously not practical and the market developed a solution.

Let the same need to appear in Bitcoin, and the solutions will also develop themselves, allowing bitcoins to be sent cheaper and quicker, while still keeping it lightweight and decentralized.

And let me repeat it one more time: increasing MAX_BLOCK_SIZE is not a solution for anything!
Though, it has a good potential to create a disaster.

No, I'm not afraid. I just think this idea does not have a chance to succeed, and will list a few points why.

1) Offline wallets will be holding more and more money, so they won't be able to vote in a "simple, automatic process". IMO few years from now most of the money will be kept in cold wallets. Actually, maybe it is already the case - we don't even know it.

2) Assuming that the block size won't blow up soon and so people will use all kind of bitcoin banks, because of the rising on-chain tx costs, this solution will be just anti-democratic.

3) Buying bitcoins is much easier that buying (and deploying) mining equipment. Moreover number of bitcoins (unlike hashing h/w) is limited, so if you have enough money you can just buy half of the coins and become the ever lasting bitcoin dictator.

4) The miners will still be able to overrule whatever the proof-of-stake voters decided and I don't see any solution to prevent it. Client nodes need miners more than miners need client nodes and if the clients decide to go into a forked branch of their choice, but leaving the miners at the other branch - it would be their suicide.

Retrospecting the thread, I'd like to bring in some numbers.
At the moment we have 6353442 unspent outputs with 11287864 BTC in them, from which 4799281 (75%) outputs are below 0.01 BTC, and they carry 1515 BTC (0.01%) of the money.
The average block size, for the last 24 h, has been 125.0 KB.

So it makes me wonder, again; why do we actually need to increase the 1MB block limit, within the next year or so?
What numbers do he have to support even worrying about it?

As for my measurement, if we do the dust filtering right, and allow the fee system to work out some fair tx fees, we wont need to touch MAX_BLOCK_SIZE at least for the next 3 years. And if there will be a war (which I hope not) the 1MB limit might easily survive for 10 more years...

Keep bitcoin node lightweight - please.

Yeah, and I am with you here, so after all I do not quite support the idea of moving the power from he miners to the coin holders.

If you guys, whoever you are, but who are smart enough to make whitepapers that I can hardly read, want to do something really useful, I'd modestly suggest you moving the focus from empowering bitcoin banks to empowering individual miners, from behind the pools' interface.

Could you think of any voting system where a miner can vote individually, using his small 300Mh/s miner?
Something that would still allow him to cast a vote of his choice, yet without a need for him to give up his mining pool?
Why do we even want to involve mining pools into politics? I am sure none of them wants that - they are not like the elite of bitcoin
But anyway, it's the people who mine that should decide - just let them to do it, but without forcing mining pools to choose a camp (which can likely start a war of giants).
That should be doable.

You can also have a look at a tool called versigmsg, from my gocoin project.
https://github.com/piotrnar/gocoin/blob/master/tools/versigmsg.go

If you build it, it end up as a single executable, about 2MB big.

I like the idea. It would definitely be a step towards democracy, which IMHO is quite needed already.

I have some questions about the specifics of the implementations, though.

1. What is the purpose of setting nLockTime to 500,000,000-1?
Is it to prevent old miners (that do not know about voting txs) from mining such transactions?

2. Is it that older coins would have less voting power - or is it only older votes?
Either way I do not get the part when someone casts a vote, then moves the coins and then votes again using the new ones - repeating this over and over...
How do you do the vote accounting to prevent that?

3. Enough vote-type-txs that voted in favor must be mined into block-chain, in order to allow an increase in the block size (or some other change in the protocol) - correct?
But how are you going to decide about the definition of the majority? I mean, there will surely be coins that wont vote at all and we have no idea whether it will be 20, 50 or 80% of the existing coins. Do you also need to mine the votes that were against the change? If so: why would you want to do that?

4. As you have noticed yourself plenty of coins are kept at exchanges - and I do not know if it's better or worse to move the problem of centralization of voting power from mining pools to bitcoin banks, which will likely hold even more coins in the future, because of the increasing on-chain transactions costs.
I agree that how many bitcoins one holds seems to be a better approach to weighting the votes (from how much hashing power one can control), but I am afraid that it goes against the bitcoin's security design, so it might not work well enough. But maybe I just don't see the whole picture yet, so if you don't mind drawing it a bit further..

Sounds like a business plan.

But do you really think that you can predict what the network will decide to do? Or are you still one of those who belive that it won't be the network to decide?
Or maybe, abstracting from a religion of network: how much would you be willing to bet that what you think will happen, will actually happen?
Because I, for instance, I don't know. Though, I do know that the network does not seem to be having any incentive to increase MAX_BLOCK_SIZE. At least not now.
I'm glad to be silently assured by some people that it wont happen without asking miners for a conscious vote, but I still think that making sure that miners vote consciously should be the main target of a real bitcoin foundation. Instead of making fun of people, who are actually doing their job, though in a kind of an underground. If the main principle of the project becomes an underground - where are we?

IMHO, if the SHA gets broken (so when you can do the reverse function using limited resources), then we can as well assume that bitcoin got broken, because from that moment on, you will be able to replace any existing transaction inside the chain. So then, instead of changing the POW function, it would probably be just more efficient and more fair to start a new currency.

But if it only gets broken in a meaning that it will suddenly be i.e. 1e10 times easier to calc the hash - then it isn't really broken, but rather optimized.
New mining h/w will appear, smashing the old one, the difficulty will adjust, and you can as well continue with SHA...

And as far as I understand SHA, it is quite proven that the function cannot be reversed. From a popular science point of view, reversing SHA is much less possible than time travels

Sorry I don't speak English that well - I have to guess what it means and hope that it wasn't too insulting

So you believe that there is an actual bitcoin elite, and I am deprecating their titles by giving it to any freak who thinks that he can just change the protocol without asking the miners?

In such case: can I get the list, please? Otherwise how am I supposed to know who I can call the elite of bitcoin, and who I cannot..


Yeah, I said that, only using different words. But it wont change not because nobody will try - it wont change because the network won't let it.
Surely some people will try - the only question is 'is it only Dan?'

Well, if you watch the video, he even said that he already discussed changing of the POW function with others, during a "great meeting", though he did not want to give their names.
So either he was lying, or he indeed did not want to disclose a conspiracy. Or maybe he was just fantasizing...

Either way it happened at the very same conference where Gaving was working out a consensus among the people who know better than anyone else why we must push to increase the block size.

Hehe. I'm willing to call "elite of bitcoin" anyone who considers himself as such..
And he surely does, if you listen to him. And he even got an applause.

No, I don't.
Though when I put his name into Google a wiki article appears on top, so I guess he must be somehow important

There is a brilliant article at www.thegenesisblock.com that starts with a quote from the conference.


I think the above quote wraps up pretty well some concerns that people have been trying to discuss in this topic (though only to meet a wall of silence).

So, what do the elite of bitcoin do seeing that the network's genius design is not going to let them put their dirty hands on the protocol?
They announce plan B: the proof-of-work function must change... and that is also not a discussion!
And why it must change?
Because it's just wrong that one dude (meaning some guy in China who they don't know) has more voting power than they do altogether, while they are supposed to be the bitcoin ruling elite...

Well, let me tell you something, mr Kaminsky.
The one dude at least has done something to build an infrastructure that protects this network from governments, while you were conspiring with a bunch eggheads on how to capture it for yourself using the very means that the network was designed to prevent. And the design is so fine, that it will surely prevent it, so keep dreaming...
Yesterday the one dude turned out to be much smarter than you and there is no reason to assume that he won't be smarter than you tomorrow, so even if you don't value his contribution into the security of the network, at least have a decency to show some respect towards people smarter than you.

You want to change the bitcoin's POW function, and you think that you can just do it, because you have an entitlement to pull patches and tag sources on the github, and the ownership of bitcoin.org domain? 
Be my guest, man - I'll gladly see your disappointment when you smash onto the Satoshi's great wall. Although, I would rather advise you to just stop wasting your time, and if you are not interested in the real bitcoins, better go back to using US dollars already today - that will save you a lot of wasted efforts and further disappointments.

yes. I'm not a kind of person who would start a forum topic to not learn anything from it. though, I believe that for you it might be unusual :-)